Cropped 22 February 2023: Amazon healing; Bird flu; Safeguard mechanism

Welcome to Carbon Brief’s Cropped. 
We handpick and explain the most important stories at the intersection of climate, land, food and nature over the past fortnight.

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Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has decreased since the new president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office earlier this year, according to official reports, while international promises to reignite the Amazon Fund emerge.

A deadly avian flu that led to the death of 58m birds in the US alone has continued to spread across the world, with Argentina and Uruguay declaring national sanitary emergencies. Egg prices reached record highs. Experts warn that H5N1 bird flu is now a year-round problem and has become endemic in some wild birds. 

Australia’s revamped climate policy, called the “safeguard mechanism”, faces a test as legislation for “safeguard credits” needs political support within the next three weeks. Greens, experts and critics have panned the policy for its overreliance on carbon offsets.

Key developments

Amazon’s redirection

DEFORESTATION DROP: Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon decreased by 61% in January, a period consistent with the first month since President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula) has been in office, Agence France-Press reported, via Phys.org. According to satellite images collected by Brazil’s national space research institute, an area of 167 square kilometres (km2) – equivalent to 22,000 football pitches – was destroyed in January, down from 430km2 lost during January 2022 under former president Jair Bolsonaro. Although experts in Brazil say the decrease is a good sign, it does not necessarily mark a long-term reversal, Al Jazeera reported. “It is still too early to talk about a trend reversal, as part of this drop may be related to greater cloud cover,” Daniel Silva, a conservation specialist at WWF-Brasil, told the outlet. 

BIDEN’S PROMISE: During a meeting with Lula at the White House on 10 February, US president Joe Biden promised to work with US Congress to fund the Amazon’s protection, Climate Home News reported. Among the pledges made were to provide “initial support for the Amazon Fund and to leverage investments in this critical region”, said a summary of the meeting released by the US government. The Amazon Fund was suspended by Bolsonaro’s administration and has previously been funded by Norway and Germany, however, the UK “is considering a donation too”, Climate Home News wrote. The fund “has supported 102 projects, including combatting forest fires in the Amazonian state of Rondônia”, according to Mongabay. The US plans an initial donation of $50m, Reuters reported. 

PREVIOUS LESSONS: Lula and his environment and climate change minister, Marina Silva, are planning to apply previous policies used to reduce deforestation, called PPCDAm, to all local biomes, Mongabay reported. This includes not just the Amazon rainforest, but also the “Cerrado savanna, Atlantic forest, semi-arid Caatinga, Pampas grasslands and Pantanal wetlands”, Mongabay added. PPCDAm helped slashed Amazon deforestation by nearly 84% during 2004-12 and is focused on land-use planning, environmental monitoring and sustainable production. During that period, Brazil established 44m and 25m hectares of Indigenous lands and protected lands, respectively, and saved 196,000km2 of rainforests from being cleared – “an area equivalent to more than twice the size of Portugal”, Mongabay wrote. Suely Araújo, senior specialist in public policies at the Climate Observatory, told Mongabay that the new Brazilian president faces major challenges after the “chaos left behind by the Bolsonaro government”. 

Bird flu

FLU THE ROOF: The “largest poultry outbreak ever recorded in the UK, Europe and Japan” has now “reached new corners of the globe and become endemic for the first time in some wild birds that transmit the virus to [chickens]”, Reuters reported. Veterinarians and disease experts have warned that the “highly pathogenic” avian influenza H5N1 is now “a year-round problem” and that “record outbreaks will not abate soon on poultry farms, ramping up threats to the world’s food supply”, the newswire wrote. Wild birds “spread the disease farther and wider around the world than ever before, likely carrying record amounts of the virus”, as the virus has changed to a form that is “probably more transmissible”, Gregorio Torres of the World Organisation for Animal Health told Reuters. In the US alone, 58.4m birds were killed by the flu or were slaughtered to stop its spread – a number equal to one-third of the national flock of laying hens. Bird flu has driven egg prices the world over to record highs and chicken meat could be next, Bloomberg reported. The impact on wild birds has also been “disastrous”, but harder to estimate, Wired wrote.

INFLUENZA MAP: Months after the first outbreak in the Americas, “the virus has been steadily trickling into mammalian populations – foxes, bears, mink, whales, seals – on both land and sea, fueling fears that humans could be next”, the Atlantic reported. While scientists say the risk of “sustained spread among people is very low…each additional detection of the virus in something warm-blooded and furry hints that the virus is improving its ability to infiltrate new hosts”, the outlet wrote. Last week, both Argentina and Uruguay declared “national sanitary emergencies” after wild birds and dead swans tested positive, according to Reuters. That makes it 10 South American countries that have “recently marked their first-ever encounter with the virus, including Peru – where more than 50,000 wild birds died last fall and more than 600 sea lions in January”, Wired reported.

CHICKEN-AND-EGG: Countries are adopting different measures to contain the flu, including vaccination, preparedness and biosecurity. But few are “addressing the root cause” or “legislat[ing] changes to them”, experts told Wired. “We would never have a debate about preventing cancer from tobacco products without talking about stopping smoking…[but] when it comes to zoonotic disease risk, there is a huge reticence to discuss curbing animal production,” said Dr Jan Dutkiewicz, a political economist. Meanwhile, a Grist story pointed to studies that have found that “changing weather patterns fundamentally affect the way birds behave in ways that could influence the spread of bird flu”. From rising temperatures to rising sea levels, climate change is affecting how and where birds migrate and nest, “prompting species that don’t typically interact to make contact and share disease”. But experts told Grist that, while scientists have been able to connect these dots, figuring out how climate change “may be influencing the spread of avian flu is a far more complicated and difficult task”.

Safeguard mechanism 

BADLY COOKED: A “vexed debate” over the fate of major new Australian climate policy – known as the safeguard mechanism – “is coming to a head” after months of discussion, the Guardian explained. Introduced by the Tony Abbott-led Coalition government, the safeguard mechanism is being revamped by Anthony Albanese’s administration to address emissions from Australia’s biggest polluting facilities, including oil and gas projects and coal mines. However, the policy does not explicitly require businesses to reduce absolute emissions, allowing Australia’s expanding fossil fuel industry to buy millions of carbon credits in order to comply with the safeguard. For this to happen, part of the policy must be approved by parliament within the next three weeks, but it cannot pass without the support of the Greens, who want Albanese to “block new coal and gas developments”, the Guardian wrote. 

TOO MUCH CREDIT: There “remains widespread uncertainty” over the policy, “aggravated by a parallel debate over the role that carbon offsets should play”, a majority of which come from Australia’s land sector, the Guardian reported. Offsets are key to the safeguard mechanism, which requires Australia’s 215 biggest polluters to cut emissions by nearly 5% per year. A Climate Analytics report (pdf) that the Guardian covered pointed out that businesses could use unlimited carbon offsets as an alternative to cutting their own emissions, delaying industry-wide decarbonisation and increasing pressure on its land sector to deliver abatement. Speaking to Carbon Brief, Polly Hemming – acting director of the climate and energy programme at the Australia Institute thinktank – warned that “the Australian government is not just relying on existing land sector offsets such as avoided deforestation or regeneration projects, it is promoting blue carbon and soil carbon…that are incredibly easy to ‘game’ and the risk of over-crediting is high”. She added: “Australia is really selling off its environment, a false binary has been established where the trade-off for restoring and protecting ecosystems is increasing emissions.”

OFFSETTING EVERYONE: The policy’s carrot-and-stick model might just provide “enough incentive to drive many to clean up their act”, wrote environment editor Nick O’Malley in the Sydney Morning Herald. However, he added, its particular reliance on offsets – “some of [which] might be dirty in the first place” – could lead to the plan’s failure.. O’Malley asked: “What if landholders are being paid to regenerate desert land that would never sustain carbon-rich forests, or to not clear land that would never have been cleared in the first place?” The Australian government has “long touted its $450m-a-year carbon market, but the challenges it is facing now could offer key lessons for other countries embarking on their own journeys to net-zero emissions”, the Washington Post wrote, in a story examining disproportionate carbon incomes in a country hit by drought, wildfires and heatwaves. According to Hemming, the policy continues the practices of the previous governments “to maintain supply and suppress the price of land-based carbon offsets” and “the easiest way to increase and maintain the supply is to turn a blind eye to their integrity…which appeases the industries Australia’s government is largely beholden to”. The Australian government plans to bring the safeguards mechanism into force on 1 July.

News and views

NEPAL FORESTS: Nepal’s forests have made an “incredible recovery” over the past several decades thanks to community forest regeneration efforts, the Verge reported, based on NASA maps and research. The turn-around is “remarkable”, the outlet wrote, given predictions that the Himalayan nation’s hill slopes would go barren before 1990 unless large-scale reforesting was carried out to replace the trees that fell to fuelwood harvesting and agriculture. But in 1978, Nepal changed course, launching a community forestry programme where local rangers developed plans with forest-dependent peoples. These plans allowed people to harvest forest products, but deterred them from tree-cutting and grazing. Between 1992 and 2016, Nepal’s forest cover almost doubled, from 26% to 45%, the NASA data showed, with forest cover in the community-governed area of Devithan growing from 12% in 1988 to 92% in 2016. Communities patrolled their forests to ensure they were protected, going to show that “empowering locals to manage forests is an excellent way to preserve them”, the Verge wrote.

GMO TREES: The company Living Carbon planted the first genetically modified trees in the US, the New York Times reported. In southern Georgia’s pine belt, workers planted poplar trees that had been modified to grow wood “at turbocharged rates while slurping up carbon dioxide from the air”. The San Francisco-based biotechnology company reported – in a study that has not been peer-reviewed – that its poplar trees grew 50% faster than non-modified ones. However, there are concerns about the risks this technology poses. The environmental association Global Justice Ecology Project “called the company’s trees ‘growing threats’ to forests and expressed alarm that the federal government allowed them to evade regulation”, the newspaper wrote. 

ALGAL BUST: After a decade of advertising its attempts to produce biofuels from algae, ExxonMobil is “quietly walking away from its most heavily publicised climate solution”, Bloomberg reported. The fossil fuel giant “slashed its support” towards Viridos, a California-based biotechnology company that served as its main technical partner in its algae push and “halted funding for a multi-million-dollar algae project at the Colorado School of Mines” in favour of other “low carbon solutions”, according to Bloomberg. Exxon’s retreat from algae “comes just as the algae research has shown significant progress”, Bloomberg wrote, but added that “cultivating huge quantities of algae in a way that can compete economically with fossil fuels is incredibly daunting”. ExxonMobil has rejected consistent criticism that its algae venture amounted to greenwashing, but leaked company correspondence showed that its researchers knew algae-based fuels were “still decades away from the scale we need”, Climate Home News reported last year. 

MALARIA ON THE MOVE: Mosquitoes that transmit malaria increased their distribution over the last century as the temperature rose, the New York Times wrote. A new study showed that mosquitoes in sub-Saharan Africa “moved to higher elevations by about 6.5 metres (roughly 21 feet) per year and away from the equator by 4.7km (about three miles) per year over the past century”, the newspaper wrote. Although the study confirms climate change is modifying mosquito populations and distribution, it does not predict where malaria might spread in the future, Bloomberg noted. The lead author of the study pointed out the possibility, in the next few years, of seeing malaria in places not currently considered high risk.

NO COVER: One-third of companies linked to tropical rainforest destruction have no policy in place to end deforestation, the Guardian reported. This was one finding of a Global Canopy report that found that 31% of the companies with deforestation risk in their supply chains have not set a deforestation commitment. The report also found that only half of the 100 companies that do have those policies are monitoring their commitments. The Guardian quoted the report: “We are three years past the 2020 deadline that many organisations set themselves to halt deforestation, and just two years away from the UN’s deadline of 2025 for companies and financial institutions to eliminate commodity-driven deforestation, conversion and the associated human rights abuses.” 

EXTREME WEATHER MENU: UK supermarkets limited sales of some fruits and vegetables because of shortages arising from extreme weather and higher energy prices, BBC News reported. Retailers told the outlet that they were “experiencing sourcing challenges on some products that are grown in southern Spain and north Africa”, the former hit by unusually cold weather and the latter “affected by floods, while storms have led to ferries being delayed or cancelled”. The story added that farmers in the UK and Netherlands “have cut back on their use of greenhouses to grow winter crops due to higher electricity prices”. Elsewhere, India’s meteorological department warned that unseasonal February heat may damage wheat crops, the Economic Times reported. Farmers in India’s northern wheat belt “are closely guarding their fields as the threat of another extreme weather event looms”, wrote Bloomberg. But India’s scientists may have developed a promising wheat variety to “beat the heat”, Indian Express reported.

Extra reading

• How Delhi ate up its village commons – Vaishnavi Rathore, Scroll.in
• The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework: Business as usual or a turning point? – David Obura, One Earth
• London ship insurers accused of enabling fishing vessels to ‘go dark’ – Karen McVeigh, The Guardian
• Russia and China have a stranglehold on the world’s food security – Alan Crawford, Frank Jomo, Elizabeth Elkin and Matthew Bristow, Bloomberg

New science

Inexorable land degradation due to agriculture expansion in South American Pampa
Nature Sustainability

Agriculture expansion has led to land degradation in South American Pampa – vast grasslands that cover Argentina and Uruguay – according to new research. Scientists collected sediment cores in reservoirs near agricultural catchments that drain the Rio Negro River in Uruguay and reconstructed the causes of the erosion in those lands. The study demonstrated two periods of acceleration of sediment delivery, associated with the impact of agriculture: the mid-1990s, due to tree-planting programmes, and after 2000, when soybean crops expanded. The researchers concluded that conservation measures are “urgently” needed to preserve biodiversity and soil functions, as agriculture expansion is projected to continue in the region.

Cloudiness delays projected impact of climate change on coral reefs
PLOS Climate

A new study found that cloud cover may delay the impacts of coral bleaching. Researchers modelled four different emissions scenarios to estimate the effect of clouds on future coral bleaching, taking into account both temperature and amount of light. The research showed that under a low-emissions scenario, clouds delay the bleaching “by multiple decades in some regions”, however, 70% of coral reefs are still likely to experience “dangerously frequent bleaching by the end of the century”. This result differed from the higher-emissions scenario, where increased thermal stress may overwhelm the effect of clouds. The research pointed out that the impact of clouds on bleaching had not been considered in previous studies and might help identify climate refugia.

‘Our burgers eat carbon’: investigating the discourses of corporate net-zero commitments
Environmental Science & Policy

A new study scrutinised popular Swedish food chain MAX Burgers and its “climate positive” burgers and found that its net-zero claim “justifies its existing business practices and directs focus away from actions that could directly reduce its emissions”. Researchers conducted an extensive analysis of the company’s net-zero and “climate-positive” communications. They found that despite MAX being one of the first companies to publish climate footprints on menus and offer non-meat options, it continued to push “offsetting and voluntary corporate action while shifting responsibility for climate action onto others”, conflating absolute and relative emission reductions. The authors conclude that “even seemingly progressive corporate net-zero pledges and claims become problematic if they distract from real reductions and justify carbon-intensive lifestyles”. 

In the diary

• 20 February-3 March: Intergovernmental Conference on Marine Biodiversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) treaty negotiations
• 14-16 March: International Conference on GMO Analysis and New Genomic Techniques
• 20-24 March: [Webinar] Global Women in Crop Science Coffee | International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, University of Leeds, National Institute of Agricultural Botany and the Consortium of International Agricultural Research Centres

Cropped is researched and written by Dr Giuliana Viglione, Aruna Chandrasekhar, Daisy Dunne, Orla Dwyer and Yanine Quiroz. Please send tips and feedback to [email protected].