Climate Crisis = Children’s Crusade

“It’s insane that a 16-year-old has to cross the Atlantic in order to take a stand, but that’s how it is. It feels like we are at a breaking point. Leaders know that more eyes on them, much more pressure is on them, that they have to do something, they have to come up with some sort of solution. I want a concrete plan, not just nice words.”

— Greta Thunberg

Since Ms. Thunberg’s first solo vigil outside Sweden’s parliament a year ago, almost to the day, the harsh glare of the media spotlight has proved a mixed blessing. For every believer like 14-year-old Manhattan climate activist Alexandria Villasenõr, there have been critics like the influencer for the website Spiked who mocked the “apocalyptic dread in (Ms. Thunberg’s) eyes” and the far-right conservative MP in the French parliament who, ahead of her address last month, labeled her the “Justin Bieber of ecology” and a “prophetess in shorts.”

Leaving aside the fact that, based on her past public pronouncements, she’d be only too happy to cultivate a following as widespread and culturally diverse as that which follows Mr. Bieber, she’s proved herself more than a match for her doubters — doubters, it must be said, who include some truly nasty, dangerous characters such as followers of Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) ahead of the EU elections in May.

None of this was going to change when she finally stepped foot in New York City this past week, having crossed the Atlantic in a 16-day sea voyage aboard a small, carbon neutral solar powered racing yacht owned by Prince Albert of Monaco.

Human activity is a prime driver behind global warning, according to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This conclusion is shared by 97% of actively publishing climate scientists, according to a 2016 study of peer-reviewed journals; the other 3% are climate scientists who appear on Fox News.

Ms. Thunberg was reportedly trembling and unsteady on her legs when she finally stepped onto dry land after 16 days at sea — she’s only 16, after all — but, having arrived in Trumplandia, if she was going to be intimidated, she didn’t show it. Not so long ago, Trumplandia was the land of the free and the home of the brave, after all.

The UN Climate Summit awaits, and Ms. Thunberg

will be there at the invitation of UN Secretary-General António Guterres, who tweeted Thursday, “The determination and perseverance shown during your journey should embolden all of us taking part in next month’s #ClimateAction Summit. We must deliver on the demands of people around the world and address the global climate crisis.”

Here’s the thing, though: Ms. Thunberg is well past the point of settling for pomp and pageantry. She made as much clear, during a brief appearance before the media later that day.

The wildfires that have ravaged the Amazon rainforest in recent weeks, she told reporters, are a “clear sign we need to stop destroying nature.”

Crossing the Atlantic by solar-power yacht, as opposed to flying, sends a signal that “the climate crisis is a real thing.

“I want to thank everyone . . .  who is involved in this climate fight, because this is a fight across borders, across continents.” 

She a realist, not a fantasist or ideologue. Asked if she could make the current leader of the United States listen, she replied with a simple, flat, “No.”

“I’m not that special,” she added. “I can’t convince everyone. I’m just going to do what I want to do and what will have most impact.”

If she had a message for Mr. Trump, she added, “My message for him is to listen to the science, and he obviously doesn’t do that.”

Several of Ms. Thunberg’s critics have mocked her for her Asperger’s, a form of autism, but she owned it and threw it right back at them.

Asperger’s has allowed her to “see things from outside the box,” she explained to BBC News.

“If I would’ve been like everyone else, I wouldn’t have started this school strike.”

Oh, and one other thing. She has been nominated for the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize. ‘nuff said.

©Craig Ruttle/Associated Press for The New York Times

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And That’s a Wrap: CoP Wildlife Conference Calls It a Day

“If I had my way, there wouldn’t be a single lion or tiger in captivity anywhere in the world. They never take to it. They’re never happy. They never settle down . . . You can see it in their eyes.”

— Hugh Lofting

The experts, as always, are divided. That much, at least, didn’t change as delegates headed home Wednesday from Geneva, site of this year’s CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) conference.

And if that handle seems a bit of a handful, well — exactly. Conferences tend to be dry anyway, and consensus is hard to reach at the best of times. Nothing is ever simple, especially when all but 15 of the world’s 195 countries are attending.

The CITES conference is staged every three years, but the next time countries meet, in Costa Rica in 2022, they may have to do so without Zimbabwe.

Zimbabwe, furious that its bid to temporarily lift the ivory ban  so it can sell its stockpile of elephant tusks — estimated value to be at least USD $300 million, depending on whose figures you choose to believe — is threatening to quit the organization and go it alone, much the same way Japan did over whales. Any funds raised from the one-off sale of ivory were theoretically to be consigned to conservation, no small feat for a nation as impoverished and poorly governed as Zimbabwe. The bid was voted down 101-23, in part because, while it’s true that no one really trusts Zimbabwe to follow through on its promise of conservation, past evidence suggests that a temporary lifting of the ivory ban would have the opposite effect of conservation: The last time CITES tried this, in 1998, poaching tripled over the next 11-year period.

Government policy wonks may be slow on the uptake at times, but they do learn eventually.

The conference ended on a generally positive note, with delegates reportedly in a hopeful mood as they left Geneva. The split with Zimbabwe, though, once again exposed the deep divisions with African countries over trade in their exotic wildlife. Zimbabwe’s pain was Kenya’s gain. Kenya, which relies on wildlife tourism for much of its hard currency exchange — i.e. US dollars, GB pounds and EU euros — has worked hard over the years to preserve what’s left of its natural resources — i.e. wildlife — and has been particularly vulnerable to poaching in the past.

Successive Kenyan governments have believed, not without reason, that any kind of legal sale of endangered species only serves to feed the market, regardless of how well intended a one-off sale might be.

Never mind ivory: Kenya is one of the few countries in Africa to ban trophy hunting altogether, unlike its neighbour to the south, Tanzania. 

Why does this matter now, more than in past years?

This past spring, a new report from the Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services — another clunky name guaranteed to turn off all but the most die-hard conservation enthusiasts — outlined overwhelming evidence that biodiversity is declining at a pace unprecedented in human history.

Though some extinction deniers might not care to believe it, a shattered ecosystem will erode the very foundation of the global economy, by affecting livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life. And not just in the immediately affected areas, either — the Amazon Basin, for example — but far beyond.

The IPBES report concluded that the exploitation of animals and plants is the second biggest driver of deleterious effects on nature, after the climate crisis and the way a rapidly changing climate is changing the way we use both land and sea.

Pangolins, tigers, mako sharks, guitarfish, crocodiles, giraffes, rhinos, songbirds, Southeast Asian parrots and African vultures all had their moment in the CITES spotlight — in a good way — but as always with any agreed-to set of new rules and regulations, monitoring and enforcement will be key to any success in staving off a fast-looming mass extinction.

One little-known but nonetheless important decision was saved for last.

You wouldn’t know it from following the mainstream media but while Zimbabwe and other southern African countries’ bid to temporarily waive lift the ivory ban grabbed the media spotlight, CITES delegates voted by an even wider margin to draw the line on the growing trend to capture animals in the wild, like elephants, and sell them to zoos overseas. Elephants are particularly sought-after, because every zoo in the world wants one, especially in China, and Zimbabwe (yes, Zimbabwe again) has proved all too accommodating in capturing and selling elephants to China.

It will still be possible for African countries to sell wild elephants to other, faraway countries, but the rules surrounding what is euphemistically referred to as “legal acquisition” suddenly got a lot tighter. The zoo trade in baby elephants has been banned internationally. (Canada, not doing itself any favours where conservationists are concerned, was one of the very few countries to vote against the new rules.)

CITES delegates also voted to rein in online wildlife trafficking, after the International Fund for Animal Welfare  (IFAW) and the NGOs TRAFFIC and the self-explanatory Coalition to End Wildlife Trafficking Online presented papers on the illegal trade in songbirds.

After all, as the pioneering conservationist Archie Carr once said, “For most of the wild things on Earth, the future must depend on the conscience of humankind.”

https://www.traffic.org/news/wildlife-trade-conference-ends-with-progress-on-key-issues-but-others-still-unresolved/

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-49481716?fbclid=IwAR0-J8YaSXVH0mhT1_0dmd0HbLhEBC26T7Tt5KCMUCKhRi3VcT_5nKyyq_o

©CITES-CoP18

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Decision Day for CITES

“Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.”

— Albert Einstein

So far, aside from a couple of quick hits about the ivory ban (good news) and the legal trade in rhino horn (not so good), the news from the once-every-three-years wildlife forum in Geneva has been a bit dry.

That may change in the next few days, as the meeting of the UN Conference of Parties (CoP18) draws to a close in midweek (Aug. 28). That’s because, much like Supreme Court decisions, the most contentious decisions are saved for last.

What that may mean this time is anyone’s guess, as the burning of the Amazon rainforest and catastrophic ice melt in Greenland have thrust news about conservation and the environment to the top of the mainstream news agenda.

The very name “Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora” is enough to make one’s eyes glaze over, though the message out of Geneva in the past couple of days has been an easy sell: Environmental protections have been extended to sharks and rays, which not everyone likes, and giraffes, which nearly everyone does.

(And, yes, in one of the more unpleasant surprises of the past three years since the last time CITES met, in Johannesburg, giraffes are in trouble, believe it or not, in no small part because of the usual suspects: Habitat loss through rapidly expanding farming by humans and illegal hunting for their meat, skins and tails. Three of the currently recognized nine subspecies have been listed as Endangered or Critically Endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature IUCN Red List.)

The 18 species of sharks and rays now listed on CITES’ Appendix II index of endangered species includes two species of mako sharks and six species of guitarfish.

Appendices I, II and III are lists of endangered species accorded different levels of protection

based on how exploited they are. Appendix II lists species that are not necessarily threatened with extinction — for now — but may become so unless their trade is closely watched.

Although the oceans are vast, few if any areas of our blue planet remain untouched by human hands. Of the approximately 100 species of finned fish sought after by the international fishing industry, a third are threatened with extinction.

All but 15 of the world’s 195 countries are represented at the wildlife conference.

Business as usual “is no longer an option,” Ivonne Higuero, CITES’ secretary-general, told delegates at the conference’s opening, 10 days ago. “The rate of wildlife extinction is accelerating.”

Experts — who, oddly enough, don’t count too many populist leaders among their number — affirm that as many as a million plant and animal species are now threatened, Higuero added.

The #StopVotingForAssholes lobby, of which I’m a charter member, clearly has its work cut out for it.

The CITES conference comes just days after the Trump administration announced plans to roll back protections in the US Endangered Species Act. Most attendees at the conference know the US move is calculated more for a domestic audience than anyone in the international trade community, but still, it doesn’t help, does it?

Bottom line: Anyone who knows anything about science and the environment, let alone the future of the entire planet, knows the best decisions — in fact, the only decisions worth making — are those based on science, not political or other considerations.

For all the easy, cheap dismissal of conservationists and climate activists as snowflakes and bunny huggers, reason wins over emotion any time science is involved. That simple, really.

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Elephants Win Reprieve. But For How Long?

As always, pry beneath the surface and there’s more there than meets the eye. In a post-truth world, where facts don’t count for much and low-information voters keep electing populists, no news item, it seems, is entirely as it appears.

Word late Friday that CITES delegates meeting in Geneva have decided to keep the ivory ban in place and deny several African countries’ bid to have the ban lifted for a one-off sale of stockpiled elephant tusks — the better to fund conservation efforts with, they insist — has been met with a mixture of relief and tempered euphoria in the Save the Elephant conservation community.

The reason not everyone is doing cartwheels of joy is best summed up by two similar and yet seemingly contradictory headlines. “Bid to allow sale of ivory stockpiles rejected at wildlife trade summit,” the nature site Mongabay (“News & Inspiration from Nature’s Frontline”) reported, and went on to furnish details: “A proposal by Zimbabwe, Botswana, Zambia and Namibia that would have allowed them to sell their ivory stockpiles has been rejected by 101 votes to 23 at the wildlife trade summit taking place in Geneva.”

Germany’s respected public international broadcaster Deutsche Welle took a more circumspect tack, however, with its heading, “Elephant ivory ban upheld, but legal loopholes remain.”

Those loopholes include the — for now — legal trade in woolly mammoth tusks, which make it possible for illicit ivory — i.e. ivory from elephants that have been illegally hunted — to be traded in the market as legal ivory, as elephant tusks and mammoth tusks can be hard to tell apart. Mammoth tusks used to be relatively rare, but warming permafrost and receding ice in the Arctic is uncovering more buried mammoth tusks all the time. Mammoth tusks are being uncovered in Siberia at such a rapid pace that it may not be long before ivory from mammoth tusks becomes an industry in its own right.

At the very least, mammoth ivory helps feed a market most conservationists wish would just go away entirely.

“We’re pleased with the outcome, but frustrated also that we have to spend all this time having that discussion again when there’s so much work that needs to be done,” International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) policy director Matt Collis told Deutsche Welle.

Kenya drew the hardest line against lifting the ivory ban, backed by several countries — most of them in East Africa — in the African Elephant Coalition (AEC). Kenya opposed the bid by southern African countries, saying one-off sales increase the demand for ivory, making poaching more likely — and profitable — across the continent. Illegal ivory can be passed off as legal with false certificates. This makes protecting Africa’s dwindling wild elephant populations all the more difficult.

In 1930, there were an estimated 10 million elephants in Africa. Today, there are roughly 415,000.

The international ivory trade was outlawed in 1989, in a move  widely credited with saving the elephant from extinction. A temporary lifting of the ban in 1998, to allow one-off sales of stockpiled ivory, caused illegal hunting to triple over a 12-year period between 1999 and 2011. That has only bolstered conservationists’ argument that any kind of trade only increases demand, which in turn feeds the black market.

Even with the ban, about 50 elephants are poached every day to feed demand in Japan, China and Southeast Asia, where ivory is valued for high-end, luxury carvings.

Still, a win is a win. These days, the natural world can use all the help it can get.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/22/cites-wildlife-summit-giraffe-protections-global-trade-parts-saiga-antelope-horn

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Elephants Never Forget. So Why Can’t CITES?

“Earlier, 100,000 elephants lived in Kenya and we didn’t have any noteworthy problem with that. The problem that we have is not that there are now more elephants.”

— Richard Leakey

Here we go again. 

Ever since paleoanthropologist and then-head of Kenya’s Dept., of Wildlife Conservation and Management Richard Leakey famously burned 10 tons of confiscated ivory in October, 1989 — just weeks prior to a CITES meeting that would decide whether to include the elephant on its global list of endangered species — the ivory lobby has sought to overturn the ban on trade in ivory.

And guess what’s back on the agenda at CITES’ once-every-three-years meeting, happening right now, through Aug. 28, in Zurich, Switzerland?

A number of southern African countries, led by Zimbabwe, want to sell their stockpiled ivory — worth an estimated USD $300 million — ostensibly to raise funds for conservation, though given the state of Zimbabwe’s economy, and that government’s tenuous relationship with good governance, no one really believes that.

Botswana, traditionally a safe haven for Africa’s otherwise beleaguered wild elephants, recently incurred the wrath of the international conservation community by lifting its ban on trophy hunting for elephants; the CITES ban on trade in ivory was still in effect, however, and remains so. For the time being.

That may change.

Conservation groups’ nerves are frayed in Zurich right now because just days ago CITES — shorthand for the torturously labeled United Nations Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora — lifted the ban on the sale of stockpiled rhino horn in South Africa, again ostensibly to raise funds for the conservation of rhinos.

The problem with elephants is that, right now and depending on who you talk to, there are too many elephants in too small a space in countries like Botswana and Zimbabwe, but too few elephants in once wildlife-rich, tourism-dependent countries like Kenya and Tanzania.

“Why should we have to suffer,” one Namibia farmer and lodge operator told me angrily, a number of years back, “because East Africa can’t handle its poaching problem?”

Even with the ban, elephants face an uncertain future. As recently as five years ago, according to a study by the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society, some 100 African elephants were being killed every day for their tusks. Today, the Worldwide Fund for Wildlife (WWF) estimates just 415,000 wild elephants remain in Africa. That seems like a large number when one considers that possibly fewer than 10,000 cheetahs remain on the entire planet — but the elephant is a herd animal, remember, not a solitary predator. Sometimes, too, it’s not the total number that tells the story so much as how quickly that number has crashed. Forty years ago, there were more than a million wild elephants. In just 10 years, between 1979 and 1989, the elephant population crashed more than half, from 1.3 million to 600,000.

Despite a promise by China that it would halt ivory-related commerce by the end of 2017, the illegal trade persists. The market is still there.

Ivory is valued for its quality and malleability in high-end, expensive carvings. It’s a status symbol throughout China and  Southeast Asia, owing to its uniquely, close-grained texture, adhesive hardness, mellow colour and pleasing smoothness. 

Ivory is infinitely better — and so more sought-after — than any 

chemical compound or substance created in a lab. Imitation ivory, unlike, say, imitation leather, is virtually unheard of.

How you feel about the ban depends largely on who you choose to believe. 

Conservationists, non-governmental organizations and a handful of African countries, such as Kenya, argue that the ban feeds public awareness of the need to protect one of the world’s most engaging, iconic animals, and sends a message to poachers that they’ll face stiff fines and prison sentences if they’re ever caught.

The ban’s critics argue that a ban has the opposite effect: It feeds the perception that ivory has near-priceless value, because it’s both rare and illegal. Extending the ban on international trade in ivory, they argue, will only further hurt those countries that are already struggling with poverty.

The original ban was enacted in 1990 — just weeks after Leakey’s ivory burn — and proved effective for about 10 years. Starting in 1997, though, CITES granted one-time-only exceptions to Botswana, Zimbabwe and Namibia to sell a limited amount of ivory.

The effect on wild elephant populations was immediate and dramatic, and not in a good way. Illegal trafficking tripled between 1998 and 2011.

The trouble is that when some ivory is legal and other ivory isn’t, it’s impossible to tell the two apart, let alone enforce laws that keep changing every three years, every time CITES meets.

Worse, once you establish a legal market for a supposedly illegal commodity in one part of the world, the rest of the world can be forgiven for asking why it shouldn’t be legal in their part of the world, too.

The result is, quite simply, a mess.

You would think that, with the evidence of 1998-2011 staring them straight in the face, CITES delegates would get it into their heads by now that one-time-only exceptions to the ivory ban just won’t work, and in fact have the opposite effect. When illegal trafficking triples in a 12-year period, something is clearly amiss somewhere.

They say elephants never forget. So why can’t CITES delegates do the same?

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