As if we didn’t have enough incentive to tackle climate change, Richard Branson is offering US$25 million to anyone who can come up with an effective means of removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Let's have a gander at some of the contenders.
Standing shoulder to shoulder, Al Gore and British billionaire Richard Branson announced recently they would help save the Earth - by giving away US$25 million. And to take advantage of Branson's generosity, all you need is an invention that will fix global warming.
More specifically, the Virgin Earth Challenge prize, worth A$32 million, will be awarded to a person whose invention removes significant amounts of "anthropogenic, atmospheric greenhouse gases each year for at least ten years without countervailing harmful effects". Let's put the word 'significant' in perspective.
The Australian government thinks it can prevent up to four million tonnes per year of carbon dioxide emissions by requiring virtually every person in Australia to swap their wasteful incandescent light bulbs for more energy-efficient options. This is less than one tenth of one percent of current annual global emissions. For Branson and Gore, 'significant' amounts to something in the order of one billion tonnes per year - 250 times more than what Australia hopes to achieve. To make it happen every year - without side effects - is a truly monumental undertaking.
To the winner of the challenge goes the cold hard cash and to the rest of us go the spoils of a less-spoiled planet. Though the task may seem insurmountable, prizes have proved a potent incentive for innovation in the past. Branson himself is reaping the fruits of another large prize - licensing the technology that won the US$10 million Ansari Prize for the first private manned space vehicle for use by Virgin Galactic, his venture into space tourism.
While slowing global warming is arguably a bit more difficult than sending a few tourists into space, and though the prize won't be awarded until 2010 at the earliest, individuals and organisations are lining up to throw their hat in the ring. And since they're already queueing, we might as well start inspecting them to see if they've got what it takes to meet the challenge.
Here, fishy fishy
Some technologies aim to harness or improve on nature's own carbon removal and storage systems; its oceans, forests and soils. Others use a more artificial approach to carbon sequestration. An example of the former is Ocean Nourishment.
"Ocean Nourishment takes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and converts it into fish," says Ian Jones of Sydney University's Ocean Technology Group. The idea is to dump nitrogen in the form of urea into the open ocean to stimulate the growth of plant-like microorganisms called phytoplankton. Like plants, phytoplankton perform photosynthesis - turning carbon into sugars that they use for food. Phytoplankton are near the bottom of the oceanic food chain, and more phytoplankton means more food for fish and other marine life. The theory goes: every animal is basically a mobile carbon storage device, so more animals in the oceans means better carbon storage.
The scheme was originally developed to restore the health of 'desertified' parts of the ocean with dwindling plankton populations, but snaffling excess atmospheric carbon dioxide is a welcome side effect. Early trials have been promising, but the biggest question is what will happen when it is scaled up.
Dawn Levy, a science writer at Stanford University in California, is wary of strategies like Ocean Nourishment and an analogous scheme that uses iron instead of nitrogen as fertiliser. "Monkeying with the food chain may have ripple effects - unknown consequences - throughout the system, and I doubt it would have a big enough effect to make a dent on the problem," she says.
There's carbon in them thar hills!
If the Earth Challenge were awarded today, many people would place their own money on geosequestration. Already well into the testing phase, variations on the geosequestration theme are probably the best known carbon-reducing strategies at the moment. Basically, geosequestration is the burial of carbon in rocks. Many possible locations have been mooted, including old oil fields, saline aquifers and unminable coal seams. Some schemes are looking to store carbon dioxide beneath the seabed.
For years mining companies have been pumping carbon dioxide and other gases into oil fields to pressurise oil pockets, helping push the oil to the surface. To many it makes sense to take advantage of this pre-existing infrastructure. The energy industry is well-placed to take the lead with geosequestration, as they can capture emissions at the source. In the North Sea, a Norwegian company has been separating carbon dioxide from natural gas and burying it for the last ten years, with over 10 million tonnes stored so far.
Critics of geosequestration say it amounts to sweeping carbon under the carpet, with a real chance that it could leak out at a later date. If this were to happen to carbon stored under the seabed, it could make the ocean more acidic – and ocean acidity is already a problem in some areas.
Kelpie Wilson, environmental editor at the online magazine truthout.org, believes everyone has overlooked something that applies to all forms of carbon sequestration. "When plants pull CO2 out of the air and use it to grow stems and roots, they recycle the oxygen back into the atmosphere. Are we in danger of burying a needful portion of our oxygen deep in the Earth?"
Fake plastic trees
Klaus Lackner of Columbia University in New York has several fingers in the Earth Challenge pie. One project of Lackner's that has attracted attention is using artificial trees to capture carbon dioxide. In fact, it was Lackner's daughter who performed the proof of concept experiment for the technology - for her high school science class. Blowing carbon dioxide through a solution containing sodium hydroxide (lye), she captured half of the CO2 as sodium carbonate, or soda ash.
Artificial 'trees' would be coated with a carbon-capturing chemical, their 'leaves' far more densely packed than a regular tree, as they need only be exposed to air rather than direct sunlight. It has been pointed out that the coating would need to be regularly recycled and refreshed – something trees do for no charge. The carbon captured using this method would then be piped away and stored using one of the geosequestration techniques.
As part of the industry group known as the Zero Emissions Coal Alliance (ZECA), Lackner is also behind proposals to minerally sequester carbon. In this process, carbon is transformed into a less reactive and – more to the point – less dangerous form than carbon dioxide.
One limitation of this method is the relative scarcity of raw materials for the reaction, which converts carbon dioxide into magnesium carbonate. Another extremely stable form of carbon is diamond. But if researchers could transform atmospheric carbon dioxide into diamonds they wouldn't need the prize money in the first place.
~~~
It is genuinely exciting to think of the potential of these and other technologies that will emerge in the future. But how hopeful should we be?
Wilson has condemned the prize, which she calls "an engineer's wet dream", for encouraging inaction among the masses who blithely assume the inevitability of a techno-fix. This assumption is not shared by Jones and Lackner, who agree on the need to cut our fossil fuel use now. Others cry out for more support of renewable and non-polluting energies.
Levy, who thinks that the climate situation is more serious than the general public perceives, is more optimistic. "I think the prize will make a difference in both the short and long term. I am grateful people like Richard Branson and Al Gore are looking beyond profit and politics to address a problem that knows no borders."
A broader concern of Wilson's is one shared by many of us. When we set out to change the earth's climate on the grandest scale of all, how confident can we possibly be of precisely controlling its consequences? What if we overcorrect and remove too much carbon dioxide, killing all the trees and starving ourselves of oxygen in the process?
Last week the company Geopower Basel provided a timely warning to those who would save the Earth with technology. The geothermal energy project involved injecting pressurised water into 4.8 km deep bore holes near Basel, Switzerland, where the water is heated to 200 ° C. When the water returns to the surface as steam it drives a turbine to generate electricity. Unfortunately the work set off four minor earthquakes in the area.
Jones summed up the current pickle when he told the BBC, "Once you start managing nature you have to continue to manage nature, there is no use hoping that it will restore itself to a new equilibrium set up by humans."
Thursday, June 21, 2007
A Few Good Viruses
Viruses generally get a bad rap, but when you scratch under the surface, you see not all is what it seems...
As far as words with negative connotations go, it's hard to top 'virus'. AIDS, bird flu, cholera, Dengue fever, Ebola - and that's just the first five letters of the alphabet. And when Agent Smith tells Neo in The Matrix that he considers the human race a virus, it's widely understood that he's not paying a compliment. But for a rising number of scientists, viruses aren't sinister at all.
Hitchhikers, hijackers & hosts
Defining viruses is notoriously difficult. Though viruses are a subject firmly rooted in biology, ask a biologist for an explanation of what they are and you're likely to hear some emphatically non-biological descriptives like 'particle', 'entity' and 'fragment'.
Like some bacteria, and even 'higher' eukaryotic organisms such as fungi, viruses are entirely dependent on a host organism for survival. But unlike the others, viruses are not generally afforded 'living' status because they consist of little more than DNA or RNA wrapped in a shell, without the tools for reproducing themselves or turning their genetic information into useful proteins.
When a virus infects a host cell, the cell becomes its workshop. It hijacks the machinery of the cell, turning it from its usual purposes to the sole task of replicating the virus's genetic material and protein coat. So effectively does the virus take over the cell - so many copies of the virus does it produce - that the cell eventually suicides, bursting under the pressure of the viral progeny (also called bicentuplets), setting them free to infect other cells and continue the cycle.
But there is another path the virus can take, one that has spawned a research love affair with viruses. Rather than immediately hijacking the cell for its own reproductive ends, sometimes a virus will insert its genes into the host's genome, ensuring their safety and biding its time until conditions are right for replication. Often this is not harmful to the host cell, and during this period of dormancy the viral DNA gets replicated along with the rest of genome when the cell divides. Eventually, a trigger may activate the viral genes, which usurp control of the cell's machinery and send off daughter viruses to infect other cells.
Tool thief or tool?
In 1952, Martha Chase and Alfred Hershey used viruses to help establish that DNA, rather than protein, forms the basis of heredity. Cheap, quick to produce, and easy to modify, a core group of viruses has filled out the toolboxes of many a biologist ever since.
Their ability to entwine themselves with the host's genome has made viruses the darlings of the field of gene therapy. The once outlandish scenario of going into a person's cells and correcting genetic 'typos' is now an earnest aim of researchers, who hope intentional viral infections will one day help sufferers of diseases such as Parkinson's and Severe Combined Immunodeficiency (SCID), also known as 'bubble boy syndrome', a mutation in the genome that prevents the body's immune system from functioning.
Researchers plan to 'hijack the hijackers' - swapping the virus' harmful genes for a corrected version of the patient's defective genes and using the virus' unique abilities to insert the gene into patient's genome. In reality, the procedure is fraught with difficulties, not least getting the right amount of gene in the right location without side effects.
Pavel Osten from Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, recently co-authored a paper on the use of viruses as DNA delivery systems, or vectors. "In my view, it is most likely that this work [gene therapy] will become a mainstream treatment of some of the devastating brain disorders for which there is currently no treatment," he wrote.
But how would you feel about being injected with a virus to cure a disease? According to Osten, the risks are low and decreasing. "The viral vectors … are in most cases stripped down to the most basic elements that are required for gene delivery, and thus in no possible way pose any risk with respect to the original disease."
Viruses don't attack only animal cells, however. The vast majority of viruses actually target bacteria, including the bacteria that infect humans; they are called bacteriophages, or phages for short (from the Greek phagein, to consume). "For years researchers have been looking at using this targeted bacterial killing as an alternative to antibiotics," says Jason Clark from Moredun Research Institute in Scotland. While this might seem a bit like inviting in the barbarians, it's also sound science; in August of last year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a bacteriophage food spray designed to reduce the amount of illness-causing bacteria on ready-to-eat meals.
It's a virus' world
By probing their workings and exploiting their functions in laboratories around the world, scientists have gone a long way toward demystifying viruses. But recent revelations about the extent of viral diversity could radically shift our perceptions of them again.
The advent of a range of DNA-sequencing technologies has allowed microbiologists to move beyond the constraints of studying only what they can culture in the lab, and glimpse what exists 'out there' - in the soil, in the sea and in our guts. And the results have been eye opening.
According to some estimates, the total number of viruses exceeds the total number of cells in every other life form - including bacteria - by a factor of ten. "The total biomass and biodiversity of viruses is truly staggering," says microbiologist Nick Coleman, from the University of Sydney in Australia.
So what are all these viruses doing? Should we be avoiding contact with other people and frequently sterilising ourselves? According to Coleman, viruses actually do a lot to control other parasites. "The implication [of microbial biodiversity studies] is that most, if not all, larger microbes are subject to viral parasitism, and that viruses might be crucial in controlling the populations of other microbes."
Forest Rohwer of San Diego State University in southern California has conducted several landmark studies of marine microbial diversity. Rohwer has seen a change in attitudes towards viruses over the years. "Scientists have always recognized the importance of viruses, but recently it has become clearer that viruses are an integral part of every ecosystem and can't be ignored when we try to understand how life on Earth works," he says. "We usually only hear about viruses in the context of human disease. But most viruses are actually not harmful, and in fact have played an important part in evolution and in maintaining healthy ecosystems."
Andrew Holmes, a microbiologist from the University of Sydney, thinks that people should know that "viruses are everywhere and do not instantly equal 'bad'… [they] have the potential to cause very rapid biological change through epidemic disease, but that is exceedingly rare," he says. "Vigilance is important but panic is unwarranted." Holmes points out that this same process is an important part of correcting imbalances that occur in nature. For example, one mechanism by which algal blooms - explosions of algae that choke sea life and disrupt food chains - break down is viral disease. As Holmes puts it, "such viruses are the means by which the ecosystem corrects itself."
According to Rohwer, when you multiply the number of viruses out there by the billions of years they've been around, their probable influence over evolution is huge. "They are able to move genetic information between different hosts, but we still do not fully understand how this has influenced, and continues to influence, the evolution of new species."
So the next time your nose starts to run or you feel a tickle in your throat, spare a thought for your uninvited guest … and the role you play as gracious host to a galaxy of hitchhikers.
As far as words with negative connotations go, it's hard to top 'virus'. AIDS, bird flu, cholera, Dengue fever, Ebola - and that's just the first five letters of the alphabet. And when Agent Smith tells Neo in The Matrix that he considers the human race a virus, it's widely understood that he's not paying a compliment. But for a rising number of scientists, viruses aren't sinister at all.
Hitchhikers, hijackers & hosts
Defining viruses is notoriously difficult. Though viruses are a subject firmly rooted in biology, ask a biologist for an explanation of what they are and you're likely to hear some emphatically non-biological descriptives like 'particle', 'entity' and 'fragment'.
Like some bacteria, and even 'higher' eukaryotic organisms such as fungi, viruses are entirely dependent on a host organism for survival. But unlike the others, viruses are not generally afforded 'living' status because they consist of little more than DNA or RNA wrapped in a shell, without the tools for reproducing themselves or turning their genetic information into useful proteins.
When a virus infects a host cell, the cell becomes its workshop. It hijacks the machinery of the cell, turning it from its usual purposes to the sole task of replicating the virus's genetic material and protein coat. So effectively does the virus take over the cell - so many copies of the virus does it produce - that the cell eventually suicides, bursting under the pressure of the viral progeny (also called bicentuplets), setting them free to infect other cells and continue the cycle.
But there is another path the virus can take, one that has spawned a research love affair with viruses. Rather than immediately hijacking the cell for its own reproductive ends, sometimes a virus will insert its genes into the host's genome, ensuring their safety and biding its time until conditions are right for replication. Often this is not harmful to the host cell, and during this period of dormancy the viral DNA gets replicated along with the rest of genome when the cell divides. Eventually, a trigger may activate the viral genes, which usurp control of the cell's machinery and send off daughter viruses to infect other cells.
Tool thief or tool?
In 1952, Martha Chase and Alfred Hershey used viruses to help establish that DNA, rather than protein, forms the basis of heredity. Cheap, quick to produce, and easy to modify, a core group of viruses has filled out the toolboxes of many a biologist ever since.
Their ability to entwine themselves with the host's genome has made viruses the darlings of the field of gene therapy. The once outlandish scenario of going into a person's cells and correcting genetic 'typos' is now an earnest aim of researchers, who hope intentional viral infections will one day help sufferers of diseases such as Parkinson's and Severe Combined Immunodeficiency (SCID), also known as 'bubble boy syndrome', a mutation in the genome that prevents the body's immune system from functioning.
Researchers plan to 'hijack the hijackers' - swapping the virus' harmful genes for a corrected version of the patient's defective genes and using the virus' unique abilities to insert the gene into patient's genome. In reality, the procedure is fraught with difficulties, not least getting the right amount of gene in the right location without side effects.
Pavel Osten from Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, recently co-authored a paper on the use of viruses as DNA delivery systems, or vectors. "In my view, it is most likely that this work [gene therapy] will become a mainstream treatment of some of the devastating brain disorders for which there is currently no treatment," he wrote.
But how would you feel about being injected with a virus to cure a disease? According to Osten, the risks are low and decreasing. "The viral vectors … are in most cases stripped down to the most basic elements that are required for gene delivery, and thus in no possible way pose any risk with respect to the original disease."
Viruses don't attack only animal cells, however. The vast majority of viruses actually target bacteria, including the bacteria that infect humans; they are called bacteriophages, or phages for short (from the Greek phagein, to consume). "For years researchers have been looking at using this targeted bacterial killing as an alternative to antibiotics," says Jason Clark from Moredun Research Institute in Scotland. While this might seem a bit like inviting in the barbarians, it's also sound science; in August of last year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a bacteriophage food spray designed to reduce the amount of illness-causing bacteria on ready-to-eat meals.
It's a virus' world
By probing their workings and exploiting their functions in laboratories around the world, scientists have gone a long way toward demystifying viruses. But recent revelations about the extent of viral diversity could radically shift our perceptions of them again.
The advent of a range of DNA-sequencing technologies has allowed microbiologists to move beyond the constraints of studying only what they can culture in the lab, and glimpse what exists 'out there' - in the soil, in the sea and in our guts. And the results have been eye opening.
According to some estimates, the total number of viruses exceeds the total number of cells in every other life form - including bacteria - by a factor of ten. "The total biomass and biodiversity of viruses is truly staggering," says microbiologist Nick Coleman, from the University of Sydney in Australia.
So what are all these viruses doing? Should we be avoiding contact with other people and frequently sterilising ourselves? According to Coleman, viruses actually do a lot to control other parasites. "The implication [of microbial biodiversity studies] is that most, if not all, larger microbes are subject to viral parasitism, and that viruses might be crucial in controlling the populations of other microbes."
Forest Rohwer of San Diego State University in southern California has conducted several landmark studies of marine microbial diversity. Rohwer has seen a change in attitudes towards viruses over the years. "Scientists have always recognized the importance of viruses, but recently it has become clearer that viruses are an integral part of every ecosystem and can't be ignored when we try to understand how life on Earth works," he says. "We usually only hear about viruses in the context of human disease. But most viruses are actually not harmful, and in fact have played an important part in evolution and in maintaining healthy ecosystems."
Andrew Holmes, a microbiologist from the University of Sydney, thinks that people should know that "viruses are everywhere and do not instantly equal 'bad'… [they] have the potential to cause very rapid biological change through epidemic disease, but that is exceedingly rare," he says. "Vigilance is important but panic is unwarranted." Holmes points out that this same process is an important part of correcting imbalances that occur in nature. For example, one mechanism by which algal blooms - explosions of algae that choke sea life and disrupt food chains - break down is viral disease. As Holmes puts it, "such viruses are the means by which the ecosystem corrects itself."
According to Rohwer, when you multiply the number of viruses out there by the billions of years they've been around, their probable influence over evolution is huge. "They are able to move genetic information between different hosts, but we still do not fully understand how this has influenced, and continues to influence, the evolution of new species."
So the next time your nose starts to run or you feel a tickle in your throat, spare a thought for your uninvited guest … and the role you play as gracious host to a galaxy of hitchhikers.
Nature of War
Landmines, chemical agents and hunting for bushmeat all take a heavy toll on wildlife during war, but on occasion animals can fare surprisingly well in times of conflict. What can we learn from these examples?
After ten years of bitter civil combat in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) the outlook for the eastern lowland gorilla was looking grim. The combat itself, a marked increase in the bushmeat trade and illegal mining to fund the conflict had all taken a heavy toll. Conservation International was one of many non-governmental organisations chased out by the war in 1994. But upon their return ten years later, they found that gorilla numbers had collapsed by as much as 70 per cent.
This tale has a familiar ring to it. Asian elephants in Vietnam and Sri Lanka, waterfowl in Iraq, bluefin tuna and green turtles in Lebanon, rhinos in Nepal and hippos in the DRC have all suffered the fallout of human conflict.
It doesn't always have to be that way though. During a similar period in the 1990s, a radically different fate befell the eastern mountain gorilla, a montane cousin of the lowland gorilla. The species shot to fame after the work of conservationist Dian Fossey and the subsequent movie Gorillas in the Mist. Amidst Rwanda's own infamously bloody civil war, mountain gorillas in the Virunga Volcanoes National Park experienced a remarkable upswing, of a round a fifth, in numbers.
This begs the question: why would a species do well at times of conflict? If conservationists can pin down the reasons, they might be able to learn from these experiences to help species survive future conflicts.
Hit list
The list of ways in which warfare can harm wildlife and their habitats is lengthy. Munitions, landmines and chemical agents can cause both immediate and long-lasting effects. Refugees and soldiers spill into wild habitats during conflicts, as does poaching and over-harvesting.
"Here in [Africa's] Great Lakes Region you are never far from war," says Andre Plumptre, director of the Wildlife Conservation Society's Albertine Rift Program in Uganda. Plumptre has seen the effect of war on wildlife first hand and says that conserving species while finding ways to work alongside a background of unrest is a way of life.
Large animals tend to suffer disproportionately as they are hunted for bushmeat, he says. That can also be "bad for the rest of the biodiversity, if it leads to loss of their habitat or conversion to another land use."
One such example is Akagera Park in Rwanda, which has shrunk to a third of its original area as a direct result of the civil war. The bushmeat trade also hurts conservation efforts indirectly as the loss of large 'flagship' species makes it much harder to generate funds and retain political support.
Agent Orange
Plumptre co-authored a 2002 study in U.S. journal Conservation Biology cataloguing effects such as these and detailing a litany of species battered by war. For example, during the Vietnam War (1955 to 1975) Asian elephants were routinely strafed and bombed by U.S. aircraft to prevent the Vietcong using them for transport. Landmines continue to maim wildlife and livestock, in addition to people, to this day.
Furthermore, around one hundred thousand tonnes of herbicide – such as the 'defoliant' Agent Orange - were sprayed over not just Vietnam, but also Cambodia and Laos during the conflict. A recent survey in an area of Vietnam untouched by the conflict found 150 species of birds; but a comparable area, blanketed with the herbicide during the war, was found to contain just 24 species of birds.
Asian elephants have also been caught in the crossfire in the ongoing Sri Lankan civil war. Starting in 1984, elephants that managed to avoid munitions have had their migratory patterns disrupted by the conflict. In 1986 a national park was directly attacked by rebels, killing staff and wildlife and crippling infrastructure.
No-go zone
Surprisingly though, some species do quite well in times of conflict. The answer may lie in the compelling deterrent conflict creates for people, and the ability of species to bounce back when humans leave them well alone.
According to Plumptre, war can sometimes give species the breathing space they need to rebound. "War can be good in that it keeps people from moving into an area and settling there," he says.
He cites the example of an area of the DRC west of Lake Tanganyika, which has been unstable because of rebel activity until the last few years.
"The forest is amazingly intact and few people live in the region despite the place having been totally unprotected for more than 50 years," says Plumptre. "If there had not been rebels here this forest would likely have been finished by now."
The deterrent effect isn't new either. Paul Martin and Christine Szuter from the University of Arizona in the U.S. studied areas disputed by Native American tribes from the 17th to the 19th centuries. They found that disagreement between tribes over these areas created buffer zones with few inhabitants, where species such as bison, elk and deer thrived.
Strange effects
The Korean Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea is perhaps the ultimate no man's land. Created in 1953 by the U.N., the DMZ (four-km-wide but 248 km-long) divides the Korean Peninsula in two and is the most heavily armed border in the world.
Thanks to this strange confluence of events, the DMZ is a treasure trove of biodiversity, packed with 149 U.N.-listed World Heritage Sites. The zone is home to a significant chunk of Korean biodiversity and two endangered cranes use it as a pit-stop on a migratory journey spanning thousands of kilometres across the globe.
Present day Australia is not the first place you'd think to go looking for war zones. One thing the country does have in increasing abundance though are military training areas, and these often have high conservation value too, says zoologist John Woinarski with the Northern Territory Department of Natural Resources, Environment and the Arts in Darwin.
This is likely down to the fact that much of the rest of Northern Australia, at least the bits that aren't desert, are given over to cattle production, he says. "In this environment, any lands that aren't managed for cows will have biodiversity gains."
Working in a war zone
In between dodging bullets, conservationists working in war zones are constantly trying to extract maximum benefit from severely limited resources. But can we learn from the experiences of species that have been ravaged by conflict to better protect others in the future?
A study published in April 2007 in the U.K. journal Biology Letters argues that current efforts to protect endangered species during wartime may need rethinking. Guy Cowlishaw, a conservationist at the Institute of Zoology in London, U.K., and colleagues studied changes in the bushmeat trade in the DRC during periods of peace and conflict. Surprisingly, the number of anti-poaching patrols had little effect on bushmeat offtake.
What they found instead was that social factors were critical in determining the opportunities of poachers. In rural areas where village chiefs maintained a tight control over the supply of automatic weapons, poaching was restricted even during periods of armed conflict. In urban areas the outbreak of fighting lead to a catastrophic loss of control over arms and an increase in poaching.
These results point to the need for conservationists to establish closer links with the community. "Our results indicate that sociopolitical factors can be an important determinant of species offtake," say the authors.
"The impact of human conflict on wildlife and habitats is complex. While stretches of depopulated no man's land between warring forces can provide a sanctuary for wildlife, most war zones are more likely to act as population sinks through the proliferation of armaments and uncontrolled poaching by refugees and combatants," they wrote. "Given the threat that warfare poses and the prevalence of armed conflicts, it is imperative to identify how wildlife and habitats can best be safeguarded."
Their study is hopefully the first of many that will provide more data to help conservationists understand why the eastern mountain gorilla was able to do so well during the Rwandan civil war – and also help them find ways to protect less fortunate species such as the eastern lowland gorilla, which was so decimated during the DRC's neighbouring conflict.
After ten years of bitter civil combat in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) the outlook for the eastern lowland gorilla was looking grim. The combat itself, a marked increase in the bushmeat trade and illegal mining to fund the conflict had all taken a heavy toll. Conservation International was one of many non-governmental organisations chased out by the war in 1994. But upon their return ten years later, they found that gorilla numbers had collapsed by as much as 70 per cent.
This tale has a familiar ring to it. Asian elephants in Vietnam and Sri Lanka, waterfowl in Iraq, bluefin tuna and green turtles in Lebanon, rhinos in Nepal and hippos in the DRC have all suffered the fallout of human conflict.
It doesn't always have to be that way though. During a similar period in the 1990s, a radically different fate befell the eastern mountain gorilla, a montane cousin of the lowland gorilla. The species shot to fame after the work of conservationist Dian Fossey and the subsequent movie Gorillas in the Mist. Amidst Rwanda's own infamously bloody civil war, mountain gorillas in the Virunga Volcanoes National Park experienced a remarkable upswing, of a round a fifth, in numbers.
This begs the question: why would a species do well at times of conflict? If conservationists can pin down the reasons, they might be able to learn from these experiences to help species survive future conflicts.
Hit list
The list of ways in which warfare can harm wildlife and their habitats is lengthy. Munitions, landmines and chemical agents can cause both immediate and long-lasting effects. Refugees and soldiers spill into wild habitats during conflicts, as does poaching and over-harvesting.
"Here in [Africa's] Great Lakes Region you are never far from war," says Andre Plumptre, director of the Wildlife Conservation Society's Albertine Rift Program in Uganda. Plumptre has seen the effect of war on wildlife first hand and says that conserving species while finding ways to work alongside a background of unrest is a way of life.
Large animals tend to suffer disproportionately as they are hunted for bushmeat, he says. That can also be "bad for the rest of the biodiversity, if it leads to loss of their habitat or conversion to another land use."
One such example is Akagera Park in Rwanda, which has shrunk to a third of its original area as a direct result of the civil war. The bushmeat trade also hurts conservation efforts indirectly as the loss of large 'flagship' species makes it much harder to generate funds and retain political support.
Agent Orange
Plumptre co-authored a 2002 study in U.S. journal Conservation Biology cataloguing effects such as these and detailing a litany of species battered by war. For example, during the Vietnam War (1955 to 1975) Asian elephants were routinely strafed and bombed by U.S. aircraft to prevent the Vietcong using them for transport. Landmines continue to maim wildlife and livestock, in addition to people, to this day.
Furthermore, around one hundred thousand tonnes of herbicide – such as the 'defoliant' Agent Orange - were sprayed over not just Vietnam, but also Cambodia and Laos during the conflict. A recent survey in an area of Vietnam untouched by the conflict found 150 species of birds; but a comparable area, blanketed with the herbicide during the war, was found to contain just 24 species of birds.
Asian elephants have also been caught in the crossfire in the ongoing Sri Lankan civil war. Starting in 1984, elephants that managed to avoid munitions have had their migratory patterns disrupted by the conflict. In 1986 a national park was directly attacked by rebels, killing staff and wildlife and crippling infrastructure.
No-go zone
Surprisingly though, some species do quite well in times of conflict. The answer may lie in the compelling deterrent conflict creates for people, and the ability of species to bounce back when humans leave them well alone.
According to Plumptre, war can sometimes give species the breathing space they need to rebound. "War can be good in that it keeps people from moving into an area and settling there," he says.
He cites the example of an area of the DRC west of Lake Tanganyika, which has been unstable because of rebel activity until the last few years.
"The forest is amazingly intact and few people live in the region despite the place having been totally unprotected for more than 50 years," says Plumptre. "If there had not been rebels here this forest would likely have been finished by now."
The deterrent effect isn't new either. Paul Martin and Christine Szuter from the University of Arizona in the U.S. studied areas disputed by Native American tribes from the 17th to the 19th centuries. They found that disagreement between tribes over these areas created buffer zones with few inhabitants, where species such as bison, elk and deer thrived.
Strange effects
The Korean Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea is perhaps the ultimate no man's land. Created in 1953 by the U.N., the DMZ (four-km-wide but 248 km-long) divides the Korean Peninsula in two and is the most heavily armed border in the world.
Thanks to this strange confluence of events, the DMZ is a treasure trove of biodiversity, packed with 149 U.N.-listed World Heritage Sites. The zone is home to a significant chunk of Korean biodiversity and two endangered cranes use it as a pit-stop on a migratory journey spanning thousands of kilometres across the globe.
Present day Australia is not the first place you'd think to go looking for war zones. One thing the country does have in increasing abundance though are military training areas, and these often have high conservation value too, says zoologist John Woinarski with the Northern Territory Department of Natural Resources, Environment and the Arts in Darwin.
This is likely down to the fact that much of the rest of Northern Australia, at least the bits that aren't desert, are given over to cattle production, he says. "In this environment, any lands that aren't managed for cows will have biodiversity gains."
Working in a war zone
In between dodging bullets, conservationists working in war zones are constantly trying to extract maximum benefit from severely limited resources. But can we learn from the experiences of species that have been ravaged by conflict to better protect others in the future?
A study published in April 2007 in the U.K. journal Biology Letters argues that current efforts to protect endangered species during wartime may need rethinking. Guy Cowlishaw, a conservationist at the Institute of Zoology in London, U.K., and colleagues studied changes in the bushmeat trade in the DRC during periods of peace and conflict. Surprisingly, the number of anti-poaching patrols had little effect on bushmeat offtake.
What they found instead was that social factors were critical in determining the opportunities of poachers. In rural areas where village chiefs maintained a tight control over the supply of automatic weapons, poaching was restricted even during periods of armed conflict. In urban areas the outbreak of fighting lead to a catastrophic loss of control over arms and an increase in poaching.
These results point to the need for conservationists to establish closer links with the community. "Our results indicate that sociopolitical factors can be an important determinant of species offtake," say the authors.
"The impact of human conflict on wildlife and habitats is complex. While stretches of depopulated no man's land between warring forces can provide a sanctuary for wildlife, most war zones are more likely to act as population sinks through the proliferation of armaments and uncontrolled poaching by refugees and combatants," they wrote. "Given the threat that warfare poses and the prevalence of armed conflicts, it is imperative to identify how wildlife and habitats can best be safeguarded."
Their study is hopefully the first of many that will provide more data to help conservationists understand why the eastern mountain gorilla was able to do so well during the Rwandan civil war – and also help them find ways to protect less fortunate species such as the eastern lowland gorilla, which was so decimated during the DRC's neighbouring conflict.
Sunday, June 3, 2007
The Beginning of a New Era
Welcome to Artful Science! This website will be dedicated to talking about science, talking about science in the media, not sensationalising science, understanding science, criticising science and more.
I will be posting stories, interviews, opinion pieces and of course a fair share of rambling nonsense thrown in for good measure.
I believe that people are crying out for a fresh perspective on science. A non-institutional perspective. One that is frank, honest, and not afraid to be uncertain (at least I think so). One that takes into account the humanity behind science, from which it grows, that supports it and that bears its brunt.
Like Big Kev, I'm excited!
I will be posting stories, interviews, opinion pieces and of course a fair share of rambling nonsense thrown in for good measure.
I believe that people are crying out for a fresh perspective on science. A non-institutional perspective. One that is frank, honest, and not afraid to be uncertain (at least I think so). One that takes into account the humanity behind science, from which it grows, that supports it and that bears its brunt.
Like Big Kev, I'm excited!
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