The Weekly Anthropocene, February 15 2023
Dispatches Against Despair, from the Wild, Weird World of Humanity and its Biosphere
New Protected Areas
The Republic of Congo1 has expanded its Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park to include the Djéké Triangle, a 95 square kilometer patch (that’s larger than Manhattan) of unlogged tropical rainforest. The Djéké Triangle is home to three groups of critically endangered western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) that have been continuously studied since 1995 from Mondika Research Site, and is one of the key sites advancing human knowledge of one of our closest relative species. Notably, this park addition occurred with local communities’ free, prior, and informed consent, with the Wildlife Conservation Society spending two years holding community meetings with local villages to define the parameters of the new protections.
"We are not prohibited from activities such as harvesting leaves, mushroom or honey, or fishing, all of which are allowed in the zoning; what we are prohibited from doing is using firearms, and we agree on this because we know that in Djéké there are gorillas habituated to human presence, and if we use guns, we risk disturbing them.”
-Gabriel Mobolambi, Chief of Bomassa, the village closest to the Djéké Triangle.
Costa Rica has designated all of its territorial waters as a reserve for critically endangered hammerhead sharks (genus Sphyrna), banning the capture, storage, transportation, or sale of hammerhead sharks or their body parts. Costa Rican waters have recently been a major site of illegal shark fishing (to be sold to China as ingredients for shark fin soup), and their hammerhead populations have declined by 90% in the ten years. Here’s hoping for strict enforcement of the new rules and the development of a true stronghold for these persecuted biological marvels.
Canada recently hosted the Fifth International Marine Protected Areas Congress, and took the opportunity to make three major announcements on new marine protected areas (MPAs), as part of Prime Minister Trudeau’s goals to conserve 25% of Canada’s oceans by 2025 and 30% by 2030.
The biggest action was the launch of the “Great Bear Sea,” initiative, where delegates from 15 First Nations, the province of British Columbia, and the federal government announced plans to create a vast network of MPAs (details to be determined) covering much of coastal British Columbia north of Vancouver Island. This is seen as a marine complement to the temperate rainforest protection agreement of 2016 that safeguarded northern BC’s “Great Bear Rainforest.” As a start to this grand effort, the Canadian government federally recognized the Gwaxdlala/Nalaxdlala marine refuge, which was unilaterally designated by the Mamalilikulla First Nation in 2016. This protects rare corals and sponges in a small 20 square kilometer patch of sea north of Vancouver Island.
The Canadian government also announced imminent plans to designate the immense 133,019 square kilometer Tang.ɢwan-ḥačxʷiqak-Tsig̱is MPA (larger than Pennsylvania!) protecting a rich constellation of life-rich marine ecosystems farther off the west coast of Vancouver Island, including ranges of seamounts and deep-sea hydrothermal vents. This amounts to 2.31% of Canada’s territorial waters all by itself!
Clean Energy
A new report from the International Energy Agency calculated that renewable energy (e.g. wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal) will overtake coal as the world’s largest energy source in 2025 (see chart), meeting all increased electricity demand and starting to displace fossil fuels. Spectacular news!
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, solar power is set to account for 54% of all planned utility-scale power generation capacity additions in America in 2023! And zero-carbon electricity (renewables plus nuclear) will account for a whopping 86%, with the remaining 14% accounted for by new natural gas facilities. Notably, the EIA expects 29.1 GW of new solar capacity to come online in 2023, more than doubling the previous record of 13.4 GW in 2021!
Heat pump sales in the US overtook gas furnace sales in 2022 for the first time ever, passing the milestone of 4 million new units sold for the first time as well. (Heat pumps also earned applause recently for performing excellently across New England during a cold snap, underscoring the reliability of the latest technologies). And this is before the Inflation Reduction Act tax credits (which include substantial support for heat pumps, check out the calculator) come into effect!
A new study found that in California, each addition of 20 zero-emission electric vehicles per 1,000 residents in a given zip code caused a 3.2% decrease in the rate of emergency room visits for asthma. Even partial, step-by-step adoption of EVs brings substantial health benefits!
The Biden Administration’s Energy Department revealed a $2 billion conditional loan guarantee to support a new battery recycling campus in Nevada to be built by Redwood Materials, which will manufacture key anode and cathode components for EV batteries using recycled old batteries as a feedstock. This will supply other new American battery factories with domestically-made components, enough to support over 1 million new EV batteries a year. American battery manufacturing is continuing to boom since the Inflation Reduction Act, reversing years of inaction!
Nepal
In the 1980s, the Himalayan nation of Nepal was facing a deforestation crisis, with widespread livestock grazing and firewood collection reducing tree cover to the point of causing flooding and landslides. In 1993, a highly innovative new law was passed, allowing the government of Nepal to give ownership of nationally-owned forests to local community groups. This gave the villages that used the forest an incentive to manage them sustainably, selling fruits, wood, and other forest products for their own benefit. Community groups rapidly began restricting grazing, establishing protective forest patrols, and starting reforestation programs to expand forest area on their new lands. In the decades since, forest cover in Nepal nearly doubled, from 26% in 1992 to 45% in 2016 (see map). Over 22,000 community groups representing 3 million households now manage almost 2.3 million hectares of Nepalese forest lands, an area larger than Connecticut or Île-de-France. A spectacular example of sustainable common-pool resource management2!
Switzerland
In the Swiss canton of Valais, nine species of prickly pear cacti (genus Opuntia) are spreading across hillsides previously covered with snow or edelweiss, as global warming changes the local climate into a drier, hotter environment more to their liking. This edible North American cactus is hardy, fast-growing, and almost impossible to eradicate or fully uproot, and has already been introduced to many other parts of the world, including Australia, South Africa, Madagascar, and the Middle East. It’s even become a vital food supply during droughts in Madagascar and a climate-resistant cash crop in Algeria. In Valais, although the spread of prickly pear is disconcertingly strange in an Alpine ecosystem and several towns have made unsuccessful efforts to eradicate them, the cacti are likely here to stay-and this may well end up being harmless or even beneficial. (Introduced species are often stigmatized as “invasive” based on little to no evidence). This writer suspects that a few generations from now, prickly pear will seem a perfectly natural part of the Swiss landscape, cuisine, and culture.
The Republic of the Congo, with its capital at Brazzaville, is often confused with its neighbor to the east, the much larger Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire), with its capital at Kinshasa. You may also see these distinguished as Congo-Brazzaville and Congo-Kinshasa, or Congo and the DRC.
One of many examples showing that the “tragedy of the commons” can be avoided when natural resources are collaboratively managed by local users, as discussed by the research of Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom.