How fluctuating oxygen levels may have accelerated animal evolution

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS

 

IMAGE: FOSSIL RECORDS OF EARLY ANIMALS FROM MISTAKEN POINT ECOLOGICAL RESERVE IN CANADA. view more 

CREDIT: DR EMILY. G. MITCHELL – UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

How fluctuating oxygen levels may have accelerated animal evolution

Oxygen levels in the Earth’s atmosphere are likely to have “fluctuated wildly” one billion years ago, creating conditions that could have accelerated the development of early animal life, according to new research.  

 
Scientists believe atmospheric oxygen developed in three stages, starting with what is known as the Great Oxidation Event around two billion years ago, when oxygen first appeared in the atmosphere. The third stage, around 400 million years ago, saw atmospheric oxygen rise to levels that exist today.  

 
What is uncertain is what happened during the second stage, in a time known as the Neoproterozoic Era, which started about one billion years ago and lasted for around 500 million years, during which time early forms of animal life emerged.   

 
The question scientists have tried to answer is - was there anything extraordinary about the changes to oxygen levels in the Neoproterozoic Era that may have played a pivotal role in the early evolution of animals – did oxygen levels suddenly rise or was there a gradual increase?  

 
Fossilised traces of early animals - known as Ediacaran biota, multi-celled organisms that required oxygen - have been found in sedimentary rocks that are 541 to 635 million years old.  

  

To try and answer the question, a research team at the University of Leeds supported by the Universities of Lyon, Exeter and UCL, used measurements of the different forms of carbon, or carbon isotopes, found in limestone rocks taken from shallow seas. Based on the isotope ratios of the different types of carbon found, the researchers were able to calculate photosynthesis levels that existed millions of years ago and infer atmospheric oxygen levels.  

 
As a result of the calculations, they have been able to produce a record of oxygen levels in the atmosphere over the last 1.5 billion years, which tells us how much oxygen would have been diffusing into the ocean to support early marine life. 

 

Fossil records of early animals from Mistaken Point Ecological Reserve in Canada

CREDIT

Dr Emily. G. Mitchell – University of Cambridge

Dr Alex Krause, a biogeochemical modeller who completed his PhD in the School of Earth and Environment at Leeds and was the lead scientist on the project, said the findings give a new perspective on the way oxygen levels were changing on Earth.  

 
He added: “The early Earth, for the first two billion years of its existence, was anoxic, devoid of atmospheric oxygen. Then oxygen levels started to rise, which is known as the Great Oxidation Event.   

 
“Up until now, scientists had thought that after the Great Oxidation Event, oxygen levels were either low and then shot up just before we see the first animals evolve, or that oxygen levels were high for many millions of years before the animals came along. 

 
“But our study shows oxygen levels were far more dynamic. There was an oscillation between high and low levels of oxygen for a long time before early forms of animal life emerged. We are seeing periods where the ocean environment, where early animals lived, would have had abundant oxygen - and then periods where it does not.  

 

Dr Benjamin Mills, who leads the Earth Evolution Modelling Group at Leeds and supervised the project, said: “This periodic change in environmental conditions would have produced evolutionary pressures where some life forms may have become extinct and new ones could emerge.”  

 
Dr Mills said the oxygenated periods expanded what are known as “habitable spaces” – parts of the ocean where oxygen levels would have been high enough to support early animal life forms.  

 
He said: “It has been proposed in ecological theory that when you have a habitable space that is expanding and contracting, this can support rapid changes to the diversity of biological life.  

 
“When oxygen levels decline, there is severe environmental pressure on some organisms which could drive extinctions. And when the oxygen-rich waters expand, the new space allows the survivors to rise to ecological dominance.  

 

“These expanded habitable spaces would have lasted for millions of years, giving plenty of time for ecosystems to develop.”

END

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JOURNAL

Science Advances

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Computational simulation/modeling

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Extreme variability in atmospheric oxygen levels in the late Precambrian

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

14-Oct-2022

Discovery of family of hormones may be key to increased crop yields

Peer-Reviewed Publication

NAGOYA UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: PSY RECEPTOR MUTANT (RIGHT) AND WILD TYPE (LEFT). PSY RECEPTOR MUTANT IS LESS STRESS TOLERANT, BUT ITS GROWTH IS FACILITATED. view more 

CREDIT: DR. YOSHIKATSU MATSUBAYASHI

Crops often face harsh growing environments. Instead of using energy for growth, factors such as disease, extreme temperatures, and salty soils force plants to use it to respond to the resulting stress. This is known as the “growth-stress response trade-off". Now, a group of researchers from Nagoya University has discovered a previously unknown pathway that regulates whether a plant uses its resources for growth or stress tolerance. This discovery could enable the stress response to be controlled under agricultural conditions, increasing crop yields. They published the findings in the journal Science. 

A research group, led by Professor Yoshikatsu Matsubayashi and Assistant Professor Mari Ohnishi of the Graduate School of Science at Nagoya University in Japan, investigated the role of hormones and their receptors in the plant stress response. They focused on three receptors for which the corresponding hormone had not yet been identified. Using thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana), a small flowering plant, they discovered the PSY family, which functions as a hormone, binding to these receptors and mediating the switch between the stress response and growth.  

When the researchers investigated the pathway involved, they made an unexpected discovery. Usually, receptors and hormones function like locks and keys, with the hormone (in this case, a peptide PSY hormone) acting as a key that is necessary to start a biological process. However, in this study, plant cells that did not produce PSY nonetheless had an active stress response. Therefore, this suggests that instead of activating the stress response, the presence of the PSY ‘key’ in the receptor ‘lock’ keeps it switched off. 

To test the nature of stress responses, the researchers grew plants under extremely stressful conditions using heat, salt, and also infected them with bacteria. Plants that were either deficient in PSY receptors or were continuously fed the hormone PSY failed to respond adequately to stress, resulting in reduced survival. The scientists concluded that stressed plants stop releasing PSY, the absence of which induces stress response genes. 

To explain this phenomenon, the researchers proposed a mechanism in which damaged cells reduce the concentration of PSY hormones in the cell layers next to the damaged sites. This lack of PSY triggers the stress response. Importantly, this may explain why even damaged plants can send messages. Rather than using their limited resources to create a new signal, an impaired plant cell may instead stop the release of the PSY hormone, activating the stress response. Such a mechanism would balance stress tolerance with associated energy costs. As a result, even under the most stressful environmental conditions, plants can still grow by managing their limited resources. 

“Most of the mechanisms found in Arabidopsis are found in other plants. Therefore, our results apply to all crops,” explained Matsubayashi. “This mechanism makes it possible to artificially control the balance between stress tolerance and yield, which is a trade-off relationship. In recent years, an increasing number of crop plants have been grown in plant factories. When crops are grown indoors, it is a low-stress environment and the stress response system that is needed to withstand the fluctuating natural outdoor environment is not always necessary. Generating cultivars with reduced PSY receptor activity in plant factories may lead to higher yields in these controlled environments.”  

//Funding// 
This research was supported by Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (S) (project number 18H05274), which started in FY2008, and by Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Transformation (A) (project number 20H05907), which started in FY 2020.  

---

JOURNAL

Science

DOI

10.1126/science.abq5735 

ARTICLE TITLE

Peptide ligand-mediated trade-off between plant growth and stress response

Can shifting social norms help mitigate climate change?

Peer-Reviewed Publication

ASSOCIATION FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE

Climate change is the result of many human activities, from carbon emissions to deforestation, and it will take multiple and varied interventions to mitigate it, including legislation, regulation, and market-based solutions implemented at local, national, and global levels. Demand-side factors, such as changes in social norms, can also help by creating political pressure for increased climate action. In addition, they can strengthen the efficacy of other interventions, for example by increasing the acceptance and adoption of new technologies or adherence to laws and regulations.

In the latest issue of Psychological Science in the Public Interest, an interdisciplinary team of researchers reports on how social norms—“patterns of behaviors or values that depend on expectations about what others do and/or think should be done”—can be harnessed to bring about collective climate action and policy change. They emphasize that although social norm interventions can be powerful drivers of social change, they can also reinforce unsustainable behaviors and attitudes and require deep contextual knowledge to be used effectively.

“Demand-side changes can be integral components of broader climate policy by creating public acceptance for new measures and accelerating or strengthening their impacts,” said Sara M. Constantino, an assistant professor at Northeastern University and lead author on the paper. “However, the efficacy and ethics of interventions aimed at shifting social norms depend critically on the details of the behaviors or attitudes in question, a host of structural and cultural factors, psychological processes, and myriad design and implementation decisions.”

In this paper, Constantino and her colleagues review the literature on how social-norm change occurs, how the tendency to conform or coordinate with others can drive rapid social change, and the circumstances under which this is likely to happen. They base their conclusions on the review and synthesis of a large body of literature on social-norm influence, measurement, and change from the perspectives of psychology, anthropology, sociology, and economics, published between 1951 and 2021.

Harnessing the power of social norms for climate action can take two interrelated forms, the authors explain. Social-norm interventions attempt to increase the adoption of sustainable social norms within social networks by providing information about what people in a group do or believe should be done. They can reshape individuals’ and communities’ behaviors by correcting social misperceptions (e.g., people believe there is limited support for climate action when in fact there is large support) and/or by rendering visible the prevalence of certain private behaviors (e.g., water and energy conservation, recycling, voting).

However, many prevailing behaviors are unsustainable. In such cases, social-tipping interventions aim to create change that disrupts these unsustainable norms. Interventions (e.g., subsidies) can be used to incentivize change in a subset of a population. Once enough individuals adopt sustainable nonnormative behaviors and beliefs, this can lead to broader social change, “tipping” societies toward a new social norm even in the absence of sustained interventions.

Structural, social, and other factors will shape the success of social-norm interventions, and Constantino and colleagues suggest taking a number of steps before designing and implementing them. These include identifying key properties of the target behavior and population, measuring existing social norms and expectations, and considering an intervention’s potential adverse consequences, such as perceived threats to people’s sense of agency and autonomy or a phenomenon known as “moral licensing,” where taking action on an issue can lead people to feel they have done enough, crowding out other actions.

Finally, the authors highlight the importance of piloting any intervention with local stakeholders—that is, conducting small trials, evaluating the results, and then conducting more trials—before adopting it. "An intervention should be scaled up only after it has been piloted in the context of interest and deemed successful,” they write. 

“Social-norm and social-tipping interventions can drive rapid social change under certain conditions,” said Constantino. “However, they are not a replacement for other forms of climate action, and designing an effective and responsible intervention will depend on many factors.”

In an accompanying commentary, Stephan Lewandowsky (University of Bristol; University of Western Australia) and Sander van der Linden (University of Cambridge) propose that the challenge of turning scientific consensus on climate action into social consensus is more likely to be overcome if practitioners consider “the adversarial, misinformation-rich environments in which normative information is communicated, the role of pervasive misperceptions about norms and the behavior of other people, the possibility that community norms can unravel quickly following key political events, and the fact that there are important differences in how susceptible people are to social influence.”

Reference

Constantino, S. M., Sparkman, G., Kraft-Todd, G., Bicchieri, C., Centola, D., Shell-Duncan, B., Vogt, S., & Weber, E. U. (2022). Scaling up change: A critical review and practical guide to harnessing social norms for climate action. Psychological Science in the Public Interest. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/15291006221105279

About the Authors: https://doi/full/10.1177/15291006221121610

Commentary: https://doi/full/10.1177/15291006221114132

Reporters: Reach out to lead author Sara Constantino (s.constantino@northeastern.edu) or coauthor Elke Weber (eweber@princeton.edu).

---

JOURNAL

Psychological Science in the Public Interest

DOI

10.1177/15291006221105279 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Literature review

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Scaling Up Change: A Critical Review and Practical Guide to Harnessing Social Norms for Climate Action

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

13-Oct-2022

US Quietly Keeping Close Eye on Africa's Growth

Newsmax | Charles Kim | Saturday, 15 October 2022 

While not predominantly mentioned in the 2022 National Security Strategy report released Wednesday, U.S. officials said they are keeping a close watch on the African continent's growth and relations with nations like China and Russia as an important part of maintain national security.

"In Africa, the dynamism and demographic growth of the region make it central to solving every single significant global challenge we face," National Security adviser Jake Sullivan said in a speech at Georgetown University following the release of Wednesday's report. "And we will continue to revive and deepen our partnerships in the region that most directly impacts the United States more than any other: our own region, the Western Hemisphere."

The report itself spends most of its time evaluating other regions and nations, including Chinese expansion and Russia's war in Ukraine, but also highlights the importance of the African continent in future geopolitical relations.

"Africa's governments, institutions and people are a major geopolitical force, one that will play a crucial role in solving global challenges in the coming decade," the report said. "Africa is more youthful, mobile, educated and connected than ever before. African countries comprise one of the largest regional voting groups at the UN and their citizens lead major international institutions."

Gen. Stephen Townsend, outgoing commander of the United States Africa Command, told Congress in March that his command, with 10,000 troops on the continent, worked to implement the prior National Security Strategy there to bolster the U.S. "deterrence to better safeguard vital U.S. interests."

"I am certain of two things," Townsend said during his testimony, "First, access to a stable and prosperous African continent will be increasingly important to the United States, politically, economically and militarily, and will become more so in the future.”

Key concerns include the increasing expansion of Chinese military bases on the continent and arms coming in through Russia.

Russian President Valdimir Putin's war against Ukraine and his losses on the battlefield, however, have dwindled the number of arms it can now sell to Africa, Foreign Policy reported in July, before Russia sustained major military setbacks into the fall.

"We anticipate that they're going to have a real problem delivering equipment at the rate they're losing equipment in Ukraine," a senior U.S. intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity based on ground rules set by the Pentagon, told the publication at the time.

As Russia's influence decreases, China is flexing its muscles on the continent by wanting to build additional military bases there, National Defense reported in July.

Townsend told the news outlet that China has a "desire to establish more military bases on the continent."

"Why they need that capability there, I don't know," he said in the report. "I suspect they're thinking very deeply about the future and their future role in that region."

China has one base in the east African country of Djibouti, and is actively seeking to establish another along the Atlantic coast, which Townsend said could cause security problems for the U.S.

"They seem to have a little bit of traction in Equatorial Guinea," he said in the report. "We haven't asked Equatorial Guinea to choose between us or China. What we're doing is we're trying to convince them that it's in their interest to stay partnered with all of us, and not choose one over the other."

Why Ambitious Tree Planting and Carbon Offset Projects Are Failing

“A complete disaster;” “a giant ponzi scheme;” “essentially no regulatory requirements.”

FRED PEARCE

Bio
ENVIRONMENT
OCTOBER 15, 2022

More than 9,000 people in Leh, India, planted more than 50,000 tree saplings in under an hour on October 10, 2010. Drukpa Publications via Wikipedia

This story was originally published by YaleE360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

It was perhaps the most spectacular failed tree planting project ever. Certainly the fastest. On March 8, 2012, teams of village volunteers in Camarines Sur province on the Filipino island of Luzon sunk over a million mangrove seedlings into coastal mud in just an hour of frenzied activity. The governor declared it a resounding success for his continuing efforts to green the province. At a hasty ceremony on dry land, an official adjudicator from Guinness World Records declared that nobody had ever planted so many trees in such a short time and handed the governor a certificate proclaiming the world record. Plenty of headlines followed.

“The survivors only managed to cling on because they were sheltered behind a sandbank at the mouth of a river. Everything else disappeared.”

But look today at the coastline where most of the trees were planted. There is no sign of the mangroves that, after a decade of growth, should be close to maturity. An on-the-ground study published in 2020 by British mangrove restoration researcher Dominic Wodehouse, then of Bangor University in Wales, found that fewer than 2 percent of them had survived. The other 98 percent had died or were washed away.

“I walked, boated, and swam through this entire site. The survivors only managed to cling on because they were sheltered behind a sandbank at the mouth of a river. Everything else disappeared,” one mangrove rehabilitation expert wrote in a letter to the Guinness inspectors this year, which he shared with Yale Environment 360 on the condition of anonymity. The outcome was “entirely predictable,” he wrote. The muddy planting sites were washed by storms and waves and were otherwise “ecologically unsuited to mangrove establishment, because they are too waterlogged and there is no oxygen for them to breathe.”

“It was a complete disaster,” agrees Jim Enright, former Asia coordinator of the US-based nonprofit Mangrove Action Project. “But no one that we know of from Guinness or the record-planting proponents have carried out follow-up monitoring.” Guinness has not responded to requests for comment.

Such debacles are not unusual. Forest scientists say they are surprisingly frequent, and they warn that failed afforestation projects around the world threaten to undermine efforts to make planting a credible means of countering climate change by reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or generating carbon credits for sale to companies to offset their emissions.

In another high-profile case, in November 2019, the Turkish government claimed to have planted more trees on dry land than anyone else in a single hour—300,000, in the central province of Çorum. It beat a record, also confirmed by Guinness inspectors, set four years before in the Himalayan state of Bhutan. The Çorum planting was part of a National Afforestation Day, when volunteers planted 11 million trees at 2,000 sites across Turkey. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was among those wielding a spade.Ministers imposed unachievable targets, resulting in planting “without…survey, mapping and planning.”

But two months later, the head of the country’s union of forestry workers reported that a survey by its members had found that as many as 90 percent of the national plantings had died. The government denies this, but experts said its counter-claim that 95 percent of the trees had survived and continued to grow was improbably high. No independent audit has yet been carried out.

In an investigation published last year into extensive government-organized tree planting over several decades in the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, Eric Coleman of Florida State University and colleagues found little evidence that it had resulted in more tree cover, carbon uptake, or community benefits. Typically, tree species growing on common land that were useful to local people for animal fodder and firewood had been replaced by plantations of fast-growing but less useful trees, often fenced off from local communities.

Another study, published last year by the nonprofit World Resources Institute in Mexico, called into question the benefits from a billion-dollar government-funded environmental recovery program. Sembrando Vida pays farmers to plant trees across the country to help Mexico meet its climate targets under the Paris Agreement. But WRI found the program has no effective audit of outcomes, and that rates of forest loss were currently greater in states implementing the plan than in others. It concluded that the program “could have had a negative impact on forest cover and compliance with the country’s carbon mitigation goals.”

Tree planting in the Philippines under its National Greening Program has also been a widespread failure, according to a 2019 study by the government’s own Commission on Audit. Ministers imposed unachievable planting targets, it said, resulting in planting “without…survey, mapping and planning.” The actual increase in forest cover achieved was little more than a tenth of that planned.

The causes of failure vary but include planting single species of trees that become vulnerable to disease; competing demands for the land; changing climate; planting in areas not previously forested; and a lack of aftercare such as watering saplings.

Everybody likes trees. There is no anti-tree lobby. A global push to go beyond conservation of existing forests and start creating new ones goes back to 2011, when many of the world’s governments, including the United States, signed up to the Bonn Challenge, which set a goal of restoring some 860 million acres of forest globally by 2030. That is an area bigger than India, and enough to soak up 1.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually, adding almost a quarter to the current estimated forest carbon sink.

In 2020, at its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, the World Economic Forum launched One Trillion Trees, an initiative aimed at adding a third to the world’s current estimated inventory of around 3 trillion trees. Even Donald Trump got behind the push, promising to plant a billion trees across the U.S.

But the very unanimity of support for tree planting may reduce the impetus for detailed audits or critical analysis of what is actually achieved at each project. The paucity of follow-up thus far has resulted in a great deal of wasted effort—and money.“With success rates ranging between 15 and 20 percent, a lot of conservation funding has gone to waste.”

Every year, “millions of dollars” are spent on reforesting landscapes, according to Lalisa Duguma of World Agroforestry, an international research agency in Nairobi, Kenya. Yet “there are few success stories.” Typically only a minority of seedlings survive, he says, because the wrong trees are planted in the wrong places, and many are left untended, in part because ownership and management of trees is not handed over to local communities.

Such failures often go unnoticed, believes Duguma, because performance indicators measure planting rates not survival rates, and long-term oversight is minimal because projects typically last three years or less. The result is “phantom forests.”

The record for restoring mangroves along coastlines, often in an effort to hold back coastal erosion from storms and rising tides, is especially bad. An analysis last year by the Netherlands-based NGO Wetlands International, which had previously sponsored mangrove planting, concluded that “while many tens of millions of euros have been spent on mangrove restoration in recent years, the majority of these restoration projects has failed. With success rates ranging between 15 and 20 percent, a lot of conservation funding has gone to waste.” It blamed poor planting methods and the wrong species planted in the wrong places.

Most planting across Southeast Asia has been of Rhizophora red mangroves. Their cuttings are easy to harvest from existing trees and to plant. Typically, they are planted in tidal mudflats, which ensures no competing land uses, but most are starved of oxygen or washed away by constant inundation at high tide, according to an analysis by Shing Yip Lee of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

The government of Sri Lanka launched a mass mangrove planting program around its shores to help prevent a repeat of the disastrous loss of life there during the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. But the program has turned out to be an abysmal failure. “Nine out of 23 project sites…showed no surviving plants,” according to a 2017 study by Sunanda Kodikara of the University of Ruhuna. “Only three sites showed a level of survival higher than 50 percent.”

Too often, argues Duguma, tree planting is “greenwashing” aimed at grabbing headlines and promoting an image of governments or corporations as environmentally friendly. Tiina Vahanen, deputy director of forestry at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, noted recently that many projects end up being little more than “promotional events, with no follow-up action.”

Cynical PR is one thing, but phantom forests are also increasingly sabotaging efforts to rein in climate change. This happens when planters claim the presumed take-up of carbon by growing forests as carbon credits. If certified by reputable bodies, these credits can count toward governments meeting their national emissions targets or be sold to industrial polluters to offset their emissions. Many corporations plan to use their purchase of carbon credits as a means of fulfilling promises to attain “net-zero” emissions. So the stakes are rising. But even the best-planned and best-audited planting projects can come undone, leaving behind non-existent forests and uncaptured carbon.


The 2021 Bootleg Fire in burned through Oregon woodlands 

that provided Microsoft with carbon offsets.
Nathan Howard/AP

The California Air Resources Board is a major certifier of carbon-offset forests across the American West. It approves the carbon credits generated by the forests, which are then sold to industrial polluters in California who want to offset their emissions in line with state regulations. But climate change is leaving the western United States increasingly vulnerable to wildfires—raising serious questions about the viability of the forests and the credibility of their carbon credits. To meet this challenge, CARB requires offset developers to hold back from sale a proportion of the credits, which they put into a central buffer fund as insurance against a variety of potential mishaps during the 100-year planned lifetime of the offsets.

Up to 4 percent of credits insure against wildfires. That buffer fund picked up the tab, for instance, when 99 percent of the carbon in a forest offset project on Eddie Ranch in Northern California burned in a fire in 2018. But the CARB certification system is running out of buffer carbon, according to an analysis published in August by ecologist Grayson Badgley at CarbonPlan, a nonprofit climate solutions database.“Allowing nature to choose which species predominate…allows for local adaptation and higher functional diversity.”

Badgley found that just seven years into its supposed century-long insurance, 95 percent of the wildfire buffer has been consumed by just six fires across the West. CARB says that certifying more forests will grow the buffer account and prevent a default. But Danny Cullenward, an environmental lawyer at American University in Washington, DC, and co-author of the CarbonPlan analysis, calls this “a giant Ponzi scheme.”

He says the problem of undercapitalized buffer accounts for carbon is widespread among the hundreds of markets set up internationally to certify and trade carbon offsets for corporate clients. They have “essentially no regulatory requirements and operate instead on loose private standards,” he says.

Those private standards are likely to be increasingly inadequate, says forest ecologist William Anderegg of the University of Utah, who estimated recently that climate change will make wildfires four times more likely across the American West by the end of the century, raising “serious questions about the integrity of [offset] programs.”

Besides climate change and wildfires, another major problem for forest planters is bad relations with locals. In a global survey of organizations involved in forest restoration, Markus Höhl of the University of Gottingen found widespread concern about a lack of buy-in from forest communities. Project promoters did not ask the local people what trees they wanted, or where they should be planted.

Not surprisingly, those locals often reacted badly. For example, in northern Malawi, they broke fences and burned a growing forest to get back the common grazing land on which the trees had been planted. In two Nigerian projects, villagers cut all the planted non-fruit trees for firewood, while protecting those that bore fruit. Forest planting can work if the social and environmental conditions are right, and if planting is followed by long-term monitoring and aftercare of the trees. There has been substantial regrowth of the Brazil’s Atlantic Forest following a joint initiative of the government and private sector. But even here progress has been haphazard and much of the increase has been a result of natural regeneration rather than planting.

In fact, many forest ecologists say creating space to allow nature to do its thing is usually a better approach to restoring forests than planting. “Allowing nature to choose which species predominate…allows for local adaptation and higher functional diversity,” argues one advocate, Robin Chazdon of the University of Connecticut, in her book Second Growth. For mangroves, Wetlands International now recommends abandoning widespread planting and instead creating areas of slack water along coastlines, where mangroves can naturally reseed and grow. Ashwini Chhatre, an expert in forest governance at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, is not alone in saying that “after three decades of walking through planted forests…it is surprising any are successful at all.”

Attack on Indian sovereignty, says Centre on Wall Street Journal advertisement

Suhasini Haidar
OCTOBER 16, 2022 09:45 IST

The advertisement which appeared on October 13 in the Wall Street Journal appeared to have been timed with Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s visit to Washington D.C. Photo: Twitter/@GLandrith

Senior adviser raises queries on the advertisement which called for sanctions against the Finance Minister, Enforcement Directorate chief and Supreme Court judges in Devas case

The government reacted strongly on Saturday to an advertisement in U.S. newspaper Wall Street Journal by a U.S. group calling for sanctions against Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, Supreme court judges and Enforcement Directorate and other officials in the Devas-Antrix case, calling it an “attack on Indian sovereignty”.

The advertisement which appeared on October 13 in the newspaper appeared to have been timed with Ms. Sitharaman’s visit to Washington, in an attempt to draw attention to the case on behalf of Devas co-founder, U.S. citizen Ramachandra Vishwanathan. Mr. Vishwanathan who has, along with a Washington-based NGO “Frontiers of Freedom” appealed to the U.S. State Department to apply “Magnitsky Act” sanctions on the named eleven Indian government officials for what he called a faulty investigation, an “unfair” trial and government moves to declare him a criminal and attach his property which he said amounted to “depriving” him of his “liberty and security”. In Delhi, a senior government advisor called it a “shockingly vile” advertisement that had targeted India and its Government.

“This is not a campaign against [the] Modi Government alone. It's a campaign against [the] judiciary. It's a campaign against India’s sovereignty,” said Kanchan Gupta, Senior Adviser, Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, in a set of tweets where he also criticised the Wall Street Journal for allowing the “shameful weaponisation of American media by fraudsters”. Mr. Gupta said that the advertisement had been taken out on behalf of Mr. Vishwanathan who is a “declared fugitive economic offender” accused of corruption.

While the original case involved a dispute between Bangalore-based Devas Multimedia and Antrix Corp, the commercial arm of the Indian Space Research Organisation over a 2005 deal to operate satellites that was cancelled, the latest controversy pertains to actions by Devas co-founder Vishwanathan and the government’s counter-actions against Devas more recently. In August this year, the Delhi High Court set aside a $1.3 Billion (including interest) arbitration verdict in favour of Devas Multimedia that had been passed in 2015 by the International Chamber of Commerce. The government sought Mr. Vishwanathans arrest on charges of corruption, froze Devas accounts in Mauritius through the use of the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) and requested an Interpol red corner notice to have him extradited from the U.S.

However, also in August, Devas Multimedia s had seized $87,457.47 in cash from Antrix Corporation’s account in the U.S. and had seized a property in Paris after getting favourable orders in U.S., French and Canadian courts on the basis of the ICC award.

The advertisement, that was taken out by an American right-wing NGO founded by a Republican party Senator, accused Ms. Sitharaman, Judges V. Ramasubramanian and Hemant Gupta, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, ED Director Sanjay Kumar Mishra and Assistant Director R. Rajesh and other officials of misusing state powers to “settle scores with political and business rivals”. Calling the named officials “Modi’s Magnitsky 11”, Frontiers of Freedom President George Landrith, who is also a Republican party member, said

“The actions of [officials named and the Modi government] send a clear message to potential investors in India: India is a dangerous place to invest,” Mr. Landrith tweeted on Thursday.

The Global Magnitsky Act of 2016 authorizes the U.S. government to sanction foreign government officials worldwide that it determines are ‘human rights offenders’, freeze their assets, cancel visas and ban them from entering the U.S.

Speaking at a public event in Delhi as well as to television channels, Mr. Gupta called on the U.S. government to look into the advertisement. He also called into question the fact that the financial paper ran the advertisement questioning India’s investment climate even as the IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva, who met Ms. Sitharaman had referred to India as a “bright spot” on the global horizon.

Low water disrupts industry along lower Mississippi River

The Associated Press
Jackson, Miss.
October 15, 2022

Low-water restrictions on the barge loads make for cautious navigation on the Mississippi River as evidenced by this tow passing under a bridge in Vicksburg, Miss. on Tuesday. The unusually low water level in the lower Mississippi River has caused some barges to get stuck in the muddy river bottom, resulting in delays.
Rogelio V. Solis | AP

Plummeting water levels in the lower Mississippi River are projected to drop even further in the weeks ahead, a projection shows, dampening the region's economic activity and potentially threatening jobs in one of the country's poorest states.

In Vicksburg, on the Mississippi River's east bank near the Louisiana line, the water is approaching its lowest level since 2012. The river’s level near that Mississippi city on Thursday was 4.3 feet (1.3 meters), and it is projected to drop to 3 feet (0.9 meters) by Tuesday, according to the National Weather Service.

Falling water levels have disrupted industrial shipping and tourism in the area and are on pace to keep dropping.

“Right now, the latest forecast is going to take us down on Nov. 8 down to 2 feet (0.61 meters) at Vicksburg and it could drop a lower than that,” Marty Pope, a hydrologist at the National Weather Service Office in Jackson, told the Vicksburg Post.

A dearth of rainfall in recent weeks has left the Mississippi River approaching record low levels in some areas across several states. Nearly all of the Mississippi River basin, from Minnesota through Louisiana, has seen below-normal rainfall since late August. The low levels have caused barges to get stuck in mud and sand, disrupting river travel for shippers, recreational boaters and passengers on a cruise line.

The lower portion of a Vicksburg bridge, normally submerged in the river, has been exposed to sunlight in recent days. The American Heritage, a paddlewheeler cruise ship, navigated the river with caution.

Companies that transport industrial products along the river in barges offer a window into the regionwide economic impacts of the low water levels. Companies are loading their barges with less cargo to traverse the river safely.

Pablo Diaz, president of the Vicksburg Chamber of Commerce, said the Port of Vicksburg has already seen a steep decline in tonnage shipped through the port.

“It’s definitely lower, and by a long way,” Diaz said. “It’s a cascade effect. Everybody that is having issues north of here who might be sending products through Vicksburg, that (traffic) has slowed down a lot.”

North of Vicksburg, agricultural products remained stalled in the ports along the river, Diaz said. At least 19 companies rely on the Port of Vicksburg and together they support about 4,000 jobs in the region.

“Things were going really well on the industrial side before the water problem,” Diaz said. “This is going to be a really big problem if it doesn’t turn around soon. Many jobs depend on our industrial users in this region.”

The Mississippi River has seen water levels fluctuate year to year in the past. In 2011, the river flooded and caused $2.8 billion in damage. A drought brought the water levels to dangerous lows in 2012.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been dredging the Mississippi at several spots to keep river traffic flowing.
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Michael Goldberg is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

PAKISTAN

PTI leader Durrani misstate facts while hiring ex-CIA contractor’s firm for lobbying: Report

ANI
16 October, 2022
Pakistan's former Special Assistant to ousted Prime Minister Imran Khan

 (Image Credit: Twitter/@IftikharDurani)

Islamabad [Pakistan], October 15 (ANI): Pakistan’s former Special Assistant to ousted Prime Minister Imran Khan, Iftikhar Durrani misstated the facts as mentioned in the agreement, signed in May 2021, probably to avoid the regulatory processes in the US.

The News International citing the sources reported that Durrani had misrepresented the facts in the agreement, signed with a former Central Intelligence Agency contractor, probably to avoid the regulatory processes in the US.

“Probably in order to avoid any regulatory processes in the US, Durrani had misrepresented the facts and gave government’s cover for the agreement,” The News International quoted the sources as saying.

Earlier, on May 1, 2021, Durrani signed an agreement with a consulting firm headed by a former CIA contractor in a private capacity for the lobby and providing advice on Pakistan-US relations on May 1 of this year.

As per The News International citing agreement, “the consulting firm will maintain contacts with US government officials of both the executive and legislative branches, as well as with think tanks and other informed individuals, in addition to consulting with the client and the client’s associates, to determine how the scope of constructive relations between the U.S. government and the government of Pakistan might be enhanced, and will advise his Pakistani client and the client’s associates accordingly, both through verbal and written communications.”

Durrani, who was not holding any government position at the time of contract signing, was representing the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, signed the agreement without involving the Ministry of Foreign Affairs despite the fact that dues agreed in the contract were to be paid by the Government of Pakistan

As per the agreement, the Government of Pakistan had to pay a fixed monthly amount of USD 25,000 to the lobbying firm in addition to the one-time service fee or expense retainer of UD 5,000. Although the agreement was signed on behalf of the PTI office-bearer, the amount as per the terms and conditions of the contract was to be paid by the government.

Section 11 of the agreement, a copy available with this scribe, says, “Durrani is supervised by the senior leadership of the party, which is currently the party in government power. As Durrani is supervised by senior party officials, he is effectively under their direction, and under the direction of Pakistan government officials, as well. As some of his activities are supervised, directed and financed by officials of the government of Pakistan, Durrani is also effectively under their control. Durrani disburses funds from the government of Pakistan,” according to The News International.

Interestingly, on one side PTI chief Imran khan holds the US responsible for the regime change in Pakistan but on the other hand, it has a history of involving lobbying firms to build its positive image in the US.

Recently, after Imran Khan was ousted from his government, PTI USA hired a lobbying firm Fenton/Arlook to provide its services for public relations in the US. (ANI)

This report is auto-generated from ANI news service. ThePrint holds no responsibility for its content.

US Regulators should finally require some transparency of large private firms

BY GEORGE S. GEORGIEV, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 10/15/22

THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN 

AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL


The rapid growth of private markets has been among the biggest shifts in the capital raising ecosystem since the end of the financial crisis. In the United States, more money was raised on the opaque private markets than on the well-oiled public markets in each of the past 10 years. And most of this money has poured into private companies valued at over $1 billion.

Named “unicorns” in the early 2010s because they weren’t supposed to exist, such companies now number more than 1,100 worldwide, with more than half based in the U.S. Unicorns are even part of the cultural zeitgeist thanks to recent binge-worthy shows such as “WeCrashed” (about WeWork), “The Dropout” (Theranos) and “Super Pumped” (Uber).

Despite the carefree innocence associated with their namesakes, unicorn companies have provoked frequent consternation from investors, employees, customers, suppliers and regulators. After years of regulatory inaction, Sens. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Catherine Cortez Masto (Nev.) introduced an ambitious new bill last month that is poised to shine some much-needed light on unicorns by subjecting them to regulatory obligations that now apply to public companies. The bill would help protect ordinary investors, such as those saving for retirement, and it would also benefit unicorns’ employees, who are often heavily invested in their employers. Congress needs to pass this bill.

Though far-reaching, the bill would simply correct some of the deregulatory excesses of the past decade. As I discussed in recent research, private markets and private companies did not register as an investor protection concern until recently because they used to be the exclusive domain of professional and sophisticated investors, primarily private equity and venture capital funds. Retail investors and the institutions that held their retirement savings stuck to the liquid and transparent public markets. But a deregulatory cycle that started with the JOBS Act in 2012 and ended with new SEC rules finalized the day before the November 2020 election has undone this traditional balance between public and private markets.

For example, the new SEC rules made it easier for retail investors to invest, both directly and indirectly, in risky private companies. The monetary thresholds above which an investor is presumed to be sophisticated have not been updated since 1982, so the mere passage of time has increased the share of households deemed sophisticated by 550 percent. The quest for higher returns has also pushed institutional investors, retirement schemes and broadly-marketed mutual funds to invest in private markets. The JOBS Act, meanwhile, effectively erased the existing triggers that required private companies to transition to the public markets.

Unicorns have taken advantage of investors’ appetite and the absence of regulatory constraints and have opted to stay private for much longer. When Amazon went public during the 1990s, it was within three years of its founding; by contrast, Uber waited 10 years, and the average age of all firms going public since the JOBS Act is even higher.

None of this would be a problem if private markets were orderly and efficient and if private companies didn’t harm investors. But the evidence suggests just the opposite. Private markets are illiquid, prone to valuation bubbles and incapable of serving as a disciplining mechanism for wayward founders and management.

Private companies often embrace a “move fast and break things” philosophy that may be fine for a small startup but is bound to cause large-scale harm in the case of large unicorns like Uber. Indeed, the most recent spate of revelations reaffirms what we already knew about Uber’s culture of lawbreaking in its pre-IPO days. The larger the private company, the greater the potential for harm. During its unicorn days, Uber’s valuation was as high as $69 billion and outranked most of America’s well-established public companies. And when things go south, investors suffer. WeWork lost 80 percent of its value in just a year and a half trying to unwind a series of bad decisions that no one – not even its largest shareholders – knew about.

The problems often boil down to lack of transparency and supervision, which enable poor governance and waste. This is where the new bill, the Private Markets Transparency and Accountability Act, would come in.

The bill would require private companies in the United States to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) if they either reach a valuation of $700 million (excluding shares held by affiliates), or have at least 5,000 employees and $5 billion in revenues. Once a company is registered, it would need to start reporting much of the same information currently required of public companies: financial and operational performance, business strategy, risk factors, conflict of interest transactions and the like. As proposed, the bill would capture several hundred of the largest and most problematic unicorns and bring much-needed transparency to the capital markets.

Because registration would provide many of the obligations of a public listing without the benefits, we can expect that the private companies that would be caught by it would prefer to undertake a traditional IPO, which would provide them with those benefits.

This, in turn, would boost the number of public companies, whose dwindling number has been an ever-present concern, and give mainstream investors more investment options. A public listing will also ensure that the price at which those investors buy and sell a firm’s stock reflects its underlying value. And it will give employees who receive stock options as part of their compensation a much better sense of the value of that compensation. Will Russia rejoin the international community through space, post-Putin?Ten Commandments of DC

To be sure, implementing a proposal like this will not be straightforward, and the registration thresholds may well need to be adjusted upward. It may also be necessary for the SEC to act on its own existing authority if the bill doesn’t receive the bipartisan support it deserves.

But the underlying rationale behind the bill is solid and uncontroversial: Companies that look alike in terms of size, investor profile, number of employees and societal imprint should be subject to the same transparency and accountability obligations, regardless of whether they are private or public. Watching an investment landscape teaming with ever-larger unicorns over the past 10 years may have been fun, but it would now be better for all involved if those unicorns shed their horns and became regular public companies.

George S. Georgiev is a law professor at Emory University specializing in corporate and securities law. Follow him on Twitter @GeorgievLaw.

FOLEY: Tio Time: Latin Family Orientedness 

vs. American Individualism

Every Mexican has a tio who they aren’t quite sure is their tio — biologically, at least.

MICHELLE FOLEY
OCT 15, 2022
GUEST COLUMNIST


Every Mexican has a tio who they aren’t quite sure is their tio — biologically, at least. That is to say, if an adult around your parents’ age is around enough, they’re granted the tio title. I’ll be guilty of this, too. My friend Andrea jokes that to immerse my future children in Spanish, I can send them over to her for a month and lie that Tia Andrea doesn’t speak any English so it’ll be puro Español with her.

Mexican families are typically more extensive, and so is their role in daily life. Generally, family connectivity is celebrated more prominently in Latino cultures than American culture. Of course, no particular culture loves their families more than others — love is just shown differently. Many Latinos fundamentally believe that individual action reflects one’s family values, so loyalty, tradition and honor are prioritized accordingly. Greater group orientation characterizes the family as a larger safety net against hardship.

It’s an imperfect system. Strict adherence to the family unit may entail that instances of abuse and dysfunction are swept under the rug. At my local community college’s sociology symposium, one presenting student explained that Latinas are less likely to transfer to a four-year college after community college partly due to cultural pressure to stay home. Increased family dependence may also enforce unbalanced power dynamics, enabling parents to dictate children’s career paths or enforce religious and gendered ideas into the minutia of their children’s lives. But familial culture doesn’t necessitate hypercontrol: there’s plenty of room for diverging perspectives. A personal standout is my mom’s conversation with a friend who’d pushed her daughter to turn down a master’s degree program scholarship abroad to stay closer to family.

“It’s Mexican culture,” she said, but my mom disagreed. She told me she almost saw her children as an extension of herself, so their successes and travels felt like hers, too.

Therein lies the distinction between family-oriented and helicopter parenting. Hovering over growing children carries a perception of weakness, so many American parents pridefully send their children “out of the nest” as soon as they can. To be a “helicopter parent” implies that you believe your child can’t handle the real world on their own. A more balanced perspective is that your child can absolutely tackle adulthood, but you’ll remain an important part of it.

Americans often romanticize the ’50s nuclear family model as the suburbanite ideal, but there’s merit to an expanded family. One or two caretakers per family unit allow for fewer shock absorbers; with a smaller group of people to rely on, familial strife may affect us more acutely and leave us lonelier. One dysfunctional parent can more easily fracture a smaller family, but having grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins to turn to helps dilute the problem. “It takes a village” isn’t just a saying: it’s evolutionary biology. Take the widely-explored grandmother hypothesis, which suggests that grandparents long outlive their reproductive years partially because their presence in their grandchildren’s lives increases the parents’ reproductive fitness and resource availability. We benefit from wider familial systems not only for our own upbringing, but also for that of our children.

Platonic touch is comparatively rare in cultures like the U.S. and U.K., so we may turn to family for touch instead. We should put our fingers on the dissonance that many patients of color feel when encouraged by culturally white American therapists to simply cut off unhealed family members, or told that self-love is enough to compensate for lacking close relationships.

Of course, we should welcome various definitions of family and found family. In this way, we may stop turning to the hyper-individualistic, materialist default of American sociality for achievement, fulfillment and belonging in this world. The Latin practice of defining and redefining family combats isolation through resortion to some of the most natural systems we have. When we have a strong emotional core to return to again and again, we can live in abundance and resilience, regardless of what life has to offer.

Michelle Foley is a sophomore at Benjamin Franklin College. Contact her at michelle.foley@yale.edu .

MICHELLE FOLEY