Study: Sustainably-Sourced Goods are KEY for Protecting Endangered Species’

Have you ever teared up at a news story about giraffes heading towards extinction? Perhaps you symbolically adopted an elephant to save it from poaching. Your heart is in the right place. But a study released earlier this year highlights the very real damage human consumption does to threatened species and the environment.

The couch you’re sitting on, the smartphone you used to donate money to the African elephant rescue effort – both of these have a negative impact on biodiversity. Even the coffee you brew in the morning takes a toll.

I hate to say it, but unless it is sustainably-sourced, every time you buy something, you’re wrecking the damn planet. Thanks a lot, you … and me.

UN Report: Small Scale Organic is the Only Way to Feed the World

Research published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution illuminates the global hotspots most impacted by goods exported to the United States, China, Japan, and the European Union. The findings show that U.S. consumption is particularly harmful to land species from parts of Southeast Asia and Madagascar, in addition to southern Europe, the Sahel region of Africa, coastal Mexico, Central America, and Central Asia. [1]

Source: Time – Darker purple and green regions indicate the regions where exports to the U.S. most damage biodiversity.

Goods in nearly every store you visit in the U.S. originate in places where monkeys, toads, sea cows, and big cats call home. Elements like coffee and palm oil are elements that animals in shrinking habits need to survive. These resources are used in products made by 15,000 industries globally and consumed in some 187 countries, and an inordinate amount of it is consumed in the U.S. and Europe.

This results in the suffering of more than 6,500 species of wildlife. [2]

Sea cow

Tracking Consumption’s Impact

For the study, researchers evaluated the supply chains of a multitude of different products to trace the effects of goods on 6,800 species listed as threatened by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Supply chains were found to threaten species in a variety of ways, including forestry-destroying habitats, pollution, and urban development. [1]

The researchers laid fairly new global supply-chain databases over the habitats of endangered species listed by the IUCN and BirdLife International. This allowed the team to identify the world’s “threatened biodiversity hot spots,” as they refer to them. [2]

For example, logging in Brazil to make products eventually sold in the U.S. cuts down trees used by red-face spider monkeys. Mangroves off Papua New Guinea – home to diverse plant species and an endangered sea cow – are impacted by the fishery trade and gold mined and destined for Japan.

Red face spider monkey

Daniel Moran, a researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, said:

“Biodiversity hot spots is a well studied topic, and it is known that the last reserves of biodiversity are harbored in a small number of places. Economic pressure, even at the margin and in small increments, exerts pressure at these places. Almost any human pressure at the places, unless very well managed, will have a big impact on species there.”

The researchers wrote that product demand in the U.S. also affects “marine hot spots off the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica and Nicaragua at the mouth of the Orinoco around Trinidad and Tobago.” They went on to say:

“The European Union drives threats [in] hot spots outside Southeast Asia in the islands around Madagascar: Réunion, Mauritius, Seychelles.

Despite much attention on the Amazon rain forest, the U.S. footprint in Brazil is actually greater in southern Brazil, the Brazilian Highlands, where agriculture and grazing are extensive, than inside the Amazon basin, although impacts along the Amazon river itself are high.”

Source: World Wildlife Fund

Humans have moved into animal habitats and now live among them so closely that even the smallest environmental impact can reverberate widely.

The study states:

“For threats driven by U.S. consumption, the 5 percent most intensively affected land area covers 23.6 percent of its total impact on species, and at sea the 5 percent most intensively impacted marine area affects 60.7 percent of threatened species habitats.”

Read: 4 Ways to Heal and Replenish our Damaged Soil and Food Supply

About $66 billion is spent on conservation efforts annually, with 90% of that going to use in developed countries far away from the most endangered locations, the researchers found.

The findings could help conservationists better direct resources to address both the source of harmful goods and the markets where they are sold, the team said. [1]

Sources:

[1] Time

[2] The Washington Post

World Wildlife Fund

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About Mike Barrett:
	Mike is the co-founder, editor, and researcher behind Natural Society. Studying the work of top natural health activists, and writing special reports for top 10 alternative health websites, Mike has written hundreds of articles and pages on how to obtain optimum wellness through natural health.

Amazon Biodiversity Threatened by Hundreds of Dams

(The Real Agenda News) Along the Amazon there are 140 hydraulic dams that are under construction or already operating. There are plans for the construction of another 428.

AMAZÔNIA — Although only a portion of them will eventually be constructed, scientists believe that their impact on the Amazonian rivers will be “disastrous.”

A global study on the consequences of water dams indicates that they will alter the flow of the river, retaining most of the sediments and river nutrients that will not vivify the Amazonian plain, drowning the life that depends on the river and the ocean where it ultimately ends.

In the Amazon, everything is large. Its main section is about 2,000 kilometers to the mouth of the Atlantic, in an estuary more than 300 kilometers wide.

But there are still another 5,000 kilometers until reaching the opposite end, at its head in the Peruvian Andes.

Some of Amazon’s most important water sources, such as Madeira, Negro or Japura, are among the 10 largest rivers on the planet.

The Amazon basin occupies an area of ​​6.1 million km2 and the water that flows through the Amazon rivers is equivalent to 20% of the fresh water of Earth’s supply.

Despite such enormity, there is no river that survives 568 dams. That is the main conclusion of a large study involving ecologists and engineers, economists and geologists from a dozen American, German, British and Brazilian universities.

Although each dam is accompanied by its environmental impact study, the regional impact of all existing dams in the Amazon basin had never been studied.

The research, published in Nature, analyzes the cost they will have on the life of the river, from the seasonal floods that give life to the Amazon, to the sediments that will stop dragging nutrients all along the region.

Rivers are not just water. They also carry large amounts of sediment that starts from one side and deposits in the other.

These sediments are the mineral substratum of life in a vast region of more than one million km2, between wetlands and alluvial plains.

In its last stretch, the Amazon transports between 800 and 1.2 million tons of silt, sand and clay and at least half end up in the ocean every year.

With each dam that stands between the river and the sea, a percentage of these sediments will be trapped in the concrete.

“Remember ancient Egypt, which depended on the silt of the river that fertilized the lands of the floodplain,” says University of Texas researcher in Austin (USA) and lead author of the study, Edgardo Latrubesse.

“The Nile is today a river artificially regulated by mega dams. It is a typical case that exemplifies the tremendous impacts produced by infrastructures constructed several decades ago, which produced great social, environmental and economic impacts”, adds this expert in geomorphology of the rivers.

It is not the first time that the situation of modern Egypt is related to the alteration of the course of its great river.

In the case that Latrubesse cites, the Amazonian, the combined impact of the dams could cause more than 60% of the sediments that the river drags to get now stuck along the way.

“In the Yangtze, where the Three Gorges dam was built, the retention now stands at more than 75% and in other rivers like the upper Paraná River in Brazil, the retention is more than 100%.

Values ​​of more than 70-90% are typical in the world. We expect something similar in the Amazon if everything that is supposed to be built is actually built,” he says.

Such interference in the dynamics of the river will have “disastrous consequences,” in the words of Latrubesse.

The sediments not only transport nutrients to the alluvial plain, they are an integral part of the river: “islands and pieces of the alluvial plains are eroded while new areas are generated by sedimentation,” recalls this researcher.

This dynamic helps to maintain a great diversity of environments in the tropics and, for biologists, “this regeneration process is a very important mechanism that contributes to the creation of biodiversity,” he concludes.

The problem will not be less at the mouth. The column of water and sediment that ends in the Atlantic extends for more than 1.3 million km2 of the ocean, half of what occupies the Mediterranean.

In addition to being the base of an extensive coral line on the American coast and the mangroves of the Guayanas and northern Brazil, this enormous Amazon contribution is involved in the regional climate, conditioning the generation and movement of tropical storms in the Caribbean.

The lack of sediments in the coastal zone will also favor marine erosion and salt-water intrusion in aquifers.

The authors of the study have created an index of vulnerability of rivers to the impact of dams. About a maximum of 100, some rivers of the Andean strip, like the Marañón, could reach an index 72.

At its head, 104 dams with more than 1 megawatt (MW) of generating capacity have been built or planned.

Further down, the most vulnerable river is Madeira, one of the 10 largest rivers in the world that alone provides half of the sediments that the Amazon takes to the sea.

With an index of vulnerability higher than 80, the Madeira river hosts about 1,000 species of fish, triple the amount of all the rivers of Europe.

But perhaps the most striking case is that of the Tapajós, the main contributor of the right bank of the Amazon.

Although there are no dams in its main section, it is and will be one of the most affected by the construction of dozens of dams in its affluents, which will create an interconnected system of dams and artificial marshes along 1,000 km.

For Latrubesse, “it would be impossible to construct such dams in developed countries” because of the gigantic environmental impact they have.

The justification for all this was the need to generate energy on which Brazil, Ecuador, Peru or Bolivia could base their development. However, hydroelectric dams do not seem to be the solution.

Oxford University researcher and co-author of the study, Atif Ansar, recalls: “Our previous research has shown that, because of the systematic problem of extra costs and the lengthening of deadlines, the real cost of large dams is too high to recover it”.

Previous studies only included economic impact but did not include environmental impact. Now, he says, “large dams are not only economically unviable but also environmentally damaging.”