Installation of bird flight diverters by helicopter on a high voltage power line in Germany. Credit: © RWE Netzservice

By Jacques Trouvilliez and Patricia Zurita
BONN, May 9 2015 (IPS)

Climate change is one of the greatest risks to human societies, but also to biodiversity, often creating a “snowball effect” exacerbating existing pressures such as habitat fragmentation.

Consequently, the conservation community, including inter-governmental treaties such as AEWA and NGOs such as BirdLife International, is strongly advocating genuine attempts to address its causes and mitigate its effects. We can square this particular circle: producing renewable energy to help combat climate change without inadvertently hammering another nail in the coffin of our endangered wildlife.

Alongside cutting energy demand and increasing energy efficiency, developing renewable sources of energy is essential in order to reduce the amount of fossil fuels burned and the emission of greenhouse gases. There is little doubt that the development and deployment of renewable energies are vital if we are to end our dependency on traditional fuels.

However, appropriate planning, assessment and monitoring of renewable infrastructure are necessary in order to prevent adverse effects to wildlife.  All the innovative technologies being developed – wind turbines, solar panels, tidal, wave and hydropower – can have distinct drawbacks as far as wild animals – and particularly migratory birds – are concerned, if not sited correctly.

One thing that conventional and renewable energies often have in common is the need to transfer power from the point of production to the consumers.  Natural habitat is sacrificed so that power lines can be constructed.

The pylons and cables form a barrier to migration – and large birds are most vulnerable – perching on the structures, their long wing span can often lead to short circuits; this is fatal to the electrocuted bird but also inconvenient for the customer whose electricity supply is interrupted. The birds that most commonly fall victim are from long-lived, slow-breeding species that cannot sustain these losses.

Power lines are not the only hazard – wind turbines take a toll too.  The Spanish Ornithological Society says that more than 18,000 wind turbines in Spain are causing significant mortality of raptors and bats, including threatened species.

It would be foolish for conservationists to oppose all forms of renewable energy just as it would be foolish to welcome any proposal to build a windfarm, barrage or solar plant unquestioningly.  What needs to be done is to find the right balance.

The Parties to the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS), under which AEWA was concluded, adopted a resolution calling for appropriate Strategic Environment Assessments and Environmental Impact Assessments procedures to be put in place, which would mean applying rigorous planning guidance.

It would involve following a simple sequence: first, developments should be avoided in the most sensitive locations, e.g. bottlenecks on birds’ migration routes.  Everywhere else, mitigation measures should be taken and a last resort compensatory actions should be considered.

And some mitigation measures bring large gains at little cost– shutting off wind farms when migrating birds are passing has proven to have reduced the mortality rate of the Griffon Vulture by 50 percent in Spain – while lost electricity production was less than 1.0 percent.

The design and placement of the pylons are also very important – in forested landscapes for example, it is best if the structures do not protrude above the canopy.  Monitoring in France over the past 20 years has shown that attaching spirals to power lines at regular intervals to make them more visible can lead to a reduction in the fatalities as a result of collisions.

The next few decades will see a massive increase in demand for power in developing countries in Africa – and this will be matched by expansion of both renewable generation capacity and grid connections.  The danger is that if the design and location are not right, further devastating losses to the continent’s birdlife will be inevitable.

We need to increase our knowledge and to share it once it has been acquired.  This will entail close cooperation between conservationists on the one hand and the power companies on the other.

CMS and AEWA have produced the first version of a set of guidelines on the appropriate deployment of renewable energy technology and the BirdLife International network can provide the expertise on the ground to ensure that we can square this particular circle: producing renewable energy to help combat climate change without inadvertently hammering another nail in the coffin of our endangered wildlife.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

Executives of the Chinese company HKDN and members of the Nicaraguan Grand Interoceanic Canal Commission, behind a large banner on Dec. 22, 2014, in the Pacific coastal town of Brito Rivas, during the ceremony marking the formal start of the gigantic project that will cut clean across the country. Credit: Mario Moncada/IPS

By José Adán Silva
MANAGUA, Mar 31 2015 (IPS)

The new interoceanic canal being built in Nicaragua has brought good and bad news for the scientific community: new species and archeological sites have been found and knowledge of the local ecosystems has grown, but the project poses a huge threat to the environment.

Preliminary reports by the British consulting firm Environmental Resources Management (ERM) revealed the existence of previously unknown species in the area of the new canal that will link the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. The study was commissioned by Hong Kong Nicaragua Canal Development (HKND Group), the Chinese company building the canal.

Among other findings, the study, “Nicaragua’s Grand Canal”, presented Nov. 20 in Nicaragua by Alberto Vega, the consultancy’s representative in the country, found two new species of amphibians in the Punta Gorda river basin along Nicaragua’s southern Caribbean coast.

The two new kinds of frogs have not yet been fully studied, said Vega, who also reported 213 newly discovered archaeological sites, and provided an assessment of the state of the environment along the future canal route.

The aim of the study was to document the main biological communities along the route and in adjacent areas, and to indicate the species and habitats in need of specific conservation measures in order to identify opportunities to prevent, mitigate and/or compensate for the canal’s potential impacts.

The 278-km waterway, which includes a 105-km stretch across Lake Cocibolca, will be up to 520 metres wide and 30 metres deep. Work began in December 2014 and the canal is expected to be completed by late 2019, at a cost of over 50 billion dollars.

The environmental impact study will be ready in late April, Telémaco Talavera, the spokesman for the presidential Nicaraguan Grand Interoceanic Canal Commission, told Tierramérica.

“The studies are carried out with cutting-edge technology by an international firm that is a leader in this area, ERM, with a team of experts from around the world who were hired to provide an exhaustive report on the environmental impact and the mitigation measures,” he said.

Three farmers study the route for the interoceanic canal on a map of Nicaragua, which the Chinese firm HKND Group presented in the southern city of Rivas during one of the meetings that the consortium has organised around the country with people who will be affected by the mega-project. Credit: José Adán Silva/IPS

Víctor Campos, assistant director of the Humboldt Centre, told Tierramérica that HKND’s preliminary documents reveal that the canal will cause serious damage to the environment and poses a particular threat to Lake Cocibolca.

The 8,624-sq-km lake is the second biggest source of freshwater in Latin America, after Venezuela’s Lake Maracaibo.

Campos pointed out that HKND itself has recognised that the route that was finally chosen for the canal will affect internationally protected nature reserves home to at least 40 endangered species of birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians.

The route will impact part of the Cerro Silva Nature Reserve and the Indio Maiz biological reserve, both of which form part of the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor (CBM), where there are endangered species like scarlet and great green macaws, golden eagles, tapirs, jaguars, spider monkeys, anteaters and black lizards.

Along with the Bosawas and Wawashan reserves, Indio Maíz and Cerro Silva host 13 percent of the world’s biodiversity and approximately 90 percent of the country’s flora and fauna.

This tropical Central American country of 6.1 million people has Pacific and Caribbean coastlines and 130,000 sq km of lowlands, plains and lakes. There have been several previous attempts to use Lake Cocibolca to create a trade route between the two oceans.

The Cocibolca Group, made up of a dozen environmental organisations in Nicaragua, has warned of potential damage by excavation on indigenous land in the CBM, on the country’s southeast Caribbean coast.

One site that would be affected is Booby Cay, surrounded by coral reefs and recognised by Birdlife International as an important natural habitat of birds, sea turtles and fish.

Studies by the Cocibolca Group say that dredging with heavy machinery, the construction of ports, the removal of thousands of tons of sediment from the lake bottom, and the use of explosives to blast through rock would have an impact on the habitat of sea turtles that nest on Nicaragua’s southwest Pacific coast.

Map of Nicaragua with the six possible routes for the Grand Canal. The one that was selected was number four, marked in green. Credit: Courtesy of ERM

The selected route, the fourth of the six that were considered, will run into the Pacific at Brito, 130 km west of Managua. A deepwater port will be built where there is now a beach that serves as a nesting ground for sea turtles.

ERM’s Talavera rejects the “apocalyptic visions” of the environmental damage that could be caused by the new waterway. But he did acknowledge that there will be an impact, “which will be focalised and will serve to revert possible damage and the already confirmed damage caused by deforestation and pollution along the canal route.”

The route will run through nature reserves, areas included on the Ramsar Convention list of wetlands of international importance, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) biosphere reserves, and water basins.

According to Talavera, besides the national environmental authorities, HKND consulted institutions like the Ramsar Convention, UNESCO, the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Birdlife International, “with regard to the feasibility of mitigating and offsetting the possible impacts.”

The canal is opposed by environmental organisations and affected communities, some of which have filed a complaint with the Inter-american Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).

In an IACHR hearing on Mar. 16, Mónica López, an activist with the Cocibolca Group, complained that Nicaragua had granted HKND control over the lake and its surrounding areas, including 16 watersheds and 15 protected areas, where 25 percent of the country’s rainforest is concentrated.

López told Tierramérica that construction of the canal will also lead to “the forced displacement of more than 100,000 people.”

In addition, she criticised “the granting to the Chinese company of total control over natural resources that have nothing to do with the route but which according to the HKND will be of use to the project, without regard to the rights of Nicaraguans.”

The 2013 law for the construction of the Grand Interoceanic Canal stipulates that the state must guarantee the concessionaire “access to and navigation rights to rivers, lakes, oceans and other bodies of water within Nicaragua and its territorial waters, and the right to extend, expand, dredge, divert or reduce these bodies of water.”

The state also gives up the right to sue the investors in national or international courts for any damage caused to the environment during the study, construction and operation of the waterway.

In the IACHR hearing in Washington, representatives of the government, as well as Talavera, rejected the allegations of the environmentalists, which they blamed on “political interests” while arguing that the project is “environmentally friendly”.

They also repeated the main argument for the construction of the canal: that it will give a major boost to economic growth and will enable Nicaragua, where 42 percent of the population is poor, to leave behind its status as the second-poorest country in the hemisphere, after Haiti.

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Over a dozen huge windmills line the roadside of the town of Jhimpir, close to Karachi, in the Sindh province. Credit: Farooq Ahmed/IPS

By Bradnee Chambers
BONN, Oct 25 2014 (IPS)

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has set a target of reducing emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO₂. One way countries can meet their obligations is to switch energy production from the burning of fossil fuels to “renewables”, generally understood to include wind, wave, tidal, hydro, solar and geothermal power and biomass. 

They have a dual advantage: first, they do not create by-products responsible for global warming and climate change; and secondly, they are non-consumptive, drawing on primary energy sources that are to all intents and purposes inexhaustible.

Why then is the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS), which is holding its triennial policy conference next month in Quito, Ecuador, rocking the boat by publishing a review highlighting the serious environmental threats posed by the new technologies? Renewables provide many of the answers but they need to be deployed sensitively and not indiscriminately, so that our efforts to keep the atmosphere clean and planet cool do not come at a price that our wildlife cannot afford to pay.

First and foremost, CMS is not joining the climate sceptics’ camp. There is ample evidence of the effects climate change is having on migratory animals.

The Convention has long been grappling with this issue. The Convention and the vulnerable species it protects need climate change to be halted or at least slowed down so that adaptation measures can be developed.

Climate change just adds to the threats migratory species currently face. This includes threats posed by the fishing gear responsible for by-catch of seabirds, turtles and dolphins; and the demand for luxury products that result in the wasteful practice of shark finning and the fuelling of the massacre of elephants and rhinos for ivory and horn. And then there is marine debris, bird poisoning and illegal trapping – the list goes on.

Climate change is opening several new fronts in the conservation war by causing habitat change and loss; by affecting gender ratios in species such as marine turtles; and by altering species’ behaviour with some not migrating at all, others leaving their breeding grounds later and returning earlier, while some are extending their range displacing other species less capable of adapting.

So why is CMS not rejoicing at the news that wave energy installations, tidal barrages, solar panels and wind farms on land and at sea are being developed at unprecedented rates? CMS would give a hearty cheer if these new technologies reduce as promised the human-induced drivers of climate change.

However, the report commissioned by the Convention, together with the African-Eurasian Waterbird Agreement, the International Renewable Energy Agency and BirdLife International, explains the prudent reaction from conservationists, as it illustrates how renewable energies are a double-edged sword – a cure for some ills afflicting the world but with potentially severe side-effects for wildlife.

Hydro-power relies on dams – technological wonders in many cases – but essentially barriers across rivers preventing migratory species such as salmon from reaching their spawning grounds. The changes to water flow and levels both up and downstream of the dams can drastically transform habitats. The human inhabitants displaced when their homes were flooded were given ample warning and compensation; not so the wildlife.

Wind power is harnessed through turbines, which take a huge toll of wildlife through collisions. The rotor blades of wind turbines are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of bats and birds a year, to the detriment of the ecological services these useful insectivores provide by devouring as many as 1,000 mosquitoes a night, reducing the need to use chemical pesticides.

The construction, operation and maintenance of turbines are also negative factors, especially in marine wind farms – noise whirring of the rotors can all disturb whale and dolphin species which are particularly sensitive to sound.

Biomass production leads to habitat loss and degradation affecting birds and terrestrial mammals. Large plantations lead to monocultures and a loss of habitat diversity and thus reduce the number of species that a given area can support.

Solar, wave and tidal power similarly have their drawbacks, but the guidelines accompanying the report point the way to constructing renewable energy installations in ways that eliminate or at least reduce their impacts on migrating mammals such as birds, dolphins, porpoises and fish and their habitats.

There is no silver bullet to deliver a perfect solution to the problems of our growing demand for energy and of producing it in ways that do not damage the environment in one form or another. Renewables provide many of the answers but they need to be deployed sensitively and not indiscriminately, so that our efforts to keep the atmosphere clean and planet cool do not come at a price that our wildlife cannot afford to pay.

Edited by: Nalisha Adams

Excerpt:

Over the past two decades, 99 percent of India’s vultures have disappeared. Credit: gkrishna63/CC-BY-ND-2.0

By Stella Paul
PYEONGCHANG, Republic of Korea, Oct 16 2014 (IPS)

The Mountain Chicken isn’t a fowl, as its name suggests, but a frog. Kimisha Thomas, hailing from the Caribbean island nation of Dominica, remembers a time when she could find these amphibians or ‘crapaud’ as locals call them “just in the backyard”.

Known also as the Giant Ditch Frog, these creatures form a crucial part of Dominica’s national identity, with locals consuming them on special occasions like Independence Day. Today, hunting mountain chicken is banned, as the frogs are fighting for their survival. In fact, scientists estimate that their numbers have dwindled down to just 8,000 individuals.

Locals first started noticing that the frogs were behaving abnormally about a decade ago, showing signs of lethargy as well as abrasions on their skin. “Then they began to die,” explained Thomas, an officer with Dominica’s environment ministry.

“People also started to get scared, fearing that eating crapauds would make them ill,” she adds. In fact, this fear was not far from the truth; preliminary research has found that Chytridiomycosis, an infectious disease that affects amphibians, was the culprit for the wave of deaths.

Some 2,599 of 71,576 species recently studied are thought to be endangered -- International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN)
Besides the mountain chicken, there has been a sharp decline in the population of the sisserou parrot, which is found only in Dominica, primarily in the country’s mountainous rainforests. Thomas says large-scale destruction of the bird’s habitat is responsible for its gradual disappearance from the island.

Dominica is not alone in grappling with such a rapid loss of species. According to the Red List of Threatened Species, one of the most comprehensive inventories on the conservation status of various creatures, some 2,599 of 71,576 species recently studied are thought to be endangered.

Compiled by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the Red List aims to increase the number of species assessed to 160,000 by 2020. But even with only half the world’s biological species included in the index, the forecast is bleak.

While the extinction or threat of extinction of thousands of species poses huge challenges across the board, tribal and indigenous communities are generally first to feel the impacts, and will likely bear the economic and cultural brunt of such losses.

As Thomas points out, “The crapaud was our national dish. The sisserou parrot [also known as the Imperial Amazon] sits right in the middle of our national flag. Their loss means the loss of our very cultural identity.”

A similar refrain can be heard among the Parsi community of India, whose culture dictates that the dead be placed in high structures, called ‘towers of silence’, that they may be consumed by birds of prey: kites, vultures and crows. The unique funeral rites are an integral part of the Zoroastrian faith, which stipulates that bodies be returned to nature.

But over the past two decades, 99 percent of India’s vultures have disappeared, making it impossibly difficult for the Parsi community to keep up with a centuries-old tradition.

Rising economic burden

Besides severely affecting ancient cultural and spiritual practices, the disappearance of various species is also taking an economic toll on indigenous communities according to 65-year-old Anil Kumar Singh, who was born and raised in the village of Chirakuti in India’s northeastern hill districts.

Singh says that as a child, he never saw a doctor for minor ailments like the common cold or an upset stomach.

“We used Vishalyakarni [a herb] for pains and cuts. We drank the juice of basak leaves (adhatoda vasica) for a cough and used the extract from lotus flowers for dysentery,” he tells IPS.

“But today, these plants don’t grow here anymore. Even when we try, they die out soon and we don’t know the reason. We now have to buy medicines from a chemist’s shop for everything,” he asserts.

Sometimes, the cost is much higher. Northern Indian states like Haryana and Uttar Pradesh have experienced an explosion in the population of stray dogs, giving rise to health risks among locals.

By way of explanation, Neha Sinha, advocacy and policy officer of the Bombay Natural History Society in India (BNHS), a Mumbai-based conservation charity, tells IPS that the phenomenon of increasingly feral dogs can be traced to Indian farmers’ practice of leaving dead cattle out in the open to be consumed by birds of prey.

With no vultures to pick the beasts clean, dogs are now getting to the carcasses, growing more and more vicious and resorting to attacks on humans. BNHS is currently breeding vultures in captivity in order to prevent their complete extinction, but it is unlikely the birds will regain their numbers from 20 years ago.

Meanwhile, according to a study by Birdlife International, the population of feral dogs in India has grown by 5.5 million due to the disappearance of vultures.

The report says there have been “roughly 38.5 million additional dog bites and more than 47,300 extra deaths from rabies, [which] may have cost the Indian economy an additional 34 billion dollars.”

Legal and knowledge gaps

The near extinction of vultures in India is attributed to diclofenac, a painkiller that is often given to cows and buffalos to which vultures are allergic. Intense campaigning against use of the drug led to a government ban in 2004, but implementation of the law has been poor, and diclofenac is still widely used, according to Singh of BNHS.

“The farmers know [the drug] is banned but they continue to use it because the law is not being enforced,” she said.

In several other cases, communities are left confused as to the reasons behind species loss, making it increasingly hard to settle on a solution. For instance, even after a decade of seeing their unique creatures vanish, Dominica still does not know what brought the Chytridiomycosis fungus to their soil, or how to deal with it.

This knowledge gap is a double whammy for indigenous communities, whose lives and livelihoods depend heavily on the species they have lived side by side with for millennia.

Lucy Mulenekei, executive director of the Indigenous Information Network (IIN), tells IPS on the sidelines of the 12^th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP 12), currently underway in Pyeongchang, South Korea, that the decline in the livestock population in Kenya has affected the Maasai people, a pastoral tribe that has always relied on their herds for sustenance.

Now forced to live off the land, the tribe is faltering.

“The Maasai people don’t know what kind of farming tools they need, or how to use them. They don’t know what seeds to use and how to access them. There is a huge gap in knowledge and technology,” explains Mulenekei, who is Maasai herself.

In response to the growing crisis, governments and U.N. agencies are pushing out initiatives to tackle the problem at its root.

Carlos Potiara Castro, a technical advisor with the Brazilian environment ministry, is leading one such project in the Bailique Archipelago, 160 km from the Macapa municipality in northern Brazil, where local fisher communities are taught to conserve biodiversity. Already, community members have learned the properties of 154 medicinal plants.

The annual cost of the project is about 50,000 dollars, but Potiara says a lot more funding will be needed in order to scale up the work and replicate such efforts around the country.

This might soon be possible under a new initiative launched by the government of Germany together with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Global Environment Facility (GEF), which offers 12.3 million euros over a period of five years to indigenous communities in over 130 countries to help them conserve protected areas.

Yoko Watanabe, a senior biodiversity specialist at the natural resources team of the GEF Secretariat, tells IPS the grants will also cover the cost of trainings, to pass on necessary skills to indigenous communities who are recognised as “indispensable to biodiversity conservation.”

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

An Alagoas foliage-gleaner (Philydor novaesi) photographed in the Frei Caneca Private Reserve in Pernambuco. Credit: Courtesy of Carlos Gussoni

By IPS Correspondents
CAJÍO, Cuba/RIO DE JANEIRO, Nov 11 2013 (IPS)

The extinction of a single species (a fish off the coast of Cuba, a bird in the Brazilian forest) creates a void that can trigger a whole series of repercussions, from the alteration of ecosystems to increased hunger.

“I can sum it up for you in one sentence: there is less of everything,” says fisherman Lázaro Andrés Gorrín. He earns his living from the waters of the Gulf of Batabanó, which bathe the coast of his humble fishing village, Cajío, in southwest Cuba.

Fishing is the traditional lifeblood of more than 577 coastal towns and villages in Cuba, but it is an endangered livelihood due to reduced fish stocks throughout the country.

“Now it takes a whole day to catch enough fish just to cover the bottom of the cooler, which means very little income,” said Gorrín as he showed Tierramérica the few tiny lane snappers (Lutjanus synagris) he had caught that day. “You can’t support a family with this,” added his wife, who was waiting on shore for him to help carry his catch home.

Overfishing is the main cause of the decreased stocks of lane snappers in the Gulf of Batabanó, as well as the almost complete disappearance of the Nassau grouper (Epinephelus striatus) throughout its entire habitat, among other losses.

The decline in fish stocks has been highly evident since 1990. Other contributors include pollution, rising sea temperatures, and higher salinity, since the damming of rivers results in less fresh water flowing to the Cuban coasts.

The size of the fish has diminished, and the species less popular among the population have become more predominant, according to research by marine scientist Rodolfo Claro.

That is why Gorrín, 41, and other coastal fishermen are “seriously thinking” about plying their trade in rivers, lakes and reservoirs or even seeking out new ways to make a living.

Some of them, however, believe they are too old to give up the livelihood passed down to them by their ancestors.

This is the case of Roberto Díaz, 53, who works alongside Gorrín. The two men head out daily in a small motorboat to an area roughly 40 miles off the coast of Cajío, where they fish with nylon fishing lines and rustic trammel nets.

“I’m still here even though it gets harder to make a good income every day. There are also a lot of regulations. There’s a ban on catching a number of different species, and on using certain equipment and methods,” Díaz told Tierramérica.

Fifteen years ago, Gorrín and Díaz, members of a fishing cooperative, went out on rafts and filled their cooler every day with snappers, groupers and other fish species that abounded in the area.

Fishermen Díaz and Gorrín display their meagre day’s catch of lane snappers. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

But the waters around Cuba were seriously overfished between the 1960s and 1980s.

In 1985 alone, 78,000 tons of fish were harvested off the country’s coasts. Since then, and in the midst of the economic crisis that began in the 1990s, the fishing sector has shrunk and prohibitions have been established for certain areas and species.

In 2012, total fish production, including farmed fish, was 48,498 tons. Lane snappers accounted for just 1,694 tons, and Nassau groupers, a mere 26 tons.

In 2007 the use of seine nets was banned because of the destruction they caused to the marine habitat.

“Trawlers and seine nets finished off the lane snappers,” said Díaz.

Since there are very few formal jobs in fishing, there has been an increase in informal and subsistence fishing activity, which also takes a bite out of fish stocks. Sometimes it is clandestine, while in other cases it is legalised as sport fishing.

Tierramérica talked to an electrician from the municipality of Quivicán, near Cajío, who goes out fishing on the weekends to supplement his family’s diet, using a tractor tire inner tube as a raft. He cannot venture more than 400 metres offshore, he noted.

“Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t only do this for a living,” explained the electrician, who asked to remain anonymous. While fishing began as a hobby for him when he was boy, today it serves a more essential purpose: putting food on his family’s table. “I don’t know if what I do is legal,” he commented.

The life support system that generates the planet’s air, water and food is powered by an estimated 8.7 million living species. Very little is known about a large share of them. Some become extinct before we even know they exist; others, when they have just been discovered.

Farewell to a natural means of insect control

A few thousand kilometres south of Cajío, in the Atlantic Forest of northeast Brazil, the bird known as the Alagoas foliage-gleaner (Philydor novaesi) is no longer seen. Measuring 18 centimetres long and reddish-brown in colour, the bird was first discovered in 1979 in the state of Alagoas.

Back then, the species was “relatively easy to find” on the edges of clearings in the forest, said biologist Tatiana Pongiluppi, project coordinator at the conservation organisation SAVE Brasil, which forms part of the BirdLife International global partnership.

Its name derives from the fact that it “gleans” its food – primarily insects – from leaves, bark, crevices and debris.

Surveys conducted in 1992 and 1998 revealed that the species had already become rare. And it was sighted for the last time on Sep. 13, 2011, when it was filmed by photographer Ciro Albano.

The Alagoas foliage-gleaner played an important role in controlling the insect population. It also attracted bird watchers from around the world, thus generating tourism-related income.

In 1998 only single individuals of the species were observed. In 2000, just four of them were found in the Pernambuco Endemism Centre, an area rich in biodiversity north of the São Francisco River.

The main cause of the bird’s disappearance is deforestation, driven by a number of factors: the expansion of sugar cane plantations, charcoal production, and the harvesting of timber for the furniture industry, Pongiluppi told Tierramérica.

Their natural habitat is in areas with tall trees and large quantities of bromeliad plants, whose dried leaves provide the small birds with an abundance of food.

The Atlantic Forest once extended along the entire length of Brazil’s Atlantic coast, from the far north to the south, and included portions of eastern Paraguay and northeast Argentina. It covered a total area of 1.3 million square kilometres.

Today barely seven percent of its original forest cover remains, yet is still one of the planet’s greatest storehouses of biodiversity, with 20,000 species of plants, 849 of birds, 370 of amphibians, 200 of reptiles, 270 of mammals and 350 of fish.

There is not a single specimen of Philydor novaesi living in captivity. “They are insectivores, and no techniques have been developed to keep and breed them in captivity,” explained Pongiluppi.

Officially, the species is considered “critically endangered”. Extinction can only be declared when there is no doubt that the last living specimen has died, and that can take decades.

“We cannot state with authority that the individuals sighted in recent years have died, because we have no proof. But there have been no recorded sightings of this species since 2011, despite the efforts of ornithologists and bird watchers,” who have made numerous trips to the area in search of the bird, said Pongiluppi. The same unfortunate fate awaits a number of other bird species in the region.

Seven species of fauna have already been declared extinct in Brazil, specialist Ugo Eichler Vercillo from the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation told Tierramérica: a dragonfly, two earthworms, an ant, a frog and two bird species.

Taking action to combat extinction

Embattled by erratic weather and a persistent disease that has decimated the area’s coffee plantations, indigenous women in the province of Lamas, in the Amazon rainforest of northern Peru, did not sit back and cry over the loss of the crops that allowed their grandmothers to put food on the table. They set out to save them.

The women sought support from the Federation of Kechwa Indigenous Peoples of the Region of San Martín in order to revive the planting of two species of tubers, sachapapa (Discorea trífida) and dale dale (Calathea allouia), a root vegetable, michuksi (Colocasia esculenta), and the oilseed sacha inchi (Plukenetia volubilis).

In numerous villages “the seeds for these crops had completely disappeared, and they had to be obtained in other communities, sometimes far away,” notes a report from the humanitarian organisation Oxfam, which provided funding for this initiative, launched in 2011.

On half-hectare plots, the women plant sachapapa, dale dale and michuksi, which take a year to be ready to harvest, alongside other food crops with shorter growing cycles: peanuts, corn, beans and leafy vegetables.

The elders in each community helped to revive the traditional farming methods and to design an agricultural calendar. The women, organised in “mothers clubs”, elected a coordinator for each village.

While the initial plan was to grow food for their own families, the women realised that in the city of Lamas there was a demand for the traditional dishes “that grandma used to cook,” and they decided to promote the newly revived agricultural diversity at regional food fairs and competitions.

The community of Chumbakiwi, with a population of around 330, took first place at the inaugural fair by presenting 79 different crop varieties.

Each village decided what to do with the income earned. Some of them created a fund in order to acquire more seeds and continue to preserve them.

With reporting by Ivet González (Cajío), Fabíola Ortiz (Rio de Janeiro) and Milagros Salazar (Lima).

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

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