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      Western wildfires’ health risks extend across the country

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      After a relaxing day at the Jersey Shore last July, Jessica Reeder and her son and daughter headed back home to Philadelphia. As they crested a bridge from New Jersey into Pennsylvania, they were greeted with a hazy, yellow-gray sky. It reminded Reeder of the smoky skies she saw growing up in Southern California on days when fires burned in the dry canyons.

      Smelling smoke and worried about her asthma and her kids, Reeder flipped the switch to recirculate the air inside the car instead of drawing from the outside. At home, the family closed all the windows and turned their air purifiers on high.

      The smoke had traveled from fires raging on the other side of the continent, in the western United States and Canada. Although air quality in Philadelphia didn’t come close to the record-bad air quality that some western cities experienced, it was bad enough to trigger air quality warnings — and not just for people with asthma or heart problems.

      Most large U.S. wildfires occur in the West. But the smoke doesn’t stay there. It travels eastward, affecting communities hundreds to thousands of kilometers away from the fires. In fact, the majority of asthma-related deaths and emergency room visits attributed to fire smoke in the United States occur in eastern cities, according to a study in the September 2021 GeoHealth.

      Smoke poured into the eastern United States and Canada from wildfires in the West on July 21, 2021 (darker red is denser smoke). Residents of eastern cities received code orange and code red warnings that air quality was unhealthy.Joshua Stevens/NASA Earth Observatory

      The big problem is fine particulate matter, tiny particles also known as PM2.5. These bits of ash, gases and other detritus suspended in smoke are no more than 2.5 micrometers wide, small enough to lodge in the lungs and cause permanent damage. PM2.5 exacerbates respiratory and cardiovascular problems and can lead to premature death. The particles can also cause asthma and other chronic conditions in otherwise healthy adults and children.

      Over the last few decades, U.S. clean air regulations have cut down on particulate matter from industrial pollution, so the air has been getting cleaner, especially in the populous eastern cities. But the regulations don’t address particulate matter from wildfire smoke, which recent studies show is chemically different from industrial air pollution, potentially more hazardous to humans and increasing significantly.

      So far, a lot of the research on how wildfire PM2.5 can make people sick has been based on people living or working near fires in the West. Now, researchers are turning their attention to how PM2.5 from smoke affects the big population centers in the East, far from the wildfires. One thing is clear: With the intensity and frequency of wildfires increasing due to climate change (SN: 12/19/20 & 1/2/21, p. 32), people across North America need to be concerned about the health impacts, says Katelyn O’Dell, an atmospheric scientist at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

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      Bad air travels

      Air pollution regulations limit PM2.5 from exhaust-emitting cars and trucks and fossil fuel–burning factories and power plants. These regulations have done “a really good job” reducing anthropogenic air pollution in the last couple of decades, says Rosana Aguilera, an environmental scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif. In the United States, concentrations of six of the most common air pollutants have dropped by 78 percent since the Clean Air Act of 1970, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. PM2.5 concentrations have come down as well — at least until recently.

      Western wildfires, which are growing more frequent, more severe and larger, are erasing some of the gains made in reducing industrial pollution, says Rebecca Buchholz, an atmospheric chemist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.

      Fires in the Pacific Northwest are “driving an upward trend” in particulate matter air pollution, Buchholz and colleagues wrote April 19 in Nature Communications. Such smoke pollution peaks in August when fires in the region tend to spike and the atmosphere’s ability to clean itself through, say, rain, is limited. This spike of late-summer air pollution is new, Buchholz says. It’s especially noticeable since 2012.

      New York City, visible through hazy skies in September 2020, and many places in the East have seen some of the worst air quality in decades due to fires burning in the U.S. West and in Canada. Such fires are increasing in intensity and frequency.Gary Hershorn/Getty Images plus

      And, as Reeder and her family experienced last year, transported wildfire pollution is causing substantial particulate matter spikes in the central United States and northeastern North America, Buchholz and colleagues found. Pacific Northwest wildfires thus “have the potential to impact surface air quality, even at large distances downwind of the wildfires,” the team wrote, putting some 23 million people in the central United States and 72 million in northeastern North America at increased risk of health impacts from the imported wildfire smoke.

      How far and where PM2.5 travels depends on weather patterns and how high wildfire smoke reaches — the stronger the fire, the longer it can last and the farther smoke can go, and thus the farther particulate matter can reach. Last year, far-away wildfires created unhealthy air quality conditions in locations from the Great Plains to New York City and Washington, D.C.

      New York City saw some of its worst air quality in two decades. Philadelphia had two “code red” days — meaning air quality was unhealthy for all — because of the U.S. West and Canadian fires. In 2019, 2020 and 2021, those fires pushed PM2.5 to unhealthy levels in much of Minnesota. In fact, a 2018 study showed that wildfire smoke plumes now waft above Minnesota for eight to 12 days per month between June and September.

      Human impacts

      Smoke in the West is already having a tangible effect on human health in the East, says O’Dell, lead author of the 2021 GeoHealth study.

      Reviewing smoke and health data from 2006 to 2018, O’Dell and colleagues found that more people visit emergency rooms and are hospitalized in the East than in the West from asthma problems attributable to smoke PM2.5. Asthma-related ER visits and hospitalizations were higher east of the Rockies in 11 of the 13 years.

      Over the study period, an average of 74 percent of asthma-related deaths and 75 percent of asthma ER visits and hospitalizations attributable to smoke occurred east of the Rockies. Of the estimated 6,300 excess deaths from asthma complications due to smoke PM2.5 that occurred annually over the study period, more than 4,600 were in the East.

      Smoke affects so many more people in the East primarily because more people live there, O’Dell notes. Her team defined “West” as west of the Rockies, with a population of 64 million, and “East” as east of the Rockies, home to 226 million people. In the West, smoke PM2.5 causes a higher portion of regional asthma deaths. In the East, it’s a lower portion of the total population, but a far higher total number of people affected.

      “We may be already seeing the consequences of these fires on the health of residents who live hundreds or even thousands of miles downwind,” Buchholz said in a press release.

      Vulnerable youth

      “Asthma is a very widespread, common health condition,” says Yang Liu, an environmental scientist at Emory University in Atlanta. In the United States, about 25 million people have asthma, or 8 percent of adults and 7 percent of children, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

      Fine particulate matter can spark asthma attacks, but it can also be a danger to people without the condition. Children are especially vulnerable primarily because of physiology. Children breathe faster so they end up taking in more particulate matter, plus their lungs are smaller so more of their lung surface is likely to be damaged when they breathe in particulate matter. And their lungs are still developing, says Jennifer Stowell, an environmental epidemiologist at Boston University School of Public Health.

      Stowell led a study, reported in the January Environmental Research Letters, estimating how much wildfire smoke will exacerbate asthma attacks in the West. Stowell, Liu and colleagues estimate that, in the 2050s, there will be an additional 155,000 asthma-related ER visits and hospitalizations per wildfire season in the West just from smoke PM2.5. The biggest concern, Stowell says, is for children and younger adults.

      Aguilera, of Scripps, and her colleagues found associations between wildfire-specific PM2.5 and pediatric respiratory-related ER and urgent care visits. In San Diego County from 2011 to 2017, wildfire-specific PM2.5 was 10 times as harmful to respiratory health in children 5 and younger as ambient PM2.5, the researchers reported in 2021 in Pediatrics. In fact, the same increase in levels of PM2.5 from smoke versus ambient sources caused a 26 percent higher rate of ER or urgent care visits. The researchers didn’t note whether the children had preexisting asthma.

      And even when a wildfire increased PM2.5 by a small amount, respiratory ER and urgent care visits in kids 12 and under increased, Aguilera and colleagues reported in 2020 in the Annals of the American Thoracic Society. “Even relatively smaller wildfires can still generate quite an impact on the pediatric population,” Aguilera says. “And really, any amount of PM or air pollution is harmful.”

      Studies of nonhuman primates have also shown permanent effects of smoke on the young — results researchers expect would also apply to humans, given genetic similarities. In 2008, a group of infant rhesus macaques at the California National Primate Research Center at the University of California, Davis was exposed to high PM2.5 levels from a series of devastating wildfires in Northern California. Researchers have been comparing those monkeys with macaques born a year later that weren’t exposed to smoke.

      At the California National Primate Research Center, rhesus macaques that were exposed to wildfire smoke early in life have immune disorders, nervous system changes and weakened lungs. © 2014 Kathy West/California National Primate Research Center/UC Davis

      At around age 3, macaques exposed to smoke displayed immune disorders and reduced lung capacity, lung function and lung volume, says Hong Ji, a molecular biologist at UC Davis and the primate center who wasn’t involved with this study. The lungs look like they had fibrosis, Ji says. “Early life smoke exposure … changed the trajectory of lung development,” and it doesn’t appear to be reversible, she says.

      The monkeys exposed to wildfire PM2.5 also have important changes to how their DNA works, Ji and colleagues reported in the January Environment International. Exposure to wildfire smoke in infancy can cause life-altering, long-term changes to the monkeys’ nervous and immune systems, as well as brain development, Ji says. Even worse, she says, the DNA changes are the type that can be passed down and may result in generational damage.

      Even macaques born after in utero exposure to wildfire smoke can suffer cognitive, immune and hormone problems, primate center researchers reported April 1 in Nature Communications.

      Now, Ji and colleagues have teamed with Rebecca Schmidt, a molecular epidemiologist at UC Davis who’s leading a study on the effects of wildfire smoke exposure on pregnant women and young children. This research group, as well as other teams, is also looking into whether PM2.5 is causing genetic changes to babies exposed to smoke in utero, Ji says. The more results gathered on the effects of wildfire PM2.5 on babies and children — and even in pregnancy — the more dangerous we realize it is, Ji says.

      Chemical differences

      Particulate matter changes as it travels through the atmosphere, both in volume and in chemistry. Some PM2.5 is emitted directly from fires, and some is born from chemicals and trace gases emitted from fires that get chemically processed in the atmosphere, Buchholz says. Reactions that happen in the smoke plume, combined with sunlight, can create even more PM2.5 downwind of the fires. How these particulates change chemically — through interactions between the atmosphere and the particulate matter, and between fire pollution and human pollution — and what that means for human health “is a really active area of research right now,” she says. “It’s super complicated.”

      Epidemiological and atmospheric chemistry studies indicate that wildfire PM2.5 is more hazardous to human health than ambient PM2.5, says Stowell, the Boston epidemiologist. One such study compared particulate matter from Amazonian fires with urban sources such as vehicle exhaust in Atlanta. Nga Lee Ng, an atmospheric chemist at Georgia Tech, and colleagues found that smoke particulate matter is more toxic than urban particulate matter, “inducing about five times higher cellular oxidative stress,” Ng says. Oxidative stress damages cells and DNA in the body.

      In addition, as smoke travels through the atmosphere and ages, it seems to become even more toxic, Ng says. Reactions between the particulate matter and sunlight and atmospheric gases change the particulate matter’s chemical and physical properties, rendering it even more potentially harmful. So, even though particulate matter dissipates over time and distance, “the health effects per gram are greater,” says Daniel Jaffe, an atmospheric chemist at the University of Washington Bothell.

      That means that the studies of health effects near wildfires in the West may not represent the full story of how smoke from distant fires affects people in the East.

      Liu, at Emory, hopes to see the U.S. government revisit policies related to what PM2.5 levels are dangerous, since they’re based on ambient and not wildfire-related PM2.5. In March, an EPA advisory panel recommended just that. In a letter to the agency, the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee wrote: “Regarding the annual PM2.5 standard, all CASAC members agree that the current level of the annual standard is not sufficiently protective of public health and should be lowered.” The committee added, “There is substantial epidemiologic evidence from both morbidity and mortality studies that the current standard is not adequately protective.”

      Local communities throughout the country need to determine when to close schools or at least keep kids inside, Liu says, as well as when to advise people to close windows and turn on air purifiers. Good masks — N95 and KN95 — can help too (yes, masks that block viruses can also block particulate matter).

      City, county and state governments also need to prepare the health care system to respond to increased asthma issues, Liu says. Some states are starting to respond. In 2017, for example, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency increased its air quality monitoring stations around the state from two to 18. The agency is also working with the National Weather Service, the Minnesota Department of Health and the Minnesota Department of Transportation to better communicate air quality warnings.

      Minnesota, after experiencing a rise in smoky summer days, has added extra air quality monitoring stations to improve local forecasts.Minnesota Pollution Control Agency

      In the meantime, much more research is needed into the human health implications of increasing wildfire smoke, Buchholz says, as well as the chemical interactions in the atmosphere, how climate is changing fires, how fires change year after year, and how they impact the atmosphere, not to mention how different trees, buildings and other fuels affect particulate matter.

      “Wildfires are perhaps one of the most visible ways that [climate change] is linked to health,” Stowell says. And the reality is, she says, “we’re going to see it remain as bad or worse for a while.” More

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      Ancient penguin bones reveal unprecedented shrinkage in key Antarctic glaciers

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      Antarctica’s Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers are losing ice more quickly than they have at any time in the last few thousand years, ancient penguin bones and limpet shells suggest.

      Scientists are worried that the glaciers, two of Antarctica’s fastest-shrinking ones, are in the process of unstable, runaway retreat. By reconstructing the history of the glaciers using the old bones and shells, researchers wanted to find out whether these glaciers have ever been smaller than they are today.

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      “If the ice has been smaller in the past, and did readvance, that shows that we’re not necessarily in runaway retreat” right now, says glacial geologist Brenda Hall of the University of Maine in Orono. The new result, described June 9 in Nature Geoscience, “doesn’t give us any comfort,” Hall says. “We can’t refute the hypothesis of a runaway retreat.”

      Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers sit in a broad ocean basin shaped like a bowl, deepening toward the middle. This makes the ice vulnerable to warm currents of dense, salty water that hug the ocean floor (SN: 4/9/21). Scientists have speculated that as the glaciers retreat farther inland, they could tip into an irreversible collapse (SN: 12/13/21).  That collapse could play out over centuries and raise the sea level by roughly a meter.

      Researchers dated ancient shorelines (seen here as the series of small ridges in the rocky terrain between the foreground boulders and background snow) on islands roughly 100 kilometers from Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers in Antarctica to help figure out if the glaciers are in the process of unstable, runaway retreat.James Kirkham

      To reconstruct how the glaciers have changed over thousands of years, the researchers turned to old penguin bones and shells, collected by Scott Braddock, a glacial geologist in Hall’s lab, during a research cruise in 2019 on the U.S. icebreaker Nathaniel B. Palmer.

      One afternoon, Braddock clambered from a bobbing inflatable boat onto the barren shores of Lindsey 1 — one of a dozen or more rocky islands that sit roughly 100 kilometers from where Pine Island Glacier terminates in the ocean. As he climbed the slope, his boots slipped over rocks covered in penguin guano and dotted with dingy white feathers. Then, he came upon a series of ridges — rocks and pebbles that were piled up by waves during storms thousands of years before — that marked ancient shorelines.

      Twelve thousand years ago, just as the last ice age was ending, this island would have been entirely submerged in the ocean. But as nearby glaciers shed billions of metric tons of ice, the removal of that weight allowed Earth’s crust to spring up like a bed mattress — pushing Lindsey 1 and other nearby islands out of the water, a few millimeters per year.

      As Lindsey 1 rose, a series of shorelines formed on the edges of the island — and then were lifted, one after another, out of reach of the waves. By measuring the ages and heights of those stranded shorelines, the researchers could tell how quickly the island had risen. Because the rate of uplift is determined by the amount of ice being lost from nearby glaciers, this would reveal how quickly Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers had retreated — and whether they had gotten smaller than they are today and then readvanced.

      Braddock dug into the pebbly ridges, collecting ancient cone-shaped limpet shells and marble-sized fragments of penguin bones deposited when the shorelines formed. Back in Maine, he and his colleagues radiocarbon dated those objects to estimate the ages of the shorelines. Ultimately, the researchers dated nearly two dozen shorelines, spread across several islands in the region.

      These dates showed that the oldest and highest beach formed 5,500 years ago. Since that time, up until the last few decades, the islands have risen at a steady rate of about 3.5 millimeters per year. This is far slower than the 20 to 40 millimeters per year that the land around Pine Island and Thwaites is currently rising, suggesting that the rate of ice loss from nearby glaciers has skyrocketed due to the onset of rapid human-caused warming, after thousands of years of relative stability.

      “We’re going into unknown territory,” Braddock says. “We don’t have an analog to compare what’s going on today with what happened in the past.”

      Slawek Tulaczyk, a glaciologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, sees the newly dated shorelines as “an important piece of information.” But he cautions against overinterpreting the results. While these islands are 100 kilometers from Pine Island and Thwaites, they are less than 50 kilometers from several smaller glaciers — and changes in these closer glaciers might have obscured whatever was happening at Pine Island and Thwaites long ago. He suspects that Pine Island and Thwaites could still have retreated and then readvanced a few dozen kilometers: “I don’t think this study settles it.” More

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      Growing wildfire threats loom over the birthplace of the atomic bomb

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      There are things I will always remember from my time in New Mexico. The way the bark of towering ponderosa pines smells of vanilla when you lean in close. Sweeping vistas, from forested mountaintops to the Rio Grande Valley, that embellish even the most mundane shopping trip. The trepidation that comes with the tendrils of smoke rising over nearby canyons and ridges during the dry, wildfire-prone summer months.

      There were no major wildfires near Los Alamos National Laboratory during the year and a half that I worked in public communications there and lived just across Los Alamos Canyon from the lab. I’m in Maryland now, and social media this year has brought me images and video clips of the wildfires that have been devastating parts of New Mexico, including the Cerro Pelado fire in the Jemez Mountains just west of the lab.

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      Wherever they pop up, wildfires can ravage the land, destroy property and displace residents by the tens of thousands. The Cerro Pelado fire is small compared with others raging east of Santa Fe — it grew only to the size of Washington, D.C. The fire, which started mysteriously on April 22, is now mostly contained. But at one point it came within 5.6 kilometers of the lab, seriously threatening the place that’s responsible for creating and maintaining key portions of fusion bombs in our nation’s nuclear arsenal.

      That close call may be just a hint of growing fire risks to come for the weapons lab as the Southwest suffers in the grip of an epic drought made worse by human-caused climate change (SN: 4/16/20). May and June typically mark the start of the state’s wildfire season. This year, fires erupted in April and were amplified by a string of warm, dry and windy days. The Hermits Peak and Calf Canyon fires east of Santa Fe have merged to become the largest wildfire in New Mexico’s recorded history.

      Los Alamos National Lab is in northern New Mexico, about 56 kilometers northwest of Santa Fe. The lab’s primary efforts revolve around nuclear weapons, accounting for 71 percent of its $3.9 billion budget, according the lab’s fiscal year 2021 numbers. The budget covers a ramp-up in production of hollow plutonium spheres, known as “pits” because they are the cores of nuclear bombs, to 30 per year beginning in 2026. That’s triple the lab’s current capability of 10 pits per year. The site is also home to radioactive waste and debris that has been a consequence of weapons production since the first atomic bomb was built in Los Alamos in the early 1940s (SN: 8/6/20).

      What is the danger due to fire approaching the lab’s nuclear material and waste? According to literature that Peter Hyde, a spokesperson for the lab, sent to me to ease my concern, not much.

      Over the last 3½ years, the lab has removed 3,500 tons of trees and other potential wildfire fuel from the sprawling, 93-square-kilometer complex. Lab facilities, a lab pamphlet says, “are designed and operated to protect the materials that are inside, and radiological and other potentially hazardous materials are stored in containers that are engineered and tested to withstand extreme environments, including heat from fire.”

      What’s more, most of roughly 20,000 drums full of nuclear waste that were stored under tents on the lab’s grounds have been removed. They were a cause for anxiety during the last major fire to threaten the lab in 2011. According to the most recent numbers on the project’s website, all but 3,812 of those drums have been shipped off to be stored 655 meters underground at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.

      But there’s still 3,500 cubic meters of nuclear waste  in the storage area, according to a March 2022 DOE strategic planning document for Los Alamos. That’s enough to fill 17,000 55-gallon drums. So potentially disastrous quantities of relatively exposed nuclear waste remain at the lab — a single drum from the lab site that exploded after transport to Carlsbad in 2014 resulted in a two-year shutdown of the storage facility. With a total budgeted cleanup cost of $2 billion, the incident is one of the most expensive nuclear accidents in the nation’s history.

      Since the 2011 fire, a wider buffer space around the tents has been cleared of vegetation. In conjunction with fire suppression systems, it’s unlikely that wildfire will be a danger to the waste-filled drums, according to a 2016 risk analysis of extreme wildfire scenarios conducted by the lab.

      But a February 2021 audit by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Inspector General is less rosy. It found that, despite the removal of most of the waste drums and the multiyear wildfire mitigation efforts that the lab describes, the lab’s wildfire protection is still lacking.

      According to the 20-page federal audit, the lab at that time had not developed a “comprehensive, risk-based approach to wildland fire management” in accordance with federal policies related to wildland fire management. The report also noted compounding issues, including the absence of federal oversight of the lab’s wildfire management activities.

      A canyon on lab grounds that runs alongside the adjacent city of Los Alamos (two spots shown) was called out in an audit by the Department of Energy’s Office of Inspector General because it was packed with about 400 to 500 trees per acre. The ideal number from a wildfire management viewpoint is 40 to 50 trees per acre.The Department of Energy’s Wildland Fire Prevention Efforts at the Los Alamos National Laboratory

      Among the ongoing risks, not all fire roads were maintained well enough to provide a safe route for firefighters and others, “which could create dangerous conditions for emergency responders and delay response times,” the auditors wrote.

      And a canyon that runs between the lab and the adjacent town of Los Alamos was identified in the report as being packed with 10 times the number of trees that would be ideal, from a wildfire safety perspective. To make matters worse, there’s a hazardous waste site at the bottom of the canyon that could, the auditors wrote, “produce a health risk to the environment and to human health during a fire.”

      “The report was pretty stark,” says Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “And certainly, after all the warnings, if they’re still not doing all they need to do to fully mitigate the risk, then that’s just foolishness.”

      A 2007 federal audit of Los Alamos, as well as nuclear weapons facilities in Washington state and Idaho, showed similar problems. In short, it seems little has changed at Los Alamos in the 14-year span between 2007 and 2021. Lab spokespeople did not respond to my questions about the lab’s efforts to address the specific problems identified in the 2021 report, despite repeated requests. 

      The Los Alamos area has experienced three major wildfires since the lab was founded — the Cerro Grande fire in 2000, Las Conchas in 2011 and Cerro Pelado this year. But we probably can’t count on 11-year gaps between future wildfires near Los Alamos, according to Alice Hill, the senior fellow for energy and the environment with the Council on Foreign Relations, who’s based in Washington, D.C.

      The changing climate is expected to dramatically affect wildfire risks in years to come, turning Los Alamos and surrounding areas into a tinderbox. A study in 2018 in Climatic Change found that the region extending from the higher elevations in New Mexico, where Los Alamos is located, into Colorado and Arizona will experience the greatest increase in wildfire probabilities in the Southwest. A new risk projection tool that was recommended by Hill, called Risk Factor, also shows increasing fire risk in the Los Alamos area over the next 30 years.

      “We are at the point where we are imagining, as we have to, things that we’ve never experienced,” Hill says. “That is fundamentally different than how we have approached these problems throughout human history, which is to look to the past to figure out how to be safer in the future…. The nature of wildfire has changed as more heat is added [to the planet], as temperatures rise.”

      Increased plutonium pit production will add to the waste that needs to be shipped to Carlsbad. “Certainly, the radiological assessments in sort of the worst case of wildfire could lead to a pretty significant release of radioactivity, not only affecting the workers onsite but also the offsite public. It’s troubling,” says Lyman, who suggests that nuclear labs like Los Alamos should not be located in such fire-prone areas.

      The Los Alamos Neutron Science Center (shown in March of 2019), a key facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory, was evacuated in March 2019 when power lines sparked a nearby wildfire. It could be damaged or even destroyed if a high-intensity wildfire burned through a nearby heavily forested canyon, according to an audit by the Department of Energy’s Office of Inspector General.The Department of Energy’s Wildland Fire Prevention Efforts at the Los Alamos National Laboratory

      For now, some risks from the Cerra Pelado wildfire will persist, according to Jeff Surber, operations section chief for the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forestry Service’s efforts to fight the fire. Large wildfires like Cerra Pelado “hold heat for so long and they continue to smolder in the interior where it burns intermittently,” he said in a May 9 briefing to Los Alamos County residents, and to concerned people like me watching online.

      It will be vital to monitor the footprint of the fire until rain or snow finally snuffs it out late in the year. Even then, some danger will linger in the form of “zombie fires” that can flame up long after wildfires appear to have been extinguished (SN: 5/19/21). “We’ve had fires come back in the springtime because there was a root underground that somehow stayed lit all winter long,” said Surber.

      So the Cerro Pelado fire, and its occasional smoky tendrils, will probably be a part of life in northern New Mexico for months still. And the future seems just as fiery, if not worse. That’s something all residents, including the lab, need to be preparing for.

      Meantime, if you make it out to the mountains of New Mexico soon enough, be sure to sniff a vanilla-flavored ponderosa while you still can. I know I will. More

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      Just 3 ingredients can quickly destroy widely used PFAS ‘forever chemicals’

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      The undoing of toxic “forever chemicals” may be found in products in your pantry.

      Perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also known as PFAS, can persist in the environment for centuries. While the health impacts of only a fraction of the thousands of different types of PFAS have been studied, research has linked exposure to high levels of some of these widespread, humanmade chemicals to health issues such as cancer and reproductive problems.

      Now, a study shows that the combination of ultraviolet light and a couple of common chemicals can break down nearly all the PFAS in a concentrated solution in just hours. The process involves blasting UV radiation at a solution containing PFAS and iodide, which is often added to table salt, and sulfite, a common food preservative, researchers report in the March 15 Environmental Science & Technology.

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      “They show that when [iodide and sulfite] are combined, the system becomes a lot more efficient,” says Garrett McKay, an environmental chemist at Texas A&M University in College Station who was not involved in the study. “It’s a big step forward.”

      A PFAS molecule contains a chain of carbon atoms that are bonded to fluorine atoms. The carbon-fluorine bond is one the strongest known chemical bonds. This sticky bond makes PFAS useful for many applications, such as water- and oil-repellant coatings, firefighting foams and cosmetics (SN: 6/4/19; SN: 6/15/21). Owing to their widespread use and longevity, PFAS have been detected in soils, food and even drinking water. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency sets healthy advisory levels for PFOA and PFOS — two common types of PFAS — at 70 parts per trillion.

      Treatment facilities can filter PFAS out of water using technologies such as activated carbon filters or ion exchange resins. But these removal processes concentrate PFAS into a waste that requires a lot of energy and resources to destroy, says study coauthor Jinyong Liu, an environmental chemist at the University of California, Riverside. “If we don’t [destroy this waste], there will be secondary contamination concerns.”

      One of the most well-studied ways to degrade PFAS involves mixing them into a solution with sulfite and then blasting the mixture with UV rays. The radiation rips electrons from the sulfite, which then move around, snipping the stubborn carbon-fluorine bonds and thereby breaking down the molecules.

      But some PFAS, such as a type known as PFBS, have proven difficult to degrade this way. Liu and his colleagues irradiated a solution containing PFBS and sulfite for an entire day, only to find that less than half of the pollutant in the solution had broken down. Achieving higher levels of degradation required more time and additional sulfite to be poured in at spaced intervals.

      The researchers knew that iodide exposed to UV radiation produces more bond-cutting electrons than sulfite. And previous research has demonstrated that UV irradiation paired with iodide alone could be used to degrade PFAS chemicals.

      So Liu and his colleagues blasted UV rays at a solution containing PFBS, iodide and sulfite. To the researchers’ surprise, after 24 hours of irradiation, less than 1 percent of the stubborn PFBS remained.

      What’s more, the researchers showed that the process destroyed other types of PFAS with similar efficiency and was also effective when PFAS concentrations were 10 times that which UV light and sulfite alone could degrade. And by adding iodide the researchers found that they could speed up the reaction, Liu says, making the process that much more energy efficient.

      In the solution, iodide and sulfite worked together to sustain the destruction of PFAS molecules, Liu explains. When UV rays release an electron from iodide, that iodide is converted into a reactive molecule which may then recapture freed electrons. But here sulfite can step in and bond with these reactive molecules and with electron-scavenging oxygen in the solution. This sulfite “trap” helps keep the released electrons free to cut apart PFAS molecules for eight times longer than if sulfite wasn’t there, the researchers report.

      It’s surprising that no one had demonstrated the effectiveness of using sulfite with iodide to degrade PFAS before, McKay says.

      Liu and his colleagues are now collaborating with an engineering company, using their new process to treat PFAS in a concentrated waste stream. The pilot test will conclude in about two years. More

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      Scientists hope to mimic the most extreme hurricane conditions

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      Winds howl at over 300 kilometers per hour, battering at a two-story wooden house and ripping its roof from its walls. Then comes the water. A 6-meter-tall wave engulfs the structure, knocking the house off its foundation and washing it away.

      That’s the terrifying vision of researchers planning a new state-of-the-art facility to re-create the havoc wreaked by the most powerful hurricanes on Earth. In January, the National Science Foundation awarded a $12.8 million grant to researchers to design a facility that can simulate wind speeds of at least 290 km/h — and can, at the same time, produce deadly, towering storm surges.

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      No facility exists that can produce such a one-two punch of extreme wind and water. But it’s an idea whose time has come — and not a moment too soon.

      “It’s a race against time,” says disaster researcher Richard Olson, director of extreme events research at Florida International University, or FIU, in Miami.

      Hurricanes are being made worse by human-caused climate change: They’re getting bigger, wetter, stronger and slower (SN: 9/13/18; SN: 11/11/20). Scientists project that the 2022 Atlantic Ocean hurricane season, spanning June 1 to November 30, will be the seventh straight season with more storms than average. Recent seasons have been marked by an increase in rapidly intensifying hurricanes linked to warming ocean waters (SN: 12/21/20).

      Those trends are expected to continue as the Earth heats up further, researchers say. And coastal communities around the world need to know how to prepare: how to build structures — buildings, bridges, roads, water and energy systems — that are resilient to such punishing winds and waves.

      To help with those preparations, FIU researchers are leading a team of wind and structural engineers, coastal and ocean engineers, computational modelers and resilience experts from around the United States to work out how best to simulate these behemoths. Combining extreme wind and water surges into one facility is uncharted territory, says Ioannis Zisis, a wind engineer at FIU. “There is a need to push the envelope,” Zisis says. But as for how exactly to do it, “the answer is simple: We don’t know. That’s what we want to find out.”

      Prepping for “Category 6”

      It’s not that such extreme storms haven’t been seen on Earth. Just in the last few years, Hurricanes Dorian (2019) and Irma (2017) in the Atlantic Ocean and super Typhoon Haiyan (2013) in the Pacific Ocean have brought storms with wind speeds well over 290 km/h. Such ultraintense storms are sometimes referred to as “category 6” hurricanes, though that’s not an official designation.

      The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, rates hurricanes in the Atlantic and eastern Pacific oceans on a scale of 1 to 5, based on their wind speeds and how much damage those winds might do. Each category spans an increment of roughly 30 km/h.  

      Category 1 hurricanes, with wind speeds of 119 to 153 km/h, produce “some damage,” bringing down some power lines, toppling trees and perhaps knocking roof shingles or vinyl siding off a house. Category 5 storms, with winds starting at 252 km/h, cause “catastrophic damage,” bulldozing buildings and potentially leaving neighborhoods uninhabitable for weeks to months.

      But 5 is as high as it gets on the official scale; after all, what could be more devastating than catastrophic damage? That means that even monster storms like 2019’s Hurricane Dorian, which flattened the Bahamas with wind speeds of up to nearly 300 km/h, are still considered category 5 (SN: 9/3/19).

      “Strictly speaking, I understand that [NOAA doesn’t] see the need for a category 6,” Olson says. But there is a difference in public perception, he says. “I see it as a different type of storm, a storm that is simply scarier.”

      And labels aside, the need to prepare for these stronger storms is clear, Olson says. “I don’t think anybody wants to be explaining 20 years from now why we didn’t do this,” he says. “We have challenged nature. Welcome to payback.”

      Superstorm simulation

      FIU already hosts the Wall of Wind, a huge hurricane simulator housed in a large hangar anchored at one end by an arc of 12 massive yellow fans. Even at low wind speeds — say, around 50 km/h — the fans generate a loud, unsettling hum. At full blast, those fans can generate wind speeds of up to 252 km/h — equivalent to a low-grade category 5 hurricane.

      Inside, researchers populate the hangar with structures mimicking skyscrapers, houses and trees, or shapes representing the bumps and dips of the ground surface. Engineers from around the world visit the facility to test out the wind resistance of their own creations, watching as the winds pummel at their structural designs.

      Twelve fans tower over one end of the Wall of Wind, a large experimental facility at Florida International University in Miami. There, winds as fast as 252 kilometers per hour let researchers re-create conditions experienced during a low-grade category 5 hurricane.NSF-NHERI Wall of Wind/FIU

      It’s one of eight facilities in a national network of laboratories that study the potential impacts of wind, water and earthquake hazards, collectively called the U.S. Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure, or NHERI.

      The Wall of Wind is designed for full-scale wind testing of entire structures. Another wind machine, hosted at the University of Florida in Gainesville, can zoom in on the turbulent behavior of winds right at the boundary between the atmosphere and ground. Then there are the giant tsunami- and storm surge–simulating water wave tanks at Oregon State University in Corvallis.

      The new facility aims to build on the shoulders of these giants, as well as on other experimental labs around the country. The design phase is projected to take four years, as the team ponders how to ramp up wind speeds — possibly with more, or more powerful fans than the Wall of Wind’s — and how to combine those gale-force winds and massive water tanks in one experimental space.

      Existing labs that study wind and waves together, albeit on a much smaller scale, can offer some insight into that aspect of the design, says Forrest Masters, a wind engineer at the University of Florida and the head of that institution’s NHERI facility.

      This design phase will also include building a scaled-down version of the future lab as proof of concept. Building the full-scale facility will require a new round of funding and several more years.

      Past approaches to studying the impacts of strong wind storms tend to use one of three approaches: making field observations of the aftermath of a given storm; building experimental facilities to re-create storms; and using computational simulations to visualize how those impacts might play out over large geographical regions. Each of these approaches has strengths and limitations, says Tracy Kijewski-Correa, a disaster risk engineer at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.

      “In this facility, we want to bring together all of these methodologies,” to get as close as possible to recreating what Mother Nature can do, Kijewski-Correa says.  

      It’s a challenging engineering problem, but an exciting one. “There’s a lot of enthusiasm for this in the broader scientific community,” Masters says. “If it gets built, nothing like it will exist.” More

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      High altitudes may be a climate refuge for some birds, but not these hummingbirds

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      Cooler, higher locales may not be very welcoming to some hummingbirds trying to escape rising temperatures and other effects of climate change.

      Anna’s hummingbirds live no higher than about 2,600 meters above sea level. If the birds attempt to expand their range to include higher altitudes, they may struggle to fly well in the thinner air, researchers report May 26 in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

      These hummingbirds have expanded their range in the past. Once only found in Southern California, the birds now live as far north as Vancouver, says Austin Spence, an ecologist at the University of California, Davis. That expansion is probably due to climate change and people using feeders to attract hummingbirds, he says.

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      Spence and colleagues collected 26 Anna’s hummingbirds (Calypte anna) from different elevations in the birds’ natural range in California. The team transported the birds to an aviary about 1,200 meters above sea level and measured their metabolic rate when hovering. After relocating the hummingbirds to a field station at 3,800 meters altitude, the researchers let the birds rest for at least 12 hours and then measured that rate again.

      The rate was 37 percent lower, on average, at the higher elevation than the aviary, even though the birds should have been working harder to stay aloft in the thinner air (SN: 2/8/18). At higher altitudes, hovering, which takes a lot of energy compared with other forms of flight, is more challenging and requires even more energy, Spence says. The decrease in metabolic rate shows that the birds’ hovering performance was suffering, he says. “Low oxygen and low air pressure may be holding them back as they try to move upslope.”

      Additional work is needed to see whether the birds might be able to better adjust if given weeks or months to acclimate to the conditions at gradually higher altitudes. More

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      Biocrusts reduce global dust emissions by 60 percent

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      In the unceasing battle against dust, humans possess a deep arsenal of weaponry, from microfiber cloths to feather dusters to vacuum cleaners. But new research suggests that none of that technology can compare to nature’s secret weapon — biological soil crusts.

      These biocrusts are thin, cohesive layers of soil, glued together by dirt-dwelling organisms, that often carpet arid landscapes. Though innocuous, researchers now estimate that these rough soil skins prevent around 700 teragrams (30,000 times the mass of the Statue of Liberty) of dust from wafting into the air each year, reducing global dust emissions by a staggering 60 percent. Unless steps are taken to preserve and restore biocrusts, which are threatened by climate change and shifts in land use, the future will be much dustier, ecologist Bettina Weber and colleagues report online May 16 in Nature Geoscience.

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      Dry-land ecosystems, such as savannas, shrublands and deserts, may appear barren, but they’re providing this important natural service that is often overlooked, says Weber, of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany. These findings “really call for biocrust conservation.”

      Biocrusts cover around 12 percent of the planet’s land surface and are most often found in arid regions. They are constructed by communities of fungi, lichens, cyanobacteria and other microorganisms that live in the topmost millimeters of soil and produce adhesive substances that clump soil particles together. In dry-land ecosystems, biocrusts play an important role in concentrating nutrients such as carbon and nitrogen and also help prevent soil erosion (SN: 4/12/22).

      And since most of the world’s dust comes from dry lands, biocrusts are important for keeping dust bound to the ground. Fallen dust can carry nutrients that benefit plants, but it can also reduce water and air quality, hasten glacier melting and reduce river flows. For instance in the Upper Colorado River Basin, researchers found that dust not only decreased snow’s ability to reflect sunlight, but it also shortened the duration of snow cover by weeks, reducing flows of meltwater into the Colorado River by 5 percent. That’s more water than the city of Las Vegas draws in a year, says Matthew Bowker, an ecologist from Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff who wasn’t involved in the new study.

      Experiments had already demonstrated that biocrusts strengthened soils against erosion, but Weber and her colleagues were curious how that effect played out on a global scale. So they pulled data from experimental studies that measured wind velocities needed to erode dust from various soil types and calculated how differences in biocrust coverage affected dust generation. They found that the wind velocities needed to erode dust from soils completely shielded by biocrusts were on average 4.8 times greater than the wind velocities need to erode bare soils. 

      The researchers then incorporated their results, along with data on global biocrust coverage, into a global climate simulation which allowed them to estimate how much dust the world’s biocrusts trapped each year.  

      “Nobody has really tried to make that calculation globally before,” says Bowker. “Even if their number is off, it shows us that the real number is probably significant.”

      Using projections of future climate conditions and data on the conditions biocrusts can tolerate, Weber and her colleagues estimated that by 2070, climate change and land-use shifts may result in biocrust losses of 25 to 40 percent, which would increase global dust emissions by 5 to 15 percent.

      Preserving and restoring biocrusts will be key to mitigating soil erosion and dust production in the future, Bowker says. Hopefully, these results will help to whip up more discussions on the impacts of land-use changes on biocrust health, he says. “We need to have those conversations.” More

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      Farmers in India cut their carbon footprint with trees and solar power

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      In 2007, 22-year-old P. Ramesh’s groundnut farm was losing money. As was the norm in most of India (and still is), Ramesh was using a cocktail of pesticides and fertilizers across his 2.4 hectares in the Anantapur district of southern India. In this desert-like area, which gets less than 600 millimeters of rainfall most years, farming is a challenge.

      “I lost a lot of money growing groundnuts through chemical farming methods,” says Ramesh, who goes by the first letter of his father’s name followed by his first name, as is common in many parts of southern India. The chemicals were expensive and his yields low.

      Then in 2017, he dropped the chemicals. “Ever since I took up regenerative agricultural practices like agroforestry and natural farming, both my yield and income have increased,” he says.

      Agroforestry involves planting woody perennials (trees, shrubs, palms, bamboos, etc.) alongside agricultural crops (SN: 7/3/21 & 7/17/21, p. 30). One natural farming method calls for replacing all chemical fertilizers and pesticides with organic matter such as cow dung, cow urine and jaggery, a type of solid dark sugar made from sugarcane, to boost soil nutrient levels. Ramesh also expanded his crops, originally groundnuts and some tomatoes, by adding papaya, millets, okra, eggplant (called brinjal locally) and other crops.

      Farmers in Anantapur, India, pose with the natural fertilizer they use on their crops. Called Ghanajeevamritam, it contains jaggery, cow dung, cow urine and sometimes flour from dried beans. M. Shaikshavali

      With help from the nonprofit Accion Fraterna Ecology Centre in Anantapur, which works with farmers who want to try sustainable farming, Ramesh increased his profits enough to buy more land, expanding his parcel to about four hectares. Like the thousands of other farmers practicing regenerative farming across India, Ramesh has managed to nourish his depleted soil, while his new trees help keep carbon out of the atmosphere, thus playing a small but important role in reducing India’s carbon footprint. Recent studies have shown that the carbon sequestration potential of agroforestry is as much as 34 percent higher than standard forms of agriculture.

      In western India, more than 1,000 kilometers from Anantapur, in Dhundi village in Gujarat, 36-year-old Pravinbhai Parmar is using his rice farm for climate change mitigation. By installing solar panels, he no longer uses diesel to power his groundwater pumps. And he has an incentive to pump only the water he needs because he can sell the electricity he doesn’t use.

      If all farmers like Parmar shifted to solar, India’s carbon emissions, which are 2.88 billion metric tons per year, could drop by between 45 million and 62 million tons annually, according to a 2020 report in Carbon Management. So far, the country has about 250,000 solar irrigation pumps out of an estimated 20 million to 25 million total groundwater pumps.

      For a nation that has to provide for what will soon be the world’s largest population, growing food while trying to bring down already high greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural practices is difficult. Today, agriculture and livestock account for 14 percent of India’s gross national greenhouse gas emissions. Adding in the electricity used by the agriculture sector brings this figure up to 22 percent.

      Ramesh and Parmar are part of a small but growing group of farmers getting assistance from government and nongovernmental programs to change how they farm. There’s still a ways to go to reach the estimated 146 million others who cultivate 160 million hectares of arable land in India. But these farmers’ success stories are testimony that one of India’s largest emitting sectors can change.

      Pravinbhai Parmar (center) poses with fellow farmers who are part of the solar irrigation program in Dhundi village, Gujarat.IWMI-TATA Program, Shashwat Cleantech and Dhundi Saur Urja Utpadak Sahkari Mandali

      Feeding the soil, sustaining farmers

      India’s farmers are already deeply feeling the effects of climate change, coping with dry spells, erratic rainfall and increasingly frequent heat waves and tropical cyclones. “When we talk about climate-smart agriculture, we are largely talking about how it has reduced emissions,” says Indu Murthy, sector head for climate, environment and sustainability at the Center for Study of Science, Technology and Policy, a think tank in Bengaluru. But such a system should also help farmers “cope with unexpected changes and weather patterns,” she says.

      This, in many ways, is the philosophy driving a variety of sustainable and regenerative agricultural practices under the agroecology umbrella. Natural farming and agroforestry are two components of this system that are finding more and more takers across India’s varied landscapes, says Y.V. Malla Reddy, director of Accion Fraterna Ecology Centre.

      “For me, the important change is the change in attitude of people towards trees and vegetation in the last few decades,” Reddy says. “In the ’70s and ’80s, people were not really conscious of the value of the trees, but now they consider trees, especially fruit and utilitarian trees, as also a source of income.” Reddy has advocated for sustainable farming in India for close to 50 years. Certain types of trees, such as pongamia, subabul and avisa, have economic benefits apart from their fruits; they provide fodder for livestock and biomass for fuel.

      Reddy’s organization has provided assistance to more than 60,000 Indian farming families to practice natural farming and agroforestry on almost 165,000 hectares. Calculation of the soil carbon sequestration potential of their work is ongoing. But a 2020 report by India’s Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change notes that these farming practices can help India reach its goal of having 33 percent forest and tree cover to meet its carbon sequestration commitments under the Paris climate agreement by 2030.

      Regenerative agriculture is a relatively inexpensive way to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, as compared with other solutions. Regenerative farming costs $10 to $100 per ton of carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere, compared with $100 to $1,000 per ton of carbon dioxide for technologies that mechanically remove carbon from the air, according to a 2020 analysis in Nature Sustainability. Such farming not only makes sense for the environment, but chances are the farmers’ earnings will also increase as they shift to regenerative agriculture, Reddy says.

      Farms in Kanumpalli village in Antanapur district grow multiple crops using natural farming methods.M. Shaikshavali

      Farmers from the Baiga and Gondh tribal communities in Dholbajja panchayat, India, harvest chiraita, or Andrographis paniculata, a plant used for medicinal purposes. Their Indigenous community recently took up agroforestry and sustainable farming methods.Elsa Remijn photographer, provided by Commonland

      Growing solar

      Establishing agroecology practices to see an effect on carbon sequestration can take years or decades. But using renewable energy in farming can quickly reduce emissions. For this reason, the nonprofit International Water Management Institute, IWMI, launched the program Solar Power as Remunerative Crop in Dhundi village in 2016.

      “The biggest threat climate change presents, specifically to farmers, is the uncertainty that it brings,” says Shilp Verma, an IWMI researcher of water, energy and food policies based in Anand. “Any agricultural practice that will help farmers cope with uncertainty will improve resilience to climate change.” Farmers have more funds to deal with insecure conditions when they can pump groundwater in a climate-friendly way that also provides incentives for keeping some water in the ground. “If you pump less, then you can sell the surplus energy to the grid,” he says. Solar power becomes an income source.

      Growing rice, especially lowland rice, which is grown on flooded land, requires a lot of water. On average it takes about 1,432 liters of water to produce one kilogram of rice, according to the International Rice Research Institute. The organization says that irrigated rice receives an estimated 34 to 43 percent of the world’s total irrigation water. India is the largest extractor of groundwater in the world, accounting for 25 percent of global extraction. When diesel pumps do the extracting, carbon is emitted into the atmosphere. Parmar and his fellow farmers used to have to buy that fuel to keep their pumps going.

      “We used to spend 25,000 rupees [about $330] a year for running our diesel-powered water pumps. This used to really cut into our profits,” Parmar says. When IWMI asked him in 2015 to participate in a pilot solar-powered irrigation project with zero carbon emissions, Parmar was all ears.

      Since then, Parmar and six fellow farmers in Dhundi have sold more than 240,000 kilowatt-hours to the state and earned more than 1.5 million rupees ($20,000). Parmar’s annual income has doubled from 100,000–150,000 rupees on average to 200,000–250,000 rupees.

      The boost is helping him educate his children, one of whom is pursuing a degree in agriculture — an encouraging sign in a country where farming is out of vogue with the younger generation. As Parmar says, “Solar power is timely, less polluting and also provides us an additional income. What is not to like about it?”

      This aerial image shows solar panels installed among crops to power groundwater pumps and offer a new income source for farmers in western India’s Dhundi village.IWMI-TATA Program, Shashwat Cleantech and Dhundi Saur Urja Utpadak Sahkari Mandali

      Parmar has learned to maintain and fix the panels and the pumps himself. Neighboring villages now ask for his help when they want to set up solar-powered pumps or need pump repairs. “I am happy that others are also following our lead. Honestly, I feel quite proud that they call me to help them with their solar pump systems.”

      IWMI’s project in Dhundi has been so successful that the state of Gujarat started replicating the scheme in 2018 for all interested farmers under an initiative called Suryashakti Kisan Yojana, which translates to solar power project for farmers. And India’s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy now subsidizes and provides low-interest loans for solar-powered irrigation among farmers.

      “The main thing about climate-smart agriculture is that everything we do has to have less carbon footprint,” says Aditi Mukherji, Verma’s colleague and an author of February’s report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (SN: 3/26/22, p. 7). “That is the biggest challenge. How do you make something with a low carbon footprint, without having a negative impact on income and productivity?” Mukherji is the regional project leader for Solar Irrigation for Agricultural Resilience in South Asia, an IWMI project looking at various solar irrigation solutions in South Asia.

      Back in Anantapur, “there is also a visible change in the vegetation in our district,” Reddy says. “Earlier, there might not be any trees till the eye can see in many parts of the district. Now there is no place which doesn’t have at least 20 trees in your line of sight. It’s a small change, but extremely significant for our dry region.” And Ramesh and other farmers now enjoy a stable, sustainable income from farming.

      A family in the village of Muchurami in Anantapur district, India, display vegetables harvested through natural farming methods. The vegetables include pumpkins, peas, spinach, and bottle gourds.M. Shaikshavali

      “When I was growing groundnuts, I used to sell it to the local markets,” Ramesh says. He now sells directly to city dwellers through WhatsApp groups. And one of India’s largest online grocery stores, bigbasket.com, and others have started purchasing directly from him to meet a growing demand for organic and “clean” fruits and vegetables.

      “I’m confident now that my children too can take up farming and make a good living if they want to,” Ramesh says. “I didn’t feel the same way before discovering these nonchemical farming practices.” More