Featured image: Dayak Culture Parade to commemorate Youth Pledge Day in Anjungan village, West Kalimantan, Borneo. Image courtesy of Antonsurya12/Wikimedia Commons.
A new report highlights systemic social and environmental problems that continue to plague the Indonesian palm oil industry and ripple far up the global palm oil supply chain.
The report looked at local and Indigenous communities living within and around 10 plantations and found that their human rights continued to be violated by the operation of these plantations.
The documented violations included seizure of community lands without consent; involuntary displacement; denial of fundamental environmental rights; violence against displaced Indigenous peoples and communities; harassment; criminalization; and even killings of those trying to defend their lands and forests.
The problems have persisted for decades due to ineffective, and sometimes lack of, due diligence by buyers and financiers along the global supply chain, the report says.
JAKARTA — Human rights abuses continue to fester in the Indonesian palm oil industry as global brands and financial institutions and investors turn a blind eye to the problem, a new report says.
The report by a coalition of NGOs documents the human rights and environmental impacts of 10 oil palm plantations in Indonesia that are currently supply to markets in the EU, U.K. and U.S., with consumer goods giants such as Nestlé and PepsiCo rounding out the supply chains.
The report found that local and Indigenous communities living within and around these 10 plantations continue to have their human rights violated by the operations of these plantations, which are the declared holdings of the Astra Agro Lestari, First Resources, Golden Agri-Resources/Sinar Mas, and Salim (Indofood) conglomerates.
The documented violations include seizure of community lands without consent; involuntary displacement; denial of fundamental environmental rights; violence against displaced Indigenous peoples and communities; harassment; criminalization; and even killings of those trying to defend their lands and forests.
“It is scandalous that Indigenous and rural communities endure years and sometimes decades without redress for harms inflicted by the palm oil industry, that continue to this day,” said Norman Jiwan, a Dayak Indigenous leader and co-author of the report.
Palm oil from these 10 plantations end up in the supply chains of numerous global brands, including Cargill, Nestlé, PepsiCo, Unilever, Wilmar International, Archer Daniels Midland and AAK.
And funding the operations of these plantations are prominent institutions and investors, including BlackRock, ABN-AMRO, Rabobank, Standard Chartered, Citigroup, Lloyds Banking Group, JP Morgan Chase, as well as various other banks and pension funds, according to the report.
“Our report is just the latest in a whole set of independent studies showing the Indonesian plantation sector and associated global palm oil trade are not complying with industry sustainability standards nor applicable laws,” Norman said.
New oil palm planting near a protected area in Indonesia. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.
Selling off problem assets
One of the cases highlighted in the report is the ongoing conflict between the Indigenous Dayak Hibun communities in the western part of Indonesian Borneo and plantation firm PT Mitra Austral Sejahtera (MAS).
The conflict started in 1996, when MAS obtained a location permit for the lands of the Dayak Hibun without their free, prior and informed consent, or FPIC. Despite that, MAS went on to obtain, in 2000, a right-to-cultivate permit, or HGU — the last in a series of licenses that oil palm companies must obtain before being allowed to start planting.
The HGU permit, valid until 2030, covers 8,741 hectares (21,600 acres) of land, of which 1,400 hectares (3,460 acres) overlap with the ancestral lands of the Dayak Hibun. As a result, the communities’ lives have been impacted by the plantation, with their sacred sites damaged and their environment degraded.
The land conflict has also led to injuries, threats, harassment and intimidation, and the criminal prosecution of four farmers seeking land justice.
Despite the conflict being well-documented over the years, MAS continues to be a supplier to Cargill, Nestlé, Unilever and Wilmar, and also supplies AAK via Cargill, according to the report.
Cargill had the case logged as “under investigation” in July 2019 without details and no updates in 2020.
Although MAS was named on Unilever’s 2018 mill list, Unilever said in May 2020 via its grievance tracker that MAS was now “outside” of its palm oil supply chain, though it precise status in 2021 is unclear.
Nestlé had not logged the conflict at the time the NGOs compiled their report.
In an attempt to seek remedy, the communities and the NGO Sawit Watch filed a formal complaint to the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) in 2012, as MAS at the time was owned by Sime Darby, an RSPO member.
This complaint remains unresolved and still “under investigation,” eight years after the original grievance was lodged.
In 2019, Sime Darby sold MAS to PT Inti Nusa Sejahtera (INS), despite strong objections and pleas from the communities for Sime Darby to remain engaged.
The report says this shows how powerful palm oil conglomerates like Sime Darby are still permitted to wash their hands of responsibility for remedying community grievances by divesting “problematic” subsidiaries, even as formal complaints remain unresolved.
At the end of 2020, INS allegedly sold its majority stake in MAS to PT CAPITOL, citing difficulties in getting bank funding to finance acquisition, consolidation and operational activities. The communities affected by MAS’s operations have still not received any official notification of changes in the company’s ownership, according to the report.
The communities are also insisting that Sime Darby honor its earlier commitments to assist in resolving the case, the report says.
They say this can be done by providing funds to the Indonesian land agency to compensate MAS for relinquishing the disputed land to the Dayak communities, or to cover their legal costs to seek land restitution through the courts, the report adds.
The communities are also demanding the RSPO investigate Sime Darby’s divestment of MAS, given that RSPO members are discouraged from selling any subsidiaries subject to ongoing complaints, according to the report.
“It’s regrettable that the RSPO, Unilever, Sime Darby, PT Inti Nusa Sejahtera, PT CAPITOL and PT Mitra Austral Sejahtera have failed to remedy the human rights of Dayak Hibun communities in Kerunang and Entapang,” said Redatus Musa, a member of the Dayak Hibun community and the head of Entapang hamlet in West Kalimantan province.
On the issue of Sime Darby’s divestment from MAS, the RSPO pointed Mongabay to the resolution passed in November 2018 “discouraging” members from divesting units with active complaints.
“However, it is pertinent to note that the above resolution looks into measures to discourage members from divesting, and not to prohibit or refrain members from doing so as the RSPO recognizes its members’ rights to divest as part of its ongoing business dealings,” the RSPO told Mongabay in an email.
The RSPO added that its complaints panel may investigate the divestment “based on the independent legal review and the final comments from the parties of the complaint.”
Sime Darby did not respond to Mongabay’s questions on the issue.
Oil palm fruit bunches in a truck for transport to market. Image by John C. Cannon/Mongabay.
Weak due diligence
Most of the companies in the supply chains of the plantations linked to human rights abuses, and some of the investors, are prominent members of the RSPO and other sustainability initiatives.
“Yet, despite the fact that the violations uncovered are clearly contrary to RSPO standards, as well as the companies’ own ‘No Deforestation, No Peat and No Exploitation’ [NDPE] policies, the trade and investment continues unchecked,” the report says.
This is because existing industry accountability mechanisms, such as the RSPO complaints system, are typically slow and ineffective, according to the report.
It highlights this lack of effectiveness in the case of the Dayak Hibun communities, whose complaint against MAS has languished for more than eight years at the RSPO.
Most of the businesses were also found to have ineffective due diligence systems in place to uphold their human rights responsibilities and commitments.
In 2019, the Corporate Human Rights Benchmark (CHRB) initiative found that 49% of 195 large global companies surveyed scored between 0 and 10% against a set of human rights due diligence indicators, while only one scored above 80%.
Responding to the criticisms, the RSPO said some cases could take a long time to resolve since its complaints system “follows a rigorous process to ensure the highest standards of assurance and integrity are upheld.”
“At times, this may result in lengthy investigations, especially for complex cases,” the RSPO told Mongabay in an email, adding that it continues to address any inefficiencies in its system and expedite the resolution of complaints.
A woman collects oil palm fruit on an oil palm estate in southern Papua. Image by Albertus Vembrianto for Mongabay and The Gecko Project.
Opaque finances
The due diligence failings are even more prevalent among global and local financiers and investors of the palm oil industry. Many global financiers and the corporate agribusiness groups in Indonesia and elsewhere that they finance or control don’t have public grievance logs, according to the report.
Financiers should step up their game, said Linda Rosalina, a campaigner from TuK Indonesia, an NGO that advocates for social justice in the agribusiness sector.
“Banks and investors should have looked at these cases and taken an active role to ensure that their clients could improve [the situation on] the ground,” she said. “It’s important for banks and investors to improve their regulations to ensure the mitigation of impacts [of their clients’ activities] on the ground.”
The report also calls for greater transparency in the finances of the plantation sector, with many corporate groups failing to disclose their beneficial owners. This opacity has allowed the persistence of offshore financial jurisdictions and shadow companies to enable investments in the sector, according to the report.
This study and related investigations indicate that beneficial ownership of subsidiary companies associated with land conflicts and deforestation is not being disclosed by RSPO members like First Resources in potential violation of RSPO rules on transparency.
As a result, companies and their financiers are evading accountability for violations against the rights of local communities and the public.
“Our research in 2019 shows that less than 1%, or 0.7% to be exact, of companies have disclosed who their beneficial owners are,” Linda said. “This is a far cry from companies’ responsibilities to be transparent, and I think responsibilities are key.”
Interior of an oil palm plantation in Indonesia. Photo by Rhett A. Butler.
Falling through the cracks
While many conflicts are still awaiting resolution before the RSPO and other sustainability mechanisms, many others aren’t even picked up at all.
Tom Griffiths, responsible finance coordinator at the Forest Peoples Programme and co-author of the report, said those cases that come to the fore are only a sliver of the total conflicts brewing on the ground.
“The main finding [of the report] is that the impacts and grievances are not being picked up,” he said at the virtual launch of the report. “We know that companies increasingly have grievances logged or registered, but they only touch the tip of the iceberg of the grievances and harmful impacts.”
Most of the time, companies only respond to cases that are reported to the RSPO or documented in reports by major NGOs, Griffiths said.
“But other impacts that we have documented here are not being picked up or certainly not disclosed,” he said.
This is because companies further down the supply chain from these plantations appear to apply a flawed approach to the definition of community “grievances,” limited to formal complaints only, according to the report.
“This narrow focus is failing to identify numerous outstanding community concerns and grievances, which should be picked up and addressed through due diligence, thus overlooking unresolved human rights abuse cases in their operations and palm oil supply chains,” the report says.
These ongoing cases of human rights violations fall through the cracks despite companies and global food and beverage brands continuing to market their green credentials and claim to support due diligence and “environmental, social and governance” (ESG) principles.
The report calls for strengthening the due diligence process to identify the impacts that the whole supply chain has. Without it, affected communities will continue to be denied remedy, according to Griffiths.
“Many of these [communities], sometimes [they are] waiting for years or even decades, they have no remedy,” he said. “They’re still suffering from harmful impacts, and these are still ongoing.”
Editor’s note: We agree that “This is a landmark victory for the local communities who have stood up and held firm for over a decade to protect the climate, the Salish Sea, and their own health and safety.” We don’t put much hope into the Paris Agreement or all the UN climate summits. The best hope we have is us, so communities that develop and nurture a culture of resistance are the way to go.
This article originally appeared in Common Dreams.
Featured image: The Whatcom County Council on Tuesday night approved landmark policies regulating fossil fuel expansion at Cherry Point, home to two oil refineries. (Photo: RE Sources/Twitter)
By Jessica Corbett
In a move that comes as wildfires ravage the Western United States and could serve as a model for communities nationwide, the Whatcom County Council in Washington voted unanimously on Tuesday night to approve new policies aimed at halting local fossil fuel expansion.
“Whatcom County’s policy is a blueprint that any community, including refinery communities, can use to take action to stop fossil fuel expansion.”
—Matt Krogh, Stand.earth
“For too long, the fossil fuel industry has been allowed to cloak its infrastructure and expansion projects in an air of inevitability,” said Matt Krogh, director of Stand.earth’s SAFE Cities Campaign. “It has used this to diminish local communities’ concerns and then dismiss or ignore their voices. Whatcom County’s new, permanent policy is a clear signal that those days are over.”
“Local communities and their elected officials do have the power to decide what gets built near their homes, schools, and businesses,” Krogh continued. “Whatcom County’s policy is a blueprint that any community, including refinery communities, can use to take action to stop fossil fuel expansion.”
The county’s new land-use rules (pdf), approved in a 7-0 vote, apply to industrial land at Cherry Point, located north of the city of Bellingham. As KNKXreports:
The area has a deep-water port and two oil refineries. It’s zoned for industrial use. It sits adjacent to waterways that connect the Northwest to lucrative markets across the Pacific Rim. It’s also where what would have been the nation’s largest coal export facility—the proposed Gateway Pacific Terminal—was canceled five years ago.
…Five years ago, the Army Corps of Engineers pulled the plug on Gateway Pacific proposal after the Lummi Tribe argued it would violate treaty fishing rights. The land at Cherry Point is adjacent to waters that are at the heart of the tribe’s usual and accustomed fishing area. And the state has designated that area an aquatic reserve.
Since that project’s demise, the council has enacted 11 six-month moratoriums. Tuesday’s vote permanently banned new refineries, shipping terminals, or coal-fired power plants at Cherry Point and imposed tougher regulations on any expansion of the area’s existing facilities.
The Bellingham Heraldnotes that while the five-year battle pitted the oil industry against environmentalists, “talks took a key step forward after the appointed county Planning Commission approved the Cherry Point amendments and a ‘stakeholder group’ of business and environmental interests began meeting to build a consensus over its final wording.”
“From the onset of the process five years ago, the County Council had set forth clear aims for new rules that would allow improvements of existing refineries while restricting facilities’ use for transshipment of fossil fuels,” Eddy Ury, a council candidate who led the stakeholders group for months while he was with the environmental group RE Sources for Sustainable Communities, told the newspaper.
“These dual purposes proved to be challenging to balance in lawmaking without overstepping authority,” Ury said. “The stakeholder group came together at the point where our respective interests were best served by cooperating.”
In a statement Wednesday, RE Sources executive director Shannon Wright welcomed the vote.
“This is a landmark victory for the local communities who have stood up and held firm for over a decade to protect the climate, the Salish Sea, and their own health and safety from risky and reckless fossil fuel expansion projects,” said Wright.
“There’s more to be done,” Wright added, “including addressing the pollution burden borne by local communities, in particular Lummi Nation, who live in close proximity to existing heavy industry and fossil fuel operations, and continuing to counter the threat of increased vessel traffic across the region.”
“When people ask local leaders to address their concerns, this is how it should be done.”
—Whatcom County Councillor Todd Donovan
Still, Whatcom County Councillor Todd Donovan celebrated that local residents “are now safer from threats like increased oil train traffic or more polluting projects at existing refineries.”
“When people ask local leaders to address their concerns, this is how it should be done—with input from all affected communities and industries, but without watering down the solutions that are most protective of public safety, the climate, and our waterways,” he said.
Stand.earth’s statement pointed out that the development comes as residents and activists in Tacoma, Washington are pushing for similar protections.
In a tweet about the vote in Whatcom County, the Tacoma arm of the environmental group 350.org said that it is “still waiting for Tacoma City Council to find courage to do the same here.”
The fights for local regulations on fossil fuels come as communities across the West endure the impacts of the human-created climate emergency—from deadly, record-breaking heat to ferocious fires. In Washington state alone, there are currently eight large active fires that have collectively burned 136,758 acres.
Conditions in the U.S. West, along with fires in Siberia and flooding across China and Europe, have fueled demands for bolder climate policy on a global scale. Parties to the Paris agreement—which aims to keep global temperature rise this century below 2°C, and preferably limit it to 1.5°C—are set to attend a two-week United Nations climate summit in Glasgow beginning October 31.
This episode of Muse Ecology is a terrific podcast with interviews with members of the People of Red Mountain, local community members, campers at Thacker Pass, and other supporters of Protect Thacker Pass.
In this episode in the Water, Life, Climate, and Civilization series, we hear diverse voices from the resistance to the proposed lithium mine at Thacker Pass in northern Nevada, on Paiute and Shoshone ancestral lands.
The Congolese government has officially recognized community ownership of a conservation area linking two national parks in the Democratic Republic of Congo, giving hope for the survival of the Grauer’s gorilla, a critically endangered species.
The gorilla, found only in DRC, faces threats from habitat loss, poaching for bushmeat, and the effects of lingering civil unrest in the region.
The Nkuba Conservation Area is co-managed by local communities and the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, with the latter providing jobs and training initiatives for women.
The years-long effort to develop the conservation area and now to maintain it points to the importance of engaging local communities in conservation.
In eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), critically endangered Grauer’s gorillas (Gorilla beringei graueri) share their forest home with rural communities – which could help save their shrinking populations and habitat.
The DRC government officially recognized community ownership of three forest concessions, which combined are called the Nkuba Conservation Area, in April. The 1,580-square-kilometer (610-square-mile) patch of protected area, about twice the size of New York City, is situated between the Maiko and Kahuzi-Biéga national parks.
The formal recognition of Nkuba Conservation Area represents a win for community rights and conservation both, increasing the area of community-owned forests in the Walikale territory by more than 70%, according to the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, a non-profit that has worked with local leaders since 2012 to secure the area, a biodiversity hotspot, for protection.
Under the DRC legal framework implemented in 2016, each community-managed forest concession can be no larger than 50,000 hectares, amounting to the three concessions that form Nkuba Conservation Area. While the official land titles are not designated as conservation sites, the communities at Nkuba have entered a 25-year agreement to co-manage the area for conservation with the Fossey fund, which is responsible for the management plan and management decisions with approval from a union representing the communities.
In exchange for protecting gorillas by not hunting them and alerting authorities of poaching activity, the fund’s leadership say they provide education, jobs and conservation training to locals to aid protection efforts for the Grauer’s gorilla and other threatened species that live in the forests.
Now that locals own the forest concessions for themselves, they have a better incentive for protecting them and recognize their value, Tara Stoinski, CEO and chief science officer of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, told Mongabay.
“They’re using them [forest concessions] in a way that’s sustainable for them in the long term and for wildlife in the long term,” she said.
Safeguarding the Grauer’s gorilla
Nkuba’s strategic location acts as a haven for some of DRC’s most threatened and rarest species, including the Grauer’s gorilla, which is only found in eastern DRC. The species, also called the eastern lowland gorilla, faces poaching; habitat loss from widespread deforestation; and the effects of civil unrest from armed rebel groups fueling illegal mining operations, Stoinski explained.
Scientists estimate close to 17,000 Grauer’s gorillas existed in the wild prior to the civil war in DRC in the mid-1990s. Now, only 6,800 remain in the wild, according to the most recent estimates.
“They’re found nowhere else on the planet, so conserving them here is the only way to ensure that the species survives,” Stoinski said.
Researchers at the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund estimate about 200 individuals live within Nkuba, but the majority of Grauer’s gorillas — an estimated 75% — live outside of protected areas. Nkuba makes up about 10% of the gorilla’s total habitat in DRC, said Urbain Ngobobo, the Congo programs director for the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund. Research indicates that the greatest number of Grauer’s gorillas live in the Oku community forests, located near Kahuzi-Biega National Park.
As ecosystem engineers, gorillas help keep the entire ecosystem healthy. They play a vital role in seed dispersal by eating fruits and seeds that they defecate throughout the forest, and they clear paths for other animals, Stoinski said.
If they go extinct, so too might other wild animals and tree species in the area, Ngobobo added, so protecting gorilla habitat also ensures the protection of other wildlife.
Recent studies show that Grauer’s gorilla populations have suffered decreased genetic diversity from habitat fragmentation, making Nkuba’s role as a wildlife corridor between the two national parks crucial. A 2018 study found that Nkuba’s Grauer’s gorillas, a centrally located population, were more genetically diverse than populations living at the edges of its habitat range, bolstering the importance of Nkuba for forest connectivity.
“It’s playing the role of an ecological corridor, ensuring connectivity, allowing wildlife [to move] from one point to another point,” Ngobobo said.
Habitat fragmentation occurs when contiguous habitat, such as a forest, is sliced into smaller patches of habitat, often due to human activities like deforestation for logging operations or oil palm plantations. Animals living within those patches are thus reduced to a smaller area of suitable habitat, which can threaten those populations’ survival and decrease genetic diversity by restricting the number of potential mates.
“You don’t want these island populations, if you can help it,” Stoinski said. “One disaster could have a significant effect, so maintaining connectivity is really important.”
Seven globally threatened mammal species are protected within Nkuba Conservation Area’s borders. Red circles indicate its IUCN-designated conservation status as vulnerable (VU), endangered (EN) or critically endangered (CE). Images by (clockwise from top left) Canva, Nik Borrow via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0), Bart Wurston via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0), Mulhouseville via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0), Laila Bahaa-el-din/ Panthera, Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, David Brossard via Flickr (CC BYe-SA 2.0.). Graphic by Marlowe Starling using Canva.
Biodiversity at stake in the Congo Basin
Central Africa’s Congo Basin, the second largest tropical rainforest in the world, stretches across an area of 3.7 million km2 (1.4 million mi2). The rainforest is home to a rich diversity of endemic and endangered species, from the charismatic mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei) that U.S. primatologist Dian Fossey studied in Rwanda, to more than 600 tree species that play a critical role as one of the Earth’s largest carbon sinks.
But in recent years, scientists have warned that the ability of Africa’s forests to store carbon is projected to decline due to deforestation and climate change. Satellite data show that deforestation is now occurring at higher rates than before in northern DRC.
The Congo Basin receives a smaller share of forest conservation funding than the Amazon or forests in Southeast Asia, according to the Central African Forestry Commission. Stoinsiki said more funding is needed in Central Africa to protect the forest ecosystems people depend on.
“Ultimately, the health of these forests depend[s] on intact ecosystems,” Stoinski said. “Then we, in turn, depend on these ecosystems to keep our planet intact.”
Although climate change does threaten species living in tropical rainforests, biodiversity in the Congo Basin is mostly threatened by human activities and the direct killing of wildlife.
“Behind all poaching activities is a business,” said Dominique Endamana, the IUCN Regional Forest Program for Central and West Africa officer, in an interview with Mongabay. “People kill for money. People kill for [eating].”
For example, elephants no longer live in the area because they were poached to extinction for ivory. That’s a fate the Fossey fund is working to help the Grauer’s gorillas avoid.
Mining sites are a main cause of deforestation and poaching in eastern DRC, where the critically endangered Grauer’s gorilla lives mostly outside of protected areas. Image by Marlowe Starling/Mongabay.
Working with communities to champion conservation
Prior to the civil war, people depended on agriculture and small business for their livelihoods, Ngobobo told Mongabay in an email. But rampant violence left communities in eastern DRC in acute poverty, Endamana said, forcing them to hunt for bushmeat or work for environmentally damaging mining operations that harvest minerals used to make electronics sold in the Global North.
Rebel groups in mineral-rich DRC control artisanal mines and often poach gorillas for their high volumes of meat. Ngobobo said he and his team were kidnapped four times by rebel groups. Each time, however, locals living at Nkuba negotiated for their release, which he said was a sign of local support for their conservation work.
Plus, widespread food insecurity in the area caused locals to overexploit forest resources like medicinal plants and hunt for bushmeat, which Stoinski said was the greatest cause of wildlife decline.
Now that communities own the forests for themselves, they have a better incentive to protect them, motivated by the steady employment, health care, payment of school fees and improved living conditions the Fossey fund provides, Ngobobo said. He added that locals now alert Fossey fund staff when they notice a suspected poacher roaming their forest.
“Ultimately, for conservation to work, people need to be invested in it,” Stoinski said.
The charity has employed 70 full-time staff members from the local community at Nkuba and hires about 250 part-time employees every month, according to Stoinski. Survey teams conduct field work for gorilla research, unarmed rangers patrol the forests for signs of poachers, and several ex-poachers are also employed as Fossey Fund staff.
But establishing Nkuba as a community-managed forest wasn’t a simple process, and convincing people who earned income from mining to switch to conservation wasn’t easy, Ngobobo said.
“Mining offered direct benefits while people felt that without tourism, there was no other material benefit to be gained from conservation,” Ngobobo said in an email.
For example, elephants no longer live in the area because they were poached to extinction for ivory. That’s a fate the Fossey fund is working to help the Grauer’s gorillas avoid.
In addition to initial community pushback, it is legally difficult to obtain a community concession, so support from an NGO, such as the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, can help communities navigate the process.
Fossey Fund leadership says that its training and conservation programs have helped alleviate those pressures by providing an alternative source of income and focusing on sustainable harvesting techniques. For example, some community members are analyzing Grauer’s gorilla fecal samples to find out what kind of food they eat. Gorilla diets can provide clues to what types of wild fruits are edible, so cultivating those seeds in the community eliminates the need for harvesting fruit and other non-timber forest products in gorilla habitat, according to the Fossey fund.
Forest-dependent communities play a critical role in addressing climate change, say researchers at Human Rights Watch, who make the argument for placing such communities at the center of climate policies.
Similarly, Endamana warned against scientists like himself ignoring the needs, knowledge and values of local and Indigenous communities when making management decisions.
“We can’t talk [about] conservation without local communities,” Endamana said. “It’s impossible. We can’t conserve without them.”
Through educational programs, the Fossey fund is now training the next generation of conservationists, Ngobobo said, supporting 240 students. More young people than before, including women, are earning high school diplomas and attending college, he added.
“We’re very excited for Nkuba to be a field site where young Congolese biologists can come and do their master’s thesis, or their Ph.D., or just get a better understanding of the biodiversity that’s in their backyard,” Stoinski said.
As climate change and extractive activities continue to place pressure on Central Africa’s dense and biodiverse forests, scientists stress the need for continuous action and more community-managed protected areas like Nkuba.
“Me, as Congolese, I think it’s my responsibility to give my life, to give my knowledge, to give my energy, to give my time to protecting [gorillas],” Ngobobo said. “We need to act now. Now, and not later.”
Citations:
Baas, P., Van der Valk, T., Vigilant, L., Ngobobo, U., Binyinyi, E., Nishuli, R., … Guschanski, K. (2018). Population-level assessment of genetic diversity and habitat fragmentation in critically endangered Grauer’s gorillas. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 165(3), 565-575. doi:10.1002/ajpa.23393
Hubau, W., Lewis, S. L., Phillips, O. L., Affum-Baffoe, K., Beeckman, H., Cuní-Sanchez, A., … Zemagho, L. (2020). Asynchronous carbon sink saturation in African and Amazonian tropical forests. Nature, 579(7797), 80-87. doi:10.1038/s41586-020-2035-0
Nnoko-Mewanu, J., Téllez-Chávez, L., & Rall, K. (2021). Protect rights and advance gender equality to mitigate climate change. Nature Climate Change, 11(5), 368-370. doi:10.1038/s41558-021-01043-4
Plumptre, A. J., Kirkby, A., Spira, C., Kivono, J., Mitamba, G., Ngoy, E., … Kujirakwinja, D. (2021). Changes in Grauer’s gorilla ( gorilla beringei graueri ) and other primate populations in the kahuzi‐biega National Park and Oku community reserve, the heart of Grauer’s gorilla global range. American Journal of Primatology. doi:10.1002/ajp.23288
Plumptre, A. J., Nixon, S., Kujirakwinja, D. K., Vieilledent, G., Critchlow, R., Williamson, E. A., … Hall, J. S. (2016). Catastrophic decline of world’s largest primate: 80% loss of Grauer’s gorilla (Gorilla beringei graueri) population justifies critically endangered status. PLOS ONE, 11(10), e0162697. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0162697
Réjou-Méchain, M., Mortier, F., Bastin, J., Cornu, G., Barbier, N., Bayol, N., … Gourlet-Fleury, S. (2021). Unveiling African rainforest composition and vulnerability to global change. Nature, 593(7857), 90-94. doi:Scientific Reports, 8(1). doi:10.1038/s41598-018-24497-7
Walters, G., Sayer, J., Boedhihartono, A. K., Endamana, D., & Angu Angu, K. (2021). Integrating landscape ecology into landscape practice in central African rainforests. Landscape Ecology. doi:10.1007/s10980-021-01237-3
Editor’s note: As radical environmentalists, we can not understand how any culture can be so stupid to put poison on their own food. The widespread application of herbicides, pesticides and all kinds of poisonous chemicals to our holy mother earth’s surface as an attempt to control weed and insect “pests” is just another expression of this culture’s deep disconnection and hatred of all life.
When it comes to Monsanto’s controversial herbicide, both the mainstream scientific community and our regulatory establishments have failed us.
By Stephanie Seneff
In September 2012, I attended a nutrition conference where Dr. Don Huber from Purdue University was speaking on the topic of “glyphosate.” Glyphosate is the active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup. While glyphosate isn’t a household name, everyone has heard of Roundup. Drive across the United States and you’ll see vast fields marked with crop labels that say “Roundup Ready.” Monsanto, the Missouri-based company that was Roundup’s original manufacturer, was acquired by the Germany-based company Bayer in 2018 as part of its crop science division. Monsanto has touted glyphosate as remarkably safe because its main mechanism of toxicity affects a metabolic pathway in plant cells that human cells don’t possess. This is what—presumably—makes glyphosate so effective in killing plants, while—in theory, at least—leaving humans and other animals unscathed.
But as Dr. Huber pointed out to a rapt audience that day, human cells might not possess the shikimate pathway but almost all of our gut microbes do. They use the shikimate pathway, a central biological pathway in their metabolism, to synthesize tryptophan, tyrosine, and phenylalanine, three of the twenty coding amino acids that make up the proteins of our body. Precisely because human cells do not possess the shikimate pathway, we rely on our gut microbiota, along with diet, to provide these essential amino acids for us.
Perhaps even more significantly, gut microbes play an essential role in many aspects of human health. When glyphosate harms these microbes, they not only lose their ability to make these essential amino acids for the host, but they also become impaired in their ability to help us in all the other ways they normally support our health. Beneficial microbes are more sensitive to glyphosate, and this causes pathogens to thrive. We know, for example, that gut dysbiosis is associated with depression and other mental disorders. Alterations in the distribution of microbes can cause immune dysregulation and autoimmune disease. Parkinson’s disease is strongly linked to a proinflammatory gut microbiome. As has become clear from the remarkable research conducted on the human microbiome in the past decade or so, happy gut bacteria are essential to our health, including in ways that researchers have yet to fully understand. It’s worth remembering that Roundup hit the market—and was declared safe—before much of this groundbreaking research on the human microbiome was ever conducted.
Dr. Huber also explained that glyphosate is a chelator, a small molecule that binds tightly to metal ions. In plant physiology, glyphosate’s chelation disrupts a plant’s uptake of essential minerals from the soil, including zinc, copper, manganese, magnesium, cobalt, and iron. Studies have shown that plants exposed to glyphosate take up much smaller amounts of these critical minerals into their tissues. When we eat foods derived from these nutrient-deficient plants, we become nutrient deficient, as well.
Glyphosate also interferes with the symbiotic relationship between plant roots and soil bacteria. Surrounding the roots of a plant is a soil zone called the rhizosphere that is teeming with bacteria, fungi, and other organisms. Glyphosate kills the organisms living in the rhizosphere, which then interferes with a plant’s nitrogen uptake, as well as the uptake of many different minerals. This interference further translates into mineral deficiencies in our foods. Glyphosate also causes exposed plants to be more vulnerable to fungal diseases. And fungal diseases can lead to contamination of our foods with mycotoxins produced by pathogenic fungi.
I came away from Dr. Huber’s lecture convinced that I needed to learn a lot more about glyphosate.
Fable for Tomorrow
Both of my parents grew up on family farms in small towns in southern Missouri. The area is now an environmental and economic wasteland, because large agrochemical farming has forced most small farmers into bankruptcy. As a child, I visited my grandparents on their farms, gathering eggs from the chicken coop, marveling over the cows and their calves in the fields, and helping with the fruit stand where my dad’s parents sold apples and peaches. When I was 13, my grandfather was discovered dead on his tractor, with a split-open bag of DDT by his side.
In the 1940s and 1950s, Americans were told that herbicides and insecticides, such as DDT, were safe. DDT is an organochloride first used by the military during World War II to control body lice, bubonic plague, malaria, and typhus. While DDT was effective at preventing malaria, the environmental consequences of its use were devastating, especially as people began using it more and more, in broader and broader applications, for pest control.
I read Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring in 1962, shortly after it was published. A marine biologist by training, Carson condemned the chemical industry for its irresponsible disinformation campaign. She painted a grim picture of no birds singing in the spring. She called it a “fable for tomorrow,” a phrase that haunts me to this day. Silent Spring explores in detail how DDT and other chemicals were poisoning wildlife—from earthworms in the soil to juvenile salmon in the rivers and oceans. Carson’s book had a profound effect on me and helped me understand my grandfather’s untimely and unexpected death.
Around the same time, I also learned about the thalidomide disaster. Thalidomide, manufactured by a German pharmaceutical company, was prescribed to pregnant women to help with morning sickness and difficulty sleeping. It was aggressively marketed and advertised as safe. But thousands of children whose mothers took thalidomide during pregnancy were born with birth defects, including missing arms and legs. Studying the photographs of these deformed and unhappy children in a magazine, I realized that sometimes the products that purport to improve our lives can have major adverse effects—and that the companies that sell them cannot necessarily be trusted to tell us the whole truth about the risks their products pose.
The United States avoided this disaster, which devastated the lives of at least 10,000 children in Europe, because of a brave scientist named Frances Oldham Kelsey. Dr. Kelsey was a Canadian-born reviewer for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, responsible for approving or rejecting the application for a license to distribute the drug in the United States. Although she faced enormous pressure, and although thalidomide was already approved for use in Canada, Great Britain, and Germany, Dr. Kelsey rejected the application after she determined that there was insufficient evidence that it was safe to use during pregnancy. At the time, I was young, optimistic, and patriotic. I remember thinking how lucky I was to live in the United States, a country that protected its citizens from such a catastrophe.
Hiding in Plain Sight
In the 1950s, in the small town in coastal Connecticut where I grew up, living treasures were everywhere: ladybugs, dragonflies, butterflies, bumblebees, grasshoppers, lightning bugs, giant beetles we called pinching bugs, toads, and dozens of chittering playful squirrels. Praying mantises were a rare delight, but fireflies could be counted on in the evening, along with bats overhead as the shadows grew. Today I live outside Boston, in a place that has a similar climate to the Connecticut town where I spent my childhood. Yet it’s rare to see wildlife on our suburban street. An occasional squirrel, and one or two butterflies in the spring. No longer do we have to clean the windshield of all the dead bugs that accumulate on a summer’s day. Children, of course, don’t realize what they’re missing out on. This change appears to have happened slowly enough that almost nobody has noticed.
Yet, there’s no question that something devastating is going on, even if it’s difficult to name it precisely. The rate of species going extinct today is hundreds or even thousands of times faster than it has been during the past tens of millions of years. Environmental scientists warn that we have already entered the sixth mass extinction. Human health is also suffering. Over the past few decades an alarming rise in many chronic diseases across the globe has occurred, especially in countries that adopt a Western-style diet based on industrialized agriculture. Many of these diseases have an autoimmune component. They include Alzheimer’s disease, autism, celiac disease, diabetes, encephalitis, inflammatory bowel disease, and obesity.
Something terrible seems to be affecting every living thing on the planet—the insects, the animals, and the health of human beings, including children. Something hiding in plain sight. While we can’t reduce all environmental and health problems to one insidious thing, I believe there is a common denominator. That common denominator is glyphosate.
This problem is too important to ignore. My goal is to convince anyone who eats, anyone who has children, and anyone who cares about the health of humans and the planet that we need to look much more closely and much more carefully at the impact of glyphosate on and beyond the food supply. Both the scientific community and our regulatory establishments have failed us. It is time to shine light onto the shadows—to convince the world about glyphosate’s diabolical mechanism of toxicity and give ourselves the tools we need to understand how glyphosate harms us and what we can do to protect ourselves and our families.
Stephanie Seneff is a senior research scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. She has a bachelor’s degree in biology with a minor in food and nutrition, and a master’s degree, an engineer’s degree, and a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science, all from MIT. She has authored more than three dozen peer-reviewed journal papers on topics relating human disease to nutritional deficiencies and toxic exposures. She has focused specifically on the herbicide glyphosate and the mineral sulfur. Dr. Seneff is the author of Toxic Legacy.
A new risk analysis has found that the tipping points of five of Earth’s subsystems — the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, the Greenland Ice Sheet, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Amazon rainforest — could interact with each other in a destabilizing manner.
It suggests that these changes could occur even before temperatures reach 2°C (3.6°F) above pre-industrial levels, which is the upper limit of the Paris Agreement.
The interactions between the different tipping elements could also lower critical temperature thresholds, essentially allowing tipping cascades to occur earlier than expected, according to the research.
Experts not involved in the study say the findings are a significant contribution to the field, but do not adequately address the timescales over which these changes could occur.
When the first tile in a line of dominoes tips forward, it affects everything in front of it. One after another, lined-up dominoes knock into each other and topple. This is essentially what could happen to ice sheets, ocean currents and even the Amazon biome if critical tipping points are crossed, according to a new risk analysis. The destabilization of one element could impact the others, creating a domino effect of drastic changes that could move the Earth into an unfamiliar state — one potentially dangerous to the future of humanity and nature as we know it.
The study, published this month in Earth System Dynamics, examines the interactions between five subsystems that are known to have vital thresholds, or tipping points, that could trigger irreversible changes. They include the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, the Greenland Ice Sheet, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Amazon Rainforest.
Scientists believe the AMOC could reach its critical threshold when warming temperatures weaken the current enough to substantially slow it, halt it, or redirect it, which could plunge parts of the northern hemisphere into a period of record cold, even as global warming continues elsewhere. Likewise, the Antarctic ice sheet may reach its irreversible threshold when warming temperatures trigger a state of constant ice loss, which could ultimately result in a 4-meter (13-foot) rise in global sea levels over the coming centuries. In fact, it’s suggested that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet may have already passed its critical threshold, and that ice loss is unstoppable now.
Interactions between climate tipping elements and their roles in tipping cascades. Image by Wunderling et al.
These individual tipping points are largely being driven by human-caused climate change, which is considered to be one of nine planetary boundaries — scientifically identified limits on change to vital Earth systems that currently regulate and sustain life. Overshooting those boundaries could lead to new natural paradigms catastrophic for humanity. Climate change has its own threshold of 350 parts per million (ppm) of CO2, which is the amount that scientists say the atmosphere can safely hold, but this threshold was already passed in 1988. In 2021, CO2 exceeded 417 ppm, which is 50% higher than pre-industrial levels.
To conduct this new study, the research team used a conceptual modeling process to analyze the interactions between these five Earth subsystems. What they found was that more than a third of these elements showed “tipping cascades” even before temperatures reached 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, which is the upper limit of the 2015 Paris climate agreement. At present, almost no nation on Earth is on target to meet its Paris carbon reduction goals.
Significantly, the study also found that the interactions between the tipping elements could lower critical temperature thresholds, essentially allowing tipping cascades to occur earlier than anticipated. Additionally, the researchers found that the Greenland Ice Sheet would function as an initiator of tipping cascades, while the AMOC would act as a transmitter that would push further changes, including dieback of the Amazon. Most of these tipping elements have been projected to have a destabilizing effect on each other, with the exception of the weakening of the AMOC, which could actually make the North Atlantic region colder and help stabilize the Greenland Ice Sheet.
Canoe in the Zacambu river, Peru. Photo by Rhett A. Butler for Mongabay.
“We found that the overall interactions tend to make [things] worse, so to say, and tend to be destabilizing,” lead author Nico Wunderling, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, told Mongabay.
He said that the findings suggest that we already face significant risk, but that the study does not necessarily provide a forecast.
“We have made a risk analysis,” Wunderling said. “This is not a prediction, but it’s more like, ‘OK, if we have this warming, then we might face an increasing risk of tipping cascades.’”
Tim Lenton, a professor of climate change and Earth system science at the University of Exeter, U.K., and co-author of a similar study on tipping points, says the new paper is a “useful addition to the assessment of climate tipping point interactions.”
“The important takeaway message from this study is that the cascading causal interactions between four different climate tipping elements lower the ‘safe’ temperature level at which the risk of triggering tipping points is minimized,” Lenton told Mongabay in an email. “In fact the study suggests that below 2C of global warming (above pre-industrial) — i.e. in the Paris agreement target range — there could still be a significant risk of triggering cascading climate tipping points.”
However, Lenton says the study does not unpack the timescale in which these tipping cascades would occur, focusing more on their consequences.
Iceberg off Antarctica. Image by Mongabay.
“In the case of ice sheet collapse this can take many centuries,” he said. “Hence the results should be viewed as ‘commitments’ to potentially irreversible changes and cascades that we may be making soon, but will leave as a grim legacy to future generations to feel their full impact.”
Juan Rocha, an ecologist at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, says the findings of the study affirm previous hypotheses about how “the tipping of one system can affect the likelihood of others in a self-amplifying way,” although he also notes its oversight of evaluating timescales.
“The Amazon is likely to tip way earlier than AMOC or Greenland,” Rocha told Mongabay. “Future work needs to take into account the diversity and uncertainty of the feedbacks at play for each tipping element to really understand how likely [it] is that one system can tip the other.”
Rocha says he’s pleased the authors undertook this study and hopes others continue to build on this research.
“I would like to extend an invitation to the authors and the scientific community to keep working on these important questions,” he said. “There is a lot of work to do, a lot that we do not know, and our models can only get us so far. Understanding how different systems of the Earth … are connected is fundamental to avoid the risk of domino effects, but also to empower people to act on time, identify leverage points and understand the extent of action or lack of it.”
Citations:
Cai, Y., Lenton, T. M., & Lontzek, T. S. (2016). Risk of multiple interacting tipping points should encourage rapid CO2 emission reduction. Nature Climate Change, 6(5), 520-525. doi:10.1038/nclimate2964
Wunderling, N., Donges, J. F., Kurths, J., & Winkelmann, R. (2020). Interacting tipping elements increase risk of climate domino effects under global warming. Earth System Dynamics, 12, 601-619. doi:10.5194/esd-12-601-2021
Elizabeth Claire Alberts is a staff writer for Mongabay. Follow her on Twitter @ECAlberts.
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