Ancient invasion can inform modern strategies for wildlife conservation

Animals 446 million years ago also had to contend with invasive species

Reports and Proceedings

UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI

 

IMAGE: UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI GEOLOGY STUDENT IAN FORSYTHE STUDIED THE FOSSIL RECORD IN THE LATE ORDOVICIAN PERIOD TO LEARN MORE ABOUT A PHENOMENON CALLED THE RICHMONDIAN INVASION. view more 

CREDIT: IAN FORSYTHE

We might be inclined to think of invasive species as a modern problem of our own creation or carelessness.

But a University of Cincinnati graduate student says ecosystems around the world have had to contend with new invaders for hundreds of millions of years.

Ian Forsythe studies geology in UC’s College of Arts and Sciences. In his latest work in UC’s Department of Geosciences, he examined the fossil record to examine how one well-known invasion of animals that impacted surrounding animals in the vast shallow seas that covered the Midwestern United States during the Late Ordovician Period.

“We are a catalyst for these things today. But these biotic invasions happened in the past, too,” Forsythe said.

Forsythe presented his findings in October to the annual conference of the Geological Society of America.

Just how he can study changes in species over time is a testament to the amazing fossil record left behind from the Ordovician. Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky were covered in a salty sea filled with starfish, crinoids, brachiopods and other mollusks.

Today, it’s hard to find a rock in any southwestern Ohio creek that doesn’t bear evidence of these ancient marine fossils. Paleontologists from around the world come to Cincinnati to study its fossils.

“We have really incredible fossil deposits here. They’re globally exceptional,” Forsythe said. “The quantity of fossils gives us an awesome window to the past. It’s an amazing natural laboratory.”

Forsythe said one well-known phenomenon called the Richmondian Invasion about 446 million years ago brought a myriad of new species into contact with each other in these shallow seas.

But unlike some invaders like brown tree snakes that have wiped out entire populations of birds in places like Guam, the ocean invaders did not cause widespread extinctions, Forsythe said.

Instead, the native species were generalists that didn’t need specialized habitats or food requirements and were able to adapt and make room for the newcomers, he said.

“Generalists are more successful during invasions because they can contract their niche to accommodate novel competitors,” he said.

Since the invaders were low on the food chain, they didn’t cause a widespread disruption, he said.

Forsythe began the project at Ohio University in the lab of Alycia Stigall, now a professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

“The Richmondian invasion is one of the most intensively studied fossil invasion events in terms of ecosystem and species impacts,” Stigall told the Geological Society of America. “But Ian’s work is truly groundbreaking; he was able to examine changes at the community level at a very fine temporal level of a few thousand years and relate this directly to changes in sea level and the timing of the invaders’ arrival.”

Still, there is a lot we can learn about the resilience of today’s ecosystems by studying these changes millions of years ago, Forsythe said.

“That’s what drew me to invasion science. It’s a big issue today with so many outstanding questions,” he said. “We can’t answer how these things play out in longer timescales without a long data set.”

Forsythe said invaders higher on the food chain present a greater existential threat to native species, particularly those with specialized dietary or habitat needs.

“It’s a guiding principle for what imperiled species might require attention first,” Forsythe said.

Marine fossils from the Ordovician Period are on display at the Cincinnati Museum Center.

CREDIT

Jay Yocis/UC

Marine fossils from the Ordovician Period are on display in the Geosciences Department of the University of Cincinnati.

CREDIT

Joseph Fuqua II/UC

CAPTION

A trilobite the size of a dinner platter is on display in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Cincinnati.

CREDIT

Jay Yocis/UC

New walking robot design could revolutionize how we build things in space

Peer-Reviewed Publication

FRONTIERS

Researchers have designed a state-of-the-art walking robot that could revolutionize large construction projects in space. They tested the feasibility of the robot for the in-space assembly of a 25m Large Aperture Space Telescope. They present their findings in Frontiers in Robotics and AI. A scaled-down prototype of the robot also showed promise for large construction applications on Earth.

Maintenance and servicing of large constructions are nowhere more needed than in space, where the conditions are extreme and human technology has a short lifespan. Extravehicular activities (activities done by an astronaut outside a spacecraft), robotics, and autonomous systems solutions have been useful for servicing and maintenance missions and have helped the space community conduct ground-breaking research on various space missions. Advancements in robotics and autonomous systems facilitate a multitude of in-space services. This includes, but is not limited to, manufacturing, assembly, maintenance, astronomy, earth observation, and debris removal.

With the countless risks involved, only relying on human builders is not enough, and current technologies are becoming outdated. 

“We need to introduce sustainable, futuristic technology to support the current and growing orbital ecosystem,” explained corresponding author Manu Nair, PhD candidate at the University of Lincoln.

“As the scale of space missions grows, there is a need for more extensive infrastructures in orbit. Assembly missions in space would hold one of the key responsibilities in meeting the increasing demand.” 

In their paper, Nair and his colleagues introduced an innovative, dexterous walking robotic system that can be used for in orbit assembly missions. As a use case, the researchers tested the robot for the assembly of a 25m Large Aperture Space Telescope (LAST).

Assembling telescopes in orbit

Ever since the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope and its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, the space community has been continuously moving towards deploying newer and larger telescopes with larger apertures (the diameter of the light collecting region).

Assembling such telescopes, such as a 25m LAST, on Earth is not possible with our current launch vehicles due to their limited size. That is why larger telescopes ideally need to be assembled in space (or in orbit).

“The prospect of in-orbit commissioning of a LAST has fueled scientific and commercial interests in deep-space astronomy and Earth observation,” said Nair.

To assemble a telescope of that magnitude in space, we need the right tools: “Although conventional space walking robotic candidates are dexterous, they are constrained in maneuverability. Therefore, it is significant for future in-orbit walking robot designs to incorporate mobility features to offer access to a much larger workspace without compromising the dexterity.”

E-Walker robot

The researchers proposed a seven degrees-of-freedom fully dexterous end-over-end walking robot (a limbed robotic system that can move along a surface to different locations to perform tasks with seven degrees of motion capabilities), or, in short, an E-Walker.

They conducted an in-depth design engineering exercise to test the robot for its capabilities to efficiently assemble a 25m LAST in orbit. The robot was compared to the existing Canadarm2 and the European Robotic Arm on the International Space Station. Additionally, a scaled down prototype for Earth-analog testing was developed and another design engineering exercise performed. 

“Our analysis shows that the proposed innovative E-Walker design proves to be versatile and an ideal candidate for future in-orbit missions. The E-Walker would be able to extend the life cycle of a mission by carrying out routine maintenance and servicing missions post assembly, in space” explained Nair.

“The analysis of the scaled-down prototype identifies it to also be an ideal candidate for servicing, maintenance, and assembly operations on Earth, such as carrying out regular maintenance checks on wind turbines.”

Yet a lot remains to be explored. The research was limited to the design engineering analysis of a full-scale and prototype model of the E-Walker. Nair explained: “The E-Walker prototyping work is now in progress at the University of Lincoln; therefore, the experimental verification and validation will be published separately.”

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JOURNAL

Frontiers in Robotics and AI

DOI

10.3389/frobt.2022.995813 

Kirk Douglas Fights Evil Robot - Saturn 3 (1980)

 

How scientist summarized the development of space robotic technologies for on-orbit assembly?

How to find the future research direction of space machine on-orbit assembly?

Peer-Reviewed Publication

BEIJING INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY PRESS CO., LTD

 

IMAGE: HETEROGENEOUS SPACE ROBOTS ASSEMBLE LARGE SPACE STRUCTURES ON ORBIT. view more 

CREDIT: SPACE: SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

The construction of large structures is one of the main development trends of the space exploration in the future, such as large space stations, large space solar power stations, and large space telescopes. However, due to their large size, such structures cannot be carried directly into space by rockets or spacecraft. Therefore, these large structures need to be broken down into multiple modular units, which are brought into space by a launch vehicle and then assembled. This is an important task of on-orbit servicing (OOS): on-orbit assembly. It is one of important development tendency, which aims to make full use of space robots to assemble space structures autonomously in the aerospace industry. In a review paper recently published in Space: Science & Technology, Qirong Tang from Tongji University and Delun Li and other experts and engineers from China Academy of Space Technology summarized the development status of space robot technology and the relevant space robot on-orbit assembly technology in recent decades.

First of all, the author introduced the research status of on-orbit assembly of space robots. The aerospace industry had been researching and practicing on-orbit service technology for decades. It was known that the space on-orbit assembly task could be completed by space robots and astronauts in collaboration. Although manual assembly by astronauts had proven to be an effective method for constructing space structures, this method had many limitations. Therefore, it was very necessary to use space robots to autonomously complete on-orbit assembly tasks. In general, space on-orbit assembly technology has gradually developed from manual operation to autonomous work. The way of working has shifted from simple assisted astronaut operations to autonomous assembly and maintenance. Mission scenes have also changed from a single small object to a large spatial structure. However, in terms of the development of space-in-orbit assembly technology, it has not yet matured and applied. However, as far as the development of space on-orbit assembly technology was concerned, it had not yet been matured and applied. Moreover, as the size of the object becomes larger, the flexible vibration becomes stronger, and the assembly accuracy becomes higher during the assembly process, the research on multi robot cooperation to complete high-precision operation needs to be in-depth.

Afterwards, the author discusses the key technologies of space-on-orbit assembly, including assembly sequence planning, space robot motion planning, on-orbit assembly, and vibration suppression and compliance control methods. Firstly, based on the space robot motion planning and assembly sequence planning, the development of space robot planning algorithms was introduced. The planning of assembly sequences described the details of assembly operations in how different parts should be placed in a product. The traditional assembly planning method was greatly affected by human factors. At the same time, the increasing complexity of assembly structure and the diversification of assembly evaluation criteria also brought difficulties to assembly sequence planning. Computer intelligent assembly methods, such as virtual reality technology, could make up for this deficiency and improve the efficiency and reliability of assembly sequence planning. As for the motion planning, it was of great significance to the on-orbit operation of space robots. When a space robot performs on-orbit assembly in space, a basic task was to move the spacecraft from one point to another in the state space. For the spacecraft itself, its state space was the displacement and rotation of the spacecraft in the Cartesian coordinate system. Therefore, the traditional Dijkstra, A∗, and other algorithms can be used as path planning methods. Besides, commonly used intelligent bionic algorithms, including genetic algorithm, ant colony algorithm, and particle swarm algorithm were also applied. Secondly, the space robot assembly method was summarized. The artificial potential field method, machine vision method, neural network learning method and so on were developed and applied in important scenarios, i.e. assembling the large space truss and performing space multirobot multitask. At last, from the control point of view, how to solve the vibration suppression and compliant assembly of on-orbit assembly is reviewed. Due to the microgravity conditions in space, it was easy to cause vibration of large structures. Analysis of single and multiple robot assembly strategies, as well as the hybrid method of branch and bound and improved ant colony algorithm, could suppress the vibration disturbance. In the assembly contact process, there was direct contact between the targets, and a certain amount of force (moment) would be generated, so compliance control was also very necessary. The current compliance control methods are mainly divided into two categories: active compliance and passive compliance. Passive compliance was completely dependent on the properties of the material, cannot be controlled, and had high uncertainty. And active compliance referred to obtaining contact force information through sensors, using the information as a feedback input to the controller, and performing feedback control of the robotic arm to reduce the contact force and achieve the purpose of compliance control. Active force position control generally adopted traditional “force-position” hybrid control, impedance control, and other methods.

Then, in order to simulate the space assembly scene on the ground, the author introduced the development of ground verification experiments and provided ideas for the effective verification of space on-orbit assembly technology. Due to the high cost of space on-orbit construction, the space manipulator and its related control system and other environments must be verified on the ground to ensure that all equipment can operate normally before the space on-orbit assembly. The biggest difference between the ground and space was whether there was gravity, so how to simulate zero-microgravity conditions was the key and focus of ground test verification. At present, there were five commonly used ground verification methods, namely, air flotation method, water flotation method, force compensation method, parabola method, and free fall method. The space administrations or space institutes of various countries had established corresponding laboratories, especially the air flotation experimental platform and the gravity compensation experimental platform with the purpose of completing the “space-ground consistency” experiment on the ground and ensuring the accuracy and feasibility of the experiment.

Finally, the author summarized opportunities and challenges of on-orbit assembly in the future.

On-orbit assembly relies on space multirobot coordination and a super presence and the support intelligent interaction capabilities such as brain control, voice control, and eye control are worthy being developed.

More intelligent on-orbit assembly technology is boosting, including the autonomous decision-making functions, fault diagnosis and self-repair functions, autonomous mission planning, autonomous work, and learning capabilities.

Diversified capabilities of space robots are potential. The robots not only need to have long-distance transfer and movement functions, but also need to have the ability to complete high-precision operations and flexible operations including clamping, rotating, pulling, cutting, connector operation, and even own functions of robot group reconstruction, robot task reconstruction, and configuration reconstruction.

JOURNAL

Space Science & Technology

DOI

10.34133/2022/9849170 

ARTICLE TITLE

A Survey of Space Robotic Technologies for On-Orbit Assembly

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.  

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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).

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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.