Earth911 is honoring the 52 years of Earth Day with 52 Actions for the Earth. Each week through Earth Day 2023, we will share an action you can take to invest in the Earth and make your own life more sustainable. The environmental impact of the global textile and fashion industry is so big that EarthDay.org has made sustainable fashion one of its major campaigns. While fashion magazines are filled with quizzes to help you figure out your personal style, EarthDay.org’s quiz will help you understand the environmental impacts of the fashion industry better and help you avoid making the wrong kind of fashion impact. This week, you can take action for the Earth by testing – and growing – your (environmental) fashion knowledge.

Fashion for the Earth

The history of Earth Day is the history of collective action by individuals. But over time, the organizers realized that while individual action is necessary to stop climate change, it will not be enough unless industry and governments are also committed to investing in the Earth to create a green economy. It’s not easy to envision how government, businesses, and consumers can work together to transform a polluting industry into a model for the green economy. EarthDay.org chose the fashion industry as both an example of the possibilities of change and a place to begin making a difference. The Fashion for the Earth campaign is designed both to change how people think about shopping and to encourage clothing companies to adopt more sustainable practices.

The Impacts of Fashion

Regular readers of Earth911 are already familiar with some of the environmental impacts of the fashion industry and many of the strategies for making fashion sustainable. We’ve learned how to choose eco-friendly fabrics and considered the environmental trade-offs of different natural fibers, various synthetic fabrics, and even leather and leather alternatives. All of these materials have significant environmental impacts at all stages of their life cycle. Agricultural and industrial pollution are generated during textile manufacture. Human rights and labor abuses occur during the manufacturing of garments. Laundry results in chemical and microplastic pollution. And thanks to fast fashion, both the retail and consumer stages waste tremendous quantities of textiles and garments, resulting in mountains of textile garbage.

Take the Quiz

If you want to cram, read through the Get the Facts section on EarthDay.org’s sustainable fashion page. But if you don’t feel like studying, never fear. The quiz reveals each correct answer as you go, then totals your score at the end.

After you take the Sustainable Fashion Quiz, you might be inspired to do something more. You can take immediate action by signing the sustainable fashion petition. You can go further by making your own wardrobe more sustainable and learning how to quit fast fashion for good. Read up on retailer take-back programs before you clean out your closet and host a clothing swap to recycle the clothes you don’t wear. Maybe you will create a capsule wardrobe to eliminate impulse shopping or learn more sustainable laundry methods and dry-cleaning options. You can learn how to mend to extend the life of your clothes and upcycle worn out clothes into napkins.

Lee esta nota de prensa en español here.

Earth’s average surface temperature in 2022 tied with 2015 as the fifth warmest on record, according to an analysis by NASA. Continuing the planet’s long-term warming trend, global temperatures in 2022 were 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit (0.89 degrees Celsius) above the average for NASA’s baseline period (1951-1980), scientists from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York reported.

“This warming trend is alarming,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “Our warming climate is already making a mark: Forest fires are intensifying; hurricanes are getting stronger; droughts are wreaking havoc and sea levels are rising. NASA is deepening our commitment to do our part in addressing climate change. Our Earth System Observatory will provide state-of-the-art data to support our climate modeling, analysis and predictions to help humanity confront our planet’s changing climate.”

The past nine years have been the warmest years since modern recordkeeping began in 1880. This means Earth in 2022 was about 2 degrees Fahrenheit (or about 1.11 degrees Celsius) warmer than the late 19th century average.

“The reason for the warming trend is that human activities continue to pump enormous amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and the long-term planetary impacts will also continue,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of GISS, NASA’s leading center for climate modeling.

Human-driven greenhouse gas emissions have rebounded following a short-lived dip in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Recently, NASA scientists, as well as international scientists, determined carbon dioxide emissions were the highest on record in 2022. NASA also identified some super-emitters of methane – another powerful greenhouse gas – using the Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation instrument that launched to the International Space Station last year.

The Arctic region continues to experience the strongest warming trends – close to four times the global average – according to GISS research presented at the 2022 annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, as well as a separate study.

Communities around the world are experiencing impacts scientists see as connected to the warming atmosphere and ocean. Climate change has intensified rainfall and tropical storms, deepened the severity of droughts, and increased the impact of storm surges. Last year brought torrential monsoon rains that devastated Pakistan and a persistent megadrought in the U.S. Southwest. In September, Hurricane Ian became one of the strongest and costliest hurricanes to strike the continental U.S.

Tracking Our Changing Planet

NASA’s global temperature analysis is drawn from data collected by weather stations and Antarctic research stations, as well as instruments mounted on ships and ocean buoys. NASA scientists analyze these measurements to account for uncertainties in the data and to maintain consistent methods for calculating global average surface temperature differences for every year. These ground-based measurements of surface temperature are consistent with satellite data collected since 2002 by the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder on NASA’s Aqua satellite and with other estimates.

NASA uses the period from 1951-1980 as a baseline to understand how global temperatures change over time. That baseline includes climate patterns such as La Niña and El Niño, as well as unusually hot or cold years due to other factors, ensuring it encompasses natural variations in Earth’s temperature.

Many factors can affect the average temperature in any given year. For example, 2022 was one of the warmest on record despite a third consecutive year of La Niña conditions in the tropical Pacific Ocean. NASA scientists estimate that La Niña’s cooling influence may have lowered global temperatures slightly (about 0.11 degrees Fahrenheit or 0.06 degrees Celsius) from what the average would have been under more typical ocean conditions.

A separate, independent analysis by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) concluded that the global surface temperature for 2022 was the sixth highest since 1880. NOAA scientists use much of the same raw temperature data in their analysis and have a different baseline period (1901-2000) and methodology. Although rankings for specific years can differ slightly between the records, they are in broad agreement and both reflect ongoing long-term warming.

NASA’s full dataset of global surface temperatures through 2022, as well as full details with code of how NASA scientists conducted the analysis, are publicly available from GISS.

GISS is a NASA laboratory managed by the Earth Sciences Division of the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The laboratory is affiliated with Columbia University’s Earth Institute and School of Engineering and Applied Science in New York.

For more information about NASA’s Earth science programs, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/earth

News Media Contacts

Tylar Greene

Headquarters, Washington

202-358-0030

[email protected]

Jacob Richmond

Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

301-286-0535

[email protected]

The researchers report their findings in the journal Frontiers in Genetics.

“We combined existing methodologies in such a way that we are now able to use noninvasive samples to generate genome-scale data,” said Alida de Flamingh, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who led the work with U. of I. animal sciences professor Alfred Roca. “This allows us to assess wildlife populations without having to dart, capture or immobilize animals.”

Collecting DNA from elephant dung is not new, Roca said.

“Elephant fecal samples have been used for decades to study the genetics of elephants,” he said. “But this relies on very cumbersome methods, often involving chemicals that in some cases may be dangerous. The collections are bulky, they’re hard to ship and they have to be refrigerated, making the whole process very costly.”

De Flamingh tested a relatively inexpensive alternative: using postcard-sized data-collection cards that have been treated to prevent the samples from degrading. Previous research has shown that once samples are smeared on the cards, they can be stored for months without refrigeration.

The inspiration for the study came from de Flamingh’s work with U. of I. anthropology professor and study co-author Ripan Malhi, whose laboratory focuses on ancient DNA.

“Ancient DNA can be problematic because samples are degraded and may yield very low levels of target species DNA,” de Flamingh said. Obtaining genomic data from dung can be similarly challenging, with lower elephant DNA concentrations than are available from blood samples. “I thought, this sounds like an excellent opportunity to test whether the same methodologies can be applied to noninvasive samples to generate the same type of data.”

The team first collected samples from zoo elephants in experiments designed to determine how long after defecation the dung would yield viable genomic data. The Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens in Florida and the Dallas Zoological Gardens allowed the team to collect samples from their African savanna elephants. The researchers retrieved the samples immediately after defecation and 24, 48 and 72 hours later.

Their tests revealed that even three-day-old dung yielded enough DNA for genomic studies of the elephants.

The researchers next tested their approach on samples collected from wild African savanna elephants. Study collaborator and co-author Rudi van Aarde, a professor emeritus of zoology and entomology at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, and his colleagues used the cards to collect elephant dung samples after identifying a geographically and ecologically diverse set of wild areas across South Africa.

By running the sequence data obtained from the cards through genomic databases, the team found a treasure trove of information in the dung.

“I was surprised,” Roca said. “I thought we might get some elephant DNA from the cards, but I was thinking on the order of 2%. However, on average, more than 12% of the DNA was attributed to the elephant.”

This was achieved without using laboratory methods that target only elephant DNA, a costly and time-consuming procedure, the researchers said. As a result, each sample yielded a vast amount of data about the elephant, the microbial composition of its gut, its habitat and diet. The researchers even detected the DNA of butterflies and other arthropods that interact with the dung after it is deposited.

“It’s really beneficial to get an idea of everything that’s in there because now you can start asking questions, not only about elephant genomes but also about things like their health, their diet and whether there are pathogens or parasites present,” de Flamingh said.

When it comes to the elephant genomes, the results are comparable to those obtained via blood samples, Roca said.

“You can explore the connectivity of different elephant populations, the level of genetic diversity, the level of inbreeding and relatedness among elephants,” he said. “And I would say there are lots of reasons you don’t want to have to collect blood samples from wild elephants.”

“It’s possible to do what you could do with blood, but it goes beyond that,” de Flamingh said. “You now can do analyses that you couldn’t do before with blood DNA, which only provides information about the elephant’s genome.”

De Flamingh is a postdoctoral researcher and Malhi and Roca are professors at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at the U. of I.

The International Fund for Animal Welfare, the Conservation Ecology Research Unit of the University of Pretoria, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service African Elephant Conservation Fund supported this research.

The Brazilian Amazon encompasses the largest tropical forest area with the highest biodiversity in the world. Since 2000, Indigenous territories and protected areas have increased substantially in the region and by 2013, Indigenous territories and protected areas accounted for 43% of the total land area and covered approximately 50% of the total forest area.

However, tensions between forest conservation and socioeconomic development goals persist. In recent years, forest conservation has been threatened by large socio-ecological changes in Brazil. Weakened forest and environmental policies and enforcement as well as impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic had devastating impacts on Indigenous groups in the region.

In this U.S.-Brazil collaborative study, Yuanwei Qin, Ph.D., and Xiangming Xiao, Ph.D., of OU’s Center for Earth Observation and Modeling, with Fabio de Sa e Silva, Ph.D., assistant professor of international studies and Wick Cary Professor of Brazilian Studies in the OU College of International Studies, worked with collaborators from the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research and the National Institute for Research in Amazonia in Brazil. The research team combined multiple data sources to document and quantify the dynamics and impact of forest loss in the Brazilian Amazon over the past two decades.

Because of frequent cloud cover and fire-induced smoke in the Brazilian Amazon, annual forest maps from analyses of optical images have only moderate accuracy. In a 2019 paper published by the same journal, the research team combined image data from both optical and microwave sensors to generate annual Brazilian Amazon forest maps. Using these annual forest maps, they assessed the effects of Indigenous territories and protected areas on deforestation dynamics in the Brazilian Amazon through 2021.

“Between 2000 and 2021, the areas designated as Indigenous territories or protected areas increased to cover approximately 52% of forests in the Brazilian Amazon, accounting for only 5% of net forest loss and 12% of gross forest loss in the period,” said Qin. “This finding highlights the vital role of Indigenous territories and the protected areas for forest conservation in the region.”

The protected areas in the Brazilian Amazon are subject to different state and national governance arrangements and have different management objectives, including strict protection or sustainable use. They found that from 2003 through 2021, gross forest loss fell 48% in the protected areas subject to strict protection and 11% in the protected areas subject to sustainable use.

“These varying effects on forest conservation call for more in-depth causal analyses by researchers and invite stakeholders, decision-makers, and the public to reassess existing policies for these areas. Legal designations are important, but if the law is not enforced, the intended protection of forests and biodiversity will be illusional. This is an area in which Brazil is knowingly failing,” de Sa e Silva said.

The results from this study also show that annual forest area loss was affected by Brazilian forest policies, as evidenced by a large reduction of forest area loss in the early 2000s to mid-2010s, corresponding with Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva administration in 2003-2010, and renewed rise of forest area loss even among Indigenous territories and the protected areas in 2019-2021, corresponding with President Jair Bolsonaro’s administration in 2019-2022.

“How to rebuild effective policies and reduce forest area loss in the Brazilian Amazon in the coming years will be one of the grand challenges for Lula’s administration and international communities,” Xiao said.

This study adds to a portfolio of research efforts to document forest areas in the Brazilian Amazon by Qin and Xiao, including a 2019 paper, “Improved estimates of forest cover and loss in the Brazilian Amazon in 2000-2017,” published in Nature Sustainability; a 2021 paper, “Carbon loss from forest degradation exceeds that from deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon,” published in Nature Climate Change; as well as two others. 

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The researchers found that the mountain plover, birds that thrive when vegetation is kept shorter by prairie dogs, almost disappeared from the study area, while migrant songbirds such as the lark bunting, which prefer taller vegetation, increased in number. Meanwhile, species including ferruginous hawks, badgers and swift foxes declined dramatically as their prey base crashed.

When an outbreak of sylvatic plague decimated black-tailed prairie dog numbers in the Thunder Basin National Grassland in 2017, researchers saw an opportunity for a “natural experiment” to explore the impact of the rodents’ die-off on the plants and other wildlife in that area of northeast Wyoming.

What they learned was that the decline in prairie dogs, along with abnormally high precipitation in 2018, combined to bring about dramatic ecosystem changes. The findings highlight the serious conservation challenges caused by boom-and-bust disease cycles in remaining Great Plains grasslands, the researchers say.

“We found that prairie dogs play a critical role for associated vegetation and wildlife communities in this system, creating important grassland habitat for numerous species while serving as prey for several predators,” says Courtney Duchardt, an assistant professor in Oklahoma State University’s Department of Natural Resource Ecology and Management who led the research as a University of Wyoming Ph.D. student in ecology. “Our research highlights how precipitation can interact with disease-induced loss of a keystone species to induce drastic and rapid shifts in wildlife communities.”

The research is published in Ecological Applications, a journal of the Ecological Society of America that focuses on applications of ecological science to environmental problems. Others involved were Professor Jeff Beck, Associate Professor Derek Scasta and former graduate student Lauren Connell, all of UW’s Department of Ecosystem Science and Management; Ana Davidson, of Colorado State University; Jacob Hennig, of the U.S. Geological Survey; David Augustine and Lauren Porensky, of the U.S. Department of Agriculture; and David Pellatz, of the Thunder Basin Grasslands Prairie Ecosystem Association.

Black-tailed prairie dogs now occupy a small fraction of their historical range and are considered a nuisance in some areas because of their capacity to compete with livestock for forage. They also are highly susceptible to sylvatic plague, a nonnative pathogen introduced to North America in the early 1900s. The combined pressures of disease, habitat loss and control efforts that have reduced populations of the rodent also have resulted in declines in associated wildlife species. Those include birds such as burrowing owls, mountain plovers and raptors, as well as swift foxes, coyotes and badgers.

This study, conducted from 2015-19 in the Thunder Basin grassland, may be the first to specifically examine the multispecies impacts of a wide-scale plague outbreak, which reduced the area covered by prairie dog colonies from nearly 25,000 acres to only about 125 acres in the study area. The 2017 outbreak was followed by abnormally high precipitation in 2018, which caused vegetation to grow quickly and taller without the presence of prairie dogs.

The researchers found that the mountain plover, birds that thrive when vegetation is kept shorter by prairie dogs, almost disappeared from the study area, while migrant songbirds such as the lark bunting, which prefer taller vegetation, increased in number.

Meanwhile, species including ferruginous hawks, badgers and swift foxes declined dramatically as their prey base crashed.

The researchers say that, while plants and animals in Great Plains grasslands historically have been subject to variations in precipitation and other factors, the boom-and-bust cycles are likely to “destabilize” the ecosystems further. That could even be a challenge for livestock managers.

During the boom portion of the cycle, the capacity of prairie dogs to compete with livestock for available forage makes the rodents a nuisance. But the bust portion of the cycle isn’t ideal for producers, either.

“Although reduced prairie dog numbers yield increased vegetation biomass, the unpredictability of these cycles makes capitalizing on additional forage difficult for agricultural producers,” the researchers wrote. “Essentially, the undesirability and unpredictability of these cycles is potentially the one thing that most, if not all, stakeholders can agree on.”

The scientists suggest that further efforts to predict prairie dog boom-and-bust cycles will help support the compatibility of managing rangelands for both livestock and biodiversity conservation.

Earth911 is honoring the 52 years of Earth Day with 52 Actions for the Earth. Each week through Earth Day 2023, we will share an action you can take to invest in the Earth and make your own life more sustainable. Gardeners love the new year because that’s when the seed catalogs start showing up in mailboxes. If you’ve already canceled all your catalogs, this week, you can take action for the Earth by making sustainable garden plans instead of browsing catalogs for plants you’ll never actually grow.

Action: Plan a Garden

Green Gardening

Spending time in the garden is one of the easiest ways to experience the outdoors. And doing garden work makes a lot of people feel closer to nature. But ironically, a lot of the things we do to make our gardens grow aren’t very good for the environment. Lawns are the most notorious. Turfgrass is a monoculture that covers more than three times as much area as any food crop in the United States. Maintaining that massive monoculture results in pollution and health risks from fertilizers, weed killers, and gas mowers. Nearly one-third of all residential water is sprinkled on our lawns.

But lawns aren’t the only culprits. The pesticides we drench our plants in have even more impacts. Pesticides weaken our food, kill beneficial insects as well as pests, and can be toxic to wildlife and kill pets. More than 90% of Americans’ bodies contain pesticide residues. Pesticides and fertilizers contaminate our groundwater and drinking water and contribute to dead zones in oceans.

Even the plants we grow can have a negative impact. Most of the invasive species that harm natural areas were purposely introduced through cultivation, usually as ornamental plants.

Pick Your Project

This may be the year you completely relandscape to create an eco-haven. But it’s easy to dream up projects in January that are too much to manage in July. So make a realistic plan. If starting from scratch is too much, take incremental steps. Consider converting a part of your yard to a more sustainable design.

Instead of changing what you plant, you could choose to adopt some more sustainable maintenance habits for the landscape you already have. Here are some greener gardening ideas:

Whatever you decide to do, designing on the fly while you’re at the nursery in the spring is a great way to waste money and plants. Now is the time to figure out how you’re going to make your garden more sustainable in 2023.

In a recent study published in Nature Climate Change, these researchers analyzed projections from three dozen climate models and found that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation and the Southern Meridional Overturning Circulation will slow by as much as 42 percent by 2100. The simulations suggest that under worst-case warming, the SMOC could cease entirely by 2300.

“Analysis of the projections from 36 Earth system models over a range of climate scenarios shows that unchecked global warming could lead to a shutdown of the ocean deep circulation,” said co-author J. Keith Moore, UCI professor of Earth system science. “This would be a climate disaster similar in magnitude to complete melting of the ice sheets on land.”

The importance of overturning circulation

In the Atlantic, as warm water flows northwards on the surface, it cools and evaporates, making it saltier and denser. This heavier water sinks into the deep ocean and proceeds to the south where it eventually rises back up, carrying from the depths the nutrients that are the food foundation of marine ecosystems.

In addition, globe-spanning ocean circulation creates a powerful factory for the processing of atmospheric carbon dioxide. The basic physical and chemical interaction of seawater and air — what Moore and his colleagues call a “solubility pump” — draws CO₂ into the ocean. While the ocean circulation sends some carbon back to the sky, the net amount is sequestered in the ocean’s depths.

Additionally, a “biological pump” occurs as phytoplankton use CO₂ during photosynthesis and in forming carbonate shells. When the plankton and larger animals die, they sink, slowly decomposing and releasing the carbon and nutrients at depth. Some comes back up with circulation and upwelling, but a portion remains banked beneath the waves.

“A disruption in circulation would reduce ocean uptake of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, intensifying and extending the hot climate conditions,” Moore said. “Over time the nutrients that support marine ecosystems would increasingly become trapped in the deep ocean, leading to declining global-ocean biological productivity.”

Humans depend on the solubility pump and the biological pump to help remove some of the CO₂ emitting into the air through fossil fuel burning, land use practices and other activities, according to Moore.

“Our analysis also shows that reducing greenhouse gas emissions now can prevent this complete shutdown of the deep circulation in the future,” he said.

Joining Moore on this project, which was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, were lead author Yi Liu, UCI Ph.D. student in Earth system science; Francois Primeau, professor and chair of UCI’s Department of Earth System Science; and Wei-Lei Wang, professor of ocean and Earth sciences at Xiamen University in China. The study depended substantially on simulations developed by the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 6 (CMIP6) project used to inform the IPCC climate assessments.

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Materials provided by University of California – Irvine. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.