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.

Atypical as well—for most CEOs—is Nangle’s office attire: runners, jeans and a dark blue cotton shirt. That casual approach is present throughout Modo’s 300 square-metre Vancouver office, with its floor-to-ceiling photos of happy customers (called members), airy workspaces and cornucopia of fresh fruit in the coffee room. But the equanimity belies a serious mandate that is energized by Vancouver’s unique socially progressive spirit. This, says Nangle, is the Modo ethos of “transforming communities.”

Nangle is fairly new to the car-share company. He arrived in Vancouver in July 2016 following three and a half years as the CEO of Purolator, the $1.63 billion annual turnover Toronto-based company known for its premium overnight delivery service. On paper, Modo is tiny in comparison to Purolator, with its 5,000 vehicles and 12,000 employees. Modo has just 700 cars, mostly in British Columbia’s Lower Mainland area, but is revving up a model with potential impact on how billions of people get around in cities worldwide.

At Purolator, Nangle oversaw the company’s move away from a dedicated fleet of airplanes to a co-share model. This led to a significant reduction in greenhouse gases per package since planes could be full of cargo and more fuel-efficient. But Nangle had a desire to invest his time and effort more directly into issues that he was personally interested in—versus delivering a pair of shoes ordered online the same day. Asks Nangle, “Do the millennials driving e-commerce growth and the trend toward ever shorter delivery times, including same-day [delivery], realize the environmental consequences?”

“Do the millennials driving e-commerce growth and the trend toward ever shorter delivery times, including same-day [delivery], realize the environmental consequences?”

 

Concerns about how we’re impacting the planet prompted Nangle to walk away from his Purolator post and return to the mountains of Vancouver, his stomping grounds in the mid-1980s while he was working towards an MBA in international business at the University of British Columbia. “I have always been an environmentalist and I’m concerned about how things are going—the level of risk and pace of impact of climate change is accelerating,” says Nangle, an urban beekeeper who convinced more than a dozen neighbours to plant bee- and butterfly friendly flowerbeds on their boulevards.

Nangle is a pragmatic environmentalist. Riding his bike, taking a bus to the office or eating more sustainably might feel good in the fight against climate calamity but “in the scheme of things, it doesn’t make much of a big difference.” Taking the CEO position at Modo, however, he’d have the chance to directly influence the behaviour of tens of thousands of people, and potentially many more, by way of the Modo model. “At a macro level, it’s about transforming communities for the better: fewer cars, less congestion, better use of space, lower emissions, healthier lifestyles. At the household and individual level it’s about affordability and an affordable life, free of the burden of car ownership.”

Double digit growth Y-O-Y

Modo was first launched in Vancouver in 1997 by Simon Fraser University student Tracey Axelsson as North America’s second car-share service and first car-share co-op. Today, about 22,000 individuals are qualified to reserve and drive vehicles for as little as 30 minutes or as long as 10 days. The co-op has 11,000 members who pay $500 in shares and provide the organization with $5.5 million in capital. In combination with retained earnings, the money is used to fund a fleet of more than 700 vehicles, half of which are in the City of Vancouver. The rest are scattered throughout 24 municipalities in Metro Vancouver, Victoria and Kelowna.

Modo’s impact, however, outweighs its humble corporate stature as a for-profit cooperative that keeps costs low enough to ensure more people join—a tactic that has translated into double-digit growth year-over-year. Nangle looks at the number of vehicles that, today, are absent from Metro Vancouver’s choked roadway system thanks to Modo and its three sister car-sharing operations: Evo, Car2Go and Zipcar. Together, the companies have about 3,000 cars on the road in the Vancouver area, making it North America’s car-sharing capital.

“Car-sharing can be seen as a catalyst for more sustainable transportation choices,” says Nangle. “As long as people own a car they will tend to use it more and walk, cycle and use transit less.”

Studies show that one shared car replaces 10 private vehicles, effectively displacing 30,000 cars. Still, he admits, 30,000 cars “is a drop in the bucket.” Privately owned vehicles—not other car-sharing companies—are the real competition.

Nangle is referring to the 1.6 million light-duty vehicles currently on Metro Vancouver roadways. That’s two cars for every three people. And vehicle numbers will only mushroom as an anticipated one million people migrate into B.C. in the next two decades, which could translate into an additional 700,000 cars and trucks to further complicate the existing Gordian Knot of congestion.

“That will not be sustainable and we need to act now to get ahead of it. [One way is to] grow car sharing as fast as we can,” says Nangle. One of Modo’s key strategies is an accelerated transition to lower and zero emission vehicles. Modo started adding electric vehicles to its fleet in 2011 and electric and hybrid vehicles currently constitute 20% of its stable. Earlier this year it became the first car-share operator to make two zero-emission hydrogen fuel cell vehicles accessible to members.

If you build it, they will come

Modo is Canada’s first car-share operator to make zero-emission hydrogen fuel cell vehicles accessible to members.

Getting private vehicles off the roads requires multifaceted solutions, with good public transit being the biggest incentive to car sharing, says Nangle. Following a successful pitch to Metro Vancouver TransLink’s Open Innovation Call, Modo is working with partners on a plan intended to provide seamless movement across Vancouver using a variety of shared modes: bicycles, cars, buses and Skytrain. The initiative is being piloted in the near future.

How does Nangle think car-sharing and multimodal forms of transportation will fare in the future, as more people migrate to the West Coast? There will always be a split between those who car-share and those who don’t—the dividing line being who has the deeper pockets, Nangle says. (The need for children’s car seats also deters families from car-sharing.) BC’s inflated housing prices have forced many people to give up their vehicles, which in BC costs from $9,500 to $12,000 annually to operate, depending upon size and number of kilometres driven. “Our average member isn’t spending more than $1,000 a year.”

For the record, Nangle doesn’t see one-way ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft (soon to be permitted on B.C.’s streets) as a threat to Modo’s roundtrip car-share model. “We deliberately don’t compete with transit and will not be negatively impacted by Uber.” Adds Nangle, “In fact, to the extent that the availability of ride-hailing will encourage more people to live without the hassle of car ownership, that could prove to be a benefit to Modo.”

One of the biggest potential drivers of change is the autonomous, driverless vehicle, which Nangle estimates will take a decade to come into common use.

But no matter the pace of change, Modo will be at the front of the pack, Nangle says. “I was brought on by the board of directors to work on strategy at a high level to keep this wonderful, well-loved, local and a bit quirky co-op going in a world that’s changing really fast.”

Roberta Staley is a magazine editor and writer specializing in medical, science and business reporting.

The post Ex-Purolator CEO steers car-sharing towards low-carbon future appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The word “Kimadi,” says tribe spokesperson Matheu Lawun, is a word encapsulating three clans – the Matev, Dibaren and Kimbu – which make up a community of about 400 people living 80 kilometres north of the town of Madang. Lawun describes how the clans have lived there since time immemorial – gardening, hunting and relying upon the sacred forest “for building purposes, for our drugs and, during droughts when food is low, we look to the forest for food. There is bread fruit, wild yam and nuts like aila (chestnuts) and walnuts,” says Lawun, a lean 51-year-old Matev-clan member. And, if water supplies run low, the cane rattan vine provides copious amounts of water accessed by cutting a section of the vine and pouring out the refreshing liquid, he adds.

The forest is also a source of health and wellbeing. If someone contracts malaria, which is endemic to much of the country, a tea made from the bark and leaves of the Alstonia scholaris evergreen is drunk as medicine. Other tree brews assuage gastrointestinal upsets, while some plants act as analgesics or antiseptics, staunch blood flow and even provide birth control, says Kimadi tribal member Anna Tome.

Two Papua New Guinean women row out to an anchored tuna fishing trawler to sell the workers fruits like coconut, banana and pineapples that are grown in their forest gardens. Photos by Tallulah Photography.

Signs that the Kimadi’s subsistence lifestyle is under threat first appeared last July when Malaysian company Woodbank Pacific began logging about 10 kilometres upstream. Roads were cut into the steep, hilly wilderness to allow logging-truck access. Then, clear cutting began of softwood and hardwood trees, such as the kwila, which grows up to 50 metres high and is used in a variety of products, from furniture and musical instruments to building bridges. But the loggers were cavalier as they felled these forest giants, letting some logs fall into the waterways and leaving them to rot, contaminating the water flowing downstream to where the Kimadi villagers live, says Lawun. “All the communities downstream are being affected.”

This past February, members of the Kimadi tribe were shocked to find signs posted in their traditional territory by Woodbank Pacific. The signs stated that parts of their land were a “no-go zone,” says Lawun. Two of the clans, the Dibaren and Matev, responded with a letter opposing all logging and surveying operations on their territory. The letter concluded by stating that refusing to comply could result in a delay in operations and possible legal action. If the letter is ignored, says Lawun darkly, “we will go and burn one of their logging vehicles.”

Members of the Kimadi tribe were shocked to find signs posted in their traditional territory by Woodbank Pacific.The signs stated that parts of their land were a “no-go zone.”

 

The Kimadi have reason to be worried about the pernicious ubiquity of logging in their home province. In 2010, Madang province had 2,000,000 hectares of tree cover extending over 76% of its land area. In 2017 alone, it lost 15,900 hectares of tree cover, Global Forest Watch reported.

Ancestral occupation of land

Papua New Guinea, one of the world’s most culturally diverse nations, consists of 19 provinces and the National Capital District. Its population speaks upwards of 850 languages, with each dialect representing a distinct cultural group. These communities, no matter their isolation, hold something as dear as the land that gives them life: Papua New Guinea’s unique system of landownership called “customary tenure.” It gives land resource management to clans, tribes or communities based upon ancestral occupation of the territory where they live. Customary landowners have the freedom to sell their land, lease it or enter into agreements with companies that will generate income in order to pay for infrastructure projects such as schools, health centres, water and electricity services, roads and ports, according to Making Land Work, published by the Australian Agency for International Development.

The Kimadi’s troubles are a microcosm of the impact of development in Papua New Guinea, an ecological gem just north of Australia in Oceania that, while only half the size of Ontario, has some of the richest biodiversity and unique flora and fauna in the world. Here are found tree kangaroos, carnivorous mice, birds of paradise, birdwing butterflies and more than 2,000 species of orchids. The nation, which gained its independence from Australia in 1975, is not only spectacularly beautiful but also resource rich, with significant gas and mineral deposits and abundant fishing grounds.

It is also home to the world’s third largest rainforest, which spans the neighbouring country of Indonesia, making it an important carbon sink and a producer of oxygen, as well as being home to 8.3 million Papua New Guineans, most leading a subsistence lifestyle. However, like rainforests around the world, which now cover just 6% of the Earth’s surface, PNG’s wilderness is being threatened not only by logging interests but mining and agricultural plantations, especially palm oil, found in cosmetics, processed foods, biofuels and pharmaceuticals, among other uses.

In PNG, the roots of the deforestation problem lie with Special Agriculture and Business Leases (SABLs), which have weakened Indigenous Papua New Guineans’ claims to customary landownership. Before the Land Act (1996) came into existence, about 97% of PNG was controlled by Indigenous peoples. However, provisions in the act enabled the state to lease land from customary owners, then re-lease it to private companies or individuals. According to Father Philip Gibbs, a professor and vice-president of research and higher degrees at Divine Word University in Madang, this “lease-leaseback scheme” has resulted in 10% of the country’s total land area ending up in private hands. The national and provincial governments of Papua New Guinea encouraged landowners to enter into the strategy, giving up their land, often based upon false promises of community enrichment or employment, Gibbs says.

Consumer demand high

Although Papua New Guinea seems a world away, and lost in time, the West is implicated in the ongoing destruction of its forest. Consumers, whether they live in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom or the European Union, have a huge appetite for timber products – and manufacturing behemoth China is happy to meet this demand. According to the World Resources Institute, China is the largest importer of logs, which it processes then exports as timber products. In 2016, it imported logs from more than 100 countries, according to the United Nations’ Comtrade database.

Lela Stanley, the Washington-based senior policy advisor, Asia forests, for Global Witness, says the total 2018 export of logs from Papua New Guinea is greater than three million cubic metres, with more than 85% going to China via Malaysian logging companies. Studies by Global Witness and other NGOs indicate a significant percentage, “north of 70%” are illegal, “usually in violation of community land rights,” she says.

Countries like Canada and the U.S. have legislation trying to ensure that illegally sourced wood products are not sold to consumers. This means that retailers should “do everything they can to ensure their imports are legal,” says Stanley. This might involve interviewing a supplier, checking all documentation that declares the source of the products and even undertaking site visits. “But you can’t rely upon documents alone, so it’s really about being quite aggressive in checking your assumptions and cross-checking your suppliers for proof that what they are selling you is actually legal.” (The Canadian Association of Importers and Exporters as well as the Canada China Business Council declined comment while the Chinese embassy in Ottawa didn’t respond to requests for an interview.)

North of 70% of Papua New Guinea’s

logging exports are illegal and

“usually in violation of community land rights.”

The results of rampant logging and forest clearance are alarming on a world scale, since these once-pristine carbon sinks have been turned into sources of global emissions. Today, deforestation is responsible for 17% of annual greenhouse global emissions, says Stanley, of which tropical deforestation accounts for nearly half (8%). “That’s quite significant as tropical forests should be a carbon sink – not a source – which is why protecting them is such a critical issue, not just for communities in Papua New Guinea but the globe.”

Fighting to overturn leases

Peter Bosip is executive director of the Center for Environmental Law and Community Rights (CELCOR), a not-for-profit based in Papua New Guinea’s capital city of Port Moresby. CELCOR, which promotes and defends environmental and customary landowners’ rights, is trying to fight SABL leases. Since 2005, says Bosip, there have been 72 SABLs issued, with 27 found to be illegally acquired. This resulted in 5.2 million hectares, or 52,000 square kilometres, of land being logged or turned into oil palm plantation from 2005-2011, an area seven times larger than the Greater Toronto Area. “That’s huge,” he says. “We have been demanding the government take appropriate actions by cancelling all the SABLs and give the land back to customary landowners.”

Bosip explains how SABLs are illegally or clandestinely acquired by developers, most of them logging companies. Companies will connect with individuals who may or may not be members of a clan or tribe and strike a deal with them as representatives of the community. The government will then give its approval to the proposal. But when the developer goes to the area, to clear cut in order to plant palm oil, for example, “the majority of the land owners are taken by surprise.”

Members of the Kimadi tribe in Madang province are trying to stop a Malaysian logging company from cutting down trees on their traditional territory. Photos by Tallulah Photography

Bosip believes that many of these deals are facilitated by bribes. He points to widespread government corruption among government officials, a claim backed by Transparency International, which ranks Papua New Guinea 135 out of 180 countries on the Corruption Perceptions Index, comparable to nations like Russia. As a result, CELCOR has requested help from the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner in Geneva. Since 2011, the commissioner has been sending letters to the PNG government expressing concern that SABLs “infringed Indigenous peoples’ rights.” The PNG government has consistently ignored the commissioner’s request for dialogue.

Another example of corruption, says Bosip, is the lack of taxes paid to the government by foreign companies. The companies declare a loss, despite exporting more and more logs every year. Although the companies pay royalties, taxes to the state are paid based on how much profit the firm admits to making. “They declare they are making zero or even negative profit.”

Such exploitation of PNG’s abundant resources, says Gibbs, leads to economic stagnation for much of the country, including a “steady decline in infrastructure and services in recent years, particularly in rural areas.” In 2018, the United Nations Development Programme placed PNG at 153 out of 189 countries on the Human Development Index, which measures basic human development achievements in a country.

There are worrisome developments ahead, says Bosip. In 2018, PNG announced its formal commitment to China’s $1 trillion-plus Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), an ambitious development strategy embracing 152 countries. Bosip says the PNG government hasn’t revealed publicly the “terms and conditions that have been agreed to by the state.” He fears China’s so-called debt trap diplomacy, whereby a country faces unsustainable debt and is forced to give up strategic assets.

This happened in Sri Lanka in 2017 when a Chinese company gained a 99-year lease port after the country failed to pay back loans to Chinese banks. “The worst thing that can happen is the Chinese say to the Papua New Guinea government, ‘you defaulted on your loan payment so we will take over all the land and especially the forest land.’ So, we are very worried,” Bosip says.

Papua New Guinea is facing a future that will see even more of its forests razed as the government pushes for more palm oil production while logging companies continue to conduct themselves in a rapacious manner. For tribes like the Kimadi, development of natural resources bodes an ill future. For them, not only their land but their lifestyle is on the chopping block.

Roberta Staley is a magazine editor and writer specializing in medical, science and business reporting.

All photos by Tallulah Photography.

Also by Roberta Staley: Trees and the laws of supply and demand: Illegal import bans and ecotourism protect tropical forests

The Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada helped fund this reporting endeavour.

The post Papua New Guinea on the chopping block appeared first on Corporate Knights.

About 7.3 million hectares of forest – an area the size of Panama – is lost every year to deforestation, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. At the current pace, the Earth’s tropical rainforests will be gone within the next century.

The demand side

An alternative development model is clearly needed for countries like Papua New Guinea (PNG) that struggle with rule of law and corrupt governance, in order to meet UN Sustainable Development Goals and lift Papua New Guineans out of poverty while ensuring environmental integrity.

Much will depend upon China, not only because of its strengthened trade relations via the Belt and Road Initiative but also because it is the destination for PNG’s raw logs. Beibei Yin, the China policy and advocacy senior advisor for Global Witness, says China should extend its own sustainability policies to PNG. China has invested US$350 billion into programs like forest conservation and erosion reduction as well as poverty reduction to protect its own natural resources and adopt a more sustainable and long-term development model. “But China hasn’t broadened its ambitions overseas yet,” Yin says.

Pressure can be brought to bear by China’s trading partners, says Yin, pointing to an EU-China joint study, titled “Feasibility analysis of the incorporation of timber legality requirements into Chinese laws or regulations to promote trade in legal forest products,” which promotes mandatory laws and regulations that would oblige checks on the legality of timber imports. This is a way for China to protect its global trading reputation, says Yin. Unfortunately, “progress has been slow.” (One Chinese company, Nature Home, which manufactures floorings, wooden doors, cabinets, etc., has publicly committed not to buy any SABL-sourced wood, says Yin.)

Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), the 21-nation Pacific Rim association that includes Canada, China and the United States, could play a significant role in promoting sustainability in PNG. For the first time, PNG, which is APEC’s poorest member, hosted the organization’s annual summit this past November in Port Moresby. APEC’s stated priorities include sustainability as well as innovative and inclusive growth, sustainable agriculture in response to climate change and a rules-based multilateral trading system.

As a leading example, Canada has strict laws preventing the import of products illegally sourced. These include the Wild Animal and Plant Protection and Regulation of International and Interprovincial Trade Act. The act makes it illegal to import illegally harvested plants, including wood, so importers do need to know what they are buying or risk potentially millions of dollars in fines, according to the Government of Canada Justice Laws website.

At the vanguard of progressive legislation is a new bill introduced this past February in California titled the California Deforestation-Free Procurement Act. It broadens America’s Lacey Act, which banned trade on illegally sourced wood products in 2008. The Deforestation-Free Procurement Act applies to almost all deforestation commodities such as palm oil, beef, leather and soy, while providing misdemeanor charges for companies that violate it, in addition to sanctions. The act must be passed by the California senate.

Alternative income stream

The village of Labablia, Papua New Guinea. Tallulah Photography.

Kisi Issack’s village of Labablia, an informal collection of wood and grass homes on stilts, sits a coconut’s throw away from the Solomon Sea tideline on the Huon Coast in Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea (PNG). Labablia is isolated from the outside world, accessible only by a picturesque, if bone-shaking, motorboat ride from the port city of Lae, PNG’s second largest metropolis with just over 100,000 people.

Issack, tiny and sinewy, with a weathered and kindly face, shelters in the shade out of the 30 C-plus muggy heat, slacking her thirst with just-opened, sweet, nutty coconut water. Issack is a senior guide and secretary with the Kamiali Wildlife Management Area (KWMA), founded by a Dutch NGO two decades ago. Today, KWMA is a biological research station that attracts scientists and hardy ecotourists (who pay C$400 for a five day visit) study the surrounding lowland tropical forest and the coral reefs as well as monitor leatherback turtles, which come to Lababia’s white sandy beaches every year to lay their eggs. Decreasing in number, leatherbacks, the world’s largest turtle, are classified as vulnerable, due in large part to human consumption of their billiard ball-size eggs.

Issack is proud of the role the villagers of Labablia have come to play as land and oceanic stewards. Not only are they helping protect their ancestral homeland, but the money that they make from tourism helps to support health and education in the community of 800, who live dispersed on thousands of hectares that they own under Papua New Guinea’s system of customary landownership. This alternative income stream is a bulwark against logging companies and palm oil plantations, since it funds vital infrastructure, such as community schools. Other indigenous groups, Issack says, have given up their traditional lands to logging interests in return for money, only to face long-term environmental effects. “Logging is short-term benefit,” she says.

As part of their KWMA stewardship, Issack and her fellow villagers are focusing on initiatives to preserve the sandy beaches where the leatherback turtles lay their eggs. Climate change and rising tides — especially noticeable since 2016 — are eroding beaches. In order to preserve these crucial nesting sites, Issack says there are plans underway to plant kalapulim trees close to the tideline to act as wave breakers and anchor the beach. Preserving the integrity of the land and waterways is a way to honour the ancestors, says Issack, while “conserving it for the future of our children.”

Read Roberta Staley’s feature: Papua New Guinea on the chopping block

Roberta Staley is a magazine editor and writer specializing in medical, science and business reporting.

Photos by Tallulah Photography.

The post Trees and the laws of supply and demand appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Despite ongoing technological progress throughout the aeronautical industry, the area of air transport that remains grounded is one where the need – often caused by disasters like Typhoon Haiyan – is the greatest. Ideally, what is required is an aircraft that can land and take off without an airstrip, carry tonnes of supplies and personnel, is stable once it drops its payload (eliminating the need for ground crew), has a small horsepower engine that is frugal on fuel, can travel thousands of kilometres and is tough enough to withstand rough weather and even gunfire.

An international horse race to commercialize such a craft has pitted established aeronautical corporations like Lockheed Martin against dynamic entrepreneurial innovators like California’s Worldwide Aeros and Canada’s Solar Ship. The demand for a low-maintenance, dependable cargo craft nimble enough to navigate mountains and hills and land on uneven ground, ice, snow and water comes not only from military and government, it also comes from the mining, oil and gas sectors and isolated aboriginal groups.

The key difference between such a vessel and, say, the venerable Goodyear blimp, is the ability to transport huge payloads, says Tim Kenny, director of engineering at Worldwide Aeros, which is headquartered in Los Angeles. The company is one of the frontrunners in the development of such an airship, thanks largely to eight years of financial backing by the United States Department of Defense and NASA.

One of Worldwide Aeros’ flagship vessels is called the Aeroscraft, which underwent extensive field-testing last year but won’t be ready for commercialization until 2016. The 70-metre-long vessel has been built with unique features enabling it to fly in and out of remote areas that a helicopter or plane can’t safely access, Kenny says. “You could take in a whole platoon – about 30 or 35 guys – with vehicles and supplies, all at one drop.”

Helium highs

The Aeroscraft has long been in development and features vertical takeoff and landing, allowing it to manoeuvre in mountainous and heavily treed areas. It also boasts speeds of nearly 185 kilometres per hour. Called a hybrid, the craft is a combination of lighter-than-air technology, meaning it gets the majority of its lift from a gas like helium, which is contained in a highly engineered skin made of a material like Kevlar.

A smaller percentage of its lift comes from heavier-than-air technology: gas engines and aerodynamic wings. One of the design features that Worldwide Aeros has developed and patented is called control-of-static heaviness (COSH), enabling vertical ascent, descent and hovering. Equally importantly, COSH stabilizes the craft after it unloads, Kenny explains. COSH technology was inspired by submarines, which compress air to allow water in to create ballast for descent. For ascent, the compressed air is released, forcing the water out. With the Aeroscraft, the helium is either compressed or expanded by allowing air into specially designed envelopes in the balloon, creating upwards and downwards mobility. “We never have to dissipate helium or exhaust it outside,” Kenny says.

Since the military has provided the majority of financial backing, Worldwide Aeros has focused on fulfilling its demands and needs with a workhorse vessel that is expected to command annual lease fees of $25 million or $55 million, depending on airship size. But the company is also drafting plans for the creation of recreational aircraft for high-in-the sky casinos and wilderness excursions for well-heeled tourists.

Competing with Worldwide Aeros is U.K.-based Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV). It has developed several prototypes that are capable of landing on a variety of surfaces, including ice, desert and water, according to spokesperson Chris Daniels. HAV even created a lake, funded by the U.S. Navy, at its U.K. facility for testing water landings of a 15-metre-long prototype.

The HAV’s 92-metre airship can carry a payload of 50 tonnes. Engineers are working on scaling up, creating a 90- to 120-metre-long aircraft with a payload potential of 200 tonnes – enough to carry vehicles and other heavy equipment. “The bigger they are, the more proportionally they can lift,” says Daniels. “That’s why the airships of the 1920s and 1930s were so massive.”

Kevlar edge

Those were the halcyon days for airships, an era that ground to a halt when the massive hydrogen-filled Hindenburg exploded in 1937 and left 36 people dead. Hydrogen is highly flammable while helium, used in today’s airships, is not. But hydrogen is not necessarily as dangerous as the tragic accident implied. The Hindenburg’s biggest weakness was the material used to contain the hydrogen, on top of the fact that in those days it didn’t have high-tech radar, advanced weather forecasting, GPS and many other gizmos commonly used today.

That, says Daniels, is a key reason modern dirigibles are different. Today’s airship skins, for example, are virtually indestructible. Made of a lightweight, carbon-fibre Kevlar weave, airship skins have undergone gruelling testing. One dirigible was fired at 200 times with 50-calibre bullets and stayed inflated for two hours, he says.

The creation of a viable commercial industry of high-payload hybrid aircraft is tantalizingly close, and HAV, like Worldwide Aeros, is also planning luxury travel airships. But the more immediate need is in northern Canadian aboriginal communities and with industries like mining. This would include delivering fuel and supplies and flying people in and out of remote First Nation communities, many of which have expressed strong interest in the idea. With an airship that is 100- to 120-metres long, “you could carry 200 people,” Daniels says.

A few years ago, HAV negotiated the sale of two aircrafts with Canadian company Discovery Air, which provides aviation and logistics services in northern environments. That deal was never consummated. Nonetheless, the vessels are a natural fit with Canada’s rugged and desolate wilderness. HAV’s “long-endurance” aircraft can stay airborne for five days, providing a platform for geological surveys, surveillance and academic research such as monitoring animal migration and melting rates of Arctic ice packs.

HAV is also refitting a long-endurance aircraft that it sold to the U.S. Army for work in Afghanistan in 2012. The vessel was grounded after one 90-minute maiden flight, a result of budget cuts and the accelerated withdrawal plans of American forces from Afghanistan. But HAV, in what could be described as the deal of a lifetime, bought back the $100 million craft for $300,000. It plans to use the vessel as a demonstration craft to help sell a new generation of models in 2016. “We are currently dealing with interest from some Canadian mining companies,” says Daniels.

Solar assist

The company faces tough competition from Toronto-based Solar Ship, which is developing three prototype airships with different cargo capacities. Some Solar Ship prototypes are solar-electric powered, which has less range and carrying ability than a hybrid airship. However, the company is also developing its own hybrid, utilizing both solar and gasoline power with customized electric motors – a compromise between the twin demands of sustainability and efficiency, says founder and CEO Jay Godsall.

Solar Ship, which is focused on testing its smallest hybrid airship called the Caracal, is carving an aeronautical niche in Canada that piggybacks on the venerable northern bush plane system. Last year, this objective was bolstered by the injection of a $2.2 million grant from Sustainable Development Technology Canada, which has helped considerably to refine a prototype that can dependably service remote communities and the increasing needs of mining companies. Godsall says that the demand is accelerating due to climate change. Canada’s famous ice road system – the main conduit for goods and services to the North – is deteriorating due to warming temperatures.

Solar Ship’s aircrafts are nimble, requiring a short runway for takeoff and landing –100 metres with a full payload and 50 metres empty. Solar Ship is also developing amphibious aircraft that, like HAV’s prototype, can land and take off from water. Its Caracal airship, meanwhile, has come to the attention of the World Health Organization, which is exploring use of a prototype for delivery of medical supplies to strife-torn nations in Africa, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo and Burundi. The immediate plan, says Godsall, is to start training pilots who already fly with non-governmental organizations like Mission Aviation Fellowship and the Flying Doctors Society of Africa.

Global challenges like extreme weather events and military conflicts are, unfortunately, not going away. This will accelerate the demand for the dirigibles currently being engineered in hangars around Canada, the U.S., Europe and the U.K. First seen floating above the English Channel in 1785, then reincarnated in various permutations over two centuries, it seems the time has finally come for airships to fill the skies.

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