AFP UK

From the boutiques of Christian Dior to royal wedding favours, jute is growing in popularity worldwide as demand for alternatives to plastic soars, with experts predicting the bag industry alone will be worth more than $3 billion by 2024. 

India is desperate to capitalise on this consumer shift and seize the opportunity to revive its flagging industry, expanding it from sacks and gunny bags to fashion.

Also known as sack cloth, hessian, or burlap, the fibre is hailed by environmentalists because growing it can help with carbon capture, and it uses less natural resources than cotton. 

“One hectare of jute plant can soak up to nearly 15 tonnes of carbon-dioxide and discharge 11 tonnes of oxygen during a season, thereby reducing greenhouse effects,” estimated Swati Singh Sambyal, a sustainability and circular economy expert based in New Delhi.

She added that production takes about only four months and requires “minimal water and fertiliser” compared to cotton.

During British rule, the jute industry was a key part of India’s economy and the fabric was exported worldwide but by the 1990s it was struggling, unable to compete with cheaper synthetic substitutes and lower production costs of farmers in neighbouring Bangladesh. 

Today India is trying to promote jute as a fabric for a sustainable future, with the government issuing a mandate that all grains and 20 percent of sugar should be packed in jute sacks.

Leading homegrown designers such as Ashish Soni and Pawan Aswani also use jute blends for their fashion lines.

But critics warn the country’s rundown mills and outdated farming practices do not match up with such grand ambitions.  

– Billion dollar industry –

“India can cater to global demand but for that two things are needed: upgrading the skills of the people…to produce different types of products and upgrading the machinery,” said Gouranga Kar, who heads the Central Research Institute for Jute and Allied Fibres.

There are around 70 jute factories in West Bengal state, some of which were set up in the 19th century mainly to produce coarse sacks for packing coffee and food grains, but there has been little change to machinery and production methods since.

At Meghna Jute Mills hundreds of barefoot workers labour in a vast dingy hall covered in fine, fibrous dust across eight-hour shifts, 24 hours a day. 

“Jute has a potentially huge international market” said company president Supriya Das, as noisy machines rolled out long strands of shimmery yarn behind him. 

“If the machines are high-tech we can produce good yarn. For diversified end use, the quality of the fibre has to improve. The industry won’t be viable unless we introduce value-added products like decorative items and rugs.”

Nearly all of the world’s jute is grown in this region or in Bangladesh, because of the conducive humid climate and availability of cheap labour.

According to a recent report by Research and Markets, the global jute bag market reached a value of $2.07 billion in 2020 and is projected to touch $3.1 billion by 2024 as consumers look for alternatives to single use plastic. 

The material’s appeal has been boosted by brands such as Dior making jute sandals and stars such as the Duchess of Sussex wearing jute footwear and using hessian gift bags for guests attending her wedding to Prince Harry. 

– Drowning in plastic pollution –

Kar said India should seize the opportunity to invest in its industry and make diverse jute-based products such as rugs, lamps, shoes and shopping bags.

India’s scientists have developed high yielding varieties of jute to tap this renewed interest, Kar explained, but unskilled labour and outdated farming practices meant this had yet to translate into economic returns. 

“This is a major cause of concern for us,” he added. 

The coronavirus pandemic has also thwarted hopes of restoring the lost glory of the industry — several mills have shut down and lockdowns have caused labour and raw material shortages. 

Environmentalists insist jute has vast economic and green potential, particularly as consumers voice concerns about fast fashion and more countries introduce legislation to ban single-use plastic.

Every part of the jute plant can be used: the outer layer for the fibre, the woody stem for paper pulp, and the leaves can be cooked and eaten, Sambyal explained. 

The UN Environment Programme has said the planet is “drowning in plastic pollution”, with about 300 million tonnes of plastic waste produced every year.

India generates 3.3 million metric tonnes of plastic waste annually, according to a report in 2018-19 by the Central Pollution Control Board. 

Back at Meghna Mills, factory bosses are hopeful that if authorities invest, they can rebrand and reboot jute for the 21st century.

Das said: “Jute has a great future. It can bring a lot of valuable foreign exchange to the country so the government must focus on this sector.”

Turkey’s parliament on Wednesday unanimously ratified the Paris Agreement on climate change, more than five years after Ankara first signed the landmark deal on cutting emissions that contribute to global warming.

The vote followed President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s announcement at the UN General Assembly in September that Turkey would implement the accord in time for next month’s UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow. 

Turkey has felt the full force of climate change, with a rapid succession of floods and wildfires killing some 100 people in July and August.

Swathes of the country have also been suffering through an extended drought.

The crises have heaped political pressure on Erdogan to tackle greenhouse emissions blamed for global warming, which scientists say is contributing to increasingly extreme and more frequent adverse weather events.

Nearly 200,000 hectares (around 480,000 acres) of forest have been scorched in Turkey this year — more than five times the annual average for 2008-2020, data from the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) show.

Before Turkey’s ratification, the Climate Action Tracker project said Ankara’s efforts to reach the Paris accord’s goals were “critically insufficient”. 

Climate change has become one of the greatest issues of concern to Turkey’s youth, millions of whom are set to vote for the first time in elections expected in 2023.

Some 95 percent of young people in Turkey believe climate change is one of the biggest threats facing the country, according to a report last month by the British Council as part of its Global Youth Letter on Climate Action.

Turkey’s reticence to ratify the accord came over disputes about the amount of funding afforded to specific countries and timelines for putting stricter regulations into place.

Turkey’s total greenhouse gas emissions rose by 157.7 percent between 1990 and 2019, according to the state statistics service.

One Western diplomat said Turkey had invested strongly in the infrastructure for renewable energy, including solar and wind, but remained weighed down by its reliance on polluting coal.

“Turkey’s policy on the environment is reactionary, as we saw with the mucilage and the debate around importing European plastic waste,” the Western diplomat said.

The shores of Istanbul were covered this summer by a viscous mucilage, also known as “sea snot”, which scientists blamed on an accumulation of pollutants being dumped into the Sea of Marmara.

The government this year banned the import of some plastic waste products from countries including France and Britain, after a public backlash over images showing the waste dumped in ditches or burned by roadsides.

Covering Climate Now, a global media project devoted to reporting on global warming, on Wednesday honored Agence France-Presse among the winners of its first journalism award.

“The awards celebrate work that sets a standard of excellence for journalists everywhere to emulate as newsrooms increase their coverage of the climate story,” the consortium of over 400 media outlets said in a statement.

The 12 winners chosen from nearly 600 entries included a multimedia piece by The Guardian, which lets the audience listen to the sounds of icebergs melting in the Antarctic, and a long-form piece by ProPublica documenting migration caused by global warming.

Josh Edelson, an AFP photographer based in California who specializes in covering wildfires, won in the photography category for his series “Heart of Fire.”

In the series, shot in September 2020, Edelson documented the wildfires burning in California, capturing “the overwhelming size of the inferno and its emotional impact on both firefighters and the displaced,” the consortium said.

“In ten years covering wildfires in California, I’ve never seen anything like what this year brought,” Edelson wrote in an essay that accompanies his photo series. “The new normal now seems to be that every fire season brings a new surprise.”

“I am transfixed and fascinated and passionate and also humbled by the power of these events and super-driven to continue telling these stories so people can see what’s going on inside the fire line,” Edelson wrote.

Germany’s Benjamin List and Scottish-American David MacMillan on Wednesday won the Nobel Chemistry Prize for developing a tool to build molecules that has spurred new drug research, scaled up production and made chemistry more environmentally friendly.

The processes they developed independently of one another in 2000 are used to control and accelerate chemical reactions.

Prior to their work, scientists believed there were only two types of catalysts — metals and enzymes.

The new technique, which relies on small organic molecules and which is called “asymmetric organocatalysis,” is widely used in pharmaceuticals, allowing makers to streamline the production of drugs for depression and respiratory infections, among others.

Organocatalysts allow several steps in a production process to be performed in an unbroken sequence, considerably reducing waste in chemical manufacturing, the Nobel committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

List and MacMillan, both 53, will share the 10-million-kronor ($1.1-million, one-million-euro) prize.

“I thought somebody was making a joke. I was sitting at breakfast with my wife,” List told reporters by telephone during a press conference after the prize was announced.

In past years, he said his wife has joked that he should keep an eye on his phone for a call from Sweden.

“But today we didn’t even make the joke,” List, who is a director at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, said.

He called Scottish-born MacMillan with the news in the wee hours of the morning in the United States, but the Princeton professor didn’t believe it either and went back to sleep.

“I’m incredibly happy, but at the same time, I’m still trying to find my feet and understand what is happening today, it’s all a whirlwind,” MacMillan told AFP.

– ‘So proud’ –

Asked about what the prize would mean for his future as a researcher, List promised he had “a few more plans”.

“I always like to go to the extremes. ‘Can we do things that were just impossible before?'” List told reporters. “I hope I live up to this recognition and continue discovering amazing things.”

MacMillan, the son of a steel worker and house cleaner who credited his Scottish public school education with his success, told AFP he was proud his research had helped produce enough medicine for the world.

He hopes the next breakthroughs will come through his lab’s work on “photoredox catalysis”, using visible light to break and rejoin atomic bonds, one electron at a time.

Explaining the award, the Academy said “many research areas and industries are dependent on chemists’ ability to construct molecules that can form elastic and durable materials, store energy in batteries or inhibit the progression of disease”.

“This work requires catalysts, which are substances that control and accelerate chemical reactions, without becoming part of the final product,” it added.

List was the first to prove that the amino acid “proline”, which he called his favourite catalyst, could drive an aldol reaction, which is when carbon atoms from two different molecules are bonded together.

“Compared to both metals and enzymes, proline is a dream tool for chemists. It is a very simple, cheap and environmentally friendly molecule,” the Academy said.

– ‘Gold rush’ –

Since their discovery, developments in the field can “almost be likened to a gold rush”, with List and MacMillan designing “multitudes of cheap and stable organocatalysts”, the Nobel committee noted.

For example, in 2011, researchers were able to make the production process for strychnine, today mostly used as a pesticide, 7,000 times more efficient, reducing it from 29 chemical reactions to just 12, it said. 

Ahead of Wednesday’s announcement, analysts had said the chemistry field was wide open.

According to Clarivate, which maintains a list of potential Nobel Prize winners, more than 70 researchers had what it takes to be considered for the prize, given the thousands of citations they have received in scientific papers.

The Nobel season continues with the two most closely watched prizes, literature on Thursday and peace on Friday. The winner of the economics prize will be announced on Monday.

The medicine prize kicked off the 2021 Nobel season on Monday, going to David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian for breakthroughs that paved the way for the treatment of chronic pain.

The physics prize followed Tuesday, when half was awarded to US-Japanese scientist Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann for climate models, and the other half to Italy’s Giorgio Parisi for work on the theory of disordered materials and random processes.

Princeton professor David MacMillan on Wednesday won the Nobel Chemistry Prize for his work developing a new tool to scale up chemical reactions in an environmentally friendly way, known as “organocatalysis.”

Here is a lightly edited interview that the Scotsman, who holds British and American citizenships, gave to AFP after the announcement. 

– Organic molecules –

Q: Why is organocatalysis so different and important compared to the catalysts that came before, such as metals and enzymes?

A: Chemical reactions make all the things that are around us: medicine, materials, etc. And those reactions often require “catalysis.” 

To do catalysis, the world used lots of things that were toxic or created problems for the environment.

About 23 years ago, we thought “What if you could use the same types of molecules that you’d find in your body?” 

In other words, organic molecules — because we know that those are fine in the environment, and they’re happy to be around in our atmosphere.

– Eureka –

Q: Can you recall a specific eureka moment?

A: I was standing at a blackboard with a student, and I was showing them a reaction. 

And I suddenly had this idea about how we could take this whole thing in a very different way using these organic molecules, so that was the first eureka moment.

The second moment was when another student actually tried the reaction and it worked. That was just the fantastic feeling at the time, much like I’m feeling right now.

When we published it, it took off like crazy and went quickly into the community and people started to adopt it very rapidly, which was also very exciting.

– Metals worked –

Q: Why were organic molecules neglected as tools to build molecules in the past?

A: It’s a great question. I think it’s because when people first tried using metals, they worked. And like many things in life when something works, people will go in that direction.

– ‘The world is a very big place’ –

Q: The applications of your discovery are plentiful, but is there one that you’re the most proud of?

A: People use these to make these medicines on a very, very large scale because the world is a very big place. 

To be able to use these catalysts to do that, and at the same time be safe and environmentally fine is the part that I’m certainly most proud of.

– Using light to break atoms –

Q: You’re currently a leader in “photoredox catalysis,” using visible light to break and rejoin atomic bonds, one electron at a time. What excites you about that?

A:  That work is now also being heavily employed by people making medicines and other materials.

We’ve just started taking that into biology, and we think that we can start to have new insights that will be really important for developing new medicines.

– Undergrad at Glasgow –

Q: How far does your love for chemistry go back?

A: It goes back to when I was an undergraduate at the University of Glasgow and I first made a molecule, and the professor I was working with told me that no one in the world had ever made that molecule before. 

I was very young. I hardly knew what I was doing, and I’d already made a molecule. And I think where I’m lucky is I get to work with young people every day who have at least that level of excitement.  

– Co-winners –

Q: Do you know your co-winner Benjamin List? 

A: We published our papers separately, around about the same time, but we’ve known each other forever.

He was the person who texted me at 5:30 am this morning about the win, and I actually thought it was a joke.

I told him, “It’s just a joke, people are joking,” and I went back to sleep. 

About 20 minutes later there was a lot of buzzing on my phone so I went to the New York Times front page and there was my picture.

I’m incredibly happy, but at the same time, I’m still trying to find my feet and understand what is happening today, it’s all a whirlwind.

The World Health Organization on Wednesday endorsed the RTS,S/AS01 malaria vaccine, the first against the mosquito-borne disease that kills more than 400,000 people a year, mostly African children.

The decision followed a review of a pilot programme deployed since 2019 in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi in which more than two million doses were given of the vaccine, first made by the pharmaceutical company GSK in 1987.

After reviewing evidence from those countries, the WHO said it was “recommending the broad use of the world’s first malaria vaccine”, the agency’s director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.

The WHO said it was recommending children in sub-Saharan Africa and in other regions with moderate to high malaria transmission get four doses up to the age of two.

Every two minutes, a child dies of malaria, the agency said. 

More than half of malaria deaths worldwide are in six sub-Saharan African countries and almost a quarter are in Nigeria alone, according to 2019 WHO figures.

Symptoms include fever, headaches and muscle pain, then cycles of chills, fever and sweating.

Findings from the vaccine pilot showed it “significantly reduces severe malaria which is the deadly form by 30 percent,” said Kate O’Brien, Director of WHO’s Department of Immunization, Vaccines and Biologicals.

The vaccine is “feasible to deliver”, she added and “it’s also reaching the unreached… Two thirds of children who don’t sleep under a bed net in those countries are now benefiting from the vaccine.”

Many vaccines exist against viruses and bacteria but this was the first time that the WHO recommended for broad use a vaccine against a human parasite.

The vaccine acts against plasmodium falciparum — one of five malaria parasite species and the most deadly.

“From a scientific perspective this is a massive breakthrough,” said Pedro Alonso, Director of the WHO Global Malaria Programme.

– ‘Glimmer of hope’ –

Matshidiso Moeti, the WHO regional director for Africa said Wednesday’s recommendation “offers a glimmer of hope for the continent which shoulders the heaviest burden of the disease.”

The estimated cost of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa is over 12 billion dollars a year, Alonso said at a news conference following the announcement.

Before the newly recommended vaccine can reach children in need, the next step will be funding. 

“That will be the next major step… Then we will be set up for scaling of doses and decisions about where the vaccine will be most useful and how it will be deployed,” said O’Brien.

Gavi vaccine alliance said in a statement after the WHO announcement that “global stakeholders, including Gavi, will consider whether and how to finance a new malaria vaccination programme for countries in sub-Saharan Africa.”

The fight against malaria received a boost in April when researchers from Britain’s Oxford University announced that their Matrix-M vaccine candidate had become the first to surpass the WHO’s threshold of 75-percent efficacy.

Germany’s BioNTech, which developed a coronavirus vaccine with US giant Pfizer, also said it aimed to start trials for a malaria vaccine next year using the same breakthrough mRNA technology.

The WHO also hopes this latest recommendation will encourage scientists to develop more malaria vaccines. 

The RTS,S/AS01 is “a first generation, really important one,” said Alonso, “but we hope… it stimulates the field to look for other types of vaccines to completement or go beyond this one.”

Dengue affects tens of millions each year, producing the brutal symptoms that earned it the moniker “breakbone fever,” but new research may have found the first-ever treatment for the virus.

Tests in cell cultures and mice found that a newly identified compound can effectively disarm the virus, stopping it from replicating and preventing disease, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

And it appears to be effective whether taken protectively before infection or as a treatment after the virus is contracted.

It is an “exciting” development in the battle against dengue, according to Scott Biering and Eva Harris of the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Public Health.

It “represents a major advance in the field of dengue therapeutics,” the pair, who were not involved in the research, wrote in a review in Nature.

There is no doubt about the threat posed by the mosquito-borne dengue virus, which is estimated to infect at least 98 million people a year and is endemic in 128 countries worldwide.

It can cause intense flu-like symptoms, and sometimes develops into severe dengue which can be fatal.

And because there are four different strains of the virus, infection with one doesn’t protect against another, and catching dengue a second time is often more serious.

No treatment exists so far, with efforts focusing instead on reducing transmission — including a programme that infects mosquitoes with a disease-resistant bacteria.

A vaccine called Dengvaxia is approved for use only in some countries and is effective against a single strain.

– ‘Unprecedented’ –

Enter the unassumingly named JNJ-A07, a compound found by screening thousands of potential candidates, in a process researcher Johan Neyts described as like “looking for a needle in a haystack.”

It turned out to be worth the wait.

Its effect “in infected animals is unprecedented,” Neyts, who helped lead the research, told AFP.

“Even if treatment is started at the time of peak viral replication there is important antiviral activity,” added Neyts, a professor of virology at the University of Leuven, Belgium.

JNJ-A07 works by targeting the interaction between two proteins in the dengue virus that are key to its replication.

Tests in cells, including from mosquitoes and humans, found it worked against all four dengue strains.

Dengue can evolve quickly, and so the team also examined how JNJ-A07 would fare as the virus mutates.

“It took us in the lab, in infected cells, almost half a year before we could obtain important resistance (to the treatment),” said Neyts.

“Given that the barrier to resistance is so high, it is very unlikely that this will clinically be a problem.”

Intriguingly, the mutations that caused resistance also appeared to make the virus incapable of replicating in mosquito cells.

That could suggest that even if the virus develops resistance to treatment with JNJ-A07, it would no longer be transmissible via mosquitoes, effectively reaching a dead end in its host.

– Clinical trials in progress –

Promisingly, the compound was effective whether administered to mice before infection or afterwards.

The version of the compound reported in Nature has now been “further slightly optimised” and is in clinical development by Johnson & Johnson, Neyts said.

Various questions about JNJ-A07 remain, including whether it would be more effective if paired with other compounds, wrote Biering and Harris.

Another potential issue is whether it could increase vulnerability to reinfection.

When people contract dengue, the presence of the virus in their blood — known as viraemia — generally stimulates a potent immune response that protects them from future infection.

But in some people, the immune response is weaker and that leaves them vulnerable to reinfection with different strains, which can produce more serious symptoms.

Given that JNJ-A07 works to reduce viraemia, Biering and Harris cautioned that research is needed into whether this might leave people more susceptible to reinfection.

Despite the unknowns, Neyts said the study offers exciting possibilities.

“Seeing the compound work so potently in animals was breathtaking,” he said, describing the research as “an amazing ride.”

Germany’s Benjamin List and US-based David MacMillan on Wednesday won the Nobel Chemistry Prize for developing a tool to build molecules which has helped make chemistry more environmentally friendly.

Their tool, which they developed independently of each other in 2000, can be used to control and accelerate chemical reactions, exerting a big impact on drugs research.

Prior to their work, scientists believed there were only two types of catalysts — metals and enzymes.

The new technique, which relies on small organic molecules and which is called “asymmetric organocatalysis” is widely used in pharmaceuticals, allowing drug makers to streamline the production of medicines for depression and respiratory infections, among others.

Organocatalysts allow several steps in a production process to be performed in an unbroken sequence, considerably reducing waste in chemical manufacturing, the Nobel committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

List and MacMillan, both 53, will share the 10-million-kronor ($1.1-million, one-million-euro) prize.

“I thought somebody was making a joke. I was sitting at breakfast with my wife,” List told reporters by telephone during a press conference after the prize was announced.

In past years, he said his wife has joked that he should keep an eye on his phone for a call from Sweden.

“But today we didn’t even make the joke,” List, who is a director at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, said.

“It’s hard to describe what you feel in that moment, but it was a very special moment that I will never forget.”

– ‘So proud’ –

Asked about what the prize would mean for his future as a researcher, List promised he had “a few more plans.”

“I always like to go to the extremes. ‘Can we do things that were just impossible before?’ List told reporters. “I hope I live up to this to this recognition and continue discovering amazing things.”

MacMillan, born in Scotland but a professor at Princeton University in the US, also thought he was the target of a prank, saying he originally went back to sleep when he started receiving texts from Sweden early Wednesday.

“I am shocked, and stunned and overjoyed,” MacMillan said in a statement from Princeton University.

“Organocatalysis was a pretty simple idea that really sparked a lot of different research,” the professor added. 

“The part we’re just so proud of is that you don’t have to have huge amounts of equipment and huge amounts of money to do fine things in chemistry.”

Explaining the award, the Academy said “many research areas and industries are dependent on chemists’ ability to construct molecules that can form elastic and durable materials, store energy in batteries or inhibit the progression of disease.”

“This work requires catalysts, which are substances that control and accelerate chemical reactions, without becoming part of the final product,” it added.

List was the first to prove that the amino acid “proline,” which he called his favourite catalyst, could drive an aldol reaction, which is when carbon atoms from two different molecules are bonded together.

“Compared to both metals and enzymes, proline is a dream tool for chemists. It is a very simple, cheap and environmentally friendly molecule,” the Academy said.

– ‘Gold rush’ –

Since their discovery, developments in the field can “almost be likened to a gold rush,” with List and MacMillan designing “multitudes of cheap and stable organocatalysts, the science body noted.

For example, in 2011, researchers were able to make the production process for strychnine, today mostly used as a pesticide, 7,000 times more efficient, reducing it from 29 chemical reactions to just 12, it said. 

Ahead of Wednesday’s announcement, analysts had said the chemistry field was wide open.

According to Clarivate, which maintains a list of potential Nobel Prize winners, more than 70 researchers had what it takes to be considered for the prize, given the thousands of citations they have received in scientific papers.

Last year, the Nobel went to France’s Emmanuelle Charpentier and America’s Jennifer Doudna, for developing the gene-editing technique known as CRISPR-Cas9 — DNA snipping “scissors”.

The Nobel season continues with the two most closely watched prizes, literature on Thursday and peace on Friday. The winner of the economics prize will be announced on Monday.

The medicine prize kicked off the 2021 Nobel season on Monday, going to David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian for breakthroughs that paved the way for the treatment of chronic pain.

The physics prize followed Tuesday, when half was awarded to US-Japanese scientist Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann for climate models, and the other half to Italy’s Giorgio Parisi for work on the theory of disordered materials and random processes.

Ecologists said Wednesday they had submitted a formal complaint to the EU over Spain’s “continued failure” to protect the Mar Menor, one of Europe’s largest saltwater lagoons, against agricultural pollution.

In a statement outlining details of the complaint, ClientEarth and Spain’s Ecologists in Action urge the European Commission to take “immediate action against Spain” as harmful agricultural practices were pushing the lagoon “to the brink of ecological collapse”.

It said the “continuous build-up of fertilisers from nearby agricultural land has created toxic conditions in the Mar Menor” which breach both EU and Spanish laws. 

In August, millions of dead fish and crustaceans began washing up on the shores of the Mar Menor, located on Spain’s southeastern coast, which experts have repeatedly blamed on agricultural pollution. 

They argue that sealife died due to a lack of oxygen caused by hundreds of tonnes of fertiliser nitrates leaking into the waters causing a phenomenon known as eutrophication which collapses aquatic ecosystems.

Two similar catastrophic pollution events occurred in 2016 and 2019. 

Although the lagoon is protected under various EU directives and the UN environment programme, Spain had failed to comply with its legal obligations, taking “only superficial steps to safeguard the Mar Menor from damaging agricultural practices”, the environmental groups said. 

“The European Commission must urgently act to stop this environmental crisis. As legal guardian of the Mar Menor, the Spanish authorities have a duty to safeguard the lagoon.. which risks disappearing forever,” ClientEarth lawyer Soledad Gallego said in a statement.

“Spain’s lack of meaningful action to protect this iconic site means we are witnessing the Mar Menor breaking down before our eyes. Protected species and habitats clearly cannot survive, let alone thrive, under the suffocating conditions caused by current industrial farming.”

Spain’s environment minister has accused the regional authorities of turning a blind eye to farming irregularities in the Campo de Cartagena, a vast area of intensive agriculture surrounding the lagoon.

But agricultural groups insist they comply scrupulously with environmental legislation.

If intensive agricultural practices are not curbed, there will be damaging long-term consequences, the NGOs warned.

“Continuing to compromise the Mar Menor and the surrounding farmland in favour of short-term gains is already causing irreversible harm and will eventually leave the area barren, which will have environmental as well as economic and social repercussions,” said Gallego.

Experts at Ecologists in Action believe the lagoon could recover if the area of irrigated land was reduced, if stricter limits were imposed on the use of fertilisers and if natural solutions were found to help retain excess nutrients and prevent soil loss.

Activists, who held a mass demonstration in August, are planning a new rally on Thursday evening in the city of Murcia to demand urgent action to save the lagoon. 

Germany’s Benjamin List and US-based David MacMillan on Wednesday won the Nobel Chemistry Prize for developing a tool to build molecules which has helped make chemistry more environmentally friendly.

Their tool, which they developed independently of each other in 2000, can be used to control and accelerate chemical reactions, exerting a big impact on drugs research.

Prior to their work, scientists believed there were only two types of catalysts — metals and enzymes.

The new technique, which relies on small organic molecules and which is called “asymmetric organocatalysis” is widely used in pharmaceuticals, allowing drug makers to streamline the production of medicines for depression and respiratory infections, among others.

Organocatalysts allow several steps in a production process to be performed in an unbroken sequence, considerably reducing waste in chemical manufacturing, the Nobel committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

List and MacMillan, both 53, will share the 10-million-kronor ($1.1-million, one-million-euro) prize.

“I thought somebody was making a joke. I was sitting at breakfast with my wife,” List told reporters by telephone during a press conference after the prize was announced.

In past years, he said his wife has joked that he should keep an eye on his phone for a call from Sweden.

“But today we didn’t even make the joke,” List said.

“It’s hard to describe what you feel in that moment, but it was a very special moment that I will never forget.”

– ‘Extremes’ –

Asked about what the prize would mean for his future as a researcher, List promised he had “a few more plans.”

“I always like to go to the extremes. ‘Can we do things that were just impossible before?’ List told reporters. “I hope I live up to this to this recognition and continue discovering amazing things.”

MacMillan, born in Scotland, is a professor at Princeton University in the US, while List is a director at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. 

“Many research areas and industries are dependent on chemists’ ability to construct molecules that can form elastic and durable materials, store energy in batteries or inhibit the progression of disease,” the Academy said.

“This work requires catalysts, which are substances that control and accelerate chemical reactions, without becoming part of the final product,” it added.

List was the first to prove that the amino acid “proline,” which he called his favourite catalyst, could drive an aldol reaction, which is when carbon atoms from two different molecules are bonded together.

“Compared to both metals and enzymes, proline is a dream tool for chemists. It is a very simple, cheap and environmentally friendly molecule,” the Academy said.

– ‘Gold rush’ –

Since their discovery, developments in the field can “almost be likened to a gold rush,” with List and MacMillan designing “multitudes of cheap and stable organocatalysts, the science body noted.

For example, in 2011, researchers were able to make the production process for strychnine 7,000 times more efficient, reducing it from 29 chemical reactions to just 12, it said. 

Ahead of Wednesday’s announcement, analysts had said the chemistry field was wide open.

According to Clarivate, which maintains a list of potential Nobel Prize winners, more than 70 researchers had what it takes to be considered for the prize, given the thousands of citations they have received in scientific papers.

Last year, the Nobel went to France’s Emmanuelle Charpentier and America’s Jennifer Doudna, for developing the gene-editing technique known as CRISPR-Cas9 — DNA snipping “scissors”.

The Nobel season continues with the two most closely watched prizes, literature on Thursday and peace on Friday. The winner of the economics prize will be announced on Monday.

The medicine prize kicked off the 2021 Nobel season on Monday, going to David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian for breakthroughs that paved the way for the treatment of chronic pain.

The physics prize followed Tuesday, when half was awarded to US-Japanese scientist Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann for climate models, and the other half to Italy’s Giorgio Parisi for work on the theory of disordered materials and random processes.