What is a wetland? An ecologist explains

October 2, 2022 / activist360

By Jon Sweetman, The Conversation US CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Wetlands are areas of land that are covered by water, or have flooded or waterlogged soils. They can have water on them either permanently or for just part of the year.

Whether it’s year-round or seasonal, this period of water saturation produces hydric soils, which contain little or no oxygen. But this doesn’t mean that they are lifeless: Wetlands are full of unique water-loving plants and wildlife that have adapted to wet environments.

Wetlands can take many different forms, depending on the local climate, water conditions and land forms and features. For example, swamps are dominated by woody trees or shrubs. Marshes often have more grasslike plants, such as cattails and bulrushes. Bogs and fens are areas that accumulate peat – deposits of dead and partly decomposed plant materials that form organic-rich soil.

Trillions of dollars in ecological benefits

Wetlands are important environments for many reasons. They provide ecological services whose value has been estimated to be worth more than US$47 trillion per year.

For example, wetlands support very high levels of biodiversity. Scientists estimate that 40% of all species on Earth live or breed in wetlands.

Wetlands are critical homes or stopovers for many species of migratory birds. In the central U.S. and Canada, for example, wetlands in the so-called prairie pothole region on the Great Plains support up to three-quarters of North America’s breeding ducks.

The hunting and conservation group Ducks Unlimited works to conserve prairie pothole wetlands on North America’s Great Plains.

Along with providing important habitat for everything from microbes to frogs to waterfowl, wetlands also work to improve water quality. They can capture surface runoff from cities and farmlands and work as natural water filters, trapping excess nutrients that otherwise might create dead zones in lakes and bays. Wetlands can also help remove other pollutants and trap suspended sediments that cloud water bodies, which can kill aquatic plants and animals.

Because wetlands are often in low-lying areas of the landscape, they can store and slowly release surface water. Wetlands can be extremely important for reducing the impacts of flooding. In some places, water entering wetlands can also recharge groundwater aquifers that are important for irrigation and drinking water.

Wetlands also act as important carbon sinks. As wetland plants grow, they remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They they die, sink to the bottom of the wetland and decompose very slowly.

Over time, the carbon they contain accumulates in wetland soils, where it can be stored for hundreds of years. Conserving and restoring wetlands is an important strategy for regulating greenhouse gases and mitigating the impacts of climate change.

Resources at risk

Despite the many valuable services they provide, wetlands are constantly being destroyed by draining them or filling them in, mainly for farming and development. Since 1970, the planet has lost 35% of its wetlands, a rate three times faster than the loss of forests.

Destruction and degradation of wetlands has led to the loss of many organisms that rely on wetland habitat, including birds, amphibians, fish, mammals and many insects. As one example, many dragonfly and damselfly species are declining worldwide as the freshwater wetlands where they breed are drained and filled in. A marsh or bog may not look like a productive place, but wetlands teem with life and are critically important parts of our environment.

Disclosure statement
Jon Sweetman receives funding from the US EPA for work on wetland restoration. He is affiliated with the Society for Freshwater Science, the Ecological Society of America, and the Society of Wetland Scientists

Kids born near fracking sites 2-3 times more likely to develop leukemia: Study

August 21, 2022 / activist360

Exposure to fracking and its effects is “a major public health concern,” said a study co-author.

By Kenny Stancil, Common Dreams (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Adding further evidence of the negative public health impacts associated with planet-heating fossil fuel pollution, new research published Wednesday found that children living in close proximity to fracking and other so-called “unconventional” drilling operations at birth face significantly higher chances of developing childhood leukemia than those not residing near such activity.

Existing setback distances, which may be as little as 150 feet, are insufficiently protective of children’s health.
—Cassandra Clark, Postdoctoral Associate, Yale Cancer Center

The peer-reviewed study, published in Environmental Health Perspectives, examined the relationship between residential proximity to unconventional oil and gas development (UOGD) and risk of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), the most common form of childhood leukemia.

Researchers compared 405 children ages 2 to 7 who were diagnosed with ALL in Pennsylvania between 2009 and 2017 to a control group of 2,080 children without leukemia matched on birth year. They measured the connection between in utero exposure to unconventional oil and gas activity and childhood leukemia diagnoses in two exposure windows: a “primary window” of three months pre-conception to one year prior to diagnosis and a “perinatal window” of pre-conception to birth.

Children with at least one fracking well within 2 kilometers (1.24 miles) of their birth residence during the primary window had 1.98 times the odds of developing ALL compared with those whose neighborhoods were free from such fossil fuel infrastructure, they found. Children who lived within 2 kilometers of at least one fracking well during the perinatal window were 2.8 times more likely to develop ALL compared with their unexposed counterparts.

Accounting for maternal race and socio-economic status reduced the strength of these relationships, but only slightly, with the adjusted odds of developing childhood leukemia 1.74 and 2.35 times higher for those exposed to UOGD during the primary and perinatal windows, respectively.

“Unconventional oil and gas development can both use and release chemicals that have been linked to cancer,” study co-author Nicole Deziel, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, said in a statement.

Last summer, Physicians for Social Responsibility uncovered internal records revealing that since 2012, fossil fuel corporations have injected potentially carcinogenic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), or chemicals that can degrade into PFAS, into the ground while fracking for oil and gas—after former President Barack Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency approved their use despite agency scientists’ concerns about toxicity.

The possibility that children living in close proximity to such sites are “exposed to these chemical carcinogens is a major public health concern,” said Deziel.

Roughly 17.3 million people in the United States, including nearly four million children, live within a half-mile radius of active oil and gas production, according to the Oil & Gas Threat Map, a geospatial analysis released in May.

Not only do those people have a greater risk of suffering severe health problems from toxic air pollution, but as the research published Wednesday notes, fracking also contaminates drinking water—creating another pathway of exposure to cancer-linked chemicals.

The new study adds to a growing body of literature documenting the deleterious health and environmental consequences of fracking and other forms of fossil fuel extraction.

Research published earlier this year found that residential proximity to UOGD is correlated with a higher risk of dying early. More broadly, the World Health Organization warned last year that burning coal, oil, and gas is “causing millions of premature deaths every year through air pollutants, costing the global economy billions of dollars annually, and fueling the climate crisis.”

Other recent studies have estimated that slashing energy-related air pollution would prevent more than 50,000 premature deaths and save $608 billion per year in the U.S. alone, while eliminating greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 would save 74 million lives around the globe this century—demonstrating that the “mortality cost of carbon” is astronomical.

“Fracking threatens every person on the planet, directly or indirectly. It should be banned entirely.
—Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director, Food & Water Watch

Despite this obvious case for rapid decarbonization, President Joe Biden has yet to use his executive authority to cancel nearly two dozen fracked gas export projects that are set to unleash pollution equivalent to roughly 400 new coal-fired power plants.

The researchers behind the paper published Wednesday hope that their findings will be used to improve public policy, including better regulation of “setback distances”—the required minimum distance between a private residence or other sensitive location and fracking wells.

Setback distances are currently being debated across the U.S., with some communities calling for setback distances to be lengthened to more than 305 meters (1,000 feet) or as far as 1,000 meters (3,281 feet), the authors wrote.

In Pennsylvania, where the study was based, the current setback distance is 152 meters (499 feet), up from 61 meters (200 feet) in 2012. Researchers, meanwhile, observed elevated risks of childhood leukemia from fracking activity within a 2,000 meter (6,562 feet) radius.

“Existing setback distances, which may be as little as 150 feet, are insufficiently protective of children’s health,” lead author Cassandra Clark, a postdoctoral associate at the Yale Cancer Center, said in a statement. “We hope that studies like ours are taken into account in the ongoing policy discussion around UOG setback distances.”

Other critics of fracking have demanded far more extensive federal action, including prohibiting the practice entirely.

As “hundreds of scientific studies and thousands of pages of data have already shown over the last decade,” Food & Water Watch executive director Wenonah Hauter said last year, “fracking is inherently hazardous to the health and safety of people and communities in proximity to it.”

“This says nothing of the dreadful impact fossil fuel extraction and burning is having on our runaway climate crisis,” she added. “Fracking threatens every person on the planet, directly or indirectly. It should be banned entirely.”

1 in 5 Deaths Globally Caused by Fossil Fuel Pollution, a New Study Reveals

February 13, 2021 / activist360 / Leave a comment

By Douglas Broom, Senior Writer, Formative Content, World Economic Forum (Public License).

Burning fossil fuels is causing nearly one in five of all deaths worldwide.
A new study found the death toll is almost twice as high as previously thought.
China’s clean-air initiatives have saved 1.5 million lives, but the country still has the highest death toll.
The researchers call on policymakers to make the switch to clean energy.

Fossil fuel pollution was responsible for almost one in five deaths in 2018, according to a new study which has prompted calls for governments and businesses to do more to switch to clean energy.

More than eight million people died as a result of breathing in minute particulate matter from burning fossil fuels in 2018, according to research from Harvard University, in collaboration with the University of Birmingham, the University of Leicester and University College London.

They found that particulate pollution was responsible for 18% of deaths in 2018, almost twice the level previously estimated. In 2016, the World Health Organization (WHO) put the global death toll from air pollution at 4.2 million.

We already know that more than nine out of 10 people live in areas where air pollution exceeds WHO safety levels. So how did the researchers arrive at such alarming figures for fossil fuel-related deaths?

The study took a new approach, using a 3D atmospheric modelling tool to pinpoint the greatest concentrations of fine particulate (PM2.5) pollution around the world, and combined that data with more accurate measurements of its effects.

Death toll underestimated

As well as confirming that regions with the worst air pollution have the highest rates of mortality, the study, published in the journal Environmental Research, found that the number of deaths in these regions had been underestimated.

Although China has achieved a dramatic reduction in particulate pollution – numbers almost halved between 2012 and 2018 – the country still emerged with the highest death toll (3.9 million) followed by India (2.5 million).

The study found that without its clean air initiatives, the death toll in China would have been even higher. As well as saving 1.5 million lives in China, the measures had also reduced deaths from particulate pollution outside the country by almost a million as well.

North America, Europe and Asia were also shown to suffer more deaths from particulates than previously thought. Overall, the study found higher mortality rates among people who suffered long-term exposure to fossil-fuel emissions, even at comparatively low levels.

Switch to clean energy

“Our study adds to the mounting evidence that air pollution from ongoing dependence on fossil fuels is detrimental to global health,” said Professor Eloise Marais of University College, London, one of the report’s authors.

“We can’t in good conscience continue to rely on fossil fuels, when we know that there are such severe effects on health and viable, cleaner alternatives,” she added.

Harvard Professor Joel Schwartz, another of the report’s authors, said that often discussion of the harmful effects of burning fossil fuels focused on CO2 emissions and climate change and overlooked the damage to health from pollutants emitted along with greenhouse gases.

“We hope that by quantifying the health consequences of fossil fuel combustion, we can send a clear message to policymakers and stakeholders of the benefits of a transition to alternative energy sources,” he said.

Global leaders, surveyed for the World Economic Forum’s 2021 Global Risks report, ranked human environmental damage, like air pollution, as one of the top 10 clear and present dangers facing the planet. They also ranked it the third most likely risk to materialize in 2021.