Dispatches

Former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper's war on science has ended after a 9-year run. The Conservative Party leader gutted environmental legislation, terminated environmental monitoring programs, muzzled government scientists, and laid off over 2000 researchers from federal labs. The new Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, elected on October 19, says he will restore the place of science in evidence-based policy making. Scientists are cautiously optimistic he will make good on this promise. “Until a decade ago, Canada was regarded as an international leader in environmental science and policy”, says David Schindler, an aquatic ecologist with the University of Alberta (Edmonton, Canada). For instance, Canada hosted the landmark Montréal Protocol, taking the initiative on regulating chemicals that destroy the Earth's UV-shielding ozone layer. The government's labs generated research that led to the first policies to cut acid rain and the nutrient pollution of lakes. “But after Harper was elected in 2006, Canada became the ultimate international thug, earning a ‘Lifetime Unachievement’ Fossil Award for stalling progress at UN climate talks”, Schindler continues. In 2011, Canada became the only country to back out of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. “The Harper government's ideological objective was to support industry at all costs and smooth the approval process for developments such as oil and gas pipelines”, says Jeffrey Hutchings, an evolutionary ecologist at Dalhousie University (Halifax, Canada). The Fisheries Act was weakened to protect only commercially important species, and in 2012, the government repealed the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, leaving assessments up to the provinces. Basic science took a hit when Canada mothballed 17 Arctic monitoring stations, once known worldwide for collecting data on holes in the ozone layer. The Harper government also shut down the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences, which funded academic research. Additionally, the world-renowned Experimental Lakes Area in northwestern Ontario lost federal funding, and is now run by a policy think-tank with limited access to government research dollars. New Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau. “The stronger you are as a partisan ideologue, the more you want to control communication”, Hutchings explains. In 2007, the Prime Minister's office forbade government scientists from speaking to the media without the office's permission. When a fish biologist was barred from answering media questions about her recent paper in Science, the incident helped drive international headlines about Canada's gagging of scientists. Determined to resist the war on science, researchers protested in 17 Canadian cities in 2013. Launching a nonprofit organization called Evidence for Democracy, scientists lobbied Canada's political parties in advance of this year's federal election. “It's interesting how effectively the scientific community got organized and saw that momentum carry through into the election”, says Katie Gibbs, executive director of Evidence for Democracy. The researchers' efforts to insert government science reforms into Trudeau's Liberal Party platform seem to be paying off. Sworn into office on November 4, Trudeau signaled a more prominent role for science with his Cabinet Minister appointments. The former Industry Ministry is now the Ministry of Innovation, Science, and Economic Development. Trudeau has promised to restore the position of Chief Science Advisor, a post that Harper eliminated in 2008. “That will go a long way toward reinstating the contributions of scientists to decision making, because it sends a message from the top that the best scientific information will inform decisions”, Hutchings says. Climate change, a term scrubbed out of the Harper lexicon, is now being embraced. Environment Canada has now become Environment and Climate Change Canada. And Trudeau introduced former medical geographer Kirsty Duncan as his Minister of Science, a newly created position. To top it off, within days of Trudeau taking office, scientists at Fisheries and Oceans Canada and Environment and Climate Change Canada were told they could speak freely to media and the public. “My government colleagues were ecstatic”, says Miriam Diamond, an environmental chemist at the University of Toronto (Toronto, Canada). However, “other changes the Conservative Party made will take much longer to rectify”, Hutchings cautions. Budgets of government science departments were reduced by over 20%, leading to a drain of experts and capacity that will take a long time to restore. Diamond agrees, adding that the anti-science culture will be slow to change, as mid-management levels in the science agencies are staffed with people hired under Harper to “make sure nothing happened”. Canada's experience is a cautionary tale for scientists the world over, Gibbs says. Similar attacks on science have occurred in other countries when a new government, hostile to the environment, gets elected. In such cases, she urges scientists to mobilize early. “What happened in Canada shows how scientists can transform into a political movement with clout”, she concludes. Illegal logging is a scourge in the Russian Far East, home to arguably the world's most biodiverse northern forests. However, a Virginia court case could signal a shift toward more sustainable forestry – in Russia and globally. Lumber Liquidators, the largest specialty hardwood flooring retailer in the US, has pled guilty to violating the Lacey Act, a US law that prohibits the import of illegally harvested timber. Evidence procured by WWF Russia, the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), and a 2013 federal agency raid on the retailer's Virginia headquarters confirms that Lumber Liquidators ignored red flags that it was importing wood illegally harvested in the Russian Far East. According to Brian Milakovsky, former Forest Project Coordinator for WWF Russia's Amur Branch (Vladivostok, Russia), this is the first time a government has pressed charges against a corporation for importing timber harvested illegally in another country. Charges included the falsification of declaration forms and the continued import of wood despite suppliers lying about product origins. For instance, Lumber Liquidators knowingly mislabeled Mongolian oak (Quercus mongolica) as Welsh oak (Quercus petraea) – a species common in Europe, where illegal logging is less rampant – in Lacey Act declarations for 35 shipments. Mongolian oak is the only oak species found in the Russian Far East, where its acorns support prey populations of the endangered Amur tiger (Panthera tigris altaica) and the critically endangered Far Eastern leopard (Panthera pardus orientalis). Ninety-six percent of the Russian Far East's valuable hardwood exports leave the region via the Chinese border town of Suifenhe. Lumber Liquidators has agreed to pay over $13 million in criminal fines, forfeiture, and community service payments. The sentence also includes a 5-year probation involving the implementation of an Environmental Compliance Plan, as well as third-party auditing. Since peaking in 2013, the company's stock has dropped more than 85% in value, which Milakovsky considers the real blow. The US, EU, and Australia are the only major timber consumers with laws banning the import of illegally harvested wood. “To protect key terrestrial ecosystems, we need global systemic change in the rules for wood trade”, says Alexander von Bismarck, Executive Director of EIA (Washington, DC). “Our strategy involves getting these laws passed around the world. There have never been consequences before for the biggest corporations in the world accepting illegal wood. This can be the beginning of a new set of sensible rules that protect consumers from being unwitting participants in horrible violence, organized crime, and the destruction of the most biodiverse places on Earth. We need help as consumers to do that.” Coast redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) – some of the tallest and oldest trees on the planet – grow almost exclusively within a narrow strip of land on the US Pacific coast extending from California's Big Sur in the south to the southwest corner of Oregon in the north. How the geographic range of these redwoods will be affected by future climate change has long been of interest and concern to scientists. Miguel Fernández, then a PhD student at the University of California, Merced (Merced, CA) and currently a postdoctoral fellow at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (Leipzig, Germany), chose to tackle this question in an unconventional way: by turning to the past (Glob Change Biol 2015; doi:10.1111/gcb.13027). “History repeats itself, and I believe that climate follows this rule”, he explains. “So instead of trying to find ways to improve the models of the future, I decided to look at the past. One of the main issues with modeling the effects of future climate change on biodiversity is spatial resolution, but observations of past climate are available at greater spatial resolutions than models of the future. By using the extreme years from the past as analogs for the future, we can take full advantage of the spatial resolution and produce climatic habitat projections that are relevant at local scales.” Fernández and his colleagues developed eight scenarios of future climate change based on different historical combinations of temperature and precipitation to model potential shifts in the range of climatically suitable habitat, determining that a scenario of increasing temperatures with unchanged rates of precipitation most closely matched large-scale projections for California by 2030 or so. Under this scenario, their model shows that although the coast redwood's range will contract in the south, climatically suitable habitat will expand several hundred kilometers to the northwest, thereby shifting the species' northern range farther into southern Oregon. “We also found that some areas will be maintained as suitable habitat regardless of the scenario that we used”, Fernández adds, suggesting that these sites may serve as persistent climatic refugia for this iconic species, even as California's climate changes. A new study of Hawaiian forest birds illustrates how habitat protection alone may not be enough to save many species, if climate impacts are not also addressed (PLoS ONE 2015; doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0140389). The research shows how rising temperatures would push birds higher up mountain slopes to escape mosquitoes carrying avian malaria, even though plenty of habitat remains available at lower elevations. “There's a difference between the distribution of the species and the habitat of the species”, says Lucas Fortini, a research ecologist at the US Geological Survey and lead author of the study. “That's one of the critical distinctions for us to make.” The endemic forest birds of Hawaii are among the most rare and unique in the world. Although they once flocked from sea level to mountaintops, today they are restricted to higher elevations that are too cool for the transmission of certain diseases. But rising temperatures could make that safe zone higher and smaller. The researchers found that six out of the 10 species examined would lose 90–100% of their range by the year 2100 under a “moderate” climate-change scenario, and the rest would see their range reduced by at least half. Fortini explains that conservation efforts have largely focused on habitat protection and management. “What [our] results highlight is, yes, those things are vitally important but there are some situations where [habitat protection] alone, by the end of the century, will not be enough.” Jonathan Price (University of Hawaii, Hilo), a biogeographer who was not affiliated with the study, says the research shows how temperature can serve as a “proxy” for other climate-related factors –like disease, invasive species, and food sources – that are harder to measure. “We think about climate simply in terms of whether it's an appropriate climate for these birds, and forget that just over 100 years ago, a lot of these species were at low elevation and perfectly common”, he says. Fortini hopes the findings will spur conservationists to take other measures, such as mosquito suppression. “The silver lining is that we know the drivers for some of the losses we're projecting, and therefore we know what we can do.” Roughly 116 000 fires were documented in Indonesia this summer – over half of which occurred on carbon-rich peatlands, generating high-impact methane emissions. As a result, the country's anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) contribution surpassed that of the US during its peak times in September and October. While clearing land to plant oil palm trees is a high-profile source of GHGs, this accounts for only about 10% of the country's total; nationwide emissions from pulpwood plantations, at 25%, are a bigger contributor. Beyond the climate impact of the peat fires, the region experienced enormous fire-related public health concerns. Over 300 000 people sought medical help for respiratory ailments in Indonesia between June and October 2015, concentrated in areas where air quality measures were 10 times worse than “hazardous” levels. In some cities, the sky turned yellow. “In Indonesia, any burning to clear land is illegal except by small farmers, so virtually all the fires are illegal”, says Susan Minnemeyer, a Geographic Information Systems manager of the Forest Program at the World Resources Institute (Washington, DC). “The climate implications are serious, but human health is the pressing issue that will likely drive people to take action”, she adds. An Unmanned Aerial Vehicle surveys burning peat in Indonesia. There are signs that steps are being taken to conserve peatlands and hold companies accountable for illegal burning. “This [2014] is the first year that a fine – a large fine of roughly $30 million – was upheld against a company for fires”, continues Minnemeyer. Singapore is also trying to prosecute any companies responsible for their unhealthy air quality, no matter which country the company operates in, under the Transboundary Haze Pollution Act passed last year. In addition to holding companies accountable for the fires, some efforts are underway to reverse the draining of peatlands. Essentially, that means blocking drainage canals to re-wet the peat. One company, Asia Pulp and Paper, has reportedly undertaken a 7000-ha restoration project in fire-sensitive peatlands. And the Katingan Peatland Restoration and Conservation Project aims to restore over 200 000 ha of peat swamp forest in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia, a region where hundreds of thousands of people endured terrible air quality this fall. “Restoring peatlands to hydrological equilibrium is key to preventing fires in the future, as is stopping agricultural expansion into these areas”, says Miriam Marlier, a postdoctoral scientist at University of California in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, says Minnemeyer, peat restoration will have to be done at a massive scale to have a substantial impact on future fires. Tiny microplastics are suspended throughout the world's oceans – they are so pervasive that one recent study even found them in samples of sea salt (Environ Sci Technol 2015; doi:10.1021/acs.est.5b03163) – but until recently, the process by which microplastics are transported from the surface to deeper parts of the ocean has remained a mystery. Knowing that biofouling can cause larger plastic particles to sink in the ocean, researchers at the Université de Bretagne Occidentale, Brest (Brest, France) investigated whether “micro-biofouling” by phytoplankton was contributing to the transport of microplastics through the water column. Their findings are reported in Marine Chemistry (2015; doi: 10.1016/j.marchem.2015.04.003). “Phytoplankton is known to sink mainly as aggregates”, says co-author Brivaëla Moriceau. “Our study is the first to estimate the sinking rates of plastic in phytoplankton aggregates, and the carrying capacity of different phytoplankton aggregates.” The team modified a traditional closed roller tank, commonly used in algal aggregation and sinking studies, to allow the addition of microplastic particles with minimal disturbance to the fragile algae clumps. The researchers ran the test with two common algal species – Chaetoceros neogracile (a diatom known to form larger, denser aggregates) and Rhodomonas salina (a cryptophyte that forms smaller, less dense aggregates) – and with a mix of the two species. They found that microplastics were easily incorporated into the sticky bonds of each type of algal aggregate, and sank along with the algae at speeds ranging from tens of centimeters to hundreds of meters per day. The cryptophyte aggregates incorporated more plastic particles than either the diatoms alone or the mix of species, and their usual sinking rate increased from 76 m to around 125 m per day. Diatom aggregates, on the other hand, sank at slower speeds when linked with plastic fragments. A flow-through roller tank aggregates and mimics algae sinking while allowing microplastic particles to be added. “I was not expecting that the diatom aggregates [would] decrease their sinking rates so strongly when they incorporated the microplastics”, admits Moriceau. The researchers think this effect could be due to the lower-density microplastics reducing the overall density of the aggregate community. The decreased speed of plastic-laden diatom clumps sinking to the ocean floor, she says, “might have a huge impact on the biological carbon pump”. You might want to think twice before you toss out those coffee grounds after brewing your coffee. That sludge may one day lead to clean fuel for cars, as well as improved fuel cells. Researchers at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST; Ulsan, South Korea) have created an inexpensive, highly stable, solid medium in which to store gases such as methane, by activating the carbon that is naturally present in waste coffee grounds (Nanotechnology 2015; doi:10.1088/0957-4484/26/38/385602). “Work on activated carbon to capture gases is nothing new”, says lead author Christian Kemp, now based at Pohang University of Science and Technology (Pohang, South Korea). “But we found an effective material that's renewable and a method that is fast, easy, and cheap.” Carbon activation of solids is usually achieved through a multistep “stir, soak, and heat” process that makes the materials more absorbent, and is already being tested with old tires, nut husks, and certain types of seeds. The idea to similarly test the capacity of coffee dregs had struck Kemp as he was staring at the bottom of his own coffee cup while discussing an unrelated issue. The UNIST team quickly found that they could reach maximum methane absorption for their coffee grounds with merely a short soak in potassium hydroxide – an ingredient found in common drain cleaners – followed by heat treatment in a furnace to get the mix to 700–900 °C. “Coffee is so absorbent that we could decrease the fabrication time significantly”, explains Kemp. “It took a couple of hours – a fraction of the 24 hours it usually takes to produce similar carbon capture materials. And it's renewable.” There are multiple environmental benefits of storing methane in coffee grounds. In its pure form, methane can serve as a clean fuel source for vehicles. You can pump it into the empty, spacious material of the coffee grounds to create pressurized solid fuel cells that are much safer than conventional high-pressure cylinders. Methane is also an important greenhouse gas, produced by industrial processes and other sources, so its capture is a plus in mitigating climate change. And no of coffee to a study at the University of doi: million of coffee are produced each with the small coffee around 10 of coffee waste per day.