Is the world being destroyed?

Some vaccines are associated with myocarditis,5 including mRNA vaccines,1-4 and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported a possible association between COVID-19 mRNA vaccines and myocarditis, primarily in younger male individuals within a few days after the second vaccination, at an incidence of about 4.8 cases per 1 million.6 This study shows a similar pattern, although at higher incidence, suggesting vaccine adverse event underreporting. Additionally, pericarditis may be more common than myocarditis among older patients.

Face coverings are now a legal requirement in many public spaces around the world. But even before they became compulsory, masks were causing litter problems on land and at sea.

One February beach clean in Hong Kong found 70 masks along 100 metres of shoreline, with 30 more appearing a week later. In the Mediterranean, masks have reportedly been seen floating like jellyfish.

Despite millions of people being told to use face masks, little guidance has been given on how to dispose of or recycle them safely. And as countries begin to lift lockdown restrictions, billions of masks will be needed each month globally. Without better disposal practices, an environmental disaster is looming.

The majority of masks are manufactured from long-lasting plastic materials, and if discarded can persist in the environment for decades to hundreds of years. This means they can have a number of impacts on the environment and people.

Analysis of the world, from experts
Hazardous to people and animals
Initially, discarded masks may risk spreading coronavirus to waste collectors, litter pickers or members of the public who first come across the litter. We know that in certain conditions, the virus can survive on a plastic surgical mask for seven days.

Discarded plastic waste in a grassy area, including plastic gloves and face masks.
Masks aren’t the only problem – other items of PPE, such as gloves, are also being discarded in high numbers. TANYARICO/Shutterstock
Over the medium to long term, animals and plants are also affected. Through its sheer mass, plastic waste can smother environments and break up ecosystems. Some animals also cannot tell the difference between plastic items and their prey, subsequently choking on pieces of litter.

Even if they do not choke, animals can become malnourished as the materials fill up their stomachs but provide no nutrients. Smaller animals may also become entangled in the elastic within the masks or within gloves as they begin to break apart.

A face mask floating underwater at sea.
Discarded face masks may be mistaken by sea creatures for prey and eaten. Stely Nikolova
Plastics break down into smaller pieces over time, and the longer litter is in the environment, the more it will decompose. Plastics first break down into microplastics and eventually into even smaller nanoplastics. These tiny particles and fibres are often long-lived polymers that can accumulate in food chains. Just one mask can produce millions of particles, each with the potential to also carry chemicals and bacteria up the food chain and potentially even into humans.

Really? That sounds like gross overkill based on the fact that the virus is airborne.

Please dispose of used masks in the residual waste (not in the yellow bin)! Contaminated masks are also safely disposed of in the residual waste by incineration.

If the masks end up in the environment, this pollutes nature. Not only because animals can get tangled in the tapes, but also because the material, which is made of polyester and polypropylene, takes many years to decompose completely.

If the masks end up in rivers and end up as plastic waste in the sea, they decompose into microplastics - and thus enter the food chain of many marine creatures.

Therefore: When wearing masks, take care of yourself and others - when disposing of masks, take care of the environment!

Other medical waste, such as utensils for detection procedures (for example corona rapid tests), also regularly accumulates during these times. Rapid tests can be carried out in pharmacies and doctors' surgeries, but they are also increasingly used in companies, schools and private households. The waste generated there should always be disposed of in a sturdy, tightly sealed rubbish bag via the residual waste bin.

During a pandemic, the rules of infection control have top priority. This means that the most important thing is to dispose of the waste safely according to the given rules, which excludes the further spread of possible pathogens. The last step of this safe disposal procedure is the "thermal treatment" of the waste in a waste incineration plant, i.e. the burning of the medical waste. The prevailing incineration temperatures guarantee the complete destruction of any pathogens.

But even before they became compulsory, masks were causing litter problems on land and at sea.

This is another case where your arguments seem inconsistent.

So are corporations responsible for the plastic waste littering the beaches in those pictures you posted?

Russia has endured its worst forest fire season in the country’s modern history, according to recent data from the Russian Forestry Agency analysed by Greenpeace.

Fires have destroyed more than 18.16m hectares of Russian forest in 2021, setting an absolute record since the country began monitoring forest fires using satellites in 2001. The previous record was set in 2012, when fires covered 18.11m hectares of forest.

The record was surpassed late last week after a long fire season that has also produced unprecedented levels of global wildfire emissions and upturned daily life for hundreds of thousands of people living in Siberia and elsewhere in central Russia.

“For the past several years, when the area of the fires has surpassed 15m hectares, it has become, in all likelihood, the new normal in the conditions of the new climate reality,” Greenpeace Russia wrote.

Those fires have primarily affected communities in Siberia, where dry, hot summers have turned the vast taiga forests into a tinderbox. In Yakutia, a northern Siberian region that has been particularly hard-hit, smog covered the capital city, Yakutsk, for weeks, and villagers have had to come together in last-ditch efforts to save their homes.

“Emergency workers have come and villagers are also fighting the fires but they can’t put them out, they can’t stop them,” Varvara, a 63-year-old from the remote village of Teryut, said by telephone in July. “Everything is on fire.”

The statistics do not record other types of fires taking place outside Russia’s forests. “If we counted all the fires – grass, reed, tundra, where there is no forest fund – then we would see an even higher number,” wrote Grigory Kuksin, the head of Greenpeace Russia’s firefighting project. The total area could be as high as 30m hectares, he said, an area the size of Italy or Poland.

Burning forests in Russia helped produced some of the worst global emissions in recent months. The Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service of the EU found that burning forests released 1.3 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide last month, the highest since the organisation began measurements in 2003.

The taiga forests of Siberia pumped 970 megatonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere between June and August – more than all the forests in the rest of the world put together. The fires in Yakutia played an important role in that, as the fire season lengthens and pushes farther north, amid unusually high temperatures and lower than normal soil moisture.

According to Greenpeace Russia, the fires in Yakutia are continuing, including north of the Arctic Circle. “That is not characteristic for this time of year,” Kuksin wrote.

Grassfires are also ongoing mainly in Russia’s southern regions of Rostov, Volgograd, Astrakhan and Orenburg, Greenpeace said. Climate change will also make it more difficult for emergency workers to manage Russia’s regular peat fires, which have enveloped Moscow and other cities in noxious smog in past years.

Scientists from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) have been closely monitoring a summer of severe wildfires which have impacted many different countries across the Northern Hemisphere and caused record carbon emissions in July and August. CAMS, which is implemented by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts on behalf of the European Commission with funding from the EU, reports that not only large parts of the Northern Hemisphere were affected during this year’s boreal fire season, but the number of fires, their persistence and intensity were remarkable.

As the boreal fire season draws to a close, CAMS scientists reveal that:

• Dry conditions and heatwaves in the Mediterranean contributed to a wildfire hotspot with many intense and fast developing fires across the region, which created large amounts of smoke pollution.
• July was a record month globally in the GFAS dataset with 1258.8 megatonnes of CO2 released. More than half of the carbon dioxide was attributed to fires in North America and Siberia.
• According to GFAS data, August was a record month for fires as well, releasing an estimated 1384.6 megatonnes of CO2 globally into the atmosphere.
• Arctic wildfires released 66 megatonnes of CO2 between June and August 2021.

Scientists at CAMS use satellite observations of active fires in near-real-time to estimate emissions and predict the impact of resulting air pollution. These observations provide a measure of the heat output of fires known as fire radiative power (FRP), which is related to the emission. CAMS estimates daily global fire emissions with its Global Fire Assimilation System (GFAS) using the FRP observations from the NASA MODIS satellite instruments. The estimated emissions of different atmospheric pollutants are used as a surface boundary condition in the CAMS forecast system, based on the ECMWF weather forecast system, which models the transport and chemistry of atmospheric pollutants, to predict how global air quality will be affected up to five days ahead.

The boreal fire season typically lasts from May to October with peak activity taking place between July and August. In this summer of wildfires, the most affected regions were:

Mediterranean

Many nations in eastern and central Mediterranean suffered the effects of intense wildfires throughout July and August with smoke plumes clearly visible in satellite imagery and CAMS analyses and forecasts crossing the eastern Mediterranean basin. As southeast Europe experienced prolonged heatwave conditions, CAMS data showed daily fire intensity for Turkey reaching the highest levels in the GFAS dataset dating back to 2003. Following the fires in Turkey, other countries in the region went on to be affected by devastating wildfires including Greece, Italy, Albania, North Macedonia, Algeria, and Tunisia.

Fires also hit the Iberian Peninsula in August, affecting vast parts of Spain and Portugal, especially a large area near Navalacruz in the Avila province, just west of Madrid.



Siberia

While the Sakha Republic in northeastern Siberia typically experiences some degree of wildfire activity every summer, 2021 has been unusual, not just in size but also the persistence of high-intensity blazes since the beginning of June. A new emissions record was set on 3rd August for the region and emissions were also more than double the previous June to August total. In addition, the daily intensity of the fires reached above average levels since June and only began to subside in early September. Other areas affected in Siberia have been the Chukotka Autonomous Oblast (including parts of the Arctic Circle) and the Irkutsk Oblast. The increased activity observed by CAMS scientists corresponds with increased temperatures and decreased soil moisture in the region.

North America

Large scale wildfires have been burning in western regions of North America throughout July and August affecting several Canadian provinces as well as the Pacific Northwest and California. The so-called Dixie Fire which raged across northern California is now one of the biggest ever recorded in the state’s history. Resulting pollution from the persistent and intense fire activity affected the air quality for thousands of people in the region. CAMS global forecasts also showed a mixture of smoke from the long-running wildfires burning in Siberia and North America travelling across the Atlantic. A clear plume of smoke was seen moving across the north Atlantic and reaching western parts of the British Isles in late August before crossing the rest of Europe. This happened as Saharan dust was travelling in the opposite direction across the Atlantic including a section over southerly areas of the Mediterranean resulting in reduced air quality.

Mark Parrington, Senior Scientist and wildfire expert at the ECMWF Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, comments: “Throughout the summer we have been monitoring wildfire activity across the Northern Hemisphere. What stood out as unusual were the number of fires, the size of the areas in which they were burning, their intensity and also their persistence. For example, the wildfires in Sakha Republic in northeastern Siberia have been burning since June and only started receding in late August although we have been observing some continuing fires in early September. It’s a similar story in North America, parts of Canada, the Pacific Northwest and California, which have been experiencing large wildfires since the end of June and beginning of July and are still ongoing.”

“It is concerning that drier and hotter regional conditions - brought about by global warming - increase the flammability and fire risk of vegetation. This has led to very intense and fast-developing fires. While the local weather conditions play a role in the actual fire behaviour, climate change is helping provide the ideal environments for wildfires. More fires around the world are anticipated in the coming weeks, too, as the fire season in the Amazon and South America continues to develop.” he adds.

Rabat - Whenever I tell people that climate change is one of the key reasons for not wanting to have children, they often look at me with disbelief. Despite ever escalating cries of warning from the world’s foremost experts, humanity continues its climate change delusion that life on Earth will continue as it has for millennia.

Everyday we live our lives, buy cars, go on vacations and make long-term life decisions as if the climate crisis is just another reason to be demanding that politics “gets its act together.”

Psychologically it is understandable that we do not live with the constant feeling of doom that ought to arise when hearing politicians declare that we are “on the verge of the abyss,” as UN chief Antonio Guterres aptly described the situation on April 19.

Similar to how humans psychologically ignore the knowledge of our own inevitable death, we appear to treat the climate crisis with a similar resigned numbness.

This “physic numbness” makes the climate crisis just another political issue, another topic to “care about.” Ignoring our own finite existence might not harm us much, yet ignoring a pending global crisis will harm us and generations to come.

The global climate catastrophe is already well under way, and driven by a perverse climate apartheid. People living in poverty in the Global South are bearing by far the most significant impact of the current stage of the crisis.

For our greed-based system this is not a “crisis,” as we are already allowing horrific suffering. Aid organizations highlight that “people are not starving, they’re being starved,” while billions in idle cash sits in the bank accounts of the ultra-rich and giant corporations.

Meaningless action

Today we mark Earth Day, like every April 22 since 1970. The Earth Day website proudly announced how one billion people have been “mobilized” and over 75,000 “partners” are “driving positive change.”

“Our world needs transformational change,” Earth Day organizers proclaim, yet after 50 years of activism amid ever increasing emissions, consumerism, and birth rates, it appears we have only moved backwards.

The world celebrates whenever another essentially meaningless climate treaty has been signed, patting politicians on the back for entering into agreements that will not, and cannot be enforced.

The voluntary nature of climate treaties reveals the suicidal trend that humanity is following. We “wish” to address the coming apocalypse, yet we just cannot dare disturb our economy or, God forbid, harm our multinational corporations who have become more powerful than nation states themselves.

Casting blame

We blame the UN, while ignoring its very limited powers and its highly problematic structure in which the world’s most powerful nuclear powers can veto any decision the rest of the world makes.

We blame our national body politic, while ignoring who has voted them in, and on whose opinion polls they base their policies.

We blame energy companies, agriculture, or mining for their emissions, yet we forget that our consumerism fuels the growing demand for the products these industries produce.

For me, the reason we are not truly addressing this issue is because it would highlight the self-destructive lie that has governed economic decision-making for the last half century. We live in a commodified society that appears to have all but abandoned the idea of “saving a life at all cost.”

Built on a lie

Our global economy is built on a fundamental myth to which we seem unable to admit, as it would discredit or even cast blame on every political “leader” who has ignored it for all this time.

We evaluate a country’s performance by measuring its GDP “growth,” as if Earth holds infinite resources and space for us to perpetually “grow.” We extract countless billions from the poor through their underpaid labor and celebrate those people so immoral as to hoard billions amid Earth’s well-documented poverty and hunger. They are actively enriching themselves off others’ misery.

We live in a world where democracy and government have become a farce, mere instruments in the hands of global capital. Global institutions such as the IMF and World Bank are there to punish any country who does not subscribe to the mantra of perpetual growth. Meanwhile, three for-profit national credit-rating agencies in the US hold the fate of nations in their hands.

These flawed institutions do not hold countries accountable for spending billions on unnecessary, and ultimately self-destructive, arms sales. Yet increased spending on healthcare or social security will see any country’s credit rating start to drop.

Real fundamental change

We live in a world ruled by multinationals, greedy billionaires, and arms-dealing nations that hold undemocratic veto powers in what seems to be the ironically named UN “Security Council.” How could we ever expect anything besides a steady profit-making march towards our collective doom?

Like an abusive husband, our economic system continues to make victims out of the people who have not contributed significantly to the problem.

The burning of fossil fuels started in the colonial era, while the injustices of that era to current-day “developing nations” are only set to be exacerbated by this imperial past.

The emergence of “climate colonialism” perpetuated by former colonial powers is only further evidence of our problematic past and how little we have changed in the post-colonial era.

Crisis response

As a political analyst I keenly observed the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic for signs of a possible new mentality of global solidarity and de-politicized action to save lives.

Those signs have not appeared. Instead, the current reality only further highlights our petty global divisions that could lead us all to our collective doom, driven there by greed, nationalist delusions, and wishful thinking.

Short-sighted greed in particular appears to drive climate change, leading to good ideas being neglected or opposed out of fear they might harm quarterly profits. The many offered climate measures, like the US and EU versions of a “Green New Deal,” would actually be beneficial within a perpetual-growth-oriented economic system.

These plans are often tailored to not offend the status quo and fit neatly within the overton window. This results in plans that are not nearly as radical as a pending end to the planet’s ability to host human life would require. Yet, they fit neatly into our warped zeitgeist.

A salient fact to add to this is that not combating climate change could cost the global economy an estimated $1.9 trillion annually.

If during a pandemic we value corporate profits over saving millions of lives and allow a few dozen billionaires to continue hoarding our Earth’s wealth, how could we ever change our system enough to stop, or even slow, climate change?

If the world’s richest countries cannot, amid a global crisis, lift patents on vaccines to ensure every human is vaccinated as soon as possible, what chance do we have of genuine economic reform?

Solving the crisis

For some the solution to climate change is inherently personal. For them it revolves around recycling, eating less meat, or avoiding high-carbon travel.

For others the solution is a purely political one. They see the solution driven by ambitious climate treaties, lofty carbon emission targets, and leaders with vision.

Another perspective is that the solution lies in addressing our economic system that is rapidly draining our earth of its resources for the benefit of a select few. With 100 companies responsible for 90% of all global emissions, economic reform and strong regulations could alleviate some of the worst consequences of climate change.

For me, the solution would include all of the above, but most of all would resolve around finally treating this as the real and growing crisis it is.

As long as we feel that this crisis is being addressed, we continue our self delusion as the sword of damocles swings ever closer. There is not one national politician on Earth today that is treating this crisis as the coming apocalypse that it is.

Minimizing Earth’s climate crisis requires us to value our children and grandchildren as we value ourselves. For future generations we must act drastically right now. For current generations born into less privilege, we must act drastically right now.

That change will even serve the rich, the comfortable, and those in power, the people who have deluded themselves the most about the fact that a growth-oriented, fossil fuel-driven economy is causing emissions that will make our planet uninhabitable.

For me, the solution lies around not having children, which drastically reduces my carbon footprint, and trying to ring the alarm as so many others have tried.

Solving this crisis requires an immense awakening of courage and solidarity. If the pandemic is anything to go by, then we are utterly doomed.

Still, humans are strange creatures that always have the tendency to surprise you when you least expect it.

BUENOS AIRES — Sergio Koci’s sunflower farm in the lowlands of northern Argentina has survived decades of political upheaval, runaway inflation and the coronavirus outbreak. But as a series of historic droughts deadens vast expanses of South America, he fears a worsening water crisis could do what other calamities couldn’t: Bust his third-generation agribusiness.

“When you have one bad year, you can face it,” Koci said. Some of his 20,000 acres rest near the mighty Paraná River, where water levels have reached lows not seen since 1944. On the back of two years of drought-related crop losses, he said, the continuing dryness is now set to reduce his sunflower yields this year by 65 percent.

“When you have three bad years, you don’t know if there will even be another year,” he said.

From the frigid peaks of Patagonia to the tropical wetlands of Brazil, worsening droughts this year are slamming farmers, shutting down ski slopes, upending transit and spiking prices for everything from coffee to electricity.

So low are levels of the Paraná running through Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina that some ranchers are herding cattle across dried-up riverbeds typically lined with cargo-toting barges. Raging wildfires in Paraguay have brought acrid smoke to the limits of the capital. Earlier this year, the rushing cascades of Iguazu Falls on the Brazilian-Argentine frontier reduced to a relative drip.

The droughts this year are extensions of multiyear water shortages, with causes that vary from country to country. Yet for much of the region, the droughts are moving up the calendar on climate change — offering a taste of the challenges ahead in securing an increasingly precious commodity: water.

“It’s an escalating problem, and the fact that we’re seeing more and more of these events, and more extreme events, is not a coincidence,” said Lisa Viscidi, energy and climate expert with the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue. “It’s definitely because we’re seeing the effects of climate change.”

The region is one of many across the globe being struck by severe drought. Hot spots severe enough to cause widespread crop losses, water shortages and elevated fire risk are now present in every continent outside Antarctica. Farmers in Arizona are curbing water use amid a catastrophic decline of the Colorado River. California melons are withering on their vines. The drought in Madagascar is being partly blamed for what the United Nations is calling the world’s first climate famine.

Such disasters, scientists say, will worsen as the planet warms. The latest climate assessment from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects that one-third of global land areas will suffer from at least moderate drought by the end of the century.

For South America, that future is coming into view just as some of the economies hit hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic are struggling to rebound. The impact of the droughts are threatening to soar into the billions of dollars. Across the region, the price of historic dryness is being measured in lost crops, a slowdown in mining, surging transportation costs and shortages of energy in a region heavily dependent on hydropower.

In Chile, a nation caught in the vortex of a 13-year drought, its longest and most severe in 1,000 years, a “blob” of warm water in the southwest Pacific the size of the continental United States is disturbing rain patterns, pushing storm tracks southward over the Drake Passage and Antarctica. Scientists say greenhouse gases have exacerbated the drying trend, putting Chile at the forefront of the region’s water crisis.

“We are one of the regions of the globe where you can see that climate models coincide in their predictions, that by the end of the 21st century, we’ll have on average 30 percent less rainfall than today,” said Duncan Christie, a paleoclimatologist at the Austral University of Chile. “What we’re seeing today is as if the future has already arrived in central Chile.”
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The Chilean government has declared an agricultural emergency in 8 of its 16 regions and is offering aid to stricken farmers. Agriculture Minister María Emilia Undurraga said some regions are registering rainfall losses of between 62 and 80 percent.

If conditions do not improve, Chile’s copper mining industry — responsible for 10 percent of the nation’s economic output, and heavily reliant on water for processing — could see a drop in production of between 2.6 and 3.4 percent this year, amounting to losses of up to $1.7 billion, according to Manuel Viera, president of the Chilean Mining Chamber.

“Our economy very much depends on copper, and this is going to have an impact,” Viera said. “Without water, there is no mining.”

Francisco Sotomayor, head of the Chilean Ski Areas Association, said seven of the organization’s 12 lodges opened late or suffered interruptions this year due to a lack of snow — compounding losses for a sector already hit hard by the pandemic.
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“Before, we could always speak of having more than three meters of snow accumulated by this date, and now we are under two meters,” Sotomayor said.

Bolivia’s drought is lingering after two brutally dry years that saw millions of acres burned by wildfires. In the department of Oruro, dairy farmer Demetrio Martínez said his family business lost two cows this year from drought after losing a total of six in 2019 and 2020.

“If they don´t get water, they die,” he said. “In the past, we were able to maintain 25 head of cattle. [Because of the drought now] we’re only managing to keep 10 alive.”

Martínez lives roughly 100 miles from Lake Poopó, which was the country’s second-largest lake before it dried up in 2015. It has dried and recovered in the past, but it now resembles a desert, and scientists fear it might stay that way.

Communities in Bolivia’s Tarija department are now depending on water trucks and impromptu groundwater wells to survive. Yenny Noguera Rodríguez, 29, an environmentalist activist, said the water shortage is affecting not only crops, but families who now often need to travel long distances to bathe.

“My family drives an hour to another place where there’s water every two days,” she said. “Some families travel even farther; up to six hours to places where they can do laundry or take a shower. This means some people are showering only one day a week.”

Analysts blame a combination of the La Niña weather pattern, deforestation in the Amazon and climate change for what is shaping up to be the worst drought in nearly a century in parts of Brazil.

Falling water tables are emptying hydroelectric reservoirs in a nation of 211 million that relies on water to power the majority of its energy grid. Brazil’s Vice President Hamilton Mourão has warned that the drought could lead to energy rationing.

Brazil’s mines and energy minister, Bento Albuquerque, says hydropower losses now equal five months’ worth of energy consumed by the city of Rio de Janeiro. The ministry announced it would jack up energy prices, with affected consumers paying a new premium of more than 6 percent.

“The rainy season in the South was worse than expected. As a result, the reservoirs of our hydroelectric power plants in the Southeast and Midwest suffered a greater reduction than expected,” Albuquerque said in a televised address last month. He said federal government agencies had been directed to cut electricity consumption by 20 percent.

The drought, combined with frost from unusually cold temperatures, has damaged coffee crops in Brazil, the world’s largest producer and exporter. The result: In July, the price of Arabica beans touched seven-year highs, a spike that will filter into morning mugs globally in the weeks and months ahead.

“Never before have we seen two seasons of Arabica crops being impacted by the drought,” said Judy Ganes, a U.S.-based soft commodities analyst. “It was bad enough to have the drought damage, and now we have the frost damage.”

Here in Argentina, the country is suffering a double blow. The northern and central regions are experiencing the drier weather patterns that are affecting parts of Brazil, even as its Andean regions get hit by the conditions that are robbing moisture from central Chile.

In a country long known as a global breadbasket, where 70 percent of exports are food commodities such as soybeans and corn, the drought is slamming farmers — and the broader economy — just as the country is struggling to emerge from a recession made worse by the pandemic.

The Paraná River — one of the principal trade routes in South America’s Southern Cone, second on the continent only to the Amazon in length and flow — has been reduced in some stretches to a stream. Piers where boats used to berth are now silted up, separated from flowing water by several yards. To avoid being grounded, barges are running with lighter loads, causing transport costs to surge by as much as 25 percent and transit times to triple. The sector is expecting losses this year of $100 million, according to Juan Carlos Muñoz Menna, director of the Paraguayan shipping industry group CAFYM.

Analysts fear the droughts are a harbinger of a new normal, portending consistently lower crop yields in the future. Total cereal output in Argentina was 12.7 million tons in 2020. The number is expected to fall to 11.4 million in 2021 and 10.9 million in 2022, according to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization. In the longer term, the World Bank warns, changes in weather patterns could cause corn and wheat yields in some parts of the country to fall by 80 percent.

“Several provinces could potentially see catastrophic losses, Buenos Aires, Córdoba, La Pampa, Santa Fe, especially for corn and soybeans,” Julie Rozenberg, a senior economist at the World Bank, wrote in an email.

Analysts say Argentine farmers, stung by high inflation, repeated economic crises and the pandemic and high inflation, have been slow to adopt new technologies such as drought-resistant seeds or sophisticated irrigation systems.

“There’s no technology investment capacity to face recurring weather events,” said Matías Lestani, chief economist at the Argentine Rural Confederation. Restrictions imposed by the government have limited the ability of domestic agribusiness to import critical farming equipment and supplies needed for adaptation, Lestani said. Soaring inflation and credit restrictions haven’t helped.

Twelve thousand miles south of subtropical Chaco, where Koci grows his sunflowers, farmers in Argentina’s Patagonia region tell an eerily similar story.

Winston Ninaja, an onion and carrot grower in the province of Chubut, said water shortages this year have driven yields down by 30 percent.

“My biggest headache is water,” Ninja said. “In reality, now, you never know what to expect.”

WOODBINE, N.J. — Shawn LaTourette sees a warning on the coast of New Jersey in the miles of Atlantic white cedar trees that have devolved into what researchers call ghost forests.

It’s a term that points to the visceral changes of the landscape — going from lush green to a pale white — and the destruction of the area’s crucial role as a biodome and coastal buffer. These once-thriving forests are a direct result of climate change as the trees are suffocated by saltwater intrusion sparked by sea level rise and an uptick of hurricanes and superstorms.

“If we pay close attention to our environment, we often see that it sends us signals,” LaTourette, the state’s commissioner of environmental protection, said while walking along a ghost forest spanning more than 300 acres in southern New Jersey. “This is a signal about that risk that we all face from saltwater intrusion from storm surge.”

The Atlantic white cedar forests are seen as the first line of defense on New Jersey’s coast. They thrive in freshwater wetlands — swamps so thick that extreme caution and a good pair of wader boots are necessary in order to walk through them. As sea levels rise, these trees are hit first, and the saltwater intrusion is killing them due to their sensitive nature. That water will then move on to inundate farm fields, peoples’ homes, drinking water and businesses.

Along much of the Eastern Seaboard, the once-healthy coastal woodlands are dwindling rapidly — to the extent that if the rate of decline continues, these forested wetlands will reach the “point of no return within the century,” according to University of Virginia and Duke University researchers focused on studying the ecosystems. Ghost forests are already a problem all along the East Coast and in states along the Gulf Coast, such as Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

Coastal woodlands like these are critical ecosystems in the United States, as they filter pollutants, act as natural barriers and store carbon in the ground. But their positioning on the coast puts them at the vanguard of rising sea levels brought on by the warming atmosphere, therefore worsening some of the effects of climate change.

“To be able to look at these forests and see that this is a direct result from climate change is frightening,” says Kristen Meistrell, a Stewardship Project director for the New Jersey Audubon Society, which focuses on environmental awareness and conservation. Meistrell has worked here for nearly 10 years and recalls walks she used to take on the property when she started in 2012, surrounded by live Atlantic white cedar trees. Since then, she’s watched the forests completely die off.

The state and environmental groups are scrambling to restore the cedar species in environments that aren’t as immediately threatened by impending storm surges. Foresters and environmental groups are largely focused on restoring forests in new homes, where they won’t be hit by sea level rise. The groups have cleared out large swaths of land typically filled with other hardwoods like maple, to allow remaining healthy cedars to drop seeds naturally with adequate space and access to sunlight. The New Jersey Audubon Society leverages farmers’ and hunters’ attachment to the land, working with them on their private property to develop forest stewardship plans to manage the property for wildlife like these cedars.
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“We’re trying to put this forest type back on the landscape,” State Forester John Sacco said. “When we do that, we’re introducing biodiversity. There are suites of organisms that occur with this forest type that you really don’t find in other forests. It increases biodiversity, helps with resiliency, and it’s part of our natural heritage that we need to keep around and bequeath to the next generation.”

This will take some time. A healthy cedar forest will take decades to develop, and they’re playing catch up after losing more than 80 percent of the woodlands due to logging over the last two centuries.

Growing new trees in safer homes is just one conservation method in their toolbox, as New Jersey and other states also focus on protecting what already exists. The Nature Conservancy works on refuges along the Outer Banks in North Carolina, where it is building oyster reefs and ditch networks to slow down erosion and control water running upstream, and adding more vegetation that can tolerate salt water into the peat soils where the trees typically grow, making root systems more sturdy.

The scientists from University of Virginia and Duke project that coastal forested wetlands will be “drowned and salted out of existence through the North American Coastal Plain within 100 years,” but also note this isn’t the only region globally that’s at risk. Environments in Brazil, Ukraine and Mozambique have similar wetland ecosystems, but don’t currently have research available.