That means that in an overall warmer climate, models suggest we’ll have the same variety of atmospheric patterns as we have now but the weather we experience from them will be warmer and, in some cases, wetter.

Graham Taylor, a Ph.D. student in PSU’s Earth, Environment and Society program, and Paul Loikith, associate professor of geography at PSU, applied a novel machine-learning approach to assess to what degree the range of weather patterns over the Pacific Northwest will change under a high-end scenario of future warming using a suite of state-of-the-art climate models. Their findings were published in the Journal of Climate.

The study’s aim was to look at whether a warming climate would make certain types of weather patterns — movements of air that on a large scale can influence whether it’s hotter than average, colder than average, dry or wet — become more or less frequent or stronger or weaker.

“We get a certain number of patterns that bring us rain, patterns that bring us heat waves and patterns that are average,” Taylor said. “The range and strength of those patterns isn’t projected to necessarily change, but they will be within a much warmer climate.”

For example, the study does not show that heat domes — which became part of the public’s vocabulary after the deadly weather event in June 2021 — will become more common or stronger, only that they will be hotter when they do occur.

“Global warming is making everything warmer,” Loikith said. “Hot summer patterns are getting hotter, but we’re not seeing a shift towards more hot patterns according to these models. It’s just more hot weather because everything’s hotter.”

The study also found that the models show an increase in rainfall over the Pacific Northwest in most seasons except summer in a warmer future.

Africa is the birthplace of modern humans and the continent with the highest level of genetic diversity. While ancient DNA studies are revealing some aspects of the genetic structure of Africa before the spread of food production, issues concerning DNA preservation have limited the insights from ancient DNA.

Hoping to find clues in modern populations, researchers from a Portuguese-Angolan TwinLab ventured into the Angolan Namib desert — a remote, multi-ethnic region where different traditions met. “We were able to locate groups which were thought to have disappeared more than 50 years ago,” states Jorge Rocha, a population geneticist from Centro de Investigação em Biodiversidade e Recursos Genéticos (CIBIO, University of Porto) who led the fieldwork, together with Angolan anthropologists Samuel and Teresa Aço from the Centro de Estudos do Deserto (CEDO).

Among the communities the team encountered are the Kwepe, a pastoral group who used to speak a language known as Kwadi. “Kwadi was a click-language that shared a common ancestor with the Khoe languages spoken by foragers and herders across southern Africa,” explains Anne-Maria Fehn, a linguist from CIBIO who participated in the fieldwork and was able to interview what may well be the last two speakers of Kwadi. “Khoe-Kwadi languages have been linked to a prehistoric migration of eastern African pastoralists,” adds Rocha, whose research focuses on southern African population history. In addition, the team contacted Bantu-speaking groups that are part of the dominant pastoral tradition of southwest Africa, as well as marginalized groups whose origins have been associated with a foraging tradition, distinct from that of the neighboring Kalahari peoples, and whose original language was supposedly lost.

Modern DNA research can complement ancient DNA studies

The team’s new study shows that the inhabitants of the Angolan Namib are quite divergent from other modern populations but also highly structured among themselves. “In agreement with our previous studies on the maternally-inherited DNA, most genome-wide diversity segregates according to socio-economic status. A lot of our efforts were placed in understanding how much of this local variation and global excentricity was caused by genetic drift — a random process that disproportionally affects small populations — and by admixture from vanished populations,” says Sandra Oliveira, a researcher at the University of Bern in Switzerland who worked with these populations during her PhD and post-doc studies with Rocha and Mark Stoneking at CIBIO and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) in Leipzig, Germany. The team demonstrated that besides the high impact of genetic drift, which contributed to differences among neighboring groups of different socio-economic status, the descendants of Kwadi speakers and the marginalized communities of the Namib Desert retain a unique Pre-Bantu ancestry that is only found in populations from the Namib desert.

Mark Stoneking, who contributed to the earliest genome-wide studies on southern African foragers and participated in this study, says: “Previous studies revealed that foragers from the Kalahari desert descend from an ancestral population who was the first to split from all other extant humans. Our results consistently place the newly identified ancestry within the same ancestral lineage but suggest that the Namib-related ancestry diverged from all other southern African ancestries, followed by a split of northern and southern Kalahari ancestries.” With this new information, the researchers could reconstruct the fine-scale histories of contact emerging from the migration of Khoe-Kwadi-speaking pastoralists and Bantu-speaking farmers into southern Africa. Moreover, the study demonstrates that modern DNA research targeting understudied regions of high ethnolinguistic diversity can complement ancient DNA studies in probing the deep genetic structure of the African continent.

Deforestation is a major contributor to climate change, producing between 6 and 17 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to a 2009 study. Meanwhile, because trees also absorb carbon dioxide, removing it from the atmosphere, they help keep the Earth cooler. And climate change aside, forests protect biodiversity.

“Climate change and biodiversity make this a global problem, not a local problem,” says MIT economist Ben Olken. “Deciding to cut down trees or not has huge implications for the world.”

But deforestation is often financially profitable, so it continues at a rapid rate. Researchers can now measure this trend closely: In the last quarter-century, satellite-based technology has led to a paradigm change in charting deforestation. New deforestation datasets, based on the Landsat satellites, for instance, track forest change since 2000 with resolution at 30 meters, while many other products now offer frequent imaging at close resolution.

“Part of this revolution in measurement is accuracy, and the other part is coverage,” says Clare Balboni, an assistant professor of economics at the London School of Economics (LSE). “On-site observation is very expensive and logistically challenging, and you’re talking about case studies. These satellite-based data sets just open up opportunities to see deforestation at scale, systematically, across the globe.”

Balboni and Olken have now helped write a new paper providing a road map for thinking about this crisis. The open-access article, “The Economics of Tropical Deforestation,” appears this month in the Annual Review of Economics. The co-authors are Balboni, a former MIT faculty member; Aaron Berman, a PhD candidate in MIT’s Department of Economics; Robin Burgess, an LSE professor; and Olken, MIT’s Jane Berkowitz Carlton and Dennis William Carlton Professor of Microeconomics. Balboni and Olken have also conducted primary research in this area, along with Burgess.

So, how can the world tackle deforestation? It starts with understanding the problem.

Replacing forests with farms

Several decades ago, some thinkers, including the famous MIT economist Paul Samuelson in the 1970s, built models to study forests as a renewable resource; Samuelson calculated the “maximum sustained yield” at which a forest could be cleared while being regrown. These frameworks were designed to think about tree farms or the U.S. national forest system, where a fraction of trees would be cut each year, and then new trees would be grown over time to take their place.

But deforestation today, particularly in tropical areas, often looks very different, and forest regeneration is not common.

Indeed, as Balboni and Olken emphasize, deforestation is now rampant partly because the profits from chopping down trees come not just from timber, but from replacing forests with agriculture. In Brazil, deforestation has increased along with agricultural prices; in Indonesia, clearing trees accelerated as the global price of palm oil went up, leading companies to replace forests with palm tree orchards.

All this tree-clearing creates a familiar situation: The globally shared costs of climate change from deforestation are “externalities,” as economists say, imposed on everyone else by the people removing forest land. It is akin to a company that pollutes into a river, affecting the water quality of residents.

“Economics has changed the way it thinks about this over the last 50 years, and two things are central,” Olken says. “The relevance of global externalities is very important, and the conceptualization of alternate land uses is very important.” This also means traditional forest-management guidance about regrowth is not enough. With the economic dynamics in mind, which policies might work, and why?

The search for solutions

As Balboni and Olken note, economists often recommend “Pigouvian” taxes (named after the British economist Arthur Pigou) in these cases, levied against people imposing externalities on others. And yet, it can be hard to identify who is doing the deforesting.

Instead of taxing people for clearing forests, governments can pay people to keep forests intact. The UN uses Payments for Environmental Services (PES) as part of its REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) program. However, it is similarly tough to identify the optimal landowners to subsidize, and these payments may not match the quick cash-in of deforestation. A 2017 study in Uganda showed PES reduced deforestation somewhat; a 2022 study in Indonesia found no reduction; another 2022 study, in Brazil, showed again that some forest protection resulted.

“There’s mixed evidence from many of these [studies],” Balboni says. These policies, she notes, must reach people who would otherwise clear forests, and a key question is, “How can we assess their success compared to what would have happened anyway?”

Some places have tried cash transfer programs for larger populations. In Indonesia, a 2020 study found such subsidies reduced deforestation near villages by 30 percent. But in Mexico, a similar program meant more people could afford milk and meat, again creating demand for more agriculture and thus leading to more forest-clearing.

At this point, it might seem that laws simply banning deforestation in key areas would work best — indeed, about 16 percent of the world’s land overall is protected in some way. Yet the dynamics of protection are tricky. Even with protected areas in place, there is still “leakage” of deforestation into other regions.

Still more approaches exist, including “nonstate agreements,” such as the Amazon Soy Moratorium in Brazil, in which grain traders pledged not to buy soy from deforested lands, and reduced deforestation without “leakage.”

Also, intriguingly, a 2008 policy change in the Brazilian Amazon made agricultural credit harder to obtain by requiring recipients to comply with environmental and land registration rules. The result? Deforestation dropped by up to 60 percent over nearly a decade.

Politics and pulp

Overall, Balboni and Olken observe, beyond “externalities,” two major challenges exist. One, it is often unclear who holds property rights in forests. In these circumstances, deforestation seems to increase. Two, deforestation is subject to political battles.

For instance, as economist Bard Harstad of Stanford University has observed, environmental lobbying is asymmetric. Balboni and Olken write: “The conservationist lobby must pay the government in perpetuity … while the deforestation-oriented lobby need pay only once to deforest in the present.” And political instability leads to more deforestation because “the current administration places lower value on future conservation payments.”

Even so, national political measures can work. In the Amazon from 2001 to 2005, Brazilian deforestation rates were three to four times higher than on similar land across the border, but that imbalance vanished once the country passed conservation measures in 2006. However, deforestation ramped up again after a 2014 change in government. Looking at particular monitoring approaches, a study of Brazil’s satellite-based Real-Time System for Detection of Deforestation (DETER), launched in 2004, suggests that a 50 percent annual increase in its use in municipalities created a 25 percent reduction in deforestation from 2006 to 2016.

How precisely politics matters may depend on the context. In a 2021 paper, Balboni and Olken (with three colleagues) found that deforestation actually decreased around elections in Indonesia. Conversely, in Brazil, one study found that deforestation rates were 8 to 10 percent higher where mayors were running for re-election between 2002 and 2012, suggesting incumbents had deforestation industry support.

“The research there is aiming to understand what the political economy drivers are,” Olken says, “with the idea that if you understand those things, reform in those countries is more likely.”

Looking ahead, Balboni and Olken also suggest that new research estimating the value of intact forest land intact could influence public debates. And while many scholars have studied deforestation in Brazil and Indonesia, fewer have examined the Democratic Republic of Congo, another deforestation leader, and sub-Saharan Africa.

Deforestation is an ongoing crisis. But thanks to satellites and many recent studies, experts know vastly more about the problem than they did a decade or two ago, and with an economics toolkit, can evaluate the incentives and dynamics at play.

“To the extent that there’s ambuiguity across different contexts with different findings, part of the point of our review piece is to draw out common themes — the important considerations in determining which policy levers can [work] in different circumstances,” Balboni says. “That’s a fast-evolving area. We don’t have all the answers, but part of the process is bringing together growing evidence about [everything] that affects how successful those choices can be.”

The study highlights the severity and scale of the landscape fire-sourced air pollution, its increased impact on the world’s population and associated rise in public health risk. Exposure to fire-sourced air pollution has many adverse health impacts, including increased mortality and morbidity and a global worsening of cardiorespiratory conditions and mental health.

The study, published today (20 September) in Nature led by Australian scientists, estimated the global daily air pollution from all fires from 2000 to 2019 — finding that 2.18 billion people were exposed to at least one day of substantial landscape fire air pollution in each year, with each person in the world having on average 9.9 days of exposure per year, an increase of 2.1 per cent in the last decade. It also found that exposure levels in low-income countries were about four-fold higher than in high income countries.

Led by Professors Yuming Guo and Shanshan Li, from Monash University’s School of Population Health and Preventive Medicine, the study also found that the exposure levels of PM_2.5 were particularly high in Central Africa, Southeast Asia, South America and Siberia. The study also looked at global landscape fire-sourced ozone, an important fire-related pollutant has only been estimated for United States.

In the study, landscape fires refer to any fires burning in natural and cultural landscapes, e.g. natural and planted forest, shrub, grass, pastures, agricultural lands and peri-urban areas, including both planned or controlled fires (e.g., prescribed burns, agricultural fires) and wildfires (defined as uncontrolled or unplanned fires burning in wildland vegetation).

The comprehensive assessment of the global population exposures to fire-sourced PM_2.5 and ozone during 2000-2019 was calculated using a machine learning approach with inputs from chemical transport models, ground-based monitoring stations, and gridded weather data.

The recent pollution from the Canadian wildfires that spread smoke across North America highlighted the increase in severity and frequency of landscape fires due to climate change. According to Professor Guo, no study to date has looked at the long-range effect of this increase in landscape fires globally and wildfires often impact remote areas where there are few or no air quality monitoring stations. In addition, in many low-income countries, there are no air quality monitoring stations even in urban areas.

“The exposure to air pollution caused by landscape fire smoke travelling hundreds and sometimes even thousands of kilometres can affect much larger populations, and cause much larger public health risks,” he said.

“Mapping and tracking the population exposure to landscape fire-sourced air pollution are essential for monitoring and managing its health impacts, implementing targeted prevention and interventions, and strengthening arguments for mitigation of climate change.”

Imagine a world where business not only thrives but also nurtures the planet we call home. A world where sustainability isn’t just a buzzword but a powerful driver of profits and purpose. With a few changes to typical business practices, you can begin to practice sustainable entrepreneurship, a way to measure success that goes hand in hand with making a positive impact.

In our fast-paced and environmentally conscious era, testing sustainable options for your product and company has become nothing short of essential. 50% of consumers across all industries cited sustainability as one of the top 5 factors driving their purchasing decisions.

As an entrepreneur with a vision, you may be eager to unlock the secrets of success while leaving a greener footprint behind. But where do you begin? How can you navigate the dynamic landscape of sustainability? Start with actionable strategies and a step-by-step process to test sustainable options for your business.

Whether you’re an aspiring entrepreneur or a seasoned business owner, your initial choices represent an opportunity to dive into the world of sustainable entrepreneurship and emerge with a business that is stronger, wiser, and ready to reshape the future.

Editor’s Note: This article is based on “Sustainable Entrepreneurship Training” offered by Shift Group. If you purchase an item through one of these links, Earth911 receives a small commission that helps fund our Recycling Directory.

Step One: Screen for Sustainable Ideas

As a savvy entrepreneur, you know that sustainable ideas power successful businesses and help them generate even more profits as other non-sustainable businesses around them struggle to breathe.

Take Tesla, for instance, a company that revolutionized the automotive industry by prioritizing electric vehicles and renewable energy solutions. Today, it’s the most valuable carmaker in the world, worth more than 10 times more than Ford or General Motors, demonstrating that sustainability and profitability can go hand in hand.

Here’s how you can find and embrace some of the game-changing concepts in the sustainability space that can help your business idea take shape:

• Stay informed and inspired: Keep your finger on the pulse of environmental and social trends while taking the time to understand how progress is measured. Engage with industry thought leaders, attend sustainability events, and immerse yourself in sustainable business trends. These insights will spark your creativity and fuel your innovation.
• Seek inspiration from success stories: Look for successful sustainable companies within your industry and beyond, because their innovations can inform how you go about transforming your industry. Study their business models, value propositions, and environmental and social impact. Learn from their approaches and identify potential areas for innovation, especially in sustainability.
• Collaborate with like-minded people and businesses: In the quest for sustainable ideas, collaboration can be a powerful tool. Partnering with like-minded organizations can spark new ideas, inspire innovative solutions, and open doors to valuable resources. Additionally, establishing strong relationships with sustainable vendors and suppliers can ensure a reliable and ethical supply chain, reinforcing your commitment to sustainability.  And of course, adding to your credibility.
• Embrace empathy: Understanding the needs and challenges of your target audience is fundamental to screening for sustainable ideas that lead to business growth. Empathize with your potential customers to gain insights into their sustainability preferences, pain points, and aspirations. Conduct surveys, interviews, or focus groups – even if it’s with a small sample size – to listen actively and learn from their perspectives. By putting yourself in their shoes, you can identify gaps in the market, discover unmet needs, and develop sustainable solutions that directly address your audience’s concerns.

Step Two: Adapt Your Sustainability Plan as Your Market Changes

Sustainability is not a static concept; it’s a dynamic force that evolves over time – and companies need to evolve with it. Take the example of Patagonia, an outdoor clothing company that recognized the growing demand for sustainable products and transparent supply chains. Renee Chouinard led the sustainable business movement, adapting to changing consumer values by championing environmental initiatives and even encouraging customers to buy used products through their “Worn Wear” program to promote a circular economy. The result? Patagonia has the best business reputation in the nation.

Here are steps you can take to stay ahead of the game by adapting to key market changes and incorporating them into your product development:

• Agile and adaptive approach: Embrace an agile mindset that allows you to respond quickly to changing market demands. This flexibility will enable you to align your products and services with evolving sustainability enhancements.
• Fuel innovation: Encourage a culture of innovation within your team. Foster creativity, reward experimentation, and provide space for ideas to flourish, including the room for errors that help you learn faster. Sustainable businesses are born from innovation.
• Leverage data: Utilize data and analytics to identify emerging sustainability patterns, as well as to measure your progress toward environmental goals. Understand customer preferences, market dynamics, and the impact of your sustainable initiatives.

Step Three: Define Your Product/Service

A clear definition is the cornerstone of a successful sustainable business to help it stand out from the crowd:

• Address customer pain points: Let’s face it, most businesses have ignored their customers’ environmental concerns. Stand apart. Uncover the pain points your customers face and design your offering to address those specific challenges. Remember, your solution should be the answer they’ve been searching for.
• Showcase sustainability: Communicate the sustainable features of your product/service with the appropriate context. One change to a product does not make it green, but it can be presented as a step in the right direction. Take the time to explain your choices of low-carbon or natural materials, how you achieve energy efficiency, and how you create meaningful social impact. Focus on how your product or service directly addresses your customers’ needs and pain points. Will it save them time and money, or reduce their carbon footprint? Does it improve their health, well-being, or overall quality of life?
• Compelling value proposition: A well-crafted value proposition connects with your target audience, aligns with their values, and positions your brand as the top choice in the market. Clearly communicate how your product or service stands out from the competition – features tell but benefits sell – while making a positive impact on the planet.

Step Four: Find Market Fit as a Sustainable Company

Achieving market fit, the proof that customers will buy your product or service, is essential for any business, especially sustainable ones. For example, the success of TOMS Shoes lies in achieving market fit by connecting its sustainable business model with a social cause. For every pair of shoes sold, TOMS donates a pair to a child in need, attracting customers who align with their philanthropic mission.

To ensure that your offering resonates with your target market, follow these steps:

• Understand your target audience: Take the time to understand your ideal customer’s values and preferences related to sustainability, then tailor your solution to align with their unique needs. There are many ways to understand your target audience, including interviews, focus groups, and surveys, but the best way to understand your target audience is to be one of them. For example, the best way to design and sell organic cotton jumpers for infants is to be a mom who has an infant and understands the challenges that people like her face.
• Test and refine: Validate your sustainable offering with a select group of potential customers or early adopters. Gather feedback, iterate, and refine your product/service based on these insights. More about this below.
• Engage with your customers: Maintain a close relationship with your customers to gain ongoing insights. Track satisfaction levels, retention rates, and referrals. Remember, happy customers are your brand ambassadors.

Step Six: Learn The Numbers of ESG/Sustainability

Financial sustainability is the backbone of any business. Incorporating environmentally sustainable practices into a company’s financial model is essential for long-term success as it mitigates risks, reduces costs, enhances brand reputation, attracts capital and top talent, fosters innovation, gives the company a competitive edge, and prepares the business for a changing market. Here’s a quick overview of how you can align your financial components with ESG principles:

• Explore sustainable investment and financing: Seek out sustainable investment and financing options, then ask about how they arrived at their criteria for which businesses to fund. Interview leaders at impact investment funds, sustainable banking institutions, and grants tailored for sustainable businesses. Apply the lessons to your financing strategy.
• Calculate all the returns: Develop financial models that assess the return on sustainability investments, not just financial outcomes. Consider cost savings, increased market share, brand reputation, and long-term resilience. And if you have an investor, you will also need to consider the kind of return – in money and impact — they want.
• Transparency and reporting: Embrace transparent reporting of your sustainability initiatives and performance. Share your progress through sustainability reports, ESG disclosures, and dedicated website sections.

Step Seven: Fine-Tune Your Business Idea

Even superheroes need fine-tuning. Your sustainable business idea is important, so ensure its viability and success in the market with continuous reflection and refinement. Entrepreneurs can align their offerings with customer needs, identify unique selling points, and address potential challenges – it just takes time and a focus on sustainable outcomes. This iterative process allows for better market fit, a stronger value proposition, and a more competitive position in sustainability.

Try these approaches to refine your sustainable business concept:

• Feedback from stakeholders and experts: Engage with customers, employees, vendors, investors, mentors, and industry experts. Gather feedback on your business idea and use their insights to improve your model.
• Leverage industry networks: Connect with sustainability-focused industry associations, attend conferences, and join forums or communities. Networking will bring fresh perspectives and collaborations.
• Embrace a growth mindset: Focus on continuous learning, adaptation, and innovation. Challenge assumptions and explore new possibilities. Your growth mindset will drive you forward.

Become Part of a Community That Helps You Grow

You’ve begun the journey in the exciting world of testing sustainable options for your product and company. And the adventure doesn’t end here. To unlock your full potential as a sustainable entrepreneur, we invite you to join the transformative “Sustainable Entrepreneurship Training” course that Shift Group offers.

In this exclusive course, you’ll learn from not one, not two, but five experts. Access 102 engaging course videos, a treasure trove of resources, and real-world examples. With Shift Group’s carefully curated training, you’ll be equipped with the skills to create a pitch-ready business idea and a roadmap to success.

And as a part of the global community of sustainable entrepreneurs on a mission to restore the planet – a community that you will also join upon graduating from our program – you’ll be making a lasting impact while building a profitable business.

Enroll in the “Sustainable Entrepreneurship Training” course and embark on your sustainable business journey with Shift Group today! Use the discount code “Earth911D” during checkout to save 20% on the list price of the course.

About the author

Stefan Doering is this course’s host and Managing Director at Shift Group. He has started and run seven of his own businesses and has been innovating in business and sustainability since 1987. He also teaches and coaches green businesses in three major areas: innovating powerful green business models, crafting and implementing marketing and positioning strategies for bringing green to the mainstream, and creating a consistently profitable and sustainable business.

Warm ocean waters from the developing El Niño are shifting north along coastlines in the eastern Pacific Ocean. Along the coast of California, these warm waters are interacting with a persistent marine heat wave that recently influenced the development of Hurricane Hilary. The Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite is able to spot the movement of these warm ocean waters in unprecedented detail.

A collaboration between NASA and the French space agency, CNES (Centre National d’Études Spatiales), SWOT is measuring the height of nearly all water on Earth’s surface, providing one of the most detailed, comprehensive views yet of the planet’s oceans and fresh water lakes and rivers.

Water expands as it warms, so sea levels tend to be higher in places with warmer water. El Niño – a periodic climate phenomenon that can affect weather patterns around the world – is characterized by higher sea levels and warmer-than-average ocean temperatures along the western coast of the Americas. The image above shows sea surface heights off the U.S. West Coast, near the California-Oregon border, in August. Red and orange indicate higher-than-average ocean heights, while blue and green represent lower-than-average heights.

The SWOT science team made the measurements with the Ka-band Radar Interferometer (KaRIn) instrument. With two antennas spread 33 feet (10 meters) apart on a boom, KaRIn produces a pair of data swaths as it circles the globe, bouncing radar pulses off the water’s surface to collect water-height measurements. The visualization combines data from two passes of the SWOT satellite.

“SWOT’s ability to measure sea surface so close to the coast will be invaluable for researchers but also forecasters looking at things like the development and progress of worldwide phenomena like El Niño,” said Ben Hamlington, a sea level researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

Watch Latest Water Satellite Unfold Itself in Space

In its September outlook, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecast a greater than 70% chance for a strong El Niño this coming winter. In addition to warmer water, El Niño is also associated with a weakening of the equatorial trade winds. The phenomenon can bring cooler, wetter conditions to the U.S. Southwest and drought to countries in the western Pacific, such as Indonesia and Australia.

More About the Mission

Launched on Dec. 16, 2022, from Vandenberg Space Force Base in central California, SWOT is now in its operations phase, collecting data that will be used for research and other purposes.

SWOT was jointly developed by NASA and CNES, with contributions from the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and the UK Space Agency. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed for the agency by Caltech in Pasadena, California, leads the U.S. component of the project. For the flight system payload, NASA provided the KaRIn instrument, a GPS science receiver, a laser retroreflector, a two-beam microwave radiometer, and NASA instrument operations. CNES provided the Doppler Orbitography and Radioposition Integrated by Satellite (DORIS) system, the dual frequency Poseidon altimeter (developed by Thales Alenia Space), the KaRIn radio-frequency subsystem (together with Thales Alenia Space and with support from the UK Space Agency), the satellite platform, and ground operations. CSA provided the KaRIn high-power transmitter assembly. NASA provided the launch vehicle and the agency’s Launch Services Program, based at Kennedy Space Center, managed the associated launch services.

To learn more about SWOT, visit:

https://swot.jpl.nasa.gov/

Eastern hemlocks are an ecologically important tree species found from eastern Canada to the Great Lakes states and south along the entire Appalachian mountain range. The hemlock woolly adelgid — an invasive insect that was introduced to North America 70 years ago and has spread along the East Coast — can kill a hemlock tree in as little as four years.

“An integrated pest management strategy is the best approach in cases like this,” says Robert Jetton, associate professor of forest health at North Carolina State University and study co-author. “Integrated pest management utilizes multiple tactics to combat insect pests and can include chemical insecticides, seed preservation, biological control, and silviculture, or managing the surrounding forest.

“This study focused on silviculture. Is there a way to actively manage a forest to improve the health of eastern hemlocks?”

The study began in 2017. Jetton and colleagues from the U.S. Department of Agriculture selected 105 eastern hemlock trees in national and state forests along the Appalachians from Maryland to Georgia. They created small or large canopy gaps around the trees by either felling or girdling the competing trees. Felling is cutting down the tree outright, while girdling refers to killing the tree by removing its access to nutrients, but not cutting it down.

The gaps around the hemlocks ranged in size from .05 to .15 acre. Small gaps were created by felling or girdling any competing tree that overlapped the hemlock’s outermost branches, or dripline. For large gaps, they created a radius around the hemlock that was equal to the dripline plus 25% of the average tree height in the stand.

For comparison, the researchers also monitored a control group which consisted of hemlocks that didn’t have canopy gaps created around them.

The researchers collected data on the trees every six months from late 2017 through early 2021. One tree had died (due to another tree falling on it), but overall, even though all of the “canopy gap” trees in the study were infested with woolly adelgid, their health had substantially improved. By comparison, the health of the control trees continued to decline.

“The major benefit of the treatment is that the trees’ crown health improved, especially in areas where we did the large fell,” Jetton says. “Crown health refers to the tree’s foliage — its color and density. With all four gap treatments, we saw that the trees continued to produce new shoot growth annually, though this effect was greatest in the large fells. This is good news because woolly adelgids feed on branch tips, so one of the first effects of infestation is that the tree stops producing new growth.”

While the treatment’s effectiveness varied by region — it was more effective in the southernmost sites (North Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee) — the researchers believe the results are encouraging.

“The canopy gaps give the trees better access to resources like water and nutrients that help them deal with the adelgid,” Jetton says. “While it doesn’t cause the adelgid population to decrease, it may be giving trees the ability to ‘outgrow’ the insect’s impact, at least temporarily.”

The study is ongoing, and the researchers plan to focus on stands of hemlocks, rather than single trees, next.

“Our study was conducted in forests where hemlocks occurred under a canopy of primarily hardwood trees, which lose their leaves in fall and winter,” says Albert Mayfield, entomologist with the USDA Forest Service and study co-author. “So, the response of hemlocks to canopy gaps might be different in pure hemlock forests, where there is more year-round shade. But our sites were very typical of the southern Appalachian forests, where hemlock trees are usually mixed with hardwood trees.”

“We see silviculture as part of the overall pest management strategy,” says Jetton. “Hopefully it will benefit biological control efforts by allowing the adelgid’s predators to establish populations, and it may decrease our use of chemicals. But the bottom line is this study shows silviculture is another tool in the toolkit to increase the survival rate of eastern hemlocks.”

The study appears in Forest Ecology and Management and was supported by the USDA Forest Service Special Technology Development Program. Albert Mayfield of the USDA Forest Service is corresponding author. NC State research associate Andy Whittier, and USDA Forest Service members Bryan Mudder, Tara Keyser, and James Rhea, also contributed to the work.

The article, based on research led by Utrecht University in the Netherlands, brought together a group of scholars with broad expertise in global sustainability governance. “Our research has shown that the SDGs lack any sizeable impact on political systems,” argues Frank Biermann, professor at Utrecht University and the lead author of this study. He continues, “Now is the moment for change. Governments must urgently launch a process to strengthen the SDG framework through four make-or-break reform measures.”

Four reforms needed

First, the expert group calls for the SDGs to be strengthened in a way that commits high-income countries to stronger and more concrete action. So far, wealthier countries often focus on those SDGs that they can most easily achieve, and the agenda’s universal approach may be obscuring unequal global consumption and emissions patterns. Also, with inadequate finance holding back SDG implementation in the Global South, stronger commitments by high-income countries to equitable financing solutions are needed.

Second, the SDGs must be adjusted to new challenges, improved scientific understanding, and past failures in implementation. The goals must become more adaptable to escalating crises of ecological breakdown, global pandemics, and rising inequalities, and the UN should introduce regular review rounds where countries can adjust their ambitions to evolving global circumstances.

Third, the SDGs are not legally binding and are often merely vague commitments. While this approach has helped to bring all governments together under the broad banner of the SDGs, it is no longer enough. Instead, governments must together take steps to turn at least parts of the SDGs into binding international law. The authors highlight the ongoing negotiations for an international treaty to end plastic pollution as an example, which is linked to SDG 12 (Sustainable Production and Consumption).

Fourth, many SDGs are poorly embedded in the structures, policies, practices, and norms of local, national, and international institutions and political systems. Governments need to build stronger institutions, both internationally and at home, to make the SDGs a fundamental part of how they operate and make decisions. To support this, the researchers argue that much stronger global oversight of the SDGs is needed. One option would be the creation of a UN Council on Sustainable Development as a major center of global sustainability coordination in the UN system. They also draw on recent research showing the SDGs are making notable impact through the work of cities, provinces, and parts of civil society, arguing that strengthening these networks can also play a key role in accelerating the SDG agenda.

A global agenda

“The SDGs must be supported across the board by all levels of government, civil society and the private sector. Only this will ensure that our world will make meaningful progress towards global sustainability,” argues Dr. Yixian Sun, an assistant professor at University of Bath in the United Kingdom and co-author of this study.

The UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals sit at the heart of the UN’s global “2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” One of a string of recent high-profile global megaconferences attempting to mobilize action for a sustainable future, the UN SDG Summit in September 2023 could act as a springboard to achieving the goals by 2030. Professor Biermann: “The SDG Summit is a crucial event to pave the way for a major reform process that will allow the floundering SDGs to deliver on their promise of a global sustainability transition, while ensuring that no one is left behind.”