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    Illegal mining in the Amazon hits record high amid Indigenous protests

    Indigenous territories, long a bulwark against deforestation in the Amazon, are under increasing threat in Brazil, according to an analysis of 36 years’ worth of satellite imagery. The data show that illicit mining operations on Indigenous lands and in other areas formally protected by law have hit a record high in the past few years, under the administration of President Jair Bolsonaro, underscoring fears that his policies and rhetoric are undermining both human rights and environmental protection across the world’s largest rainforest. These operations strip the land of vegetation and pollute waterways with mercury.
    When will the Amazon hit a tipping point?
    The analysis, released in late August, comes as scientists and environmentalists warn of a deteriorating situation in Brazil; Indigenous groups have frequently found themselves in violent clashes with miners since Bolsonaro took office in 2019 — and they are demanding more protection for their land. Although Indigenous territories are legally protected, Bolsonaro has openly called for mining and other development in them.“This is definitely the worst it’s been for Indigenous peoples since the constitution was signed in 1988,” says Glenn Shepard, an anthropologist with the Emílio Goeldi Museum in Belém. Before this, Brazil was ruled by a military dictatorship.Researchers at MapBiomas, a consortium of academic, business and non-governmental organizations that has been conducting geospatial studies across Brazil, developed algorithms that they used in conjunction with Google Earth Engine to conduct the analysis. After training the algorithms on images of mining operations — desolate landscapes where forests have been converted into a collection of sand dunes pockmarked by mining ponds — the team ran its analysis on a freely available archive of imagery captured by the US Landsat programme, and then analysed trends on Indigenous lands and other formally protected areas where mining is not allowed.Over the past decade, illegal mining incursions — mostly small-scale gold extraction operations — have increased fivefold on Indigenous lands and threefold in other protected areas of Brazil such as parks, the data show (see ‘Mining incursions’). The findings agree broadly with reports from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) in São José dos Campos, which monitors the country’s forests and has been issuing alerts about mining incursions for several years. “We kind of knew that this was happening, but to see numbers like this is scary even for us,” says Cesar Diniz, a geologist with the geospatial-analysis company Solved in Belém, Brazil, who led the analysis for MapBiomas.Clashes on multiple frontsAside from being home to their people, Indigenous territories play a part in protecting the Amazon’s biodiversity and the enormous pool of carbon that is locked away in its trees and soils. Numerous studies have found that Indigenous lands, as well as other conservation areas, are effective buffers against tropical deforestation in the Amazon1,2, which is responsible for around 8% of global carbon emissions.Earlier this month, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) approved a motion, put forward by Indigenous groups, calling on governments to protect 80% of the Amazon basin by 2025. Indigenous representatives say they plan to fight for implementation across the Amazon, but the proposal faces a particularly tough sell in Brazil under Bolsonaro, whose pro-business conservative government has scaled back enforcement of existing environmental laws and halted efforts to demarcate new Indigenous territories.

    Sources: MapBiomas/Amazon Geo-Referenced Socio-Environmental Information Network/Terrabrasilis

    Indigenous groups have also taken their case to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, the Netherlands. On 9 August, the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB), which represents Indigenous groups across the country, filed a complaint with the court accusing the Bolsonaro administration of violating human rights and, they claim, paving a path for genocide by undermining Indigenous rights, reducing environmental protections and inciting incursions and violence through calls for mining and land development. APIB also made it clear that it’s not just Indigenous rights at stake, drawing a direct link between the protection of their territories and of the globe.

    Members of the Munduruku people sit in front of equipment from an illegal mining operation on their land.Credit: Meridith Kohut/The New York Times/eyevine

    “Defending the traditional territories of Amazonian communities is the best way to save the forest,” says Luiz Eloy Terena, an anthropologist and lawyer from the village of Ipegue who coordinates legal affairs for APIB. “What is needed is a state commitment on the demarcation and protection of Indigenous lands, which are the last barrier against deforestation and forest degradation.”During an address to the United Nations General Assembly on 21 September, Bolsonaro said he was committed to protecting the Amazon and emphasized that 600,000 Indigenous people live “in freedom” on reserves totalling 1.1 million square kilometres of land, equivalent to 14% of Brazil’s territory. In the past, Bolsonaro has publicly said that Indigenous peoples have too much land given their sparse population, and at times called for their “integration”. The Bolsonaro administration did not respond to Nature’s requests for comment regarding illegal mining in the Amazon, its Indigenous and environmental policies or the accusations filed with the International Criminal Court.Existential threatBrazil earned recognition as a leader in sustainable development during the 2000s. Former president Luiz Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva and his Workers’ Party put in place policies that helped to curb deforestation in the Amazon by more than 80% between 2004 and 2012.

    Source: Brazilian National Institute for Space Research

    But the party was dogged by corruption charges that would later land Lula in jail, and its environmental agenda ultimately faltered. In 2012, the increasingly conservative Brazilian Congress weakened a once-vaunted forest-protection law. With each successive government, funding for the country’s main environmental enforcement agency, the Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA), has decreased: IBAMA had 1,500 enforcement agents in 2012, compared with just 600 today, says Suely Araújo, a political scientist in Brasília who spent nearly three decades working in the Brazilian Congress and led IBAMA from 2016 to 2018.The rate of deforestation in the Amazon, which includes land converted for mining, agriculture and other development, began rising anew after 2012 and shot up by 44% during Bolsonaro’s first two years in office, according to INPE (see ‘Razing the rainforest’). Many expect yet another increase when the numbers for 2021 are released later this year.But the biggest threats are yet to come, says Araújo. The current government is now pushing legislation in Congress — as well as arguments in a case that is pending before Brazil’s Supreme Court — that would make it harder to establish new Indigenous lands and could even allow the government to repossess existing lands. Other legislation that has been advanced by Bolsonaro’s supporters in Congress would open up Indigenous lands to industrial development, grant amnesty to people who have illegally invaded public lands and gut regulations governing major infrastructure projects such as mines, roads and dams.
    The scientists restoring a gold-mining disaster zone in the Peruvian Amazon
    “It’s painful,” says Araújo, who decided to forgo retirement and join Brazil’s Climate Observatory, a coalition of activist and academic groups fighting to preserve the country’s social and environmental protections. “This has become my mission.”For Indigenous tribes, the growing damage to their lands and the rainforest pose an existential threat. More than 6,000 Indigenous people descended on Brasília, the country’s capital, in August and September in protest against Bolsonaro’s policies on land demarcation and the environment. They also travelled to Marseille, France, for the IUCN’s World Conservation Congress earlier this month to promote their motion to protect the Amazon basin.“We will not give up,” says José Gregorio Diaz Mirabal, a member of the Wakueni Kurripaco people of Venezuela and the elected leader of the Congress of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin. “Science supports us, and the world is waking up.”

    doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02644-x

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    Why stem cells might save the northern white rhino

    OUTLOOK
    29 September 2021

    Why stem cells might save the northern white rhino

    Biologist Jeanne Loring explains how her work could bring endangered animal species back from the brink.

    Julianna Photopoulos

    Julianna Photopoulos

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    Stem-cell researcher Jeanne Loring in her laboratory at Scripps Research.Credit: Nelvin C. Cepeda/SDU-T/Zuma/eyevine

    Up to one million plant and animal species face extinction, many within decades, because of human activities. One of these is the northern white rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum cottoni). Only two individuals remain, both of them female, making the subspecies functionally extinct. Jeanne Loring, a stem-cell biologist and founding director of the Center for Regenerative Medicine at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California, spoke to Nature about how collecting and reprogramming stem cells could save this species and others from extinction.What does stem-cell research have to do with saving endangered animals?Induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, which closely resemble embryonic stem cells, can develop into any tissue in the body, including sperm and eggs. The hope is to generate these reproductive cells from the reprogrammed stem cells of endangered animals, and use them in assisted captive-breeding programmes to rescue the species.How did you get involved in this work?My laboratory set out to make iPS cells from endangered animals in 2008, after we visited the San Diego Zoo Safari Park in California. The previous year, a team led by Shinya Yamanaka, who won a Nobel prize for the work, had become the first to make human iPS cells from skin cells called fibroblasts1, and we had immediately started making them too, to treat neurological diseases. The San Diego Zoo’s Institute for Conservation Research had been collecting and freezing fibroblasts from animals since the 1970s. The institute’s director of conservation genetics, Oliver Ryder, was thinking of using stem cells to try to treat musculoskeletal disorders, but nobody had created iPS cells from endangered species before.
    Part of Nature Outlook: Stem cells
    In 2011, my postdoctoral fellow Inbar Friedrich Ben-Nun was the first to reprogramme stem cells in two animals from endangered species: the northern white rhino and the drill monkey (Mandrillus leucophaeus)2. We’re now focused on saving the northern white rhino — Ryder’s favourite animal — but the techniques we are working on are going to become a standard way of rescuing species from extinction.When did this become a serious venture?Our endangered-species project mostly remained a hobby until 2015, when scientists and conservationists from around the world met in Vienna to explore how cell technologies might aid conservation. We seriously discussed the idea of using stem cells to rescue endangered species, and later published a rescue plan for the northern white rhino3. To begin with, embryos will be created from sperm and egg cells that were collected and stored. They’ll then be implanted into a surrogate mother, a southern white rhino (Ceratotherium simum simum). But we want to be able to create more sperm and eggs from iPS cells and implant them, too — and that’s where our team comes in.After the Vienna meeting, the San Diego Zoo invested in this idea. Staff there built a stem-cell lab and the Rhino Rescue Center, where they brought in six southern white rhinos from Africa, specifically to serve as surrogate mothers for embryos made from northern white rhinos’ cells. The animals should be compatible because southern white and northern white rhinos are closely related, and so have similar reproductive physiologies. A team of reproductive biologists led by Barbara Durrant is now working to perfect the techniques to fertilize eggs in vitro and transfer viable embryos into the southern white rhinos.What progress have you made in creating northern white rhinoceros iPS cells?When we first set out to make the cells from endangered animals, we assumed that human versions of the reprogramming genes would not work in a rhino. So we tried reprogramming the rhino’s fibroblasts with horse genes — the horse is one of the closest relatives of the rhino — but this failed. Surprisingly, the corresponding human genes did work, and we were able to generate pluripotent cells. However, we had used viral vectors to reprogramme the cells, and this has been shown to lead to tumours in mice, so it could not be used for reproduction purposes.After three years of tweaking the technique, we were able to perform the reprogramming without any genetic modification. It’s all trial and error — you just have to keep testing different combinations of variables. Earlier this year, we celebrated a milestone in our efforts to rescue the rhino: Marisa Korody’s lab at the San Diego Zoo was able to reprogramme frozen cells from nine northern white rhinos and two southern white females to become iPS cells4.

    Najin (right) and her daughter Fatu are the world’s only remaining northern white rhinos.Credit: Tony Karumba/AFP via Getty

    How do you hope to create gametes from iPS cells?The major effort now is to make eggs that can be fertilized with sperm collected from adult males. We’re following in the footsteps of other researchers who have had success, mainly with mice so far. For example, in 2016, Katsuhiko Hayashi and his team at Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan, artificially engineered egg cells from reprogrammed mouse skin cells, entirely in a dish, and these were used to birth pups that were healthy and fertile5.That technique required ovarian tissue to be co-cultured with the developing eggs to get them to mature, and it’s impossible to get that kind of tissue from rhinos without putting them at risk. But in July, the same team showed that it could make both egg cells and ovarian tissue from iPS cells, which was a huge improvement6.We are now trying to find an efficient way to make the precursors of gametes, known as primordial germ cells, from the iPS cells of northern white rhinos. We know it’s possible — we’ve seen it happen spontaneously in cultures of these iPS cells — but we need to learn how to generate more of them. And then we have to turn those germ cells into eggs and sperm — or at least, something like sperm. Typically, the process of in vitro fertilization (IVF) involves knocking the tail off a sperm cell and injecting the small head directly into the egg, so we might not need to make sperm with tails. The IVF process itself will need to be adapted, however, to the southern white rhino surrogates — we don’t know for sure that it will work as it does in humans, because it’s never been done before.What advantage is there to using stem-cell technology over other approaches, such as cloning?The San Diego Zoo has frozen fibroblasts from 12 northern white rhinos. We didn’t want to clone those animals, because we would still have only the same 12 individuals. But if we make gametes from them instead — sperm from males, eggs from females and, in theory, sperm from females — then we could make various combinations through IVF to get a new, genetically diverse pool of animals that will help the species to survive. We have found that there is sufficient diversity in combining that group of 12 to exceed the diversity of the current population of southern white rhinos.
    More from Nature Outlooks
    Another group, at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin, is instead harvesting eggs from the two living animals in the hope that they can fertilize them and get new animals that way. I’m perfectly happy if that works, but the challenge is getting enough diversity in the population if you have eggs from only one or two animals.Have you encountered opposition to your iPS-cell-mediated approach?If I were doing this with humans there’d be a lot of debate, but with animals there is less. One criticism is that resources for conservation should be invested differently, for example in restoring natural habitats and educating people. One argument we hear is that there’s no purpose in rescuing a species that will be confined to zoos because of poaching. I don’t know how to stop people from hunting rhinos for their horns, but I will do what I can to try to save an animal that humans have forced into extinction.Are you confident that your work will help to save the northern white rhino?It saddens me that as we’ve made progress in the lab, these animals have been dying out. When we started this project there were 8 of them alive, and now there are only 2: Najin, aged 32, and her daughter Fatu, aged 21, who live in a protected park in Kenya. It’s possible that these last two survivors will be gone by the time we succeed. I hope that’s not the case, but we’re working with cells that have been harvested and frozen, so we can try to bring the species back to life if necessary.I can’t predict how long it will take to get there — things have happened much more slowly than I’d like. But I do hope that our efforts will pay off over the next 10 to 20 years. I want to see a new northern white rhino in my lifetime — before I become ‘extinct’!

    Nature 597, S18-S19 (2021)
    doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02626-zThis interview has been edited for length and clarity.This article is part of Nature Outlook: Stem cells, an editorially independent supplement produced with the financial support of third parties. About this content.

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