A veritable A to Z of world finance institutions are enabling the destruction of three of the world’s biggest rainforests, research carried out by environmental and anti-corruption NGO Global Witness has revealed. 

Among those identified are some of the largest names in global finance—Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Santander and Standard Chartered among them—providing tens of billions of dollars in financing between 2013-2019 to companies either directly or indirectly deforesting the largest rainforest regions of the world.

Five of the world’s leading investment banks, JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Barclays and Morgan Stanley are also implicated.

Money to Burn

Global Witness wrote to each bank and received responses, which are referenced in the full report, Money to Burn.

Six major agribusinesses causing this damage – which these well-known global financial players invest in – produce agricultural commodities like palm oil, beef, and rubber.

Global Witness investigated these giant companies over six years (2013-2019), operating across the three largest single rainforests on earth – Amazon, Congo Basin and New Guinea – and found that they were backed to the tune of $44 billion by over 300 investment firms, banks and pension funds headquartered across the globe.

The revelations in the report Money to Burn come after a summer of international outcry over the burning of the Brazilian Amazon, and fresh from a week of strikes and climate action across the globe. 

Studies have shown that forests and other ecosystems could make up more than a third of the total carbon mitigation by 2030 needed to limit global heating to a 2-degree Celsius rise.

Rapid breakdown

In 2018 alone an area of primary tropical rainforest the size of Belgium was destroyed. About a quarter of forest loss, or as high as 78 percent in South East Asia and 56 percent in Latin America, was to make way for agricultural commodities, including beef and palm oil.

Ed Davey, head of forest investigations at Global Witness said: “The rapid breakdown of our climate is a concern to many – including bank customers – so it’s unsurprising that banks and investors proudly trumpet policies on ethical investment and lending, giving the impression they are not pumping money into companies that would fell and burn precious rainforests.

“But their hypocrisy is clear: the same financial institutions are breaking their own policies at will and in search of profit, make many of their promises barely worth the paper they are printed on.

Responsibility

“Members of the public will be shocked to know that the bank they have a current account with,that manages their pension fund or invests their retirement nest egg are enabling the destruction ofthe world’s most previous ecosystems.”

“$44 billion is a terrifying sum of money to be ploughing into companies that destroy forests – at a time when we need trees more than ever. These household name banks and iconic investment funds our exposé highlights will be familiar to anyone who has looked at the skyline of Wall Street or Canary Wharf, read a newspaper or opened a current account. But the activity in this report is just the tip of the iceberg.”

Global Witness is calling on the financial sector to take responsibility for the impact of their financing and investments on forests and the climate.

They are also urging policy makers to address the systemic failure of the financial system, and the companies it finances or invests in, to tackle deforestation by introducing regulatory measures, strengthening their existing commitments, and take meaningful measures to ensure they are implemented effectively.

This Author 

Marianne Brooker is The Ecologist’s content editor. This article is based on a press release from Global Witness. 

Image: Represenatational/Pixabay. 

More songbirds could be living in captivity than in the wild on the Indonesian island of Java, according to new research led by Manchester Metropolitan University and Chester Zoo.

Around 75 million birds are kept as pets in Java, threatening to wipe out some wild bird populations.

Across South-east Asia thousands of songbird species are extracted from the wild for a variety of reasons, but many are sought after to enter into singing competitions or to be kept as ornamental pets.

Shrinking habitat

The biggest source for this demand is Indonesia, where levels of ownership have put a huge drain on wild populations causing an ‘Asian songbird crisis’, which may now be approaching a tipping point, threatening wild bird populations with extinction.

Manchester Metropolitan PhD student and Chester Zoo Conservation Scholar Harry Marshall led a team that surveyed 3,000 households across the island of Java – Indonesia’s most densely populated island and home to more than half of its 260 million population. For many Indonesians, bird-keeping is a popular pastime.

His research, published in Biological Conservation, looked into the prevalence and patterns of bird keeping. He found that the proportion of bird-keeping households has increased over the past decade, and that a third of the island’s 36 million households now keep birds.

Harry said: “The removal of birds from the ever-shrinking forest habitat on such a large scale may be extremely damaging, not only causing bird extinctions but also threatening the important ecosystem services they provide such as pollination.

“The trade in songbirds is estimated to be worth tens of millions of dollars to the Indonesian economy, so it is no surprise that it is a key regional source of both supply and demand for songbirds, with hundreds of markets running across the archipelago, selling more than 200 different species – the majority of which are native to Indonesia.”

‘Kicau-mania’

The illegal trade in wildlife affects species in almost every country, with a growing number of species threatened with extinction because of demand for pets, medicine or ornaments.

Birds are one of the most traded groups with over 3,000 species, a third of all surviving species, reportedly affected by the trade.

Keeping songbirds has a long tradition in certain parts of Indonesia and is seen as an important part of a balanced life for Javanese men – the most populous ethnicity in Indonesia. The researchers found that bird-keeping is more common in the Eastern provinces of Java with the largest Javanese populations.

In recent years however, bird-keeping has evolved into a modern hobby, often referred to as ‘Kicau-mania’ – singing contests for the birds. The competition has become a ubiquitous part of urban life, where birds’ songs, or Kicau in Indonesian, are judged on melody, duration and volume.

These events happen all the time across the island with some people willing to pay thousands of dollars for prize-winning songsters that could win them as much as $50,000 in the top contests.

Notable members of Indonesia’s political elite are also keen songbird enthusiasts, supporting the creation of the high-end songbird contests exclusively for White-rumped Shamas, making it one of the most popular and expensive birds with over three million owned across households. Not surprisingly, the species – once widespread in Java – is now almost exclusively only found in captivity in Java, with evidence suggesting birds are being illegally imported from neighbouring countries.

Future prospects

Species not native to Indonesia, such as canaries and lovebirds, are also are amongst the most commonly kept across Java and bred in captivity, so the demand for these birds does not affect wild populations.

Lovebirds – small parrots of African origin – have seen a seven-fold increase in popularity over the last decade, suggesting that demand is adapting to the reduced availability of other species in the wild and could be a way to meet demand and maintain wild bird populations.

Stuart Marsden, Professor of Conservation Ecology at Manchester Metropolitan University, said: “Overall bird ownership shows an increase in the last decade but the high prevalence of bird-keeping, the higher species diversity and the expanding variety of motivations for keeping birds in urban areas suggest that bird keeping is likely to increase in prevalence as the Indonesian population continues to become more urban.

“The songbird trade has become a major threat to the survival of South-east Asia songbirds. Millions of these beautiful birds are captured illegally every year and we need to act now before we reach the point of no return.”

Cautious optimism

Andrew Owen, Curator of Birds at Chester Zoo, added: “We’re well aware that songbirds are under enormous threat from illegal trapping in Indonesia. Yet to see the new figures in this study is really startling. Make no mistake, this is a crisis.

“Information like this really helps us to understand and tackle the problem. Through community awareness and education projects in South-east Asia and conservation breeding programmes for rare songbirds here in Chester, we have been striving to combat the songbird crisis for a number of years.

“There is room for cautious optimism though, as a number of influential and well-respected song competition groups hold events exclusively for captive-bred birds – thus reducing the pressure on wild bird populations. We hope that these events can become the norm as opposed to the exception before it’s too late.”

Global partnership

The findings will help conservationists to target the most important communities with campaigns to reduce bird ownership. The aim is to reduce the number of wild caught birds trapped to be kept in captivity, and with it, an increase in the number living in the wild, in their natural habitat. 

This research is in partnership with Birdlife International, Atma Jaya University in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and the Oriental Bird Club.

This Article 

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist. This article is based on a press release from Manchester Metropolitan University. 

Image: Gabby Salazar.

You’ve probably heard of Extinction Rebellion (XR) by now. The environmental campaign has caused waves with its focused, colourful and in many ways controversial direct actions.

The weeks of disruption caused to central London in April 2019 marked a turning point, mobilising large numbers who had not previously engaged in direct action, and finally pushing well overdue conversations into the public discourse. 

This article was first published in Resurgence & Ecologist magazine

XR has also been criticised by parts of the organised left, who accused it of irresponsible tactics, of backgrounding capitalism as the core enemy, and of understating the existing struggles of people in the global south.

Climate activism

Out of this comes An Extinction Rebellion Handbook, recently released by Penguin, with the aim of pushing the message – and the confidence to take action – even further.

The book is a collection of 32 short essays by diverse authors, split into two halves, illustrated throughout with XR’s signature impactful artwork.

The first half, Tell the Truth, relates to the situation at hand: rising temperatures, catastrophic events, and the failure of governments to act.

The second half, Act Now, provides practical advice on climate activism, including how to organise and carry out a direct action, building campaign support, and the nitty-gritty of making art, providing food and keeping spirits up on the day.

This two-part structure mirrors the successful presentations that XR has been taking around the country to begin forming groups, helping to make that experience available to a wider audience.

Whilst there is no single voice, there does appear to have been an effort to respond to the criticisms, with chapters on Indigenous struggle and the ecological situation in the global south featuring prominently, and capitalism and colonialism frequently named as the core problem.

Movement DNA

A further criticism I have personally had of XR has been its apparent lack of a concrete future vision in terms of transformed social structures (as opposed to merely demanding reduction in emissions).

I was pleasantly surprised, then, to see that in the final few essays the book moves on to lay out ideas for alternative societies such as Rojava, democratic confederalism in Northern Syria; participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil; and Cooperation Jackson’s radical cooperative network in the US, as well as discussing post-growth economics, redesigning cities, and building common ownership.

The potential for these ideas to be opened up to a wider readership is, for me, enough to warrant recommending this book, as it remains a missing piece in the climate movement puzzle.

Those who were critical may remain dissatisfied. Many of the essays continue to feature an unquestioned liberal state analysis: for example, the term ‘social contract’ is thrown around without any analysis or acknowledgement that this concept emerged from the same Enlightenment philosophy that has formed the backbone of capitalism and colonialism.

Further, the friendly approach to the police is unchanged and is so deeply embedded in the organisation’s DNA that it is extremely likely to remain so. But the book does give a much clearer explanation than I’ve seen elsewhere for why this approach has been taken.

Mobilising people 

Anyone embarking on any extended critique of these or other aspects of XR would be advised to read it for insight into the underlying strategy. 

But whatever problems the book might have, it’s worth taking a step back and looking at it in terms of its intended purpose: that of mobilising the large number of people who are currently outside the left-wing bubble.

This is an accessible text appropriate for introducing the average reader to both the scale of the building crisis and what they can do to fight back. It does that while seeding in ideas that haven’t been heard in the popular conversation, such as around the role of colonialism, and viable utopian visions.

It won’t please everyone, but it’s aware it won’t. It’s a messy book for messy times. Buy it for that person in your life who just needs one more nudge to take action.

This Author 

Graham Jones is the author of The Shock Doctrine of the Left. This article was first published in Resurgence & Ecologist magazine

Image: Francesca E Harris.

Coffee could become a luxury in the UK if businesses do not invest more to help farmers who are abandoning their crops because of climate change and historically low prices.

Temperature extremes, increased humidity and crippling market prices are forcing coffee producers in Peru to turn to other sources of income as they struggle to harvest healthy crops.

Farmers of the Arabica bean, used in thousands of Britons’ daily flat whites and cappuccinos, are deserting their farms or turning to other crops, as pests and disease trigger smaller harvests of lower-quality beans.

Fair

Farmers are also being forced to grow the delicate plant on ever-higher, cooler land, as rising annual average temperatures render large swathes of ground unsuitable.

By 2050, up to half the land currently used globally to grow coffee could have become unusable for this purpose, experts predict.

The environmental cost of this could be dire, with increased deforestation likely in order to clear new areas for coffee farms.

Experts fear the quality of coffee could be diminished as farmers turn to new varieties, and that lower production volumes could cause prices to increase.

Catherine David, head of commercial partnerships at Fairtrade, said the UK public “really expect businesses to be paying a fair price for their coffee – this isn’t a nice-to-have for them”.

Coca

She told the PA news agency: “While now coffee sales have grown and it’s a very popular product and we can pick up coffee from all different price ranges, I think if we don’t invest now then coffee could become a luxury, longer term.

“Because if 50 percent of land currently used for coffee isn’t going to be suitable for it by 2050, and coffee farmers are abandoning their farms, there simply won’t be enough coffee, and so we could, conceivably, get to a point where coffee is no longer available for, say, £1.50 at Greggs, but becomes a premium product for only those who can afford to enjoy it.

“It really is a crisis we are facing and I think it’s one that, if the UK public were more aware of, they’d be pretty scandalised that brands, retailers and coffee shops that they are buying their coffee from aren’t doing more.”

The poorest farmers are being hit the hardest, because they cannot invest profits in tools to improve the soil or buy new plants.

In places such as Tarapoto, farmers have even returned to growing the coca plant, the raw material for cocaine, despite a Government initiative to reduce production.

Exacerbated

Norandino, a Fairtrade co-operative representing the largest number of farmers in Peru, about 7,000, said extreme rainfall two years ago destroyed crops and caused buildings to crumple in the north west region Piura.

Its headquarters were flooded with water, and members fear the region may become uninhabitable in the future.

It buys coffee from its producers at a minimum price higher than the current market rate, but many not in co-operatives are without this vital safety net.

In Montero, a valley district in Piura, leaf rust disease has continued to diminish yields after a devastating outbreak five years ago.

The disease, which has been exacerbated by climate change, covers the leaves with orange dust and causes them to fall off, stopping the plant photosynthesising.

Thrive

Farmers replaced many of their crops with the catimor variety, which is resistant to the rust but vulnerable to the brown eye fungus, which has also become more common due to rising temperatures.

Over the last five years, coffee production in the area shrank from 80% to 20%, with many now turning to the more-resilient sugar cane.

The family of Segundo Alejandro Guerrero Mondragon, part of the Norandino co-operative, has been experimenting with new coffee varieties.

This summer has been unusually cold, meaning the coffee has not been drying properly, while an outbreak of coffee rust last year has led to lower yields this harvest.

The family has started planting higher up the steep valley, as plants are no longer able to thrive at the altitudes once perfect for their growth, replacing the lower coffee plants with sugar cane. But there is only so much hillside before the land runs out.

Lucky

The 72-year-old was one of the founders of the organisation that became Norandino. His family has been farming coffee for more than 100 years.

He told PA: “Our area used to be free of all types of disease. There was no rust, there was no brown eye, there was no borer (a beetle that is an aggressive coffee pest).

“Lately we were managing to partly control brown eye, but when we got rust it was a largely unknown disease and really concerned us, it hit us really hard and there was a huge drop in production.

“For me it was very disappointing, we had coffee plantations with a really good crop and we were left with next to nothing, it was almost completely destroyed.

“I was a little bit lucky because of my children (three are agronomists) who helped to manage the crop and for the greater part managed to control the fungus. Others were left with nothing.”

Disease

His sons Hugo, 33, and Omar, 35, are helping him experiment with new varieties of coffee in a protected nursery, to produce a more resilient bean without compromising on quality.

Organic fertilisers and irrigation have meant the plants are healthier than their poorer neighbours’, but with little to no boundaries between plantations, disease is just a boot print away from being spread.

The family has been able to invest in production facilities to speed up their coffee farming due to being members of the co-operative.

Poorer farmers who are not members can use their machinery, while the family is providing seasonal employment for students and women, and sharing their technical knowledge.

One of those they have been helping is Sefelmira Alberca Pangalima, a single mother who cannot support her two daughters with her dwindling, disease-ridden coffee crop.

Struggles

The 50-year-old inherited a quarter of a hectare of land after her father’s recent death, but has found it difficult to become a member of a co-operative as she does not hold the legal rights to her share of the farm.

She is hoping to obtain the correct documents and join Norandino. In the meantime, she has been securing extra income by helping the family harvest, cooking meals, and sewing.

She told PA: “Sometimes we plant coffee but a disease that comes in on the wind or something, I don’t know, they dry out. We plant them, and they start well and then they wither.

“But in the future, I hope to produce enough coffee and then perhaps join an organisation and sell at a better price.”

Those worst hit are adamant they want their children to be spared their struggles, with an increasing challenge being how to encourage the younger generation to stick with the industry.

Professional

Omar added: “If Fairtrade did not exist… we would not now be growing coffee.

“Or perhaps only about one third of what we grow now, just enough to meet the demand of the small plant we have. It would not be profitable.

“Or maybe everything that is now coffee would instead be cane, because it is an easier crop to tend, and is more profitable than coffee.

“Without the coffee, professional people like me would not be here, we would be working in the city or elsewhere.”

This Author

Jemma Crew is the PA health and science correspondent and is currently in Peru.

Come all ye heart-weary activists longing to heal the planet, and bring your environmentalist friends with you, for I have the perfect podcast for your ears. 

Outrage and Optimism describes itself as “a podcast about solving the climate crisis and reshaping the world”.

This article was first published in Resurgence & Ecologist magazine

In other words, it’s a podcast for people who already understand that we face a climate and extinction crisis, and who want to take radical action to “create a kinder, healthier and more beautiful world for everyone”.

Easy humour

The weekly podcast is presented by Christiana Figueres, who as Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change brought together the countries for the Paris Agreement, Paul Dickinson, who co-founded CDP, an NGO showing what business is doing to reduce CO2 emissions, and Tom Rivett-Carnac, who has previously worked with both Figueres and Dickinson.

The three are already very good friends, so there is an easy humour and unforced rapport between them from the first episode, though each brings a different perspective to keep the discussions interesting.

But why call it ‘Outrage and Optimism’? This is explained beautifully in the first episode, where Figueres asserts that we need both in order to move beyond the climate crisis.

She describes her despair following the Copenhagen climate negotiations, and her realisation that her belief that agreement was impossible would ensure the failure of all future talks. She intentionally changed her attitude, and slowly the mood began to change.

“We finally understood”, she said, “that optimism is not the result of an achievement, but rather the input with which we have to approach any challenging task.”

Climate justice

And the outrage? We’re possibly all more familiar with this one. It’s seeing the extinction of species, and the increasing frequency of extreme weather events, and the rising death toll. It’s the anger we feel when, even though we have the policies, the technologies and the finance to make a difference, we are still not moving fast enough.

Outrage gives us the energy to come together and act, or as Figueres puts it: “Optimism is the direction, and outrage is the fuel.”

Crucially, the podcast includes the outrage felt by those left behind by rising global inequality – the need for climate justice – so that our actions need to be about creating a better world for everyone, not just saving the world as it is now.

For a relatively new podcast, the team has already interviewed some huge names, including David Attenborough, Greta Thunberg, Bill McKibben, Jane Goodall, Ellie Goulding and – perhaps not such a big name in the environmental movement – William Hague.

Well, yes. Although activists tend to be left-leaning, Hague makes the point that the political right also needs to be engaged and to come on board. The discussion is polite but lively. Well worth a listen.

Striking a balance

There are episodes about pollution in our cities, about the role of the EU, the mechanics of the Paris Agreement, and how the climate crisis is magnifying the numbers of refugees. There are moments of hope – Democrat presidential hopeful Jay Inslee claims that strong action on the climate can win votes; there are tears – including an absolute mic drop moment at the end of the Attenborough interview; and there are moments of despair – Figueres is deeply moved by her interview with Thunberg, and all three are profoundly concerned by Thunberg’s sadness.

This is a podcast that assumes its listeners are intelligent. It manages to strike the right balance between providing information, global context and news.

But it’s the emotional frankness that makes it so transformative. I’ve felt it changing my brain wiring as I’ve listened.

I’ll leave the final word to Figueres: “Remember, impossible is not a fact: it is an attitude… and we are running out of time.”

This Author

Rachel Marsh is a podcast addict and designs Resurgence & Ecologist magazine. This article was first published in Resurgence & Ecologist magazine. 

Image: David Morrison. 

Raging forest fires in Brazil are a direct result of Brazilian government policies that have dismantled environmental protection and Indigenous rights. The fires have led to a huge spike in deforestation. 

Indigenous communities on the frontline of this fight are speaking out, condemning the government and calling for solidarity action.

On Thursday 3 October the Brazilian environment minister, Ricardo Salles, will be visiting the UK on a public relations trip. He’s been hit by protests at every step of the tour, and London will be no different.

Solidarity and unity

Protestors will gather at 8.30am on Thursday morning to send a clear message to Salles that until their destructive agenda is reversed and the amazon and its people are protected, he is not welcome here. More information can be found here. 

Campaigners from the UK Student Climate Network said: “As young people worried about climate change and its impacts across the globe, we stand in solidarity with the Indigenous and local communities defending their land, the forest and the lungs of the earth. We see you.

“Come on Thursday morning – bring your friends – for music, speakers and solidarity for the ‘NOT WELCOME’ that Salles won’t forget. Opposition is global. There is no climate justice without indigenous justice, without solidarity and, without unity.”

This Author 

Marianne Brooker is The Ecologist’s content editor.

Image: Palácio do Planalto, Wikimedia. 

There are over 3.5 billion hectares of farmland and grassland on Earth and each hectare can remove tons of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.

We can draw down carbon with beneficial soil biology, Like planting trees to store carbon in their trunks. In my home state of California, rangeland ecologists and bio-geochemists have been testing the soil carbon from improved grazing and compost application, practices known as carbon farming.

The reduction in carbon emissions has been astounding—in ranch in my supply chain, the equivalent to not burning 6500 liters of petrol per hectare, each year, for 6 years and counting.

Perverse incentives 

There’s really no downside to investing in better farming and healthy soil, which also creates more delicious and nutritious food while conserving water and making farms more climate resilient.

Each dollar invested in climate solutions related to food and land use would generate over $13 in public benefit; overall, 1 percent of GDP annually would be enough funding to lower global temperatures by 2050.

However, at present, in the US and other countries, agricultural incentives are so perverse that they often punish farmers and ranchers for investing in healthy soil: as a result, very little of the world’s agricultural land is healthy. 

According to the United Nations, if current trends continue, the world’s topsoil has only about 60 harvests left in it.  Capitalism prioritizes short-term yield and profit instead of long-term agro-ecology and human health, so we’ve adopted a production mode reliant on monoculture and chemical inputs and extracting as much as we can, as quickly as possible. 

If we can focus on returning carbon (i.e. organic matter) to the soil, we can solve global warming and create better food. Applying compost to farmland is probably the best example of how society can shift to a renewable food system. 

Cultural shift

Making these changes would require widespread cultural shift – but recycling has become the norm in a few short decades and renewable energy is scaling rapidly. However, we must view the transformation of the food system along the same lines as the transition to renewable energy—we must fund the transition to renewable farming. 

Since the goal is to truly change many acres of farmland, then we must not only try to source well, but specifically ask our existing supply chains to change. In fact, we should help pay for the transition. 

Like many chefs – and home cooks – I aspire to work with the best ingredients I can afford, or the best that my business model allows.  But as demand for sustainably produced ingredients starts to outpace the 2 percent or 3 percent of the farmland, or when we can’t afford the most sustainably farmed choice, we must also focus on actually creating the change. 

Imagine for a moment if such an option presented itself in another industry—if, say, there was a fuel additive that could eliminate the emissions from burning petrol, or in fact if the additive went as far as to pull greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere.

Now imagine if it cost just 1 percent more at the pump. We would expect corporations and governments and citizens to be scaling up as quickly as possible. 

Funding transition

The same model could be applied to farming. Bio-geochemists have determined that carbon farming actually begins to create long-term, durable soil carbon immediately.  If we paid farmers to reconfigure the food system by applying climate beneficial soil additives such as compost and cover crops, then we can transition millions of hectares each year and solve global warming.

Restaurants are a tough business and barely making ends meet, but we can serve as a pathway for customers to invest in better farming.

I have been piloting this in my restaurant, Mission Chinese Food, in San Francisco.  And many of the restaurants at Zero Foodprint.org have as well by adding a surcharge of 1 percent to support environmentally-friendly farming practices.

The funds from the surcharge will help farmers transition from non-renewable production in a scalable way – sequestering CO2 in plants and soils, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and producing co-benefits that build ecological and economic resilience in local landscapes.  

So far, it’s a success – At MCF we’ve probably served about 30,000 people and only two diners have opted out. (And unlike most of the other participating restaurants, we have applied 3 percent charge).

Optional surcharge

In January, we’re working with the State of California to ask all restaurants to add an optional surcharge to create a renewable food system.  If just 1 percent of California’s restaurants participate, the program will generate $10 million a year to fund carbon farming across the state.

The solution to reducing carbon emissions is not using chard stems or perfecting the stem cell burger.

It’s using trillions of dollars to return billions of pounds of nutrients to millions of hectares—shifting to a renewable food system. Re-storing carbon one hectare at a time can help us to fight climate breakdown. 

This Author 

Anthony Myint is the winner of the Basque Culinary World Prize 2019, an award for chefs around the world whose work has transformed society through gastronomy.

The gene-editing of DNA inside living cells is considered by many to be the preeminent technological breakthrough of the new millennium. Researchers in medicine and agriculture have rapidly adopted it as a technique for discovering cell and organism functions.

But the implications of its commercial uses are much more complex.

Gene-editing has many potential uses. These include altering cells to treat human disease, altering crops and livestock for breeding and agriculture. Furthermore, in a move that has been widely criticised, Chinese researcher He Jiankui claims to have edited human babies to resist HIV by altering a gene called CCR5.

‘Tweaking’

For most commercial applications gene-editing’s appeal is simplicity and precision: it alters genomes at precise sites and without inserting foreign DNA. This is why, in popular articles, gene-editing is often referred to as ‘tweaking’.

The tweaking narrative, however, is an assumption and not an established fact. And it recently suffered a large dent.

In late July researchers from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) analysed the whole genomes of two calves originally born in 2016. The calves were edited by the biotech startup Recombinetics using a gene-editing method called TALENS (Norris et al., 2019).

The two Recombinetics animals had become biotech celebrities for having a genetic change that removed their horns. Cattle without horns are known as ‘polled’. The calves are well-known because Recombinetics has insisted that its two edited animals were extremely precisely altered only to possess the polled trait.

However, what the FDA researchers found was not precision. Each of Recombinetics’ calves possessed two antibiotic resistance genes, along with other segments of superfluous bacterial DNA. Thus, apparently unbeknown to Recombinetics, adjacent to its edited site were 4,000 base pairs of DNA that originated from the plasmid vector used to introduce the DNA required for the hornless trait.

Animal research 

The FDA finding has attracted some media attention; mainly focussed on the incompetence of Recombinetics. The startup failed to find (or perhaps look for) DNA it had itself added as part of the editing process. Following the FDA findings, Brazil terminated a breeding program begun with the Recombinetics animals.

But the FDA’s findings are potentially trivial besides another recent discovery about gene-editing: that foreign DNA from surprising sources can routinely find its way into the genome of edited animals.

This genetic material is not DNA that was put there on purpose, but rather, is a contaminant of standard editing procedures.

These findings have not yet been reported in the scientific or popular media. But they are of great consequence from a biosafety perspective and therefore for the commercial and regulatory landscape of gene-editing.

They imply, at the very least, the need for strong measures to prevent contamination by stray DNA, along with thorough scrutiny of gene-edited cells and gene-edited organisms. And, as the Recombinetics case suggests, these are needs that developers themselves may not meet.

Understanding the sources

As far back as 2010 researchers working with human cells showed that a form of gene-editing called Zinc Finger Nuclease (ZFN) could result in the insertion of foreign DNA at the editing target site (Olsen et al., 2010). The origin of this foreign DNA, as with Recombinetics’ calves, was the plasmid vector used in the editing process.

Understanding the presence of plasmid vectors requires an appreciation of the basics of gene-editing, which, confusingly, are considerably distinct from what the word ‘editing’ means in ordinary English.

Ultimately, all DNA ‘editing’ is really the cutting of DNA by enzymes, called nucleases, that are supposed to act only at chosen sites in the genome of a living cell. This cut creates a double-stranded break that severs (and therefore severely damages) a chromosome. The enzymes most commonly used by researchers for this cutting are the Fok I enzyme (for TALENS type editing), Cas9 (for CRISPR), or Zinc Finger Nucleases (for ZFN).

Subsequent to this cutting event the cell effects a repair. In practice, this DNA repair is usually inaccurate because the natural repair mechanism in most cells is somewhat random. The result is called the ‘edit’. Researchers typically must select from many ‘edits’ to obtain the one they desire.

Like virtually all enzymes these nucleases are proteins. And like most proteins they are somewhat tricky to produce and relatively unstable once made. Typically, therefore, rather than produce the DNA cutting enzymes directly, researchers introduce vector plasmids into target cells.

These vector plasmids are circular DNA molecules that code for the desired enzyme(s). (Vector plasmid DNA may also code for the guide RNA that CRISPR editing techniques require). What this means, in practice, is that TALENS, Cas9 and the other cutting enzymes end up being produced by the target cell itself.

Stray DNA

Introducing DNA rather than proteins is thus much easier, research-wise, but it has a downside: non-host (i.e. transgenic) DNA must be introduced into the cell that is to be edited and this DNA may end up in the genome.

Plasmid vectors are not simple. As well as specifying the nucleases, the vector plasmid used by Recombinetics contained antibiotic resistance genes, plus the lac Z gene, plus promoter and termination sequences for each of them, plus two bacterial origins of replication. Each of these DNA components comes from widely diverse microbes.

As Olsen et al. and the FDA showed, using both TALENS and ZFN types of DNA cutters can result in plasmid vector integration at the target site. In 2015 Japanese researchers showed that DNA edits made to mouse zygotes using the CRISPR method of gene editing are also vulnerable to unintended insertion of non-host DNA (Ono et al., 2015).

Since then, similar integrations of foreign DNA at the target site have been observed in many species: fruitflies (Drosophila melanogaster), medaka fish (Oryzias latipes), mice, yeast, Aspergillus (a fungus), the nematode C. elegans, Daphnia magna, and various plants (e.g. Jacobs et al., 2015; Li et al., 2015; Gutierrez-Triana et al., 2018).

Contamination

The vector plasmids themselves are not the only source of potential foreign DNA contamination in standard gene-editing methodologies.

Earlier this year the same Japanese group showed that DNA from the E. coligenome can integrate in the target organisms’ genome (Ono et al. 2019). Acquisition of E. coli DNA was found to be quite frequent.

Insertion of long unintended DNA sequences occurred at four percent of the total number of edited sites and 21 percent of these were of DNA from the E. coli genome. The source of the E. coli DNA was traced back to the E. coli cells that were used to produce the vector plasmid. The vector plasmid, which is DNA, was contaminated with E. coli genome DNA. Importantly, the Japanese researchers were using standard methods of vector plasmid preparation.

Even more intriguing was the finding, in the same paper, that edited mouse genomes can acquire bovine DNA or goat DNA (Ono et al., 2019). This was traced to the use, in standard culture medium for mouse cells, of foetal calf serum; that is, body fluids usually extracted from cows.

This serum contains DNA from whichever animal species it happened to have been extracted from, hence the insertion in some experiments of goat DNA (which occurred when goat serum was used instead of calf serum).

Even more worrisome, amongst the DNA sequences inserted into the mouse genome were bovine and goat retrotransposons (jumping genes) and mouse retrovirus DNA (HIV is a retrovirus). Thus gene-editing is a potential mechanism for horizontal gene transfer of unwanted pathogens, including, but not limited to, viruses.

Unwelcome viruses

Other potential sources of unwanted DNA also exist in cell cultures used for gene editing. In 2004 researchers observed that when cells from a hepatoma cell line were caused to have DNA breaks, some of these breaks were filled by hepatitis B virus sequences (Bill and Summers, 2004). In other words, pathogens contaminating the foetal serum, such as DNA viruses, should also be a source of concern.

Furthermore, the insertion of superfluous DNA from other species is likely not restricted to the intended target site. As is becoming appreciated, gene-editing enzymes can act at unwanted locations in the genome (e.g. Kosicki et al., 2018).

DNA introduced by accident can also end up at such sites. This has been shown for human cells and also plants using CRISPR (Kim and Kim 2014; Li et al., 2017; Jacobs et al., 2015). There is every reason to suppose that the more exotic DNAs mentioned above can integrate there as well, but this has not been specifically tested for.

In summary, the new findings are very simple: cutting DNA inside cells, regardless of the precise type of gene editing, predisposes genomes to acquire unwanted DNA. The unwanted DNA may come from inside the edited cell, or it may come from the culture medium, or it may come from any biological material added to the culture medium, whether accidentally or on purpose.

Therefore, it is not hard to imagine, for instance, gene-edited animals becoming the breeding stock that leads to the development or spread of novel or unwelcome viruses or mycoplasmas.

Human applications

Stuart Newman of New York Medical College is a cell biologist, a founding member of the Council for Responsible Genetics, and Editor-In-Chief of the journal Biological Theory. According to him, the addition of DNA originating from cell culture “is something that has not been broached in the discourse around safety of CRISPR and other gene modification techniques.”

Newman explained that in the case of gene-editing intended to generate altered living organisms, cell culture media “contain genes that could cause developmental problems if reincorporated by CRISPR/Cas9 into the zygote genome in extra numbers and uncontrolled chromosomal sites.

“I have little doubt E. coli DNA has been inadvertently incorporated into many CRISPR targets, and it is likely to cause problems, as it has in the horned cattle.”

Similar concerns apply to human applications. The incorporation of DNA from other species has not publicly been raised in connection with the gene-edited human babies of researcher He Jiankui. Clearly, it should be.

From what cell types, for example, did He Jiankui purify the proteins he presumably used to edit the CCR5 gene? Rabbit cells? Insect cells? Those, at least, are the standard methods.

The second important conclusion, and what the Recombinetics case exemplifies, is that researchers are often not looking for stray DNA. If they were to look, many more examples would likely be reported. We can conclude this because the research cited above used standard methods of gene-editing. The only untypical aspect was the extra effort put towards detecting superfluous DNA.

GMOs

What these recent findings also highlight is a more general, but little-discussed, aspect of gene-editing. Although the goals of gene-editors and genetic engineers are assumed to be very different, their standard methods are, in practice, virtually indistinguishable.

Consider crop plants, which are where much of the immediate commercial interest in gene-editing resides. To edit plants, DNA, in the form of vector plasmid, is introduced into plant cells. In contrast to methods of animal gene-editing, this vector plasmid is necessary (and not optional) since proteins cannot penetrate plant cell walls.

This vector plasmid must access the cell interior, which requires either a gene gun or infection with the DNA-transferring bacterium Agrobacterium tumefaciens. Lastly, in-vitro cell culture is used to regenerate the edited cells into whole plants.

Gene guns, tissue culture, and A. tumefaciens are all standard genetic engineering methods for crops. They also all create mutations. That is, they damage DNA. Depending on the specifics of the method used, such as the length of time in tissue culture, the collective result can be ten thousand mutations per genome (Wilson et al., 2006; Latham et al., 2006).

For gene-editing of crops this means that one on-target mutation may be dwarfed by thousands of off-target ones.

The other necessary comparison with GMOs is their track record of being found, long after commercialisation, to have unintended foreign DNA present in their genomes. Cornell’s virus-resistant papaya, released in Hawai’i, turned out to contain at least five (and possibly six) separate fragments of transgenic DNA.

Cornell had previously told regulators its papaya contained two transgenes (Ming et al., 2008). Monsanto’s Roundup Ready Soybean, by then grown on 96 percent of US soybean acres, was found by independent researchers to have substantially more foreign DNA than Monsanto had claimed (Windels et al., 2001).

Solutions

So, if one only listened to the rhetoric contrasting ‘precise’ ‘tweaks’ of gene-editing with ‘messy’, ‘random’ genetic engineering one would hardly suspect that, when it comes to plants, and often to animals as well, there is little difference between the reality of gene-editing and that of genetic engineering.

Solutions to the presence of superfluous DNA (at or distant from the editing site) come in two basic forms: prevention, or detection followed by removal.

An obvious preventive step is to avoid the use of vector plasmids and undefined culture media (undefined media are those containing fluids or extracts from living organisms). Another is to explicitly breed (backcross) gene-edited animals and plants to remove superfluous DNAs. A third is to sequence their whole genome, compare it to the parent genome, and select only unaltered lines, if they can be found (Ahmad et al., 2019).

However, these remedies are time-consuming and costly, or not yet fully developed, or only available for some species. These are also solutions that nullify the advantages of speed and ease that are often the stated reasons for editing in the first place.

The requirements for expertise and effort do much to explain the second major problem, which is that the industry, and not just Recombinetics, is not showing much interest in self-examination. Far greater even than the GMO industry before it, there is a cowboy zeitgeist: blow off problems and rush to market.

Thus most gene-editing companies are reluctant to share information and consequently very little is known about how, in practice, many of these companies derive their ‘gene-edited’ products.

Regulations

Many countries are at present formulating regulations that will go a long way to determining who benefits and who loses from any potential benefits that gene-editing may have.

But, in any event, these results provide a compelling case for active government oversight.

It is not just regulators who need to step up, however. Investors, insurers, journalists, everyone, in fact, should be asking far more questions of the scientists and companies active in gene-editing. Otherwise, boom is likely to stray into bane.

This Author 

Jonathan Latham is a molecular biologist and former genetic engineer. This article was first published by Independent Science News. 

Much of the world has been shifting away from coal. But Pakistan, one of the smallest contributors to global greenhouse gas emissions historically, is intending to burn a lot more of it in the coming years.

Less than one percent of global emissions currently come from Pakistan – but this number is likely to increase four-fold in the next decade due to its growing portfolio of coal-fueled plants.

Until three years ago, the South Asian country had just one active coal-fired plant. Today, it has nine – with more to come in the pipeline.

Energy crisis 

One of these plants is a mile-wide pit that runs nearly 500 feet deep being dug by hundreds of workers in the heart of the Thar Desert, in Pakistan’s southern province of Sindh.

The project is on its way to becoming Pakistan’s biggest industrial site – a $1.6 billion power project by Sindh Engro Coal Mining Co (SEMC), backed by a combination of Chinese and Pakistani companies.

The project promises to bring 3,960MW of electricity to a country that is currently facing a crippling energy crisis – nearly 25 percent of Pakistan’s 197 million population still lacks access to grid electricity – which costs the country billions per year, according to a World Bank report.

Imran Farooq, a resident of Karachi, the capital of the province of Sindh and the premier industrial and financial centre of the country, said: “We just need electricity – cheap electricity, it doesn’t matter from where.” 

Karachi is also one of the world’s most polluted cities in the world. “The air is already bad, how much worse can it get? At least we can have air-conditioning we can afford during the heatwaves.”

Thar’s coal was first discovered in 1992 but because of its poor quality, it was considered too expensive to be mined and only became a less likely prospect as environmental awareness rose globally. But China has recently shown interest. 

Local opposition

Shahzad Qasim, the Prime Minister’s special assistant on the power sector, has said: “Finding international financing for coal had been difficult, with China the only country willing to invest.” 

China is moving away from domestic mining in an attempt to curb greenhouse gas emissions and curb climate change, but many activists have criticized the country for promoting dependence on fossil fuels in many developing countries by actively investing in their nonrenewable projects. 

Currently, China is investing in 21 energy projects under the Chinese Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) – an economic ‘zone’ between the two countries that started in 2015 and on its eventual completion with connect a number of countries in South and Central Asia for trade and industrial purposes. Although a number of them are wind, solar, and hydropower fueled, at least 70 percent of the nearly 14GW of power projects will be coal fired.

Asad Jatoi, an activist and environmental lawyer based in Pakistan, states that the reason there isn’t a louder national outcry about projects like the coal-fired plant in Thar, is because of the lack of awareness.

In addition, he said: “People who are most vulnerable to and most directly impacted by the project have already been voicing their complaints against the project but are completely ignored.”

The past two years have seen several cases of opposition from local residents of Thar over concerns of land seizures, air pollution, fly ash contamination in wells, and displacement of communities.

Water pollution 

Once construction is complete, the mine’s watery effluents will be regularly transported into a reservoir nearly 30km away.

But several villagers nearby have been protesting the construction and the potential pollutants in their sweet water wells.

SEMC has provided alternative pastures for villagers nearby as well as as new houses to relocate to and a training centre for labor jobs needed for the construction project. But many villagers are protesting the damages done to their ancestral land. The villages of Senhri dars and Thareo Halepoto, for instance, have been completely relocated. 

One of the residents from Senhri dars said: “We don’t want their money, we want to keep our ancestral land.”

Several grassroots activists in Sindh have also been calling for the complete shutdown of the mining project because of how detrimental it will prove to be to the region’s ecosystem and for Pakistan’s emission rates.

Public outcry

Although Pakistan has one of the smallest contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions globally, it is among the countries most vulnerable to climate change, while also lacking the technical and economical capacity to mitigate its worst impacts.

Mohammed Khan, a member of Pakistan’s Anti-Coal Alliance, an emerging grassroots civil society campaign, said: “Pakistan is going to face the brunt of climate change and it should be prioritising adapting to changing climate conditions. Coal is disastrous to the climate and it is tragic that, as the world moves away from it, Pakistan is moving towards it.”

Anti-Coal Alliance, in collaboration with locally affected people, plans to continue protesting against the construction of coal-fired plant projects in Thar as well as others.

Khan explains that the province of Sindh province is more prone to climate change due to its geographical location and if coal projects will not just impact emissions, result in additional displacement of many of the 1.6 million local people of the desert, but will also negatively impact the ecosystem of the region.

Khan added: “We have been protesting for two years and we will continue to protest until our voices our heard by someone. Pakistan’s future cannot be coal and it is only a matter of bringing enough awareness about it to people before there is a loud enough public outcry about it.”

This Author 

Rabiya Jaffery is a freelance journalist and multimedia producer covering stories from the Middle East and South Asia. She reports on climate, culture, and conflicts. She tweets at @rabiyasdfghjkl.

Hundreds of thousands of girls and young women are calling for the UK to make a promise to reduce single-use plastic.

The call is part of a new campaign, launched by Girlguiding, aimed at tackling plastic pollution.

Nearly half a million members – including the Rainbow, Brownie, Guide and Ranger divisions, as well as volunteers – are due to take part in a week of action dedicated to the issue, Girlguiding said.

Pledge

The majority of girls and young women – aged seven to 21 (88%), feel it is urgent that everyone does more to protect the environment, a poll conducted by the organisation in the summer found.

The #PlasticPromise campaign has five pledges, and anyone can sign up by visiting the website plasticpromises.co.uk.

Girlguiding members will be asking their friends, family, politicians and the public to join them in making in a pledge, the organisation said.

The pledges are:

– Start using a reusable water bottle

– Start using an alternative to disposable cutlery

– Start using a reusable coffee cup

– Start using a reusable box or reusable wrapping instead of clingfilm

– Stand up and speak out about cutting plastic waste – and make big brands listen

Planet

TV presenter Liz Bonnin, who is supporting the campaign, said: “We all need to take action to create the change our planet needs.

“Today, thousands of girls all over the UK are making their #PlasticPromise, leading by example and inspiring others to be part of the solution too.

“I am joining forces with these powerful young women to say to those who can enforce change where it matters most: treat the future of our children and our planet with the respect they deserve.

“These girls and young women want you to act now, for their future.”

This Author

Alison Kershaw is the PA education correspondent.

– The annual Girlguiding Girls’ Attitudes survey questioned over 2,000 UK girls and young women aged seven to 21