A court ruled this week that the California Endangered Species Act (CESA) can apply to invertebrates, including insects.
This means legal protections will be in place for four native, endangered bumblebee species in California.
The decision marks the end of a court battle between conservation groups and a consortium of large-scale industrial agricultural interests.
An estimated 28% of all bumblebees in North America are at risk of extinction, with consequences for ecosystems and crops, as one-third of food production depends on pollinators.
A California court has ruled that state legislation on endangered species can apply to invertebrates. The decision this week by the Third District Court of Appeal means insects, including four endangered native Californian bumblebee species and the monarch butterfly, will receive much-needed protection under the California Endangered Species Act.
“We are celebrating today’s decision that insects and other invertebrates are eligible for protection under CESA,” Sarina Jepsen, director of endangered species at the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, said in a press release. “The Court’s decision allows California to protect some of its most endangered pollinators, a step which will contribute to the resilience of the state’s native ecosystems and farms.”
In 2018, the Xerces Society, the Center for Food Safety (CFS), and Defenders of Wildlife petitioned the state of California to list four species of native bumblebees as endangered under CESA.
The California Fish and Game Commission voted to begin the process of listing these bees as endangered in 2019, but were then sued by a “consortium of California’s large scale industrial agricultural interests,” according to a Xerces Society press release. The trial court sided with the agricultural consortium, and the conservation groups appealed that decision in 2021. The decision this week marks a win for the conservation groups.
The four species are the western bumblebee (Bombus occidentalis), whose relative abundance has declined by 84%; the Suckley cuckoo bumblebee (Bombus suckleyi) which is considered critically endangered on the IUCN Red List and whose range has shrunk by 58%; the Crotch’s bumblebee (Bombus crotchii), now found in just 20% of its historical range; and Franklin’s bumblebee (Bombus franklini) which, despite extensive annual surveys, has not been seen since 2006.
Photo by Jiří Mikoláš
According to California law, protections under the CESA mean that public agencies should not approve projects that would “jeopardize the continued existence” of any endangered or threatened species or adversely modify their habitat. These species are also protected from being removed from the wild or killed.
“It is a great day for California’s bumble bees!” said Pamela Flick, California program director with Defenders of Wildlife.
Sam Joyce, a certified law student with the Stanford Environmental Law Clinic who argued the case in the Third District, said the CESA is an important tool to protect and restore endangered species. He said the court’s ruling “ensures that CESA will fulfill its purpose of conserving ‘any endangered species’ by protecting the full range of California’s biodiversity, including terrestrial invertebrates.”
The IUCN’s Bumble Bee Specialist Group reports that 28% of all bumblebees in North America are at risk of extinction. Alarming on its own, this decline may also have consequences for ecosystems and crops, as one-third of food production depends on pollinators like bees.
“With one out of every three bites of food we eat coming from a crop pollinated by bees, this court decision is critical to protecting our food supply,” said Rebecca Spector, West Coast director at the Center for Food Safety. “The decision clarifies that insects such as bees qualify for protections under CESA, which are necessary to ensure that populations of endangered species can survive and thrive.”
A first-of-its-kind experimental study has found that climate change reduces the abundance of wildflowers and causes them to produce less nectar and fewer and lighter seeds.
These changes also impact pollinating insects visiting the flowers: they have to visit more flowers, more frequently, to gather the required food.
Fewer flowers imply reduced reproductive fitness in plants, as well as fewer food resources for invertebrates that rely on these plants for food, habitat and shelter.
Overall, climate change may disturb the composition of wildflower species and their pollinators, impacting agricultural crop yields, researchers say.
Think of climate change, and you’ll probably picture devastating floods, raging wildfires, or parched earth. For the environmentally savvy, coral bleaching or masses of refugees may also make it to the list. Not many of us would think of the vibrant wildflowers in nearby meadows as victims of climate change. But the future of these pretty blooms could be gloomy in the face of a warming planet, suggests a recent study published in the journal Frontiers in Plant Science.
This first-of-its-kind study, conducted in the U.K., found that wildflowers across Northern Europe would likely see a steep decline in abundance — up to 40%. In the experimental study, the researchers simulated the warmer, wetter conditions predicted for the region due to climate change. Under this new scenario, some species of plants produced flowers with 60% less nectar and fewer or lighter seeds. Due to these changes, pollinating insects had to visit more flowers to gather the needed pollen and nectar, and visited each flower more frequently.
“Our results demonstrate that climate warming could have severe consequences for some species of wildflowers and their pollinators in agricultural systems, and shows that their community composition is likely to change in the future,” said lead author Ellen D. Moss, a research associate at Newcastle University in the U.K.
While theoretical studies have predicted that climate change could accelerate pollinator losses and wildflower declines, Moss’s study marks the first time scientists have put the theory to the test in an experimental setting. And previous climate change studies have focused on a small number of either plants or pollinating insects in a particular region, and not looked at the effects at a community level.
“This study adds to the weight of evidence that pollinators are at risk from multiple stressors,” said ecologist Jane Stout from Trinity College Dublin, who was not involved in the study. “They are losing places to feed and breed, and they are stressed by pesticides, disease and changes in climate.”
To do this, the researchers sowed spring wheat and a few native wildflowers, which grow on wheat farms, in small agricultural plots in a North Yorkshire farm. They then heated some of these plots with infrared heaters to increase the soil temperature by 1.5° Celsius (2.7° Fahrenheit) and they increased the water supply by 40% to mimic the predicted wetter conditions from future climate change for Northern Europe. The non-heated plots acted as a control in their experiments to compare their results with.
For two flowering seasons, 2014 and 2015, the researchers tracked the different plant species that grew in these plots, the number of flowers they produced, the volume of nectar in them, and the weight of the dried seeds resulting from the flowers. They also collected information about visiting insect pollinators, including their visiting patterns to both the experimental and untouched plots.
The study reported 25 plant species and 80 insect species in 2014, and 19 plant and 69 insect species in 2015. Higher temperatures and more precipitation didn’t change what species were found in the plots, with the most abundant wildflowers being corn marigold (Glebionis segetum), cornflower (Centaurea cyanus), common field-speedwell (Veronica persica), shepherd’s purse (Capsella bursa-pastoris), chickweed (Stellaria media) and red dead-nettle (Lamium purpureum).
Not only did wildlife abundance plunge by up to 40% in the heated plots, most of the plants in these plots also had fewer seeds in the seed heads, and the seeds weighed much less than those in non-heated plots. The only exception was the generalist weed known as common field-speedwell. While it produced more and heavier seeds in the heated plots, its flowers secreted 65% less nectar, making it a less popular flower with pollinators.
“A key finding [of the study] is that not all wild plant species respond to experimental manipulation in the same way, and so the implications for plant communities, and their interactions with pollinators, are complex to predict,” Stout said. Nevertheless, the general decrease in both the abundance and the number of seeds produced is of concern, she added, “because loss of floral resources in the landscape is already a major driver of pollinator decline.”
The study also found marked changes in the feeding behavior of pollinators in the heated plots. Hoverflies, honeybees and bumblebees, which were the most abundant insects, visited more flowers, and increased the frequency of their visits to the same flower to collect the nectar and pollen they needed.
“Fewer flowers and less nectar mean less food for pollinators,” Moss said, adding that such conditions may drive competition between pollinators and force them to choose less optimal flowers. “This could reduce their fitness and survival.”
Veronica persica (also known as field-speedwell) is a flowering plant in the plantain family Plantaginaceae. Source: AnRo0002, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
A gloomy future for the blooms
Worldwide, two in five plants, including wildflowers, are threatened with extinction due to land use change for agriculture, housing and construction. In California, which is experiencing increasingly hotter and drier winters due to climate change, studies have recorded a decline of wildflower species by 15% in 15 years. In the U.K., human activities have destroyed about 97% of wildflower meadows since the 1930s, threatening once commonly seen plants like wild strawberry (Fragaria vesca), harebell (Campanula rotundifolia), and ragged robin (Silene flos-cuculi).
The loss of wildflowers also has a knock-on effect on thousands of insect species, including pollinators like bees and herbivores like aphids, grasshoppers and caterpillars. It also hits populations of natural pest controllers like spiders, ladybirds and lacewings that take shelter in the meadows. Studies show that, worldwide, a quarter of known bee species have not been seen since the 1990s, and loss of habitat is one of the primary reasons for the decline.
“[Climate change] risks crop pollination and our own food supply, but perhaps of more concern is the risk to wild plant pollination and our ecosystems and all the other benefits we get from them,” Stout said.
Tackling climate change by rapidly decreasing emissions would save at least some of the blooms, but in the meantime, there are other steps that could prevent a catastrophic future for wildflowers.
“The main things that will improve ecosystem resilience in the context of wildflowers and pollinators is to improve habitat quantity, quality and connectivity,” Moss said. “We need to leave more wild spaces for native plants and insects and try to connect these areas up so that these patches of high-quality habitat are not too small or too far apart.”
Citations:
Moss, E. D., & Evans, D. M. (2022). Experimental climate warming reduces floral resources and alters insect visitation and wildflower seed set in a cereal agro-ecosystem. Frontiers in Plant Science. doi:10.3389/fpls.2022.826205
(2020). State of the World’s Plants and Fungi 2020. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. doi:10.34885/172
Harrison, S. P., Gornish, E. S., & Copeland, S. (2015). Climate-driven diversity loss in a grassland community. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(28), 8672-8677. doi:10.1073/pnas.1502074112
Zattara, E. E., & Aizen, M. A. (2021). Worldwide occurrence records suggest a global decline in bee species richness. One Earth, 4(1), 114-123. doi:10.1016/j.oneear.2020.12.005
Indigenous leader and CONAIE President Leonidas Iza and other Indigenous leaders hold a press conference outside the Constitutional Court before filing their lawsuit against Ecuador’s President Guillermo Lasso, October 18th 2021. Photo Mitch Anderson / Amazon Frontlines
QUITO, Ecuador — Indigenous communities across Ecuador celebrated over the weekend after a historic ruling by the country’s highest court declaring that Indigenous communities have more autonomy over their territory and a much stronger say over extractive projects affecting their lands.
“This has been a very big news, very important for the community, for all of us who have been on this path,” said Nixon Andy, from the Indigenous Kofan community of Sinangoe in Ecuador’s northern Amazon rainforest.
Ecuador’s Constitutional Court, the country’s highest court, made the ruling on Feb. 4 after reviewing Sinangoe’s 2018 lawsuit, in which the community sued three government ministries for selling mining concessions on their territory without consultation. Provincial judges at the time ruled in favor of the community and the rights of nature, overturning 52 mining concessions.
But last week, the Constitutional Court took this ruling one step further. After reviewing the evidence and traveling to Sinangoe to hold a historic hearing in Indigenous territory last November, the judges found there was a violation of a number of the community’s rights. This includes their right to be consulted before extractive projects are developed on their land.
As a result, the court ruled that the state has an obligation to ensure that communities undergo a consultation process before any extractive activity is planned on or near their territory. This process must also be “clear and accessible” for the whole community, and be carried out with the purpose of “obtaining consent or reaching an agreement with” the communities, according to the 39-page ruling.
Lina Maria Espinosa, a senior attorney with Amazon Frontlines, the environmental NGO that has been supporting Sinangoe, said the ruling will have an immediate impact on any oil or mining activity in any Indigenous territory in the country, as they must now undergo a consultation process with communities and obtain the community’s consent.
“The sentence seems to be an advance in the recognition of the rights of Indigenous peoples to consent [to projects affecting their land], which is the ultimate purpose of the consultation,” Espinosa wrote to Mongabay in a text message.
“This goal must be pursued by the state ALWAYS,” she wrote.
Absent and faulty consultation process
According to Ecuador’s Constitution, Indigenous communities must be consulted before any oil, mining or other extractive projects begin on or near their territory. This is upheld internationally, under Convention 169 of the International Labour Organization, which guarantees Indigenous communities access to free, prior and informed consent (FPIC).
Despite these legal mechanisms, prior consultation has been a major point of conflict in the small South American nation. Many Indigenous communities say they were either never consulted before oil or mining projects were developed on their land, such as the community of Sinangoe, or that the process was faulty.
In 2019, Ecuador’s Waorani sued the state for conducting a flawed consultation process with the community in 2012, which they said was based on lies, misinformation, and a lack of translation necessary for elders who don’t speak Spanish. The court ruled in favor of the community, calling the process fraudulent. This ruling put into doubt all other consultations the government had conducted with communities across the Amazon in 2012, a process that led to the division of the rainforest into oil blocks to be sold to international investors.
The A’i Kofan guardia of Sinangoe finds heavy gold-mining machinery along the Aguarico river in their lands, January 2018, Ecuadorian Amazon. Photo Jerónimo Zúñiga / Amazon Frontlines
Andres Tapia, communications director with Ecuador’s Amazon Indigenous federation, CONFENIAE, said the consultation process had been reduced to an “administrative process.”
“They complied with the requirement to say that [communities] had been consulted, when in reality there was no real relevant consultation process,” Tapia told Mongabay.
The Constitutional Court’s ruling is “historic,” Tapia said, as it “provides a guideline for the right to consent, whereby the community has the final decision on whether or not to allow any extractive activity,” he added.
President Guillermo Lasso has not yet commented on the ruling, as he is currently in China trying to renegotiate his country’s massive debt with Beijing. The ruling could hamper his administration’s plans to double both oil and mining across the country, in order to address Ecuador’s economic crisis that has seen unemployment and poverty spike during the COVID-19 pandemic. Oil and mining account for a combined more than 8% of Ecuador’s GDP.
The Constitutional Court ruling leaves the door open for the government to advance with certain extractive projects without consent from the community in “exceptional circumstances.” But, it stipulates, these initiatives can never “generate disproportionate sacrifice to the collective rights of communities and nature.”
Waorani women in their ancestral territory, Pastaza, Ecuadorian Amazon. Photo Mitch Anderson / Amazon Frontlines
There are 14 Indigenous nations in Ecuador, many of them living in areas rich in oil and mineral deposits. This is particularly true in the Ecuadoran Amazon, where the vast majority of the country’s crude oil reserves are located. At the same time, 70% of the region is also designated Indigenous territory, CONFENIAE said. Scientists also say that an intact Amazon is essential to tackling climate change.
Of the nine Constitutional Court judges hearing the recent case, five ruled in favor of this final ruling, three ruled against, and one abstained.
“The Constitutional Court ratified that the state has to listen to us, so this sets a very important precedent for us, and for the whole Indigenous world, because our voices are not always listened to,” Andy told Mongabay.
