Quote:Nearly one fifth of the genetic diversity of the planet’s most vulnerable species may already be lost, an analysis published today (September 22) in Science finds. If accurate, it would mean that many species are already below a conservation threshold proposed last year by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) a part of the United Nations Environment Programme.

Calculating lost genetic diversity

Moisés Expósito-Alonso was in his back yard in Menlo Park, California, last year reading a monograph on the unified theory of biodiversity—“kind of a nerd thing to do,” he says—when an idea dawned on him. He kept seeing concepts related to biodiversity and realized that those concepts should also relate to the genetic diversity of a given species.

Expósito-Alonso, an evolutionary geneticist and ecologist at Stanford University, says that one equation in particular caught his eye: the species-area relationship (SAR), a function that predicts that species-level biodiversity becomes richer as habitat area expands. Essentially, it says that “when you explore ecosystems, you continuously find more species because you find more little niches to which different species have adapted,” he says. And as humans have increasingly carved up ecosystems for our own purposes, the SAR holds that the reverse is also true—shrinking habitat areas diminish species biodiversity. Researchers have used the SAR to estimate extinction rates, and it has been cited in policy-making decisions, Expósito-Alonso says; so, he began to wonder if a genetic diversity equivalent existed that could analogously predict how habitat loss reduces genetic diversity.

Unlike species extinctions that can be observed, genetic diversity loss is much harder to detect. “I feel it’s like an invisible extinction to our eyes, but it’s probably one of the largest extinctions that is happening,” he says. And, so far, it hasn’t been garnering the attention Expósito-Alonso says it deserved.

Quote:The Discovery Channel’s annual Shark Week is the longest-running cable television series in history, filling screens with sharky content every summer since 1988. It causes one of the largest temporary increases in U.S. viewers’ attention to any science or conservation topic.

It’s also the largest stage in marine biology, giving scientists who appear on it access to an audience of millions. Being featured by high-profile media outlets can help researchers attract attention and funding that can help super-charge their careers.

Unfortunately, Shark Week is also a missed opportunity. As scientists and conservationists have long argued, it is a major source of misinformation and nonsense about sharks, the scientists who study them, and how people can help protect endangered species from extinction.

I am a marine biologist who recently worked with five colleagues to scientifically analyze the content of Shark Week episodes. We tracked down copies of 202 episodes, watched them all and coded their content based on more than 15 variables, including locations, which experts were interviewed, which shark species were mentioned, what scientific research tools were used, whether the episodes mentioned shark conservation and how sharks were portrayed.

Even as longtime Shark Week critics, we were staggered by our findings. The episodes that we reviewed were full of incorrect information and provided a wildly misleading picture of the field of shark research. Some episodes glorified wildlife harassment, and many missed countless chances to teach a massive audience about shark conservation.

Quote:

• Human-wildlife conflict has caused a decline in the puma population in parts of Argentinian Patagonia, research shows.
• One of Patagonia’s emblematic species, the puma is treated very differently by Argentina and Chile, the two countries that share the region.
• The Argentinian province of Chubut pays a puma bounty to incentivize the hunting of pumas, as a measure to counter livestock killings.
• Chile has outlawed puma hunting and has found a delicate balance between ranching and conservation.
  

“As a boy, my father killed pumas,” says Vincente Navarra, whose family has been raising sheep against the backdrop of Argentina’s Patagonian wilderness for generations. Navarra, a 71-year-old rancher who raises livestock on Patagonia’s Chilean side was the first in his family to cross the border to produce wool there.

Not many people can endure the harsh conditions of Patagonia, a region spread across more than 1 million square kilometers (386,000 square miles), split between Chile to the west and Argentina to the east. Ranchers are among them. But pumas’ appetite for livestock has made it difficult for ranchers to peacefully share a territory with the big cat.

“We were taught to fear the puma and that made it easier to hunt them,” Navarra tells Mongabay about Patagonia’s biggest predator and its relationship with the ranchers inhabiting the region.

*This image is copyright of its original author

Quote:We held a total of 78 meetings (67 individual interviews and 11 focus group interviews with 37 people) to interview 104 people. Stakeholder groups interviewed included ranchers (n = 45), NGO employees (n = 11), wildlife agency staff (n = 19), wildlife agency commissioners (n = 2), beef industry (n = 4), hunters (n = 9), FFA (n = 5), elected officials (n = 4), and range riders (n = 2). Ranchers interviewed had varying levels of dependence on the income from their ranches. Large scale ranchers derived their entire livelihood from the ranches while some smaller scale ranchers had alternative jobs in addition to ranching. There were two ranchers who identified as hobby ranchers, and two for whom ranching was a second career after retiring from their first career.

We deduced five major findings (Table 1): (1) Both economic and social factors were mentioned as motivating or dissuading ranchers to participate in predator-friendly beef programs. (2) Most ranchers who responded positively toward predator-friendly beef labeling perceived marketing their products as predator-friendly to be more of an education and outreach opportunity than as a new source of income. (3) Some ranchers expressed that labeling their ranch products as predator-friendly would make them more socially accepted by the general public, but at the cost of being ostracized by their neighbors and fellow ranchers. (4) Predator-friendly labeling was considered inferior to grass-finished or organic beef labels, and many ranchers interviewed feared being burdened to prove their beef is legitimately predator-friendly, especially if their neighbors were not participating in the certification program. (5) All stakeholders except county commissioners and FFA perceived an economic opportunity for predator-friendly beef facilitated by existing pro-environmental markets and the existence of a private beef processing plant.

Quote:A changing world for Kenyan herders

Whatever the offset’s climate benefits, Survival International says there’s another, more immediate problem with the project. For it to work, Indigenous communities in the conservancies need to agree to bring their herding practices under a new form of management, with the ultimate goal being to convert them into a monetizable carbon credit. That means that older systems of livestock management that already existed in those communities are giving way to that new system. Not everyone is pleased with the change.

“It’s already automatic that we look after our vegetation and environment so that we can keep our livestock there,” said Abdullahi Gonjobe, chairman of the Borana Council of Elders, in a phone interview with Mongabay. “It’s not something that we are supposed to be told. We are born with it, it’s Indigenous knowledge that we have.”

But NRT says the changes aren’t just good for the environment, they’re good for the communities themselves. While most of the revenue from the sale of the carbon credits either goes to the consultancy firm that markets the credits and helped set up the project, or direct operating costs for the conservancies, around a quarter of the proceeds end up in a “carbon community fund” that can be used to finance drought relief, scholarships and other local priorities.

Some researchers say those funds, and the bodies set up to administer them, can themselves be a source of division within pastoralist communities at times, though.

“With these conservancies, for communities there are pros and cons,” said Tahira Shariff, an anthropologist who studies pastoralism in Kenya. “There are a few members of the communities who support the conservancies because of the benefits, but for the majority of the population, especially in the pastoral areas where I come from, it has brought about a lot of division because of feelings of exclusion and that only a minority is involved in decision-making.”

NRT and its technical experts say they don’t agree that the new conservancy grazing councils are a major departure from preexisting systems. The grazing plans that form the basis of the offset are collaboratively written with the community’s leaders, they say, and then implemented directly by local conservancy managers, not outsiders.

“At no time in the project have we ever told people, this is where you should go and this is how many animals you should have,” Ritchie said. “The only thing the project has ever done is say that in order to regenerate your rangeland you need the following two rules of thumb: you never graze in any one area longer than a month, and when the grass gets shorter than a certain height, you leave.”

Describing the changes as a radical shift from centuries-old Indigenous practices is misleading, Ritchie told Mongabay. Those practices already changed after independence, when previously nomadic communities began to build more permanent settlements in areas where they could access government services, creating new pressures on local ecosystems and leading to unsustainable grazing.


“All of the decisions about where the herders go are still totally made by the communities,” he added. “They’re not made by the project at all.”


But Shariff bristled at the idea that herders need an external intervention to help them manage a landscape that’s been their home since long before Kenya was a state at all.


“I think one major problem that pastoralists have is these assumptions and this narrative that they’ve been doing things wrongly and need to be guided the right way,” she said. “For example, the Borana pastoralists that I’ve been researching for the last four years have a very sophisticated and organized way of managing grazing patterns.”


While Indigenous groups in the region are less nomadic than they used to be, the meager presence of government services in a few areas is only part of the explanation for why they’ve stopped moving around as much as they used to. The presence of infrastructure and conservation projects surrounding them on all sides is a bigger factor, Shariff said, not lack of knowledge or care about their ecosystem.


“I really disagree with the idea that pastoralists are grazing in an unplanned manner and now they need to be governed,” she said. “Actually it will bring lots of complication and competition among them.”


There’s also a cruel irony under the surface of the offset’s relationship with the conservancies. While emissions-heavy corporations in the U.S. purchase carbon credits generated by it, allowing them to claim progress toward their net-zero climate goals, the pastoralists who produce those credits are suffering some of climate change’s most devastating impacts. This year’s drought in Kenya is so bad that President Ruto has been urged to declare it a national disaster.


“Today, due to the prolonged drought, the livestock has perished,” said Gonjobe, the Borana elder. “Ninety percent of our livestock is gone. We are poor now.”


In the long run, the question of whether Netflix can confidently tell its customers that some of the emissions caused by their weekend streaming binge are being cleansed by Kenya’s soil may be moot — at least for those who’ve been walking on it for the past few thousand years.

“This drought is actually exacerbated by these land pressures, whereby people have to compete with development infrastructure, conservancies and farming groups,” Shariff said. “And pastoralists are dying squeezed in between them.”