Ecological Threat Register 2020

September 11, 2020 / activist360 / Leave a comment

Understanding ecological threats, resilience and peace

The first edition of Ecological Threat Register (ETR) by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) measures the ecological threats faced by 157 independent states and territories and provides projections to 2050.

Topics covered in the ETR include population growth, water stress, food insecurity, droughts, floods, cyclones, rising temperatures, and rising sea levels. The report uses IEP’s Positive Peace framework to identify areas where resilience is unlikely to be strong enough to adapt or cope with these future shocks.

The ETR places threats into two major clusters: resource scarcity and natural disasters. The resource scarcity domain includes food insecurity, water scarcity, and high population growth. At the same time, the natural disasters cluster measures threats of floods, droughts, cyclones, sea-level rise, and rising temperatures.

The ETR identifies three clusters of ecological hotspots, which are particularly susceptible to collapse:

The Sahel-Horn belt of Africa, from Mauritania to Somalia;
The Southern African belt, from Angola to Madagascar;
The Middle East and Central Asian belt, from Syria to Pakistan.

These countries compete for scarce resources, which creates conflict. The conflict, in turn, leads to further resource depletion. These countries are more likely to experience civil unrest, political instability, social fragmentation, and economic collapse.

While high resilience regions, such as Europe and North America, have superior coping capacities to mitigate the effects of these ecological threats, they will not be immune from large flows of refugees. Refugee influx, in turn, can cause considerable unrest and shift political systems.

There are 141 countries exposed to at least one ecological threat between now and 2050. The 19 countries with the highest number of risks have a population of 2.1 billion people. Approximately one billion people live in countries that do not have the resilience to deal with the ecological changes expected.

The countries with the largest number of people at risk are Pakistan, with 220 million people, and Iran with 84 million people. In such circumstances, even small events could spiral into instability and violence, leading to mass population displacement, which would negatively impact regional and global security.

The countries at the highest risk also face food insecurities and crisis-level water demands.

Corn’s Effect On The Environment, Q&A With EarthTalk

April 26, 2020 / activist360 / Leave a comment

How did corn become such a dominant crop in the U.S. and what’s the effect on the environment of growing so much of it?
—J.S., Washington, DC

It’s true that corn is the most dominant agricultural product in the U.S., and perhaps the world. Originally domesticated in Central America, European explorers initially shunned it. But when their crops failed, the conquerors of the New World decided to integrate corn into their agricultural efforts. Fast forward: A couple of hundred years and this tall grass now covers 90 million acres of land in America alone, and accounts for some 10 percent of total crop production globally.

*Although Americans love corn, its ubiquity in our diets and agricultural sector isn’t so good for the planet. Credit: Livier Garcia, Pexels.*

Corn is so ubiquitous in our food system that an estimated 70 percent of the atoms in the body of the average American originally came from it.

One of the reasons corn is so dominant is that, as far as crops go, it excels at converting raw materials into chemical energy. Growing corn generates far more calories per unit of land than nearly any other crop. Another key factor in corn’s rise was the surplus of ammonium nitrate after the end of World War II. Agricultural scientists repurposed this compound, originally stockpiled for explosives, into a cheap form of fertilizer. This allowed corn to be grown in the same fields year after year, without depleting the nitrogen already in the soil. Additionally, corn is incredibly versatile. We can eat it, process it into syrup and use it as a sweetener, fuel our cars with it, and feed it to our animals.

Currently, we use approximately 40 percent of corn grown in the U.S to create ethanol, and 36 percent to feed animals. Unfortunately, both uses wreak havoc on the environment. Ethanol has a low “energy-returned-on-energy-invested” ratio, meaning we must put a large amount of energy into producing it, in some cases even more than ethanol itself generates.

Even just growing corn is far from environmentally friendly. Conventional monoculture farming (the way most corn is grown) degrades soil and often leads to harmful runoff into streams and rivers. Pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers can all wreak havoc on aquatic organisms.

An indirect negative effect of the supremacy of corn has been its help in fueling explosive growth in the livestock industry at home and abroad. These days we use about 80 percent of the world’s farmland for animal production. But as a result of animals’ inefficiency in converting feed to energy, animal agriculture produces only 18 percent of the world’s calories.

So, what can we do? On a political level, agricultural subsidies for corn can be either eliminated or redistributed. Some 60 percent of farm subsidies in the U.S. go toward corn and other grains, while only one percent goes toward promoting healthier and more eco-friendly fruits and non-grain vegetables.

Farmers themselves can transition from monoculture practices to those that incorporate a wider variety of species into the mix. As consumers, one of the best measures we can take is to buy organic corn. Organic agriculture is not quite as eco-friendly as some make it out to be, it’s miles ahead of conventional farming.

CONTACTS: “The Environmental Risks Of Corn Production,” “How a national food policy could save millions of American lives.”

EarthTalk® is produced by Roddy Scheer & Doug Moss for the 501(c)3 nonprofit EarthTalk. Send questions to: question@earthtalk.org.

Environmental Impact And Edible Bugs, Q&A With EarthTalk

February 24, 2020 / activist360 / Leave a comment

Is switching out meat for edible bugs to satisfy our protein needs a viable way to ratchet down our carbon emissions and overall environmental impact?
—J. Cruz., Gary, IN

It’s true that humans’ affinity for meat—especially beef, lamb, pork and to a lesser extent chicken—takes a huge toll on the environment given the resources and emissions expended to rear and then transport it to market. In fact, the UN’s Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports that raising livestock accounts for some 18 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions globally. Meanwhile, on the consumption side, cutting meat out of our diets is perhaps the most efficient way we can slash our personal carbon footprints. But eating only vegetables can make it hard to get enough protein, and that’s where bugs—with half or more of their body weight consisting of proteins—could play an important role in providing us with enough sustenance to feed ourselves, especially as our population surges to nine billion by 2050.

Proponents of eating bugs argue that emissions from so-called “insect farming”—that is, growing bugs for the express purpose of feeding humans and/or animals with them—is a much more energy- and emissions-efficient way to produce protein than traditional forms of livestock agriculture.

If we bartered beef, pork or chicken for a handful of insects, the environmental impact of our animal-protein intake would drop dramatically .
Insects are especially effective at converting their food because they’re cold-blooded and therefore waste less energy to keep warm.”
—David Suzuki, Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki

If you’re curious about edible insects, why not try some? Lewiston, Maine-based EdibleInsects.com ships edible insects coast to coast. UK-based PureGym is a big proponent of deriving dietary protein from insects, and offers several seemingly tasty recipes on its website and YouTube channel. Creamy Mealworm and Coconut Noodles, anyone?

*Some environmentalists are opting to meet their dietary protein needs by eating bugs—like this Thai green curry crickets dish—instead of meat. Credit: Flavio Ensiki, FlickrCC.*

Of course, just because crickets, ants, cockroaches and worms are becoming more common as food delicacies doesn’t mean that eating them is new for humans. The FAO points out in its “Edible Insects” report that while bugs have always been part of human diets, recent innovations in so-called “mass-rearing systems” mean we can produce a lot more insect-based protein than we used to: “Insects offer a significant opportunity to merge traditional knowledge and modern science in both developed and developing countries.”

Suzuki couldn’t agree more: “Emerging entotechnologies (from the Greek root entomo, for ‘insect’) bring together applications that focus on what insects do best.” For instance, food waste or agricultural residue is fed to fly larvae, which in turn is used as a meat-free but protein-rich livestock feed. “[L]arvae have voracious appetites for fruit and vegetable residues and could help improve the way we handle…organic waste,” reports Suzuki. “It’s a way to give a second life to stale food, rather than sending it to compost bins or biogas plants.”

“Considering that nearly 45 percent of fruit and vegetables produced worldwide is wasted, this is not a fringe idea,” says Suzuki. “After feeding the hungry with the highest quality unsold portions of our food, we could feed our breeding animals with insects raised on organic residues from grocery stores and restaurant kitchens.”

CONTACTS: David Suzuki’s “Save The Planet: Eat An Insect,” FAO’s “Edible Insects,” PureGym.

EarthTalk® is produced by Roddy Scheer & Doug Moss for the 501(c)3 nonprofit EarthTalk. Send questions to: question@earthtalk.org.

Understanding ecological threats, resilience and peace

How did corn become such a dominant crop in the U.S. and what’s the effect on the environment of growing so much of it?—J.S., Washington, DC

Is switching out meat for edible bugs to satisfy our protein needs a viable way to ratchet down our carbon emissions and overall environmental impact?—J. Cruz., Gary, IN

How did corn become such a dominant crop in the U.S. and what’s the effect on the environment of growing so much of it?
—J.S., Washington, DC

Is switching out meat for edible bugs to satisfy our protein needs a viable way to ratchet down our carbon emissions and overall environmental impact?
—J. Cruz., Gary, IN