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Category: biodiversity

  • Herds Of Life-Sized Animal Puppets Set Off On Climate Awareness Journey

    The Herds, a public art initiative of life-sized animal puppets that aims to raise awareness about the climate crisis, has set off on a 12,400-mile journey starting in central Africa and traveling through 20 cities in four months to the Arctic Circle.

    The mobile art piece of hundreds of intricately crafted puppets began on April 10 in Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and has since visited Lagos, Nigeria, and Dakar, Senegal, with its next stop in Marrakesh, Morocco.

    “The idea is to put in front of people that there is an emergency – not with scientific facts, but with emotions,” said Sarah Desbois, producer of The Herds Senegal, as The Guardian reported.

    The post Herds Of Life-Sized Animal Puppets Set Off On Climate Awareness Journey appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Opinion: The Coffee & Cocoa Crisis Is Here. Here’s How Business Can Adapt

    coffee climate change
    6 Mins Read

    I love coffee. I drink it every day. It’s part of my culture, my mornings, my memories. But behind each cup is a fragile system, and that system is breaking.

    Coffee and cocoa are daily rituals for many of us, but behind every cup or chocolate bar lies a fragile system under increasing stress. What used to be distant projections of climate disruption are now real-time events: volatile harvests, surging prices, and shrinking yields.

    In 2024, cocoa prices quadrupled. Coffee hit a 50-year high in 2025. Farmers are leaving these crops behind. Hedging no longer works. And the effects are rippling across the supply chain.

    If your business depends on these ingredients, whether in chocolate bars, coffee blends, or ready-to-drink beverages, this isn’t a passing blip. It’s a structural shift.

    The supply chains are broken (and it’s costing you money)

    coffee prices
    Coffee prices have reached a 50-year high | Courtesy: MacroTrends

    Cocoa prices exploded from $2,500 per tonne in 2023 to over $10,000 in 2024, the highest in 46 years. Even after retreating slightly, prices remain three times higher than historical norms.

    Coffee futures hit $4.24 per lb in 2025, a 50-year high, as droughts in Brazil and Vietnam (which together supply 50% of global beans) slashed yields.

    Why does this matter for businesses? Input costs are rising and increasingly volatile, putting pressure on margins and making it harder to forecast. Hedging can’t keep up. But the biggest risk isn’t just price, it’s access. As supply becomes more unstable, securing reliable ingredients is becoming harder by the season.

    This isn’t a temporary squeeze. The narrow equatorial zones where these crops grow are becoming unpredictable. Rising temperatures, erratic rainfall, and disease (like swollen shoot virus in West African cocoa) are systemic threats.

    Bottom line: If your products rely on coffee or cocoa, your margins and supply security are at risk.

    Traditional solutions are too slow

    The industry’s playbook – breeding hardier plants, shifting farms north, and promoting regenerative practices – is critical, but too slow. New coffee varieties take 10-15 years to develop, test, and scale. Cocoa trees require three to five years to mature, if they survive pests and drought.

    Meanwhile, land availability is shrinking. World Coffee Research estimates that 50% of current coffee-growing land could become unproductive by 2050.

    starbucks climate resilient varietals
    Courtesy: Anay Mridul/Green Queen

    The overlooked solution: alternatives that work

    Here’s the truth: businesses don’t need perfect replacements. They need ingredients that are functional, cost-stable, and compatible with today’s supply chains. Ours delivers on all three – and tastes great while doing so.

    At Compound Foods, we’re building beanless coffee and cocoa ingredients designed to:

    • Reduce exposure to price spikes (no dependency on fragile origins)
    • Slot into existing manufacturing (no reformulation headaches)
    • Meet sustainability targets (up to 70% lower carbon footprint vs conventional coffee)

    How we do it

    Our journey began with a simple but powerful question: what makes coffee and cocoa what they are?

    We mapped over 800 compounds that create coffee’s flavour and aroma. Then we asked: can we replicate those experiences using what we already have? We explored byproducts from other food processes, seeds, cereals, and fibres, and applied food science, fermentation, and formulation design to transform them.

    Our first hypothesis was to use precision fermentation to recreate specific key compounds. But we quickly learned that no single compound could replicate the complex sensory experience of coffee. Even chlorogenic acid, a major coffee molecule, didn’t move the needle alone.

    So we took inspiration from nature, from how coffee farmers use fermentation to influence flavour. We built a base using whole foods that mimicked the coffee cherry. We identified ingredients with molecular overlap, tested them in the lab, and developed a fermentation process using microbial strains sourced from global coffee cherries.

    Over time, and with input from baristas, Q graders, and sensory scientists (including blind testing with Purdue University), we created a formulation that could rival the complexity and acidity of high-quality coffee. In one study with 120 tasters, 60% preferred our coffee over Blue Bottle and Stumptown.

    We also explored cell culture, partnering with a lab in Costa Rica to grow coffee plant cells. The result? It still required roasting and fermentation, and sensory performance fell short. After years of testing and iteration, our current method delivered the best outcomes across flavour, cost, and scalability.

    And what began with coffee, we Bean-Free, Climate-Ready: Compound Foods Expands Sustainable Coffee & Cocoa Ingredient Platform, developing high-quality alternatives in half the time, leveraging the ingredient database and expertise we built.

    minus coffee
    Courtesy: Compound Foods

    Why it matters now

    The current market dynamics are creating an opening. Brands are open to alternatives. Especially in cocoa, where consistency and cost have become pain points, ingredient diversification is no longer niche: it’s a strategy.

    Coffee has more emotional complexity. We get it. I love specialty coffee. It’s the only coffee I personally drink. The industry’s commitment to quality, soil health, and fair practices is unmatched. But specialty coffee accounts for just 10-15% of the market. The rest is commodity-driven, and that’s where the greatest risk lies.

    Let’s be clear: we are not trying to replace specialty coffee. If all coffee could be produced with the same care and ethics, we’d be in a very different place. But for the vast majority of brands and manufacturers, cost and consistency are non-negotiables.

    That’s why we’re offering a solution:

    • for small brands looking to reduce formulation costs;
    • for CPG companies protecting margins;
    • for distributors needing a backup supply.

    The path forward

    This isn’t about replacing coffee or cocoa. It’s about making them more resilient and closing the future gap between supply and demand.

    • Blending: Stretch expensive commodities by combining with alternatives.
    • Hedging: Secure secondary supply, insulated from climate shocks.
    • Innovating: Partner with food scientists to build future-proof products.

    If cocoa stays above $8,000 per tonne, alternatives save millions. If coffee yields drop another 20%, blends protect revenue.

    cocoa free chocolate
    Courtesy: Compound Foods

    Securing the future of coffee and cocoa through partnerships

    The coffee and cocoa industries won’t disappear, but business models built on low-cost, resilient, abundant supply will.

    Companies that thrive will be those that:

    • Diversify ingredients now
    • Invest in supply-chain resilience (not just sustainability optics)
    • Partner with innovators to bridge the gap

    At Compound Foods, we’re giving businesses the tools to act today. Because in a climate-disrupted world, the biggest risk isn’t change, it’s waiting too long to adapt.

    I want to drink coffee every morning. I want to indulge in cocoa treats forever. But the future of these crops won’t be built on nostalgia. It will be built by those willing to evolve. And the time to do so is now.

    The post Opinion: The Coffee & Cocoa Crisis Is Here. Here’s How Business Can Adapt appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • Biodiversity Study Highlights Destructive Global Impact Of Humans

    One of the largest studies ever conducted on biodiversity loss worldwide has revealed that humans are having a severely detrimental impact on global wildlife.

    The number of species is declining, as well as the composition of populations.

    “Biological diversity is under threat. More and more plant and animal species are disappearing worldwide, and humans are responsible. Until now, however, there has been no synthesis of the extent of human intervention in nature and whether the effects can be found everywhere in the world and in all groups of organisms,” a press release from University of Zurich (UZH) said.

    The post Biodiversity Study Highlights Destructive Global Impact Of Humans appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Grass-Fed Beef A Deceptive Climate ‘Solution’ That Misleads Consumers, Confirms New Study

    grass fed beef climate change
    5 Mins Read

    Grass-fed beef is as bad for the planet as the industrial version, and significantly more carbon-intensive than plant proteins, a new study has found.

    You may be eating grass-fed beef because you’ve been told it’s better for the climate. Turns out this claim is misleading “a large portion of the population who really do wish their purchasing decisions will reflect their values”, according to Gidon Eshel, an environmental physics professor at Bard College and the lead author of a new study lifting the curtain on the planetary impact of beef.

    Proponents of grass-fed beef argue that it’s more environmentally friendly because cattle grazing can enhance soil carbon sequestration (offsetting production emissions in the process), but Eshel and his colleagues found that this wasn’t the case.

    Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, their research suggests that beef derived from cows only raised on pastures does not present a climate benefit over grain-fed beef. Even the most efficient grass-fed operations had 10-25% higher emissions than industrially farmed beef. The former were also three to 40 times more carbon-intensive than proteins derived from plants or other animals.

    In fact, replacing cropland-based beef with plant proteins is “far more environmentally lucrative”, according to the authors. While this is not the first study proving that grass-fed beef is a source of greenwashing rather than a climate solution, it’s still a damning indictment of the claim that any kind of beef is good for the planet.

    Grass-fed beef is just as bad as industrial farming

    grass fed beef better for environment
    Courtesy: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

    Beef is the most polluting food on Earth, generating twice as many emissions as the second-worst product (dark chocolate). About half of these emissions come from methane, a harmful gas 80 times more potent than carbon over a 20-year period.

    The average cow produces 200 lbs of methane a year – about half the emissions of an average car. According to the UN, cattle are responsible for over 60% of livestock emissions, which itself account for up to 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

    In the US, only about 5% of cows are grass-fed, with the majority being raised in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), which are not just harmful to the animals, but also to human health and the planet.

    Eshel and his colleagues used newly available estimates of beef cattle yields, herd methane production, and feed needs from across the US, and factored this data into a model that simulated and compared the emissions of grass-fed and industrial beef.

    They incorporated estimates on the carbon uptake of grasslands into the model and excluded lush pasturelands with high rainfalls where other crops could be grown. This was done to align with the idea that cattle should only eat what humans cannot, and thus not take up land suitable for growing food crops.

    The researchers found that grass-fed beef produces more emissions than industrial beef. While the carbon footprint of the former shrunk after factoring in the effects of soil carbon sequestration, it was still not low enough to position grass-fed beef as a better-for-the-planet solution.

    This is because soil sequestration through grazing reduced grass-fed beef’s emissions from 280-390 kg of CO2e per kg of protein to 180-290 kg of CO2e, but industrial beef’s emissions were still at 180-220kg of CO2e.

    “Accounting for soil sequestration lowers the emissions, and makes grass-fed beef more similar to industrial beef, but it does not under any circumstances make this beef desirable in terms of carbon balance,” Eshel told the Washington Post. “That argument does not hold.”

    Swapping beef for plant proteins could bring large climate benefits

    grass fed beef
    Courtesy: BananaStock via Photo Images

    In stark contrast, non-beef alternatives generated 10-70 kg of CO2e per kg of protein, meaning that plant-based alternatives, pork, poultry, cheese and milk produced just 5-35% of the emissions of the least intensive grass-fed beef modelled in the study.

    The researchers highlight how beef only contributes 5-20% of the calories from protein intake in the US, despite its production dominating the resource use in the food industry.

    “Compared with non-beef alternatives, grass-fed beef yields at most one-tenth of the protein per kg CO2eq emitted regardless of agricultural intensity,” the study reads. “Beef – extensive, intensive, or anything in between – is not a competitive form of resource use.”

    The authors argue that pasturelands should be rewilded to provide nature-based carbon sequestration and biodiversity benefits, as well as boost food security. Plant proteins can prove handy here – if 120 million hectares of semi-arid rangeland in the US were converted from beef to plant production, it would save annual emissions between 85 and 195 million tonnes of CO2e.

    Likewise, croplands in high-rainfall areas can be repurposed from beef grazing to plant-based food for direct human consumption. Using only as much of these areas as required to replace protein from beef with plants would lower yearly emissions by 260 to 400 million tonnes of CO2e and free 50 to 120 million hectares of farmland.

    Environmental journalist George Monbiot has famously railed against grass-fed beef advocates, calling pasture-fed meat production the “major cause of agricultural sprawl”. “The world’s urban areas occupy just 1% of the planet’s land surface, in comparison with the 26% used for grazing. Agricultural sprawl inflicts a very high ecological opportunity cost: the missing ecosystems that would otherwise exist,” he wrote in 2022.

    “We live in a bubble of delusion about where our food comes from and how it is produced. We’ve been dealing in stories when we should be dealing in numbers,” he added.

    The new study is especially relevant as it comes during the tenure of Robert F Kennedy Jr as US health secretary. He has previously laid out plans to shift away from intensive meat production and advocated for grass-fed, pasture-raised meat, despite limited evidence about the latter’s health benefits, and a trove of evidence finding it just as bad for the climate.

    “I have a hard time imagining, even, a situation in which it will prove environmentally, genuinely wise, genuinely beneficial, to raise beef,” Eshel told the Associated Press. His advice for people who truly want to look after the planet? “Don’t make beef a habit.”

    The post Grass-Fed Beef A Deceptive Climate ‘Solution’ That Misleads Consumers, Confirms New Study appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • UN Talks End With Countries Backing Biodiversity Conservation Plan

    The COP16 UN Biodiversity Conference in Rome has ended with a plan for nations to contribute $200 billion a year for the protection of the planet’s biodiversity by 2030, but critics say it’s not enough.

    The countries came to an agreement on how to contribute the funds. The accord also includes a plan for raising $20 billion annually to finance conservation in developing nations starting this year, with the amount rising to $30 billion a year by 2030, reported The Associated Press.

    Following hours of tense discussions, delegates at the conference applauded when the deal was finally reached.

    The post UN Talks End With Countries Backing Biodiversity Conservation Plan appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Rise And Repair Alliance Advocates For Wild Rice Protection Act

    Saint Paul, MN — Urging Minnesota legislators to adopt bills related to environmental conservation at the start of a new legislative session, the Rise and Repair Alliance gathered at the Minnesota State Capitol on January 14, 2025. For many activists present, the main focus was on saving wild rice, which would be a key measure in safeguarding the natural resource as an Indigenous legal right.

    At the Capitol, singer, artist and organizer Eoin Small hosted activists, providing snacks and coffee while they signed postcards with messages intended for legislators. Unicorn Riot was there to document the family-friendly art-filled action and hear from environmentalists.

    The post Rise And Repair Alliance Advocates For Wild Rice Protection Act appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Putting Nature At The Center

    Life may be unique to Earth. Even if single-celled organisms can readily evolve in conditions that exist on millions or billions of other planets, we have no actual evidence that complex, multi-cellular life exists anywhere else in the vastness of space.

    Bacteria appeared on our planet roughly 3.7 billion years ago; by 2 billion years ago, the tree of life was branching into what would become a stunning web of creatures, huge and tiny. Plants, animals, and fungi proliferated, formed relationships, and produced ecosystems. The result was a planet full of life, and one whose atmosphere, temperature, chemical composition, and weather are all largely shaped by the side effects of the strategies that organisms use to thrive.

    The post Putting Nature At The Center appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Paella with Quinoa? This Future Seed Project Aims to Inspire Climate Action & Preserve Native Foods

    seeding tomorrow
    7 Mins Read

    A new project is using climate analogue mapping to send native seeds to regions that will have similar environments decades down the line.

    What do the dishes of the future look like? Will we be eating the same traditional dishes in 60 years that we do now? What if we could take heritage crops from one part of the world and grow them elsewhere to address food insecurity and the changing climate?

    These are questions Prof Jonathon Keats is contending with. The conceptual artist and University of Arizona researcher is working on a project to preserve locally and culturally important seeds for the future.

    But it’s not your typical seed banking project. Keats is exploring how native seeds that grow in one part of the world today – but are threatened by climate change – can thrive in another area that will have a similar climate decades from now.

    The idea is based on climate analogue mapping, a model devised by fellow researchers from the University of Maryland and North Carolina State University. Essentially, it determines where you’ll find the climate today that your current place of residence will experience in the future – whether that’s 10 or 20 years, or even a century or more.

    jonathon keats
    Courtesy: Barak Shrama

    The predictions are based on UN models and were created to understand the changes in flora and fauna as a result of the climate crisis. Keats was interested in the cultural aspect of this methodology, using it to identify the ideal future regions for foods that are traditional to you.

    His project, called Seeding Tomorrow, involves sending local seeds in jars to climate analogue regions and burying them in a public space, as well as distributing seed packets to families. They’re meant as agricultural insurance – but also as an incentive to take a stand against climate change. If those seeds stay buried or unused, that’s a win for the planet.

    “Agriculture moves very slowly. And farmers need to know that there will be a demand for crops, well in advance of making the commitment to changing crops,” says Keats, who is also working on an atlas of traditional ecological knowledge to help people make long-term decisions.

    “So this is a way to be able to transfer that knowledge to prepare people, and to also create the systemic level of experimentation and have the confidence to make the changes that are going to most likely be needed,” he explains.

    Born out of a heritage cuisine project

    tasting tomorrow
    Courtesy: Omar Shihab/Boca

    Seeding Tomorrow is a sister project of a heritage cuisine initiative called Tasting Tomorrow. Keats is based at the University of Arizona’s Desert Laboratory in Tucson, whose climate analogue is Burgos, a city in Spain.

    He worked with James Beard Award-winning chef Janos Wilder (also based in Tucson) to reimagine olla podrida, a traditional dish from Burgos. “How do we sustain your cultural heritage – and specifically your culinary heritage – but in a way that is sustainable in terms of the ingredients and demands [of] irrigation, energy, input, and all the other factors,” Keats explains the thinking behind the project.

    The Spanish red bean is a key ingredient in olla podrida. To substitute it, Wilder used the tepary bean, grown by the Tohono O’odham people in the Sonoran desert since time immemorial and is highly drought-adapted to Tucson. Similarly, instead of the rice used as a binder for the blood sausage in the stew, he utilised Sonoran white wheatberries as an alternative.

    The project helps to offer a vision for what olla podrida could look like in 50 years’ time, when Burgos’s climate resembles the hot, dry climate of Tucson today.

    Other examples of climate-analogue locations include San Francisco and Tangier in Morocco, Mexico City and the Sanaa region of Yemen, as well as Hong Kong and the northwest Indian city of Alipurduar.

    Another such link exists between Seville, Spain and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, which Keats demonstrated at a Taste of Tomorrow dinner at the Dubai Future Forum last month, in partnership with BOCA restaurant. The idea was to highlight how many places in the Gulf have the future climate of regions in southern Spain.

    dubai future forum
    Courtesy: Isabella Porolo

    Green Queen founding editor Sonalie Figueiras was present at the event, and tried dishes like a paella made from quinoa and seaweed and oyster mushroom kebabs (instead of the pork-based pinchos morunos). “The use of quinoa was proposed by the restaurant, and fits their interest in sustainable ingredients that can be grown in local climate conditions. That said, it has not been traditionally grown in the Gulf,” says Keats.

    These efforts point to a mounting and crucial problem. A tenth of the world’s population has been facing chronic hunger thanks to a combination of Covid-19, geopolitical conflicts, and climate change. If the latter isn’t addressed, the risk of hunger and malnutrition could rise by 20% by 2050.

    And about 80% of the people at risk from climate-change-induced crop failures and hunger live in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, highlighting why these are among the regions most vulnerable to the climate crisis.

    How Seeding Tomorrow works

    Keats’s project has two aspects to it, one more public than the other. In an installation funded by Germany’s Goethe Institute, Seeding Tomorrow developed a prototype of seed packets for San Francisco.

    “It’s a matter of putting the seeds in people’s hands so that they have these packets with seeds for plants that are typical in an analogue location. And the packet challenges you to keep it sealed,” he says. In the San Francisco initiative, the team took tangerine seeds – which is where Tangier gets its name from – and delivered them to locals on the West Coast.

    The seed jars are a little more complicated, as they require large-scale cooperation between people from different locations. “What we want to do is to find a community in West Bengal willing to identify food crops that are really traditional in terms of being well-adapted to the climate there, and to write instructions in the local language for growing those seeds and cooking those food crops,” says Keats.

    climate analogue mapping
    Courtesy: Elina R

    These will then be sent to people in Hong Kong, who will make a seed jar – ideally in Cantonese and with traditional materials – which will be annotated with information about the viable substitutions to those crops.

    “All of this will be buried in the ground and marked with a brass marker in a public place – a botanical garden, for instance – where essentially it’s a time capsule, but a time capsule that is meant never to be disinterred,” he explains.

    “The idea is that it gets buried and people see and recognise it simultaneously as a sort of insurance that is best not cashed in because ideally, we make conditions on Earth better.”

    The importance and challenges of global seed banks

    Currently, the Seeding Tomorrow project is without any funding, operating in good faith and with in-kind support from originations including the Metropolitan Autonomous University in Mexico City and the Highland Institute in Nagaland, India.

    That is in stark contrast to the well-established seed banks across the globe, such as the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the Millennium Seed Bank, the Indian Seed Vault, and the US National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation.

    Keats believes these large seed banks are “really important”. Monocropping, for example, has led to a loss of biodiversity that’s essential for dealing with climate change impacts. “So for the place that deposited the seeds, they’re really important to have,” he says.

    They also serve as an inspiring symbol for the world, in that there’s a commitment that implores people to think longer-term and act in the present to safeguard the future.

    But these seed vaults have several challenges, chief among them being the transportation of seeds. Keats says they haven’t worked this out because they have a lot of other things to focus on, primarily food sovereignty: “And food sovereignty is really important in its own right, but it is not necessarily viable in the sense of seeds remaining where they are.”

    svalbard seed vault
    Courtesy: Cierra Martin/Crop Trust via Wikimedia Commons/CC

    He continues: The conditions of climate change result in a sort of a three-body problem: the land, the climate and the people are all changing in their relationship with each other. And so we’re going to need to respect food sovereignty, but [also] to think beyond that in terms of the complexity of the problem. And thus far, the seed banks are not doing that.”

    Seeding Tomorrow, he argues, is simultaneously working with people on both climate mitigation and adaptation. “The last thing we want is for people to be paralysed by the cataclysmic conditions that potentially obtain with climate change,” says Keats. “That will only make matters worse.”

    “I think it’s really important to recognise that there still are possibilities. It won’t be the same, but nevertheless, there is the possibility that you will still be able to have your traditions. And those traditions are all that much more important because of the many different ways in which the world will change.”

    The post Paella with Quinoa? This Future Seed Project Aims to Inspire Climate Action & Preserve Native Foods appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • Guide To Preserving Sacred Land Near You

    Anthropogenic climate change and biodiversity loss are the most pressing issues for our planet. Carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere continue to rise due to the burning of fossil fuels and land use change, with the latter occurring primarily in the form of animal agriculture and growing crops to feed livestock. Biodiversity loss is greatly enhanced by these climate changes, causing catastrophic threats to nature. Because these unprecedented climate changes make modeling future scenarios relatively impossible, region-by-region data is the only reliable tool, so conservation efforts must begin regionally.

    The post Guide To Preserving Sacred Land Near You appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands Now Open To US Military

    The national government of Daniel Noboa approved a resolution that enables US ships and crews to use the Galapagos Islands for control and patrol activities in the area.

    On February 15, 2024, Noboa signed a series military cooperation treaties with the US government, allowing ships, military personnel, armament, equipment, and submarines to be installed in the natural reserve, which UNESCO declared a World Natural Heritage Site in 1978.

    In doing so, Noboa ratified the Washington Agreement, signed by former President Guillermo Lasso. The agreement grants US soldiers and their contractors several privileges, exemptions, and immunity in Ecuadorian territory, similar to those enjoyed by members of diplomatic missions as agreed on in the Vienna Convention.

    The post Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands Now Open To US Military appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Climate, Food, Health & Economic Crises Are Interlinked – What’s the Best Path Forward?

    un climate change report
    6 Mins Read

    A major UN report calls out governments for ignoring the connections between biodiversity, water, food, health and climate change – and suggests how best to address these crises.

    Environmental, social and economic crises like biodiversity loss, water scarcity, food insecurity, health risks, and climate change are all deeply interconnected, rendering separate efforts to address them “ineffective and counterproductive”, according to a landmark report by the UN Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

    The report – known as the Nexus Assessment – found that governments are prioritising “short-term benefits and financial returns for a small number of people”, while ignoring the costs to the five nexus elements: biodiversity, water, food, health, and climate.

    Approved by almost 150 countries in Windhoek, Namibia, the analysis is described as “the most ambitious scientific assessment ever undertaken of these complex interconnections”, and argues that “fragmented governance” of these elements is causing unintended consequences and stands in the way of effective action.

    Instead, tackling these issues can maximise co-benefits for each of the nexus points, according to the IPBES, which laid out 71 “response options” to address the challenges.

    “We have to move decisions and actions beyond single-issue silos to better manage, govern and improve the impact of actions in one nexus element on other elements,” said Prof Paula Harrison, a co-chair of the Nexus Assessment.

    Fellow chair Prof Pamela McElwee said that decision-makers have so far failed to hold climate-damaging actors to account. “It is estimated that the unaccounted-for costs of current approaches to economic activity – reflecting impacts on biodiversity, water, health and climate change, including from food production – are at least $10-25T per year,” she noted.

    Analysing a variety of long-term climate outcomes

    ipbes nexus report
    Courtesy: Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services

    The Nexus Assessment suggests that for the last 30 to 50 years, 2-6% of biodiversity has decreased every decade, across every region. And today, more than half the world lives in areas experiencing the worst impacts of declines in biodiversity, water availability and food security, and increases in health risks and climate harms.

    But while some regulations and research efforts have been partially successful in improving trends across the nexus elements, they’re unlikely to succeed without addressing the interconnections in a more rounded way, and tackling indirect drivers like trade and consumption.

    The authors used 186 outcomes from 52 studies to assess how the elements would interact with each other this century, using the data to develop six nexus scenario archetypes. They found that a focus on trying to maximise the outcomes for only one part of the nexus in isolation will likely result in negative outcomes for the other nexus element.

    The first two archetypes – labelled “sustainability scenarios” – concern nature-oriented and balanced nexuses. They focus on strong environmental regulation, effective protection of natural areas, sustainable agriculture, healthy diets and food waste reduction, resulting in positive impacts for all five elements.

    Meanwhile, the conservation-first archetype has positive outcomes for biodiversity and climate, but negatively impacts the food nexus. The next archetype, climate-first, results in negative impacts for both biodiversity and food.

    Business as usual will lead to ‘extremely poor’ outcomes

    ipbes nexus assessment
    Courtesy: Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services

    The final two archetypes – food-first and nature overexploitation – are described as “business-as-usual” scenarios, and have negative impacts on almost all elements. The food-first archetype focuses on unsustainable agriculture and positively affects nutritional health, but this arises from an “unsustainable intensification of production and increased per capita consumption”.

    These business-as-usual archetypes are characterised by intensive material, energy and land use, greater greenhouse gas emissions, and unsustainable exploitation. This is a key message of the IPBES report: if things continue the way they are the outcomes will be “extremely poor” for biodiversity, water quality and human health, with worsening climate change and growing challenges to meet policy goals.

    “The future scenarios with the widest nexus benefits are those with actions that focus on sustainable production and consumption in combination with conserving and restoring ecosystems, reducing pollution, and mitigating and adapting to climate change,” said Harrison.

    The link between human health and the multiple crises is startling. Nearly six in 10 human infection diseases are likely to worsen during climate change, while 16% of all deaths in 2019 were caused by increased air and water pollution (numbering nine million).

    It’s why the IPBES has come up with its response options, which can allow us to manage these crises and often at low costs. They’re divided into 10 broad categories, covering pollution, sustainable consumption, ecosystem management, planning and governance, and finance, among others.

    These solutions include managing biodiversity to reduce animal-borne diseases in humans, improving integrated landscape management, supporting Indigenous food systems, and reducing pesticide and plastic pollution, as well as repurposing public investments.

    IPBES advises replacing meat with novel foods and sustainable healthy diets

    ipbes report 2024
    The IPBES roadmap for applying Nexus approaches | Courtesy: Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services

    Today, 42% of the world’s population is unable to afford healthy diets, a figure that rises to 86% for low-income countries. Over a tenth of the world is affected by food insecurity in Asia and Africa, while in 2017, 11 million adult deaths were caused by unhealthy diets.

    With the global food system accounting for 21-37% of all emissions, sustainable production and consumption are key to achieving goals across the five nexus elements. The response options therefore include a reduction in food loss and waste, a shift to planet-friendly, healthy diets, and a decrease in the overconsumption of meat.

    The latter involves cutting back on red and processed meat in support of “sustainable healthy diets”, which the IPBES defines as those that promote individual health, have a low climate impact, and are accessible, equitable, affordable, and culturally affordable.

    “Scenarios show that sustainable healthy diets and the reduction of food loss and waste decrease greenhouse gas emissions as well as benefiting other nexus elements; in addition, sustainable healthy diets also reduce human deaths,” the Nexus Assessment says.

    Shifting to such eating patterns and reducing the amount of food that ends up in the bin will benefit food security and health, reduce emissions, and free up land, providing “co-benefits for nexus elements such as biodiversity conservation and carbon sinks”.

    Additionally, among the food system transformations analysed in the nature-oriented archetype is the adoption of novel food sources like macroalgae and microbial protein. “Such transformations would enable the current agricultural land area to meet the calorific and nutritional needs of future generations in the medium to long term (e.g., through improved productivity), enabling positive outcomes for human health and for biodiversity as well as sustainability.”

    The report further says it’s well-established that “the way food is produced, what foods are produced and consumed, where they are produced, and how much food is lost and wasted impact both nature and people”.

    “Our current governance structures and approaches are not responsive enough to meet the interconnected challenges that result from the accelerated speed and scale of environmental change and rising inequalities,” said McElwee. “This can be addressed by moving towards ‘nexus governance approaches’: more integrated, inclusive, equitable, coordinated and adaptive approaches.”

    The post Climate, Food, Health & Economic Crises Are Interlinked – What’s the Best Path Forward? appeared first on Green Queen.

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  • From the Impossible Burger to A Carbon Ranch, Film Spotlights Pat Brown’s Bid to Save the Planet

    pat brown impossible foods
    5 Mins Read

    Impossible Foods founder Pat Brown is the subject of a recent episode of the Wild Hope documentary, which details his dedication to fighting climate change, and his new Carbon Ranch.

    After decades spent in labs, Pat Brown is taking to the field.

    The founder and former CEO of Impossible Foods, one of the most seminal companies in the alternative protein ecosystem, is leveraging his experience in academic and corporate America to tackle the biggest issues in the heartland.

    On a 1,000-acre Carbon Ranch in Arkansas owned by the Poland-based Impossible Foundation, Brown and fellow scientist Michael Eisen are creating a model to show farmers how carbon-intensive cattle ranches can be transformed into carbon-capturing forests.

    Brown’s journey from biochemist to food CEO to land restorer was detailed in a recent episode of the Wild Hope docuseries, titled Mission Impossible.

    Problem one: cattle farming

    The work on the Carbon Ranch is built on research by the two colleagues in 2022, which suggested that a phaseout of animal agriculture over the next 15 years would have the same effect as reducing emissions by 68% through the rest of the century.

    The study was published in PLOS Climate, a journal owned by the Public Library of Science, an open-access publisher co-founded by Brown at the turn of the century. Since then, he took a sabbatical that led to the establishment of Impossible Foods.

    “What I wanted to do on the sabbatical was to figure out what was the most important thing I could do to make the best possible world,” Brown says in the documentary. “The environmental impact of the animal ag industry was completely unacceptable, and no one was seriously trying to make it go away completely. So that’s what I decided I was going to do.”

    Figuring out what makes meat taste the way it does, and finding the necessary components to deliver an animal-free alternative, was “the most important scientific challenge in the world”, he says.

    impossible foods ranch
    Courtesy: Wild Hope

    The documentary details Brown and his team’s bet on heme, the iron-rich red molecule that is said to give animal products the meaty colour and flavour they’re known for. Brown recalled that heme is also carried in soy leghemoglobin, a protein present in high concentrations in soy root nodules.

    To produce it at scale though, the team turned to precision fermentation, inserting the DNA from the soy plants into a genetically engineered yeast strain called K. phaffii, which is then fermented in a similar way to how Belgian beer is made. The soy leghemoglobin is then extracted from the yeast and added to the plant-based ingredients that make up the Impossible Burger.

    It formed the base of Impossible Foods’ success, which soon partnered with Burger King to launch the first vegan Whopper, in a distribution deal that still runs today.

    Beef is the most polluting food on the planet, and as a whole, livestock farming emits a fifth of the world’s emissions. According to the Californian firm, the Impossible Burger generates 89% fewer greenhouse gas emissions, consumes 87% less water, and uses 96% less land than conventional beef.

    But 11 years after establishing the company, Brown turned to the next stage of his quest to safeguard the planet and undo the harms of the animal agriculture economy.

    Problem two: land restoration

    wild hope documentary
    Courtesy: Wild Hope

    “If you get rid of the demand for meat products, you have two problems you need to solve,” Brown told Wild Hope in an interview. “Number one, what happens to the people who make their living raising animals for food? Obviously they’re not the bad guys. They’re just trying to make a living, doing an incredibly hard, dangerous job. So, what happens to them?

    “Secondly, you don’t realise the benefit of eliminating the use of land for animal agriculture unless you use that land to restore the native ecosystems and recover carbon from the atmosphere.”

    This is why Brown stepped down from his role as CEO in 2022 to focus on specific strategic initiatives at the company, including hands-on research, public outreach and technology progress.

    The Carbon Ranch he’s working on now had 800 cows when it was first bought, who were moved to a nearby land by the previous owner. “We’re so used to thinking of a cattle farm as… a part of nature,” Brown says in the documentary. “And it’s the destruction of nature.”

    Brown and his colleagues cleared the land to give it the opportunity to recover, and divided it into three sections. In the first, they did no intervention. In the second, they planted a mixture of 30 different native tree species, and in the third, they cultivated 330,000 fast-grown timber species.

    pat brown impossible
    Courtesy: Wild Hope

    “The product we want from this experiment is a playbook for farmers and ranchers that basically tells them how to do this, and how to make a living by doing this,” he said in the interview with Wild Hope. “Because they’re ultimately going to be the ones that are carrying out the transformation, and we want them to be able to make a really good living from it.

    “The best way for that to happen right now is through carbon markets. Because if you’re capturing carbon through reforestation, you can get paid a decent amount of money. And if it works well, a lot of farmers are going to opt to do that, so we need to figure out how well that works.”

    The post From the Impossible Burger to A Carbon Ranch, Film Spotlights Pat Brown’s Bid to Save the Planet appeared first on Green Queen.

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  • Q+A w/ ADM’s Ana Yaluff: ‘Sustainability Is The Foundation Of Our Purpose As A Company’

    adm sustainabillity
    8 Mins Read

    The company’s Director of Sustainability talks to Green Queen about working towards a more sustainable food and ag value chain in Asia Pacific.   

    Earlier this year, ADM, a global leader in innovative solutions from nature, released its 2023 Corporate Sustainability Report, showcasing its sustainability achievements spanning three focus areas: feeding the world, protecting nature, and enriching lives. Among its milestones, ADM engaged over 25,500 smallholder farmers in India through sustainable agriculture practices, partnered with Water.org to provide water and sanitation solutions to over 800,000 people across six countries, and introduced a landfill diversion initiative at its Dharwad site in India, projected to divert approximately 100 metric tons of waste annually.

    The report emphasises the company’s commitment to decarbonisation and building a sustainable future through innovative initiatives, which are key to fostering a resilient food system that can support a growing population.

    In an exclusive interview, Ana Yaluff, ADM’s Director of Sustainability, spoke with Green Queen’s Sonalie Figueiras about how sustainability is deeply embedded in ADM. Yaluff discussed the company’s holistic approach and continued efforts to advance food security, including in Asia Pacific, a region facing heightened challenges due to rapid population growth and climate volatility.

    Green Queen: What is ADM’s approach to sustainability, and how does it impact the communities you operate in, particularly in Asia? 

    Sustainability is the foundation of our purpose as a company, and a pillar of our growth strategy. Our commitment is anchored in three pillars: Feed the World, Protect Nature, and Enrich Lives – a holistic approach that enables us to unlock the power of nature to enrich the quality of life. 

    Feeding the World: The Asia Pacific (APAC) region is home to 60% of the global population, including some of the world’s most populous countries, with the number expected to increase to 5.2 billion by 2050. The region’s rapid growth – along with climate volatility – has heightened the need for secure, nutritious, and affordable food. At ADM, we are advancing food security by working at the intersection of innovation, sustainability, and agricultural development. 

    We understand the importance of working with growers across our vast supply chains to integrate regenerative practises, which ultimately enhance their resilience. For instance, in India, our team’s efforts on World Water Day focused on proactive water management, educating over 100 local farmers on sustainable water conservation techniques to help secure water resources for future generations. 

    Protecting Nature: In an era where the impacts of climate change, biodiversity loss, and resource scarcity have cast a spotlight on our global food system, the need for sustainable practises has become a priority for stakeholders across the food and agriculture value chain.

    Our focus on regenerative agriculture is one of the most powerful ways we are addressing these challenges. Globally, we’ve expanded our regenerative agriculture initiatives to cover 2.8 million acres, with a goal of reaching 5 million acres by 2025. ADM’s commitment to achieving 100% deforestation-free supply chains by 2025 is another cornerstone of our strategy. We have made significant progress in tracing and monitoring the supply chains of key commodities, aspiring to protect critical ecosystems while maintaining the highest ethical standards. 

    Enriching Lives: Sustainability at ADM goes beyond environmental stewardship, we believe that it is also about enriching the lives of the people who are at the heart of the global food system. From farmers and communities to consumers and employees, we are dedicated to creating shared value and empowering individuals through meaningful, long-term impact.

    ADM Cares, our corporate social investment programme, plays a critical role in driving these efforts globally. In Vietnam, for example, ADM Cares partnered with World Vision International in Vietnam (WVIV) for a targeted project in the Son Tay District. This initiative aimed to empower local farmers and households by equipping them with knowledge and technical skills in environmentally aware poultry breeding methods, along with financial education. As a result, it has improved the community’s livelihoods and the farming capacity of beneficiary households.

    Green Queen: What are the key tenets of your decarbonisation plans? What data points are you most focused on to measure the company’s efforts? 

    Ana Yaluff: We are guided by a comprehensive, science-based approach that addresses emissions across our entire value chain. The key tenets of our plan include decarbonising our operations, leading in regenerative agriculture, investing in renewable energy, and collaborating with stakeholders across our ecosystem. 

    We have set a target to reduce absolute greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for Scope 1 and 2 by 25% from our 2019 baseline by 2035, along with a 25% reduction in Scope 3 GHG emissions from a 2021 baseline within the same timeframe. Together with our targets for energy, water, and waste reduction, these goals are collectively known as “Strive 35”. 

    Since announcing our Strive 35 goals, we have made significant progress, reducing Scope 1 and 2 GHG emissions by 14.7% as of 2023, and we are continuing to advance our efforts. Our initiatives include transitioning from coal to natural gas and optimising energy use. In 2023 alone, we completed 59 projects projected to reduce Scope 1 and 2 emissions by over 280,000 metric tons of CO₂e annually.

    Meanwhile, to address Scope 3 emissions, which account for the vast majority of our carbon footprint, we are working closely with our farmers and partners to promote sustainable practises. This includes supporting farmers in adopting regenerative farming techniques that improve soil health and sequester carbon. 

    As we move forward, we remain focused on accelerating our efforts, leveraging cutting-edge technologies, and strengthening partnerships to drive further progress. With innovation, collaboration, and a steadfast commitment to sustainability, we are confident in our ability to shape a more resilient and sustainable future for the food system.

    Green Queen: Given ADM’s scale and role in the global agrifood system, what is the company doing to enhance food access and security?

    Ana Yaluff: Food security is a pressing issue, especially in the APAC region, which is home to over 370 million undernourished individuals – a figure that continues to rise due to climate volatility and supply chain disruptions. These challenges are exacerbated by extreme weather events, land degradation, and growing pressures on agricultural productivity. As a result, ensuring consistent access to safe, nutritious, and affordable food has never been more urgent.

    In response to these challenges, ADM is harnessing its scale, expertise, and innovation to enhance food access and security. We operate an extensive transportation network that allows us to constantly adjust and shift the sourcing and delivery of agricultural and food products in the event of unexpected disruptions that may jeopardise food security. Beyond our supply chain, we collaborate with NGOs and government organisations to improve access to essential nutrition for at-risk populations. Through ADM Cares, we continue our partnership with the World Food Program USA to support the ERASE Hunger campaign, which aims to improve children’s nutrition by providing school meals.

    A key aspect of our approach also lies in supporting sustainable agriculture. In 2023, ADM partnered with over 25,000 soy growers in India, delivering nearly 90,000 regenerative acres. We have supported these farmers in implementing regenerative agricultural practises, helping improve soil health and increasing crop resilience in regions facing environmental challenges.

    As a global leader in the agrifood system, we are committed to driving systemic change. With our extensive footprint and innovative solutions, we address the complex challenges of food security – not just by focusing on feeding people today, but by building a more resilient, sustainable food system for future generations.

    Green Queen: Why have you decided to invest so heavily in sustainable agriculture, particularly in regenerative practises? What opportunities do you see for advancing sustainable farming in India in particular?  

    Ana Yaluff: At ADM, we view regenerative agriculture as an essential part of the future of farming. In fact, it is a great example of how we’re committed to our purpose – to unlock the power of nature to enrich the quality of life. 

    Driven by the need to balance environmental sustainability with the growing global demand for food, our sustainable and regenerative agriculture efforts focus on building resilient farming systems that can withstand the impacts of climate change, reduce GHG emissions, and sequester carbon, all while improving the livelihoods of farmers. 

    As the world’s most populous country, India’s rapidly growing population will inevitably drive greater demand for food and resources. However, this growth also places additional pressure on agricultural systems already strained by issues like erratic weather conditions and water scarcity. In fact, India’s ambition to reach net zero by 2070 underscores the urgent need to embrace sustainable and regenerative practises that can restore degraded land, enhance productivity, and mitigate the effects of climate change.

    For more than two decades, ADM India has been working in partnership with the Ministry of Agriculture to support some 250,000 smallholder farmers in Maharashtra and Karnataka. Through this collaboration, we provide small and midsize growers with sustainability resources, technology, best practises in conservation, and important market connections. As a result, these farmers now have the opportunity to access global markets as registered vendors with ADM. This opens doors for them to meet the growing global demand for certified organic and non-GMO soy, all while increasing their incomes and improving their farming practises.

    In 2022, ADM expanded its commitment through a partnership with Bayer, providing training to about 25,500 soybean farmers in the Latur, Osmanabad, and Beed districts of Maharashtra. These farmers are educated on seed treatments, pesticide management, and Integrated Pest Management (IPM) practises, ensuring that they are equipped to meet both sustainability requirements and market demands.

    In addition, ADM’s partnership with Coromandel International Limited (Coromandel) strengthens our commitment to sustainable agriculture by training farmers through the ProTerra Foundation on non-GMO agricultural production. By analysing soil samples from 3,000 farmers, we aim to document improvements in organic soil carbon content and tracking the positive environmental impacts of regenerative practises.

    As a bridge between growers and global consumer-facing brands, ADM leverages its global capabilities to scale sustainable practises across the value chain. By empowering farmers and providing them with the tools, knowledge, and market connections, we are driving long-term sustainability in India’s farming ecosystem and beyond. 

    Green Queen: As a commodity, palm is viewed as having a “high risk of deforestation” globally. What steps has ADM taken to ensure a responsible supply chain for palm, and how are you progressing with these initiatives?

    Ana Yaluff: In today’s world, where environmental and ethical concerns are in the spotlight, responsible sourcing has become crucial for businesses. At ADM, we are committed to achieving a 100% deforestation-free supply chain by 2025 and are actively tracing and monitoring the supply chains of our commodities at high risk for deforestation, including palm, on a global scale. 

    We do not source palm directly from plantations; instead, we obtain palm oil, palm kernel oil, and palm kernel expeller (PKE) from processors. We collaborate with our suppliers to enhance supply chain traceability, engage with them, and ensure robust monitoring, verification, and reporting practises.

    A key initiative in this effort is our PKE Responsible Sourcing Supplier Programme, which aims to continuously improve supplier sustainability performance and reinforce our responsible sourcing expectations. Built on four pillars – supplier engagement, supplier improvement, monitoring & verification, and investing in local communities – we engage all direct PKE suppliers in Indonesia and Malaysia and assess their sustainability performance through our palm scorecard tool. By working closely with our suppliers, we are increasing traceability and ensuring third-party verification of deforestation, successfully delivering responsibly sourced PKE to our customers.

    Green Queen: What are your long-term sustainability goals for the APAC region?

    Ana Yaluff: Looking ahead, ADM remains dedicated to advancing sustainability across all aspects of our operations. We will continue to innovate and strengthen partnerships with local, like-minded organisations to help feed the world, protect the environment, and improve lives. Through these efforts, we aim to actively contribute to the sustainable transformation of the food and agricultural value chain in the APAC region.   

    This is a Green Queen Partner Post.

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  • MeliBio Bags Pre-Series A Investment to Expand Bee-Free Mellody Honey

    mellody vegan honey
    4 Mins Read

    Californian food tech startup MeliBio has secured a “strategic investment” as part of a pre-Series A round to accelerate the growth of its vegan honey.

    As it makes inroads on its precision-fermented honey, San Francisco-based MeliBio has obtained fresh capital to scale up the distribution of its plant-based sweetener, Mellody.

    The “strategic investment” from Future Food Fund by Oisix, a food tech investor from Japan, is part of MeliBio’s pre-Series A financing round. It means the company has raised around $10M in total funding since it was established in 2020, co-founder and CEO Darko Mandich tells Green Queen.

    MeliBio was initially planning a Series A round this year – as revealed by Green Queen – which was expected to bring in a further $10M. But the challenges of the food tech market, where investment dropped by 61% last year, made it difficult to do so. “We shifted to [the] pre-Series A round, and will reopen Series A next year,” says Mandich.

    Mellody honey now available nationwide

    vegan honey
    Courtesy: MeliBio

    The startup initially launched Mellody through foodservice partners, before debuting the product in the D2C channel via a partnership with famed New York eatery Eleven Madison Park’s online store.

    Since then, the product has been introduced across the US (alongside a new hot honey variety), available at independent retailers and a growing list of restaurants – recent partnerships include Palmetto Superfoods and Joyride Pizza in California and Moto Pizza in Seattle. Moreover, MeliBio has also expanded its distribution through KeHE, UNFI, Greco and Sons, and ACE Natural.

    Unlike other vegan honey products, which make use of apples and lemons, elderflower, carob, or other ingredients, Mellody aims to replicate the honey through a combination of fructose and glucose, complemented by a range of plant extracts (red clover, jasmine, passionflower, chamomile, and seaberry), gluconic acid and natural flavours.

    It aims to solve a key biodiversity problem. The demand for money has proliferated honey bee populations, and that has plunged wild bees into chaos. Many of the 20,000 wild bee species are endangered, and some are facing the threat of extinction, but they’re important pollinators (even better than honey bees) and protecting them is crucial for the survival of natural habitats.

    This makes them a major cog in preserving the planet’s biodiversity and maintaining its ecosystem. But continued honey production spells grave trouble for these bees. And as for honey bees, their own ability to produce the sweetener itself has declined, thanks to widespread herbicide use, conversion of flower-rich land into monocultures, a drop in soil productivity, and climate change. It’s why plant-based and precision-fermented alternatives like MeliBio’s are needed.

    The company, which can produce 10,000 lbs of Mellody per day, has also launched vegan honey in Europe through a partnership with Slovenia’s Narayan Foods. In the UK, this is in the form of Vegan H*ney under the Better Foodie, whereas it sells as Vegan Hanny or Ohney under Aldi’s private label, Just Veg. The $10M, four-year deal aims to put MeliBio’s vegan honey into 75,000 stores eventually. Additionally, it recently secured a patent win in Germany for its plant-based honey technology.

    MeliBio makes gains in precision fermentation

    melibio honey
    Courtesy: MeliBio

    MeliBio began as a precision fermentation company, and that remains its core target in the long term. The technology combines the process of traditional fermentation with the latest biotech advancements to efficiently produce compounds like proteins, flavour molecules, vitamins, pigments, or fats.

    It involves inserting a molecular sequence – derived from digitised databases rather than the relevant animals or plants – into microorganisms to give them instructions to produce the desired molecule when fermented. This enables companies like MeliBio to produce bioidentical versions of animal-derived products like honey.

    While its plant-based products have been expanding, MeliBio has been working on the precision-fermented product in the background, and recently made some advancements. Aaron Schaller, the startup’s co-founder and CTO, recently announced that the team has taken three of its protein and enzyme targets from ideation to proof-of-concept to bioreactors, with a fourth soon to come.

    And this week, he noted that MeliBio has increased the titer – the amount of product per unit volume at the end of the fermentation process – of its main enzyme target by 1,300%. “Taking our strains from the bench to bioreactors sent our strain productivity through the roof across only two runs,” he said. “With ample room to further optimise our bioprocess, future titer and yield improvement is imminent.”

    This was a result of its collaboration with AI-led biomanufacturing startup Pow.Bio, with whom it has been engaging in scale-up efforts since March. The firm is now evaluating further biomanufacturing partners for the next phase of its precision-fermented honey.

    “This investment from Future Food Fund is an exciting step forward for MeliBio. It aligns perfectly with our mission to not only transform the honey industry but also to make a measurable impact on biodiversity and the environment,” says Mandich.

    “At Future Food Fund, we are excited to support MeliBio’s vision of giving bees a break while offering a new model for food production through their exceptional products,” adds Hiro Hasegawa, venture partner at the VC firm.

    The post MeliBio Bags Pre-Series A Investment to Expand Bee-Free Mellody Honey appeared first on Green Queen.

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  • Will COP16 on Biodiversity Listen to Indigenous Women or Corporate Lobbyists?

    COP16, the UN World Summit on Biodiversity, is underway in Cali, Colombia, from October 21 through November 1. This summit carries a crucial task: establishing policies and actions to reverse the alarming trends of biodiversity loss and species extinction driven by human activities. World leaders attending are tasked with ensuring that agreements align with the objectives of the Convention on…

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Revealed: The Taxpayer-Funded Campaign to Discredit Pesticides’ Climate Risks

    pesticides climate change
    7 Mins Read

    A new investigation led by Lighthouse Reports has uncovered a covert campaign partly funded by American taxpayers to downplay the risk of pesticides and discredit climate experts in Africa, Europe and North America. Food and climate journalist Thin Lei Win, who worked on the report, breaks the findings down.

    Lighthouse Reports’ Food Systems Newsroom, of which I’m a proud member, and multiple media partners published a blockbuster investigation into a covert campaign, partly funded by American taxpayers, “to downplay the risks of pesticides and discredit environmentalists in Africa, Europe, and North America”.

    My colleagues Margot Gibbs and Elena DeBre worked on it for over a year to get a rare insight into the industry’s attempts not only to defend products that are harmful to human health and nature but also to undermine people who are calling for change. 

    It all started with a tip: a major donor withdrew support for a scientific conference scheduled in Nairobi, Kenya, in 2019, supposedly after coming under pressure from the U.S. government. The conference was about showcasing alternatives to pesticides.

    Digging further using Freedom of Information (FOI) requests revealed “extensive correspondence between US civil servants, a Kenyan NGO, pesticide executive and a company, v-Fluence, about how to subvert the event.”

    Thus begins a quest to find out what happened and who v-Fluence is.

    Turns out, it is a Missouri-based PR firm set up by Jay Byrne, a former communications executive at Monsanto, the American agrochemical giant whose name is synonymous with genetically modified (GMO) seeds and the weed killer Roundup, which contains glyphosate. It is now part of Germany’s Bayer.

    It also turns out – thanks to public spending records and analysis of financial statements – USAID has granted a contract to v-Fluence to construct a “private social network”.

    The firm is also being accused of working with Syngenta to hide the risks of Paraquat, a herbicide that is generally accepted as highly toxic. There is also mounting evidence linking it to Parkinson’s disease.

    Headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, Syngenta is another agrochemical giant. Since 2017, it has been owned by China National Chemical Corporation (ChemChina). 

    v-fluence
    Courtesy: Richard Villalon/Getty Images

    The private social network

    Byrne came up with Bonus Eventus, which according to him, is “named after the Roman god of agriculture whose name translates to “good outcome””. 

    The network profiled hundreds of scientists, campaigners and writers who are deemed anti-pesticide and pro-organic, including celebrated US food writers Michael Pollan (of the “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants” fame) and Mark Bittman, the Indian environmentalist Vandana Shiva and ecologist Debal Deb, the Nigerian activist Nnimmo Bassey, and two former U.N. Special Rapporteurs, Hilal Elver and Baskut Tuncak. 

    Many profiles have personal details such as the names of family members, phone numbers, home addresses and even house values. Some have deeply personal details that have little to no relation to their work on crops or chemicals. Many also “include disparaging allegations authored by people funded by, or otherwise connected to, the chemical industry”, said The Guardian. 

    These are accessible by about 1,000 people who were granted privileged entry. This includes:

    • In the US, more than 30 current government officials, most of whom are from the US Department of Agriculture. 
    • In Australia, the civil servant overseeing the registration and approval of agricultural chemicals (the profile appeared to have been set up years earlier, and the person involved denied having had access during their tenure as a regulator) and several scientists affiliated with the nation’s top universities. 
    • In Kenya, members of the Ministry of Agriculture and the National Biosafety Authority 
    • In India, the Executive Director of the Federation of Seed Industry of India (FSII), the consulting editor of the right-wing magazine Swarajya (who denied any knowledge about the network and of Byrne), and researchers and policy advisors from research institutes and agrochemical companies

    “The network’s membership roster is a who’s-who of the agrochemical industry and its friends, featuring executives from some of the world’s largest pesticide companies alongside government officials from multiple countries,” my colleagues wrote. 

    Most of the account holders interviewed by Lighthouse Reports, Le Monde and their partners said they have simply signed up for a press review service, and that they do not participate in the network’s activities, do not consult the document database made available to subscribers. 

    pesticide lobby
    Courtesy: Wuzefe/Pixabay

    The pressure on Africa

    In Kenya, where more than 75% of the agrochemicals used in 2020 were categorised as Highly Hazardous Pesticides (HHPs) and where there has been both climate and political pressure to boost food production, the consequences have been devastating, wrote The New Humanitarian. 

    Take John Kiunjuri, 75. In his mid-40s, he worked for a farm growing vegetables and flowers for export. He regularly mixed herbicides without gloves or a mask. His hands started shaking while he was still working on the farm. By 2016, nearly two decades after his contract ended, he could no longer hold a teacup. 

    “A doctor at Nanyuki General Hospital eventually diagnosed Parkinson’s disease, and told him that his condition could have been a result of the agrochemicals he had handled,” the article said.

    There is also a disturbing “chemical colonialism” at work: “Out of all the HHPs registered and legally sold by international companies in Kenya, nearly half are banned in the EU and the United States”. 

    Brazilian academic Larissa Bombardi who had to leave the country after receiving threats for her research on pesticides, used the same term to talk about the impact of European pesticides on ordinary Brazilians. These are pesticides banned in the EU but still in use in Brazil. 

    Members of Bonus Eventus in Kenya also wrote multiple op-ed columns, portraying efforts to ban pesticides as threatening the country’s food security and openly criticising agroecology, a holistic philosophy of farming that takes into account the needs of both people and nature and shuns chemical inputs. 

    Their stance on agroecology mirrors that of a Trump-appointed U.S. ambassador to the U.N. food agencies in Rome who, in a public speech in 2020, called the practice “an explicit rejection of the very idea of progress – extolling “peasant” farming and promoting “the right to subsistence” agriculture.” 

    Kip Tom, the ambassador, has a farm regarded as one of Monsanto’s largest seed producers. He is a member of Bonus Eventus, according to Le Monde. In a response to Lighthouse Reports, he too denied being connected to the network.

    The attempt to derail EU’s Farm to Fork 

    During the Trump administration, v-Fluence also obtained a contract with another PR firm, called The White House Writings Group (WHWG), aimed at undermining the EU’s Farm to Fork policy, according to Le Monde. A key pillar of Farm to Fork was to slash the use of chemical pesticides. 

    The USDA, assisted by WHWG, tried to get through to Brussels via the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) parliamentary group who were seen as sympathetic to American interests. At that time, ECR members included some trenchantly right-wing groups such as Hungary’s Fidesz and Italy’s Fratelli d’Italia. 

    On July 29, 2020, WHWG organised a webinar attended by the then-US Secretary of Agriculture, Sonny Perdue, ECR MEPs and the European Commissioner for Agriculture, Janusz Wojciechowski. Purdue criticised Farm to Fork and said it could jeopardise global food security. Media reports on the webinar focused on the concern. 

    According to Le Monde: “In a note sent to USDA executives several months later, the two PR firms congratulated themselves. “At the time of its May release, F2F appeared to have achieved widespread acceptance across the Continent; until the webinar at the end of July, not a single negative story on F2F appeared in mainstream European media.”” 

    In a November 2020 memo, v-Fluence and WHWG not only pledged to defeat the F2F strategy and the European Green Deal, they also proposed to step up operations in the countries of the South, the article added. 

    Regular readers of Thin Ink know what happened to the Farm to Fork and the pesticide regulation: the former is in limbo and the latter was abandoned. 

    The work, worth up to $4.9 million, was set to begin in 2020, but public spending records suggest the work either did not continue or was suspended when President Biden was elected. The USDA said that it was reviewing the agreement.

    pesticide health effects
    Courtesy: Robert Kneschke

    The response

    In an email statement to Lighthouse Reports, v-Fluence founder Byrne said that the allegations of his network secretly profiling individuals who have spoken out against pesticides and their unregulated use are “grossly misleading representations” and “manufactured falsehoods”. 

    v-Fluence also denied having held government contracts now or in the past, but said that the US government was a “funder of other organisations with whom we work.” 

    Byrne also described v-fluence’s role as “an information collection, sharing, analysis, and reporting provider” to “promote understanding of all the various stakeholders, positions, research… impacting food and agriculture”

    “The claims by the Lighthouse NGO and other advocacy groups with whom they are collaborating are based on grossly misleading representations, factual errors regarding our work and clients, and manufactured falsehoods,” he said in a statement published on its website. 

    Byrne also denied the allegations in the lawsuit against him and Syngenta that is currently ongoing in the US.

    This is an edited and web-adapted version of the October 4, 2024 edition of the Thin Ink newsletter, a weekly publication on food, climate, and where they meet by journalist Thin Lei Win – subscribe here.

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  • Climate-Proof Cocoa: Can These New Plants Save the Future of Chocolate?

    new cacao plants
    4 Mins Read

    Scientists have discovered three plants closely related to the Theobroma cacao plant, which could unlock the development of climate-resilient chocolate.

    Chocolate is becoming worse for the planet, worse for labourers, and worse for our wallets. This year, we’ve seen cocoa futures rocket to never-seen-before prices, on the back of poor harvests thanks to an increasingly volatile crop in an increasingly volatile climate.

    When it comes to food products, only beef is worse from an emissions point of view than dark chocolate. But the changing climate has also rocked the cocoa industry, with Ivory Coast – the leading producer –having lost more than 85% of its forest since 1960.

    In response, both the public and private sectors are taking action. The UK and the EU have both announced bans on deforestation-linked chocolate, with the latter being supported by giants like Nestlé, Mars and Ferrero.

    The food tech sector is also tackling the issue with new innovations. Some are using plant cell cultures to make chocolate, while others are utilising agricultural sidestreams and more climate-friendly crops to make cocoa-free versions of chocolate.

    But the latest breakthrough comes from scientists at University College Cork (UCC), the University of São Paulo and New York Botanical Garden, who have discovered three new plant species that are close relatives of Theobroma cacao, the cocoa bean tree that originated in South America and is the source of an industry that sustains the livelihoods and incomes of over 50 millon people.

    A cacao cousin to save the day

    climate resilient chocolate
    Courtesy: AI-Generated Image via Canva

    The team of researchers came across the three new species – Theobroma globosum, T. nervosum and T. schultesii – while preparing a taxonomy report on the Theobroma genus.

    These species are subsects of Herrania Goudot, a group closely related to Theobroma. While it has traditionally been treated as a separate genus, the study – published in the journal Kew Bulletin – recalls how some have struggled to distinguish between the two, and have thus included Herrania as a section of Theobroma.

    Both Theobroma and Herrania species are predominantly found in the western part of the Amazon rainforest, recognised as a centre of biodiversity for both plants. This section of the forest is also said to be home to the highest number of new or undiscovered species within the Amazon.

    Unlike Theobroma, Herrania species grow from a single stem and have leaflets that radiate outward (like fingers off a hand). And while the internal structure of the petals and fruits are similar in both plants, the fruits of Herrania tend to have 10 ridges, compared to the cacao fruits of Theobroma, which can be smooth or have up to five ridges.

    “These new species were discovered as a result of studying specimens in herbaria and demonstrate the importance of maintaining these natural history collections as many more species remain to be discovered within them,” said James Richardson of UCC’s School of Biological, Earth & Environmental Sciences.

    Discovery could help develop future-proof cocoa trees

    cocoa deforestation
    Courtesy: Marizilda Cruppe/WWF

    The scientists, who examined leaves, flowers and fruits, and collaborated with multiple botanical institutions to reach the discovery, said their finding was significant as it suggests there’s much more work to do in characterising Earth’s biodiversity.

    “That there were recently unknown species closely related to Theobroma cacao, which is of huge importance for the production of chocolate and other products, shows how much more work there is to be done to catalogue the vast amount of unknown biodiversity across our planet,” said Richardson.

    He added that the discovery could lead to the development of climate-resilient cacao trees, which would help make the future of chocolate production more sustainable – both economically and environmentally.

    “Cacao prices have trebled in recent months due to low production as a result of a prolonged period of drought in West Africa, which is the area of greatest production,” Richardson explained. “The discovery of new species, in addition to those already known, expands the genetic resources that are available to us that might allow us to produce drought-tolerant or disease-resistant cacao trees.”

    The Amazon rainforest is home to half of the world’s tropical forests and over three million species of plants and animals, but its Brazilian expanse is also the site of 40% of global tropical deforestation. This has made the Amazon a source of carbon, emitting more of the greenhouse gas than it absorbs. And research has found that between 10-47% of its forests are at risk of collapsing by 2050.

    In April, a marketing campaign by Natura, Forbes and Africa Creative labelled Amazon as the ‘world’s richest billionaire’, worth $317B. This valuation is seven times greater than the potential earnings derived from its destruction, highlighting the importance of preserving what was once called the “lungs of the Earth”.

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  • Switching Half the US Protein Supply to Alternative Proteins Can Free Up Land the Size of South Dakota

    alternative proteins land use
    5 Mins Read

    A 50% shift to alternative proteins in the US would make land use much more efficient, alongside biodiversity and carbon sequestration gains for the Midwest and South.

    If Americans switch half their meat, dairy and egg intake to alternative proteins, the country would see land nearly the size of South Dakota be freed up. What’s more – the Midwest and South regions can become better carbon sinks, while restoring many threatened ecosystems.

    That’s the consensus of a new report exploring the land use benefits of alternative proteins. Authored by the Good Food Institute (GFI) and Highland Economics, Transforming Land Use focuses on US cropland demand to meet current protein consumption, and quantifies how the US can get closer to its biodiversity and climate goals by focusing on proteins that require much less land than animals.

    In the US, 42% of land is used for grazing livestock. And of the 21% that is cropland, more than three-quarters is dedicated to crops primarily supporting livestock production. Meanwhile, alternative proteins require 50-90% less land on average than animal proteins per protein – and yes, that includes poultry and eggs too.

    land use vegan vs meat
    Courtesy: GFI

    But if the US substituted 50% of animal products for alternative proteins, the report finds that 47.3 million acres of cropland would no longer be needed to produce food. Americans collectively eat eight billion kgs of animal protein per year, so cutting that in half would eliminate the need for 32 million acres of forage and 31.5 million acres of feed crops.

    However, the report doesn’t include the land restoration benefits linked with rangelands (where the native vegetation is grass) for grazing livestock, using cropland for biofuels or animal feed exports, water use, and other environmental impacts like greenhouse gas emissions. This means that these benefits – purely for land use – are conservative estimates of the true prospects of alternative protein.

    How alternative proteins can change America’s landscape

    Freeing up all this land would enable the large-scale restoration of the US’s threatened ecosystems. Of the 485 ecosystems in the country, 45% are currently vulnerable or endangered.

    The researchers identified the ecosystems present before the land was converted into feed crops and forage cropland, and can survive in the future with restoration. The proposed shift to alternative proteins was found to have the potential to restore 64% of these threatened ecosystems.

    Since the South and the Midwest are home to a significant percentage of feed crops and forage cropland in the US, they have a high number of threatened ecosystems. The Midwest would have the opportunity to restore 84% of its feed crop area (higher than anywhere else in the US), while the South has the greatest opportunities for ecosystem restoration

    how much land is used for animal agriculture
    Courtesy: GFI

    The US National Climate Task Force has set a goal of conserving 30% of national land and waters by 2030, and shifting to 50% alternative proteins alone would help restore 13% of the area in this target.

    Meanwhile, the restored natural area available from the protein transition would sequester 178 million tonnes of CO2e annually – that’s more than the combined emissions of all domestic flights in the US in 2021. This would mean a 22% increase in the average net national carbon sink associated with land use and forestry. Here, too, the South and Midwest present the greatest carbon sequestration opportunities, at 48% and 33%, respectively.

    US government must increase policy support for smart proteins

    On a global level, agriculture, forestry and other land uses account for up to 24% of all emissions. Livestock and feed production, meanwhile, have made up 65% of global agricultural land use change in the last 50 years, according to separate research, which said dietary shifts towards more animal-sourced and ultra-processed foods are putting a major strain on land, with factory farming and forest clearance closely associated with animal agriculture. 

    Climate scientists have suggested that land use alone represents a quarter of the world’s emissions mitigation potential between now and 2050.

    And research by Our World in Data has found that beef, sheep, goat and buffalo meats have the greatest carbon opportunity costs per kg – which refers to the land that could be used to restore native vegetation and sequester carbon if a foodstuff wasn’t being grown on it.

    livestock farming land use
    Courtesy: GFI

    The GFI report makes several recommendations for NGOs and governments to enable a transition to alternative proteins. Non-profits should push governments to back R&D and commercialisation efforts for smart proteins; analyse the socioeconomic impacts of a shift to these foods, and advocate for policies that add revenue streams for farmers; as well as expand land use efficiency benefits across borders.

    As for policymakers, they must increase investment into alternative protein research to enhance their taste, texture, price, nutrition, and production capabilities. Governments are urged to promote the scaling up of biomanufacturing, new equitable workforce opportunities, and regional diversity. Additionally, public policies that support farmers and boost new markets for locally produced alternative protein crops are crucial.

    “To reach [the US’s] ambitious 2030 and 2050 targets for climate change mitigation and land conservation and restoration, diversifying our protein supply is essential,” the report reads. “More policy support will be necessary to create appealing alternative protein products, scale their production, and provide them at an affordable price to the public.”

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  • Brazil Orders Cattle Rancher to Pay $50M for Destroying the Amazon

    amazon deforestation cattle
    5 Mins Read

    A Brazilian cattle farmer has been fined $50M for destroying parts of the Amazon rainforest, and ordered to restore the land he deforested.

    A federal court in Brazil last month froze the assets of a local cattle rancher, ordering him to pay $50M in climate compensation for damage caused to the Amazon rainforest through illegal deforestation.

    The case was brought by the national attorney general’s office on behalf of the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA), which accused Dirceu Kruger of damaging the Amazon – already close to a tipping point – to make space for cattle farming.

    Once known as the “lungs of the Earth”, widespread deforestation in the Amazon for foods like beef, soybean and cocoa has converted the rainforest from a carbon sink to a carbon source. This means it emits more of the greenhouse gas than it absorbs, and the court’s order recognised this, asking Kruger to restore the land he degraded so it can once again become a valuable carbon sink.

    The prosecution argued that Kruger had harmed the climate by burning vegetation – which directly generates greenhouse gases – and eliminating plants, which meant the forest could no longer sequester carbon.

    According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, cattle ranching is the leading cause of deforestation in the rainforest, accounting for 80% of forest destruction and 340 million tons of carbon emissions annually.

    Cattle farmer ordered to restore damaged land

    cocoa deforestation
    Courtesy: Marizilda Cruppe/WWF

    First filed in September 2023, this is the largest civil action case for climate change in Brazil. The plaintiffs argued that Kruger’s actions illegally interfered with the forest’s carbon stock and intensified the climate crisis by emitting greenhouse gases.

    They suggested that the climate damage caused is intergenerational, as it spreads indefinitely and will lead to future environmental harm. Moreover, Ibama and the attorney general’s office said Kruger’s conduct was in violation of the Paris Agreement and Brazil’s international obligations.

    The cattle farmer used chainsaws to cut trees, set fires to clear the land, and then planted grass as pasture for cattle grazing. Satellite imagery showed the scale of the damage caused by Kruger, who admitted doing so on film.

    The attorney general’s office charged Kruger with destroying 5,600 hectares of public land (owned by the federal government and the state of Amazonas) in the municipalities of Boca do Acre and Lábrea between 2003 and 2016.

    When it came to the damages, the court assessed the prosecution’s value of €60 ($65) per tonne of carbon, derived from the social cost of carbon calculated by the US Environmental Protection Agency and UN Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) – although more recent research from the US National Bureau of Economic Research (which is yet to be peer-reviewed) puts that number at $1,056 per tonne.

    According to the court filing, an average of 161 tonnes of CO2 is released into the atmosphere for each Amazonian hectare that is destroyed, and Kruger’s actions were adjudged to have emitted 901,600 tonnes. This amounted to 292 million Brazilian reals, or around $50M, in liable damages. The money paid by Kruger would go to the national climate change fund, which aims to finance projects and research to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the impacts of the climate crisis.

    Apart from the monetary fine, Kruger’s assets have been frozen, and he is barred from transferring his land to a third party, selling or donating cattle and agricultural products, or leasing chainsaws and other deforestation tools. He is also banned from receiving any government finance or tax credits.

    Additionally, Kruger will need to restore the land he damaged. The court noted that this approach of making offenders pay compensation is important as this climate damage can never be fully remedied.

    Attorney general hints at more climate cases over Amazon deforestation

    cattle ranching amazon deforestation
    Courtesy: IBAMA

    The Amazon rainforest is home to half of the world’s tropical forests and over three million species of plants and animals, but continued deforestation – both legal and illegal – has put 10-47% of its forests at risk of collapse by 2050. The Brazilian part of the Amazon accounts for the majority of the rainforest’s deforestation, as well as 40% of global tropical deforestation.

    In 2020, Brazilian climate organisation network Observatório do Clima revealed that former president Jair Bolsonaro’s reign from 2019-22 saw a 60% increase in Amazon deforestation compared to the four years before – the highest increase among presidential terms since records began in 1988.

    Since then, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s government has been updating the country’s climate policy, and unveiled plans to meet the goal of eliminating deforestation from the Amazon by 2030. But as reported by the Guardian, Brazil’s supreme court has said more can be done, and ordered the federal government to restore a strategy to prevent and manage deforestation as well as investigate climate crimes in the rainforest.

    In April, a marketing campaign by Natura, Forbes and Africa Creative labelled Amazon as the ‘world’s richest billionaire’, worth $317B. This valuation is seven times greater than the potential earnings derived from its destruction, highlighting the importance of preserving the rainforest.

    “It is our duty to act not only to mitigate the problem, but to hold accountable in an exemplary manner those who accelerated the greenhouse effect illegally and for their own benefit, destroying the environment in violation of the Constitution and Brazilian legislation,” said Jorge Messias, Brazil’s attorney general.

    Messias’s office has indicated that the case against Kruger is set to be “just the first of a series of actions that seek to repair the climate damage caused by the destruction not only of the Amazon, but of all Brazilian biomes”.

    “To reclaim our leading role in the climate agenda and contribute to reducing emissions,” said Mariana Cirne Barbosa, the national attorney for climate defence. “Destroying nature cannot be worth it.”

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  • Overfishing is Bad for Marine Life – and the Planet

    5 Mins Read

    Just by ending the practice of overfishing, we could store the same amount of carbon as 6.5 million acres of forest each year.

    By Sophie Kevany

    In the search for winning climate solutions, the world’s oceans are an undisputed powerhouse. Oceans absorb around 31 percent of our carbon dioxide emissions, and hold 60 times more carbon than the atmosphere. Critical to this valuable carbon cycle are the billions of sea creatures who live and die underwater — whales and anchovies alike. Yet our ever-growing global appetite for fish threatens the oceans’ climate power. So much so that researchers in Nature argue there is “a strong climate change case” for putting a stop to overfishing.

    Even though there is fairly widespread agreement on the need to end this practice, there is virtually no legal authority to make it happen. Still, if the planet could figure out a way to stop overfishing, the climate benefits would be enormous: 5.6 million metric tons of CO2 per year. And bottom trawling, a practice akin to “rototilling” the sea floor, increases emissions from global fishing by over 200 percent, according to research from earlier this year. To store the same amount of carbon using forests would require 432 million acres.

    The ocean’s powerful carbon cycle, explained

    ocena carbon cycle
    Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons/CC

    Every hour, oceans take in around a million tons of CO2. The same process on land is far less efficient — taking a year and a million or so acres of forest.

    Storing carbon in the ocean requires two major players:  phytoplankton and marine animals. Like plants on land, phytoplankton, also known as microalgae, live in the seawater’s upper layers where they absorb sunlight and carbon dioxide, and release oxygen. When fish eat the microalgae, or eat other fish that have eaten it, they absorb the carbon.

    By weight, each fish body is anywhere from 10 to 15 percent carbon, says Angela Martin, one of the co-authors of the Nature paper and a PhD student at the Centre for Coastal Research at Norway’s University of Agder. The bigger the dead animal, the more carbon it carries downward, making whales unusually good at taking carbon out of the atmosphere.

    “Because they live for so long, whales build up huge carbon stores in their tissues. When they die and sink, that carbon is transported to the deep ocean. It’s the same for other long-lived fish like tuna, bill fish and marlin,” says Natalie Andersen, lead author of the Nature paper and researcher for the International Programme on the State of the Ocean.

    Remove the fish and there goes the carbon. “The more fish we take out of the ocean, the less carbon sequestration we are going to have,” says Heidi Pearson, a marine biology professor at University of Alaska Southeast who studies marine animals, particularly whales, and carbon storage. “Plus, the fishing industry itself is emitting carbon.”

    Pearson points to a 2010 study led by Andrew Pershing, which found that had the whaling industry not wiped out 2.5 million great whales during the 20th century, the ocean would have been able to store nearly 210,000 tons of carbon each year. If we were able to repopulate these whales, including humpbacks, minke and blue whales, Pershing and his coauthors say that would be “equivalent to 110,000 hectares of forest or an area the size of the Rocky Mountain National Park.”

    A 2020 study in the journal Science found a similar phenomenon: 37.5 million tons of carbon were released into the atmosphere by tuna, swordfish and other large sea animals targeted for slaughter and consumption between 1950 and 2014. Sentient’s estimates using EPA data suggest it would take about 160 million acres of forest a year to absorb that amount of carbon.

    Fish poop also plays a role in carbon sequestration. First, waste from some fish, like California anchovy and anchoveta, is sequestered faster than others because it sinks quicker, says Martin. Whales poop much closer to the surface, on the other hand. More correctly known as a fecal plume, this whale waste essentially acts as a microalgae fertilizer — which enables the phytoplankton to absorb even more carbon dioxide.

    Whales, Pearson says, “come to the surface to breathe, but dive deep to eat. When they are at the surface, they are resting and digesting, and this is when they poop.” The plume they release “is full of nutrients that are really important for phytoplankton to grow. A whale’s fecal plume is more buoyant which means there is time for the phytoplankton to take up the nutrients.”

    Curbing overfishing and bottom trawling would boost carbon sequestration

    bottom trawling
    Courtesy: Flickr/CC

    While it’s impossible to know the exact amount of carbon we could store by ending overfishing and bottom trawling, our very rough estimates suggest that just by ending overfishing for a year, we would allow the ocean to store 5.6 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent, or the same as 6.5 million acres of American forest would absorb in that same time period. The calculation is based on the carbon storage potential per fish from the ‘Let more big fish sink’ study’ and the annual global fish catch estimate of 77.4 million tons, of which about 21 percent is overfished.

    More reliably, a separate study released earlier this year suggests banning bottom trawling would save an estimated 370 million tons of CO2 each year, an amount equivalent to what it would take 432 million acres of forest each year to absorb.

    One major challenge, however, is that there isn’t universal agreement on ocean protection, let alone overfishing. Protecting ocean biodiversity, controlling overfishing and reducing marine plastic are all goals of the high seas treaty put forth by the United Nations. The long delayed treaty was finally signed in June last year, but it is yet to be ratified by 60 or more countries and remains unsigned by the U.S.

    Should fish be considered a climate-friendly food?

    vegan seafood
    Courtesy: Aqua Cultured Foods

    If sparing fish could store this much carbon out of the atmosphere, are fish really a low-emissions food? Researchers aren’t sure, says Martin, but groups like WKFishCarbon and the EU-funded OceanICU project are studying it.

    A more immediate worry, says Andersen, is interest from the fishmeal sector in turning to deeper areas of the ocean to source fish for feed, from parts of the sea called the twilight zone or the mesopelagic region.

    “Scientists believe the twilight zone contains the largest biomass of fish in the ocean,” says Andersen. “It would be a major concern if industrial fisheries started targeting these fish as a food source for farmed fish,” Andersen warns. “It could disrupt the ocean carbon cycle, a process that we still have so much to learn about.”

    This article by Sophie Kevany was originally published on Sentient Media. It is republished here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.

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  • Lidl Teams Up with WWF to Promote Sustainable Diets, Cut Food Waste & Help People Make Greener Choices

    lidl wwf
    5 Mins Read

    German discount retailer Lidl has partnered with the World Wildlife Fund to conserve biodiversity, promote planet-friendly diets, and reduce food waste across 31 countries.

    One of the world’s largest retailers, Lidl, has entered a five-year, 31-country partnership with global conservation group the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to speed up its sustainability efforts.

    The collaboration will focus on making Lidl’s entire value chain more planet-friendly, ensuring greater consumer access to sustainable choices, and building nature-positive business models. The two entities will do so through efforts to create deforestation-free supply chains, engage in advocacy for sustainable diets, and reduce food waste.

    “In our role as one of the largest food retailers, we are aware of our responsibility and our influence,” said Christoph Pohl, chief purchasing officer at Lidl International. “We take responsibility with the aim of doing business within planetary boundaries.”

    Kirsten Schuijt, director-general of WWF International, added: “Lidl has enormous international leverage to drive sustainable change in the food and retail industry. WWF is proud to accompany Lidl on this journey on which we will both support and challenge the retailer.”

    Responsible sourcing on the agenda with EU deforestation laws

    lidl climate change
    Courtesy: Lidl

    The link-up comes a year after Lidl GB became the first discount supermarket to sign the WWF’s Retailers’ Commitment for Nature, which is an industry-wide agreement designed to have the climate impact of British shopping baskets by 2030 (from a 2019 baseline).

    “The way we produce and consume food and energy is one of the leading drivers of nature loss and climate change,” said Schuijt. “In order to halt and reverse what is the biggest crisis facing humanity today, we need bold and urgent actions towards changing our food and energy systems, and the food and retail sector has a big role to play in driving this change.”

    Lidl has been working with the conservation group across individual markets like Austria and Switzerland, and the new partnership is looking to expand the scope of this work globally, with a common goal of enabling shoppers to make more planet-friendly choices.

    The partnership will focus on several areas, including conversation and promotion of biodiversity, responsible management of water sources, and environmental protection through science-based climate targets.

    lidl deforestation
    Courtesy: Lidl

    Responsible sourcing is a major highlight. Working with the WWF, Lidl plans to build and expand traceable, deforestation-free and conversion-free supply chains – this will be key as policymakers begin to clamp down on deforestation, most notably the EU from next year.

    Lidl wants to ensure responsible sourcing of “critical raw materials” like palm oil, soy, cocoa, tea, coffee, wood, and paper products – all commodities that fall under the EU’s upcoming legislation, which prohibits imports of any of these items that have links to deforestation. Additionally, fish and seafood are part of the sourcing focus too, as is the safeguarding of fishing grounds and stocks.

    “Sustainable management is not only a question of attitude, but also the basis for the future viability of our business model,” said Pohl. “With the support and expertise of WWF, we will now take our commitment to sustainability to the next level. We can only overcome major global challenges such as climate change and nature loss by working together.”

    Lidl hones in on dietary shift and food waste goals

    lidl plant based meat
    Courtesy: Lidl Nederland

    Outlined in the agreement are two areas that Lidl has made a lot of progress on and set long-term goals for: sustainable diets and food waste.

    The retailer wants to advocate for “more conscious, sustainable diets and consumption” and cut food waste, which are two key tenets of the global fight against the climate crisis. The food system accounts for a third of all emissions, 60% of which comes from meat production. In parallel, food waste is responsible for 8-10% of greenhouse gas emissions, with a majority of that coming from households.

    Lidl is well on track to meet its target of halving food waste by 2030 (from 2016 levels), having already reduced it by 43% by 2023. Meanwhile, plant-based foods – which emit half the emissions of meat and dairy – are becoming a more prominent fixture on the retailer’s shelves.

    In the UK and Ireland, plant proteins are slowly encroaching upon the share of animal proteins sold, with whole foods and meat analogues making up 15.3% of all proteins sold in 2022/23 (up from 14.4% the year before. Likewise, dairy alternatives went up a percentage point to reach 7.4% of overall dairy sales.

    This is part of Lidl GB’s larger effort to increase sales of its private-label meat-free and plant-based milk ranges – under the Vemondo brand – by 400% by the end of the decade, compared to 2020 levels.

    lidl vegan
    Courtesy: Lidl

    In the Netherlands, it is one of 11 supermarkets that have pledged to have at least 60% of all proteins sold be plant-based by 2030. Also in this country, it boosted the sales of its own-label meat analogues by 7% after placing them in the meat aisle for six months.

    It made the same move in its home market too, with all 3,250 Lidl stores in Germany featuring plant-based dairy and meat next to their conventional counterparts. To encourage further adoption, it lowered the price of all vegan analogues to match animal-derived meat and dairy. The price shift was also carried out in Belgium.

    These are major moves from a company that employs over 376,000 employees across 31 countries, and whose parent, the Schwarz Group, made €167.2B in 2023. For Lidl, the WWF partnership will only aim to accelerate its goal to cut scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions – excluding forest, land and agriculture (FLAG) – by 90% by 2050, and FLAG emissions by 72%.

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  • Canada Confirms Ban on Open-Net Pen Salmon Farming in British Columbia, But Pushes It Back to 2029

    canada salmon ban
    6 Mins Read

    The Canadian government has announced it will ban open-net salmon farms in British Columbia in 2029, but environmentalists have criticised the five-year-long delay in implementation.

    By 2029, open-net salmon farming will be banned in British Columbia, the Canadian government has announced. But while some environmental activists hailed the move, others are questioning the slow pace of the move, given it represents a delay from the original phaseout deadline of 2025.

    “Today, we are saying enough,” said natural resources minister Jonathan Wilkinson. It’s time for us to actually ensure that we are protecting the environment and thinking about how we actually move forward from the economic perspective.”

    A transition from open-net pen farming to closed containment technologies was first announced by the administration in 2019, with the aim of protecting declining wild Pacific salmon populations. “We are delivering on that promise and taking an important step in Canada’s path towards salmon and environmental conservation, sustainable aquaculture production, and clean technology,” said Wilkinson.

    But to facilitate this transition, fisheries minister Diane Lebouthillier has renewed the licences of aquaculture farms for another five years, though from next month, these will come under stricter conditions to ensure improved management of sea lice on farmed fish, robust reporting requirements, and monitoring of marine mammal interactions.

    She argued that the licence extinction would allow farms to transition in a “responsible, realistic, and achievable” manner and ensure “the protection of wild species, food security and the vital economic development of British Columbia’s First Nations, coastal communities and others”, as the government works on a final transition plan by next year.

    Why Canada is banning open-net pen salmon farming

    open net salmon farming
    Courtesy: Tavish Campbell/Pacific Salmon Foundation

    There are dozens of aquaculture farms in British Columbia, but more than half of the over 9,000 wild salmon populations in its waters are dwindling. The province’s farming industry has previously been caught dumping piscine orthoreovirus-infected (a fish virus) blood into Canada’s largest wild salmon migration route, and scientists had warned in 2012 that a virus was infecting both its farmed and wild salmon, which is a detriment to human health too.

    At the time, the Canadian government ignored these warnings, stating that risks to salmon populations were low. But in 2019, it finally announced its intention to ban open-net farming, which involves farming hundreds of thousands of salmon in large cages or pens.

    These farms are located along coastal areas to take advantage of ocean currents by delivering oxygen to fish and dispersing their waste, which flows into the water and releases deadly parasites, pollutants and pathogens. This can change the chemical composition and biological diversity of the seabed around the pens, and lead to disease outbreaks via the spread of sea lice parasites.

    Many have proposed closed-containment farming as an alternative, which comprises a range of technologies – from floating bag systems to land-based recirculating water systems – that aim to restrict interaction between farmed and wild salmon, preventing the transfer of diseases, waste and sea lice.

    Under the new regulations, only marine or land-based closed-containment systems will be considered for salmon aquaculture licenses in coastal British Columbia. Since this involves greater investment costs, the government intends to issue nine-year licences for successful closed-containment applicants.

    Protecting First Nations and coastal communities

    salmon farming ban
    Courtesy: Pacific Salmon Foundation

    The ban has spawned reactions spanning from laudatory to critical. The BC Salmon Farmers Association suggested the move could cost up to 6,000 jobs and hinders an industry that generates C$1.2B ($880M) for the province.

    “The idea that 70,000 tonnes of BC salmon can be produced on land in five years is unrealistic and ignores the current capabilities of modern salmon farming technology, as it has not been done successfully to scale anywhere in the world,” said Brian Kingzet, executive director of the association.

    A major spotlight is on First Nations populations and coastal communities, who rely on open net-pen aquaculture for their livelihood. “We recognise the importance of meaningful and thoughtful engagement with First Nations partners and communities as we move forward, in order to ensure that economic impacts are mitigated and we incentivise and promote wild fish health, reconciliation, economic development, and food security as we move forwards,” said Wilkinson.

    The government will release a draft transition plan by the end of July, which will focus on supporting Indigenous and coastal communities, identifying economic opportunities for “clean aquaculture technology”, setting criteria and milestones for the transition to closed-containment farms, and managing open-net pen salmon farming until the ban comes into effect by the end of June 2029.

    “Wild Pacific salmon is part of who we are as British Columbians. This measure respects the Wild Salmon Policy, the precautionary principle, and is part of our commitment to environmental stewardship and reconciliation,” said citizens’ services minister Terry Beech.

    “We will work with Indigenous communities, industry, governments, and stakeholders to restore the abundance of wild salmon for the benefit of future generations while growing the sustainable aquaculture industry as part of our Blue Economy Strategy,” he added.

    Bob Chamberlin, chairman of the First Nation Wild Salmon Alliance, applauded the move, stating “This date will serve the longer-term needs of protecting wild Pacific salmon from the impacts of the open-net pen fish farm industry, and is a positive step in that regard.”

    Five-year timeline raises eyebrows

    open pen salmon farming
    Courtesy: Ian McAllister/Pacific Wild

    Some have raised concerns about the delay. “We are relieved that the federal government is sticking to their commitment to remove the farms, but five years is too long for the phaseout period,” said Aaron Hill, executive director of the Watershed Watch Salmon Society. “That’s five more years of bombarding wild salmon with parasites and viruses from factory fish farms.”

    Michael Meneer, president and CEO of the Pacific Salmon Foundation, echoed this sentiment. “Given the challenged state of many Pacific salmon species, we would have preferred a shorter timeline than the five-year license renewals announced today,” he said.

    However, Meneer recognised the impact on First Nations and dependent communities: “We must acknowledge the need for a thoughtful and well-supported transition for First Nations and coastal communities impacted by this decision. The risks to salmon are clear, but we know this decision is complex and that resilient communities are just as important as resilient salmon.”

    Stan Proboszcz, senior science and policy analyst for the Watershed Watch Salmon Society, stated that the government could change next year, which is why it was important “to see the development of the regulatory framework that enshrines the ban into law as soon as possible”.

    Salmon farming has been under the environmental microscope for years now. To tackle the growing demand and declining populations, as well as mitigate the climate impact, developing novel alternatives is essential. The Canadian government has recognised that, with its innovation cluster Protein Industries Canada making multimillion-dollar investments into alternative proteins.

    In November, it contributed $4.5M to an $11.4M project involving plant-based seafood company New School Foods, precision fermentation startup Liven Proteins, and dehydration solutions provider NuWave Research (all Canadian), with the goal of commercialising a whole-cut vegan wild salmon analogue that “transforms from raw to cooked” and replicates the taste and texture of its conventional counterpart.

    The post Canada Confirms Ban on Open-Net Pen Salmon Farming in British Columbia, But Pushes It Back to 2029 appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • This Biodiversity-Positive Sunscreen Nourishes Coral Reefs While Protecting Your Skin

    reef safe sunscreen
    4 Mins Read

    Skincare brand Stream2Sea and scientists from the University of Derby have developed a sunscreen that feeds and nourishes coral reefs.

    Sunscreen has become a political issue. From “anti-SPF conspiracy theorists” denouncing their efficacy to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez vouching for better regulatory standards to increase access, these cosmetic products are a hot topic.

    One of the major points of discussion is the toxicity of sunscreens, thanks to the presence of certain chemicals. For example, oxybenzone is a UV filter that absorbs UVB radiation and is present in around 80% of all sunscreen products. Some have suggested that it can disrupt the hormone system in humans, while there’s also strong evidence that the compound turns into sunlight-activated toxins in the sea, killing coral reefs.

    It’s why governments are banning sunscreen with certain chemicals. Hawaii, the US Virgin Islands and Key West, Florida have all done so recently. This has also given birth to the reef-safe sunscreen industry, with products based on mineral formulations and free from coral-harming chemicals.

    But now, one product is hoping to take the reef-friendly efforts further, developing a product that doesn’t just protect them, but also actively supports their health and growth.

    Reef Relief bids adieu to chemicals

    is sunscreen bad for you
    Courtesy: McCann Demand

    Developed by Florida-based skincare label Stream2Sea, scientists from the University of Derby in the UK, and global ad agency McCann, Reef Relief is a sunscreen range that feeds and nourishes coral reefs while protecting human skin.

    An estimated 14,000 tonnes of sunscreen enter the waterways every year, with significant amounts accumulating in areas with heavy tourism. And even in small doses, the makers of Reef Relief suggest that the chemicals here have a lethal effect on coral reefs, which are crucial for a quarter of all marine life and beneficial to over a billion people as a source of food, medicine, coastal protection and income.

    This makes corals one of the planet’s most important ecosystems, with a global value of $2.7T per year. “However, if we continue harming the world’s reefs and do not make any substantial changes to our carbon footprint and other stressors associated with reef decline, 90% of these important ecosystems could be functionally extinct by 2030,” warns Michael Sweet, molecular ecology professor at the University of Derby and coordinating author for the UN World Ocean Assessment.

    Reef Relief comprises a bespoke formula with an eco-certification-compliant base, removing all the harmful chemicals found in sunscreens, including oxybenzone, benzophenone and octinoxate. Plus, it also contains an FDA-approved blend of marine nutrients that corals naturally feed on.

    “This is game-changing. A simple, important and powerful idea and exactly what the world needs more of – original thinking leading to a product and initiative that could genuinely benefit the planet,” says Jon Elsom, group executive creative director of McCann Central.

    The sunscreen has been two years in the making, and was soft-launched in 2023. Sweet and his team were brought in to undertake further testing, with six months of coral tests proving that the product can boost coral growth by as much as 8% in some species.

    A new certification system for sunscreens

    reef relief sunscreen
    Courtesy: McCann Demand

    The sunscreen is introduced in a new ad created by McCann. “When I first heard about Reef Relief, I got really excited about how something could be changed from the negative to a positive,” Sweet says in the video. “The world needs more concepts and products like Reef Relief.”

    The commercial has been shortlisted in the Product Innovation category for the Cannes Lions Innovation awards, which “celebrate ground-breaking innovation, technology and problem-solving ideas that turn imagination into impactful reality”.

    Extending the impactfulness of the innovation, the makers of Reef Relief have also introduced an entirely new certification marque for sunscreens. While you may be familiar with SPF, they want you to also look out for RPF, or Reef Protection Factor.

    This is because there’s a lot of misinformation surrounding reef-friendly sunscreens, thanks to a lack of regulation on terms like ‘reef-safe’ on product packaging. As the Sustainable Tourism Association of Hawaii points out, this effectively makes these labels “simply a marketing term”.

    But RPF is a scientifically validated certification, and the aim is to make it an industry standard, having all sunscreens carry it on their packaging eventually. With 79% of consumers having doubts about eco claims on beauty products, and nine in 10 factoring in sustainability and ethics when purchasing them, such certifications could help them detect greenwashing and make more informed decisions.

    Stream2Sea and McCann are now engaging in talks with governments and tourism bodies to launch their nature-based solution to the sunscreen problem in their territories.

    The post This Biodiversity-Positive Sunscreen Nourishes Coral Reefs While Protecting Your Skin appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • How Palestine fights ecocide with biodiversity and sustainability resistance

    Asia Pacific Report

    For more than 76 years, Palestinians have resisted occupation, dispossession and ethnic cleansing, culminating in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

    Yet in the midst of this catastrophic seven months of “hell on earth”, it is a paradox that there exists an extraordinary oasis of peace and nature.

    Nestling in an Al-Karkarfa hillside at the University of Bethlehem is the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability (PIBS), a remarkable botanical garden and animal rehabilitation unit that is an antidote for conflict and destruction.

    “There is both a genocide and an ecocide going on, supported by some Western governments against the will of the Western public,” says environmental justice advocate Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh, the founder and director of the institute.

    It has been a hectic week for him and his wife and mentor Jessie Chang Qumsiyeh.

    On Wednesday, May 15 — Nakba Day 2024 — they were in Canberra in conversation with local Palestinian, First Nations and environmental campaigners. Nakba – “the catastrophe” in English — is the day of mourning for the destruction of Palestinian society and its homeland in 1948, and the permanent displacement of a majority of the Palestinian people (14 million, of which about 5.3 million live in the “State of Palestine”.)

    Three days later in Auckland, they were addressing about 250 people with a Palestinian Christian perspective on Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine and the war in the historic St Mary’s-in-Holy-Trinity Church in Parnell.

    This followed a lively presentation and discussion on the work of the PIBS and its volunteers at the annual general meeting of Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) along with more than 100 young and veteran activists such as chair John Minto, who had just returned from a global solidarity conference in South Africa.


    Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh’s speech at Saint Mary’s-in-Holy-Trinity Church in Parnell.  Video: Radio Inqilaab 

    Environmental impacts less understood
    While the horrendous social and human costs of the relentless massacres in Gaza are in daily view on the world’s television screens, the environmental impacts of the occupation and destruction of Palestine are less understood.

    As Professor Qumsiyeh explains, water sources have been restricted, destroyed and polluted; habitat loss is pushing species like wolves, gazelles, and hyenas to the brink; destruction of crops and farmland drives food insecurity; and climate crisis is already impacting on Palestine and its people.

    The PIBS oasis as pictured on the front cover of the institute's latest annual report
    The PIBS oasis as pictured on the front cover of the institute’s latest annual report. Image: David Robie/APR

    The institute was initiated in 2014 by the Qumsiyehs at Bethlehem University along with a host of volunteers and supporters. After 11 years of operation, the latest PIBS 2023 annual report provides a surprisingly up-to-date and telling preface feeding into the early part of this year.

    “In 2023, there were increased restrictions on movement, settler and soldier attacks on Palestinians throughout the occupied territories, combined with the ongoing siege and strangulation of the Gaza Strip, under Israel’s extreme rightwing government.

    “This led to the Gaza ghetto uprising that started on 7 October 2023. The Israeli regime’s ongoing response is a genocidal campaign in Gaza.

    Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh
    Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh . . . In contrast to false perceptions of violence about Palestinians, “these methods have been the exception to what is a peaceful and creative.” Image: Del Abcede/Pax Christi

    “[Since that date], 35,500 civilians were brutally killed, 79,500 were wounded (72 percent women and children) and nearly 2 million people displaced. Thousands more still lay under the rubble.

    “An immense amount – nearly two-thirds – of Gaza’s infrastructure was destroyed , including 70 per cent of residential buildings, hospitals, schools, universities and government buildings.

    Total food, water blockade
    “Israel also imposed a total blockade of, among other things, fuel, food, water, and medicine.

    “This fits the definition of genocide per international law.

    “Israel also attacked the West Bank, killing hundreds of Palestinians in 2023 (and into 2024), destroyed homes and infrastructure (especially in refugee camnps), arrested thousands of innocent civilians, and ethnically cleansed communities in Area C.

    “Many of these marginalised communities were those that worked with the institute on issues of biodiversity and sustainability.”

    This is the context and the political environment that Professor Qumsiyeh confronts in his daily sustainability struggle. He is committed to a vision of sustainable human and natural communities, responding to the growing needs for education, community service, and protection of land and environment.

    Popular Resistance in Palestine cover (2011)
    Popular Resistance in Palestine cover (2011). Image: Pluto Press/APR

    In one of his many books, Popular Resistance in Palestine: A history of Hope and Empowerment, he argues that in contrast to how Western media usually paints Palestine resistance as exclusively violent: armed resistance, suicide bombings, and rocket attacks. “In reality,” he says, “these methods have been the exception to what is a peaceful  and creative

    Call for immediate ceasefire
    An enormous global movement has been calling for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza, to end decades of colonisation, and work toward a free Palestine that delivers sustainable peace for all in the region.

    Professor Qumsiyeh reminded the audience at St Mary’s that the first Christians were in Palestine.

    “The Romans used to feed us to the lions until the 4 th century,” when ancient Rome adopted Christianity and it became the Holy Roman Empire.

    He spoke about how Christians had also paid a high price for Israel’s war on Gaza as well as Muslims.

    PSNA's Billy Hania
    PSNA’s Billy Hania . . . a response to Professor Qumsiyeh. Image: David Robie/APR

    Christendom’s third oldest church and the oldest in Gaza, the Greek Orthodox church of Saint Porphyrius in the Zaytoun neighbourhood — which had served as a sanctuary for both Christians and Muslims during  Israel’s periodic wars was bombed just 12 days after the start of the current war.

    There had been about 1000 Christians in Gaza; 300 mosques had been bombed.

    He said “everything we do is suspect, we are harassed and attacked by the Israelis”.

    ‘Don’t want children to be happy’
    “They don’t want children to be happy, they have killed 15,000 of them in Gaza. They don’t want us to survive.”

    Palestine action for the planet
    Palestine action for the planet . . . a slide from Professor Qumsiyeh’s talk earlier in the day at the PSNA annual general meeting. Image: David Robie/APR

    He said colonisers did not seem to like diversity  — they destroy it, whether it is human diversity, biodiversity.

    “Palestine is a multiethnic, multicultural and multireligious country.”

    “Diversity is healthy, an equal system. We have all sorts of religions in our part of the world.

    “Life would be boring if we were all the same – that’s human. A forest with only one kind of  trees is not healthy.’

    Professor Qumsiyeh was critical of much Western news media.

    “If you watch Western media, Fox news and so on, you would be told that we are people who have been fighting for years.”

    That wasn’t true. “We had the most peaceful country on earth.”

    “If you go back a few years, to the Crusades, that is when political ideas from Europe such as principalities and kingdoms started to spread.”

    Heading into nuclear war
    He warned against a world that was rushing headlong into a nuclear war, which would be devastating for the planet – “only cockroaches can survive a nuclear war.”

    "Humanity for Gaza"
    “Humanity for Gaza” . . . a slide from Professor Qumsiyeh’s talk earlier in the day. Image: David Robie

    Professor Qumsiyeh likened his role to that of a shepherd, “telling the world that something must be done” to protect food sovereignty and biodiversity as “climate change is coming to us with a vengeance. So please help us achieve the goal.”

    The institute says that they are leaders in “disseminating information and ideas to challenge the propaganda spread about Palestine”.

    It annual report says: “We published 17 scientific articles on areas like environmental justice, protected areas, national parks, fauna, and flora.

    “Our team gave over 210 talks locally, only and abroad, and over 200 interviews (radio and TV).

    “We produced statements responding to attacks on institutions for higher education, natural areas, and cultural heritage.

    “We published research on the impact of war, on Israel’s weaponisation of ‘nature reserves’ and ‘national parks, and a vision for peace based on justice and sustainability.”

    When it is considered that Israel destroyed all 12 universities in Gaza, the sustaining work of the institute on many fronts is vital.

    Professor Qumsiyeh also appealed for volunteers, interns and researchers to come to Bethlehem to help the institute to contribute to a “more liveable world”.

    Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh
    Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh . . . an appeal for help from volunteers to contribute to a “more liveable world”. Image: David Robie/APR


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Climate Change is Rewiring Fish Brains and Human Brains May Be Next

    5 Mins Read

    Acidifying oceans are leading to sensory loss in fish. Scientists fear people might be next.

    By Clayton Aldern

    Imagine you are a clown fish. A juvenile clown fish, specifically, in the year 2100. You live near a coral reef. You are orange and white, which doesn’t really matter. What matters is that you have these little ear stones called otoliths in your inner ear, and when sound waves pass through the water and then through your body, these otoliths move and displace tiny hair cells, which trigger electrochemical signals in your auditory nerve. Nemo, you are hearing.

    But you are not hearing well. In this version of century’s end, humankind has managed to pump the climate brakes a smidge, but it has not reversed the trends that were apparent a hundred years earlier. In this 2100, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have risen from 400 parts per million at the turn of the millennium to 600 parts per million — a middle‑of‑the-road forecast. For you and your otoliths, this increase in carbon dioxide is significant, because your ear stones are made of calcium carbonate, a carbon-based salt, and ocean acidification makes them grow larger. Your ear stones are big and clunky, and the clicks and chirps of resident crustaceans and all the larger reef fish have gone all screwy. Normally, you would avoid these noises, because they suggest predatory danger. Instead, you swim toward them, as a person wearing headphones might walk into an intersection, oblivious to the honking truck with the faulty brakes. Nobody will make a movie about your life, Nemo, because nobody will find you.

    Clayton Page Aldern is pictured with his book, The Weight of Nature
    Author Clayton Page Aldern. Bonnie Cutts / Dutton

    It’s not a toy example. In 2011, an international team of researchers led by Hong Young Yan at the Academia Sinica, in Taiwan, simulated these kinds of future acidic conditions in seawater tanks. A previous study had found that ocean acidification could compromise young fishes’ abilities to distinguish between odors of friends and foes, leaving them attracted to smells they’d usually avoid. At the highest levels of acidification, the fish failed to respond to olfactory signals at all. Hong and his colleagues suspected the same phenomenon might apply to fish ears. Rearing dozens of clown fish in tanks of varying carbon dioxide concentrations, the researchers tested their hypothesis by placing waterproof speakers in the water, playing recordings from predator-rich reefs, and assessing whether the fish avoided the source of the sounds. In all but the present-day control conditions, the fish failed to swim away. It was like they couldn’t hear the danger.

    In Hong’s study, though, it’s not exactly clear if the whole story is a story of otolith inflation. Other experiments had indeed found that high ocean acidity could spur growth in fish ear stones, but Hong and his colleagues hadn’t actually noticed any in theirs. Besides, marine biologists who later mathematically modeled the effects of oversize otoliths concluded that bigger stones would likely increase the sensitivity of fish ears — which, who knows, “could prove to be beneficial or detrimental, depending on how a fish perceives this increased sensitivity.” The ability to attune to distant sounds could be useful for navigation. On the other hand, maybe ear stones would just pick up more background noise from the sea, and the din of this marine cocktail party would drown out useful vibrations. The researchers didn’t know.

    The uncertainty with the otoliths led Hong and his colleagues to conclude that perhaps the carbon dioxide was doing something else — something more sinister in its subtlety. Perhaps, instead, the gas was directly interfering with the fishes’ nervous systems: Perhaps the trouble with their hearing wasn’t exclusively a problem of sensory organs, but rather a manifestation of something more fundamental. Perhaps the fish brains couldn’t process the auditory signals they were receiving from their inner ears.

    The following year, a colleague of Hong’s, one Philip Munday at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia, appeared to confirm this suspicion. His theory had the look of a hijacking.

    A neuron is like a house: insulated, occasionally permeable, maybe a little leaky. Just as one might open a window during a stuffy party to let in a bit of cool air, brain cells take advantage of physical differences across their walls in order to keep the neural conversation flowing. In the case of nervous systems, the differentials don’t come with respect to temperature, though; they’re electrical. Within living bodies float various ions — potassium, sodium, chloride, and the like — and because they’ve gained or lost an electron here or there, they’re all electrically charged. The relative balance of these atoms inside and outside a given neuron induces a voltage difference across the cell’s membrane: Compared to the outside, the inside of most neurons is more negatively charged. But a brain cell’s walls have windows too, and when you open them, ions can flow through, spurring electrical changes.

    In practice, a neuron’s windows are proteins spanning their membranes. Like a house’s, they come in a cornucopia of shapes and sizes, and while you can’t fit a couch through a

    porthole, a window is still a window when it comes to those physical differentials. If it’s hot inside and cold outside, opening one will always cool you down.

    Until it doesn’t.

    Here is the clown fish neural hijacking proposed by Philip Munday. What he and his colleagues hypothesized was that excess carbon dioxide in seawater leads to an irregular accumulation of bicarbonate molecules inside fish neurons. The problem for neuronal signaling is that this bicarbonate also carries an electrical charge, and too much of it inside the cells ultimately causes a reversal of the normal electrical conditions. At the neural house party, now it’s colder inside than out. When you open the windows — the ion channels — atoms flow in the opposite direction.

    Munday’s theory applied to a particular type of ion channel: one responsible for inhibiting neural activity. One of the things all nervous systems do is balance excitation and inhibition. Too much of the former and you get something like a seizure; too much of the latter and you get something like a coma — it’s in the balance we find the richness of experience. But with a reversal of electrical conditions, Munday’s inhibitory channels become excitatory. And then? All bets are off. For a brain, it would be like pressing a bunch of random buttons in a cockpit and hoping the plane stays in the air. In clown fish, if Munday is right, the acidic seawater appears to short-circuit the fishes’ sense of smell and hearing, and they swim toward peril. It is difficult to ignore the question of what the rest of us might be swimming toward.

    From THE WEIGHT OF NATURE: How a Changing Climate Changes Our Brains by Clayton Page Aldern, to be published on April 9, 2024, by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Clayton Page Aldern.

    This excerpt was originally published in Grist and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.

    The post Climate Change is Rewiring Fish Brains and Human Brains May Be Next appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • WMO Bright Red Alert

    The World Meteorological Organization (Geneva, Switzerland) State of Climate 2023 Report by Celste Saulo, secretary general, was issued on March 19th, 2024.

    “As secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization, I am now sounding the Red Alert about the state of the climate.”

    The WMO has issued an annual State of the Climate Report for more than 30 years. Accordingly, Dr. Celste Saulo’s release of the Flagship Report: “The year 2023 set new records for every single climate indicator. This annual report shows that the climate crisis is the defining challenge that humanity faces, closely intertwined with the inequality crisis as witnessed by growing food insecurity, population displacement, and biodiversity loss.”

    According to WMO Secretary-General Saulo (Ph.D. Atmospheric Sciences, University of Buenos Aires): “Scientific knowledge of climate change has existed for more than five decades, and yet we’ve missed an entire generation of opportunity. We must base today’s decisions upon future generations rather than short-term economic interests.”

    Economic interests might consider taking a back seat by adjusting, considerably lower, its “infinite growth as soon as possible” footprint so the planet can catch its breath. Short-term economic interests as a feature of the neoliberal brand of capitalism are antithetical to the staid principles of climate science. They simply don’t mix.

    The inherent antagonism between neoliberalism’s free market dictates of “follow the money” versus the planet’s complex ecosystems that don’t need money is addressed in Global Social Challenges d/d May 4, 2021, The University of Manchester: “It seems then, that in order to prevent total ecological breakdown, we need to radically change our relationship with the way we produce and use resources. Any system that provides profit as an incentive, seems to always lead to exploitation of the earths finite resources. The idea of unlimited growth continuing indefinitely is the key culprit in climate breakdown.”

    What’s more important for life: Profits or Mother Nature?

    Accordingly, economic interests risk sudden failure, blindsided without the support of planetary ecosystems, i.e., planetary infrastructure which is increasingly under attack like never before. Throughout the biosphere, ecosystems struggle, rainforests emitting CO2, ice caps melting, Greenland a basket case, permafrost methane bubbling to surface, glaciers clobbered, and severe drought repeatedly hitting nations of the world, everywhere worldwide, Europe much harder, especially Spain subject to risk of 75% desertification with temperatures running in-excess of +2°C pre-industrial throughout the EU.

    Some highlights of WMO’s State of the Climate:

    Climate change is an existential threat to vulnerable populations everywhere: “The cost of climate action may seem high, but the costs of climate inaction are much higher.”

    Glaciers, as of 2023, had the largest loss on record. Yet, glaciers are the “water towers of the world, and we’re losing them fast. They are freshwater reservoirs.”

    A separate report by the Swiss Academy of Sciences, coincided with WMO’s Red Alert: “Swiss glaciers are melting at a rapidly increasing rate. The acceleration is dramatic, with as much ice being lost in only two years as was the case between 1960 and 1990. The two extreme consecutive years have led to glacier tongues collapsing and the disappearance of many smaller glaciers. For example, measurements of the St. Annafirn glacier in the canton of Uri had to be suspended as a result.”

    On a positive note, according to the secretary-general: “A glimmer of hope… in 2023 clean renewable energy increased nearly 50% over 2022.” Africa has huge renewable potential that is only using 1% of renewable investments. “We must focus on renewables for Africa.”

    Omar Badur, WMO Head of Climate Monitoring

    A key climate Indicator: Global temperatures 2023 were the warmest on record at 1.45°C above 1850-1900 average. Past 9 years, warmest 9 years on record. This trend appears endless.

    Sea ice loss in Antarctica was one of the major climate features reported in 2023. As a result, 2023 saw the highest rise in sea level ever. The rate doubled. In previous decades it was 2.13 mm per year. The recent decade recorded 4.17 mm/yr., nearly double.

    The most extreme climate events for the year related to heat and extreme precipitation:

    Extreme heat during the summer occurred (1) Japan had the hottest summer on record (2) Australia the hottest July-Sept on record (3) unprecedented wildfires in Canada (4) SE Asia extreme heat April/May (5) All-Europe extreme heat in summer (6) SE United States exceptionally hot summer (7) Mid-South America March, September extreme heat waves. All of which led to excessive mortality and massive forest fires.

    WMO’s discussion of extreme precipitation and deficit precipitation references the impact on agricultural food security and flooding. Most of South America, Central America, and North America experienced extreme dry episodes. North Africa experienced a long drought with some dam reservoirs at nearly zero percent of capacity. Water deficits are defining significant parts of the African continent.

    Meanwhile, pervasive flooding was seen throughout, especially in China and New Zealand, the worst flooding in recorded history. For example, in August 2023 more than 1,000,000 were forced to flee homes in China’s northeastern Hebei province, thereafter over one month to recede.

    A major concern, maybe most significant of all, and most hidden from sight, major changes in the oceans, over time, become irreversible. According to WMO’s report, 80-90% of the oceans recorded marine heatwaves in 2023. Like drought on land, excessive heatwaves lead to desertification of the oceans. However, in contrast, changes in the ocean are not as fast as atmospheric changes, and as such. once a change is established in the oceans, it’s irreversible. This is an extremely worrying trend as 80-90% experienced heatwaves.

    Confirming WMO’s observations, according to the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the U.S. National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, 2o23 ocean temperatures were, in the words of researchers: “Off the charts.” (Source: “Astounding Ocean Temperatures in 2023 Intensified Extreme Weather, Data Shows”, The Guardian, January 11, 2024.)

    According to Secretary General Celste: “We are having temperatures that are way above what we used to have, and our populations are not prepared to cope with that. Their infrastructure is not prepared. Their homes are not prepared. That’s why we spoke about a Red Alert.”

    Future UN climate conferences should consider focusing on adaptation measures for countries infrastructure to withstand the onslaught of drought, wildfires, floods, and sea level rise. After all, insurance companies are raising rates and, in some areas, dropping coverage altogether to adapt to climate change’s impact on bottom line profits, but in the harshest fashion, leaving the public to fend for itself, hopefully finding state-sponsored support.

    In contrast to insurance companies, which are running for the hills as global warming slashes profits, after 30 consecutive years of UN climate meetings, every issue brought before the plenary body of experts ends up worse until the following annual meeting, when it is again discussed one more time as an existential threat that gets progressively worse by the next annual session, on and on it goes. Yet, nothing about adaptation.

    In fact, the UNEP Adaptation Gap Report 2023 found the world underfinanced, underprepared, with inadequate investment and thus exposed to “slow progress on climate adaptation.”

    Adaptation to the forces of climate change at UN climate conferences, as a major focus, would likely be a welcomed relief and a more appropriate topic than whining about excessive fossil fuel CO2 emissions now that climate change/global warming is starting to look more and more like an out-of-control freight train barreling down the mountainside.

    In line with publication of WMO’s 2023 flagship report, January 2024 was the hottest January on record.

    Moreover, as reported by NOAA, February 2024 was the hottest February on record. February is the ninth consecutive month of record heat.

    Now that the climate system is setting new hottest temperature records month-by-month, it goes without saying, it’s a deadly dangerous affair.

    How long can this trend last?

    The post WMO Bright Red Alert first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Why Are We Still Killing Horseshoe Crabs? An Alternative Has Existed for Decades

    horseshoe crab blood
    6 Mins Read

    The US Pharmacopeia has finally released draft guidelines to allow the use of human-made alternatives to horseshoe crab blood – a critical element in biomedical and pharmaceutical testing. After failing in 2020, can the guidance pass this time around?

    They have been around for over 450 million years, with their eggs being a major food source for coastal birds and certain fish species. They’re also known for their bright-blue blood – thanks to the presence of a tiny amount of copper – whose functionality has meant one of the world’s oldest species is now vulnerable.

    I’m talking, of course, about horseshoe crabs. Over the last 50 or so years, humans have drained these sea creatures alive – quite literally. That blue blood is considered a vital source for endotoxin testing – it contains important immune cells that are highly sensitive to toxic bacteria. These cells clot around the bacteria to protect the rest of the horseshoe crab’s body from toxins.

    Scientists have made use of this functionality by developing a process called limulus amoebocyte lysate (LAL), which tests new human vaccines for bacterial contamination. But this process, of course, involves taking horseshoe crabs, stabbing them in their hearts, and pumping out their blood (sometimes for as long as eight minutes, depleting half the volume of their blood).

    However, for decades now, there has been a synthetic, man-made alternative to LAL – and yet, despite their importance to biodiversity, our planet’s history, and the overall ecosystem, the pharmaceutical industry has continued to use horseshoe crabs for vaccine testing. That, at long last, may change soon.

    Why alternatives to horseshoe crab blood are important

    red knot horseshoe crab
    Courtesy: milehightraveler/Getty Images

    There are four remaining species of horseshoe crabs, three of which are in Asia. The fourth, Limulus polyphemus, reside near the east coast of North America, and it’s these crabs that are under the spotlight, with the US Pharmacopeia – a non-profit regulatory body in charge of setting national safety standards (independent of the FDA) – publishing draft guidelines in August that will enable the use of synthetic alternatives to LAL.

    Each year, around 80 million tests are performed using horseshoe crabs around the world, but within the US, just five companies along the East Coast, drained blood from over 700,000 crabs in 2021, according to NPR – that’s more than any other year since records began in 2004. And it is estimated that as many as 30% of these creatures die as a result of this bleeding process.

    It’s not just the pharma industry – many around the world use these crabs as bait during fishing, as well as eat them as a delicacy. This has led to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) declaring the American horseshoe crab as a vulnerable species. And in 2019 – along with other conservation groups – it called for stronger rules and more scientific research to protect horseshoe crabs.

    These creatures are also crucial for biodiversity. Of the coastal boards that feed on its eggs, the most common is the red knot. These migratory birds rely on horseshoe crabs’ eggs to fuel their nearly 10,000-mile-long from South America to the Arctic every year. But around 94% of red knots have disappeared over the past 40 years, with the IUCN classifying the species as ‘near threatened’. A loss in horseshoe crab numbers would be fatal for these birds.

    An alternative has existed for decades

    what is horseshoe crab blood used for
    Courtesy: Nanoclustering/Science Photo Library

    The solution to the issue is an alternative that has been around for decades now. The problem, however, is its adoption. In the late 1990s, scientists at the National University of Singapore realised the potential a protein cloned from crab blood – called recombinant Factor C (rFC) – could have for endotoxin detection, sans animals.

    Versions of this alternative have been produced by several biotech companies, including France’s bioMérieux and Switzerland’s Lonza. The latter’s rFC had initially been considered by USP to be added to guidelines that govern its international testing, but the effort was abandoned in 2020.

    It meant that Big Pharma would continue to use horseshoe crabs for drug testing. USP’s decision came after Charles River Laboratories, a global biomedical giant that provides the pharma industry with over half of its LAL supply, criticised rFC citing safety concerns. Currently, USP’s rules put the synthetic alternative in a separate chapter in its guidelines, meaning that drug companies that want to use rFC need to conduct extra validation experiments.

    It’s a heavily criticised move, given the LAL alternative has been commercially available since the 2000s. In 2019, the European Pharmacopoeia approved the use of rFC as an animal-free drug alternative. Around the same time, its Japanese and Chinese counterparts also approved the rFC test for use. In fact, as far back as 2012, the US FDA issued guidance on rFC testing for injectable medicines too.

    Now, USP is finally coming on board. Its draft guidance – which is open for comment until the end of January – proposes changing its standards to support the use of synthetic alternatives to harvesting horseshoe crabs for blood. It advocates the use of not just rFC, but another alternative, recombinant cascade reagent (rCR), which contains rFC, recombinant Factor B, and a recombinant proclotting enzyme.

    USP also details methods to use these synthetic reagents, as well as steps to verify their use for a specific product. Pharmaceutical companies producing new drugs can use the guidelines without needing to first show comparability LAL, but manufacturers of existing products looking to switch to animal-free testing are required to. However, switching from LAL remains optional.

    “We acknowledge the need for information to help drive the adoption of recombinant reagents as alternatives to naturally sourced reagents from horseshoe crabs,” the group said in a statement. “This approach advances USP’s commitment to transition methods from using animal-derived materials to synthetic and recombinant materials.”

    More wins for horseshoe crabs

    horseshoe crab blood used for
    Courtesy: Aimin Tang/Getty Images

    The news around the same time environmental groups announced a settlement in a lawsuit against the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources and Charles River, alleging that they permit unlimited amounts of horseshoe crabs to be stored in ponds away from beaches. While the accused parties denied the charge, the settlement requires Charles River to provide for five years of enhanced protections for spawning horseshoe crabs and migrating red knots.

    This means the company cannot harvest crabs across 30 island beaches, and is prohibited from keeping female crabs in ponds away from shores. It followed a ruling by the US Fish and Wildlife Service a few weeks earlier, which stated that harvesters can’t take crabs from their refuge anymore – this was the first time a federal agency acted in favour of horseshoe crab harvesting to protect red knots.

    New Jersey congressman Frank Pallone welcomed USP’s new standards, which, “if adopted, will provide a viable alternative to the use of horseshoe crab blood in this process”. “Unfortunately, this global reliance on horseshoe crabs has placed an enormous strain on the population of these unique creatures,” he said. “I look forward to this new standard being finalised soon so that we can pave the way for more responsible medical options that do not rely on the vulnerable horseshoe crab population.”

    Jaap Venema, the group’s chief science officer, said: “We hope that this will be an encouragement for companies to continue switching to non-animal-derived reagents. We’re only expanding opportunities for companies to start using them.”

    The previous guidance in 2020 was thwarted after the public comment period – the hope is that this time will be different, allowing for animal-free testing to save human lives, while safeguarding horseshoe crab and red knot populations. It’s about time.

    The post Why Are We Still Killing Horseshoe Crabs? An Alternative Has Existed for Decades appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • UN Warns Human Activity Pushes Over 1 in 5 Migratory Species Toward Extinction

    As world governments gathered in Uzbekistan Monday for the United Nations conference on migratory species, they centered the theme “Nature Knows No Borders” — an idea that a new landmark report said must take hold across the globe to push policymakers in all countries and regions to protect the billions of animals that travel each year to reproduce and find food. The Convention on the Conservation…

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Why Blended Meat is Not a BIG Idea

    4 Mins Read

    Marketing expert Irina Gerry argues that while blended meat, could meet niche consumer needs such as upgraded nutrition or improved flavor, it’s not a ‘big’ idea.

    The concept of blended meat — combining plant-based ingredients with animal meat — has recently emerged as a solution to the challenges faced by purely plant-based meats. At first glance, it seems like a compelling proposition, promising enhanced taste compared to plant-based meat, reduced environmental impact versus animal-based meat, and potentially better pricing. Recent entrants into this space include brands like 50/50 Foods, Paul’s Table, and Mush Foods. However, does this idea truly address consumer needs, or is it merely an industry-driven solution?

    The Best of Both Worlds: Understanding Flexitarians

    The rise of flexitarian diets suggests a willingness to embrace both plant-based and animal products. However, this doesn’t automatically translate into a desire for blended products. Products like almond-dairy milk blend by Live Real Farms or mixed chicken and Raised and Rooted blended meat and plant-based protein burgers by Tyson haven’t performed well in the market. 

    The reason for this is the lack of a real consumer need. We don’t see consumers mixing almond and dairy milk in the same glass. They likely have both milks in their fridge, but use them for different occasions or different members of the household, based on a specific set of preferences. Similarly, we rarely see anyone blending a Beyond Burger with ground beef to improve the flavor.

    Quality Perception of Blended Meat: A Complicated Relationship

    The act of blending can create a perception of lesser quality. Meat enthusiasts often view pure meat as a high-quality product. When you start mixing in soy or pea protein, it’s like watering down a fine wine. Remember when rumors of McDonald’s burger patties getting mixed with soy caused a social media outrage? The company now specifically messages that its patties are 100% beef, with no fillers, as proof of quality.

    The same goes for plant-based consumers. When they choose to have a plant-based product, they are doing so consciously, and for a variety of reasons such as health, ethics, or the environment. None of these reasons is strengthened by adding animal protein to the mix. So, the blend likely dilutes the value proposition for both camps.

    Choice and Control: The Art of Personalization

    Most consumers enjoy a mix of plant-based and animal-based foods, but they do so on their own terms. They might choose a purely plant-based dish one day and mix and match both plant and animal foods another day. Some are vegan at home, whilst indulging in a pepperoni pizza on weekends, or they might stretch ground beef with veggies and bread crumbs for cost savings. The key is personalization and control over the mixing and matching based on specific occasions and recipes. It is unlikely for a single product to satisfy such divergent needs, especially if it’s a standard product like a burger patty.

    Narrow Appeal: The Challenge of a Niche Market

    Given these factors, blended meat risks becoming a niche product category. For meat eaters, adding plant-based elements may seem like a compromise in quality and taste. For plant-based consumers, the introduction of animal ingredients feels counterintuitive. The appeal might be limited to a small segment of flexitarians, driven by a specific need or usage occasion, likely making it a commercial challenge. 

    Blending to meet a specific consumer need, such as lower cost or better nutrition, could be a viable idea, but it’s just not a BIG idea. 

    So, What’s the Way Forward?

    To give blended meat the best chance of success, we need a consumer-centric approach. Here are two potential positioning strategies:

    1. Lead with Flavor: People enjoy exploring new flavors. Incorporating caramelized onions and roasted bell peppers on a burger, or adding a portobello mushroom for an umami boost, can enhance the appeal. This approach focuses on exciting flavors rather than compromising taste or nutritional values. Blending animal-based meat with whole plant ingredients that contribute to an intriguing flavor profile has potential, especially if brands lead with a positive taste experience. However, this might result in occasional purchases due to fractionated usage occasions, leading to low turnover.
    2. Better Nutrition without Compromise: Many consumers aspire to eat healthier foods. Blended meat products offering additional nutritional benefits, such as more fiber, reduced saturated fat, and fewer calories, could be appealing. However, ensuring that taste is not compromised is crucial. Since most consumers choose animal-based meat for its taste, any compromise on this front could spell trouble. Thus, a strategy that leads with great taste, while delivering improved nutrition as a secondary benefit, might hold more promise.

    Solving The Blended Meat Puzzle

    Successfully positioning blended meat products requires navigating the complex landscape of consumer preferences, quality perceptions, cultural influences, and dietary choices. While the idea holds potential, its success hinges on more than just merging two types of proteins, as a logical response to current struggles of plant-based meat. It demands a deep understanding of consumer desires and their choices in integrating plant-based and animal-based foods into their diets. Only by tapping into these nuances can blended meat transcend being a fleeting trend and secure a meaningful place in our diverse and dynamic food landscape.

    The post Why Blended Meat is Not a BIG Idea appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • MeliBio’s Vegan Honey Expands European Presence with Aldi Deal

    melibio vegan honey
    4 Mins Read

    Shortly after launching into the UK, the vegan honey from MeliBio and Narayan Foods is widening its European footprint with the debut of its bee-free product in Aldi/Hofer stores in Switzerland and Austria.

    MeliBio’s European launch is well underway. After releasing its bee-free honey product, dubbed vegan H*ney, under Slovenia-based Narayan Foods’ Better Foodie brand in the UK, it is stepping into Europe after striking a deal with Germany-headquartered discount retailer Aldi.

    Marketed as Vegan Hanny or Ohney, the new product will be sold under Aldi’s private label Just Veg in Hofer stores in Austria and Switzerland, as part of a wider plan to expand into other European countries.

    What MeliBio’s vegan honey is composed of

    The launch is born out of MeliBio’s collaboration with Narayan Foods, which was announced in late 2022. The $10M, four-year partnership aims to propel the plant-based honey into 75,000 retailers across Europe.

    This isn’t the brand’s first foray into retail, however. In its home market in the US, MeliBio unveiled a vegan honey for foodservice under the Mellody brand. It even teamed up with Michelin-starred restaurant Eleven Madison Park’s e-tail channel Eleven Madison Home – while that partnership has ended, Mellody has evolved into a D2C entity as well, with pre-orders open for its Golden Clover honey.

    mellody
    Courtesy: MeliBio

    This product comprises 80% fructose and glucose and 18% water, with a blend of plant extracts like red clover, jasmine, passionflower, chamomile, and seaberry, as well as gluconic acid and natural flavours, making up the rest. But in an interview with AFN, MeliBio co-founder and CEO Darko Mandich confirmed that the formulation is slightly different in the European products.

    He added that these first innovations were inspired by light clover and acacia honey. MeliBio has scaled up to the level of a medium-sized honey company, with a capacity of making over 10,000 lbs or more of its vegan honey daily via co-packers. This means it can produce over 15,000 bottles of its European honey every day.

    This is key given the troubling decline in bee populations recently. In Europe, 24% of bumblebee species are facing a threat of extinction, while in the UK, 17 species of bees have become extinct, with a further 25 endangered. In fact, beekeepers have reported colony losses in countries like France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Russia, Brazil and the US.

    There are a host of reasons for this, the primary cause being human activities, including land use change for agriculture or urbanisation, and intensive farming. Plus, honey bees’ very ability to produce the golden liquid has also declined, thanks to widespread herbicide use, conversion of flower-rich land into monocultures, a drop in soil productivity, and climate change. All this makes solutions like MeliBio’s vegan honey increasingly important.

    vegan honey
    Courtesy: MeliBio

    MeliBio’s route to price parity

    MeliBio began as a precision fermentation company looking to make bioidentical honey in 2020. But it pivoted to its plant-based product earlier this year, as a way to accelerate its route to market. “We realised that our investors’ samples are becoming more sophisticated, to the point where chefs begged us to launch our plant-based honey,” Mandich told Green Queen in August.

    “We heard our customers loud and clear, and that’s how our pivot happened. It shortens our initial five to seven years timeline for product launch down to three years, which is great success.”

    However, Mandich confirmed that the company is still working on the novel fermentation tech, with R&D “ongoing and progressing well”: “It will empower us to go beyond the type of product we have right now, and set us [up] for success in launching many new products under the vision of creating the world where humans and bees thrive.”

    MeliBio, which has raised $9.4M in total funding, is now looking to close its Series A later this year, which it will set aside for “growth and expansion” only. It will also help the company make its honey price competitive. In the US, a 340g bottle of Mellody costs $19.99, while the Better Foodie one in the UK sells for £5.99 per 300g jar.

    vegan honey
    Courtesy: Better Foodie/Getty Images via Canva

    This is why partnering with Aldi was key, with the Vegan Hanny priced at €4.99 per 300g jar. “Our approach is really to get the product as close to the real thing as possible at an affordable price point,” Mandich told AFN. “Aldi is a massive global [corporation] that’s very price-sensitive, so by landing this deal we are confirming that MeliBio technology can play at that level of price sensitivity which Aldi requires.”

    He added in a statement: “We’ve been overwhelmed by the demand from customers all over the world for our sustainable, bee-friendly products, and we’re glad that working with Aldi will enable European consumers to enjoy what is truly the best honey available on the market.”

    Honey is a $9.1B market, and brands like MeliBio are trying to disrupt it with sustainable and ethical alternatives. Others in this space include Gaffney Foods’ Nectar, Blenditup, ChocZero, Plant Based Artisan’s Honea, and Sweet Freedom.

    The post MeliBio’s Vegan Honey Expands European Presence with Aldi Deal appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.