World Governments Failing on Biodiversity

  • The recovery of the European Bison is one of the recent successes in the fight against biodiversity loss. Despite some improvements, the UNEP report suggests efforts to address the loss of biodiversity need to be substantially strengthened.(Photo courtesy of Gil Wojciech, Polish Forest Research Institute, Poland)

Transcript

A new report finds an agreement among the world’s governments to protect nature is failing. Lester Graham reports on the assessment which finds more animals, forests and other habitats are being lost.

World governments signed the 2002 Convention of Biological Diversity, agreeing to protect more habitat and species that are at risk. An assessment of the progress has been published in the journal Science and it finds biodiversity is at greater risk than it was when the agreement was signed eight years ago. Matt Foster is with the environmental group Conservation International. He says despite some government efforts to protect habitat, there have been more pressures destroying habitat and biodiversity.

“And it’s a scary prospect, not just from a biodiversity side, but considering that there are so many vulnerable people around the world for whom the services provided by nature and biodiversity are essential such as for water, for food and all of us depend on nature and forests especially to try to mitigate climate change.”

Foster says much more needs to be done by governments and the private sector to preserve natural areas and protect species.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

Related Links

Mapping Underground Rivers

  • DNR hydrologist Jeff Green consults a high-resolution topographic map to figure out which sinkhole is ahead of him. The trees and grass that grow up around the sinkhole form a buffer, allowing water to soak into the soil and filtering any pollutants before it reaches the aquifer.(Photo courtesy of Stephanie Hemphill)

Spring in the north is a time of melting snow and running water. It’s the best time of year for people who study underground water flows. Those underground rivers are important, especially where surface water easily drains into bedrock. It can quickly carry pollution long distances. Hydrologists try to map these underground rivers to help protect fragile ecosystems. As Stephanie Hemphill reports, the first step in making these maps is a process called dye tracing.

Transcript

Spring in the north is a time of melting snow and running water. It’s the best time of year for people who study underground water flows. Those underground rivers are important, especially where surface water easily drains into bedrock. It can quickly carry pollution long distances. Hydrologists try to map these underground rivers to help protect fragile ecosystems. As Stephanie Hemphill reports, the first step in making these maps is a process called dye tracing.

When the snow is melting in the woods and fields, Jeff Green wants to know where it’s going.

“We’re going to hike back to two springs.”

Green is a hydrologist with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, and an expert in the limestone geology of Southeast Minnesota.

Green climbs a fence and splashes through a stream that’s flooding a pasture. The stream is bordered by a natural wall of limestone.

Melting snow seeps into the limestone. It runs down vertical cracks to bigger horizontal openings that look like miniature caves. Jeff Green calls these “conduits,” and some are three inches wide.

“You can imagine a pipe that big — water would move very fast, like we’re seeing. So these conduits are what we’re dye tracing.”

Green has traipsed out to this pasture to put what he calls a “bug” in a spring. The ‘bug’ is a small mesh bag about the size of a cellphone, packed with charcoal. The charcoal will capture a dye that he’ll pour into melting snow in a sinkhole a few miles away. He’ll do this in several different spots.

By tracing the paths of different colors of dye, he’ll learn the sources of the water that feeds each spring. That will help him make what he calls a springshed map.

We slog across a corn field that’s dotted with small groves of trees. They’re growing around miniature canyons, about 20 feet deep. Here, you can see how this honeycombed water highway works, and this is where Jeff Green will pour the first dye.

“This is a place where there was a conduit, an opening in the limestone.”

Green climbs down carefully into the crevasse.

“Listen! … All right!”

He’s found some running water.

“Water’s running right here. I don’t know where it’s going but it’s going someplace. So I’m going to try pouring dye here.”

He pours a cup or so of a bright red fluorescent dye into the snow.

Green marks the spot with a GPS unit. This is a place where surface water and groundwater meet.

“That snow-melt is surface water, it’s going into this sinkhole and it’s becoming groundwater as you’re listening to it.”

That means what happens here on the land directly affects the quality of the groundwater.

“In this case, it’s pretty good, you’ve got conservation tillage, lots of corn stalks left to keep the soil from eroding, and then you’ve got grass, permanent cover, around the sinkholes. So this is actually really good.”

There are wonderful trout streams around here. The map Green is making will help protect those streams by pinpointing the source of the water that feeds them.

In a day or two, Green will check the “bugs” he put in the springs, and find out exactly where the dye from this sinkhole went.

He usually finds water traveling one-to-three miles underground before it surfaces.

When the springshed map is finished, he’ll share it with local governments, farmers, and people who want to protect the water in this landscape.

For The Environment Report, I’m Stephanie Hemphill.

Related Links

Forests, Carbon, and Critters

  • Some suspect that in Copenhagen, rich countries might agree to pay poor countries to stop cutting forests. (Photo by John J. Mosesso, courtesy of the National Biological Information Infrastructure)

World leaders are meeting in Copenhagen,
Denmark next month to begin dealing with
global climate change. A firm treaty is
off the table for now, but one idea they’re
thinking through is to preserve forests
and have them absorb heat-trapping carbon
dioxide. Shawn Allee reports,
some scientists want all this forest talk
to include animals, not just trees:

Transcript

World leaders are meeting in Copenhagen,
Denmark next month to begin dealing with
global climate change. A firm treaty is
off the table for now, but one idea they’re
thinking through is to preserve forests
and have them absorb heat-trapping carbon
dioxide. Shawn Allee reports,
some scientists want all this forest talk
to include animals, not just trees:

Stuart Pimm is a biologist at Duke University. He says in Copenhagen, rich countries might agree to pay poor countries to stop cutting forests. Pimm says that’s great but not all forests are equal.

“Some forests have more carbon in them than others, and some forests have more species in them than others.”

Pimm and other biologists say carbon pricing alone might mean carbon-poor forests get cut – even if they’re home to lots of animal species. They want negotiators to somehow tweak any climate agreement.

“So we should be encouraging countries not to burn their forests, but we should encourage them not to burn the forests that are so biologically rich.”

Climate negotiators could take up Pimm’s idea next month in Copenhagen.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

Related Links

Interview: Big, Nasty Fish

  • Some biologists worry the Asian Carp will destroy the four-billion dollar fishing industry in the Great Lakes if it gets in. (Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)

There is a man-made canal that connects
the Mississippi River system with the Great
Lakes. The Chicago Ship and Sanitary Canal
makes shipping cargo between the waterways
possible. It also makes it possible for invasive
pests in the water to invade both systems.
The big concern right now is a big, nasty group
of fish known as Asian Carp that’s already
invaded the Mississippi and some of its
tributaries. An electric barrier has been built
in the canal to try to stop the fish from getting
into the Great Lakes. Lester Graham talked with
Jennifer Nalbone about the problem. She’s the
Director of Navigation and Invasive Species with
the environmental group Great Lakes United:

Transcript

There is a man-made canal that connects
the Mississippi River system with the Great
Lakes. The Chicago Ship and Sanitary Canal
makes shipping cargo between the waterways
possible. It also makes it possible for invasive
pests in the water to invade both systems.
The big concern right now is a big, nasty group
of fish known as Asian Carp that’s already
invaded the Mississippi and some of its
tributaries. An electric barrier has been built
in the canal to try to stop the fish from getting
into the Great Lakes. Lester Graham talked with
Jennifer Nalbone about the problem. She’s the
Director of Navigation and Invasive Species with
the environmental group Great Lakes United:

Jennifer Nalbone: They are just incredible eaters, and they get as big as 3 to 4 feet, 80 to100 pounds when mature. And they are just prolific. Some species, the females can produce over 1 million eggs in their lifetime. So the fear is, like they’ve done in the Mississippi River Basin, they’ll get so big, they’ll have no predators, they’ll eat so much food, and there’ll be so many that they’ll basically take over the ecosystem. In some areas, where they’ve invaded, upwards of 90% of the river’s biomass is carp.

Lester Graham: You’ve probably seen this fish on videos or something like that – they’re the ones that as a boat passes by, they’ll jump out of the river, and sometimes even hit the boaters.

Nalbone: I admit, the first time I saw a video of the jumping silver carp, I was so startled I laughed at it. But there’s nothing funny about 50, 60, 70 pounds of fish flying at you when you’re going 20 miles an hour. It could kill someone.

Graham: Now, there’s this electric barrier in place that actually shocks the water so the fish is discouraged from coming into the area. But now there’s concern that the fish has invaded a nearby river, the Des Planes River, that’s very close to this canal. So, why’s that a problem?

Nalbone: Our concern is with flooding. Just last year, we saw major floodwaters in the Des Planes River, where floodwaters connected the Des Planes and the Chicago Sanitary Ship Canal in streams of water several feet deep. And carp could be carried into the Chicago Sanitary Ship Canal in those floodwaters.

Graham: So, what are you proposing? How could we stop the fish from going any further?

Nalbone: Well, the long-term solution is hydrologic separation of the Mississippi River Basin and the Great Lakes Basin. Army Corps of Engineers has been authorized to study that problem, but that’s a multi-year project. Right now, what we’re concerned about are floodwaters this fall. We are pressing that the Army Corps of Engineers put in place sandbags or berms in the low points between the Des Planes and the Canal. And also fill in some of the culverts in the IMN Canal that connect to the Chicago Sanitary Ship Canal.

Graham: Now, I’ve watched this situation for years – long before the Asian Carp invaded the Mississippi River system – and I’m wondering, even if further millions of dollars are spent, to try to put up barricades or stop this fish, whether it’s simply inevitable that this fish will get into the Great Lakes.

Nalbone: Well, this is a battle against time right now. If we can block the future floodwaters from the Des Planes – which is probably our biggest hole in our defense right now – and plug the culverts in the IMN, we can buy ourselves some good time. But we won’t be out of the woods until we separate the Mississippi and the Great Lakes Basin. But we can’t let this invasion happen. It would be, perhaps, the greatest anticipated ecological tragedy of our time. So, I don’t think that inevitable is an option. We have to get it done.

Graham: Jennifer Nalbone is with the group Great Lakes United. Thanks, Jennifer.

Nalbone: Thank you, Lester.

Related Links

Citizen Scientists Help Uncle Sam

  • Citizen scientist divers brave the chilly waters of Washington State to count the marine life below. (Photo by Ann Dornfeld)

As governments tighten their belts,
it’s getting harder for them to pay
scientists to monitor the health of
the nation’s ecosystems. So increasingly,
they’re turning to citizens who do
that kind of work for free. Ann Dornfeld
reports on the growing influence of these
“citizen scientists”:

Transcript

As governments tighten their belts,
it’s getting harder for them to pay
scientists to monitor the health of
the nation’s ecosystems. So increasingly,
they’re turning to citizens who do
that kind of work for free. Ann Dornfeld
reports on the growing influence of these
“citizen scientists”:

It’s the kind of cloudy, wet day that most people spend indoors. But the cold and wet doesn’t matter as much when you’re planning to spend your day at the bottom of a Puget Sound fjord.

(sound of divers splashing into water)

About 75 miles from Seattle, these scuba divers are conducting volunteer surveys for REEF, an organization that monitors fish populations around the world. The data help researchers understand where fish live, and in what kind of numbers. It’s the kind of information governments need to understand how fishing and pollution are affecting waterways.

Back on the boat, surveyor Janna Nichols has just emerged from the 48-degree water. She pulls out her survey and goes down the list marking off what she’s just seen.

“Sunflower stars, definitely, many of those – saw a lot of those around. No sand dollars, no sea urchins. Ah! Ooh! Ah! Here’s an exciting one! I saw a giant nudibranch! A very small giant nudibranch. But those are very cool to see – a treat!”

Identifying fish can be tricky, because the same species can have different coloration depending on its age, gender, or even time of the year.

“Black-eyed gobies were everywhere. I would say under a hundred of them. And – they were mating! Because I don’t know if you noticed, they had black pelvic fins. And they kind of hover around and say “Hey, baby baby, look at me!”

As much fun as these “citizen scientists” have, professional scientists take the data these divers collect seriously. Last summer volunteer surveyor David Jennings went diving in Washington’s Olympic National Park Marine Sanctuary. He was excited to see the colorful tiger and china rockfish he’d heard were abundant at the park. But when he got there, he only saw a couple. So he looked at the past six years of REEF survey data to see how the rockfish populations had changed.

“One of the best sources was someone that wrote up a diving experience he had in 2002 where he saw dozens of tigers and many chinas. Whereas I in a week of diving saw two tigers and just three chinas. so it was a very big contrast to what people saw in the past.”

Jennings took the data to the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife. That’s the agency that decides fishing limits. Greg Bargmann is a department fisheries biologist who’s working on next year’s catch limits for rockfish. He says even though the REEF divers aren’t as highly-trained as the state biologists, the data they collect are more current and cover a wider area.

“The REEF survey shows a very dramatic decrease in abundance over the last five years. Our state surveys don’t show that, but we have a lot of imprecision in our surveys so we’re relying on the REEF surveys to look for changes in population.”

That’s because the state can’t afford to send its biologists out as often or to as many sites as the volunteers dive.

“We really appreciate the interest of our citizens to spend time going out there and using their own transportation costs and their own equipment to go out and collect data, and to listen to us and collect things that are not easy to do sometimes.”

You don’t have to dive to be a citizen scientist. In Ohio, citizens track everything from salamanders to spiders. In California, tighter budgets mean more poaching – and not enough game wardens. So states are training volunteers to do more work. And across the country, the Environmental Protection Agency relies on citizens to monitor water quality in lakes and streams.

Bargmann says while governments rely on citizen scientists more during budget crunches, he sees programs like these becoming increasingly important for keeping track of the health of the environment.

For The Environment Report, I’m Ann Dornfeld.

Related Links

Jellyfish Taking Over Oceans?

  • A jellyfish under the Ross Sea ice, on October 14, 2005 (Photo by Henry Kaiser, courtesy of the National Science Foundation)

Some scientists are warning
that as overfishing and climate
change affect the world’s oceans,
jellyfish will take over the
ecosystem. That could mean that
eventually, if you cast a net
into the ocean all you’d haul
in would be jelly blobs. But
as Ann Dornfeld reports, such
warnings may be premature:

Transcript

Some scientists are warning
that as overfishing and climate
change affect the world’s oceans,
jellyfish will take over the
ecosystem. That could mean that
eventually, if you cast a net
into the ocean all you’d haul
in would be jelly blobs. But
as Ann Dornfeld reports, such
warnings may be premature:

The theory goes like this. Overfishing is removing the main jellyfish predators from the oceans. And warming oceans could be more hospitable to jellies.

A new report published in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution says jellyfish are already taking over. Its authors point to recent big jellyfish blooms as evidence.

But not everyone’s convinced.

“I think there’s a set of people that are sensationalizing the jellyfish bloom issue.”

University of Washington researcher Claudia Mills has been studying jellies for 30 years.

“I do think that probably jellyfish blooms are on the increase. But the problem is, we have so little baseline data that it’s almost impossible to really, honestly know that.”

Mills says there’s hardly any historical data on jellyfish populations, and not even much recent data.

She says it could be that the future of the world’s oceans is gelatinous and tentacled… or the blooms could just be cyclical.

For The Environment Report, I’m Ann Dornfeld.

Related Links

Serving It Up Green

  • The Duluth Grill is a family-style restaurant that's finding ways to cut down on trash, reduce energy use, and encourage volunteering in the community. The hanging lamps use LED bulbs, for a dramatic reduction in electricity use. (Photo by Stephanie Hemphill)

Some big corporations and some small businesses are taking a serious look at their impact on the environment. Some are using a science-based framework called the Natural Step to try to operate more sustainably. Stephanie Hemphill visited one, and has this report:

Transcript

Some big corporations and some small businesses are taking a serious look at their impact on the environment. Some are using a science-based framework called the Natural Step to try to operate more sustainably. Stephanie Hemphill visited one, and has this report:

The Duluth Grill is a family restaurant. Tom Hanson is the owner here. He says things started changing for the restaurant when he decided he should be offering healthier foods. He says too many of us are gaining too much weight. So he changed the menu, and now he says people can still go out and have a good time without it all going to their waist.

“Whether it’s French fries or fruit or healthy home-made soups, people can be socially engaged eating out but you’re not necessarily sacrificing your eating habits or eating styles.”

His menu offers healthy ethnic meals, gluten-free foods, and teas that claim health benefits.

Once Hanson started thinking about the health and well-being of his customers, he started thinking about the other impacts of his business. He joined a group of about a dozen businesses recruited by a local non-profit to try out the Natural Step approach to sustainability. The Natural Step was developed in Sweden, but it’s being used all over the world.

Restaurant staffers attended training sessions on how ecosystems work, and on what it means to be sustainable.

Manager Jeff Petcoff shows off the new LED lights in the restaurant.


“They produce 12 watts of energy versus 320 watts from the regular light bulbs that we were using prior to this. It’s a little more intimate with dining at night, but we’ve had a positive reaction to that as well.”

The Natural Step program encourages reducing the use of fossil fuels and other resources that have to be mined from the earth. And it calls for not throwing as much garbage into the earth.


In the kitchen, workers separate the trash. There’s a bin for recyclables, one for trash, and one for food scraps. Petcoff says the food waste goes for compost.

“We’ve just made it very easy for our staff to be able to compost and recycle with the bins all over the restaurant.”

The Duluth Grill has reduced its weekly trash pickup, and saved a bunch of money in the process. Owner Tom Hanson says saving money is nice, but part of the Natural Step program calls for not degrading the earth, like by building landfills.

“We don’t live next door to landfill but somebody does, and once you become aware of it, I think, it becomes more compelling to do it.”

And the restaurant encourages its customers to get involved in helping each other. Next to the front door there’s a bin where people can dump their old magazines. A local youth center is recycling them to raise money.

And there’s a bookshelf where people can leave children’s books; it’s part of a community-wide literacy campaign.

One Natural Step principle is about people: a sustainable business operator makes sure the people who work there, and even the suppliers and customers, anyone who has contact with the business, can meet their needs without a big struggle.

Tom Hanson dreams of offering health coverage to all his staff — and maybe someday even child care.

“You could easily consider day care for your staff as being an expense that no small operator could afford. But when you make change little by little, that step could very well enter into our values, and once it becomes one of our values it becomes affordable.”

Many businesses are making these kinds of changes and you might not even be aware of it. But Tom Hanson would say if you’re not sure, ask. You might prompt someone else to do better.


For the Environment Report, I’m Stephanie Hemphill.

Related Links

Study: 1/4 of World’s Mammals at Risk

  • A study finds that 25% of all mammals are threatened with extinction (Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)

A new survey shows that at least
one fourth of the world’s wild mammal
species are at risk of extinction. Julie
Grant reports that scientists find human
activities are largely to blame:

Transcript

A new survey shows that at least
one fourth of the world’s wild mammal
species are at risk of extinction. Julie
Grant reports that scientists find human
activities are largely to blame:

The mammal survey took five years, and 1,700 experts in
130 countries to complete. Their results are just being
published in the journal Science.

Jan Schipper of Conservation International is a lead author.
He says the assessment paints a bleak picture.

“It was in fact surprising to find out that 25% of all mammals,
to which we currently have sufficient information, are
threatened with extinction, meaning they are either critically
endangered, endangered, or vulnerable.”

Schipper says hotbeds for extinctions are in Southeast Asia,
Africa and Central and South America – and it is largely
driven by consumers.

For example, if we demand bananas in the middle of winter,
it drives growers to cut down native forests for banana
plantations – but without those native forests, many
mammals are left without a place to live.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

Related Links

U.S. Gets an ‘Eco-Checkup’

  • Wetlands, such as these in Michigan, have decreased, according to a report on the country's ecosystems (Photo by David Kenyon of the Michigan Department of Natural Resources)

A new report about the state of the nation’s ecosystems was recently released. And the results are so-so. Jennifer Guerra has the details:

Transcript

A new report about the state of the nation’s ecosystems was recently released. And the results are so-so. Jennifer Guerra has the details:

Think of the report as the environmental equivalent of an annual physical exam.

Here are the results: the number of wetlands in the country is down and virtually every stream contains contaminants. On the plus side, it looks like soil erosion has decreased. And farmers are able to produce more food on less land.

Robin O’Malley plans to take those results to federal lawmakers. O’Malley is with the Heinz Center. It’s the non-partisan think tank responsible for the report.

“In the same way the chairmen of the federal reserve comes up and reports to congress about how our nation’s economy is doing, we think we need to do that kind of thing at a national scale for the environment.”

In addition to the report, the Heinz Center also included a little roadmap of sorts to help the lawmakers along.

For The Environment Report, I’m Jennifer Guerra.

Related Links

New Ship Has Balance Without Ballast

  • A diagram of the ballast-free ship (Photo courtesy of Professor Michael Parsons)

Cargo ships move sea life around the world.
Moving aquatic life from one port to another can cause
environmental havoc. Lester Graham reports there’s a
new idea that could nearly eliminate the problem of
transporting sea life to foreign ports:

Transcript

Cargo ships move sea life around the world.
Moving aquatic life from one port to another can cause
environmental havoc. Lester Graham reports there’s a
new idea that could nearly eliminate the problem of
transporting sea life to foreign ports:

There is an invasion of every major port on the globe.

“Today, the world’s shores are under attack. Armies of aliens are secretly invading our coasts.”

If this video, Invaders from the Sea, from the International Maritime
Organization sounds a little over-dramatic, it’s really not. Invaders from far-flung
corners of the world are brought in by commerce. In their travels, cargo ships pick up the
hitchhikers.

Those hitchhikers can be fish, mussels – aquatic bugs of all kinds. They can become
pests. Out-compete native species for food and space. They can destroy the
native ecosystems and often damage the economic well-being of people.

Here’s how it happens. Ocean-going cargo ships dock at a foreign port. They pump in
water for ballast to keep the ship stable. They also pump in some of the living things in
the water. When they arrive at the destination port, they can pump out that water and
the critters that were sucked up with it.

In the US, ports from Chesapeake Bay to San Francisco have been invaded. But,
the Great Lakes have been hit especially hard by invasive species.

Michael Parsons is a professor of naval architecture at the University of Michigan. He
says when foreign ships were able to come in from the Atlantic and travel as far as
inland as Duluth, Minnesota; they brought a lot of invaders with them.

“With the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in the ‘50’s, that led to increased
introduction of non-indigenous species such as the zebra mussel, and the round goby, and
the ruffe, and the various smaller creatures that have been brought in to the Great Lakes.”

Those creatures have damaged the ecosystem of the Great Lakes. And they’ve cost the economy.
By one Environmental Protection Agency estimate about five-billion dollars a year.

Parsons and his colleagues have been working to design a ship that has no need for
ballast. In the lab, a scale model has been tested in a long pool. Instead of pumping
water in and out of the ballasts, the water would flow through big
tubes that run the length of the ship.

“And so, that’ll create a slow flow through these trunks so that they’re always swept
clean of foreign water.”

“A ship like that is just what we need in the Great Lakes.”

Andy Buchsbaum runs the Great Lakes office of the environmental group, the National
Wildlife Federation.

“If you eliminate the need for ballast water altogether, then you’re eliminating the vast
majority of invasive species introductions that come in through the discharge of ballast.”

The ballast-free ship design is creating some excitement. Even the shipping industry is
paying attention because the ship also is more fuel efficient.

If someone decides to actually build the ballast-free cargo ship, it’ll be a while before
the first one is on the high seas.

Allegra Cangelosi has been working on the ballast and invasive species problem for
close to a decade. She’s a policy analyst with the Northeast-Midwest Institute.

“I think it’s a wonderful development. I don’t think there’s going to be any one answer
for all ships plying all waters throughout the globe. However, the more good answers
that are out there to choose from, the better for the environment.”

Some of those choices are filtering ballast water or killing organisms in the ballast with
chemicals. Those systems are expensive. And since fuel isn’t getting any cheaper, that
might make a more fuel-efficient ballast-free ship attractive.

For The Environment Report, this is Lester Graham.

Related Links