AFP UK

The tall and attractive stranger has showy plumes and can make itself at home at the coast, in the city or even in your garden. 

But conservationists warn that Cortaderia selloana — or pampas grass — is a damaging invasive species menacing parts of southern Europe.  

Also known as “feather duster”, pampas grass is sold as an ornamental plant despite appearing in a rogue’s gallery of a hundred of the worst invasive species in Europe.  

At the world congress of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), winding down this week in Marseille, a motion called for “urgent action” to restrict and ultimately eradicate the plant outside its native South American habitat.

Conservation groups and ministries, many from Spain, said they were “alarmed because today its seeds can be bought easily and cheaply anywhere in the world, without legal constraints, through different internet platforms”. 

The case highlights the difficulties of halting the spread of invasive plants in the face of low awareness and a massive international online trade offering exotic species at the click of a button.   

“You see more clearly the impact of animals — they are a predator destroying a prey. But plants can have a very severe effect,” Piero Genovesi, who heads up the IUCN’s Invasive Species Specialist Group. 

“It’s less visible in the beginning, but then it becomes huge.” 

Genovesi told AFP that in Europe most invasive plants are introduced by being sold for gardens. 

“Pampas grass is beautiful, but it spreads very rapidly, so once it’s out, it’s very difficult to contain it,” he said.

The plant is “very aggressive”, according to the EU-backed LIFE Stop Cortaderia project, warning that it has expanded across urban and industrial areas and squeezed out native species in Atlantic coastal areas of France, Spain and Portugal. 

It featured on a European inventory of a hundred of the worst invasive species — an awareness-raising effort to highlight problem species.

Now the IUCN is going a step further with a new global classification system called the Environmental Impacts Classification of Alien Taxa. 

It has scientific criteria to measure the relative threats posed by different harmful species — animals and plants — to help governments prioritise their responses. 

The first few have already been added, but the organisation is aiming for hundreds, as a complement to its Red List of Threatened Species.

– Imperialism and escape –

Experts say invasive species are a key driver of global extinctions — along with habitat loss, overexploitation and climate change.

Consider the case of the water hyacinth. 

Taken from its home in the Amazon by European explorers, the water hyacinth dazzled imperial courts, including France’s Napoleon and his plant-loving wife Josephine, with its beautiful floating flowers. 

They took it to Egypt, where it escaped and began a continent-wide invasion. 

“In Africa, it creates huge green carpets, blocking navigation, fishing, access to water, destroying the habitat for many fish and also increasing evaporation so it decreases the water stock,” said Genovesi.

“It also creates an environment for mosquitoes and increases the risk of malaria.”

Keeping unwanted species out in the first place, he said, is far easier and cheaper than trying to get rid of them once they have put down roots. 

– Bad seeds –

One key concern — for pampas grass and many other species — is that climate change will further increase the range and competitive advantage of invasive species. 

Another challenge is the international trade in seeds. 

This issue was highlighted last year in a bizarre incident where US authorities raised the alarm after thousands of Americans reported receiving packets of seeds they had not ordered, mostly from China.

Many of the packages were likely part of a “brushing scam”, where a seller sends unwanted items and posts fake reviews, but it prompted Amazon to announce last September that it would ban imported seeds in the United States.   

Some invaders, however, are more welcome than others. 

“You think of the beautiful landscapes of Tuscany — cyprus, poppy flowers and all the cereals. They’re all introduced, none of them are native, but we love them,” said Genovesi, adding that authorities needed to focus their energies on fast-spreading and damaging varieties.   

Even at the IUCN conference he had spotted an insect greenhouse, which contained an invasive plant as well as exotic butterflies.  

“We look at that and say ‘let’s hope they don’t escape’,” he said.

In the movie Jurassic Park, reconstructing and tweaking genetic material makes it possible to bring dinosaurs back to life.

Today, a technology that manipulates animal genomes, called gene drive, has become a reality. The goal, however, is not to revive long-gone species, but to eliminate invasive ones. 

Steven Spielberg’s film was set on an imaginary island off the coast of Costa Rica, and it is also on an island that the first open-air experiments in programmed extinction could take place, according to experts gathered at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Congress in Marseille.

It could happen within a decade, they told AFP.

That’s because fragile island ecosystems are in crisis. Dozens of vertebrate species have vanished in the last century, and dozens more are on a glide path to extinction.

The culprits are non-native rats, snakes and mosquitoes — all introduced by humans, for the most part by accident — that eat bird eggs, infect birds with disease, or outcompete indigenous amphibians and mammals. 

For more than 20 years, Island Conservation has been working to eradicate rodents and other invasive alien species, which are a major threat to biodiversity globally, the organisation’s Royden Saah told AFP. 

The conservation NGO has been successful on two Galapagos islands — Seymour North and Mosquera — using traps and poison-delivering drones. 

But species eradication using these tools is costly and has no guarantee of success. Rat poison is effective, but poses risks to other species. 

– ‘Obvious ecological risks’ –

“Should we create a genetically modified rat so that its offspring is only male (or female)?”, Island Conservation asks on its website. 

So far, this Franken-rat does not exist. 

“But if we don’t do the research, we will not know what the potential of this technology is,” said Royden Saah, who coordinates a team of scientists for the NGO. 

At its last Congress in 2016, the IUCN’s 1,400 members created a working group to evaluate the issue from every angle — feasibility, costs and benefits, possible side effects, ethics. 

On Friday, following intense debate, the congress endorsed a motion for “synthetic biology” — an umbrella term for genetic engineering that including gene drive — that tilts towards those in favour of continuing with research and experimentation.  

“I’m scared about the potential applications of synthetic biology,” the head of the IUCN working group, Kent Redford, told AFP in Marseille before the vote. 

“There are obvious ecological risks and concerns regarding genetic modification of wild species”, warned Ricarda Steinbrecher, a geneticist working with Pro-Natura. 

That NGO and others  such as Friends of the Earth, ETC Group and the Heinrich Boll Foundation have sounded alarms on the dangers of synthetic biology and gene drive. 

Scientists themselves cannot agree on the precise boundaries of synbio. Does a modified rat still belong to the same species? At what point does it become a new one?

– Avian malaria –

For some species, science has explored other options. Take the rhinoceros, careening towards extinction because of a demand in Asia for it’s horn, thought to have medicinal properties. 

Scientists can now recreate a molecular facsimile of rhino horn in the lab.

“But people want the real product,” said Steinbrecher. 

For some island ecosystems, the situation is no less dire than for the rhino, and that urgency is a problem for the technologies under review.

“While there is the potential, [gene drive] is not going to be here in time to save the birds,” said Samuel Gon, a scientific advisor to the NGO Nature Conservancy. 

Of more than 50 known endemic bird species in Hawaii, only 15 remain, and five of those are “critically endangered” on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species — the last stop before “extinct in the wild”. 

The birds were mostly wiped out by avian malaria, brought by mosquitoes that arrived in the 19th century by boat. 

Hawaii is poised to use another technology that sterilises mosquitoes by inoculating them with a bacterium, Wolbachia. 

Meanwhile, the Jurassic Park scenario is still on the cards.

Researchers in the United States and Russia announced earlier this year that they have successfully sequenced the genome of a million-year-old mammoth.

But the next step remains controversial — should it be brought back to life? 

The United Nations chief warned Friday that the world is “moving in the wrong direction” and exhorted nations to take urgent action to fight the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change. 

“Covid-19 is a wake-up call, and we are oversleeping,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said at a press conference.

Speaking ahead the UN General Assembly that kicks off in New York on Sep. 21, Guterres lamented that vaccine-manufacturing nations have been unable to ramp up production toward the goal of vaccinating some 70 percent of the world population by the first half of 2022. 

“The pandemic has demonstrated our collective failure to come together and make joint decisions for the common good, even in the face of an immediate, life-threatening global emergency,” Guterres said. 

Guterres dismissed calls to delay a major UN climate summit, known as COP26, due to take place in Scotland in November. Climate activists have called for postponing the event due to vaccine inequality, the raging Covid pandemic and logistical difficulties in organizing the event.

“To delay the COP is not a good thing,” Guterres said. “Delays have been so many and the issue is so urgent.”

Guterres urged the United States and China, the world’s two biggest polluters, to do more to combat climate change.

“We need a stronger engagement of the US, namely in financing for development, for climate-related development issues, mitigation, adaptation, and we need an additional effort from China in relation to emissions,” Guterres said.

NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has now collected two rock samples, with signs that they were in contact with water for a long period of time boosting the case for ancient life on the Red Planet.

“It looks like our first rocks reveal a potentially habitable sustained environment,” said Ken Farley, project scientist for the mission, in a statement Friday. “It’s a big deal that the water was there for a long time.”

The six-wheeled robot collected its first sample, dubbed “Montdenier” on September 6, and its second, “Montagnac” from the same rock on September 8.

Both samples, slightly wider than a pencil in diameter and about six centimeters long, are now stored in sealed tubes in the rover’s interior.

A first attempt at collecting a sample in early August failed after the rock proved too crumbly to withstand Perseverance’s drill.

The rover has been operating in a region known as the Jezero Crater, just north of the equator and home to a lake 3.5 billion years ago, when conditions on Mars were much warmer and wetter than today.

The rock that provided the first samples was found to be basaltic in composition and likely the product of lava flows.

Volcanic rocks contain crystalline minerals that are helpful in radiometric dating. 

This in turn could help scientists build up a picture of the area’s geological history, such as when the crater formed, when the lake appeared and disappeared, and how climate changed over time.

“An interesting thing about these rocks as well is that they show signs for sustained interaction with groundwater,” NASA geologist Katie Stack Morgan told a press conference.  

The scientists already knew the crater was home to a lake, but couldn’t rule out the possibility that it had been a “flash in the pan” with floodwaters filling up the crater for as little as 50 years.

Now they are more certain groundwater was present for much longer.

“If these rocks experienced water for long periods of time, there may be habitable niches within these rocks that could have supported ancient microbial life,” added Stack Morgan.

The salt minerals in the rock cores may have trapped tiny bubbles of ancient Martian water. 

“Salts are great minerals for preserving signs of ancient life here on Earth, and we expect the same may be true for rocks on Mars,” added Stack Morgan.

NASA is hoping to return the samples to Earth for in depth lab analysis in a joint mission with the European Space Agency sometime in the 2030s.

Chilean scientists have announced the discovery of the first-ever southern hemisphere remains of a type of Jurassic-era “winged lizard” known as a pterosaur.

Fossils of the dinosaur which lived some 160 million years ago in what is today the Atacama desert, were unearthed in 2009.

They have now been confirmed to be of a rhamphorhynchine pterosaur — the first such creature to be found in Gondwana, the prehistoric supercontinent that later formed the southern hemisphere landmasses.

Researcher Jhonatan Alarcon of the University of Chile said the creatures had a wingspan of up to two meters, a long tail, and pointed snout.

“We show that the distribution of animals in this group was wider than known to date,” he added.

The discovery was also “the oldest known pterosaur found in Chile,” the scientists reported in the scientific journal Acta Paleontologica Polonic.  

The world’s most influential conservation congress passed resolutions Friday calling for 80 percent of the Amazon and 30 percent of Earth’s surface — land and sea — to be designated “protected areas” to halt and reverse the loss of wildlife.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which is meeting in Marseille, does not set global policy, but its recommendations have in the past served as the backbone for UN treaties and conventions. 

They will help set the agenda for upcoming UN summits on food systems, biodiversity and climate change. 

– Saving the Amazon –

An emergency motion calling for four-fifths of the Amazon basin to be declared a protected area by 2025 — submitted by COICA, an umbrella group representing more than two million indigenous peoples across nine South American nations — passed with overwhelming support.

“Indigenous Peoples have come to defend our home and, in doing so, defend the planet. This motion is a first step,” said Jose Gregorio Diaz Mirabal, general coordinator of COICA and a leader of the Curripaco people in Venezuela.

Over the last two decades, the Amazon has lost roughly 10,000 square kilometres every year to deforestation, much of it through fires set deliberately to clear land for commercial agriculture or cattle grazing.

This destruction combined with climate change, scientists have warned, could push the world’s largest tropical forest irretrievably past a “tipping point” into a savannah-like landscape.

– ‘30% by 2030’ –

Another hotly debated measure that was accepted in a vote of IUCN members — government agencies, NGOs and indigenous people’s organisations — says that 30 of the planet’s land and ocean area should have protected status within a decade. 

The zones selected must include “biodiversity hotspots” teaming with animal and plant life, and be backed up by rigorous monitoring and enforcement, the resolution says. 

Many scientists and conservationists advocated for an even more ambitious “half-Earth” target.

“Passage of this motion sends a clear signal to world leaders that the ’30 by 30′ target, and respect for indigenous and local community rights, must be agreed to at COP15,” said Campaign for Nature director Brian O’Donnell, referring to a UN biodiversity summit tasked with delivering a treaty next May to protect nature.

The pace at which animal and plant species are going extinct is 100 to 1,000 times the normal “background” rate, a widely accepted threshold for the kind of mass-extinction event that has only occurred five times in the last half-billion years.  

– Deep-sea mining –

The IUCN’s 1,400 members overwhelmingly approved a resolution recommending a moratorium on deep sea mining and reform of the International Seabed Authority (ISA), a intergovernmental regulatory body.

Industry argued that the unattached rocks on the ocean floor some five kilometres below the waves are a greener source of minerals — manganese, cobalt, nickel — needed to build electric vehicle batteries. But scientists counter that seabed ecosystems at that depth are fragile, and could take decades or longer to heal once disrupted. 

The measure passed with more than 80 percent of votes from government agencies, and 90 percent support from NGOs and civil society groups.

“The resounding Yes in support for a global freeze on deep seabed mining is a clear signal that there is no social licence to open the deep seafloor to mining,” said Jessica Battle, lead of the WWF’s Deep Sea Mining Initiative.

– Climate change commission? –

The major drivers of species decline and extinction are habitat loss, hunting for food, poaching for animal parts, invasive species and environmental pollution.

But climate change is starting to loom large as a threat to wildlife, leading members to vote in a motion for the creation of a climate change commission within the IUCN. 

The aim is to “bring together the world’s experts on climate change to help shape the agenda around species,” said Craig Hilton-Taylor, head of the IUCN’s Red List Unit.

“The climate and biodiversity emergencies are not distinct, but two aspects of one crisis,” a draft version of the congress’s final manifesto said.

– Programmed extinction –

On Friday, following intense and prolonged debate, the congress endorsed a motion on “synthetic biology” — an umbrella term for genetic engineering — that tilts towards those in favour of more research and experimentation.

One technology in particular that causes local extinction of a species, called gene drive, has divided conservationists.

Proponents say it is the best tool available to fight invasive species of rodents, snakes and mosquitos that have already wiped out dozens of species of birds and other vertebrates on island habitats. Opponents fear genetically modified animals could find their way to other continents, or share mutated genes with other species. 

“There are obvious ecological risks and concerns regarding genetic modification of wild species”, said Ricarda Steinbrecher, a geneticist working with the NGO Pro-Natura. 

Tropical storm Olaf swept across Mexico’s Baja California peninsula on Friday, bringing strong winds and heavy rain to the major beach resorts of Los Cabos before losing its hurricane force.

Olaf made landfall near the city of San Jose del Cabo late Thursday as a Category Two hurricane packing maximum winds of 100 miles (160 kilometers) per hour, the US National Hurricane Center (NHC) said.

It weakened over land and lost its hurricane status as winds dropped to 70 mph, it reported.

A public hospital in Los Cabos, one of Mexico’s top tourist destinations, was evacuated due to the risk of flooding, authorities said.

But there were no immediate reports of injuries or major damage, and a hurricane warning was downgraded to a tropical storm warning for coastline from Todos Santos to Cabo San Lazaro.

A dangerous storm surge was expected to be accompanied by large and damaging waves near the coast, the NHC said, warning that heavy rainfall may trigger “significant and life-threatening flash flooding and mudslides.”

Authorities set up storm shelters and school children in the state of Baja California Sur were told to stay home on Friday.

Ports were closed for smaller boats and flights were cancelled at the Los Cabos and La Paz airports.

Olaf also brought heavy rainfall on the northwestern mainland that could cause landslides, overflowing rivers and flooding, Mexico’s meteorological service said.

The storm was forecast to weaken further and head west back out over the Pacific by Friday night.

Mexico is regularly lashed by tropical storms.

Last month a Category 3 hurricane named Grace left 11 people dead after hitting eastern Mexico.

Storm Olaf came as Mexico recovers from a 7.1-magnitude earthquake and major flooding elsewhere in the disaster-prone country.

Fourteen patients at a hospital in the town of Tula in the central state of Hidalgo died this week after flooding disrupted the power supply and life-sustaining oxygen treatment.

Tens of thousands of residents were affected after a river in the town burst its banks, forcing people to leave their homes.

“From one moment to the next, everything got out of control,” said Jenny Casillas, a housewife in her 40s.

Then came the earthquake that left at least one person dead on Tuesday in the southern state of Guerrero, damaged buildings and was felt hundreds of kilometers away including in Tula.

“It will be difficult for us to climb out of this situation,” said Marisela Maya, 31, who works at a clinic in the town.

South African scientists are studying ways to inject radioactive material into rhino horns to make them easier to detect at border posts, a move to discourage poaching, a researcher said on Friday.

Poachers killed at least 249 rhinos in South Africa during the first six months of the year — 83 more than in the first half of 2020.

The animals are slaughtered for their horns, which are smuggled into Asia where they are highly prized for traditional and medicinal purposes.

Injecting rhino horns with a small amount of radioactive material might deter poachers by making smuggling easier to detect, said James Larkin, a nuclear researcher at the University of the Witwatersrand.

More than 11,000 radiation detectors are installed at ports and airports around the world, he told a webinar hosted by the World Nuclear Association.

Border agents often have handheld radiation detectors that could also detect the contraband, he added.

“We can radically increase the army of people who are capable of intercepting these horns… to push back against the smugglers,” Larkin explained.

Two rhinos have already been injected with a non-radioactive isotope to ensure the material will not travel into their bodies or cause health problems for the animals or humans.

Computer modelling will then help determine what dose is appropriate for rhinos. A model rhino head will be built with a 3D printer to test the doses before the trial moves to real rhinos.

The programme, called The Rhisotope Project, has backing from Russia’s state-owned nuclear company Rosatom, as well as researchers in the United States and Australia.

To save one of the last wetlands on the French Riviera from rising sea levels, conservationists have taken the unusual step of removing its protective seawalls.

Instead, they have let nature take its course.

The Vieux-Salins d’Hyeres salt marshes sit just below sea level with a stretch of vital but shifting sand beach that separates them from the open sea.

“The coastline was receding with each winter storm,” said wetlands expert Guirec Queffeulou, who helps manage the site located in the heart of the Cote d’Azur, the tourist-clogged French Mediterranean coast.

Conservationists acquired the site through legal wrangling in the late 1990s after the former owner, a salt company that built the protective dykes, wanted to sell it do developers.

But the dykes didn’t really work — even with two kilometres (just over one mile) of seawalls, the sea still crept inland more than 30 metres (around 100 feet).

The beach along its outer edge disappeared, and it seemed inevitable that the rest of the wetland would one day be submerged.

Then after years of studies, work began in 2019 to extract thousands of tons of fake boulders.

– Biodiversity benefits –

“We had to do it gently to avoid damaging the natural barrier of Neptune grass a few metres from the coast,” says Richard Barety of the coastal conservation organisation that has owned the site for the last 20 years.

Astonishingly, once the dykes were gone it only took a few months for a new landscape to emerge, including a wide beach with a small dune. 

Small Mediterranean dunes and leaves of dead Neptune grass — an underwater plant vital to the ecosystem — soon formed banks that serve as natural barriers against erosion.

With its vast area separating the land from the sea, the salt marsh plays a crucial role in regulating the local climate and provides a habitat for a rich variety of animal species.

“The interaction between the wetlands and the beach mean that biodiversity here has increased tenfold,” says Barety.

Norbert Chardon, who heads up the regional chapter of the Bird Protection League, says more than 300 bird species have been documented in the area, drawn by fish and insects prey that thrive in the salty water.

– Nature-based solutions –

At the world’s biggest biodiversity summit this week, so-called “nature-based solutions” are at the forefront of ideas for adapting to unprecedented environmental change.

Radhika Murti, who heads up global ecosystem management for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), says the scale of the climate crisis means we can’t rely on technological solutions alone.

“Engineering will never be enough because the disasters are going to get bigger and bigger,” she says.

Instead, we need to learn from the ways that nature has of changing and self-regulating.

“Look at solutions that already exist in nature,” she adds, “so we can work with it to meet our need rather than against it.”

The concept has been around for over a decade and last year the IUCN adopted eight criteria that define solutions as “nature-based” — though so far no project has received the label.

Its proponents emphasise that such solutions are often less expensive and more flexible than using infrastructure or technology.

In Hyeres, residents hope the newly-formed beach will keep the Vieux-Salins from being submerged over the long term.

The old Aleppo pines have died and in their place Tamarisk trees, more adapted to salt water, are taking their places, suggesting that the changes are taking root.

The sea could also eventually seep into the basins, altering the site’s unique water mixture — a possibility long feared but today seen as potentially positive for biodiversity.

Chardon says that whatever happens to the Vieux-Salins could serve as a teaching tool to illustrate the effects of climate change “gently, without frightening people”. 

Hurricane Olaf weakened to a Category One storm on Friday as it swept through Mexico’s Baja California peninsula and as the disaster-prone country recovered from a 7.1-magnitude earthquake and major flooding.

But Olaf still threatened more damage, causing “hurricane-force winds and heavy rainfall” over the Baja California Sur, the US National Hurricane Center (NHC) said in its latest report.

Olaf made landfall near the city of San Jose del Cabo late Thursday as a Category Two storm near the beach resorts of Los Cabos before it dropped to the lowest on the five-level Saffir-Simpson scale.

A hurricane warning was in effect for a stretch of Baja California coastline from Los Barriles to Cabo San Lazaro.

“Preparations to protect life and property should be rushed to completion,” the NHC said earlier as the storm approached.

A dangerous storm surge was expected to be accompanied by large and damaging waves near the coast, the NHC said, warning that heavy rainfall may trigger “significant and life-threatening flash flooding and mudslides.”

Authorities set up storm shelters and school children in the state of Baja California Sur were told to stay home on Friday.

Ports were closed for smaller boats and flights were cancelled at the Los Cabos and La Paz airports.

The storm was forecast to churn over the southern coast of Baja California before heading west out over sea again late Friday or early Saturday.

“Gradual weakening is expected through Friday as Olaf interacts with land. Further weakening is likely over the weekend after Olaf moves away from Baja California Sur,” the NHC said.

The hurricane comes as when Mexico recovers from a 7.1-magnitude earthquake and major flooding in the disaster-prone country.

Fourteen patients at a hospital in the town of Tula in the central state of Hidalgo died this week after flooding disrupted the power supply and life-sustaining oxygen treatment.

Tens of thousands of residents were affected after a river in the town burst its banks, forcing people to leave their homes.

Jenny Casillas, a housewife in her 40s, told AFP on Thursday that the water reached the roof of her house in less than 10 minutes 

“From one moment to the next, everything got out of control,” she said.

Then came the earthquake that left at least one person dead on Tuesday in the southern state of Guerrero, damaged buildings and was felt hundreds of kilometers away.

“The rain didn’t let up and then to top it all came the earthquake,” said Marisela Maya, 31, who works at a clinic in Tula.

“It will be difficult for us to climb out of this situation,” she said.