Ecology

A kelp forest off the coast of California.Credit: Douglas Klug/Getty

The vast swathes of kelp forest growing along the world’s coastlines are estimated to generate US$500 billion a year on average, making them considerably more valuable than previous studies have suggested, according to an analysis that assessed economic contributions made by six types of the seaweed.The study, published on 18 April in Nature Communications1, estimates that kelp forests provide services worth between $465 billion and $562 billion a year worldwide, mainly by providing a habitat for valuable fish and seafood species, and by removing nitrogen from contaminated seawater. The results suggest that each type of kelp forest (see ‘Seaweed services’) generates up to $147,100 per hectare annually, a figure that’s more than three times higher than previous estimates.“Until now, most kelp-forest evaluations were regional,” says Cristina Piñeiro-Corbeira, a marine ecologist at the University of A Coruña in Spain who was not involved in the project. “This study is a step forward in understanding kelp forests and their importance for human well-being on a global scale.”

Source: Ref. 1

Kelp forests are widespread in temperate and polar regions, with some 740 million people thought to live within 50 kilometres of one of these tracts of brown seaweed. They provide habitat for more than one thousand species, draw carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and help to remove nutrient pollution, such as nitrogen and phosphorus, from the ocean. “Outside of the tropics, kelp forests are really the dominant [coastal] habitat,” says study co-author Aaron Eger, a marine scientist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. “These are the essential threads to marine ecosystems.”Despite this, few studies have attempted to quantify the economic value of kelp forests on a global scale. To address this gap, Eger and his colleagues assessed the value of common types of kelp forest by considering their contributions to fisheries, nutrient cycling and atmospheric CO2 removal. They collated kelp-distribution estimates, data from biodiversity surveys and current seafood prices from different regions.
World leaders are waking up to the ocean’s role in a healthy planet
The team’s estimates suggest that kelp forests provide an average harvest for fisheries of more than 900 kilograms per hectare a year, worth about $30,000. In many locations, lobsters and abalone accounted for more than one-quarter of a kelp site’s fisheries value. Pollack, giant seabass, South American morwongs and lingcod were the most valuable fish across the sites surveyed.Each hectare of kelp forest also removes an average of 657 kilograms of excess nitrogen — which flows into the ocean in waste water and agricultural runoff — from seawater, a service worth almost $74,000 per hectare per year. And together, kelp forests absorb almost five megatonnes of atmospheric CO2 each year, putting them on a par with other prominent carbon sinks, such as mangrove forests and terrestrial woodland. The economic value of this carbon removal is only $163 a year per hectare of kelp, however, owing to the low market price of carbon and its widespread presence in the ocean, says Eger. “The impacts of nitrogen are quite localized, so there is a higher demand to address the problem,” he says. “Carbon is diffuse and hard to attach to damages in any one location.”Kelp conservationPiñeiro-Corbeira says the findings could provide a push for kelp forests to be included more prominently in climate-change policies and could also encourage better ways of managing and conserving them. But she adds that because the study focuses on only three ecosystem services, it could still underestimate the value of kelp forests.The inclusion of other services — such as coastal protection, tourism and recreation — in the models is likely to further boost kelp forests’ estimated value, says Eger. The value might also increase as more areas are mapped and researchers gain a better understanding of how much kelp is in the ocean. “It has a strong potential to go up,” he says. More

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In the wake of ever-increasing wildfires, many of California’s forests are taking longer to recover their capacity to absorb carbon than they did a century ago1.

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The future of mobility needs to be electric.Credit: Shutterstock

Worldwide, the planes, trains and automobiles we use to get around pumped around 7.7 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in 2021, one-fifth of all anthropogenic emissions. Some three-quarters of transport emissions came from just one source — the exhausts of road vehicles.Converting road transport to run on green energy would be a huge step towards achieving net zero emissions by mid-century, a change needed if we are to limit global warming to ‘safe’ levels. This is why policymakers have been nudging car makers to accelerate efforts to bring an end to the manufacture of vehicles fitted with an internal combustion engine. It’s a no-brainer. In the European Union, at least, it seemed that the two sides were strapped in, ready to reach that destination by 2035.However, the past few weeks have seen the European Commission embroiled in a row with Germany, Italy and some other EU members over implementation of the 2035 deadline. This has been resolved, but only through a concession to Germany’s powerful automotive industry. New cars with internal combustion engines can continue to be sold after 2035, provided the engines use carbon-neutral fuels instead of diesel, petrol or compressed and liquefied gases. These are climate-damaging moves from a region that has so far led the world in policies for decarbonizing transport.
How the hydrogen revolution can help save the planet — and how it can’t
The problem lies in the phrase ‘carbon-neutral fuels’. These fuels rely either on inputs such as ‘green’ hydrogen, which is made by splitting water using renewable electricity, or on feedstocks such as biomass. The technologies used to make these fuels are inefficient, expensive and untested at scale. Moreover, claims of climate neutrality — based on the idea that the CO2 emitted by their combustion was absorbed relatively recently from the biosphere, or that CO2 produced during their manufacture was prevented from entering the atmosphere — are questionable.The capacity to make green hydrogen is severely limited, and any expansion should be used to power sectors such as heavy industry, for which viable decarbonization alternatives are not yet available. Meanwhile, the use of biomass creates incentives to harvest wood and divert agricultural land to grow energy crops, regardless of the consequences for land as a carbon sink or for biodiversity.It’s clear why some in the automotive industry want to keep the internal combustion engine alive. The idea is attractive to short-sighted policymakers, too, because it reduces the need to plan the roll out of charging infrastructure, to worry about grid capacity, and to teach people the skills to build and maintain different technologies. The research community must be equally clear in underlining why this is a false economy. There is only one proven viable, scalable and technologically ripe scheme for decarbonizing personal road transport. That is electrification.Not all car makers want to delay. Many understand that the transition to electric vehicles will take time, and want to get on with transforming their businesses. They want policy certainty and continuity from governments to allow them to get down to business. Last year’s COP27 climate conference in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, saw the launch of the Accelerating to Zero Coalition to drive the global transition to new electric cars and vans by 2035 in “leading markets”, meaning high-income countries, and globally by 2040. Its more than 200 signatories include 14 car manufacturers, among them household names such as Ford, General Motors, Mercedes-Benz and Volvo Cars, and the governments of more than 40 countries.
Overhyping hydrogen as a fuel risks endangering net-zero goals
But the absentees are also notable. They include some of the world’s most prominent motor manufacturers — Toyota, Volkswagen, Honda, Hyundai and Kia. Also absent are the governments of some of the biggest car-producing countries — China, Japan, South Korea and Germany.If the electric-vehicle transition is further delayed, there are likely to be cascading effects elsewhere that will ultimately put a brake on global decarbonization. The demand for personal powered mobility is increasing in low- and middle-income countries. In Asia alone, cars are projected to account for more than 40% of trips taken in 2050, up from 28% in 2015. On the basis of current trends, there will be three billion cars and vans on the road globally in 2050, up from one billion now — another reason to accelerate the transition to electric vehicles worldwide.For the decarbonization of road transport to occur, the world will need what the Global Fuel Economy Initiative, a partnership on fuel economy and efficiency, called a “radical policy framework” (see go.nature.com/4381wvk). That means the removal of fossil-fuel subsidies and the mobilization of both public and private investment for the development of electric vehicles and their attendant charging infrastructure. It means tying the development of that infrastructure to renewable-energy-generation systems, while ensuring that supply chains are sustainable and providing recycling facilities for battery materials. And it means an international agreement must be reached on standards, so that the introduction of cleaner vehicles in one part of the world doesn’t mean old bangers being shipped off to pollute the environment elsewhere.All of this is doable. But the growing global demand for personal mobility means a truly green transport transition will happen only by addressing another factor. Technological innovation will take us only so far: behavioural change is also needed. Alongside a cogent, evidence-based strategy to develop electric vehicles and displace fossil fuels, we must plan and redesign urban environments around the world to encourage active transport — walking and cycling — rather than driving. That surely is the best route to a cleaner, healthier world. More

They might have been new to fifteenth-century sailors, but primates have been in the Americas for millions of years.Credit: Konrad Wothe/Nature Picture Library

One of my happy childhood memories of growing up in Mexico City is singing along to a favourite ballad of my parents by the Spanish band Mocedades. We enthusiastically repeated, “… this is the new Spain, the one that smells like sugar cane, tobacco and tar, the one that is lazy and has golden skin.” Listening to this song today, I am unsure whether to be flattered or insulted.The term ‘New World’ was first used by the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci in 1503 while documenting his travels across the Atlantic Ocean. Of course, the land was not ‘new’ to those who already lived there. When Vespucci arrived in what are now named the Americas, there were hundreds of civilizations and a population of around 60.5 million. A century later, 90% of that population was gone — a result of infectious diseases introduced by European settlers and the violence and famines for which they were responsible.
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Many of us have learnt the mistakes of the past, but the phrase New World has remained to describe what we call now the American continent. The term has been used in science to describe certain foods (New World crops or New World wine), animal species (New World monkeys) and ecosystems (New World mangroves). Even the global biogeographical classification of provinces of the world by the International Union for Conservation of Nature uses the terms Nearctic or New Arctic (to denote Greenland, Canada, most of the United States and the highlands of Mexico) and Neotropics or New Tropics (covering the rest of Mexico, plus Central and South America and the Caribbean islands). The term has been criticized by literary historians for being historically and geographically inaccurate, but it is still widely used in academia.A world of differenceI am Mexican, and I do not understand why I should label the natural riches of my country on the basis of the subjective perspective of colonizers five centuries ago. I have no familial or cultural connection to Europe, and using the term New World feels offensive. It reminds me of being a child and feeling that Mexico was not as good as Spain, that we were just lazy people with the wrong skin colour. It makes me feel that we cannot find our own worth unless we are validated through the eyes of Europe.
How to include Indigenous researchers and their knowledge
Scientifically, it makes no sense to apply this term to describe a vast area with such variable climate, geomorphology and geological history. It is time to reconsider using it. Not only to improve accuracy in science but to respect and acknowledge the history of the colonized or exterminated cultures. Since I realized this term’s origin, I have avoided its use and suggested that other people do the same. At least once a year, I will review a paper on ‘New World’ species or ‘Neotropical mangroves’. I politely suggest that the authors reconsider this use of language and try another, more accurate term that reflects the climate, location or country of origin. For instance, Caribbean mangroves, fishes of the western Atlantic Ocean, or primates of southeast Brazil are better options.This world is well worth singing about. More

Cocoa crops (Theobroma cacao) continue to drive extensive deforestation in West Africa (see, for example, C. Renier et al. Environ. Res. Lett. 18, 024030; 2023). Their expansion outside protected areas is also increasing deforestation and degradation indirectly, by displacing food production and so forcing communities on the forest fringes to move their food crops into protected forests (E. O. Acheampong et al. Sci. Afr. 5, e00146; 2019).
Competing Interests
The authors declare no competing interests. More

We are facing a global crisis. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, 41% of frog species globally and 57% of the frog species in Ecuador are endangered, owing primarily to chytrid fungus disease, habitat destruction and climate change. One of our emergency tools for protecting endangered frog species is to take frogs from the wild, breed them in the laboratory and release the offspring into their habitats.My job involves working out how to do that. I also describe new frog species in an encyclopaedia of amphibians of Ecuador. So far, we have gathered information on 652 species. There are many more, and many are disappearing before we can describe them.In 2021, one of my collaborators collected members of a new species of harlequin frog (Atelopus sp. nov.) from a recently logged forest. We’re now trying to produce a new population. In this picture, I am measuring the eyes, fingers, legs and other features of this species. I record where and when the frogs are collected, and monitor how their habitat changes over time.We have to know what species exist where, so we can protect them. In Junín, Ecuador, water quality will be affected if planned copper-mining operations are approved. My colleagues have found a critically endangered harlequin-frog species in the area, and a new frog species that lives in a waterfall. We fear that both species will go extinct if the mining goes ahead.Along with community members and others, I presented a legal case to Ecuador’s environment ministry to stop the mining, to protect these frog species. We won the case, but lost on appeal; now, I’m providing scientific information for a new filing.Finding and describing new frog species is a powerful conservation tool because it compels governments to protect them. We don’t want to lose any other species — we have already lost too many. More

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