Cropped 31 July 2024: Deep-sea mining talks; UN hunger report; Venezuela election and the Amazon

§ Key developments

Still at sea

DARK OXYGEN: Scientists discovered “dark oxygen” being produced in the deep ocean, “apparently by lumps of metal on the seafloor”, BBC News reported. The study challenges the “long-held assumption” that oxygen is produced exclusively through photosynthesis, CNN reported. Ocean scientist and lead author Dr Andrew Sweetman “observed the phenomenon time and time again over almost a decade” at several locations in the mineral-rich Clarion-Clipperton Zone in the Pacific, the outlet added. Canada’s The Metals Company, which partially funded Sweetman’s research, “attempted to poke holes in the study”, according to E&E News, but Sweetman stood by his team’s findings.

O CAPTAIN, MY CAPTAIN: The study created ripples at the ongoing seabed mining talks in Kingston, Jamaica, delegates told Carbon Brief. However, nations negotiating rules to govern the sector are also “face[d with] a critical vote” to decide who will head the International Seabed Authority (ISA), a decision “that could impact the nascent industry for years”, the Guardian wrote. Ahead of “one of the world’s most important elections…you’ve never heard of”, Foreign Policy carried an in-depth interview with Brazilian oceanographer Leticia Carvalho. Carvalho is standing for election against the ISA’s current chief Michael Lodge, “who has been criticised for allegedly having cosy ties to eager mining firms”. 

RUDDERLESS WORLD: Despite heated talks, the meeting is drawing to a close with mining rules “still far from finalised”, but no mining authorised, according to the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition. Malta, Honduras, Tuvalu and Guatemala announced they were joining in the call for a “precautionary pause” on deep-sea mining, taking the number of countries pushing for a moratorium, pause or ban to 31 countries, according to the Earth Negotiations Bulletin. Palau’s president lamented: “We are once again at the mercy of powerful external forces, reminiscent of colonial exploitation that scarred our history.” For a detailed breakdown of country positions, evolving science and state of play, read Carbon Brief’s new Q&A on deep sea mining, published today.

UN hunger report

FOOD INSECURITY: Around one in five people in Africa faced hunger in 2023 as “major drivers”, including climate change and conflict, became “more frequent and severe”, a new report from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) found. More than 700 million people around the world were undernourished in 2023, the report estimated – an increase of around 150 million people compared to 2019. “Transforming agrifood systems is more critical than ever,” the director general of the FAO, Dr Qu Dongyu, said in a statement. He added that the FAO is “committed to supporting countries in their efforts to eradicate hunger and ensure food security for all”. 

AFRICA IMPACTS: Food insecurity is an issue in many parts of the world, “but Africa is at the epicentre of the crisis, with hunger on the rise across the continent”, Context News said in its coverage of the report. East Africa had the highest number of people going hungry on the continent – more than 138 million people in 2023, the outlet noted. Dr David Laborde, director of the agrifood economics division at FAO, told the New Humanitarian that “hunger level remains high, higher than in 2015” – the year that countries adopted the UN sustainable development goals for 2030, which include an aim to end hunger. 

DROUGHT: Meanwhile, the prime minister of Lesotho, Sam Matekane, declared a “national food insecurity disaster” as around 700,000 people in the small African country face drought-related hunger, according to the Lesotho Times. The “critical” situation needs “national, regional and international humanitarian intervention”, the president said. Lesotho and other southern Africa countries including Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi were hit by drought in recent months, scorching crops and leaving millions at risk of hunger, the Associated Press reported earlier this year. A rapid attribution study found that the El Niño weather pattern was the key driver behind this drought.

§ Spotlight

What Venezuela’s election means for the Amazon 

In this Spotlight, Carbon Brief looks at what Venezuela’s disputed election results could mean for illegal mining in the Amazon rainforest. 

Earlier this week, Nicolás Maduro was declared the winner of the Venezuelan presidential election by the “government-controlled electoral authority”, the Guardian reported. 

The country’s opposition disputed the results as “fraudulent”, BBC News said, while protests broke out in the country’s capital of Caracas.

Pre-election polls showed Maduro, who has served as Venezuela’s president for the past 11 years, falling behind as “voters express[ed] exhaustion over Venezuela’s economic crisis and political repression”, Al Jazeera said. 

According to Mongabay, there was “little room for discussion about environmental issues” in the build-up to the election amid focus on whether the vote would be “anything close to free and fair”. The outlet said that this is “despite the fact that the country has plunged into a crisis so severe that many observers now call it an ecocide”.

Amazon impacts

Venezuela is among the world’s most biodiverse countries and it holds almost 7% of the Amazon region. 

In 2022, Mongabay reported that more than 140,000 hectares of primary forest were lost in the Venezuelan areas of the Amazon over 2016-20.

New Scientist also reported in 2022 that pristine forest loss in the Venezuelan Amazon “is estimated to be increasing by around 170% annually” due to “a state-sanctioned boom in gold mining”. 

Luis Jiménez, the general coordinator of the Venezuelan conservation NGO Phynatura, believes that Maduro remaining in power would continue the “exponentially accelerated” destruction of the Amazon. 

He tells Carbon Brief that mining has impacted “important protected natural areas” in Venezuela, such as the Canaima and Yapacana national parks, which “apart from protecting large, megadiverse forest spaces, are home to 31 Indigenous ethnic groups”. 

Jiménez believes another Maduro term would continue this “extractivist economy, which in no way benefits local communities or the rest of Venezuelans”. 

Indigenous rights

In 2022, the NGO Human Rights Watch “documented horrific abuses” of Indigenous peoples “by groups controlling illegal gold mines in southern Venezuela, operating with government acquiescence”. 

Last year, the Venezuelan government launched a military option to “expel more than 10,000 illegal miners from the Amazon, according to an Agence France-Presse article published in Deutsche Welle.

The article noted that Maduro said illegal mining was “destroying” the Amazon. 

On deforestation, Venezuela and Bolivia were the only Amazon countries to not sign a 2021 global pledge to work towards halting deforestation by 2030.

But, in 2022, Venezuela and Colombia proposed relaunching the 1978 Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organisation, a pact between Brazil, Bolivia, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela to protect the Amazon.

The countries then met for the first time in 14 years last August, committing to act together to prevent the rainforest “from reaching the point of no return” – but stopped short of agreeing on a common target to end deforestation. 

Politicians in the US, Chile, Argentina and around the world have cast doubt over the Venezuelan election results, Reuters said. Maduro has allegedly pledged to release the full voting records, a Brazilian government official told Bloomberg, amid continued protests and tension in the country. 

§ News and views

MILKING THE SYSTEM: Big meat and dairy corporations are “mobilis[ing] significant resources to delay and derail progressive environmental legislation”, a Changing Markets Foundation investigation found. An examination of 22 of the biggest meat and dairy corporations across four continents revealed the use of distract, delay and derail tactics, mirroring those of “big oil”. Distraction tactics, such as greenwashing, steer the spotlight away from the lack of climate action, the report said, adding that companies are using “industry-funded academic research to downplay” the sector’s environmental impact. Delay tactics “ask governments to slow down any regulation by claiming that [companies] are already taking voluntary action”. Finally, the “most aggressive” derail tactics focus on political activity, including millions spent on donations and lobbying, the report said. 

COP16 THREAT MONITORING: The organising committee of the COP16 UN biodiversity summit, which will be held in Cali, Colombia in October, sought to reassure delegates after online threats from a “dissident rebel group”, reported the Guardian. The organisers reiterated that “the safety and wellbeing of all participants, attendees and collaborators are our top priority”, the newspaper added. This came after threats made by the Central General Staff (EMC) in a post on Twitter that was addressed to Colombian president Gustavo Petro and said that COP16 would “fail”. The threat came during a ceasefire breakdown between the Colombian government and factions of the EMC, which is active near Cali. The organising committee has assured that it is “closely monitoring the situation and working to establish the validity of the [threats] on social media”.

NEW GROUPS: The new European parliament agriculture committee has been formed of “predominantly right-leaning” politicians, Euronews reported. The “heightened political significance” of the committee after EU farmer protests earlier this year “has attracted top-tier MEPs and lawmakers with little ties to the agricultural world”, Euractiv reported. Some “unexpected faces” in the committee formed after the June parliament elections include a “Spanish far-right YouTuber Luis ‘Alvise’ Pérez”. Meanwhile, the bloc’s yet-to-be-announced agriculture commissioner could be Luxembourg’s Christophe Hansen from the European People’s Party, Politico speculated. 

BIRD FLU BROILER: Extreme heat may have played a key role in the bird flu outbreak that infected five workers in the US state of Colorado earlier this month, the Guardian reported. The newspaper said the workers, tasked with culling poultry with the virus, became infected themselves, as their protective gear failed to work correctly amid extreme temperatures. CNN said temperatures at the time were above 40C, with large industrial fans being used to try to control the heat. “We understand those large fans…were moving so much air…the workers were finding it hard to maintain a good seal or a good fit either between the mask or with eye protection,” said Dr Nirav Shah, principal deputy director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told CNN.

WASTE NOT: Leaders of Pacific Island states have come to an agreement with Japan over the latter’s “controversial” discharge of treated nuclear wastewater into the Pacific Ocean, according to the Pacific Islands News Association. Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida assured the Pacific Islands Forum that the practice was being done “in compliance with international safety standards and practices”, while Pacific leaders “emphasised the need for Japan to continue providing sincere and transparent explanations” about the process. However, Prof Robert Richmond, the director of the University of Hawaii at Manoa’s Kewalo Marine Laboratory, “voiced significant concerns” about the efficacy of the treatment and the monitoring programme that is currently in place, the outlet said.

DAMAGED GOODS: A cattle rancher in Brazil has had his assets frozen in the “largest civil case brought for climate crimes in Brazil to date”, the Guardian reported. Dirceu Kruger will be compelled to pay more than $50m in “compensation for the damage he had caused to the climate through illegal deforestation”, according to the newspaper. The price tag was calculated based on the number of hectares that Kruger was found to have deforested, the average greenhouse gas emissions from damaging the rainforest and a calculation of the “social cost” of carbon. The money will be paid into the country’s climate emergency fund and the rancher will also “have to restore the land he degraded so it can become a valuable carbon sink again”, the outlet said.

§ Watch, read, listen

CLIMATE FINANCE: Dialogue Earth explored uncertainties around ocean communities being able to access “loss and damage” funding for those impacted by climate change. 

US ELECTION: The “record on the environment” of Kamala Harris – US vice president and Democratic frontrunner for the country’s presidential election – was discussed on the NPR Living on Earth podcast. 

GROWING PAINS: A feature in Al Jazeera looked at the “uncertain future” for women coffee farmers in the “conflict-ridden” eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. 

HOT WATER: The Financial Times examined the “dangerous effects of rising sea temperatures”. 

§ New science

Indigenous food production in a carbon economy

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

A new study has revealed that replacing locally harvested foods with imported market substitutes in Canada’s Inuvialuit Settlement region “would cost over C$3.1m [US$2.3m]…and emit over 1,000 tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions” annually. The study modelled the cost of substituting local food harvests with market replacements in the region. The study found that gasoline use would add about “C$295,000 [US$213,611] [to harvesting costs] and result in 315 to 497 tonnes of emissions”, in contrast to the much higher costs and emissions associated with substituting local foods with imports. Disregarding local food systems could, therefore, “undermine emissions targets and adversely impact food security and health in Arctic Indigenous communities”, the study added. 

Global atmospheric methane uptake by upland tree woody surfaces

Nature

New research found that tree bark can absorb methane from the atmosphere, meaning that the climate benefits of protecting forests “may be greater than previously assumed”. Researchers measured the methane exchange on tree stems in a range of forests in the Amazon, Panama, UK and Sweden. They found that microbes in bark could help trees to take in between 25-50m tonnes of atmospheric methane each year, with tropical forests taking in the highest levels of methane. The researchers conclude that identifying tree species that can absorb the most methane could help to tackle the global growth of the potent greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. 

Cost-effectiveness of natural forest regeneration and plantations for climate mitigation

Nature Climate Change

A new research effort has created global maps illustrating what is likely to be the most cost-effective reforestation method in 138 low- and middle-income countries. To create the maps, the researchers used machine learning to combine data on the likely implementation costs of passive natural regeneration and reforestation through plantations, as well as household survey data on the opportunity costs of reforestation, data on the most suitable tree species to plant in each area and the likely carbon accumulation in each area. The research found that plantations offer the most cost-effective form of reforestation over 54% of the land included in the study, while natural regeneration would be most effective over 46% of the land.

§ In the diary

• 9 August: International day of the world’s Indigenous peoples
• 11-15 August: World Water Congress and Exhibition | Toronto
• 12-16 August: Working group on benefit-sharing from the use of digital sequence information | Montreal, Canada

This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s fortnightly Cropped email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.

Cropped is researched and written by Dr Giuliana Viglione, Aruna Chandrasekhar, Daisy Dunne, Orla Dwyer and Yanine Quiroz. Antara Basu also contributed to this issue. Please send tips and feedback to [email protected].