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Plant burgers are way better for the planet than beef, but these 2 ingredients threaten tropical ecosystems

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Wednesday, June 7, 2023

A farmer arranges his coconuts in Poi Village, Sigi Regency, Central Sulawesi, Indonesia, in January 2020. Coconut farmers in the region have struggled with the declining price of copra, the dried flesh of coconut from which coconut oil is extracted. | Basri Marzuki/NurPhoto via Getty Images How plant-based meat’s dependence on coconut and cacao could become a liability. Jalil, a 50-year-old cacao farmer in Palopo, Sulawesi, Indonesia, has never heard of plant-based meats, nor the American company Beyond Meat. When told, he is surprised to hear that cocoa butter made from beans like those grown on his farm, which he has been tending for 30 years, could end up in a Beyond Burger. “I have no idea where my cacao beans go,” said Jalil. “I thought it’s all for chocolate.” That may once have been true, but the rapid growth of plant-based meats in recent years has begun to fundamentally alter agricultural supply chains, creating new demand for key ingredients like cocoa butter and coconut oil. Yet even as the plant-based meat industry is snapping up more of those ingredients, small farmers like Jalil say they’re not seeing any benefit. “Cacao farming is getting increasingly difficult,” he said, pointing to unpredictable prices, a more variable climate, and growing risk of crop disease as growing challenges. “Many farmers are cutting down their cacao trees” and abandoning their plantations. (Cacao is the raw, unprocessed product of the cacao fruit, from which cocoa is roasted and processed.) What is happening on the ground in Sulawesi should serve as a major warning sign for the plant-based meat companies that rely on these tropical oils. Facing slowing growth in the United States, plant-based meat producers are working hard to reduce costs in the hope of hitting a goal deemed essential to their future: bringing the price of plant-based meat in line with that of beef or pork. Industry watchers warn that plant-based alternatives will struggle to break out of their current niche status unless they can achieve price parity with meat. “Long-term price parity is the only way that these products are going to be competitive,” said Ryan Nebeker, a research analyst at the nonprofit Foodprint. One way to do that is to lower ingredient costs, but supply chain challenges and threats from climate change could make achieving that goal tough. Much of the supply of coconut oil and cacao butter comes from countries such as Indonesia, the Philippines, Côte d’Ivoire, and Ghana, with weak labor and environmental protections. There is a risk that a desire to lower costs could result in purchasing cacao butter or coconut oil from less ethical sources. These are delicate questions to ask. Nothing can take away from the fact that the emissions and deforestation footprints of beef are far worse than those of plant-based alternatives. Beef is an outsize driver of deforestation around the world, including in the vital Amazon rainforest. One serving of beef, as Vox has reported, requires as much as 20 times more land and four times more water, and creates more emissions, than an equivalent serving of plant-based meat. Tim Ryan Williams/Vox But no diet is free from impacts on the planet and those who live on it. Even as the plant-based meat sector offers an important tool in mitigating climate change — not to mention reducing the number of animals sent to the slaughterhouse — there are risks of unintended environmental and labor consequences. That includes significant localized impacts in tropical cacao- and coconut-growing regions in Asia and Africa, areas that haven’t been as intensively impacted by the beef industry as South America. Even though their products are indisputably more friendly to the planet, those consequences present key business challenges to plant-based meat producers as they try to scale their industry. Pressure to cut costs from Beyond and Impossible, neither of which has the publicly available sustainable sourcing policies or guidelines that are increasingly common in the packaged food industry, risks exacerbating problems such as deforestation, the use of child and forced labor, and sub-living wages for farmers and workers. Those aren’t the only risks the industry faces in striving to get its ambitious growth plans back on track. Decades of underinvestment and unpredictable prices have left many Indonesian and Filipino farmers unable to maintain their farms, meaning there may simply not be enough cacao butter or coconut oil available. Coconut and cacao make plant-based meat meaty To make their animal-free products, Impossible, Beyond, and a host of smaller rivals have developed a range of substitute ingredients derived from plants, such as pea and soy proteins that mimic the texture and feel of animal proteins. But few are as important as cocoa butter — a key ingredient for Beyond Meat as well as products like UNLIMEAT — or coconut oil, which is used by Impossible Foods and several other brands, including Next Gen Foods’ Tindle plant-based chicken, Conagra’s Gardein beefless burger, Hormel’s Happy Little Plants plant-based meatballs, and NotCo’s NotBurger. Refined coconut oil and cacao butter have unique characteristics that help plant-based products replicate meat. Like animal fats, they remain solid at room temperature, and this high melting point enables plant-based meats to be grilled or cooked similarly to their animal-meat counterparts in gourmet restaurants, fast food chains, or home kitchens. These fats make up between 5 and 20 percent of a plant-based burger; already, major ingredients providers like Cargill and AAK have set up new sales platforms aimed at providing these two oils to the growing plant-based market segment. And that’s just a start. Good Food Institute (GFI), a nonprofit that promotes plant-based alternatives to animal products, estimated in 2021 that plant-based meats will use 19 percent of global coconut production by 2030. GFI acknowledges that the recent slowdown in plant-based meat sales in the US might impact these projections and plans to provide updated figures later this year. But “continued development of the plant-based market outside of the US and Europe will support global growth of this industry,” the organization told Vox. On a warming planet, coconut and cacao supplies are increasingly volatile To achieve rapid sales growth, Beyond and Impossible will need to achieve price parity with meat, which will require steadily increasing supplies of cheap cacao butter and coconut oil. But in a changing climate, where the farmers who produce the raw materials are increasingly struggling to make a living, that supply is far from guaranteed. Take the Philippines, the main exporter of coconut oil to the US. In the province of Quezon, in the southeast of the island of Luzon, a key coconut-growing region, low or unpredictable wages, lack of investment, and extreme weather events have caused many farmers to simply stop growing coconuts in recent years, said Julito Ordinado, a 51-year-old coconut farmer who has been working his family’s fields since he was 12. He says he can no longer make a living from coconuts alone, and often works as a construction day laborer. His brother was so desperate, he chose to cut down his coconut trees and sell them for wood in order to get needed cash. “A coconut tree’s harvest lasts a lifetime, but once you’ve sold all the coco lumber, that’s it,” said Ordinado. “You can’t sell coconuts anymore.” It takes years before new coconut trees can start producing nuts, which means it’s not easy to rapidly expand or shrink production in response to market demand. These problems are compounded by increasingly volatile weather. Last September, Super Typhoon Noru suddenly intensified off the coast of Luzon and slammed into Quezon province’s coconut heartlands. It was the third major typhoon to hit the region since 2020. Many experts connect the growing intensity and frequency of typhoons to climate change. “When typhoons hit coconut farms, it takes up to a year before they can recover,” said Jun Pascua, director of the National Peasants Movement, a Filipino association that represents coconut farmers. The latest storm was so strong that some of Pascua’s farmer-members in districts that were hit directly lost all their coconut trees. The situation in Quezon is common across the region, according to Haigan Murray, co-founder of the Coconut Knowledge Center, an Indonesia-based nonprofit. Production has fallen steadily by about 0.1 percent a year since 2010. This is primarily due to aging trees, a lack of investment in replanting, and limited tools to help farmers diversify their incomes. Worse may be yet to come: By 2027, 80 percent of coconut trees in Southeast Asia will be past their productive peak, producing fewer and fewer coconuts per year or becoming senile, meaning that they are unable to produce coconuts at all, according to estimates from the industry group Sustainable Coconut Partnership. Similar problems are emerging in Indonesia, both in the coconut growing regions of Sumatra and in the lowlands of Sulawesi, which are uniquely suitable for growing cacao. After Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana, it is the world’s second major cacao-growing region and the largest direct exporter of cacao butter to the US. According to industry experts, West Africa is the main source of cacao for chocolate; Indonesian cacao is often used for cacao butter. Jervis Gonzales Coconut trees flourish along the Agos River in General Nakar, Quezon Province, in the Philippines. Coconuts are among the major produce in the town, where most coconut farmers are involved in either whole nut farming or copra farming. Cacao farmers are on the front lines of the climate crisis Jalil, the farmer from Palopo, Sulawesi, says he was surrounded by other cacao plantations until a few years ago. But much like what Ordinado has seen in Quezon, many neighboring farmers have cut down their cacao trees and converted to other crops, like rice or oil palm. At the local cacao processor, Gudang 999, Fahmi, the branch manager, buys beans from farmers and dries them before sending them off to a factory in the provincial capital, Makassar, where they are turned into cacao butter by major multinationals such as Cargill and Singapore-based agribusiness giant Olam International. He confirms the dire diagnosis. “We get 70 percent less cacao than a few years ago,” said Fahmi. “Used to be three tons a day, now just one.” There’s a reason for this. At his farm, Jalil quickly identifies a sickened fruit, tearing it from the branch and with a quick jab with his machete, opening it up for me and tearing out the mushy, white seeds. “See, it’s diseased. We have to throw it away.” Because Sulawesi’s dry seasons have been getting hotter due to climate change, plant diseases can spread more easily in lowland-regions like Palopo. According to experts, this is a growing challenge globally. “Many cocoa farmers are on the front lines of the climate crisis, leaving them vulnerable to drought, pests, and diseases that can decimate a harvest,” said Kerry Daroci, cocoa sector lead at the nonprofit Rainforest Alliance. Nithin Coca Jalil shows the author a diseased cacao fruit. Beyond heat, the more frequent floods in the rainy season are also making cacao farming more difficult. Four years ago, heavy rains destroyed nearly half of Jalil’s harvest. “If flooded, cacao can die,” said Jalil. He points to the rice paddies of his neighbors, a crop less susceptible to flooding and supported by a government program that expanded irrigation. “That’s why they switched.” According to Fahmi, all across Sulawesi’s cacao-growing regions, the combination of low prices, increased rain and heat, and government incentives to expand irrigation and promote the growing of staple crops are leading many farmers to do as Jalil’s neighbors did: switch to rice or, in West Sulawesi, oil palm. In West Africa, too, climate change is creating uncertainty over the future availability of cheap cacao butter. Ghana, the world’s second largest producer, saw widespread drought in 2022, which, according to the cacao consultancy Equipoise, led to a more than 30 percent shortfall in production. This has started to impact global cacao prices, which have jumped by about 15 percent since mid-2022, though that has not yet trickled down to farmers like Jalil. So far, the fall in production hasn’t hurt the plant-based meat industry, partly because other users of coconut oil and cacao butter have been able to more easily replace it with alternatives like palm, sunflower, or rapeseed oil. But for Beyond and Impossible’s need for an oil that behaves like animal fat, as well as the desire to avoid using artificial or lab-based alternatives that might put off consumers, coconut oil and cacao butter remain essential. Impossible and Beyond haven’t invested in sustainability tracing Even as the plant-based meat companies grapple with the challenge of finding adequate supplies, environmentalists and other observers see a broader sustainability challenge as the demand for the products increases. “The spike in demand for coconut as a plant-based fat input could ... create negative consequences if no alternative fat sources are concurrently developed,” said Mirte Gosker, managing director of the Good Food Institute’s Asia-Pacific division. One concern is that if there’s a surge in demand for cacao butter for plant-based meat, and if Indonesian cacao butter production continues to fall, companies may be forced to source more from West Africa. There, cacao is seen as a major driver of deforestation, and child labor is widespread. “It’s completely reasonable to believe that if they are trying to achieve price parity, they might choose to go for some unreliable suppliers, especially for ingredients that are hard to source in the first place,” said Nebeker. “But cutting corners causes a lot of problems.” The plant-based meat companies “will face the same issues as other companies that use deforestation-risk commodities like soy or palm oil,” said Erasmus K.H.J. zu Ermgassen, a researcher at Cambridge University. “A lot of these commodities are not currently traceable. It’s important that these companies manage risks in their supply chains.” Supply chain experts believe that the key to avoiding these risks is committing to sustainable sourcing, investing in farmers, and working with third-party nonprofits like Rainforest Alliance or Fair Trade, which certify coconut oil and cacao, among other products. They, in return, allow brands to use their logos on their packaging. So far, however, no major plant-based meat brand is using any trusted third-party certifier for their cacao or coconut. In fact, Murray has not seen any of the well-known plant-based meat companies engaging directly with coconut oil producers or farmers. Instead, he believes they are sourcing coconut from the major trading companies: Cargill, AAK, and Barry Callebaut. A decade ago, when Murray first heard about the innovative, plant-based burgers being promoted by Beyond and Impossible, he saw an opportunity. “I saw potential for a win-win relationship between plant-based meat and coconut smallholder farmers,” said Murray. “If consumers of plant-based meat are environmentally conscious, then coconut oil could offer multiple co-benefits, from livelihoods to climate change.” Today, he feels far less hopeful, even after directly meeting with executives from Impossible and other smaller brands. “No one that I spoke to had the first idea about their coconut oil, where it comes from, who grows it, how it’s made, nothing,” said Murray. He points out that the big trading companies are unable to trace the vast majority of their coconut oil. These big trading companies do recognize that there are supply and sustainability challenges facing coconut oil and cacao production. They’ve created a Sustainable Coconut Partnership to increase investment in smallholder production. But Murray points out that in the four years since it was initially formed, the organization has done little. Similarly, media attention on child labor in the cacao industry led Cargill, AAK, Barry Callebaut, and Olam to launch numerous sustainable sourcing initiatives. “They can provide you with cocoa that is traceable, deforestation-free ... but only if you pay extra,” said Etelle Higonnet, a cacao supply chain expert formerly with the nonprofit Mighty Earth. And so far, Impossible, Beyond, or other plant-based meat companies are not listed on reports released by Cargill, AAK, Olam, or Barry Calleabaut among brands paying a premium for traceable cacao. Cargill declined to be interviewed, while Olam and Barry Calleabaut did not respond to requests. An AAK spokesperson sent an emailed response about their coconut oil sourcing, stating that “traceability data is something that has not been a priority for the coconut oil industry in the past and we are working with long and complex supply chain involving many different players,” but that they hope to achieve “first sub-national level,” meaning state or province traceability, “for all our coconut supply chains by 2025.” Higonnet and Murray believe trusting the major trading companies is risky, as they have also been criticized for buying ingredients like cacao from sources known to be using child labor or farming on deforested land. They point to a different model. Some global consumer companies have been successful at reducing these risks by tracing their own supply chains. These include cosmetics brand Dr. Bronner’s and the chocolate producer Alter Eco, which work with Fair Trade certifiers to source coconut oil and cacao butter. Large companies, too, are increasingly rethinking sourcing. Mars, a major candymaker, now operates its own cacao processing facilities in Sulawesi, which allows it to bypass the big traders and directly determine if farmers are meeting its labor and sustainability standards. And just as important, it also offers farmers a higher price. So far, there are no signs that Beyond or Impossible is willing to invest in creating sustainable supply chains. Neither company responded to requests for interviews about their cacao or coconut sourcing. That is why experts such as Higonnet and Murray feel there’s a growing risk that as they and their many smaller rivals expand supply chains and seek to reduce costs, an increase in deforestation, child or forced labor, and sub-living wages for farmers and workers could follow. Jervis Gonzales Stores of dried coconut meat in coconut shells in a storehouse in General Nakar, Philippines. Dried coconut meat — which is used to make copra, from which coconut oil is extracted — tends to have a long shelf life. The future of sourcing So what does the future hold for these two critical ingredients? For cacao, one of two things could happen. Production falls, leading to higher prices, or cacao expands into new regions — most likely cooler upland forests, or new countries, increasing its impact on deforestation and the climate. That is already happening, according to a recent report from Mighty Earth, which found cacao plantations encroaching into protected forests across West Africa. Almost all of this is tied to the global chocolate industry, since plant-based meat is still a small player in cacao, but if its footprint grows, there is a risk that it could contribute to the problem. “Climate, economic displacement, and poor soils are pushing cacao farmers into the forests,” said Gerome Tokpa, the West Africa regional head for Earthworm, a nonprofit. “My fear is that we wake up and it is too late. Companies that source cacao really should be more involved in what is going on on the ground.” Yohannes Samosir, a Sumatra, Indonesia-based agro-scientist and a principal adviser to the coconut company RCA Carbon, has much the same worry for coconut production on his island. “Most of the 3.5 million hectares of Indonesia’s coconut are becoming senile. Unless we do big scale replanting, I don’t think the supply will catch up to the potential increased demand for plant-based meat,” said Samosir. “Should a big plant-based meat company be interested, they could invest in the plantation through a collaboration, or a business-to-business agreement. That would be a good way to secure supply later” while avoiding deforestation. Nithin Coca Cacao beans that have been dried for about three days. These are used to make cacao butter and other products. All this offers an important reminder that all food production has a planetary impact. The environmental footprint of plant burgers pales in comparison to that of meat, but if they manage to reshape how Americans eat, the corresponding shifts in global food production will have real impacts on farmers and critical landscapes in the global south. Plant-based meat companies are responsible for handling those shifts responsibly. Back in Quezon, Ordinado, the struggling coconut farmer, would be happy to provide his crop for use in Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods products. “Imagine if we could learn how to help produce ingredients for plant-based meat such as coconut oil,” said Ordinado. “We can work on the production side, while they can work on the processing side. But we need support, we can’t do it ourselves.” Until that happens, he’ll continue to work partly in construction, and his neighbors will likely continue to cut down or neglect their trees — making the price parity and growth dreams of the plant-based meat industry more challenging. Nithin Coca is an Asia-focused freelance journalist who covers climate, environment, and supply chains across the region. He has been awarded fellowships from the Pulitzer Center, the International Center for Journalists, the Solutions Journalism Network, and the Earth Journalism Network, and his reporting has appeared in outlets in North America, Asia, and Europe, including the Financial Times, BBC Future, Mongabay, Nikkei Asia, Yale E360, China Dialogue, the Nation, and Engadget. The reporting of this story was supported by the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.

A farmer atop a large pile of fresh coconuts outdoors.
A farmer arranges his coconuts in Poi Village, Sigi Regency, Central Sulawesi, Indonesia, in January 2020. Coconut farmers in the region have struggled with the declining price of copra, the dried flesh of coconut from which coconut oil is extracted. | Basri Marzuki/NurPhoto via Getty Images

How plant-based meat’s dependence on coconut and cacao could become a liability.

Jalil, a 50-year-old cacao farmer in Palopo, Sulawesi, Indonesia, has never heard of plant-based meats, nor the American company Beyond Meat. When told, he is surprised to hear that cocoa butter made from beans like those grown on his farm, which he has been tending for 30 years, could end up in a Beyond Burger.

“I have no idea where my cacao beans go,” said Jalil. “I thought it’s all for chocolate.”

That may once have been true, but the rapid growth of plant-based meats in recent years has begun to fundamentally alter agricultural supply chains, creating new demand for key ingredients like cocoa butter and coconut oil. Yet even as the plant-based meat industry is snapping up more of those ingredients, small farmers like Jalil say they’re not seeing any benefit.

“Cacao farming is getting increasingly difficult,” he said, pointing to unpredictable prices, a more variable climate, and growing risk of crop disease as growing challenges. “Many farmers are cutting down their cacao trees” and abandoning their plantations. (Cacao is the raw, unprocessed product of the cacao fruit, from which cocoa is roasted and processed.)

What is happening on the ground in Sulawesi should serve as a major warning sign for the plant-based meat companies that rely on these tropical oils. Facing slowing growth in the United States, plant-based meat producers are working hard to reduce costs in the hope of hitting a goal deemed essential to their future: bringing the price of plant-based meat in line with that of beef or pork. Industry watchers warn that plant-based alternatives will struggle to break out of their current niche status unless they can achieve price parity with meat. “Long-term price parity is the only way that these products are going to be competitive,” said Ryan Nebeker, a research analyst at the nonprofit Foodprint.

One way to do that is to lower ingredient costs, but supply chain challenges and threats from climate change could make achieving that goal tough. Much of the supply of coconut oil and cacao butter comes from countries such as Indonesia, the Philippines, Côte d’Ivoire, and Ghana, with weak labor and environmental protections. There is a risk that a desire to lower costs could result in purchasing cacao butter or coconut oil from less ethical sources.

These are delicate questions to ask. Nothing can take away from the fact that the emissions and deforestation footprints of beef are far worse than those of plant-based alternatives. Beef is an outsize driver of deforestation around the world, including in the vital Amazon rainforest. One serving of beef, as Vox has reported, requires as much as 20 times more land and four times more water, and creates more emissions, than an equivalent serving of plant-based meat.

Chart showing CO2-equivalent emissions for meat and alternatives. Beef has by far the highest range, with dairy following it, and then pork, chicken, plant-based meats, and tofu, in that order. Tim Ryan Williams/Vox

But no diet is free from impacts on the planet and those who live on it. Even as the plant-based meat sector offers an important tool in mitigating climate change — not to mention reducing the number of animals sent to the slaughterhouse — there are risks of unintended environmental and labor consequences. That includes significant localized impacts in tropical cacao- and coconut-growing regions in Asia and Africa, areas that haven’t been as intensively impacted by the beef industry as South America. Even though their products are indisputably more friendly to the planet, those consequences present key business challenges to plant-based meat producers as they try to scale their industry.

Pressure to cut costs from Beyond and Impossible, neither of which has the publicly available sustainable sourcing policies or guidelines that are increasingly common in the packaged food industry, risks exacerbating problems such as deforestation, the use of child and forced labor, and sub-living wages for farmers and workers.

Those aren’t the only risks the industry faces in striving to get its ambitious growth plans back on track. Decades of underinvestment and unpredictable prices have left many Indonesian and Filipino farmers unable to maintain their farms, meaning there may simply not be enough cacao butter or coconut oil available.

Coconut and cacao make plant-based meat meaty

To make their animal-free products, Impossible, Beyond, and a host of smaller rivals have developed a range of substitute ingredients derived from plants, such as pea and soy proteins that mimic the texture and feel of animal proteins. But few are as important as cocoa butter — a key ingredient for Beyond Meat as well as products like UNLIMEAT — or coconut oil, which is used by Impossible Foods and several other brands, including Next Gen Foods’ Tindle plant-based chicken, Conagra’s Gardein beefless burger, Hormel’s Happy Little Plants plant-based meatballs, and NotCo’s NotBurger.

Refined coconut oil and cacao butter have unique characteristics that help plant-based products replicate meat. Like animal fats, they remain solid at room temperature, and this high melting point enables plant-based meats to be grilled or cooked similarly to their animal-meat counterparts in gourmet restaurants, fast food chains, or home kitchens.

These fats make up between 5 and 20 percent of a plant-based burger; already, major ingredients providers like Cargill and AAK have set up new sales platforms aimed at providing these two oils to the growing plant-based market segment. And that’s just a start. Good Food Institute (GFI), a nonprofit that promotes plant-based alternatives to animal products, estimated in 2021 that plant-based meats will use 19 percent of global coconut production by 2030.

GFI acknowledges that the recent slowdown in plant-based meat sales in the US might impact these projections and plans to provide updated figures later this year. But “continued development of the plant-based market outside of the US and Europe will support global growth of this industry,” the organization told Vox.

On a warming planet, coconut and cacao supplies are increasingly volatile

To achieve rapid sales growth, Beyond and Impossible will need to achieve price parity with meat, which will require steadily increasing supplies of cheap cacao butter and coconut oil. But in a changing climate, where the farmers who produce the raw materials are increasingly struggling to make a living, that supply is far from guaranteed.

Take the Philippines, the main exporter of coconut oil to the US. In the province of Quezon, in the southeast of the island of Luzon, a key coconut-growing region, low or unpredictable wages, lack of investment, and extreme weather events have caused many farmers to simply stop growing coconuts in recent years, said Julito Ordinado, a 51-year-old coconut farmer who has been working his family’s fields since he was 12. He says he can no longer make a living from coconuts alone, and often works as a construction day laborer. His brother was so desperate, he chose to cut down his coconut trees and sell them for wood in order to get needed cash.

“A coconut tree’s harvest lasts a lifetime, but once you’ve sold all the coco lumber, that’s it,” said Ordinado. “You can’t sell coconuts anymore.” It takes years before new coconut trees can start producing nuts, which means it’s not easy to rapidly expand or shrink production in response to market demand.

These problems are compounded by increasingly volatile weather. Last September, Super Typhoon Noru suddenly intensified off the coast of Luzon and slammed into Quezon province’s coconut heartlands. It was the third major typhoon to hit the region since 2020. Many experts connect the growing intensity and frequency of typhoons to climate change.

“When typhoons hit coconut farms, it takes up to a year before they can recover,” said Jun Pascua, director of the National Peasants Movement, a Filipino association that represents coconut farmers. The latest storm was so strong that some of Pascua’s farmer-members in districts that were hit directly lost all their coconut trees.

The situation in Quezon is common across the region, according to Haigan Murray, co-founder of the Coconut Knowledge Center, an Indonesia-based nonprofit. Production has fallen steadily by about 0.1 percent a year since 2010. This is primarily due to aging trees, a lack of investment in replanting, and limited tools to help farmers diversify their incomes. Worse may be yet to come: By 2027, 80 percent of coconut trees in Southeast Asia will be past their productive peak, producing fewer and fewer coconuts per year or becoming senile, meaning that they are unable to produce coconuts at all, according to estimates from the industry group Sustainable Coconut Partnership.

Similar problems are emerging in Indonesia, both in the coconut growing regions of Sumatra and in the lowlands of Sulawesi, which are uniquely suitable for growing cacao. After Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana, it is the world’s second major cacao-growing region and the largest direct exporter of cacao butter to the US. According to industry experts, West Africa is the main source of cacao for chocolate; Indonesian cacao is often used for cacao butter.

Tall coconut trees growing against a sunny sky Jervis Gonzales
Coconut trees flourish along the Agos River in General Nakar, Quezon Province, in the Philippines. Coconuts are among the major produce in the town, where most coconut farmers are involved in either whole nut farming or copra farming.

Cacao farmers are on the front lines of the climate crisis

Jalil, the farmer from Palopo, Sulawesi, says he was surrounded by other cacao plantations until a few years ago. But much like what Ordinado has seen in Quezon, many neighboring farmers have cut down their cacao trees and converted to other crops, like rice or oil palm.

At the local cacao processor, Gudang 999, Fahmi, the branch manager, buys beans from farmers and dries them before sending them off to a factory in the provincial capital, Makassar, where they are turned into cacao butter by major multinationals such as Cargill and Singapore-based agribusiness giant Olam International. He confirms the dire diagnosis.

“We get 70 percent less cacao than a few years ago,” said Fahmi. “Used to be three tons a day, now just one.”

There’s a reason for this. At his farm, Jalil quickly identifies a sickened fruit, tearing it from the branch and with a quick jab with his machete, opening it up for me and tearing out the mushy, white seeds.

“See, it’s diseased. We have to throw it away.”

Because Sulawesi’s dry seasons have been getting hotter due to climate change, plant diseases can spread more easily in lowland-regions like Palopo. According to experts, this is a growing challenge globally.

“Many cocoa farmers are on the front lines of the climate crisis, leaving them vulnerable to drought, pests, and diseases that can decimate a harvest,” said Kerry Daroci, cocoa sector lead at the nonprofit Rainforest Alliance.

A man’s hands hold an opened cacao fruit with mushy, white seeds. Nithin Coca
Jalil shows the author a diseased cacao fruit.

Beyond heat, the more frequent floods in the rainy season are also making cacao farming more difficult. Four years ago, heavy rains destroyed nearly half of Jalil’s harvest.

“If flooded, cacao can die,” said Jalil. He points to the rice paddies of his neighbors, a crop less susceptible to flooding and supported by a government program that expanded irrigation. “That’s why they switched.”

According to Fahmi, all across Sulawesi’s cacao-growing regions, the combination of low prices, increased rain and heat, and government incentives to expand irrigation and promote the growing of staple crops are leading many farmers to do as Jalil’s neighbors did: switch to rice or, in West Sulawesi, oil palm.

In West Africa, too, climate change is creating uncertainty over the future availability of cheap cacao butter. Ghana, the world’s second largest producer, saw widespread drought in 2022, which, according to the cacao consultancy Equipoise, led to a more than 30 percent shortfall in production. This has started to impact global cacao prices, which have jumped by about 15 percent since mid-2022, though that has not yet trickled down to farmers like Jalil.

So far, the fall in production hasn’t hurt the plant-based meat industry, partly because other users of coconut oil and cacao butter have been able to more easily replace it with alternatives like palm, sunflower, or rapeseed oil. But for Beyond and Impossible’s need for an oil that behaves like animal fat, as well as the desire to avoid using artificial or lab-based alternatives that might put off consumers, coconut oil and cacao butter remain essential.

Impossible and Beyond haven’t invested in sustainability tracing

Even as the plant-based meat companies grapple with the challenge of finding adequate supplies, environmentalists and other observers see a broader sustainability challenge as the demand for the products increases.

“The spike in demand for coconut as a plant-based fat input could ... create negative consequences if no alternative fat sources are concurrently developed,” said Mirte Gosker, managing director of the Good Food Institute’s Asia-Pacific division.

One concern is that if there’s a surge in demand for cacao butter for plant-based meat, and if Indonesian cacao butter production continues to fall, companies may be forced to source more from West Africa. There, cacao is seen as a major driver of deforestation, and child labor is widespread.

“It’s completely reasonable to believe that if they are trying to achieve price parity, they might choose to go for some unreliable suppliers, especially for ingredients that are hard to source in the first place,” said Nebeker. “But cutting corners causes a lot of problems.”

The plant-based meat companies “will face the same issues as other companies that use deforestation-risk commodities like soy or palm oil,” said Erasmus K.H.J. zu Ermgassen, a researcher at Cambridge University. “A lot of these commodities are not currently traceable. It’s important that these companies manage risks in their supply chains.”

Supply chain experts believe that the key to avoiding these risks is committing to sustainable sourcing, investing in farmers, and working with third-party nonprofits like Rainforest Alliance or Fair Trade, which certify coconut oil and cacao, among other products. They, in return, allow brands to use their logos on their packaging.

So far, however, no major plant-based meat brand is using any trusted third-party certifier for their cacao or coconut. In fact, Murray has not seen any of the well-known plant-based meat companies engaging directly with coconut oil producers or farmers. Instead, he believes they are sourcing coconut from the major trading companies: Cargill, AAK, and Barry Callebaut.

A decade ago, when Murray first heard about the innovative, plant-based burgers being promoted by Beyond and Impossible, he saw an opportunity.

“I saw potential for a win-win relationship between plant-based meat and coconut smallholder farmers,” said Murray. “If consumers of plant-based meat are environmentally conscious, then coconut oil could offer multiple co-benefits, from livelihoods to climate change.”

Today, he feels far less hopeful, even after directly meeting with executives from Impossible and other smaller brands. “No one that I spoke to had the first idea about their coconut oil, where it comes from, who grows it, how it’s made, nothing,” said Murray. He points out that the big trading companies are unable to trace the vast majority of their coconut oil.

These big trading companies do recognize that there are supply and sustainability challenges facing coconut oil and cacao production. They’ve created a Sustainable Coconut Partnership to increase investment in smallholder production. But Murray points out that in the four years since it was initially formed, the organization has done little.

Similarly, media attention on child labor in the cacao industry led Cargill, AAK, Barry Callebaut, and Olam to launch numerous sustainable sourcing initiatives.

“They can provide you with cocoa that is traceable, deforestation-free ... but only if you pay extra,” said Etelle Higonnet, a cacao supply chain expert formerly with the nonprofit Mighty Earth.

And so far, Impossible, Beyond, or other plant-based meat companies are not listed on reports released by Cargill, AAK, Olam, or Barry Calleabaut among brands paying a premium for traceable cacao.

Cargill declined to be interviewed, while Olam and Barry Calleabaut did not respond to requests. An AAK spokesperson sent an emailed response about their coconut oil sourcing, stating that “traceability data is something that has not been a priority for the coconut oil industry in the past and we are working with long and complex supply chain involving many different players,” but that they hope to achieve “first sub-national level,” meaning state or province traceability, “for all our coconut supply chains by 2025.”

Higonnet and Murray believe trusting the major trading companies is risky, as they have also been criticized for buying ingredients like cacao from sources known to be using child labor or farming on deforested land.

They point to a different model. Some global consumer companies have been successful at reducing these risks by tracing their own supply chains. These include cosmetics brand Dr. Bronner’s and the chocolate producer Alter Eco, which work with Fair Trade certifiers to source coconut oil and cacao butter. Large companies, too, are increasingly rethinking sourcing. Mars, a major candymaker, now operates its own cacao processing facilities in Sulawesi, which allows it to bypass the big traders and directly determine if farmers are meeting its labor and sustainability standards. And just as important, it also offers farmers a higher price.

So far, there are no signs that Beyond or Impossible is willing to invest in creating sustainable supply chains. Neither company responded to requests for interviews about their cacao or coconut sourcing. That is why experts such as Higonnet and Murray feel there’s a growing risk that as they and their many smaller rivals expand supply chains and seek to reduce costs, an increase in deforestation, child or forced labor, and sub-living wages for farmers and workers could follow.

Large open bags of dried coconut meat Jervis Gonzales
Stores of dried coconut meat in coconut shells in a storehouse in General Nakar, Philippines. Dried coconut meat — which is used to make copra, from which coconut oil is extracted — tends to have a long shelf life.

The future of sourcing

So what does the future hold for these two critical ingredients? For cacao, one of two things could happen. Production falls, leading to higher prices, or cacao expands into new regions — most likely cooler upland forests, or new countries, increasing its impact on deforestation and the climate. That is already happening, according to a recent report from Mighty Earth, which found cacao plantations encroaching into protected forests across West Africa. Almost all of this is tied to the global chocolate industry, since plant-based meat is still a small player in cacao, but if its footprint grows, there is a risk that it could contribute to the problem.

“Climate, economic displacement, and poor soils are pushing cacao farmers into the forests,” said Gerome Tokpa, the West Africa regional head for Earthworm, a nonprofit. “My fear is that we wake up and it is too late. Companies that source cacao really should be more involved in what is going on on the ground.”

Yohannes Samosir, a Sumatra, Indonesia-based agro-scientist and a principal adviser to the coconut company RCA Carbon, has much the same worry for coconut production on his island. “Most of the 3.5 million hectares of Indonesia’s coconut are becoming senile. Unless we do big scale replanting, I don’t think the supply will catch up to the potential increased demand for plant-based meat,” said Samosir. “Should a big plant-based meat company be interested, they could invest in the plantation through a collaboration, or a business-to-business agreement. That would be a good way to secure supply later” while avoiding deforestation.

Large open bags of dried cacao beans inside a storehouse. Nithin Coca
Cacao beans that have been dried for about three days. These are used to make cacao butter and other products.

All this offers an important reminder that all food production has a planetary impact. The environmental footprint of plant burgers pales in comparison to that of meat, but if they manage to reshape how Americans eat, the corresponding shifts in global food production will have real impacts on farmers and critical landscapes in the global south. Plant-based meat companies are responsible for handling those shifts responsibly.

Back in Quezon, Ordinado, the struggling coconut farmer, would be happy to provide his crop for use in Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods products.

“Imagine if we could learn how to help produce ingredients for plant-based meat such as coconut oil,” said Ordinado. “We can work on the production side, while they can work on the processing side. But we need support, we can’t do it ourselves.”

Until that happens, he’ll continue to work partly in construction, and his neighbors will likely continue to cut down or neglect their trees — making the price parity and growth dreams of the plant-based meat industry more challenging.

Nithin Coca is an Asia-focused freelance journalist who covers climate, environment, and supply chains across the region. He has been awarded fellowships from the Pulitzer Center, the International Center for Journalists, the Solutions Journalism Network, and the Earth Journalism Network, and his reporting has appeared in outlets in North America, Asia, and Europe, including the Financial Times, BBC Future, Mongabay, Nikkei Asia, Yale E360, China Dialogue, the Nation, and Engadget.

The reporting of this story was supported by the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

Birds, bees and even plants might act weird during the solar eclipse

A total eclipse isn’t just a spectacle in the sky. Birds, insects and even plants will take notice, and might start acting strange.

A total eclipse isn’t just a spectacle in the sky. When the moon consumes the sun on April 8, day will plunge into twilight, the temperature will drop — and nature will take notice.Reports abound of unusual animal and plant behavior during eclipses. A swarm of ants carrying food froze until the sun reemerged during an 1851 eclipse in Sweden. A pantry in Massachusetts was “greatly infested” with cockroaches just after totality in 1932. Sap flowed more slowly in a 75-year-old beech tree in Belgium in 1999. Orb-weaving spiders started tearing down their webs and North American side-blotched lizards closed their eyes during an eclipse in Mexico in 1991.Plenty of scientists see eclipses as rare opportunities to bolster anecdotal reports by studying how nature responds — or doesn’t — to a few minutes of dusk in the middle of the day. That’s why teams across the country produced a swarm of studies about plant and animal behavior during the last total eclipse to cut across the United States in 2017.Some of these scientists found that when the sun vanished, insects, birds and plants seemed to enter into something approaching a nocturnal pattern. Case in point: Scientists in multiple states reported that fireflies started flashing, and a team in Idaho captured two species of voles that are normally active at night.Bat researchers in Georgia, on the other hand, weren’t convinced that the eclipse had any effect on behavior, though they noticed slightly more bat activity on the night after the eclipse than on previous or subsequent nights. Beetles flew around as normal in South Carolina.Understanding how eclipses affect nature writ large is nearly impossible. That’s because eclipses don’t follow one of the most basic rules of science: replication. They don’t happen with regularity in the same spot. They vary in length. They happen at different times of day, during different seasons.“A lot of the things we found in the literature were exactly that — a curiosity. It happens once every so often, so it’s curious, but not generally informative of animal behavior,” said Olav Rueppell, a scientist who studies honeybee biology at the University of Alberta in Canada.And while an eclipse is an incredible time to observe the natural world, there’s also a potential observer effect: People who might normally be at school, at work or simply distracted are looking and listening closely, and what they see as responses to the eclipse could just be normal behaviors that escape notice on a typical day.Adam Hartstone-Rose, a professor of biological sciences at North Carolina State University, led a study of how animals reacted to the 2017 eclipse at the Riverbanks Zoo in Columbia, S.C.“At any given point on Earth, a total eclipse occurs once every 375 years. So it’s not like you’re learning something now you can use again in the future, and that’s certainly true for animals,” Hartstone-Rose said.“But it’s a unifying event. All of us have this experience together,” he said, adding that during the April eclipse, “we’re all going to be communing with animals and thinking about how they experience it.”Experimenting with natureStudies of animal behavior during an eclipse tend to fall into two categories. Some biologists who are near the path of totality will design a study to see how the eclipse affects their favorite organism, whether it be honeybees or chimpanzees. Others try to activate members of the public to take data and make observations all across the path, which the scientists can use to discern broad patterns.The NASA-backed Eclipse Soundscapes project, for example, will collect audio data and observations from hundreds of people during the April eclipse to repeat, with a bit more rigor, a citizen-science study of animal responses to a 1932 eclipse.In his team’s 2017 study of zoo animals, Hartstone-Rose had researchers systematically observe 17 species, including baboons, flamingos and Galapagos tortoises.Most responded to the eerie darkness in some way — whether by starting their bedtime routines, acting anxious or mating. Giraffes that had been munching on lettuce and chewing their cud huddled near their barn or galloped through their exhibit. A Komodo dragon that hadn’t moved in a day raced around its enclosure and climbed up the wall.Hartstone-Rose is repeating the observations this year at the Fort Worth Zoo in Texas, and he is drafting more than a thousand volunteers across the country to collect records of animal behavior through a project called Solar Eclipse Safari. He’s as interested in the anomalous behavior of animals as he is in learning how observing animals and trying to understand their experience affects humans, perhaps widening their sense of wonder and awe.One common report is that birds go to roost and go quiet during an eclipse. But when a team of ornithologists from Cornell University made recordings along an old logging road near the town of Corinna, Maine, for the 1963 eclipse, they heard the per-chic-o-ree of a goldfinch in the middle of totality, along with a hermit thrush, a Swainson’s thrush and a veery.“Perhaps no two lists of birds heard before, during, and after the eclipse would be anywhere near similar,” they wrote in their summary of the observations.In the 50 minutes before and after totality in 2017, researchers monitoring flying insects and birds via the weather radar network found that the skies went eerily quiet, but there was an intriguing uptick of activity right at totality. The researchers speculated that it might be some kind of insect reacting to the sudden darkness, while the birds possibly grew still due to confusion.“Some previous research shows that insects react much more immediately to light cues, while birds are more like, ‘What’s going on?’” said Cecilia Nilsson, a biologist at Lund University in Sweden. “Totality only lasts a few minutes, so by the time you’re figuring it out, it’s over.”For bird lovers, the many uncontrollable variables of an eclipse can be scientific opportunities, too.One exciting aspect of the 2024 eclipse is that it is happening during the spring, whereas the North American eclipse of 2017 took place very early in the fall migration season, Nilsson said. Many birds, she noted, migrate at night and are often more motivated during the spring migration, so it’s possible that abrupt darkness will have a different effect this time around.Rueppell, the honeybee scientist, was based in North Carolina during the total eclipse in 2017. He decided with collaborators to try to bring some rigor to previous observations of honeybee behavior.A crowdsourced compilation of observations from a 1932 total eclipse, for example, included reports of a swarm of 200 bees showing “apprehensiveness” in the minutes before totality. Another observer reported that “as darkness increased the outgoing bees diminished in numbers and the return battalions grew larger.”Rueppell and colleagues at Clemson University in South Carolina enlisted observers to watch the entrances of hives, counting how many honeybees were exiting and how many were returning from foraging trips before, during and after totality. They made some hives hungrier than others by taking the bees’ honey away before the eclipse, to see if that changed their willingness to forage.The researchers found that the environmental cues overrode bees’ own internal circadian clocks, with darkness causing them to return to the hive and hunker down. Those findings square with another study that found bees stopped buzzing around flowers during totality. But hives that were stressed by hunger shut down less completely than those that weren’t.They also conducted a second experiment, putting fluorescent powder on bees and releasing them away from their hives, then measuring how quickly they returned.Right before totality, they found the bees were returning faster, almost as if they were panicked.The forests full of treesDaniel Beverly, a plant ecophysiologist at Indiana University, studied how sagebrush in Wyoming reacted during the 2017 eclipse. A total eclipse last passed over Wyoming in 1918, though it traversed different parts of the state.“These plants are 60 to 100 years old, and they’ve never seen this midday darkness,” he said. The scientists found that photosynthesis plummeted during totality, then took hours to recover from the shock of the sun reemerging minutes later.This year Beverly will be measuring ecological responses to the eclipse at a forest in Indiana that is part of a long-term project monitoring carbon, water and energy flux through the ecosystem. Because the Morgan-Monroe State Forest is already the subject of intense scientific scrutiny, scientists can take advantage of existing instruments to measure factors such as carbon flux and water movement in white oak, tulip poplars, sassafras and sugar maples.Beverly noted that he’s excited to get as much of the data collection automated as possible so he and his team can fully appreciate the brief but wondrous moment of totality.“It is pretty awesome and life-changing,” Beverly said. “Just the spectacle of it. I don’t know what it does to the human brain.”

Aellopobatis bavarica: Scientists Discover New 150 Million-Year-Old Species of Rays

A new species of fossil ray, Aellopobatis bavarica, has been discovered in Bavarica, Germany, dating back to the Late Jurassic period. In a new study...

Aellopobatis bavarica: The newly discovered species, complete fossils are only known from Germany. This species is also the largest species of all and can grow up to 170 cm in size. Credit: Türtscher et al. (2024, Figure 4)A new species of fossil ray, Aellopobatis bavarica, has been discovered in Bavarica, Germany, dating back to the Late Jurassic period.In a new study recently published in the journal Papers in Palaeontology, an international team of scientists led by palaeobiologist Julia Türtscher from the University of Vienna has explored the puzzling world of rays that lived 150 million years ago and discovered a previously hidden diversity – including a new ray species.This study significantly expands the understanding of these ancient cartilaginous fish and provides further insights into a past marine ecosystem.In her new study, palaeobiologist Julia Türtscher from the Institute of Palaeontology at the University of Vienna examined 52 fossil rays from the Late Jurassic period. These rays are 150 million years old, from a time when Europe was largely covered by the sea, except for a few islands, comparable to today’s Caribbean. The Late Jurassic specimens are particularly valuable to scientists because they are among the oldest known fully preserved ray specimens. As only the teeth of fossilized rays are usually preserved, such rare skeletal finds provide exciting insights into the early evolution of this group. Although the exceptionally well-preserved fossils (from Germany, France, and the UK) have been known for some time, they have been largely unexplored. Türtscher’s study is the first comprehensive analysis of the variation in body shape in these rays.Palaeobiologist Julia Türtscher in the Bavarian State Collection of Palaeontology and Geology in Munich, where several specimens of the new ray species are on display. Credit: Patrick L. JamburaThe results show a greater diversity of holomorphic (fully preserved) rays in the Late Jurassic than previously thought. “Until now, only three holomorphic ray species have been confirmed from the Late Jurassic, but thanks to this study, a total of five species have now been identified,” says Türtscher.Based on their analyses, the researchers were able to confirm a fourth species that had been discussed for some time, as well as documenting and introducing a new, previously undiscovered ray species: Aellopobatis bavarica. This species, which can grow up to 170 cm long, was previously thought to be a large form of the much smaller French Spathobatis bugesiacus, which is 60 cm long. However, by analyzing the skeletal structures and body shapes in detail, the scientists were able to show that Aellopobatis bavarica is a separate species.The new results also suggest that the five species occurred in very restricted areas, but the authors are reluctant to jump to conclusions about possible endemisms: “Further studies on the tooth morphology of the specimens and subsequent comparisons with isolated teeth from other sites may help to reconstruct the palaeogeographic distribution of Late Jurassic rays,” explains Türtscher.Insight into past marine ecosystemsThe results of this new study not only contribute to the understanding of the biodiversity and evolution of rays in the Upper Jurassic, but also have direct implications on the identification of fossil ray species that are known from isolated teeth solely. Continual new discoveries about these fascinating animals provide insights into the dynamics of past marine ecosystems and highlight the importance of well-preserved fossils in the reconstruction of our geological past. “We can only draw accurate conclusions about living species if we also understand the past of a group, including its evolution, its adaptations to changing environmental factors over time, and the extinction this group has faced during its evolutionary history. Palaeobiological knowledge enables us to better understand the dynamics behind evolution and extinction of species and thus aids to develop more effective conservation measures for today’s endangered species” says second author Patrick L. Jambura from the Institute of Palaeontology at the University of Vienna.Reference: “Rostral and body shape analyses reveal cryptic diversity of Late Jurassic batomorphs (Chondrichthyes, Elasmobranchii) from Europe” by Julia Türtscher, Patrick L. Jambura, Eduardo Villalobos-Segura, Faviel A. López-Romero, Charlie J. Underwood, Detlev Thies, Bruce Lauer, René Lauer and Jürgen Kriwet, 19 March 2024, Papers in Palaeontology.DOI: 10.1002/spp2.1552

We Can Still Save the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge

The Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge belongs to the planet. And we can still save it.

One of the hardest things to reconcile about living in the American South is how this region of extraordinary natural beauty, this still-wild place of irreplaceable biodiversity, is mostly in the hands of politicians who will gladly sell it to the highest bidder. It’s hard to reconcile how even land that’s ostensibly protected is never truly safe. And how state regulators charged with protecting it will often look the other way when the highest bidder violates the state’s own environmental regulations.An egregious example of this pattern is unfolding now in Georgia, where state officials are poised to approve a strip mine on the southeastern edge of the magnificent Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge.At 407,000 acres, the Okefenokee is the largest ecologically intact blackwater swamp in North America and the largest National Wildlife Refuge east of the Mississippi River. It hosts or shelters a huge range of plant and animal life, including endangered and threatened species. It is a crucial way station for migratory birds. Designated a Wetland of International Importance under the RAMSAR Convention of 1971, it sequesters an immense amount of carbon in the form of peat.The proposed mine poses a profound risk to the swamp. Trail Ridge, the site where Twin Pines Minerals will begin operations, is a geological formation that functions as a low earthen dam holding the waters of the Okefenokee in place. The mine would remove the topsoil, dig out the sand pits, separate the titanium from the sand, and then return sand and soil to some approximation of their original place. To manage all this, Twin Pines would need to pump 1.4 million gallons of groundwater a day from the aquifer that serves the Okefenokee.It doesn’t sound too bad, I guess, unless you know that this destroy-extract-replace plan is effectively mountaintop-removal mining transferred to the watery lowlands. There is no restoring an ecosystem after an assault like that. Aquatic plants and animals die off if waterways become clogged with silt. Drinking water can be contaminated by heavy metals. Ancient land formations and the habitats they underpin are lost forever. The living soil is left barren.As a species, we have never let ecological necessity get in the way of something we think we need from the land. Thing is, we don’t need this mine. Titanium dioxide is used primarily as pigment in a range of products, including paint and toothpaste. It is not difficult to find in less environmentally sensitive areas.Subscribe to The Times to read as many articles as you like.

Grey-headed flying-fox population is stable – 10 years of monitoring reveals this threatened species is doing well

Ten years of data from Australia’s comprehensive national flying-fox monitoring program reveals the grey-headed flying fox (fruit bat) population is stable. It’s good news for this threatened species.

Adam McKeown, CSIROFlying foxes, or fruit bats, are familiar to many Australians. So it may come as a surprise to learn two of the four mainland species, both grey-headed and spectacled flying foxes, are threatened with extinction. But our decade-long survey of one of these species – the grey-headed flying fox – brings some encouraging news. Our data show the population has been relatively stable since 2012, when surveys first began under the National Flying-fox Monitoring Program. Incredibly, the species emerged from the Black Summer of 2019–20 relatively unscathed. Flying foxes also suffer in heatwaves and many die, but overall numbers have remained stable. While this study is good news for the species, we must not become complacent. Heatwaves are expected to become more frequent and intense as the climate changes. Only further monitoring can determine its effects. Read more: Flying foxes pollinate forests and spread seeds. Here's how we can make peace with our noisy neighbours Hanging out with flying foxes The grey-headed flying fox (Pteropus poliocephalus) is common in most cities and towns across south-eastern Australia. More recently, colonies have become established in South Australia. The species can be found anywhere from Maryborough, on Queensland’s Fraser Coast, to Adelaide, with some outlying populations as far north as Ingham in north Queensland. There’s also a breakaway group in Port Augusta, 300km north of Adelaide. The “vulnerable” listing means the species is at risk of extinction. But it’s not as dire as if it were “endangered”. The original vulnerable assessment, endorsed in 2001, was based on a population decline of about 30% over ten years and the potential for ongoing land clearing in the grey-headed flying fox’s core range. But this is the flying fox you’re most likely to see and hear in south-east Australia, from Sydney to Adelaide. During the day, flying foxes like to hang out together. They rest and socialise in large roosts, sometimes numbering more than 100,000 animals. More than 150,000 grey-headed flying foxes roosted in Gympie, Queensland, after much of their habitat burned during the Black Summer of 2019-20. Eric Vanderduys, CSIRO As the sun sets, they take to the sky, departing in large streams to forage during the night in the surrounding landscape. They can travel long distances to find food, sometimes venturing more than 40km from home, and flying more than 300km in a single night. Their food of choice is nectar from a wide variety of eucalypt, bloodwood and melaleuca species. In return, they play an important pollination role, as if they were nocturnal bees with a one-metre wingspan. They also feed extensively on native figs. In urban areas, they feast on the nectar and fruit of introduced species found in gardens and street trees. Individuals regularly change roosts. They move throughout the species’ range, following food resources. That means the number of bats in roosts is constantly changing, depending on the availability of the surrounding resources, which makes accurate counting particularly challenging. Grey-headed flying foxes sleep and socialise during the day but are often well aware of approaching humans. Adam McKeown, CSIRO Monitoring a threatened species Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, co-ordinated the National Flying-fox Monitoring Program in partnership with federal and state environmental agencies from 2012 to 2022. The intention was to monitor the populations of the two nationally listed flying fox species on the mainland. It was specifically designed to understand their population trends. Here we focus on the grey-headed flying foxes. The program involved quarterly visits by federal, state and local government staff and volunteers to as many flying fox roosts as possible. Over the entire program almost 12,000 counts were conducted at 912 potential roosts. Grey-headed flying foxes were found at 469 of those roosts. This program would not have been possible without hundreds of hours of work around the clock by staff and volunteers, often in challenging conditions. Their work highlights the importance of long-term monitoring programs. From 2012 to 2022 we counted an average of 580,000 grey-headed flying foxes in each survey. But total numbers ranged between 330,000 and 990,000, with strong seasonal variation. This variation relates to their reproductive cycle and the availability of food within their range. Flying foxes pup late in the year. When those pups become independent, they can be counted. This results in a sudden increase in the numbers, typically around February. So while our data show peaks and troughs throughout each year, overall the population remained stable. We developed a model to allow for this seasonality and examine overall population trends. The model strongly suggests the population hovered around 600,000 adults for the ten years of the survey. We found a 70% chance of a slightly increasing population, versus a 30% chance the population has declined slightly. The population appeared to be stable despite exceptional events such as the 2019–20 megafires and severe heatwaves known to have killed thousands of flying foxes. The flying foxes seem resilient to these threats for two main reasons. First, they are nomadic and well adapted to travelling long distances. This allows them to evade threats such as fires and droughts. Second, grey-headed flying-foxes are likely to benefit from a “human-modified landscape”. In other words, they may well be urban “winners”, as the urban areas we’ve created provide diverse foraging opportunities. Grey-headed flying foxes continually occupied all major cities within their range throughout our monitoring program. These urban environments offer a smorgasbord of flowering and fruiting species, especially palms and figs. Many of these species are exotics, with flowering and fruiting patterns that flying foxes can readily exploit. We found continuous occupation of individual roosts was unusual. The few that were continuously occupied were all in urban areas, supporting the view that urban areas are increasingly important for this species. This young grey-headed flying fox is big enough to count. Eric Vanderduys, CSIRO Good news, but we need to be cautious After ten years of monitoring we can safely say the grey-headed flying fox is doing ok, for the time being. But threats to its survival remain. Climate change is expected to cause more heatwaves, bushfires and droughts within their range. This could turn their fate around. It’s also worth noting that while our monitoring continued for two years after the 2019–20 bushfires, the longer-term impacts are still unknown. Given this uncertainty, continuing monitoring using similar methods and incorporating updated technology would increase certainty about the population trajectory. Unfortunately, monitoring has paused since 2022, pending further funding discussions. Read more: To stop new viruses jumping across to humans, we must protect and restore bat habitat. Here's why Eric Vanderduys works for CSIRO. He receives funding from a range of federal and state government agencies.Adam McKeown receives funding from a variety of federal and state government agencies.Chris R. Pavey works for CSIRO. He receives funding from a variety of federal and state government agencies. John Martin works for Ecosure ecological consultancy. He receives funding from a variety of federal and state government agencies.Peter Caley works for the CSIRO. He receives funding from a range of federal and state government agencies.

Oregon Is Now Home to the World's Largest Dark Sky Sanctuary

The Oregon Outback International Dark Sky Sanctuary covers 2.5 million acres in the southeastern part of the state

Officials have been working toward the designation for four years. Travel Southern Oregon Calling all stargazers: Oregon is now home to the largest Dark Sky Sanctuary in the world. Earlier this month, DarkSky International certified a remote, 2.5 million-acre area in the southeastern part of the state. From this rugged swath of high desert landscape dotted with sagebrush, visitors who stay up late can see large numbers of stars, planets and other celestial bodies. “It’s surprising sometimes to see that many stars all at once,” says Bob Hackett, executive director of Travel Southern Oregon, to the Guardian’s Dani Anguiano. “It catches you, and it makes you pause because you feel like you can touch it … That vastness of the whole cosmos up there—it almost makes you get closer to the people you’re with on the ground.” DarkSky International is a nonprofit that certifies areas that have developed comprehensive protections against light pollution. To date, the group has certified more than 200 Dark Sky Places in 22 countries. The newly certified area is called the Oregon Outback International Dark Sky Sanctuary, and officials spent four years working to earn the designation. They’ve implemented a lighting management plan that will help preserve the region’s unobstructed night sky views, which includes measures such as installing motion detectors and reducing the number of lights that point upward. Additionally, every light source within the sanctuary’s boundaries will need to comply with DarkSky International’s standards within the next decade, reports KLCC’s Nathan Wilk. In Dark Sky Sanctuaries, travelers can marvel at the cosmos without interference from light pollution. Travel Southern Oregon These efforts will not only benefit stargazers and astronomers but also help protect the many animals that call the region home, such as sage grouse, bighorn sheep, migratory birds and white-tailed jackrabbits. Light pollution can disrupt breeding, migration and other wildlife behaviors. Moths, for example, can congregate around street lights to the point of exhaustion, while sea turtle hatchlings can die after becoming disoriented by artificial lighting near the shore. Humans, too, suffer because of light pollution, which is getting worse year after year. In addition to obscuring views of the night sky, it is also a health hazard. Studies have linked light pollution to an array of problems, from sleep disorders and depression to obesity and diabetes. The new Oregon sanctuary is now the biggest in the world. But local officials want to make it even bigger: They hope someday to expand the sanctuary into neighboring Harney and Malheur counties, covering a total of 11 million acres, per KLCC. If they achieve this goal, they’ll have protected roughly one-fifth of the entire state, reports AFAR’s Bailey Berg. “As the population of Oregon and the trend of light pollution continue to rise, the unparalleled scale and quality of the Outback’s dark skies will long serve as a starry refuge to people and wildlife alike,” says Dawn Nilson, an environmental consultant who helped get the area certified, in a statement. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

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