AFP UK

The world’s 20 biggest meat and dairy firms are responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than produced by the economies of Germany or Britain, a report said Tuesday.

The ‘Meat Atlas’ is an annual digest of scientific and official data on meat production and consumption, compiled by research NGO Heinrich-Boll-Stiftung foundation and Friends of the Earth Europe. 

It calculates a hefty 932 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions from major milk and meat companies, with Brazilian multinational JBS responsible for over a quarter of that. 

Using the same metric, Germany’s total emissions were just over 900 million tonnes, while France and Britain each emit closer to half that amount.

A UN report attributes 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions to livestock farming, and Tuesday’s report finds demand for meat is on the rise. 

It estimates 75 billion animals are slaughtered every year to produce 325 million tonnes of meat — with the OECD predicting an increase of 40 million tonnes by 2029.

“This is, by far, too much to respect the boundaries of our planet,” study co-author Christine Chemnitz said in a news conference.

In addition to livestock emissions, the report highlights the growing environmental impact of related resources such as soybeans used for feed.

Chemnitz said some 1.2 million square kilometres — an area three times the size of Germany — are already dedicated to farming soy, over 90 percent of which is used to feed livestock. 

This growing demand is driving deforestation and threatening biodiversity as land is cleared to make room for crops, the report said.

It is also driving up demand for pesticides.  

Top soy exporters Brazil and the US are the biggest importers of pesticides deemed “highly hazardous” by the watchdog Pesticide Action Network, according to the repot.

The “Meat Atlas” estimates that if production continues under current conditions and increases at the predicted rate, it will be impossible to meet the UN’s sustainable development goals set for 2030.

The Berlin-based institute also polled young people in Germany and found 70 percent were willing to pay more for meat raised under strict environmental and labour standards.

But Chemnitz says government policy has yet to respond.

“No country on Earth has a strategy to ambitiously reduce meat production or consumption,” she said. 

In their search for pink river dolphins, researchers in the Peruvian Amazon scooped up river water sloshing with genetic material that they hoped could trace the elusive creatures. 

They found what they were looking for. And then some. 

The environmental DNA collected yielded information on 675 species, including dozens of land-based mammals like deer, jaguar, giant anteaters, monkeys and 25 species of bat.

“It’s kind of mind blowing,” said Kat Bruce, founder of the eDNA firm NatureMetrics, which carried out the study for the wildlife charity WWF.

The technology is increasingly used to track rare species. 

Bruce hopes eDNA will help revolutionise the way the world measures and monitors nature. 

It is now at the heart of a $15 million dollar project with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to collect and analyse 30,000 freshwater samples over three years from major river systems — including the Amazon, Ganges and Mekong Delta. 

With species in precipitous decline and growing calls for international targets on biodiversity protection, organisers say this “eBioAtlas” can help inform policy and focus scarce conservation resources.

“What the eBioAtlas will do in the middle of this mass extinction, is hopefully start to fill those gaps in in a way that is scalable,” said Mike Morris, who heads the project for NatureMetrics, at an event showcasing the project at the IUCN conference in Marseille this week.

The IUCN plans to feed the information into conservation tools like its Red List of Threatened Species.  

It offers a “simple and I would say precise way to tell us where species are,” said Paola Geremicca, who leads IUCN’s corporate engagement.  

– ‘Tickle a fish’ –

The method relies on that fact that living creatures constantly shed cells, leaving traces of genetic material swirling in the environment that wind up in river systems: skin, mucus, saliva. 

But most of all “it’s from a lot of poo,” Bruce told AFP, both from fish and animals in the rivers and those just passing by.

Scientists have been using eDNA for at least a decade, with early work focused on microbes. 

Bruce started using the technique during her PhD studies, blending assortments of insects into a “soup” and figuring out what creatures were inside using genetic sequencing.  

That led her to set up NatureMetrics, which focuses on finding DNA “fingerprints” in freshwater. 

Researchers collect a litre or two of water then pass it through a small filter, which traps the sample. 

To sequence the DNA they need to decide what to look for — mammals for example — because otherwise the result would be swamped with ubiquitous bacteria and microbes. 

After two days their machine spits out about 30 million DNA sequences — imagine a text file 30 million lines long and crammed with A’s, T’s, C’s and G’s, the molecular building blocks of life.  

While they are confident in the accuracy of the sampling itself, Bruce said the problems come with anomalies and gaps in the identification reference database. 

In the Amazon for example, only 20 percent of fish could be identified to species level because the genetic information did not match any sequences in the library. 

In these types of situations, they contact local zoos and museums looking for a reference specimen. 

Or they could find the species in the wild. 

“We’ve got these simple kits, where people can just tickle the fish with the swab and send that back to us to generate the reference sequence,” she said.

– ‘Game changer’ –

When results are transmitted back to local conservationists, Morris said people are often “astonished” at the array of hidden wildlife.

Other researchers have called this “dark diversity”.

In research published in the journal Science Advances in 2018, scientists took 20 coastal water samples in New Caledonia for eDNA sequencing and found more shark species than they had previously identified in two decades of visual and camera surveys. 

“Even if people in Noumea never see sharks when they go diving… they are always there,” said David Mouillot from the University of Montpellier and co-author of the research, at the IUCN congress. 

He works with another eDNA initiative, Vigilife, an international public-private alliance developing long-term biodiversity monitoring and sharing technological expertise with local conservationists. 

Morris acknowledged that eDNA sampling should be seen as one biodiversity tool among many.

A blindspot is plants, which are harder to identify at species level. 

The eBioAtlas developers, who plan to create an open source database, hope to spread their net beyond freshwater — with plans for marine and soil eDNA surveys.  

After that they might snatch samples from thin air.

Separate preliminary studies this year in Britain and Denmark sucked air through filters in zoo enclosures and not only identified resident animal DNA, but also local wildlife. 

“For things like caves, bat roosts and burrows, that’s potentially a game changer,” said Bruce.

Outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkel on Tuesday said Germany’s car industry could be “part of the solution” to the climate emergency, as she opened a major motor show for the last time.

Germany’s leader of the last 16 years said she was convinced the transition to a climate-neutral economy by 2045 would be “a success” and touted her government’s steps to support it by subsidising electric vehicles and the development of charging infrastructure.

The German car industry was previously seen as “reluctant” to embrace the switch to environmentally-friendly electric cars, Merkel said at the IAA motor show, before praising the progress that has been made.

The move to electric was accelerated by the “dieselgate” scandal in 2015, when German car giant Volkswagen admitted to fitting millions of vehicles with emissions-cheating devices.

Merkel, who has been a regular at the IAA over the years, earned the sobriquet the “car chancellor” for her efforts in the past to shield German carmakers from tougher EU pollution rules.

“The auto industry is not just part of the climate problem, but above everything else a central part of the solution,” she told the conference hall in Munich.

Merkel cautioned, however, that European coordination would be needed in future to ensure “security for jobs” in the face of competition from countries where climate rules are less stringent.

Her opening speech at the IAA was her last as chancellor, before she steps down after the German elections on September 26.

The biennial IAA is mired in controversy this year as Germany struggles to adapt its flagship industry to the electric and digital revolution.

Environmental activists blocked motorways around Munich on Tuesday, while others brandished slogans like “Stop driving climate change”. 

– ‘Depressing and incomprehensible’ – 

Merkel was among those to express their anger when the “dieselgate” scandal broke.

But in Brussels, her government had sought to slow the shift to e-mobility by watering down toughened emissions regulations that German carmakers would struggle to comply with, the Sueddeutsche newspaper said.

On the eve of Merkel’s visit, the boss of Volkswagen even blamed her government for slowing down the electric revolution by incentivising diesel fuel for years.

“A car company cannot do this transition (alone) because you need the right environment,” Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess told AFP. “If you keep diesel cheap… nobody will buy an electric car, it’s impossible.”

Ferdinand Dudenhoeffer, director of the Center for Automotive Research at the University of Duisburg-Essen, called the government’s diesel strategy “depressing and incomprehensible”.

“The state fuelled a diesel boom through tax breaks, and now diesel passenger cars are practically unsellable,” he told AFP.

Merkel’s government has always treaded gingerly because of the 800,000 jobs at stake in the industry.

But the Sueddeutsche daily lamented in August that “with her overly generous attitude towards the car industry, the chancellor has helped neither the companies nor the country in the medium term”.

Dudenhoeffer agreed. “Scrappage schemes, incentives to buy electric cars, subsidies for battery production, aid for recycling, short-time working allowances — this has been the strategy for 16 years. This alleviates short-term economic problems, but does not build a new structure,” he said.

– Existential crisis –

With the momentum for greener mobility growing, and tougher anti-pollution guidelines now in place, Germany’s carmakers are no longer able to put off the inevitable and this week’s IAA will see a slew of new electric models being unveiled.

The decline of the combustion engine is proving to be an existential crisis for the auto industry, which accounts for more than 12 percent of jobs in the industrial sector in Germany.

In late 2019, Audi said it was planning to slash 9,500 jobs in Germany by 2025, while Daimler announced it would cut 10,000. 

The threat of legal action against carmakers also hangs over the fair, after Greenpeace and Germany’s DUH environmental group threatened last week to file lawsuits against Volkswagen, BMW and Daimler if they do not speed up efforts to reduce carbon emissions.

The campaigners want the auto companies to stop producing diesel or petrol cars by 2030, arguing that their current pledges for electrification are vague and non-binding.

French wine production for 2021 is expected to plunge 29 percent after unseasonable cold snaps earlier this year wreaked havoc on grape vines, the agriculture ministry said on Tuesday.

Heavy summer rains also fostered mildew growth that took a toll on grapes, with output from the world’s largest wine exporter now forecast to be “historically low,” the ministry’s Agreste statistics agency said.

At 33.3 million hectolitres (880 million gallons), the harvest would be “below the levels of both 1991 and 2017, years that were also impacted by severe spring frosts,” Agreste said, adding that it could rival the record lows of 1977.

Nearly all French wine-producing regions, from Bordeaux in the southwest to Champagne in the northeast, were hit by freezing temperatures in early April that came just as buds were burgeoning early after a mild winter.

Desperate growers lit fires throughout vineyards in an attempt to raise nighttime temperatures and curtail the losses, while others sprayed vines with water, hoping to form ice “cocoons” on buds that would in fact protect them from freezing.

Agriculture Minister Julien Denormandie has said the frost attack for France was “probably the greatest agricultural catastrophe of the beginning of the 21st century”.

Growers of kiwis, apricots, apples and other fruit were also badly hit, along with farmers of other crops such as beet and rapeseed.

World Weather Attribution, an international organisation that analyses the links between extreme weather events and global warming, said in a study in June that a warmer climate had increased the probability of an extreme frost coinciding with a growing period by 60 percent.

France is the world’s second-largest wine producer, after Italy.

A global network of more than 1,500 climate NGOs called on Britain to postpone the upcoming COP26 summit, saying Tuesday that a lack of Covid-19 vaccines risked sidelining developing countries.

An increase in Covid cases, unequal global vaccine rollout, and stringent quarantine requirements for more than 60 “red list” nations or territories hoping to attend the 12-day UN talks mean that “a safe, inclusive and just global climate conference is impossible,” the Climate Action Network (CAN) said in a statement.

“Our concern is that those countries most deeply affected by the climate crisis and suffering from the lack of support by rich nations in providing vaccines will be left out,” said Tasneem Essop, CAN’s Executive Director.

“There has always been an inherent power imbalance within the UN climate talks and this is now compounded by the health crisis.”

Host government Britain countered that the climate crisis was too urgent for the meeting to be put off.

A recently released UN climate science report shows “why COP26 must go ahead this November to allow world leaders to come together and set out decisive commitments to tackle climate change”, COP President Alok Sharma told AFP, noting that the conference — originally slated for last November — has already been postponed once.

The northern hemisphere has been battered over the last three months by record-breaking extreme weather made worse by global warming, according to scientists who have developed tools to tease out the impact of climate change.

Deadly heatwaves in parts of North America and Europe; unprecedented flooding across western Europe, China and the United States; uncontrolled wildfires around the Mediterranean basin and in California — all were made more intense or likely by global warming.

Britain has said it would cover accommodation costs for delegates subject to the quarantines, and has offered to provide fast-track vaccines. 

“We are working tirelessly with all our partners, including the Scottish Government and the UN, to ensure an inclusive, accessible and safe summit in Glasgow,” Sharma said.

But delegates who have applied for them have yet to get their jabs, according to the NGO group.

– ‘Not fit for purpose’ –

The British government said the vaccinations would start “this week,” and that even with a four-week delay between doses there was still enough time to get the job done before COP26 kicks off on October 31. 

Currently, more than 55 percent of Europeans are fully vaccinated, compared to about three percent in Africa.  

Civil society campaigners, who play a crucial watchdog role as registered observers, will also likely face restricted access, CAN warned. 

Developing countries will be deeply affected by decisions taken at the COP on issues ranging from climate finance, international carbon markets, and how to help poor nations cope with severe climate damages already incurred.

“A climate summit without the voices of those most affected by climate change is not fit for purpose,” said Mohamed Adow, a longtime observer of the talks and director of the Nairobi-based think tank Power Shift Africa.

“If COP26 goes ahead as currently planned, I fear it is only the rich countries and NGOs from those countries that would be able to attend,” he added. 

“This flies in the face of the principles of the UN process and opens the door for a rich nations stitch-up of the talks.”

CAN said the call to postpone COP26 should not be construed as a boycott of the climate talks.

“We will continue our work to push political leaders to deliver ambitious national climate targets, fulfil their responsibilities on climate finance, and phase out fossil fuels,” it said.

Toyota said Tuesday it will invest $13.6 billion into batteries for electric and hybrid cars by 2030, as the world’s biggest automaker pushes to make its production carbon-neutral.

The Japanese car giant said in a presentation it plans to pour 1.5 trillion yen into the development and supply of batteries for electric vehicles and that it aims to cut battery costs by half per car by 2030.

Toyota said in June it aimed to make its production carbon-neutral by 2035, replacing the previous target date of 2050.

One of the ways the company hopes to realise its goal is by introducing new technologies for painting vehicles — one of auto production’s most power-gobbling procedures — such as replacing paint with adhesive film.

Toyota is a pioneer of hybrid vehicles and autos using hydrogen fuel, and is also stepping up its development of battery-powered electric cars.

Japan’s Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga in October set a 2050 deadline for the world’s third-largest economy to become carbon neutral, significantly firming up the country’s climate-change commitments.

The nation has struggled to cut carbon emissions after shutting down reactors following the 2011 meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

In November, engineering giant Toshiba said it would stop constructing new coal-fired power plants and shift to renewable energy in a bid to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Century-old footage of the last known Tasmanian tiger in captivity has been brought to life by colourisation, offering a tantalising glimpse of the now-extinct creature.

The wolf-like thylacine, known as the Tasmanian tiger because of its striped coat, roamed in Australia and on the island of New Guinea before dying out about 85 years ago.

Fewer than a dozen snippets of footage — totalling about three minutes of silent, black-and-white film — are known to have survived of the elusive beast.

The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia said the longest of these rare clips, an 80-second film of the last known Tasmanian tiger, called Benjamin, has now been colourised.

The government agency handed the footage to Paris-based Samuel Francois-Steininger, of Composite Films, who completed the painstaking colourisation process over 200 hours.

The footage was “stunning” for its age but “very challenging to colourise because, apart from the animal, there were few elements in the frame”, Francois-Steininger said in a post on the archive’s website.

“And because of the resolution and quality of the picture, there were a lot of details -– the fur was dense and a lot of hair had to be detailed and animated,” he added.

The clip shows the carnivorous marsupial pacing around a small enclosure, lying down, sniffing and scratching — its sandy brown coat punctuated by thick dark stripes.

It was released Tuesday to mark National Threatened Species Day in Australia, which is held each year on September 7 to commemorate Benjamin’s death on the same date in 1936.

The footage was shot by David Fleay in December 1933 at the city of Hobart’s now-defunct Beaumaris Zoo, where the naturalist was reportedly bitten on the buttocks while filming.

NASA confirmed Monday that its Perseverance Mars rover succeeded in collecting its first rock sample for scientists to pore over when a future mission eventually brings it back to Earth.

“I’ve got it!” the space agency tweeted, alongside a photograph of a rock core slightly thicker than a pencil inside a sample tube. 

The sample was collected on September 1, but NASA was initially unsure whether the rover had successfully held onto its precious cargo, because initial images taken in poor light were unclear.

After taking a new photo so mission control could verify its contents, Perseverance transferred the tube to the rover’s interior for further measurements and imaging, then hermetically sealed the container.

“This is a momentous achievement and I can’t wait to see the incredible discoveries produced by Perseverance and our team,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement.

Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for science, likened the achievement to the first samples of rock taken from the Moon, which are still invaluable to researchers today.

Perseverance’s sampling and caching system is the most complex mechanism ever sent to space, with over 3,000 parts. 

Its first target was a briefcase-sized rock nicknamed “Rochette” from a ridgeline that is particularly interesting from a geological perspective as it contains ancient layers of exposed bedrock.

Perseverance uses a drill and a hollow coring bit at the end of its 7-foot-long (2-meter-long) robotic arm to extract samples.

After coring the rock, the rover vibrated the drill bit and tube for one second, five separate times. 

This procedure is called “percuss to ingest” and is meant to clear the lip of the tube of residual material, and cause the sample to slide down the tube.

Perseverance landed on an ancient lake bed called the Jezero Crater in February, on a mission to search for signs of ancient microbial life using a suite of sophisticated instruments mounted on its turret.

It is also trying to better characterize the Red Planet’s geology and past climate.

The first part of the rover’s science mission, which will last hundreds of sols or Martian days, will be complete when it returns to its landing site. 

By then, it will have traveled somewhere between 1.6 and 3.1 miles (2.5 and five kilometers) and may have filled up to eight of its 43 sample tubes.

It will then travel to Jezero Crater’s delta region, which might be rich in clay minerals. On Earth, such minerals can preserve fossilized signs of ancient microscopic life.

Eventually NASA wants to send back the samples taken by the rover in a joint mission with the European Space Agency, sometime in the 2030s.

Its first attempt at taking a sample in August failed after the rock was too crumbly to withstand the robot’s drill.

NASA confirmed Monday that its Perseverance Mars rover succeeded in collecting its first rock sample for scientists to pore over when a future mission eventually brings it back to Earth.

“I’ve got it!” the space agency tweeted, alongside a photograph of a rock core slightly thicker than a pencil inside a sample tube. 

The sample was collected on September 1, but NASA was initially unsure whether the rover had successfully held onto its precious cargo, because initial images taken in poor light were unclear.

After taking a new photo so mission control could verify its contents, Perseverance transferred the tube to the rover’s interior for further measurements and imaging, then hermetically sealed the container.

“This is a momentous achievement and I can’t wait to see the incredible discoveries produced by Perseverance and our team,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement.

Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for science, likened the achievement to the first samples of rock taken from the Moon, which are still invaluable to researchers today.

Perseverance’s sampling and caching system is the most complex mechanism ever sent to space, with over 3,000 parts. 

Its first target was a briefcase-sized rock nicknamed “Rochette” from a ridgeline that is particularly interesting from a geological perspective as it contains ancient layers of exposed bedrock.

Perseverance uses a drill and a hollow coring bit at the end of its 7-foot-long (2-meter-long) robotic arm to extract samples.

After coring the rock, the rover vibrated the drill bit and tube for one second, five separate times. 

This procedure is called “percuss to ingest” and is meant to clear the lip of the tube of residual material, and cause the sample to slide down the tube.

Perseverance landed on an ancient lake bed called the Jezero Crater in February, on a mission to search for signs of ancient microbial life using a suite of sophisticated instruments mounted on its turret.

It is also trying to better characterize the Red Planet’s geology and past climate.

The first part of the rover’s science mission, which will last hundreds of sols or Martian days, will be complete when it returns to its landing site. 

By then, it will have traveled somewhere between 1.6 and 3.1 miles (2.5 and five kilometers) and may have filled up to eight of its 43 sample tubes.

It will then travel to Jezero Crater’s delta region, which might be rich in clay minerals. On Earth, such minerals can preserve fossilized signs of ancient microscopic life.

Eventually NASA wants to send back the samples taken by the rover in a joint mission with the European Space Agency, sometime in the 2030s.

Its first attempt at taking a sample in August failed after the rock was too crumbly to withstand the robot’s drill.

Four alleged members of an Irish crime gang and five other defendants went on trial in France Monday accused of trafficking rhino horn and ivory to markets in east Asia.

French prosecutors started a probe in 2015 after police discovered several elephant tusks and 32,800 euros ($38,900) in cash in a BMW during a random motorway traffic inspection.

Prosecutors say the occupants of the car, who claimed they were antique dealers, were members of the Rathkeale Rovers, an Irish crime gang with roots in the Traveller community.

The nine defendants on trial in the town of Rennes, which include alleged traders of Chinese and Vietnamese origin, face up to 10 years in jail and heavy fines, although two of those charged are on the run.

“We’re hoping for heavy sentences including fines to dissuade people from taking part in smuggling activities which encourage the cruelty of poaching,” Charlotte Nithart, head of French anti-poaching charity Robin des Bois, told AFP. 

Nichart, who was in court as an observer, said that the case files and the first day of hearings had underlined how Europe, and European auction houses, played a role in supplying east Asia with horns and tusks.

“What you can see in the intercepted telephone records is that the supply comes from lots of different towns in France and around Europe. The networks are well structured,” she added.

Many of the objects are old ornaments and antiques, but the seizures by police of several tusks that are less than 20 years old suggest that recently poached animal parts are also being traded.

– Rhino specialists –

As part of their investigation, French police also found that tusks and rhino horns were being turned into powder, flakes, and other objects on French soil before being exported to Vietnam and China.

Vietnamese defendant David Ta, a 51-year-old owner of an export company in the Paris region, denied illegally trafficking protected animals, despite the discovery of 14 tusks on a pallet at his home.

“I’m a collector. It’s a passion,” he told the court.

Four suspected members of the Rathkeale Rovers — Tom Greene, Richard O’Riley, Edward Gammel, and Daniel MacCarthy — are accused of supplying horns and tusks to exporters in France with links to China and Vietnam.

An exceptionally large horn weighing nearly 15 kilos seized from the gang during the investigation would have earned around $15 million once processed at Asian market prices at the time, according to the Robin des Bois group.

The organised crime group from the Limerick region of western Ireland “have many activities, but what is of interest to us is their speciality in trading rhino horns,” said Nithart.

They have been linked in particular to thefts from museums and private collections.

There were suspicions they had been involved in the shocking 2017 killing of a white rhino in Thoiry zoo outside Paris. The animal’s horn was hacked off in a grisly overnight raid.

Along with antiques trading, the group is also known to be behind a pan-European scam in selling counterfeit tarmac for resurfacing private driveways.

The Rathkeale Rovers were the target of a joint investigation by European police in 2010 that led to 31 people being arrested, including for the theft of rhino horns, according to the Europol police agency’s website.

Two members were arrested in the United States in 2010 after paying undercover investigators in Colorado about $17,000 for four black rhino horns.