Desperate US Bid to Engineer Corals for Climate Change

Nikki Traylor-Knowles takes out a rescued coral reef from a tank to study restoring Florida's coral reefs. CHANDAN KHANNA AFP
Nikki Traylor-Knowles takes out a rescued coral reef from a tank to study restoring Florida's coral reefs. CHANDAN KHANNA AFP
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Desperate US Bid to Engineer Corals for Climate Change

Nikki Traylor-Knowles takes out a rescued coral reef from a tank to study restoring Florida's coral reefs. CHANDAN KHANNA AFP
Nikki Traylor-Knowles takes out a rescued coral reef from a tank to study restoring Florida's coral reefs. CHANDAN KHANNA AFP

A bit of coral shimmers like gold in a US lab as part of urgent work to help the species protect itself from climate change, an effort even skeptical experts see as sadly justifiable.

Researchers in Florida are aiming to determine whether coral can be saved from rising water temperatures and acidification by transplanting stem cells from resistant varieties to those more vulnerable to climate impacts, AFP said.

In other words, global warming worries have reached a point that scientists are trying to tweak some organisms' genetics so that they might survive.

"Reefs are dying at an alarming rate and they are not able to keep up with climate change," Nikki Traylor-Knowles, who heads a University of Miami team working on the coral, told AFP.

"At this point, we've just got to try everything and see what works," she said before nations gathered at the COP26 summit in Glasgow -- seen as a last chance to halt catastrophic climate change.

The Florida research is one of a handful of efforts backed by Revive and Restore, a non-profit based near San Francisco that sees genetic engineering as a valuable tool for conservationists working to save plants and animals from doom.

Organisms on Earth have survived in the long run by gradually evolving, or moving to places where the land, habitat or temperature are more hospitable. Climate change is altering the environment too quickly for that to work.

"We don't have evolutionary time to help species make that kind of adaptation," Revive co-founder Ryan Phelan told AFP at a California conference.

"We're going to have to intervene, or we have to let it go," she said.

The concern for coral is particularly pressing because oceans absorb more than 90 percent of the excess heat from greenhouse gas emissions, shielding land surfaces but generating huge, long-lasting marine heatwaves.

'We may have to do it'
These are pushing many species of coral -- often dubbed the "rainforests of the oceans" for their rich biodiversity -- past their limits of tolerance.

Along with pollution and dynamite fishing, global warming wiped out 14 percent of the world's coral reefs between 2009 and 2018, according to a survey by the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network, the biggest ever carried out.

More than half of an $8 million Catalyst Science Fund for backing biotechnology tools to help solve conservation's most intractable problems is being poured into coral projects.

"Our thinking is the tools we develop for coral will be generalizable for other marine species," said Bridget Baumgartner, who coordinates coral projects at Revive.

"We hope we can easily translate them to problems with kelp, oysters, sea stars, what have you."

Genetic projects backed by Revive and Restore elsewhere in the United States have yielded a black-footed ferret named Elizabeth Ann, cloned from frozen cells decades old, and which could be the salvation of her species.

And a yearling called Kurt being cared for in a California zoo is a resurrected Przewalski wild horse, which had gone extinct.

Though neither are connected to climate change, the creatures' existence are key to the group's argument in favor of their genetic work.

Certainly genetic tinkering raises concerns, said Stanford University law and biosciences director Henry Greely, citing potential for deformations or an altered plant or animal causing unexpected consequences in the wild.

Yet he sees saving species, including coral, from decimation as worthy uses of the technology.

"I'm a fan of this approach, if it's done carefully, with appropriate regulation and prudence," Greely said of adding genetic technology tools to conservation efforts.

Gregory Kaebnick, a scholar at bioethics research institute The Hastings Center also supported creature-protecting tweaks, and noted the risk of a creation running amok was lower than simply failing to impart durable, effective changes.

"I'm not excited about the prospect of changing coral to let them survive, but it might be something that we have to do," he added.



Children Suffer as Schools Go Online in Polluted Delhi

Confined to her home by the toxic smog choking India's capital, Harshita Gautam attends an online class on a mobile phone - AFP
Confined to her home by the toxic smog choking India's capital, Harshita Gautam attends an online class on a mobile phone - AFP
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Children Suffer as Schools Go Online in Polluted Delhi

Confined to her home by the toxic smog choking India's capital, Harshita Gautam attends an online class on a mobile phone - AFP
Confined to her home by the toxic smog choking India's capital, Harshita Gautam attends an online class on a mobile phone - AFP

Confined to her family's ramshackle shanty by the toxic smog choking India's capital, Harshita Gautam strained to hear her teacher's instructions over a cheap mobile phone borrowed from her mother.

The nine-year-old is among nearly two million students in and around New Delhi told to stay home after authorities once again ordered schools to shut because of worsening air pollution.

Now a weary annual ritual, keeping children at home and moving lessons online for days at a time during the peak of the smog crisis in winter ostensibly helps protect the health of the city's youth.

The policy impacts both the education and the broader well-being of schoolkids around the city -- much more so for children from poorer families like Gautam.

"I don't like online classes," she told AFP, sitting on a bed her family all share at night in their spartan one-room home in the city's west.

"I like going to school and playing outside but my mother says there is too much pollution and I must stay inside."

Gautam struggles to follow the day's lesson, with the sound of her teacher's voice periodically halting as the connection drops out on the cheap Android phone.

Her parents both earn paltry incomes -- her polio-stricken father by working at a roadside food stall and her mother as a domestic worker.

Neither can afford to skip work and look after their only child, and they do not have the means to buy air purifiers or take other measures to shield themselves from the smog.

Gautam's confinement at home is an additional financial burden for her parents, who normally rely on a free-meal programme at her government-run school to keep her fed for lunch.

"When they are at school I don't have to worry about their studies or food. At home, they are hardly able to pay any attention," Gautam's mother Maya Devi told AFP.

"Why should our children suffer? They must find some solution."

Delhi and the surrounding metropolitan area, home to more than 30 million people, consistently tops world rankings for air pollution.

The city is blanketed in acrid smog each winter, primarily blamed on agricultural burning by farmers to clear their fields for ploughing, as well as factories and traffic fumes.

Levels of PM2.5 -- dangerous cancer-causing microparticles that enter the bloodstream through the lungs -- surged 60 times past the World Health Organization's recommended daily maximum on Monday.

A study in the Lancet medical journal attributed 1.67 million premature deaths in India to air pollution in 2019.

Piecemeal government initiatives include partial restrictions on fossil fuel-powered transport and water trucks spraying mist to clear particulate matter from the air.

But none have succeeded in making a noticeable impact on a worsening public health crisis.

- 'A lot of disruptions' -

The foul air severely impacts children, with devastating effects on their health and development.

Scientific evidence shows children who breathe polluted air are at higher risk of developing acute respiratory infections, a report from the UN children's agency said in 2022.

A 2021 study published in the medical journal Lung India found nearly one in three school-aged children in the capital were afflicted by asthma and airflow obstruction.

Sunita Bhasin, director of the Swami Sivananda Memorial Institute school, told AFP that pollution-induced school closures had been steadily increasing over the years.

"It's easy for the government to give a blanket call to close the schools but... abrupt closure leads to a lot of disruptions," she said.

Bhasin said many of Delhi's children would anyway continue to breathe the same noxious air whether at school or home.

"There is no space for them in their homes, so they will go out on the streets and play."