AFP UK

The perilous state of the planet’s wildlife will be laid bare when the largest organisation for the protection of nature meets on Friday hoping to help galvanise action as the world faces intertwined biodiversity and climate crises. 

Relentless habitat destruction, unsustainable agriculture, mining and a warming planet will dominate discussion at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) conference, hosted by France in the city of Marseille. 

The meeting, delayed from 2020 by the pandemic, comes ahead of crucial United Nations summits on climate, food systems and biodiversity that could shape the planet’s forseeable future. 

“Our common goal is to put nature at the top of international priorities — because our destinies are intrinsically linked, planet, climate, nature and human communities,” said French President Emmanuel Macron in a statement ahead of the IUCN meeting.    

He said the conference should lay the “initial foundations” for a global biodiversity strategy that will be the focus of UN deliberations in China in April next year.

The international community is grappling with a near set of goals to “live in harmony with nature” by 2050, with interim goals to be set for this decade. 

Nutritious food, breathable air, clean water, nature-based medicines — humans are dependent on the health of the ecosystems they are destroying.

Previous IUCN congresses have paved the way for global treaties on biodiversity and the international trade in endangered species. 

But efforts to halt extensive declines in numbers and diversity of animals and plants have so far failed to slow the destruction.

In 2019 the UN’s biodiversity experts warned that a million species are on the brink of extinction — raising the spectre that the planet is on the verge of its sixth mass extinction event in half a billion years.

– Interwoven threats –

The nine-day IUCN meeting, which opens at 1500 GMT on Friday, will include an update of its Red List of Threatened Species, measuring how close animal and plant species are to vanishing forever.

Experts have assessed nearly 135,000 species over the last half-century and nearly 28 percent are currently at risk of extinction, with habitat loss, overexploitation and illegal trade driving the loss.

Big cats, for example, have lost more than 90 percent of their historic range and population, with only 20,000 lions, 7,000 cheetahs, 4,000 tigers and a few dozen Amur leopards left in the wild. 

The meeting is likely to hammer home the message that protecting wildlife is imperative for the healthy function of ecosystems and for humanity.

Loss of biodiversity, climate change, pollution, diseases spreading from the wild have become existential threats that cannot be “understood or addressed in isolation,” the IUCN said ahead of the meeting in a vision statement endorsed by its 1,400 members.

Motions on the table include protecting 80 percent of Amazonia by 2025, tackling plastic in the oceans, combatting wildlife crime and preventing pandemics.

The IUCN will also, for the first time in its seven-decade history, welcome indigenous peoples to share their deep knowledge on how best to heal the natural world as voting members.

Among the cranes and containers of the port of Rotterdam is a surreal sight: a herd of cows peacefully feeding on board what calls itself the world’s first floating farm.

In the low-lying Netherlands where land is scarce and climate change is a daily threat, the three-storey glass and steel platform aims to show the “future of breeding”.

The buoyant bovines live on the top floor, while their milk is turned into cheese, yoghurt and butter on the middle level, and the cheese is matured at the bottom.

“The world is under pressure,” says Minke van Wingerden, 60, who runs the farm with her husband Peter. 

“We want the farm to be as durable and self-sufficient as possible.”

The cows are a sharp contrast to the huge ships and the smoke from the refineries of Europe’s biggest seaport, which accounts for 13.5 percent of the country’s emissions.

With their floating farm, which opened in 2019, Peter and Minke say they wanted to “bring the countryside into the town”, boost consumer awareness and create agricultural space.

The Dutch are no strangers to advanced farming methods, using a network of huge greenhouses in particular to become the world’s second biggest agricultural exporter after the United States.

But that has come at a cost. 

– ‘Moves with the tide’ –

The Netherlands is one of Europe’s largest per capita emitters of climate change gases and faces a major problem with agricultural emissions, particularly in the dairy sector which produces large amounts of methane from cows.

Those emissions in turn fuel the rising waters that threaten to swamp the country, a third of which lies below sea-level, and further reduce the land in one of the most densely populated nations on Earth.

The floating farm therefore aims to keep its cows’ feet dry in both the long-term, by being sustainable, and the short-term, by, well, floating.

“We are on the water, so the farm moves with the tide — we rise and fall up to two metres. So in case of flooding, we can continue to produce,” says Minke van Wingerden.

In terms of sustainability, the farm’s cows are fed on a mixture of food including grapes from a foodbank, grain from a local brewery, and grass from local golf courses and from Rotterdam’s famed Feyenoord football club — saving on waste as well as the emissions that would be required to create commercial feed for the animals.

Their manure is turned into garden pellets — a process that helps further cut emissions by reducing methane — and their urine is purified and recycled into drinking water for the cows, whose stable is lined with dozens of solar panels that produce enough electricity for the farm’s needs.

– ‘Cows don’t get seasick’ –

The farm is run by a salaried farmer but the red and white cows, from the Dutch-German Meuse-Rhin-Yssel breed, are milked by robots.

The cheeses, yoghurts and pellets are sold at a roadside shop alongside fare from local producers.

The products are also sold to restaurants in town by electric vehicles.

“I was immediately seduced by the concept,” says Bram den Braber, 67, one of 40 volunteers at the farm, as he fills bottles of milk behind the counter of the store. 

“It’s not blood running through my veins, it’s milk.”

The idea of the farm is also to make farming “more agreeable, interesting and sexy”, and not just to be environmentally friendly, says Minke van Wingerden.

When she and her husband first approached port authorities with the idea to build a floating farm, they said “are you nuts?”, she recalls.

But the farm is set to turn a profit for the first time at the end of 2021, with consumers apparently ready to pay the 1.80 euro ($2.12) a litre for milk produced there, compared to around one euro at a supermarket.

They are also aiming to build a second floating farm to grow vegetables, and to export their idea, with a project already under way in the island nation of Singapore.

Most importantly, while farming goes greener, the animals don’t.

“No, the cows don’t get seasick,” says van Wingerden. “The water moves only a little bit, it’s like you were on a cruise ship.”

Among the cranes and containers of the port of Rotterdam is a surreal sight: a herd of cows peacefully feeding on board what calls itself the world’s first floating farm.

In the low-lying Netherlands where land is scarce and climate change is a daily threat, the three-storey glass and steel platform aims to show the “future of breeding”.

The buoyant bovines live on the top floor, while their milk is turned into cheese, yoghurt and butter on the middle level, and the cheese is matured at the bottom.

“The world is under pressure,” says Minke van Wingerden, 60, who runs the farm with her husband Peter. 

“We want the farm to be as durable and self-sufficient as possible.”

The cows are a sharp contrast to the huge ships and the smoke from the refineries of Europe’s biggest seaport, which accounts for 13.5 percent of the country’s emissions.

With their floating farm, which opened in 2019, Peter and Minke say they wanted to “bring the countryside into the town”, boost consumer awareness and create agricultural space.

The Dutch are no strangers to advanced farming methods, using a network of huge greenhouses in particular to become the world’s second biggest agricultural exporter after the United States.

But that has come at a cost. 

– ‘Moves with the tide’ –

The Netherlands is one of Europe’s largest per capita emitters of climate change gases and faces a major problem with agricultural emissions, particularly in the dairy sector which produces large amounts of methane from cows.

Those emissions in turn fuel the rising waters that threaten to swamp the country, a third of which lies below sea-level, and further reduce the land in one of the most densely populated nations on Earth.

The floating farm therefore aims to keep its cows’ feet dry in both the long-term, by being sustainable, and the short-term, by, well, floating.

“We are on the water, so the farm moves with the tide — we rise and fall up to two metres. So in case of flooding, we can continue to produce,” says Minke van Wingerden.

In terms of sustainability, the farm’s cows are fed on a mixture of food including grapes from a foodbank, grain from a local brewery, and grass from local golf courses and from Rotterdam’s famed Feyenoord football club — saving on waste as well as the emissions that would be required to create commercial feed for the animals.

Their manure is turned into garden pellets — a process that helps further cut emissions by reducing methane — and their urine is purified and recycled into drinking water for the cows, whose stable is lined with dozens of solar panels that produce enough electricity for the farm’s needs.

– ‘Cows don’t get seasick’ –

The farm is run by a salaried farmer but the red and white cows, from the Dutch-German Meuse-Rhin-Yssel breed, are milked by robots.

The cheeses, yoghurts and pellets are sold at a roadside shop alongside fare from local producers.

The products are also sold to restaurants in town by electric vehicles.

“I was immediately seduced by the concept,” says Bram den Braber, 67, one of 40 volunteers at the farm, as he fills bottles of milk behind the counter of the store. 

“It’s not blood running through my veins, it’s milk.”

The idea of the farm is also to make farming “more agreeable, interesting and sexy”, and not just to be environmentally friendly, says Minke van Wingerden.

When she and her husband first approached port authorities with the idea to build a floating farm, they said “are you nuts?”, she recalls.

But the farm is set to turn a profit for the first time at the end of 2021, with consumers apparently ready to pay the 1.80 euro ($2.12) a litre for milk produced there, compared to around one euro at a supermarket.

They are also aiming to build a second floating farm to grow vegetables, and to export their idea, with a project already under way in the island nation of Singapore.

Most importantly, while farming goes greener, the animals don’t.

“No, the cows don’t get seasick,” says van Wingerden. “The water moves only a little bit, it’s like you were on a cruise ship.”

Flash flooding caused by the remnants of Hurricane Ida killed at least 44 people in four northeastern US states overnight into Thursday, including several who perished in basements during the “historic” weather event officials blamed on climate change.

Record rainfall, which prompted an unprecedented flash flood emergency warning for New York City, turned streets into rivers and shut down subway services as water cascaded down platforms onto tracks.

“I’m 50 years old and I’ve never seen that much rain ever,” said Metodija Mihajlov whose basement of his Manhattan restaurant was flooded with three inches of water.

“It was like living in the jungle, like tropical rain. Unbelievable. Everything is so strange this year,” he told AFP.

Hundreds of flights were canceled at LaGuardia and JFK airports, as well as at Newark, where video showed a terminal inundated by rainwater.

President Joe Biden declared emergencies in the states of New York and New Jersey on Thursday, ordering federal disaster management agencies to coordinate relief efforts and provide emergency support. 

The Federal Emergency Management Agency was mandated “to identify, mobilize, and provide at its discretion, equipment and resources necessary to alleviate the impacts of the emergency,” the White House said in a statement. 

Ahead of a visit to the southern state of Louisiana, where Ida earlier destroyed buildings and left more than a million homes without power, Biden said “we’re all in this together. The nation is ready to help”. 

– ‘Historic weather event’ –

Flooding closed major roads across New Jersey and New York boroughs including Manhattan, The Bronx and Queens, submerging cars and forcing the fire department to rescue hundreds of people.

At least 23 people died in New Jersey, Governor Phil Murphy told reporters.

“The majority of these deaths were individuals who got caught in their vehicles,” he said. 

A state trooper died in the neighboring state of Connecticut.

Thirteen died in New York City, including 11 who could not escape their basements, police said. The victims ranged from the ages of two to 86.

“Among the people MOST at risk during flash floods here are those living in off-the-books basement dwellings that don’t meet the safety codes necessary to save lives,” lawmaker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted.

“These are working class, immigrant, and low-income people & families,” she added.

Three also died in the New York suburb of Westchester, while another four died in Montgomery County outside Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, a local official confirmed.

Ida blazed a trail of destruction north after slamming into Louisiana over the weekend, bringing severe flooding and tornadoes.

“We’re enduring an historic weather event tonight with record-breaking rain across the city, brutal flooding and dangerous conditions on our roads,” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said late Wednesday.

The National Weather Service issued its first-ever emergency flash flood warning for New York City, urging residents to move to higher ground.

“You do not know how deep the water is and it is too dangerous,” the New York branch of the National Weather Service (NWS) said in a tweet.

The NWS recorded 3.15 inches (80 millimeters) of rain in Central Park in just an hour — beating a record set just last month during Storm Henri.

The US Open was also halted as howling wind and rain blew under the corners of the Louis Armstrong Stadium roof.

– Lingering tornado threat –

New Yorkers woke to clear blue skies Thursday as the city edged back to life, but signs of the previous night’s carnage weren’t far away: residents moved fallen tree branches from roads as subway services slowly resumed.

By Thursday evening, around 38,000 homes in Pennsylvania, 24,000 in New Jersey and 12,000 in New York were without power, according to the website poweroutage.us, a significant decrease from earlier in the day.

It is rare for such storms to strike America’s northeastern seaboard and comes as the surface layer of oceans warms due to climate change.

The warming is causing cyclones to become more powerful and carry more water, posing an increasing threat to the world’s coastal communities, scientists say.

“Global warming is upon us and it’s going to get worse and worse and worse unless we do something about it,” said Democratic senator Chuck Schumer.

In Annapolis, 30 miles (50 kilometers) from Washington, a tornado ripped up trees and toppled electricity poles.

The NWS warned the threat of tornadoes would linger, with tornado watches in effect for parts of southern Connecticut, northern New Jersey, and southern New York as Ida tracked north through New England.

A tornado struck the popular tourist destination Cape Cod, Massachusetts, on Thursday evening.

arb-mdo-nr-pdh/bgs/ssy/jfx

After hiking for hours across the mountain and a vast expanse of white, Swiss glaciologist Matthias Huss crouches down near the middle of the massive glacier and checks the measurements.

Analysis of the data gathered from Aletsch, the largest glacier in the Alps, paints a dire picture of the toll that climate change is taking on the behemoth.

Aletsch glacier alone holds about a fifth of the total ice volume found in all of Switzerland’s around 1,800 glaciers.

But over the past decade, the glacier consisting of some 80 square kilometres (32 square miles) of ice and rock has seen 1.5 metres (yards) shaved off its thickness each year.

A cubic kilometre of ice has also melted away during the same time period.

“The change is happening really, really quickly,” Huss told AFP.

The 41-year-old heads Glacier Monitoring in Switzerland (GLAMOS), a scientific network documenting the shrinking of the Swiss glaciers in the face of a warming planet.

“The glaciers are truly a giant and visible thermometer,” he said, pointing out that it is “much more poignant to see a glacier shrinking in volume and thickness than to look at a graph showing temperatures rising.”

“Glaciers are beautiful,” he added, accounting for the often emotional response when people reflect on the shrinking and future disappearance of the ice formations. 

GLAMOS scientists monitor around 20 Swiss glaciers each year and have noted that since 2010, the frequency of years with extreme ice loss has accelerated dramatically.

One such year was 2011, the next was 2015, and then 2017, 2018 and 2019 were each record breakers.

– Symbolic funerals –

While last year was not a year of extremes, Swiss glaciers still shed two percent of their total volume, Huss said.

And this year, the negative trend will likely continue, despite heavy snow and a relatively cold winter, he added.

Global warming is going so fast that a number of smaller glaciers have already disappeared.

In September 2019, Huss participated in a symbolic funeral for the Pizol glacier in northeastern Switzerland, at an altitude of around 2,700 metres (8,850 feet).

“Since then, we have stopped active monitoring of Pizol. It no longer makes any sense,” Huss said.

He plans to collect two final samples in a few weeks, but, he acknowledged, “after that it will really be over”.

And Pizol will surely not be the last glacier to melt away, Huss said.

“Over the next 10-20 years, there will certainly be other well-known glaciers that will disappear.” 

Global warming caused by human activity — mostly the burning of fossil fuels — has pushed up Earth’s average surface temperature 1.1 degrees Celsius (2.0 degrees Fahrenheit) compared to mid-19th century levels. 

Most of that increase has occurred in the last 50 years. 

– Childhood excitement –

Huss has been fascinated by the mammoth ice formations since early childhood, when he first set foot on the giant Gorner glacier, near Zermatt.

“Every time I return to a glacier, I have this special feeling, and I think about the first time,” he said.

That childhood pleasure is visible each time the lanky yet athletic figure bounds across the bluish crevasses cutting across his path.

Given Huss’s love of glaciers, one might expect the work of documenting their rapid demise to be a sad endeavour.

“It is true that, as a human being, it is depressing,” he said.

“But as a scientist, it is also very interesting to see and analyse such rapid changes.”

Huss said he hoped that highlighting what scientific measurements tell us about the state of the glaciers could finally help spur concrete action.

“For a while now, I’ve had the feeling that there has been a real change in the way politicians think” about climate change, Huss said, welcoming the fact that “a lot of people are now saying that we must act.”

But, while there are swelling numbers of action plans, he insisted that “at some point, they will need to be transformed into something real.”

New Zealand saw its warmest winter on record this year as climate change fuelled rising temperatures, a government scientific agency said Friday.

Temperatures in the June-August period were 1.32 degrees Celsius (34.3 degrees Fahrenheit) above average, exceeding the previous record set last year, the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) said.

The agency said the data meant seven of the top 10 hottest winters in New Zealand had occurred since 2000.

It said the last time the country recorded back-to-back record winters was in 1970 and 1971, but those years now stood at 18th and 13th respectively on the all-time list — which dates back to 1909.

“What was considered to be unusually warm at the time is no longer considered unusual,” NIWA meteorologist Nava Fedaeff said.

Fedaeff said natural weather patterns played a role in both record-setting periods but a key difference was the amount of carbon dioxide now polluting the atmosphere.

She said one measuring station near Wellington recorded a carbon dioxide concentration of 32 parts per million in the early 1970s but the level was now 412 parts per million, up almost 30 percent.

“These similar winters, decades apart, show us that there are key natural ingredients to getting a warm winter, but adding climate change to the mix is like taking the same recipe and swapping plain flour for self-raising,” she said.

The country’s centre-left Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern declared a ‘climate emergency’ last year, saying urgent action was needed for the sake of future generations.

New Zealand has committed to becoming carbon neutral by 2050 and generating all of its energy from renewable sources by 2035.

Faizuddin is still traumatised from the lightning strike that killed his three friends as they took selfies atop a 400-year-old fort in India, where climate change is making lethal strikes more common.

Scores of people have met similarly gruesome ends this year in the western desert state of Rajasthan, where deaths caused by thunderstorms used to be uncommon. 

“I was hit by three thunderbolts, one after the other,” said Faizuddin, his voice quivering as he lay wrapped in a blanket at his modest home in Jaipur.

He and his trio of childhood friends had climbed hundreds of steps to a watchtower on top of Amer Fort during a July storm that also claimed eight other lives.

“The sound was deafening, it felt like a huge bomb blast. My trousers and shoes caught fire, my limbs became stiff and I couldn’t move,” the 21-year-old told AFP, a deep gash still on his head.

Around 2,500 people die in lightning strikes around India each year, according to government figures, compared to just 45 in the United States.

Cattle and other animals are often killed or maimed during severe thunderstorms, with one burst of lightning in northeastern Assam state wiping out a herd of 18 elephants in May. 

Thunderbolts contain as much as a billion volts of electricity and can cause immense damage to buildings when they hit.

Earlier this year at another fort in Chittorgarh, a few hours south of where Faizuddin’s friends died, a bolt struck a tower and sent a huge chunk of stone plummeting to the ground.

The site was fitted with a rod to draw lightning away from the centuries-old structure “but it proved to be ineffective,” said Ratan Jitarwal, a conservator supervising the fort’s painstaking repair work.

– ‘A sudden surge’ –

Lightning is also becoming more frequent, with nearly 19 million recorded strikes in the 12 months to March — up by a third from the previous year. 

Global warming is driving the increase, says Sanjay Srivastava of the Lightning Resilient India Campaign, one of the few organisations collecting data on thunderstorms.

“Because of climate change and localised heating of the Earth’s surface, and more moisture, there is a sudden surge of huge lightning,” he told AFP.

The problem is worldwide, with research this year forecasting a possible doubling of the average number of lightning strikes inside the Arctic Circle over this century.

This could spark widespread tundra fires and trigger massive amounts of carbon stored within the permafrost escaping into the atmosphere, exacerbating global warming. 

Evidence suggests lightning strikes are also becoming more common in urban areas — a particular concern in India, where the city population is forecast to rise dramatically in the coming years. 

Srivastava said the results could be catastrophic if, for example, a strike hit a hospital and shorted out equipment used to keep patients on life support in intensive care. 

– ‘Devil came from the sky’ –

As with rising sea levels, the growing frequency of deadly heatwaves and other consequences of climate change, the country of 1.3 billion people is struggling to adapt to the threat of worse lightning strikes.

Most human deaths in thunderstorms are preventable but almost no buildings have lightning rods to protect their inhabitants, Srivastava said.

Forecasting is also tricky and warning people of approaching storms is difficult.

Indian scientists recently developed a mobile app that seeks to provide real-time warnings about imminent strikes and precautions to be taken.

But this has limited use in a country where only half the population has access to a smartphone, and even fewer in rural areas where strikes are more common.

Many people are also unaware of the dangers and what to do — like not to shelter under a tree and avoiding open areas — in a thunderstorm.

“Had we known that lightning strikes… can kill and maim, we would have never allowed our son to step out of the house,” said Mohammed Shamim, whose 20-year-old son died in the Amer Fort incident.

“He had worn a new shirt that day and all he wanted was to take some nice shots on his phone. But it feels as if some devil came from the sky and took our son away.” 

Flash flooding caused by the remnants of Hurricane Ida killed at least 44 people in the New York area overnight into Thursday, including several who perished in basements during the “historic” weather event officials blamed on climate change.

Record rainfall, which prompted an unprecedented flash flood emergency warning for New York City, turned streets into rivers and shut down subway services as water cascaded down platforms onto tracks.

“I’m 50 years old and I’ve never seen that much rain ever,” said Metodija Mihajlov whose basement of his Manhattan restaurant was flooded with three inches of water.

“It was like living in the jungle, like tropical rain. Unbelievable. Everything is so strange this year,” he told AFP.

Hundreds of flights were cancelled at LaGuardia and JFK airports, as well as at Newark, where video showed a terminal inundated by rainwater.

“We’re all in this together. The nation is ready to help,” President Joe Biden said ahead of a trip Friday to the southern state of Louisiana, where Ida earlier destroyed buildings and left more than a million homes without power.

– ‘Historic weather event’ –

Flooding closed major roads across New Jersey and New York boroughs including Manhattan, The Bronx and Queens, submerging cars and forcing the fire department to rescue hundreds of people.

At least 23 people died in New Jersey, Governor Phil Murphy told reporters.

“The majority of these deaths were individuals who got caught in their vehicles,” he said. 

A state trooper died in the neighboring state of Connecticut.

Thirteen died in New York City, including 11 who could not escape their basements, police said. The victims ranged from the ages of two to 86.

“Among the people MOST at risk during flash floods here are those living in off-the-books basement dwellings that don’t meet the safety codes necessary to save lives,” lawmaker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted.

“These are working class, immigrant, and low-income people & families,” she added.

Three also died in the New York suburb of Westchester, while another four died in Montgomery County outside Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, a local official confirmed.

Ida blazed a trail of destruction north after slamming into Louisiana over the weekend, bringing severe flooding and tornadoes.

“We’re enduring an historic weather event tonight with record-breaking rain across the city, brutal flooding and dangerous conditions on our roads,” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said late Wednesday.

State emergencies were declared in New York and New Jersey while the National Weather Service issued its first-ever emergency flash flood warning for New York City, urging residents to move to higher ground.

“You do not know how deep the water is and it is too dangerous,” the New York branch of the National Weather Service (NWS) said in a tweet.

The NWS recorded 3.15 inches (80 millimeters) of rain in Central Park in just an hour — beating a record set just last month during Storm Henri.

The US Open was also halted as howling wind and rain blew under the corners of the Louis Armstrong Stadium roof.

– Lingering tornado threat –

New Yorkers woke to clear blue skies Thursday as the city edged back to life, but signs of the previous night’s carnage weren’t far away: residents moved fallen tree branches from roads as subway services slowly resumed.

By Thursday evening, around 38,000 homes in Pennsylvania, 24,000 in New Jersey and 12,000 in New York were without power, according to the website poweroutage.us, a significant decrease from earlier in the day.

It is rare for such storms to strike America’s northeastern seaboard and comes as the surface layer of oceans warms due to climate change.

The warming is causing cyclones to become more powerful and carry more water, posing an increasing threat to the world’s coastal communities, scientists say.

“Global warming is upon us and it’s going to get worse and worse and worse unless we do something about it,” said Democratic senator Chuck Schumer.

In Annapolis, 30 miles (50 kilometers) from Washington, a tornado ripped up trees and toppled electricity poles.

The NWS warned the threat of tornadoes would linger, with tornado watches in effect for parts of southern Connecticut, northern New Jersey, and southern New York as Ida tracked north through New England.

A tornado struck the popular tourist destination Cape Cod, Massachusetts on Thursday evening.

arb-mdo-nr-pdh/bgs/to/sw

Brazil’s worst drought in almost a century is threatening electricity supply and critical crops, pushing up energy and food prices at a time the country was hoping to start recovering from the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic.

The country of 213 million people relies on hydropower for two-thirds of its electricity, but crucial dams are at near-record lows of less than a quarter full.

Last week, President Jair Bolsonaro urged Brazilians to “turn off a light at home” to conserve power, and on Tuesday the government hiked electricity prices by an average of seven percent, partly to cover new power plants and energy imports.

“We are the limit of the limit,” said Bolsonaro, who is gearing up to seek reelection in 2022 amid record low popularity ratings, widespread disapproval of his handling of the Covid-19 crisis, and now also confronting extreme climate conditions that show little sign of abating.

Brazil’s water levels will likely continue to deteriorate in September, according to electric grid operator ONS.

And the National Water and Sanitation Agency (ANA) has declared a “critical shortage of water resources,” effective until November, for the Parana river basin at the heart of Brazil’s hydroelectric capacity.

In a bid to stay ahead of demand and avoid outages, Brazil this week added one new biomass power station, three photovoltaic generators, and four wind farms to its power grid.

But much of the cost has fallen on consumers already contending with high unemployment and surging inflation in the country with the world’s second-highest pandemic death toll.

– Eating less –

“I was forced to cut down a lot of things at home, some types of food. I cut down on the times my children could use the phone, to save money,” consumer Marisa das Dores told AFP at her home in Mateus Leme, in eastern Brazil.

And price hikes are further fueling inflation, which reached 8.99 percent year-on-year in July — almost three times the limit targeted by the central bank for 2021.

“Energy is an important contributor to inflation because it is reflected in each step of the production chain of all goods and services and impacts on the income of families,” said Nivalde de Castro, a researcher at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

On Tuesday, Brazil’s national statistics institute, IBGE, said the economy had performed worse than expected in the second quarter of 2021, contracting 0.1 percent.

The drought is also threatening Brazil’s critical agriculture sector.

Coffee production is projected to drop 25 percent this season, with staples such as maize, sugarcane, oranges and black beans also at risk.

– ‘Urgent effort’ – 

But de Castro said that unless the rainfall pattern changes, dam levels will not be restored any time soon.

And “if the rains remain below average… there will be a mismatch between electricity supply and demand during peak hours in October,” he added.

Brazil’s Energy Minister Bento Albuquerque has appealed for an “urgent effort” by all to reduce electricity use, saying the drought had cost hydroelectric generation capacity the equivalent of five months’ worth of consumption by a large city such as Rio de Janeiro.

The federal government is seeking to cut public service electricity use by between 10 and 20 percent until April next year.

Some medium-sized towns have also started rationing the valuable resources, including Itu in Sao Paulo state, where since July, residents have access to tap water at home only every second day.

Brazilians fear a repeat of a painful electricity rationing during a previous drought in 2001. No such move is on the cards yet, but it has not been ruled out by the government.

“It is crucial to get results in the short term because every day of delay diminishes the impact of measures seeking to mitigate the risk of electricity shortages,” said Luiz Barroso of the firm PSR Energy Consulting and Analytics.

Experts say the drought in Brazil’s central-west is caused partly by Amazon deforestation, which has diminished cloud generation and rainfall.

A far-right climate change skeptic, Bolsonaro has prompted commercialization of the Amazon, and forest destruction has accelerated on his watch.

Like the more than 3,000 species of butterflies in Colombia, agronomist Juan Guillermo Jaramillo underwent his own metamorphosis several years ago, as his passion for photographing nature took an unexpected twist.

The 65-year-old, who used to run an animal feed business, originally took photographs of birds, but he is now a key figure in the world of Colombian butterflies.

Jaramillo is the co-author of an inventory that led to Colombia being recognized as having the widest variety of butterfly species in the world.

The list he worked on was published in the British Natural History Museum in London — which has the world’s largest collection of butterflies — in June.

The Checklist of Colombian Butterflies identifies 3,642 different species in the Andean country, which makes up 19.4 percent of the known global varieties.

But Jaramillo is keen to point out he is not a collector.

“I broke from the traditional image associated with butterflies of collectors that kill them, put them in an envelop and then pin them to the inside of a box,” Jaramillo told AFP.

“I’m simply not capable of killing them.”

Like bees, butterflies are pollinators vital to the ecosystem. They are also an important source of food for birds and snakes.

Yet their habitats are under threat from deforestation, agriculture and global warming.

Jaramillo, who lives in the southwestern Antioquia department, has an archive of 220,000 photos of butterflies and has captured images of 1,500 different species.

– Tricking the butterflies –

Jaramillo has spent the last 15 years trekking through jungles and woodlands in search of the “winged jewels” — a dangerous pastime given those areas are infested with armed groups and drug traffickers.

The signing of an historic 2016 peace accord between the government and the marxist guerrilla Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia after more than half a century of armed conflict sparked hope areas previously off limits would become safe for scientists and naturalists.

But it was not long before armed rebels and drug-traffickers returned.

“I want to go to many places but there are some I don’t go to out of fear,” said Jaramillo.

When he does venture out, Jaramillo takes with him a camera, tripod and a container of pink liquid he prepares every morning: shrimp bait.

Having tried various other types of bait, he found shrimp worked best.

He spreads the foul-smelling bait on rocks and leaves by a rushing stream, and even lays out cotton balls soaked in the liquid.

“That’s how I make them think it’s bird droppings,” he explained.

“When the butterflies land on a leaf they stay there for quite some time… they’re almost like models,” he added.

“Without the bait, it would be impossible to see certain species in the woodland because they live in very tall trees.”

Another potential barrier is the weather. 

“If there’s no sun, there are no butterflies.”

– Some like it hot –

Jaramillo used to be a bird watcher and also compiled an inventory of the species he observed.

Colombia boasts the widest varieties of bird species and orchids, according to the United Nations’s Convention on Biological Diversity.

It was the switch from film to digital photography that sparked Jaramillo’s conversion to butterflies.

“Taking a good photo of birds is very difficult because you need very big, heavy lens.”

While filming birds, he also took photos of butterflies and was amazed by their colors and shapes.

It opened up a vast world to Jaramillo. After beetles, butterflies and moths are the most numerous insect on the planet with almost 160,000 described species.

“In Colombia, I think there are about twice as many species of butterflies as birds,” American Kim Garwood, Jaramillo’s fellow inventory author, told AFP.

“In the Andes I have been told there are about 10-15 percent of the butterfly species that are undescribed. We have many photos of undescribed species.” 

Near his farm on a road with little traffic, Jaramillo, who is retired, says he is in the perfect place to photograph butterflies when the sun rises and the day’s warm air helps them stay aloft.

But Jaramillo’s work doesn’t end with sunset, as at nightfall, he turns his lens onto moths. 

“With butterflies and moths, I have work for this lifetime and 10 more,” he said.