Focus on Arts and Ecology

It would also greatly cut greenhouse gas emissions. 

AUTHORS

Chad Frischmann is co-author, lead researcher and creator of the Drawdown Solutions Framework at Project Drawdown, an international research group focused on solving climate change.


Credit: Nick Higgins

Mamta Mehra is a senior fellow for the land-use and food sectors at Project Drawdown.


Credit: Nick Higgins

September 29, 2021

Imagine going to the market, leaving with three full bags of groceries and coming home. Before you step through your door, you stop and throw one of the bags into a trash bin, which later is hauled away to a landfill. What a waste. Collectively, that is exactly what we are doing today. Globally, 30 to 40 percent of food intended for human consumption is not eaten. Given that more than 800 million people go hungry every day, the scale of food loss fills many of us with a deep sense of anguish.

If population growth and economic development continue at their current pace, the world will have to produce 53 million more metric tons of food annually by 2050. That increase would require converting another 442 million hectares of forests and grassland—far greater than the size of India—into farmland over the next 30 years. The escalation would also release the equivalent of an additional 80 billion tons of carbon dioxide over the next 30 years—about 15 times the emissions of the entire U.S. economy in 2019. Food waste already accounts for roughly 8 percent of the world's greenhouse gases.

There is another path, however. Our group at Project Drawdown, an international research and communications organization, completed an exhaustive study of existing technologies and practices that can significantly reduce greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere while ushering in a more regenerative society and economy. Reducing food waste is one of the top-five means of achieving these goals among 76 we analyzed. Basic adjustments in how food is produced and consumed could help feed the entire world a healthy, nutrient-rich diet through 2050 and beyond without clearing, planting or grazing more land than is used today. Providing more food by eliminating waste, along with better ways of producing that food, would avoid deforestation and also save an enormous amount of energy, water, fertilizer, labor and other resources.

Opportunities to reduce waste exist at every step along the supply chain from farm to table. We harvest crops, raise livestock, and process these commodities into products such as rice, vegetable oil, potato chips, perfectly cut carrots, cheese and New York strip steaks. Most of these products are packaged in cardboard boxes, plastic bags and bottles, tin cans and glass jars made from extracted materials in industrial factories, and then they are shipped on gas-guzzling trucks, trains and planes all over the world.

After arriving at stores and restaurants, food is held in energy-hungry refrigerators and freezers that use hydrofluorocarbons—powerful greenhouse gases—until purchased by consumers, whose eyes are often bigger than their appetites, particularly in richer communities. In high-income countries, restaurants and households turn on their energy-consuming stoves and ovens, and in developing nations, billions of people burn biomass in noxious cookstoves that spew polluting, unhealthy smoke and black carbon.

After all these waste-producing activities, too much of the food that makes it to a consumer's table is thrown in the garbage, which then is typically transported by fossil-fueled trucks to landfills where it decomposes and emits methane, another potent greenhouse gas. Tossing that leftover lasagna accounts for far more emissions than a rotting tomato that never leaves the farm gate. We can do better.

SMALLER FOODPRINT

At Project Drawdown, we poured global data from the Food and Agriculture Organization and many other sources into a detailed model of the entire food production and consumption system. The model took into account rising population projections, as well as greater consumption and more meat eating per person, particularly in developing countries, based on actual trends over the past several decades. According to our calculations, healthier diets and more regenerative agricultural production lead to a lower “foodprint”—less waste, fewer emissions and a cleaner environment.

If half of the world's population consumes a healthy 2,300 kilocalories a day, built around a plant-rich diet, and puts into practice already proven actions that cut waste across the supply chain, food losses could decline from the current 40 percent to 20 percent, an incredible savings. If we were even more ambitious in following the same practices, food waste could be cut to 10 percent [see graphics below for details].

These hefty savings would result partly from shifts in basic habits. In the developed world, embracing an average daily 2,300-kilocalorie diet instead of consumption that often reaches more than 3,000 kilocalories lessens food waste in the first place. In the developing world, caloric and protein intake generally need to rise to reach nutritious levels, which may increase some waste across the system. But overall, if everyone on the planet adopted healthy consumption practices and a plant-rich (not necessarily vegetarian) diet, 166 million metric tons of food waste could be avoided over the next 30 years. Feedback would be sent across the supply chain to increase crop production and decrease animal production.

Reducing waste by adjusting how food is produced and consumed can greatly help the environment as well. Different types of foods such as grains, vegetables, fish, meat and dairy have very different environmental footprints. On average, growing and harvesting one kilogram of tomatoes creates about 0.35 kilogram of carbon dioxide emissions. Producing the same amount of beef creates an average of 36 kilograms of emissions. With the entire supply chain taken into account, greenhouse gas emissions from plant-based commodities are 10 to 50 times lower than from most animal-based products.

Additionally, industrial agriculture has spread monocropping, excessive tillage, and widespread use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. These practices degrade soil and emit a vast amount of greenhouse gases. Staples are still destroyed in the field by pests and disease and can rot in storage. Livestock consumption of grasses and feed adds further emissions.

Agroecological pest-management practices, such as planting different crops together, and smarter crop rotation can suppress pests and weeds, reducing these losses. Improved livestock-management practices, such as silvopasture, which integrates trees into foraging land, can improve the quality and quantity of animal-based products: more food from fewer hooves in the field and thus fewer resources used and fewer losses. And because regenerative farming practices—which can increase yield from 5 to 35 percent, restore soils and pull more carbon from the air—use compost and manure instead of artificial fertilizers, any food that fails to leave the farm gate can be recycled as natural fertilizer or can be converted by anaerobic digestors into biogas for energy on the farm. More farms need to convert to such practices. Restaurants across the U.S. are helping them through one interesting organization called Zero Foodprint, started by chef Anthony Myint, which takes a few cents added to patrons' bills to fund regenerative farms in the making.

SAVING THE THIRD BAG

In low-income countries, most food is lost before ever getting to market. Improving education and professional training for farmers and producers there, along with innovative technologies, can minimize waste. India's state of Jharkhand, for example, has installed solar-powered refrigeration units that allow farmers who produce vegetables, fruits and other perishables to store their products without sacrificing quality—a project led by the United Nations Development Program and the Global Environment Facility. In Africa, the Consortium of International Agricultural Research Centers has expanded training that will help local farmers grow more food under conditions being created by climate change, using crops that better tolerate drought and no-till farming to protect withering soil.

In high- and medium-income countries, most waste occurs at the end of the supply chain—markets and households. There consumers have a tremendous amount of power to prevent waste. A good first step is to reflect on what and how much we are buying. This begins with conscious decisions to purchase what we intend to eat and to eat what we purchase. Rather than overstocking on perishables and other products, buying appropriate quantities of food reduces waste. If too much is cooked for the dinner table, properly storing leftovers reduces spoilage, or they can be shared with neighbors, building stronger community ties.

Broader cultural shifts are also required. The “inglorious fruits and vegetables” campaign launched by the French supermarket chain Intermarché in 2014 aimed to avoid waste by changing cultural attitudes toward “imperfect” foods. Markets tend to procure only fruits and vegetables that meet an idealized cultural perception of shape and color. Imperfect produce that does not match these false traits accounts for up to 40 percent of edible fruits and vegetables being discarded before they leave the farm gate. Instead Intermarché sells these fruits and vegetables in special aisles and runs a national marketing campaign glorifying the inglorious. Other retailers are going even further: All the shelves at Danish supermarket WeFood are stocked with products that would have gone to a landfill. Pittsburgh-based 412 Food Rescue distributes nutritious food that was destined for landfills because of imperfections, limited freshness (such as day-old bread) and unclear labeling to communities in need—for free.

Wholesalers, retailers and restaurants can play a significant role in shrinking the waste piles. They can demand that suppliers use more food from local regenerative farms. Ensuring that food items are sold with clear, standardized “sell by/use by” labels helps store managers know when to mark down items, and it helps consumers know when and when not to dispose of food. Restaurant owners can offer different portion sizes and fewer menu items and can encourage patrons to take leftovers home.

Governments and companies that offer food services to employees can jump in, too. U.S. federal government cafeterias serve more than two million people; imagine if the kitchen managers chose to offer plant-rich fare made from perfectly imperfect produce procured from regenerative suppliers. Google is already doing more of that in its cafeterias today.

No matter how conscientious we all are, some food will inevitably be lost across the supply chain. Anaerobic digesters and composting are better ways of disposal than dumping food in landfills because they create soil or generate electricity. Eight states across the U.S. now have laws requiring that organic waste be diverted from landfills to avoid potent methane emissions. The latest Project Drawdown analysis shows that implementing these solutions globally can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by around 14 billion metric tons over the next 30 years.

The real magic happens when a variety of solutions are adopted in parallel and sustained over time. The decisions people make as farmers, executives, grocers, chefs and consumers can prevent enough food loss to feed the world through 2050 without converting any more land. That means together we can eliminate hunger and support a healthier global population. And there would still be enough cropland available to grow plants for organic materials such as bioplastics, insulation and biofuels.

Revamping the food chain and adjusting eating habits will not happen overnight. Nor should we expect to immediately become perfect, regeneratively minded, plant-rich connoisseurs who are fastidious about our purchases and what we waste. Our most fundamental task is to be conscientious about the choices we make—to try to be “solutionists” as much as we can. Together we can save that third bag of groceries.

(Sources: Scientific American)

Studies of bats in China and Laos show southeast Asia is a hotspot for potentially dangerous viruses similar to SARS-CoV-2. 

• By Smriti Mallapaty, Nature magazine on September 28, 2021

A sleeping colony of Greater horseshoe bats (Rhinolophus ferrumequinum) on a cave ceiling. Credit: Alamy

Scientists have found three viruses in bats in Laos that are more similar to SARS-CoV-2 than any known viruses. Researchers say that parts of their genetic code bolster claims that the virus behind COVID-19 has a natural origin—but their discovery also raises fears that there are numerous coronaviruses with the potential to infect people.

David Robertson, a virologist at the University of Glasgow, UK, calls the find “fascinating, and quite terrifying”.

The results, which are not peer reviewed, have been posted on the preprint server Research Square. Particularly concerning is that the new viruses contain receptor binding domains that are almost identical to that of SARS-CoV-2, and can therefore infect human cells. The receptor binding domain allows SARS-CoV-2 to attach to a receptor called ACE2 on the surface of human cells to enter them.

To make the discovery, Marc Eloit, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and his colleagues in France and Laos, took saliva, faeces and urine samples from 645 bats in caves in northern Laos. In three horseshoe (Rhinolophus) bat species, they found viruses that are each more than 95% identical to SARS-CoV-2, which they named BANAL-52, BANAL-103 and BANAL-236.

NATURAL ORIGIN

“When SARS-CoV-2 was first sequenced, the receptor binding domain didn’t really look like anything we’d seen before,” says Edward Holmes, a virologist at the University of Sydney in Australia. This caused some people to speculate that the virus had been created in a laboratory. But the Laos coronaviruses confirm these parts of SARS-CoV-2 exist in nature, he says.

“I am more convinced than ever that SARS-CoV-2 has a natural origin,” agrees Linfa Wang, a virologist at Duke–NUS Medical School in Singapore.

Together with relatives of SARS-CoV-2 discovered in Thailand, Cambodia and Yunnan in southern China, the study demonstrates that southeast Asia is a “hotspot of diversity for SARS-CoV-2-related viruses”, says Alice Latinne, an evolutionary biologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society Vietnam in Hanoi.

In an extra step in their study, Eloit and his team showed in the laboratory that the receptor binding domains of these viruses could attach to the ACE2 receptor on human cells as efficiently as some early variants of SARS-CoV-2. The researchers also cultured BANAL-236 in cells, which Eloit says they will now use to study how pathogenic the virus is in animal models.

Last year, researchers described another close relative of SARS-CoV-2, called RaTG13, which was found in bats in Yunnan. It is 96.1% identical to SARS-CoV-2 overall and the two viruses probably shared a common ancestor 40–70 years ago. BANAL-52 is 96.8% identical to SARS-CoV-2, says Eloit—and all three newly discovered viruses have individual sections that are more similar to sections of SARS-CoV-2 than seen in any other viruses.

Viruses swap chunks of RNA with one another through a process called recombination, and one section in BANAL-103 and BANAL-52 could have shared an ancestor with sections of SARS-CoV-2 less than a decade ago, says Spyros Lytras, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Glasgow. “These viruses recombine so much that different bits of the genome have different evolutionary histories,” he says.

MISSING LINKS

The Laos study offers insight into the origins of the pandemic, but there are still missing links, say researchers. For example, the Laos viruses don’t contain the so-called furin cleavage site on the spike protein that further aids the entry of SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses into human cells.

The study also doesn’t clarify how a progenitor of the virus could have travelled to Wuhan, in central China, where the first known cases of COVID-19 were identified—or whether the virus hitched a ride on an intermediate animal.

Answers might come from sampling more bats and other wildlife in southeast Asia, which many groups are doing.

Another preprint, also posted on Research Square and not yet peer reviewed, sheds light on the work under way in China. For that study, researchers sampled some 13,000 bats between 2016 and 2021 across China. But they did not find any close relatives of SARS-CoV-2, and conclude that these are “extremely rare in bats in China”.

But other researchers question this claim. “I strongly disagree with the suggestion that relatives of SARS-CoV-2 may not be circulating in Chinese bats, as such viruses have already been described in Yunnan,” says Holmes.

The corresponding author of the study declined to respond to Nature’s questions about the findings, because the paper is still under review.

Wang says that both studies highlight the importance of ramping up sampling in regions outside China to help uncover the origins of the pandemic.

This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on September 24 2021.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Author

1. Timothy A. Carey

   Director: Institute of Global Health Equity Research, Andrew Weiss Chair of Research in Global Health, University of Global Health Equity

2. September 24, 2021

Earlier this year the UK introduced a “traffic light” system in yet another attempt to contain and mitigate the effects of COVID-19. The system assigned the status of either red, amber, or green to other countries with each colour indicating different rules for a range of things including terms of travel and quarantine requirements.

In mid-September the UK government announced a change to the three lists: the amber and green colours were replaced with one “OK to travel” category. The red list remains in place. The changes will take effect from 4 October.

Attempting to determine the justification for the lists and accurate details about them is less than straightforward. The rules for which countries are in or out is far from transparent making it difficult to find any justification for why a country is placed on the red list and, perhaps more importantly, how they get off it.

Of the 54 countries on the red list 22 (approximately 41%) are from sub-Saharan Africa. Put another way, of the 48 countries making up the sub-Saharan region, 21 (approximately 44%) are on the UK’s red list.

Reports suggest that the UK Government’s justification for placing a country on the red list include: known variants of concern; known high-risk variants that are under investigation; and very high in-country or territory prevalence of COVID-19.

These justifications are difficult to understand on a number of levels. The revised rules reported on the UK government’s website are similarly opaque.

Just take the issue of variants. An important feature about viruses like COVID-19 is that mutations are a natural phenomenon. Some mutations present additional risks but many are inconsequential . And, of course, knowledge about the variants present in any country at any particular time depends entirely on the accuracy and extent of testing taking place.

This is just one reason why the red list has kicked up a storm, with some recommending that it be “scrapped in its entirety”. In South Africa scientists have been critical of the reasons cited as justification for retaining their country on the red list.

When the UK’s red list is considered at perhaps a more granular level, the difficulties become immediately apparent. Two scenarios point to the flawed logic being applied.

Sudan versus South Sudan

Sudan is on the red list whereas South Sudan is not.

Yet the numbers available about COVID-19 in the two countries point to this being a ridiculous call.

Current estimates are that Sudan has a rate of daily new confirmed cases per million of 0.23. South Sudan’s rate is higher, at 1.18. On top of this Sudan’s rate of total vaccinations per 100 is 3.34, South Sudan’s is much lower at 0.84.

Sudan has a rate of total deaths per one million of 64.15 while South Sudan’s rate is 10.36.

At the end of July South Sudan had confirmed the presence of the Delta variant while the spread of the Delta variant in Sudan had not been confirmed.

One may well question what these data tell us about the two countries. It is very hard to make firm conclusions in the absence of information about the health systems and other important factors in the two countries. Comparisons become difficult and somewhat arbitrary.

This is precisely the difficulty with the red list.

Is it a case of cherry-picking the data? At the very least it indicates an opaqueness to decision-making that should be unacceptable in an era of rigorous scientific thinking and evidence-based policy making. When difficulties arise, we need to raise, rather than lower, the bar on our standards of what counts as credible evidence.

Barbados versus Rwanda

The rules around the red list and vaccination status is equally baffling and difficult to fathom.

The UK Government website states that from 4am on 4 October, you will qualify as fully vaccinated according to two criteria. The first specifies an approved vaccination programme from a small number of countries. The second stipulates a full course of one of four named vaccines from a “relevant public health body” in 18 different countries. None are in Africa.

Also, from that date

if you have been in a red list country in the last 10 days, you will only be allowed to enter the UK if you are a British or Irish national or you have residence rights in the UK.

To illustrate how ridiculous this is I have mapped out a scenario.

I am an Australian academic currently working in Rwanda. I have had both doses of the Pfizer vaccine and have had numerous COVID-19 tests all with negative results. Neither I nor any member of my family have ever tested positive for COVID-19. I received my Pfizer COVID-19 vaccinations in Rwanda, a country that acted swiftly and decisively with clear and transparent leadership from the earliest indications of the monumental significance of the virus.

Despite all this, I will be unable to visit the UK under any conditions.

Suppose I have a colleague from the UK who, prior to relocating to Rwanda, received her two Moderna vaccinations in Barbados – one of the countries named with an approved vaccination programme – and has been living in Rwanda for six months. After she had been in Rwanda for two months she, hypothetically, tested positive for COVID-19 even though she was asymptomatic. From 4am on 4 October she would be able to return to the UK according to certain rules such as a pre-departure test and a period of quarantine once she arrives.

It is unfathomable to me how this can be achieving anything other than an exacerbation of existing inequities. What possible difference can it make where I had my vaccinations? Is there some reason that being vaccinated in Rwanda or South Africa is inferior to being vaccinated in Barbados (with 360.98 daily new confirmed cases per million or Malaysia with 488.11 daily new confirmed cases per million?

In fact the World Health Organisation recently commended Rwanda’s vaccination drive. Yet it remains on the UK’s red list and Rwanda is not listed as a country with an approved vaccination programme.

Read more: How Rwanda is managing its COVID-19 vaccination rollout plans

More fancy footwork with numbers perhaps? Or simply skewed thinking.

Equity in global health

The World Health Organisation is clear that

vaccination will not bring an end to this pandemic until it is distributed to everyone around the world.

Yet some countries, predominantly high-income ones, are stock piling far more vaccines than they need and providing booster shots to people who don’t require them.

COVID-19 is providing us with opportunities to learn a great many things about health and health systems. But perhaps it’s most valuable lesson is the inescapable importance of equity to the global community. That lesson is ignored to the peril of us all.

Maybe rather than focusing on a red list country club with unclear and questionable criteria, we should create a red list of countries that are actively creating vaccine distribution inequities.

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(Sources: The Conversation)