Focus on Arts and Ecology

The Mexico City Policy – often referred to as the “Global Gag Rule” – is a US government policy that requires non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that are not based in the US and that receive US global health assistance to certify that they will not provide, refer for, counsel on, or advocate for abortion as a method of family planning. The rule also applies to any non-US funding that the organisation may receive.

The policy was rescinded by President Obama in 2009 but then reinstated and expanded by President Trump in 2017. While prior iterations applied only to family planning assistance (US$575 million in 2016), Trump’s new version extends the restrictions to nearly all US global health assistance – an estimated US$9.5 billion – which includes funding for HIV/AIDS, malaria, and maternal and child health. For example, it now means that an organisation that provides HIV care and treatment with US funding may not also provide safe abortion.

The global gag rule includes exceptions for cases of rape, incest, and to save the life of the woman; however, these are rarely applied in practice.

For over 50 years US Global Health Assistance has provided support to developing countries around three strategic priorities: to prevent child and maternal deaths, control the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and combat infectious diseases.

Kenya relies heavily on foreign aid to finance its sexual and reproductive health services. The vast majority of this aid (95% in 2018) comes from the US government. There are also approximately 71 active US global health awards to various NGOs that were subject to this rule.

The African Population and Health Research Center, in partnership with the Global Health Justice and Governance Program of Columbia University, carried out a study to establish how Trump’s expanded rule affected sexual and reproductive health services including family planning, safe abortion, and post-abortion care in Kenya.

We found that in the first 18 months, the expanded rule’s effects transcended the limitation of abortion care. It affected funding and disrupted collaboration and health promotion activities. It also strengthened opposition to sexual and reproductive health and rights.

These losses weaken NGO support to the Kenyan health system and, we believe, will likely have a substantial impact on clients seeking sexual and reproductive health services.

Our findings call for harm mitigation interventions by advocates, donors and policymakers in Kenya and the United States.

Implications

We drew our data from in-depth interviews conducted in September 2018 and March 2019 with representatives of 18 local and international NGOs. These implemented sexual and reproductive health, HIV or other health services. We also interviewed 37 health workers whose facilities received support from an NGO for their services, meaning they could be affected by the policy via these NGOs.

We found that the policy had far-reaching implications.

NGOs were forced to choose between providing safe legal abortion services and accepting US global health funding. NGOs that turned down US funding had to then find replacement funding from other sources. This led to health facilities being closed, frequent contraceptive stockouts, staff layoffs and salary cuts. It also led to the curtailment of community-based activities, such as community health volunteers referring women for services.

In addition, NGOs that provided comprehensive integrated sexual and reproductive health services – such as HIV, child health and maternal health – reported closure of some components of their service delivery when they were forced to choose between US funding and funding for these other services. This meant that women encountered more difficulties obtaining these services.

Ambiguous

We also found that the Global Gag Rule is ambiguous (and confusing) (we believe purposefully so), leaving ample room for over-interpretation. This led to organisations reducing or ending services not restricted by the rule, such as post-abortion care, out of fear of violating the policy.

The policy also emboldened opponents of sexual and reproductive health and rights and safe abortion. This stifled the efforts of those advocating for safe and quality care. It also compounded existing legal, policy and cultural barriers in the delivery of these services.

Partnership disruption

The Global Gag Rule created divisions between NGOs that chose to comply with the policy and those that declined to do so. This led to the disruption of existing coalitions and partnerships. In addition, some compliant NGOs no longer referred clients for permitted services to non-compliant NGOs.

As one interviewee from a non-US NGO said:

It’s impossible to partner with a US-funded organisation…We are working in silos…we cannot work in the same space. Even in terms of being invited in meetings, you would feel like you are being stigmatised, in fact not invited in those places, yeah, because you do not believe in the Global Gag Rule, and you are pro-choice.

What does this mean for Kenya?

The US provides 55% of Kenya’s development aid for health and 95% of sexual and reproductive health aid.

In light of evidence of the effects of this policy, the US government should reconsider how it affects people living in different contexts. And the Kenyan government must figure out how to lessen the impact of the global gag rule on its health system.

It is critical for the Kenyan government to look to its own policies and increase budgetary allocation for sexual and reproductive health services so that they cushion the impact of the global gag rule.

In addition, policymakers in the US should work to permanently repeal the policy in light of ample evidence demonstrating its adverse impact.

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(Sources: The Conversation)

Infernos in South America’s Pantanal region have burnt twice the area of California’s fires this year. Researchers fear the rare ecosystem will never recover.

By Emiliano Rodríguez Mega, 25 SEPTEMBER 2020

Firefighters and volunteers in the Pantanal, Brazil, have been scrambling to rescue jaguars from extreme fires.Credit: Andre Penner/AP/Shutterstock

When Luciana Leite arrived in the Pantanal on 2 September, she thought she would be celebrating her wedding anniversary. Instead, the biologist and her husband spent their eight-day planned holiday aiding volunteers and firefighters struggling to extinguish the burning landscape.

A common destination for ecotourists, the Pantanal is the world’s largest tropical wetland, home to Indigenous peoples and a high concentration of rare or endangered species, such as jaguars and giant armadillos. Small fires occur every year in the region, which sprawls over parts of western Brazil and extends into Bolivia and Paraguay.

But 2020’s fires have been unprecedented in extent and duration, researchers say. So far, 22% of the vast floodplain — around 3.2 million hectares (see ‘Biodiversity Hotspot Under Threat’) — has succumbed to the flames, according to Renata Libonati, a remote-sensing specialist at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, whose data are being used by firefighters to plan containment. That’s more than twice the area that has burnt in the record-breaking fires in California this year.

Scientists worry that the extreme blazes will profoundly alter the already fragile ecosystem of the Pantanal, and that research programmes investigating the region’s ecology and biodiversity will never recover.

“It’s apocalyptic,” says Leite, who studies humanity’s relationship with nature at the Federal University of Bahia in Salvador, Brazil. “It is a tragedy of colossal proportions.”

Scorched earth

Unlike in the nearby Amazon Rainforest, vegetation in the Pantanal has evolved to coexist with fire — many plant species there require the heat from fires to germinate. Often caused by lightning strikes, those natural fires tend to spring up at the end of the dry season, in September. They run out of fuel quickly, and the surrounding floodplains prevent them from spreading.

What’s different this season is that the region is facing its worst drought in 47 years, says Luisa Diele-Vegas, a Brazilian ecologist at the University of Maryland in College Park. And 2019’s fires were also intense, contributing even further to the unusually dry conditions and exacerbating the fire risk this year.

The desiccated vegetation was perfect tinder for fires intentionally set by ranchers clearing land for their cattle. But some of those fires got out of control, adding to the wildfire damage, says Diele-Vegas.

In July, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro announced a 120-day moratorium on setting fires in the Amazon and the Pantanal. However, those regulations were not strictly enforced, says José Marengo, a climatologist at the National Center for Monitoring and Early Warning of Natural Disasters in São Paulo. According to news reports, the Bolsonaro government, which has a reputation for being unfriendly towards environmental regulations, reduced the number of environmental inspectors and blocked funding for fire prevention this year.

What worries scientists further is that this year’s fire season might not be an isolated incident. Climate modelling suggests that the Pantanal could become hotter and drier, with a rise in temperature of up to 7 ºC by the end of the century1. Unpublished data from Diele-Vegas project an even grimmer outlook: by 2050, if climate-change trends continue, annual mean temperatures in the Pantanal could increase by 10.5%, and the annual volume of rain could decrease by 3%.

According to Marengo, these changes could lead to a collapse of the Pantanal’s current vegetation, making it even more susceptible to fires, and could push the region to transform into a different type of ecosystem.

A race against the flames

One of the biggest losses in this year’s fires is the region’s wildlife, says Douglas Morton, a remote-sensing specialist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who has studied fires and deforestation across Brazil for two decades. Many creatures thrive in the mosaic landscape of the Pantanal, which includes flooded areas, grasslands, lakes and forests. Scientists have so far documented more than 580 species of bird, 271 of fish, 174 mammals, 131 reptiles and 57 amphibians in the region2. “My lasting memory from being in the Pantanal is the cacophony of life,” Morton says. “To me, that’s what’s so heart wrenching about seeing the extent of fires.”

The flames have also breached five territories in the Pantanal where Indigenous communities live. More than 80% of the land in each of the three most affected — Baía dos Guató, Perigara and Tereza Cristina — has been consumed by fire.

A number of locals have jumped in to rescue as many animals as possible from the flames and smoke. Eduarda Fernandes Amaral, who works as a guide in the Encontro das Águas State Park, is among them. As of 20 September, more than 83% of the park, which is home to a large number of jaguars, capybaras and alligators, had been destroyed.

In the past month, a team including Fernandes Amaral has rescued more than 20 animals, although some had to be euthanized. To deal with the situation, Fernandes Amaral and her colleagues have adopted a mantra. “When we see an animal dying, we have to look at it, be sad for two minutes and understand that there is another in need of help,” she says.

As the blazes advance, animal research in the Pantanal might also suffer. Two years ago, Diele-Vegas started a project to study the distribution of frogs, tree frogs and toads across the Pantanal, and how it might shift owing to land-use change and climate variations. But she doesn’t know whether the amphibian populations she’s monitoring will even survive the blazes.

“We are seeing our fauna and flora burning. And there’s a lot of this fauna and flora that we haven’t had time to study yet,” she says. “We are trying to race against time, but the fire is coming and taking everything down.”

After her initial trip to the Pantanal, Leite couldn’t leave it behind. She returned a few days ago to keep helping the locals. What she’s seen has convinced her that the wetlands will be forever changed.

“If climate trends, land-management trends and the current anti-environment politics persist,” says Leite, “the Pantanal as we know it will cease to exist.”

Nature 586, 20-21 (2020)

Globetrotting pathogens have caused forest-felling disasters that scientists are doing their best to contain

By Stephanie Pain, Knowable, SEPTEMBER 28, 2020

My adopted hometown of Brighton on England’s south coast is best known as a party town. It grew from fishing village to chic resort thanks to a prince’s desire for a fun place to hang out with his secret wife and, more than two centuries later, people still flock here in pursuit of pleasure. The city’s most famous landmarks are a wacky pastiche of an oriental palace, a glitzy pier and a vast pebble beach backed by flamboyant Regency squares and terraces.

Away from the bright lights and bling, though, something more dignified makes this place unique. Lining its streets and adorning its parks are around 17,000 elm trees. Welcome to Elm City, the last great refuge of trees that once shaped the English landscape.

The UK lost most of its elms to an epidemic of Dutch elm disease in the 1970s. As a teenager, I witnessed the terrible transformation of the local countryside as stately giants became lifeless skeletons. In little more than a decade, 30 million elms died. The nation’s second most important source of hardwood timber, a key component of hedgerows and woodlands, and home to at least 80 species of invertebrates, virtually disappeared. Brighton’s elms survived thanks to a quirk of geography and a take-no-prisoners policy of fell-and-burn at the first sign of infection. For almost half a century, those trees have stood as a salutary reminder of the dangers posed by globetrotting plant pathogens.

Tree-killing microorganisms like the microfungus responsible for Dutch elm disease have been criss-crossing the world for centuries, shipped along with exotic trees and shrubs, timber and wood products, even packaging. In the twentieth century, a slew of epidemics hammered home the message that hitchhiking bacteria and fungi — the rusts and blights and their kin — and the fearful fungus-like phytophthoras are seriously bad news for agriculture, forestry and natural wooded habitats. Yet despite those woeful experiences and the tougher biosecurity measures that they prompted, the number of arrivals is rising.

With wildfires growing fiercer and more frequent and world leaders vowing to plant trillions of trees to help restore nature and tackle the climate emergency, there’s an urgent need to find ways to fight future epidemics. This year is the UN Year of Plant Health, so it’s a good time to see how we’re doing. And the blunt answer is badly, but with bright spots that offer some hope that things will improve.

“We are getting better at it because we are better equipped, but at the same time the challenges are increasing,” says plant disease epidemiologist Stephen Parnell of the University of Salford in northern England, who presented the case for surveillance in the Annual Review of Phytopathology. “We need to get ahead of epidemics, not just monitor the damage. If we don’t, we stand to lose many more species and billions of trees that we depend on for so much.”

Historic horror stories

In their native ranges, trees and pathogens evolve in tandem: Trees acquire resistance, pathogens try harder, trees ramp up their defenses another notch — and so on until they reach a sort of truce where trees tolerate infection and the pathogen does little harm. Transport the pathogens elsewhere, though, and all bets are off. Loosed among defenseless trees, seemingly mild microbes can turn nasty and fell whole forests. Every part of the world has experienced a loss so traumatic that it’s left a permanent scar on the public consciousness.

Take the US: It lost the magnificent chestnut forests that once stretched from Maine to Alabama, from the East Coast west to Michigan and southern Illinois — an event considered one of the world’s worst ecological disasters. The killer was chestnut blight, a fungus native to China and Japan that was introduced with ornamental Japanese chestnuts in the early 1900s. In susceptible trees like America’s native chestnut, the blight kills live tissue just beneath the bark, eventually blocking supplies of water and nutrients. In the 40 years after the Bronx Zoo first reported it in 1904, the fungus killed more than 3 billion native trees.

Australia’s heartbreaker was (and still is) cinnamon fungus, an untreatable root-rotting phytophthora from Southeast Asia that poses such a risk to the nation’s native trees it’s officially designated a “key threatening process.” It was first identified in Australia in the 1930s, with lethal potential that really hit home in the mid-twentieth century after it began to destroy the country’s Jarrah Forest, an internationally important hotspot of biodiversity that’s home to hundreds of unique species. The fungus attacks roots, starving trees of water and nutrients and progressively killing them from the top down — a phenomenon known as dieback. The disease is now widespread in Australia, attacking more than 40 percent of native species, including half of the endangered species in the Jarrah Forest, with some close to extinction.

For the UK, the 1970s epidemic of Dutch elm disease is the one etched on people’s memories, including mine. Europe had a foretaste of disaster in the early twentieth century when an unknown disease swept the continent from Scandinavia to southern Italy. Dutch botanists identified the pathogen responsible as a microfungus carried by bark beetles that breed in mature elms. Infected trees try to block the pathogen’s progress by plugging their water transport system, suicidally depriving themselves of water. That epidemic died down in the 1940s — but in the late 1960s, a far more aggressive form of the microfungus showed up. Imported to the UK in a consignment of elm logs from Canada and distributed across the nation through the sale of logs from diseased trees, it swiftly dispatched more than 90 percent of the nation’s elms.

So there have been warnings aplenty, followed by decades of research to find ways of stamping out newly arrived diseases. Cures and treatments remain elusive; fungicides and vector-zapping pesticides can sometimes help in commercial settings but not in the wider environment, where the task is too big and the remedy too ecologically harmful. In almost every case, the main control strategy remains culling trees. Better, then, to stop pathogens arriving in the first place: That’s led to tougher quarantine procedures, rigorous health checks and tighter regulation of the plant trade.

But still they come.

Killers on the loose

Wherever you live, you’ll probably have heard of some of them. Citrus greening, or huanglongbing, a bacterial disease delivered by sapsucking insects, has devastated Florida’s citrus industry and now threatens California’s. Sudden oak death, caused by another phytophthora known as ramorum fungus (even though, like cinnamon fungus, it’s a different organism entirely), has ravaged oak and tan oak forests along the US West Coast.

Sudden oak death has reached the UK too, although confusingly here it’s mostly killing larch trees, while ash dieback, another fungal disease, is poised to reshape the British landscape as dramatically as Dutch elm disease once did. And on the horizon but approaching fast is Xylella fastidiosa, a bacterium currently on a killing spree in the olive groves of southern Italy but moving steadily north and west across Europe.

In Australia, one of the latest headline horrors is myrtle rust, a fungal pathogen that has circled the globe and made landfall in New South Wales in 2010. The rust infects trees and shrubs belonging, as the name suggests, to the myrtle family — and Australia is myrtle central, home to 2,250 native species, including eucalyptuses, tea trees and paperbarks. With more than 350 Australian species known to be susceptible, within a few years of arrival the disease was doing serious damage to native ecosystems.

“At least two once-common trees are now known to be critically endangered, and there could be many more,” says government forest pathologist Angus Carnegie, who examined the lessons learned from this invasion in the 2018 Annual Review of Phytopathology. One, the native guava, is at imminent risk of extinction.

Another effect of globalism

To get a clearer picture of the scale of the problem and how it’s being tackled, I took a train to London and the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew to meet Richard Buggs, who leads research in plant health at Kew. “Everyone is sharing their pests and pathogens,” Buggs tells me. “Europe has pathogens from the Americas and America has some from Europe. The US has Chinese pathogens and China has trees dying from American pathogens. And so on and so on.” Most go undetected until they are on the loose, and each year they cause the loss of crops worth billions of dollars and do incalculable damage in the wider environment.

How did it get so bad? In a word: Globalization. Speedier travel and the rapid expansion of trade, including the movement of billions of plants for the horticulture industry, have proved disastrous. “The scale of global trade is overwhelming attempts to control accidental imports of pests and pathogens,” Buggs says. In the US, for instance, data from the Department of Transportation on 63 US ports show a doubling of the number of arriving shipping containers between 2000 and 2017.

Despite trade policies aimed at reducing the risk of accidental imports, better standards of plant hygiene and tighter biosecurity measures at ports, pathogens will inevitably slip through, Buggs says. “However good your system of quarantine checks, you are going to miss things.” Spotting insect pests is difficult enough, but how much harder it is to detect microscopic bacteria and fungi, especially when infected plants often show no symptoms. “There’s no indication anything is wrong until they hop onto another species, and away they go,” Buggs says. To make matters worse, some potential tree-killers aren’t yet on any checklist: Unknown and unseen, they have a free pass until a sharp-eyed forester, gardener or nature-lover spots trees sickening with a puzzling new disease.

Once in, if they encounter susceptible hosts — and some pathogens can infect hundreds of species — they establish a foothold and begin to spread. Some, like myrtle rust and ash dieback, travel naturally via windblown spores, while the sudden oak death pathogen disperses more in splashes of rain. But all advance further with human help — distributed through plant sales, in soil-filled tire treads, even on hikers’ clothing and footwear.

Pathogens like the bacteria responsible for huanglongbing and Xylella rely on sapsucking insects to inject them into their hosts — and they hijack local species to do the job. Climate change also figures in the equation: Changes in temperature, wind patterns and rainfall aid both survival and dispersal of pathogens, encouraging their expansion into newly hospitable areas. Warmer, wetter springs see the sudden oak death pathogen spread much more prolifically, while the frost-sensitive cinnamon fungus benefits from Europe’s milder winters and is likely to spread northward.

“You can put in place measures to reduce the risk of incursions, but you can’t reduce the risk to zero,” Parnell says. “Nor can you always predict if an introduced species will take off. You only know it’s a disaster once it is.”

Need for speed

The best hope of containing a newly arrived pathogen is two-pronged: Detect it early, act fast. In the UK, ash dieback was first detected in 2012 — at least seven years after it’s thought to have arrived, and by then it had already spread widely. It’s now on course to kill an estimated 70 percent of the country’s 150 million to 200 million ash trees.

In California, the signs of sudden oak death were spotted early, but tough, coordinated action came too late. The first sightings of sick trees were in 1995 near San Francisco but the response was slow and piecemeal. A recent study that looked at what might have been if things had been done differently concluded that the epidemic could have been controlled if a strict culling policy had been in place before 2002. It wasn’t, and after that, control was impossible. “We need to put more effort into stopping things coming but also in early detection to at least give us a chance to eradicate before the horse has bolted,” Carnegie says.

Surveillance is key. Nurseries and trees near ports are relatively easy to monitor, but beyond that, where to start looking? Parnell and his colleagues are developing computer models that help narrow the search. By combining information on a pathogen’s most likely points of entry and what’s known of its biology and epidemiology — how far and fast it can travel, where conditions suit it, and the distribution of potential host trees — they can identify the places most at risk, providing targets for surveillance.

Yet even with some idea of where to look, finding infected trees in the early stages of an outbreak is a monumental challenge — and not just in wild woodlands. Spotting early signs of disease in commercial plantings can be pretty near impossible with pathogens that are cryptic or symptomless for many months. Olive trees infected with Xylella, for example, can look healthy for a year or more before symptoms appear, while huanglongbing might not reveal itself for two or three years. “There’s a wave of silent spread,” Parnell tells me. “When you are looking at symptoms, you are looking at history. It’s already moved on.”

Ace detectives

Encouragingly, there are promising new methods of diagnosis in the pipeline, as well as an untapped army of people ready and willing to join the hunt: farmers and landowners, growers and tree lovers of all kinds. New smartphone apps that help diagnose diseases provide a way to harness the potential of all those citizen spotters. In the US, OakMapper is being used to monitor outbreaks of sudden oak death; in France, the app Vigil’Encre allows citizen scientists to detect and report chestnut ink disease, one of the devastating results of infection with Phytophthora cinnamoni.

If large numbers of eyes on the ground improve the chances of spotting disease early, eyes in the sky could be more efficient still, especially if they can see what human eyes can’t. Pablo Zarco-Tejada, a remote-sensing specialist at the University of Melbourne, and colleagues at the European Commission Joint Research Centre in Italy have test-flown a Xylella detector system over olive groves, with good results.

Two detectors, a thermal imaging camera and a hyperspectral sensor that resolves color into hundreds of shades, picked out signs of infection from a height of 500 meters. Infection causes subtle but signature changes in leaf color and temperature because it disrupts two key physiological processes: photosynthesis and cooling evaporation from leaves. The team flew over 15 olive groves — more than 7,000 olive trees — and identified sick trees with more than 80 percent accuracy.

Advanced technology isn’t always the answer, though. The best news citrus growers fearful of huanglongbing have had in a long time is that a dog’s nose offers a quicker and more accurate diagnosis than any other method.

Normally, human spotters walk citrus groves looking for leaves with tell-tale green-and-yellow blotches, yellow shoots or corky leaf veins. If they see suspect trees, they send leaf samples to a lab to check for bacterial DNA. That’s slow and unreliable in the early stages of infection, because random samples of leaves can easily miss the scattered few that carry the bacterium. Dogs, on the other hand, sample the whole tree with a sniff and pick up the scent of huanglongbing within a few weeks of infection and with remarkable accuracy.

Earlier this year, plant pathologist Tim Gottwald of the US Department of Agriculture reported results of trials with sniffer dogs. He and his colleagues trained dogs to recognize the scent of the huanglongbing bacterium and to sit whenever they detected it. When put through their paces, the dogs identified infected trees with 99 percent accuracy and as early as two weeks after infection. “With dogs, we’ve moved on from a situation where it wasn’t possible to eradicate the disease to one where it is,” Parnell says.

The ones that got away

But if it’s too late to stop a killer disease from spreading, what then? Are we doomed to a treeless landscape? “No,” Buggs says. “We will have trees, but they won’t be the same ones.” One option is to plant related but resistant species from a pathogen’s original haunts. In the UK, even in Brighton, unfamiliar sorts of elms have begun to appear in parks and gardens. But such alien trees are out of place in native woodlands.

In the US, a nation still mourning its lost chestnut forests, scientists are pursuing two other strategies for resurrecting them. One is to cross native trees with resistant Chinese ones, then increase the American component by backcrossing with native trees. The hoped-for result is an almost-American chestnut that won’t succumb to blight. The second, more controversial strategy is to slip a resistance gene into the tree’s DNA, to produce a transgenic chestnut.

Better than any of these options is to work with native trees, encouraging the evolution of resistance — naturally, or with a helping human hand.

The devastation caused by ash dieback prompted urgent research to find ways of preserving Europe’s native species. Observations from surveys and trials across Europe suggest that there are a few trees in every wood that exhibit some tolerance to the dieback fungus. “Between 1 and 5 percent stay healthy, but the number of trees that survive with some damage is higher,” Buggs says. Critically, there is also evidence that at least some of that tolerance is genetically based and can be passed on to offspring. “So if we leave healthy-looking trees standing and let them regenerate from seed, then their offspring are more likely to be resistant,” Buggs tells me. “Eventually, that should lead to populations of trees adapted to withstand the fungus.”

That is a long, slow process. But there is a way to accelerate and improve on nature’s efforts, by identifying trees with resistance genes and designing a breeding program that strengthens their progeny’s defenses.

Almost as soon as dieback was spotted in England, Buggs started to sequence the ash genome, publishing the work in 2016. Last year, he and colleagues at Queen Mary University of London and elsewhere reported that multiple genes are linked to resistance. If those genes have additive effects, then careful crossbreeding should produce trees with even greater resistance. “I’m optimistic,” Buggs says. “If we accept that lots of ash trees will die, in the long term we will still have native ash because they do have the genetic basis for resistance. And because that’s based on many genes it makes it harder for the pathogen to evolve to overcome the tree’s defenses.”

By January, 3,000 ash saplings had been planted at a secret location in southern England. These young trees have all been propagated from the shoots of trees that showed some signs of tolerance. Together, they form the Ash Archive, a living library of genes for researchers to study and breeders to draw on in their quest for trees that will restore ash trees to the landscape.

Lest we forget, new invasions are not the only worry. Old enemies are still with us, including Dutch elm disease. Since the onslaught of the 1970s, elms that escaped infection because they were too small to support breeding beetles, and trees regenerated from surviving elm roots, have reached maturity. As soon as they are large enough, though, the beetles return and set off new cycles of disease.

Here in Elm City, the arboriculturists can’t ever lower their guard. Each year, a few more elms are quietly felled and burned. Late last year, sad memories were reawakened when a chainsaw gang set to work on a national icon — one of sibling elms known as the Preston Twins. This venerable pair, thought to be the oldest and largest elms in the world, were planted in 1613 — when Shakespeare was still writing plays and the Pilgrim Fathers hadn’t yet left England. The only consolation is that the loss of our much-loved Methuselah thrust the issue of travelling tree-killers back into the limelight, exactly where it needs to be.

by ROBERT HUNZIKER,  SEPTEMBER 29, 2020

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Global warming is ravaging forests throughout the world.

“New studies show drought and heat waves will cause massive die-offs, killing most trees alive today.” (Source: We Need to Hear These Poor Trees Scream: Unchecked Global Warming Means Big Trouble for Forests, Inside Climate News, April 25, 2020)

According to Bill Anderegg, a forest researcher at the University of Utah: “Global warming has pushed many of the world’s forests to a knife edge… in the West, you can’t drive on a mountain highway without seeing how global warming affects forests,” Ibid.

Similar to corals and reefs, trees are slow growing and long-lived but cannot easily move to escape newly emerging rapid heat. Regrettably, both systems have inflexible damage thresholds. Corals experienced a tipping point from 2014-16 of record-breaking ocean heat as reefs around the world bleached and died in unprecedented numbers.

The Great Barrier Reef suffered its worst coral bleaching on record in February of 2020 from the most extreme ocean temperatures since records began in 1900. That’s global warming at work, overtime. Not only that but consider the egregious fact that the world’s largest living organism has been hit by three devastating bleachings in only five years. This year, for the first time in recorded history, severe bleaching, which kills coral outright, hit all three major regions of the famous reef. Scientists were awestruck.

Similar to no predictions of coral-bleaching disasters (what a big surprise!) nobody is predicting a similar disaster for forests, but it’s already underway right under everybody’s nose. It’s here now!

Giant Sequoias, the Grand Daddy of the world’s trees are “dying from the top down.” This has never been documented before. According to Christy Brigham, chief of resource management for parks: “We’ve never observed this before.” (Source: Craig Welch, The Grand Old Trees of the World are Dying, Leaving Forests Younger and Shorter, National Geographic, May 28, 2020)

The loss of Giant Sequoias is but one example of a worrisome worldwide trend that’s nerve-racking. “Trees in forests are dying at increasingly high rates – especially the bigger, older trees,” Ibid.

According to Nate McDowell, an earth scientist at the US Energy Department’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the lead author of a major worldwide study: “We’re seeing it almost everywhere we look.” (Nate G. McDowell, et al, Pervasive Shifts in Forest Dynamics in a Changing World, Science, Vol. 268, Issue 6494, 29 May 2020)

The numbers are staggering. From 1900 to 2015 the world lost more than a third of its old-growth forests. Ever since, the numbers are accelerating enough for calls of extra-alarm.

The causes are mostly anthropogenic, meaning logging and land-clearing, plus the biggest impact or fossil fuel emissions that bring forth rising global temperatures significantly magnifying the rate of dying, as droughts extend longer and harsher, resulting in extremely brittle tinder, leading to massive wildfires. The upshot is a world on fire like never before. Dead trees burn easily.

According to Henrik Hartmann of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemisty, in central Europe: “You don’t have to look for dead trees… They’re everywhere,” Ibid.

For example, in northern Europe one week of extreme heat resulted in hundreds of thousands of beech trees dropping leaves. The trees could not handle the heat.

In the US Southwest emerging mega-drought conditions have already weakened and killed hundreds of millions of trees, including Rocky Mountain lodgepole and piñon pines, as well as aspens.

As it happens, the massive numbers of tree deaths are newly unique to the entire world. African cedars and acacias are dying. The majestic Amazon rainforest is struggling under severe drought conditions exaggerated and super-charged by tens of thousands of human-generated fires undercutting the entire ecosystem. Junipers are rapidly declining in the Middle East. In Spain and Greece oak trees are shriveling because of intense global warming. In Siberia massive wildfires have erupted within a virtual tinderbox of excessive heat conditions. Ancient African Baobab trees, some thriving for 2,000 years, have all begun decline or outright dying as their ecosystems suffer from global warming.

The integrity of trees is compromised by excessive heat, which not only kills them outright, but also makes them more vulnerable to tree-burrowing insects, especially as normalized winter temperatures crank up way too high too soon during the season.

Meanwhile, climate denial charlatans theorize that rising levels of CO2 feeds enhanced growth for trees and flora as a positive. They’re dead wrong. It’s one more dishonest position taken by rightwing politicians.

Rising levels of CO2 blanket the atmosphere, thus trapping more heat, as the planet gets ever-hotter, causing the atmosphere to suck excessive levels of moisture thereby causing trees to shed leaves and/or close pores to hold in as much moisture as possible, thus curtailing CO2 uptake. It’s a vicious cycle that reverses the carbon uptake cycle that is key to maintaining all life on the planet.

Even more odious, along the way, trees die outright. There is no silver lining to increasing levels of fossil fuel CO2 emissions. It’s bad, it’s dangerous, and it’s a killer. “Stop fossil fuel CO2 emissions or die” should be the motto of responsible political campaigns. But, that’s a pipedream without enough funding to support it.

Forest ecologist Diana Six (University of Montana) has always been skeptical of claims of projected beneficial effects of excessive levels of CO2 triggering photosynthesis in plants: “I was always amazed by the early predictions for enhanced growth of forests, especially in the West. Many of the models only included warmer temperatures or higher CO2 effects. The projections were made mainly by economists who assumed that only temperatures and CO2 affect tree growth… No one seemed to consider water. With warmer temperatures and a longer growing season comes greater demand for water and we are getting less, not more, in most cases. That should have been a big red flag,” Ibid.

In the final analysis, “Forests are our last, best natural defense against global warming. Without the world’s trees at peak physical condition, the rest of us don’t stand a chance.” (Source: Eric Holthaus, Up in Smoke, Grist, March 8, 2018)

The message behind the boundless death march is simple: Stop fossil fuel emissions!