Saving Saiga Antelope

Saving Saiga Antelope

By Mike DiGirolamo / Mongabay

In 2006, a group of international NGOs and the government of Kazakhstan came together to save the dwindling population of saiga antelope of the enormous Golden Steppe, a grassland ecosystem three times the size of the United Kingdom. Since that moment, the Altyn Dala Conservation Initiative has successfully rehabilitated the saiga (Saiga tatarica) from a population of roughly 30,000 to nearly 4 million.

For this monumental effort, it was awarded the 2024 Earthshot Prize in the “protect & restore nature” category. This prize, launched by David Attenborough and Britain’s Prince William, also provides a grant of 1 million pounds ($1.32 million) to each winner.

Joining the podcast to discuss this achievement is Vera Voronova, executive director of the Association for the Conservation Biodiversity of Kazakhstan, an NGO involved in the initiative. Voronova details the cultural and technological methods used to bring the saiga back from the brink and to help restore this massive grassland ecosystem, and shares lessons learned along the way, plus hopes and plans for the future.

“When [the] initiative [was] started, the saiga would be always like the flagship and the priority species because we did have this emergency case to recover saiga,” she says. “But the whole … picture of restoring the [steppe] was always behind this, and will be now a long term strategy.”

Voronova emphasizes the importance of local community participation in this effort, pointing to the role of local landowners residing in ecological corridors between protected areas, and education programs on the value of Kazakh wildlife for children especially.

“One of the recent book[s] that we published was about specifically the steppe animals, because as a child, I grew up knowing a lot about African animals and very little about what kind of animals live in my country,” Voronova says. “And this is exactly [what] we want to change, [the] attitude of the people, to know more about nature they live close to.”

1,500 Wild Saiga Donated to China

By Shanna Hanbury / Mongabay

Saiga antelopes, among the most ancient living mammals, are set to be reintroduced to China 75 years after they went extinct in the region, thanks to a donation of 1,500 wild individuals from Kazakhstan.

The transfer, announced during a meeting between the countries’ presidents on June 17, is projected to begin in 2026. Its aim is to restore part of the antelope’s historic range, which stretched from Kazakhstan into northwest China until the 1950s.

The donation “is a significant conservation-driven move aimed at restoring the saiga population in China and promoting international collaboration on the conservation of transboundary species,” conservation biologist Zhigang Jiang, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told Mongabay by email. Jiang co-authored a 2017 study on the saiga antelope’s historic range and its prospects for reintroduction in China.

The saiga (Saiga tatarica), most easily recognized for its large otherworldly nose, lived alongside Ice Age megafauna like woolly mammoths and saber-toothed cats thousands of years ago. Until the 1800s, the species could be found as far as Eastern Europe, but its range has contracted ever since.

Disease and poaching pushed the antelope’s population to a historic low of fewer than 30,000 individuals in 2003, before it bounced back following a recovery effort led by the Kazakh Altyn Dala Conservation Initiative.

As of April, there are now an estimated 4.1 million individuals, with more than 98% concentrated in Kazakhstan’s Golden Steppe.

China has tried to reintroduce the saiga into the wild since the 1980s, but low numbers and a limited gene pool from its captive population have largely frustrated previous efforts. A safe translocation from other populations has been considered for decades as a possible but challenging fix.

“For the reintroduction to succeed, it’s crucial to identify habitats for saiga in China,” Jiang said. “Open steppe and semi-desert ecosystems, with low human disturbance and migratory space, will support large herds of saigas.”

Wild saigas were last recorded in China in the Junggar Basin of China’s northwestern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, which borders Kazakhstan. But according to Jiang, other sites could also potentially host saiga herds, including areas bordering Xinjiang such as the Qaidam Basin of Qinghai province, northern Gansu, western Inner Mongolia and Ningxia.

“I am expecting the reintroduced saiga from Kazakhstan to return to its historical range in China,” Jiang added.

Banner image: A saiga antelope at the Stepnoi Sanctuary in Russia. Image by Andrey Giljov via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Do Nukes Cause Climate Change?

Do Nukes Cause Climate Change?

Editor’s note: When you invent nuclear energy (nukes) you invent radioactive waste

Some proponents of nuclear energy refuse to give up on the technology. They blame the decline in nuclear energy and the high costs and long construction periods on the characteristics of older reactor designs, arguing that alternative designs will rescue nuclear energy from its woes. In recent years, the alternatives most often advertised are small modular (nuclear) reactors—SMRs for short. These are designed to generate between 10 and 300 megawatts of power, much less than the 1,000–1,600 megawatts that reactors being built today are designed to produce.

For over a decade now, many of my colleagues and I have consistently explained why these reactors would not be commercially viable and why they would never resolve the undesirable consequences of building nuclear power plants. I first started examining small modular reactors when I worked at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security. Our group largely comprised physicists, and we used a mixture of technical assessments, mathematical techniques, and social-science-based methods to study various problems associated with these technologies. My colleague Alex Glaser, for example, used neutronics models to calculate how much uranium would be required as fuel for SMRs, which we then used to estimate the increased risk of nuclear weapons proliferation from deploying such reactors. Zia Mian, originally from Pakistan, and I showed why the technical characteristics of SMRs would not allow for simultaneously solving the four key problems identified with nuclear power: its high costs, its accident risks, the difficulty of dealing with radioactive waste, and its linkage with the capacity to make nuclear weapons. My colleagues and I also undertook case studies on Jordan, Ghana, and Indonesia, three countries advertised by SMR vendors as potential customers, and showed that despite much talk, none of them were investing in SMRs, because of various country-specific reasons such as public opposition and institutional interests.


 

By George Tzindaro

The mainstream view of the current climate crisis is that it is mainly caused by greenhouse effect from gases released by burning of fuels such as coal and oil. But there is another theory of man-made climate disaster that is hardly ever mentioned in the mainstream media. That is the theory that much of the anthropogenic change in climate in the last 60 years or so is due to the introduction of nuclear power.

Between 1949, when the atomic bomb testing program began, and 1963, when the atmospheric test ban treaty went into effect, over 1,000 atomic bombs (nukes) were set off above ground. Since 1963, many more have been set off underground, and ever single one of them has resulted in leakage of radioactive gases into the atmosphere. That’s right! They have never yet managed to set off an underground test that did not leak.

Nuclear explosions are one source, but only one, of a radioactive gas called Krypton 85, which is not found naturally in the atmosphere except in insignificant trace amounts. There is now several million times as much in the atmosphere as in 1945 at the start of the Atomic Age.

Kr85 has a half-life of only around 12 years, so much of it would be gone now if bomb tests were the only source for it. But it is also produced by the recycling of nuclear reactor fuel rods. During the recycling process 100% of the Kr85 is released into the atmosphere with no attempt at containment because since it goes up into the upper atmosphere where it cannot contact any living thing, it is considered biologically harmless.

Kr85 is a radioactive gas. Radioactive gases consist of charged particles. When charged particles enter the field of a magnet, they migrate toward the poles of the magnet. The earth is a giant bar magnet. The charged particles of the radioactive gas, Kr85, end up at the North and South Poles.

Tropical storms like hurricanes form along the equator. Such storms are highly-charged systems. How far they travel from their birthplace along the equator toward the pole is determined by how strongly charged they are and how strongly charged the pole of the earth is that attracts them.

As charge from Kr85 builds up at the poles, more and more tropical storms are attracted farther and farther toward the poles, bringing tropical heat with them, causing warming of the temperate and polar regions. At the same time, the temperate zones experience more frequent and more severe tropical-type storms. The storm surges from these storms send high water marks higher, eroding coastlines and giving the impression of rising sea levels.

The build-up of radioactive gas at high altitude in the polar regions interacts with the influx from space that enters the earth at the poles and is known as the Wilson Current. This energetic stream then flows through the crust of the earth in huge surges, and is discharged back into space in the form of upward-striking lightning bolts as a part of the nearly constant belt of thunderstorm activity that circles the earth at the equator. The whole process is known as the Wilson Circuit, and it is the balance of inflow from space at the poles and discharge into space as lightning that maintains the electrostatic balance of the earth.

The ionization of the upper atmosphere at the polar regions, making the atmosphere more conductive, bleeds off a portion of the inflowing Wilson Current and the result is less lightning on a global basis. According to carefully-maintained insurance company statistics, the number of claims for lightning-related damage was steady from the 1830s until about 1950 and has since declined by about 35%, indicating a drastic decrease in lightning all over the earth.

Since lightning is the most important mechanism in nature by which atmospheric nitrogen is “fixed” into nitrogen compounds plants can utilize, and some species of plants are more dependent on lightning for their nitrogen needs than others, this would have a transformative effect on the composition of ecosystems, leading to a decrease in biodiversity as the most lightning-dependent species decline and other species, less dependent on lightning-produced nitrogen, succeed them in the ecosystem.

This subtle effect, changing the ratio of one plant species to another, is not likely to be noticed, and if noticed, is not likely to be ascribed to a cause so remote as a build-up of radioactive gas at the North or South Poles from nuclear plants scattered all over the industrialized regions of the world. But that is a perfect example of how closely connected and interdependent the natural world really is. And this effect is one of the most important consequences of the development of nuclear technology.

These are only some of the effects of nuclear power that are seldom if ever addressed by the mainstream anti-nuclear movement, and which MUST be addressed if the full costs of the nuclear age are to be understood.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Deep Green Resistance, the News Service or its staff.

 

Photo by https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NTS_-_Low-level_radioactive_waste_storage_pit.jpg

Twin Ship Disasters In India

Twin Ship Disasters In India

Editor’s note: Result of deeper structural failures

Speaking at a media briefing to raise awareness on the importance of accountability when such maritime disasters occur, Anita Perera, Campaigner for Greenpeace South Asia, said that when a team visited Mannar on June 19, they noticed a significant number of plastic pellets even after one round of cleanup operations. “The Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) is responsible for cleaning up the oil spill, but so far, they haven’t communicated their response to expedite the cleaning of nurdles or the oil spill. This isn’t an isolated incident but a result of deeper structural failures in how we are governing our oceans and environmental safety. These are critical ecosystems, and there are people(and all of the other species) whose daily livelihoods would be affected as a result of such disasters. We need to hold these companies accountable for such incidents,” she underscored.


By Malaka Rodrigo / Mongabay

COLOMBO — Sri Lanka is once again facing a significant marine environmental crisis, as tiny plastic pellets, commonly known as nurdles, have begun washing ashore along the island’s northern coastline. This time, the pollution is linked to the sinking of the Liberia-flagged container ship MSC ELSA 3 off of Kerala, India. The unfolding incident has triggered fears of a repeat of the X-Press Pearl disaster in 2021, the worst maritime disaster to have occurred in Sri Lanka, significantly impacting marine ecosystems and coastal communities.

According to the Indian Coast Guard, the MSC ELSA 3, carrying 640 containers including hazardous cargo, sank on May 25, roughly 38 nautical miles off the Kerala coast. The cause was reportedly a failure of its ballast system. Indian authorities confirmed the vessel was loaded with an estimated 85 metric tons of diesel and 367 metric tons of furnace oil, in addition to at least 13 containers of dangerous substances such as calcium carbide. All 24 crew members were safely rescued by Indian Coast Guard and Navy teams.

While Indian authorities were able to initially contain an oil spill, the environmental fallout soon escalated. Plastic nurdles released from sunken containers began appearing on beaches in southern India, and by June 11, ocean currents driven by strong gusts of southwest monsoon winds carried them toward Sri Lanka’s northern shores, raising serious concerns among marine biologists and local communities.

Plastic nurdles washed ashore on Sri Lanka’s northern coast. Image courtesy of the Marine Environmental Protection Agency (MEPA).

Fresh environmental fallout

“We’ve begun cleaning efforts and are evaluating coordinated response actions,” said Padma Abeykoon, additional secretary at the Ministry of Environment. With strong monsoon winds forecast for the coming days, she noted that ocean currents may bring even more pollutants ashore.

According to Abeykoon, Indian authorities had alerted Sri Lanka about the possibility of debris from the sunken vessel drifting toward its shores, depending on ocean current patterns. The plastic pellets first arrived on the northern islands and reached the Mannar coast within a day, continuously washing up along Sri Lanka’s southern-facing beaches.

One of the earliest reports from Sri Lanka came from Lahiru Walpita, a birdwatcher in Mannar, who observed the nurdles during his routine early morning seabird monitoring. “On June 12, I noticed strange white pebbles scattered across the Mannar beach. A closer look revealed they were plastic nurdles, something I sadly recognize from the X-Press Pearl spill,” Walpita said.

Walpita initially assumed the rough seas had opened up a remnant of X-Press Pearl, but as he discovered 20 25-kilogram (55-pound) bags of nurdles strewn across a 2-kilometer (1.2-mile) stretch of beach in Mannar, he realized something was wrong. Out of these, only two bags were damaged, and others were in perfect shape, Walpita told Mongabay.

Walpita also observed crows and an egret investigating the pellets but hadn’t consumed them. “However, seabirds, like little terns and bridled terns, feed off the ocean surface while in flight and I fear they could mistake these pellets for food as they have little time to observe,” he warned. The breeding season for these species, especially on tiny islands nearby in Adam’s Bridge Marine National Park, runs from May to September, and Walpita fears the nurdle invasion could disrupt their reproductive cycles.

The process of cleaning nurdles along Sri Lanka’s northern coastal area commenced soon after the marine disaster but the strong monsoonal winds are expected to push more nurdles toward the Indian Ocean island’s beaches. Image courtesy of the Marine Environment Protection Agency (MEPA).

Temporary fishing ban

Meanwhile, Indian authorities imposed a temporary fishing ban within 20 nautical miles of the MSC ELSA 3 wreck to mitigate risks from hazardous cargo. One of the most concerning chemicals on board was calcium carbide, which reacts violently with water to release acetylene — a highly flammable and potentially explosive gas — and produces caustic substances harmful to marine life.

“The ship sank about 300 nautical miles from Sri Lanka, so we don’t anticipate immediate chemical contamination threat for Sri Lankan waters,” said Jagath Gunasekara, general manager of Sri Lanka’s Marine Environment Protection Authority. “However, we are conducting continuous water quality tests and have activated the National Oil and Hazardous Noxious Substances Spill Contingency Plan to remain prepared,” he added.

Adding to the urgency, Indian authorities are battling another maritime emergency just two weeks after the ELSA 3 incident. On June 7, the Singapore-flagged container ship MV Wan Hai 503 caught fire following multiple explosions, approximately 88 nautical miles off the coast of Kerala. The vessel, carrying more than 2,128 metric tons of fuel and numerous containers with hazardous materials, poses a potentially greater environmental risk than ELSA 3. As of June 18, Indian Coast Guard reports indicated that the fire was under control. The drifting vessel has since been secured and successfully towed away.

The Singapore-flagged MV Wan Hai 503, the second ship that caught fire off the south Indian coast of Kerala, occurred just 15 days after the sinking of the MSC ELSA 3. Image courtesy of the Indian Coast Guard via X.

Nurdle spill

The nurdles are highly persistent in the marine environment, as they can absorb toxic chemicals and enter the food chain, posing a risk to marine life and potentially humans as research on the aftermath of X-Press Pearl disaster proves.

The parallels of these disasters with the X-Press Pearl disaster are striking. The 2021 incident released billions of nurdles into the Indian Ocean, contaminating beaches for months, killing marine organisms and disrupting fishing livelihoods. One silver lining is that a lot of research was conducted following the X-Press Pearl disaster, and this can be informative in tackling the ongoing episode of the nurdle pollution, Gunasekara said.

Even today, Sri Lanka is fighting for adequate compensation, with legal proceedings dragging on in international courts. The echoes of that catastrophe now serve as a grim warning: Unless stronger regional protocols and maritime safety measures are enforced, the region could be doomed to repeat history.

Malaka Rodrigo is a naturalist with an IT background that took environmental journalism in 2007 to follow his belief ‘conservation through awareness’. He won many awards for his work and writes extensively on biodiversity, wildlife, oceans, water, climate change and environmental issues.

 

Banner image: The Liberia-flagged vessel MSC ELSA 3, carrying 640 containers including 13 with hazardous cargo, together with almost 85 metric tons of diesel and 367 metric tons of furnace oil sank on 25 May, off of Kerala in southern India. Image courtesy of the Indian Coast Guard.

Beyond Reforestation, Let’s Try Proforestation

Beyond Reforestation, Let’s Try Proforestation

Editor’s note: The International Day for Biodiversity was celebrated on May 22, which commemorates the adoption of the Convention on Biological Diversity, a global treaty. What lessons have we learned from undoing past harms and conserving biodiversity for our planet’s future?

Global efforts to restore forests are gathering pace, driven by promises of combating climate change, conserving biodiversity and improving livelihoods. Yet a recent review published in Nature Reviews Biodiversity warns that the biodiversity gains from these initiatives are often overstated — and sometimes absent altogether.

Restoration has typically prioritized utilitarian goals such as timber production, carbon sequestration or erosion control. This bias is reflected in the widespread use of monoculture plantations or low-diversity agroforests. Nearly half the forest commitments in the Bonn Challenge to restore degraded and deforested landscapes consist of commercial plantations of exotic species, a trend that risks undermining biodiversity rather than enhancing it.

Scientific evidence shows that restoring biodiversity requires more than planting trees. Methods like natural regeneration — allowing forests to recover on their own — can often yield superior biodiversity outcomes, though they face social and economic barriers. By contrast, planting a few fast-growing species may sequester carbon quickly but offers little for threatened plants and animals.

Biodiversity recovery is influenced by many factors: the intensity of prior land use, the surrounding landscape and the species chosen for restoration. Recovery is slow, often measured in decades, and tends to lag for rare and specialist species. Alarmingly, most projects stop monitoring after just a few years, long before ecosystems stabilize.

Scientists underline that while proforestation, reforestation and forest rewilding can contribute to curbing climate change and biodiversity loss, they have their limits and must be combined with deep carbon emissions cuts and conservation of existing forests and wilderness.


By Sruthi Gurudev / Mongabay

Edward Faison, an ecologist at the Highstead Foundation, stood quietly in a patch of forest that stretched for miles in all directions. Above him, the needles from white pine trees swayed — common in the Adirondack Forest Preserve in northern New York state. He stepped past downed wood and big, broken snags, observing how the forest functioned with minimal interference.

“These forests have been essentially unmanaged for over 125 years. To see them continue to thrive and accumulate carbon, recover from natural disturbances and develop complexity without our help reveal just how resilient these systems are,” Faison says.

Protected from logging in 1894 by an act of the New York Legislature, the Adirondack Forest Preserve (AFP) is a model of natural forest growth, or letting forests simply “get on with it.” The largest trees, white pines (Pinus strobus), are more than a century old and stretch more than 150 feet tall and are 4-5 feet in diameter.

The AFP, the largest wilderness preserve in the eastern United States, is a prime example of what researchers have come to call “proforestation.” Coined in 2019 by Tufts University professor William Moomaw and Trinity College professor of applied science Susan Masino, the term proforestation describes the process of allowing existing forests to continue growing without human interference until they achieve their full ecological potential for carbon sequestration and biological diversity.

Proforestation is considered a natural climate solution, i.e., a strategy to steward the Earth’s vegetation to increase the removal of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere. According to Faison, a forest naturally develops greater complexity over time, with a diversity of tree sizes and heights as well as large standing dead trees and downed logs. This complexity provides habitat for various animals, plants and fungi, which make the forest more resilient to disturbances associated with climate change.

Proforestation is distinct from reforestation, which can involve planting new trees in deforested areas to restore them (or allowing deforested areas to naturally regenerate). It is also different from afforestation, which is the process of planting new forests in previously unforested areas. Proforestation’s merit lies in inaction: simply leaving old forests undisturbed, allowing for continuous growth to maximize carbon accumulation over time. As forests mature and trees grow larger, they sequester greater amounts of carbon.

“The largest 1% diameter trees in a mature multiage forest hold half the carbon,” according to Moomaw. “It’s the existing forests that we have that are doing the work.” Existing forests remove almost 30% of CO2 from the atmosphere that humans put in every year from burning fossil fuels.

Older is better

In Mohawk Trail State Forest in Massachusetts, Moomaw studied the tallest grove of white pine trees in New England, aged between 150 and 200 years, observing how the trees grew. When comparing them with younger trees of the same type growing under similar conditions, he found that “the amount of carbon added by these trees between 100 and 150 years of age is greater than the amount added between zero and 50.”

In addition to carbon storage capabilities, old forests are pivotal in controlling regional and global water cycles through a process called evapotranspiration, by which water is transferred from the land to the atmosphere. Due to deeper and more complex root systems as well as larger canopies and leaves, old forests capture more water and release it as vapor into the atmosphere.

“Old forests have the genetic competence to do this work,” Masino says. “It’s not done by meadows. It’s not done by grassy areas. It’s not done as effectively by forests that have been cut or planted. It’s these ancient systems that have the complexity to bring water to themselves. And in doing that, they’re bringing it to the rest of the landscape. Once you start cutting the landscape, you’re drying it out.”

Masino, who also has a joint appointment in neuroscience and psychology at Trinity College, emphasizes the importance of designating natural areas appropriately and allowing more room for proforestation.

“It’s urgent to decide where we intend to prioritize natural processes, where we are doing research, and what areas we are dedicating for our resource needs,” she says. “Nature needs room to breathe. We can’t leave everything open to manipulation and extraction. It’s deadly.”

She says that planting trees on streets, on campuses or in parks is good for temperature regulation, flood protection and creating habitat, but these trees don’t grow up in a web of life. Planting trees in a forest, too, can risk disrupting the dynamic complexity of evolved and evolving genetic knowledge.

Wildlife dependent on old growth

Over on the West Coast, University of Oregon professor emeritus Beverly Law has studied forests for decades. She describes watching three logging trucks, each with a giant log from an old, single tree strapped to the back, passing in a procession while waiting at an intersection on her bike, a frequent occurrence on her way to work at the university in the late 1980s.

“There are plant and animal species that rely on these old forests for their survival. You take away the forest, and they’re gone,” Law says. “It’s important to have diverse genetics in the forest. Some of them will be more genetically able to withstand climate change than others. You don’t know which ones they will be. That is why genetic diversity within species is important.”

Mature forests are crucial to the survival of certain critically endangered animals that rely on the connected canopies or the soil-rich forest floor. Preserving the biodiversity of the Pacific Northwest, which hosts forests more than a thousand years old, is especially dire. According to a 2022 paper published in Environmental Chemistry Letters, old growth forests retain a number of species from both the top and bottom of the food chain, such as the Olympic salamander (Rhyacotriton olympicus), the Del Norte salamander (Plethodon elongatus) and the two species of tailed frog (Ascaphidae). Losing them forever could kick off a cascade effect and result in severe consequences for the environment.

The spotted owl (Strix occidentalis), too, depends on old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest, requiring the specific environment for roosting and nesting, and remains a central figure in forest management debates.

Such hulking ancient trees are the eyes of the woods, having stood through changing years and the changing climate.

“Ten to 12% of old-growth forests are left [in the US], and it’s insane that people are still trying to cut them down,” Law says. “They are the only survivors of American handiwork. Is it man’s dominion over the forest? We should have reverence, considering they’re all that’s left.”

Banner image: Pine cone of a white pine (Pinus strobus). Image by Denis Lifanov via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).

Laundering Carbon and the New Scramble for Africa

Laundering Carbon and the New Scramble for Africa

Editor’s note: “What if you could save the climate while continuing to pollute it?” If that sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is. But corporations across the globe are increasingly trying to answer this question with the same shady financial tool: carbon offsets.

To understand what’s going on with the carbon market, it’s important to know the terms(term-oil), vocabulary and organizations involved. For starters, a carbon credit is different from a carbon offset. A carbon credit represents a metric ton of carbon dioxide or the equivalent of other climate-warming gases kept out of the atmosphere. If a company (or individual, or country) uses that credit to compensate for its emissions — perhaps on the way to a claim of reduced net emissions — it becomes an offset.

“We need to pay countries to protect their forests, and that’s just not happening,” Mulder said. But the problem with carbon credits is they are likely to be used as offsets “to enable or justify ongoing emissions,” she said. “The best-case scenario is still not very good. And the worst-case scenario is pretty catastrophic, because we’re just locking in business as usual.”

“Offsetting via carbon credits is another way to balance the carbon checkbook. The idea first took hold in the 1980s and picked up in the following decade. Industrialized countries that ratified the 1997 Kyoto Protocol became part of a mandatory compliance market, in which a cap-and-trade system limited the quantity of greenhouse gases those countries could emit. An industrialized country emitting over its cap could purchase credits from another industrialized country that emitted less than its quota. Emitters could also offset CO2 by investing in projects that reduced emissions in developing countries, which were not required to have targets.”

Yet, the truth is far darker. Far from being an effective tool, carbon credits have become a convenient smokescreen that allows polluters to continue their damaging practices unchecked. As a result, they’re hastening our descent into environmental and societal breakdown.

The entire framework of carbon credits is based on a single, fatal assumption: that “offsets” can substitute for actual emissions reductions. But instead of cutting emissions, companies and countries are using carbon credits as a cheap alternative to meaningful action. This lack of accountability is pushing us closer to catastrophic climate tipping points, with the far-reaching impacts of climate change and resource depletion threatening the lives of everyone on this planet.

Brazilian prosecutors are calling for the cancellation of the largest carbon credit deal in the Amazon Rainforest, saying it breaks national law and risks harming Indigenous communities.

While marketed as a solution to mitigate climate change, carbon markets have been criticized as a facade for continued extractivism and corporate control of minerals in Africa.

Africa’s vast forests, minerals, and land are increasingly commodified under the guise of carbon offset projects. Global corporations invest in these projects, claiming to “offset” their emissions while continuing business as usual in their countries. This arrangement does little to address emissions at the source and increase exploitation in Africa, where land grabs, displacement, and ecological degradation often accompany carbon offset schemes.

“But beginning in January 2023, The Guardian, together with other news organizations, have published a series of articles that contend the majority of carbon credit sales in their analysis did not lead to the reduction of carbon in the atmosphere. The questions have centered on concepts such as additionality, which refers to whether a credit represents carbon savings over and above what would have happened without the underlying effort, and other methods used to calculate climate benefits.

The series also presented evidence that a Verra-approved conservation project in Peru promoted as a success story for the deforestation it helped to halt resulted in the displacement of local landowners. Corporations like Chevron, the second-largest fossil fuel company in the U.S., purchase carbon credits to bolster their claims of carbon neutrality. But an analysis by the watchdog group Corporate Accountability found that these credits were backed by questionable carbon capture technologies and that Chevron is ignoring the emissions that will result from the burning of the fossil fuels it produces.”

Since 2009, Tesla has had a tidy little side hustle selling the regulatory credits it collects for shifting relatively huge numbers of EVs in markets like China, Europe and California. The company earns the credits selling EVs and then sells them to automakers whose current lineup exceeds emission rules set out in certain territories. This business has proven quite lucrative for Tesla, as Automotive News explains:

The Elon Musk-led manufacturer generated $1.79 billion in regulatory credit revenue last year, an annual filing showed last week. That brought the cumulative total Tesla has raked in since 2009 to almost $9 billion.

“Tesla shouldn’t be considered a car manufacturer: they’re a climate movement profiteer. Most of their profits come from carbon trading. Car companies would run afoul of government regulations and fines for producing high emissions vehicles, but thanks to carbon credits, they can just pay money to companies like Tesla to continue churning out gas guzzlers. In other words, according to Elon Musk’s business model: no gas guzzlers, no Tesla.” – Peter Gelderloos


A LICENSE TO POLLUTE

The carbon offset market is an integral part of efforts to prevent effective climate action

What Are the Rights of Nature?

What Are the Rights of Nature?

Editor’s notes: “A Washington state city has granted part of the Snohomish River watershed legal rights that can be enforced in court. In nearly all cases, state legislatures heavily lobbied by commercial industries have preempted the laws, rendering them unenforceable. But the Everett initiative could be the first to withstand such a challenge. Democrats, typically more open to stronger environmental protections than Republicans, currently control Washington’s Legislature and governorship.”

Efforts to apply the rights of nature in Ecuador have often failed. Legal challenges can become highly politicised and there is little legal infrastructure beyond general constitutional principles.

For example, in a case brought after road builders had dumped material into the Vilcabamba River, plaintiffs claimed to represent nature in court. However, they were not genuinely advocating for the river’s rights – their main concern was protecting their downstream property.

An ecocentric perspective

Ultimately, defending the rights of nature in court will be a struggle if the nature in question – the river, forest or lake – is not represented by someone with an ecocentric perspective. That means prioritising the intrinsic value of nature itself, rather than focusing on how it can serve human interests.

“According to the third Kawa, the people and the river are intrinsically linked, so Te Awa Tupua isn’t merely the river but also includes the surrounding communities — which challenges Western notions of property and human-made law. The relationship between the Iwi and the river goes beyond mere geographical proximity and includes spiritual and affective care for each other.”

Biodiversity is declining at rates unprecedented in human history. This suggests the ways we currently use to manage our natural environment are failing.

One emerging concept focuses on giving legal rights to nature.

Many Indigenous peoples have long emphasised the intrinsic value of nature. In 1972, the late University of Southern California law professor Christopher Stone proposed what then seemed like a whimsical idea: to vest legal rights in natural objects to allow a shift from an anthropocentric to an intrinsic worldview.

“According to United Nations, developing a rights of nature framework in legislation can lead to ecosystem preservation and restoration as well as supporting human rights.”


 

What Are the Rights of Nature?

Here’s what you need to know about one of the fastest-growing environmental and social movements worldwide—to secure legal rights for ecosystems and other parts of the natural world.

April 2, 2025

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

“Rights of nature” is a movement aimed at advancing the understanding that ecosystems, wildlife and the Earth are living beings with inherent rights to exist, evolve and regenerate.

Legal rights are the highest form of protection in most governance systems. In the United States, humans and non-humans have enforceable legal rights, like corporations’ right to freedom of speech.

At the same time, most legal systems treat nature as rightless property that humans can own, use and destroy. That means the law views sentient species like elephants and bald eagles, as well as life-supporting ecosystems like forests and coral reefs, no differently than objects like microwaves or cars.

For the people behind the rights of nature movement, that way of thinking is deeply flawed. It’s also scientifically inaccurate.

Humans are part of nature and depend on ecosystems for survival—from the food we eat to the water we drink and air we breathe. Evolutionary biology shows that humans share a common ancestor with all other life on Earth. Forests, rivers and other biomes provide conditions for human life to thrive. And humans have always shaped the environment and have been shaped by it.

Understanding this interconnectedness is key to understanding that human flourishing ultimately depends on a healthy Earth. Rights of nature activists say most societies have forgotten that basic truth, harming their own wellbeing—and threatening their very survival—as a result.

When did this forgetting happen? Academics have traced the notion that humans are separate from, and superior to, nature back to Renaissance-era thinkers like René Descartes, who compared animals to machines. The idea is also woven into the Bible’s book of Genesis, with God giving man “dominion” over the Earth. Others point to the advent of cities, when masses of people lost regular contact with nature.

Modern legal systems have been shaped by these developments and ideas, thus institutionalizing the belief that nature is an object, or thing, beneath humans.

“Until the rightless thing receives its rights, we cannot see it as anything but a thing for the use of ‘us’—those who are holding rights at the time,” law professor Christopher Stone wrote in the seminal 1972 law review article, “Should Trees Have Standing?” Stone noted that the law has always evolved to extend rights to new groups: moving from white, property-owning men to include women, people of color and children.

In 2006, a rural, conservative Pennsylvania town plagued by industrial pollution enacted the world’s first rights of nature resolution. Since then, scores of countries—including Ecuador, Spain, Bolivia, Colombia, Panama, India, the United States and Uganda—have had court rulings or enacted laws at the national or subnational level recognizing nature’s rights.

The advocates behind these laws argue that if nature’s rights are respected, humans will benefit.

How Do Rights of Nature Laws Differ From Environmental Regulations?

In the course of human history, environmental law is a relatively young field. In the United States, it largely developed in the late 1960s in response to mass pollution wrought by industrialization. Rivers caught fire, pervasive smog blanketed cities and chemicals like DDT were sprayed indiscriminately.

Policymakers enacted legislation like the Clean Water Act and Toxic Substances Control Act to regulate human activity and limit impacts of industry on human health. Those laws did curtail pollution. But rights of nature advocates argue that those conventional laws haven’t stopped the severe environmental problems we face today, like climate change, biodiversity loss and mass pollution.

Advocates say conventional environmental laws have a central flaw: They’re designed to permit pollution. They only control how much.

Rights of nature laws start from an entirely different place. Ecosystems, wildlife and Earth itself are treated as living beings with inherent rights deserving of the highest form of legal protection. The central concern of rights of nature laws is to maintain and preserve the integrity of ecosystems, requiring governments to take a preventative, rather than a reactionary, approach.

Ecuador’s Constitutional Court has said this mandates government officials to respect what is known as the “precautionary principle,” or the idea that, absent adequate scientific evidence, it is better to avoid certain risks that could lead to irreversible damage of ecosystems.

How Do These Laws Work in Practice? 

The laws do not give nature’s rights absolute primacy over all other rights and interests.

No legal right is absolute. A right to free speech ends when that speech is defamatory or incites violence. Judges balance competing rights in the decisions they make every day. Nature’s rights are no different.

Rights of nature jurisprudence is still a young field. Most countries with such laws on the books haven’t had lawsuits attempting to enforce them. It’s also important to note that not all rights of nature laws are the same—there is wide variation in how the laws are written and what rights are recognized.

But Ecuador, which constitutionalized nature’s rights in 2008, has seen dozens of cases. There, Mother Earth, or Pachamama, has a right to “integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions, and evolutionary processes.”

The Ecuadorian Constitution also requires the government to prevent the “extinction of species, the destruction of ecosystems, and the permanent alteration of natural cycles.”

Not all cases have been favorable for ecosystems. Ecuador’s economy is still largely dependent on oil revenues and other extractive industries.

But Ecuadorian courts have ruled in favor of mangroves, cloud forests, rivers, endangered frogs and coastal marine ecosystems, thwarting mining operations, industrial fishing and other nature-damaging activities. In some cases, courts have ordered the government to restore damaged ecosystems. Cases decided in favor of nature usually have a compelling reason for why nature’s rights ought to prevail over competing interests, like a high risk of extinction for certain species.

In the cloud forest case, the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court explained the importance of protecting a sensitive ecosystem from mining impacts, saying: “[T]he risk in this case is not necessarily related to human beings … but to the extinction of species, the destruction of ecosystems or the permanent alteration of natural cycles.”

In deciding these cases, Ecuadorian courts have depended heavily on scientific experts and evidence. Judges have also looked holistically at the health of ecosystems, rather than at piecemeal levels of pollution—a departure from the way courts tend to evaluate conventional environmental laws.

Scientists have come to the forefront of the movement in other ways. In Panama, for instance, marine biologists were instrumental in the passage of that country’s national rights of nature law.

How Are Rights of Nature Laws Enforced?

Trees and wild animals can’t walk into a courtroom and make their case. But rights of nature laws give ecosystems and species the ability to act in their own capacity under the law with help from people, similar to other non-human entities like corporations, business partnerships, ships and nonprofits.

This is done through a longstanding concept called legal personhood. That legal construct is most commonly used to allow businesses to enter into contracts, sue, be sued, own property and, in the case of corporations, limit the liability of its shareholders.

Each of those nonhuman entities is represented by a human guardian. Similar arrangements are used for minors and incapacitated people in court proceedings.

Who Is Behind This Movement? 

Indigenous peoples have been at the forefront of the movement in several ways.

The worldviews of many Indigenous cultures—that humans are part of nature and owe responsibilities to other living beings—are foundational for the movement.

Honoring and preserving those worldviews and related knowledge for centuries has been no small thing. Indigenous communities have faced a long, dark history of colonization and other attempts aimed at eradicating their culture and separating them from their territories. Today, people in many Indigenous communities are still harassed, attacked and sometimes killed for defending water and land.

Indigenous peoples have also been behind many of the laws and court rulings advancing the movement. In New Zealand, Māori people fought for a settlement with the national government, resulting in legal personhood for a river, national park and mountains.

It was Ecuador’s strong Indigenous movements that led to the country becoming the first in the world in 2008 to constitutionally recognize Mother Earth’s rights. Ecuador’s Constitutional Court has also drawn on Indigenous knowledge in deciding rights of nature cases.

Bolivia’s Indigenous movements were behind that country’s 2010 and 2012 laws recognizing the rights of Mother Earth. Enforcement of nature’s rights in Bolivia has proved difficult, however.

Across North America, many Indigenous nations have passed rights of nature laws.

And in Peru, a coalition of Indigenous women won rights for the Marañón River ecosystem, a place the oil industry has heavily polluted for decades. The fight for the Marañón River came at great personal cost for Mariluz Canaquiri Murayari, president of Huaynakana Kamatahuara Kana, and other women in the organization, who were harassed and threatened for their advocacy.

What Are the Criticisms of Rights of Nature Laws?

The biggest opposition to the movement has come from industry groups—developers, the industrial agricultural sector and other polluting industries—and politicians aligned with those interests.

Those opponents argue that giving nature a higher level of protection will impede development and lead to an explosion of litigation. In practice, that hasn’t happened. Barriers to pursuing lawsuits, like the high cost of attorney fees, are substantial.

But the laws do threaten the interests of industries and businesses that have made money off extracting from and monetizing the natural world in unsustainable ways.

Some critics of the movement have questioned whether, if nature has rights, it also has duties: Can a river be sued if it floods and harms humans? Rights of nature advocates respond to this by saying that legal rights, duties and liability are always tailored to the entity they are assigned to.

Corporations, for instance, don’t have a right to family. Nature doesn’t have the capacity to act with intent and therefore should not have legal liability for harm it causes, advocates argue.

Another prevalent charge is that the rights of nature movement is an attempt to force human societies to surrender modern comforts and technology. In practice, though, advocates have sought to rebalance human interests with the health of ecosystems by placing better guardrails around human activity, ensuring the integrity and sustainability of Earth is maintained now and into the future. Advocates argue that humanity isn’t harmed by that but benefits instead.

They also say nothing so quickly forces people to surrender modern comforts as a disaster that destroys their homes and communities, and megadisasters are far more common in a warming world.

Is the Rights of Nature Just a Legal Movement?

No. Beyond the legal realm, the movement has seeped into mainstream culture, religious discourse, the arts, corporate governance, education and cultural revival.

Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’, and papal exhortation Laudate Deum, said humans have a moral duty to protect the Earth.

“For ‘we are part of nature, included in it and thus in constant interaction with it,’” Francis wrote in Laudate Deum.

Ecuadorian activists say the country’s constitutional recognition of nature’s rights has made their country more pluralistic by incorporating the worldviews of Indigenous peoples and is changing the way everyday people think about the Earth, their home.

“We now have a whole generation of young people who have grown up only knowing that nature has rights,” Ecuadorian political scientist Natalia Greene told Inside Climate News. “The law has influenced peoples’ understanding of nature and that is very powerful.”

Learn More

  • Follow our reporting at Inside Climate News. We’re the only newsroom we know of that has a dedicated rights of nature beat. Start here and here.

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Our system of law and government was founded in racial-divisiveness and colonization and is dominated by corporations. The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) fights to build sustainable communities by assisting people to assert their right to a local self-government system and the Rights of Nature. Fight for a more just, Earth-centered tomorrow, today.

The Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature(GARN) is a global network of organizations and individuals committed to the universal adoption and implementation of legal systems that recognize, respect and enforce “Rights of Nature”

 

 

Banner: To protect it from mining and deforestation, Los Cedros cloud forest was awarded the same rights as people.

Andreas Kay / flickr, CC BY-NC-SA