Nature Beat #54
Updates, stories, resources and opportunities
Welcome to the latest edition of Global Nature Beat. If you are new here, read my About page to find out what this newsletter is, who I am and why I am doing this. Or just dive in. You’ll find news, reporting resources, job postings, links to some great stories and a look ahead to what’s coming up in the world of biodiversity and nature policy.
Taking The Pulse
Trump 2.0: The Trump Administration has taken a hammer to many of the structures that protect nature and drive action on climate change, in the United States and globally. In its first two weeks in power, the new government has pulled the United States out of the Paris Agreement of climate change, given a boost to fossil fuel production and withdrawn support for renewable energy. It has cancelled promised financial support for action on climate and deforestation in countries such as India and Brazil.
This week, is it the turn of USAID, the national agency for international development, whose continued existence is now in doubt. The Trump agenda has far-reaching implications. On 31 January, Indonesia's special envoy for climate change questioned the relevance of the Paris Agreement: "If the United States does not want to comply with the international agreement, why should a country like Indonesia comply with it?"
CITES: The Standing Committee of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) will hold its 78th meeting on 3-8 February 2025 in Geneva, Switzerland. It will consider issues relating to sharks, elephants, trees, pangolins and more — including developing decisions for adoption at the CITES Conference of Parties later this year. See the press release or the preview from the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, which will have daily coverage of this week’s meeting. The Environmental Investigation Agency outlined its priorities in a briefing — summarized here. CITES is 50 years old this year. Academics Dan Challender and Michael 't Sas-Rolfes wrote about what has worked and what needs to change — read their full paper here.
Press freedom: Cambodia has denied entry to — and permanently banned —environment journalist Gerald Flynn, who has lived and worked there since 2019, often reporting on illegal logging and land grabbing. Flynn reports for Mongabay, whose founder Rhett Butler said in a statement that Cambodia’s decision “appears to be direct retaliation for [Flynn’s] journalistic work”.
Green corridor: The Democratic Republic of the Congo’s President Felix Tshisekedi has announced the creation of one of the world’s largest protected areas — the size of France. The Couloir Vert (Green Corridor) is to be a ‘community-managed protected area’, and is part-funded by the European Union (see press release). The Couloir Vert is intended to link the east and west of the country, enabling economic development and boosting livelihoods and food security, while protecting biodiversity and mitigating climate change. Rainforest Foundation UK highlights some challenges that Democratic Republic of the Congo will need to address.
In The Spotlight
Haritha John wrote about hopes and fears for India’s huge rollout of artificial reefs.
Something is killing off birds in pristine tropical rainforests — new research suggests that climate change is to blame, reports Tess McLure.
Katarina Zimmer wrote about why some sharks become problems.
Tips And Resources
On 6 February, Covering Climate Now will hold two training webinars on reporting on climate change solutions — register here.
Lameez Omarjee wrote about her research into how journalists can cover just transitions to clean energy.
On 11 February, two of the Pulitzer Center’s rainforest investigation fellows are holding a webinar on how to investigate green finance.
Oxpeckers has launched a global edition of its #WildEye map with data on thousands of cases of wildlife crime
See past editions for more tips and resources.
What Caught My Eye
Luring bats with scents of their preferred fruits could aid rainforest restoration, reports Sean Mowbray.
Judges in Kenya ordered two large community wildlife conservancies to cease operations after ruling them to be illegal, reports Ashoka Mukpo.
Rainforest Foundation US launched a Bitcoin-based reserve to secure long-term funding to protect rainforests in Central and South America.
Twenty new protected areas in Mexico remain at risk as the country’s environment ministry has failed to publish management plans as required by law, reports Aimee Gabay.
Water-guzzling crops are pushing India’s largest state into a groundwater crisis, reports Varsha Singh.
The World Bank has cancelled a US$150 million project to boost tourism to Tanzania’s Ruaha National Park, following allegations of human rights abuses, reports Ashoka Mukpo.
Chatham House shared some of the key ideas in its recent report on how to boost action on climate change and nature by developing bio-economies.
Only 3% of projects approved by Brazil’s Amazon Fund have been managed by indigenous organizations, reports Jullie Pereira.
Rat populations are booming in big cities as the planet heats, reports Benji Jones.
Covering Climate Now launched the 89 Percent Project focusing on the global silent majority who support climate action.
Seven new countries — Angola, Bangladesh, Gabon, Guatemala, Kenya, Senegal, and Tanzania – joined the Global Plastic Action Partnership, bringing the total to 25 members.
Ten percent of farmland in the United Kingdom — mostly used for livestock — will be returned to nature under government plans.
In Focus: Illegal Wildlife Trade
China has greatly reduced its annual quota for pangolin parts for use in traditional medicine, but conservationists say a lack of clarity about stockpiles could aid illegal trade, reports Keith Anthony Fabro.
Growing numbers of endangered gibbons from Southeast Asia are being smuggled to India to meet demand for exotic pets, reports Spoorthy Raman.
The United Kingdom has banned trade in ivory from hippopotamuses, narwhals, killer whales and sperm whales.
Papiya Bhattacharya wrote about the growing use of DNA-based evidence to prosecute poachers and wildlife traffickers in India.
From The Journals
Successes and failures of conservation actions to halt global river biodiversity loss — read the full paper.
Reforestation is a win-win for climate and wildlife, but large-scale afforestation and bioenergy cropping may do more harm than good — read the press release or the full paper.
How declining rice consumption in South Korea has endangered two treefrog species — read the full paper.
Catastrophic bleaching in protected reefs of the Southern Great Barrier Reef — read the press release or the full paper.
India’s tiger population is growing and expanding, showing how humans and large wildlife can coexist — read the press release or the full paper.
If You Find This Useful…
… please consider supporting my work. If you can spare £1 a week for a paid subscription, you will be helping me to keep Global Nature Beat going for those who cannot afford to pay.
Jobs And Opportunities
The International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) seeks nominations for the 2025 ICFJ Knight International Journalism Award — deadline 6 February.
Journalists in five Central American countries and Mexico can apply for a training program on climate change and a chance to report on the COP30 conference in Brazil — deadline 9 February.
The Metcalf Institute invites applications for its Annual Science Immersion Workshop for Journalists — deadline 14 February.
The Earth Journalism Network invites journalists in Africa to apply to join an online workshop on great apes and the One Health concept — deadline 26 February.
The Earth Journalism Network has grants for stories on the marine environment in the Adriatic region — deadline 27 February.
The Sigma Awards for data journalism published in 2024 — deadline 28 February.
Journalists can apply for an Uproot Project Fellowship to cover environmental justice, climate solutions, science or water, food and culture — deadline 1 March.
Journalists covering sustainability can apply for a Communications Fellowship with the Club of Rome — deadline 7 March.
The Sharon Begley Science Reporting Award is open for entries — deadline 30 April.
Bonus content: There are 36 jobs, grants, fellowships and other opportunities listed here for Global Nature Beat’s paying supporters. Paid subscriptions are less than £1 per week.
On The Horizon
25-27 February 2025: The resumed 16th Conference of Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity takes place in Rome, Italy.
3 March 2025: World Wildlife Day.
5-7 March 2025: The 24th World Sustainable Development Summit takes place in New Delhi, India.
12-13 March 2025: The 12th World Ocean Summit & Expo takes place in Tokyo, Japan.
Bonus content: The full calendar for Global Nature Beat’s supporters includes nature-related intergovernmental negotiations, scientific conferences, report launches, and other events up until 2026.
Whose Eye Was It?
The eye belongs to a mudskipper. Photo credit: Klaus Stiefel / Flickr — Creative Commons
Thanks for reading. For past editions, see the Archive. If you found it interesting or useful, please share and subscribe. If you want to get in contact, you can reach me at: thenaturebeat@substack.com.
Our Research group New England Canadian Provinces Alliance: hydrodamtruth.org
Although our focus has been on "climate change" and the importance of the Arctic regions influence on the global climate, we look to advance a deeper understanding of this planet Earth we are all trying to live with. We thought that you and you readers could appreciate the below article we recently had published.
Our Planet: Person or Living Being
Earth, could it be a living being that we have overlooked
cliff Krolick
Our Planet: Person or Living Entity?
Lately it’s fashionable to think of this planet we share as having Environmental Personhood and afforded status equal to a living person and entitled to Environmental Justice.
It’s time to consider our Earth as a living, breathing being possessing systems that keep it running smoothly and healthily. We’re now have to face the fact that the temperature of the planet is increasing and as in other living beings this signals that something is happening out of the “normal functioning range”.
People call this warming climate change. But we could say, the earth has a fever, and it’s not going down.
When we humans have a prolonged fever we see a doctor. We test our fluids, our breathing, our blood pressure and our blood for toxic and nutritional levels.
Our cardiovascular system, heart, arteries, veins and capillaries supply us with nutrients, circulate oxygen from our lungs, and cleanse our kidneys and liver: in short, keep us alive.
It follows that our Earth, as a living, breathing being, appears to have similar cardiovascular system in play; a system that is not functioning within “normal range”.
If we assume the Earth has a cardiovascular system of sorts, we can think of the oceans as its heart, large rivers its arteries, smaller rivers and streams, wetlands and bogs its veins and capillaries sending nutrients to its extremities and to the heart. We can think of the atmosphere as its’ lungs, all those GHGs we routinely put into it. There’s also a terrestrial form, like a body that provides sustenance and housing to land life. Land and waters are have been intertwined for eons of time supporting nutritional health. Land loving creatures receive directly from the land or catch fish from waters. However, health of aquatic species is mainly delivered and connected to major waterways(rivers) which make deliveries of food, key elements, and nutrients for survival of water creatures. But those avenues-rivers of support are more and more clogged, similar to cardiovascular disease in humans, by large hydroelectric dams: mega-dams.
Large or Mega-dams and their sea-size impoundment reservoirs are the clots in the world’s circulatory system, hoarding much of the nutrients, stuck behind the dams. So why imprison so much water and nutrient material. It seems that generating and selling hydroelectricity is very profitable. Are profits made, worth the cost of destroying marine life ? Maybe destroying life on Earth?
The damming of rivers is one of mankind’s most significant modifications impacting the flow of water and associated materials from land to sea. Included in these materials are nutritional elements like nitrogen and phosphorus, calcium carbonate and silicon required by all life on Earth. As a matter of fact, some of the smallest microscopic organisms called diatoms a form of algae account for the largest fraction of biological productivity of the oceans. Their main function is to eat, capture,carbon dioxide and convert it to oxygen, sounds familiar?
Diatoms sequester more Co2 than all the rainforests of the planet But according to NASA studies these floating diatomic Plankton, commonly known as Phytoplankton, their populations are decreasing 1% per year, mainly from lack of available nutrients
Maavara, T., Akbarzadeh, Z.,& Van Cappellen, P. (2020). Global dam‐driven changes to riverine N:P:Si ratios delivered to the coastal ocean. Geophysical Research Letters, 47, e2020GL088288.
https://doi.org/
10.1029/2020GL088288
Many of the larger rivers up until the early to mid 19th century had been functioning normally. Rivers were the main nutritional delivery system for the smallest microscopic living things: the smallest, diatoms (plankton), feed the largest of Marine Mammals the Blue Whale, in a continuous stream of regeneration.
The estuaries, bays, and Continental Shelf flooded each spring during ice out from rivers and stormy periods providing waters with rich nutritional sediments from erosion off the land. Through the late 1950s into the 1980s many of the major rivers and waterways that emptied into the Northern Hemisphere oceans had large dams constructed permanently obstructing the natural flows containing much of the nutritional requirements of marine life.
This obstruction and impoundment cuts off much of the nutritional food supplies to all marine life . Stockpiling this nutrition deep behind dams decomposes emitting methane which accelerates global warming. Clearly these many river alterations is way out of the historical normal range, an the planet’s coronary arteries, providing optimal health, are compromised.
Like cardiovascular disease in humans the deprivation of this ‘blood supply’ results in the starvation of aquatic life and the decline of livable habitat.
Unfortunately the earth does not have a primary care physician who would recommend surgery to remove the blockages freeing up the blood supply to allow the patient to recover.
It is up to us, the tenant stewards, to take the helm and choose not to invest in damming up its cardiovascular system. We need to live with, not on, the earth and allow it to recover from our antiquated energy generation practices that are doing what may be irreparable harm.
Divest from mega-dams. Remove the blockages that are continuing to damage our climate by preventing nutritional flow, thawing the permafrost and destroying habitats for all living things, land and sea.
Allow the Earth to heal itself by returning the natural flow of water, the planet’s life blood, with all its beneficial value. Let the rivers run free again.
Many thanks for an excellent summary!