The Weekly Anthropocene, September 4 2024
Ultralight glider-led ibis migration, a sand motor in Benin, German permitting reform, British beavers, the U.S. Western Solar Plan, battery recycling in Ohio, wildfire-prevention robots, and more!
Austria to Spain
It’s that time of year again. As of late August, one of the most epic wildlife conservation projects in history is in the air once more, with thirty-six endangered young northern bald ibises (Geronticus eremita) following a human piloting an ultralight glider on a 2,800-kilometer migration flight over the Alps from Austria to Spain that could take up to 50 days to complete.
How did such an extraordinary adventure come to be? The northern bald ibis, or waldrapp, was extinct in central Europe for over three hundred years, with the few remaining populations surviving in Africa, the Middle East, and in zoos. While captive-breeding efforts were successful, the ibises had lost the knowledge of their historic migration routes; those released to migrate on their own got lost and died. Thus arose the current paradigm, requiring the bold intervention of a flying human guide (who the ibis chicks had previously imprinted on as to build trust) to show them where to go. The project has been a resounding success, with the wild European waldrapp population rising from zero in 2002 to nearly 300 today, 17 human-guided migration flights conducted, and “alumni” ibises found to be migrating on their own. Absolutely spectacular work!
Benin
The West African nation of Benin has completed a World Bank-funded sand motor coastline protection project, with Dutch engineers deploying 6.4 million cubic meters of sand along the Benin coast to naturally wash up and replenish the beaches in years to come. Based on the original “De Zandmotor” project in the Netherlands, which this writer was lucky enough to see earlier this year, the “sand motor” model amasses a in a sandbar offshore instead adding sand directly the beach, so that wave motion ends up pushing new sand onto the main beach instead of eroding it away.
Notably, Benin has also enjoyed strong economic growth recently (solar installations are on the rise, with more planned)) and is developing a large-scale clothing industry, following the industrialization model that’s helped lift countries like Bangladesh out of extreme poverty and raising hopes that it might be emerging as a “flying geese” leader of sustainable development in West Africa. Here’s hoping!
China
A recent study has calculated that the 41% reduction in air pollution in China from 2013 through 2022 has added two years of life to the average Chinese life expectancy. If they can lower air pollution further and reach the WHO’s recommended target, that would likely add another 2.3 years. Even if climate change wasn’t a thing, moving away from fossil fuels is an incredibly important issue for public health reasons alone!
Turkey
In the Kizilirmak Delta of Turkey, wild marsh frogs have learned to climb onto Anatolian water buffaloes and routinely do so by the dozen, in the first observed case of amphibians foraging on the body of a large mammal. Researchers suspect that the frogs may be hunting the flies around the buffalo, and/or attracted by the warmth. What a great example of mutualism!
Germany
A few years ago, the renewables buildout in Germany was suffocating under a morass of paperwork. The time to get permits had doubled since 2017, and in one infamous case, a project to build three individual wind turbines ended up requiring 36,000 pages of printed-out documents to get a permit. This is a common problem around the world, with permitting delays a major factor in creating the USA’s gigantic backlog of cleantech projects that people want to build but can’t.
But then, in 2022, Germany’s federal government passed comprehensive permitting reform legislation. Among other actions, they designated renewables projects as a national security interest, consolidated the required environmental reviews to one review, simplified the grid-planning process, and generally reduced the red tape.
Since these permitting reforms, the renewables buildout in Germany has taken off, rising from less than 10 GW in 2021 to nearly 20 GW in 2023, outpacing all peer European countries, and likely just beginning to accelerate as more projects get to move forward under the simpler system. Great work!
New Zealand
The government of New Zealand is preemptively vaccinating small groups of five critically endangered native bird species against the global H5N1 bird flu pandemic: the kakī (black stilt), flightless takahē, flightless kākāpō parrot, tūturuatu (shore plover) and the red-crowned kākāriki.
Notably, this appears to be just the second-ever government program to vaccinate wild birds, after last year’s effort to vaccinate California condors in the USA (also against H5N1), which this newsletter covered at the time. The deadly H5N1 virus has not yet been reported in New Zealand, so hopefully this intervention will end up being unnecessary, but it’s nonetheless an awesome new example of proactive, foresighted Anthropocene conservation!
United Kingdom
While continuing “moonshot” efforts to accelerate the clean energy revolution (nine new offshore wind farms just got contracts awarded), the new UK government has also withdrawn legal backing from two proposed North Sea oil and gas projects currently undergoing judicial review. While this is a fairly low-key procedural event, it may add up to a historic shift: as Bill McKibben highlighted recently, this now has good odds of becoming one of the first cases in the world where a government decides to leave a large oilfield in the ground due to climate concerns.
Some British biodiversity news:
Alongside a “beaver baby boom” proving that the species can thrive when rewilded, “beaver bombing” is on the rise in Britain, as long delays of further planned official beaver releases have led activists to unofficially release beavers into wild river systems on their own. Awesome!
The Starmer government has pledged to end badger culling in the UK by 2029.
A new report indicates that a recent program (begun in 2021) to pay farmers for biodiversity conservation on their land is paying off, with 25% more breeding birds found in enlisted areas.
A new automated AI system has successfully deterred 6,000 deer from train tracks in Britain. The system identifies approaching deer, sounds an alarm when they approach rail lines, and tracks them with a camera as they move away. Fascinating potential.
United States
On August 29, 2024, the Biden-Harris Administration finalized the new Western Solar Plan, with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management identifying 31 million acres1 of federal land in the American West that are optimal for solar development, with both high solar potential and low conflict with wildlife habitat2. This still leaves a lot of desert that’s ideally suited to produce more clean electrons to help fight climate change!
Notably, any future proposed solar projects in these optimal areas will now get an expedited simpler and faster federal permitting process, a continuation of the Biden-Harris Administration’s unprecedented (and ongoing!) attention to clean energy permitting.
"We've been really pushing ourselves to use our executive authority wherever possible to improve the federal permitting process.”
-White House Deputy Chief of Staff Natalie Quillian.
This is an excellent step forward to speed up America’s and the world’s transition to clean energy, and likely brings far-reaching benefits for the global fight against climate change! Great work.
A gigantic newly expanded battery recycling factory operated by Cirba Solutions has opened in Lancaster, Ohio, thanks to strong support from the Biden-Harris Administration. The two new production lines will be able to process used consumer batteries (and scrap from U.S. battery manufacturing plants) to produce 15,000 tons of mineral-rich metal salts per year, which can then be used to make new batteries.
“We’re going to create a closed-loop material processing system in Lancaster, where we can return all those elements back into the domestic supply chain.”
-David Klanecky, CEO of Cirba Solutions.
This is exactly the kind of thing RMI’s Battery Mineral Loop report was discussing - and it dovetails perfectly with the Biden-Harris Administration’s ongoing efforts to develop a secure American cleantech supply chain to compete with China. Notably, this factory is also the first-ever project receiving funds from the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (passed thanks to the hard work of Kamala Harris!) to come fully online. Spectacular work!
California startup BurnBot has developed a robot that can conduct precise controlled burns to help prevent future wildfires. The BurnBot rolls over grass or brush, sets it on fire, keeps the fire contained within the large tank-like body of the robot (greatly reducing the risk of a controlled burn getting out of control), then snuffs out the fire as it passes with a roller on the back, leaving just a trail of ash to serve as a future firebreak. The intense heat within the robot-contained fire even destroys particulate matter, substantially reducing harmful smoke clouds. As with solar-installing robots, this could help reduce the human workforce needed to scale up a task that’s increasingly in demand on Anthropocene Earth. And BurnBot is just one of many emerging innovations in the “fire tech” sector, with many researchers and companies also developing flying anti-wildfire drones. Amazing work!
31 million acres is 12.5 million hectares, or over 48,000 square miles, though likely only a fraction of this vast area will end up with a solar farm. It’s still a big deal: The Wilderness Society estimates that if just 700,000 (0.7 million) acres of this area eventually get solar farms, it would displace carbon emissions roughly equivalent to closing 30 coal plants!
For example, the Plan specifically prohibits solar development in vital wildlife areas like key migration corridors, bird stopover points, and calving grounds.
It’s also worth noting here that a recent study has found that the cool shade of solar panels can serve as a growth-enhancing “nursery” for small American desert plants and “biocrust” species like mosses, lichen and cyanobacteria. More research on these interesting “win-win” synergies would be great!
Well, it's the first I'm hearing about the human-led ibis migration and that's just awesomely bonkers. Since I've subscribed to this newsletter, I have felt materially more hopeful about our future and our willingness to protect it (which of course is more useful for action than feeling doomed). Thank you so much for that, and thanks for the UK bits!
Well, I'll join the crowd here. The human-assisted waldrapp migration lessons are so sweet (for lack of a more fitting word). It's us at our best. Sand for Benin, bird vaccinations in New Zealand, beaver protections in GB, Chinese pollution decline, burnbots and solar farms... All very positive things. You're performing a valuable service in these parlous times.