Environment

For more than 30 years, José DeCoux woke each morning to a deafening noise. In his home in Ecuador's Los Cedros forest, monkeys squeal, squirrels scuffle, and 400 species of bird flit and squawk. A mist hangs in the trees, and ferns and mosses in countless shades of green cover every rock and tree trunk.

DeCoux moved to the Los Cedros reserve in northern Ecuador from the US in the 1980s. He was "sort of heeding the call to save the rainforest, or something", he told BBC Future Planet with a smile in April.

With the help of friends and non-profits including Friends of the Earth Sweden and the Rainforest Information Center of Australia, DeCoux bought land in Los Cedros forest, and a conservation and eco-tourism project was born. DeCoux managed the reserve until his death in May, four years after being diagnosed with cancer.

Despite extensive deforestation in the surrounding region, Los Cedros' 11,681 acres (4,800 ha) buzz and thrum with life. Its biodiversity is astonishing: more than 130 scientific papers have been published on the vast number of species that call Los Cedros home – from fungi and orchids to snails, jaguars and bears. Most of the reserve is a cloud forest where the air is heavy with moisture from drenching rain and permanent condensation, which fosters blankets of lichen and strange orchids. Many species can't be found anywhere else, such as the tiny orange Los Cedros rainfrog.

Life continues to thrive in Los Cedros, but its survival wasn't always certain – and it is largely thanks to a powerful, and increasingly influential, global legal movement that the forest is still standing.

In 2008, Ecuador became the first country to change its constitution to state that nature has the same rights as people. The change was led by Ecuador's Indigenous movement, and marked one of the first major steps in what has become known as the 'rights of nature' movement – a movement centred on a legal framework that recognises the inherent right of the natural world to the same protections as people and corporations.

The rights of nature movement "is a move to transform natural entities from objects to subjects, in courts and in front of the law", says Jacqueline Gallant from New York University's School of Law's Earth Rights Advocacy Clinic. "But in a much broader sense, it's been a movement to reanimate and recentre nature as a subject of intrinsic worth," Gallant explains. This is in contrast, she says, to the Western view of nature as "an inanimate backdrop against which the drama of human activity unfolds".

"The rights of nature movement reanimates and recentres nature as a subject of intrinsic worth" – Jacqueline Gallant

To date, initiatives to recognise the rights of nature have been pursued in 44 countries, from Bolivia to Brazil and Uganda to the US. Some cases have defended a single animal, while other legal decisions have recognised the rights of rivers, mountains, and all of Mother Earth. Still, legal practice in this area is relatively new, with few clear precedents for what nature rights look like in action.

DeCoux initially took his case to court in 2019, when a mining company began explorations in the area. DeCoux argued that allowing mining in the forest would violate the rights of nature, and defended Los Cedros forest's right to exist, survive and regenerate. The case was thrown out of the lower courts – the judge "just didn't like it", DeCoux said – but was later selected by the Constitutional Court as a case that would provide a real world of example of the rights of nature. Finally, in 2021, DeCoux won. The judge ruled that mining would harm the biodiversity of the forest, and therefore violate the constitutional rights of nature. "The litigation was successful beyond our wildest dreams," DeCoux said.

The case was an opportunity for judges to look at the rights of nature beyond the theoretical framework of Ecuador's Constitution. It would help determine what these rights look like in action, and set a precedent for future cases, DeCoux believed.

Gallant explains this distinction. The US Constitution includes the right to free speech, for example, and centuries of case law now explain how this right plays out in the real world, she says. "Constitutions lay out the law in a level of generality that doesn't always provide a roadmap about how it plays out in practice," she says. "So that's why the ruling on Los Cedros is really important, because it helps explain what the rights of nature provisions in the Constitution actually mean in practice."

The ruling on Los Cedros was all the more powerful for specifying that it did not only apply to protected areas, but – as with any constitutional right – to the entire territory of the country. The judges were also clear that the area deserves protection in its own right, not just because it provides resources, like clean water, to humans.

Their verdict has turned the rights of nature from a constitutional idea into a practical reality. As Gallant says, "there are people around the world looking at it and seeing how a court has articulated what the rights of nature means in practice, and they say, 'Great, let's try and do this in this jurisdiction'. And that's how the global movement advances".

In Los Cedros, the verdict was resoundingly good news for the animals, plants and fungi that live there. Mining has not happened, and the forest has therefore not suffered. The mining companies had to remove their machinery immediately, and the court put a blanket ban on all future mining and all other extractive activities in Los Cedros. "The companies packed their bags and left less than 10 days after the decision came down from the Constitutional Court," DeCoux told the BBC when we spoke to him.

But the outcome of nature rights cases isn't always so clear, or positive – even when a court rules in nature's favour. The River Ganga in India, for example, was recognised as a legal person in 2017, but by 2023 pollution has continued to the extent that most of its water remains undrinkable.

"Some courts hand down the rulings and then forget about them, they never go back to them again," says César Rodríguez-Garavito, professor of clinical law and director of the More-Than-Human Rights (Moth) Project at NYU School of Law – an initiative that brings together law, science and the arts to advance rights for humans, non-humans and the broader web of life.

To quantify the impact of the court's decision on Los Cedros, Rodríguez-Garavito has spent time in the area, speaking to scientists and other key actors, and observing the outcomes two years on from the ruling. He has looked at the precise ways in which the ruling has been acted on, and the practical impact of that on the forest. His research concludes that Los Cedros has remained a sanctuary for biodiversity – and that this would very likely not have been possible without the ruling. "Definitely, both in and of itself, and compared to other rights of nature rulings, the picture is positive," he says.

However, Rodríguez-Garavito's findings also highlight that the forest remains vulnerable. The Ecuadorian government has passed the burden of protection to other state and private actors, who have limited resources to monitor and protect the land. And mining permitted in nearby areas could have "spillover effects" on Los Cedros, and boost illegal hunting, logging and mining on the reserve’s borders.

In his interview with the BBC, De Coux was adamant there was still work to do. "The game is not over yet," he said. "The forces of the extractive industries are still actively working against us.

"But I'm certainly very happy with the position we're in today because we've got a way forward."

Rodríguez-Garavito says that his research provides a template for tracking and measuring the impact of future legal decisions on the rights of nature. "We wanted to propose a methodology for future similar reports," he says. "We're trying to create some accountability."

The work of the rights of nature movement is powerful, but it cannot operate alone – and nor should it, Gallant says. Moth's work is interdisciplinary, bringing together science, culture and the arts – because, she says, "the judiciary alone can't do everything that's needed to promote a paradigm where the more than human world is valued more centrally and where we structure our politics and our culture to reflect that more".

Gallant points out that, importantly, the rights of nature movement is a vehicle for Indigenous principles and priorities to have sway, and that these ideas are leading the rest of the world.

"These [philosophical ideas] are not new inventions, they are things that Indigenous peoples around the world have been saying for time immemorial," Gallant says. "Movements and organisations in the Global South have been on the frontlines of advancing these concepts politically, legally, socially. It's a really good example of the Global North learning something really important from the Global South."

Environmental organizations were incredulous when they learned that COP29, the next United Nations World Climate Change Conference, would be held in Baku, Azerbaijan this November.

A fossil-fuels heavyweight, the small Caucasus country [with a population of 10 million] the size of Austria produces 34 billion cubic meters of gas and 35 million tons of oil per year. And fossil fuels amount to around 90% of the country's exports.

On the sidelines of the COP preparatory conference in Bonn over the last two weeks, Environment Minister Mukhtar Babayev said that his country plans to continue expanding natural gas production in the coming years. However, Baku also wants to invest in renewable energies "at the same time," the minister, who will also chair COP29, told news agency AFP.

"I think in parallel — natural gas production and renewables — possibly will move together at the same time," he said.

'Authoritarian petrostate'

Critics are unimpressed with his plans. Babayev is a "former oil executive from an authoritarian petrostate," Alice Harrison from the international environmental organization Global Witness said back in January. German climate NGO Germanwatch declared around the same time that Baku was a "highly problematic" choice for COP29.

While such criticism can be voiced safely from abroad, domestic media and environmental activists in Azerbaijan don't enjoy the same freedom. According to Human Rights Watch, at least 25 such critics have been arrested or sentenced in the last year as the conference approaches. Numerous environmental activists and organizations there have also stated that their work is being hindered by the repressive atmosphere in the country.

Azerbaijani journalist Arzu Geybulla, who now lives in Istanbul, warned on the social media platform X that civil society in her country is in danger of being completely silenced before the start of the conference in November.

Autocratic rule

Azerbaijani authorities reject these accusations. But Azerbaijan has been ruled by the same family since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. President Ilham Aliyev, son of the first president Heydar Aliyev, has now been in power since 2003.

Both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have repeatedly alleged that political opposition and freedom of expression and assembly are being severely restricted. Azerbaijan is also said to be holding a "three-digit number" of political prisoners.

The intensifying crackdown on journalists is due in part to a stricter media law that was enacted in 2022. Since November 2023, several legal steps have also been taken to close down the remaining independent media outlets, Amnesty International reported.

Meanwhile, Aliyev's autocratic rule has further solidified as a result of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict with Armenia, in which he claimed victory. For more than 30 years, dispute over the enclave, which is mainly inhabited by ethnic Armenians, has strained relations with Azerbaijan's western neighbor. In September 2023, Azerbaijani troops invaded Nagorno-Karabakh and expelled more than 100,000 Armenians. This escalation was preceded by a nine-month blockade of the only road connecting Nagorno-Karabakh with Armenia, which triggered a humanitarian crisis in the region. War crimes, including the killing of civilians and prisoners of war, were reportedly committed by the Azerbaijani military during the conflict.

Corruption reaches Council of Europe

Azerbaijan is also one of the most corrupt countries in the world. In Transparency International's annual ranking in 2023, it came in at 154th out of 180 countries. The organization writes in its report that corruption "erodes various levels of society and state, while undermining civic and political rights." It thus contributes significantly to Aliyev's hold on power.

Bribery has also been deliberately deployed by Baku outside the country — including of officials associated with the Council of Europe, an international organization that upholds human rights and rule of law, but is not affiliated with the European Union.

Azerbaijan has been a member since 2001. In 2012, Baku was revealed to have hosted up to 40 officials from the Council of Europe annually, showering them with expensive gifts. With this "caviar diplomacy," Aliyev was apparently trying to buy favorable assessments of the human rights situation in his country.

Europe looks the other way

The fact that the European Union has not yet criticized such corruption more harshly is due to Azerbaijan's role as an increasingly important supplier of oil and gas, observers say. Since the start of Russia's war in Ukraine, the EU has worked to become less dependent on Russian fossil fuels.

In 2022, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen therefore signed a declaration of intent with President Aliyev, according to which Brussels intends to double its gas imports from Azerbaijan in the coming years. Environment Minister Babayev's statement this week about increasing gas production must therefore be seen within this context.

This role as an energy supplier for Europe lends additional legitimacy to Aliyev's role as head of state. Following what he would consider to be a successful conclusion of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, he is now primarily concerned with internal stability and brought the schedule for new presidential elections forward to take political advantage of his current popularity.

Aliyev will no doubt also want to use COP29 to present himself as a global player. But without any unwelcome criticism and dissent.

Climate skeptics are scapegoating a weather modification technique known as cloud seeding to deny the role of global warming in historic floods that have recently devastated countries from Brazil to Kenya.

Record rainfall brought to some regions by the natural weather cycle El Niño matches an expected increase in extreme events, experts say.

But online, claims have repeatedly been made that geoengineering—not carbon emissions—is to blame.

"Dubai airport looks like an apocalyptic movie. Videos of the flooding are insane," said Robby Starbuck, a conservative American commentator, to his more than 460,000 followers on X in April, after the Gulf city was hit by unprecedented downpours.

"I've seen some blaming climate change when the cause is actually from the use of weather modification. Cloud seeding where chemicals are sprayed in clouds to create rain caused this."

Claims that weather had been manipulated appeared after every major flood this year, including in Zimbabwe, the United Arab Emirates and other nations. According to Google Trends data, searches for cloud seeding reached a record high after the Dubai floods in April.

"I have not agreed to our planet having cloud seeding everywhere, have you?" was typical of posts among X users in late May, blaming the recent rainfall on a "man-made climate crisis."

Cloud seeding, which introduces tiny particles into the sky to induce rain over small geographical areas, has gained popularity worldwide as a way to combat drought and increase local water supplies.

But scientists say the technique cannot create weather—nor can it trigger rainfall at the scale observed in countries such as Germany and the United States.

"Due to the strong natural variability of clouds, there exists very little scientific proof that cloud seeding has indeed a measurable effect on precipitation," said Andrea Flossmann, co-chair of an expert team on weather modification at the World Meteorological Organization.

Experts, meanwhile, say climate change doubled the likelihood of floods in southern Brazil and worsened the intense rains caused by El Niño.

"There's definitely a consensus that climate change is responsible for many of these extreme weather events," said Mariana Madruga de Brito, a Brazilian scientist from Rio Grande do Sul, the state that suffered historic flooding in May.

She told AFP she saw people posting photos of clouds on social media shortly after the floods, claiming they had been "fabricated" and questioning scientific institutions.

But she insisted cloud seeding "cannot be causing events of this magnitude."

Reinforcing climate denial

Di Yang, an assistant professor at the University of Wyoming, said extensive research over several decades has shown "no definitive large-scale or long-term impacts from cloud seeding."

Still, the technique has become a recurring target for climate skeptics. AFP has debunked several false claims of weather manipulation after major floods in recent years.

Callum Hood, head of research at the Center for Countering Digital Hate, said that as severe weather events become more frequent, "climate deniers are putting extra efforts into claiming these extremes have nothing to do with climate change."

"You see this every summer now," he told AFP.

As more changes are recorded in seasons and ecosystems, Hood said "a slightly more conspiratorial and newer argument" is overtaking older narratives that simply deny Earth's warming "by trying to argue that extreme weather events have this other cause, whether it's geoengineering or something else."

Lincoln Muniz Alves, a researcher at the Brazil National Institute for Space Research, said the dissemination of false narratives not only obstructs effective communication during environmental crises but also "reinforces the views of those who deny the reality of climate change."

Weather modification methods are controversial in the scientific community, due in part to the potential for unintended consequences such as excess rain and pollution.

But experts say such caution should not discredit the reality of the climate crisis.

"This focus on cloud seeding misses the larger picture –- for more than a century, humans have been releasing greenhouse gasses (that) have warmed the planet and made heavy rain more likely in many regions of the world," said Edward Gryspeerdt, a research fellow at Imperial College London's Grantham Institute.

"We are already manipulating the weather at a global scale (larger) than would ever be possible through cloud seeding."

A multipolar world populated by green power centers from the global south is what China advocates on the international stage. Why, then, is its dam-building in Tibet aimed to completely the opposite effect?

Tibet is often described as the world’s third pole, a land of rising mountains, vertiginous valleys, sliding glaciers and once free-flowing rivers, where outstanding biodiversity and geological complexity furnish humankind with a treasure trove of natural and spiritual richness.

Bordering India and China, it straddles the headwaters for culturally and economically vital rivers that flow through both heavyweights, not to mention the Indo-Chinese Peninsula. Its mineral riches are as replete as the pharmaceutical possibilities implied by its numerous world-unique plant species.

These features ought to combine to establish a regional power innately endowed with wealth and clout, one that, with its pastoralist heritage of stewardship towards the natural world, could perhaps suggest a less intrusive and exploitative pathway to development if it was accorded the right to democratic self-determination.

Yet, as described in a report released in May by Turquoise Roof, a collective of Tibet-focused specialists, scholars and analysts, these strengths are being usurped and partially destroyed by the Chinese government, which, having invaded and occupied Tibet since 1950, is aggressively arrogating its resources in order to enmesh the country within itself and render the energy economy of the future dependent on its whims.

Titled “Occupying Tibet’s rivers: China’s hydropower ‘battlefield’ in Tibet,” the report takes as its starting point the recent protests in the Derge area of Kardze in the Tibetan region of Kham, which is currently administered as part of Sichuan Province. In February of this year, Derge broke out into protest over plans to evict families and monks from 12 villages and six monasteries to make way for one section of a dam cascade upstream on the Yangtze River, where it is known as the Jinsha to Mandarin-speakers or the Drichu to Tibetans.

Even though protesters donned the Chinese flag to emphasize that their actions were not aimed at “splittism,” the lowest of crimes in Beijing’s eyes, and religious leaders prostrated themselves in front of Chinese Communist Party officials, their pleas for their homes and heritage resulted in hundreds of arrests, beatings in custody and a paramilitary-style lockdown that apparently continues to the present moment.

Turquoise Roof places this ongoing incident against the backdrop of China’s wider plans to transform Tibet into a literal battery and generator by ramming vast hydropower installations into mountain valleys and bundling them together with solar and wind technologies, irrespective of the social, cultural and ecological cost.

Constructed under the umbrella of the state-owned coal conglomerate China Huadian Corporation, which has just signed a cooperation deal with Siemens, Derge’s Gangtuo Dam, as the 1.1. million-kilowatt hydropower station is called in Mandarin, will merely be one of 13 that are set to transform formerly unadulterated upper reaches of the Yangtze into something like a series of stepped reservoirs with “captive water levels high enough to lap at the bottom of the dam wall of the next dam upriver.”

Alongside more hydropower that China is locating on other major rivers of Tibet, numerous dangers are foreseen. Environmental concerns range from the disruption of a major migratory bird route and wetlands of international importance covered by the Ramsar Convention to the exorbitant release of greenhouse gasses that are required to form and transport materials for the colossal dam walls. Livelihoods from fisheries may be compromised, an outcome that is already attested in scientific literature for both the Yangtze and the Mekong in relation to the existing artificial segmentation of their waterways downstream.

On the other hand, because more suitable locations for construction have already been exploited, Tibetan dams are now being erected on thick silt beds in a seismically active region where mountains are still rising, rivers still cutting into them. As a result, they are said to be structurally akin to tofu, a metaphor that was made famous during the devastating 2008 Sichuan earthquake. According to some hypotheses, that disaster, which killed at least 90,000 people, may have been triggered by the filling of a large, nearby reservoir, and Turquoise Roof argues that something similar could ensue again alongside other dam-induced geological catastrophes in Tibet.

To make way for these dangers, thousands upon thousands of people are being coercively relocated from their homelands to new government-designated residences where they frequently lack the opportunities or skills to adapt. Food insecurity and malnutrition are wolves at the door due to the resettlement of farmers and nomads, who once produced nourishment for themselves and their families.

Thus, Tibet may be looking not just at a cascade of potential dams, but a cascade of potential dam failures visited upon a local population that is already struggling to make ends meet, and, if that sounds fanciful, it is worth remembering that hydropower facilities built by China’s state-owned companies have not always maintained the highest standards for construction and assessment of impact.

Infrastructure has proven defective in Ecuador, Uganda and Guangxi, where a recent dam failure went unreported by domestic media. As pointed out by Turquoise Roof, Tibet has already suffered a major disaster associated with the establishment of a massive dam known as Lawa Batang, too. And, going back to the previous century, the 1975 collapse of the Banqiao Dam in Henan Province led to the loss of more than 150,000 lives.

So why is China pursuing such risky plans despite the engineering fallibilities and cultural destruction that could result? Partly, the subsummation of rural homes and spiritual centers like the fresco-filled, 13th century Wontoe Monastery can be read as another round in China’s long-term attempts to assimilate Tibetans, a policy that is often justified in ecological or poverty alleviation terms, but which is better understood as breaking up Tibetan communities, leaving them disconnected from their heritage and dependent on the Han state.

However, with renewable energy, other motivations are coming to the fore. The rivers of the Tibetan plateau sit upstream from well over a billion people, conferring significant power on anybody who can conquer their flow. The electricity generated by Tibetan dams can meanwhile be routed to nearby mines, where local reserves of minerals like copper and lithium are extracted in often environmentally calamitous conditions to service the battery, electric vehicle and other industries. It is also sent eastwards to feed China’s factory heartlands.

Hence, the discrepancy between what the Chinese leadership practices and propounds is exposed. While it claims to support a multilateral world in which less affluent countries and peoples are freed from Western domination to fulfill their own developmental destinies, it is determinedly chaining the fate of Tibet to itself in an effort to render any concept of its future independence meaningless.

At the same time, it is establishing ownership of Tibetan lands that confer strategic power over the wider region and exploiting the specific natural features of these lands in order to generate the energy required to rob them of their mineral resources. Then, both the energy and the extracted minerals are supplied to Chinese companies, who, under the direction of the state, can produce a cheap flood of products in the green- and high-tech industries, decimating competitors elsewhere in the world and concentrating yet more wealth and influence in Beijing’s clutches.

An independent Tibet that made its own decisions about its rivers and resources would necessarily temper these hegemonic designs. That is why, in the eyes of the Chinese Communist Party, it can never be allowed to occur.

Archived link

Here is the article as pdf.

Huge planetary problems were fixed in the past, yielding lessons for the current climate crisis — yet this time a solution is justice - [Book review]

Solvable: How We Healed the Earth, and How We Can Do It Again Susan Solomon Univ. Chicago Press (2024)

From lead pollution to the hole in the ozone layer and climate change, Earth is no stranger to human-made — often, man-made — global disasters.

In Solvable, atmospheric chemist Susan Solomon describes how high-income countries, and the United States in particular, have repeatedly inflicted incredible amounts of damage on people and ecosystems. She relates the long and difficult struggles that concerned individuals — often from marginalized groups — faced in trying to convince governments to stop industries from destroying lives and the planet in the pursuit of profit. Solvable is a harrowing read, but Solomon is an engaging writer and there is a lot to learn in this book about the environmental crises of the past century.

Solomon relates the story of US marine biologist Rachel Carson, who rang alarm bells about persistent pesticides such as dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) in her eloquent book Silent Spring (1962). Now that we know just how harmful these pesticides are, it is jarring to read how difficult it was to stop their use.

Carson described how falcons and other birds of prey started to lay eggs with thinner shells, then almost no eggs at all; various other bird populations shrank markedly; DDT in mammals led to the development of tumours and caused sterility. Although the overwhelming evidence for the effect of DDT on animals that Carson presented was independently confirmed by the then US president John F. Kennedy’s own science advisory council, Carson was belittled and portrayed as a hysteric by politicians and the media.

This playbook of deliberate ignorance of the scientific method, disinformation and a hefty dose of misogyny is all too familiar to those advocating for climate justice today.

In the United States, it took a non-governmental organization, the Environmental Defense Fund, and a few highly publicized lawsuits to ban DDT in 1972 — seven years after Carson’s death. Others followed suit, slowly, including in the European Union with partial bans from 1978 and the United Kingdom in 1984.

Yet, the chemical industry continued to manufacture and export DDT to countries that lacked regulation, such as those in Africa and southeast Asia. A global limit was placed on DDT use in 2004 — when the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants came into force. It’s hard to assess adherence, however, because there’s little monitoring.

Geopolitical inequities

In another parallel with the climate crisis, exported DDT found its way back to nations that had banned it, through global supply chains, such as those involved in importing fashion goods from Asia, which often rely on farms that use DDT to grow cotton. Similarly, by consuming goods produced in Asian nations, European countries are exporting their production of carbon dioxide emissions, as well as exploiting cheap labour.

As inexpensive, practical and short-lived alternatives have been found, DDT use is slowly fizzling out. As a result of the bans, populations of peregrine falcons (Falco peregrinus) in the United States and Europe are recovering. Solomon takes hope from this, even though she points out that the alternatives, such as neonicotinoids, are not harmless either. Because of them, bees are now dying out.

Lead additives in petrol and paint are another example of policymakers and industry dragging their feet. Solomon highlights how, in the 1920s, Thomas Midgley Jr, a chemist at the US automotive company General Motors (GM), discovered that adding tetraethyl lead to petrol increased the efficiency and lifespan of internal combustion engines. The health hazards associated with lead were well known — even the ancient Romans had realized, centuries before, that drinking wine from lead-lined pottery caused poisoning. Yet, GM’s compound, marketed under the trade name Ethyl, became widely used.

Lead contaminated the environment and caused serious public-health issues, affecting the brains and nervous systems of many children, causing comas, convulsions and even deaths. From the early 1960s, citizen groups demanded change, citing strong scientific evidence. Yet, policymakers didn’t feel compelled to stop the use of lead in paint and petrol for more than a decade. The US Environmental Protection Agency limited the amount of lead allowed in petrol in 1973. Although the harm such fuels caused — exacerbated by the increasing number of vehicles on the road — was known, they were only fully banned in the 1990s.

Lead-based house paints were banned in 1978 in the United States. Yet, even today, some people are still exposed to lead in old, peeling paints. Similar to climate change, it is often Indigenous communities, people of colour and other marginalized groups who are disproportionately paying the price, with their health and lives, for the decades of profits that have enriched a few in the petroleum industry.

Within a decade, now at the Frigidaire division of GM, Midgley had turned his attention to refrigerants and was involved in the creation of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), particularly Freon. CFCs were initially celebrated for their non-toxic, non-flammable properties, which made them ideal, or so it seemed, for use as coolants in refrigerators and as propellants in aerosol sprays. In the mid-1970s, it became apparent that these compounds break down at cold temperatures and react with ozone.

Over the next 15 years or so, CFCs created a massive hole in the ozone layer that protects Earth and its inhabitants from dangerous ultraviolet radiation. Rates of skin cancer rose. In what Solomon, rightly in my view, sees as an outstanding success of international collaboration, leaders around the globe agreed in the 1987 Montreal Protocol to phase out CFCs. The ozone hole is now closing. But, once again, this phasing out was planned to be very slow, and only sped up when CFCs were replaced with safer alternatives, in the mid-1990s — more than a decade after their harms were known, and only after companies making and using them had found a profitable alternative.

For Solomon, all these examples show that change happens when impacts are personal, perceptible and practical solutions are available — “the three p’s”. For the climate crisis, in her view, the three p’s have been met: its devastating consequences are being felt around the world and renewable energy has become affordable. Thus, she concludes, we can “do it again”.

Broader solutions

I love Solomon’s optimism and agree that it is important to show that the climate crisis is solvable. Yet, as a climate scientist and philosopher, I don’t quite share her outlook. Each struggle she explores, from pesticides and smog to lead in paint and petrol, demonstrates just how keenly policymakers listen to industry — over other people and living things.

None of these cases were solved by overwhelming scientific evidence, or public concern and outcry. Each time, the industry responsible let go of a harmful product (such as DDT) only once it was sure to make a profit from selling its substitutes (other pesticides) — a strategy it could implement owing to its immense lobbying power in governments. But to solve the climate crisis, technological substitutions won’t be enough.

The harms of persistent pesticides were known long before governments banned them.

Substituting every internal combustion engine with an electric vehicle is not sufficient, neither is replacing coal with solar energy: energy demand needs to fall, too. The consequences of climate change are already very dire. Unlike the issues with the ozone hole or peregrine populations, they will not go away once we stop burning fossil fuels.

Ecological restoration is essential. It includes the sustainable management of forests and rivers, as well as changes in agricultural practices to focus less on livestock and more on diverse, drought-resistant crops. These are not just technical issues that can be implemented by one industry. They require an innovative approach to environmental management, through more decentralized industries and wider participation. The industries that profit from exacerbating the climate crisis will not be the same ones that will profit from change. Ultimately, the justice issues that have been set aside in the more-limited solutions of previous planetary problems — which had inserted technological substitutes into an untouched business model — cannot be ignored any longer.

Solvable is essential reading. I am convinced that Solomon is right: the climate crisis is solvable and this fight does have parallels with previous global challenges. But to address — or rather, redress — the climate crisis, any solution must have human rights at its heart, instead of the continued profits of industries.

Archived version

While officials boast that Russia's vast forests can help the country achieve its climate goals, experts say this won't be possible without significant change.

As the climate crisis intensifies, Russia is pinning its hopes on its vast forests to make up for its carbon emissions — the world’s fourth-highest — and even help the country become a global leader in carbon absorption.

But the country’s substandard conservation and ineffective forestry practices, combined with the impacts of climate change itself, make it more likely that Russia’s forests will become a carbon source rather than a sink in the next decade, experts told The Moscow Times.

"If the trend of increasing wildfires continues ... then within the next one or two decades, Russian forests will become a carbon source," a Russian forestry expert said.

From 2006 to 2023, Russia lost on average 1.9 million hectares of forests to fires annually — roughly the size of Slovenia or Fiji.

And according to the expert’s estimates, about a quarter of all logging in Russia targets its largely untouched old-growth forests — a major carbon reservoir.

As the planet continues to warm at an unprecedented rate due to human activity, carbon capture by ecosystems — alongside human emissions reduction — is becoming a significant climate solution, making forest preservation crucial, scientists say.

During the 2021 UN climate conference in Glasgow, President Vladimir Putin said that Moscow takes “the most serious and rigorous” measures to preserve forests by ramping up reforestation and combatting illegal logging and wildfires.

Yet experts doubt whether current measures will be enough for the future of Russia’s forests.

All three experts interviewed by The Moscow Times for this article requested anonymity due to the risks of speaking to a media outlet labeled a “foreign agent” by Russia.

Absorption quandary

In a persistent narrative framing the country’s forests as a catch-all solution to the climate problem, Sergei Ivanov, Putin’s special envoy for the environment, went as far as to claim that Russia’s forests could absorb the majority of global emissions.

“The more forests that are there, the more emissions are captured. And in this regard, Russia is a world leader. This gives me grounds to publicly state that Russia is the planet's ecological donor," Ivanov said at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) in 2022.

At SPIEF 2024 this week, Economic Development Minister Maxim Reshetnikov echoed this view, saying that Russia’s “colleagues” — an apparent reference to Western countries — emphasize emissions reduction while neglecting absorption.

"The underlying reason is clear: the country [Russia] exports mainly carbon-containing natural resources and does not want to do anything” to reduce its emissions, a Russian forest management expert and member of the Scientific Council on Forests of the Russian Academy of Sciences said.

“That's why everyone has latched onto the role of forests without truly understanding the real situation [with them],” they added.

Researchers from the Moscow-based Izrael Institute of Global Climate and Ecology found that Russia's greenhouse gas emissions appear to be higher than what its ecosystems can absorb.

The report’s authors also warned that Russia's ecosystems could become a carbon source after 2050 due to increased methane release from the continental shelf and melting permafrost.

An international team of researchers came to a similar conclusion in a 2022 study (here is the pdf), saying that wildfires and droughts make the carbon-sink status of Siberia’s forests less certain.

Russian forests fail to offset even the country’s own emissions, let alone those of others — and their absorption capacity has declined by nearly 20% since 2009, an exiled Russian environmental economist said.

Multiple threats

Experts say that the increasing frequency and severity of wildfires in Russia’s regions every year are perhaps the biggest threat to the country’s forests.

According to the forestry expert, the area of forests lost to fires each year exceeds the area lost to clear-cut logging by two to three times on average.

Other climate-induced problems include the spread of pests that now survive warmer winters and destructive windfalls in some regions, the environmental economist said.

The picture becomes even bleaker when forest management practices are factored in, the forestry expert noted, with crucial decisions sometimes based on a “bouquet of legends” rather than scientific knowledge.

Specifically, reforestation efforts often involve planting spruce, pine and oak, which grow slower and therefore absorb less carbon than fast-growing birch or aspen, which would naturally overgrow if left untouched.

"Moreover, pioneer species are initially cleared [before reforestation] and during the growing process. And everything that is cleared rots away and goes into the atmosphere," they said.

The expert also pointed to the Far East Sakhalin region, which as part of its plan to achieve climate neutrality is planting larch. Because the chosen site is a raised bog peat with very poor soil, the expert said, the plantation will not survive.

"Roslesinforg [the federal forestry body] has lost so many specialists during Putin's time that they might no longer understand basic things like this," they said.

The forest management expert said the widespread practice in Russia of planting coniferous monocultures — a technique that dates back to the 18th century — appears to be outdated in today’s changing climate, given that conifers burn more easily than mixed or small-leaved forests.

"It is believed that if something dies or burns, we need to take budget money and spend it on the most expensive seedlings … of spruce or pine,” they said. “But the climate has changed, and there are more wildfires.”

The country also lacks incentives for long-term sustainable forest management, the environmental economist said, as forest users often lease rather than own plots.

"After clear-cutting — which is the main approach to timber harvesting [in Russia] — the plots are turned into a devastated wasteland for many decades. Reforestation measures are generally not very effective, and they are not truly implemented," they said.

A study of reforestation in the Moscow region from 1999 to 2022 by the Earth Touches Me environmental project showed that some young plantations perished due to a lack of proper care.

Hemp fields

Russian researchers have sought out creative ways to enhance carbon absorption beyond the capacity of the country’s forests.

Outside Russia's fourth-largest city of Yekaterinburg, scientists who planted industrial hemp discovered that it absorbs carbon dioxide up to five times more effectively than conifers.

The researchers envision long-term carbon storage products made from hemp ranging from clothing and ropes to tableware.

Their endeavor is part of a network of 18 sites across Russia known as “carbon polygons,” in which scientists explore the absorption capacities of various plants in hopes of helping Russia achieve carbon neutrality.

While experts doubt hemp’s reliability for carbon storage, they see the polygons’ benefit in enhancing Russian researchers’ knowledge, particularly in the regions.

"Clothing made from hemp becomes unusable within a few years, and the carbon contained in it will be released into the atmosphere,” the environmental economist said. “Today in the EU ... wooden houses can be certified as carbon removals if they last for 50 years or more."

“When individuals start to understand that deciduous species capture carbon more effectively and rapidly than conifers, there is hope that forestry management will eventually become more meaningful," the forest management expert said.

Despite Russia’s already strained carbon-capture capacities, the country aims to more than double carbon absorption by ecosystems by 2050.

Experts said this plan would be unrealistic unless significant additional actions are taken.

The forestry expert said that three key measures could bring Russia closer to fulfilling this task: banning logging in virgin forests, improving firefighting and developing forestry on abandoned agricultural lands.

Without more competent forestry management, Russia will not be able to preserve this natural treasure.

“As things stand now, there are absolutely no chances of saving the forests,” the expert said.

“And the situation will only worsen.”

Archived version

- Environmental charity Climate Force is collaborating with the Eastern Kuku Yalanji people and rangers to create a wildlife corridor that runs between two UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Australia: the Daintree Rainforest and the Great Barrier Reef.

- Wildlife habitats in this region have become fragmented due to industrial agriculture, and a forested corridor is expected to help protect biodiversity by allowing animals to forage for food and connect different populations for mating and migration.

- The project aims to plant 360,000 trees over an area of 213 hectares (526 acres); so far, it has planted 25,000 trees of 180 species on the land and in the nursery, which can also feed a range of native wildlife.

***- The project is ambitious and organizers say they’re hopeful about it, but challenges remain, including soil regeneration and ensuring the planted trees aren’t killed off by feral pigs or flooding.***🌲

Pretty cool stuff.