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animals
Instead of a Climate Villain, Livestock Can Be a Solution With Legs
For places where livestock is deeply embedded in livelihoods and culture, it is critical to see these farm animals from our perspective and help channel climate and biodiversity finance into their potential as a force for good.
Oct 08, 2024
Livestock are a vital component of both the African food system and rural livelihoods. The continent has around 400 million cattle alone, and the livestock sector accounts for a significant 30-40% of the total agricultural gross domestic product across the continent.
Small amounts of meat, milk and eggs can have life-changing benefits in tackling malnutrition, and these animals also provide a reliable income source when alternatives simply do not readily exist.
Yet, from an environmental perspective, livestock are often perceived only as a problem, contributing to habitat loss, greenhouse gas emissions, and land degradation. This narrow view can hold back much-needed finance into the sector, yet it misses a much more nuanced reality.
International climate finance should prioritise support for sustainable livestock systems, recognizing their unique role in tackling broad environmental challenges while providing food, livelihoods, and economic growth.
As the United Nations prepares for three major environmental meetings over the next few months—on biodiversity conservation, climate change, and land management, respectively—it is important for the world to rethink how it perceives livestock in the context of development progress, and to begin to see such animals as cows, goats, camels, and pigs as “solutions with legs” in combating these intensifying climate and environmental crises at scale.
For countries like Kenya, where livestock is deeply embedded in livelihoods and culture, it is critical for U.N. meetings to see these farm animals from our perspective and help channel climate and biodiversity finance into their potential as a force for good.
Firstly, contrary to popular belief, livestock can be powerful agents of biodiversity conservation when managed correctly. Well-managed grazing systems help maintain ecosystems, control invasive species, and foster the regeneration of diverse native plant life in degraded areas. Pastoralist communities in Kenya, from the Maasai to the Samburu, have long understood this, using livestock grazing as a tool to balance ecosystems and promote biodiversity while providing essential sources of income and producing almost 20% of Kenya’s milk.
And in many conservancies, livestock are intentionally integrated into wildlife conservation strategies. Cattle are grazed rotationally, mimicking natural patterns seen in wild herbivores like zebras and gazelles. This approach helps prevent overgrazing, maintains healthy grasslands, and supports both livestock and wildlife populations.
Secondly, in terms of climate action, the role of livestock is often framed solely around their methane emissions, particularly in the case of ruminant animals like cattle. However, the potential for livestock to contribute to climate solutions is much broader, particularly in places like Africa.
In terms of mitigation, improved rangeland management and the adoption of climate-smart feeding practices can significantly reduce livestock-related emissions. For instance, integrating climate-resilient forages into grazing systems improves both productivity and environmental outcomes.
Moreover, sustainable grazing practices can play a crucial role in lowering the emissions intensity of meat and dairy production through carbon sequestration. Rangelands, often considered wastelands, are actually some of the planet’s largest carbon sinks. When managed properly, they store significant amounts of carbon in their soils, and proper management can contribute as much as 20.92 gigatons of climate mitigation by 2050.
On the adaptation front, livestock are a critical lifeline for communities facing increasing climate variability, including in Kenya’s arid and semi-arid lands. By moving their livestock across landscapes in response to rainfall variability, pastoralists effectively manage scarce resources while avoiding overgrazing.
This adaptive mobility, coupled with the use of Indigenous livestock breeds adapted to harsh climates, provides a critical buffer against droughts and other climate stresses—even more so when index-based livestock insurance is available. The East African Zebu cattle, for example, are better equipped to survive on limited, poor-quality forage in dry conditions, making them crucial to climate resilience in Kenya.
Lastly, as the global land degradation crisis worsens, it is becoming increasingly clear that sustainable livestock management can be a tool for land restoration and rehabilitation. Somewhere between 25% and 35% of rangelands globally suffer from some form of degradation. If left unattended, they become unproductive, reducing food security and driving people to abandon rural areas. Livestock systems can actually help reverse this trend by promoting soil health and regenerating landscapes.
Sustainable grazing practices, including rotational grazing and controlled stocking densities, allow grasslands to recover and restore soil fertility. By moving livestock strategically across the land, these practices prevent overgrazing and promote the growth of deep-rooted plants, which stabilise the soil and improve water retention. Furthermore, healthy rangelands support a wide variety of plant species, protect watersheds, and improve overall ecosystem resilience.
Which begs the question, if livestock are so critical to all these environmental issues, why does the sector receive so little funding? International climate finance should prioritise support for sustainable livestock systems, recognizing their unique role in tackling broad environmental challenges while providing food, livelihoods, and economic growth.
Livestock are not the enemy in this fight. Rather, they are an integral part of the solution, especially in places like Africa where pastoralist and livestock-keeping communities depend on them for survival.
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'Astonishing' Study Shows Infant Deaths Rise in US When Bat Populations Fall
Experts hailed the study as "groundbreaking" and "sobering" for the connections it draws between ecosystem and human health.
Sep 06, 2024
Bat die-offs in the U.S. led to increased use of insecticides, which in turn led to greater infant mortality, according to a "seminal" study published Thursday that shows the effects of biodiversity loss on human beings.
Eyal Frank, an environmental economist at the University of Chicago, authored the study, which was published by Science, a leading peer-reviewed journal.
Bats can eat thousands of insects per night and act as a natural pest control for farmers, so when a fungal disease began killing off bat populations in the U.S. after being introduced in 2006, farmers in affected counties used more insecticides, Frank found. Those same counties saw more infant deaths, which Frank linked to increased use of insecticide that is harmful to human health, especially for babies and fetuses.
The study was greeted by an outpouring of praise from unaffiliated scientists for its methodology and the important takeaways it offers.
"[Frank] uses simple statistical methods to the most cutting-edge techniques, and the takeaway is the same," Eli Fenichel, an environmental economist at Yale University, toldThe New York Times. "Fungal disease killed bats, bats stopped eating enough insects, farmers applied more pesticide to maximize profit and keep food plentiful and cheap, the extra pesticide use led to more babies dying. It is a sobering result."
Carmen Messerlian, an environmental epidemiologist at Harvard University, told the Times the study "seminal" and "groundbreaking."
The study shows the need for a broader understanding of human health that includes consideration of entire ecosystems, said Roel Vermeulen, an environmental epidemiologist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. "It emphasizes the need to move from a human-centric health impact analysis, which only considers the direct effects of pollution on human health, to a planetary health impact assessment," he toldNew Scientist.
Reporter Benji Jones echoed that sentiment in Vox, calling Frank's findings "astonishing" and writing that such studies could help us fight chemical pollution by corporations.
"When the link between human and environmental health is overlooked, industries enabled by short-sighted policies can destroy wildlife habitats without a full understanding of what we lose in the process," Jones said. "This is precisely why studies like this are so critical: They reveal, in terms most people can relate to, how the ongoing destruction of biodiversity affects us all."
NEW: This is one of the more stunning (and sobering) studies I've covered in a while:
It found that a decline of bats in the U.S. had come at a deadly cost to human babieshttps://t.co/M82FXxBrtO
— Dino Grandoni (@dino_grandoni) September 5, 2024
Frank, who said he started the work after stumbling on an article about bat population loss while procrastinating, happened upon an excellent natural experiment. The spread of white-nose syndrome, the fungal disease, was well tracked on a county-by-county level, leaving him with high-quality data that is hard to find for researchers who study the intersection of human and animal life.
The benefits of biodiversity on humans, and the drawbacks to its loss, are normally very difficult to quantify.
"That's just quite rare—to get good, empirical, grounded estimates of how much value the species is providing," Charles Taylor, an environmental economist at Harvard Kennedy School, toldThe Guardian. "Putting actual numbers to it in a credible way is tough."
Taylor himself is the author of a somewhat similar study that showed that pesticide use and infant mortality rose during years in which cicadas appeared; the insects do so at 13-17 year intervals.
David Rosner, a historian based at Columbia University, said the new bat study joins a large body of evidence dating back to the 1960s that links pesticide use with negative human health outcomes. "We're dumping these synthetic materials into our environment, not knowing anything about what their impacts are going to be," he said. "It's not surprising—it's just kind of shocking that we discover it every year."
Frank's claim about the cause of increased infant mortality should be taken with some caution, said Vermeulen, the Dutch researcher. He said the loss of agricultural income caused by bat die-offs could be connected to the increased deaths in complex ways.
The exact causal mechanism isn't known, Frank told media outlets, but the data shows the rise of infant mortality didn't come from food contamination by insecticides—rather, it's more likely it came via the water supply or contact with the chemicals.
Frank's other research extends beyond pesticide use. He and another researcher recently estimated that hundreds of thousands of human beings have died in India due to the collapse of the country's vulture population, as rotting meat increased the spread of diseases such as rabies.
Frank is not the first to study the impacts of white-nose syndrome on humans. Other studies have shown a reduction in land rents in counties hit by the bat plague and documented the billions of dollars that farmers have lost as their natural pest control disappeared.
The syndrome attacks bats while they hibernate. It was first identified in New York in 2006 and has since spread to much of North America. It's believed to have been brought over from Europe. It doesn't affect all bat species, but it's killed more than 90% of three key species, and bats also face a myriad of other threats, including habitat loss, climate change, and the dangerous churn of wind turbines.
Frank's bracing study should be a call to arms, experts said.
"This study estimates just a few of the consequences we suffer from the disappearance of bats, and they are just one of the species we're losing," Felicia Keesing, a biologist at Bard College, told The Washington Post. "These results should motivate everyone, not just farmers and parents, to clamor for the protection and restoration of biodiversity."
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Discovering Intelligence in Unexpected Places
If our human intelligence has discerned over thousands of years which plants are edible and nutritious and healing, wouldn’t the evolutional ingenuity of plants which feed and sustain us and all life also constitute intelligence?
Aug 27, 2024
From the largest to the smallest and the oldest to the youngest creatures on Earth—Antarctic blue whales and coastal redwood trees, minute bacteria and human beings—we are all enmeshed in layers of relationships. We need each other, though some more than others.
Plants evolved hundreds of millions of years before the first humans and transformed the Earth—through their creativity in surviving predators—into a livable environment for all animals, including humans. We needed plants for our evolution and need them now for our survival from climate disaster. They, however, did not need us for their existence and would survive without us.
Putting humans at the top of the evolution chain as the crown of intelligent life, a Western worldview, is—as some keenly grasp—mistaken. The baleful consequences of this simplistic hierarchy are everywhere: out-of-control climate change; accelerating rates of animal and plant extinction; dead zones in the oceans and mass mortality of coral reefs; the vast pollution of land, air, and water; and the mounting likelihood of human extinction with nuclear war. All caused by humans, humans with financial and political power much more egregiously than others.
Perhaps you have you noticed that late summer asters and goldenrod tend to grow as companions. Why? Together—their combined beauty—attracts more pollinators.
Certain scientists who study plants—from the simplest to the exotic—are stirring controversy with their “ Are plants intelligent?” Consider that we humans owe our lives to plants for their food, medicines, and critical balance of 21% oxygen in the air we breathe. If our human intelligence has discerned over thousands of years which plants are edible and nutritious and healing, wouldn’t the evolutional ingenuity of plants which feed and sustain us and all life also constitute intelligence?
Studies have found that elephants recognize themselves in a mirror, crows create tools, dolphins demonstrate empathy and playfulness, and cats exhibit similar styles of attachment as human toddlers. The given explanation is that they have brains with neurological capacity for consciousness and intelligence.
But plants do not have a central brain. Could their mode of learning to evade insect predators and maximize their growth come from a diverse form of intelligence, possibly be distributed across their roots, stems, and leaves? Could the whole plant, then, function as a brain? Recent studies of plants have stirred the possibility that they are conscious and intelligent. Take communication, something we humans claim as our domain through language and more recently acknowledge that animals also possess.
Botanists have found that not only do alder and willow trees alter their leaf chemistry to defend themselves against an invasion of tent caterpillars, but that leaves of faraway trees also change their chemical composition similarly. Warned, as they are, by airborne plant chemicals released from the original trees under attack. Goldenrods signal an attack by a predator through strong chemical communication sent to all other goldenrod neighbors, just as humans warn their neighbors about a nearby fire or flood or crime.
Without any recognizable ears, plants sense sounds. The vibration of a predator insect chewing on its leaves causes a plant to make its own defensive pesticide. Beach evening primrose responds to the sound of honeybees in flight by increasing the sweetness of its nectar to attract them for pollination. Tree roots grow toward the sound of running water, including in pipes, where the roots often burst through causing great difficulties for municipalities. How do the various plants hear these stimulating sounds?
Plants have memory, some anticipating from past experience when a pollinator will show up for the plants’ pollen. Plants express social intelligence: Members of the pea family form relationships with bacteria living in their roots to have the bacteria supply beneficial nitrogen for the plants’ growth. Several kinds of plants provide a home and food for compatible ants who then attack the plants’ ant pests. Perhaps you have you noticed that late summer asters and goldenrod tend to grow as companions. Why? Together—their combined beauty—attracts more pollinators.
In finishing, I express my immense respect for the Indigenous worldview where wind, rocks, air, and rain are our kin, together with plants and nonhuman animals. We, humans, the most recent beings, depend on all of these elder kin; and this awareness, this worldview of connectivity among all beings, is our path back to Earth well-being.
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