Climate change is ruining beer, maple syrup, chocolate — even your favorite Cosby sweater. Now we can add fish to the list. SWELL.
Basically, warming waters make killifish hungrier, according to new research. Then these bitty fish at the bottom of the food chain eat more mercury-tainted food than usual, storing lots of metal in their tissue as a present for everyone up the food chain, from tuna to humans. Mercury: the gift that keeps on giving! (Did we mention it’s increasingly in bird eggs too?)
Quoth the Washington Post:
[K]illifish at the bottom of the food chain will probably absorb higher levels of methylmercury in an era of global warming and pass it on to larger predator fish, such as the tuna stacked in shiny little cans in the cupboards of Americans and other people the world over.
“The implication is this could play out in larger fish…because their metabolic rate is also increasing,” said Celia Chen, a professor at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and one of six authors of the study. “Methylmercury isn’t easily excreted, so it stays. It suggests that there will be higher methylmercury concentrations in the fish humans eat as well.”
Lest you think the Minamata Convention on Mercury last week was just scientists in lab coats breaking open thermometers and cackling wildly, that’s where this research was discussed. Oh yeah, they also signed a massively important treaty:
Delegates from 130 nations at the three-day convention that ended Friday met to sign a treaty that seeks to greatly limit emissions from coal-fired power plants from industrial nations, mining operations in Africa and other sources that pollute oceans.
Good thing no Americans were there because of the government shutdown! (Le sigh.) Who wants a tuna sandwich?
Holly Richmond (hollyrichmond.com) writes and edits things for fun and money. She worked for Grist in the 1890s. Please follow her on Twitter because that is the entire basis of her self-esteem.
Salish Kootenai College students are a part of a team that will soon launch the first “CubeSat” satellite into space.
Physics student Cory Drowatsky tests CubeSat in what he describes as “moment of inertia” with assistance from computer engineering student Zach DuMontier. (Photo by Lailani Upham/Char-Koosta News)
Char-Koosta News reporter Lailani Upham reports about the work the students are doing at SKC’s Division of Sciences.
CubeSats are small “low cost” satellites in the shape of a cube 10 centimeters in size used by universities, government agencies, and private businesses to orbit the earth to produce images utilizing solar power.
The SKC CubeSat selection is one to be proud of as the tribal college’s satellite design matches building and design along with big name colleges such as Cal-Berkeley, Notre Dam, Texas, MIT, and the U.S. Air Force Academy.
CubeSats are effective opportunities for undergraduate students to participate in space flight missions and NASA recognized the importance of the next generation of space scientist and engineers through build and design of the mini-satellites at their higher education institutions.
The CubeSat is set to go to space sometime in 2014.
The design is complete and the SKC team is working on the stages of testing equipment.
The aim of the project is to motivate and prepare Native students to go into careers at NASA centers, as NASA contactors, or attend universities performing NASA-sponsored research.
A farmer discovered a huge oil spill — several times bigger than the recent Mayflower, Ark., spill – nearly two weeks ago in North Dakota. But because of federal government furloughs, we’re only just learning about it.
More than 20,000 barrels of fracked oil seeped from a ruptured pipeline over 7 acres of remote North Dakota wheat fields, oozing 10 feet into the clay soil and killing crops. Farmer Steven Jensen found the mess on his land on Sept. 29.
The National Response Center, which reports oil and chemical spills, posted an alert about the spill on its website this week. Reuters reports that the agency normally posts such reports within a day, but that its work has been stymied by the government shutdown.
But there’s really nothing to worry about, says Tesoro Logistics, the company responsible for the spill:
There have been no injuries or known impacts to water, wildlife or the surrounding environment as a result of this incident.
Jeez, it’s as if the pipeline spewed oxygen and candy.
Try telling that to Jensen, whose nose led him to a pool of oil while he was out harvesting on his 1,800-acre farm. “It was pretty ugly,” he told Reuters. The nearby crop had “disintegrated, you wouldn’t have known it was a wheat plant.” More from Reuters:
At an estimated 20,600 barrels, it ranks among the biggest U.S. spills in recent years. It is the biggest oil leak on U.S. land since March, when the rupture of an Exxon Mobil pipeline in Mayflower, Arkansas spilled 5,000 to 7,000 barrels of heavy Canadian crude. …
This is the biggest oil spill in North Dakota since 1 million barrels of salt water brine, a by-product of oil production, leaked from a well site in 2006, according to the state Department of Health.
Tesoro says the burst pipeline has been shut down and it’s conducting an internal investigation to try to determine the cause of the accident. A state official’s description of a hole in the pipeline made it sound as though the spill was caused by corrosion. About 1,200 barrels of oil had been recovered by Thursday, meaning at least another 18,000 barrels are still out there in Jensen’s fields.
Seattle banned those thin, plastic grocery bags. So did Shoreline, Bellingham and Edmonds. But at least one city could be going the other direction. (File photo)
Seattle banned those thin, plastic grocery bags. So did Shoreline, Bellingham and Edmonds. Olympia is just the latest Washington city to consider a similar restriction. But at least one city could be going the other direction.
In 2012, following the lead of Seattle, the Issaquah City Council voted 5-2 to ban the plastic carry-out bags. The ban took effect last March and former Issaquah city councilmember Mark Mullet says the drop in plastic bag use has been dramatic.
“It’s in the millions, not in the thousands, and that’s just in the city of Issaquah. What happened is people are bringing bags from home and when people buy one or two items from the store, they just carry them out with them.”
Now a state Senator, Mullet said this is a purely environmental issue.
“These bags, they take hundreds of years to decompose so the goal is: don’t use something for 30 seconds and have it sit around for 500 years,” he said. Seattleite Craig Keller called that lazy environmentalism. “The only environment that they’re saving is in their minds. The same plastic lids on the top of their Starbucks cups that they suck constantly are also the same problem.”
Keller is co-founder of Save Our Choice. His answering machine describes the purpose of his campaign this way: “Taking a stand against those on council, hell bent to quote: ‘modify your behavior.'”
Keller and his supporters gathered enough signatures to force the city council to reconsider the plastic bag ban. King County Elections issued a Certificate of Sufficiency for a petition to the Issaquah City Council, which can either adopt the petition and repeal the ban or send the issue to the ballot in the form on an initiative.
The city council has not indicated a time frame for considering the options. The council has until Dec. 27 to notify the county elections office if it wants to put the measure on the February ballot.
“There’s broad support for restoration of consumer and merchant choice,” said Keller. But Mullet thinks the people of Issaquah favor the ban. “We actually held a special city council meeting devoted to one topic and that was plastic bags because we wanted to be sure that the city of Issaquah could give as much input as they wanted and we heard support from the community for supporting the ban.”
Mullet welcomes a vote of the people and thinks it could be an interesting campaign with plastics manufacturers paying special attention.
“I think there’s going to be an industry here that’s going to view this as sort of a battleground and they’re going to put resources in because if they can get it overturned in this city, maybe they feel it will prevent other cities from going down the same path,” reasoned Mullet.
The vote on plastic bags could be the first citizens initiative to make it to the ballot in Issaquah.
In this Oct. 8, 2013 photo provided by the North Dakota Health Department, a vacuum trucks cleans up oil in near Tioga, N.D. The North Dakota Health Department says more than 20,000 barrels of crude oil have spewed out of a Tesoro Corp. oil pipeline in a wheat field in northwestern North Dakota. Officials say the 20,600-barrel spill, among the largest recorded in the state, was discovered on Sept. 29 by a farmer harvesting wheat about nine miles south of Tioga. NORTH DAKOTA HEALTH DEPARTMENT — AP Photo
October 10, 2013
By JAMES MacPHERSON — Associated Press
BISMARCK, N.D. — A North Dakota farmer who discovered an oil spill the size of seven football fields while out harvesting wheat says that when he found it, crude was bubbling up out of the ground.
Farmer Steve Jensen says he smelled the crude for days before the tires on his combines were coated in it. At the apparent break in the Tesoro Corp.’s underground pipeline, the oil was “spewing and bubbling 6 inches high,” he said in a telephone interview Thursday.
What Jensen had found on Sept. 29 turned out it was one of the largest spills recorded in the state. At 20,600 barrels it was four times the size of a pipeline rupture in late March that forced the evacuation of more than 20 homes in Arkansas.
But it was 12 days after Jensen reported the spill before state officials told the public what had happened, raising questions about how North Dakota, which is in the midst of an oil boom, reports such incidents.
The spill happened in a remote area in the northwest corner of the state. The nearest home is a half-mile away, and Tesoro says no water sources were contaminated, no wildlife was hurt and no one was injured.
The release of oil has been stopped, state environment geologist Kris Roberts said Thursday. And the spill — spread out over 7.3 acres, or about the size of seven football fields, — has been contained.
Jacob Wiedmer, who was helping Jensen harvest his wheat crop, likened the Sept. 29 discovery to the theme song from “The Beverly Hillbillies” television show.
“It was just like Jed Clampett shooting at some food …” he said of the oil coming from the ground. “Except we weren’t hunting, we were harvesting.”
Gov. Jack Dalrymple, who says he wasn’t even told about what happened until Wednesday night, said the state is now investigating its procedures for reporting spills.
“There are many questions to be answered on how it occurred and how it was detected and if there was anything that could have been done that could have made a difference,” Dalrymple said Thursday, when questioned at a news conference on a separate topic.
“Initially, it was felt that the spill was not overly large,” Dalrymple said. “When they realized it was a fairly sizable spill, they began to contact more people about it.”
Jensen said he had harvested most of his wheat before the spill, but the land is no longer usable for planting.
“We expect not to be able to farm that ground for several years,” he said.
Tesoro Logistics, a subsidiary of the San Antonio, Texas-based company that owns and operates parts of Tesoro’s oil infrastructure, said in a statement that the affected portion of the pipeline has been shut down.
“Protection and care of the environment are fundamental to our core values, and we deeply regret any impact to the landowner,” Tesoro CEO Greg Goff said in a statement. “We will continue to work tirelessly to fully remediate the release area.”
Wayde Schafer, a North Dakota spokesman for the Sierra Club, said the spill is an example of the lack of oversight in a state that has exploded with oil development in recent years.
“We need more inspectors and more transparency,” Schafer said. “Not only is the public not informed, but agencies don’t appear to be aware of what’s going on and that’s not good.”
Eric Haugstad, Tesoro’s director of contingency planning and emergency response, said the hole in the 20-year-old pipeline was a quarter-inch in diameter. Tesoro officials were investigating what caused the hole in the 6-inch-diameter steel pipeline that runs underground about 35 miles from Tioga to a rail facility outside of Columbus, near the Canadian border.
Roberts said state and federal regulators are monitoring the cleanup, and Tesoro estimated it would cost $4 million.
A natural layer of clay more than 40 feet thick underlies the spill site and has “held the oil up” so that it does not spread to underground water sources, Roberts said.
“It is completely contained and under control,” Roberts said Thursday. “They got very lucky.”
Follow James MacPherson on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/macphersonja
TOKYO — TOKYO (AP) — Another day, another radioactive-water spill. The operator of the meltdown-plagued Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant says at least 430 liters (110 gallons) spilled when workers overfilled a storage tank that lacked a gauge that could have warned them of the danger.
The amount is tiny compared to the untold thousands of tons of radioactive water that have leaked, much of it into the Pacific Ocean, since a massive earthquake and tsunami wrecked the plant in 2011. But the error is one of many the operator has committed as it struggles to manage a seemingly endless, tainted flow.
Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Thursday workers detected the water spilling from the top of one large tank when they were patrolling the site the night before. The tank is one of about 1,000 erected on the grounds around the plant to hold water used to cool the melted nuclear fuel in the broken reactors.
TEPCO said the water spilled out of a concrete barrier surrounding the tank and believed that most of it reached the sea via a ditch next to the river.
The new leak is sure to add to public concern and criticism of TEPCO and the government for their handling of the nuclear crisis. In August, the utility reported a 300-ton leak from another storage tank, one of a string of leaks in recent months.
That came after the utility acknowledged that contaminated groundwater was seeping into ocean at a rate of 300 tons a day.
TEPCO spokesman Masayuki Ono told an urgent news conference Thursday that the overflow occurred at a tank without a water gauge and standing on an unlevel ground, slightly tilting toward the sea. The tank was already nearly full, but workers pumped in more contaminated water into it to maximize capacity as the plant was facing storage crunch.
Experts have faulted TEPCO for sloppiness in its handling of the water management, including insufficient tank inspection records, lack of water gauges, as well as connecting hoses lying directly on the grass-covered ground. Until recently, only one worker was assigned to 500 tanks in a two-hour patrol.
In recent meetings, regulators criticized TEPCO for even lacking basic skills to properly measure radioactivity in contaminated areas, and taking too long to find causes in case of problems. They also have criticized the one-foot (30-centimeter) high protective barriers around the tanks as being too low.
The government has said it will spend $470 billion to build an underground “ice wall” around the reactor and turbine buildings to block groundwater inflows and prevent potential leaks from spreading. It is also funding more advanced water treatment equipment to make the contaminated water clean enough to be eventually released into the sea.
The oceans are more acidic now than they have been for at least 300m years, due to carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels, and a mass extinction of key species may already be almost inevitable as a result, leading marine scientists warned on Thursday.
An international audit of the health of the oceans has found that overfishing and pollution are also contributing to the crisis, in a deadly combination of destructive forces that are imperilling marine life, on which billions of people depend for their nutrition and livelihood.
In the starkest warning yet of the threat to ocean health, theInternational Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) said: “This [acidification] is unprecedented in the Earth’s known history. We are entering an unknown territory of marine ecosystem change, and exposing organisms to intolerable evolutionary pressure. The next mass extinction may have already begun.” It published its findings in the State of the Oceans report, collated every two years from global monitoring and other research studies.
Alex Rogers, professor of biology at Oxford University, said: “The health of the ocean is spiralling downwards far more rapidly than we had thought. We are seeing greater change, happening faster, and the effects are more imminent than previously anticipated. The situation should be of the gravest concern to everyone since everyone will be affected by changes in the ability of the ocean to support life on Earth.”
Coral is particularly at risk. Increased acidity dissolves the calcium carbonate skeletons that form the structure of reefs, and increasing temperatures lead to bleaching where the corals lose symbiotic algae they rely on. The report says that world governments’ current pledges to curb carbon emissions would not go far enough or fast enough to save many of the world’s reefs. There is a time lag of several decades between the carbon being emitted and the effects on seas, meaning that further acidification and further warming of the oceans are inevitable, even if we drastically reduce emissions very quickly. There is as yet little sign of that, with global greenhouse gas output still rising.
Corals are vital to the health of fisheries, because they act as nurseries to young fish and smaller species that provide food for bigger ones.
Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is absorbed by the seas – at least a third of the carbon that humans have released has been dissolved in this way, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – and makes them more acidic. But IPSO found the situation was even more dire than that laid out by the world’s top climate scientists in theirlandmark report last week.
In absorbing carbon and heat from the atmosphere, the world’s oceans have shielded humans from the worst effects of global warming, the marine scientists said. This has slowed the rate of climate change on land, but its profound effects on marine life are only now being understood.
Acidification harms marine creatures that rely on calcium carbonate to build coral reefs and shells, as well as plankton, and the fish that rely on them. Jane Lubchenco, former director of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a marine biologist, said the effects were already being felt in some oyster fisheries, where young larvae were failing to develop properly in areas where the acid rates are higher, such as on the west coast of the US. “You can actually see this happening,” she said. “It’s not something a long way into the future. It is a very big problem.”
But the chemical changes in the ocean go further, said Rogers. Marine animals use chemical signals to perceive their environment and locate prey and predators, and there is evidence that their ability to do so is being impaired in some species.
Trevor Manuel, a South African government minister and co-chair of the Global Ocean Commission, called the report “a deafening alarm bell on humanity’s wider impacts on the global oceans”.
“Unless we restore the ocean’s health, we will experience the consequences on prosperity, wellbeing and development. Governments must respond as urgently as they do to national security threats – in the long run, the impacts are just as important,” he said.
Current rates of carbon release into the oceans are 10 times faster than those before the last major species extinction, which was the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum extinction, about 55m years ago. The IPSO scientists can tell that the current ocean acidification is the highest for 300m years from geological records.
They called for strong action by governments to limit carbon concentrations in the atmosphere to no more than 450 parts per million of carbon dioxide equivalent. That would require urgent and deep reductions in fossil fuel use.
No country in the world is properly tackling overfishing, the report found, and almost two thirds are failing badly. At least 70 per cent of the world’s fish populations are over-exploited. Giving local communities more control over their fisheries, and favouring small-scale operators over large commercial vessels would help this, the report found. Subsidies that drive overcapacity in fishing fleets should also be eliminated, marine conservation zones set up and destructive fishing equipment should be banned. There should also be better governance of the areas of ocean beyond countries’ national limits.
The IPSO report also found the oceans were being “deoxygenated” – their average oxygen content is likely to fall by as much as 7 per cent by 2100, partly because of the run-off of fertilisers and sewage into the seas, and also as a side-effect of global warming. The reduction of oxygen is a concern as areas of severe depletion become effectively dead.
Rogers said: “People are just not aware of the massive roles that the oceans play in the Earth’s systems. Phytoplankton produce 40 per cent of the oxygen in the atmosphere, for example, and 90 per cent of all life is in the oceans. Because the oceans are so vast, there are still areas we have never really seen. We have a very poor grasp of some of the biochemical processes in the world’s biggest ecosystem.”
The five chapters of which the State of the Oceans report is a summary have been published in the Marine Pollution Bulletin, a peer-reviewed journal.
With millions of tons of garbage dumped into the oceans annually and repeat incidence of oil spills like the Deepwater Horizon Disaster, it’s the Ocean which has taken the brunt of unsustainable methods from man. In effect, it’s estimated almost 100,000 marine animals are killed due to debris entanglement and continually rising pollution.
To a degree, individual lessening of consumerism and utilizing sustainable methods to re-use and eliminate waste is very beneficial. However, reducing the already-toxic state of the Earth is the biggest concern of environmentalists and engineers, seeking to utilize the technological advances already available. To this avail, it was 19-year-young Boyan Slat that ingeniously created the Ocean Array Plan, a project that could remove 7,250,000 tons of plastic from the world’s oceans in just five years.
Slat’s idea consists of an anchored network of floating booms and processing platforms that could be dispatched to garbage patches around the world. Working with the flow of nature, his solution to the problematic shifting of trash is to have the array span the radius of a garbage patch, acting as a giant funnel as the ocean moves through it. The angle of the booms would force plastic in the direction of the platforms, where it would be separated from smaller forms, such as plankton, and be filtered and stored for recycling. The issue of by-catches, killing life forms in the procedure of cleaning trash, can be virtually eliminated by using booms instead of nets and it will result in a larger areas covered. Because of trash’s density compared to larger sea animals, the use of booms will allow creatures to swim under the booms unaffected, reducing wildlife death substantially.
Economically, the Ocean Array Project also rises to the top due to its sustainable construct; it’s completely self-supportive, by receiving energy from the sun, currents, and waves. By also letting the platforms’ wings sway like an actual manta ray, contact with inlets in the roughest weather can be ensured. It’s a plan that merges environmental safety with thoroughly thought out processes.
Inspired to tackle global issues of sustainability, Boyan began by launching a project at school that analyzed the size and amount of plastic particles in the ocean’s garbage patches; his final paper went on to win several prizes, including Best Technical Design 2012 at the Delft University of Technology. Continuing the development of his concept during the summer of 2012, he revealed it several months later at TEDxDelft2012.
Slat took his well-planned project further by then founding The Ocean Cleanup Foundation, a non-profit organization responsible for the development of proposed technologies. Aside from saving thousands of animals and reducing chemicals (like PCB and DDT) from building up in the food chain, it could also save millions of dollars a year due to clean-up costs, lost tourism, and damage to marine vessels. His undeterred passion to create healthier oceans has possibility to beneficially impact the lives of the entire world.
Although extensive feasibility studies are currently being conducted, it has been estimated that through the selling of plastic retrieved over the five years, the money would surpass the initial cost to execute the project. In other words, it may even be potentially profitable. Because the main deterrent to implement large scale cleanup projects is due to the financial cost, this solution could perhaps pave ways for future innovations of global cleanup to also be invented.
While the project process would take five years, it’s a span that could continue to increase the world’s awareness of garbage patches, as well as the importance of recycling and reducing consumption of plastic packaging.
To find out more about the project and to contribute, click here.
Congressional paralysis is freezing or slashing national spending on weather forecasting and monitoring. Plans to deploy a next-generation array of satellites known as COSMIC-2 could be cut by lawmakers as part of the sequester spending cuts — if only they would pass a budget. And workers at NASA, which provide data used by climate researchers the world over, are being furloughed.
But Monsanto — that profitable agro-corporation that wields ever-increasing power over the world’s food supply — is taking a smarter approach. As the effects of climate change devastate crops the world over, Monsanto has announced it is buying the Climate Corporation for $930 million. From the press release:
“Farmers around the world are challenged to make key decisions for their farms in the face of increasingly volatile weather, as well as a proliferation of information sources,” said David Friedberg, chief executive officer for The Climate Corporation. “Our team understands that the ability to turn data into actionable insight and farm management recommendations is vitally important for agriculture around the world and can greatly benefit farmers, regardless of farm size or their preferred farming methods. Monsanto shares this important vision for our business and we look forward to creating even greater experiences for our farmer customers.”
Climate Corporation underwrites weather insurance for farmers, basically in real time, using some of the most sophisticated data tools available to determine the risks posed by future weather conditions and events.
And the company doesn’t limit itself to weather data. As politicians, pundits, and people on the Internet continue to argue over whether climate change is real, the insurance industry has for years been operating under the assumption that it is. So Climate Corporation uses data from major climate-change models — the very ones that are under constant assault by doubters — in its calculations.
Climate Corporation manages an eye-popping 50 terabytes of live data, all at once. Besides climate-change models, data is collected from regular old weather forecasts and histories, soil observations, and other sources. The company collects data from 2.5 million separate locations. Given these numbers, it shouldn’t be surprising that Climate Corporation is basically alone in this market.
If Congress continues down the road of spending cuts and government shutdowns, private industry will soon know more about what’s going on with the weather than the government does.
AP Photo Elephant carcasses rot, the stench hanging on the air, in Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe, on September 29, 2013. Officials said that at least 91 animals had been poisoned with cyanide by poachers who hack off the tusks. Poachers poisoned the salt licks around the majestic beasts’ watering holes with cyanide, authorities said.
The mineral-rich salt licks scattered around watering holes commonly draw elephants and other animals. But these familiar fixtures became death traps sometime in the past month for at least 91 elephants when poachers filled them with cyanide taken from illegal gold-mining operations.
The horrific tactic killed not only the majestic beasts but also lions, hyenas and vultures that fed on the remains or drank the water, authorities in Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park, where the slaughter took place, told the Associated Press. The lethal chemical “attacks the bloodstream, kills almost instantly and causes rapid decomposition,” the AP noted.
Once the elephants were dead, their tusks were hacked off and smuggled out of the country.
“The magnitude of what we are witnessing today is much higher than what has occurred previously,” Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Saviour Kasukuwere told reporters as he toured the scene.
Authorities have arrested nine people suspected of poaching, the AP said, with three men sentenced to 16 years in prison.
The situation of elephants in Africa as a whole is dire, with poaching putting the species at risk for extinction. The Central African Republic is another site of unremitting elephant slaughter, The New York Times reported in a series a year ago.
At least 35,000 elephants were killed in Africa during 2012 alone, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society. That’s 96 per day.
Last December the United Nations flagged illegal wildlife trafficking, including that of elephant and other endangered animal parts, as a dire problem—and an illegal global trade worth copy9 billion per year.
National Geographic detailed the slaughter and how it is fueled by the Chinese ivory market in an October 2012 series, Blood Ivory. And in 2011 Vanity Fair gave a haunting portrayal of elephant slaughter by the poverty-stricken Maasai, who once revered them, in Agony and Ivory.
Those poachers commonly shoot from helicopters with high-powered assault rifles. But the poison method has caused an environmental crisis as well as hurt elephant populations, the AP said. Zimbabwe’s Environmental Management Authority will burn the cyanide-laced carcasses and will have to remove the toxin from the areas where it has been spread. The salt licks must be dug out, the AP said, and the top layers of soil removed—everything that has been contaminated with cyanide granules.
Moreover, two deep wells that supply the watering holes may also be poisoned and need to be sealed, the AP reported, and new wells are needed. This will be hard because the agency is underfunded and understaffed in Zimbabwe’s struggling economy.
Nevertheless, Kasukuwere said the country would stand firm against poaching.
“We will cooperate with international organizations such as Interpol to crack down on the pay masters,” he told reporters. “So the war is on, it’s a war which we will win, we are not going to surrender.”
