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    Windbreaks, surprisingly, could help wind farms boost power output

    Windbreaks may sound like a counterintuitive idea for boosting the performance of a wind turbine. But physicists report that low walls that block wind could actually help wind farms produce more power.

    Scientists already knew that the output of a single wind turbine could be improved with a windbreak. While windbreaks slow wind speed close to the ground, above the height of the windbreak, wind speeds actually increase as air rushes over the top. But for large wind farms, there’s a drawback. A windbreak’s wake slows the flow of air as it travels farther through the rows of turbines. That could suggest that windbreaks would be a wash for wind farms with many turbines.

    But by striking a balance between these competing effects, windbreaks placed in front of each turbine can increase power output, new computer simulations suggest. It comes down to the windbreaks’ dimensions. Squat, wide barriers are the way to go, according to a simulated wind farm with six rows of turbines. To optimize performance, windbreaks should be a tenth the height of the turbine and at least five times the width of the blades, physicists report July 30 in Physical Review Fluids. Such an arrangement could increase the total power by about 10 percent, the researchers found. That’s the equivalent of adding an additional turbine, on average, for every 10 in a wind farm.

    In the simulations, the wind always came from the same direction, suggesting the technique might be useful in locations where wind tends to blow one way, such as coastal regions. Future studies could investigate how this technique might apply in places where wind direction varies.

    In a computer simulation of a wind farm with 24 turbines, scientists found that windbreaks (red) improved the overall power output. Wakes created by the windbreaks appear in dark blue, and wakes of the turbines are light blue.L. Liu and R.J.A.M. Stevens/Physical Review Fluids 2021, Visualizations by Srinidhi N. Gadde More

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    The new UN climate change report shows there’s no time for denial or delay

    The science is unequivocal: Humans are dramatically overhauling Earth’s climate. The effects of climate change are now found everywhere around the globe and are intensifying rapidly, states a sweeping new analysis released August 9 by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC. And the window to reverse some of these effects is closing.

    “There is no room for doubt any longer” about humans’ responsibility for current climate change, says Kim Cobb, a climate scientist at Georgia Tech in Atlanta and an author on the first chapter of the report. “And now we can say quite definitely that a whole class of extreme [events]” is linked to human-caused climate change.

    Climate change is already affecting every region on Earth in multiple ways, from drought and fire conditions in the U.S. West to heat waves in Europe and flooding in Asia, the report notes  (SN: 7/7/21). Each of the past four decades has been the warmest on record since preindustrial times (SN: 5/26/21).

    The study also looks at several different scenarios of greenhouse gas warming, including perhaps the most hopeful scenarios in which by 2050 the world achieves “net zero” carbon emissions, where emitted gases are balanced by carbon removal from the atmosphere.

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    If the world gets down to net-zero emissions, the decades afterward hold “hints of light,” says Baylor Fox-Kemper, an oceanographer at Brown University in Providence, R.I., and the coordinating lead author of the new report’s chapter on oceans and Earth’s icy regions. “Temperatures come back down a little — not all the way back to preindustrial times, but there’s a little recovery.”

    But other changes are irreversible on near-future timescales — that is, the next century or more, Fox-Kemper says. Even in those mid-century net-zero emissions scenarios, “it’s still pretty bad,” he says. Sea levels, for example, will continue to rise until about the year 2300, driven in part by the juggernaut of Greenland’s melting ice sheet (SN: 9/30/20). “We may have already crossed [the] threshold beyond which Greenland’s melting could be stopped,” he says. Still, swift and deep emissions reductions would significantly slow how much sea levels will rise by the end of the century, the report finds.

    The new analysis is the sixth in a series of massive assessment reports undertaken by the IPCC since 1990. In each report, hundreds of scientists from around the world analyze the findings of thousands of studies to form a consensus picture of how Earth’s climate is changing and what role people play in those changes.

    “The key message [of this report] is still the same as was first published in 1990 … human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases pose a threat for humans’ well-being and the biosphere,” said Petteri Taalas, Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization, at an event announcing the report’s release August 9.

    But researchers understand climate change far better now than they did in 1990, when the first assessment report was released. In the last three decades, new findings have poured in from tens of thousands more observing stations, from a wealth of satellite instruments, and from dramatically improved climate simulations (SN: 1/7/20).

    The IPCC’s fifth assessment report, released in several parts during 2013 and 2014, was itself a game changer. It was the first to state that greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are driving climate change — a conclusion that set the stage for 195 nations to agree in Paris in 2015 to curb those emissions (SN: 4/13/14; SN: 12/12/15).

    The Paris Agreement set a target of limiting the global average temperature to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial times. But many island nations and others most threatened by climate change feared that this target wasn’t stringent enough. So in an unprecedented step, the U.N. commissioned a report by the IPCC to compare how a future Earth might look if warming were limited to just 1.5 degrees Celsius instead.

    The Dixie Fire, the largest individual wildfire in California’s history, started on July 13, 2021 and left the town of Greenville, including its library (shown) in ruins. The IPCC’s sixth assessment report finds that humans are unequivocally responsible for the planet’s rising temperatures since the late 1800s, and links these changes to extreme weather including wildfires, drought, heat waves, extreme precipitation and properties of tropical cyclones. Trevor Bexon/Getty Images

    That special report, released in 2018, revealed in fine detail how just half a degree of extra warming by 2100 could matter, from the increased likelihood of heat waves to higher sea levels (SN: 12/17/18). The one-two punch of those concrete findings and scorching temperatures in 2019 grabbed the attention of public and policy makers alike.

    Scientists were surprised by how hard the 1.5 degree report landed. “Even for me,” says Ko Barrett, vice chair of the IPCC and a senior advisor for climate at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “a person who has dedicated my entire professional career to addressing climate change, the report caused me to rethink my personal contribution to the climate problem. Climate change was not some distant temperature target to be hit in the ethereal future. It was close; it was now.”

    IPCC scientists hope the new report, with its powerful emphasis on the regional and local effects of climate change — fully a third of the report is devoted to outlining those — will have a similar impact. And its timing is significant. Beginning October 31, heads of state from around the world are scheduled to meet in Glasgow, Scotland, to discuss updated — and hopefully increasingly ambitious — plans to reduce emissions to meet the targets of the 2015 Paris Agreement. 

    With previous reports, “the world listened, but it didn’t hear. Or the world listened, but it didn’t act strongly enough,” said Inger Andersen, executive director of the U.N. Environment Programme, at the Aug. 9 event for the report’s release. “We certainly urge them … to listen to the facts on the table now.” More

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    Greece’s Santorini volcano erupts more often when sea level drops

    When sea level drops far below the present-day level, the island volcano Santorini in Greece gets ready to rumble.

    A comparison of the activity of the volcano, which is now partially collapsed, with sea levels over the last 360,000 years reveals that when the sea level dips more than 40 meters below the present-day level, it triggers a fit of eruptions. During times of higher sea level, the volcano is quiet, researchers report online August 2 in Nature Geoscience.

    Other volcanoes around the globe are probably similarly influenced by sea levels, the researchers say. Most of the world’s volcanic systems are in or near oceans.

    “It’s hard to see why a coastal or island volcano would not be affected by sea level,” says Iain Stewart, a geoscientist at the Royal Scientific Society of Jordan in Amman, who was not involved in the work. Accounting for these effects could make volcano hazard forecasting more accurate.

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    Santorini consists of a ring of islands surrounding the central tip of a volcano poking out of the Aegean Sea. The entire volcano used to be above water, but a violent eruption around 1600 B.C. caused the volcano to cave in partially, forming a lagoon. That particular eruption is famous for potentially dooming the Minoan civilization and inspiring the legend of the lost city of Atlantis (SN: 2/1/12).

    To investigate how sea level might influence the volcano, researchers created a computer simulation of Santorini’s magma chamber, which sits about four kilometers beneath the surface of the volcano. In the simulation, when the sea level dropped at least 40 meters below the present-day level, the crust above the magma chamber splintered. “That gives an opportunity for the magma that’s stored under the volcano to move up through these fractures and make its way to the surface,” says study coauthor Christopher Satow, a physical geographer at Oxford Brookes University in England.

    According to the simulation, it should take about 13,000 years for those cracks to reach the surface and awaken the volcano. After the water rises again, it should take about 11,000 years for the cracks to close and eruptions to stop.

    When the sea drops at least 40 meters below the present-day level, the crust beneath the Santorini volcano (illustrated) starts to crack. As the sea level drops even further over thousands of years, those cracks spread to the surface, bringing up magma that feeds volcanic eruptions.Oxford Brookes University

    It may seem counterintuitive that lowering the amount of water atop the magma chamber would cause the crust to splinter. Satow compares the scenario to wrapping your hands around an inflated balloon, where the rubber is Earth’s crust and your hands’ inward pressure is the weight of the ocean. As someone else pumps air into the balloon — like magma building up under Earth’s crust — the pressure of your hands helps prevent the balloon from popping. “As soon as you start to release the pressure with your hands, [like] taking the sea level down, the balloon starts to expand,” Satow says, and ultimately the balloon breaks.

    Satow’s team tested the predictions of the simulation by comparing the Santorini Volcano’s eruption history — preserved in the rock layers of the islands surrounding the central volcano tip — with evidence of past sea levels from marine sediments. All but three of the volcano’s 211 well-dated eruptions in the last 360,000 years happened during periods of low sea level, as the simulation predicted. Such periods of low sea level occurred when more of Earth’s water was locked up in glaciers during ice ages.

    “It’s really intriguing and interesting, and perhaps not surprising, given that other studies have shown that volcanoes are sensitive to changes in their stress state,” says Emilie Hooft, a geophysicist at the University of Oregon in Eugene, who wasn’t involved in the work. Volcanoes in Iceland, for instance, have shown an uptick in eruptions after overlying glaciers have melted, relieving the volcanic systems of the weight of the ice.

    Volcanoes around the world are likely subject to the effects of sea level, Satow says, though how much probably varies. “Some will be very sensitive to sea level changes, and for others there will be almost no impact at all.” These effects will depend on the depth of the magma chambers feeding into each volcano and the properties of the surrounding crust.

    But if sea level controls the activity of any volcano in or near the ocean, at least to an extent, “you’d expect all these volcanoes to be in sync with one another,” Satow says, “which would be incredible.”

    As for Santorini, given that the last time sea level was 40 meters below the present-day level was about 11,000 years ago — and sea level is continuing to rise due to climate change — Satow’s team expects the volcano to enter a period of relative quiet right about now (SN: 3/14/12). But two major eruptions in the volcano’s history did happen amid high sea levels, the researchers say, so future violent eruptions aren’t completely off the table. More

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    A stunning visualization of Alaska’s Yukon Delta shows a land in transition

    The westward journey of the mighty Yukon River takes it from its headwaters in Canada’s British Columbia straight across Alaska. The river has many stories to tell, of generations of Indigenous people hunting on its banks and fishing in its waters, of paddle-wheeled boats and gold panning and pipelines.

    Where it meets the Bering Sea, the river fans out into an intricate delta resembling cauliflower lobes of river channels and ponds. The delta has a story to tell, too — that of an increasingly green Arctic.

    A composite image of the delta’s northern lobe, taken May 29 by the U.S. Geological Survey’s Landsat 8 satellite, shows willow shrublands lining river channels as they wind toward the sea. Farther inland, tussock grasses carpet the tundra. Grasslike sedge meadows populate low-lying wetlands, punctuated by ponds left behind by springtime floods along the riverbanks from snow and ice that have melted upstream.

    In southern Alaska, such as in the Kenai Peninsula, the Arctic has been getting noticeably greener since the 1980s, as global temperatures climb (SN: 4/11/19). Researchers observed this change using satellite measurements of red and near-infrared light reflected off the vegetation. Now, analyses of changing vegetation in the Yukon Delta and nearby Kuskokwim Delta show that more northern areas are getting greener too, researchers report June 1 in Earth Interactions.

    The increasing prevalence of tall willows, an important moose habitat, is one sign of these changes in the delta. Moose populations, too, are on the rise. But for the Yukon and other Arctic deltas — where higher floodwaters due to climate change are likely to deposit thicker sediment piles, supporting more greenery — many more changes are likely to come as the planet warms.  More

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    How intricate Venus’s-flower-baskets manipulate the flow of seawater

    A Venus’s-flower-basket isn’t all show. This stunning deep-sea sponge can also alter the flow of seawater in surprising ways.

    A lacy, barrel-shaped chamber forms the sponge’s glassy skeleton. Flow simulations reveal how this intricate structure alters the way water moves around and through the sponge, helping it endure unforgiving ocean currents and perhaps feed and reproduce, researchers report online July 21 in Nature.

    Previous studies have found that the gridlike construction of a Venus’s-flower-basket (Euplectella aspergillum) is strong and flexible. “But no one has ever tried to see if these beautiful structures have fluid-dynamic properties,” says mechanical engineer Giacomo Falcucci of Tor Vergata University of Rome.

    Harnessing supercomputers, Falcucci and colleagues simulated how water flows around and through the sponge’s body, with and without different skeletal components such as the sponge’s myriad pores. If the sponge were a solid cylinder, water flowing past would form a turbulent wake immediately downstream that could jostle the creature, Falcucci says. Instead water flows through and around the highly porous Venus’s-flower-basket and forms a gentle zone of water that flanks the sponge and displaces turbulence downstream, the team found. That way, the sponge’s body endures less stress.

    Ridges that spiral around the outside of the sponge’s skeleton also somehow cause water to slow and swirl inside the structure, the simulations showed. As a result, food and reproductive cells that drift into the sponge would become trapped for up to twice as long as in the same sponge without ridges. That lingering could help the filter feeders catch more plankton. And because Venus’s-flower-baskets can reproduce sexually, it could also enhance the chances that free-floating sperm encounter eggs, the researchers say.

    It’s amazing that such beauty could be so functional, Falcucci says. The sponge’s flow-altering abilities, he says, might help inspire taller, more wind-resistant skyscrapers.

    This simulation shows how water flows around and through a Venus’s-flower-basket (gray). Ridges that spiral across the outside of the sponge cause water inside to somehow slow and swirl, forming particle-trapping vortices. And the sponge’s shape creates a gentle zone of slower water that forms immediately downstream, buffering the creature against turbulence. Vertical cross sections contrast the flow activity of the calm zone (nearer the sponge) and the turbulent zone (downstream).G. Falcucci et al/Nature 2021 More

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    Climate change may be leading to overcounts of endangered bonobos

    Climate change is interfering with how researchers count bonobos, possibly leading to gross overestimates of the endangered apes, a new study suggests.

    Like other great apes, bonobos build elevated nests out of tree branches and foliage to sleep in. Counts of these nests can be used to estimate numbers of bonobos — as long as researchers have a good idea of how long a nest sticks around before it’s broken down by the environment, what’s known as the nest decay time.

    New data on rainfall and bonobo nests show that the nests are persisting longer in the forests in Congo, from roughly 87 days, on average, in 2003–2007 to about 107 days in 2016–2018, largely as a result of declining precipitation. This increase in nests’ decay time could be dramatically skewing population counts of the endangered apes and imperiling conservation efforts, researchers report June 30 in PLOS ONE.

    “Imagine going in that forest … you count nests, but each single nest is around longer than it used to be 15 years ago, which means that you think that there are more bonobos than there really are,” says Barbara Fruth, a behavioral ecologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz, Germany.

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    Lowland tropical forests, south of the Congo River in Africa, are the only place in the world where bonobos (Pan paniscus) still live in the wild (SN: 3/18/21). Estimates suggest that there are at least 15,000 to 20,000 bonobos there. But there could be as many as 50,000 individuals. “The area of potential distribution is rather big, but there have been very few surveys,” Fruth says.

    From 2003 to 2007, and then again from 2016 to 2018, Fruth and colleagues followed wild bonobos in Congo’s LuiKotale rain forest, monitoring 1,511 nests. “The idea is that you follow [the bonobos] always,” says Mattia Bessone, a wildlife researcher at the Liverpool John Moores University in England. “You need to be up early in the morning so that you can be at the spot where the bonobos have nested, in time for them to wake up, and then you follow them till they nest again.”

    In doing so, day after day, Fruth, Bessone and colleagues were first able to understand how many nests a bonobo builds in a day, what’s known as the nest construction rate. “It’s not necessarily one because sometimes bonobos build day nests,” Bessone says. On average, each bonobo builds 1.3 nests per day, the team found.

    Tracking how long these nests stuck around revealed that the structures were lasting an average of 19 days longer in 2016–2018 than in 2003–2007. The researchers also compiled fifteen years of climate data for LuiKotale, which showed a decrease in average rainfall from 2003 to 2018. That change in rain is linked to climate change, the researchers say, and helps explain why nests have become more resilient.

    These images show bonobo nests at different stages of decay. Knowing the time it takes for a nest to decay is crucial for estimating accurate bonobo numbers.© B. Fruth/MPI of Animal Behavior

    By counting the numbers of nests and then dividing that number by the product of the average nest decay time and nest construction rate, scientists can get an estimate of the number of bonobos in a region. But if researchers are using outdated, shorter nest decay times, those estimates could be severely off, overestimating bonobo counts by up to 50 percent, Bessone says.

    “The results are not surprising but also highlight how indirect (and therefore prone to errors) our methods of density estimates of many species are,” Martin Surbeck, a behavioral ecologist at Harvard University, wrote in an e-mail.

    Technologies such as camera traps can be used to directly count animals instead of using proxies like nests and are the way forward for animal population studies, researchers say. But until those methods become more common, nest counts remain vital for scientists’ understanding of bonobo numbers.

    This phenomenon is probably not limited to bonobos. All great apes build nests, and nest counts are used to estimate those animals’ numbers too. So, the researchers say, the new results could have implications for the conservation of primates far beyond bonobos. More

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    Hurricanes may not be becoming more frequent, but they’re still more dangerous

    Climate change is helping Atlantic hurricanes pack more of a punch, making them rainier, intensifying them faster and helping the storms linger longer even after landfall. But a new statistical analysis of historical records and satellite data suggests that there aren’t actually more Atlantic hurricanes now than there were roughly 150 years ago, researchers report July 13 in Nature Communications.

    The record-breaking number of Atlantic hurricanes in 2020, a whopping 30 named storms, led to intense speculation over whether and how climate change was involved (SN: 12/21/20). It’s a question that scientists continue to grapple with, says Gabriel Vecchi, a climate scientist at Princeton University. “What is the impact of global warming — past impact and also our future impact — on the number and intensity of hurricanes and tropical storms?”

    Satellite records over the last 30 years allow us to say “with little ambiguity how many hurricanes, and how many major hurricanes [Category 3 and above] there were each year,” Vecchi says. Those data clearly show that the number, intensity and speed of intensification of hurricanes has increased over that time span.

    But “there are a lot of things that have happened over the last 30 years” that can influence that trend, he adds. “Global warming is one of them.” Decreasing aerosol pollution is another (SN: 11/21/19). The amount of soot and sulfate particles and dust over the Atlantic Ocean was much higher in the mid-20th century than now; by blocking and scattering sunlight, those particles temporarily cooled the planet enough to counteract greenhouse gas warming. That cooling is also thought to have helped temporarily suppress hurricane activity in the Atlantic.  

    To get a longer-term perspective on trends in Atlantic storms, Vecchi and colleagues examined a dataset of hurricane observations from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that stretches from 1851 to 2019. It includes old-school observations by unlucky souls who directly observed the tempests as well as remote sensing data from the modern satellite era.

    How to directly compare those different types of observations to get an accurate trend was a challenge. Satellites, for example, can see every storm, but earlier observations will count only the storms that people directly experienced. So the researchers took a probabilistic approach to fill in likely gaps in the older record, assuming, for example, that modern storm tracks are representative of pre-satellite storm tracks to account for storms that would have stayed out at sea and unseen. The team found no clear increase in the number of storms in the Atlantic over that 168-year time frame. One possible reason for this, the researchers say, is a rebound from the aerosol pollution–induced lull in storms that may be obscuring some of the greenhouse gas signal in the data.  

    More surprisingly — even to Vecchi, he says — the data also seem to show no significant increase in hurricane intensity over that time. That’s despite “scientific consistency between theories and models indicating that the typical intensity of hurricanes is more likely to increase as the planet warms,” Vecchi says. But this conclusion is heavily caveated — and the study also doesn’t provide evidence against the hypothesis that global warming “has acted and will act to intensify hurricane activity,” he adds.

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    Climate scientists were already familiar with the possibility that storm frequency might not have increased much in the last 150 or so years — or over much longer timescales. The link between number of storms and warming has long been uncertain, as the changing climate also produces complex shifts in atmospheric patterns that could take the hurricane trend in either direction. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change noted in a 2012 report that there is “low confidence” that tropical cyclone activity has increased in the long term.

    Geologic evidence of Atlantic storm frequency, which can go back over 1,000 years, also suggests that hurricane frequency does tend to wax and wane every few decades, says Elizabeth Wallace, a paleotempestologist at Rice University in Houston (SN: 10/22/17).

    Wallace hunts for hurricane records in deep underwater caverns called blue holes: As a storm passes over an island beach or the barely submerged shallows, winds and waves pick up sand that then can get dumped into these caverns, forming telltale sediment deposits. Her data, she says, also suggest that “the past 150 years hasn’t been exceptional [in storm frequency], compared to the past.”

    But, Wallace notes, these deposits don’t reveal anything about whether climate change is producing more intense hurricanes. And modern observational data on changes in hurricane intensity is muddled by its own uncertainties, particularly the fact that the satellite record just isn’t that long. Still, “I liked that the study says it doesn’t necessarily provide evidence against the hypothesis” that higher sea-surface temperatures would increase hurricane intensity by adding more energy to the storm, she says.

    Kerry Emanuel, an atmospheric scientist at MIT, says the idea that storm numbers haven’t increased isn’t surprising, given the longstanding uncertainty over how global warming might alter that. But “one reservation I have about the new paper is the implication that no significant trends in Atlantic hurricane metrics [going back to 1851] implies no effect of global warming on these storms,” he says. Looking for such a long-term trend isn’t actually that meaningful, he says, as scientists wouldn’t expect to see any global warming-related hurricane trends become apparent until about the 1970s anyway, as warming has ramped up.

    Regardless of whether there are more of these storms, there’s no question that modern hurricanes have become more deadly in many ways, Vecchi says. There’s evidence that global warming has already been increasing the amount of rain from some storms, such as Hurricane Harvey in 2017, which led to widespread, devastating flooding (SN: 9/28/18). And, Vecchi says, “sea level will rise over the coming century … so [increasing] storm surge is one big hazard from hurricanes.” More

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    The first step in using trees to slow climate change: Protect the trees we have

    Between a death and a burial was hardly the best time to show up in a remote village in Madagascar to make a pitch for forest protection. Bad timing, however, turned out to be the easy problem.

    This forest was the first one that botanist Armand Randrianasolo had tried to protect. He’s the first native of Madagascar to become a Ph.D. taxonomist at Missouri Botanical Garden, or MBG, in St. Louis. So he was picked to join a 2002 scouting trip to choose a conservation site.

    Other groups had already come into the country and protected swaths of green, focusing on “big forests; big, big, big!” Randrianasolo says. Preferably forests with lots of big-eyed, fluffy lemurs to tug heartstrings elsewhere in the world.

    The Missouri group, however, planned to go small and to focus on the island’s plants, legendary among botanists but less likely to be loved as a stuffed cuddly. The team zeroed in on fragments of humid forest that thrive on sand along the eastern coast. “Nobody was working on it,” he says.

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    As the people of the Agnalazaha forest were mourning a member of their close-knit community, Randrianasolo decided to pay his respects: “I wanted to show that I’m still Malagasy,” he says. He had grown up in a seaside community to the north.

    The village was filling up with visiting relatives and acquaintances, a great chance to talk with many people in the region. The deputy mayor conceded that after a morning visit to the bereaved, Randrianasolo and MBG’s Chris Birkinshaw could speak in the afternoon with anyone wishing to gather at the roofed marketplace.

    Courtesy of the staff of the Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis and Madagascar

    Courtesy of the staff of the Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis and Madagascar

    Courtesy of the staff of the Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis and Madagascar

    Conserving natural forests is a double win for trapping carbon and saving rich biodiversity. Forests matter to humans (with a Treculia fruit), Phromnia planthoppers and mouse lemurs.

    The two scientists didn’t get the reception they’d hoped for. Their pitch to help the villagers conserve their forest while still serving people’s needs met protests from the crowd: “You’re lying!”

    The community was still upset about a different forest that outside conservationists had protected. The villagers had assumed they would still be able to take trees for lumber, harvest their medicinal plants or sell other bits from the forest during cash emergencies. They were wrong. That place was now off-limits. People caught doing any of the normal things a forest community does would be considered poachers. When MBG proposed conserving yet more land, residents weren’t about to get tricked again. “This is the only forest we have left,” they told the scientists.

    Finding some way out of such clashes to save existing forests has become crucial for fighting climate change. Between 2001 and 2019, the planet’s forests trapped an estimated 7.6 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide a year, an international team reported in Nature Climate Change in March. That rough accounting suggests trees may capture about one and a half times the annual emissions of the United States, one of the largest global emitters.

    Planting trees by the millions and trillions is basking in round-the-world enthusiasm right now. Yet saving the forests we already have ranks higher in priority and in payoff, say a variety of scientists.

    How to preserve forests may be a harder question than why. Success takes strong legal protections with full government support. It also takes a village, literally. A forest’s most intimate neighbors must wholeheartedly want it saved, one generation after another. That theme repeats in places as different as rural Madagascar and suburban New Jersey.

    Overlooked and underprotected

    First a word about trees themselves. Of course, trees capture carbon and fight climate change. But trees are much more than useful wooden objects that happen to be leafy, self-manufacturing and great shade for picnics.

    “Plant blindness,” as it has been called, reduces trees and other photosynthetic organisms to background, lamented botanist Sandra Knapp in a 2019 article in the journal Plants, People, Planet. For instance, show people a picture with a squirrel in a forest. They’ll likely say something like “cute squirrel.” Not “nice-size beech tree, and is that a young black oak with a cute squirrel on it?”

    This tunnel vision also excludes invertebrates, argues Knapp, of the Natural History Museum in London, complicating efforts to save nature. These half-seen forests, natural plus human-planted, now cover close to a third of the planet’s land, according to the 2020 version of The State of the World’s Forests report from the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization. Yet a calculation based on the report’s numbers says that over the last 10 years, net tree cover vanished at an average rate of about 12,990 hectares — a bit more than the area of San Francisco — every day.

    This is an improvement over the previous decades, the report notes. In the 1990s, deforestation, on average, destroyed about 1.75 San Francisco equivalents of forest every day.

    Branches of a Dracaena cinnabari dragon’s blood tree from Yemen ooze red sap and repeatedly bifurcate in even Y-splits.BORIS KHVOSTICHENKO/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS (CC BY-SA 4.0)

    Trees were the planet’s skyscrapers, many rising to great heights, hundreds of millions of years before humans began piling stone upon stone to build their own. Trees reach their stature by growing and then killing their innermost core of tissue. The still-living outer rim of the tree uses its ever-increasing inner ghost architecture as plumbing pipes that can function as long as several human lifetimes. And tree sex lives, oh my. Plants invented “steamy but not touchy” long before the Victorian novel — much flowering, perfuming and maybe green yearning, all without direct contact of reproductive organs. Just a dusting of pollen wafted on a breeze or delivered by a bee.

    To achieve the all-important goal of cutting global emissions, saving the natural forests already in the ground must be a priority, 14 scientists from around the world wrote in the April Global Change Biology. “Protect existing forests first,” coauthor Kate Hardwick of Kew Gardens in London said during a virtual conference on reforestation in February. That priority also gives the planet’s magnificent biodiversity a better chance at surviving. Trees can store a lot of carbon in racing to the sky. And size and age matter because trees add carbon over so much of their architecture, says ecologist David Mildrexler with Eastern Oregon Legacy Lands at the Wallowology Natural History Discovery Center in Joseph. Trees don’t just start new growth at twigs tipped with unfurling baby leaves. Inside the branches, the trunk and big roots, an actively growing sheath surrounds the inner ghost plumbing. Each season, this whole sheath adds a layer of carbon-capturing tissue from root to crown.

    “Imagine you’re standing in front of a really big tree — one that’s so big you can’t even wrap your arms all the way around, and you look up the trunk,” Mildrexler says. Compare that sky-touching vision to the area covered in a year’s growth of some sapling, maybe three fingers thick and human height. “The difference is, of course, just huge,” he says.

    Big trees may not be common, but they make an outsize difference in trapping carbon, Mildrexler and colleagues have found. In six Pacific Northwest national forests, only about 3 percent of all the trees in the study, including ponderosa pines, western larches and three other major species, reached full-arm-hug size (at least 53.3 centimeters in diameter). Yet this 3 percent of trees stored 42 percent of the aboveground carbon there, the team reported in 2020 in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change. An earlier study, with 48 sites worldwide and more than 5 million tree trunks, found that the largest 1 percent of trees store about 50 percent of the aboveground carbon-filled biomass.

    Plant paradise

    The island nation of Madagascar was an irresistible place for the Missouri Botanical Garden to start trying to conserve forests. Off the east coast of Africa, the island stretches more than the distance from Savannah, Ga., to Toronto, and holds more than 12,000 named species of trees, other flowering plants and ferns. Madagascar “is absolute nirvana,” says MBG botanist James S. Miller, who has spent decades exploring the island’s flora.

    The Ravenala traveler’s tree is widely grown, but native only to Madagascar.CEPHOTO, UWE ARANAS/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS (CC BY-SA 3.0)

    Just consider the rarities. Of the eight known species of baobab trees, which raise a fat trunk to a cartoonishly spindly tuft of little branches on top, six are native to Madagascar. Miller considers some 90 percent of the island’s plants as natives unique to the country. “It wrecks you” for botanizing elsewhere, Miller says.

    He was rooting for his MBG colleagues Randrianasolo and Birkinshaw in their foray to Madagascar’s Agnalazaha forest. Several months after getting roasted as liars by residents, the two got word that the skeptics had decided to give protection a chance after all.

    The Agnalazaha residents wanted to make sure, however, that the Missouri group realized the solemnity of their promise. Randrianasolo had to return to the island for a ceremony of calling the ancestors as witnesses to the new partnership and marking the occasion with the sacrifice of a cow. A pact with generations of deceased residents may be an unusual form of legal involvement, but it carried weight. Randrianasolo bought the cow.

    Randrianasolo looked for ways to be helpful. MBG worked on improving the village’s rice yields, and supplied starter batches of vegetable seeds for expanding home gardens. The MBG staff helped the forest residents apply for conservation funds from the Malagasy government. A new tree nursery gave villagers an alternative to cutting timber in the forest. The nursery also meant some jobs for local people, which further improved relationships.

    Trying to build trust with people living near southeastern Madagascar’s coast was the first task the Missouri Botanical Garden faced in efforts to conserve the Agnalazaha forest.Courtesy of the staff of the Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis and Madagascar

    The MBG staff now works with Malagasy communities to preserve forests at 11 sites dotted in various ecosystems in Madagascar. Says Randrianasolo: “You have to be patient.”

    Today, 19 years after his first visit among the mourners, Agnalazaha still stands.

    Saving forests is not a simple matter of just meeting basic needs of people living nearby, says political scientist Nadia Rabesahala Horning of Middlebury College in Vermont, who published The Politics of Deforestation in Africa in 2018. Her Ph.D. work, starting in the late 1990s, took her to four remote forests in her native Madagascar. The villagers around each forest followed different rules for harvesting timber, finding places to graze livestock and collecting medicinal plants.

    Three of the forests shrank, two of them rapidly, over the decade. One, called Analavelona, however, barely showed any change in the aerial views Horning used to look for fraying forests.

    Near Madagascar’s Analavelona sacred forest, taxonomist Armand Randrianasolo (blue cap) joins (from left) Miandry Fagnarena, Rehary, and Tefy Andriamihajarivo to collect a surprising new species in the mango family (green leaves at front of image). The Spondias tefyi, named for Tefy and his efforts to protect the island’s biodiversity, is the first wild relative of the popular hog plum found outside of South America or Asia.Courtesy of the staff of the Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis and Madagascar

    The people living around Analavelona revered it as a sacred place where their ancestors dwelled. Living villagers made offerings before entering, and cut only one kind of tree, which they used for coffins.

    Since then, Horning’s research in Tanzania and Uganda has convinced her that forest conservation can happen only under very specific conditions, she says. The local community must be able to trust that the government won’t let some commercial interest or a political heavyweight slip through loopholes to exploit a forest that its everyday neighbors can’t touch. And local people must be able to meet their own needs too, including the spiritual ones.

    A different kind of essential

    Tied with yarn to nearly 3,000 trees in a Maryland forest, tags displayed the names of the people lost on 9/11. The memorial, organized by ecologist Joan Maloof who runs the Old-Growth Forest Network, helped protect a patch of woods where people could go for solace and meditation.Friends of the Forest, Salisbury

    Another constellation of old forests, on the other side of the world, sports some less-than-obvious similarities. Ecologist Joan Maloof launched the Old-Growth Forest Network in 2011 to encourage people to save the remaining scraps of U.S. old-growth forests. Her bold idea: to permanently protect one patch of old forest in each of the more than 2,000 counties in the United States where forests can grow.

    She calls for strong legal measures, such as conservation easements that prevent logging, but also recognizes the need to convey the emotional power of communing with nature. One of the early green spots she and colleagues campaigned for was not old growth, but it had become one of the few left unlogged where she lived on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

    She heard about Buddhist monks in Thailand who had ordained trees as monks because loggers revered the monks, so the trees were protected. A month after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, she was inspired to turn the Maryland forest into a place to remember the victims. By putting each victim’s name on a metal tag and tying it to a tree, she and other volunteers created a memorial with close to 3,000 trees. The local planning commission, she suspected, would feel awkward about approving timber cutting from that particular stand. She wasn’t party to their private deliberations, but the forest still stands.

    In 1973, high school freshman Doug Hefty wrote more than 80 pages about the value of Saddler’s Woods in Haddon Township, N.J. His typed report, with its handmade cover, played a dramatic role in saving the forest. Saddler’s Woods Conservation Association

    As of Earth Day 2021, the network had about 125 forests around the country that should stay forests in perpetuity. Their stories vary widely, but are full of local history and political maneuvering.

     In southern New Jersey, Joshua Saddler, an escaped enslaved man from Maryland, acquired part of a small forest in the mid-1880s and bequeathed it to his wife with the stipulation that it not be logged. His section was logged anyway, and the rest of the original old forest was about to meet the same fate. In 1973, high school student Doug Hefty wrote more than 80 pages on the forest’s value — and delivered it to the developer. In this case, life delivered a genuine Hollywood ending. The developer relented, and scaled back the project, stopping across the street from the woods.

    In 1999, however, developers once again eyed the forest, says Janet Goehner-Jacobs, who heads the Saddler’s Woods Conservation Association. It took four years, but now, she and the forests’ other fans have a conservation easement forbidding commercial development or logging, giving the next generation better tools to protect the forest.

    Goehner-Jacobs had just moved to the area and fallen in love with that 10-hectare patch of green in the midst of apartment buildings and strip malls. When she first happened upon the forest and found the old-growth section, “I just instinctively knew I was seeing something very different.”

    Saddler’s Woods, with a scrap of old-growth forest, has survived in the rush of development in suburban New Jersey thanks to generations of dedicated forest lovers.Saddler’s Woods Conservation Association More