Community Land & Water Coalition (CLWC) on Friday Feb. 14, 2025, filed a demand for a cease and desist after confirming that Eric Pontiff, doing business under the name of Standish Investment Group, LLC, started the work before the legal appeal period expired.
The group’s cease and desist request states:
The Work is destroying the ancestral lands and heritage of the Wampanoag Tribes including destroying potential burial sites, graves, and homesites without an archeological study, without Free Prior Informed Consent and in violation of Article 32 of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People, the laws of Massachusetts and the Zoning Bylaw.
Photos Above: February 14, 2025, tree clearing has started to cut down ancient trees on sacred Wampanoag Lands at 71 Hedges Pond Road, Cedarville, Plymouth MA.
One of the last remaining hills in the Town, sacred site of the Wampanoag People
The proposed mining site is 33-acres of forested land at 71 Hedges Pond Road. It is one of the last hills not leveled by decades of sand and gravel mining in the Town. The plans show massive excavation that will start at the top of the 150-foot hill and mine about 90 feet deep across the site.
In January 2025, following a recommendation by Plymouth’s Planning Board, the Town’s Director of Inspectional Services issued zoning and building permits to level the 150 foot hill, allegedly preparing the site for a “commercial complex” of large buildings. Over 1,000 letters were sent to the Town demanding that the Director require a special permit under the Town’s Zoning Bylaw. The Town ignored the letters.
The hill and forested land is in an area known as the “Ancient Indian Plantation” and are the ancestral lands of the state’s Native American Wampanoag People.
“We oppose this project and the development of this area on Hedges Pond Road,” said Melissa Ferretti, Chairwoman of the Herring Pond Wampanoag Tribe based in Plymouth, which was called Patuxet by Indigenous People. “This location is an integral part of our original reservation lands known to us as the “Great Lot.” This project threatens to irreversibly damage our ancestral homelands, the heart of our existence and heritage here in Plymouth. The Great Lot holds immense cultural and historic significance for our community and any development would not only harm the land but also disrupt our deep-rooted connection to it. Honoring the sacredness of these grounds is fundamental to our community and culture,” Ferretti stated. In November 2024, Governor Healy issued an Executive Order granting the Tribe state recognition, a major accomplishment.
Speaking at the February 11, 2025 Select Board meeting,Indigenous youth urged the Town to, “At least consider and possibly even invite people from her tribe and other neighboring sister tribes to have discussions about these matters and include them in them.”
At the Select Board meeting Miciah Stasis from the Herring Pond Wampanoag Tribe said, “Our people have been here for thousands of years and our ancestors lay beneath those lands that you are trying to sand mine… If this was anybody else’s grandmother or grandparents that are being dug up right now, there would be an issue.”
“Plymouth officials and the business interests that make up the Plymouth Foundation promote the Town as “America’s Hometown.” They market the Native American and Pilgrim story to the world’s tourists. They profit from the Thanksgiving story but are letting this project destroy that very history without even an archeological or environmental impact study,” said Meg Sheehan, attorney for the petitioners filing the appeal.
The community neighborhood Cedarville Village Steering Committee in a December finding unanimously rejected the “unified complex” plan calling it vague. By claiming a development is a “unified complex,” a sand and gravel company can seek to evade the more stringent special permitting process and proceed without a public hearing.
The February 14, 2025 appeal requires the Zoning Board of Appeals (ZBA) to hold a public hearing on whether to uphold the permits. The hearing will be scheduled in several weeks and is open to the public. In a potential conflict of interest, two members of the ZBA are Directors of the Plymouth Foundation, which received the sand mining permit from the Town.
On another mining project, on March 3, 2025, the Zoning Board of Appeals will hold the second day of a public hearing on a proposal by PA Landers, a regional sand and gravel mining operator, to expand its 100 acre mine and level a hill visible from Route 3 North. This is adjacent to 71 Hedges Pond Road, the subject of the February 14, 2025, legal appeal. The hearing is in the Great Hall, 2nd Floor, 26 Court St., Plymouth, 7 pm.
On Sunday, February 16, 2025 at 7 p.m. the local group CLWC is holding its second public forum on sand and gravel mining in Plymouth.
A state-wide campaign, Stop the Desecration, seeks to raise awareness about the destruction of Native American archeological sites without proper legal reviews.
Editor’s note: When a hurricane like Helene or Milton ravages coastal communities, already-strained first responders face a novel, and growing, threat: the lithium-ion batteries that power electric vehicles, store PV solar, e-bikes, and countless gadgets. When exposed to the salty water of a storm surge or extreme heat, they are at risk of bursting into flames — and taking an entire house with them.
“Anything that’s lithium-ion and exposed to salt water can have an issue,” said Bill Morelli, the fire chief in Seminole, Florida, and the bigger the battery, the greater the threat. That’s what makes EVs especially hazardous. “[The problem] has expanded as they continue to be more and more popular.”
Also petrochemical-based building materials and furnishings have replaced traditional wood, fabric and metal materials in homes worldwide. But plastics are more flammable and release persistent toxic chemicals when burned or exposed to high heat. Over the last 25 years, wildfires have multiplied and intensified due to global warming, and often now jump the wildland-urban interface, burning whole neighborhoods and leaving behind a dangerous toxic home legacy. After the Camp Fire razed Paradise, California, in 2018, water utilities found high levels of volatile organic compounds in drinking water. Similar issues have arisen in places like Boulder County, Colorado, where the Marshall Fire destroyed nearly 1,000 structures in 2021,
“The extreme heatwaves of 2023, which fueled huge wildfires, and severe droughts, also undermined the land’s capacity to soak up atmospheric carbon. This diminished carbon uptake drove atmospheric carbon dioxide levels to new highs, intensifying concerns about accelerating climate change. Widespread wildfires across Canada and droughts in the Amazon in 2023 released about the same amount of carbon to the atmosphere as North America’s total fossil fuel emissions, underscoring the severe impact of climate change on natural ecosystems.”
The following story talks about the Moss Landing fire but there was also a fire that erupted in southeast Missouri at one of world’s largest lithium-ion battery recycling facilities and also in Madison County, Illinois.
Batteries’ toxic gases can cause respiratory, skin and eye problems. Toxic gases from burning lithium-ion batteries can contaminate wildlife such as Monterey Bay’s unique tidal wetland.
This is the fourth fire at the Moss Landing battery storage facility.
Referring to last week’s explosive fire, County Supervisor Glenn Church said, “This is a wake-up call for the industry. If we’re going to move ahead with sustainable energy, we need a safe battery system in place. State of the art safety protocols did not work.”
County officials lifted evacuation orders Friday evening after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found “no threat to human health.” Still, Highway 1 remains closed, and health officials in Monterey, San Venito and Santa Cruz counties advise residents to stay indoors, turn off ventilation systems and limit outdoor exposure. Www.ksbw.com provides live updates.
WILDFIRES AND URBAN FIRES
When the Los Angeles fires started January 7, I learned about the differences between wild and urban fires. Wildfires occur in forests or grasslands, fueled by trees or other vegetation. More than 80% of wildfires start by human activities like abandoned cigarettes, campfires and barbeques. Wildfire smoke can penetrate deep into peoples’ lungs and aggravate heart and lung diseases.
Urban fires—conflagrations—are fueled by combustible construction materials including wood framing, plastics, metals, furniture fabric and solar panels (hazardous waste). Because of houses’ flammable contents, urban fires burn extremely hot and generate toxic emissions. High winds and insufficient water supply intensify urban fires. Burning houses emit chemical toxins and generate more heat than burning trees (which, if alive, hold fire-resistant moisture).
INCLUDING LITHIUM-ION BATTERIES IN FIRE RISK ASSESSMENTS
Here’s a question: How do lithium-ion batteries contribute to urban fires?
Like much of the world, Southern California is now dotted with lithium batteries at every telecom cell site (for backup in the event of a power outage); in every electric vehicle, e-bike and hoverboard; in every EV charger; in laptops, tablets and smartphones—and their chargers; in smart utility meters on grid-connected houses and buildings; in off-grid rooftop solar PV systems’ batteries; in battery energy storage systems (BESS) for large-scale solar facilities and wind facilities.
RECOGNIZING THE FIRE RISKS CAUSED BY DRY AND COVERED SOIL
LA has endured eight months without rain. Drought increases fire risk.
Do fire risks also increase when soil can’t absorb and hold water? Soil’s ability to absorb and hold water is one of the Earth’s main cooling mechanisms. How do we reconcile this when we’ve covered land with paved roads, houses, malls, parking lots, data centers and battery storage facilities?
When rebuilding, what policies will ensure that fire’s toxic emissions (to air, soil and groundwater) will not affect future residents and farmers? Given that Governor Newsom has suspended environmental reviews to speed rebuilding in wildfire zones, what will protect residents in rebuilt areas from toxic exposures?
What measures would prevent lithium-ion batteries (at cell sites, in electric vehicles, smart meters, laptops, tablets, smartphones, rooftop solar system batteries, etc.) from catching fire and exploding? Could we prohibit lithium-ion batteries until they’re proven safe and ecologically sound from cradle-to-grave? New Hampshire legislators have introduced an ACT that would allow towns to decline 5G cell sites.
How could rebuilding Los Angeles respect the Earth? To reduce fire risk, support healthy water cycling and increase locally-produced food, could rebuilding policies encourage healthy soil structure?
To provide much-needed affordable housing in LA and elsewhere, would any mansion-owners turn their homes into multiple-family units?
RECONSIDER “SUSTAINABILITY”
Many communities and corporations aim to sustain themselves by installing battery energy storage systems and solar facilities. According to the California Energy Commission, since 2020, battery storage in the state has increased sevenfold—from 1,474 megawatts in 2020 to 10,383 megawatts by mid-2024. One megawatt can power 750 homes.
In New Mexico, AES Corporation has proposed building a 96 MW, 700-acre solar facility with 45 MWs/39 battery containers in Santa Fe County. (Each battery is about 39’ x 10’ x 8’.) Santa Fe’s Green Chamber of Commerce, the Sierra Club’s Rio Grande Chapter, the Global Warming Express and 350 Santa Fe support AES’s project.
Opponents of AES’s facility include the San Marcos Association, the Clean Energy Coalition and Ashley Schannauer (formerly a hearing officer for the state’s Public Regulatory Commission).
I frequently hear people call battery storage, solar PVs, industrial wind and EVs “sustainable.” Looked at from their cradles to their graves, this is simply not true. Mining lithium ravages ecosystems. So does burning coal and trees to make solar panels’ silicon. Refining lithium and making silicon electrically-conductive takes millions of gallons of water, daily. At end-of-life, these technologies are hazardous waste.
Meanwhile, I have many friends with rooftop solar systems and EVs. I would welcome forums about reducing our overall use of energy, water, extractions and international supply chains. I would welcome learning how to live with less.
As survivors of the LA fires, battery fires, Hurricane Helene, Israel’s decimation of Gaza and other catastrophes rebuild, what would communities look like if we considered our technologies’ impacts to ecosystems and public health from their cradles to graves? What would our communities look like if we think, “Ecosystems and public health first?”
Banner Moss Landing battery plant fire, January 16-17, 2025.
MY MISTAKE While writing article I got help from a physicist of fire ignition, an electrical engineer, a forensic fire investigator and an electrician. I also went to the Internet, which informed me that in the event of an outage, cell sites’ power is backed up by lithium-ion batteries. This isn’t totally correct. While 5G small cells primarily use lithium ion batteries, larger cell towers usually backup with lead-acid batteries. I apologize for this error.
Editor’s note: “75 of the world’s largest 114 fossil fuel companies have now made net zero by 2050 commitments, yet not a single fossil fuel company has committed to phasing out oil and gas production by 2050 nor have any committed to ending exploration for new oil and gas fields or halting the extraction of existing reserves.”
“Real Zero, not greenwashed ‘net zero,’ is essential. As the Corporate Accountability report concludes, it’s time to reject the big polluters’ agenda and implement programs that rapidly phase out fossil fuels and truly eliminate greenhouse gas emissions.”
We “obsess” over getting to “Net Zero” yearly CO2 increases in the atmosphere. The Moderates in Climate Science THEORIZE that when this happens, the GMST will IMMEDIATELY stop going up and will level off.
DOES IT LOOK LIKE “NET ZERO” is going to happen?
If your child is born this year, they are likely going to live through +1.5°C of warming by the time they are 25. A fact that is likely going to cause a 40% to 50% drop in the global food supply and a reduction of 2.5 billion — 4 billion in the global population by 2050, at a minimum.
The overshoot myth of bargaining: you can’t keep burning fossil fuels and expect scientists of the future to get us back to 1.5°C
Record breaking fossil fuel production, all time high greenhouse gas emissions and extreme temperatures. Like the proverbial frog in the heating pan of water, we refuse to respond to the climate and ecological crisis with any sense of urgency. Under such circumstances, claims from some that global warming can still be limited to no more than 1.5°C take on a surreal quality.
For example, at the start of 2023’s international climate negotiations in Dubai, conference president, Sultan Al Jaber, boldly stated that 1.5°C was his goal and that his presidency would be guided by a “deep sense of urgency” to limit global temperatures to 1.5°C. He made such lofty promises while planning a massive increase in oil and gas production as CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.
We should not be surprised to see such behaviour from the head of a fossil fuel company. But Al Jaber is not an outlier. Scratch at the surface of almost any net zero pledge or policy that claims to be aligned with the 1.5°C goal of the landmark 2015 Paris agreement and you will reveal the same sort of reasoning: we can avoid dangerous climate change without actually doing what this demands – which is to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions from industry, transport, energy (70% of total) and food systems (30% of total), while ramping up energy efficiency.
This is also not surprising given that net zero and even the Paris agreement have been built around the perceived need to keep burning fossil fuels, at least in the short term. Not do so would threaten economic growth, given that fossil fuels still supply over 80% of total global energy. The trillions of dollars of fossil fuel assets at risk with rapid decarbonisation have also served as powerful brakes on climate action.
Overshoot
The way to understand this doublethink: that we can avoid dangerous climate change while continuing to burn fossil fuels – is that it relies on the concept of overshoot. The promise is that we can overshoot past any amount of warming, with the deployment of planetary-scale carbon dioxide removal dragging temperatures back down by the end of the century.
This not only cripples any attempt to limit warming to 1.5°C, but risks catastrophic levels of climate change as it locks us in to energy and material-intensive solutions which for the most part exist only on paper.
To argue that we can safely overshoot 1.5°C, or any amount of warming, is saying the quiet bit out loud: we simply don’t care about the increasing amount of suffering and deaths that will be caused while the recovery is worked on.
Our co-editors commission long-form journalism, working with academics from many different backgrounds who are engaged in projects aimed at tackling societal and scientific challenges.
A key element of overshoot is carbon dioxide removal. This is essentially a time machine – we are told we can turn back the clock of decades of delay by sucking carbon dioxide directly out of the atmosphere. We don’t need rapid decarbonisation now, because in the future we will be able to take back those carbon emissions. If or when that doesn’t work, we are led to believe that even more outlandish geoengineering approaches such as spraying sulphurous compounds into the high atmosphere in an attempt to block out sunlight – which amounts to planetary refrigeration – will save us.
The 2015 Paris agreement was an astonishing accomplishment. The establishment of 1.5°C as being the internationally agreed ceiling for warming was a success for those people and nations most exposed to climate change hazards. We know that every fraction of a degree matters. But at the time, believing warming could really be limited to well below 2°C required a leap of faith when it came to nations and companies putting their shoulder to the wheel of decarbonisation. What has happened instead is that the net zero approach of Paris is becoming detached from reality as it is increasingly relying on science fiction levels of speculative technology.
There is arguably an even bigger problem with the Paris agreement. By framing climate change in terms of temperature, it focuses on the symptoms, not the cause. 1.5°C or any amount of warming is the result of humans changing the energy balance of the climate by increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This traps more heat. Changes in the global average temperature is the established way of measuring this increase in heat, but no one experiences this average.
Climate change is dangerous because of weather that affects particular places at particular times. Simply put, this extra heat is making weather more unstable. Unfortunately, having temperature targets makes solar geoengineering seem like a sensible approach because it may lower temperatures. But it does this by not reducing, but increasing our interference in the climate system. Trying to block out the sun in response to increasing carbon emissions is like turning on the air conditioning in response to a house fire.
In 2021 we argued that net zero was a dangerous trap. Three years on and we can see the jaws of this trap beginning to close, with climate policy being increasingly framed in terms of overshoot. The resulting impacts on food and water security, poverty, human health, the destruction of biodiversity and ecosystems will produce intolerable suffering.
The situation demands honesty, and a change of course. If this does not materialise then things are likely to deteriorate, potentially rapidly and in ways that may be impossible to control.
Au revoir Paris
The time has come to accept that climate policy has failed, and that the 2015 landmark Paris agreement is dead. We let it die by pretending that we could both continue to burn fossil fuels and avoid dangerous climate change at the same time. Rather than demand the immediate phase out of fossil fuels, the Paris agreement proposed 22nd-century temperature targets which could be met by balancing the sources and sinks of carbon. Within that ambiguity net zero flourished. And yet apart from the COVID economic shock in 2020, emissions have increased every year since 2015, reaching an all time high in 2023.
Despite there being abundant evidence that climate action makes good economic sense (the cost of inaction vastly exceeds the cost of action), no country strengthened their pledges at the last three COPs (the annual UN international meetings) even though it was clear that the world was on course to sail past 2°C, let alone 1.5°C. The Paris agreement should be producing a 50% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, but current policies mean that they are on track to be higher than they are today.
Editor’s note: DGR knows that “renewable” technologies are not sustainable and that the only transition will be to a future that does not include civilization.
We do not deny that significant progress has been made with renewable technologies. Rates of deployment of wind and solar have increased each year for the past 22 years and carbon emissions are going down in some of the richest nations, including the UK and the US. But this is not happening fast enough. A central element of the Paris agreement is that richer nations need to lead decarbonisation efforts to give lower income nations more time to transition away from fossil fuels. Despite some claims to the contrary, the global energy transition is not in full swing. In fact, it hasn’t actually begun because the transition demands a reduction in fossil fuel use. Instead it continues to increase year-on-year.
And so policymakers are turning to overshoot in an attempt to claim that they have a plan to avoid dangerous climate change. A central plank of this approach is that the climate system in the future will continue to function as it does today. This is a reckless assumption.
2023’s warning signs
At the start of 2023, Berkeley Earth, NASA, the UK Met Office, and Carbon Briefpredicted that 2023 would be slightly warmer than the previous year but unlikely to set any records. Twelve months later and all four organisations concluded that 2023 was by some distance the warmest year ever recorded. In fact, between February 2023 and February 2024 the global average temperature warming exceeded the Paris target of 1.5°C.
Currently we cannot fully explain why global temperatures have been so high for the past 18 months. Changes in dust, soot and other aerosols are important, and there are natural processes such as El Niño that will be having an effect.
But it appears that there is still something missing in our current understanding of how the climate is responding to human impacts. This includes changes in the Earth’s vital natural carbon cycle.
Around half of all the carbon dioxide humans have put into the atmosphere over the whole of human history has gone into “carbon sinks” on land and the oceans. We get this carbon removal “for free”, and without it, warming would be much higher. Carbon dioxide from the air dissolves in the oceans (making them more acidic which threatens marine ecosystems). At the same time, increasing carbon dioxide promotes the growth of plants and trees which locks up carbon in their leaves, roots, trunks.
All climate policies and scenarios assume that these natural carbon sinks will continue to remove tens of billions of tons of carbon from the atmosphere each year. There is evidence that land-based carbon sinks, such as forests, removed significantly less carbon in 2023. If natural sinks begin to fail – something they may well do in a warmer world – then the task of lowering global temperatures becomes even harder. The only credible way of limiting warming to any amount, is to stop putting greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere in the first place.
Science fiction solutions
It’s clear that the commitments countries have made to date as part of the Paris agreement will not keep humanity safe while carbon emissions and temperatures continue to break records. Indeed, proposing to spend trillions of dollars over this century to suck carbon dioxide out of the air, or the myriad other ways to hack the climate is an acknowledgement that the world’s largest polluters are not going to curb the burning of fossil fuels.
Over the following years we are going to see climate impacts increase. Lethal heatwaves are going to become more common. Storms and floods are going to become increasingly destructive. More people are going to be displaced from their homes. National and regional harvests will fail. Vast sums of money will need to be spent on efforts to adapt to climate change, and perhaps even more compensating those who are most affected. We are expected to believe that while all this and more unfolds, new technologies that will directly modify the Earth’s atmosphere and energy balance will be successfully deployed.
What’s more, some of these technologies may need to operate for three hundred years in order for the consequences of overshoot to be avoided. Rather than quickly slow down carbon polluting activities and increasing the chances that the Earth system will recover, we are instead going all in on net zero and overshoot in an increasingly desperate hope that untested science fiction solutions will save us from climate breakdown.
We can see the cliff edge rapidly approaching. Rather than slam on the brakes, some people are instead pushing their foot down harder on the accelerator. Their justification for this insanity is that we need to go faster in order to be able to make the jump and land safely on the other side.
We believe that many who advocate for carbon dioxide removal and geoengineering do so in good faith. But they include proposals to refreeze the Arctic by pumping up sea water onto ice sheets to form new layers of ice and snow. These are interesting ideas to research, but there is very little evidence this will have any effect on the Arctic let alone global climate. These are the sorts of knots that people tie themselves up in when they acknowledge the failure of climate policy, but refuse to challenge the fundamental forces behind such failure. They are unwittingly slowing down the only effective action of rapidly phasing out fossil fuels.
That’s because proposals to remove carbon dioxide from the air or geoengineer the climate promise a recovery from overshoot, a recovery that will be delivered by innovation, driven by growth. That this growth is powered by the same fossil fuels that are causing the problem in the first place doesn’t feature in their analysis.
The bottom line here is that the climate system is utterly indifferent to our pledges and promises. It doesn’t care about economic growth. And if we carry on burning fossil fuels then it will not stop changing until the energy balance is restored. By which time millions of people could be dead, with many more facing intolerable suffering.
Major climate tipping points
Even if we assume that carbon removal and even geoengineering technologies can be deployed in time, there is a very large problem with the plan to overshoot 1.5°C and then lower temperatures later: tipping points.
The science of tipping points is rapidly advancing. Late last year one of us (James Dyke) along with over 200 academics from around the world was involved in the production of the Global Tipping Points Report. This was a review of the latest science about where tipping points in the climate system may be, as well as exploring how social systems can undertake rapid change (in the direction that we want) thereby producing positive tipping points. Within the report’s 350 pages is abundant evidence that the overshoot approach is an extraordinarily dangerous gamble with the future of humanity. Some tipping points have the potential to cause global havoc.
The melt of permafrost could release billions of tons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere and supercharge human-caused climate change. Fortunately, this seems unlikely under the current warming. Unfortunately, the chance that ocean currents in the North Atlantic could collapse may be much higher than previously thought. If that were to materialise, weather systems across the world, but in particular in Europe and North America, would be thrown into chaos. Beyond 1.5°C, warm water coral reefs are heading towards annihilation. The latest science concludes that by 2°C global reefs would be reduced by 99%. The devastating bleaching event unfolding across the Great Barrier Reef follows multiple mass mortality events. To say we are witnessing one of the world’s greatest biological wonders die is insufficient. We are knowingly killing it.
We may have even already passed some major climate tipping points. The Earth has two great ice sheets, Antarctica, and Greenland. Both are disappearing as a consequence of climate change. Between 2016 and 2020, the Greenland ice sheet lost on average 372 billion tons of ice a year. The current best assessment of when a tipping point could be reached for the Greenland ice sheet is around 1.5°C.
This does not mean that the Greenland ice sheet will suddenly collapse if warming exceeds that level. There is so much ice (some 2,800 trillion tons) that it would take centuries for all of it to melt over which time sea levels would rise seven metres. If global temperatures could be brought back down after a tipping point, then maybe the ice sheet could be stabilised. We just cannot say with any certainty that such a recovery would be possible. While we struggle with the science, 30 million tons of ice is melting across Greenland every hour on average.
Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are being affected by global warming. Pexels from Pixabay, CC BY
The take home message from research on these and other tipping points is that further warming accelerates us towards catastrophe. Important science, but is anyone listening?
It’s five minutes to midnight…again
We know we must urgently act on climate change because we are repeatedly told that time is running out. In 2015, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, the UN special adviser and director of The Earth Institute, declared:
The time has finally arrived – we’ve been talking about these six months for many years but we’re now here. This is certainly our generation’s best chance to get on track.
In 2019 (then) Prince Charles gave a speech in which he said: “I am firmly of the view that the next 18 months will decide our ability to keep climate change to survivable levels and to restore nature to the equilibrium we need for our survival.”
“We have six months to save the planet,” exhorted International Energy Agency head Fatih Birol – one year later in 2020. In April 2024, Simon Stiell, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change said the next two years are “essential in saving our planet”.
Either the climate crisis has a very fortunate feature that allows the countdown to catastrophe to be continually reset, or we are deluding ourselves with endless declarations that time has not quite run out. If you can repeatedly hit snooze on your alarm clock and roll over back to sleep, then your alarm clock is not working.
Or there is another possibility. Stressing that we have very little time to act is intended to focus attention on climate negotiations. It’s part of a wider attempt to not just wake people up to the impending crisis, but generate effective action. This is sometimes used to explain how the 1.5°C threshold of warming came to be agreed. Rather than a specific target, it should be understood as a stretch goal. We may very well fail, but in reaching for it we move much faster than we would have done with a higher target, such as 2°C. For example, consider this statement made in 2018:
Stretching the goal to 1.5 degrees celsius isn’t simply about speeding up. Rather, something else must happen and society needs to find another lever to pull on a global scale.
What could this lever be? New thinking about economics that goes beyond GDP? Serious consideration of how rich industrialised nations could financially and materially help poorer nations to leapfrog fossil fuel infrastructure? Participatory democracy approaches that could help birth the radical new politics needed for the restructuring of our fossil fuel powered societies? None of these.
The lever in question is Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) because the above quote comes from an article written by Shell in 2018. In this advertorial Shell argues that we will need fossil fuels for many decades to come. CCS allows the promise that we can continue to burn fossil fuels and avoid carbon dioxide pollution by trapping the gas before it leaves the chimney. Back in 2018, Shell was promoting its carbon removal and offsets heavy Sky Scenario, an approach described as “a dangerous fantasy” by leading climate change academics as it assumed massive carbon emissions could be offset by tree planting.
Shell is far from alone in waving carbon capture magic wands. Exxon is making great claims for CCS as a way to produce net zero hydrogen from fossil gas – claims that have been subject to pointed criticism from academics with recent reporting exposing industry wide greenwashing around CCS.
But the rot goes much deeper. All climate policy scenarios that propose to limit warming to near 1.5°C rely on the largely unproven technologies of CCS and BECCS. BECCS sounds like a good idea in theory. Rather than burn coal in a power station, burn biomass such as wood chips. This would initially be a carbon neutral way of generating electricity if you grew as many trees as you cut down and burnt. If you then add scrubbers to the power station chimneys to capture the carbon dioxide, and then bury that carbon deep underground, then you would be able to generate power at the same time as reducing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Unfortunately, there is now clear evidence that in practice, large-scale BECCS would have very adverse effects on biodiversity, and food and water security given the large amounts of land that would be given over to fast growing monoculture tree plantations. The burning of biomass may even be increasing carbon dioxide emissions. Drax, the UK’s largest biomass power station now produces four times as much carbon dioxide as the UK’s largest coal-fired power station.
Five minutes to midnight messages may be motivated to try to galvanise action, to stress the urgency of the situation and that we still (just) have time. But time for what? Climate policy only ever offers gradual change, certainly nothing that would threaten economic growth, or the redistribution of wealth and resources.
Despite the mounting evidence that globalised, industrialised capitalism is propelling humanity towards disaster, five minutes to midnight does not allow time and space to seriously consider alternatives. Instead, the solutions on offer are techno fixes that prop up the status quo and insists that fossil fuel companies such as Shell must be part of the solution.
That is not to say there are no good faith arguments for 1.5°C. But being well motivated does not alter reality. And the reality is that warming will soon pass 1.5°C, and that the Paris agreement has failed. In the light of that, repeatedly asking people to not give up hope, that we can avoid a now unavoidable outcome risks becoming counterproductive. Because if you insist on the impossible (burning fossil fuels and avoiding dangerous climate change), then you must invoke miracles. And there is an entire fossil fuel industry quite desperate to sell such miracles in the form of CCS.
Four suggestions
Humanity has enough problems right now, what we need are solutions. This is the response we sometimes get when we argue that there are fundamental problems with the net zero concept and the Paris agreement. It can be summed up with the simple question: so what’s your suggestion? Below we offer four.
1. Leave fossil fuels in the ground
The unavoidable reality is that we need to rapidly stop burning fossil fuels. The only way we can be sure of that is by leaving them in the ground. We have to stop exploring for new fossil fuel reserves and the exploitation of existing ones. That could be done by stopping fossil fuel financing.
At the same time we must transform the food system, especially the livestock sector, given that it is responsible for nearly two thirds of agricultural emissions. Start there and then work out how best the goods and services of economies can be distributed. Let’s have arguments about that based on reality not wishful thinking.
2. Ditch net zero crystal ball gazing targets
The entire framing of mid and end-century net zero targets should be binned. We are already in the danger zone. The situation demands immediate action, not promises of balancing carbon budgets decades into the future. The SBTi should focus on near-term emissions reductions. By 2030, global emissions need to be half of what they are today for any chance of limiting warming to no more than 2°C.
It is the responsibility of those who hold most power – politicians and business leaders – to act now. To that end we must demand twin targets – all net zero plans should include a separate target for actual reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. We must stop hiding inaction behind promises of future removals. It’s our children and future generations that will need to pay back the overshoot debt.
3. Base policy on credible science and engineering
All climate policies must be based on what can be done in the real world now, or in the very near future. If it is established that a credible amount of carbon can be removed by a proposed approach – which includes capture and its safe permanent storage – then and only then can this be included in net zero plans. The same applies to solar geoengineering.
Speculative technologies must be removed from all policies, pledges and scenarios until we are sure of how they will work, how they will be monitored, reported and validated, and what they will do to not just the climate but the Earth system as a whole. This would probably require a very large increase in research. As academics we like doing research. But academics need to be wary that concluding “needs more research” is not interpreted as “with a bit more funding this could work”.
4. Get real
Finally, around the world there are thousands of groups, projects, initiatives, and collectives that are working towards climate justice. But while there is a Climate Majority Project, and a Climate Reality Project, there is no Climate Honesty Project (although People Get Real does come close). In 2018 Extinction Rebellion was formed and demanded that governments tell the truth about the climate crisis and act accordingly. We can now see that when politicians were making their net zero promises they were also crossing their fingers behind their backs.
We need to acknowledge that net zero and now overshoot are becoming used to argue that nothing fundamental needs to change in our energy intensive societies. We must be honest about our current situation, and where we are heading. Difficult truths need to be told. This includes highlighting the vast inequalities of wealth, carbon emissions, and vulnerability to climate change.
The time for action is now
We rightly blame politicians for failing to act. But in some respects we get the politicians we deserve. Most people, even those that care about climate change, continue to demand cheap energy and food, and a constant supply of consumer products. Reducing demand by just making things more expensive risks plunging people into food and energy poverty and so policies to reduce emissions from consumption need to go beyond market-based approaches. The cost of living crisis is not separate from the climate and ecological crisis. They demand that we radically rethink how our economies and societies function, and whose interests they serve.
To return to the boiling frog predicament at the start, it’s high time for us to jump out of the pot. You have to wonder why we did not start decades ago. It’s here that the analogy offers valuable insights into net zero and the Paris agreement. Because the boiling frog story as typically told misses out a crucial fact. Regular frogs are not stupid. While they will happily sit in slowly warming water, they will attempt to escape once it becomes uncomfortable. The parable as told today is based on experiments at the end of the 19th century that involved frogs that had been “pithed” – a metal rod had been inserted into their skulls that destroyed their higher brain functioning. These radically lobotomised frogs would indeed float inert in water that was cooking them alive.
Promises of net zero and recovery from overshoot are keeping us from struggling to safety. They assure us nothing too drastic needs to happen just yet. Be patient, relax. Meanwhile the planet burns and we see any sort of sustainable future go up in smoke.
Owning up to the failures of climate change policy doesn’t mean giving up. It means accepting the consequences of getting things wrong, and not making the same mistakes. We must plan routes to safe and just futures from where we are, rather where we would wish to be. The time has come to leap.
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Editor’s note: Major plastic polluters win as the UN Treaty talks conclude without an agreement. Modern lifestyles and practices are intimately entwined with the use of plastics. Our phones, computers, food packaging, clothes, and even renewable energy technologies, such as wind turbine blades and the cables that connect them to the power grid, are all largely made from plastics. Plastics production requires fossil hydrocarbons and this connection continues to grow stronger daily. Powerful oil producers, both private companies and governments of oil-producing nations, were seen as the key impediment to a consensus deal. What will happen next? “Agree to a treaty among the willing even if that means leaving some countries that don’t want a strong treaty or concede to countries that will likely never join the treaty anyway, failing the planet in the process.”
“Plastic has been found everywhere on Earth — from deepest oceans to high mountains, in clouds and pole to pole. Microplastics have also been found in every place scientists look for them in the human body, from the brain to the testes, breast milk, and artery plaque. Microplastics pose health risks to humans and wildlife, researchers warn.” PFAS(perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances) – “forever chemicals” contaminate biosolids(waste from sewage) used as fertilizer and pesticides, they also contain heavy metals and nitrates.
Today’s cheerleaders for increased birth rates are well aware of the silent cause of the ongoing rapid decline in male sperm counts. It’s the very industries these corporate managers run and governments regulate that is the blame. So you can be almost 100 percent sure that they are not going to address the real problem in order to achieve the goal of increasing human birth rates.
Laws must mandate companies to reduce their plastic footprint through production reduction, product redesign, or reuse systems — higher-priority strategies in the Zero Waste hierarchy,
Bottlenose dolphins leapt and torpedoed through the shallow turquoise waters off Florida’s Sarasota Bay. Then, a research team moved in, quickly corralling the small pod in a large net.
With the speed of a race car pit crew, veterinarians, biologists and their assistants examined the animals, checking vital signs while taking skin, blood and other samples. They held a petri dish over each dolphin’s blowhole until it exhaled, with an intensity similar to a human cough. Then, they rolled up the net and the dolphins swam off unharmed. A pod in Louisiana’s Barataria Bay was similarly tested.
Generations of dolphins have been part of this ongoing dolphin health study, which has been run by the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program since 1970. It tracks populations and individuals and also looks for health issues related to pollutants in the marine environment.
In the lab, scientists discovered that all 11 of the dolphins had breathed out microplastic fibers, shed from synthetic clothing, says Leslie B. Hart, associate professor at the College of Charleston and an author on this research. The fibers resembled those found in human lungs in previous studies, proving that dolphins, like us, are breathing plastic. In people, microplastic has been linked to poor lung function and possible lung disease.
The dolphin studies are part of a larger quest to understand how plastic pollution is impacting the world’s wildlife. While thousands of human studies have demonstrated damage from tiny plastic particles entering both cells and organs throughout the body, little is known about animal impacts because long-term field studies are difficult and costly. “We’re really just starting to skim the surface,” Hart says.
Beyond the threat plastics pose to individual animals and species, other researchers have detected broader, global harm, a new report warns. Plastic pollution is transforming Earth systems needed to support life, worsening climate change, increasing biodiversity loss, making oceans more acidic and more.
The plastics crisis is escalating rapidly: Each year, petrochemical manufacturers make more than 500 million tons of plastics –– but the world recycles just 9%. The rest is burned, landfilled or ends up in rivers, rainwater, the air, soil or the sea. Today, the planet is awash in plastic. “It’s everywhere. It’s pervasive and it’s persistent,” says Andrew Wargo, who focuses on ecosystem health at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science.
Since the 1930s the polymers industry has completely altered daily life: Plastics are in our homes, cars, clothes, furniture, and electronics, as well as our single-use throwaway water bottles, food packaging and takeout containers.
A critically important fifth round of negotiations begins Nov. 25 when delegates hope to hammer out final treaty language for ratification by U.N. member states.
Meanwhile, the natural world is in great danger, threatened by a biodiversity crisis, a climate crisis and serious degradations of planetary systems. Researchers are now scrambling to understand the growing threat plastics pose to the health of all living organisms.
Plastics conquer the world
Bakelite, the first synthetic plastic product ever made, came on the market in 1907. By the 1950s, production ramped up, changing the course of history and revolutionizing modern life. Plastics facilitated innumerable human innovations — and spawned a throwaway culture. Add in poorly regulated petrochemical manufacturing processes and industrial fishing’s plastic gear, and global plastic pollution stats soared.
Plastic debris was first noticed in the oceans in the early 1960s. For a long time, ecologists’ main wildlife concerns focused on the threat to sea turtles and other marine creatures that ate plastic bags or became tangled in plastic fishing nets. Now, everything from zooplankton to sharks and seabirds eat it and are exposed to it.
Hart emphasizes the problem’s global scope: “Plastic pollution has been found on every continent and in every ocean, in people, terrestrial wildlife and marine wildlife.” It contaminates creatures across the tree of life and concentrates up the food chain, threatening
Seabirds are at particular risk from microplastics, easily mistaking particles for food. Ingestion causes physical and hormonal damage to cells and organs. Image by A_Different_Perspective via Pixabay (Public domain).Image by Alpizar, F., et al. via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Insidious plastic harm to health
It’s well known that animals regularly mistake plastic debris for food. Shearwaters and other seabirds, for example, can choke and starve when plastic pieces block their digestive tracts or pierce internal organs. At least 1,565 species are known to ingest plastic. For decades, scientists have noted dead animals ensnared in plastic nets, fishing gear or six-pack rings.
But those big pieces of petrochemical plastic (along with their chemical additives) don’t decompose; they degrade into ever-smaller pieces, getting smaller and smaller. Eventually, they break down into microplastics, tiny particles no bigger than a grain of sand, or become nanoparticles, visible only under a high-powered microscope. These microplastics can leach toxic chemicals. Of the more than 13,000 chemicals currently used in plastics, at least 3,200 have one or more “hazardous properties of concern,” according to a U.N. report.
Most of what we know today about the health impacts of plastics and their chemical additives is based on human medical research, which may offer clues to what happens to animals; that’s unlike most health research, which is done on animals and extrapolated to people.
We know from human medical research that microplastics can damage cells and organs and alter hormones that influence their function. Plastic particles have crossed the blood-brain barrier. They have lodged in human bone marrow, testicles, the liver, kidneys and essentially every other part of the body. They enter the placenta, blood and breast milk. Exposure may affect behavior and lower immunity.
And what plastics do to us, they likely do to animals. The phthalates found in Florida dolphins, for example, along with phenols, parabens and per- and polyfluoroalkyls, are just a fraction of the many endocrine disruptors released by plastics and their chemical additives that can alter hormone levels and derail body functions. Exposure may affect behavior and lower immunity.
Plastic does not disappear: It breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces that settle in soil and float in the air and water. Microplastic can easily penetrate living organisms, their cells, and even cross the blood-brain barrier. Image by European Commission (Lukasz Kobus) via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).
Doctors have confirmed links between plastic and human disease and disability. “They cause premature birth, low birth weight, and stillbirth as well as leukemia, lymphoma, brain cancer, liver cancer, heart disease and stroke,” Phil Landrigan, a pediatrician and environmental health expert stated in a press conference earlier this year.
In the wild, animals are now exposed daily to microplastics, eating and breathing them, while many freshwater and marine species swim in a plastic soup. But little is known about the long-term impacts of chronic exposure or what microplastics do within animal tissues, with even less understood about what happens when microplastics shrink to nano size and easily enter cells.
In lab experiments, microplastics in the lungs of pregnant rats easily passed to their fetuses’ brains, hearts and other organs. In adult mice, plastic nanoparticles crossed the blood-brain barrier, triggering swift changes that resembled dementia. In a wild animal, cognitive decline can quickly prove fatal, making it difficult to find food, avoid predators, mate or raise young.
In the lab, fish were more susceptible to a common virus after a one-month exposure to microplastic. They then shed more virus (a fish public health problem) and died in high numbers. Surprisingly, “there’s a lot of similarities between fish and humans, so that we have a lot of the same immune pathways,” explains Wargo, an author on this study. However, the reaction depended on the type of plastic. Nylon fibers had the biggest effect; most nylon sheds from synthetic clothing.
Nearly all Laysan albatross (Phoebastria immutabilis) carcasses found on Midway Atoll contain marine plastic debris. Experts estimate that albatrosses feed their chicks approximately 10,000 pounds of marine debris annually on Midway, enough plastic to fill about 100 curbside trash cans. Image by USFWS – Pacific Region via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).
One challenge to researching health impacts, Wargo explains, is that “plastics oftentimes are lumped into one category, but they’re [all] very different: their structure, chemical composition, their shape and size,” creating thousands of variations. These factors influence how toxic they are, he says, which likely varies between individual animals and different species. Investigation is further complicated and obstructed by petrochemical companies that zealously guard their proprietary polymer product formulas.
The ubiquity of plastics and their global presence means that polymers likely have many undetected and unstudied wildlife health impacts. Some impacts could be masked by other environmental stressors, and untangling and analyzing the particulars will likely take decades.
What we do know is that the poor health, decline or disappearance of a single species within a natural community ripples outward, affecting others, and damaging interconnected ecological systems that have evolved in synchrony over millennia. Here’s just one speculative concern: We know microplastics can bioaccumulate, so apex predators, which balance ecosystems by keeping prey species in check, may be at high risk because they consume and build up large concentrations of microplastics and additive chemicals in their organs.
Plastics harm wildlife –– and humans –– in additional ways: by polluting the air and contributing to climate extremes. Currently, about 19% of plastic waste is incinerated, releasing potentially harmful chemical aerosols into the air. In addition, plastic production sends 232 million metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere yearly. Then there’s the pollution and carbon released from fracking and drilling operations to source the oil and gas to make these products.
Lastly, the microplastics animals and humans ingest are “Trojan horses.” These tiny particles absorb and carry a wide range of pollutants and bacteria, which then can enter and lodge within our bodies.
Single-use plastic bottles and other throwaway plastic packaging are a major cause of plastic pollution, with many activists and nations calling for a ban. While plastic bottles can be recycled, they frequently aren’t. Also, plastics degrade every time they’re recycled and are usually recycled only once or twice. Image by Hans via Pixabay (Public domain).
Stanching ‘a global-scale deluge of plastic waste’
Climate change and the plastics crisis spring from the same source: The world’s seven largest plastic manufacturers are fossil fuel companies. The U.S. produces the most plastic waste of any country, more than the entire EU combined: 42 million metric tons annually, or 287 pounds per person, according to a 2022 congressional report. It noted that “The success of the 20th-century miracle invention of plastics has also produced a global-scale deluge of plastic waste seemingly everywhere we look.”
Consumers can take small actions to protect themselves and limit plastic pollution by avoiding single-use plastics and carrying reusable bags and stainless-steel water bottles. Disposable fast-food packaging makes up almost half of plastic garbage in the ocean, so cutting back on takeout and bottled water could help.
But realistically addressing the planet’s plastics emergency requires a global paradigm shift that reframes the discussion. Many nations still think of plastics as a waste management issue, but responsibility needs to fall on the shoulders of regulators — and the producers, specifically fossil fuel companies and petrochemical manufacturers.
An international consortium of scientists has stressed the need for “urgent action” in the run-up to this month’s United Nations plastics treaty negotiations, the fifth and hopefully final summit intended to establish international regulations.
The U.S. had been among the largest, most influential dissenters in efforts to limit global plastics production and identify hazardous chemicals used in plastics. But in August 2024, prior to the U.S. presidential election, the Biden administration publicly announced it had toughened its position, supporting production limits, but submitted no position paper. Then, this week it returned to its earlier stance that would protect the plastics industry from production caps.
The plastics treaty summit in Busan, South Korea, beginning Nov. 25 and ending Dec. 1, aims to finalize treaty language that will then need to be ratified by the world’s nations. Regardless of the summit’s outcome, scientists continue to uncover new evidence of plastic’s dangers to humans, animals and the planet, raising the alarm and need for action.
This beach on the island of Santa Luzia, Cape Verde, dramatically illustrates a global problem: a world awash in plastic waste. What it doesn’t show is the breakdown of this debris by wind and tide into microplastics, now sickening people and animals. Image by Plastic Captain Darwin via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Banner: A black-winged stilt (Himantopus himantopus) forages in a swamp polluted with plastic and other trash. Image by Sham Prakash via Pexels (Public domain).
Editor’s note: “Our heating of the Earth through carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas pollution, is closely connected to our excessive energy consumption. And with many of the ways we use that energy, we’re also producing another less widely discussed pollutant: industrial noise. Like greenhouse-gas pollution, noise pollution is degrading our world—and it’s not just affecting our bodily and mental health but also the health of ecosystems on which we depend utterly.”
“Our study presents a strong, albeit selfish, argument for protecting natural soundscapes.”
Wind turbines in coastal waters, along with the noise from construction and surveys, have led to concerns about their impact on marine life. “In particular, cetaceans such as whales and dolphins are likely to be sensitive to the noises and increased marine traffic brought by these turbines.” These marine mammals’ survival depends on the technology of bounce to hear noise thousands of miles away through echolocation.
There are growing concerns regarding artificial sounds produced in waters that could impact marine life negatively. The effects of ocean noise produced by sonar, oil and gas exploration, offshore wind, and ship traffic could alter the behavior of mammals and cause hearing loss or potentially even death. “The latest discovery in this field could provide substantial ground for alterations in the Marine Mammal Protection Act that dictated the kind of noise-inducing activities that can be carried out in the waters. This new conclusion could hinder the scale of the activities or even get certain types of equipment banned from use at sites.”
‘It’s nonstop’: how noise pollution threatens the return of Norway’s whales.
It started as a simple spreadsheet that documented locations where researchers were recording sound to monitor biodiversity. Three years on, the Worldwide Soundscapes project is a global database on when, how and where passive acoustic monitoring is being deployed around the world to study terrestrial as well as aquatic ecosystems.
“This is a project that is now becoming too big to be handled by only one person,” Kevin Darras, currently senior researcher at France’s National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE), who conceived the project, told Mongabay in a video interview.
Darras started the project when he was a postdoctoral researcher at Westlake University in China. The idea struck when he was waiting for updates on another project he was working on at the time. With the project, Darras said he was attempting to fill a void that often led to duplication of efforts in the research community that uses passive acoustic monitoring — audio recorders left out in the wild — to study biodiversity around the world. “There was a scientific gap in the sense that we didn’t know where and when we were sampling sound for monitoring biodiversity,” he said.
Passive acoustic monitoring has long been used to listen in on insects, birds and other animals in ecosystems around the world. It’s aided scientists to detect elusive species in a noninvasive manner. For example, a team in Australia used acoustic recorders and artificial intelligence to track down the breeding hollows of pink cockatoos (Lophochroa leadbeateri leadbeateri) in a remote region. The method has also helped researchers get insights into the behavioral and communications patterns of animals.
Despite advances in recent years with more sophisticated recorders and automated data analysis, Darras said researchers still haven’t “achieved standardization in terms of deployment or analysis.” Darras said he hoped to use the Worldwide Soundscapes project to help build a supportive network that could potentially work toward harmonizing approaches to passive acoustic monitoring.
“We hope people will look at the data and see what is already done to avoid duplication,” he said. “They might also probably find a colleague’s work and wonder, ‘Oh, why is this gap not filled? Maybe I can do something there.’”
Kevin Darras spoke with Mongabay’s Abhishyant Kidangoor on why he started the Worldwide Soundscapes project, how he envisions it growing into a global network, and the potential of ecoacoustics in biodiversity monitoring. The following interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Mongabay: To start with, how would you describe the Worldwide Soundscapes project to someone who knows nothing about it?
Kevin Darras: In a fairly simple way, I would describe it as a simple inventory of what has been done globally, whether it’s aquatic or terrestrial, in terms of acoustic recording for monitoring biodiversity. Our first goal was to compile something like a phonebook for connecting people who are usually separated by the realms that we study. What I mean by that is we don’t communicate as much among ourselves. For example, marine scientists usually don’t talk much with terrestrial scientists. We have now succeeded in connecting and bringing people together. However, very early on, we realized that we could do more than that, and that we could put our metadata together to get a comprehensive picture of what is going on worldwide in terms of acoustic sampling.
Mongabay: What gaps were you trying to fill with this project?
Kevin Darras: There was a scientific gap in the sense that we didn’t know where and when we were sampling sound for monitoring biodiversity. There was also this gap in the community that made us not so well aware of the developments in other fields. There have been a lot of parallel efforts in different realms when, in reality, the same solutions might already exist in other communities. Our aim is to first make everyone aware of what is out there and ideally, one day, to harmonize our approaches and to benefit from each other’s experience.
Mongabay: Could you give me an example of how acoustic research efforts were duplicated in the past?
Kevin Darras: There are lots of examples when it comes to sound recording, calibration and the deployment of equipment. Because deployment in the deep sea is very much more troublesome and costly, our marine scientists go to great lengths to calibrate their equipment to make every deployment really worth it and to get data that are standardized. As a result, they are able to usually measure noise levels, for instance. Whereas those of us in the terrestrial realm have access to such cheap recorders that setting them up is almost too easy. The consequence is that, generally, we have very large study designs where we deploy hundreds of sensors and recorders and end up with a massive data set that, unfortunately, isn’t very well calibrated. We would only have relative sound levels and won’t be able to really measure noise levels.
On the other hand, I think the community that does terrestrial monitoring has made some great strides with respect to the use of artificial intelligence for identifying sound. By now, we have achieved a pretty consistent approach to bird identification with AI. This is something that could benefit people working in the aquatic realm who often have custom-made analysis procedures.
Mongabay: What was the spark to get started with this?
Kevin Darras: It started three years ago. I was actually busy with another project where I was working on an embedded vision camera. Between the development rounds, we had some time where we were waiting for the next prototype. Rather than just sit and wait, I told my supervisor that I wanted to start another project while waiting for updates. This is when I started contacting people from my close network to find out where they’ve been recording. It started with filling an online spreadsheet, which has grown since then. By now, I believe, a good portion of the community that uses passive acoustic monitoring knows about the project.
Mongabay: Could you tell me how it works currently?
Kevin Darras: The way it currently works is that people find out from their colleagues. Or we actively search for them. Then we send them all the basic information about the project. We ask them to fill in the data in a Google spreadsheet, but we are slowly transitioning to enter everything directly on a website. In the very beginning of the project, we didn’t have the capability, and we needed a really easy and effective way of adding people’s data. A Google spreadsheet was a fairly good idea then. Then we validate the data to see if things make sense. We cross-validate them with our collaborators after showing them the timelines and the maps that represent when and where their recordings have been made. In the end, there is a map which shows where all sounds have been recorded. For each collection, you can also view when exactly the recordings have been made.
Mongabay: Could you give me a sense of the kind of data in the database?
Kevin Darras: If you were a potential contributor, you would have to first provide some general information. Who are the people involved? Are the data externally stored recordings or links? Then we would get to the level of the sampling sites. We require everyone to provide coordinates and also to specify what were the exact ecosystems they were sampling sounds in. That’s the spatial information.
For the temporal information, we ask people to specify when their deployments started and when it stopped, with details on date and time. We also ask for whether they are scheduled recordings with predefined temporal intervals, like daily or weekly, or duty-cycled recordings, meaning one minute or every five minutes, or if they are continuous recordings.
We also request audio parameters like the sampling frequency, high-pass filters, number of channels, the recorders and microphones that they used. Lastly, we ask them to specify whether their deployments were targeting particular [wildlife], which is not always the case. Sometimes people just record soundscapes with a very holistic view.
Mongabay: How do you hope this database will help the community that uses passive acoustic monitoring?
Kevin Darras: We hope people will look at the data and see what is already done to avoid duplication. They might also probably find a colleague’s work and wonder, “Oh, why is this gap not filled? Maybe I can do something there.”
Mongabay: What surprised you the most?
Kevin Darras: It’s probably how big some of these studies were. I was amazed by the sampling effort that, for instance, some Canadian groups did over hundreds of sites over many years.
Also surprising for me was that there were some really gaping holes in our coverage in countries where I would have thought that the means existed for conducting eco-acoustic studies. Many North African countries don’t seem to be doing passive acoustic monitoring. We’ve just had our first collaborator from Turkey. Central Asia is poorly covered. This is for terrestrial monitoring.
For marine monitoring, I was actually surprised to see that the coverage was rather homogeneous. It’s sparse because it’s more difficult to deploy things underwater, but it was globally well distributed. I was surprised to see how many polar deployments there were, for instance, under very challenging conditions. Those are very expensive missions.
Mongabay: What was the biggest challenge in doing this?
Kevin Darras: It’s making everyone happy [laughs].
We had to be fairly flexible with what we expected from people and our criteria. Basically, we decided to trust our collaborators and it worked pretty well. Some people would struggle to provide basic metadata and would have to organize themselves and their data before being able to provide it. Others would be like, “Sure, I can send this to you in five minutes,” and then you get a huge data sheet.
Mongabay: Now that you have a fair idea of how acoustic monitoring is being used around the world, how do you think it is faring when it comes to biodiversity monitoring?
Kevin Darras: I think that the point is too often made that passive acoustic monitoring is something promising and something that has just started. Passive acoustic monitoring has been mature for some time already. It’s true that we haven’t achieved standardization or impact in terms of deployment or analysis, but we are, when using this technology, fairly efficient and effective for gathering rather comprehensive data about biodiversity. I don’t think we need to convince anyone anymore that this is useful and that this is a valid sampling method.
But I have a feeling that this message has not yet reached everyone who’s not using passive acoustic monitoring. It’s rather surprising for me to see that it hasn’t achieved the same level of standardization as what has been done with environmental DNA, when I think that the potential is just as big. Of course, it’s not comparable one to one, but it’s a sampling method that will enable us to have some great global insights.
Mongabay: How do you envision the future of Worldwide Soundscapes?
Kevin Darras: This is a project that is now becoming too big to be handled by only one person. I am soon going to have discussions with the people who want to be involved more deeply so that we have a team that is managing the Worldwide Soundscapes project.
We are going to continue integrating more and more data. We are also looking into automated ways to continue to grow the database from which we can then analyze data to answer macro-ecological questions. As of now, we have only shown the potential of the database. We still need to ask those big ecological questions and show that we can answer them with the database. We would also really like to reach those people in regions where passive acoustic monitoring has not been done yet.
One of the things we’re going to try to develop is something that we’ve tried already on a small scale within our network. To give you an example, I had a North African colleague who wanted to do passive acoustic monitoring in the Sahara and he obtained some recorders from a Polish colleague in the same network. It wasn’t even a loan. They were gifted to him and this enabled him to plug a gap in our coverage. I am hoping that we can develop the network in that sense, where we can loan equipment and provide knowledge for capacity building. It sounds ambitious, but sometimes it’s as simple as sending a postal parcel. I hope it will help expand the use of passive acoustic monitoring.
JAKARTA — German chemical giant BASF and French miner Eramet have pulled out of a multibillion-dollar “green energy” project in Indonesia because of its impact on one of the last Indigenous tribes on Earth living in voluntary isolation.
In an announcement on June 24, both companies said they had scrapped plans to invest up to $2.6 billion in the project on the island of Halmahera in Indonesia’s eastern province of North Maluku. The Sonic Bay project would have seen the construction of a refinery producing about 67,000 metric tons of nickel and 7,500 metric tons of cobalt a year. These metals, crucial ingredients in electric vehicle batteries, would have come from the nearby Weda Bay Nickel mine, the world’s largest nickel mine, in which Eramet holds a minority stake.
In its announcement, BASF said it would “stop all ongoing evaluation and negotiation activities for the project in Weda Bay.”
The decision came after a sustained campaign by activists voicing concerns that the Sonic Bay refinery, which is essentially an extension of the Weda Bay Nickel project, would increase the risk of Indigenous peoples in the area losing their lands. Weda Bay Nickel’s concession overlaps with rainforest that’s home to hundreds of members of the Forest Tobelo people, according to U.K.-based Indigenous rights NGO Survival International, which has lobbied both BASF and the German authorities to drop out of the project.
Eramet’s Weda Bay Nickel mine on the territory of the uncontacted Forest Tobelo people in Halmahera, Indonesia. Image courtesy of Survival International.
‘The people who live in the forest’
The Forest Tobelo tribe are among the last Indigenous groups still living in voluntary isolation from the rest of world. They are believed to number between 300 and 500 hunter-gatherer nomadic peoples whose way of life is so intricately tied to the environment that they call themselves O’Hongana Manyawa — the people who live in the forest.
Because the Forest Tobelo people avoid contact with outsiders, it’s unlikely they could ever be reasonably consulted about any projects in their area, or give their free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) for the use of their customary lands. Some tribe members have emerged from their isolation to report losing their forests to the mining concession.
As such, any investment in the Sonic Bay project would likely contribute to the ongoing destruction of the Forest Tobelo people’s forests, Survival International said.
This could be a reason why BASF and Eramet pulled out of the project, said Pius Ginting, coordinator of the Indonesian NGO Action for Ecology and Emancipation of the People (AEER). BASF’s stated reason is that the supply of battery-grade nickel in the market has eased, and that it therefore doesn’t need to invest so heavily to secure supplies.
What it doesn’t mention, however, is that its home government, Germany, is legally obligated to protect, respect and implement the rights of Indigenous and tribal peoples and improve their living and working conditions in the countries where they live. That’s because Germany in 2021 ratified the International Labour Organization’s Indigenous and Tribal Populations Convention.
That would therefore make any German company’s involvement in a project like Sonic Bay that threatens Indigenous peoples a violation of the convention, Pius said.
He also pointed out that WBN had scored poorly in a routine annual assessment of environmental parameters by Indonesia’s Ministry of Environment and Forestry. Known as the PROPER assessment, it assigns a color code to rate companies’ performance, ranging from gold to green to blue to red to black; a gold or green grade means a company exceeds legal requirements.
In 2022, Weda Bay Nickel received a red grade, meaning it failed to operate in accordance with existing environmental and social regulations.
“Even if [BASF and Eramet] said the main reason [for their withdrawal] is because of the market and the economy, we see that environmental risks are of course being considered as well due to WBN’s bad PROPER score,” Pius said.
He added their abandonment of the project should be a wake-up call for the rest of the battery metals industry and the Indonesian government to improve the environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance of the industry.
A member of the Forest Tobelo indigenous group in North Maluku, Indonesia. Photo by Muhammad Ector Prasetyo/Flickr.
‘No-go zone’ to protect Indigenous tribe
Despite this development, WBN’s mining operation looks set to continue as the government pushes for Indonesia to become a powerhouse in the production of battery metals. This means the Forest Tobelo people will continue to be at risk of losing their forests, Survival International said.
The campaign group recently posted a video showing an uncontacted Forest Tobelo family approaching workers at a mining camp. According to Survival International, the family was asking for food after their rainforest was destroyed. It said similar scenes can be prevented by establishing a no-go zone, where no mining or other activities can take place.
Much of the nickel mined at Weda Bay goes to Chinese EV makers; the mine’s majority stakeholder is Tsingshan Holding Group, the world’s biggest nickel producer. Tesla, which doesn’t currently source nickel from Weda Bay but has signed agreements worth billions of dollars with Indonesian nickel and cobalt suppliers, said in its 2023 impact report that it was “exploring the need for a no-go zone” to protect uncontacted Indigenous peoples.
In a meeting with Survival International representatives, senior Indonesian politician Tamsil Linrung also voiced his support for the protection of the Forest Tobelo people through the establishment of a no-go zone.
“We will try to make that region a no-go zone. If not in the near future, perhaps after the next president is sworn into office [in October 2024],” he said.
Uncontacted Forest Tobelo peoples appear at a Weda Bay Nickel mining camp. The uncontacted Forest Tobelo are becoming effectively forced to beg for food from the same companies destroying their rainforest home. Image courtesy of Survival International.
Respite — for now
For now, the news that BASF and Eramet are dropping out of the refinery project provides some respite for the Forest Tobelo people, said Survival International director Caroline Pearce.
“BASF’s withdrawal means that they, at least, will not be complicit in the Hongana Manyawa’s destruction. But Eramet, and other companies, are still ripping up the rainforest and the uncontacted Hongana Manyawa simply won’t survive without it. They must stop now, for good, before it’s too late,” she said.
But another top official, Investment Minister Bahlil Lahadalia — who faces allegations of self-dealing and corruption in the revocation and reissuance of mining permits — said negotiations are still underway to get BASF and Eramet to invest in the refinery. He attributed their withdrawal to a decline in EV sales in Europe as a result of weakening purchasing power, but said this would only be temporary.
“[The project] is still pending,” he said as quoted by Indonesian news website Tempo.co. “We’re still negotiating.”
