AFP UK

Scientists in Sardinia are hoping a thousand-year-old olive tree nearly destroyed by recent fires can be saved, mobilising volunteers to stand guard around the remains of the ancient tree.

“The Patriarch”, as it is known in the west of the Italian island region, was a massive wild olive tree with a trunk about 10 metres (33 feet) around and 16.5 metres (54 feet) high.

But it was nearly completely devoured by flames that ripped through the area last weekend when over 20,000 hectares (50,000 acres) burned in the worst fires seen on the island in decades. 

The blaze destroyed homes and killed livestock as it ravaged thousands of Sardinia’s olive trees, along with juniper groves, cork trees, oaks and pines. 

After an examination of the tree earlier this week, experts said they hoped there might be signs of life in the root system and the side of the trunk that was spared the worst burns. 

The community of Cuglieri has organised volunteers to stand guard to prevent people from walking on its fragile root systems on the advice of experts, including botanist Gianluigi Bacchetta of Cagliari University.

“Keeping this tree alive means keeping everyone’s hope alive,” he said of the specimen, which registered on Italy’s list of monumental trees.

Bacchetta said after an examination of the area Wednesday that water added to the soil around the tree had helped lower its temperature.

Another scientist who surveyed the damage, University of Sassari botany professor Ignazio Camarda, wrote on Facebook that all that was left of the mighty tree were “miserable remains that lie on the ground and a few blackened stumps, as well as a section of the base”.

But he also noted “a glimmer of life from which a new sapling could emerge”. 

Firefighters were still on the ground in western Sardinia Friday, extinguishing new outbreaks and clearing areas, even as scorching temperatures of over 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) and winds mean that the risk of fire remains high. 

China has opened the doors on what it bills as the world’s largest planetarium, a slick new Shanghai facility showcasing the nation’s recent extra-terrestrial exploits while notably downplaying those of space pioneers like the United States.

Beijing has spent much of this year bombarding the public with news of the country’s rising space prowess, part of a larger propaganda blitz highlighting Chinese achievements under the ruling Communists to mark the party’s 100th anniversary.

In recent months, China has landed a spacecraft on Mars, set loose a rover to explore it, and sent the first astronauts to a Chinese space station.

Scale-model replicas of spaceships from these and other missions figure prominently at the new Shanghai Planetarium, along with paeons to China’s rapid scientific advancement, and clips of President Xi Jinping addressing the nation’s taikonauts.

“This year we had several astronauts go to space, which is a source of pride for China,” said a woman surnamed Zhou, who brought her young daughter.

“I wanted my child to have some knowledge about space from a young age.”

By contrast, the pioneering space-travel efforts of the then-Soviet Union and China’s geopolitical rival the United States get only passing mention, if at all.

The 1969 US landing on the moon is referenced only briefly in a small, dryly-worded display, and a section entitled “Space Heroes” lists only two Russian cosmonauts along with Yang Liwei, the first person sent into space by the Chinese space programme.

The planetarium features working telescopes and a range of interactive exhibits on the origins of the universe and history of astronomy, including Chinese-speaking versions of Copernicus and other luminaries explaining their theoretical breakthroughs.

The building was designed by New York’s Ennead Architects and resembles a union of swirling galaxies.

It covers 38,000 square metres, (420,000-square feet) of floor space — roughly equal to five football fields — and cost 600 million yuan ($93 million), according to Chinese media.

A reactor at a nuclear plant in southern China has been shut down because it is damaged, the operator said Friday, but it insisted there were no major safety issues.

Chinese authorities last month blamed minor fuel rod damage for a build-up of radioactive gases at the Taishan plant in Guangdong province, describing it as a “common phenomenon” with no need for concern.

French nuclear firm Framatome, which helps operate the plant, last month reported a “performance issue” which caused the US government to look into the possibility of a leak.

“After lengthy conversations between French and Chinese technical personnel, Taishan Nuclear Power Plant… decided to shut down Unit 1 for maintenance,” China General Nuclear Power Group (CGN) said Friday in an online statement. 

The company added that “a small amount of fuel damage” had occurred.

CGN said both reactors at the plant have “maintained safe and stable operations throughout” and that the faulty unit is “completely under control”.

Engineers will now “find the cause of fuel damage and replace the damaged fuel”, the statement added.

There are more than 60,000 fuel rods in the reactor and the proportion of damaged rods is “less than 0.01 percent”, China’s environment ministry and nuclear regulator previously said.

They called the damage “inevitable” due to factors including fuel manufacturing and transportation.

French energy giant EDF — the majority owner of Framatome — also previously blamed the build-up of radioactive gases on deteriorating coating on some uranium fuel rods.

EDF said it was first informed about the fuel rod problem in October, but only learned about the gas build-up in mid-June.

Official environmental monitoring data shows a slight increase in radiation near Taishan compared with other nuclear plants in China, but experts say this remains within the normal range of environmental radiation levels in Guangdong.

– ‘Permanently monitored’ –

The shutdown follows the French firm stating last week that it would have shut down a nuclear reactor in France if it suffered problems similar to those reported at the Taishan plant.

“Based on analyses, EDF operating procedures for its French plant would have led it to shut down the reactor to fully understand the problem and halt its development,” the company said in a statement.

However, they noted that the situation was “not urgent”. 

The radioactivity levels in the water of the reactor’s primary circuit “remain below regulator levels in place for Taishan, which are in line with international standards”, they said.

But based on earlier data provided by Chinese officials, the deterioration of the structural integrity of some fuel rods “appears to be continuing, and is being permanently monitored”, the firm added.

The problem is the latest blow to the European Pressurised Reactor (EPR) design, which is being used to build power plants in France, Britain and Finland that have racked up delays and billions of euros in cost overruns.

Abrupt disruptions to Earth’s climate thousands of years ago that caused extreme sea-level rise and mass ice cap melting can serve as an early warning system for today’s planetary tipping points, according to new research. 

Climate tipping points — which are irrevocable over centuries or longer — are thresholds past which large and rapid changes to the natural world may occur.

They include looming catastrophes such as the melting of the ice sheets atop Greenland and West Antarctica, which contain enough frozen water to lift oceans more than a dozen metres (40 feet). 

But they are notoriously hard to anticipate, given the relatively small or incremental changes in variables such as atmospheric carbon concentrations that trigger them.

In a review of past climate events published in the journal Nature Geoscience, an international team of scientists examined two major instabilities in the Earth system, caused by changes in ice, oceans, and rainfall patterns.

They looked at the conditions that led to the Bolling-Allerod warming event nearly 15,000 years ago, which saw surface air temperatures soar up to 14 degrees Celsius over Greenland. 

The team also studied the end of the so-called African humid period around 6,000-5,000 years ago, which led to regional changes in ecosystems and pre-historic human societies. 

They found that various past climate systems, such as ocean dynamics and rainfall patterns, tended to slow as they reached a tipping point, after which they failed to recover from perturbations. 

“Earth’s recent past shows us how abrupt changes in the Earth system triggered cascading impacts on ecosystems and human societies, as they struggled to adapt,” said Tim Lenton, review co-author and director of the University of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute. 

“We face the risk of cascading tipping points again now — but this time it is of our own making, and the impacts will be global,” said Lenton. 

“Faced with that risk, we could do with some early warning systems.” 

– Compound changes –

While current atmospheric CO2 levels of around 412 parts per million have some precedent — at least 800,000 years ago — the rate of CO2 accumulation does not. 

Scientists are divided on when or if most tipping points will be triggered, but many believe effects such as ice-sheet melt is already “locked-in” due to carbon pollution. 

Authors of the review, which was published online Thursday, said it showed evidence that the impacts of past abrupt changes to the Earth system combined to create planet-wide disruption. 

Changes to ice levels and ocean currents, for example, at the start of the Bolling-Allerod warming lead to cascading impacts such as low ocean oxygen levels, vegetation cover, and atmospheric CO2 and methane levels.

“It sounds counterintuitive, but to foresee the future we may need to look into the past,” said lead author Victor Brovkin from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology. 

“The chance to detect abrupt changes and tipping points — where small changes lead to big impacts — increases with the length of observations,” he said. 

“This is why analysis of abrupt changes and their cascades recorded in geological archives is of enormous importance.”

Scientists working to bring back the functionally extinct northern white rhino announced they had successfully created three additional embryos of the subspecies, bringing the total to 12. 

One of world’s two remaining live specimens — female Fatu who lives with her mother Najin on Kenya’s 90,000-acre Ol Pejeta wildlife conservancy — provided the eggs for the project, while the sperm used was from two different deceased males. 

Scientific consortium Biorescue described in a press release late Thursday how the eggs were collected from Fatu in early July before being airlifted to a lab in Italy for fertilisation, development and preservation.

Neither Fatu nor Najin is capable of carrying a calf to term, so surrogate mothers for the embryos will be selected from a population of southern white rhinos.

Ol Pejeta director Richard Vigne told AFP on Friday that he believed in the project’s chances of success, while emphasising the high stakes.

“No one is going to pretend that this is going to be easy,” he said.

“We are doing things which are cutting-edge from a scientific perspective and we a dealing with genetics, with the two last northen white rhinos left on the planet,” said Vigne. 

“There are many, many things that could go wrong,” he said. “I think everybody understand the challenges that remain.”

Since 2019 Biorescue has collected 80 eggs from Najin and Fatu, but the 12 viable embryos all hail from the younger rhino.

The project is a multi-national effort with scientists from the German Leibniz Institute backing the Kenya Wildlife Service and Ol Pejeta, and the Italian Avantea laboratory providing fertilisation support.

Kenyan Tourism Minister Najib Balala welcomed the news.

“It is very encouraging to note that the project has continued to make good progress in its ambitious attempts to save an iconic species from extinction,” he said in the press release.

Rhinoceroses have very few natural predators but their numbers have been decimated by poaching since the 1970s.

Modern rhinos have roamed the planet for 26 million years and it is estimated that more than a million still lived in the wild in the middle of the 19th century.

Turkish firefighters made progress Friday containing deadly wildfires that forced the evacuation of entire villages and Mediterranean coast hotels already reeling from the shock of the coronavirus pandemic.

Blazes that erupted Wednesday to the east of the tourist hotspot Antalya on Turkey’s scenic southern coast have officially killed four people and injured nearly 200.

But they have also threatened to scare off tourists who had only just started to return to Turkey in what President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had hoped would be a boon for the developing country’s fragile economy.

The soaring flames turned summer skies dark orange over five-star hotels and villages dotting rolling hills that have been parched by another dry summer.

They had spread by Thursday evening to the Aegean Sea on Turkey’s western coast and spanned a region stretching 300 kilometres (185 miles) and covering most of the country’s top resorts.

Local resident Gulen Dede Tekin came with his family to a five-star hotel in the Mediterranean coast city of Manavgat on Thursday morning and at first thought nothing of the fires raging beyond the hills.

“In the evening, we realised how serious things were when they cut off the electricity and the ventilation at the hotel,” Tekin told AFP.

“This morning, we woke up to a rain of ash.”

– Arrests –

The government said 57 of the 71 fires had been contained or entirely put out by Friday morning.

“The situation is improving in all active fires,” Agriculture Minister Bekir Pakdemirli told reporters during a visit to the affected region.

But he also confirmed that Turkey no longer had a firefighting plane in its inventory and was only in the process acquiring one under orders from Erdogan.

Russia has sent three giant aircraft and Turkey’s historic rival Greece — at odds with its neighbour on a wide range of regional disputes — said it was “read to help”.

The blow the fires threaten to deal to Turkey’s tourism-dependent economy and the admission that the country had no firefighting planes has put Erdogan’s government under pressure.

His office has officially blamed the fires on arson and unspecified “attacks”.

Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu announced the arrest of five people on suspicions of starting one of the blazes in the southern city of Osmaniye.

“Who started these fires,” he asked in televised comments. “We, as well as our citizens, have our suspicions.”

The private DHA news agency said two children — one eight and the other 10 years old — admitted under questioning in the presence of their teacher that they accidentally started one of the fires by burning their books.

Turkish firefighters made progress Friday containing deadly wildfires that forced the evacuation of entire villages and Mediterranean coast hotels already reeling from the shock of the coronavirus pandemic.

Blazes that erupted Wednesday to the east of the tourist hotspot Antalya on Turkey’s scenic southern coast have officially killed four people and injured nearly 200.

But they have also threatened to scare off tourists who had only just started to return to Turkey in what President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had hoped would be a boon for the developing country’s fragile economy.

The soaring flames turned summer skies dark orange over five-star hotels and villages dotting rolling hills that have been parched by another dry summer.

They had spread by Thursday evening to the Aegean Sea on Turkey’s western coast and spanned a region stretching 300 kilometres (185 miles) and covering most of the country’s top resorts.

Local resident Gulen Dede Tekin came with his family to a five-star hotel in the Mediterranean coast city of Manavgat on Thursday morning and at first thought nothing of the fires raging beyond the hills.

“In the evening, we realised how serious things were when they cut off the electricity and the ventilation at the hotel,” Tekin told AFP.

“This morning, we woke up to a rain of ash.”

– Arrests –

The government said 57 of the 71 fires had been contained or entirely put out by Friday morning.

“The situation is improving in all active fires,” Agriculture Minister Bekir Pakdemirli told reporters during a visit to the affected region.

But he also confirmed that Turkey no longer had a firefighting plane in its inventory and was only in the process acquiring one under orders from Erdogan.

Russia has sent three giant aircraft and Turkey’s historic rival Greece — at odds with its neighbour on a wide range of regional disputes — said it was “read to help”.

The blow the fires threaten to deal to Turkey’s tourism-dependent economy and the admission that the country had no firefighting planes has put Erdogan’s government under pressure.

His office has officially blamed the fires on arson and unspecified “attacks”.

Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu announced the arrest of five people on suspicions of starting one of the blazes in the southern city of Osmaniye.

“Who started these fires,” he asked in televised comments. “We, as well as our citizens, have our suspicions.”

The private DHA news agency said two children — one eight and the other 10 years old — admitted under questioning in the presence of their teacher that they accidentally started one of the fires by burning their books.

Hundreds of thousands of people in China were in coronavirus lockdown Friday as the country battled its worst outbreak in months, while the United States intensified vaccination efforts in the face of a Delta variant-fuelled surge.

The World Health Organization has warned that the highly transmissible strain, first detected in India, could unleash more Covid-19 outbreaks in a high-risk area from Morocco to Pakistan where vaccination rates are low.

In China, a cluster of infections in Nanjing city linked to airport workers who cleaned a plane from Russia earlier this month had reached the capital Beijing and five provinces by Friday.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been locked down in Jiangsu province, of which Nanjing is the capital, while 41,000 came under stay-at-home orders in Beijing’s Changping district.

At least 206 infections across China have been linked to the cluster, and the outbreak is geographically the largest in several months.

It challenges Beijing’s aggressive containment efforts which have relied on mass testing, lockdowns and swift contact tracing.

The Delta variant is more transmissible than the pathogens that cause SARS, Ebola and smallpox, and as easily spread as chickenpox, according to an internal US Centers for Disease Control presentation reported by The Washington Post and The New York Times.

It has driven recent surges around the world, especially in the Asia-Pacific region.

The Philippines next week will send more than 13 million people in the national capital region back into lockdown because of a Delta-linked increase, the government said Friday.

The variant has also been linked to around half of new cases in Tokyo.

Japan on Friday extended a virus state of emergency in the capital a week into the Olympics, with the city reported a record number of new cases the day before.

Meanwhile, Australia said Friday it would reopen borders and end lockdowns when vaccination rates reach 80 percent.

– ‘You don’t have to die’ –

The United States ramped up efforts to get people vaccinated in the face of a Delta variant-fuelled surge.

With infections and hospitalisations rising, President Joe Biden asked every US federal worker to either declare they are fully vaccinated or wear masks and be tested.

“People are dying — and will die — who don’t have to die,” Biden said Thursday. “If in fact you are unvaccinated, you present a problem — to yourself, to your family, and to those with whom you work.”

The president also said he would ask the Pentagon to consider making the coronavirus vaccine mandatory for active duty military personnel, and asked state and local governments to offer $100 to holdouts who get the shot.

Later, the Pentagon said all its military and civilian personnel would require masks, regular testing and travel restrictions if they are unvaccinated.

The CDC has already asked people in virus hotspots — including the vaccinated — to wear masks indoors again.

The moves stop short of a politically sensitive vaccination mandate for federal workers, but mark a dramatic return to restrictions after a rapid vaccination phase.

The surge across America — which has the highest known Covid-19 death toll in the world — has left early vaccine adopters angry at those who have so far opted against the shot.

“It’s almost like they don’t care about the rest of the world,” Alethea Reed, a 58-year-old healthcare administrator in Washington, told AFP.

“They’re being selfish and self-centred.”

– Israel offers 3rd shot –

Nearly 4.2 million people are known to have died of Covid-19 worldwide so far, and vaccines are widely considered to be the main weapon against the disease.

Israel was an early leader in vaccinations, with around 55 percent of the population fully vaccinated using mRNA two-dose vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett announced that those over the age of 60 would be offered a third booster shot from Sunday.

But while wealthy nations like Israel can offer third doses, many poorer nations are struggling to even provide the first.

More than four billion doses have been administered around the world, according to an AFP tally.

High-income countries gave out an average of 97 shots per 100 inhabitants compared with just 1.6 in low-income nations.

burs-qan/rbu

Less than two hours from Madrid, 76-year-old Francisca Benitez has to brush her teeth every night with bottled water because her village has no supply of drinking water. 

In Lastras de Cuellar in the central Castilla y Leon region, nitrates and arsenic have made the water undrinkable for the village’s residents, who number 350 in winter and nearly 1,000 in summer. 

And across the country, dozens of villages are suffering the same fate because groundwater resources are at risk from agricultural pollution, a lack of water quality controls and drought. 

Every Monday, the villagers walk to the main square in Lastras to buy multipacks of mineral water in 1.5 litre bottles, sold at a discounted price, which some take away in wheelbarrows. 

Alejandro Martin, 17, is there to help his 95-year-old grandfather bring home the precious resource which is then poured into a pan so they can prepare coffee.

Outside, clusters of empty plastic bottles dangle from the balconies alongside banners demanding access to drinking water.

“This is not normal in the 21st century!” protests Mercedes Rodriguez, 41, who belongs to a local residents association.  

Mayor Andres Garcia also points to the “lack of (public) funding” which has slowed down a project to ensure drinking water supplies by the end of the year.

In Castilla y Leon alone, 63 municipalities were without running water in March, according to the region’s main television station. 

National figures are not available. 

According to the health ministry, a 2019 study of national water resources found that 67,050 samples — some taken from the same place on different dates — were undrinkable. 

– Nitrates and manure –

Nitrate levels are a cause for concern, with nearly three out of 10 — 28 percent — of Spain’s groundwater monitoring stations registering a concentration close to or above the potability threshold. 

Fully 22 percent of Spain’s overall surface area — which covers 506,000 square kilometres (195,000 square miles) — is exposed to nitrate pollution due to the nature of the soil or through agricultural activities, the environment ministry says. 

And many are increasingly blaming agricultural pollution for the water crisis. 

Lierta, a tiny village in the northeastern Aragon region, has been deprived of drinking water since 2018 because of nitrate pollution and residents are currently fighting plans to set up a new farm for 3,000 pigs. 

Under a scorching sun, a lone dog can be seen drinking from a fountain in a landscape dominated by vast golden wheatfields that are dotted with pig farms. 

In this area, there are already “close to 20,000 pigs and just 50 villagers”, says 68-year-old Bernard Mas, a member of the residents’ association that has just managed to get the farm project suspended for a year. 

In a country where pork products reign supreme, “intensive livestock farming and huge macro farms are a real problem” for local water quality due to the pollution from manure, says Luis Babiano, head of the Spanish Association of Public Water Supply and Sanitation Operators (AEOPAS). 

But excess nitrates in water sources are mainly the result of “fertiliser use in agricultural activity” which is “the main problem” in the countryside, an environment ministry report found late last year. 

– ‘Without water, we’ll disappear’ –

“In rural areas, water resource management is lacking and residents of some small settlements may be drinking non-potable water without knowing it,” the report said. 

And such concerns have even reached Brussels with the European Commission last year issuing an ultimatum, warning Spain to improve its water quality control or face heavy fines. 

In the long term, drought could also jeopardise the quality of Spain’s water resources, especially as the impact of climate change gathers pace. 

If the quantity of water decreases but the level of harmful substances does not, proportionally it means the level of such pollutants in Spain’s water resources increases, explains Babiano.

In Lastras, Rodriguez fears that the water shortage could spell the end of their little community. 

“A village that doesn’t have water is destined to disappear. Who is going to come and live in a village where they don’t have tap water?” she wonders. 

“Who is ever going to set up a business here?”

The father and son stood in the forest burning around them, the elder with a shovel in hand, the younger with a plastic bottle filled with gasoline.

As the son poured the fuel onto the forest floor, watching as the rising flames rendered white birch trunks black, his father shovelled dirt onto embers that popped across the other side of a trench marked for a controlled burn.

Ivan Fyodorov, 65, and his 42-year-old son Pyotr were helping firefighters on an afternoon in late July to prevent a wildfire from reaching their land in the Siberian region of Yakutia.

While large wildfires are an annual occurrence in Siberia, the blazes have hit Yakutia with an increasingly ferocious intensity the past three years, scorching its legendary vast northern forests known as the taiga.

With firefighters and emergency services struggling, hundreds of volunteers have joined the efforts to contain the blazes, which experts have linked to climate change.

Fyodorov said the first fire had come close to his farmland around the village of Byas-Kyuel in June, but they were able to beat it back. 

Then came the second. Then the third. 

“At that point we didn’t have the strength. It’s good these guys came,” he said of the dozen firefighters working nearby. 

Citing government inaction, Fyodorov said that he and his family have taken the fight into their own hands.

Pyotr had been helping him for 17 days straight, while his other three sons and daughter travelled four hours by car from the regional capital Yakutsk at the beginning of July to do their part.

“We haven’t been able to cut our hay yet because we’ve been busy fighting the fires,” Fyodorov said.

Asked what he would do if the fires keep intensifying in the coming years, he said: “I’ll fight the fires, what else can I do.”

“I’ve lived my whole life in the taiga. I’m dependent on nature,” he added. “We have to protect it.” 

– ‘Nothing to breathe’ –

The fires have not only affected the taiga.

For days in July Yakutsk was covered in a smog that monitors called one of the world’s worst-ever air pollution events.

In the city of some 300,000 people on a late July weekend evening, volunteers were preparing to leave in a convoy for the Gorniy district, which is home to Byas-Kyuel and where some of the most intense fires had raged that month. 

Some three dozen members of a local athletics club gathered around a dummy on the floor in a volunteer centre where two emergencies ministry officials conducted a rapid rescue training session. 

“Our job is to get you ready as quickly as possible,” one yelled out to the group.

The men, eager to get moving, half-listened as they shuffled back and forth.

“When our homeland is burning, we can’t stand on the sidelines,” said the club’s 50-year-old head, Turgun Popov. 

He told AFP that their goal was not to put out the fire on their own, but to give professionals “the chance to rest for a couple of hours or a couple of days because they have been putting out the fires for months.”

Earlier that day the centre had sent 10 volunteers by helicopter to the Lena Pillars national park — a natural rock formation on the UNESCO heritage list — and was planning to send more that week. 

As the emergencies ministry officials trained the sporting club members, 25-year-old volunteer Lili Odun received two phone calls from others interested in deploying.

Popov motioned to the hazy sky outside to explain why people were volunteering. 

“There’s nothing to breathe,” he said.