These technologies may help more animals and plants survive climate change
As the climate changes, the ripples will reach everywhere. Better data is needed for both plants and animals, and scientists are looking for genes that could allow crops to survive.
This article originally appeared in One Health/One Planet, a single-issue magazine that explores how climate change and other environmental shifts are making us more vulnerable to infectious diseases by land and by sea - and how scientists are working on solutions.
Along the west coast of South Florida and the Keys, Florida Bay is a nursery for young Caribbean spiny lobsters, a favorite local delicacy. Growing up in small shallow basins, they are especially vulnerable to warmer, more saline water. Climate change has brought tidal floods, bleached coral reefs and toxic algal blooms to the state, and since the 1990s, the population of the Caribbean spiny lobster has dropped some 20 percent, diminishing an important food for snapper, grouper, and herons, as well as people. In 1999, marine ecologist Donald Behringer discovered the first known virus among lobsters, Panulirus argus virus—about a quarter of juveniles die from it before they mature.
“When the water is warm PaV1 progresses much more quickly,” says Behringer, who is based at the Emerging Pathogens Institute at the University of Florida in Gainesville.
Caribbean spiny lobsters are only one example of many species that are struggling in the era of climate change, both at sea and on land. As the oceans heat up, absorbing greenhouse gases and growing more acidic, marine diseases are emerging at an accelerated rate. Marine creatures are migrating to new places, and carrying pathogens with them. The latest grim report in the journal Science, states that if global warming continues at the current rate, the extinction of marine species will rival the Permian–Triassic extinction, sometimes called the “Great Dying,” when volcanoes poisoned the air and wiped out as much as 90 percent of all marine life 252 million years ago.
Similarly, on land, climate change has exposed wildlife, trees and crops to new or more virulent pathogens. Warming environments allow fungi, bacteria, viruses and infectious worms to proliferate in new species and locations or become more virulent. One paper modeling records of nearly 1,400 wildlife species projects that parasites will double by 2070 in the far north and in high-altitude places. Right now, we are seeing the effects most clearly on the fringes—along the coasts, up north and high in the mountains—but as the climate continues changing, the ripples will reach everywhere.
Few species are spared
On the Hawaiian Islands, mosquitoes are killing more songbirds. The dusky gray akikiki of Kauai and the chartreuse-yellow kiwikiu of Maui could vanish in two years, under assault from mosquitoes bearing avian malaria, according to a University of Hawaiʻi 2022 report. Previously, the birds could escape infection by roosting high in the cold mountains, where the pests couldn’t thrive, but climate change expanded the range of the mosquito and narrowed theirs.
Likewise, as more midge larvae survive over warm winters and breed better during drier summers, they bite more white-tailed deer, spreading often-fatal epizootic hemorrhagic disease. Especially in northern regions of the globe, climate change brings the threat of midges carrying blue tongue disease, a virus, to sheep and other animals. Tick-borne diseases like encephalitis and Lyme disease may become a greater threat to animals and perhaps humans.
"If you put all your eggs in one basket and then a pest comes a long, then you are more vulnerable to those risks," says Mehroad Ehsani, managing director of the food initiative in Africa for the Rockefeller Foundation. "Research is needed on resilient, climate smart, regenerative agriculture."
In the “thermal mismatch” theory of wildlife disease, cold-adapted species are at greater risk when their habitats warm, and warm-adapted species suffer when their habitats cool. Mammals can adjust their body temperature to adapt to some extent. Amphibians, fish and insects that cannot regulate body temperatures may be at greater risk. Many scientists see amphibians, especially, as canaries in the coalmine, signaling toxicity.
Early melting ice can foster disease. Climate models predict that the spring thaw will come ever-earlier in the lakes of the French Pyrenees, for instance, which traditionally stayed frozen for up to half the year. The tadpoles of the midwife toad live under the ice, where they are often infected with amphibian chytrid fungus. When a seven-year study tracked the virus in three species of amphibians in Pyrenees’s Lac Arlet, the research team found that, the earlier the spring thaw arrived, the more infection rates rose in common toads— , while remaining high among the midwife toads. But the team made another sad discovery: with early thaws, the common frog, which was thought to be free of the disease in Europe, also became infected with the fungus and died in large numbers.
Changing habitats affect animal behavior. Normally, spiny lobsters rely on chemical cues to avoid predators and sick lobsters. New conditions may be hampering their ability to “social distance”—which may help PaV1 spread, Behringer’s research suggests. Migration brings other risks. In April 2022, an international team led by scientists at Georgetown University announced the first comprehensive overview, published in the journal Nature, of how wild mammals under pressure from a changing climate may mingle with new populations and species—giving viruses a deadly opportunity to jump between hosts. Droughts, for example, will push animals to congregate at the few places where water remains.
Plants face threats also. At the timberline of the cold, windy, snowy mountains of the U.S. west, whitebark pine forests are facing a double threat, from white pine blister rust, a fungal disease, and multiplying pine beetles. “If we do nothing, we will lose the species,” says Robert Keane, a research ecologist for the U.S. Forest Service, based in Missoula, Montana. That would be a huge shift, he explains: “It’s a keystone species. There are over 110 animals that depend on it, many insects, and hundreds of plants.” In the past, beetle larvae would take two years to complete their lifecycle, and many died in frost. “With climate change, we're seeing more and more beetles survive, and sometimes the beetle can complete its lifecycle in one year,” he says.
Quintessential crops are under threat too
As some pathogens move north and new ones develop, they pose novel threats to the crops humans depend upon. This is already happening to wheat, coffee, bananas and maize.
Breeding against wheat stem rust, a fungus long linked to famine, was a key success in the mid-20th century Green Revolution, which brought higher yields around the world. In 2013, wheat stem rust reemerged in Germany after decades of absence. It ravaged both bread and durum wheat in Sicily in 2016 and has spread as far as England and Ireland. Wheat blast disease, caused by a different fungus, appeared in Bangladesh in 2016, and spread to India, the world’s second largest producer of wheat.
Insects, moths, worms, and coffee leaf rust—a fungus now found in all coffee-growing countries—threaten the livelihoods of millions of people who grow coffee, as well as everybody’s cup of joe. More heat, more intense rain, and higher humidity have allowed coffee leaf rust to cycle more rapidly. It has grown exponentially, overcoming the agricultural chemicals that once kept it under control.
To identify new diseases and fine-tune crops for resistance, scientists are increasingly relying on genomic tools.
Tar spot, a fungus native to Latin America that can cut corn production in half, has emerged in highland areas of Central Mexico and parts of the U.S.. Meanwhile, maize lethal necrosis disease has spread to multiple countries in Africa, notes Mehrdad Ehsani, Managing Director for the Food Initiative in Africa of the Rockefeller Foundation. The Cavendish banana, which most people eat today, was bred to be resistant to the fungus Panama 1. Now a new fungus, Panama 4, has emerged on every continent–including areas of Latin America that rely on the Cavendish for their income, reported a recent story in the Guardian. New threats are poised to emerge. Potato growers in the Andes Mountains have been shielded from disease because of colder weather at high altitude, but temperature fluxes and warming weather are expected to make this crop vulnerable to potato blight, found plant pathologist Erica Goss, at the Emerging Pathogens Institute.
Science seeks solutions
To protect food supplies in the era of climate change, scientists are calling for integrated global surveillance systems for crop disease outbreaks. “You can imagine that a new crop variety that is drought-tolerant could be susceptible to a pathogen that previous varieties had some resistance against,” Goss says. “Or a country suffers from a calamitous weather event, has to import seed from another country, and that seed is contaminated with a new pathogen or more virulent strain of an existing pathogen.” Researchers at the John Innes Center in Norwich and Aarhus University in Denmark have established ways to monitor wheat rust, for example.
Better data is essential, for both plants and animals. Historically, models of climate change predicted effects on plant pathogens based on mean temperatures, and scientists tracked plant responses to constant temperatures, explains Goss. “There is a need for more realistic tests of the effects of changing temperatures, particularly changes in daily high and low temperatures on pathogens,” she says.
To identify new diseases and fine-tune crops for resistance, scientists are increasingly relying on genomic tools. Goss suggests factoring the impact of climate change into those tools. Genomic efforts to select soft red winter wheat that is resistant to Fusarium head blight (FHB), a fungus that plagues farmers in the Southeastern U.S., have had early success. But temperature changes introduce a new factor.
A fundamental solution would be to bring back diversification in farming, says Ehsani. Thousands of plant species are edible, yet we rely on a handful. Wild relatives of domesticated crops are a store of possibly useful genes that may confer resistance to disease. The same is true for livestock. “If you put all your eggs in one basket and then a pest comes along, then you are more vulnerable to those risks. Research is needed on resilient, climate smart, regenerative agriculture,” Ehsani says.
Jonathan Sleeman, director of the U.S. Geological Survey National Wildlife Health Center, has called for data on wildlife health to be systematically collected and integrated with climate and other variables because more comprehensive data will result in better preventive action. “We have focused on detecting diseases,” he says, but a more holistic strategy would apply human public health concepts to assuring animal wellbeing. (For example, one study asked experts to draw a diagram of relationships of all the factors affecting the health of a particular group of caribou.) We must not take the health of plants and animals for granted, because their vulnerability inevitably affects us too, Sleeman says. “We need to improve the resilience of wildlife populations so they can withstand the impact of climate change.”
A company uses AI to fight muscle loss and unhealthy aging
In December 2022, a company called BioAge Labs published findings on a drug that worked to prevent muscular atrophy, or the loss of muscle strength and mass, in older people.
There’s a growing need to slow down the aging process. The world’s population is getting older and, according to one estimate, 80 million Americans will be 65 or older by 2040. As we age, the risk of many chronic diseases goes up, from cancer to heart disease to Alzheimer’s.
BioAge Labs, a company based in California, is using genetic data to help people stay healthy for longer. CEO Kristen Fortney was inspired by the genetics of people who live long lives and resist many age-related diseases. In 2015, she started BioAge to study them and develop drug therapies based on the company’s learnings.
The team works with special biobanks that have been collecting blood samples and health data from individuals for up to 45 years. Using artificial intelligence, BioAge is able to find the distinctive molecular features that distinguish those who have healthy longevity from those who don’t.
In December 2022, BioAge published findings on a drug that worked to prevent muscular atrophy, or the loss of muscle strength and mass, in older people. Much of the research on aging has been in worms and mice, but BioAge is focused on human data, Fortney says. “This boosts our chances of developing drugs that will be safe and effective in human patients.”
How it works
With assistance from AI, BioAge measures more than 100,000 molecules in each blood sample, looking at proteins, RNA and metabolites, or small molecules that are produced through chemical processes. The company uses many techniques to identify these molecules, some of which convert the molecules into charged atoms and then separating them according to their weight and charge. The resulting data is very complex, with many thousands of data points from patients being followed over the decades.
BioAge validates its targets by examining whether a pathway going awry is actually linked to the development of diseases, based on the company’s analysis of biobank health records and blood samples. The team uses AI and machine learning to identify these pathways, and the key proteins in the unhealthy pathways become their main drug targets. “The approach taken by BioAge is an excellent example of how we can harness the power of big data and advances in AI technology to identify new drugs and therapeutic targets,” says Lorna Harries, a professor of molecular genetics at the University of Exeter Medical School.
Martin Borch Jensen is the founder of Gordian Biotechnology, a company focused on using gene therapy to treat aging. He says BioAge’s use of AI allows them to speed up the process of finding promising drug candidates. However, it remains a challenge to separate pathologies from aspects of the natural aging process that aren’t necessarily bad. “Some of the changes are likely protective responses to things going wrong,” Jensen says. “Their data doesn’t…distinguish that so they’ll need to validate and be clever.”
Developing a drug for muscle loss
BioAge decided to focus on muscular atrophy because it affects many elderly people, making it difficult to perform everyday activities and increasing the risk of falls. Using the biobank samples, the team modeled different pathways that looked like they could improve muscle health. They found that people who had faster walking speeds, better grip strength and lived longer had higher levels of a protein called apelin.
Apelin is a peptide, or a small protein, that circulates in the blood. It is involved in the process by which exercise increases and preserves muscle mass. BioAge wondered if they could prevent muscular atrophy by increasing the amount of signaling in the apelin pathway. Instead of the long process of designing a drug, they decided to repurpose an existing drug made by another biotech company. This company, called Amgen, had explored the drug as a way to treat heart failure. It didn’t end up working for that purpose, but BioAge took note that the drug did seem to activate the apelin pathway.
BioAge tested its new, repurposed drug, BGE-105, and, in a phase 1 clinical trial, it protected subjects from getting muscular atrophy compared to a placebo group that didn’t receive the drug. Healthy volunteers over age 65 received infusions of the drug during 10 days spent in bed, as if they were on bed rest while recovering from an illness or injury; the elderly are especially vulnerable to muscle loss in this situation. The 11 people taking BGE-105 showed a 100 percent improvement in thigh circumference compared to 10 people taking the placebo. Ultrasound observations also revealed that the group taking the durg had enhanced muscle quality and a 73 percent increase in muscle thickness. One volunteer taking BGE-105 did have muscle loss compared to the the placebo group.
Heather Whitson, the director of the Duke University Centre for the study of aging and human development, says that, overall, the results are encouraging. “The clinical findings so far support the premise that AI can help us sort through enormous amounts of data and identify the most promising points for beneficial interventions.”
More studies are needed to find out which patients benefit the most and whether there are side effects. “I think further studies will answer more questions,” Whitson says, noting that BGE-105 was designed to enhance only one aspect of physiology associated with exercise, muscle strength. But exercise itself has many other benefits on mood, sleep, bones and glucose metabolism. “We don’t know whether BGE-105 will impact these other outcomes,” she says.
The future
BioAge is planning phase 2 trials for muscular atrophy in patients with obesity and those who have been hospitalized in an intensive care unit. Using the data from biobanks, they’ve also developed another drug, BGE-100, to treat chronic inflammation in the brain, a condition that can worsen with age and contributes to neurodegenerative diseases. The team is currently testing the drug in animals to assess its effects and find the right dose.
BioAge envisions that its drugs will have broader implications for health than treating any one specific disease. “Ultimately, we hope to pioneer a paradigm shift in healthcare, from treatment to prevention, by targeting the root causes of aging itself,” Fortney says. “We foresee a future where healthy longevity is within reach for all.”
How old fishing nets turn into chairs, car mats and Prada bags
A company called Aquafil is turning the fibers from fishing nets and old carpets into new threads for chairs, car mats, bikinis and Prada bags.
Discarded nylon fishing nets in the oceans are among the most harmful forms of plastic pollution. Every year, about 640,000 tons of fishing gear are left in our oceans and other water bodies to turn into death traps for marine life. London-based non-profit World Animal Protection estimates that entanglement in this “ghost gear” kills at least 136,000 seals, sea lions and large whales every year. Experts are challenged to estimate how many birds, turtles, fish and other species meet the same fate because the numbers are so high.
Since 2009, Giulio Bonazzi, the son of a small textile producer in northern Italy, has been working on a solution: an efficient recycling process for nylon. As CEO and chairman of a company called Aquafil, Bonazzi is turning the fibers from fishing nets – and old carpets – into new threads for car mats, Adidas bikinis, environmentally friendly carpets and Prada bags.
For Bonazzi, shifting to recycled nylon was a question of survival for the family business. His parents founded a textile company in 1959 in a garage in Verona, Italy. Fifteen years later, they started Aquafil to produce nylon for making raincoats, an enterprise that led to factories on three continents. But before the turn of the century, cheap products from Asia flooded the market and destroyed Europe’s textile production. When Bonazzi had finished his business studies and prepared to take over the family company, he wondered how he could produce nylon, which is usually produced from petrochemicals, in a way that was both successful and ecologically sustainable.
The question led him on an intellectual journey as he read influential books by activists such as world-renowned marine biologist Sylvia Earle and got to know Michael Braungart, who helped develop the Cradle-to-Cradle ethos of a circular economy. But the challenges of applying these ideologies to his family business were steep. Although fishing nets have become a mainstay of environmental fashion ads—and giants like Dupont and BASF have made breakthroughs in recycling nylon—no one had been able to scale up these efforts.
For ten years, Bonazzi tinkered with ideas for a proprietary recycling process. “It’s incredibly difficult because these products are not made to be recycled,” Bonazzi says. One complication is the variety of materials used in older carpets. “They are made to be beautiful, to last, to be useful. We vastly underestimated the difficulty when we started.”
Soon it became clear to Bonazzi that he needed to change the entire production process. He found a way to disintegrate old fibers with heat and pull new strings from the discarded fishing nets and carpets. In 2022, his company Aquafil produced more than 45,000 tons of Econyl, which is 100% recycled nylon, from discarded waste.
More than half of Aquafil’s recyclate is from used goods. According to the company, the recycling saves 90 percent of the CO2 emissions compared to the production of conventional nylon. That amounts to saving 57,100 tons of CO2 equivalents for every 10,000 tons of Econyl produced.
Bonazzi collects fishing nets from all over the world, including Norway and Chile—which have the world’s largest salmon productions—in addition to the Mediterranean, Turkey, India, Japan, Thailand, the Philippines, Pakistan, and New Zealand. He counts the government leadership of Seychelles as his most recent client; the island has prohibited ships from throwing away their fishing nets, creating the demand for a reliable recycler. With nearly 3,000 employees, Aquafil operates almost 40 collection and production sites in a dozen countries, including four collection sites for old carpets in the U.S., located in California and Arizona.
First, the dirty nets are gathered, washed and dried. Bonazzi explains that nets often have been treated with antifouling agents such as copper oxide. “We recycle the coating separately,” he says via Zoom from his home near Verona. “Copper oxide is a useful substance, why throw it away?”
Still, only a small percentage of Aquafil’s products are made from nets fished out of the ocean, so your new bikini may not have saved a strangled baby dolphin. “Generally, nylon recycling is a good idea,” says Christian Schiller, the CEO of Cirplus, the largest global marketplace for recyclates and plastic waste. “But contrary to what consumers think, people rarely go out to the ocean to collect ghost nets. Most are old, discarded nets collected on land. There’s nothing wrong with this, but I find it a tad misleading to label the final products as made from ‘ocean plastic,’ prompting consumers to think they’re helping to clean the oceans by buying these products.”
Aquafil gets most of its nets from aqua farms. Surprisingly, one of Aquafil’s biggest problems is finding enough waste. “I know, it’s hard to believe because waste is everywhere,” Bonazzi says. “But we need to find it in reliable quantity and quality.” He has invested millions in establishing reliable logistics to source the fishing nets. Then the nets get shredded into granules that can be turned into car mats for the new Hyundai Ioniq 5 or a Gucci swimsuit.
The process works similarly with carpets. In the U.S. alone, 3.5 billion pounds of carpet are discarded in landfills every year, and less than 3 percent are currently recycled. Aquafil has built a recycling plant in Phoenix to help divert 12,500 tons of carpets from the landfill every year. The carpets are shredded and deconstructed into three components: fillers such as calcium carbonate will be reused in the cement industry, synthetic fibers like polypropylene can be used for engineering plastics, and nylon. Only the pelletized nylon gets shipped back to Europe for the production of Econyl. “We ship only what’s necessary,” Bonazzi says. Nearly 50 percent of his nylon in Italy and Slovenia is produced from recyclate, and he hopes to increase the percentage to two-thirds in the next two years.
His clients include Interface, the leading world pioneer for sustainable flooring, and many other carpet producers plus more than 2500 fashion labels, including Gucci, Prada, Patagonia, Louis Vuitton, Adidas and Stella McCartney. “Stella McCartney just introduced a parka that’s made 100 percent from Econyl,” Bonazzi says. “We’re also in a lot of sportswear because Nylon is a good fabric for swimwear and for yoga clothes.” Next, he’s looking into sunglasses and chairs made with Econyl - for instance, the flexible ergonomic noho chair, designed by New Zealand company Formway.
“When I look at a landfill, I see a gold mine," Bonazzi says.
“Bonazzi decided many years ago to invest in the production of recycled nylon though industry giants halted similar plans after losing large investments,” says Anika Herrmann, vice president of the German Greentech-competitor Camm Solutions, which creates bio-based polymers from cane sugar and other ag waste. “We need role models like Bonazzi who create sustainable solutions with courage and a pioneering spirit. Like Aquafil, we count on strategic partnerships to enable fast upscaling along the entire production chain.”
Bonazzi’s recycled nylon is still five to 10 percent more expensive than conventionally produced material. However, brands are increasingly bending to the pressure of eco-conscious consumers who demand sustainable fashion. What helped Bonazzi was the recent rise of oil prices and the pressure on industries to reduce their carbon footprint. Now Bonazzi says, “When I look at a landfill, I see a gold mine.”
Ideally, the manufacturers take the products back when the client is done with it, and because the nylon can theoretically be reused nearly infinitely, the chair or bikini could be made into another chair or bikini. “But honestly,” Bonazzi half-jokes, “if someone returns a McCartney parka to me, I’ll just resell it because it’s so expensive.”
The next step: Bonazzi wants to reshape the entire nylon industry by pivoting from post-consumer nylon to plant-based nylon. In 2017, he began producing “nylon-6,” together with Genomatica in San Diego. The process uses sugar instead of petroleum. “The idea is to make the very same molecule from sugar, not from oil,” he says. The demonstration plant in Ljubljana, Slovenia, has already produced several hundred tons of nylon, and Genomatica is collaborating with Lululemon to produce plant-based yoga wear.
Bonazzi acknowledges that his company needs a few more years before the technology is ready to meet his ultimate goal, producing only recyclable products with no petrochemicals, low emissions and zero waste on an industrial scale. “Recycling is not enough,” he says. “You also need to produce the primary material in a sustainable way, with a low carbon footprint.”