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US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm announces a major scientific breakthrough in nuclear fusion

US researchers announced a historic nuclear fusion breakthrough on Tuesday, hailing a “landmark achievement” in the quest for a source of unlimited, clean power and an end to reliance on fossil fuels.

The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California said an experiment it conducted this month “produced more energy from fusion than the laser energy used to drive it.”

The US Department of Energy described the achievement of fusion ignition as a “major scientific breakthrough” that will lead to “advancements in national defense and the future of clean power.”

LLNL director Kim Budil described it as “is one of the most significant scientific challenges ever tackled by humanity.”

Scientists have been working for decades to develop nuclear fusion — touted by its supporters as a clean, abundant and safe source of energy that could eventually allow humanity to break its dependence on the fossil fuels driving a global climate crisis.

The LLNL said a team at its National Ignition Facility (NIF) conducted the first controlled fusion experiment in history on December 5, achieving what is known as “scientific energy breakeven.”

“This is a landmark achievement for the researchers and staff at the National Ignition Facility who have dedicated their careers to seeing fusion ignition become a reality, and this milestone will undoubtedly spark even more discovery,” US Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said.

– More developments needed –

Nuclear power plants around the world currently use fission — the splitting of a heavy atom’s nucleus — to produce energy.

Fusion on the other hand combines two light hydrogen atoms to form one heavier helium atom, releasing a large amount of energy in the process.

That’s the process that occurs inside stars, including our sun.

On Earth, fusion reactions can be provoked by heating hydrogen to extreme temperatures inside specialized devices.

Researchers at the LLNL use the massive National Ignition Facility — 192 ultra-powerful lasers all pointed into a thimble-sized cylinder filled with hydrogen.

Like fission, fusion is carbon-free during operation, but has many more advantages: it poses no risk of nuclear disaster and produces much less radioactive waste.

However, there is still a long way to go before fusion is viable on an industrial scale.

“Many advanced science and technology developments are still needed to achieve simple, affordable IFE to power homes and businesses,” LLNL said.

Other nuclear fusion projects are also in development around the world, including the major international project known as ITER, which is currently under construction in France.

Instead of lasers, ITER will use a technique known as magnetic confinement, containing a swirling mass of fusing hydrogen plasma within a massive donut-shaped chamber.

NASA's Perseverance rover looks out on the surface of Mars, where dust devils sweep across the arid surface

The sound of a dust devil on Mars was recorded for the first time as the eye of the whirlwind swept over the top of NASA’s Perseverance rover, a new study said Tuesday. 

“We hit the jackpot” when the rover’s microphone picked up the noise made by the dust devil overhead, the study’s lead author Naomi Murdoch told AFP.

The researchers hope the recording will help to better understand the weather and climate on Mars, including how its arid surface and thin atmosphere may once have supported life.

Common across Mars, dust devils are short-lived whirlwinds loaded with dust that form when there is a major difference between ground and air temperatures.

They are a common feature in the Jezero crater, where the Perseverance rover has been operational since February 2021 — but it had never before managed to record audio of one of them.

By chance on September 27, 2021, a dust devil 118 metres (390 feet) high and 25 metres wide passed directly over the rover.

This time the microphone on the rover’s SuperCam — which previously recorded the first ever audio from the Martian surface — managed to catch the muffled, whirring sounds of the dust devil.

“We hear the wind associated with the dust devil, the moment it arrives, then nothing because we are in the eye of the vortex,” said Murdoch, a planetary researcher at France’s ISAE-SUPAERO space research institute, where the SuperCam’s microphone was designed.

Then the sound returns “when the microphone passes through the second wall” of the dust devil, she added.

– A dust devil mystery –

The impact of the dust made “tac tac tac” sounds which will let researchers count the number of particles to study the whirlwind’s structure and behaviour, she said.

It could also help solve a mystery that has puzzled scientists. On some parts of Mars, “whirlwinds pass by sucking up dust, cleaning the solar panels of rovers along the way,” Murdoch said.

But in other areas, the whirlwinds move by without kicking up much dust. “They’re just moving air,” Murdoch said, adding that “we don’t know why”.

For example, the solar panels of NASA’s InSight lander are “covered in dust” because it is located at a spot where it cannot take advantage of these natural vacuum cleaners, she said.

Understanding why this happens could help scientists build a model of dust devils so they might predict where the whirlwinds might strike next. 

It could even shed light on the great dust storms that sweep across the planet, famously depicted in the 2015 science-fiction film “The Martian”, starring Matt Damon. However Murdoch noted that the violence of the dust storms shown in the film was “unrealistic”.

Sylvestre Maurice, a planetary scientist and co-author of the study published in the journal Nature Communications, said that analysing Martian dust makes it possible to “explore the interactions” between the ground and the extremely thin atmosphere.

The atmosphere was much thicker billions of years ago, which allowed for the presence of life-sustaining liquid water, said Maurice, who also works on the SuperCam.

“You might think that studying the Martian climate today is unrelated to the search for traces of life from billions of years ago,” he said.

“But it is all part of a whole, because the history of Mars is one of extreme climate change from a humid, hot planet to a completely arid and cold planet.”

Fires in France have led to the highest levels of carbon pollution since records began

Wildfires that scorched across Europe this year burned a record land area and stoked carbon emissions, according to an update released on Tuesday by Europe’s forest fire and satellite monitors. 

The summer of 2022 was the hottest in Europe’s recorded history. The continent suffered blistering heatwaves and the worst drought in centuries, as climate change drives ever longer and stronger hot spells. 

That created tinderbox forests, increasing the risk of devastating and sometimes deadly wildfires. 

“The length and intensity of the heatwaves to hit Europe during the summer, combined with the general dry conditions on the continent during 2022, contributed to record-breaking wildfire activity,” the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) said. 

It said the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) put the total cumulative burnt area in the 27-nation European Union from the start of the year to mid-November at over 785,000 hectares (1.9 million acres). 

That is more than double the average of just over 317,000 hectares in the 2006-2021 period. 

CAMS said that result aligns with its data, estimating total wildfire emissions from the EU plus the United Kingdom from June 1 to August 31 at 6.4 megatonnes of carbon, the highest level for these months since the summer of 2007.

While the global trend is a decline in emissions from wildfires because of a reduction in savanna fires in tropical regions, some parts of the world are seeing emissions rise, CAMS said. 

“We also continue to identify and monitor significantly increased fire emissions in different parts of the world, where hotter and drier conditions are leading to increased flammability of the vegetation,” said CAMS Senior Scientist Mark Parrington.

Huge fires that raged across Spain and France meant that the countries saw the highest carbon emissions from June to August since the satellite monitor’s records began in 2003.

“This had a major impact on air quality in the region,” CAMS said. 

EFFIS has said that 2022 is likely to have seen the highest number of fires recorded in Europe since 2006.

“Wildfires raging from west to east and across northern, central and southern European countries offer clear evidence of the effects of climate change,” it said in its report on 2021 wildfires, which was published in November and included details of the 2022 burned area.

EFFIS said it would be necessary to prepare populations to “live with wildfires, as they become more frequent and intense because of climate change”.

In September, the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization said the interaction between pollution and climate change would impact hundreds of millions of people over the coming century, and urged action to rein in the harm.

Zelensky said replacing incandescent bulbs by LED ones would help Ukraine avoid power cuts

Taken for granted by most consumers in rich countries, the humble LED lightbulb was identified on Tuesday as a strategic ally for Ukraine as Kyiv seeks to resist Russian bombing of its power grid.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky highlighted how replacing the country’s old-style incandescent bulbs by modern LED versions would help the country escape blackouts this winter. 

“It maybe doesn’t seem very important but fifty million LED lamps will allow us to save one gigawatt of power,” he told an international aid conference in Paris attended by around 70 states and international organisations. 

Large parts of Ukraine face blackouts and regular load-shedding as the country’s power grid buckles under repeated Russian air strikes.

Zelensky said the current power shortfall in the country was around 2.5 gigawatts per day, meaning 50 million LED lightbulbs would reduce this by 40 percent.

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen immediately announced that the European Union would fund the purchase of 30 million LED lightbulbs for 30 million euros ($32 million).

They are 88 percent more efficient than traditional ones, she estimated.

“The savings are crucial to reduce the pressure that we have on the power grid now,” von der Leyen said.

“In these times of suffering and darkness, it is so important to bring light to Ukraine,” she added.

Zelensky estimated that Ukraine needed around 800 million euros in emergency aid in total for its energy sector in the face of Russia’s onslaught.

The country is desperately seeking spare parts to repair its power lines, as well as transformers, gas turbines and generators to keep the lights on.

French President Emmanuel Macron, who also championed the idea of LED lighting for Ukraine, condemned Russia’s “cynical” and “cowardly” attacks on civilian infrastructure. 

“These strikes… which Russia openly admits are designed to break the resistance of the Ukrainian people, are war crimes,” he said in an opening speech.

“They violate without any doubt the most basic principals of humanitarian law. These acts are intolerable and will not go unpunished.”

A decade after his disappearance, Shui-Meng Ng says is no closer to finding answers about her missing Laotian husband Sombath Somphone

The wife of a missing Laos activist said Tuesday that a decade on she was still no closer to finding answers over his disappearance as more than 60 human rights groups condemned Vientiane’s inaction.

Sombath Somphone, an award-winning campaigner for sustainable development, vanished on December 15, 2012 after police pulled over his vehicle at a checkpoint in the capital.

The case shone a spotlight on the reclusive communist nation’s poor human rights record, but campaigners condemned on Tuesday the lack of significant progress on the case.

“I may not even get any answers by the end of my life,” his wife Shui-Meng Ng said, adding she last received an official update in 2017.

“But I just hope the memory of Sombath, especially what he has done, who he is, continues to live on,” the 76-year-old said, speaking in Bangkok on the 10th anniversary of his disappearance.

“I don’t want to keep dwelling on the sadness of what happened,” said Ng.

She recalled how her “farm boy” husband would bring her fruit freshly picked from their garden, telling her: “See what I found, let’s have some mango for breakfast.”

Ng, who worked for the UN children’s agency UNICEF in Laos and East Timor before publishing a book on Sombath’s life last year, said her husband’s mentorship of thousands was his most important legacy.

“This is what sustains me,” she said.

But she said in Laos, “you don’t hear his name being spoken much. People don’t want to talk about it because they are afraid they will invite the unnecessary attention of the government.”

Also speaking in Bangkok, Andrea Giorgetta, head of the International Federation for Human Rights’s Asia desk, said the Laotian government “has in fact engaged very actively in suppression of public discussion of Sombath.”

In a joint statement, 66 international rights groups characterised Vientiane’s lack of response as “a catalogue of apparent inaction, negligence, cover-ups, and misleading statements”.

They said there was “an overall lack of political will to effectively address Sombath’s enforced disappearance”.

Ng added that she hoped European leaders would raise the case with their Southeast Asian counterparts at a Brussels summit this week.

Laos has denied any connection to the case, raised directly with the government during United Nations human rights reviews in 2015 and 2020.

Vientiane did not respond to AFP’s requests for comment.

US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm is expected to announce that a national laboratory has made a major advancement in nuclear fusion research

The US Department of Energy is expected to announce Tuesday that its researchers have achieved a “major scientific breakthrough” regarding nuclear fusion, a technology seen as a possible revolutionary alternative power source.

Scientists have been working for decades to develop nuclear fusion — touted by its supporters as a clean, abundant and safe source of energy that could eventually allow humanity to break its dependence on the fossil fuels driving a global climate crisis.

The Energy Department has refused to give any specific details about what it will announce Tuesday, but a Financial Times report over the weekend has set the scientific community abuzz.

According to the UK-based outlet, researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California have succeeded for the first time in producing a “net energy gain” from nuclear fusion, meaning more energy was produced in the reaction than was used to activate it.

If the achievement is confirmed, “that is a true breakthrough moment which is tremendously exciting,” said physicist Jeremy Chittenden with Imperial College London.

“It proves that the long sought-after goal, the ‘holy grail’ of fusion, can indeed be achieved.”

Nuclear power plants around the world currently use fission — the splitting of a heavy atom’s nucleus — to produce energy.

Fusion on the other hand combines two light hydrogen atoms to form one heavier helium atom, releasing a large amount of energy in the process.

That’s the process that occurs inside stars, including our sun.

On Earth, fusion reactions can be provoked by heating hydrogen to extreme temperatures inside specialized devices.

Researchers at the LLNL use the massive National Ignition Facility — 192 ultra-powerful lasers all pointed into a thimble-sized cylinder filled with hydrogen.

According to the Financial Times, LLNL scientists recently produced about 2.5 megajoules of energy in a nuclear fusion reaction, or about 120 percent of the 2.1 megajoules used by the lasers to initiate it.

– Decades to achieve –

That result would finally provide proof for the physical principles outlined decades ago by fusion researchers. It would be a “a success of the science,” said Tony Roulstone, a lecturer at Cambridge University.

Like fission, fusion is carbon-free during operation, but has many more advantages: it poses no risk of nuclear disaster and produces much less radioactive waste.

However, there is still a long way to go before fusion is viable on an industrial scale.

“To turn fusion into a power source we’ll need to boost the energy gain still further,” cautions Chittenden.

“We’ll also need to find a way to reproduce the same effect much more frequently and much more cheaply before we can realistically turn this into a power plant,” he added.

That could take yet another 20 or 30 years, Erik Lefebvre, project manager at the French Atomic Energy Commission, told AFP.

Climate experts however warn that the world cannot wait that long to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, and limit the worst effects of global warming.

Other nuclear fusion projects are also in development around the world, including the major international project known as ITER, which is currently under construction in France.

Instead of lasers, ITER will use a technique known as magnetic confinement, containing a swirling mass of fusing hydrogen plasma within a massive donut-shaped chamber.

Indigenous people demonstrate at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP15) during the March for Biodiversity for Human Rights in Montreal, Quebec

For countless generations prior to European colonization, Canada’s Indigenous people relied on caribou both as a source of subsistence and as an integral part of their cultural practices.

Hunting and butchering the animal in frigid temperatures was long seen as a rite of passage, and members of the First Nations were the first to detect their serious decline.

“Fundamentally we are people of caribou,” Valerie Courtois, director of Canada’s Indigenous Leadership Initiative and a member of the Innu nation, told AFP.

“Caribou is what has really enabled us to survive, and to be who we are.”

Today the species, which is known as reindeer outside North America, is endangered across much of Canada as a result of widespread habitat destruction from logging, roadbuilding, construction of transmission lines and more.

But an innovative pilot program led by Indigenous people might show a path to wider recovery.

As delegates from across the world meet in COP15 in Montreal this week to hammer out a new deal for nature, the case highlights the value of Indigenous stewardship in protecting ecosystems that benefit all humanity.

As detailed in a March 2022 paper in “Ecological Applications,” the Klinse-Za subpopulation of caribou in British Columbia were once so plentiful they were described as “bugs on the landscape” but by 2013 had dwindled to just 38 animals.

That year, the First Nations of West Moberly and Saulteau devised a plan that saw them first cull wolves to reduce caribou predation, then added a maternal pen-fenced enclosures for females to birth and raise calves.

Their efforts saw the number of caribou of the herd triple in the area from 38 to 114. 

With the threat of localized extinction averted, the two nations signed an agreement in 2020 with the governments of British Columbia and Canada to secure 7,900 square kilometers (3,050 square miles) of land for caribou, hoping to eventually revive their traditional hunt.

“When you protect caribou, a lot of animals come along for the ride,” Ronnie Drever, a conservation scientist with nonprofit Nature United, told AFP.

“Good caribou conservation is also climate action,” he added, because the old-growth forests and peatlands they live on are invaluable carbon sinks.

– Science catching up – 

Globally, Indigenous people own or use a quarter of the world’s land, but safeguard 80 percent of remaining biodiversity — testament to centuries of sustainable practices that modern science is only just starting to understand.

A paper published this October in Current Biology looked at tropical forests across Asia, Africa, and the Americas, finding those located on protected Indigenous lands were the “healthiest, highest functioning, most diverse, and most ecologically resilient.”

A 2019 paper in Environmental Science & Policy analyzed more than 15,000 areas in Canada, Brazil and Australia.

It found that the total number of birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles were highest on lands managed or co-managed by Indigenous communities.

Protected areas like parks and wildlife reserves had the second highest levels of biodiversity, followed by areas that were not protected.

“This suggests that it’s the land-management practices of many Indigenous communities that are keeping species numbers high,” said lead author Richard Schuster, in a statement.

– Partnership crucial – 

Jennifer Tauli Corpuz, of the Kankana-ey Igorot people of the Philippines, who is a lawyer and biodiversity expert with the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity, stressed that collaborative efforts were crucial.

“Conservation does not have a good history with Indigenous peoples, it’s resulted in displacement,” she told AFP. 

National parks established on Euro-American notions that the land was once pristine “wilderness” typically prohibited Indigenous peoples from exercising their customary land uses, and forcibly displaced many from their ancestral homes.

Instead, she says, the rights of Indigenous groups need to be woven into the fabric of the new global biodiversity deal — including a cornerstone pledge to protect 30 percent of land and water by 2030.

Indigenous groups say they should have greater autonomy to take the lead as managers of protected areas, arguing their successful record demonstrates they can pursue economic activity sustainably.

“The current biodiversity crisis is often depicted as a struggle to preserve untouched habitats,” said a study published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which found that areas untouched by people were almost as rare 12,000 years ago as they are today.

“Current biodiversity losses are caused not by human conversion or degradation of untouched ecosystems, but rather by the appropriation, colonization, and intensification of use in lands inhabited and used by prior societies,” it concluded.

Delegates attend the COP15 negotiations on nature and biodiversity in Montreal, December 12 2022

The world had just eight days to seal a historic deal to stem the destruction of nature. 

But half way into the COP15 biodiversity talks, there has been no major progress either on increased funding for conservation in developing nations, or towards a pledge to protect 30 percent of the world’s land and seas.

The general view is that negotiations will get tough on Thursday, when the environment ministers of the 196 members of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) will take over from their delegates in Montreal. 

But the chances of ending on December 19 with agreement for an ambitious “peace pact with nature” — 20 objectives to stop the destruction of water, forests and living things by the end of the decade — will be undermined if the draft agreement remains as it is now.

Despite long hours put in by the 5,000 delegates since December 3, the text is far behind schedule, weighed down by dozens of points still under negotiation.

Only five of the 22 or 23 objectives envisaged have been settled. 

“Governments are making progress, but not fast enough to prepare a clean text for the arrival of ministers,” said Alfred DeGemmis, a senior official at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). 

Time is running out: a million species are threatened with extinction, a third of all land is severely degraded, soil fertility and water purity are compromised, and oceans are threatened by pollution and climate change. 

“We are still a long way away. But we are seeing flashes of light at the end of the tunnel,” said Marco Lambertini, the head of WWF international, adding that he had observed a “much more constructive engagement” since the start of the talks.

“We see a market emerging where the countries of the South say that they will not agree to commit to strong ambitions without seeing corresponding funding,” said Sebastien Treyer, director general of the think tank IDDRI.

Brazil on Saturday reiterated, on behalf of the African continent and 14 other countries including India and Indonesia, their demand for “financial subsidies of at least $100 billion per year or one percent of world GDP until 2030.”

– Global Biodiversity Fund –

That increase is deemed unrealistic by rich countries, whose aid earmarked for biodiversity in 2020 amounted to $10 billion. 

“If today we are at 10 billion, talking about 100 billion all of a sudden paralyzes the conversation,” warned the French envoy to COP15, Sylvie Lemmet, since rich countries have kept to their commitment to double aid development over the previous decade. 

The European Union also opposes creation of a new global biodiversity fund, something being called for by several countries at the COP16 in 2024 in Turkey.

That is a solution which the North deems ineffective, preferring instead to push for a reform of global finance, both in the public and private sectors, and a better use of national resources. 

They have also argued for the reduction of negative subsidies that adversely affect nature, such as fertilizers and pesticides used in agriculture, something which has been the subject of lively debates with farming powerhouses Brazil and Argentina. 

While not part of the negotiation, the United States — which has not ratified the Convention on Biodiversity — plays a crucial role in the financial equation likely to unblock any agreement.

“We did replenish the Global Environment Facility this year, the US contribution was bigger than it had ever been,” US environment ambassador Monica Medina said Monday.

Looking to remove obstacles, all eyes have turned toward China, which is president of the COP15, but which is considered to be too “wait-and-see” or “passive” by many here.

That criticism was brushed aside by the French ambassador, who lauded a “very involved Chinese presidency” that is “listening to the parties” and which “commits bilaterally.” 

On Monday, negotiators resumed talks behind closed doors. 

“The progress is encouraging”,” CBD chief Elizabeth Mrema said, but warned that negotiations remain “a bumpy road.”

The US National Ignition Facility (NIF), the interior of which is seen here in July 2008, has reportedly achieved a fusion reaction that produces more energy than was put into it

The US Department of Energy’s nuclear fusion laboratory says there will be a “major scientific breakthrough” announced Tuesday, as media report that scientists have finally surpassed an important milestone for the technology: getting more energy out than was put in.

The announcement has the scientific community abuzz, as nuclear fusion is considered by some to be the energy of the future, particularly as it produces no greenhouse gases, leaves little waste and has no risk of nuclear accidents.

Here is an update on how nuclear fusion works, what projects are underway and estimates on when they could be completed:

– Energy of the stars –

Fusion differs from fission, the technique currently used in nuclear power plants, by fusing two atomic nuclei instead of splitting one.

In fact, fusion is the process that powers the sun.

Two light hydrogen atoms, when they collide at very high speeds, fuse together into one heavier element, helium, releasing energy in the process.

“Controlling the power source of the stars is the greatest technological challenge humanity has ever undertaken,” tweeted physicist Arthur Turrell, author of “The Star Builders.”

– Two distinct methods –

Producing fusion reactions on Earth is only possible by heating matter to extremely high temperatures — over 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million Fahrenheit).

“So we have to find ways to isolate this extremely hot matter from anything that could cool it down. This is the problem of containment,” Erik Lefebvre, project leader at the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), told AFP.

One method is to “confine” the fusion reaction with magnets.

In a huge donut-shaped reactor, light hydrogen isotopes (deuterium and tritium) are heated until they reach the state of plasma, a very low density gas.

Magnets confine the swirling plasma gas, preventing it from coming into contact with the chamber’s walls, while the atoms collide and begin fusing.

This is the type of reactor used in the major international project known as ITER, currently under construction in France, as well as the Joint European Torus (JET) near Oxford, England.

A second method is inertial confinement fusion, in which high energy lasers are directed simultaneously into a thimble-sized cylinder containing the hydrogen.

This technique is used by the French Megajoule Laser (LMJ), and the world’s most advanced fusion project, the California-based National Ignition Facility (NIF).

Inertial confinement is used to demonstrate the physical principles of fusion, while magnetic confinement seeks to mimic future industrial-scale reactors.

– State of research –

For decades, scientists have attempted to achieve what is known as “net energy gain” — that is, more energy is produced by the fusion reaction than it takes to activate it.

According to reports by the Financial Times and the Washington Post, that will be the “major scientific breakthrough” announced Tuesday by the NIF.

But Lefebvre cautions that “the road is still very long” before “a demonstration on an industrial scale that is commercially viable.”

He says such a project will take another 20 or 30 years to be completed. 

To get there, researchers must first increase the efficiency of the lasers and reproduce the experiment more frequently. 

– Fusion’s benefits –

The NIF’s reported success has sparked great excitement in the scientific community, which is hoping the technology could be a game-changer for global energy production.

Unlike fission, fusion carries no risk of nuclear accidents.

“If a few lasers are missing and they don’t go off at the right time, or if the confinement of the plasma by the magnetic field… is not perfect,” the reaction will simply stop, Lefebvre says.

Nuclear fusion also produces much less radioactive waste than current power plants, and above all, emits no greenhouse gases.

“It is an energy source that is totally carbon-free, generates very little waste, and is intrinsically extremely safe,” according to Lefebvre, who says fusion could be “a future solution for the world’s energy problems.”

Regardless of Tuesday’s announcement, however, the technology is still a far way off from producing energy on an industrial scale, and cannot therefore be relied on as an immediate solution to the climate crisis.

France wants its caviar to become the gold standard

At the fish farm near Bordeaux, Christophe Baudon is running an ultrasound device over the belly of a large sturgeon to check its eggs.

“Caviar!” he shouts as the monitor shows the right sparkle around each little round ball.

“Over-mature!” comes the next shout, indicating the fish’s pregnancy cycle has gone too far and the eggs have softened — losing the crucial crunch. It will go back in the lake to await another cycle in two years.

For the company, Sturia, it’s an incredibly laborious process — they ultrasound some 20,000 fish a year for a total of 18 tonnes of caviar — but climate change has made it vital.

Many fish are coming out “over-mature”, in part because warmer waters have accelerated the pregnancy cycle.

For the guys standing in the water, scooping up the huge fish for inspection, the winter days when 10 centimetres (four inches) of ice coated the lakes are not entirely missed. 

But the change is still shocking.

“It’s been 10 years since we’ve seen any ice on these lakes,” said Baudon.

One in 20 of the fish died in 2021 when water temperatures hit 30 degrees, five degrees above a sturgeon’s comfort zone. 

“You might not know each one by name, but it’s never nice to pull out a dead fish — and of course the cost for the group is enormous,” said Sturia boss Laurent Dulau. 

– Extinction threat –

Fished to the brink of extinction in the wild — including the once-rich Russian and Iranian waters of the Caspian Sea — sturgeon now exist almost exclusively in farms, most of them in China.

Sturgeon were fished in France’s Gironde river for centuries, but their eggs were given to children, old people and pigs until Russian nobles fleeing the Communist revolution a century ago showed locals their potential.

It became a delicacy in Paris after Armenian emigrants Melkoum and Mouchegh Petrossian convinced the Ritz Hotel in Paris to serve caviar in the 1920s. 

Farming only started in France in the 1990s, and since it takes up to a decade to raise a sturgeon, progress is painstaking. 

Unable to compete with China on quantity, French producers focus on sustainable and healthy farming. 

The ultrasound avoids unnecessary killing and Sturia uses the meat for rillettes pate, the skin for leather and the bladder for a specialist glue favoured by violin-makers.

– ‘Produce better’ –

Dulau said the focus on traceability and quality is rebuilding caviar’s image after the over-fishing crisis. 

“The idea is to produce less, but produce better,” he said. “People will eat less because it’s a lot more expensive, but it will be so good that they’ll be satisfied.”

But Michel Berthommier, of nearby Caviar Perlita, is frustrated that “nine out of 10, maybe 10 out of 10” French restaurants still source from China. He blamed middle-men for preferring the mark-up on foreign eggs.

“It’s bizarre at a time when restaurants are always saying they source their products locally. We sell more to Singapore than restaurants 10 kilometres down the road,” he said. 

But he said the transparency of French production will win over buyers. 

“There used to be a mystery around how these fish were raised and harvested. We have opened our books on how our fish live, how they are fed and selected. 

“We can’t be number one in production, but we can lead the way in creativity and science.”