The water off South Florida is over 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 Celsius) in mid-July, and scientists are already seeing signs of coral bleaching off Central and South America. Particularly concerning is how early in the summer we are seeing these high ocean temperatures. If the extreme heat persists, it could have dire consequences for coral reefs.

Just like humans, corals can handle some degree of stress, but the longer it lasts, the more harm it can do. Corals can’t move to cooler areas when water temperatures rise to dangerous levels. They are stuck in it. For those that are particularly sensitive to temperature stress, that can be devastating.

I lead the Coral Program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Lab in Miami, Florida. Healthy coral reef ecosystems are important for humans in numerous ways. Unfortunately, marine heat waves are becoming more common and more extreme, with potentially devastating consequences for reefs around the world that are already in a fragile state.

Why coral reefs matter to everyone

Coral reefs are hot spots of biodiversity. They are often referred to as the rainforests of the sea because they are home to the highest concentrations of species in the ocean.

Healthy reefs are vibrant ecosystems that support fish and fisheries, which in turn support economies and food for millions of people. Additionally, they provide billions of dollars in economic activity every year through tourism, particularly in places like the Florida Keys, where people go to scuba dive, snorkel, fish and experience the natural beauty of coral reefs.

If that isn’t enough, reefs also protect shorelines, beaches and billions of dollars in coastal infrastructure by buffering wave energy, particularly during storms and hurricanes.

But corals are quite sensitive to warming water. They host a microscopic symbiotic algae called zooxanthella that photosynthesizes just like plants, providing food to the coral. When the surrounding waters get too warm for too long, the zooxanthellae leave the coral, and the coral can turn pale or white – a process known as bleaching.

If corals stay bleached, they can become energetically compromised and ultimately die.

When corals die or their growth slows, these beautiful, complex reef habitats start disappearing and can eventually erode to sand. A recent paper by John Morris, a scientist in my lab in Florida, shows that around 70% of reefs are now net erosional in the Florida Keys, meaning they are losing more habitat than they build.

Unfortunately, these critical coral reef habitats are in decline around the world because of extreme bleaching events, disease and numerous other human-caused stressors. In the Florida Keys, coral cover has decline by about 90% over the past several decades.

Coral bleaching in 2023

In the Port of Miami, where we have found particularly resilient coral communities, a doctoral candidate in my lab, Allyson DeMerlis, documented the first coral bleaching of her experimentally outplanted corals on July 11, 2023.

Other scientists we work with have reported coral bleaching off of Colombia, El Salvador, Costa Rica and Mexico in the eastern Pacific, as well as along the Caribbean coasts of Panama, Mexico and Belize.

We have yet to see widespread coral death associated with this particular marine heat wave, so it is possible the corals could recover if sea surface temperatures cool down soon. However, global sea surface temperatures are at record highs, and large parts of the Atlantic and eastern Pacific are under bleaching alerts. At this point, the evidence points to the potential for a very negative outcome.

El Niño is contributing to the problem this year, but the longer-term trends of rising ocean heat are driven by global warming fueled by human activities.

To put that into context, a paper by NOAA scientist Derek Manzello showed that in the Florida Keys, the number of days per year in which water temperatures were higher than 90 F (32 C) had increased by more than 2,500% in the two decades following the mid-1990s relative to the prior 20 years. That is a remarkable increase in the number of days that corals are experiencing particularly stressful warm water.

What can we do to protect corals?

First, we cannot give up on corals.

Alice Webb, a coral reef scientist working with our group, recently published a study based on years of our research in the Florida Keys. She modeled reef habitat persistence under climate, restoration and adaptation scenarios and found that protecting reefs is going to take everything – active restoration of reefs, helping corals acclimate or adapt to changing temperatures, and, importantly, human curbing of greenhouse gas emissions.

Major restoration efforts are underway in the Florida Keys as part of the NOAA-led Mission Iconic Reefs. We are also assessing how different coral individuals perform under stress, hoping to identify those that are particularly stress-tolerant by combing through the massive amounts of data from restoration projects and coral nurseries.

We are also evaluating stress-hardening techniques. For example, in tide pools, corals are exposed to large swings in temperature over short periods, making them more resilient to subsequent thermal stress events. We are exploring whether it’s possible to replicate that natural process in the lab, before corals are planted onto reefs, to better prepare them for stressful summers in the wild.

Coral bleaching on a large scale has really been documented only since the early 1980s. When I talk to people who have been fishing and diving in the Florida Keys since before I was born, they have amazing stories of how vibrant the reefs used to be. They know firsthand how bad things have become because they have lived it.

There isn’t currently a single silver-bullet solution, but ignoring the harm being done is not an option. There is simply too much at stake.

Ian Enochs, Research Ecologist, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Featured Image: Mass coral bleaching in 2014 left the Coral Reef Monitoring Program monitoring site at Cheeca Rocks off the Florida Keys a blanket of white.
NOAA

What do the following changes have in common?

Some ant species are struggling to follow trails, as warming temperatures cause a certain pheromone they use to communicate to decay. The water fleas Daphnia are finding it harder to evade predators as CO₂ levels rise in the water. And in coral reefs, the colourful and pretty damselfish are losing their ability to learn who their predators are.

All have been caused in some way by arguably the biggest change of all: climate change.

My colleagues and I have led research which has shown that climate change is also changing chemical communication in marine, freshwater and land-based species, with far-reaching implications for our planet’s future and human wellbeing.

Chemical communication plays an essential role in well-functioning ecosystems. This “language of life” regulates interactions between organisms and is essential to the environment, and ultimately, all life on Earth.

Interactions through so-called “infochemicals” are perhaps the oldest and most widespread form of communication on the planet. Infochemicals provide the basis for the vast majority of ecological processes across the tree of life, in both land and water, by serving as cues or signals that are present on the surface of organisms themselves or released into the surrounding environment.

They also help shape natural ecosystems by maintaining their equilibrium and, in doing so, support the provision of many things that are of great importance to humans, including food and clean water.

Image by Bruno from Pixabay

Infochemicals influence a broad range of functions and behaviour such as the relationship between predator and prey. For example, sharks use these chemicals to “sniff” out their prey over mindboggling distances. Bear in mind that any chemical you can smell is probably an infochemical, often intended for a different species. For instance the smell of a pine forest – that is, the presence of certain chemicals – signals something different to a human, a bear or an ant.

These chemicals can affect foraging and feeding too. For example, infochemicals are released by some plant species to attract pollinators but repel those that may cause harm. In some cases, a plant under attack may even tell its neighbours of impending doom so they can respond accordingly.

Infochemicals can influence habitat selection. They’re how barnacle larvae select a suitable surface on which to attach, for example. And infochemicals are also used by species to recognise potential mates and boost their chances of reproducing. For example, some bat species can “sniff” out a mate with the greatest genetic diversity.

Changing infochemicals

But climate change is altering the production of these info-carrying chemicals such as pheromones. This is having a major impact on a wide variety of species. Scientific research has shown that alterations in temperature, carbon dioxide and pH levels – all part of climate change – can affect every single aspect of the fundamental processes that organisms use to communicate with each other.

An example of this is a laboratory experiment that showed how climate change caused a reduction in anti-predator behaviour in some fish species by decreasing their anxiety towards potential predators. Many fish release certain chemicals when they are harmed by a predator or are otherwise in danger. And their fellow fish use the presence of these chemicals, detected through smell, as a warning. But scientists found that when more CO₂ is absorbed in the water and the pH level is reduced, the most commonly researched alarm cue (hypoxanthine-3-N-oxide) is irreversibly changed and fish find it harder to detect.

Climate change is not just affecting individual species. A growing number of studies suggest that climate change-associated stressors which modify these chemical interactions are causing info-disruption across whole ecosystems.

However, our understanding of the underlying mechanisms remains scarce. As a next step, colleagues and I are working on how climate change may affect the chemically mediated relationship (or communication) between disease-causing pathogens and the animals that host them. If global warming causes a communication breakdown, we ultimately want to know how that will impact us humans.

Mahasweta Saha, Marine Chemical Ecologist, Plymouth Marine Laboratory

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

(The Conversation) – People once believed the planet could always accommodate us. That the resilience of the Earth system meant nature would always provide. But we now know this is not necessarily the case. As big as the world is, our impact is bigger.

In research released today, an international team of scientists from the Earth Commission, of which we were part, identified eight “safe” and “just” boundaries spanning five vital planetary systems: climate change, the biosphere, freshwater, nutrient use in fertilisers and air pollution. This is the first time an assessment of boundaries has quantified the harms to people from changes to the Earth system.

“Safe” means boundaries maintaining stability and resilience of our planetary systems on which we rely. “Just”, in this work, means boundaries which minimise significant harm to people. Together, they’re a health barometer for the planet.

Assessing our planet’s health is a big task. It took the expertise of 51 world-leading researchers from natural and social sciences. Our methods included modelling, literature reviews and expert judgement. We assessed factors such as tipping point risks, declines in Earth system functions, historical variability and effects on people.

Alarmingly, we found humanity has exceeded the safe and just limits for four of five systems. Aerosol pollution is the sole exception. Urgent action, based on the best available science, is now needed.

So, what did we find?

Our work builds on the influential concepts of planetary boundaries by finding ways to quantify what just systems look like alongside safety.

Importantly, the safe and just boundaries are defined at local to global spatial scales appropriate for assessing and managing planetary systems – as small as one square kilometre in the case of biodiversity. This is crucial because many natural functions act at local scales.

Here are the boundaries:

1. Climate boundary – keep warming to 1℃

We know the Paris Agreement goal of 1.5℃ avoids a high risk of triggering dangerous climate tipping points.

But even now, with warming at 1.2℃, many people around the world are being hit hard by climate-linked disasters, such as the recent extreme heat in China, fires in Canada, severe floods in Pakistan and droughts in the United States and the Horn of Africa.

At 1.5℃, hundreds of millions of people could be exposed to average annual temperatures over 29℃, which is outside the human climate niche and can be fatal. That means a just boundary for climate is nearer to 1°C. This makes the need to halt further carbon emissions even more urgent.

2. Biosphere boundaries: Expand intact ecosystems to cover 50-60% of the earth

A healthy biosphere ensures a safe and just planet by storing carbon, maintaining global water cycles and soil quality, protecting pollinators and many other ecosystem services. To safeguard these services, we need 50 to 60% of the world’s land to have largely intact natural ecosystems.

Recent research puts the current figure at between 45% and 50%, which includes vast areas of land with relatively low populations, including parts of Australia and the Amazon rainforest. These areas are already under pressure from climate change and other human activity.

Image by Rosina Kaiser from Pixabay

Locally, we need about 20-25% of each square kilometre of farms, towns, cities or other human-dominated landscapes to contain largely intact natural ecosystems. At present, only a third of our human-dominated landscapes meet this threshold.

3. Freshwater boundaries: Keep groundwater levels up and don’t suck rivers dry

Too much freshwater is a problem, as unprecedented floods in Australia and Pakistan show. And too little is also a problem, with unprecedented droughts taking their toll on food production.

To bring fresh water systems back into balance, a rule of thumb is to avoid taking or adding more than 20% of a river or stream’s water in any one month, in the absence of local knowledge of environmental flows.

At present, 66% of the world’s land area meets this boundary, when flows are averaged over the year. But human settlement has a major impact: less than half of the world’s population lives in these areas. Groundwater, too, is overused. At present, almost half the world’s land is subject to groundwater overextraction.

4. Fertiliser and nutrient boundaries: Halve the runoff from fertilisers

When farmers overuse fertilisers on their fields, rain washes nitrogen and phosphorus runoff into rivers and oceans. These nutrients can trigger algal blooms, damage ecosystems and worsen drinking water quality.

Yet many farming regions in poorer countries don’t have enough fertiliser, which is unjust.

Worldwide, our nitrogen and phosphorus use are up to double their safe and just boundaries. While this needs to be reduced in many countries, in other parts of the world fertiliser use can safely increase.

5. Aerosol pollution boundary: Sharply reduce dangerous air pollution and reduce regional differences

New research shows differences in concentration of aerosol pollutants between Northern and Southern hemispheres could disrupt wind patterns and monsoons if pollutant levels keep increasing. That is, air pollution could actually upend weather systems.

At present, aerosol concentrations have not yet reached weather-changing levels. But much of the world is exposed to dangerous levels of fine particle pollution (known as PM 2.5) in the air, causing an estimated 4.2 million deaths a year.

We must significantly reduce these pollutants to safer levels – under 15 micrograms per cubic metre of air.

We must act

We must urgently navigate towards a safe and just future, and strive to return our planetary systems back within safe and just boundaries through just means.

To stop human civilisation from pushing the Earths’s systems out of balance, we will have to tackle the many ways we damage the planet.

To work towards a world compatible with the Earth’s limits means setting and achieving science-based targets. To translate these boundaries to actions will require urgent support from government to create regulatory and incentive-based systems to drive the changes needed.

Setting boundaries and targets is vital. The Paris Agreement galvanised faster action on climate. But we need similar boundaries to ensure the future holds fresh water, clean air, a planet still full of life and a good life for humans.

We would like to acknowledge support from the Earth Commission, which is hosted by Future Earth, and is the science component of the Global Commons Alliance

Steven J Lade, Resilience researcher at Australian National University, Australian National University; Ben Stewart-Koster, Senior research fellow, Griffith University; Stuart Bunn, Professor, Australian Rivers Institute, Griffith University; Syezlin Hasan, Research fellow, Griffith University, and Xuemei Bai, Distinguished Professor, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

“Large-scale heavy metal pollution, coastal erosion and seawater intrusion pose an existential threat to the Nile River Delta and endanger 60 million people in Egypt who depend on its resources for every facet of life,” say Egyptian and American experts at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering of the University of Southern California who published their findings in a new study in Earth’s Future.

As a conservation biologist who studies plastic ingestion by marine wildlife, I can count on the same question whenever I present research: “How does plastic affect the animals that eat it?”

This is one of the biggest questions in this field, and the verdict is still out. However, a recent study from the Adrift Lab, a group of Australian and international scientists who study plastic pollution, adds to a growing body of evidence that ingesting plastic debris has discernible chronic effects on the animals that consume it. This work represents a crucial step: moving from knowing that plastic is everywhere to diagnosing its effects once ingested.

From individual to species-level effects

There’s wide agreement that the world is facing a plastic pollution crisis. This deluge of long-lived debris has generated gruesome photos of dead seabirds and whales with their stomachs full of plastic.

But while consuming plastic likely killed these individual animals, deaths directly attributable to plastic ingestion have not yet been shown to cause population-level effects on species – that is, declines in population numbers over time that are linked to chronic health effects from a specific pollutant.

MBARI: “Microplastics in the ocean: A deep dive on plastic pollution in Monterey Bay”

One well-known example of a pollutant with dramatic population effects is the insecticide DDT, which was widely used across North America in the 1950s and 1960s. DDT built up in the environment, including in fish that eagles, osprey and other birds consumed. It caused the birds to lay eggs with shells so thin that they often broke in the nest.

DDT exposure led to dramatic population declines among bald eagles, ospreys and other raptors across the U.S. They gradually began to recover after the Environmental Protection Agency banned most uses of DDT in 1972.

Ingesting plastic can harm wildlife without causing death via starvation or intestinal blockage. But subtler, sublethal effects, like those described above for DDT, could be much farther-reaching.

Numerous laboratory studies, some dating back a decade, have demonstrated chronic effects on invertebrates, mammals, birds and fish from ingesting plastic. They include changes in behavior, loss of body weight and condition, reduced feeding rates, decreased ability to produce offspring, chemical imbalances in organisms’ bodies and changes in gene expression, to name a few.

However, laboratory studies are often poor representations of reality. Documenting often-invisible, sublethal effects in wild animals that are definitively linked to plastic itself has remained elusive. For example, in 2022, colleagues and I published a study that found that some baleen whales ingest millions of microplastics per day when feeding, but we have not yet uncovered any effects on the whales’ health.

Scarring seabirds’ digestive tracts

The Adrift Lab’s research focuses on the elegant flesh-footed shearwater (Ardenna carneipes), a medium-size seabird with dark feathers and a powerful hooked bill. The lab studied shearwaters nesting on Lord Howe Island, a tiny speck of land 6 miles long by one mile wide (16 square kilometers) in the Tasman Sea east of Australia.

This region has only moderate levels of floating plastic pollution. But shearwaters, as well as petrels and albatrosses, are part of a class known as tube-nosed seabirds, with tubular nostrils and an excellent senses of smell. As I have found in my own research, tube-nosed seabirds are highly skilled at seeking out plastic debris, which may smell like a good place to find food because of algae that coats it in the water. Indeed, the flesh-footed shearwater has one of the highest plastic ingestion rates of any species yet studied.

Marine ecologist Jennifer Lavers, head of the Adrift Lab, has been studying plastic debris consumption in this wild shearwater population for over a decade. In 2014 the lab began publishing research linking ingested plastic to sublethal health effects.

In 2019, Lavers led a study that described correlations between ingested plastic and various aspects of blood chemistry. Birds that ingested more plastic had lower blood calcium levels, along with higher levels of cholesterol and uric acid.

In January 2023, Lavers’ group published a paper that found multiorgan damage in these shearwaters from ingesting both microplastic fragments, measuring less than a quarter inch (five millimeters) across, and larger macroplastic particles. These findings included the first description of overproduction of scar tissue in the birds’ proventriculus – the part of their stomach where chemical digestion occurs.

This process, known as fibrosis, is a sign that the body is responding to injury or damage. In humans, fibrosis is found in the lungs of longtime smokers and people with repeated, prolonged exposure to asbestos. It also is seen in the livers of heavy drinkers. A buildup of excessive scar tissue leads to reduced organ function, and may allow diseases to enter the body via the damaged organs.

A new age of plastic disease

The Adrift Lab’s newest paper takes these findings still further. The researchers found a positive relationship between the amount of plastic in the proventriculus and the degree of scarring. They concluded that ingested plastic was causing the scarring, a phenomenon they call “plasticosis.”

Many species of birds purposefully consume small stones and grit, which collect in their gizzards – the second part of their stomachs – and help the birds digest their food by pulverizing it. Critically, however, this grit, which is sometimes called pumice, is not associated with fibrosis.

Scientists have observed associations between plastic ingestion and pathogenic illness in fish. Plasticosis may help explain how pathogens find their way into the body via a lacerated digestive tract.

Seabirds were the first sentinels of possible risks to marine life from plastics: A 1969 study described examining young Laysan albatrosses (Phoebastria immutabilis) that had died in Hawaii and finding plastic in their stomachs. So perhaps it is fitting that the first disease attributed specifically to marine plastic debris has also been described in a seabird. In my view, plasticosis could be a sign that a new age of disease is upon us because of human overuse of plastics and other long-lasting contaminants, and their leakage into the environment.

In 2022, United Nations member nations voted to negotiate a global treaty to end plastic pollution, with a target completion date of 2024. This would be the first binding agreement to address plastic pollution in a concerted and coordinated manner. The identification of plasticosis in shearwaters shows that there is no time to waste.

Matthew Savoca, Postdoctoral researcher, Stanford University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Great Salt Lake is already not what it was. The lake is 19 feet below its average height. It has lost 73% of its water and its surface area has shrunk by 60%. One of the favors this body of water does its surroundings is to suppress the toxic dust that would fly around in a dry basin of this sort.

The authors point out that the lake provides “habitat for more than 10 million migratory birds and wildlife throughout the Wasatch Front. Almost 350 bird species depend on Great Salt Lake habitats.”

This role of wetlands such as those around the lake has become even more crucial as others have dried up. The U.S. West is suffering from two decades of mega-drought that has been made substantially longer and more intense by the climate crisis.

Human over-use of the waters of the lake is the main cause of its desiccation, but that over-use is driven in part by the increased heat and aridity of the region.

The paper argues that the lake provides at least $2.5 billion a year to the Utah economy. The moisture it puts into the air falls as snow, increasing the snow pack for skiing by some 20%. Salt and minerals are extracted from it, as well as brine shrimp.

Because the lake has less water in it, the level of its saltiness has increased by nearly a fifth, which could start killing off the brine shrimp, which are used as fish food and are a major economic product of the region.

At the same time, a dry lake bed of this sort contains toxins, including loads of arsenic, that winds will blow around in the area, making for a major health concern.

When Owens Lake in California dried up after Los Angeles diverted its water there, local residents were exposed to high amounts of fine particulate matter, which causes asthma and lung problems.

A similar fate may await the residents of Salt Lake City.

(The Conversation) – Thousands of delegates have gathered in Montreal, Canada, for a once-in-a-decade chance to address the accelerating pace of species loss and the dangers of ecosystem breakdown.

COP15 brings together parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) with a goal of negotiating this decade’s biodiversity targets and a new global framework for biodiversity protection.

The summit risks being overshadowed by the recently concluded COP27 on climate change, but the issues are linked and the importance of biodiversity protection cannot be overstated.

About one million plant and animal species are at risk of extinction. Not only are our activities driving this mass extinction, its consequences also threaten our own health and survival.

COP15 needs to mark a step change in how quickly and how seriously the international community responds to catastrophic nature loss. The focus is expected to be on 30×30, a push to protect 30% of land and sea for nature by the end of this decade.

What to expect from COP15

In recent years, the global climate crisis has made more headlines than biodiversity. Yet both are inextricably linked.

Deforestation reduces the planet’s carbon carrying capacity while simultaneously destroying habitats. Erratic weather patterns, fires and floods – caused or exacerbated by climate change – erode ecosystem integrity.

As ecosystems break down, the natural barriers separating people from zoonotic diseases are reduced, with devastating consequences, as the COVID pandemic shows.

Unlike the UN climate process, which has a clear target to limit greenhouse gas emissions to 2℃, the biodiversity convention and its COPs have so far lacked a clear goal. But this might change.

30×30 could represent a significant move towards reducing humanity’s collective footprint on the planet and allowing ecosystems to rejuvenate. But as always, the devil is in the detail. It will be important to ensure Indigenous peoples’ rights are respected and that sufficient funds are released for effective management of protected areas.

Via Pixabay.

The summit will also emphasise the human right to a healthy environment, for which biodiversity is essential, and a concerted push to require mandatory nature disclosures from all large businesses and financial institutions as a measure of their impacts and dependencies on biodiversity.

Mandatory nature disclosures are receiving broad support, not least from many businesses. If adopted, this would add clarity to corporate obligations and might significantly improve transparency and accountability. But safeguards will be necessary to ensure the problems around carbon offsetting are not repeated and companies cannot unduly compensate for the loss or degradation of biologically diverse ecosystems.

Nevertheless, 30×30, the human right to a healthy environment, and #MakeItMandatory, each has the potential to capture greater public attention and to galvanise global leaders into urgent action.

New Zealand’s biodiversity record

As a party to the CBD since 1993, and with some longstanding biodiversity protections in place at home, Aotearoa New Zealand has an important role to play in supporting COP15 towards a successful outcome.

New Zealand’s ambitious biodiversity strategy, Te Mana o te Taiao, sets out a blueprint for the protection and restoration of our biodiversity, as well as for its sustainable use. But despite such ambition, New Zealand’s indigenous biodiversity remains in peril.

There are numerous challenges to the country’s ecological health. These include increasing agricultural and industrial activity, invasive alien species and introduced predators, commercial fishing and trawling, and the impacts of climate change, which already bring more weather extremes.

Regarding 30×30, more than a third of Aotearoa’s land area is already under legal protection for conservation purposes. But only 10% of the country’s original wetlands remain, and only 7% of its territorial sea is protected. Much work remains to be done.

Leadership and ambition

COP15 was originally to take place in Kunming, China, in October 2020, but was delayed by the COVID pandemic. Although it is now happening in Canada, China retains responsibility for organising most of the summit and its leadership and ambition will be crucial to its success. This is the first time China has held the presidency of a major international environmental treaty.

The summit’s ambitious theme – building a shared future for all life on Earth – now needs to be matched by an agreement on bold and substantive commitments. Sufficient financial assistance for developing states must also be made available to ensure commitments are implemented.

There is now strong consensus that human activities are altering the planet’s climate, with significant and negative consequences. Public support for action on climate change is also high.

Our chances of avoiding catastrophic climate breakdown depend in many ways on how effectively we protect and restore Earth’s biodiversity. Framing biodiversity as a crucial component of climate stabilisation could help raise the profile of COP15. It would send a message that biodiversity isn’t a limited “green” issue but simply about ensuring a healthy and habitable planet for everyone.

Nathan Cooper, Associate Professor of Law, University of Waikato

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The environmental activist group Just Stop Oil has grasped public attention with a series of “art action” stunts targeting famous paintings and buildings with cans of soup and paint. They have climbed motorway gantries, blocking drivers on the M25. Their message has been loud, but has it been clear?

Critics, including Labour leader Keir Starmer, have denounced their actions: “I think it’s arrogant [of them] to think they’re the only people that have got the answer to this.” The uproar over Just Stop Oil shows that, regardless of any widespread agreement on the dangers of climate change, there is a disconnect between activists and politicians about how to address it. Our new research shows that this appears even in the way these groups talk about environmental action.

Climate scientists and activists have been campaigning for years about the stark situation facing humanity. They may think their message is clear, but it has yet to galvanise politicians into taking meaningful action to prevent climate catastrophe.

My colleagues and I decided that we needed to look more closely at the way activist groups and politicians talk about the climate emergency. In a recently published article, we investigated what we called the “divergent discourses” of these two groups. We created two corpora – bodies, or collections of words. One curated politicians’ talk about the climate from the House of Commons from 2013-20. The other captured activists’ language in YouTube videos from 2019-20. This made sure that the corpora were around 30,000 words each.

Keywords and priorities

As part of our analysis we used software to compile lists of keywords. These are words that occur in a corpus more often than they appear in general use. We compared our corpora to the English Web 2018 corpus, a collection of 36 billion words representative of all the text on the internet.

We then grouped the resulting keywords thematically. When we did this with the single keywords, we found that the activists’ talk was focused on ecological and social justice, using words like rights (as in human rights) and indigenous. Their communications often focused on human culpability when it comes to climate change, with keywords like holocene (the geological era corresponding with the rise of human civilisation) and rewilding (an environmental movement about stopping human intervention in nature).

Politicians’ talk focused more on topics like industry, finance, politics and economy, with keywords like decarbonise, underinvestment and constituent. Notably absent were words that referenced the human role in climate change.

The analysis with multiple keyword phrases was particularly interesting. In the activists’ talk, we found that phrases appearing disproportionately frequently fell into categories of:

• activism and action (climate justice, climate activist, climate action, creating awareness)
• nature (mother Earth, sacred water, natural world, mimicking nature)
• types of people (celebrity culture, indigenous community)
• human rights (clean drinking, basic human right)
• negative effects relating to climate change (climate crisis, causing desertification, tipping point, wasting plastic).

Via Pixabay..

The politicians placed a much greater emphasis on finance, economy and the energy industry:

• energy (fuel poverty, renewable heat, energy security, onshore wind, energy market, offshore wind, low carbon, big energy, carbon budget, solar industry)
• action for renewability (renewable heat incentive, renewable target, climate change act)
• finance and economy (capacity market, price freeze, energy bill, energy company, bill payer).

Alongside the focus on energy, fuel and money, people and nature hardly featured at all in the politicians’ speeches. People are, in fact, only present in the top 25 keywords in the role of “bill payer”.

Climate change conversation

The phrase “climate change” itself was something we then looked at more closely in a concordance analysis, where we looked at how each instance of the phrase is used in context. While both politicians and activists used the phrase negatively – it’s something bad that we need to tackle – there were differences.

Human responsibility was writ large in the activist corpus, for example, and frequent present-tense constructions communicated urgency. Politicians used more passive constructions, which distance them from the problem. Their corpus also contained more frequent use of future constructions, pushing any required solutions further down the road.

Just Stop Oil and other activists are desperate to make clear that climate change is an issue caused by and impacting humans’ way of life. Meanwhile, our findings suggest that politicians – at least in parliament where they can ostensibly make important policy decisions – are focused more on the economic and industry side of the environment, not the human cost. Both groups have work to do to improve communication and align their message if we have any hope of tackling the urgent task ahead of us.

Clare Cunningham, Associate Professor in English Language and Linguistics, York St John University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.