The Colony Fire was within a mile of Sequoia National Park's iconic Giant Forest Thursday afternoon, which hosts around 2,000 sequoias including the General Sherman Tree, considered the largest on Earth in terms of volume, the Los Angeles Times reported. Officials raced to protect the grove from flames that could reach it within a day.
"It's a very significant area for many, many people, so a lot of special effort is going into protecting this grove," Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks spokesperson Rebecca Paterson told the Los Angeles Times.
The General Sherman Tree has a volume of 52,508 cubic feet, The AP reported. It also extends 275 feet into the air and has a circumference at its base of 103 feet. It is between 2,300 to 2,7000 years old, BBC News reported. Firefighters are protecting it along with other trees in the grove, the Giant Forest museum and other buildings by wrapping it in aluminum, according to The AP.
The wrap used is "like tinfoil basically," Mark Garrett, a spokesperson for the firefighting efforts, told the Los Angeles Times. It is the same material used to wrap homes and works by shielding the trees from embers and reflecting heat. Vegetation around the trees was also cleared to help protect them.
The grove is being menaced by the KNP Complex Fire, a joining of the Colony and Paradise fires that stands at 9,365 acres, according to the most recent information from InciWeb. The two fires were started by lightning strikes around a week ago and 482 firefighters are currently working to contain them.
In addition to immediate protections, the grove is also protected by the park's history of conducting prescribed burns to clear out other vegetation that might otherwise fuel fires in sequoia groves, The AP noted.
A "robust fire history of prescribed fire in that area is reason for optimism," Paterson told The AP. "Hopefully, the Giant Forest will emerge from this unscathed."
Sequoias have evolved to withstand wildfires and even to spread their seeds with help from the heat. However, the more intense fires fueled by the climate crisis can be too much even for these trees. Last year's Castle Fire killed between 7,500 to 10,600 large sequoias.
California is in the midst of yet another in a series of extreme wildfire seasons fueled by drought and climate change. Last year, a record 4.1 million acres burned, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. This year, more than 7,400 blazes have scorched more than 2.2 million acres so far, BBC News reported.
A tourist in Sequoia National Park in front of the largest tree in the world. haveseen / iStock / Getty Images Plus
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The Allen Coral Atlas announced its completion Wednesday as a tool that policy makers, conservationists and the general public can use to understand and preserve the world's reefs at a time when they are under increasing threat from the climate crisis and coastal development.
"We're trying to create a kind of moral mirror that we hold up to humanity," Andrew Zolli, vice president of sustainability and global impact at Planet, the company that provides the satellite images for the project, said in a press conference.
A Digital Public Good
The atlas is the product of three years of work, more than 450 research teams and nearly two million satellite images. It was named for the late Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Paul Allen, who was an early instigator of the project.
However, the atlas was a team effort. The high-resolution satellite imagery is provided and regularly updated by Planet. Arizona State University then cleans the images and the University of Queensland uses machine learning and regional data to generate different map layers. The National Geographic Society trains conservationists in how to best use the map, while Allen's company Vulcan funded the website that makes it accessible.
"One of the things that the Atlas represents is a kind of digital public good," Zolli said.
An Allen Coral Atlas partner looks at a map during development of the Atlas. Allen Coral Atlas
It is also a major milestone. Previously, only 25 percent of the world's reefs had been mapped using high-resolution images, and there was no consistent mapping process linking the different regions.
"It's quite an undertaking that hadn't been achieved at this resolution and with this kind of detail," director of Arizona State University's Center for Global Discovery and Conservation Science Greg Asner said during the press conference.
The only limit on the project is depth. Current satellite technology, Asner said, can only "punch through the seawater" to about 15 meters (approximately 49 feet). Which is why the atlas offers data products that extend from either zero to ten meters (approximately 33 feet) or zero to 15 meters.
Dr. Alexandra Ordonez Alvarez from University of Queensland collects georeferenced data in Far Northern Great Barrier Reef on Ashmore Bank. Chris Roelfsema
Conservation Tool
The map also comes at a pivotal moment for the world's coral reefs and the ecosystems and human communities that depend on them.
"Coral reefs are sort of at the nexus of the climate and biodiversity crisis," managing director for government and community relations at Vulcan Chuck Cooper said at the press conference.
The atlas, therefore, is designed with special tools that can help governments and scientists respond to these crises. National Geographic Society program manager Brianna Bambic said the predominant use so far was in the planning of marine protected areas.
The atlas provides a layer called a benthic map, which helps planners see where different types of habitat are located on the reef, such as coral or seagrass. It also provides a layer that allows planners to see which areas are already protected.
"We now have the highly detailed coral reef maps needed to create new spatial plans and marine protected areas. These map layers would have taken us five years to create and only if we had the budget or resources to do so, which we do not," Wen Wen, a marine spatial planner in Indonesia, said in a press release. "The Allen Coral Atlas is playing a large role in prioritizing 30 million hectares of a new Marine Protected Area zoning plan and providing alternative locations for a coastal economic development project that is environmentally sustainable. This tool is a blessing to our country."
This type of use is expected to become even more important as countries are set to convene at a summit of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity in Kunming, China next year. One goal that is expected to come out of that conference is the aim of protecting 30 percent of land and water by 2030.
"The coral atlas is going to be a really valuable tool for them to do that," Cooper said.
Indeed, countries like Mozambique and Fiji that have already committed to the goal are in the process of using the atlas to choose what part of their coastline to protect.
Reef Restoration
In addition to helping determine what parts of reefs to preserve, the atlas can also be used to determine where to restore coral reefs.
This is something that the nonprofit Coral Vida is doing in the Bahamas, Asner said, by using a layer called the geomorphic map. While the benthic map is more biological, the geomorphic map shows the physical or geological contours of the reef and can be used to determine the best location to plant new corals raised in nurseries.
In addition, the Allen Coral Atlas also includes a bleaching monitoring system updated every couple of weeks to tell users when a reef or part of a reef may be suffering a bleaching event. This is what happens when warm water forces coral to expel the algae that gives them nutrients and color, and is an increasing danger as the oceans heat up. The monitoring system enables conservationists to see what parts of a reef might be susceptible to bleaching so as not to attempt to plant new corals there.
Asner said he originally developed the bleaching tool in the Hawaiian islands, where it had another use. His team worked with the government to determine six things concerned citizens could do to reduce stress on the reef once bleaching was detected, such as limiting their fishing on the reef.
Limiting extra stress, Asner said, "can spell the difference between surviving and not surviving among corals," during bleaching events.
"That was successful, we believe," he said, "and we believe that that sort of approach can be implemented by governments... or anybody using our bleaching tool."
Child Efforts
Now that the team behind the Allen Coral Atlas has developed the technology and partnerships that made it possible, they do not plan to rest on their laurels.
One goal, Asner said, is to integrate coastal data into the atlas.
"Climate change is one of the big problems that reefs are facing, but coastal development and coastal impacts are just as important," he said, "and so you'll see us expanding into that realm over the next couple of years."
On a larger scale, Zolli said that developing the atlas showed the team the kind of collaboration that is needed to solve other major challenges. There are now "child efforts" of the atlas to create similar digital public goods for forests or greenhouse gas emissions.
"This approach is as important as the outcomes that it generated," he said.
The Allen Coral Atlas recently released the world's first satellite-based global coral reef monitoring system, shown here with New Caledonia bleaching data for the May 10, 2021 biweekly period.
That's just one of many shocking figures from the Meat Atlas 2021, a comprehensive look at the meat industry released by European nonprofits the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, Friends of the Earth Europe and BUND Tuesday.
"Europeans today eat an average of 66 kilograms (approximately 146 pounds) of meat per year per capita, which is almost twice as much as the World Health Organization actually recommends, and this persistently high consumption and production also comes with immense social and ecological costs," Lisa Tostado, head of the International Climate, Trade & Agriculture Policy Programme for Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, said at a public launch event. "And to raise awareness, provide information, and also foster a nuanced debate on the livestock center, the Heinrich-Böll Foundation and Friends of the Earth have compiled facts and figures on meat."
Launch of the Meat Atlas 2021: Facts and figures about the animals we eat www.youtube.com
Listen to the Science
The Meat Atlas 2021 is a comprehensive account of the industry's impact on environmental and public health, totaling more than 70 pages and covering more than 30 topics from land use to greenhouse gas emissions to pesticides. These impacts include:
- Climate Change: The food and farming sector in industrialized countries accounts for about a third of global greenhouse gas emissions. The livestock sector alone is responsible for 14.5 percent of global emissions: 45 percent of that from feed production and processing, 39 percent from methane release from ruminants and 10 percent from the storage and management of manure. In fact, 20 top livestock companies together emit more than Germany, the UK or France.
- Land Use Change: Meat and milk require more land than any other consumer product, and 77 percent of agricultural land is used for either livestock or livestock feed. This means that the expansion of livestock agriculture is a major driver of land conflicts that displace Indigenous and traditional communities. The conversion of land into cattle pasture drives at least two-thirds of deforestation in the Amazon region, for example.
- Public Health: The coronavirus pandemic has drawn attention to the dangers of zoonotic diseases, diseases that pass from animals to humans. Almost 75 percent of these diseases can be traced to wildlife, and the land grabs of the meat and dairy industry increase the chance that humans will encounter new zoonotic diseases as habitat is destroyed. The rampant use of antibiotics in agriculture also increases the risks that bacteria will evolve to resist these drugs. Already, drug-resistant bacteria kill 700,000 people a year, yet 73 percent of the antibiotics used worldwide are used on animals.
Despite these and many other consequences, both meat consumption and meat production are on the rise. Meat consumption has more than doubled in 20 years, and is expected to rise another 13 percent by 2028. Meat production has also been trending upwards. In the 1970s, it stood at one third of current levels, though it declined slightly in 2019 because of an outbreak of African swine fever.
The increase in production has been enabled by many of the things that make that production so problematic: more and more animals are kept in feedlots instead of pastures. This requires their feed to be grown somewhere else, gobbling up more land. Further, such crowding is only possible with antibiotics to prevent infections from spreading in close quarters.
With all of this evidence, the report argued that reducing meat consumption in industrial countries is a case of "listening to the science," something world governments have yet to do seriously with regards to this issue.
"We are talking not about a lack of information, and politicians not acting because they don't know," the atlas' chief executive editor and head of the International Agricultural Policy Division at Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung Dr. Christine Chemnitz said at the launch. "We are talking about a lack of political will to steer or transition the agricultural sector into a climate-friendly and biodiversity-friendly direction."
A Meat Atlas 2021 graphic summarizes meat's impact on the world. Bartz / Stockmar / CC BY 4.0
Race to the Bottom
One clear indication we are headed in the wrong direction, Chemnitz noted, is the sheer numbers of animals slaughtered: 75 billion a year as of 2019.
But this death translates directly into profits for the largest meat and dairy companies, Shefali Sharma, one of the report authors and director of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) European office, said at the launch.
Sharma explained that the top companies are so powerful that they can set the prices they pay to producers at below the cost of production, and governments will either directly or indirectly subsidize the difference.
This creates a "race to the bottom of cheap prices, more animals, more production, more profits," she said.
However, there is a way up and out. Sharma recommended a three-prong strategy of:
- Redirecting resources away from industrial agriculture and towards more regenerative approaches.
- Regulating companies and holding them responsible for the emissions generated by their supply chains.
- Regenerating by shifting to agroecology.
Agroecology means growing food in ways that respects natural limits while incorporating local and traditional knowledge, Stanka Becheva, a report contributor and Food and Agriculture Campaigner at Friends of the Earth Europe, explained during the launch.
"It's really the only transformative framework which will help move the industrial... farming sector away from the concentration and the devastating impacts it has," she said.
She also called for a ban on factory farming; turning to more diversified mixed plant and animal farming solutions; ensuring fair prices for small-scale, sustainable farmers; and changing diets to emphasize fresh, local, plant-based food.
A Strong Statement
One hopeful indicator cited by the report is the shifting attitudes of young people. The atlas highlighted a representative survey conducted by the University of Göttingen in Germany of young adults between 15 and 29 years old. It found that nearly 13 percent of them were either vegan or vegetarian, more than double the percentage of the overall German population. A further approximately 25 percent considered themselves flexitarians and only ate meat every so often.
But what was especially striking to Chemnitz was the motivation behind these decisions.
"One thing young people made really clear is that they see their reduced meat consumption as a political statement," she said.
Their decision was not based on taste or health, but opposition to how the current meat industry operates.
The survey found that 75 percent of the vegan and nearly 50 percent of the vegetarian respondents saw themselves as part of the climate movement. Moreover, young people were in favor of government policies directed at creating a more sustainable food system. More than 70 percent of them thought the German government should encourage people to eat a climate-friendly diet and make sure food is produced in an environmentally friendly way.
"This is a strong statement," Chemnitz said, "and it's a strong call for our government to get active."
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