Since the 1940s, diseases like these have been kept in check thanks to drugs like penicillin and streptomycin that drove death rates among both animals and humans – especially children under five – way down. Bacteria, however, haven’t survived for 3.5 billion years without developing defence mechanisms against environmental insults, and this includes modern pharmaceuticals. Called antimicrobial resistance, or AMR, this survival tactic has created a crisis that experts say is as urgent as climate change.

“Antimicrobial resistance is at levels that we’ve never seen in developed countries,” Barkema says. “There will come a time when a wound cannot be treated anymore if it is infected.”

AMR is getting worse in part because of animal antibiotic consumption. The statistics are grim. An estimated 104,079 tonnes of antibiotics will be used by the agriculture sector by 2030 as the demand for pork, beef and poultry grows, especially in low- and middle-income countries. A 2023 article in The Lancet connected animal antibiotic consumption with resistance in human diseases: in 2017, AMR was implicated in the deaths of 1.27 million people. AMR is expected to cause 10 million deaths by 2050, making it more dangerous than cancer.

The ever-increasing industrialization of agriculture is one of the drivers. The United States has mega hog facilities that each produce hundreds of thousands of animals every year. In Canada, 7,000 hog operations produce about 25.5 million animals every year. And China, which began large-scale swine and dairy production about four decades ago, has built a 26-storey pig high-rise that researchers say will be a conduit for disease due to crowding, which, among many things, causes stress that decreases natural immunity.

Chinese farmers didn’t have the husbandry skills or experience to optimize herd health, says Barkema, a dairy cow specialist and infectious diseases expert who has made numerous trips to China, advising dairy farmers on their operations. “A blanket of antibiotics” was used to “cover mistakes in management,” he says. “The best way to prevent antimicrobial resistance is by prevention of infections, because then you don’t have to treat them – period.” Nevertheless, China remains the world’s largest consumer of agriculture antibiotics, using 30% of overall antimicrobial production for livestock maintenance, according to the journal Current Research in Microbial Sciences.

Western nations, too, have been guilty of antimicrobial overuse since the 1940s, when it was discovered that low-dose antibiotics not only prevented disease but caused animals to gain weight. Administering constant low doses killed off weak bacteria but inadvertently selected for stronger ones, increasing AMR. Legislation in the United Kingdom, the EU and North America has banned the use of antibiotics for such use; however, such restrictions are less diligently maintained in lower- to middle-income countries, Barkema says.

Once bacteria develop resistance, there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. The B.C. Centre for Disease Control encourages the reduction of antibiotics in humans to try to tackle AMR. Animal husbandry practices, however, counteract the measures increasingly being taken by human medicine practitioners, with antibiotic use in animal farming growing by an estimated 8% between 2020 and 2030, according to Nature.

The ability to leap the species barrier makes the spectre of AMR increasingly grim, and more research is needed to assess how easily resistant bacteria pass from animals into humans.

The Government of Canada reports that 14,000 deaths were linked to AMR in 2018, while AMR was directly responsible for 5,400 deaths. In the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports 2.8 million infections and more than 35,000 deaths in humans related to AMR.

There will come a time when a wound cannot be treated anymore if it is infected.

 

– Herman Barkema, infectious diseases expert

 

Tackling AMR requires what has been dubbed a “One Health” approach that involves coordination between animal health, human health and environmental experts. In Alberta, where Barkema is based, more than 100 researchers from different disciplines – human and veterinary medicine as well as the Ministry of Environment and Protected Areas – are working on antimicrobial stewardship. The public is “very much involved,” with regular informational workshops on what individuals can do to fight AMR. “We need to make the public aware of this silent epidemic,” Barkema says.

The One Health approach is growing globally. In June, four multilateral agencies – the World Health Organization, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the UN Environment Programme and the World Organisation for Animal Health – released A One Health Priority Research Agenda for Antimicrobial Resistance to advocate for increased research and investment.

The same month, the Public Health Agency of Canada released the five-year Pan-Canadian Action Plan on Antimicrobial Resistance. It was developed with federal partners, the provinces and territories to strengthen the country’s collective AMR response using the One Health approach.

Critical to combatting AMR is improved diagnostics, says Ian Lewis, a visiting fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Calgary. Last year, Lewis developed a new technology that would allow a laboratory to identify in less than 20 hours the specific bacterium causing a blood infection and the types of antibiotics it will respond to. The short diagnostic timeline is a vast improvement over the two- to four-day period required in the past to identify the strain of bacteria causing sepsis, which causes one in 18 deaths in Canada. During this wait, medical staff had to guess which antibiotics to use – sometimes selecting the incorrect one – then switch to the right drug once the offending bacterium was identified. “When the guesses are wrong, patients are at a dramatically higher risk for death or serious complications,” Lewis says. “The main issue is that the chance of dying goes up by 7% per hour when patients are receiving the wrong medication.”

Being forced to guess treatment also exacerbates resistance. “The widespread use of antibiotics in hospitals and in the community is a central problem that is contributing to AMR,” says Lewis, speaking from the 2023 ASM/ESCMID Joint Conference on Drug Development to Meet the Challenge of Antimicrobial Resistance, held in late September in Boston. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that about half of all prescribed antibiotics have zero medical benefit. This is “directly attributable to a lack of rapid diagnostic tools,” Lewis says, adding that improved diagnostics should be used in veterinarian laboratories as well as human labs.

Lewis says that the implications of AMR are so dire that “it will eclipse climate change as a primary concern. People will start dying from common infections that are imminently treatable now.” AMR doesn’t present simply infection risks; it also means that people will have to eschew elective surgery or certain types of chemotherapy that cannot be undertaken without antibiotics as the risks of getting an incurable infection could outweigh the potential benefits of therapies. “Antibiotics are the foundation of modern medicine; if we don’t do something about the emerging burden of antimicrobial resistance, Canadian life expectancy could be 20 years shorter,” Lewis says.

Roberta Staley is a Vancouver-based magazine writer, documentary filmmaker and author, specializing in gender, conservation and environmental stories. 

The post A microbial scourge as urgent as climate change appeared first on Corporate Knights.

In 2014, a global oil glut sent petroleum prices spiralling down. By 2016, oil prices were 70% what they were two years earlier. Nearly one in three – or more than 100,000 – Alberta oil patch workers, lost their jobs. “It was scary,” says Keats, who was laid off from the Kearl Lake project. “I watched as some of my friends sold off their assets or even declared bankruptcy.”  

But there is hope for oil and gas workers like Keats that they can transition into clean energy jobs. The demand for renewable energy tradespeople is growing. Geni Peters, director of research at ECO Canada, says that 294,000 workers will be needed by 2025 in the sector, which includes both renewable energy and energy efficiency activities. Currently there are 282,200 workers. 

Keats was luckier than most who lost their jobs in the industry. When he was laid off, he jumped around for a bit, eventually heading to Newfoundland to take a job as an electrician on the Hebron GBS (for “gravity based structure”) drilling rig off the coast of the Grand Banks. “Most companies in Newfoundland wouldn’t even look at a tradesperson with only experience from out west,” says Keats.  

The GBS job lasted six months, and Keats suddenly faced a harsh reality: give up on the oil and gas industry if he wanted secure work. Inspired by an increasing number of inquiries from Newfoundlanders asking his advice about solar energy, Keats decided to learn how to install solar panels. “I fell in love with the industry,” he confesses. “From the planning to the installation and start-up, every step of solar installation is engaging, and the final product so rewarding.”  

Keats also joined an organization, Iron & Earth, that had been created by laid-off oil sand workers in the spring of 2016. The group realized that their expertise might be transferable to the renewable energy sector. They had two main questions: how could they connect with employers in the nascent sector, and would they need to upgrade their skills  to work on wind turbines, geothermal plants, solar farms and at carbon capture facilities?  

It was scary. I watched as some of my friends sold off their assets or even declared bankruptcy.

–Devin Keats, instructor for a solar skills program with Iron & Earth

Cue Iron & Earth’s Climate Career Portal (CCP) online tool, launched earlier this year as a bridge linking oil and gas employees as well as Indigenous communities with the renewable energy sector. CCP is overseen by Iron & Earth’s Innovation & STEM manager Jodie Hon, an engineer who began her career with Shell Canada, then, citing her love of nature, switched to the renewable sector. As part of the CCP, Hon is overseeing the rollout this fall of a new mentorship program and is also leading the development of a career blueprint program, which will help workers break down the transition into small achievable steps.  

“I’ve sensed relief that we exist and that there are support and tools available for people who want to make that transition,” Hon says.   

Iron & Earth is also partnering with educational institutions so that young trades graduates will be able to use the CCP to kick-start a career, Hon says. “It’s crucial that Canada’s renewable energy sector has access to a large source of skilled workers. We need to shift our country’s labour market in order to implement solutions to slow climate change.”  

This past summer, Keats, 29, was the instructor for one of the solar skills programs Iron & Earth ran in Nunatsiavut communities in northern Labrador, training them in solar installation. It was a “massive success,” says Keats. “If we apply this model across Canada, with the support of government and skilled workers, we could easily reach our goal of being carbon neutral.” (Canada has pledged carbon neutrality by 2050.)  

Hon says Iron & Earth’s plan is to help 250 former oil and gas workers connect with renewable energy employers via the CCP by March 2024 and assist 1,000 to plan their career blueprints and find mentors by March 2025.  

One key question that oil and gas workers ask: are wages commensurate in the renewable energy sector? Last year, Statistics Canada released 2019 findings showing that jobs in the environmental and clean technology sector paid higher – $75,815 annually – than the average Canadian salary of $56,783. Mining, quarrying and oil and gas extraction wages in 2020 were $88,546 annually, according to Statistics Canada. But as a bonus, cleantech jobs don’t generally experience petroleum’s volatile boom-and-bust cycles.  

Keats says that there are positive aspects other than wages in the renewable sector. “Personally, when you are leaving a job site of a solar panel installation, it is fulfilling that you are out there making the change and doing something you believe in. I cannot say that I felt the same driving back to camp every night on the bus while working with oil and gas.”   

The post Petroleum workers journey into the world of renewable energy appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Guliker wasn’t the only livestock operator hammered by the record flooding that ravaged B.C. last fall. An astonishing number of farm animals – at least 628,000 chickens, 420 cows and 12,000 pigs, according to the provincial government – died in the floodwaters. In all, about 200 square kilometres of southern B.C., encompassing the low-lying, fertile Sumas Prairie, flooded with upwards of 250 millimetres of rain a day. With more than $1 billion a year in farm-gate sales, the potential impact was massive not only for Abbotsford livestock operators but for fruit, vegetable and nut producers in the region.

Around the globe, the climate crisis is ravaging livestock farms. Last summer’s heat dome across much of western and central North America shrivelled crops and pastures, forcing farmers to send cows to slaughter before they starved. In California, ranchers have struggled to evacuate their herds in the face of record wildfires that have charred millions of acres of land the last few summers. In 2018 in North Carolina, about 3.5 million poultry and 5,500 pigs perished in flooding from Hurricane Florence. The costs are adding up: flooding in Nebraska wiped out US$400 million in livestock in 2019 alone.

What’s coming into sharp focus is that today’s livestock infrastructure is built for a climate that no longer exists. Farmers are facing enormous husbandry challenges trying to keep animals safe from extreme weather that brings floods, blistering heat and drought-caused feed shortages. Will barns have to be redesigned and fitted with expensive cooling systems? Might farmers have to create evacuation plans in case of flooding or wildfires? And what happens when their farms are destroyed and insurance companies deem them too risky to insure? A warming climate also attracts invasive new species, transboundary diseases and pathogens, further threatening animal welfare.

Dan Weary, NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada) industrial research chair in animal welfare at the University of British Columbia, says that the November flooding saw remarkable feats of heroism as farmers tried to save animals under their care. “Farmers judge themselves in terms of being stewards for their animals,” says Weary. But the enormous loss of life and livelihoods signals that the agriculture sector must take stock in the coming months and look at redesigning farms to make them more resilient.

“This is going to be a perennial issue,” says Weary. Particularly since B.C.’s Sumas floodplain sits in what used to be Sumas Lake, before it was drained a century ago to take advantage of the fertile soil.

Sean Smukler, chair of agriculture and environment in the Faculty of Land and Food Systems at the University of British Columbia, says that if we’re not willing to invest in the costly infrastructure needed to prevent floods, we’ll have to take a different approach. That may mean shifting to flood-resilient crops, though for livestock producers in the region, the safest solution may be to move their operations altogether. It is going to be a “negotiation between society and producers, deciding whether or not we’re willing to pay the price to protect them,” says Smukler. “We need to pay more for our food if we want something that’s sustainable.”

This is going to be a perennial issue.

-Dan Weary, NSERC industrial research chair in animal welfare at the University of British Columbia

Camille Labchuk, animal rights lawyer and executive director of Ottawa-based non-profit Animal Justice, says that agricultural facilities need to be reduced in size to make rescue attempts viable, with farmers creating evacuation pathways and emergency stockpiles of food and water for the creatures under their care. Current animal numbers make this proposition questionable. Poultry facilities in B.C. have upwards of 54,000 birds per flock and seven flocks a year – an impossible number “to realistically plan to evacuate,” says Labchuk. In the United States, for example, poultry operations can house millions of birds, an even more improbable scenario.

Animal welfare laws also need to be revamped with disaster management in mind, adds Labchuk, pointing to late June’s farming disaster, when soaring B.C. temperatures killed more than 650,000 farm animals – mainly chickens packed into cages.

Livestock scientists suggest a different approach. Veterinarian Tim Kurt is the scientific program director of advanced animal systems at the Washington, D.C.–based Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research. He points to research focused on making animals more resilient so they can withstand weather extremes. The U.S. livestock industry loses upwards of US$2.36 billion annually because of heat stress: animals eat less (which impedes growth), produce less milk and become less fertile, says Kurt.

Studies are ongoing into nutritional interventions and supplements that specifically reduce heat stress in cattle.

Scientists are also looking at gene editing: identifying traits that enable cattle in places such as sub-Saharan Africa to endure drought and heat. African cows are typically inefficient milk and meat producers, and simple crossbreeding would produce an inferior animal. However, CRISPR gene editing, which allows the addition or removal of genes in living organisms, might be used to improve “the heat tolerance of the animal without impacting the milk production, which is what gives it great potential,” Kurt says.

Unlike other GMO manipulation, CRISPR uses genes from within the same species.

In 100 years, I expect there to be almost no animal agriculture on Earth.

-Lenore Newman, director of the Food and Agriculture Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley

Producers are also trying to keep their barns cool by using fans, misters, sprayers and evaporative coolers when temperatures soar. However, such measures increase water as well as energy use, bringing into question their sustainability in drought-strained regions. In an effort to convince more ranches and farms to switch to clean energy, the Rural Energy for America Program, which is administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, provides grants to help farmers and ranchers with energy-efficiency retrofits and renewable-energy development.

The irony is that animal production itself is fuelling climate change, creating 14.5% of global greenhouse gases, such as methane and nitrous oxide, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. “Animal agriculture is the lion’s share of food’s contribution to the climate problem globally,” says Lenore Newman, director of the Food and Agriculture Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley in Abbotsford. Newman envisions a future where protein is derived from plants, lab-grown meats and cow-free dairy. “In 100 years, I expect there to be almost no animal agriculture on Earth. If we can produce meat and dairy that’s identical for a lower price, that’s better for you and the environment,” she says.

What can be done for the immediate future? Amber Itle, interim state veterinarian for Washington, says that the agriculture industry in Canada and the United States must ramp up cross-border collaboration, including emergency preparedness efforts and coordinated responses to minimize the impacts of disasters like the flooding that struck the Pacific Northwest last fall. “We need to stop thinking about our border as a line that we can’t cross,” says Itle. “We should be prepared to employ new technologies, policies and tools on farms to help prevent, prepare for and respond to animal health emergencies and mitigate the impacts.”

Henk Ovink is the special envoy for international water affairs in the Netherlands. He says that it’s not just international collaboration but an alliance with Mother Nature herself that will be needed to control the repercussions of climate change. Low-lying Netherlands has taken land out of agriculture production, compensating dairy farmers for the property and moving their operations to higher ground. “I think it’s very simple: don’t even try to control nature,” Ovink says.

Back in Abbotsford, Baars’s farm eventually ended up underwater. While he managed to get his cows out in time, it was five weeks before he could resume full dairy operations, as he had to replace milking equipment rusted by flooding. Baars is apprehensive about the future. The flood, which was supposed to be a one-in-500-year event, “could happen again in six months,” he says. He doesn’t have a plan in place in case of another one.

“We are counting on our government to upgrade the dykes in our area. If there is another flood in the future, which is very possible, we hope to get more notice and will evacuate quickly,” he says. “We have to look to politicians and light a fire and say, ‘We gotta stop this.’ I wouldn’t want to see another flood, I can tell you that.”

The post How livestock is getting caught in the climate change crossfire appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Coal never really cleaned up its act, however. The mineral, used for generating electricity (thermal) or making steel (metallurgical), remains one of the planet’s worst polluters; together, the burning of fossil fuels like oil and coal are driving climate change and killed an estimated 8.7 million people in 2018, according to Environmental Research.

Yet coal continues to hold energy-addicted nations in its thrall, with China producing 3.7 billion tonnes in 2019, the U.S. 640 million tonnes and Canada 57 million tonnes annually. But despite being an environmental pariah, coal may yet yield a silver lining that could help pave the way to the net-zero carbon-emissions future.

Coal combustion creates a variety of solid waste by-products, such as fly ash, which contain low amounts of rare-earth elements, a group of 17 elements bearing exotic names like dysprosium, neodymium, europium, terbium and thulium. These metals, with their high electrical conductivity and heat resistance, are crucial to the world’s transition from fossil fuel to advanced replacement green technologies. Electric vehicles and wind turbines, for example, use permanent magnets containing the element neodymium, currently the most important end use for rare earths.

For economically depressed coal regions, tapping America’s three billion tonnes of waste coal for rare earth could potentially usher them into the new green economy. Last year, U.S. President Joe Biden issued an executive order to secure crucial supply chains for manufactured goods, including high-tech devices requiring rare earth, such as cellphones, electric vehicles and batteries that store wind- and solar-generated energy. Canada and the U.S. have signed a Joint Action Plan for Critical Minerals to support clean energy deployment.

Spurring the race for new sources of rare earth is the need to strengthen supply chains, with Adamas Intelligence’s Rare Earth Magnet Market Outlook to 2030 forecasting severe shortages in eight years. Currently, China produces about 90% of the world’s rare earth and permanent magnets, leaving the West vulnerable to sanctions and the disruption of clean-energy technology development.

The “rare earth” moniker may imply scarcity, but these elements are easily found in the earth’s mantle. However, they aren’t concentrated in the earth the way other minerals are and have a large mining footprint. They’re also expensive to extract and purify because of the energy required and historically have generated enormous amounts of solid waste and air and water pollution.

The possibility of recycling coal for rare earth also raises concerns, says Lisa Evans, the Boston-based senior counsel for Earthjustice and a specialist in hazardous waste law. “How do you extract [rare earth] in a way that doesn’t create more of an environmental hazard, that doesn’t endanger workers and that doesn’t leave toxic waste for the community? All these questions have to be answered,” Evans says.

Pursuing such answers is mineral-processing engineer and assistant professor Maria Holuszko, co-founder of the Urban Mining Innovation Centre at the University of British Columbia. Holuszko is one of the few researchers in Canada working to identify rare-earth sources in existing coal waste in tailings ponds and on mine sites. She is also developing extraction methods.

Rare-earth recovery from coal waste is complex and includes the use of acids. “We try to minimize the impact on the environment, but generally these processes are energy intensive, using solvent extraction technologies that are not environmentally friendly,” says Holuszko.

In the U.S., the University of Kentucky, supported by the federal National Energy Technology Laboratory, is surging ahead with a similar pilot project to extract rare earth from coal waste. Last year, the university reported that pilot-scale testing of coal and its by-products netted rare-earth oxide concentrates up to 98% pure. Similar pilot projects are being federally funded by the U.S. Department of Energy in Wyoming, West Virginia, Tennessee, North Dakota and other states in the hopes that out-of-work coal workers may eventually find “good-paying jobs” in the clean economy, as one senator put it.

Potential upcycled rare-earth sources may also exist at other mineral mining sites, says Charles Dumaresq, vice-president of science and environmental management at the Mining Association of Canada (MAC). These include places where uranium and bauxite, used to produce alumina, have been mined. Even oil-waste tailings ponds in Fort McMurray may hold rare earth, says Dumaresq.

Brendan Marshall, MAC’s vice-president of economic and northern affairs, says economic factors further impede a rare-earth gold rush from waste materials like coal. There is no existing market for rare earth in Canada, nor is there a pre-existing North American supply chain for extraction or separation or a manufacturing base for products like permanent magnets. “Resolving those key challenges is the biggest factor around Canada’s success in bringing mineral extraction of these products online,” Marshall says.

The growing global urgency for rare earth may make it more efficient to source these metals from deposits in the earth, rather than relying upon mineral waste recycling, and two facilities — one American, one Canadian — are looking to capitalize on virgin deposits.

Canada has 7% of the globe’s resources of rare earth and is 10th in the world in reserves. China is first and the U.S. is eighth in the world in reserves.

To some, this signals opportunity. In 2020, the Saskatchewan Research Council (SRC) announced the creation of the Rare Earth Processing Facility in Saskatoon, sparking enquiries from around the world. The new plant will separate rare earth from virgin ore mined from northern regions of the province and create value-added midstream processing concentrating these metals, says SRC CEO Mike Crabtree.

Phase 1, opening in 2023, is a hydrometallurgy plant that extracts rare earth from ore. The Phase 2 plant, which will be finished in 2024, will use the solvent extraction process to produce separated rare-earth oxides. Compared to China’s notoriously polluting extraction methods, which have spewed thousands of millions of litres of contaminated water into the environment, Crabtree says his Canadian facility will be one of the first of its kind to recycle all its water.

How do you extract [rare earth] in a way that doesn’t create more of an environmental hazard, that doesn’t endanger workers and that doesn’t leave toxic waste for the community?

Lisa Evans, senior counsel for Earthjustice

One potential rare-earth source is monazite mined from the Alces Lake area in northern Saskatchewan. Crabtree says that one tonne of monazite, containing neodymium, used to make rare-earth magnets, yields upwards of 80% rare earth. In comparison, a tonne of coal ash might contain a few kilograms, he says.

The facility’s midstream processing plant, which Crabtree anticipates will be expanded in the future, lays a solid foundation for a thriving Canadian rare-earth export sector. After being processed into magnet metals, a tonne of monazite ore is worth 40 to 50 times its original value, he says.

Mining for rare earth in Canada’s north may elicit strong opposition, however, with Indigenous groups. Last year, Greenland’s Inuit Ataqatigiit (IA) party successfully ran on a platform to scuttle a rare-earth mining initiative that would have produced uranium as a by-product, sparking fears of radioactive contamination.

Rare-earth mining may also provide jobs and investment opportunities for First Nations.

In Canada’s Northwest Territories, for example, Yellowknives Dene First Nation, which owns Det’on Cho Nahanni Construction Corp., is running the Nechalacho rare-earth mining project.

With the West in the nascent stages of this green technology transition, ethical and socially responsible operations and obligations are still being worked out. In the U.S., the Mountain Pass rare-earth mine and processing facility near Las Vegas, Nevada, revived in 2017 and now producing about 15% of global supplies, is still developing its life-cycle assessment framework, which calculates the environmental impacts of operations.

Mountain Pass was a global supplier of rare earth in the 20th century but shut down in 2002 because of competition from China, as well as environmental restrictions. Revived, it is now expanding and optimizing its processing capabilities, including producing separated rare-earth products. Mountain Pass now claims to be the most environmentally sustainable rare-earth production site in the world, says Matt Sloustcher, senior vice-president of communications for MP Materials, which owns Mountain Pass. “This research is a strong indication that the cultivation of a U.S. supply chain, commensurate with Western environmental values and standards, will help ensure that the world’s supply of rare earth is produced responsibly and with increasingly low environmental impact.”

Rare-earth elements are among the manufacturing metals of the future. However, the future, as they say, is now, with an accelerating climate crisis emphasizing the need for a rapid transition to a green economy. Whether through virgin mining, upcycled mining waste or recycled rare-earth metals from discarded retail products like cellphones, the transition to ensure the world arrives at net-zero carbon emissions will arrive not a moment too soon.

Roberta Staley is a Vancouver-based author, magazine editor, writer and documentary filmmaker.

The post Could rare earth minerals give coal country a second life? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

“You meet nobody; you’re in total wilderness, surrounded by boreal forest,” says Pier-Olivier Boudreault, a conservation director for the Société pour la nature et les parcs (SNAP), the Quebec arm of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS).

These pristine waters, also known by the Indigenous name Muteshekau-shipu, came under threat several years ago when Hydro-Québec included the river in a strategic plan for a hydroelectric dam project. Alarmed conservationists, whitewater rafters, a Côte-Nord municipality and a First Nation band formed the Muteshekau-shipu Alliance in 2018 to oppose the project. The coalition included the Indigenous Ekuanitshit Innu Council, the Minganie regional county municipality, Association Eaux-Vives Minganie and SNAP. “We had a common goal of protecting the river,” says Boudreault.

Initially, the Muteshekau-shipu Alliance tried to create a protected area under provincial law, an initiative strongly opposed by the provincial government and Hydro-Québec. Inspired by an international Indigenous-led movement that supports the rights of nature, the alliance instead sought “personhood” for the Magpie. Montreal-based International Observatory on the Rights of Nature (IORN) drafted nine rights for the river, including the right to flow and be safe from pollution. In what was a first for Canada, early this year the Ekuanitshit Innu Council and the Minganie regional county municipality granted personhood to the river, which joined a small but growing list of rivers and wild spaces globally that have been granted the same fundamental right to exist that a human has. This time, there was no opposition from the province or Hydro-Québec.

Under common law, which is practised in the United States, the United Kingdom, India, New Zealand, Australia and Canada, personhood means that an entity has rights ascribed to it. Corporations and churches have personhood. Everything else – animals and ecosystems – are considered “things” that, similar to property, can be owned and exploited. “The rights-of-nature movement is a paradigm shift,” says Boudreault. “Nature has a reason to live.”

Along with personhood comes the granting of legal guardians who uphold the rights of the river and can sue for damages on its behalf, should the need arise. This is crucial, says Boudreault, as Hydro-Québec may want to revisit its original plan to dam the river.

Bolstered by the Magpie achievement, environmental advocates have turned their sights on a much larger waterway, the 1,200-kilometre-long St. Lawrence River.

[Securing personhood rights for rivers] is the best way to ensure a healthy environment for present and future generations.
—Yenny Vega Cárdenas, IORN president and lawyer

The river flows from Lake Ontario to the Atlantic, crossing two provincial, as well as the Canada-U.S., borders. Two years ago, IORN helped create the Saint Lawrence River alliance, which includes conservation groups, some Quebec municipalities and more than 10 Indigenous groups whose traditional territories touch upon the vast waterway. Attaining personhood will be more complex for the St. Lawrence than the Magpie; the river is highly industrialized and comes under provincial and federal jurisdiction. Undeterred, the alliance will table the motion with Quebec’s provincial legislative body in 2022. Advocates plan to support their claim by including legal precedents from jurisdictions around the globe like Ecuador, Colombia and New Zealand. (See sidebar on pages 30/31.) The pursuit of the St. Lawrence’s personhood received the backing of the federal New Democratic Party during the federal election campaign in September.

IORN president and lawyer Yenny Vega Cárdenas says a key objective of the personhood initiative is “starting a conversation” with industry and agriculture. Agriculture and corporate activities have devastated parts of the St. Lawrence, home to beluga whales, otters, multitudes of fish species, and migratory birds like snow geese. The river is afflicted by suffocating algae blooms linked to agricultural runoff and high levels of restricted pesticides such as neonicotinoids. Chemical pollutants from oil and gas drilling and hydraulic fracking that occur close to the river also affect water quality and are toxic to wildlife. Personhood would give the river fundamental rights, pressure industry and agriculture to stop polluting, and compel municipalities to improve water treatment facilities, Cárdenas says. “It’s the best way to ensure a healthy environment for present and future generations.”

Constitutional change needed

Mumta Ito is one of the EU’s leading advocates for codifying nature’s rights into law. Ito, a Scotland-based lawyer who founded the charity Nature’s Rights, warns that the Magpie River’s personhood status doesn’t protect it from a legal court challenge down the road by powerful economic or political forces. Ito emphasizes that, in order for nature to be considered equal to humans and corporations in the courts, rights must be embedded at the highest level, such as the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Other countries, such as Ecuador and Bolivia, prioritized the rights of nature over economic development in their constitutions in 2008 and 2009 respectively. In 2019, Bangladesh’s highest court granted every river in the country legal personhood, so that anyone damaging a waterway can be tried as if they have harmed a living entity.

The Bangladesh NGO Human Rights and Peace was consequently appointed guardian of all national rivers. The effect of the legislation has been imperfect, with politicians and businesses reportedly flouting riverside eviction notices. However, there have been successes, with the court ordering the closure of 231 unauthorized factories on the Buriganga River last year, according to the Rights of Rivers, a global survey of the rapidly developing Rights of Nature jurisprudence pertaining to rivers.

Currently, environmental law doesn’t challenge “the way our societal systems operate,” says Ito, who co-authored a 2020 study, Towards an EU Charter of the Fundamental Charter for the Rights of Nature, commissioned by the EU’s European Economic and Social Committee. The study proposes a restructuring of law to enshrine nature as a rights-bearing subject equal to humans and corporations – which is, on paper at least, a guiding principle for EU nations, none of whom, to date, have granted personhood to rivers. (An initiative is underway to grant personhood to Spain’s Mar Menor, one of Europe’s largest seawater lagoons, which was devastated in 2016 by agricultural discharge that sparked an algae bloom and killed off tens of thousands of fish.)

A judicial shift would have significant implications for corporations. Companies, such as those peddling tobacco and opioids, have already been found legally responsible for the harm their products cause. Globally, the Stop Ecocide Foundation is seeking to protect nature’s rights even further by pushing the International Criminal Court in The Hague to adopt “ecocide” – an act causing severe or long-term damage to the environment – as a prosecutable crime on par with war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and the crime of aggression. Corporations would be found legally responsible for such things as deforestation and oil spills.

It’s seeing things that are not human as [having] equal stature from a moral perspective.
—Ian Moore, Mack Law Corp.

If rivers have rights, what are the potential ramifications for industry and infrastructure projects that interfere with waterways? Governments see hydroelectric dams as a way to generate clean renewable energy. But environmental advocates and First Nations communities don’t necessarily agree. For example, British Columbia’s Peace River is the contentious site of the Site C Dam, the $16-billion hydroelectric megaproject set for completion in 2025. Federal and provincial scientists report that the dam, spearheaded by BC Hydro, a Crown corporation, will destroy the habitat of dozens of species of insects, mammals and plants, many on the brink of extinction. Colorado-based environmental lawyer Grant Wilson, founder of the Earth Law Center, says Site C is a “clear violation of the rights of the Peace River, in addition to many Indigenous rights violations.”

Wilson’s Earth Law Center advises groups around the world that seek to establish legal rights for waterways. This year, the non-profit co-developed the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Rivers. Signed by nearly 200 organizations to date, the declaration serves as a legal template for anyone wanting to adopt the rights of rivers, Wilson says. The centre is poised to release a legal toolkit customized for B.C. that Wilson hopes will be helpful to those groups fighting the ongoing construction of the Site C dam. The toolkit incorporates a largely untested but powerful legal document: the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), which was enshrined into B.C. law in 2019.

Vancouver lawyer Ian Moore, an associate counsel at Mack Law Corp., an Indigenous-owned firm that works primarily with First Nations but represents Inuit and Métis groups as well, contributed to the B.C. toolkit. Moore says that a number of B.C. First Nations will be using the toolkit as they seek to emulate the Magpie River’s designation of personhood.

One B.C. First Nation has formally aligned itself with the concept of personhood for rivers. In 2020, Tilhqot’in First Nation released a document establishing Sturgeon River Law. (The Fraser River, also known as the Sturgeon River, supports trout, salmon, whitefish and sturgeon.) The Tilhqot’in refer to water as tu, declaring that it is “a life form, it has its own spirit with human qualities.” The document also sets out the responsibilities of the Tilhqot’in regarding tu, stating that the community is a steward for future generations and must ensure the river is kept clean. If it is degraded, they must take corrective steps to restore ecosystem health. “These relationships define us as a Nation and highlight our protection and stewardship responsibilities that are grounded in our inherent and self-government rights,” the document states.

Congested, constricted and polluted waterways also impact the rights of other wildlife. Industry, dams and urbanization along the lower Fraser River floodplains – critical to Pacific coho and Chinook salmon – have resulted in the loss of 85% of spawning grounds, a recent report by University of British Columbia researchers and the Raincoast Conservation Foundation revealed. Such spawning-grounds loss has a deleterious effect on wildlife higher up the food chain, including the endangered Southern Resident orca population. A coalition formed by Earth Law Center is working to advance a proposed bill before the Washington State Legislature to recognize the rights of the Southern Resident orcas and the ecosystems upon which they depend, including the Salish Sea ecosystem, which spans the shores of Washington through to B.C.

The right to sue

Given the calamities that industrialization and corporations have inflicted upon the environment, how important is a river’s right to sue, should it attain personhood? Moore emphasizes that the primary value in recognizing legal personhood isn’t the ability of non-humans to sue but rather the opportunity to restructure our relationships with nature. “It’s seeing things that are not human as [having] equal stature from a moral perspective. It’s about relationship-shifting,” he says.

Precedence exists, however, with Ecuador’s Vilcabamba River, which, acting as a plaintiff alongside two property owners, stopped a damaging road construction project in 2011 by filing a constitutional injunction. The Rights of Rivers notes that, despite a raft of remedial and rehabilitation orders, the polluter ignored the directive.

Wilson hopes that establishing parameters and standards of operation will allow businesses to become partners in protecting the planet. “Companies like predictability,” he notes. The ultimate aim: a revolution that sees corporations, the public and Indigenous groups collaborating and working toward a common goal of respecting nature. Within this new zeitgeist, much ground needs to be made up. Wilson is optimistic, noting that even a river that is completely dead – as many are throughout the world – can be revitalized.

“Nature has an amazing capacity to restore itself to health when given the opportunity.”

Court Victories From Around the Globe

Ecuador & Bolivia
In 2008, Ecuador became the first country to create a constitution that recognizes the right of nature to exist and regenerate. Bolivia followed in 2010 with a Rights of Mother Earth Law.

United States
Last year, Orange County, Florida, granted legal rights to all waterways, including two rivers. It is but one of several American jurisdictions to enact rights-of-nature laws, beginning in 2006 with the borough of Tamaqua in Pennsylvania, which declared toxic sewage dumping to be a violation of the rights of nature.

New Zealand
In 2017, a treaty agreement between New Zealand’s parliament and a Maori tribe declared the Whanganui River a “legal entity,” along with a former national park, Te Urewera, and Mount Taranaki. That same year, India’s Ganges and Yamuna rivers were declared legal persons, a decision later overturned by the Supreme Court, as it was declared unsustainable at law.

Colombia
In 2018, 25 plaintiffs aged seven to 26 successfully sued the Colombian government in that country’s highest court for failing to protect the Amazon, claiming that deforestation violated their constitutional right to life and a healthy environment. As a result, the court granted the Amazon River ecosystem the same legal rights as a human being.

Roberta Staley is a Vancouver-based author, magazine editor, writer and documentary filmmaker.

The post Nature’s day in court appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Nitrogen – which is usually combined with two other fertilizer macronutrients, phosphorous and potassium, and then sold as NPK – also exacerbates climate change. The world’s most widely used chemical fertilizer, at 100 million tonnes per year globally, synthetic nitrogen leaches into ground water as nitrates, which enter the atmosphere as the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide. N2O has 300 times the warming effect of carbon dioxide. To mitigate such effects, Ottawa has proposed a target of reducing agricultural nitrogen emissions by 30%, while new technologies and biofertilizers are germinating multibillion-dollar markets.

One of the bright new sprouts is Lucent Biosciences, a biotechnology start-up in Coquitlam, B.C. Five years ago, it began experimenting with solutions to mitigate soil degradation and nutritional decline caused by NPK. With $5 million in development funding, Lucent created Soileos, a biofertilizer that binds zinc, iron, boron and manganese to cellulose derived from waste pea, lentil, rice, coconut and corn husks, thereby preventing these micronutrients from leaching into the soil.

A patented technology makes the micronutrients bioavailable, meaning that plants’ needs determine the rate of release, says Lucent CEO Michael Riedijk. Adding cellulose also enriches dirt by enhancing the microbial biomass, similar to regenerative agriculture practices, says Lucent co-founder and vice-president Jose Godoy Toku. “Soileos is unique because it improves soil health.”

Soileos isn’t a replacement for macronutrient NPK  chemical fertilizers but a complement that reduces nitrogen use, says Riedijk. It can also be applied alone or used with manure on regenerative farms, Godoy Toku says. Godoy Toku expects the product will be approved for use on certified organic farms by next year.

Indiscriminate use of NPK has caused soil infertility and led to higher soil salinity and alkalinity (when the pH rises above the optimum 6.0 to 7.0 to levels as high as 10). In Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, a lack of micronutrients is linked to growth and learning-development problems in children, Riedijk says. “Crops today don’t have the same nutrient content they had 30 or 40 years ago. Generally, the iron content of crops has dropped 20% in the past few decades.”

Soileos is undergoing testing in 40 field trials of eight hectares each across Canada and the United States. Lucent, which works with Simon Fraser University’s 4D LABS, a materials science research institute, has already undertaken two years of field testing, growing 150,000 plants in 32 trials and analyzing 5,000 tissue samples. The data are striking. Corn fertilized with Soileos showed an average yield increase of 12%, tomatoes 26% and lettuce 30%. One trial, conducted with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, boosted cabbage yield by 50%.

Soileos is available commercially, with one tonne a day produced at the Coquitlam plant. The company aims to produce 10 tonnes a day within the next 12 to 18 months, eventually reaching 100 tonnes. Lucent hopes to test Soileos in Africa in 2022 to assess its effect on alkaline soils.

The climate crisis is exacerbated by decades of excessive nitrogen use. It is imperative that alternatives be developed to reduce environmental impacts and enhance crop yields to feed a growing number of hungry people around the globe.

Roberta Staley is a Vancouver-based author, magazine editor and writer, and documentary filmmaker.

The post B.C. start-up unearthing low-carbon solutions for growing food appeared first on Corporate Knights.

But some scientists and medical professionals are crying foul. The animals that are being used as laboratory test subjects in the search for COVID-19 therapeutics might be hindering, rather than helping, the race, they say. The virulence and highly contagious nature of COVID-19 is demanding a new model of research that bypasses animals, instead using human-biology-based testing. A growing number of scientists suggest that accelerated COVID-19 research is exposing animal modelling for what many have long claimed it to be: a scientific anachronism.

Dr. Thomas Hartung is the director of the Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing (CAAT), a laboratory for developmental neurotoxicity research based on genomics and metabolomics at Johns Hopkins University. Hartung points to the slow trajectory of drug and vaccine development using animal modelling. Conventional drug development relies heavily on animal testing to understand the molecular mechanisms of disease and potential treatments, helping to explain why it takes more than 10 years to get a medication to market, while vaccines typically take 12 years, says Hartung. Such lengthy timelines translate into a hefty medical bill: roughly $2 billion per drug. With COVID-19, “we cannot wait that long for treatments,” says Hartung, who spoke to online delegates at the 11th World Congress on Alternatives and Animal Use in the Life Sciences in August. “We have to be faster than we were in the past.”

Equally problematic, if not even more eyebrow raising: 95% of new drugs that enter clinical trials don’t make it to the market, according to the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). In other words, the vast majority of new drugs fail once they move into human studies, despite appearing safe and effective in experiments with animals.

In science, as in other areas, necessity is the mother of invention. The rapid acceleration of innovations like three-dimensional human organs on a microchip are being refined. These living organoids are accelerating the development of effective medical advancements for the many virulent maladies afflicting humans, including, most urgently of course, COVID-19.

Hartung, highly regarded in the field of animal-testing alternatives, pioneered a patent on brain organoids, which are tissue cultures made from human stem cells that simulate the human organ. Developed four years ago, mini brains, which can be mass-produced, have been used to study infections caused by viruses such as HIV, dengue and Zika. This past spring, Hartung and his team proved that SARS-CoV-2 can infect and damage human brain cells by testing about 800 mini brains – each the size of a house-fly eye – that were “identical in composition” to the human organ. Observing evidence-based effects of COVID-19 in the human brain will help researchers jumpstart important therapeutics and medical care. “It will be difficult not to use them in a similar, fast way for drug and vaccine development and regulation in the future,” Hartung says.

The vast majority of new drugs fail once they move to human trials, despite appearing safe and effective in animal experiments.

Hartung points to other uses of organs on a microchip, such as human lung organoids that breathe. This past April, researchers at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering reported that human-lung airway chips demonstrated that two drugs, amodiaquine and toremifene, significantly inhibited entry of the COVID-19 virus into the human body. Such models are proving effective for quality assurance and demonstrating that a drug is therapeutically effective, helping researchers leapfrog over animal modelling. Additional benefits include toxicity testing of newly developed drugs, giving more accurate results at a lower cost, Hartung adds. Such micro physiological systems have become so well established, he says, that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that it would reduce mammal testing by 30% by 2025 and phase it out entirely by 2035.

Micro human organs aren’t the only scientific advances pushing animal modelling to the side. Sophisticated computer modelling has already begun to replace standard safety practices for chemicals, such as dropping compounds into rabbits’ eyes or feeding substances to rats to establish lethal doses. IEEE Spectrum recently reported that the Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee had crunched data on more than 40,000 human genes and analyzed 2.5 billion genetic combinations to try to determine COVID-19 therapeutics. Summit found a pattern of gene activity in the lungs of COVID-19 patients, which helped identify a pathology that physicians knew would respond to certain existing drugs.

Increasingly, pharmaceutical companies are starting to use alternative models to reduce the animals they use in research. This past spring, Pfizer, in collaboration with German biotechnology company BioNTech, announced it was jumpstarting development of a COVID-19 vaccination in an initiative titled Project Lightspeed. Using BioNTech’s proprietary messenger RNA (mRNA) technology, four different vaccine versions were tested in human clinical trials, which eliminated years of waiting for results from animal modelling. Pfizer spokesperson Jessica Smith stated in an email that traditional animal model studies are also being incorporated into the company’s research. Ultimately, one vaccine, BNT162b2, was selected for further testing. The vaccine may be available in Canada in 2021, pending Health Canada approval. If it proves safe, the American government has already committed to purchasing nearly $2-billion worth for 100 million doses.

Biotechnology company Moderna, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is also using mRNA technology in collaboration with the NIH to test a COVID-19 vaccine on humans. The company initially tried the vaccine, called mRNA-1273, on animal models before launching human trials but was able to jump to the first phase of human trials at “record speed,” noted the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is funding the trials. Moderna has received close to US$1 billion in government funding for vaccine development, as well as a purchase order of US$1.53 billion for 100 million doses, if approved.

Canadian scientists are also working to accelerate the shift away from animal modelling. In Quebec City, biopharmaceutical company Medicago is researching a plant-derived vaccine for COVID-19, in partnership with GlaxoSmithKline. Medicago uses virus-like particles, or VLPs, that mimic the shape and dimensions of a virus, allowing the body to recognize the invader and create an immune response. It started phase-one human trials this summer.

Paradigm shifters

One proponent hoping to see a paradigm shift in which human biology serves as the gold standard in scientific research is Dr. Charu Chandrasekera, the executive director and founder of the Canadian Centre for Alternatives to Animal Methods (CCAAM) at the University of Windsor in Ontario, as well as its subsidiary, the Canadian Centre for the Validation of Alternative Methods (CaCVAM). CCAAM’s aim, Chandrasekera says, is to promote the replacement of animals in Canadian biomedical research, education and regulatory testing.

Chandrasekera recalls her journey from young researcher at an American Midwestern university, investigating the molecular mechanisms of heart failure and diabetes using mice and rats. It eventually became clear, she says, that the studies “didn’t enhance our understanding of human heart disease, nor accelerate therapeutic development for humans, making the rodent studies scientifically futile and ethically unjustifiable. I realized that none of the work I was doing was going to help humans.”

Today, Chandrasekera continues her diabetes research by using alternatives like 3D bioprinted human tissue, including liver, lung, intestine, pancreas, skeletal muscle and blood-brain-barrier. Tissue for testing can be obtained from either live or deceased human organs, preserved and manipulated to ensure they can divide indefinitely, Chandrasekera says. Or, human skin can be biopsied and stem cells harvested, creating brain, heart, liver and pancreas organ cells. “You use these cell models to test drugs and chemicals,” she says.

Despite such advances, animal modelling is still regarded as the gold standard of research and is required for regulatory approval from Health Canada. The federal department demands that researchers use animals when testing the safety of chemicals found in food and household items, pharmaceuticals or medical equipment.

Canada (and the U.S.) also allows the use of animals for testing cosmetics, even though the practice has been banned in the U.K. since 1998. The European Union banned cosmetic testing on animals in 2013 but modified the legislation this past summer to allow for a handful of exceptions.

Toronto-based lawyer Camille Labchuk, executive director of Animal Justice, says that Canada needs to create a federal animal-protection act with government oversight. Currently, scrutiny of lab-animal welfare lies with the Canadian Council on Animal Care (CCAC), which assesses and verifies institutional animal ethics and care programs under its Good Animal Practice certification program. CCAC certification is required for all institutions that receive public funding to undertake animal-based projects. However, private labs can opt out of CCAC’s voluntary certification system. “There’s almost no ability for anyone to get a glimpse into what’s happening” in private labs, says Labchuk, adding that it isn’t even known how many animals are kept in such facilities. “We think that’s unacceptable in 2020 that people can use animals in pretty horrific ways in private without any government or public oversight.” (About four million animals, 40% of them mice, are used each year in public labs for research, education and regulatory testing in Canada.)

“We’re facing this wicked problem of the COVID-19 pandemic, and we can’t afford to be lazy about using antiquated methods in our pharmaceutical research.”
– Dr. Lisa Kramer,
University of Toronto

Labchuk, Chandrasekera and Dr. Lisa Kramer, a professor of finance at the University of Toronto, are part of a working group planning to lobby federal legislators in Canada to invoke greater protections for lab animals. Kramer recommends that funders withdraw support from projects that are using animal testing that show no clear benefit to humans. Continued reliance on animal modelling in biomedical research not only slows down research but poses potential financial risks for pharmaceutical companies, their investors “and for society overall,” she says. “We’re facing this wicked problem of the COVID-19 pandemic, and we can’t afford to be lazy about using antiquated methods in our pharmaceutical research.” It shortchanges not only the medical professionals and students who work with patients, but taxpayers who underwrite research at publicly funded institutions, she adds.

Using non-animal modalities can save money, says Chandrasekera, pointing to a test that assesses how a chemical, once ingested, affects a person’s sensitivity to sunlight, called dermal phototoxicity. Animal modelling, requiring hundreds of rats, costs $11,500 per chemical. The alternative, approved by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Guidelines for the Testing of Chemicals program, is an in vitro (conducted in a test tube or Petri dish) cell-based test that costs $1,300, Chandrasekera says.

Public pressure is key to a decline in animal modelling. The cosmetic industry bowed to public pressure; will other sectors bow too? A private lab in Cheshire, England, called XCellR8 thinks so. Founded in 2008 by Dr. Carol Treasure and Bushra Sim, XCellR8 is striving to “accelerate the world’s transition to animal-free testing,” says Susie Lee-Kilgariff, the company’s marketing director. In 2013, after the EU banned cosmetic testing on animals, XCellR8’s animal-free testing methodologies were suddenly in high demand. Today, clients of XCellR8 include numerous multinationals, such as beauty giants The Body Shop and Lush. Clients have embraced ethical approaches to product testing simply as a part of doing business. It also means they can claim to uphold “vegan supply chains,” with customers assured that they are buying vegan products, Lee-Kilgariff says. With ethical consumerism an ever-growing trend, other businesses, including pharmaceutical companies, that can lay claim to “cruelty-free” therapeutics will have an advantage in the marketplace of the future.

The grim battle against COVID-19 is accelerating the emergence of a new frontier in science. Increasingly, this means looking at alternatives to animal modelling to accelerate therapeutics that will save millions of people from death and sickness. Such advancements will also save the millions of creatures who have long been science’s unwilling servants and victims. As Chandrasekera says, “I would really like to see a scientific culture where human biology is the gold standard, where we all work together to advance science and medicine without harming animals.”

Roberta Staley is a Vancouver-based author, magazine editor and writer and documentary filmmaker.

The post Of mice and men: Could COVID spell the end of animal testing?   appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The widespread floods exacerbated the already dire economic state of the Maasai Mara caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has gutted the tourism industry, says Brian Kearney-Grieve, executive director of the Sidekick Foundation, the primary funder of the Mara Elephant Project. MEP, as it is known, protects the region’s 2,400 pachyderms by mitigating poaching and human-elephant conflict and preserving habitat. As a keystone species, elephants are invaluable to the Maasai Mara, eating brush and trees and spreading seeds via their dung, keeping the Serengeti plains fertile and open for herds of grazing animals.

The Maasai Mara, which is part of the vast Serengeti plains, draws thousands of foreigners every year to watch the spectacular Great Migration, when more than two million animals – wildebeest, zebras and gazelles – undertake their annual odyssey from Tanzania north into Kenya, making the region the country’s most valuable tourism asset.

The threat to elephants lies with the revenue-base collapse, says Kearney-Grieve. The Maasai tribes people, renowned for their extravagant beadwork and tall stature, are the legal landowners of the Maasai Mara. Together with such stakeholders as ecotourism camp owners, they manage 14 areas, called “conservancies.” These are lease agreements worth about US$10 million a year that is derived from tourism. Payments are given to individual Maasai landowners in exchange for keeping their fields open to wildlife, rather than growing crops or grazing livestock.

This past spring, because of COVID-19, the conservancies were negotiating reduced lease rates with the Maasai landowners while scrambling to find emergency funds to pay the teams of rangers and related expenses, such as vehicles, used to keep a lid on poaching.

Their fears about a possible increase in poaching proved to be justified. In late April, Rhino Conservation Botswana reported that poachers had killed six rhino after the global pandemic shut down tourism in the southern African nation.

MEP’s conservation work includes a remarkably successful anti-poaching intelligence network. And while MEP hadn’t detected a rise in poaching as of late April, Kearney-Grieve fears that poachers from neighbouring Tanzania may take advantage of the absence of tourists and the reduced ranger numbers to venture into the Maasai to shoot elephants for their ivory.

Farmers will also be more protective of their crops in the upcoming months, because of the economic hardship, and therefore less tolerant of crop-raiding elephants, says Kearney-Grieve. “Communities are so under threat in terms of their income that they might be more aggressive in terms of how they protect their crops from elephants.”

Roberta Staley is a Vancouver-based author, magazine editor and writer and filmmaker.

Read Roberta Staley’s feature:

Banking on the wildlife trade

The finance sector could hold the key to stopping the trade that puts the health of millions of animals and humans at risk

The post Tourism collapse in Kenya raises fears of poaching uptick appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The illegal wildlife trade (IWT) goes beyond market stalls – it’s organized transnational crime that involves criminal trafficking syndicates. And it’s flourishing due to high demand, ineffective law enforcement and a lack of financial surveillance. Wild animals are in demand not only as culinary indulgences and traditional medicine, but as exotic pets and status symbols. The effect is devastating, with thousands of species of wild animals being pushed to the brink of extinction as a result. The weakening of ecosystems and the threat to biodiversity, as well as the enormous mounting threat to human life, compounds what many have been saying for years: IWT is an offence commensurate to terrorism financing and drug, human, and weapons trafficking and thus should be fought using the same resources afforded these illegal activities. As with other illegal activities with enormous profits, a key tactic is to “follow the money.”

And that’s where the bankers come in.

Black markets worth billions

The United Nations estimates IWT to be worth upwards of US$23 billion a year. Cash is only one form of currency facilitating the operation of wildlife black markets. Much of the profit is laundered via legitimate banking channels and online payment platforms, which are increasingly being used as an underground means of buying and selling animals, particularly with many legal wildlife markets being shuttered. Hence, the financial sector has a crucial role to play in the mitigation of IWT. According to the Coalition for Private Investment in Conservation, IWT is the globe’s third-largest form of illegal trade after street drugs and weapons. A 2018 Interpol report, Global Wildlife Enforcement, states that the criminal kingpins involved in IWT are well organized and often involved in tax evasion, fraud, document falsification, money-laundering and firearms trafficking. IWT trafficking pipelines are commonly used to smuggle other illicit commodities, such as drugs and weapons, Interpol reports.

A key element making IWT as dangerous a crime as weapons trafficking is the link to pandemics like COVID-19, caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. COVID-19 is genetically similar to the SARS-related coronavirus (SARS is short for severe acute respiratory syndrome), which emerged in China in 2002/03, leaping, it’s suspected, from bats and wild Himalayan palm civets to humans, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). There are hundreds of coronaviruses circulating among animals, and seven are known to infect humans via a biological process called zoonosis, which is when viruses jump to another species, according to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the United States. (Human encroachment into wild spaces, primarily because of agriculture, is another major factor facilitating zoonosis.)

Widespread theories suggested that ground zero for COVID-19 may have been the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China, where domestic, wild and illegally trafficked animals were often kept in deplorably cramped cages – conditions that act as ideal disease vectors. A recent Chinese study published in the journal Nature suggests the market wasn’t so much ground zero for the virus, but an early “superspreader” or amplifier event among humans.

Regardless, research has found that COVID-19 likely originated in bats and then moved to humans via an intermediate species. Some researchers have suggested the missing link to be the scaly, ant-eating pangolin, which carries coronaviruses related to SARS-CoV-2. As the Wall Street Journal noted in late May, “It is possible that another animal was involved in some way, with the virus bouncing between a farmer and his animals, or a wildlife smuggler and his poor pangolins.”

Whether or not endangered pangolins are the missing link, they remain the most trafficked animals in the world – and they are emblematic of how human encroachment on threatened habitats and species is putting all of us at risk.

Illegal wildlife trade as a financial crime

Before the outbreak threw the wildlife trade into the spotlight, financial institutions had already begun collaborating to crack down on IWT. Last fall, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), which is headquartered in Paris and positions itself as the globe’s money-laundering and terrorist-financing watchdog, announced that it would be making IWT a key priority under its current president, Xiangmin Liu of the People’s Bank of China. In June, FATF will provide governments and the financial industry practical guidance on combatting money laundering linked to IWT, FATF’s media relations manager, Duncan Crawford, stated in an email to Corporate Knights. With a top priority being the stop of the financial flows and laundering of the proceeds of IWT, the tools are intended “to disrupt, dismantle and deter the flows of illicit financing,” Crawford wrote.

TRAFFIC, a U.K.-based NGO that focuses on biodiversity conservation for wild plants and animals, was one of the founding members of another task force: the United for Wildlife Financial Taskforce, a bank-led group of more than 30 global financial institutions committed to combatting IWT that was founded in 2018. TRAFFIC is set to imminently publish case studies for enforcement agencies revealing the various techniques used by criminal networks to funnel and launder ill-gotten gains from IWT, TRAFFIC spokesperson Richard Thomas says. “It’s long been known that following the money is a very effective way to bring down criminal networks. Everything you do, every transaction, has a financial record,” Thomas says.

Financial tools to hunt suspicious transactions

One of the most effective but underused weapons in fighting IWT is financial investigation, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and the Asia/Pacific Group on Money Laundering, which co-published a report in 2017, Enhancing the Detection, Investigation and Disruption of Illicit Financial Flows from Wildlife Crime. Among its many recommendations, the report states that financial asset forfeiture should be used as a deterrent by depriving perpetrators of ill-gotten gains from IWT. It also recommended that financial institutions develop better intelligence linkages to identify suspicious transactions. Extra due diligence must also be applied to legitimate businesses operating in sectors like trucking, the antique trade, traditional medicine, the fashion industry and wild animal breeding.

Legal breeding farms create enormous loopholes for IWT perpetrators, says Adam Peyman, the wildlife programs and operations manager for Humane Society International (HSI). “The legal wildlife trade acts as a cover for IWT, just as captive breeding farms act as a cover for laundering animals from the wild,” Peyman says. A huge loophole was created by China when it prohibited the sale and trade of non-aquatic wild animals for food but not medicine, fur or research, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Online wildlife purchases on the rise

Another challenge to stopping IWT is that it’s being carried out via e-commerce. “Overall, there has been increased activity online by those who are trading in illegal wildlife,” says Ivonne Higuero, the secretary-general of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), from Geneva. She says CITES is developing a practical guideline to assist law enforcement authorities in combatting IWT internet crime.
Whether on the dark web or on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, as well as apps like WhatsApp, buyers can order and purchase vast arrays of illegal animal products: live amphibians, tropical fish, exotic birds, tiger cubs or baby primates, as well as products like pangolin scales, rhino horn or ivory, with a few clicks of a computer mouse. Much of the online demand comes from European collectors willing to pay upwards of $100,000 for a particularly rare specimen, says Higuero.

The Coalition to End Wildlife Trafficking Online has been working with private companies like Facebook, eBay, Instagram and Google, as well as such Chinese companies as internet conglomerate Tencent Holdings, which are having some success policing and regulating online IWT. In a meeting with Tencent executives last November in China, Higuero was told that the company had detected more than one million IWT listings. As a result, Tencent closed 6,000 accounts, 128 arrests were made, and US$2.8 million worth of IWT products were seized, says Higuero.
Altogether, companies involved with the coalition reported removing or blocking more than three million listings for endangered or threatened species and associated products from their platforms. While these initiatives may catch collectors, Higuero warns that they’re insufficient to nab caches of tonnes of pangolin scales being spirited across porous borders, facilitated by bribing customs agents at busy ports, as well as lax monitoring and policing.

Rhino Impact Bond for the win

Additional financial tools for combatting IWT are being developed by the Coalition for Private Investment in Conservation (CPIC), a global initiative supporting the increase of private, return-seeking investment in conservation projects, thanks to enormous investor demand. One successful example was last year’s $50 million Rhino Impact Bond — response from investors was “off the charts,” according to the Zoological Society of London, which initiated the bond with the support of the finance company Conservation Capital. CPIC has begun channelling more private funds into conservation efforts that specifically reduce IWT.

A CPIC spokesperson stated in an email to Corporate Knights that “there is a huge gap in the finance we need for environmental and biodiversity conservation,” estimating that more than US$400 billion would be needed every year to reverse decades of declining populations. The urgency in halting IWT couldn’t be more dire. A 2019 report by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services predicts the extinction of one million animal and plant species in the next few decades.

Higuero says that enhanced financial diligence must be supported by harsher penalties. “Prosecution is, ultimately, the most important thing. That’s the only way that you’ll create disincentive.” TRAFFIC’s Thomas agrees, pointing out the minimal punishments currently meted out. One smuggler, Gilbert Khoo, convicted this year of smuggling more than £53 million of endangered live eels out of the U.K., received a two-year suspended sentence. Cases like this indicate to criminals that IWT is “a big return for a relatively small risk,” Thomas says.

Ultimately, says HSI’s Peyman, it’s crucial to change public perception of wildlife in the global community from things that are consumed to “something that should be conserved, protected and appreciated.” This, he says, will require a dedicated and determined international effort coordinating all aspects of government, as well as, crucially, the financial sector.

Roberta Staley is a Vancouver-based author, magazine editor and writer and filmmaker.

 Also by Roberta Staley:

Tourism collapse in Kenya raises fears of poaching uptick

Massive floods and COVID gutted the tourism industry in Kenya’s Maasai Mara, now poaching may be on the rise

The post Banking on the wildlife trade appeared first on Corporate Knights.

“There’s Ivy,” says Wall, who became MEP’s director of research and conservation early this year. He points to one icon with a long, meandering digital trail. The thread indicates the 35-year-old elephant’s movements, which are being recorded thanks to an inventive software platform called EarthRanger, which Wall helped develop while undertaking a PhD in elephant spatial behaviour at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Since then, EarthRanger has gone on to become the gold standard for protected-area management initiatives throughout Africa.

“Delta Team is waiting,” Wall says. “They’ll wait until they get a geo-fence break from Ivy. That might happen at 10 pm, it might happen at 2 am. The elephants are more active at night because of people.”

In simple language, a “geo-fence break” means that Ivy is, once again, leading her herd into temptation — crop raiding. Her heavy Kevlar collar — with its lithium batteries, GPS software, very high frequency (VHF) beacon and Iridium satellite transmitter that connects data straight to EarthRanger for real-time, 24/7 tracking — gives her away. The software is equipped with analyzers that, when a new data point is registered — such as Ivy moving to within a kilometre of a village — an algorithm is triggered and sends an alert to MEP staff. Unbeknownst to Ivy, that’s lucky, as one of MEP’s six ranger teams, such as “Delta,” consisting of four to eight rangers, will receive the exact coordinates of Ivy’s nefarious activities on their phones via short message service (SMS). Because they live not only on MEP headquarters but in temporary camps scattered about the vast range MEP monitors, the rangers can react quickly to an alert, jumping in a Land Rover cruiser and motoring over rough, dirt roads to where the crop-raiders are. The rangers will then frighten the elephants away with non-lethal deterrents like chili bombs, which launch pepper spray at the animals, or fly drones over their heads. The high-pitched whining and diving sends pachyderms scurrying, possibly because the noise reminds them of bees.

Mara Elephant Project rangers try to spot a crop-raiding elephant on their drone flight controller.

The rangers, who are trained in conflict mitigation, will record every detail of the marauding: where the event was, what type of crops were damaged, were there preventions such as electric fences, what time did the event occur, how long did it take to shoo the animals away? “We’re hoping that data collection will help inform our conservation practices,” says Wall. These include determining patterns, such as the most likely time of night and time of year elephants raid crops. “One of the things we do is build up a picture. We want to move from conflict to coexistence.”

Easier said than done, with a cascade of social, economic, cultural, climate-change and deforestation factors at play, including a mushrooming human population that is putting enormous pressure on elephants’ range. Pachyderms traverse vast distances, up to 65 kilometres a day, through forest and over grasslands in order to consume the huge amounts of food they need — as much as 270 kilograms a day for a bigger animal. Increasing populations has meant more land is being fenced off, while forests that provide rich and varied food for elephants are being decimated by people clandestinely clear-cutting trees — even in protected areas — and burning them to make charcoal, which is then sold locally and to other African countries.

Elephants decimated

The world has changed dramatically for elephants since the turn of the 20th century. Kenya’s population has grown to 53 million from 2.8 million, and that number is projected to rise to 67 million by 2030. On the continent, the elephant population is now deemed “vulnerable,” plunging to just 415,000 today from 10 million in 1930, the World Wildlife Fund states. The population nosedived with the popularity of big-game and ivory hunting. More recently, from 2011 to 2015, African elephant poaching skyrocketed when the price of ivory tripled in China; 100 pachyderms a day met a violent end, according to World Elephant Day.

In the Maasai Mara, there are 2,400 elephants, their status as a keystone species making every single one of them invaluable. They are Africa’s gardeners, boosting plant biodiversity and spreading nutrients thanks to their seed-laden dung. Dung beetles also carry elephants’ plant-heavy manure underground, a sublime form of carbon sequestration, says Wall. Elephants uproot bushes, push over small trees and dig up soil. Such behaviour, rather than being destructive, is architectural, controlling bush overgrowth and keeping grasslands open and healthy for other animals like gazelles, antelopes, zebras and wildebeests.

A 2019 report by Nature Communications indicates that poaching has declined in the past few years, thanks to China’s ban on ivory in 2017. However, raw ivory is still in high demand in other Asian countries. In the Maasai Mara, poaching has diminished due largely to MEP’s intelligence operations, which the organization focused heavily on during its first full year of operations, in 2012, when 96 elephants were killed, says MEP CEO Marc Goss, a tall, Swahili-speaking, Errol Flynn type with a boisterous laugh. Goss flies MEP’s helicopter, which had been lent to the organization by the Karen Blixen Camp Trust, operated by a nearby eco-tourism safari facility of the same name. In those early years, says Goss, MEP’s intel unit set up sting operations with armed KWS officers to bust ivory dealers and confiscate their illicit caches of tusks. “It used to be very exciting,” Goss recalls. “Death threats, hiding in the bushes, jumping out.”

Mara Elephant Project’s CEO, Marc Goss, lands his helicopter on the edge of the Nyakweri Forest, accompanied by an armed member of the Kenya Wildlife Service. Photos by Tallulah.

Human-elephant conflict

Last year, poaching fatalities fell to four. The big worry today is what Wall calls human-elephant conflict, which killed 12 elephants in 2018. Wall points to another icon on the TV screen. “This is Fred,” he says. “He’s crossed the river. He’s on the other side.” Fred likes to tag-team with co-conspirator Kegol, another collared elephant, when he has mischief on his mind. “The two of them might be lining up to go crop raiding,” Wall says. It’s going to be a busy night for the MEP rangers.
Wall compares elephant crop raiding to human consumption of alcohol. There are the binge drinkers, the occasional tipplers and the teetotallers. Ivy — first collared by MEP in late 2011 — is a binger. Distinctive for having only one left tusk, Ivy has successfully raised two babies and is a much-admired as well as notorious elephant. Wall is a big fan. “She’s super smart. She’s an important elephant to be tracking. She keeps crop raiding, so we’re using her as a beacon for other elephants, as she’s not on her own; she’s with other elephants.”

Despite being attacked in the past with arrows, and in spite of MEP’s ranger teams regularly chasing her away from farmers’ maize and sorghum crops, Ivy continues plundering. It makes for uneasy relations with local Maasai villagers, although the creation of conservancies in regions like the Maasai Mara have made elephant raiding more tolerable to native Kenyans. There are 14 privately managed conservancies in the Maasai Mara region that are run for the benefit of tourists, wildlife and local Maasai tribespeople, who receive guaranteed revenue generated from lease fees in return for leaving their land open to wildlife. MEP’s headquarters, with its permanent housing for rangers, as well as brand-new accommodations and mess hall for visiting researchers, is located in the Lemek Conservancy. MEP operates across all 14 conservancies, which cover just 1,500 square kilometres of the vast area it monitors, including the unprotected areas where human-elephant conflict most commonly occurs.

But even in those areas where Maasai are receiving regular lease payments, human-elephant conflict inevitably arises, while villagers’ patience dwindles. This year, Goss, in order to save a young bull elephant who was running for his life from villagers who had peppered him with 24 arrows, landed the helicopter in between the attackers and the elephant to protect the terrified pachyderm. Goss then flew the helicopter to pick up the veterinarian. They managed to track down the still-fleeing elephant, even though he wasn’t collared. Goss, the vet and MEP rangers tranquilized the animal, pulled arrows out of both sides and treated the deadly wounds, any of which could have become infected, leading to septic shock and organ failure.

Ivy is now on her fourth collar (it costs MEP $26,000 to collar an elephant, which covers the hardware, helicopter and veterinary time, drugs and ongoing digital and field monitoring). Despite her roguish ways, Ivy is one of the elephants enriching the Maasai Mara and the tribal Maasai who inhabit the area, grazing their cattle and growing crops. That’s because elephants are a huge tourist draw. In the Maasai Mara, 600,000 people every year — mainly well-heeled Westerners — come to see the wildlife and especially the elephants. (Tourists also come to the area to see the famous Great Migration of more than two million zebras, wildebeests and gazelles that travel north 800 kilometres from the Serengeti plains in Tanzania into the Maasai Mara, starting each May.)

Each pachyderm brings from US$1.4 million to US$1.6 million in tourism dollars into Kenya in its lifetime, according to Kirsty Smith with the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, which for 42 years has been rescuing baby elephants, orphaned by poachers, and rehabilitating them back into the wild. This huge figure compares to the comparatively paltry sum of $21,000 that organized traffickers receive — the poacher receives far less — for a set of tusks on the black market in Asia.

An elephant mother and her calf near the Mara River are among the pachyderms monitored by Mara Elephant Project’s six ranger teams. Photos by Tallulah.

Ivy goes raiding

Early the next day, Delta Team reports that its rangers have indeed spent the night chasing Ivy and an additional nine elephants from her herd out of a crop field. Several hours later, at 7 am, Delta Team responded to a call from a village just one kilometre away from their temporary camp. A big bull elephant was inside a maize, sorghum and bean field. Residents had tried to protect their village from elephants by installing an electric fence. The animal, however, crashed through the gate, the only portion that wasn’t electrified. He then panicked and couldn’t find his way out. The electricity had to be turned off, allowing him to run through the wire to safety. Sairowua takes out the MEP drone and does a flyover to see how far the rogue animal has fled. He is long gone. Says villager Johnson Moseti, “We love the elephants, but they are causing destruction all the time.”
Back at headquarters, Wall is apprised of the situation and says with a sigh that the big male will likely have to be collared. Sometimes, Wall admits, he’d love to return to pure research and start digging into the massive amount of data he’s accumulated, rather than reacting to such day-to-day concerns as protecting maize-munching elephants. Analyzing the data from EarthRanger will give answers to the big questions related to elephants’ future safety and welfare. Where are the important elephant migration corridors? How much rangeland do they need? What crop alternatives can villagers grow that elephants will find unpalatable, thus lessening human-elephant conflict? Driving all of this is Wall’s concern and deep respect for elephants like Ivy, who walk the earth with such dignity and intelligence. “The world is better with her in it,” he says.

Mara Elephant Project 2018 highlights

The Mara Elephant Project (MEP) has 57 rangers, who monitor the Maasai Mara, and an intelligence arm, which works with the Kenya Wildlife Service to nab poachers. Highlights from 2018 include:

• 46 total arrests
• 356 kilograms of ivory seized
• 324 snares removed
• 203 human-elephant conflicts
attended to
• 17,640 kilometres patrolled on foot
• 141,729 kilometres patrolled by
vehicle

Roberta Staley is an author and magazine editor and writer specializing in medical, science, gender and business reporting.

All photos by Tallulah Photography.

The post The economics of saving Kenya’s elephants appeared first on Corporate Knights.