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The Government of Panama and other tropical countries supported resolutions passed during the recent UN Climate Change Conference (COP26), which highlighted the critical importance of curtailing deforestation and restoring tropical ecosystems. But how much carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere when tropical forests are destroyed? How much carbon is stored as they recover? This is essential to understanding what these resolutions will mean in terms of specific deforestation and reforestation actions in the tropics.
Understanding just how much deforestation affects carbon storage is not easy: deforestation rates are affected by factors ranging from local economic development to global political and economic forces. Scenario planning allows policy makers and researchers to grapple with uncertainty by visualizing deforestation pathways.
Based on measurements of forest carbon storage in Panama, a new study led by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) reduces the uncertainty of mathematical models predicting carbon dioxide release resulting from deforestation scenarios and highlights the amazing capacity of young, regenerating or secondary forests to pull this greenhouse gas from the atmosphere.
The authors offer three deforestation scenarios based on 1) recent deforestation trends, 2) rates calculated in the decades prior to 2000, and 3) more hopeful scenarios in which deforestation is halted entirely or even where forests regenerate on all available land.
To improve the accuracy of their predictions, they calculated deforestation rates and correlated the amount of forest lost with geographical features based on a set of maps of existing forest cover in Panama created by study co-author, Kendra Walker.
“Panama has been making strides to calculate both the carbon sequestration potential in its forests and emissions due to forest loss,” said Jefferson Hall, lead author and STRI staff scientist. “Scenarios can help decision makers better anticipate the potential consequences of alternative sets of land-use decisions, which have a significant impact on Panama’s climate mitigation strategy.”
The research group, which also included scientists from the Harvard Forest, Arizona State University, and the University of California Santa Barbara in the United States, the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, and Yale NUS in Singapore, leveraged a Panama-wide carbon density map produced using the airborne laser technology or LiDAR by coupling a decade-long study of secondary forests with more than 1.1 million tree measurements with local studies of often-neglected carbon pools in tree roots, soil, lianas, and coarse woody debris.
Their analysis of central Panama, about one-quarter of the country, includes the area crucial for the functioning of the Panama Canal, and visually depicts the landscape in 2030 and 2050 under potential deforestation scenarios. Their discussion includes an assessment of how these deforestation pathways would impact Panama’s carbon sequestration objectives.
They found that under current deforestation trends, or fairly little deforestation, central Panama could still store about 15 percent of the national carbon goals by 2050. If deforestation were completely stopped in central Panama and the forest were left to naturally regenerate on all available land, the country could achieve up to 56 percent of its goal by 2050. In contrast, at an accelerated deforestation rate, one where deforestation reverts to levels leading up to the millennium, central Panama would lose almost half of its forests and up to 25% of its carbon baseline by 2050.
An important feature of the study is that it allows an evaluation of individual deforestation events. For example, if Panama permits the clearing of up to 25,000 ha of mature forest for mining in the Donoso and La Pintada districts of Colon and Coclé as has been reported in the press, emissions could amount to over 11 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, or the equivalent of over 40% of the potential carbon gains under the Recent Trends scenario by 2030.
Initiatives to ensure that Panama meets its carbon sequestration goals going forward will require a combination of active reforestation and allowing passive natural processes of forest succession to take place. Letting these young secondary forests regenerate will draw on the local species that are adapted to local conditions.
These forests are also important for water security thanks to the “sponge effect,” by which forest soils absorb water during the wet season and release it as stream flow during the dry months.
“Our estimates of potential carbon storage demonstrate the important contribution of secondary forests to land-based carbon storage in central Panama,” said Hall. “Protecting these forests will contribute significantly to meeting Panama’s climate change mitigation goals and enhancing water security.”
This study was supported in part by Lloyds Tercentenary Research Foundation.
The peer-reviewed article is in Landscape Ecology, entitled “Deforestation scenarios show the importance of secondary forest for meeting Panama’s carbon goals,” by Jefferson S. Hall, Joshua S. Plisinski, Stephanie K. Mladinich, Michiel van Breugel, Hao Ran Lai, Gregory P. Asner, Kendra Walker & Jonathan R. Thompson, at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10980-021-01379-4}
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The national junior baseball tournament begins on Friday with Panama Metro visiting defending champion Cocle. Looking at the FEDEBEIS website, they don’t have the first-round schedule posted yet. I don’t yet know whether the opening game takes place in Penonome or Aguadulce. (If in the former I just might go.)
GENERALLY a flock of Major League Baseball coaches come here for the tournament and go back having signed a number of these teenagers to professional contracts. The scouting practices have changed over the years, as there is now a draft for young Latin American players. I’m not entirely sure how it works, but I suspect that this keeps the signing bonuses down for the Major League organizations.
Sadly, the NCAA doesn’t do that same and offer scholarships to athletes who could make the academic grade — it’s a quiet deal that has been made with professional baseball that they don’t. The way that a Panamanian kid gets to play NCAA ball is to go to a high school in the USA and get recruited there, or get into a university as an ordinary enrollment and walk on to make the team. For MOST players, four years developing at a US university is a better deal that playing those four years in the minors, as they can come away with an education that would have a lifetime value.
Israel Delgado, the Cuban manager of a young this year Herrera team, opined in La Estrella that this year won’t be a good one for outstanding pitching. (Cuba as exporter of athletic and coaching talent is another huge story in and of itself. Here Delgado is diplomatically correct in not mentioning the politics and racket of Panamanian baseball, what with a long tradition of FEDEBEIS being run by parasitic legislators. That’s also a major story by itself.)
Anyway, Delgado suggests that we may not see the next Mariano Rivera in this year’s tournament. Perhaps, however, we will see a big time franchise player slugger of the future. Or EVEN, your editor hopes, the Panamanian who will lead the long-suffering Detroit Tigers to another World Series championship after all these years.
For baseball fans these tournaments are a lot of fun. You need to be masked and vaccinated to get in the stadiums.
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Most Panamanian presidents have published the texts of their speeches at the start of National Assembly sessions rather promptly after delivering them. Often the discourses have been posted in real time video on their web pages. The Cortizo administration, however, has preferred advertising and influencers over readily available public information through public channels. For one thing, on their website and social media where there are opportunities for comment, they have to delay in order to arrange the canned applause from their call center activists.
It’s because there is so much pretense, especially about the economy. In the morning papers before the ceremonies and speeches, there were these tales of Panamanian tourism on the comeback trail. The International Promotion Fund (Promtur) plans to spend $31 million promoting Panama as a tourist destination to people in the United States, Canada, Spain, France, Germany, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Costa Rica. We are given the concerning but optimistic figure that at the end of 2021 hotel occupancy was at 37%, about three-quarters what it was in 2019. But first of all, in comparison to previous years, 2019 was horrible for Panamanian tourism. Moreover, that’s 37% of presently available rooms, but more than 40% of the hotels — skewed a bit toward the smaller ones — are closed. As in 37% of 23,000 rooms, as compared to 32,000 rooms before the epidemic hit. As in 8,510 occupied hotel rooms last week, which would have been equal to some 27% occupancy of the rooms we had two years ago.
Such an air of unreality blows all through the Cortizo administration’s economic pronouncements, which are presented something like a power point display on the president’s Twitter feed.
Nito claims an extraordinary 14.9% increase in Gross Domestic Product for the first three quarters of 2021 — as compared to a 2020 in economic free-fall and a bad economy when Nito took over in the middle of 2019. And as if in Panama increases in overall economic activity get distributed more or less to the whole population. The reality is that for most of us last year was a time of lower income and higher prices.
Nito speaks of “17,406 Panamanians” who received property titles for real estate that had been held by rights of possession in 2021. Well, if you believe that companies and so on are people — the number includes local government councils, churches, cooperatives and schools as well as the dwellings of real people. And who believes that the distribution of titles had nothing to do with party affiliation? Or that it was a matter of just small homeowners and not developers getting title to places where they don’t actually live?
The important truths about which the president spoke were related to the country’s battle with the COVID-19 virus. He may have left out a few embarrassments and false starts, but in generally he has done the reasonable things and gives reasonable advice: “Please go to get vaccinated at any of the 105 vaccination centers; for your family, your friends and the country.”
There were the usual lists of projects — the salient one the building of a new school of medicine and nursing at the University of Panama — and the promises of an all-out war on crime.
When it came time for National Assembly president Dr. Crispiano Adames to speak, it would have been difficult for many Panamanians to keep a straight face had he played up the crime issue amidst so many thuggish legislators.
Instead Adames said that there is an “open door” for the labor movement to come in and talk, and perhaps come to a “national accord” for “harmonious cooperation.” But look for a strike wave this year instead.
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If the pandemic had happened ten years ago, what would it have looked like? Doubtless there would have been many differences, but probably the most striking would have been the relative lack of genomic sequencing. This is where the entire genetic code – or “genome” – of the coronavirus in a testing sample is quickly read and analyzed.
At the beginning of the pandemic, sequencing informed researchers that they were dealing with a virus that hadn’t been seen before. The quick deciphering of the virus’s genetic code also allowed for vaccines to be developed straight away, and partly explains why they were available in record time.
Since then, scientists have repeatedly sequenced the virus as it circulates. This allows them to monitor changes and detect variants as they emerge.
Sequencing itself is not new – what’s different today is the amount taking place. Genomes of variants are being tested around the world at an unprecedented rate, making COVID-19 one of the most highly tested outbreaks ever.
With this information we can then track how specific forms of the virus are spreading locally, nationally and internationally. It makes COVID-19 the first outbreak to be tracked in near real-time on a global scale.
This helps with controlling the virus. For example, together with PCR testing, sequencing helped reveal the emergence of the alpha variant in winter 2020. It also showed that alpha was rapidly becoming more prevalent and confirmed why, revealing that it had significant mutations associated with increased transmission. This helped inform decisions to tighten restrictions.
Sequencing has done the same for omicron, identifying its concerning mutations and confirming how quickly it’s spreading. This underlined the need for the UK to turbocharge its booster program.
The importance of genomic sequencing is undeniable. But how does it work – and how has it become so common?
Well, just like people, each copy of the coronavirus has its own genome, which is around 30,000 characters long. As the virus reproduces, its genome can mutate slightly due to errors made when copying it. Over time these mutations add up, and they distinguish one variant of the virus from another. The genome of a variant of concern could contain anywhere from five to 30 mutations.
The virus’s genome is made from RNA, and each of its 30,000 characters is one of four building blocks, represented by the letters A, G, C and U. Sequencing is the process of identifying their unique order. Various technologies can be used for this, but a particularly important one in getting us to where we are is nanopore sequencing. Ten years ago this technology wasn’t available as it is today. Here’s how it works.
First the RNA is converted to DNA. Then, like a long thread of cotton being pulled through a pinhole in a sheet of fabric, the DNA is pulled through a pore in a membrane. This nanopore is a million times smaller than a pin head. As each building block of DNA passes through the nanopore, it gives off a unique signal. A sensor detects the signal changes, and a computer program decrypts this to reveal the sequence.
Amazingly, the flagship machine for doing nanopore sequencing – the MinION, released by Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) in 2014 – is only the size of a stapler; other sequencing techniques (such as those developed by Illumina and Pacific BioSciences) generally require bulky equipment and a well-stocked lab. The MinION is therefore incredibly portable, allowing for sequencing to happen on the ground during a disease outbreak.
This first happened during the 2013-16 Ebola outbreak and then during the Zika epidemic of 2015-16. Pop-up labs were set up in areas lacking scientific infrastructure, enabling scientists to identify where each outbreak originated.
This experience laid the foundation for sequencing the coronavirus today. The methods honed during this time, in particular by a genomics research group called the Artic Network, have proved invaluable. They were quickly adapted for COVID-19 to become the basis on which millions of coronavirus genomes have been sequenced across the globe since 2020. Nanopore sequencing of Zika and Ebola gave us the methods to do sequencing at a never-before-seen scale today.
That said, without the much larger capacity of the benchtop machines from Illumina, Pacific Biosciences and ONT, we wouldn’t be able to capitalize on the knowledge gained through nanopore sequencing. Only with these other technologies is it possible to do sequencing at the current volume.
With COVID-19, researchers were able to monitor the outbreak only once it had started. But the creation of rapid testing and screening programs for other new diseases, as well as the infrastructure to conduct widespread sequencing, has now begun. These will provide an early warning system to prevent the next pandemic taking us by surprise.
For instance, in the future, surveillance programs may be put in place to monitor wastewater to identify disease-causing microbes (known as pathogens) present in the population. Sequencing will allow researchers to identify new pathogens, allowing an early start on understanding and tracking the next outbreak before it gets out of hand.
Genome sequencing also has a role to play in the future of healthcare and medicine. It has the potential to diagnose rare genetic disorders, inform personalized medicine, and monitor the ever-increasing threat of drug resistance.
Five to ten years ago, scientists were only just beginning to trial sequencing technology on smaller viral outbreaks. The effects of the past two years have resulted in a huge increase in the use of sequencing to track the spread of disease. This was made possible by technology, skills and infrastructure that have developed over time.
COVID-19 has caused untold damage worldwide and affected the lives of millions, and we’re yet to see its full impact. But recent advances – particularly in the field of sequencing – have no doubt improved the situation beyond where we’d otherwise be.
Angela Beckett, Specialist Research Technician, Centre for Enzyme Innovation, and PhD Candidate in Genomics and Bioinformatics, University of Portsmouth and Samuel Robson, Reader in Genomics and Bioinformatics, and Bioinformatics Lead, Centre for Enzyme Innovation, University of Portsmouth
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Strong, sweet, fruity tea — an old favorite. Recently, brewed with slices of turmeric root. Seems to help, but I wonder…
Turmeric’s medicinal properties include being useful for recovering from injuries. Like from getting bashed upside the temple by a fist with rock in it and falling back and hitting the back of my head, then getting beaten over the head with an aluminum mop handle several months ago.
The medical literature about turmeric that’s readily available online goes way, way back and is updated in many places. But scant is the stuff about counter-indications or reactions with other drugs or foods. When you think about it, that’s quite the indictment of capitalist medicine.
A few years back some dweeb claimed to have discovered the medicinal properties of turmeric and tried to patent it, and was shot down in a US patent court with the government of India and the German Greens joining in the opposition. The patent was not allowed.
SO, no corporate-sponsored tests to prove safety and efficacy to the FDA. No capitalist reason to look deeper into the properties of turmeric.
If I eat grapefruit and drink turmeric tea with my breakfast, will the grapefruit interfere with the effect of the turmeric? Or what if I slug down turmeric tea with a greasy bacon sandwich?
Or WHAT IF, I take some prescribed medicine, or over-the-counter medication like ibuprofren, with turmeric? Is there something I ought to know?
Similarly, what if I come down with COVID, having been drinking turmeric tea? Might it be counter-indicated by the disease? Would a physician evaluating my case want to take turmeric use into her or his diagnosis or prescription?
A few years back at one of the STRI Tuesday talks a German researcher spoke about work that he was doing in Germany, where herbal medicine is quite popular, on herbal cures’ relationships with industrial medicines.
It should be expected that China, with advanced traditional and global standard medical systems, ought to be a leader in such research.
However, the field is vast. In Panama alone there are at least seven sorts of traditional healing systems, one of which is Chinese. Or more than one, if you count acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine as two.
It was, at one point anyway, of interest to the University of Panama and the Ministry of Health to begin a unification of knowledge and development of standards to certify traditional healers.
Then socialite dingbats meddled, supposing that cult beliefs like crystal healing were somehow as valid as the generations of knowledge that the inatuledes, jaibanas and botanicas* have learned.
I am not sure if the research and movements toward certification ever got back on track to continue. I do know that there are standard physicians who call it all quackery. Some of this is racism and some of it is a monopolistic attitude about healing. But it is a problem that anyone can call himself or herself an herbal healer no matter how much knowledge, and in light of an awful lot of nonsensical ideas floating around out there.
* Note: An inatulede is an advanced healer in the Guna tradition, while the Embera counterpart of sorts is a jaibana. A botanica is a woman who practices herbal healing, and a male colleague would be a botanico. Both inatuledes and jaibanas tend to start out as herbalists, but then advance into practices that will have psychological, sociological or religious apsects.
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It’s a couple of days before 2022 begins. The editor is 69 years old and The Panama News is 28. Panama, the United States, this publication and the world have some work to do and a lot of it is readily apparent.
We have a population with mostly healthy instincts and a terminally ill political order. Yet with a wave of omicron infections growing around us there is a rise in the politics of denial, Panamanian translations of imported far-right stuff from Europe and North America, by and large. Some of it will be from actual foreigners, but the Panamanians who glom onto that stuff will often be those who otherwise spew ultra-nationalist, xenophobic bile.
In Panamanian politics this will be a year of waiting out events and the laying of groundwork. In traditional electoral politics there are these battles for control of the PRD, CD and its splinters, the Panameñista tradition, the Partido Popular and MOLIRENA. There will be eventual “winners” but it’s hard to see how any of these come out in a strong position for the 2024 elections.
Ricardo Lombana’s Movimiento Otro Camino avoids the infighting, but after buying in on the fiasco of petitioning for a parallel constitutional revision process they have yet to catch fire in the public imagination – just some timid reforms and “not THEM.”
The left is weak and divided as usual. Except that, away from the arcane and theoretical, the labor movement that’s its natural base is growing and becoming more militant. Perhaps the unions will tell the politicos what to do instead of the other way around this time.
Will far-right elements break off of the crumbling traditional parties and form a neofascist party? If they don’t do that this year it will be getting late for 2024. And if they do, which politicians and factions among the rest will say “Me, too” about the hate they inspire and which will define themselves as anti-fascist?
Ricardo Martinelli’s legal fate, and the politics associated with Martinelli family legal problems, will be the big unknowns two years out from the 2024 campaign. Perhaps a bigger danger to Panama than the former president prevailing in multiple Panamanian courts would be for too many Panamanians to look to a courthouse in Brooklyn, or to an embassy in Clayton, and figure that the gringos will solve it. That sort of thinking has led Panama to tragedy time and again.
The Democratic primary season that’s starting to get underway right now will determine whether nostalgia for the way things were once done will strip the party of any meaningful offer to the voters and leave them with “not Trump” to run on next fall. Given that Donald Trump won’t be on the ballot, that would be a most unenviable position.
OR, Democrats could choose a younger, more progressive, more capable slate than the octogenarians in the House leadership and the corporate crowd in the Senate would prefer. Democrats have about half a dozen GOP Senate seats that they might grab, and a slim House majority that they might pad. The historical odds are against that, buit then in 2022 the Republicans have the QAnon shaman as their running mate.
At the end of 2021 the big political imponderable for next year in the USA will be the movement of viruses that can’t vote. This editor is betting that by the summer the COVID epidemic will have receded and so will the double-edged politics of assigning blame for it.
As the editor slowly recovers from being beaten up last June, so has the production work on The Panama News. But it was a powerful reminder about succession and evolution. The publication will continue in its bilingual direction and will need to be gradually handed off to a more collective enterprise. Does this attract yet another wave of hustlers promising that they can “monetize” this project? It’s a known hazard to avoid.
This epidemic, widespread environmental devastation, wars with great powers as direct or proxy players, people forced out of homes in many places, the politics of extreme hatred – can Panama survive all that? Can any country? I expect that we will.
I just hope that more people will ignore the fatalism of the argument that we are beyond repair. We are not beyond repair. We are never beyond repair.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortéz
Even God cannot make two times two not make four.
Hugo Grotius
Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.
Gore Vidal
The truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
Nadine Gordimer
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It was time. I needed to make a cat food run if this oversized feline crowd was to get their expected kittie crunchies for dinner. A bunch of them are kittens, who do outrageous things just to test the limit. The adults have learned, so they KNOW how to take revenge if not fed as they demand.
The dogs? Mama Dog is an old lady in her dotage and decided to stay in, but this was Fulita’s and Giselle’s chance to get out for their morning run. Close up the house, make sure that I have everything and my mask is on. Put the key in the gate — or WAIT!!! There is this snake entwined in the gate, with her head a striking distance away from the lock.
Do they have psychologists who do evolutionary ecology? Or some mixture of scientists like that? My lay hypothesis is that it’s hardwired into the human nervous system to be startled when unexpectedly encountering a snake. But then, I was a kid who was brought up weird, so the shock was momentary.
And the snake? If I were a snake in this neighborhood I’d be terrified of people. These vicious humans will kill you for no reason at all! The snake began to move from the gate to the fence, into one of my Mayan Spinach Trees.
I could see from its head that this was not the legendary Extremely Mean Biting snake. Not the sort of serpent to bite you and slither off to a safe perch in the trees, where she can laugh as she watches you die.
Naaaaaah — she’s Oxybelis aeneus, the Brown Vine Snake. A welcome visitor to my garden, who come dry season sometimes raids the dogs’ and cats’ water bowl on the front port. (Dry season is when you are more likely to encounter snakes here, because they are out and about looking for water.) Whatever time of the year that inspect prey on my garden, she’s likely to be a self-invited dinner guest. The vine snakes like to eat insects. Or maybe, if it’s a special holiday, a tiny bird.
She is, however, deadly poisonous, via the small fangs in the back of her mouth. That is, deadly if you are an insect, or a gecko, or a tiny frog. It is said that’s her venom is “harmless to humans.” I’d expect that it hurts if she bites you and I take care not to put that expectation to the test.
Most snakes that don’t want to be bothered will try to warn a human off with a hiss. A vine snake lets off a gross odor instead, and it that doesn’t work will open her mouth wide and rear back. “Mind I bite you!” No need for either of us to threaten one another on this morning. She was a welcome guest in my garden.
She didn’t want to stay still to pose for a portrait, so what’s above is the best picture I got. I opened the gate, the dogs dashed out without paying attention to the snake, Grasshopper the attack cat yawned, I locked the gate and we went on our way, she went on hers.
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