AFP UK

The world’s top conservation forum will vote this week on whether to recommend a moratorium on deep sea mining, with scientists warning that ecosystems degraded while dredging the ocean floor 5,000 metres below the waves could take decades or longer to heal. 

The proposed ban is among a score of measures deemed too controversial to be decided remotely ahead of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Congress, meeting through Saturday in Marseille.  

A “yes” vote by IUCN members — some 1,400 national agencies, NGOs and indigenous groups — is a commitment “to support and implement a moratorium on deep seabed mining”. 

The measure also recommends greater oversight of the International Seabed Authority (ISA), an intergovernmental body that regulates the extraction of precious minerals from seabeds beyond waters falling within national exclusive economic zones.

Parts of the ocean floor are rich in minerals, including so-called polymetallic nodules composed mostly of copper, manganese, cobalt and nickel — metals increasingly in demand for electric vehicle batteries.

But there’s a catch: these fist-sized rocks are generally found on seabeds four to six kilometres below the surface.

Commercial mining at those depths does not currently exist, but there are several companies investing in the technology that would make it possible.

The ISA — mandated by the UN to regulate mineral-extraction from the high seas “for the benefit of humanity as a whole” — has approved 30 licenses for exploration.

“The threat is very imminent,” said Matthew Gianni, co-founder of a coalition of deep sea conservation NGOs, adding that mining could begin within two years.

– Fragile seabeds –

One major player in the industry working with the South Pacific island states of Nauru, Kiribati and Tonga that has environmental watchdogs on high alert is The Metals Company, based in Vancouver. 

“Polymetallic nodules are the cleanest path toward electric vehicles,” the company website claims.

Areas in which it is licensed to explore could yield enough nodules to supply more than a quarter of a billion new electric vehicles, it said.

Because the rocks are 99 percent composed of the sought-after minerals and unattached to the sea floor, they should be easier to collect and produce little heavy metal pollution, the website said.

Environmentalists disagree.

Deep marine seabeds are fragile and poorly understood: total darkness, very cold, high-pressure, limited food filtering down from the surface, they say.

“We are only now starting to get to know these ecosystems and still don’t really understand how they work,” said Pierre-Marie Sarradin, who leads research on deep ecosystems at Ifremer, a top marine research centre in France.

Scientists at JPI Ocean, a European consortium, have discovered that zones with lots of polymetallic nodules are also richer in biodiversity.

The ISA has set up a number of protected areas, but scientists say they are not representative of the zones likely to be mined.

One thing scientists do know is that when these seabeds are disturbed, recovery is very slow. 

– Carmakers cautious –

In one zone where the ocean floor was scraped 30 years ago “the ecosystem has still not returned to its initial state”, said Sarradin.

“It is also hard to measure the impact on fixing carbon, an essential process in the fight against global warming,” he added.

How mining will affect neighbouring areas, or even disturbances linked to the noise and light, are likewise unknown, especially as there are few details about the technology that would be used.

“Nodules take two million years to reform, and animal life that depends on them cannot be restored,” said Katja Uhlenkott, a doctoral student at Carl-von Ossietzky University in Germany.

Several major car manufacturers have taken a cautious position on seabed mining despite the potential for supplying an essential component of one of their fastest growing markets.

BMW, Google, Samsung SDI and Volvo have all pledged not to use minerals extracted from deep-water seabeds, or to finance deep-sea mining.

For Farah Obaidullah of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, made up of more than 80 NGOs and policy institutes, the solution for car makers remains on land.

The sought-after metals can be recycled, and new battery technologies are in the pipelines, she said. 

Mining conditions on land are “currently horrendous,” she acknowledged. But they can be improved.

“No one is going to go six kilometres under the sea to monitor things and say ‘you are not doing things right’,” she noted.

Once industry has a pathway to the deep ocean “we will be completely overwhelmed”, Sarradin said. 

NASA has confirmed that its Perseverance rover has succeeded in collecting its first rock sample on Mars.

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

NASA said last week it thought it had accomplished the feat, but poorly-lit photographs taken by the rover meant that the team operating the mission were not certain whether the sample had stayed inside its tube.

It had to retake the pictures in better lighting, but sending back the data can take several days.

“With better lighting down the sample tube, you can see the rock core I collected is still in there,” said NASA in the new tweet, adding that the next stage would be sealing this tube and storing it.

The target was a briefcase-sized rock nicknamed “Rochette” from a ridgeline that is half a mile (900 meters) long. 

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.

Eventually NASA wants to collect 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.

A giant panda gave birth to twin cubs at Madrid zoo on Monday in what officials hailed was a “great contribution” to the conservation of the vulnerable species.

Madrid’s Zoo Aquarium said its female panda — Hua Zui Ba — gave birth to the first cub at around 8:30 am after more than four hours of labour, while the second followed just after midday.

Footage of the first one being born showed a tiny pink hairless cub squeaking furiously after emerging into the light, its mother gently cleaning it up and placing it onto her stomach. 

The newborns will be “totally dependent” on their mother for the first four months until they can walk on their own, a zoo statement said.

Two technicians from China’s Chengdu panda breeding centre will help local vets care for the pair, whose sex has not yet been determined, it added. 

The cubs are the fifth and sixth of Hua Zui Ba and her partner Bing Xing, it added.

Their birth is “a great contribution to the field of conservation of threatened species,” the zoo said. 

Female pandas often have two offspring at a time.

Panda reproduction — in captivity or in the wild — is notoriously difficult, experts say, as few of the animals get in the mood or, even when they do, they do not know how to mate.

Further complicating matters, the window for conception is narrow since female pandas are in heat only once a year, for about one or two days.

The giant panda is listed as a vulnerable species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, with fewer than 2,000 thought to remain in the wild.

Nine alleged members of an international network of rhino horn and ivory traffickers went on trial in France on Monday after an investigation that shed light on illicit trade links between Europe and east Asia. 

French prosecutors started their probe after a random motorway traffic inspection by police in September 2015 that led to the discovery of several elephant tusks and 32,800 euros ($38,900) in cash in a BMW.

The occupants of the car, who claimed they were antique dealers, were allegedly 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 them are on the run.

French police discovered that ivory and rhino horn were being turned into powder, flakes, and other objects on French soil before being exported to Vietnam and China where they are used in traditional medicine.

An exceptionally large horn weighing nearly 15 kilos was seized during the investigation, which would have earned around $15 million (13 million euros) once processed at Asian market prices at the time, according to environmental group Robin des Bois.

Around 40 elephant tusks were also discovered. 

Robin des Bois, which is observing the trial, alleged that auction houses in the French towns of Cannes, Toulouse and Le Puy had facilitated the export of tusks to Vietnam and China.

“Before smuggling, its bargaining and swindles, there is poaching with its cruelties,” the group said in a statement. 

“Wildlife trafficking also contributes to the destruction and impoverishment of ecosystems, encourages speculation in elephant ivory and rhino horns and thus stimulates poaching.”

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, the Europol police agency says on its website.

Newly armed with voting rights, indigenous peoples have come to the world’s leading conservation congress meeting in the French city of Marseille both hopeful and wary. 

They have demands, and will not go quietly into the night, their representatives say.

“It makes no sense for consultants and companies to come to teach us how to protect what we have always successfully protected,” said Jose Gregorio Diaz Mirabal of COICA, which represents more than two million indigenous people across nine Amazon nations.

Their boldest proposal is for a measure to ensure that 80 percent of the Amazon is declared a protected area by 2025.

The reasoning is simple. 

“Half of [tropical] forests, and 80 percent of biodiversity” in the world are found in indigenous territories, said Peter Seligmann, a veteran conservationist who set up an NGO — Nia Tero (Our Land) — run in part by indigenous leaders.

Walter Quertehuari is a leader of the Wachiperi people in southeastern Peru. His commune in the Amarakaeri reserve is recognized on the IUCN Green List for its work in protecting biodiversity.

Unable to attend the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) meet in person due to Covid restrictions, Quertehuari reminded participants by videolink that his people have safeguarded more than 400,000 hectares of forest for more than 15 years.

By staving off the deforestation taking place all around them, he explained, his people have not only protected a crucial biodiversity hotspot but prevented planet-warming CO2 from leaching into the atmosphere. 

Now it’s time for a payday.

“We are talking about how carbon credits from the reserve can be sold,” he told the IUCN’s first Indigenous Summit.

Paying to restore or maintain healthy forests in order to fight climate change is not a new idea, and has been embedded in the UN climate convention for many years.

But such initiatives have been plagued with accounting and oversight problems, and some environmentalists say the concept is fundamentally flawed.

“There are indigenous communities that say: ‘As soon as you put a monetary value on a tree, someone is going to want to cut it down, because that’s the story of our relationship with Westerners’,” said Seligmann.

But “indigenous communities have the right to self-determination,” he added.

– ‘We are nations’ –

The full integration of indigenous peoples into the IUCN has been a lengthy and tortured process, sources within and outside the organization acknowledge.

“We have long been invited to attend, but indigenous peoples do not see themselves as conservation organizations,” Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, a former UN special rapporteur from the Philippines, told AFP.

“We are nations, we are peoples,” she added.

“And besides, membership is so expensive. Where do they think indigenous peoples can find the money?”

IUCN members — some 1,400 government ministries, research institutes and non-governmental organizations large and small — pay anywhere from 300 to 20,000 Swiss francs (about $300 to $21,000), depending on their size and resources.

“Since the 1980s there have been indigenous group members,” said Enrique Lahmann, director of the World Conservation Congress. “Inuits were among the first.”

But after years discussion and debate, native groups now have a separate status alongside government agencies and NGOs.  

“This is the first time that the IUCN has made changes within its categories” Lahmann said.

Due do Covid, there are far fewer indigenous activists than in the past at the congress, which usually attracts upward of 10,000 participants.

But indigenous representatives can now participate fully in all deliberations, and when it comes time to vote they will vote as a bloc with NGOs on propositions that have in the past served as the backbone for UN treaties or conventions.

– ‘Deceived for too long’ –

In 2012, Relmu Namku, from the Mapuche people in Argentina, was charged with attempted murder after blocking the entrance to an oil field. At the end of a harrowing trial, she was acquitted in 2015.

She came to Marseille with a clear objective.

“We are very critical of the way conservation has been managed all these years,” she explained to AFP.

“Historically, protected areas have been created through the usurpation of the territories of indigenous communities,” she said.

Being part of the IUCN, with voice and vote, “can serve to put pressure on our governments,” she added.

Not all indigenous peoples are on the same page. Navajos in the United States, for example, bought coal mines exploited for decades on their land and now operate them for profit.

And there are other hurdles ahead. 

Even with good intentions, there remains mutual misunderstanding or mistrust across the divide between science-based and traditional conservation.

“Some [traditional] communities are reluctant to share their knowledge,” acknowledged Aissatou Dicko, an indigenous representative from Burkina Faso.

“And there’s a hesitancy on the part of scientists because they don’t know how to measure the reliability” of what indigenous peoples tell them, he said.

Should 80 percent of the Amazon be declared a protected area by 2025? 

The world’s top conservation body is on Sunday poised to decide whether its 1,400 members can vote on this controversial proposal, put forward by indigenous groups.

Submitted under an emergency provision to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the measure calls for a “global action plan” to halt rampant deforestation and the destructive extraction of precious minerals and oil.

Over the last two decades, the Amazon has lost roughly 10,000 square kilometres every year, according to assessments based on satellite data.

“That’s the emergency, not just for us but for humanity,” Jose Gregorio Diaz Mirabal, a leader of the Curripaco people in Venezuela, told AFP at the Congress venue in Marseille.

For the first time in the IUCN’s 70-year history, indigenous groups have a separate status alongside government agencies and national or international NGOs. 

Diaz Mirabal submitted the Amazon proposal for the newly admitted organisation COICA, which represents more than two million indigenous people in nine Amazon nations.

“We have been neglected, and now we have a voice and will exercise that voting right,” he said.

– ‘Territory of humanity’ –

Recent research has warned that massive destruction of tropical forests combined with climate change are pushing the Amazon towards a disastrous “tipping point” which would see tropical forests give way to savannah-like landscapes.

This would not only drastically change the region’s climate, but have an impact on global climate systems as well, scientists say.

Rates of tree loss drop sharply in the forests where native peoples live, especially if they hold some degree of title — legal or customary — over land, other research has shown. 

IUCN officials are reviewing the COICA measure, along with 20 others proposals submitted after the deadline last year, “to make sure they are both ‘new’ and ‘urgent’,” said Enrique Lahmann, a senior administrator. 

“Both criteria are required.” 

A decision will be announced late Sunday or Monday, his office said. 

While the vote, which would be held in the coming week, would not have legal weight, it demonstrates the strength of feeling among indigenous groups. 

In an emotional press conference, Diaz Mirabal — flanked by indigenous leaders from French Guiana and Ecuador — implored world leaders to take head of his message.

“We are asking governments to help us protect our territory, which is also the territory of humanity,” he said. “Because if the Amazon rainforest disappears, people will die everywhere, it’s that simple.”

“It is crucial to stop extracting the oil, the gold, the uranium,” he added. “This is wealth for Europe, the United States, Russia, and China, but is poverty for us.” 

How much is a tree worth when its roots are in the ground and its leaves are helping suck carbon from the air? Answer: in most places, far less than the dollar value of its wood. 

The value we put on nature is the subject of a motion at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Marseille.

A trailblazing partnership attracting particular attention is just getting off the ground in the rainforest of Central Africa, which absorbs tons of CO2 — the gas responsible for climate change. 

At the end of June, Gabon received $17 million from the Central African Forest Initiative (Cafi), which was launched in 2015 by the UN to bring together Central African countries and international donors. 

“If a tree is standing it’s worth nothing, if you cut it down it’s worth something, but that’s useless for the planet,” said Carlos Manuel Rodriguez, Costa Rica’s former environment minister who now heads the Global Environment Facility, a specialised funding organisation. 

“Without Gabon, there won’t be rain in Africa. Without the Congo Basin forest we will never, never, achieve 1.5 degrees Celsius,” he said referring to one of the ambitions outlined in the Paris climate deal.

– ‘No real alternative’ –

Saving the world’s rainforests is an “extremely ambitious goal”, said Bard Vegar Solhjell, Director of the Norwegian Development Agency (Norad), which is funding the Gabonese operation.

“But we have no real alternative if we want to avoid catastrophic climate change,” said Solhjell, Norway’s former environment minister.

Norad is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on programmes to fight deforestation in several areas of the world. 

From Brazil to Indonesia, trees are felled at an industrial scale largely to make way for the expanding footprint of agriculture. 

But the picture is different in Gabon, which has preserved its section of a forest system that covers nearly 90 percent of its territory and spreads out across the Congo Basin.

In this region, protection of forests is inextricably linked to the fight against poverty, said Solhjell.  

Local people rely on slash-and-burn farming and cutting trees for firewood. 

According to Cafi, Gabon’s forests absorb 140 million tons of CO2 every year and emit about 30 million. 

They also house 60 percent of the remaining population of critically endangered forest elephants. 

The country has agreed to combat illegal logging and reduce forest degradation. 

The June payment was part of a much larger fund available for the country, which can claim payments for emission reductions.

– ‘Virtuous cycle’ – 

Flore Koumba Pambo, scientific adviser at the Gabon National Parks Agency, said the funding would help fuel other projects, such as the Ivindo National Park, which has just been named a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

She hopes it is the start of a “virtuous cycle”, adding: “We are very proud of this recognition.”

For Rodriguez, the Gabon partnership is a testing ground and possible blueprint for other initiatives. 

It is also “a great opportunity to talk about carbon pricing” — a thorny issue that will be discussed at crunch UN climate talks in Glasgow. 

The donors say transparency is a crucial part of the process, as is evaluation. 

“We’ve also invested a lot in building up civil society, we have seen how important working with that side is,” said Solhjell.

In terms of assessing the value of natural services and supporting developing countries to preserve natural heritage, he said the Gabon project had clear benefits.  

“We are actually paying for the services Gabon is doing to the region and the world,”  he said.

Newly armed with voting rights, indigenous peoples have come to the world’s leading conservation congress meeting in the French city of Marseille both hopeful and wary. 

They have demands, and will not go quietly into the night, their representatives say.

“It makes no sense for consultants and companies to come to teach us how to protect what we have always successfully protected,” said Jose Gregorio Diaz Mirabal of COICA, which represents more than two million indigenous people across nine Amazon nations.

Their boldest proposal is for a measure to ensure that 80 percent of the Amazon is declared a protected area by 2025.

The reasoning is simple. 

“Half of [tropical] forests, and 80 percent of biodiversity” in the world are found in indigenous territories, said Peter Seligmann, a veteran conservationist who set up an NGO — Nia Tero (Our Land) — run in part by indigenous leaders.

Walter Quertehuari is a leader of the Wachiperi people in southeastern Peru. His commune in the Amarakaeri reserve is recognized on the IUCN Green List for its work in protecting biodiversity.

Unable to attend the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) meet in person due to Covid restrictions, Quertehuari reminded participants by videolink that his people have safeguarded more than 400,000 hectares of forest for more than 15 years.

By staving off the deforestation taking place all around them, he explained, his people have not only protected a crucial biodiversity hotspot but prevented planet-warming CO2 from leaching into the atmosphere. 

Now it’s time for a payday.

“We are talking about how carbon credits from the reserve can be sold,” he told the IUCN’s first Indigenous Summit.

Paying to restore or maintain healthy forests in order to fight climate change is not a new idea, and has been embedded in the UN climate convention for many years.

But such initiatives have been plagued with accounting and oversight problems, and some environmentalists say the concept is fundamentally flawed.

“There are indigenous communities that say: ‘As soon as you put a monetary value on a tree, someone is going to want to cut it down, because that’s the story of our relationship with Westerners’,” said Seligmann.

But “indigenous communities have the right to self-determination,” he added.

– ‘We are nations’ –

The full integration of indigenous peoples into the IUCN has been a lengthy and tortured process, sources within and outside the organization acknowledge.

“We have long been invited to attend, but indigenous peoples do not see themselves as conservation organizations,” Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, a former UN special rapporteur from the Philippines, told AFP.

“We are nations, we are peoples,” she added.

“And besides, membership is so expensive. Where do they think indigenous peoples can find the money?”

IUCN members — some 1,400 government ministries, research institutes and non-governmental organizations large and small — pay anywhere from 300 to 20,000 Swiss francs (about $300 to $21,000), depending on their size and resources.

“Since the 1980s there have been indigenous group members,” said Enrique Lahmann, director of the World Conservation Congress. “Inuits were among the first.”

But none of these groups had the right to vote on important measures and propositions that have often served as the backbone for UN treaties or conventions. 

After years of discussion and debate, it was agreed that indigenous peoples would have a classification of their own.

“This is the first time that the IUCN has made changes within its categories” Lahmann said.

Due do Covid, there are far fewer indigenous activists than in the past at the congress, which usually attracts upward of 10,000 participants.

But indigenous representatives can now participate fully in all deliberations, and when it comes time to vote they will have the same status as NGOs.

– ‘Deceived for too long’ –

In 2012, Relmu Namku, from the Mapuche people in Argentina, was charged with attempted murder after blocking the entrance to an oil field. At the end of a harrowing trial, she was acquitted in 2015.

She came to Marseille with a clear objective.

“We are very critical of the way conservation has been managed all these years,” she explained to AFP.

“Historically, protected areas have been created through the usurpation of the territories of indigenous communities,” she said.

Being part of the IUCN, with voice and vote, “can serve to put pressure on our governments,” she added.

Not all indigenous peoples are on the same page. Navajos in the United States, for example, bought coal mines exploited for decades on their land and now operate them for profit.

And there are other hurdles ahead. 

Even with good intentions, there remains mutual misunderstanding or mistrust across the divide between science-based and traditional conservation.

“Some [traditional] communities are reluctant to share their knowledge,” acknowledged Aissatou Dicko, an indigenous representative from Burkina Faso.

“And there’s a hesitancy on the part of scientists because they don’t know how to measure the reliability” of what indigenous peoples tell them, he said.

Workers have deployed containment booms and skimmer devices as they attempt to contain a sizable oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico discovered after Hurricane Ida roared through the area, the US Coast Guard said Sunday. 

The spill is in waters off Port Fourchon, Louisiana — near where Ida made landfall — in a region that is a major hub of the US petrochemical industry. 

An oil slick now extends more than a dozen miles through the warm waters of the Gulf but has yet to reach shore, the Houston Chronicle reported.

The Coast Guard in Louisiana said it had been informed of a spill in that area and was responding, but provided few details.

Talos Energy, a Texas firm specializing in offshore oil and gas exploration, has dispatched clean-up vessels and divers to the site. The company, which had operated in the area of the spill until 2017, insisted that its equipment was not the cause of the leak.

The response team “identified a non-Talos owned 12 (inch) pipeline displaced from its original trench location, which appears to be bent and open ended,” the company said in a statement. 

“Additionally, two non-Talos owned 4 (inch) lines have been identified in the vicinity that are open ended and appear to be previously abandoned.”

Talos said it is using booms and skimmers to clean up the area.

Packing winds of up to 150 miles (240 kilometers) per hour, Ida roared through Louisiana last Sunday, causing catastrophic damage, according to local authorities. 

Downgraded later to tropical storm status, Ida nonetheless retained rare power as it rumbled through the US Northeast, leaving dozens dead.

It was in the petroleum-rich Gulf of Mexico that, in 2010, an explosion ripped through the Deepwater Horizon oil platform, touching off the worst oil spill in history. 

It is the skyscraper that replaced the Twin Towers in New York’s skyline. Inaugurated in 2014, the One World Trade Center has become a symbol of resilience after the horror of 9/11. 

Commonly referred to as the “Freedom Tower,” it is America’s tallest building at 1,776 feet (541 meters) and an emblem of the US economic capital.

From its conception, the tower had to testify to New York’s durability — looking to the future despite the tragedy — according to one of its architects, Kenneth Lewis.

As harrowing as the images were of the Twin Towers collapsing to the ground on September 11, 2001, no one questioned replacing them with another skyscraper, situated right next to “Ground Zero.”

For the architects at SOM, which builds skyscrapers around the world, it was an opportunity to realize concepts that they had been thinking about for years.

“We were thinking it’s the beginning of the millennium, we were thinking that this had to be the next generation of buildings, both in terms of safety, as well as environmental impact,” recalled Lewis.

– Evacuation time –

Among the most nightmarish images from 9/11 are those of people jumping to their deaths from the towers to escape the blaze.

The architects launched ideas about how to evacuate people other than from the stairs. Inventors came back with a giant chute, and a zip wire, with a parachutist demonstrating the latter, Lewis remembers.

“It was the scariest thing,” he says. “We just couldn’t imagine someone who might be a little bit overweight or a little bit afraid taking a jump out the window.”

In the end, the only solution was to shield the heart of the building with reinforced concrete, “broad enough that people can get out of there,” he explained.

The architects implemented safety standards on One WTC that have since become standard for skyscrapers.

They include wide stairwells to allow a quick evacuation of the 104-storey tower, a signaling light to alert aircraft, fire-resistant cameras and communication tools on every floor to allow rescuers to constantly monitor the situation.

“We had a goal, which was an hour evacuation total time to evacuate the whole building,” said Lewis.

Firefighters were invited to planning meetings. It was they who suggested a back-up system capable of compensating for the failure of emergency generators on 9/11 to provide electricity long enough to evacuate the building.

“They had been through such trauma, they had to be a part of the solutions we were coming up with,” said Lewis.

Fire was not the only concern: in the fall of 2001, several anonymous letters containing anthrax were sent to some media and politicians, killing five people.

“We started to think about the filtering system and the air quality,” Lewis explained.

“Think of a worst-case scenario and then what would that mean, and then prepare for it,” he added, explaining their methodology.

– ‘Transformative moment’ –

Almost 20 years later and the pandemic has left One WTC and most of Manhattan’s prestigious towers empty for months.

“People were thinking we were going to come back much quicker than we have,” admitted Lewis.

“We were immediately looking at the types of filtration systems that are in there these buildings, and most new buildings have high efficiency filters, particulate filters that also deal with viruses.”

But if the office towers have not yet regained their pre-pandemic occupancy rate, their preeminence in New York’s skyline cannot be called into question.

A tower of some 600 apartments is under construction in Brooklyn and will become the first “super-skyscraper” outside Manhattan when it is completed next year. 

Around 20 other skyscrapers are in the works across New York.

As well as the environment, the mental health of the occupants of these buildings is now also a priority, said Lewis.

“We’re in 2021 and we’re talking about well-being and incorporating that into the spaces we’re doing, creating outdoor spaces that people can work in, rooftop terraces that are really workspaces, meeting spaces.

“It really is a transformative moment,” he said.

In the meantime, One WTC is on the way to becoming as iconic as its predecessors.

While the 9/11 Memorial symbolizes “the void” created by the attacks, the “Freedom Tower” represents “the positive,” according to Lewis.

“A place of innovation and new thinking and modern ideas of safety and security,” he said.