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    Digging in: last chance to save a native forest

    “When I first came to the small Caribbean island of Carriacou in 1990, I had no intention of staying. But something clicked; my partner and I have been here ever since.I’m from Venice, Italy, so a small island feels cosy to me. We also thought that Carriacou was small enough to tackle environmental problems and help make a difference. We saw the overfishing, deforestation and environmental damage here — not by multinational corporations, but by local people who were unaware of the ecological consequences of their actions.Since starting an environment and education foundation, called KIDO, in 1995, we have run around 30 projects — from protecting sea turtles to replanting mangroves.In this photograph, I am hiking to our latest project, the 40-hectare Anse La Roche nature reserve. Deforestation affected several areas of the plot, and one spot was devastated, illegally, with a bulldozer. To reconstitute the forest’s eroded soil, we gather Sargassum seaweed — overgrowth of which is afflicting Caribbean beaches as the sea warms — and use it as fertilizer.We will also plant thousands of native trees, including replanting 20 key canopy tree species that have almost been lost from Carriacou. This might be the last chance to save the forest: Carriacou’s diminishing rainfall is our nemesis, and each day we water around 3,000 saplings.With another ten years of care, we will see the forest resurge. Today when it rains, water rushes down the hillsides, taking the topsoil with it — but once the trees are established, rainwater will be caught in the natural terracing across the slope that the formidable buttress-root systems create. Forests take decades to grow, and it will be somebody else sitting under those trees saying, ‘Wow, it’s much cooler here!’” More

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    Survival of the nicest: have we got evolution the wrong way round?

    Selfish Genes to Social Beings: A Cooperative History of Life Jonathan Silvertown Oxford Univ. Press (2024)The fact that all life evolved thanks to natural selection can have depressing connotations. If ‘survival of the fittest’ is the key to evolution, are humans hardwired for conflict with one another? Not at all, says evolutionary biologist Jonathan Silvertown in his latest book, Selfish Genes to Social Beings. On the contrary, he argues, many phenomena in the natural world, from certain types of predation to parasitism, rely on cooperation. Thus “we need no longer fret that human nature is sinful or fear that the milk of human kindness will run dry”.Silvertown uses examples from genes, bacteria, fungi, plants and animals to emphasize that cooperation is ubiquitous in nature. For instance, bacteria called rhizobia thrive in the root nodules of legumes — and turn nitrogen from the air into a soluble form that the plants can use. Some beetles cooperate to bury animal corpses that would be too large for any single insect to manage alone, both reducing the risk of other animals stealing food and providing a nest for beetle families to live in.
    It’s time to admit that genes are not the blueprint for life
    And many bacteria indicate their presence to each other using a chemical-signalling system called quorum sensing, which is active only when members of the same species are tightly packed together. This allows each cell to adjust its gene expression in a way that benefits the individuals in the group — to release a poison to kill other species, for instance, when enough bacteria are clustered together to mount a decent attack.Even eighteenth-century piracy, says Silvertown, is a good example of effective cooperation. Pirates worked together on their ships, and used violence more often against outsiders than as an internal mechanism for law enforcement.The author argues against the idea that cooperation is fundamentally at odds with competition — a view that emerged as a consequence of the sociobiology movement of the 1970s, in which some biologists argued that all human behaviour is reducible to a Darwinian need to be the ‘fittest’. The reality, as Silvertown shows, is not black and white.

    Lichen is a composite organism, in which an alga lives within a fungus.Credit: Ashley Cooper/SPL

    A matter of perspectiveTake lichens, for instance — ‘composite organisms’ in which an alga or cyanobacterium lives within a fungus. The Swiss botanist Simon Schwendener, who discovered this relationship in the 1860s, argued that a lichen is a parasite: “Its slaves are green algals, which it has sought out or indeed caught hold of, and forced into its service.” Another way to view the relationship is that these algae and fungi are co-dependent — when they co-exist as a lichen, each grows better than it would alone. The line between parasitism and mutualism, competition and cooperation is not clear cut. It’s a matter of perspective.
    A ‘user’s manual for the female mammal — how women’s bodies evolved
    Similarly hazy boundaries are found in the biology of our own cells. More than a billion years ago, cells absorbed bacteria, which eventually evolved into structures called mitochondria that generate energy. Mitochondria are an essential part of the cells of all plants, animals and fungi alive today. They could be considered slaves, with cells the parasites. Or perhaps they are more like adopted family members.Fundamentally, Silvertown proposes, cooperation in each of these situations stems from selfishness. Animals did not evolve to act for the benefit of their species, but to spread their own genes. Cooperation happens because mutual benefits are better, biologically speaking, than working alone, as the case of lichens effectively demonstrates.If this seems heartless, it’s a reflection of the human tendency to apply human moral frameworks to biological phenomena. The use of emotionally charged words such as ‘slave’ and ‘adopted’ takes us away from rigorous science and leads us to see biological interactions as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, rather than as the morally agnostic, transactional processes that they truly are.
    Why reciprocity is common in humans but rare in other animals
    The anthropomorphizing of biological processes is a deep and current problem. The tendency to falsely imply agency in the natural world is an easy trap to fall into — consider how often people might say that a virus such as SARS-CoV-2 ‘wants’ to be transmitted, for instance, or that ants act ‘for the good of their colony’. I would have liked to hear more about Silvertown’s views on this category error. But in places, I felt that he could have made his implied understanding more explicit. Instead, he sometimes sacrifices that carefulness for unnecessary jokes, noting, for instance, that bacteria “are essentially singletons who like to party”.The author could also have talked more about how the amorality inherent in most of the natural world does not apply to humans. Similarly to other organisms, our evolutionary heritage makes us social, but whether that sociality is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is a moral, not a scientific, question. This distinction from the other cooperative processes that Silvertown outlines could have been explained better.Selfish Genes to Social Beings is at its best in the long, fascinating discussions of the complexity of cooperative behaviours across the natural world. For instance, although I’ve read a lot about biology, before reading this book I could never understand how RNA chains might have joined together and started the process of self-replication through which all life evolved. Silvertown can talk as easily about the compounds making up your genes as most people can about yesterday’s football match. More

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    Brazil budget cuts could leave science labs without power and water

    More than three months into 2024, politicians in Brazil are still at odds about how much money the country’s research institutes and federal universities will receive this year. Scientists say that unless more funding is found, they won’t have enough money to cover basic expenses such as water, electricity and financial aid for students.On one side of the bargaining table is the National Congress. In December, it imposed cuts to the 2024 budget for the country’s research and higher-education institutions, which have already had their funding slashed several times in the past decade.On the other side is the administration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, which is fighting to reverse some of the congressional cuts. Lula, as the leader of the leftist Workers’ Party is popularly known, took office in 2023 pledging to make science a priority, increase Brazil’s spending on research and eliminate deforestation.“We should be doing research to support conservation policies, but now we are in a situation where we don’t know if we will be able to cover our routine activities,” says Nilson Gabas Júnior, director of the Emílio Goeldi Museum in the Amazonian city of Belém, whose studies provide data that feed into the management of the Amazon rainforest.Although the cuts affect the entire country, the Amazon institutions argue that they are the hardest hit because their federal support is already disproportionately low.Temporary reprieveLula managed to increase the budget for science and technology in 2023, compared with the levels in 2022, and scientists had hoped that funding would at least remain stable in 2024. Instead, Congress, which is controlled by a conservative majority, slashed the 2024 budget of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, which funds Brazil’s 16 federal research institutes, by 6.8% compared with that in 2023. Congress also reduced the budget for higher education from 6.3 billion reais (US$1.24 billion) in 2023 to 6.0 billion reais in 2024.After the budget was passed, an organization that represents the interests of the 69 Brazilian universities supported by the federal government published an open letter calling for more funding. Scientists’ allies in Congress have also tried to persuade legislators to reconsider their decision.In March, the government and Congress reached an agreement to restore 250 million reais to federal universities’ funding. But Sylvio Mário Puga Ferreira, dean of the Federal University of Amazonas in Manaus, who was involved in the negotiations, points out that “it would take a funding increase of 2.5 billion reais just to bring the universities’ budget closer to 2017 levels”.Winner take allThe paltry funding for federal universities and research institutes is likely to exacerbate an already-grim situation for science in Brazil’s Amazon. Data from the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), Brazil’s largest government agency for research funding, indicate that only 4% of the money invested in research projects in 2023 was directed to institutions in the seven states classified as the North region, which encompasses 87% of the Brazilian Amazon.“Scientific activity in Brazil is heavily concentrated in a few education and research institutions in the South and Southeast” regions, says Odir Dellagostin, president of the Brazilian National Council of State Funding Agencies. “They boast the best graduate programs, produce and publish more research and offer the best job opportunities” — and receive the most funding.
    ‘We are killing this ecosystem’: the scientists tracking the Amazon’s fading health
    The problem extends to biodiversity research. A study1 analysing CNPq’s investments in projects in botany, zoology, ecology and limnology (the study of freshwater ecosystems) between 2016 and 2022 found that research groups from the North region received only 2.57 million reais during this period. “This situation leaves the region with a very limited capacity to respond to the threats the forest faces,” says Lis Stegmann, one of the study’s authors and a biologist at the Eastern Amazon branch of the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa), in Belém. CNPq did not respond to Nature’s request for comment.Institutions in the North region produce fewer — and lower-quality — research outputs than do those in the South and Southeast regions, in part because they have difficulty training and attracting highly qualified personnel, and getting funding. In 2022, the seven Amazon states accounted for 3.9% of Brazil’s scientific production, whereas the state of São Paulo alone accounted for 28.9%, according to an unpublished study by Dellagostin.Funding feedback loopThis leads to a self-perpetuating problem: decisions about who gets research funding in Brazil are based heavily on quantitative assessments. Scientists who produce more research and publish in high-impact journals have better chances of acquiring funding.“Amazon research institutions are caught in a vicious circle,” says Emmanuel Zagury Tourinho, dean of the Federal University of Pará. “They don’t have enough funding because they lack robust scientific production, but they also cannot develop their research capacity because they don’t have enough funding.” This has led to a situation in which researchers from São Paulo (around 3,000 kilometres away from the Amazon) receive more public funding to study Amazon biodiversity than do researchers who are actually located in the Amazon.Some scientists are still hopeful that they will get some extra funds this year. “We are talking to the [science] minister Luciana Santos about the possibility of additional budget allocations for the upcoming months,” Gabas says. The most likely scenario, however, is that this discussion will be postponed until the next budget, because some of the funds that were earmarked for science and education in 2024 have already been redirected. More

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    Climate change predicted to exacerbate declines in bee populations

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    Estella Bergere Leopold (1927–2024), passionate environmentalist who traced changing ecosystems

    Credit: The Aldo Leopold Foundation and University of Wisconsin-Madison Archives

    Estella Bergere Leopold was a palaeobotanist whose studies of fossil pollen and spores helped to reconstruct past environments and link them to the present. Her investigations of the Cenozoic era (from 66 million years ago to the present) provided some of the first insights into the evolution of modern plant communities and the factors that governed their development, including the consequences of long-term climate change, mountain building and volcanism. Few researchers before her had traced the rise of present-day ecosystems through time, and her discoveries helped to connect the relatively well-studied ice-age influences on vegetation with deep-time geological processes.Leopold, who has died aged 97, was an ardent conservationist who argued that nature should be cherished and protected. She thought that science should be used in defence of the planet; this is evident in her writings, lectures and political activism.Leopold was born in Madison, Wisconsin, the youngest daughter of conservationist Aldo Leopold and his wife Estella Bergere Leopold. All five Leopold children became esteemed scientists and conservationists in their own right. Her childhood, particularly her time spent at the family cabin, called ‘the Shack’, in central Wisconsin spurred an early interest in ecology. Leopold graduated with a degree in botany from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1948 and a master’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1950. She moved to Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, to join a new graduate programme in conservation headed by Paul Sears, a pioneer in palynology (pollen analysis), and also to study with mathematical ecologist G. Evelyn Hutchinson and his former student Edward Deevey Jr. Her dissertation focused on the history of New England forests through the analysis of pollen and spores extracted from peat deposits, and palynology became her main research tool.
    Current conservation policies risk accelerating biodiversity loss
    After graduating from Yale in 1955, Leopold was one of the few women who joined the US Geological Survey in Lakewood, Colorado, as a scientist. By meticulously comparing fossil pollen and spores with modern ones, she reconstructed past floras — innovative and insightful findings at the time. Her early study of the Eniwetok and Bikini atolls in the Pacific Ocean revealed the existence of a tropical rainforest in the south Pacific during the Miocene epoch (23 million to 5 million years ago). She examined Cenozoic plant-fossil sites for evidence of the origins of modern flora. Leopold described the transition from ancient species to newer variants in the Rocky Mountains of western North America, which showed an earlier modernization trend in the middle of the continent than in coastal areas, as a result of greater cooling, seasonality and mountain uplift.Her research in Colorado on the Florissant fossil beds — well-preserved sediments from a 34-million-year-old lake — spurred her to lead a conservation effort in the area. In 1969, the 2,428-hectare Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument was established. Other successful actions included opposing oil-shale development in western Colorado, protesting dam building in the US Grand Canyon and stopping the shipping of highly radioactive materials through waterways that connected the Pacific Northwest region to the Pacific Ocean. Leopold also served on several conservation boards and was president of the Aldo Leopold Foundation, which she founded with her siblings to promote ethical land stewardship.From 1976 to 1982, she directed the Quaternary Research Center at the University of Washington in Seattle and maintained an active research programme there, studying the palaeoecology and palaeoflora of the western United States and comparable settings in China. She officially retired in 2000, but remained active in research until her death.Leopold recognized the power of scientific credentials in environmental activism. Throughout her career, she promoted palaeobotany as a tool for land protection. She argued that the value of a place was partly the result of its ecological history and how environmental events shape it. One of those events is fire. Using ethnographic and palaeoecological studies, Leopold highlighted the importance of Native American burning practices before European settlement for maintaining the health of prairies and woodland; she actively supported deliberate fire management.
    Address the growing urgency of fungal diseases in crops
    In 1969, Estella was named conservationist of the year by the Colorado Wildlife Federation; she received the International Cosmos Prize for contributions to conservation in 2010. But those awards, and numerous others, scarcely do justice to the personal influence that she had on students. I met Estella at the US Geological Survey as an undergraduate student and was overjoyed when she accepted me for graduate studies at the University of Washington. Her unbridled enthusiasm for science and environmental protection was inspiring. Estella had what we students called a ‘1,000-volt look’ whenever an idea piqued her interest — to experience this was electrifying.Estella will be remembered for her important contributions to ecology and for a life-long crusade to protect the land. More than most individuals, her scientific interests were inextricably linked to her environmental activism. She was keenly aware of her family heritage and, like her father, advocated simple outdoor living as a way to learn and appreciate nature. As a woman in a male-dominated field, she maintained a strong sense of humour and fearlessness throughout her career; yet, she also had immense grace and generosity. Estella leaves behind colleagues, former students and environmental activists who treasure her influence and their time with her. More

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    How a tree-hugging protest transformed Indian environmentalism

    Fifty years ago this week, Gaura Devi, an ordinary woman from a nondescript village in India, hugged a tree, using her body as a shield to stop the tree from being cut down. Little did she know that this simple act of defiance would be a seminal moment in the history of India and the world. Or that Reni village, where she lived, would come to be recognized as the fountainhead of the Chipko environmental movement.Chipko, in Hindi, means ‘to stick’ or ‘to cling’. In the early 1970s, the Western Himalayan regions of Garhwal and Kumaon, where Reni is situated, were in turmoil. Villagers had been using non-violent methods, including tree hugging, to save their local forests from industrial logging for several months by the time Gaura Devi — and about two dozen women from Reni — showed up on the scene1. But the courage of this small group of women, who stood their ground against loggers who hurled threats and abuses at them, shot the movement to international attention.What followed holds lessons for a planet teetering on the edge of a climate crisis: marginalized communities can succeed in catapulting environmental concerns into the global spotlight through innovative protest tactics. The Chipko movement gave rise to India’s Forest Conservation Act of 1980, the express aim of which is to conserve woodlands. A few years later, a new federal environment ministry was set up to act as a nodal agency for the protection of biodiversity and to safeguard the country’s environment1–3. Even the origin of the term tree hugger — which has since acquired pejorative connotations — can be traced back to the grassroots ecological consciousness that surfaced in India’s villages.
    The origins of India’s environment movement
    The movement and its aftermath hold sobering lessons, too. Villagers who threatened to cling on to trees were voicing concern not just about the state of the forests, but also about their own lives and livelihoods. Their desire was to exercise greater local control over woodland resources. Women such as Gaura Devi, for instance, had to walk long distances to gather firewood once the forests were denuded1,4.Beginning in the late 1960s, activists who took inspiration from the leader of India’s anti-colonial nationalist campaign, Mohandas Gandhi, had begun to mobilize villagers in the Western Himalayas. Their strategy to improve economic opportunity in the region hinged on the Gandhian vision of bottom-up development. A network of cottage industries and cooperatives began to be set up to market forest products. The government’s competing top-down approach of auctioning forests to big private contractors came as an unwelcome intrusion3,5,6.In essence, what the foot soldiers of Chipko wanted was an acknowledgement of their Indigenous rights to access forest resources that were crucial for their survival. What they got instead was a national law and a ministry populated by a new breed of power brokers — who, in the years to come, would decide at times that habitat preservation is possible only by keeping local communities out.The big debateGarhwal and Kumaon, part of the present-day state of Uttarakhand, were at the heart of independent India’s first big debate on environmental justice and equity for a reason. The terrain is mountainous and most of the land is forested. Lives and livelihoods centre heavily around access to land and water resources. Apart from subsistence agriculture, the main source of income in the region 50 years ago was remittance — money sent home from men who had migrated to cities or joined the armed forces2,4,5.Although daily life was economically precarious for the villagers, the hills also presented them with a fragile environment. In the years preceding the Chipko movement, floods and landslides had wreaked havoc. Some of the villages worst affected lay near forests that had been felled1,5,6.
    Three climate policies that the G7 must adopt — for itself and the wider world
    The idea of ‘commons’ and ‘sacred forests’ had been an intrinsic part of the cultural ethos of rural India, but the colonial period frayed the bonds that villagers tended to have with their immediate environment. The British Raj’s primary source of income was land revenue. As a result, converting forest or common land into agricultural land by getting rid of existing vegetation was very lucrative1,2.Things did not improve after independence — the Indian government’s fourth five-year plan (1969–74) directed the state forest departments to take control of forests and open lands. This policy resulted in more restrictions to access for the locals, who depended on nearby woodlands to meet their needs for food, fruit, fodder, firewood and other raw materials2,3.The spark that ignited Gaura Devi’s tree-hugging protest came when the provincial government handed over ash trees in the Chamoli district of Garhwal to a private contractor to make sports goods. This disregarded the request put forward by a local artisan’s cooperative, the Dashauli Gram Swarajya Sangh (DGSS, Society for Village Self-Rule), which wanted to use the trees to make agricultural implements1,5.
    Shade is an essential solution for hotter cities
    The manner of protest itself was not new. A year earlier, in March 1973, in the nearby village of Mandal, women and men had come together to prevent the felling of trees under the leadership of a local activist, Chandi Prasad Bhatt, who was associated with the DGSS. As word spread, the act of chipko, or embracing a tree, became an andolan — a movement — which united people across social, caste and age groups, with even children participating in many villages1,5.However, the protest in Reni village is now recognized as a seminal moment. Gaura Devi was an ordinary woman. But her extraordinary act continues to stand as a prominent signpost in the evolution of India’s ecological consciousness, even 50 years later.Surprising savioursOn the day the trees near Reni village were to be felled, neither the DGSS members nor the men of the village were present. This was no coincidence, but a deliberate plan by forest department staff, who had organized meetings elsewhere to minimize the possibility of a large-scale protest. However, what they did not account for was the leadership of Gaura Devi, who headed the village’s mahila mandal (women’s group). On being alerted by a young girl who had seen the bus carrying the loggers, Gaura Devi marshalled the women of the village. They put their bodies in front of the axe-wielding men, eventually forcing the loggers to leave1,5.

    In Joshimath, India, cracks developed in homes in January 2023 as the town began to sink.Credit: Brijesh Sati/AFP/Getty

    What made these village women, whose roles were conventionally restricted to the home, come out in force to protect the trees? The environmental activist Vandana Shiva, adopting an ecofeminist lens, argues that women, especially in rural areas, share close bonds with nature because their daily tasks are entwined with nature7. For the historian Ramachandra Guha, however, although Chipko did see women participating on a scale like never before, it would be simplistic to reduce it to a women’s movement. For Guha, Chipko is a peasant movement centred on the environment, in which both men and women were involved1,5.Chipko is also synonymous with two men: Bhatt and Sunderlal Bahuguna. Both had strong roots in the community, having worked with voluntary organizations based on the Gandhian ideology of non-violence and satyagraha (which loosely translates as ‘truth force’). Through eco-development camps, Bhatt worked tirelessly to raise awareness about the fragility of the region’s environment. Bahuguna’s padayatras (journeys on foot) across India brought Chipko to the attention of people in other parts of the country and across the world. Chipko thus began to spread3,5,6.In the forests of the Western Ghats in the south Indian state of Karnataka, Chipko inspired similar protests called Appiko (meaning ‘cling’ in the local language, Kannada). Internationally, Bahuguna took Chipko to university lecture halls in western Europe, and the simple idea of hugging trees for protection also resonated with activists in Canada and the United States6. In 1987, the movement was awarded the Right Livelihood Award, known as the alternative Nobel prize, for its impact on the conservation of natural resources in India.The afterlifeOver the years, Chipko has been interpreted and reinterpreted by academics and activists. It has been the subject of many books, peer-reviewed papers and popular articles, and is mentioned in the curriculum of Indian schools. Chipko has a prominent place in the discourse on sustainability, too — as an example of the demand for sustainable development at a regional or local level. In March 2018, to commemorate the 45th anniversary of the movement, an iconic photograph of women joining hands around a tree appeared as a Google doodle, highlighting the movement’s international fame.An immediate effect of the 1974 Reni protest was a 15-year moratorium on tree felling4. A slew of laws and regulations for protecting the forest came into effect. Ironically, Chipko, which had set these laws in motion, resulted in local communities losing access to the very forests that met their livelihood and subsistence needs. Little changed in terms of development or employment opportunities for the locals. With forest protection prioritized, even minor development projects, such as village roads or small irrigation channels, were denied permission. At the same time, large infrastructure projects promoted by the government, such as hydroelectric dams, got the go-ahead2.
    The global south is rich in sustainability lessons that students deserve to hear
    The fragility of the landscape has steadily worsened. In February 2021, a catastrophic landslide in Chamoli district caused the death of some 200 people. What made the disaster worse were the multiple hydropower plants situated in the path of the landslides. In January 2023, disaster struck again when the town of Joshimath in Chamoli began sinking. Cracks developed on roads and in homes, and people had to be moved to relief camps. The unplanned development of the town on top of an earthquake-induced subsidence zone was a key reason. But a persistent concern in the region is its intrinsic ecological vulnerability, compounded in recent years by climate change.What is the relevance of Chipko today? According to the United Nations, all of us are living amid the triple planetary crises of climate change, biodiversity collapse and air pollution. Humanity has also transgressed six out of the nine ‘planetary boundaries’ that ensure Earth stays in a safe operating space8. In the context of these monumental concerns, it’s remarkable that Chipko continues to inspire.Social and environmental movements in India are still guided by its spirit. It is a strategy used by non-governmental organizations, activists and citizen groups in their fight against development projects that adversely affect tree cover. Thus, hundreds of Chipko-like movements have bloomed in villages and cities across India, inspired by a simple idea — hugging a tree to save it — and by the courage of village folk.A villager from Chamoli, Dhan Singh Rana, wrote a song describing the life and struggles of Gaura Devi, in which he says, “In this world of injustice, show us your miracle again.”3 As the world careens from one crisis to the next, it is more imperative than ever to rekindle the memory of Gaura Devi. It should inspire us to act to save the planet and contribute to sustainable change, putting aside any misgivings about our own limitations as individuals or communities. More

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    Deep-sea mining plans should not be rushed

    Giant excavators for use in deep-sea mining must stay parked for now.Credit: Nigel Roddis/Reuters

    For more than a week, representatives of nations around the world have been meeting at a session of the International Seabed Authority (ISA) in Kingston, Jamaica. The ISA was established under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea 30 years ago with the task of protecting the sea bed in international waters — which comprise roughly half of the world’s ocean. The goal of the latest meeting is to write the rules for the commercial mining of metals such as cobalt, manganese and nickel. These are needed in increasing quantities, mainly to power low-carbon technologies, such as battery storage.The meeting is set to end on 29 March, and there’s mounting concern among researchers that the final text is being rushed, not least because some countries including China, India, Japan and South Korea want to press ahead with commercial exploitation of deep-sea minerals. Some in the mining industry would like excavations to begin next year.China dominates the global supply of critical minerals and so far has the most sea-bed exploration licences of any country. These permits do not allow commercial exploitation. One company, meanwhile, The Metals Company, based in Vancouver, Canada, wants to apply for a commercial permit, potentially in late July.
    Hypocrisy is threatening the future of the world’s oceans
    There is little justification for such haste. Commercial sea-bed mining is not permitted for a reason: too little is known about the deep-sea ecosystem, such as its biodiversity, and its interactions with other ecosystems, and the impact of disturbance from commercial operations. Until we have the results of long-term studies, the giant robotic underwater excavators, drills and pumps that are ready to go must remain parked. Researchers have told Nature that the text is nowhere near ready, and that important due diligence is being circumvented. Outstanding issues need to be resolved, such as what is considered an acceptable level of environmental harm and how much contractors should pay the ISA for the right to extract minerals.Last month, the ISA published the latest draft of its mining regulations text. This ran to 225 pages, and researchers and conservation groups were alarmed to see that, unlike previous drafts, it incorporated proposals that would speed up the process for issuing commercial permits, and it also weakened environmental protections.Worryingly, a few of the changes in the latest text were not identified by square brackets — the practice in international negotiations to highlight wording that has not been agreed on by all parties. Nor were the sources for some changes attributed.Furthermore, in an earlier version of the text, there was a proposal to include measures to protect rare or fragile ecosystems, but this wording is not in the latest draft. Another suggestion was to require that mining applications be decided on within 30 days of their receipt, rather than waiting for the ISA’s twice-yearly meeting — an idea that has support from some in the industry and that does appear in the latest draft.Proposing changes to draft texts is normal in a negotiation, but failing to publicly identify who is proposing them is not. It is damaging to trust and a risk to reaching an outcome in which all parties are happy.Questions are rightly being asked of the leadership of the ISA secretariat, which organizes meetings and is responsible for producing and distributing texts, as well as the leadership of the ISA’s governing council. Nature has reached out to the secretariat with questions, but no response was received by the time this editorial went to press. We urge the ISA to respond, engage and explain.
    Norway’s approval of sea-bed mining undermines efforts to protect the ocean
    It is possible that the benefits to low-carbon technologies outweigh the risks of deep-sea mining if these are mitigated. But some 25 countries are calling for a moratorium on the practice, at least until the science is better understood. The European Parliament also backs a moratorium. This is also the official view of the High Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy, a group of 18 countries that pledged to not undertake commercial deep-sea mining in their national waters — despite founding member Norway’s decision to open up applications for commercial licences, which the European Parliament has criticized.The UN Convention on Migratory Species is urging that its member states should neither encourage nor engage in deep-sea mining “until sufficient and robust scientific information has been obtained to ensure that deep-seabed mineral exploitation activities do not cause harmful effects to migratory species, their prey and their ecosystems”.The ISA and its member states should exercise care, make their decisions on a consensus of evidence and be transparent in doing so, because transparency is foundational to the success of international relations. The deep seas are the least explored parts of the planet; we should not allow for their loss before we even understand their complexities. More