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Tag: environmental conservation

  • Activist who fought for legal rights for Europe’s largest saltwater lagoon wins ‘Green Nobel’

    Activist who fought for legal rights for Europe’s largest saltwater lagoon wins ‘Green Nobel’

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    LOS ANGELES — Growing up, Teresa Vicente spent long days in Spain‘s Mar Menor swimming in transparent waters, cupping seahorses in her hands and partying under the moonlit sky. Out there, she recalled, time stood still.

    But over the decades, chronic contamination from mining, development and agricultural runoff turned the once crystal-clear waters of Europe’s largest saltwater lagoon into a graveyard. A mass fish die-off in 2019 prompted the professor of philosophy of law at the University of Murcia to take action.

    Over the next several years, Vicente, now 61, led a grassroots campaign to save the region’s ecological jewel from collapse. Her efforts helped lead to a new law passed in 2022, giving the lagoon the legal right to conservation, protection and damage remediation.

    Vicente is one of this year’s seven winners of the Goldman Environmental Prize, known as the “Green Nobel,” which honors grassroots activists and leaders from across the globe for achievements in protecting the natural world. The recipients were selected from about 100 nominees.

    “(This prize) signifies an international recognition that we are facing a new stage in humanity,” said Vicente in Spanish. It’s a stage where “human beings understand they are part of nature. And this recognition means that it is not a local or national conquest, but rather a European and international one.”

    “They call Mar Menor the lagoon of magic,” she added, “and all of us on this journey have seen a lot of magic.”

    The other winners are:

    — Marcel Gomes, executive secretary for the media nonprofit Repórter Brasil, who organized a campaign that alleged connections between beef from the world’s largest meatpacking corporation, JBS, and illegal deforestation in Brazil and helped pressure retailers around the world to stop selling the meat.

    — Indigenous activist Murrawah Maroochy Johnson, who helped stop development of a coal mine in Australia’s Queensland state that would have devasted nearly 20,000 acres (8,000 hectares) of a nature preserve, spewed nearly 1.6 billion tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere over its lifetime, and endangered the rights and culture of Indigenous peoples.

    — Alok Shukla, who led a community movement that saved nearly half a million acres (200,000 hectares) of forests from 21 proposed coal mines in Chhattisgarh, a state in central India.

    — Andrea Vidaurre, who helped convince the state of California’s air quality agency to establish two transportation regulations that limit emissions from trains and trucks. The rules include the nation’s first emissions limit for trains.

    — Nonhle Mbuthuma and Sinegugu Zukulu, Indigenous activists who prevented seismic testing for coal and gas in a coastal area off South Africa’s Eastern Cape.

    Michael Sutton, executive director of the Goldman Environmental Foundation, called the winners “an incredible group of individuals laboring, sometimes in obscurity, against overwhelming odds to prevail against governments, against industry.”

    Vicente was born and raised in Spain’s southeastern city of Murcia, home to the Mar Menor. When she learned about the 2019 fish die-off, she was at the University of Reading in England studying how other countries had successfully bestowed legal rights upon natural resources to protect them.

    To save the lagoon, Vicente in 2020 helped write the first draft of a bill granting legal protection to the Mar Menor and submitted it to Spain’s Parliament, which allows citizens to propose laws directly. But the process required her to gather 500,000 signatures during COVID-19 lockdowns.

    By November 2021, with help from thousands of volunteers across Spain, Vicente had amassed nearly 640,000 signatures — and the law was passed in 2022.

    She never doubted she would succeed. “People had understood that they were part of that ecosystem and were excited about the idea of ​​being able to defend their rights,” she said. “When people forget their political differences, their religious differences or their economic differences, and give themselves over to a new idea of ​​justice, that is a sure success.”

    The Goldman Environmental Prize was founded in 1989 by philanthropists Richard and Rhoda H. Goldman to recognize common people working in their communities to protect and improve their environment.

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    AP video journalist Haven Daley contributed to this report from San Francisco.

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    The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment.

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  • In water-stressed Singapore, a search for new solutions to keep the taps flowing

    In water-stressed Singapore, a search for new solutions to keep the taps flowing

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    SINGAPORE — A crack of thunder booms as dozens of screens in a locked office flash between live video of cars splashing through wet roads, drains sapping the streets dry, and reservoirs collecting the precious rainwater across the tropical island of Singapore. A team of government employees intently monitors the water, which will be collected and purified for use by the country’s six million residents.

    “We make use of real-time data to manage the storm water,” Harry Seah, deputy chief executive of operations at PUB, Singapore’s National Water Agency, says with a smile while standing in front of the screens. “All of this water will go to the marina and reservoirs.”

    The room is part of Singapore’s cutting-edge water management system that combines technology, diplomacy and community involvement to help one of the most water-stressed nations in the world secure its water future. The country’s innovations have attracted the attention of other water-scarce nations seeking solutions.

    A small city-state island located in Southeast Asia, Singapore is one of the most densely populated countries on the planet. In recent decades the island has also transformed into a modern international business hub, with a rapidly developing economy. The boom has caused the country’s water consumption to increase by over twelve times since the nation’s independence from Malaysia in 1965, and the economy is only expected to keep growing.

    With no natural water resources, the country has relied on importing water from neighboring Malaysia via a series of deals allowing inexpensive purchase of water drawn from the country’s Johor River. But the deal is set to expire in 2061, with uncertainty over its renewal.

    For years Malaysian politicians have targeted the water deal, sparking political tensions with Singapore. The Malaysian government has claimed the price at which Singapore purchases water — set decades ago — is too low and should be renegotiated, while the Singaporean government argues its treatment and resale of of the water to Malaysia is done at a generous price.

    And climate change, which brings increased intense weather, rising seas and a rise in average temperatures, is expected to exacerbate water insecurity, according to research done by the Singaporean government.

    “For us, water is not an inexhaustible gift of nature. It is a strategic and scarce resource,” Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said at the opening of a water treatment facility in 2021. “We are always pushing the limits of our water resources. And producing each additional drop of water gets harder and harder, and more and more expensive.”

    Seeking solutions to its water stresses, the Singaporean government has spent decades developing a master plan focusing on what they call their four “national taps”: water catchment, recycling, desalination and imports.

    Across the island, seventeen reservoirs catch and store rainwater, which is treated through a series of chemical coagulation, rapid gravity filtration and disinfection.

    Five desalination plants, which produce drinking water by pushing seawater through membranes to remove dissolved salts and minerals, operate across the island, creating millions of gallons of clean water every day.

    A massive sewage recycling program purifies wastewater through microfiltration, reverse osmosis and ultraviolet irradiation, adding to drinking supply reservoirs. Dubbed “NEWater”, the treated wastewater now provides Singapore 40% of its water, with the government hoping to increase capacity to 55% of demand in years to come. To help build people’s confidence in the safety, Singapore’s national water agency collaborated with a local craft brewery to create a line of beer made from treated sewage.

    Innovation has been possible partially because of the involvement of private businesses, Seah said.

    “Sometimes private sectors may have a different way of doing things, and you can learn from them. Industry involvement in us is very important,” Seah said.

    Getting community participation and buy in has been an effective method to improved awareness and conservation as well, Seah said.

    In 2006 the government launched the Active, Beautiful, Clean Waters Program, which transformed the country’s water systems into more public areas. Through the program, residents can kayak, hike and picnic on the reservoirs, giving a greater sense of ownership and value to the country’s water supplies. Several water facilities now have public green spaces on the roofs where the public can picnic amid big lush green lawns.

    In schools, children are taught about best practices for water use and conservation. Schools hold mock water rationing exercises where water taps are shut off and students collect water in pails.

    The international community has tapped into Singapore’s water innovation as well. The country has become a global hub for water technology, as home to nearly 200 water companies and over 20 research centers and hosts a biennial International Water Week.

    Water technology developed and used in Singapore, such as portable water filters, water testing technology and flood management tools, have been exported to over 30 countries, including Indonesia, Malaysia and Nepal.

    But not all of the solutions used in Singapore will relevant to other countries, especially those with less-developed infrastructure concedes Seah.

    Despite the leaps that Singapore has made in its journey for water security, Seah warns that continued progress is essential for the island.

    “After more than two decades we are still constantly analyzing the water,” he said. “We can never be complacent.”

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  • Benito the giraffe leaves extreme weather at Mexico's border and heads to a more congenial home

    Benito the giraffe leaves extreme weather at Mexico's border and heads to a more congenial home

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    CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico — After a campaign by environmentalists, Benito the giraffe left Mexico‘s northern border and its extreme weather conditions Sunday night and headed for a conservation park in central Mexico, where the climate is more akin to his natural habitat and already a home to other giraffes.

    Environmental groups had voiced strong complaints about conditions faced by Benito at the city-run Central Park zoo in Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso, Texas, where weather in the summer is brutally hot and temperatures plunge during the winter.

    A crane carefully lifted a container holding the giraffe onto a truck while city dwellers in love with the animal said a bittersweet goodbye. Some activists shouted, “We love you, Benito.”

    “We’re a little sad that he’s leaving. but it also gives us great pleasure … The weather conditions are not suitable for him,” said Flor Ortega, a 23-year-old who said she had spent her entire life visiting Modesto the giraffe, which was at the zoo for two decades before dying in 2022, and then Benito, which arrived last May.

    The transfer could not have come at a better time, just when a new cold front was about to hit the area.

    Benito was heading on a journey of 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) and about 50 hours on the road to his new home, the African Safari park in the state of Puebla. Visitors travel through the park in all-terrain vehicles to observe animals as if they were on safari.

    The container, more than five meters high (16.5 feet), was specially designed for Benito, and the giraffe was allowed to become familiar with it during the weekend, said Frank Carlos Camacho, the director of the park.

    The animal’s head sticks up through the top of the big wooden and metal box, but a frame allows a tarp to cover over Benito and insulate him from the cold, wind and rain as well as from noise and the sight of landscape speeding by.

    “The giraffe has huge, huge eyes and gains height to be able to look for predators in the savannah and we have to inhibit that so that it does not have any source of stress,” Camacho said in a video posted on social media.

    Inside the container is straw, alfalfa, water and vegetables, and electronic equipment will monitor the temperature and allow technicians to even talk to the animal.

    Outside, Benito will be guarded by a convoy of vehicles with officers from the Federal Attorney for Environmental Protection and the National Guard.

    “He’s going to be calm, he’s going to travel super well. We’ve done this many times,” Camacho said.

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    Associated Press writer Maria Verza in Mexico City contributed to this report.

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  • Latest EPA assessment shows almost no improvement in river and stream nitrogen pollution

    Latest EPA assessment shows almost no improvement in river and stream nitrogen pollution

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    ST. LOUIS — The nation’s rivers and streams remain stubbornly polluted with nutrients that contaminate drinking water and fuel a gigantic dead zone for aquatic life in the Gulf of Mexico, according to a recently released Environmental Protection Agency assessment.

    It’s a difficult problem that’s concentrated in agricultural regions that drain into the Mississippi River. More than half of the basin’s miles of rivers and streams were in poor condition for nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilizer that drains into waterways, the agency found. For decades, federal and state officials have struggled to control farm runoff, the biggest source of nutrient pollution that is not typically federally regulated.

    It’s a problem only expected to get harder to control as climate change produces more intense storms that dump rain on the Midwest and South. Those heavy rains flood farm fields, pick up commercial fertilizers and carry them into nearby rivers.

    “It’s really worrying that we are clearly not meeting the goals that we’ve set for ourselves,” said Olivia Dorothy, director of river restoration with the conservation group American Rivers.

    The assessment is based on samples collected in 2018 and 2019 and it allows experts to compare river conditions from previous rounds of sampling, although different sampling sites were used. It takes years for the agency to compile the results and release the report, which is the most comprehensive assessment of the nation’s river and stream health. Phosphorus levels dipped slightly while nitrogen levels remained almost exactly the same.

    About half of all river miles were found to be in poor condition for snails, worms, beetles and other bottom dwelling species that are an important indicator of biological health of the river. About a third were also rated as having poor conditions for fish based on species diversity.

    “Controlling pollution is a big job. It is hard work,” said Tom Wall, director of watershed restoration, assessment and protection division at EPA. “Things are not getting worse, despite the tremendous pressures on our waterways. And we would like to see more progress.”

    Water pollution from factories and industry is typically federally regulated. The Biden administration recently proposed toughening regulations on meat and poultry processing plants to reduce pollution, Wall said.

    When nutrient pollution flows into the Gulf of Mexico, it spurs growth of bacteria that consume oxygen. That creates a so-called “dead zone,” a vast area where it’s difficult or impossible for marine animals to survive, fluctuating from about the size of Rhode Island to the size of New Jersey, according to Nancy Rabalais, professor of oceanography and wetland studies at Louisiana State University.

    That affects the productivity of commercial fisheries and marine life in general, but nutrient pollution is also damaging upstream. Too much nitrate in drinking water can affect how blood carries oxygen, causing human health problems like headaches, nausea and abdominal cramps. It can especially affect infants, sometimes inducing “blue baby syndrome,” which causes the skin to take on a bluish hue.

    The EPA established the hypoxia task force in the late 1990s to reduce nutrient pollution and shrink the dead zone, but it relies on voluntary efforts to reduce farm runoff and hasn’t significantly reduced the dead zone.

    Anne Schechinger, Midwest director with the Environmental Working Group, said new regulations are needed, not voluntary efforts. She said the Biden administration has done a lot to improve drinking water, but not enough to reduce agricultural runoff.

    Methods to prevent runoff include building buffers between farmland and waterways, creating new wetlands to filter pollutants and applying less fertilizer.

    It’s a politically fraught issue, especially in major Midwest farming states that significantly contribute to the problem. Many of those states cite their voluntary conservation programs as evidence they’re taking on the problem, yet the new EPA data shows little progress.

    Minnesota is one of the few states that has a so-called “buffer law” that requires vegetation to be planted along rivers, streams and public drainage ditches. But because groundwater and surface water are closely connected in much of the Upper Midwest, nutrient pollution can end up leaching underground through farm fields and eventually bypass those buffers, ending up in streams anyway, said Gregory Klinger, who works for the Olmsted County, Minnesota soil and water conservation district.

    There should also be a focus on preventing over-fertilizing – about 30% of farmers are still using more than the recommended amounts of fertilizer on their fields, said Brad Carlson, an extension educator with the University of Minnesota who communicates with farmers about nutrient pollution issues.

    Martin Larsen, a farmer and conservation technician in southeast Minnesota, said he and other farmers are interested in practices that reduce their nutrient pollution. He’s broken up his typical corn and soybean rotation with oats and medium red clover, the latter a kind of plant that can increase nitrogen levels in the soil naturally. He’s been able to get by with about half as much fertilizer for a corn crop that follows a clover planting as compared to a corn-corn rotation.

    Growing oats and red clover as cover crops improves soil, too. But Larsen said it’s difficult for many farmers to plant them when they often rely on an immediate payback for anything they grow. Cover crops are planted on just 5.1% of harvested farmland, according to 2017 data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

    Larsen said since regulations are so unpopular, more should be done to incentivize better practices. For example, he said that could include companies shifting the makeup of feed they use for animals, giving farmers an opening to plant some crops that use less fertilizer. Or government programs that do more to subsidize things like cover crops.

    He said that many farmers in his community acknowledge the need to do things differently. “But we also feel very trapped in the system,” he said.

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    Walling reported from Chicago.

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    Follow Melina Walling on X: @MelinaWalling.

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    The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment

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  • As Mexico marks conservation day, advocates say it takes too long to list vulnerable species

    As Mexico marks conservation day, advocates say it takes too long to list vulnerable species

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    MEXICO CITY — Residents of Mexico‘s Caribbean reef island of Banco Chinchorro near Belize have hunted the meat and salmon-pink shells of queen conch for generations. As populations have shrunk in recent decades, Mexico has enforced limits and bans on catching the shellfish.

    The species has continued to decline despite these measures, which included a blanket five-year ban on catches in 2012. Still, the queen conch is one of many vulnerable species not included on Mexico’s national endangered species list.

    As Mexico’s environment agency celebrates the country’s biodiversity during Thursday’s national conservation day, conservationists say the government’s own registry for endangered species is too short and too slow to update.

    Despite a legal requirement to review and update the list at least every three years, there have been no updates since August 2019. In the meantime, species like the queen conch have lacked federal environmental protection and moved steadily toward extinction.

    The Mexican environment department did not respond to emails and text messages asking why there had not been any updates to the list since 2019.

    Officials accept proposals to list species only during set periods for public comment. That system is opaque and slow, said Alejandro Olivera, a marine biologist at the Center for Biological Diversity.

    “We shouldn’t have to wait until the government requests for new listings, because species can go extinct or populations can recover from one year to another,” Olivera said from La Paz, on the Gulf of California.

    The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, by comparison, accepts submissions on a rolling basis, and has to make an initial response within 90 days. It’s still not perfect, Olivera said, but better than a system of submission windows.

    “Even if you have the hard data, the scientific information to prove that one species is really endangered, the process is not open,” Olivera said. “You can’t submit the proposal just out of the blue.”

    The Mexican government most recently opened a comment window in April 2021, when the Center for Biological Diversity submitted a proposal to list the queen conch, but the group never heard back.

    One of the experts convened to adjudicate those proposals was Angélica Cervantes Maldonado, a plant biology professor at Mexico’s National Autonomous University. She acknowledged that it has taken much longer than the mandated three-year period to update the list.

    “I know the situation of species is complicated and can deteriorate very quickly, but unfortunately here the regulatory process is much slower,” she said, adding that the department expects to publish updates around April.

    Mexico’s current list was written into law in 2010, and has been updated three times since then, once to make it shorter.

    While some species like the queen conch aren’t federally protected at all, many more are listed but with a far lesser degree of danger than the science suggests, said Olivera.

    The population of elkhorn coral, for example, another Caribbean species, with large, ochre branches growing six feet tall, has declined 97% over the past four decades, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

    The International Union for Conservation of Nature, or IUCN, lists elkhorn coral as critically endangered, the last step before extinction. Meanwhile elkhorn coral has the lowest level of endangerment on Mexico’s list, despite scientists’ requests to review its classification for at least five years.

    Compared to the IUCN, last updated in 2022, the Mexican government lists 250 fewer species as needing some kind of protection, and most fall under the lowest risk category. In particular, Mexico lists 535 species as endangered, its worst risk rating, whereas IUCN lists nearly 1,500 species in Mexico as either endangered or critically endangered.

    If a species is included on Mexico’s list in any category, all commercial uses of that species are banned. Higher categories come with greater restrictions, fines and the potential for criminal prosecution. The list also impacts other permitting and pollution regulations, restricting development in areas where listed species are known to live in some cases.

    The IUCN says Mexico ranks third in the word for the number of endangered species after Ecuador and Madagascar.

    Other Latin American nations also have struggled to square ponderous regulatory procedures with rapidly changing numbers of endangered species.

    In 2014, Brazil passed legislation requiring its listings to be revised every year, but since then there has only been one update, said Rodrigo Jorge, a biologist with the government’s environment department.

    To expedite the process, Jorge’s team launched an online database of endangered species this August called Salve, which can be updated on a rolling basis. Not every species needs to be studied every year, he said, but it is important that there is a regular opportunity to assess the list and make changes.

    With Salve’s help Jorge says Brazil’s list, last revised in 2022, will be updated again next year, the fastest turnaround since the country began categorizing endangered species.

    For now, however, no species can be declared “threatened” without going through the official, slower regulatory process, and the listings on Salve do not come with regulatory obligations themselves, instead relying on the “goodwill” of companies, Jorge said.

    In the build-up to Thursday’s national conservation day, the Mexican government took to social media to promote its plan to save the vaquita porpoise, a long-time victim of bycatch fishing.

    In what it called “an exercise of unprecedented transparency” in September, the department sent delegates to a UNESCO meeting in Saudi Arabia to report on progress protecting the vaquita.

    Olivera says the government “tells lies or half-truths” and that vaquita populations have continued to decline. “They claim success but… the only way to measure the success of the vaquitas is when we have more vaquitas.”

    There are as few as 10 vaquitas left in the wild, all in the Gulf of California.

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  • Pennsylvania court permanently blocks effort to make power plants pay for greenhouse gas emissions

    Pennsylvania court permanently blocks effort to make power plants pay for greenhouse gas emissions

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    HARRISBURG, Pa. — Pennsylvania cannot enforce a regulation to make power plant owners pay for their planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, a state court ruled Wednesday, dealing another setback to the centerpiece of former Gov. Tom Wolf’s plan to fight global warming.

    The Commonwealth Court last year temporarily blocked Pennsylvania from becoming the first major fossil fuel-producing state to adopt a carbon-pricing program, and the new ruling makes that decision permanent.

    The ruling is a victory for Republican lawmakers and coal-related interests that argued that the carbon-pricing plan amounted to a tax, and therefore would have required legislative approval. Wolf, a Democrat, had sought to get around legislative opposition by unconstitutionally imposing the requirement through a regulation, they said.

    The court agreed in a 4-1 decision.

    The regulation written by Wolf’s administration had authorized Pennsylvania to join the multistate Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which imposes a price and declining cap on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.

    It would be up to Wolf’s successor, Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro, to decide whether to appeal the decision to the state Supreme Court. Shapiro’s administration had no comment Wednesday on whether it would appeal, and Shapiro himself hasn’t said publicly whether he would follow through on the plan to join the consortium, should the courts allow it.

    Still, Shapiro is “focused on addressing climate change, reducing emissions, and protecting public health while creating jobs and protecting consumers,” Shapiro’s administration said in a statement.

    Republican lawmakers hailed the decision and urged Shapiro not to appeal it. Such a plan continues to have no chance of passing the state Legislature, where the Republican-controlled Senate has been protective of hometown coal and natural gas industries in the nation’s No. 2 gas state.

    In a statement, Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman, R-Indiana, said Pennsylvania lawmakers should now work to “foster greater energy independence, while ensuring the responsible development of our God-given natural resources.”

    In the House, where Democrats hold a one-seat majority, neither a carbon-pricing plan, nor Shapiro’s most well-defined clean-energy goal — a pledge to ensure that Pennsylvania uses 30% of its electricity from renewable power sources by 2030 — have come up for a vote.

    A coalition of environmental advocacy groups said there is no alternative climate plan waiting on Shapiro’s desk and, in a statement, they urged Shapiro to appeal the decision to “demonstrate his commitment to protecting the climate, human health, and the economic future of Pennsylvanians.”

    Critics had said the pricing plan would raise electricity bills, hurt in-state energy producers and drive new power generation to other states while doing little to fight climate change.

    Opponents also included natural gas-related interests, industrial and commercial power users and labor unions whose members build and maintain pipelines, power plants and refineries.

    Backers of the plan had called it the biggest step ever taken in Pennsylvania to fight climate change and said it would have generated hundreds of millions of dollars a year to promote climate-friendly energy sources and cut electricity bills through energy conservation programs.

    The plan’s supporters included environmental advocates as well as solar, wind and nuclear power producers.

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    Follow Marc Levy: http://twitter.com/timelywriter

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  • California Gov. Gavin Newsom is traveling to China to talk climate change

    California Gov. Gavin Newsom is traveling to China to talk climate change

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    SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California Gov. Gavin Newsom will try to reinforce his state’s role as a global leader on climate change as he begins a weeklong visit to China on Monday, a trip that presents both political risk and opportunity for crucial international collaboration.

    Newsom’s tour begins with a discussion in Hong Kong before he continues on to Beijing, Shanghai and the provinces of Guangdong and Jiangsu. He’ll visit the first Chinese city to deploy an all-electric bus fleet, tour an offshore wind facility and see a wetlands preserve. He’ll sign agreements with leaders of Chinese provinces to set mutual commitments on a host of climate goals. California has already signed dozens of such agreements with subnational governments.

    Newsom’s agenda also includes conversations on “strengthening cultural ties and combating xenophobia,” and he will visit a school with his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom.

    His trip to China follows a brief visit to Israel.

    Governors of California, which has an economy larger than most countries, have a long history of climate collaboration with China. Democrat Jerry Brown and Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger also traveled there to swap knowledge on reducing air pollution and emissions, and since leaving office, Brown has launched the California-China Climate Institute at the University of California, Berkeley.

    However, Newsom’s trip comes at a very different political moment, with rising tensions between the United States and China over trade, human rights, the future of Taiwan and international conflicts. It follows a recent visit to Beijing by a congressional delegation led by U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who sought a sharper condemnation of Hamas by the Chinese government.

    Climate remains one area where collaboration is seen as both possible and necessary. Both countries appear to have fully re-engaged in the run-up to the next U.N. climate change conference, which opens Nov. 30 in Dubai.

    China suspended climate and other talks with the U.S. in August 2022 to show its anger over a visit by then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan. Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to resume climate talks three months later at a meeting with President Joe Biden in Indonesia.

    John Kerry, the U.S. climate envoy, held in-person meetings in Beijing in July, and he and Chinese counterpart Xie Zhenhua have held regular video calls since then, Xie told a forum in Beijing last month.

    David Victor, a professor and co-director of the Deep Decarbonization Initiative at the University of California, San Diego, said state-level dialogue is an important avenue for progress given the complicated politics of the U.S.-China relationship. Animosity between the two countries has led to less travel and fewer joint research projects.

    “The states really are where anything substantive is going to happen,” Victor said, while at the national level, “there’s no political constituency for opening the door and having a deeper relationship.”

    The Newsom administration has been in close contact with the White House and Kerry ahead of the governor’s trip, said Lauren Sanchez, the governor’s senior climate adviser. The White House did not comment on Newsom’s trip.

    Brown, the former governor, said political tensions don’t change the fact that greenhouse gases are still being emitted at an alarming rate.

    “Cooperation is the absolute requirement. And at this time, I would say California has been pushing the federal government in the direction of more dialogue with China,” Brown said. “It has a very important long-term effect.”

    California has passed some of the world’s most aggressive vehicle emissions rules, and Newsom has moved to ban the sale of most new gas-powered cars in the state by 2035. The state has a mandate to be carbon neutral by 2045, meaning it will remove as much carbon from the atmosphere as it emits. California is already dealing with drought and wildfires made worse by climate change.

    Still, the state is responsible for less than 1% of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions, meaning its efforts can go only so far without global partnerships, Sanchez said. In 2020, China was responsible for more than 30% of global carbon dioxide emissions, compared with the U.S. at 13.5%.

    “It’s going to be very difficult to tackle the climate crisis just here in California,” Sanchez said. “Climate change is a global issue, it requires global partnerships.”

    California has shared its expertise on air pollution regulations, carbon pricing programs and conservation, Sanchez said.

    China, meanwhile, is now more advanced at electrifying the transportation fleet and deploying offshore wind — it has more gigawatts of offshore wind power than the rest of the world combined, Sanchez said. The Biden administration recently held an auction for five offshore wind lease areas along the U.S. West Coast.

    Newsom’s second term ends in January 2026, and he cannot seek re-election. He has repeatedly denied an interest in running for president, but he has sought to boost his national profile by campaigning for Democrats in Republican-led states and even agreeing to debate GOP presidential hopeful and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in late November.

    The international trip stands to bolster Newsom’s political and policy credentials beyond his state. However, opponents will likely be on the lookout for any signs of coziness between him and China’s communist government that could be used against him in the future.

    California Republicans said Newsom shouldn’t be visiting China at a time of tensions over international conflicts and the suppression of free speech. Instead he should focus on problems at home like poverty and crime, Republican state Assembly Leader James Gallagher said in a statement.

    “Newsom shouldn’t be playing make-believe diplomat while ignoring the challenges facing our state,” he said.

    But climate experts said California has a significant role to play in advancing global climate policy.

    “It’s a major clean energy leader. It’s one of the leading economies in the world. It has a huge amount of technical expertise,” said Nathaniel Keohane, president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. “There’s a natural role for California and the California governor.”

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    Megerian reported from Washington. Associated Press journalist Ken Moritsugu in Beijing contributed.

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  • Sumatran rhino birth offers glimmer of hope for species almost hunted to extinction | CNN

    Sumatran rhino birth offers glimmer of hope for species almost hunted to extinction | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    A critically endangered Sumatran rhinoceros calf has been born in a national park in Indonesia, the third successful pairing between a local female rhino named Ratu and Andalas, a former resident of Ohio’s Cincinnati Zoo.

    The unnamed female was born on Saturday at the Way Kambas National Park on southern Sumatra island, Indonesia’s Ministry of Environment and Forestry said on X, formerly Twitter.

    Environment and forestry minister Siti Nurbaya Bakar said it was “happy news not just for Indonesia but the rest of the world.”

    Sumatran rhinos were once found in great numbers across Southeast Asia but fewer than 80 remain in fragmented areas across Indonesia, according to the International Rhino Foundation (IRF).

    The calf’s birth represents hope for a species threatened with extinction due to illegal poaching and habitat loss.

    Photos shared by the forestry ministry showed the newborn calf, weighing about 27 kilograms (60 pounds), covered in black hair and looking bright-eyed next to her mother.

    In one picture, Ratu was seen giving her baby a gentle nudge.

    Within 45 minutes of her natural birth, the calf was able to stand and began feeding from her mother within four hours, the ministry said.

    Sumatran rhinos are the world’s smallest rhinos, standing at roughly 4 to 5 feet tall (about 1.5 meters), with an average body length of around 8.2 feet (2.5 meters).

    They are more closely related to extinct woolly rhinos than other rhino species and are covered in long hair.

    Sumatran rhinos typically live in dense tropical forest, both lowland and highland, on Sumatra and are generally solitary in nature, according to IRF. Females give birth to one calf every three to four years and gestation periods can last between 15 to 16 months.

    Habitat loss has driven them to occupy smaller areas of the Indonesian jungle and conservationists are concerned about the survival of the species.

    “As this reclusive species seems to disappear further into dense jungles, direct sightings have become rare and indirect signs like footprints are getting harder to find,” the IRF said.

    “The beacon of hope for the species is the breeding program at the Sumatran Rhino Sanctuary… that has produced three calves and continues its breeding efforts to create an insurance population of rhinos.”

    The species was declared locally extinct in neighboring Malaysia in 2019.

    A 25-year-old female named Iman died of cancer on November 24, 2019 at the Borneo Rhino Sanctuary. Her death came months after Tam – the last surviving male rhino – succumbed to organ failure, officials said.

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  • In New York City, scuba divers’ passion for the sport becomes a mission to collect undersea litter

    In New York City, scuba divers’ passion for the sport becomes a mission to collect undersea litter

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    NEW YORK — On a recent Sunday afternoon, the divers arrived on a thin strip of sand at the furthest, watery edge of New York City. Oxygen tanks strapped to their backs, they waded into the sea and descended into an environment far different from their usual terrestrial surroundings of concrete, traffic and trash-strewn sidewalks.

    Horseshoe crabs and other crustaceans crawl on a seabed encrusted with barnacles and colonies of coral. Spiny-finned sea robin, blackfish and wayward angelfish swim in the murky ocean tinted green by sheets of algae.

    Not all is pretty. Plastic bottles, candy wrappers and miles and miles of fishing line drift with the tides, endangering sea life.

    The undersea litter isn’t always visible from the shore. But it has long been a concern of Nicole Zelek, a diving instructor who four years ago launched monthly cleanups at this small cove in the community of Far Rockaway, where New York City meets the Atlantic Ocean, about 4 miles (6.4 kilometers) south of John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens.

    A throwaway culture of single-use plastics and other hard-to-degrade material has sullied the world’s waters over the decades, posing a danger to marine life such as seals and seabirds. By 2025, some 250 million tons (226.7 million metric tons) of plastic will have found its way into the oceans, according to the PADI AWARE Foundation, a conservation group sponsoring a global project called Dive Against Debris.

    Dive by dive, small groups like Zelek’s have been trying to undo some of the damage.

    “Every month we have a prize for the weirdest find,” she said. They have included the occasional goat skull, perhaps used as part of some ritual, Zelek surmises.

    “The best find of all time was an actual ATM machine. Unfortunately, it was empty,” she said.

    The divers’ haul one late-summer Sunday wasn’t much, but there were clumps and clumps of fishing line untangled from underwater objects. What the divers can’t pull away by hand is cut with scissors.

    “Unfortunately, tons of crabs and horseshoe crabs — which are under threat — get tangled in the fishing line and then they die,” Zelek said.

    While more ambitious projects are underway to scoop up huge accumulations of floating debris in deeper waters, small-scale coastal cleanups like Zelek’s are an important part of the battle against ocean pollution, said Nick Mallos, vice president of conservation for Ocean Conservancy.

    “The science is very clear and that’s to tackle our global plastic pollution crisis,” he said. “We have to do it all.”

    Every September, the conservancy holds monthlong international coastal cleanups. Since its inception nearly four decades ago, the cleanups have retrieved about 400 million pounds (181.4 million kilograms) of trash from coastal areas around the world.

    The best way to combat plastics going into the oceans, Mallos said, is to reduce the globe’s dependence on them, particularly in packaging consumer products. But human-powered cleanup is the least costly of all cleanup options.

    The Dive Against Debris project invites what organizers call “citizen scientists” to survey their diving sites to help catalog the myriad items that don’t belong in oceans, lakes and other bodies of water. By the group’s count, more than 90,000 participants have conducted more than 21,000 such surveys and removed 2.2 million pieces of junk, big and small.

    Zelek and her fellow divers have contributed their finds to the project.

    Surface trash might be easy enough to clear with a rake, but the task is more challenging beneath the water. Over the years, the layers of monofilament fishing line have accumulated. And until a few years ago, no one was scooping out the line, hooks and lead weights.

    Untangled, a pound of medium-weight fishing filament would stretch to a bit more than 4 miles (6.4 kilometers). It’s anybody’s guess how many miles of fishing line remain on the channel’s bottom.

    “Those small things are really what start to accumulate and become a much larger and bigger problem,” said Tanasia Swift, who has been with the group for a year and works for an environmental nonprofit focused on restoring the health of New York City’s waters.

    “If there’s anything that we see that doesn’t belong in the water, we take it out,” she said.

    While the drivers work, fishermen cast their lines from a ledge where the city’s concrete stops. The beach is frequented mostly by residents who live nearby.

    Raquel Gonzalez is one such resident, and she’s been coming to the beach for years. She and a neighbor brought a rake with them on the same Sunday the divers were there.

    “Needs a lot of cleanup here. There’s nobody that does any cleanup around here. We have to clean it up ourselves,” she said.

    “I love this spot, I love the scuba divers,” Gonzalez said. “Look at all the good people here.”

    ___

    Associated Press journalist Cedar Attanasio contributed and is a volunteer with the scuba team featured in this report.

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  • Endangered red wolf can’t make it in the wild without ‘significant’ help, study says

    Endangered red wolf can’t make it in the wild without ‘significant’ help, study says

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    WAKE FOREST, N.C. — The endangered red wolf can survive in the wild, but only with “significant additional management intervention,” according to a long-awaited population viability analysis released Friday.

    The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service also released an updated recovery plan Friday for “Canis rufus” — the only wolf species unique to the United States. It calls for spending nearly $328 million over the next 50 years to get the red wolf off the endangered species list.

    “This final revised recovery plan will help the conservation and survival of the Red Wolf, ensuring these endangered canids endure in the wild for future generations,” Interior Department Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks Shannon Estenoz said in a news release.

    But the announcement comes with a lot of caveats. The viability analysis says it will take drastic reductions in gunshot and vehicle deaths, stepped-up efforts to prevent wolf-coyote mixing, and creative methods to increase reproduction in the wild and captive wolf populations.

    As of August, Fish and Wildlife said the known and collared wild population was 13, with a total estimated wild population of 23 to 22 — all on and around two federal reserves on the North Carolina coast.

    “Despite active current management of this very small population, declines in abundance will likely continue in the face of persistent threats including high anthropogenic (human-caused) mortality and continued hybridization with coyotes,” the study said.

    If releases from the captive breeding program were to cease, extinction of the North Carolina population will likely take place in two to three decades.

    The red wolf once roamed from central Texas to southern Iowa and as far east as Long Island, New York. But generations of persecution, encroachment and habitat loss reduced them to just a remnant along the Texas-Louisiana border.

    Starting in 1973, the year Congress passed the Endangered Species Act, the last wolves were pulled from the wild and placed in a captive-breeding program. In 1980, they were declared extinct in the wild.

    But in 1987, the agency placed four breeding pairs in the 158,000-acre Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge. Another “non-essential experimental population” was later planted in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, but was declared a failure in 1998.

    The Alligator River population thrived, growing to as many as an estimated 130 wolves by 2012. But gunshot deaths and a 2014 decision to cease releases from the captive population, among other factors, caused the numbers to plummet to as low as seven wild wolves in recent years.

    According to the recovery plan, the first update in around three decades, additional wild populations “are necessary for redundancy and, therefore, Red Wolf viability.” But that will need to include federal, state, municipal and private land.

    “We have not yet identified locations for establishing new Red Wolf populations,” the report said.

    In early August, Fish and Wildlife settled a federal lawsuit by a coalition of conservation groups, promising regular releases of the wolves from the captive population — which currently stands at around 270 — over the next eight years.

    But the viability study cautioned that such releases be done very carefully, so as not to reduce the genetic diversity within the captive-bred population. If the program could be expanded to 300 to 400 animals and the reproductive success can be increased by 15%, the authors said, “gene diversity loss in this valuable source population can be reduced.”

    Two of the biggest hurdles to wolf recovery are gunshot deaths and interbreeding with coyotes.

    The viability study authors suggest a target of reducing gunshot and vehicle deaths by half, if possible, and an annual sterilization rate of 10% of the “intact coyote population each year for up to 25 years.” Fish and Wildlife has fitted the wild wolves with orange reflective collars to help distinguish them from coyotes, and has been working with locals to capture and sterilize coyotes.

    They also recommend splitting up unsuccessful breeding pairs and breeding the wolves younger.

    “The analytical results presented here suggest that recovery of red wolves in the wild can be achieved – and can perhaps be realized in 40 to 50 years if conditions are right,” the population study said. “However, success will likely require substantial management efforts beyond many of those currently implemented …”

    Ramona McGee, a lawyer with the Southern Environmental Law Center, said the recovery plan “remains very high level and lacks detail about specific short-term actions. “ But, she added, “we are encouraged the Service took to heart our concerns about better identifying recovery criteria.“

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  • Massachusetts to ban purchase of single-use plastic bottles by state agencies

    Massachusetts to ban purchase of single-use plastic bottles by state agencies

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    Gov. Maura Healey signed an executive order Thursday that she says will make Massachusetts the first state to ban the purchase of single-use plastic bottles by state agencies

    ByThe Associated Press

    September 21, 2023, 3:11 PM

    FILE – Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey delivers her inaugural address in the House Chamber at the Statehouse moments after being sworn into office during inauguration ceremonies on Jan. 5, 2023, in Boston. Healey signed an executive order Thursday, Sept. 21, 2023, that she says will make Massachusetts the first state to ban the purchase of single-use plastic bottles by state agencies. (AP Photo/Steven Senne, File)

    The Associated Press

    BOSTON — Gov. Maura Healey signed an executive order Thursday that she says will make Massachusetts the first state to ban the purchase of single-use plastic bottles by state agencies.

    Massachusetts buys about 100,000 of the plastic water bottles each year.

    The order bars all executive offices and agencies in Massachusetts from purchasing any single-use plastic bottles under 21 fluid ounces except in cases of emergency. Healey, a Democrat, said the executive order takes effect immediately.

    Healey also signed a second executive order that she said will set state biodiversity conservation goals for 2030, 2040, and 2050 — and develop strategies to meet those targets. She said protections will be among the first to extend to coastal and marine habitats.

    “Massachusetts has a long history of being first in the nation, and we’re proud to be the first to set long-term targets for biodiversity and to ban state agencies from purchasing single-use plastic bottles,” Healey said Thursday.

    She said the state will be looking at strategies such as “marine protected areas” to help make sure that coastal and ocean habitats critical to biodiversity can recover and thrive while also ensuring the state helps maintains a climate-resilient landscape for the future.

    Christy Leavitt, campaign director at the conservation group Oceana, said other states and the federal government should follow the state’s lead.

    “Single-use plastics are polluting our oceans, devastating ecosystems, and harming our climate. The only solution is to stop the problem at its source by reducing the amount of plastic companies produce and use,” Leavitt said in a written statement.

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  • Sponsor an ocean? Tiny island nation of Niue has a novel plan to protect its slice of the Pacific

    Sponsor an ocean? Tiny island nation of Niue has a novel plan to protect its slice of the Pacific

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    WELLINGTON, New Zealand — The tiny Pacific island nation of Niue has come up with a novel plan to protect its vast and pristine territorial waters — it will get sponsors to pay.

    Under the plan, which was being launched by Niue’s Prime Minister Dalton Tagelagi on Tuesday in New York, individuals or companies can pay $148 to protect 1 square kilometer (about 250 acres) of ocean from threats such as illegal fishing and plastic waste for a period of 20 years.

    Niue hopes to raise more than $18 million from the scheme by selling 127,000 square-kilometer units, representing the 40% of its waters that form a no-take marine protected area.

    In an interview with The Associated Press before the launch, Tagelagi said his people have always had a close connection with the sea.

    “Niue is just one island in the middle of the big blue ocean,” Tagelagi said. “We are surrounded by the ocean, and we live off the ocean. That’s our livelihood.”

    He said Niueans inherited and learned about the ocean from their forefathers and they want to be able to pass it on to the next generation in sustainable health.

    Most fishing in Niue is to sustain local people, although there are some small-scale commercial operations and occasional offshore industrial-scale fishing, according to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization.

    “Because of all the illegal fishing and all the other activities at the moment, we thought that we should be taking the lead, to teach others that we’ve got to protect the ocean,” Tagelagi said.

    Unregulated fishing can deplete fish stocks, which then cannot replenish, while plastics can be ingested by or entangle marine wildlife. Human-caused climate change has also led to warmer and more acidic oceans, altering ecosystems for underwater species.

    Niue is also especially vulnerable to rising sea levels threatening its land and freshwater, and the island is at risk of more intense tropical storms charged by warmer air and waters.

    With a population of just 1,700 people, Niue acknowledges it needs outside help. It’s one of the smallest countries in the world, dwarfed by an ocean territory 1,200 times larger than its land mass.

    Under the plan, the sponsorship money — called Ocean Conservation Commitments — will be administered by a charitable trust.

    Niue will buy 1,700 sponsorship units, representing one for each of its citizens. Other launch donors include philanthropist Lyna Lam and her husband Chris Larsen, who co-founded blockchain company Ripple, and U.S.-based nonprofit Conservation International, which helped set up some technical aspects of the scheme.

    Maël Imirizaldu, marine biologist and regional leader with Conservation International, said one problem with the conventional approach to ocean conservation funding was the need for places like Niue to constantly seek new funding on a project by project basis.

    “The main idea was to try and switch that, to change the priority and actually help them have funding so they can plan for the next 10 years, 15 years, 20 years,” Imirizaldu said.

    Simon Thrush, a professor of marine science at New Zealand’s University of Auckland who was not involved in the plan, said it sounded positive.

    “It’s a good idea,” Thrush said, adding that as long as the plan was thoroughly vetted and guaranteed over the long term, “I’d be up for it.”

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  • Farms with natural landscape features provide sanctuary for some Costa Rica rainforest birds

    Farms with natural landscape features provide sanctuary for some Costa Rica rainforest birds

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    Small farms with natural landscape features such as shade trees, hedgerows and tracts of intact forest provide a refuge for some tropical bird populations, according to an 18-year study in Costa Rica.

    For almost two decades, ornithologist James Zook has been collecting detailed records on nearly 430 tropical bird species found on small farms, plantations and undisturbed forests in the country.

    While birds thrive the most in undisturbed rainforests, Zook said some species usually found in forests can establish populations in “diversified farms” that partially mimic a natural forest environment.

    “How you farm matters,” said Nicholas Hendershot, a Stanford University ecologist and co-author of the study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

    “In these diversified farms, you see growth over the long term in bird species with specialized needs,” such as safe and shady nooks to build nests and a variety of food sources, Hendershot said.

    That trend was “in stark contrast to what we saw in intensive agriculture,” or monocrop pineapple and banana plantations, he said.

    The findings may seem intuitive, but Natalia Ocampo-Penuela, a University of California, Santa Cruz conservation ecologist not involved in the study, said it’s extremely rare to have detailed long-term data from tropical regions to show that varied farming landscapes can sustain some forest bird populations.

    “With 18 years of data, you can show the species is persisting in that area, not simply passing by,” she said.

    Three-quarters of the 305 species found in diversified farms showed stable or growing populations over the time of study. These include the collared aracari, a small toucan-like bird, with a yellow chest and enormous beak, as well as several members of the manakin family — small brightly colored forest birds known for elaborate courtship dances.

    “It’s a huge contribution to have documented that some birds aren’t just going there, but staying there and populations are growing,” said Ruth Bennett, an ecologist at the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, who was not involved in the research.

    Still, such habitat sanctuaries don’t offset overall population losses from the conversion of primary forests to plantations, the authors stressed. “A pineapple plantation is like a ‘bird desert’ here,” said Zook.

    Increasingly, scientists say conserving species will require paying attention to landscapes with a human footprint — not just untouched areas.

    “Modern conservation has to happen not only inside the fences of protected areas, but within agricultural areas and even urban areas, where there’s potential habitat for at least some species,” said the University of California’s Ocampo-Penuela.

    ___

    The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • Logging is growing in a Nigerian forest home to endangered elephants. Rangers blame lax enforcement

    Logging is growing in a Nigerian forest home to endangered elephants. Rangers blame lax enforcement

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    OMO FOREST RESERVE, Nigeria — Roaring chainsaws sent trees crashing to the ground, and bare-chested men hacked away at the branches beside a muddy road. Others heaved logs onto a truck, where they were tied in place with wire.

    The work was similar on the other side of the road, with a timber-laden truck coughing dark plumes of smoke as it pulled away. This was miles into the conservation zone of Omo Forest Reserve in southern Nigeria, a protected area where logging is prohibited because it’s home to threatened species like African elephants, pangolins and white-throated monkeys. But forest rangers, seeing the impunity, were hesitant to act.

    “We see people we arrested and turned over to the government back in the forest, and they get emboldened,” ranger Sunday Abiodun told The Associated Press during a recent trip to the reserve.

    Conservationists say the outer region of Omo Forest Reserve, where logging is allowed, is already heavily deforested. As trees become scarce, loggers are heading deep into the 550-square-kilometer conservation area, which is also under threat from uncontrolled cocoa farming and poaching.

    Conservationists and rangers blame the government for not enforcing environmental regulations or adequately replanting trees, impeding Nigeria’s pledge under the Paris climate agreement to maintain places like forests that absorb carbon from the atmosphere.

    The government of Nigeria’s southwestern Ogun state, which owns the reserve, denied failing to enforce regulations. In a statement, it said it’s replanting more trees than are being cut down.

    The forest’s gatekeepers and those processing the wood both dispute that assertion, insisting trees are disappearing.

    Sawmillers get annual permits from the government to cut down trees until their designated area is completely deforested. Then they can apply for a new section. They say the permit fee of 2 million naira ($2,645) is intended to cover the government’s costs to replace trees but that this rarely occurs.

    “The government is not replanting,” said Owolabi Oguntimehin, a sawmiller in Ijebu, a nearby town that has over 50 sawmilling companies relying on the reserve. “It is not our responsibility to replant because the government collects the fee from us.”

    Besides problems with replanting, authorities don’t enforce tree removal standards, even when loggers get permits, according to forest guards, who are employed by the state government.

    Joseph Olaonipekun, a guard, said officials from Ogun state’s forestry department used to mark trees that could be cut and ensure “strict” enforcement to prevent others from being removed. But that’s no longer done, he said.

    “By implementing selective logging, the adverse effects on the biodiversity of an area can be minimized while also providing the opportunity for young trees to continue growing,” Nigerian ecologist Babajide Agboola said. “This method allows for a more sustainable approach to logging and forest management.”

    Trees such as Cordia wood, mahogany and gmelina are disappearing from the forest’s periphery, according to both sawmillers and reserve gatekeepers.

    “There has to be massive reforestation so that the conservation zone will not be dismantled,” Agboola said.

    But forest rangers hired by the nonprofit Nigerian Conservation Foundation, which is the government’s partner in managing the conservation zone, have found it a challenge to protect against illegal logging in off-limits areas.

    They say loggers harvesting trees in the conservation zone brag about bypassing regulations by paying off government officials.

    “We want the government to support us in preserving the forest,” ranger Johnson Adejayin said. He echoed his colleagues in calling for strict enforcement and sanctions, “so that the loggers do not come back to continue their illegal acts and boast that with money they can avoid punishment.”

    The Nigerian economy, Africa’s largest, heavily relies on agriculture, forestry and other land uses. These industries, which are responsible for 25% of Nigeria’s greenhouse gas emissions, provide jobs for the majority of people in agrarian communities around the reserve.

    As a result, there is debate about the political will to enforce environmental sustainability when livelihoods are at stake.

    That factor should be considered, said Wale Adedayo, chairman of the Ijebu East local government area where a significant part of the forest is located. He advocated for a reduction of the conservation zone to give more land to locals to farm and log.

    But he also acknowledged that “there is a lot of deforestation” that should be reversed to ensure Nigeria’s contribution to fighting climate change.

    For its part, the state government said “it is incorrect” to blame the pressure to make a living “when loggers illegally find their way into the conservation area to steal parts of the conserved trees.”

    Adedayo said logging in protected areas “is not possible without the connivance of the civil servants.”

    The government’s forest guards have seen it first hand.

    “There is too much corruption in this forest caused by greed and poverty,” Olaonipekun said. “When we say, ‘Don’t go there,’ some go through higher authorities to defy us, and we are helpless.”

    The government, meanwhile, has delayed formally declaring the conservation area a wildlife sanctuary to protect it from threats like logging, farming and poaching, said Emmanuel Olabode, who manages the Nigerian Conservation Foundation’s wildlife conservation project in the forest.

    The foundation’s rangers are focused on nearly 6.5 square kilometers of strictly protected land where elephants are believed to live and has been designated a Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO.

    “It is left to the government to enforce the regulations,” said Olabode, who supervises the foundation’s rangers.

    Loggers even have resorted to violence to ensure their timber supply. Olabode recounted when assailants with assault rifles attacked a rangers’ patrol base in 2021, and loggers just kept cutting trees.

    “Our rangers escaped with injuries, and we notified the authorities, but nothing was done, and we have not gone back there due to security concerns,” Olabode said, adding that the area is now unprotected.

    The government says it plans to employ the military and police to combat illegal operators. It urges loggers who follow the rules to “fight their members who are into illegalities.”

    ___

    This is the second in a series of stories from the Omo Forest Reserve. Read the first installment here.

    ___

    Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • Environmental groups recruit people of color into overwhelmingly white conservation world

    Environmental groups recruit people of color into overwhelmingly white conservation world

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    BARABOO, Wis. — Arianna Barajas never thought of herself as the outdoors type. The daughter of Mexican immigrants who grew up in Chicago’s suburbs, her forays into nature usually amounted to a bike ride to a community park.

    She was interested in wild animals but had no idea she could make a living working with them until her older brother enrolled in veterinarian school. She took a leap of faith and enrolled at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and became a wildlife ecology major.

    This summer Barajas landed an internship designed for people of color at the International Crane Foundation’s headquarters in Baraboo, Wisconsin, and stepped into a new world.

    “I always knew growing up I had an interest in wildlife and animals but didn’t know the options I had,” Barajas, 21, said. “I really just have a passion for the outdoors. I can’t just be in an office all day. I need to be outside and doing things I think are valuable.”

    Environmental groups across the country have worked for the last two decades to introduce members of underrepresented populations like Barajas to the overwhelmingly white conservation world. The effort has gained momentum since George Floyd’s death forced a national reckoning on race relations and challenged a variety of industries to focus on diversity and inclusion efforts.

    As climate change reshapes the planet, leaders need to hear every perspective when determining conservation policies, minority advocates say. Multiple studies since the early 1980s have found communities of color feel the impact of pollution and climate change more acutely than wealthy areas.

    “All the environmental issues we’re facing are really big and we simply can’t face them all unless we have a lot of ideas at the table,” said Soumi Gaddameedi, a 22-year-old Indian American who works as a donor coordinator for the nonprofit group Natural Resources Foundation of Wisconsin. “No one solution fits all. People of color are in the communities facing the worst impact. It’s important that they have a voice.”

    White men have largely controlled American conservation policy for more than a century. The modern conservation movement in the United States began around the turn of the 20th century, led by figures such as Sierra Club co-founder John Muir, who openly derided American Indians as savages, and President Theodore Roosevelt, who doubled the number of sites in the National Park System. Conservationists such as Aldo Leopold and Wisconsin Gov. Gaylord Nelson, who founded Earth Day, followed them.

    More than 80% of National Park Service employees are white, according to service data. A 2022 survey of the 40 largest non-government environmental organizations and foundations by Green 2.0, an organization advocating for minority inclusion in the environmental sector, found 60% of staff and almost 70% of organization heads identified as white.

    Sociologists offer a number of explanations for the lack of diversity in conservation ranks. For instance, people of color tend to live in urban settings with less exposure to the outdoors and may consider outdoor recreation a white man’s domain, said Kristy Drutman, the Filipino and Jewish founder of the Green Jobs Board, an online listing of environmental jobs with companies promoting diversity. She also runs the Brown Girl Green podcast.

    “I don’t think BIPOC are choosing not to be in the outdoors, they’re just not given the same opportunity,” Drutman said, using an acronym for Black people, Indigenous people and people of color.

    “Urbanization, racial segregation, all these histories have separated BIPOC from neighbors with more green spaces,” Drutman said. “It’s become a white people’s thing because of that.”

    Relatively few people of color study biology and natural resources in college. Hispanic people made up only about 13.6% of graduate students and 12.8% of doctoral students in those fields in 2021, according to a National Science Foundation study. Black people made up about 9.5% of graduate students and only 6% of doctoral students. Native Americans made up less than 1% of graduate and doctoral students in both fields.

    “There’s a long-standing tradition of white men from rural areas dominating these roles,” said Caitlin Alba, who works to recruit minority students to the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point’s environmental programs. “(Minority) mentors and educators are unfamiliar with these opportunities.”

    National environmental organization Conservation Legacy has been recruiting young people from underrepresented populations for teams across the country, including Arizona, New Mexico, North Carolina and the Appalachian region.

    The teams handle a wide array of conservation projects, such as river restoration, vegetation monitoring, disaster relief and conservation projects on Native American lands. The teams include a group for sign-language users and an all-female crew dubbed “the Trail Angels.”

    Northwest Youth Corps, based in Eugene, Oregon, has recruited LGBTQ students between 16 and 18 and LGBTQ adults to its so-called Rainbow Crews since 2017. The crews work on reforestation projects and are designed to provide hands-on training and experience for those interested in environmental jobs or other other outdoor careers. The program won the Corps Network’s 2020 Project of the Year award.

    This year the organization created two all-women crews that operate out of Idaho. The organization also recruits young American Indians for crews working on ancestral lands in hopes of encouraging them to find environmental jobs with their tribes.

    The Natural Resources Foundation of Wisconsin launched a paid internship program for BIPOC students in 2021. The program places interns with other conservation groups like the International Crane Foundation where Barajas is one of 10 interns. The internship program had three participants in 2021 and seven last summer.

    After spending the summer tagging and tracking whooping cranes across south-central Wisconsin, Barajas has become even more aware of how minority perspectives are rarely considered in the conservation world.

    “Sometimes I’ll hear about children’s programming on different natural things. I’m thinking, what opportunities do you have for people who don’t speak English?” she said. “Are you reaching out to diverse communities?”

    Barajas used the example of a city imposing fines to ensure people recycle. “Well, there’s a financial obstacle now where certain communities can’t pay that fine,” she said.

    Other people of color are working to expand inclusion on their own.

    Tykee James, who is Black, grew up in Philadelphia but became an avid birdwatcher after two white employees at a local environmental education center visited his high school environmental studies class and recruited him to serve as a guide at the facility. Like Barajas, the job opened his eyes to a new path.

    James has since served as an environmental policy specialist for Pennsylvania state Rep. Donna Bullock and governmental affairs coordinator for the National Audubon Society. He currently works as government relations representative for The Wilderness Society, which seeks to protect wilderness acreage.

    In 2019, James co-founded Amplify the Future, which provides college scholarships for Black and Latinx bird watchers from the continental U.S. and Puerto Rico.

    “When we’re making decisions about the use of finite resources … it requires a diversity of vision to answer these types of important questions,” James said. “The same folks from the same background, money, same racial make-up, same wealth background, I wouldn’t be too surprised that they all think the same about how things work.”

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  • California’s big bloom aids seed collectors as climate change and wildfires threaten desert species

    California’s big bloom aids seed collectors as climate change and wildfires threaten desert species

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    JOSHUA TREE, Calif. — Flowers that haven’t been seen in years bloomed across Southern California this spring after massive winter downpours, creating not only colorful landscapes but a boon for conservationists eager to gather desert seeds as an insurance policy against a hotter and drier future.

    In the Mojave Desert, seeds from parish goldeneye and brittlebush are scooped up by staff and volunteers working to build out seed banks in the hope these can be used in restoration projects as climate change pressures desert landscapes. Already this summer, the York Fire burned across the Mojave National Preserve, charring thousands of acres in the fragile ecosystem including famed Joshua trees.

    “This definitely highlights the importance of proactive seed banking as a fire management tool and how challenging it can be to keep up with the fire threats,” said Cody Hanford, joint executive director of the Mojave Desert Land Trust.

    Wildfires across the West can be deadly and wreak havoc on local communities, with residents forced to evacuate and homes turned to ash. But they also can destroy large tracts of land and wildlife habitat in places such as the Mojave Desert, where they are becoming more commonplace due in part to the spread of invasive grasses prone to burning quickly, fueling flames, experts said.

    Seeds long have been banked throughout the United States in a wide range of habitats. Initially, they were collected as a way to preserve rare and exotic plant species, but efforts now also focus on gathering from commonly-found plants that are increasingly in demand as climate change elevates the risk of wildfires and the growth of invasive species that can crowd out native vegetation.

    Hanford said it’s too soon to know what restoration might be needed in the Mojave National Preserve, where firefighters have largely contained the blaze. But fires like these encourage the land trust, which buys desert land for conservation, to expand its seed collection efforts, sending staff and volunteers out to gather seeds, clean and jar them for storage.

    The process is manual and time-consuming. In Joshua Tree, California, volunteers head out on hiking trails when flowers are blooming to chart where plants are located and return to collect seeds when they are ready to harvest, said Madena Asbell, the land trust’s director of plant conservation programs.

    The seeds are placed in paper bags or buckets, taken back and cleaned by hand or using an air-blowing device that removes chaff so they can be stored by the thousands in neatly labeled jars in refrigerators.

    Asbell said her organization is ramping up collection thanks to grant funding and just as the rainy winter led plants like paper bag bush to bloom for the first time in years.

    “2019 was the last wet year we had,” she said.

    Seed banking efforts are underway across the country through a program aimed at putting seeds into long-term storage and using them for projects aimed at bolstering restoration. Funding for the federal Bureau of Land Management’s program has increased in recent years, though demand for seeds to restore lands burned by wildfire or wildlife habitat far outstrips the supply, experts said.

    In California, there are more than 4,000 seed collections through this program, representing more than 1,300 species of plants. That covers about a fifth of the state’s known plant species, according to the agency.

    “We have so much land to restore and not enough seeds to restore it all,” said Katie Heineman, vice president of science & conservation at the Center for Plant Conservation.

    This year, however, presents a golden opportunity for seed banking in California due to winter storms that drenched the state, covered the mountains in snow and replenished rivers. The Chicago Botanic Garden, for example, has three times as many seed collectors in Western states this year as last, officials said.

    More collections also are being made by Bureau of Land Management crews in the Mojave Desert region, the agency said.

    One of the challenges in collecting seeds in this area is that it’s so vast, and restoration is best achieved with plants from the same general location. Seeds previously collected by the land trust therefore won’t necessarily be a fit for future restoration efforts after the York Fire, Hanford said.

    While the need for restoration isn’t unique to the West, the scale is much greater because of the size of the region’s wildfires, said Kayri Havens, chief scientist at Chicago Botanic Garden.

    “As our climate changes, places we thought in the past we wouldn’t have to restore, we’re finding out we have to restore,” Havens said. “The Mojave Desert now burns. It was not a place that had wildfire problems 30 years ago.”

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  • A Nigerian forest and its animals are under threat. Poachers have become rangers to protect both

    A Nigerian forest and its animals are under threat. Poachers have become rangers to protect both

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    OMO FOREST RESERVE, Nigeria — Sunday Abiodun, carrying a sword in one hand and balancing a musket over his other shoulder, cleared weeds on a footpath leading to a cluster of new trees.

    Until recently, it had been a spot to grow cocoa, one of several plots that Abiodun and his fellow forest rangers destroyed after farmers cut down trees to make way for the crop used to make chocolate — driving away birds in the process.

    “When we see such a farm during patrol, we destroy it and plant trees instead,” Abiodun said.

    It could take more than 10 years for the trees to mature, he said, with the hope they ease biodiversity loss and restore habitat for birds.

    He was not always enthusiastic about conservation. Before becoming a ranger, Abiodun, 40, killed animals for a living, including endangered species like pangolin. He is now part of a team working to protect Nigeria’s Omo Forest Reserve, which is facing expanding deforestation from excessive logging, uncontrolled farming and poaching.

    The tropical rainforest, 135 kilometers (84 miles) northeast of Lagos in Nigeria’s southwest, is home to threatened species including African elephants, pangolins, white-throated monkeys, yellow-casqued hornbills, long-crested eagles and chimpanzees, according to UNESCO.

    To protect animals and their habitat, 550 square kilometers — more than 40% of the forest — is designated as a conservation zone, said Emmanuel Olabode, project manager for the nonprofit Nigerian Conservation Foundation, which hires the rangers and acts as the government’s conservation partner.

    The rangers are focused on nearly 6.5 square kilometers of strictly protected land where elephants are thought to live and is a UNESCO-designated Biosphere Reserve, where communities work toward sustainable development.

    “The rangers’ work is crucial to conservation because this is one of the last viable habitats where we have forest elephants in Nigeria, and if the entire area is degraded, we will not have elephants again,” Olabode said.

    For decades, the conservation foundation has assisted in forest management, but hiring former hunters has proven to be a game changer, particularly in the fight against poaching.

    “The strategy is to win the ring leaders from the anti-conservation side over for conservation purposes, with a better understanding and life that discourages them from their destructive acts against the forest resources and have them bring others to the conservation side,” said Memudu Adebayo, the foundation’s technical director.

    For poacher-turned-ranger Abiodun, it offered a new life. He started helping the foundation protect the forest in 2017 as a volunteer but realized he needed to fully commit to the solution.

    “Back then, I used to see students on excursions, researchers and tourists visit the forest to learn about the trees and animals I was killing as a hunter,” he said. “So, I said to myself, ‘If I continue to kill these animals for money to eat now, my own children will not see them if they also want to learn about them in the future.’”

    He said he now sees “animals that I would have killed to sell in the past, but I cannot because I know better and would rather protect them.”

    Abiodun’s team consists of 10 rangers, which they say is too few for the size of the forest. They established Elephants’ Camp, named for rangers’ top priority, deep within the protected part of the forest, where they take turns staying each week and organize patrols.

    The camp has a small solar power system and a round room where the rangers can rest amid the sounds of birds and insects chirping and wind blowing through the trees. Outside, the rangers plan their work at a large wooden table beneath a perforated zinc roof.

    The roughly hourlong journey from their administrative office to the camp is difficult, with a road that is impassable for vehicles and even motorcycles when it rains. But once there, ecologist Babajide Agboola, who mentors the rangers and helps document new species, declared, “This is peace.”

    Despite the physically taxing work, Adebayo of the Nigerian Conservation Foundation said the rangers have a better life than as poachers, where they could spend 10 days hunting with no guarantee of success.

    “Now, they have a salary and other benefits, in addition to doing something good for the environment and humanity, and they can put food on the table more comfortably,” Adebayo said.

    The rangers have installed motion-detecting cameras on trees in the most protected part of the forest to capture footage of animals and poachers. In a 24-second video recorded in May, one elephant picks up food with its trunk near a tree at night. Other images from 2021 and 2023 also show elephants.

    Poaching has not been eradicated in the forest, but rangers said they have made significant progress. They say the main challenges are now illegal settlements of cocoa farmers and loggers that are growing in the conservation areas, where it is not permitted.

    “We want the government to support our conservation effort to preserve what remains of the forest,” said another poacher-turned-ranger, Johnson Adejayin. “We see people we arrested and handed over to the government return to the forest to continue illegal logging and farming. They’d just move to another part.”

    One official from the government’s forestry department said they were not authorized to comment and another did not reply to calls and messages seeking comment.

    Rangers implore communities in the forest, particularly farmers, to avoid clearing land and plant new trees. However, they called the government’s enforcement of environmental regulations critical to success.

    “We are losing Omo Forest at a very alarming rate,” said Agboola, the ecologist, who has been visiting for eight years. “When the forest is destroyed, biodiversity and ecosystem services are lost. When you cut down trees, you cut down a climate change mitigation solution, which fuels carbon accumulation in the atmosphere.”

    ___

    This is the first in a series of stories from the Omo Forest Reserve.

    ___

    Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • A Nigerian forest and its animals are under threat. Poachers have become rangers to protect both

    A Nigerian forest and its animals are under threat. Poachers have become rangers to protect both

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    OMO FOREST RESERVE, Nigeria — Sunday Abiodun, carrying a sword in one hand and balancing a musket over his other shoulder, cleared weeds on a footpath leading to a cluster of new trees.

    Until recently, it had been a spot to grow cocoa, one of several plots that Abiodun and his fellow forest rangers destroyed after farmers cut down trees to make way for the crop used to make chocolate — driving away birds in the process.

    “When we see such a farm during patrol, we destroy it and plant trees instead,” Abiodun said.

    It could take more than 10 years for the trees to mature, he said, with the hope they ease biodiversity loss and restore habitat for birds.

    He was not always enthusiastic about conservation. Before becoming a ranger, Abiodun, 40, killed animals for a living, including endangered species like pangolin. He is now part of a team working to protect Nigeria’s Omo Forest Reserve, which is facing expanding deforestation from excessive logging, uncontrolled farming and poaching.

    The tropical rainforest, 135 kilometers (84 miles) northeast of Lagos in Nigeria’s southwest, is home to threatened species including African elephants, pangolins, white-throated monkeys, yellow-casqued hornbills, long-crested eagles and chimpanzees, according to UNESCO.

    To protect animals and their habitat, 550 square kilometers — more than 40% of the forest — is designated as a conservation zone, said Emmanuel Olabode, project manager for the nonprofit Nigerian Conservation Foundation, which hires the rangers and acts as the government’s conservation partner.

    The rangers are focused on nearly 6.5 square kilometers of strictly protected land where elephants are thought to live and is a UNESCO-designated Biosphere Reserve, where communities work toward sustainable development.

    “The rangers’ work is crucial to conservation because this is one of the last viable habitats where we have forest elephants in Nigeria, and if the entire area is degraded, we will not have elephants again,” Olabode said.

    For decades, the conservation foundation has assisted in forest management, but hiring former hunters has proven to be a game changer, particularly in the fight against poaching.

    “The strategy is to win the ring leaders from the anti-conservation side over for conservation purposes, with a better understanding and life that discourages them from their destructive acts against the forest resources and have them bring others to the conservation side,” said Memudu Adebayo, the foundation’s technical director.

    For poacher-turned-ranger Abiodun, it offered a new life. He started helping the foundation protect the forest in 2017 as a volunteer but realized he needed to fully commit to the solution.

    “Back then, I used to see students on excursions, researchers and tourists visit the forest to learn about the trees and animals I was killing as a hunter,” he said. “So, I said to myself, ‘If I continue to kill these animals for money to eat now, my own children will not see them if they also want to learn about them in the future.’”

    He said he now sees “animals that I would have killed to sell in the past, but I cannot because I know better and would rather protect them.”

    Abiodun’s team consists of 10 rangers, which they say is too few for the size of the forest. They established Elephants’ Camp, named for rangers’ top priority, deep within the protected part of the forest, where they take turns staying each week and organize patrols.

    The camp has a small solar power system and a round room where the rangers can rest amid the sounds of birds and insects chirping and wind blowing through the trees. Outside, the rangers plan their work at a large wooden table beneath a perforated zinc roof.

    The roughly hourlong journey from their administrative office to the camp is difficult, with a road that is impassable for vehicles and even motorcycles when it rains. But once there, ecologist Babajide Agboola, who mentors the rangers and helps document new species, declared, “This is peace.”

    Despite the physically taxing work, Adebayo of the Nigerian Conservation Foundation said the rangers have a better life than as poachers, where they could spend 10 days hunting with no guarantee of success.

    “Now, they have a salary and other benefits, in addition to doing something good for the environment and humanity, and they can put food on the table more comfortably,” Adebayo said.

    The rangers have installed motion-detecting cameras on trees in the most protected part of the forest to capture footage of animals and poachers. In a 24-second video recorded in May, one elephant picks up food with its trunk near a tree at night. Other images from 2021 and 2023 also show elephants.

    Poaching has not been eradicated in the forest, but rangers said they have made significant progress. They say the main challenges are now illegal settlements of cocoa farmers and loggers that are growing in the conservation areas, where it is not permitted.

    “We want the government to support our conservation effort to preserve what remains of the forest,” said another poacher-turned-ranger, Johnson Adejayin. “We see people we arrested and handed over to the government return to the forest to continue illegal logging and farming. They’d just move to another part.”

    One official from the government’s forestry department said they were not authorized to comment and another did not reply to calls and messages seeking comment.

    Rangers implore communities in the forest, particularly farmers, to avoid clearing land and plant new trees. However, they called the government’s enforcement of environmental regulations critical to success.

    “We are losing Omo Forest at a very alarming rate,” said Agboola, the ecologist, who has been visiting for eight years. “When the forest is destroyed, biodiversity and ecosystem services are lost. When you cut down trees, you cut down a climate change mitigation solution, which fuels carbon accumulation in the atmosphere.”

    ___

    This is the first in a series of stories from the Omo Forest Reserve.

    ___

    Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • Blue blood from horseshoe crabs is valuable for medicine, but a declining bird needs them for food

    Blue blood from horseshoe crabs is valuable for medicine, but a declining bird needs them for food

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    PORTLAND, Maine — A primordial sea animal that lives on the tidal mudflats of the East Coast and serves as a linchpin for the production of vital medicines stands to benefit from new protective standards.

    But conservationists who have been trying for years to save a declining bird species — the red knot — that depends on horseshoe crabs fear the protections still don’t go far enough.

    Drug and medical device makers are dependent on the valuable blue blood of the crabs — helmet-shaped invertebrates that have scuttled in the ocean and tidal pools for more than 400 million years — to test for potentially dangerous impurities. The animals are drained of some of their blood and returned to the environment, but many die from the bleeding.

    Recent revisions to guidelines for handling the animals should keep more alive through the process, regulators said. The animals — not really true crabs but rather more closely related to land-dwelling invertebrates such as spiders and scorpions — are declining in some of their East Coast range.

    “They were here before the dinosaurs,” said Glenn Gauvry, president of Ecological Research & Development Group, a Delaware-based nonprofit that advocates for horseshoe crab conservation. “And they’re having problems because the new kids on the block, us, haven’t learned to appreciate the elders.”

    The harvest of horseshoe crabs, which are also caught for bait in the commercial fishing industry, has emerged as a critical issue for conservationists in recent years because of the creature’s role in coastal ecosystems. The crabs’ eggs are vitally important food for a declining subspecies of a bird called the red knot — a rust-colored, migratory shorebird listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

    The birds, which migrate some 19,000 miles (30,577 kilometers) roundtrip from South America to Canada and must stop to eat along the way, need stronger protection of horseshoe crabs to survive, said Bethany Kraft, senior director for coastal conservation with the Audubon Society. Kraft and other wildlife advocates said the fact the guidelines for handling crabs are voluntary and not mandatory leaves the red knot at risk.

    “Making sure there is enough to fuel these birds on this massive, insanely long flight is just critical,” Kraft said. “There’s very clear linkage between horseshoe crabs and the survival of the red knot in the coming decades.”

    The horseshoe crabs are valuable because their blood can be manufactured into limulus amebocyte lysate, or LAL, that is used to detect pathogens in indispensable medicines such as injectable antibiotics. The crabs are collected by fishermen by hand or via trawlers for use by biomedical companies, then their blood is separated and proteins within their white blood cells are processed. It takes dozens of the crabs to produce enough blood to fill a single glass tube with its blood, which contains immune cells sensitive to bacteria.

    There are only five federally licensed manufacturers on the East Coast that process horseshoe crab blood. The blood is often described by activist groups as worth $15,000 a quart (liter), though some members of the industry say that figure is impossible to verify.

    Regulators estimate about 15% of the crabs die in the bleeding process. In 2021, that meant about 112,000 crabs died, said Caitlin Starks, a senior fishery management plan coordinator with the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission. The bait fishery for horseshoe crabs, which are used as bait for eels and sea snails, killed more than six times that, she said.

    Still, the fisheries commission in May approved new best management practices for the biomedical industry’s harvesting and handling of the crabs. Those include minimizing exposure to sunlight and keeping crabs cool and moist, Starks said.

    “The goal is to give the crabs that are bled a better chance of surviving and contributing to the ecosystem after they are released,” she said.

    That’s exactly what the new guidelines will do, said Nora Blair, quality operations manager with Charles River Laboratories, one of the companies that manufactures LAL from horseshoe crab blood. Blair was a member of a working group that crafted the updated guidelines alongside other industry members, conservationists, fishery managers, fishermen and others.

    Blair said the industry is working toward a synthetic alternative — an outcome conservationists have been pushing for years. However, for now the wild harvest of horseshoe crabs remains critically important to drug safety, Blair said.

    “The critical role of horseshoe crab in the biopharmaceutical supply chain and coastal ecosystem makes their conservation imperative,” he said.

    The Atlantic horseshoe crab, the species harvested on the East Coast, ranges from the Gulf of Maine to Florida. The International Union for Conservation of Nature lists the species as being “vulnerable” based on a 2016 assessment.

    One of the most important ecosystems for horseshoe crabs is the Delaware Bay, an estuary of the Delaware River between Delaware and New Jersey. The bay is where the crabs breed and the red knots feed.

    The density of horseshoe crab eggs in the bay is nowhere near what it was in the 1990s, said Lawrence Niles, an independent wildlife biologist who once headed New Jersey’s state endangered species program. Meanwhile, the population of the rufa red knot, the threatened subspecies, has declined by 75% since the 1980s, according to the National Park Service.

    The birds need meaningful protection of horseshoe crab eggs to be able to recover, Niles said. He tracks the health of red knots and horseshoe crabs and has organized a group called Horseshoe Crab Recovery Coalition to advocate for conservation measures.

    Niles and volunteers he organizes have been counting the horseshoe crab eggs since the 1980s and tagging birds since the 1990s. In mid-June, as he was wrapping up this year’s tracking in southern New Jersey, he described the eggs as “good and consistent” through the month.

    “What we want is the harvest to stop, the killing to stop, and let the stock rebuild to its carrying capacity,” Niles said.

    The horseshoe crabs have been harvested for use as bait and medicine from Florida to Maine over the years, though the largest harvests are in Maryland, Delaware, Massachusetts and Virginia. According to federal fishery statistics, the crabs were worth about $1.1 million in total at the docks in 2021.

    That figure is dwarfed by seafood species such as lobsters and scallops, which are routinely worth hundreds of millions of dollars. However, horseshoe crab fishers are dedicated stewards of a fishery that supplies a vital product, said George Topping, a Maryland fisherman.

    “Everything you do in life comes from horseshoe crab blood. Vaccines, antibiotics,” he said. “The horseshoe crab stocks are healthy.”

    ___

    Associated Press photographer Matt Rourke in Pickering Beach, Delaware, and video journalist Rodrique Ngowi in Middle Township, N.J., contributed to this report.

    ___

    Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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