SCIENCE
Living Pantry: How Arizona’s Urban Food Forest Became a Model for Combating Climate Change | Arizona
HIn downtown Tucson, Arizona is Dunbar Spring, an area unlike any other in the city. The dirt sidewalks are lined with native, food-producing trees and shrubs fed by rainwater diverted from city streets. More than 100 species of plants grow in one block, including local goji berries, desert ironwood with edamame-like seeds, and chuparosa bushes with cucumber-flavored flowers.
Almost 30 years old, this urban food forest provides residents with food and roughage for livestock, and the tree canopy also brings relief to residents. third fastest warming city in the country. This has made Dunbar Spring a model for other regions struggling with increased heat, drought and food insecurity caused by the climate crisis.
“We are creating a living pantry,” said Brad Lancaster, resident and co-founder Foresters of Dunbar/Spring Neighborhood an organization that planted an urban food forest.
DUnbar Spring Urban Food Forest began in the early hours of September 1996 when residents gathered for the first ever community tree planting. Like many low-income neighborhoods in Tucson, Dunbar Spring was unusually hot due to the lack of outdoor tree cover to provide shade during harsh city summers. Today the temperature is 4.5F warmer than in the 1970s.
The plan, led by Lancaster, was to plan multipurpose drought-tolerant shade trees in outdoor pools that could collect rainwater and create a “more livable community,” he said.
Nearly 30 years later, local foresters planted over 1,700 trees and thousands more in the undergrowth, turning Dunbar Spring into a rainwater-fed urban food forest.
“We can plant resilient native trees that don’t depend on imported water for irrigation,” Lancaster said, standing near a row of curbs that divert stormwater from the street to sidewalk plantings. “Trees shade the street, reduce heat stress, and feed our neighborhood.”
Prior to the pandemic, Dunbar Spring had an annual mass milling event in which pods harvested from hundreds of nearby mesquite trees were ground into flour, Lancaster said, giving them a year’s supply of flour, Lancaster said.
Dunbar Spring’s work, along with Lancaster’s books and website, inspired people around the world to collect water to irrigate local food-producing street trees. “Almost every area in Tucson now has at least one property that does this,” he said.
Sonya Norman is one of them. Inspired by Lancaster’s work, Norman began organizing tree planting and water harvesting events in his neighborhood of Blenman Elm, east of Dunbar Spring. She started by planting mesquite and palo verde trees along her children’s walking trail to elementary school.
This has evolved into simple water harvesting – what Lancaster calls “rain planting” – by using gravity and curbs to channel water from paved surfaces into planted outdoor pools that collect the water.
The work of the foresters of the Dunbar Spring area also reported Tucson Climate Action Plan, including the legalization of citywide rainwater harvesting and the planting of trees adapted to arid conditions. Fatima Luna, Climate and Sustainability Advisor for the City of Tucson, said Dunbar Spring demonstrates how stormwater harvesting can be implemented at an area scale “using low-tech, low-cost technologies that channel runoff into vegetated pools where it infiltrates the soil.” and support native vegetation.
And Tucson Mayor Regina Romero launched Tucson Million Trees in 2020, an initiative to plant 1-meter drought-tolerant shade trees to help mitigate climate change.
ABOUTOn an overcast Saturday in January, Kathy Gannon, arborist and Tucson Million Trees program manager, gathered with program staff and volunteers in the A Mountain area for a tree planting event. The goal that day was to plant 97 desert-adapted shade trees, including pomegranates and fig trees, near three dozen homes to provide food and cooling shade for residents.
“Heat is a matter of fairness. It affects different populations differently,” Gannon said. “When we talk about heat-vulnerable areas, we are especially interested in that.”
Everyone feels warmth, but not equally. In Tucson another for the USAlow-income areas are disproportionately warmer than affluent areas, increasing the risk of heat-related diseases.
“If climate change continues at its current pace, cities in the southwest like Tucson could have 45 more days a year of temperatures above 90F. [32C] by 2100,” said Ladd Keith, an assistant professor at the University of Arizona who works at the intersection of urban planning and climate change.
Mountain dweller Eris Escalante chose desert willow and drought-tolerant oak for her backyard. She hopes the trees will make summer more bearable for her pet turtle and exotic birds.
“Summer is too hot. I think the trees will really help,” she said.
Shade can have a profound effect on city blocks. One day in September, the temperature on an open street in Dunbar Spring was 123F (50C), while on a shaded street it was only 85F (30C) – a difference of 38F (20C).
ABOUTOn rainy days, Dunbar Spring looks completely different. The first avenue, passing through the entire microdistrict, turns into a seething stream, filling street basins, planted roundabouts and other earthworks with water. These water management practices, according to Lancaster, are based on local rainwater harvesting practices, specifically Ak-Chinskoye stock farmhas been practiced in the Sonoran Desert for thousands of years.
For Lancaster, city streets hold a huge untapped potential. One mile of road in Tucson diverts more than a million gallons of stormwater runoff a year, Lancaster said, enough to support 400 native food-bearing trees.
These practices will become increasingly important as a historic mega-drought continues in the US Southwest and many cities, including Tucson, rely on imported water from the declining Colorado River. “Most of the water that irrigates landscapes in Arizona is not local water,” Lancaster said as he walked east to the now-dry St. Cruz River, which has been depleted for decades from overuse.
These time-tested water harvesting methods, combined with desert food productionwill be critical to food security in a warming Southwest, especially since agriculture consumes 74% of Arizona’s fresh water.
“Part of the tragedy is that we didn’t appreciate the indigenous peoples’ knowledge of this place,” Lancaster said.
For Lancaster, survival and prosperity in an increasingly hot and arid world will require dramatic and necessary changes in the way we live. “We need to adapt ourselves and our methods in such a way that they serve not only us, but also the living systems that allow us to be here,” he said.
The world’s climate experts are clear: the planet will almost certainly warm much more than they had hoped, and there is only a slim path left to avert many horrific consequences for both humanity and the animal kingdom.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has published its important summary climate report Monday is a decades-long attempt to unify scientists’ understanding of our changing world. The paper says the planet is likely to pass a dangerous and forewarned temperature threshold in the next decade. But it also keeps hope that the worst effects of climate change can be prevented.
Here are five key takeaways from the report:
1. Climate change has already damaged the planet.
The IPCC report speaks unambiguously about climate change. The planet has already warmed an average of 1.1 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, changing ecosystems around the world. A warming world has affected food and water security, led to the extinction of hundreds of species, caused massive loss of life and led to irreversible retreat of glaciers and rising sea levels. Extreme weather events are becoming more intense and severe, with unnecessary damage and loss in some parts of the world.
Between 3.3 and 3.6 billion people are estimated to live in areas highly vulnerable to climate change, with many low-income countries in Africa, Asia and Central and South America being most affected.
Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
2. Every warm-up counts.
Every region of the world is predicted to face increased climate hazards in the near future, the IPCC report says, threatening entire ecosystems and human society around the world. These threats include, but are not limited to, heat-related mortality, rising morbidity, flood risks, and loss of biodiversity.
These risks, however, increase with each increment of global warming and will accumulate and overlap as the planet warms.
“They are higher at 1.5°C global warming than they are currently, and even higher at 2°C,” the report says. “With further warming, the risks of climate change will become more complex and more difficult to manage.”
3. The impacts of climate change have been and will continue to be severe.
The food production network and fisheries around the world will experience a sharp drop in productivity, which will rise sharply in higher warming scenarios. The risk of heat and humidity to human health in a large swath along the equator will rise sharply, with some regions experiencing hundreds of days per year of severe temperatures in high-warming scenarios.
Many of these impacts, including sea level rise, are now inevitable. But the IPCC notes that if the world does not act, “the likelihood and consequences of abrupt and/or irreversible changes in the climate system, including changes caused by reaching tipping points, will increase.”
4. The warmer the world, the more animal species are at serious risk.
Without adaptation, climate change will cause serious and irreversible damage to the world. The risk of species loss is high at 1.5 degrees Celsius warming, but at higher levels of warming, entire sectors of the planet will face potentially dangerous temperature conditions for vast swaths of biodiversity.
Climatologist Katherine Hayhow notesthese risks will be keenly felt by ocean species that are already suffering (such as the Great Barrier Reef) and animals that live in already warm tropical zones.
5. There is a window for action, but it is small and getting smaller.
The extent to which future generations will experience a warmer world depends on decisions made now or in the very near future, the IPCC report warns.
Limiting warming to 1.5°C or 2°C requires “rapid, deep and in most cases immediate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.” So far, the world has not aspired to anything close to this, and current policies will result in global warming levels much higher than scientists hope.
This will require the world to rapidly wind down and wind down oil and gas projects and invest trillions annually in clean energy and climate change mitigation measures, three to six times more than the planet’s governments and businesses are already spending.
“The 1.5°C limit is achievable,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said on Monday. “But it will make a quantum leap in the fight against climate change.”
The formal end of the pandemic on May 11 marks neither victory nor peace: it is the cessation of hostilities with a dangerous virus that is still with us.
To uphold such an uneasy truth, Americans will have to stay protected enough to prevent a viral enemy of humanity from staging a breach on our shaky deal.
Providing such a guarantee, in turn, assumes that all scientists and public health officials agree on what it means to be “sufficiently protected” and that they can tell if people meet this indicator.
On both counts, the country’s readiness to monitor this truce is insufficient.
The problem is that no one has a clear idea of the extent of American immunity to the virus that causes COVID-19. And behind that lies a more fundamental problem: scientists and public health officials are still undecided on what it means to be immune, or have not accepted a common yardstick to measure it.
Path from the pandemic
This is the fifth part of a series of stories about emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic and how life in the United States will change after it.
“We always have to make decisions without this data,” Dr. Haley Goosea Stanford doctor of infectious diseases who advises the Food and Drug Administration on vaccine policy, said in a recent public meeting called by the agency.
There are encouraging trends. The number of hospitalizations for COVID-19 has fallen sharply, and weekly deaths from COVID-19 have fallen by 90% from the most recent peak just over a year ago.
But it’s just a “snapshot in time,” said Dr. Cody MeisnerPediatric Infectious Diseases Physician at Dartmouth University, who is on the FDA Vaccine Advisory Panel. The ability of the pandemic virus to deliver surprises has scientists wishing they understood COVID-19 immunity well enough to anticipate its next move.
Scientists have one indicator of immunity, confirmed by decades of research – the count of antibodies. This is easy and inexpensive to do with available laboratory tests.
Counting the immune proteins produced after a vaccination or infection is one way to assess how quickly a person can block or cure an infection. The more antibodies, the more reliable their protection.
To get an idea of a country’s immunity as a whole, scientists are measuring coronavirus antibodies in large groups of people, such as patients who have been bled for routine laboratory tests or volunteers who donate blood to blood banks. Thesis seroprevalence studies showed that by June 2022, 94% of American adults — and about the same children – have been vaccinated, infected, or both.
For a while, officials hoped that high antibody levels would drive the virus out of circulation entirely. It has been argued that once enough Americans are vaccinated, the antibodies will block so many infections that the coronavirus will simply die out for lack of new victims to infect.
But as the pandemic progressed, hopes of achieving this state of “herd immunity” collapsed.
All virus-specific antibodies “break down” over time, leaving behind a template that can be produced when needed. But this renewal process takes time, and the Delta and Omicron variants have proven to be able to establish infections before the body’s defenses are ready.
Over time, it became clear that antibodies alone did not tell the whole story of American immunity. People who have been vaccinated or previously infected have contracted COVID-19. But they didn’t get very sick and didn’t die at nearly the same rate as people who weren’t immune. There was clearly some other process at work here.
This invisible mechanism was what scientists call cellular immunity, and T cells are its foot soldiers.
Scanning electron micrograph of a healthy human T cell.
(NIAID)
Dr. Dan H Barusha Harvard immunologist, calls T-cells the “unsung heroes” of the immune system. They do the actual job of hunting down and destroying cells that have been invaded and taken over by the coronavirus.
Cellular immunity is believed to prevent the most devastating effects of COVID-19. Even in those whose weakened immune systems have caused an anemic antibody response to vaccination, cellular immunity may kick hard and protect from death.
As the new mutations helped the coronavirus evade antibodies, T cell responses appear to have diminished. stay strong in the face of new optionsincluding many varieties of Omicron.
There is also encouraging evidence that this cellular immunity is long lasting. Scientists have confirmed a strong T-cell response one year after infection with SARS-CoV-2 and at least six months after vaccination. Moreover, patients infected with the SARS-CoV coronavirus, a close relative of the pandemic virus that caused death in 2003. Acute respiratory disease – have signs of T-cell immunity 17 years later.
All this was done by a vaccine expert at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Paul Offit question the value of booster shots as a means of keeping Americans protected from COVID-19.
Evidence has accumulated that most Americans’ immunity now depends more on T cells than on maintaining antibody levels, Ofit said. As a result, the US government’s strategy for repeated vaccine boosters probably isn’t needed for everyone except those with weakened immune systems, he added.
Offit acknowledged that each shot raised antibody levels. But it’s not clear if these extra antibodies reduce the chance of getting seriously ill or dying, which by now should be the definition of “protected,” he said.
COVID-19 vaccine syringes are ready for use at the Encino vaccination clinic.
(Alisha Yucevic / For The Times)
Meisner goes further.
“This virus is like the wind – it cannot be stopped,” he said. “It will continue to mutate and become more contagious. But as long as we can protect against severe illness at this stage of the pandemic, I can live with it.”
At a recent meeting convened by the FDA to review future vaccination strategies, Ofit, Meisner and others urged the agency to be clear about what vaccines are for and how it will evaluate them.
“We need to define what we want from this vaccine,” Offit said at the meeting. If it’s a defense against serious illness and death, “T-cells are important.”
Unfortunately, the state of human cellular immunity is more difficult to capture and quantify. There are tests that measure these immune cells, but they are not cheap or easy to perform.
The inhabitants of the cellular immune system are very diverse, whose functions change with time and circumstances. Key details of how this complex system responds to the coronavirus are still eluding scientists, Meisner said.
“We don’t know which of these T cells are integral to protecting against a respiratory virus,” he said. “So it’s not easy to look at T cells and ask if we have enough to protect us.”
There are tests that fix cellular immunity, but their implementation is very expensive. Most of them require a large volume of human blood, special chemicals and complex manipulations to produce results. Many require highly skilled lab technicians or extensive computing resources to produce useful data.
As a result, they are used sparingly in the treatment of patients. And they have never been used to test general populations.
If a lab test could measure cellular immunity as easily as antibodies, “it would spread like wildfire because everyone is looking for it,” Meisner said.
Such a test could not only assess whether a person needed a second shot; widely used, it could encourage a return to public health measures such as social distancing and mask-wearing. If T-cell protection falls in populations, it could even alert vaccine manufacturers that they need to re-formulate vaccines to better match the circulating strain.
One such test could be the start.
In August, the European Medicines Agency blessed commercial analysis this offers scientists and public health officials an easy way to measure T-cell immunity.
The advertised use of the test is to give immunocompromised patients an indication of whether they are at high risk of becoming seriously ill or dying if they contract the coronavirus. But public health officials in Spain have used it to assess the immunity of Madrid residents after most received the vaccine and multiple waves of COVID-19 swept through the city.
For 40 consecutive days, the phlebotomists collected 100 blood samples per day. Samples were processed each night by a single lab technician operating a PCR machine, a standard fixture in virtually any commercial testing lab. The results provide a yes/no answer to the question of whether there is a cellular immune response to SARS. -Virus CoV-2.
“Even my 12-year-old son can pass the test,” he said. Jordi Ochando, an immunologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, who oversaw the Madrid study. He added that results can be accessed within a day of blood collection and instantly uploaded for analysis, sharing and storage.
Ochando quickly got the answer: on average, 10 months after vaccination, 90.2% of the population tested still showed a cellular immune response to the pandemic virus.
The test was developed by a British biotechnology company. Harris, far from exhaustive. It does not count T cells or examine their strength or diversity, as some lab tests do. And instead of detecting the response of the cellular immune system, it looks for the genetic signal that brings out such activation.
But it is simple and cheap to use. In Europe, the cost per person is “on par with a standard PCR test” for COVID-19, Hyris founder and CEO said. Stefano Lo Priore.
“His A method – the only scalable method we have right now – to quantify cellular immunity,” said Ernesto GuccioneMount Sinai immunology researcher who helped develop the test and has a patent pending.
According to Lo Priore, such a test could make it possible to measure cellular immunity in residents of a boarding school, nursing home or city. The results could help officials decide whether to lift or reinstate public health measures, such as mandatory indoor masks, or determine when more shots should be given.
Over time, this test could be used along with other tests to learn more about how T cells protect and for how long, Guccione said. It must pass FDA review before it can be sold in the United States, a process the company is currently preparing for.
Guccione and Ochando set their sights on measuring T-cell immunity in New York City, which has repeatedly been the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States.
According to Ochando, Los Angeles could be next.
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