United States

Biden gives China ultimatum over pangolin trade

/ mike shanahan / Leave a comment

President Joe Biden has stated that the United States will impose trade sanctions on China if it does not address its role in the illegal trade in pangolins, the world’s most heavily trafficked animals, by the end of the year.

Pangolins are endangered scaly mammals that live in Africa and Asia. They are widely poached for their flesh and scales, which are used in traditional medicines, particularly in China. Since January 2017, commercial international trade in pangolins has been banned under the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). But illicit trade continues.

According to the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), a nongovernmental organization, around 600,000 pangolins were illegally traded between 2016 and 2019. In 2019, authorities in Singapore seized 14 tons of pangolin scales in transit from Nigeria to Vietnam. Worth more than US$38 million, they came from an estimated 36,000 pangolins.

In August 2020, EIA and its partners at the Center for Biological Diversity and the Global Law Alliance for Animals and the Environment petitioned the US government to certify China under a law called the Pelly Amendment. This law authorizes the US President to restrict imports from any nation engaging in trade that undermines an international treaty for protecting endangered species.

More than three years later, on 8 September 2023, the US Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland announced that she had issued a finding that Chinese nationals are “diminishing the effectiveness of CITES by engaging in trade or taking of pangolin species”.

This set a clock ticking for Joe Biden. Under the Pelly Amendment, he had 60 days to decide whether to embargo any product from China. The law requires the President to explain to Congress any failure to impose sanctions against a certified nation.

China responded swiftly. In a statement on 9 September, China’s main CITES-implementing agency — the National Forestry and Grassland Administration — said it “firmly opposed attempts to use the issue of pangolin protection to damage China’s reputation”.

The statement highlighted China’s “significant efforts and achievements in global pangolin protection” including ending commercial imports and exports of pangolins and their products, and acting against smuggling and illegal trading of pangolins.

But research published by EIA in October of this year showed that more than 50 products manufactured by Chinese companies contain pangolin derivatives and are easily available online.

James Toone, EIA’s Deputy Campaign Lead for pangolins told me that: “China’s quota system – whereby it grants private entities the use of pangolin scales for the manufacture of ‘licensed products’ – is in fact fraught with opacity and complexity.”

“It is almost certainly an open invitation to corruption,” says Toone. “EIA has called for all private stockpiles of pangolin scales to be destroyed.”

On 3 November, President Biden issued his legally-required message to the US Congress. Rather than sanction China, he set a deadline for action, acknowledging that China had made some progress and needed more time to take the “necessary steps to protect pangolin species from possible extinction”.

Biden said China needed to completely close its domestic market for pangolins and pangolin parts, transparently account for domestic stockpiles, and fully remove pangolins and pangolin parts from the national list of approved medicines.

He said: “If significant commitments by the People’s Republic of China to implement CITES-directed measures to protect pangolin species have not been made by December 31, 2023, I plan to direct certain prohibitions on the importation of, and impose trade measures on, certain products from the People’s Republic of China.”

Such products might include fish and wildlife products, as well as pharmaceuticals made by companies that manufacture products containing pangolin derivatives.

“We think the response by the President is quite strong, and we’re hopeful that the US is able to successfully negotiate meaningful change,” says Erica Lyman, Director of the Global Law Alliance for Animals and the Environment.

Sarah Uhlemann, International Program Director and Senior Attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, says: “We hope the White House will continue to assert strong pressure over the next two months.”

“The White House announcement suggested that the President is standing strong, demanding that China close its domestic market, account for stockpiles, and remove pangolins from its national list of traditional Chinese medicines,” she told me. “These actions would make a real difference for pangolin survival.”

Photo credit: Marcus Chua — Flickr / Creative Commons

In under three minutes, a year in a forest

/ mike shanahan / 5 Comments

Samuel Orr has been good enough to publish online this time-lapse video he shot from a house in a nature reserve near Bloomington, Indiana. He stitched it together from 40,000 images he took over a 15-month period. It’s a wild and beautiful place. On his website, Orr says: “I’d often look out the window and see turkeys, deer, flying squirrels, vultures, possums, huge orb weaving spiders, and a dizzying array of songbirds and woodpeckers.”

The result is a stunning portrait of the seasonal cycles that breathe life through every layer of the forest — and the soundscape is a rich as the view. Here Orr describes creatures we can hear.

“I tried to put in wildlife songs and calls appropriate to the season.  For instance, the honking during what is late winter are Sandhill Cranes, which used a migratory flyway that passed directly overhead.  Many of the calls were recorded on sight, others were from elsewhere in Indiana.  Animals heard include migratory songbirds, spring peepers, tree frogs, cicadas (periodical and annual), turkeys, coyotes, elk, and wolves.  While there are no wild wolves or elk native to Indiana anymore, but for hunting long ago they would still roam the surrounding hills.  Maybe they’ll be back some day.”

You can read more about his work at Motionkicker.com

Will Obama let the climate do all the talking?

/ mike shanahan / 2 Comments

Climate chatter may seem loud to those who seek it, but it occupies a vanishingly small part of public debate in the United States. This pair of images that Andy Revkin has shared shows this only too well.

Meanwhile, too much of what has been said and written about climate change has come from the shouters not the listeners — from oversimplifying environmental groups or conservative conspiracy theorists or powerful vested interests or proud anti-science billionaires. As an example of the latter, here’s what Donald Trump told his nearly two million followers on Twitter on 6 November 2012.

This kind of idiocy cannot sustain itself. It won’t be long before everyone knows someone who suffered the effects of an extreme climatic event. Climate change — that once intangible and distant concept — is doing the leg-work for the communicators who have struggled to make this issue feel real.

Hurricane Sandy hammered home that point. Whether or not humanity had a hand in the storm’s impact is fairly academic (see David Shukman’s report on what science can and cannot say at this stage). What really matters is that Sandy showed that even a rich city in the world’s most powerful nation is vulnerable.

Some commentators hope Sandy has blown open a door to a mature conversation in the United States about climate change. It’s a conversation the world needs Americans to have — both with each other and with the rest of us.

But a quick read of George Marshall’s thoughts on psychology and climate change suggests it might take more than disasters to get the conversation rolling.

This is where President Obama needs to step up. In his 2012 election victory speech Obama said: “We want our children to live in a world… that isn’t threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet.” Does he mean it this time, or was this just another tease?

In the past Obama has flirted with a leadership role on climate change. But he has blown hot and cold — courting climate action in 2008 then shying away in 2009. He barely mentioned climate change in recent months — not even in the pre-election debates — and this in the year of a record-breaking US drought and super-storm Sandy.

Obama’s strategy has been to follow public opinion rather than lead it. This may have seemed astute, for few Americans are ready to confront a climate narrative that so forcefully challenges their worldviews, which hinge as they do on faith, freedom and the pursuit of the mighty dollar. But as Calestous Juma has pointed out: “The fact that you aren’t interested in climate change doesn’t mean climate change isn’t interested in you.”

It will take leadership, tolerance and safe spaces to encourage the American public to join the climate conversation. Obama must reject his old ‘now you see it… now you don’t‘ approach to climate change, which allowed his opponents to shackle the discourse to a political roller-coaster whose only destination was deadlock.

The world needs climate conversations that involve Americans as citizens, not just as Democrats or Republicans. The alternative is to let the climate itself continue to do most of the talking — and none of the listening.

Southern Beasts: a story to spark climate conversations

/ mike shanahan / 1 Comment

A little girl takes Nature’s pulse and finds it’s lost its rhythm. As her universe unravels and the climate flexes its muscles, she learns all is connected and that community is the key to resilience.

That’s my 200-character review* of Benh Zeitlin’s new film Beasts of the Southern Wild. It’s a timely movie — a story of survival in a poor part of the United States where the vulnerable suffer and go hungry while the wealthy consume and pollute.

The narrative chimes louder since Hurricane Sandy joined its big sister Katrina as the second mega-storm to strike the United States in just eight years. And while the film is about the United States, the community at its heart has experiences that echo those of poor people across the planet.

Here’s the trailer…

 

[*Update: 3 December 2012: I wrote the 200-character review for a competition run by The Guardian. My good news is that I heard today that I won. The film touched me deeply so the words came easy. I hope you find it as interesting and moving as I did.]