gmo_bioengineering
Would you drink genetically modified beer?
A growing number of US brewers are now using GM yeast to make their beers.
NC State researchers engineer 'promising' plastic-degrading microbe to help polluted oceans
North Carolina State University researchers have genetically modified bacteria to break down ocean-polluting plastics commonly used in water bottles and clothing.
The Great Barrier Reef can repair itself, with a little help from science.
At least two potential interventions show promise as means to boost climate resilience and tolerance in the reef’s corals: assisted gene flow and assisted evolution.
The Great Barrier Reef is suffering from recent unprecedented coral bleaching events. But the answer to part of its recovery could lie in the reef itself, with a little help.
In our recent article published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, we argue that at least two potential interventions show promise as means to boost climate resilience and tolerance in the reef’s corals: assisted gene flow and assisted evolution.
Both techniques use existing genetic material on the reef to breed hardier corals, and do not involve genetic engineering.
But why are such interventions needed? Can’t the reef simply repair itself?
Damage to the reef, so far
Coral bleaching in 2016 and 2017 took its biggest toll on the reef to date, with two-thirds of the world’s largest coral reef ecosystem impacted in these back-to-back events. The consequence was widespread damage.
Reducing greenhouse gas emissions will dampen coral bleaching risk in the long term, but will not prevent it. Even with strong action to tackle climate change, more warming is locked in.
So while emissions reductions are essential for the future of the reef, other actions are now also needed.
Even in the most optimistic future, reef-building corals need to become more resilient. Continued improvement of water quality, controlling Crown-of-Thorns Starfish, and managing no-take areas will all help.
But continued stress from climate change – in frequency and intensity – increasingly overwhelms the natural resilience despite the best conventional management efforts. Although natural processes of adaptation and acclimation are in play, they are unlikely to be fast enough to keep up with any rate of global warming.
So to boost the reef’s resilience in the face of climate change we need to consider new interventions - and urgently.
That’s why we believe assisted gene flow and assisted evolution could help the reef.
Delaying their development could mean that climate change degrades the reef beyond repair, and before we can save key species.
What is assisted gene flow?
The idea here is to move warm-adapted corals to cooler parts of the reef. Corals in the far north are naturally adapted to 1C to 2C higher summer temperatures than corals further south.
This means there is an opportunity to build resistance to future warming in corals in the south under strong climate change mitigation, or to decades of warming under weaker mitigation.
There is already natural genetic connectivity of coral populations across most of the reef. But the rate of larval flow from the warm north to the south is limited, partly because of the South Equatorial Current that flows west across the Pacific.
The South Equatorial Current splits into the north-flowing Gulf of Papua Current and south-flowing East Australian Current off the coast of north Queensland. This means coral larvae spawned in the warm north are often more likely to stay in the north.
So manually moving some of the northern corals south could help overcome that physical limitation of natural north-to-south larval flow. If enough corals could be moved it could help heat-damaged reefs recover faster with more heat-resistant coral stock.
We could start safe tests at a subset of well-chosen reefs to understand how warm-adapted populations can be spread to reefs further south.
What is assisted evolution?
While assisted gene flow may be effective for southern or recently degraded reefs, it will not be enough or feasible for all reefs or species. Here, we argue that assisted evolution could help.
Assisted evolution is artificial selection on steroids. It combines multiple approaches that target the coral host and its essential microbial symbionts.
These are aimed at producing a hardier coral without the use of genetic engineering. Experiments at the Australian Institute of Marine Science are already making progress, with results yet to be published.
First, evolution of algal symbionts in isolation from the coral host has been fast-tracked to resist higher levels of heat stress. When symbionts are made to reengage with the coral host, benefits to bleaching resistance are still small, but with more work we expect to see a hardier symbiosis.
Secondly, experiments have created new genetic diversity of corals through hybridisation and researchers have selected these artificially for increased climate resilience.
Natural hybridisation happens only occasionally on the reef, so this result gives us new options for climate hardening corals using existing genetic stocks.
The danger of doing nothing?
The right time to start any new intervention is when the risk of inaction is greater than the risk of action.
Assisted gene flow and assisted evolution represent manageable risk because they use genetic material already present on the reef. The interventions speed up naturally occurring processes and do not involve genetic engineering.
These interventions would not introduce or produce new species. Assisted gene flow would simply enhance the natural flow of warm-adapted corals into areas on the reef that desperately need more heat tolerance.
Risk of increasing the spread of diseases may also be low because most parts of the Reef are already interconnected. A full understanding of risks is an area of continued research.
These are just two examples of new tools that could help build climate resilience on the reef. Other interventions are developing and should be put on the table for open discussion.
*********************
Ken Anthony
Principal Research Scientist, Australian Institute of Marine Science
Britta Schaffelke
Research Program Leader - A Healthy and Sustainable Great Barrier Reef, Australian Institute of Marine Science
Line K Bay
Senior Research Scientist and Team Leader, Australian Institute of Marine Science
Madeleine van Oppen
Marine molecular ecologist, Australian Institute of Marine Science
Disclosure statement
Ken Anthony receives funding from the Australian Government, the Queensland Government and the Great Barrier Reef Foundation
Britta Schaffelke works for the Australian Institute of Marine Science, a publicly funded research organisation that receives funding from the Australian Government, State Government Departments, foundations and private industry.
Line Bay receives funding from the Australian Government through their National Environment Science Program .
Madeleine van Oppen receives funding from the Australian Research Council, The Paul G. Allen Foundation, the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, the Australian Institute of Marine Science.
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The water under Colorado’s Eastern Plains is running dry as farmers keep irrigating “great American desert.”
Farmers say they’re trying to wean from groundwater, but admit there are no easy answers amid pressures of corn prices, urban growth and interstate water agreements.
By BRUCE FINLEY | bfinley@denverpost.com
WRAY — Colorado farmers who defied nature’s limits and nourished a pastoral paradise by irrigating drought-prone prairie are pushing ahead in the face of worsening environmental fallout: Overpumping of groundwater has drained the High Plains Aquifer to the point that streams are drying up at the rate of 6 miles a year.
The drawdown has become so severe that highly resilient fish are disappearing, evidence of ecological collapse. A Denver Post analysis of federal data shows the aquifer shrank twice as fast over the past six years compared with the previous 60.
While the drying out of America’s agricultural bread basket ($35 billion in crops a year) ultimately may pinch people in cities, it is hitting rural areas hardest.
“Now I never know, from one minute to the next, when I turn on a faucet or hydrant, whether there will be water or not. The aquifer is being depleted,” said Lois Scott, 75, who lives west of Cope, north of the frequently bone-dry bed of the Arikaree River.
A 40-foot well her grandfather dug by hand in 1914 gave water until recently, she said, lamenting the loss of lawns where children once frolicked and green pastures for cows. Scott has been considering a move to Brush and leaving her family’s historic homestead farm.
“This will truly become the Great American Desert,” she said.
The agricultural overpumping from thousands of wells continues despite decades of warnings from researchers that the aquifer — also known as the Ogallala, the world’s largest underground body of fresh water — is shrinking.
Even if farmers radically reduced pumping, the latest research finds, the aquifer wouldn’t refill for centuries. Farmers say they cannot handle this on their own.
But there is no agreement among the eight affected states (Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Wyoming, South Dakota) to try to save the aquifer. And state rules allow total depletion.
In fact, Colorado officials faced with legal challenges from Kansas over dwindling surface water in the Republican River have found that their best option to comply with a 1942 compact is to take more water out of the aquifer. The state bought wells from farmers during the past decade and has been pumping out 11,500 acre-feet of water a year, enough to satisfy a small city, delivering it through a $60 million, 12-mile pipeline northeast of Wray to artificially resuscitate the river.
The overpumping reflects a pattern, seen worldwide, where people with knowledge that they’re exceeding nature’s limits nevertheless cling to destructive practices that hasten an environmental backlash.
The drawdown
The depletion of the High Plains Aquifer has been happening for decades, according to bulletins U.S. Geological Survey has put out since 1988. Colorado farmers this year pumped groundwater out of 4,000 wells, state records show, siphoning as much as 500 gallons a minute from each well to irrigate roughly 580,000 acres — mostly to grow corn, a water-intensive crop.
The depth where groundwater can be tapped has fallen by as much as 100 feet in eastern Colorado, USGS data show. That means pump motors must work harder to pull up the same amount of water, using more energy — raising costs for farmers. The amount of water siphoned from the aquifer since 1950 to irrigate farm fields across the eight states tops 273 million acre-feet (89 trillion gallons) — about 70 percent of the water in Lake Erie.
On one hand, the industrial center-pivot irrigation techniques perfected after World War II have brought consistency to farming by tapping the “sponge” of saturated sediment that links the aquifer to surface water in streams and rivers. America’s breadbasket produces $35 billion of crops a year. On the other hand, intense irrigation is breaking ecosystems apart.
Overpumping has dried up 358 miles of surface rivers and streams across a 200-square-mile area covering eastern Colorado, western Kansas and Nebraska, according to U.S. Fish and Wildlife-backed researchers from Colorado State University and Kansas State University who published a peer-reviewed report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers also determined that, if farmers keep pumping water at the current pace, another 177 miles of rivers and streams will be lost before 2060.
“Intermittent streams are more likely to be dry. Permanent streams are more likely to become intermittent. Large streams are more likely to be small. Everything has changed,” said KSU conservation biologist Keith Gido, one of the authors. “We have almost completely changed the species of fish that can survive in those streams, compared with what was there historically. This is really a catastrophic change.”
Disappearing fish species — minnows, suckers, catfish that had evolved to endure periodic droughts — signal to biologists that ecological effects may be reaching a tipping point.
The amount of water held in the aquifer under eastern Colorado decreased by 19.6 million acre-feet — 6.4 trillion gallons — from 1950 until 2015, USGS records show. That’s an average loss of 300,000 acre-feet a year. Between 2011 and 2015, records show, the water available under Colorado in the aquifer decreased by 3.2 million acre-feet — an annual average shrinkage of 800,000 acre-feet. Climate change factors, including rainfall, play into the rate of the drawdown.
If all pumping stopped immediately, it would still take hundreds of years for rain-fed streams and rivers to recharge the aquifer, Gido said.
“We’re not living in as sustainable a fashion as we need to be. Much of the damage has been done,” he said, “and restoring what we’ve lost could be difficult.
“It is happening all over the world in places such as Pakistan. It causes conflicts. As human populations grow, the demand for water is going to be greater. Conflicts are going to increase — unless we become more efficient in using the water we have.”
Farmers locked
For farmers, weaning themselves off groundwater is proving difficult.
They say they’re trying. They’ve reduced the land irrigated in eastern Colorado by 30,000 acres since 2006. They plan to retire another 25,000 acres over the next decade, said Rod Lenz, president of the Republican River Water Conservation District, who for years has advocated use of technology to grow more crops with less water.
“We have come to realize that, yeah, we are overmining it. We are acutely aware of that now. There’s a definite attitude to make more than just the natural progression as far as efficiency,” Lenz said, noting state officials monitor pumping and determine how many acres owners can irrigate.
“We’re constantly trying to find ways to stay in compliance,” he said. “We’re looking at serious conservation.”
For years, agriculture experts have pointed to drip-irrigation technology to do more with less. Federal agencies in the past dangled help for farmers who invest. But few in eastern Colorado have installed these systems, largely because they are expensive.
Farmer and cattleman Robert Boyd, a leader of the Arikaree Groundwater Management District, said the federal government should intervene to ensure survival of High Plains agriculture.
“Do you want us to be sustainable? Or not? It may come to a point where no one can actually irrigate,” Boyd said.
He pointed to proposals to divert water from the Missouri River Basin and move it westward through pipelines across the Great Plains.
“If the federal government wants agriculture to be sustainable, they need to pump water back toward the mountains. They need to figure out how to get water back toward the higher parts of the rivers,” he said. “The federal government needs to step in and make the states work together to make agriculture — and urban areas — sustainable.”
For now, farmers struggle, increasingly weighing water uncertainties in calculations that include corn prices falling to around $3.50 a bushel in recent years from $7. But drawing down the aquifer does not violate any law in Colorado. The state engineer’s office monitors well levels and requires permits for wells, limiting the number of acres a farmer can irrigate. But there’s no hard limit on how much water can be pumped.
In contrast, state rules limit groundwater withdrawals from the Denver Basin Aquifer — a source for many of Denver’s southern suburbs, including Castle Rock and Parker — to less than 1 percent a year. This is meant to help natural recharge keep pace with human demands.
But on the High Plains, the situation is like mining intended to fully exploit diamonds or gold.
“If you want to have it all back the way it was 150 years ago, you would have to remove everyone from the area. I’m not sure how we could do that today,” deputy state engineer Mike Sullivan said in an interview.
Sullivan and state engineer Kevin Rein emphasized that thousands of acres no longer are irrigated. “And there need to be some more retirements of land to get us into a more balanced situation,” Sullivan said.
They defended Colorado’s practice of pumping more groundwater out of the aquifer, saying this is necessary to comply with the Republican River Compact. Disputes over river flows have risen as far as the U.S. Supreme Court and Colorado’s legal obligations to deliver water to Nebraska and Kansas are clear.
“What we do with the pumping does help the streams,” Sullivan said. “It does provide a wet stream. … We could not meet our (legal) obligation without that today, even if we turned off all the wells.”
But there’s no end in sight for the drawdown of groundwater.
Nature exhausted
And for farmers who built their world on the High Plains Aquifer, the environmental fallout is increasingly painful. In the rural view, it is a problem that cannot be addressed by farmers alone without help from people in cities. All of the industrial agriculture is done with urban residents in mind — the people who consume the crops and cows that farmers grow.
“The world population is going to double. And we’re not going to be able to grow more farmland. We’re losing farming ground every day to development,” said Cody Powell, manager of 21st Century Equipment, the John Deere dealer in Burlington, an agricultural hub. “You take away farm ground for development, bring in more people. Who’s going to feed them? The only way to do that is to put water on crops.”
People in cities increasingly demand environmentally correct crops, which requires more water. “If they want natural grain-fed cattle, and non-GMO (genetically modified organism) crops — all that good stuff — it is going to take water,” he said.
A farmer can grow more by using pesticides and genetically modified seeds, he said. “With the same amount of water, you could get twice as much corn.”
He knows too well the perils of losing water. He grew up in southern Colorado’s Arkansas River Valley at a time when Aurora and other Front Range suburbs were buying up rights from farmers. This buy-up to slake growing suburban thirsts ended up killing agriculture across hundreds of thousands of once-irrigated acres.
And now when Powell goes back, he sees communities “overrun with thugs” near where his grandmother lived. “It makes me feel sick,” he said.
In eastern Colorado, the problem now is that few can afford to invest in high-efficiency water technology, such as irrigation drip tubes and tape installed underground to eliminate evaporation losses, and soil-sensor systems that let farmers irrigate only when absolutely necessary.
Federal programs to subsidize installation of this technology have withered. And the overpumping continues.
“The fear out here now is not that the aquifer is going to get ruined,” Powell said. “The fear is that the state is going to shut off wells.”
And prairie residents practically cringe to see the pipeline northeast of Wray that Colorado uses to convey groundwater away to Nebraska and Kansas to prevent future lawsuits.
The interstate compact was negotiated back when there was more water and far fewer people, they say.
“Now we just have weeds. We are feeling the effect of losing the water that Kansas is enjoying,” Scott said from her farmhouse. “It is robbing families of life. That’s what is happening to us. We should be entitled to the water underground.”
Past becomes future
The depletion means water scarcity increasingly dictates survival.
It is no surprise to historians. In the 1860s, John Wesley Powell’s surveys for the U.S. government warned that the land west of central Kansas was practically a desert. His report “On the Arid Lands of the Western United States” warned that the only way for people to live here would be by irrigating land. Otherwise, he wrote, the place could not support permanent communities. Tribes for centuries used the Great Plains seasonally as a hunting ground.
Settlers flocked in during the 19th century, initially relying on dryland farming. This led to massive soil erosion, culminating in the Dust Bowl environmental disaster of the 1930s.
Industrial irrigation took off during the 1960s, with tens of thousands of wells drilled through the 1980s.
But now, if people keep pumping, the dry-out will intensify, CSU senior research scientist Kevin Bestgen said.
“I appreciate it that people now are trying to reduce pumping. The reality is that the bucket they are pumping from does not refill. It is finite. And in order to allow recharge of that aquifer, farmers are going to have to get much more severe reductions in pumping levels. It has been going down and down and down,” he said. “People are getting what they can. This will turn out to be a tragedy. It is in the culture at this point. People want to grow corn now.”
Groundwater levels
The map shows the change in groundwater levels for various management districts in the Northern High Plains Basin over the last 10 years. The water level data is collected from wells in the areas. Click an area to see the changes in groundwater levels for 1-, 5- and 10-year periods.
Bruce Finley
Bruce Finley covers environment issues, the land air and water struggles shaping Colorado and the West. Finley grew up in Colorado, graduated from Stanford, then earned masters degrees in international relations as a Fulbright scholar in Britain and in journalism at Northwestern. He is also a lawyer and previously handled international news with on-site reporting in 40 countries.
Follow Bruce Finley @finleybruce
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Investor Jeremy Grantham is worried about the world.
“It’s one thing for the world to be deteriorating, but deteriorating at an increasingly fast rate is particularly dangerous and scary.“
BARRON'S MFQ
Jeremy Grantham is Worried About the World
The veteran investor now runs a $900 million foundation focused on protecting the environment. What he supports, where he invests.
By SARAH MAX
Oct. 6, 2017 11:42 p.m. ET
Tony Luong for Barron's
Investors know Jeremy Grantham as the chief investment strategist of GMO, the $77 billion Boston-based asset management firm he co-founded in 1977. The venerable value investor is praised for his prescient market calls, including predicting the 2000 and 2008 downturns. He also told investors to “reinvest when terrified” in a piece published in 2009 on the very day the market hit its postfinancial crisis low.
In environmental circles, Grantham, who just turned 79, is equally esteemed. In 1997 he and his wife, Hannelore, converted their foundation to focus exclusively on the environment. The $900 million Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment gives money to organizations such as the Environmental Defense Fund and World Wildlife Fund, and supports climate-related research and communication at four academic institutions. It has contributed to the training of more than a hundred Ph.Ds in climate-related work, and funded two Pulitzer-winning projects and one recipient of an Emmy. Last year Grantham, who is British, was named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for his philanthropic contributions to the environment.
As an investor, Grantham’s priority is earning the best return. Still, he says, it’s impossible to separate what he knows about the environment and how he thinks about risk and opportunity. “If you believe, as I do, that climate change is so severe that it’s an actual question about survival as a well functioning global society, then you know that I take it extremely seriously,” he says.
If we don’t solve climate change, he warns, “all the other things we are trying to protect and encourage are a waste of money and energy.”
Barron’s: What sparked your interest in climate change?
Grantham: Twenty-eight years ago, I had a series of fairly epic summer vacations with my wife and three kids. The first trip was in the Amazon, the Galapagos, and the Andes, and involved taking dugout canoes up rivers in pouring rain with my four-year-old daughter hiding under my poncho. The next one was in Rwanda, during a pause in the civil war, and on to Tanzania. The final one was to Borneo. We sailed up to the middle of nowhere and stayed in longhouses that had one visitor a year.
This exposed us to the masses of clear-cut forests and the interminable piles of logs lying along the side of the rivers. We all became increasingly obsessed by the significance of climate change and the damage to the environment.
What is one of your biggest concerns?
Acceleration. Carbon dioxide is going up at an increasing rate, with the three biggest increases occurring in the last three years; the climate is warming at an increasing rate; and the water is warming at an increasing rate; and therefore, the level at which oceans are rising is increasing at an accelerating rate. It’s one thing for the world to be deteriorating, but deteriorating at an increasingly fast rate is particularly dangerous and scary.
“It’s one thing for the world to be deteriorating, but deteriorating at an increasingly fast rate is particularly dangerous and scary.“ —Jeremy Grantham Tony Luong for Barron's
Tell us about your foundation.
Total annual giving runs about $25 million to $30 million. About 30% is in the U.K., where, all things being equal, research costs half as much as it does in the U.S.
We fund four climate-change institutes—at Imperial College, the London School of Economics, and Sheffield University, as well as a related investment at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.
We give 20% to about a dozen small organizations engaged in communications. We allocate about 40% of our giving to some of the usual suspects, The Nature Conservancy, Environmental Defense Fund, and the World Wildlife Fund, and a fourth group called RARE, which is U.S.-based but spends everything abroad protecting the environment.
The remaining part is an army of 15 or 20 more specialized enterprises, one of which is based on population. Population is a massive problem, particularly in Africa. All the safety margins, the resilience of these countries, has been chewed up by having so many people. Resources are a threat in the long run. Overpopulation is a threat. Climate change interacts with all of them in a rather pernicious way.
What is the foundation’s approach to grant-making?
We try to look at critical areas for the future. We require that grantees are urgent in their style and have fire in their bellies. We are especially focused on areas that are important but haven’t yet been recognized—and where the need for speed is critical. We also look for important areas that are politically incorrect and have a hard time attracting money because they are so controversial—like population growth.
How does the foundation invest its assets?
We have $900 million spread across a family foundation, a public trust, and, to a substantially lesser degree, my personal assets. The three pieces are run as one with the help of Cambridge Associates [an investment consultant]. We have a stunningly large amount, about 45% of assets, in early-stage venture capital funds chosen by Cambridge.
We’ve got 35% in what I modestly call world-class, very conservative hedge funds, including GMO. The remaining 20% is invested by the foundation’s executive director, Ramsay Ravenel, and myself. About 12% is in emerging markets, 5% in cash, and 3% is in our GMO Resources IV [ticker: GOVIX] in 2013, and GMO Climate Change III [GCCHX].
How has your insight into climate change influenced your investment decisions at GMO?
I’m not doing any direct investing at GMO. For the last 10 years, I have spent my time thinking about the big picture—productivity, economic booms and busts, climate change, and resource limitations. But, as an investor, you can never know too much. I can’t separate how my investing instincts were affected by knowing a lot more about resource limitations and the effects of climate change. It was part of the background music, like everything else I know.
The two funds you mentioned, GMO Resources and GMO Climate Change, are for institutional investors. Tell us about them.
We launched Resources in 2013, and Climate Change this year. Lucas White is the portfolio manager of both funds. One of the advantages for the Resources fund is that, because resource prices are volatile, most investors hate them. Value managers who might normally buy them shy away; they outperform over time because they’re cheap. Meanwhile, these stocks tend to have a low correlation with most other investments.
How do you reconcile your views on climate change with investments in the Resources fund?
It’s complicated because the biggest resources are fossil fuels. New technology is an arrow aimed at the heart of fossil fuels; after a decent one or two years, the slow burn of green energy will substitute them away. They will have to manage a long, slow decline. [About 30% of the portfolio is in oil and gas, versus nearly 70% for most market-cap-weighted resource benchmarks.] We would expect over the next 10 years to be handsomely underweighted. That does not mean that there may not be a time when the fund will choose to invest.
And the Climate Change fund?
The goal is to make money by understanding the bewildering amount of change going on. We’re not pretending that every holding is ESG. Our job is to understand this rapidly changing world and make an attractive fund for clients who would like to be investing on the right side of climate change. For example, copper mining can be a dirty business, but it’s hugely critical for electric cars. [ Freeport-McMoRan (FCX) is one of the fund’s top holdings.]
Where else does it invest?
Clean energy is almost a third of the portfolio, including companies focused on solar and wind power, and storage. [The fund owns Vestas Wind Systems (VWS), First Solar (FSLR), and Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile (SQM), which mines lithium used for storage.]
Energy efficiency is 24% of the portfolio. One aspect of this is transportation, which includes companies that are making items to increase the efficiency of motors and cars themselves. It also includes energy efficiency in buildings, as well as diversified efficiency enterprises. [Two holdings, Schneider Electric (SU.France) and Eaton (ETN), have multiple businesses tied to energy efficiency.]
There is also a fair amount in timber, fish farming, and suppliers of farming materials and equipment, such as Deere [DE], right?
We have, by other people’s standards, a stunningly large allocation of more than 17% to agriculture.
Can technology help feed more people?
Technology in agriculture is much harder, because it comes up against the laws of physics. There is just so much energy you can get out of the sun if you are a plant. We have spent a few thousand years boosting that efficiency level. We are approaching a theoretical limit.
On top of that, you have to throw in the increasing effects of storms, droughts, and temperature. Higher temperatures carry more water vapor, 4% to 5% more up in the air than there used to be. You don’t get more storms, but when you get them, they’re heavier. If you chart the incidence of heavy storms, say one inch in an hour, you will find that they are doubly grown over the last 40 years. That is so obviously the case when you read the news.
What about new food sources or agricultural methods?
There is steady progress on agriculture and feeding the public. We may have to change what we eat. To take a very tough example for Westerners, insects are incredibly nutritious and much, much more efficient sources of energy than chicken. They’re eaten a lot in Africa and the East.
Fish are being overfished, but there are great opportunities in seaweed, which is entirely edible. Seaweed can grow 10 to 20 inches a day, four times faster than the fastest-growing land plant. In that context, the sea is amazingly underoptimized. We’ve squeezed the common grains as much as they can be squeezed, but there are plenty of secondary grains important in Africa and Asia that have much more productivity potential.
Humans have all the skills and technology required to have a perfectly recyclable world that doesn’t face imminent danger from climate change, and doesn’t have massive poverty. But we have chosen to go on a rather more chaotic and help-yourself route.
Capitalism does a brilliant job on millions of decisions balancing supply and demand and so on, but on a handful of issues, it seems, it is clearly ill-equipped to deal with the problem. How do you handle global overfishing? How do you handle long-term erosion of soil and the overdevelopment of underground water, each of which is owned by an individual farmer, or an individual? These require more global cooperation and more concrete internal cooperation, and thinking and planning.
Can capitalism help with some of that? Using ESG criteria to choose securities is becoming more common.
Interest in ESG isn’t necessarily because of the rush of blood to being good. It could be just good business. If you’re a producer of consumer goods, and people become worried about the plastics in your product, or botulism in your food, you lose business.
There’s quite a lot of work that suggests that people who are early movers on good behavior are demonstrating that they are simply thinking more about the future, how it will look, how it will play out over 10 or 15 years. A study by Harvard Business School concluded that in the past, the companies that were good on ESG did exactly that, and they were outperformers.
But the heavy lifting [in combating climate change] will still be technological. By the early stage of the next decade, solar and wind will be three cents per kilowatt hour and by the middle of next decade—which is just seven years away—it will be cheaper than the marginal cost of nuclear and coal. The cost of running [a coal plant] and mining will be more than building a solar plant or wind farm from ground zero.
When that point is reached you’re talking economics. People who would have stood their ground until the end of time will be eagerly signing up for solar farms, storage facilities, etc.
Thank you, Jeremy.
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CRISPR: Can gene-editing help nature cope with climate change?
The new technology may have missed out on this year's Nobel prize, but its potential to shape the planet is growing by the day.
By India Bourke
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Could an ingenious new technology save humanity from its greatest act of planetary self-harm? It may sound like something out of a science-fiction script. But as a new gene editing technology called CRISPR-Cas9 takes rapid steps toward clinical testing in humans, some are asking if it can also help the world cope with a warming climate.
The CRISPR technique has revolutionised scientists' ability to manipulate DNA. Mice with muscular dystrophy have already been healed by the process. A trial in China plans to use it to treat sexually transmitted human papilloma virus (which can in some cases lead to cervical cancer). Designer babies, a cure for cancer and an answer to antibiotic resistance are all possible future outcomes, scientists say. But there is another possible future use - it could bring extinct animals back from the dead.
The acronymn stands for “Clustered Regularly Interspace Short Palindromic Repeats”, which is a description of the defining feature of a system that bacteria use to fight infection. Kind of like the natural world’s version of cut-copy-and-paste, a molecule guides a protein, called Cas9, to the targeted gene sequence in a strand of DNA, then snips the sequence out. By repurposing this system for use in plants, animals and humans, scientists are now able to edit genes faster and more efficiently than ever before.
CRISPR also holds the potential to pass these genetic changes on down through the generations and make them permanent. As this excellent RadioLab podcast episode explains, the technology is capable of performing what it known as a "gene drive". This is when scientists make sure an altered gene is inherited at a higher rate than through natural reproduction alone.
It can thus be used to create - or wipe out - entire features from a species. Want modified mosquitos that are incapable of carrying malaria to out-breed their natural cousins? Scientists have already demonstrated this is possible in the lab.
So what are the downsides? Imagine a scenario where blue-eyed designer babies are given gene drives, and you can start to see some of the ethical issues involved. Not to mention the risks of accidentally mutating non-target genes, or of manipulated organisms developing evolutionary resistance, or the unforeseen impacts that removing one species’ genetic trait might have on the rest of an ecosystem.
Yet while the risks of deploying CRISPR are very real, so too are the risks posed to the natural world by climate change. The burning of fossil fuels is pushing up global temperatures and bringing about a mass extinction event that will have disastrous consequences for biodiversity - not to mention human food chains.
Many species are already evolving on their own: the skulls of alpine chipmunks have changed shape due to climate pressure, while the genetics of pink salmon are adapting to favour earlier migrations. But not all will be able to successfully adapt. According to the Living Planet Index, the world will lose two-thirds of wild animals by 2020.
Some scientists are starting to think that CRISPR-Cas9 could perhaps help stave off this collapse - just as we rely on traditional engineering to provide a new, clean-energy infrastructures, so we might use bio-engineering to build ecosystems capable of withstanding more volatile weather and warmer seas.
Coral reefs, for instance, could be saved from rising sea temperatures by gene editing, says the molecular biologist Rachel Levin.
Warming oceans are already resulting in a breakdown of the symbiotic union between coral animals and the billions of photosynthetic microbes called Symbiodinium that inhabit them and make their food. When its too warm for the Symbiodinium to photosynthesize, the coral expel them from its system. However, if they don’t return, the coral host will eventually die.
Writing in Frontiers of Microbiology, Levin proposes using CRISPR to prevent this breakdown. Rare strains of Symbiodinium can survive in warmer waters, and the relevant genes could be copied and transplanted into the Symbiodinium strains from temperate regions.
Crops for human consumption could also benefit from the same process. The genes from wild tomatoes that can thrive on shorter daylight hours could be transplanted into commercial varieties, plant scientist Professor Zach Lippman told The Cold Spring Harbour laboratory. This means the latter could then continue to be grown successfully in cooler, northern latitudes.
The similarities with more conventionally genetically modified organisms (GMOS) are striking here - but so are the differences. GMOs introduce entirely foreign DNA sequences from other organisms to create variants that would not be found in nature, whereas CRISPR’s gene-editing is more akin to conventional breeding methods.
“We’re not making hugely mutant things,” Levin told the Smithsonian Magazine, of the gene editing plans for coral. “All we’re trying to do is give them an extra copy of a gene they already have to help them out.”
The technology clearly still has a long way to go before it is effective in tackling the impacts of climate change on any kind of scale. It even missed out on this year’s round of Nobel prize - pipped by research into the mechanisms behind sleep rhythms.
But if evolution’s story is one of relentless adaptability, then CRISPR may just be humanity’s opportunity to give a nature a fighting chance.
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Farmers fear ‘political’ court ruling on plant breeding techniques.
EU farmers have expressed concerns about an ongoing court case on plant breeding techniques, saying it might end up being a “political” decision that does not take into account scientific and economic arguments.
Farmers fear ‘political’ court ruling on plant breeding techniques
By Paola Tamma | EURACTIV.com 03-10-2017 (updated: 03-10-2017 )
New plant breeding techniques modify plant genes to enhance certain traits. [IAEA Imagebank/Flickr]
EU farmers have expressed concerns about an ongoing court case on plant breeding techniques, saying it might end up being a “political” decision that does not take into account scientific and economic arguments.
The European Commission revived the debate on genetic engineering on 28 September, during a meeting on modern biotechnologies in agriculture focusing on New Plant Breeding Techniques (NPBTs). But its stance is still unclear.
The term NPBTs describes a number of scientific methods that genetically engineer plants to enhance traits like drought tolerance and pest resistance.
The debate revolves on whether these techniques should be classed as genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and should therefore fall under the strict GMO approval process.
The EU defines GMOs as “organisms, with the exception of human beings, in which the genetic material has been altered in a way that does not occur naturally by mating and/or natural recombination”.
Supporters of NPBTs argue that plants obtained through these techniques could also be the product of conventional cross-breeding techniques that mimic natural processes and hence cannot be considered GMOs.
The Netherlands says there is “no need to wait” for EU-wide regulation and would like to push forward the development of NPBTs.
Amsterdam wants to revive talks on new plant breeding techniques
The Netherlands believes the new plant breeding techniques should not come under the GMO legislation as they are as safe as traditional breeding. It also insists that a discussion on the issue should be launched soon, even before the EU Court rules on the issue.
On the other hand, sceptics contest the claim that NPBTs mimic natural processes because the end product could not be obtained naturally. They say there is no knowledge of what happens when combining multiple NPBTs and repeating this over time, hence the precautionary principle should be applied and NPTBs should be regulated under GMO rules.
Playing it safe
In 2016, the EU executive commissioned an up-to-date scientific overview on NPBTs. But the review, published last April, did not take a position on the legal status of NPBTs.
Speaking at an event on 28 September, Health and Food Safety Commissioner Vytenis Andriukaitis said: “There is no single vision in the EU as to how far we could and should go to reap benefits from the use of human innovative interventions in agriculture.”
He said there is a need for further understanding of NPBTs: “In most science-related issues, people tend to look for ‘black and white’ answers where science is about risk and uncertainty.”
A European Commission spokesperson recently told EURACTIV that the executive’s legal interpretation is expected to facilitate harmonisation of EU member states’ approaches to new breeding techniques. “However, it is the sole prerogative of the European Court of Justice to provide a final and binding opinion on the interpretation of EU law.”
The court case
In 2016, France asked the European Court of Justice to clarify whether a variety of herbicide-resistant rapeseed obtained through NPBTs should follow the GMO approval process. The judgment is due in the first half of 2018.
The case concerns one type of NPTBs (mutagenesis) and it is unclear whether the judgment will extend to other NPTBs and what would be the impact of a negative ruling on genetic engineering in general.
It is also being disputed whether EU judges have sufficient scientific understanding to legislate on the matter.
“I fear that the court will make a political decision,” Thor Kofoed, head of seed policy at farmer organisation Copa-Cogeca, told EURACTIV.
“The new mutagenesis technique is a normal and natural breeding technique. I really fear the court will make the decision that mutagenesis is part of the GMO directive. Then we really have a problem because you cannot do anything – you break down the whole industry. And I feel that lawyers don’t understand a thing about biology”, he said.
Speaking at the Commission’s conference, Kofoed stressed that “farmers and breeders need to be increasingly innovative to deal with the challenge of feeding a growing world population with limited resources and increasingly variable weather events, ranging from floods to drought.”
“We need to develop new plant varieties which are for example resistant to water and heat stress, as a way to adapt to climate change, as outlined in the IPCC report on climate change,” he added.
According to Luc Vernet of Farm Europe, an agricultural think tank, for certain NPBTs, “we are on the safe side politically to go forward”, for instance, if no foreign DNA is used.
The American seed manufacturing company DowDuPont voiced confidence that the EU will come around to allow innovation in the field of NPBTs: “We remain confident that European farmers will have access to very important tools like this one”, DowDuPont’s Neal Gutterson told EURACTIV.
But organic farming body IFOAM expressed a different view. Jan Plagge, its vice president, said: “All new genetic engineering techniques should be, without question, considered as techniques of genetic modification leading to GMOs and fall within the scope of the existing legislation on GMOs.
“There are no legal or technical reasons to exclude these techniques from risk assessment, prior authorisation and mandatory traceability and labelling, which apply to current GMOs.”
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