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Maya Biosphere Reserve: A Model for Sustainable Land Management

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Saturday, August 3, 2024

In the lush jungle of northern Guatemala — in the largest protected area in Central America — 30 leaders from Colombia’s Amazon basin region are swapping strategies with local ethnic Maya farmers on how to live off this dense forest without destroying it. Under the soaring, leafy mahogany and cedar trees in the Maya Biosphere Reserve, the visiting group discusses ways to ensure the rain forest remains healthy, while studying the reserve-type model Guatemala has been developing since 1994. Guatemala’s vast sustainability project aims to achieve a balance in which communities reforest, cut down trees for timber in a controlled way, grow grains and vegetables, collect ornamental plants, and even develop low-impact tourism. “That ensures that our communities are getting the economic resources that are also invested here for conservation,” said Sergio Balan, regional director of the National Council of Protected Areas (CONAP), in the village of Melchor de Mencos, near the border with Belize. The Maya Biosphere Reserve sprawls over 2.1 million hectares (5.2 million acres) and borders Mexico and Belize. Every year, its flora and fauna are threatened by fires, deforestation for agricultural and livestock purposes, and even drug traffickers. Hundreds of archaeological sites are located in this territory, such as the ancient Mayan city of Tikal, one of the main tourist sites in Guatemala and the site hosting the visitors from the Forest Development and Biodiversity Centers of the Colombian Amazon. In the reserve and near Tikal, there is also the pre-Hispanic park of Uaxactun, where both groups participated in a Mayan ceremony with a fire stoked with candles and tree resin. The Colombian leaders, whose visit lasted a week, highlighted the achievements in reducing deforestation in the Colombian Amazon between 2021 and 2023, by 61 percent, according to data from Colombia’s environment ministry. Farmer to farmer There are currently 16 active concessions that help conserve nearly 619,000 hectares of forest, CONAP says. Controlled logging permits, meanwhile, let private companies work for 25- or 30-year periods. Concessions and reserves “not only provide employment, but also training for different jobs,” says Erwin Maas, a Guatemalan tourist guide who is also familiar with forestry. CONAP estimates that the concessions, a kind of activity grant, create about 150,000 direct and indirect jobs in the reserve. Along one part of the path, visitors find a row of cut logs that are stacked to be taken to the sawmill. The wood comes from trees selected for felling in a controlled process that will allow the forest to regenerate. Nearby, the sound of birds and monkeys fluttering through the branches, mixes with group’s chatter. “One of the great ideas we took away is the form of organization they have had (in Guatemala) to really last over time,” says Aristides Oime, president of a Colombian farm group, Asojuntas de Cartagena del Chaira. “From farmer to farmer, we see how we can really improve,” he said. “We want to show how we truly believe that deforestation is not the way, the real route is environmental conservation.” The coordinator of the Colombia-based NGO Heart of the Amazon, Luz Rodriguez, believes that though there are differences with the Guatemalan communities, they learned lessons about how other people control land sustainably. The post Maya Biosphere Reserve: A Model for Sustainable Land Management appeared first on The Tico Times | Costa Rica News | Travel | Real Estate.

Under the soaring, leafy mahogany and cedar trees in the Maya Biosphere Reserve, the visiting group discusses ways to ensure the rain forest remains healthy, while studying the reserve-type model Guatemala has been developing since 1994.

Guatemala’s vast sustainability project aims to achieve a balance in which communities reforest, cut down trees for timber in a controlled way, grow grains and vegetables, collect ornamental plants, and even develop low-impact tourism.

“That ensures that our communities are getting the economic resources that are also invested here for conservation,” said Sergio Balan, regional director of the National Council of Protected Areas (CONAP), in the village of Melchor de Mencos, near the border with Belize.

The Maya Biosphere Reserve sprawls over 2.1 million hectares (5.2 million acres) and borders Mexico and Belize. Every year, its flora and fauna are threatened by fires, deforestation for agricultural and livestock purposes, and even drug traffickers.

Hundreds of archaeological sites are located in this territory, such as the ancient Mayan city of Tikal, one of the main tourist sites in Guatemala and the site hosting the visitors from the Forest Development and Biodiversity Centers of the Colombian Amazon.

In the reserve and near Tikal, there is also the pre-Hispanic park of Uaxactun, where both groups participated in a Mayan ceremony with a fire stoked with candles and tree resin.

The Colombian leaders, whose visit lasted a week, highlighted the achievements in reducing deforestation in the Colombian Amazon between 2021 and 2023, by 61 percent, according to data from Colombia’s environment ministry.

Farmer to farmer

There are currently 16 active concessions that help conserve nearly 619,000 hectares of forest, CONAP says. Controlled logging permits, meanwhile, let private companies work for 25- or 30-year periods.

Concessions and reserves “not only provide employment, but also training for different jobs,” says Erwin Maas, a Guatemalan tourist guide who is also familiar with forestry. CONAP estimates that the concessions, a kind of activity grant, create about 150,000 direct and indirect jobs in the reserve.

Along one part of the path, visitors find a row of cut logs that are stacked to be taken to the sawmill. The wood comes from trees selected for felling in a controlled process that will allow the forest to regenerate.

Nearby, the sound of birds and monkeys fluttering through the branches, mixes with group’s chatter. “One of the great ideas we took away is the form of organization they have had (in Guatemala) to really last over time,” says Aristides Oime, president of a Colombian farm group, Asojuntas de Cartagena del Chaira.

“From farmer to farmer, we see how we can really improve,” he said. “We want to show how we truly believe that deforestation is not the way, the real route is environmental conservation.”

The coordinator of the Colombia-based NGO Heart of the Amazon, Luz Rodriguez, believes that though there are differences with the Guatemalan communities, they learned lessons about how other people control land sustainably.

The post Maya Biosphere Reserve: A Model for Sustainable Land Management appeared first on The Tico Times | Costa Rica News | Travel | Real Estate.

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JP Morgan’s ‘sustainable’ funds invested £200m in mining giant Glencore

Backing of Glencore angers campaigners who have highlighted firm’s environmental breaches in South AfricaOne of the world’s biggest banks, JP Morgan, has promoted environmental and “sustainable” funds to customers which have invested more than £200m in the mining giant Glencore, it can be revealed.Ethical investing has become big business for JP Morgan and other financial giants, with worldwide “sustainable” investing expected to surpass $40tn by 2030. But the industry now faces scrutiny over the rules around investments focusing on environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues. Continue reading...

One of the world’s biggest banks, JP Morgan, has promoted environmental and “sustainable” funds to customers which have invested more than £200m in the mining giant Glencore, it can be revealed.Ethical investing has become big business for JP Morgan and other financial giants, with worldwide “sustainable” investing expected to surpass $40tn by 2030. But the industry now faces scrutiny over the rules around investments focusing on environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues.Several of JP Morgan’s “sustainable” funds are investing in the London-listed commodity trader Glencore, which is under fire for its coal operations in South Africa, an investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the news website Voxeurop and the Daily Maverick, an online South African news publication, has revealed.JP Morgan’s asset management arm has more than 500 funds promoted as environmental or sustainable investments, ranging from a climate change solutions fund to a global healthcare fund. Under current rules, some of these may still hold investments in firms criticised for environmentally damaging practices.For many of its funds that are promoted as sustainable, JP Morgan specifies that at least 51% of investments must have positive environmental and/or social characteristics. The remaining 49% can be invested without such restrictions.Jakob Thomä, chief executive of climate thinktank Theia Finance Labs, said: “The overwhelming majority of retail investors, in my view, would feel misled if they knew that was the criteria for labelling something as a sustainable fund.”He said some sustainable funds may be breaking EU law, which says anything that “deceives or is likely to deceive the average consumer” is misleading commercial practice.A view of a coal-fired power station from the town of Phola, which is situated in Mpumalanga’s coal belt in South Africa. Photograph: Julia Evans/Daily MaverickJP Morgan’s sustainable funds also exclude companies that make more than 20% of revenues from thermal coal extraction. Despite being one of the world’s biggest coal companies, Glencore slips under this threshold in terms of revenues. In terms of actual profit, however, coal mining accounts for nearly half.The investments have angered campaigners who have highlighted environmental breaches in Glencore’s operation in South Africa’s coal belt. Glencore runs three mining complexes around the mining town of Phola, Mpumalanga, which is about 70 miles east of Johannesburg. According to a recent South African government report, obtained via a freedom of information request, one of those has been breaking environmental laws since 2017.The company’s Tweefontein coalmine has been accused by the South African water and sanitation department of several breaches including seriously contaminating a local river, storing hazardous waste in open containers and failing to fix broken walls at a sewage facility.Residents at Phola say they don’t trust the local water supply. Daisy Tshabangu, 52, moved to Phola because her family worked at the coal-fired power station that looms on the horizon. “Most of the people, when they do drink this water they get stomach aches,” she said.Phola residents say they feel abandoned by the companies whose mines dominate the landscape. Unemployment is high and infrastructure is crumbling.“We don’t benefit from the mines,” said Tshabangu. “There’s a lot we don’t have but we are surrounded by mines. So to us, it seems like we are being sidelined as a community.”Daisy Tshabangu lives in Phola, which is surrounded by three mining complexes run by Glencore. She says her community feels like it is being sidelined. Photograph: Julia Evans/Daily MaverickGlencore says that its water treatment plant supplies clean water to Phola as part of its “commitment to sustainable development”. It says it is not directly responsible for the overall supply of water and cannot comment on claims about water quality. It says it has had no complaints via a grievance procedure regarding the supply of water.Despite repeated requests to clean up its operations, the Tweefontein mine was still in breach of multiple environmental laws as recently as November 2023, an inspection report by the South African water and sanitation department reveals. Campaigners question why the company’s licence has not been revoked.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Our regulators are often compromised and give in to the pressure of the coal mining industry. [They] do not have the political will to enforce our laws,” said Mariette Liefferink, chief executive of the Federation for a Sustainable Environment, a local campaign group.Angered that finance promoted as sustainable is supporting Glencore, Liefferink wrote to the former Labour MP Chuka Umunna in November last year about the environmental risk, ecological degradation and pollution associated with JP Morgan’s investments in Glencore. Umunna is now head of sustainable solutions and head of green economy for investment banking at JP Morgan. However, the Observer understands that the former shadow secretary of state for business, who did not respond to the letter, is involved only in the activities of the investment bank, and is not involved in and does not have oversight over the sustainable policies of the asset management arm.Liefferink urged the bank to review its investments in Glencore due to the company’s alleged breaking of environmental laws, as well as the pollution, wildlife damage and environmental risk its activities were causing. Liefferink’s correspondence highlighted two JP Morgan funds with ESG in their name, both of which had millions of pounds invested in Glencore.After a rapid rise in popularity, ESG investing is the subject of increasing scrutiny around the world. Regulators are trying to settle on what it means, and create labels that are easy for investors to understand.The Mpumalanga mines form a small part of Glencore’s global operations. It is the world’s fifth biggest coal miner, selling more than 100m tonnes in 2023 – including from the Cerrejón mine in Colombia where there have been allegations of human rights abuses and environmental destruction.Glencore says it is committed to responsible engagement and the wellbeing of all workers, and that mitigating negative impacts of its mines is imperative to building trust with local communities, which it maintains through ethical and responsible business practices. The company said the water supply in Phola is a municipal service, but that it contributes to a reservoir that also receives water from other sources. It said it monitors the quality of the water provided by its treatment plant on a weekly basis to ensure it is suitable for consumption.The company said it has been taking action in response to Department of Water and Sanitation (DWS) inspections since 2017 and that incidents identified in the 2023 audit have been addressed.“Our industrial assets are closely linked to the communities and regions where they operate. We aim to avoid harm to people from our activities, respect human rights, and establish and maintain trusting relationships with stakeholders, through ethical and responsible business practices,” the company said.JP Morgan declined to comment.This investigation was supported by the Bertha Challenge fellowship; Stefano Valentino is a 2024 Bertha Challenge Fellow. Additional reporting by Ed Stoddard

Sustainable

Business

Government

One senator’s lonely quest to make the farm bill more sustainable

For years, Debbie Stabenow fought for environmentally friendly agricultural policy. She retired with mixed results.

When Debbie Stabenow retired from Congress last year, she ended a 28-year run of advocating at the federal level for sustainable food systems. The Democrat from Michigan, who served four terms in the Senate after two terms in the House of Representatives, is fond of saying, “You don’t have an economy unless somebody makes something and somebody grows something.” Over the course of her career, she proved to be a skilled negotiator — securing incremental, bipartisan changes to the nation’s farm bill, the legislative package that defines United States agricultural policy roughly every five years. Stabenow secured funding for urban agriculture, farmers markets, and growers of so-called specialty crops — such as tree nuts, fruits, and vegetables — which are defined in opposition to commodity crops like soybeans and wheat. In her final years in Congress, she argued that the farm bill should evolve to include more climate solutions. Stabenow pushed to keep or expand funding for programs that incentivized farmers to adopt land practices that help reduce emissions, like planting cover crops in fields during the off-season and restoring wetlands on their property. But last year, she found that just the mention of the term “climate” caused talks to fall apart. “I could not get my counterpart to negotiate,” Stabenow told Grist at a recent conference in northern Michigan, referring to John Boozman, the Republican senator from Arkansas who worked alongside her in the upper chamber’s agricultural committee. “Unfortunately, the term ‘climate’ has been so polarizing,” she added. (A representative for Boozman declined to comment for this article.) Stabenow’s career — the ways she managed to expand the farm bill and the ways she couldn’t — speaks to how difficult it has become for lawmakers to fund climate initiatives. Now, she warns that those elected to the 119th Congress should be wary of attempts to roll back environmental progress. Read Next Climate takes its toll on the ‘cherry capital of the world’ Ayurella Horn-Muller & Izzy Ross The U.S. agricultural sector contributes about 10 percent of the nation’s climate-warming emissions, according to an estimate from the Environmental Protection Agency. Just over half of those emissions come from the way farms manage agricultural soils, which can release nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. Livestock — and the manure they produce, depending on how it’s stored — are also major sources of methane emissions on farms. Historically, most farm bills have focused neither on reducing agricultural emissions nor on the impacts of the climate crisis on farms, such as the way severe storms, drought, and extreme heat impact crop production. But in recent years, there have been more discussions in Congress and among farmers about whether and how the farm bill should adapt to address these dynamics. “We’ve seen increased impacts since the last farm bill was passed,” said Mike Lavender, policy director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, which advocates for equitable food systems. He added that “farmers know” when their work is being hampered by climate change. Today, there’s still no new farm bill, even though it’s more than a year overdue. Last year, Congress extended the 2018 farm bill until September 2025, along with around $31 billion in aid for farmers. Passing the omnibus bill, which encompasses programs as diverse as food stamps, rural economic development, and ethanol, didn’t always take this long. Stabenow worked on five farm bills and during that time was able to increase funding and create programs for U.S. farmers big and small. “I had a lot of clout because of my seniority in chairing the Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee,” said Stabenow, who served two stints as chair and was the ranking Democrat on that Senate committee from 2015 to 2021. “So I could block and tackle.” When Democrats in Congress wrote the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which would wind up being the biggest climate spending bill in history, Stabenow fought to include almost $40 billion in funding for climate-smart agriculture, forestry and rural energy programs. The money for climate-smart agriculture would prove to be particularly controversial. The term refers to practices that are believed to reduce emissions or sequester carbon on farms, but some groups and lawmakers argue the category is too broad to actually be meaningful. Still, in her final months in Congress, Stabenow sought to secure future funding for conservation programs and climate-smart agriculture, submitting a roughly 1,400-page draft resolution of the farm bill to the Senate, even though it had virtually no chance of passing. Stabenow’s draft text included a provision that would have ensured leftover money for climate-smart agricultural practices from the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, would be included in the next farm bill. This became one of the main irreconcilable differences between her and her Republican counterparts in the House and Senate. Stabenow said it was important to name climate change in these discussions and explain why reducing emissions matters. Climate change is wreaking havoc on farmers: For instance, cherry orchards in Michigan have recently struggled with unseasonably warm and wet conditions. On the East Coast, farmers dealt with unprecedented drought and wildfires this past fall, which most in the region had never before encountered. “When discussing policy, we need to connect the dots,” she said in an email to Grist. Despite staunch gridlock in Congress, Stabenow insists that policies aiming to curb emissions from agricultural lands are common-sense. “When you talk to people about conservation programs and keeping carbon in the soil and protecting our land and our water from runoff with pesticides and so on, farmers all support that,” she said. “They are all doing these practices.” Indeed, according to the American Farm Bureau, a leading industry advocacy group, U.S. farmers have increased their use of cover crops by 75 percent over the past 10 years while also increasing adoption of other practices that trim emissions. However, some in the industry worry that allocating money exclusively for climate programs excludes farmers from directing it to other important uses. The Republican House agriculture committee chair, Glenn Thompson of Pennsylvania, wrote in an op-ed last year that farmers should have more flexibility in how to use federal dollars. Environmental groups, meanwhile, have questioned the effectiveness of certain programs deemed “climate-smart” under the IRA, such as spending on methane digesters, which create fuel out of animal manure. Cattle at a dairy farm in Porterville, California, in December 2024. David Swanson / AFP / Getty Images Even before she advocated to extend the IRA’s climate-smart spending, Stabenow pushed for policies that boosted food security and environmental conservation. Though not explicitly labeled as climate solutions, these provisions help make farms and our food system more resilient against shocks from extreme weather and other impacts of global warming. The 2018 farm bill, which Stabenow led negotiations for, provided $428 billion over its first five years, with 7 percent of that total aimed at conservation programs. A major focus of Stabenow’s career was increasing support for specialty crops — those fruits, vegetables, herbs, and tree nuts — through farm bill programs. These make up a big chunk of U.S. crop production value — up a quarter in 2020, according to the U.S. Agriculture Department — but it took until 2008 for Congress to specifically include research and funding for them in the farm bill. Specialty crop growers have benefitted from Stabenow’s work to ensure they had better access to crop insurance and block grants, which in turn helps them address disease and volatile weather, said Jamie Clover Adams, the executive director of the Michigan Asparagus Advisory Board. Support for specialty crops is not explicitly a climate solution. However, experts say that diversifying our food system can boost resilience against extreme weather. Additionally, certain land management practices used in specialty crop farming can help lessen its impact on the environment; cover crops planted in barren fields during the fall and winter, for example, help remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it in the soil. Rotating the kinds of crops grown on specialty farms can also improve soil health, which in turn makes crops more resilient to climate impacts. It made sense for Stabenow to take up the mantle for specialty crops: Michigan, which is one of the country’s most agriculturally diverse states, produces around 300 products and is a leading grower of fruits and vegetables like tart cherries and asparagus. (In her farewell speech to Congress, Stabenow said, “I have frequently said that you can see Michigan on every page of the farm bills I have written.”) Her work on food and agricultural policy was often popular across party lines: She won endorsements from industry groups like the Michigan Farm Bureau, which often supports Republicans. In fact, once Stabenow’s seat was vacant, the Michigan Farm Bureau endorsed Republican candidate Mike Rogers as her replacement. (The race was narrowly won by Democrat Elissa Slotkin.) Senator Debbie Stabenow greets witnesses ahead of a hearing to examine the farm bill in February 2023 in Washington, D.C. Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images Stabenow’s commitment to a wide variety of agriculture is even visible on the walls of the Senate agriculture committee room in Washington, D.C., where portraits of committee chairs hang. Stabenow’s portrait is filled with asparagus, cucumbers, corn, pumpkins, peppers, carrots, turnips, potatoes, peaches, apples, blueberries, tart cherries, and geranium flowers, as well as dairy cows in the background. “Even when she’s not there, it’s going to be a constant reminder that we exist and that we are part of farm policy,” said Adams of the Michigan Asparagus Advisory Board. It was her commitment to specialty crop farmers that made Stabenow widely known and respected by advocates of sustainable food systems. (She’s been called the “specialty crop queen” by agriculture industry leaders.) Her work on past farm bills showed that investment in one type of agriculture “doesn’t have to be to the detriment of other types of farming,” said Lavender, from the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. After Stabenow’s retirement, fellow Democrats on the committee lauded her work on climate policy in agriculture. She “leaves behind an impactful legacy from her work as a champion for nutrition, local food systems, and conservation,” said Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey in an email. But Stabenow’s interest in expanding the scope of the farm bill also sparked criticism from those who believed she did not do enough to protect commodity farmers, such as corn, soy, and cotton growers. In November 2024, when she released the text of her draft farm bill, Boozman called it “insulting.” The two lawmakers were split on a number of key issues — like how much funding should go towards conservation programs and food assistance programs. Boozman, now the Senate agriculture committee chair, has repeatedly said efforts should be focused squarely on securing better economic outlooks for U.S. farmers. In early February, he invited farmers to share stories of recent financial hardship with the Senate agriculture committee. One of them said, “I can say without a doubt that it was the most difficult year financially that we have endured so far. This year, I’m even more worried about what is to come.” Farmers have indeed been hit by declining profits for two years in a row. Research shows severe weather is at least part of the reason why. For her part, Stabenow hopes lawmakers will continue supporting small, diverse farming operations — while pushing for climate and conservation. “Conservation practices in general are a win-win, because it’s about keeping carbon in the soil, about keeping soil on the land and not running off into lakes and streams,” she said. “Focusing on what we call climate-smart conservation is really just doubling down on those things that are most effective at being able to capture carbon.” This story was originally published by Grist with the headline One senator’s lonely quest to make the farm bill more sustainable on Feb 27, 2025.

Sustainable

Agriculture

Climate

Eat Less Beef. Eat More Ostrich?

Ostrich is touted as a more sustainable red meat that tastes just like beef.

A few months ago, I found myself in an unexpected conversation with a woman whose husband raises cattle in Missouri. She, however, had recently raised and butchered an ostrich for meat. It’s more sustainable, she told me. Sure, I nodded along, beef is singularly terrible for the planet. And ostrich is a red meat, she added. “I don’t taste any difference between it and beef.” Really? Now I was intrigued, if skeptical—which is, long story short, how my family ended up eating ostrich at this year’s Christmas dinner.I eat meat, including beef, and I enjoy indulging in a holiday prime rib, but I also feel somewhat conflicted about it. Beef is far worse for the environment than virtually any other protein; pound for pound, it is responsible for more than twice the greenhouse-gas emissions of pork, nearly four times those of chicken, and more than 13 times those of beans. This discrepancy is largely biological: Cows require a lot of land, and they are ruminants, whose digestive systems rely on microbes that produce huge quantities of the potent greenhouse gas methane. A single cow can belch out 220 pounds of methane a year.The unique awfulness of beef’s climate impact has inspired a cottage industry of takes imploring Americans to consider other proteins in its stead: chicken, fish, pork, beans. These alternatives all have their own drawbacks. When it comes to animal welfare, for example, hundreds of chickens or fish would have to be slaughtered to feed as many people as one cow. Meanwhile, pigs are especially intelligent, and conventional means of farming them are especially cruel. And beans, I’m sorry, simply are not as delicious.So, ostrich? At first glance, ostrich didn’t seem the most climate-friendly option (beans), the most ethical (beans again), or the tastiest (pork, in my personal opinion). But could ostrich be good enough in all of these categories, an acceptable if surprising solution to Americans’ love of too much red meat? At the very least, I wondered if ostrich might be deserving of more attention than we give to it right now, which is approximately zero.You probably won’t be shocked to hear that the literature on ostrich meat’s climate impact is rather thin. Still, in South Africa, “the world leader in the production of ostriches,” government economists in 2020 released a report suggesting that greenhouse-gas emissions from ostrich meat were just slightly higher than chicken’s—so, much, much less than beef’s. And in Switzerland, biologists who put ostriches in respiratory chambers confirmed their methane emissions to be on par with those of nonruminant mammals such as pigs—so, again, much, much less than cows’.But Marcus Clauss, an author of the latter study, who specializes in the digestive physiology of animals at the University of Zurich, cautioned me against focusing exclusively on methane. Methane is a particularly potent greenhouse gas, but it is just one of several. Carbon dioxide is the other big contributor to global warming, and a complete assessment of ostrich meat’s greenhouse-gas footprint needs to include the carbon dioxide released by every input, including the fertilizer, pesticides, and soil additives that went into growing ostrich feed.This is where the comparisons get more complicated. Cattle—even corn-fed ones—tend to spend much of their life on pasture eating grass, which leads to a lot of methane burps, but growing that grass is not carbon intensive. In contrast, chicken feed is made up of corn and soybeans, whose fertilizer, pesticides, and soil additives all rack up carbon-dioxide emissions. Ostrich feed appears similar, containing alfalfa, wheat, and soybeans. The climate impact of an animal’s feed are important contributions in its total greenhouse-gas emissions, says Ermias Kebreab, an animal scientist at UC Davis who has extensively studied livestock emissions. He hasn’t calculated ostrich emissions specifically—few researchers have—but the more I looked into the emissions associated with ostrich feed, the murkier the story became.Two other ostrich studies, from northwest Spain and from a province in western Iran, indeed found feed to be a major factor in the meat’s climate impact. But these reports also contradicted others: In Spain, for instance, the global-warming potential from ostrich meat was found to be higher than that of beef or pork—but beef was also essentially no worse than pork.“Really, none of the [studies] on ostrich look credible to me. They all give odd numbers,” says Joseph Poore, the director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Food Sustainability, which runs the HESTIA platform aimed at standardizing environmental-impact data from food. “Maybe this is something we will do with HESTIA soon,” Poore continued in his email, “but we are not there yet …” (His ellipses suggested to me that ostrich might not be a top priority.)The truth is, greenhouse-gas emissions from food are sensitive to the exact mode of production, which vary country to country, region to region, and even farm to farm. And any analysis is only as good as the quality of the data that go into it. I couldn’t find any peer-reviewed studies of American farms raising the ostrich meat I could actually buy. Ultimately, my journey down the rabbit hole of ostrich emissions convinced me that parsing the relative virtues of different types of meat might be beside the point. “Just eat whatever meat you want but cut back to 20 percent,” suggests Brian Kateman, a co-founder of the Reducetarian Foundation, which advocates eating, well, less meat. (Other activists, of course, are more absolutist.) Still, “eat less meat” is an adage easier to say than to implement. The challenge, Clauss said, is, “any measure that you would instigate to make meat rarer will make it more of a status symbol than it already is.”I thought about his words over Christmas dinner, the kind of celebration that many Americans feel is incomplete without a fancy roast. By then, I had, out of curiosity, ordered an ostrich filet (billed as tasting like a lean steak) and an ostrich wing (like a beef rib), which I persuaded my in-laws to put on the table. At more than $25 a pound for the filet, the bird cost as much as a prime cut of beef.Ostrich has none of the strong or gamey flavors that people can find off-putting, but it is quite lean. I pan-seared the filet with a generous pat of butter, garlic, and thyme. The rosy interior and caramelized crust did perfectly resemble steak. But perhaps because I did not taste the ostrich blind—apologies to the scientific method—I found the flavor still redolent of poultry, if richer and meatier. Not bad, but not exactly beefy. “I wouldn’t think it’s beef,” concluded my brother-in-law, who had been persuaded to smoke the ostrich wing alongside his usual Christmas prime rib. The wing reminded me most of a Renaissance Fair turkey leg; a leftover sandwich I fixed up the next day, though, would have passed as a perfectly acceptable brisket sandwich.I wouldn’t mind having ostrich again, but the price puts it out of reach for weeknight meals, when I can easily be eating beans anyways. At Christmas, I expect my in-laws will stick with the prime rib, streaked through as it is with warm fat and nostalgia.

Sustainable

Activism

Climate

Electric fields could mine rare earth metals with less harm

Smartphones, electric vehicles and wind turbines rely on environmentally destructive rare earth mining operations. Harnessing electric fields could make this mining more sustainable

Mining for rare earth metals comes with environmental consequencesJoe Buglewicz/Bloomberg via Getty Images Rare earth elements used in smartphones and electric vehicles could be extracted from the ground more sustainably using electric fields. Today, most rare earth metals used in electronics are mined by using toxic chemicals to extract the elements from mineral ore. During the mining process, thousands of tonnes of chemical waste are released, which can pollute nearby groundwater and soil. But concentrating those elements together using electric charges could drastically cut the amount of environmentally damaging chemicals needed. “Imagine a crowd being guided through a maze by directional lights – similarly, rare earth elements are driven from the ore by the electric field toward specific collection points,” says Jianxi Zhu at the Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry in China. “This controlled movement ensures efficient mining with minimal environmental disruption.” Zhu and his colleagues created flexible, sheet-like plastic electrodes – each 10 centimetres wide with customisable lengths – made from non-metallic materials that can conduct electricity. At a rare earth deposit in southern China, they inserted 176 electrodes into individual holes drilled 22 metres into the rock. Next, they injected ammonium sulphate, a type of inorganic salt, into the ore to dissolve and separate out the rare earth elements as charged ions. They then activated the electrodes to create an electric field between positively and negatively charged electrodes. That electric field moved the rare earth elements toward the positively charged electrodes, concentrating them together. The elements could then be transferred to treatment ponds for additional purification and separation processes. The approach enabled the researchers to greatly reduce the amount of harmful chemicals used in extracting the rare earth elements, slashing the related ammonia emissions by 95 per cent. That could help prevent much of the water and soil contamination that today’s rare earth mining operations produce. This electric field process also proved 95 per cent efficient in extracting rare earth elements from 5000 tonnes of ore, whereas chemical processes alone usually achieve just 40 to 60 per cent efficiency, says Zhu. But the new mining method would also raise electricity costs for rare earth mining operations – and increased electricity consumption could mean more carbon emissions. The researchers have already shown how to reduce electricity costs by powering just one-third of the electrodes at any given time. Access to renewable power and improvements in electrode technology could also help bring down the energy demands and emissions of the mining process, says Zhu. This technology has potential to be a sustainable solution in the near future, says Amin Mirkouei at the University of Idaho. But he warned that it faces practical challenges, including the energy costs of the method and the long time – 60 days – it requires to ramp up to 95 per cent efficiency.

Sustainable

Chemicals

Technology

Environmentally harmful Christmas gifts to avoid

Our obsession with consumption and plastic is not sustainable.

It’s fun to indulge in the nostalgia of snowy Norman Rockwell Christmas scenes filled with wholesome candle-lit family joy. The happy faces in the famous paintings appear thankful and content with whatever gift they received—be it a wooden spinning top, a pair of shoes, or a bicycle. You can almost imagine a local carpenter or factory making the gifts a town or two over rather than a far-away plastic toy factory in China. Those days of sustainable, locally hand-carved furniture, wooden toys, quality clothing, homemade blankets, and quilts that could be passed down through generations seem mostly long gone. Instead, what lies beneath the warm and merry veil of today’s Christmases is an obsession with consumption that drives human and environmental tragedy. “Many people in the global north tend to think that it is their right and that it is normal to consume the amount that we consume today,” Vivian Frick, a sustainability researcher at the Institute for Ecological Economy Research in Germany, told Popular Science. “They often completely forget that the consumption level that we have depends on exploiting other countries, having cheap resources from other countries, and having cheap labor.”While burning fossil fuels for energy and transport contributes to 75% of global greenhouse gas emissions, reducing it requires systemic change at the international level to make a real, lasting difference. Although it doesn’t seem like it, given the lack of climate action at the COP29 climate conference in November, it’s far easier for 195 countries to agree on climate-friendly policy than to ask 8 billion people to carpool or stop eating cheeseburgers. That said, our personal choices can still make a difference. While some may be unable to stop driving or air-conditioning their homes–since we live in an industrialized society where fossil fuel consumption is a mostly fixed part of the current system — we can help by consuming less in our day-to-day lives. That can be as simple as being more mindful about what you gift friends and family for Christmas. Dirty SantaAlmost every Christmas gift affects the environment and humans in some way. Whether it’s a cheap single-use plastic product or metals mined using child or slave labor, it has likely caused a lot of suffering and pollution on its long manufacturing journey from the ground to your hands. For example, over 90% of children’s toys sold in the U.S. are made from plastics derived from crude oil—the same stuff that fossil fuel companies pump from the ground to keep your car running and economies ticking over. More than 80% of those toys are manufactured in China. After fossil fuel companies extract the crude oil from the ground, it travels thousands of miles via pipelines or oil tankers to a refinery. Once there, the oil is processed into materials called feedstocks and moved to petrochemical plants, where they are converted into plastic resins or pellets. Then they go to the factories to create almost everything in your home, wardrobe, and, honestly, life. Anything made in China has to be transported at least 7,200 miles across the Pacific Ocean. The effort is staggering. For example, parents report that children lose interest in new toys within hours. Most toys are forgotten within a month, and over 80% of plastic toys end up in landfills, according to a May 2022 study in the Journal of Sustainable Production and Consumption.The problem doesn’t stop there. About 70% of all clothing is made from crude oil-derived synthetics like polyester, nylon, and acrylic and manufactured in China, Vietnam, India, and other developing countries. This system is known as fast fashion. The clothing is made quickly and cheaply to keep up with the latest trends. It’s known to fall apart quickly.Around 11 million tons of clothing end up in U.S. landfills every year. The same applies to furniture and electronics. But this culture of unsustainable consumption didn’t start recently. Society’s transition from wanting very little to wanting everything began decades ago. Scientific advances during World War II led to our love-hate relationship with mass-produced plastic and our current throwaway culture. It began to take hold in the late 1940s, just as Americans entered an era free from war and economic depression. Families had more disposable income and time to watch the latest, humanity-altering invention: the television. Oh, and the baby boom. All combined, it created a new consumer market and an easy way to reach them. The U.S. toy industry’s sales skyrocketed from $84 million in 1940 to $900 million by 1953. Last year, toy sales hit $40 billion. Today, refined crude oil is used in many products: clothes, soaps, toothpaste, toilet seats, bedsheets, water pipes, food preservatives, and even aspirin. If you’re not sleeping in, wearing, sitting on, drinking, or eating a type of refined crude oil, you’re probably not reading this. Maybe you’re living in a cave. But it’s not just toys or fast fashion that make Christmas gifts unsustainable. Here are some of the most common and surprising gifts you should avoid.ElectronicsModern electronics, like smartphones and tablets, often require frequent upgrades, leading to significant e-waste. Producing these devices relies on mining rare earth minerals, which damages ecosystems, consumes massive amounts of energy, and harms local communities. Even when recycling programs exist, only a fraction of electronic components are recovered, increasing waste.Single-use beauty gift setsPre-packaged beauty sets are a popular holiday gift but often include non-recyclable plastic containers and unnecessary wrapping. Excessive packaging adds to landfill waste, and the single-use nature of products—like small lotions or disposable accessories—means they are quickly used and discarded. Opt for sustainable alternatives with minimal packaging.Subscription boxes with excess packagingWhile convenient, monthly subscription boxes generate significant waste. Each shipment typically includes single-use plastics, bubble wrap, or foam fillers, much of which cannot be recycled. The repetitive deliveries contribute to carbon emissions from shipping, and the short lifespan of box contents often adds to household clutter and waste.Candles with paraffin waxParaffin wax candles are made from petroleum byproducts, meaning they are unsustainable and release harmful toxins like benzene and toluene when burned. These emissions contribute to indoor air pollution. More sustainable alternatives, like soy or beeswax candles, burn cleaner, last longer, and have a lower environmental impact.Synthetic perfumes or fragrancesSynthetic perfumes rely heavily on petrochemicals derived from non-renewable resources like crude oil. The production process consumes high energy and generates chemical waste. Additionally, synthetic fragrance chemicals are often not biodegradable, contributing to long-term pollution when washed away or released into the environment.Mass-produced jewelryMass-produced jewelry frequently relies on unsustainable mining practices to source metals and stones. This process causes deforestation, soil erosion, and water contamination. Ethical concerns, such as poor working conditions and conflict materials, further complicate its impact. Choosing recycled metals or sustainably sourced alternatives reduces environmental harm.Chocolate from unsustainable sourcesUnsustainably sourced chocolate contributes to deforestation, as forests are cleared for cocoa plantations. Producing chocolate often involves unethical labor practices. Chocolate also uses unsustainable palm oil, harming habitats and wildlife. Opt for fair-trade or sustainably certified chocolate to minimize environmental and ethical harm.Bonus: these ain’t great either.Glitter-covered items – Microplastics that pollute waterways.Plastic-based beauty products – Microbeads also pollute our waters.Gadgets with non-recyclable batteries – Leads to e-waste.Pod coffee machines – Pods are hard to recycle effectively.Gas-powered tools – Emit greenhouse gases and harmful particulates.Gift cards to unsustainable chains – Supports factory farming and deforestation.Exotic pets – Harms wild ecosystems through poaching.Frequent flyer miles – Encourages carbon-intensive air travel.

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