Sarah Frostenson | Vox

The ecological disaster that is Trump’s border wall: a visual guide

2019-02-05T11:22:46-05:00

President Donald Trump is allowing the longest government shutdown in US history to drag on because he wants Congress to give him $5 billion for 215 miles of border wall.

But make no mistake, the existing physical wall at the US-Mexico border is about to be extended even without any new funding. That’s because, in the 2018 spending bill, Congress allocated $1.3 billion to build a total of about 33 miles of new border wall and fortify a few existing segments in California and Arizona. The Department of Homeland Security says construction will begin on the first new segment — six miles of reinforced concrete levee wall topped with steel bollards in Hidalgo County — in February.

There’s a long debate over whether physical barriers on the border actually curb the illicit flow of people and drugs. The Border Patrol, which is backing Trump’s plan, says they’re a “vital tool.” Migration experts say they’re mostly symbolic.

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What’s undeniable is that the 654 miles of walls and fences already on the US-Mexico border have made a mess out of the environment there. The existing barrier has cut off, isolated, and reduced populations of some of the rarest and most amazing animals in North America, like the jaguar. They’ve led to the creation of miles of roads through pristine wilderness areas. They’ve even exacerbated flooding, becoming dams when rivers have overflowed.

The new sections of fence under contract are slated for the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas and will cut right through a federal wildlife refuge, a state park, Native American grave sites, and the National Butterfly Center. Conservationists and wildlife managers consider this region to be one of the most ecologically valuable areas on the border — home to endangered ocelots and jaguarundis, two beautiful small cat species in the region; plants, and 400 species of birds.

According to internal documents recently made public by the conservation non-profit Defenders of Wildlife through the Freedom of Information Act, US wildlife officials have been raising red flags about the new construction. They think it will further degrade habitat for wildlife, including endangered species like the ocelot and jaguarundi, and further restrict their movement.

“The Service is concerned the levee wall in Hidalgo County could be subject to catastrophic natural flood events, leaving terrestrial wildlife trapped behind the levee wall to drown or starve,” a regional director of the Fish and Wildlife Service wrote in a 2017 letter to a branch chief of the Customs and Border Protection division of DHS. Ecotourism in the region will suffer, they warn.

Meanwhile, local environmental activists have been trying for years to prevent any new wall construction in Texas, precisely because the impacts of the wall are already well-documented.

In 2018, they convinced Congress to exempt the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge, a 2,088-acre patch of extraordinary biodiversity on the Rio Grande river, from the new sections of border wall it funded in the spending bill.

“We’ve been dealing with all these negative environmental impacts of fences on the border for more than a decade,” says Dan Millis of the Sierra Club Borderlands project. “And Trump’s wall would make it worse.”

The border region is ecologically rich because a lot of it has been federally protected

The political boundary between the US and Mexico stretches 2,000 miles from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean. Along the way, there are three mountain chains, the two largest deserts in North America, vast cattle ranches, a handful of cities and their sprawling suburbs, and the Southern section of the mighty Rio Grande river.

Much of the region has never been heavily populated, and over the years, several large swaths of land have been designated as protected areas. Today there are 25 million acres of protected US public lands within 100 miles of the line. That includes six wildlife refuges, six national parks, tribal lands, wilderness areas, and conservation areas — all of them managed by various federal agencies and tribal governments.

On the Mexican side, meanwhile, sit protected areas like El Pinacate and Gran Desierto de Altar, which abuts the US Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge and parts of the Organ Pipe National Monument and Barry M. Goldwater Range in Arizona.

These protected areas have been established, in part, to protect wildlife and plants that span both countries. In the case of El Pinacate and Cabeza Prieta, desert species like the Sonoran pronghorn (an antelope relative) have been able to migrate back and forth. But in recent years, that’s gotten harder with the construction of long sections of vehicle barriers and fences, as you can see from the map.

“People think of deserts as barren lands and flat sand dunes with nothing there,” Sergio Avila, a conservation scientist at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, says. “But deserts are very diverse and rich in life.”

The protected areas on the border harbor an incredible array of wildlife and plants

When you trace the border from west to east (as this Story Map project by Krista Schlyer did), you find shrinking pockets of remarkable biological abundance. At the far west is the Tijuana Estuary, a key salt marsh habitat for some 400 species of migrating birds. At the far east, birds and butterflies stop through the Lower Rio Grande Valley, which is also a permanent home for colorful mammals, reptiles, and amphibians.

“There are tropical animal species in some of these canyons that are not found anywhere else,” says Jesse Lasky, a biologist at Penn State who has studied the impact of border fences on border species. “They inhabit these little slices of tropical ecosystem that creep up into the US near the Gulf coast.”

In a recent tweet, Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-TX) asked about where the wall would go and what it would destroy. The responses included a series of stunning photos of the border and its landscapes:

Where would they build the wall? Whose home or ranch or farm are they going to take to build it? Which communities and habitats are they going to destroy? Reply with your best pictures of the border – let the rest of the country see what’s at stake. pic.twitter.com/9ToIXXYKp2
— Beto O'Rourke (@BetoORourke) December 21, 2018

Not many scientists have measured the border’s biodiversity in its totality — or the full impact of fences. One of the few studies to tackle these questions was written by Lasky and co-authors in 2011. They estimated that 134 mammal, 178 reptile, and 57 amphibian species live within about 30 miles of the line. Of those, 50 species and three subspecies are globally or federally threatened in Mexico or the United States. And they survive only because people on both sides have worked hard to conserve them.

Probably the most biologically impressive region on the border, according to Avila, is the sky islands, a range of mountain “islands” that extend from Arizona and New Mexico into Mexico and host a greater variety of life than almost anywhere else in North America. Most are part of the Coronado National Forest, the most ecologically diverse national forest in the country. The Coronado also hosts the greatest number of threatened and endangered species of any national forest in the US.

Living in those sky islands are spotted owls, jaguars, thick-billed parrots, barred tiger salamanders, Mount Graham red squirrels, and many more unusual species. But as with all of the protected areas on the border, these populations are dwindling fast. Climate change and urbanization are factors. But the biggest threat of all, according to Lasky, Avila, and other conservationists in the border region, are the fences that have been built along the border in the past couple of decades.

Border fences have been terrible for wildlife and plants

Since 1994, the US government has been erecting barriers to keep people and drugs from Mexico and beyond out. By 2010, about one-third of the border had been fenced with materials ranging from barbed wire to steel, bollard to wire mesh, and chain link. In addition, the Department of Homeland Security has built hundreds of miles of roads to allow the Border Patrol to access remote regions, both fenced and unfenced.

All of this construction has sliced and diced a lot of protected land along the border. And ever since the passage of the Real ID Act of 2005, DHS has had the power to waive most environmental reviews in the name of national security.

So, unlike most federal infrastructure projects, these fences have received little or no input from the public, land managers, conservation groups, or other agencies. Experts had no chance to assess beforehand what impact the fence might have on wildlife, plants, and rivers. Only after the fact have researchers documented instances where fences have interrupted wildlife corridors, and caused erosion and other damage to fragile ecosystems, as well as flooding.

But what evidence we do have is alarming. For instance, Lasky and his co-authors found that the biggest risk comes when fences bisect the range of a small population of a species with a specialized habitat, leaving the majority of the population on one side and the others adrift. His paper found 45 species and three subspecies that the current fence has affected this way.

Cutting off animal populations in this fashion leads to reduced gene flow and inbreeding — leading to a greater risk of extinction. Conservation groups are particularly worried about the Mexican gray wolf; in 2016, there were just 113 in the US and about three dozen south of the border. A wall between them could make the recovery of the population unsurmountable.

Fences also can also restrict animals’ access to water sources — particularly problematic in the drought-prone Southwest. And they can make it harder for animals to adapt to climate change. “A lot of species do best in Northern Mexico, but with changes in precipitation patterns, they would need to disperse across the border,” says Lasky. “This is something we should be thinking about a lot more — how fast organisms are responding to climate change.”

The wall structures hurt animals and insects in other ways too. Some sections have lights that attract and zap pollinators, like the monarch butterfly, that migrate across the border. And the taller the fence, the more impassable it is for some bats and birds, like the cactus ferruginous pygmy owl.

Based on this research, leading groups like the Sierra Club, the Center for Biological Diversity, and Defenders of Wildlife have strongly recommended against any further construction of fences on the border.

Trump’s wall could have a big impact on still-pristine areas

About two-thirds, or 1,350 miles, of the border remains unfenced. Trump has said that in addition to the 120 miles of new and replacement wall that have already been funded, he wants to build another 215 miles with the $5 billion he’s demanding from Congress.

Environmental activists in Texas who’ve been tracking the wall over the years say they’re concerned that the new wall segment expected to be built starting in February will do significant damage to protected areas, including a section of the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge, as well as Bentsen Rio Grande State Park, the National Butterfly Center and the La Lomita Chapel.

A wall would certainly destroy the little remaining butterfly habitat at the center, Jeffrey Glassberg, the president of the National Butterfly Center, told me last year. And it would further erode the region’s ecotourism. Look no further than what happened at Audubon’s Sabal Palm Sanctuary once a border wall was built through it: Visits fell by half because the wall made it a much less pleasant place to be, Glassberg says.

The wall could have a serious, in some cases deadly, impact on other species in the region, including:

Walls and levee walls in this region could pose a serious flooding hazard too, says Millis. “They are particularly problematic because they would be the first walls built inside the Rio Grande floodplain, and thus are likely to cause floods in the populated areas where they are planned,” he says.

Building fence where there is a flood risk has already caused chaos on other parts of the border: Flash floods in Nogales and Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in Arizona have caused millions of dollars in damage and two deaths because of floodwaters that built up along the fence.

“Flood water always has debris in it,” Millis says. “That’s how you got these damming events that blew out chunks of wall. Damming also causes erosion — it creates the situation we saw in Arizona where debris backs up the water and then the sediment building upstream created a waterfall that causes more erosion. This is liable to happen in Texas.”

Current walls in Texas are not in the floodplain — in part because a binational commission that oversees the Rio Grande River has refused to allow CPB to build there, fearing flooding in towns on both sides. But Scott Nicol, with the Sierra Club in McAllen, Texas, says he’s worried that CPB intends to act unilaterally and will build new fence in the floodplain of the Rio Grande, despite Mexico’s objections.

San Diego is a sprawling urban center, but just south of it is the Tijuana Estuary, where the Tijuana River meets the Pacific Ocean. It’s one of the most biodiverse areas in the entire state of California, according to Millis of the Sierra Club, and has already been impacted by fences. Replacing the fences there, which could happen later this year, could mean more habitat destruction in the estuary.

One unfenced section of the border is precious jaguar habitat

The Trump administration is focused on building new fence in Texas for the moment. But one day it could turn its sights on other unfenced sections — and one of the most troubling possibilities would be the miles of protected areas in Arizona and New Mexico where jaguars occasionally roam.

Jaguars are critically endangered in North America; the populations that once prowled New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and Southern California were essentially hunted to extinction in the 20th century. The northernmost breeding population in the Americas — some 80 to 120 individuals — is in the Northern Jaguar Reserve in the Mexican state of Sonora.

Like wolves, jaguars ramble widely, with ranges anywhere from 10 to 50 square miles. And since 1996, seven males have been spotted in the US, giving conservation groups hope that they may be trying to reestablish a population on this side of the border.

“The only hope for natural re-colonization in the U.S., however remote, hinges on maintaining this core population to the south, and its connectivity,” Alan Rabinowitz, CEO of Panthera, said in a statement. And a fence through the unfenced areas — shown in the illustration above — would clearly destroy that connectivity.

Conservationists say the threat of Trump’s wall also puts a strain on relations with Mexico. “We have a lot of successful conservation partnerships working together with Mexico — monarch butterfly and jaguar, for example,” Avila says. “But these policies are putting a dent on those partnerships and pitting people against each other. They could sour the relationships.” For instance, he says, changes in immigration policies are making it harder for him to bring Mexican officials to meetings in the US.

When it comes to protecting jaguars and other big cats threatened on the border, he says the solution is pretty simple: Just don’t build a wall.

“We don’t have to do that much. We have to leave them alone and allow them to move freely and their populations would move freely,” he says.

Will Trump ultimately get to build the additional 215 miles of border wall he’s promised his supporters? We don’t know if Congress will give him the money. But DHS’s record of building fences whenever it can — with the anachronistic but still powerful argument that walls work for national security — suggests the agency will fight hard for it. And the tragedy for conservationists is that they have next to no legal leverage. When it comes to the border, security trumps just about every other law of the land.

Existing US-Mexico border fence data featured in the maps is from Reveal and the Center for Investigative Reporting and OpenStreetMap contributors. This story was originally published in 2017 and was updated in January 2019.

How Trump’s travel ban threatens health care, in 3 charts

2018-06-26T16:25:48-04:00

The Supreme Court’s decision allowing the third iteration of President Trump’s travel ban to become permanent immigration policy could have far-reaching effects on the health care system because of a little-appreciated fact: That system relies heavily on foreigners, including foreigners from the list of seven banned countries.

In a 5-4 decision Tuesday, the court upheld the current version of the travel ban — which means the administration can refuse some immigrants and visa holders from Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen entry to the US. This means would-be doctors, nurses, and home care aides (or their family members) from these countries will have a hard time entering the US, even when they qualify for the administration’s waiver program.

In many ways, the health system is already stretched too thin, with scarcely enough people spread evenly across the country to do many difficult jobs. And a letter from the American Medical Association to the Secretary of Homeland Security on an earlier Trump travel ban spelled out this immigration policy could make the situation worse by “creating unintended consequences.”

Waivers are “golden tickets” from the State Department that allow citizens from banned countries to apply for entry to the US, and immigration officials decide it’s in America’s best interest to let them up. But they’ve also been very difficult to obtain, as Mohammed Al-Awadhi, a Yemen-born doctor practicing in Arkansas, learned when he tried to get a waiver for his Yemeni wife, according to the Washington Post. She had been approved for a visa in December, then rejected following Trump’s third travel ban.

The current iteration of the ban is a watered-down version of the original, which came into effect by executive order in January 2017. As Vox’s Dara Lind explained, it was designed to be “court proof,” and it targets fewer than 70,000 people — less than half of the original ban’s reach. But when you consider how much of the health care workforce is made up of immigrants like Al-Awadhi, the effects of this ban on health professionals, their families, and the health system look chilling.

Immigrants make up 22 percent of the health workforce and 30 percent of doctors and surgeons in the US

Walk into any hospital, but especially rural hospitals, in the US, and you’ll notice something: Many of the people taking care of you probably weren’t born here. Health care in this country is strikingly international, with the largest proportion of foreign-born and foreign-trained workers of any US industry.

According to 2015 data from the Migration Policy Institute, the US medical profession is particularly reliant on immigrant doctors. Of all the active physicians and surgeons, fully 30 percent are immigrants.

“India, China, Philippines, Korea, and Pakistan are the top five origin groups for physicians and surgeons,” said Jeanne Batalova, a senior policy analyst and demographer at MPI.

Iran and Syria, two of the countries whose citizens are no longer allowed entry to the US, are the sixth and 10th largest contributors, respectively. “So we’re talking about substantial representation from these countries [in the doctor workforce] here,” she added. The ban on these people will likely be felt at hospitals and clinics across the nation.

The contributions immigrant doctors make to medical care start early on when they become residents, before being funneled through training and into jobs. A data analysis performed by the Robert Graham Center showed that residents from the seven countries made up 5.7 percent of all international medical graduates in 2015, said Stan Kozakowski, director of medical education for the American Academy of Family Physicians. (Some data sets look at the country of origin for doctors, others at where they obtained their medical degree — and doctors who trained outside of the US are called “international medical graduates.”)

That’s not a huge number, Kozakowski added, but it’s sizable enough. “And if you add in the countries that [could be] tossed in as possible expansions of the ban — Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Egypt — that number goes up to 16.7 percent.”

Foreign-trained doctors make up more than 50 percent of geriatric medicine specialists and nearly 40 percent of internal medicine doctors

When you break it down by medical specialty, foreign-trained doctors do a disproportionate amount of the work in certain areas. They make up more than 50 percent of geriatric medicine doctors, almost half of nephrologists (or kidney doctors), nearly 40 percent of internal medicine doctors, and nearly a quarter of family medicine physicians, according to data from the Association of American Medical Colleges.

Compared with US-trained physicians, foreign doctors are also more likely to practice in areas where there are doctor shortages — in particular, in rural areas. (Many enter the US on visas that allowed them to stay if they work in an underserved area for three years after residency.) They’re also more likely to serve poor patients on Medicaid, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found.

“Doctors — especially in rural areas that were the key constituency that supports Trump — tend to be foreign-born,” said Nicole Smith, a chief economist at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. “The old adage that foreigners are doing the work no Americans want to do even applies to medical doctors.”

A 2017 study in BMJ revealed another twist: Patients treated by foreign-trained doctors had better mortality outcomes than those treated by doctors who went through American medical schools. The study authors suggested for foreign docs’ over-performance might be explained by the fact that they “represent some of the best physicians in their country of origin” and had to overcome intense competition and years of training to finally practice in the US.

Health care currently has the largest proportion of foreign-born and foreign-trained workers in the country of any industry

The foreigners in health care don’t just practice medicine, though. The nursing profession is also overstretched and facing projected shortfalls in the coming years, and has come to count on immigrants. As of 2015, some 20 percent of the health care support staff — including nurses and home aides — were immigrants.

Besides work at the bedside, the research immigrants do in labs across the country is also under threat. One Syrian medical researcher told Vox, after Trump’s first travel ban in 2017, that he was afraid that after working in America for more than three years at the Mayo Clinic, his application for permanent residency will be rejected and he’ll have to leave. Other researchers on visas and green cards from Iran said they fear leaving the US to visit family or go to conferences should they be barred from coming back home, and that this situation was untenable and had them thinking about alternative places to live.

As Vox’s Dara Lind reminds us, this isn’t the last we’ll be hearing about the travel ban. “In theory, the legal fight over the travel ban isn’t over, since the Supreme Court is still instructing the 9th Circuit to rule on the merits of the ban,” she writes. “But by decreeing that the legal challenges to the ban aren’t ‘likely to succeed’ on the merits, the court has just made it extremely difficult for the ban to get struck down in future.”

From the bench to the bedside, Trump’s approach isn’t just going to hurt the health system in the future — it’s already hurting it now.

America has a water crisis no one is talking about

2018-03-22T11:17:07-04:00

Access to clean water is a basic human right. Yet for 14 million US households, or 12 percent of homes, water bills are too expensive. And as the cost of water rises, even more Americans are at risk of not being able to pay their monthly water bill.

According to a 2017 paper from researchers at Michigan State University, water prices will have to increase by 41 percent in the next five years to cover the costs of replacing aging water infrastructure and adapting to climate change. That will mean that nearly 41 million households — or a staggering third of all US households — may not be able to afford water for drinking, bathing, and cooking by 2020.

There is no law that guarantees water access for poor Americans. And most financial assistance is left to the discretion of individual water utilities. So customers who have fallen behind in payments can have their water services abruptly shut off.

More than 50,000 households in Detroit have lost water services since 2014 because they couldn’t pay their bills. Flint, Michigan, which is still in the throes of a lead poisoning crisis, is now threatening to terminate water services for more than 8,000 people who haven’t paid their bill.

But it’s not just the Michigan urban poor who are at risk.

The researchers found thousands of other census tracts around the US where the median income was low enough to put people at risk of not be able to afford their water bills as water prices continue to rise.

The Environmental Protection Agency has recommended that water and wastewater services should not make up more than 4.5 percent of a household’s income. So the researchers considered places where the median income was less than $32,000 in 2014 to be high risk (in dark blue), while places where the median incomes range from $32,000 to $45,120 (in light blue) were at risk. In all, we’re looking at a huge number of areas across the US where millions of households are struggling to pay their water bill.

A third of American households might be unable to pay their water bill by 2020

According to the American Water Works Association, on average we pay less than half a penny for a gallon of water. But “it doesn’t mean there aren’t families that struggle to pay,” said Greg Kail, the communications director at AWWA.

And people in poorer states like Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Kentucky, and Arkansas are especially at risk of not being able to pay their water bills, according to Elizabeth Mack, a researcher at Michigan State and the co-author of the paper, which appeared online in the journal PLOS One. In Mississippi, nearly 75 percent of the state was either at high risk or at risk. But the problem wasn’t concentrated in just rural areas either. Mack also found 81 percent of high-risk census tracts were located in metropolitan areas.

And if water rates increase by 41 percent in the next five years (as Mack thinks they will), the number of households unable to pay their water bill will nearly triple, from 14 million to 41 million.

The 6 percent increase reflects the actual change in water costs between 2014 and 2015, and the 41 percent increase is how much water prices rose from 2010 to 2015. (Mack is assuming water rates will increase at the same clip as they did from 2010 to 2015 and that median household income will remain flat — reasonable considering household income has seen no real growth in the past 20 years.)

“I don’t know why people haven’t paid more attention to this,” she said.

The huge costs of repairing water infrastructure is forcing water rates up

After World War II, America went on something of an infrastructure kick, building an expansive network of water pipes in cities across the country. But now these pipes are more than 60 years old and in many instances are in desperate need of repair.

Federal funding for water infrastructure has fallen from more than 60 percent in the late 1970s to just 9 percent now. And civil engineers estimate the price tag for overhauling America’s drinking water system and bringing it up to code will be at least $1 trillion over the next 25 years. Add to that the estimated $14 billion to $26 billion needed to adapt water systems to climate change by 2050.

Tracy Mehan, executive director of government affairs at AWWA, has pushed for an increase in federal funding but says we can’t avoid higher water rates. “We’ve coasted for decades in most places around the country. Our rates are half that of northern European cities,” he said. “Rates are going up and need to go up.”

Just how far up? Mack thinks annual water bills will increase by nearly $600 over the next five years to around $2,000, or $169 per month. (The average annual bill is currently $1,440, or $120 a month.)

What’s more, Mack says her estimates are conservative compared with those of Circle of Blue, a nonprofit focused on issues of water affordability. Circle of Blue found cities like Austin; Charlotte, North Carolina; Chicago; San Francisco; and Tucson, Arizona, all experienced water rate hikes greater than 50 percent within the past five years.

Here’s Circle of Blue’s map of water prices in 30 major US cities as of 2015. Atlanta leads the nation with the most expensive monthly water bill — $326 on average. (Circle of Blue calculated monthly water bills for a family of four using roughly 12,000 gallons of water a month, which the EPA has estimated is average household use).

This means for a family of four making $32,000 in Atlanta, an annual water bill of $3,912 eats up more than 12 percent of their income — and again, that’s three times what the EPA recommends a family should be paying for water.

Some cities are restructuring water rates based on income, which could help struggling families

One possible solution that Mack said is gaining traction to help low-income Americans address affordability issues is restructuring water rates based on income.

Restructuring water rates involves determining the number of gallons a customer can use each month for a prenegotiated fee. If a customer uses more than the set amount, they pay a penalty or overage fee. Recent research shows that when utilities restructure rates, it can help offset the rising costs of water service.

But as cities move to restructure rates and redistribute costs, it’s important they implement lower cost rate structures for low-income households. Otherwise, restructuring rates can backfire and poorer households can end up with an even higher bill than what they were paying before. Mack says a food stamp equivalent program for water services or some kind of low income subsidy could help.

“People could think about setting up lower fees for different income brackets,” she said. “Set a minimal level of necessary water use [for lower-income households] and if you use more than that, from that point you pay more.”

And some cities like Philadelphia are already moving to implement a rate structure that offers low-income families reduced water rates. In July, the city is rolling out a tiered rate structure for customers whose incomes fall at or below 150 percent of the poverty line.

With a third of Americans at risk of not being able to pay their water bill by 2020, we need to move quickly to invest in infrastructure and restructure water rates in a way that doesn’t negatively impact low-income customers. Otherwise we could be looking at a national crisis similar to what’s playing out in Detroit and Flint — thousands of families losing their water because they can’t afford their bill.

Why South Koreans now live longer than Americans

2018-02-09T10:39:48-05:00

The Olympic flag during the Opening Ceremony of the Pyeongchang 2018 Winter Olympic Games, February 9, 2018 in Pyeongchang-gun, South Korea. | Photo by Ian MacNicol/Getty Images

Athletes from South Korea and America will compete for medals at the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang — but at least in one way, the South Koreans are already winning.

As recently as 1960, most South Koreans couldn’t expect to live past 55. Today, they can expect to live longer than Americans — for more than 80 years. And this gap is expected to get even wider very soon.

South Korea is billed to become the world leader in life expectancy by the end of the next decade. In a recent study, published in The Lancet, researchers predicted that average life expectancy in the country will reach beyond 90 years for South Korean women by 2030. Men there will also see big gains.

A handful of other wealthy countries will get closer to becoming centenarians too, but these improvements won’t be spread evenly. America, in particular, won’t be doing nearly as well against its economic peers. Instead, the US is poised to lag behind other wealthy countries when it comes to progress in longevity.

This South Korea-US contrast is yet another example of the importance of equitable access to health care — something South Korea and many other developed countries have managed to provide their citizens while the US continues to falter.

For the Lancet study, researchers at the Imperial College London, the World Health Organization, Northumbria University, and the University of Washington developed a new model for predicting future life expectancy in 35 countries using 21 forecasting projections. Most impressively, they found that in South Korea, life expectancy in women could jump from 84 in 2010 to 91 by 2030. In France, Japan, and Spain, female life expectancy is expected to hit at least 88 or 89 years, up from around 85.

Men in South Korea, as well as Australia and Switzerland, are also expected to lead the world in life expectancy, living to about 84 by 2030, with Canada, Spain, New Zealand, and the Netherlands following closely.

The US, by contrast, is among the countries in the study with the smallest boost, with similarly small gains in Japan, Sweden, Greece, Macedonia, and Serbia. In 2010, life expectancy for American men was 76, and for women, 81. In 2030, men here can expect to live to 79 and women 83 — increases of just a couple of years.

“Notable among poor-performing countries is the USA,” the researchers wrote, “whose life expectancy at birth is already lower than most other high-income countries, and is projected to fall further behind such that its 2030 life expectancy at birth might be similar to the Czech Republic for men, and Croatia and Mexico for women.”

And the prediction for the US may be too generous. The researchers only looked at data until 2013, so they didn’t account for the downturn in US life expectancy that has been happening since 2015 — the first such declines since the early 1990s. If the researchers updated their data to include that decrease, study author James Bennett said it’s likely they might have found an even lower life expectancy prediction for America.

The Lancet study is, of course, a modeling exercise, and unforeseen events, such as an epidemic or war, will affect the numbers. So would repealing Obamacare: Taking health insurance away from some 20 million Americans, and contribute to more deaths than gun homicides, HIV, and skin cancer.

The US–South Korea gap is astounding

As we’ve reported, there’s already a widening health disparity in the US — the outlier among rich nations in that it doesn’t offer its citizens universal health care. “This means that some groups are getting left behind and it’s pulling the average down,” said Bennett, a researcher in the department of epidemiology and biostatistics at Imperial College London.

The US has lagged behind its peers in increases in life expectancy (for both men and women) for at least a decade, despite gains from the 1970s to early 2000s. During that time, deaths from alcohol, drug use, and mental health disorders have risen dramatically in many parts of the country, while progress on heart disease has been stalling. (After peaking in 1985, heart disease deaths fell dramatically — but there has been an uptick since 2010, as you can see in this study.) The US also has some of the highest obesity, homicide, and infant and maternal mortality rates in the developed world.

If you use South Korea as a reference point, the contrast again is astounding. In 1960, the life expectancy for the average South Korean was only 53 years. But over the years, the country has made remarkable progress: South Koreans are now expected to live as long as 82 years — nearly four years longer than the average American.

The major reasons for the gains in South Korea — as in most rich countries — are reductions in infant mortality and cardiovascular diseases (particularly stroke), as well as declines in stomach cancers. These improvements were accompanied by rapid economic growth over the past 50 years, with gross national income per capita rising from less than US$100 in 1960 to $20,045 by 2007.

Bennett pointed out that “Korea got a lot of things right” when it comes to health care access, which is why the increases in longevity have been so widespread. “[South Korea] has had economic improvements, which has led to improved nutrition and access to health care and medical technology across the whole population,” he explained. Unlike the US, “South Korea is very equitable, all the way across the population,” he added.

That may be understating South Korea’s achievements. The country is viewed as an economic miracle. Once among the world’s poorest nations, it’s now one only two economies in the world (along with Taiwan) that have seen an annual average growth rate of more than 5 percent for five consecutive decades, as CNN’s Fareed Zakaria reported.

But what makes the South Korea example particularly striking is that on average, citizens in the US are far wealthier than South Koreans: The average income of Americans is $55,980 — more than double the average income in South Korea. For all its wealth over the past century, the US still hasn’t cracked health. And the growing problem of inequality here isn’t going to make things better.

Watch: The top reason people die early in each country

These maps show how Americans are dying younger. It’s not just the opioid epidemic.

2017-01-24T08:43:06-05:00

For the second year in a row, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that Americans are dying earlier — and mortality rates have increased for a number of causes of death, including opioid overdoses.

But we’ve seen very little explanation on precisely where in the country this public health crisis is most acute.

Thankfully, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation published studies in JAMA in December 2016 and May that map out mortality trends by county and cause. And they’re very revealing. Understanding what mortality in America looks like today now means zooming in on what’s happening in different regions. Because what’s killing more people in the South, the Great Plains, Appalachia, and other regions is remarkably different.

There is a 20-year gap between counties with the lowest and highest life expectancies

First, the big picture: Across the country, there were massive disparities in overall mortality from 1980 to 2014. Counties in South Dakota and North Dakota — particularly those with native populations — had the lowest life expectancy, along with eastern Kentucky and southwestern West Virginia. Conversely, counties in central Colorado had the highest life expectancies. These geographic disparities in life expectancy, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation researchers found, “are large and increasing.”

In general, though, Americans live longer today than they did in 1980

In this map of mortality rates in the US, comparing 1980 and 2014, you can see that there is some good news: Fewer people are dying in the US today compared with 36 years ago.

In 1980, the average life expectancy was roughly 73.7 years, but as of 2015, it had climbed to 78.8 years. So the overall story here is one of progress — but with some major caveats.

The new data from the CDC shows progress on mortality rates and life expectancy is stalling; between 2015 and 2016, life expectancy in the US dropped for the second time since 1993. (In 2016, life expectancy was 78.6 years, a decrease of 0.1 year from 2015.) And despite an overall lower national mortality rate, there are pockets of the country where a person is far more likely to die — and the new IHME data suggests this problem is getting worse.

An IHME study published in May found that many pockets of the US do not actually enjoy a significantly lower mortality rate (as you saw in the first map). In fact, in some southern counties in states like Oklahoma and West Virginia, there was little, if any, improvement in life expectancy despite overall national progress.
“It’s important to note that the population is falling in a lot of the places with rising mortality rates — people are leaving those places when they have the opportunity to,” said University of Maryland health inequality researcher Philip Cohen. “That partly means that the less healthy people are left behind, so you see higher mortality rates in those places. But in addition to declining economic fortunes from economic shifts, it’s also depressing and isolating to live in a place that people are trying to leave.” Which helps explain why we see these health outcomes in these places.

Deaths from alcohol and drug use and mental health disorders have risen dramatically, particularly in Appalachia

Of the 3,007 counties in America, more than 2,000 saw increases of 200 percent or more in death rates related to alcohol use, drug use, and mental disorders since 1980. You can see this astonishing trend here:

The problem has grown most acute in counties in Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Missouri — where mortality rates have shot up by more than 1,000 percent between 1980 and 2014.

Researchers are still puzzling over why we’re seeing these increases, but many have pointed to economic despair and the opioid epidemic concentrated in these areas of the country.

There are huge disparities in cardiovascular disease deaths, with hot spots in the South

One of the most troubling trends was the massive disparities in heart disease deaths across America. From 1980 to 2014, all 50 states experienced a decline in deaths from cardiovascular disease. But this progress hasn’t been shared equally. States like Minnesota and Massachusetts lead the nation with some of the lowest reported rates of cardiovascular-related deaths (roughly 200 per 100,000), whereas states like Arkansas and Oklahoma still report more than 300 for every 100,000 deaths. Heart issues seem to be particularly clustered around the Mississippi River and reaching west to Oklahoma.

Overall, progress has been stalling on this measure too. After peaking in 1985, heart disease deaths fell dramatically — but there has been an uptick since 2010, as you can see in this study in JAMA. The trend has been linked to rising rates of obesity and diabetes in this country over the past several decades. (According to the CDC, nearly 40 percent of adults in the US are obese, while 15 percent were in the early 1970s. Between 1980 and 2014, the number of adults with diabetes in the US has nearly quadrupled.)

It’s not just despair that’s driving the uptick in mortality

What complicates the overarching narrative of despair — that a lack of economic prospects is leading people to self-harm and substance abuse — is that it simply can’t apply to the whole country. Different geographic regions are experiencing extreme variations in despair-related outcomes like suicides, drug overdoses, and heart disease, said Abraham Flaxman of the University of Washington, one of the authors of the December JAMA paper.

“If you look at geographic patterns, you can say it’s despair that’s leading people to drink and do drugs,” he said. “But then why wouldn’t that apply to leading people to overeat and become obese and diabetic? These trends are happening in different places.”

To be more specific, today’s cardiovascular disease problems (which are linked to nutrition and obesity) largely plague the South, while the substance abuse and mental health issues are more concentrated in Appalachia, and the rise in self-harm and interpersonal violence is happening in the southwestern part of the country.

So are people just harming themselves in different ways for the same reason — despair over the future — or is there something else going on?

“These maps make it harder to come up with a universal explanation for recent mortality increases, and in my view, that’s a good thing, because there probably isn’t one,” said McGill University epidemiologist Sam Harper.

“It is true that ‘despair over the future’ is something that could be implicated, and that is most clearly seen in rising suicide rates — but it hardly seems a sufficient explanation for the persistently high rates of cardiovascular disease we see in parts of the US South, which are largely driven by much longer term behavioral and health care risk factors,” he says.

For now, all the researchers I spoke to were reluctant to hypothesize much more than this. But they say they are increasingly obsessed with these questions because it’s extremely unusual to see death rates increase in a developed country like the US.

In a commentary on last year’s blockbuster paper by the Princeton economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case on the rise of mortality among middle-aged white people, researchers flagged the rise in mortality rates among Russian men after the fall of the Soviet Union as one of the few examples of this trend.

“Every once in a while, you get these spikes and mortality jumps up — but there’s usually something you can point to to explain why it happened,” said one of the authors of that commentary, Dartmouth health economist Jonathan Skinner. “You can point to the fact that millions of Russian men lost their secure jobs in the Soviet Union.”

The same isn’t true for the mortality trends in the US today, he added. “The attribution here is just much more difficult because we think we have some idea — we are pointing to opioids — but we don’t really know yet.”

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Trump axed a rule that would help protect coastal properties like Mar-a-Lago from flooding

2018-01-08T14:19:29-05:00

An illustration of what Trump’s Mar-a-Lago would look like 2100 under the doomsday scenario of 10-foot sea level rise. | Nicolay Lamm / Climate Central

President Donald Trump has called climate change a “hoax” and a very expensive “tax” on American businesses that make the United States less competitive. In June, he announced that it was in the best interest of the country to withdraw from the Paris climate accord drawing on several bogus arguments.

His administration has also axed several regulations issued by President Obama to limit greenhouse gas emissions and reduce the impacts of climate change. The latest to fall: a 2015 directive to federal agencies requiring them to account for sea-level rise and storms when making grants and building infrastructure.

The so-called federal flood risk management standard was still in the works, but the aim was to create design standards to guard against increased flood risks for new construction in flood-prone areas. Trump did away with it in his executive order on infrastructure on Tuesday.

Environmental groups say the standard would have helped mitigate the risk of costly and harmful damages from floods. Now, “taxpayer dollars will likely be wasted through investments in projects that could be washed away in the next storm,” said Rachel Cleetus, lead economist and climate policy manager at the Union of Concerned Scientists, in a statement. According to FEMA, floods led to $260 billion in damages between 1980 and 2013.

Of course, Trump himself is one such property owner who stands to lose a lot in future flood events. Mar-a-Lago is the crown jewel of his extensive real estate portfolio and his preferred location for carrying out many of his official presidential duties. But rising sea levels are causing more frequent and more damaging tidal floods on the Florida coast. And projections suggest that the risk to human lives and property from climate change-related flooding events in this region is only going to increase dramatically in the coming years.

The National and Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has put out a variety of different estimates of rising sea levels in Southern Florida. The more conservative finding suggests that they could jump anywhere from 3 feet by 2050 to 7 feet by 2100.

But in January, the agency put out new “extreme” sea level projections — its doomsday scenario, in other words. In this scenario, we’d see a 10- to 12-foot rise in sea level in the US by 2100, which would have dramatic consequences for places like Mar-a-Lago (see the photo above).

Of all US states, Florida faces the greatest risk from rising sea levels

So what would a 10-foot rise in sea levels mean for Florida? Here’s a satellite image of what that would look like. Large swaths of the state are submerged. Miami is entirely flooded, along with the rest of Southern Florida:

There is evidence that average sea levels are already steadily rising in Southern Florida. A 2016 paper found that in the past decade, the average rate of sea-level rise had tripled from 3 millimeters a year to 9 millimeters. And overall sea levels in Southern Florida had risen about 90 millimeters, or 3.5 inches, since 2006.

Of the 30 most populous US cities that would be negatively affected by extreme sea-level rise, Climate Central, a nonprofit climate science research group, found that 19 were located in Florida (circled in yellow in the chart below).

Sea-level rise is hard to predict, but it’s clear Mar-a-Lago is at risk of extreme flooding

Scientists don’t have a great understanding of how exactly rapidly sea levels will continue to rise or the precise impact on specific areas.

But new research that indicates parts of the Antarctic ice sheet may collapse in the next 100 years — and that has scientists scrambling to model more extreme scenarios. If the Antarctic ice sheet does melt, it could trigger a catastrophic 10-foot spike in sea levels and inundate major US cities like New York and Miami, displacing nearly 150 million people worldwide.

“It may be a lot less stable [in Antarctica] than we thought,” said Ben Strauss, a vice president at Climate Central. “But the truth is we are relatively early in our scientific understanding of how the great ice sheets will respond to warming.”

Last summer, the Guardian investigated Trump’s coastal properties to see how at risk each of them were to flooding from rising sea levels.

What they found was Mar-a-Lago was already in serious trouble.

The estate was at high risk for flooding during heavy rains and storms, with water already pooling on the premises in addition to nearby bridges and roads in Palm Beach. Plus, in the next 30 years, they estimated there will be 210 days a year where Mar-a-Lago will be flooded with at least a foot of water.

Keren Bolter, chief scientist for Coastal Risk Consulting and the firm that analyzed Trump’s properties, told the Guardian that tidal flooding in the next 30 years could partially submerge some of the club’s luxurious cottages and bungalows. And perhaps even eventually render Trump’s “Southern White House” uninhabitable.

For now, though, Trump remains stubbornly in denial of the threat. In June, he reportedly told the mayor of Tangier Island, Va., which is losing up to 16 feet of coastline a year, that there was no need to worry about sea-level rise.

5 Michigan officials face involuntary manslaughter charges over Flint water contamination

2017-06-14T16:00:07-04:00

Five Michigan state officials have been charged with involuntary manslaughter in the death of a man who contracted a fatal illness from contaminated water in the city of Flint.

Robert Skidmore died in December 2015 from Legionnaires’ disease after local water was contaminated and health officials failed to notify the public. According to Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette, the 85-year-old was one of at least a dozen Flint-area residents who died of Legionnaires’ disease due to the water contamination.

Schuette said the five officials (plus another facing other charges), failed to notify the public or take action after a move to save the bankrupt city money ended up contaminating Flint’s local water supply.

After researchers discovered that water in Flint was contaminated with dangerous levels of lead, enough to harm children’s developing brains, the crisis became an international story. Lead poisoning is devastating but slow — but the water also carried other contaminants whose effects showed up more quickly, including the bacteria that cause Legionnaires’ disease.

The contaminated water was the result of a decision Flint made in 2014 as a cost-saving measure. The city would stop buying drinking water from Detroit and instead draw water from a new countywide system. But that system wasn’t yet fully built. So in April 2014, the city began using treated water from the Flint River as a stopgap.

It turned out the river water was corrosive, and lead from the city’s pipes began leaching into the drinking water. In parts of Flint, the percentage of children with high levels of lead in their blood doubled after the switch.

The corrosive water also caused other problems. Cases of Legionellosis, a respiratory disease spread by bacteria, spiked in the region, likely spread through city water. The bacteria can cause a mild illness, or it can lead to Legionnaires’ disease — a serious illness akin to severe pneumonia.

The situation in Flint became a national scandal after the water crisis played out in plain sight for months while the state refused to acknowledge it. To many people, what unfolded in Flint was a powerful illustration of how politicians ignore the problems and concerns of poor African Americans — even when the politicians caused the problems in the first place.

Attempting to punish those who failed to protect Flint’s residents

Charges against state or city officials in Flint were connected to the Legionnaires’ deaths.

Those facing involuntary manslaughter charges are Michigan Department of Health and Human Services Director Nick Lyon, former Flint Emergency Manager Darnell Earley, and former City of Flint Water Department Manager Howard Croft, as well as Michigan Department of Environmental Quality Drinking Water Chief Liane Shekter Smith and Water Supervisor Stephen Busch. Involuntary manslaughter is punishable by up to 15 years in prison, and/or a $7,500 fine, says the attorney general.

In addition to the involuntary manslaughter charges, Lyon also has been charged for misconduct in office, and Eden Wells, the chief medical executive for the state, was charged with both obstruction of justice and lying to a peace officer.

These officials charged with involuntary manslaughter on Wednesday were not the first to face criminal repercussions for inaction in the years following the water crisis.

After two separate investigations, one by the state attorney general’s office and another by the FBI and Environmental Protection Agency, Schuette has now charged 15 people in relation to Flint’s water problem.

Lyon was reportedly briefed on the contamination in January 2015, shortly after Skidmore’s death, but then failed to alert the public about any such outbreak until nearly a year later, Special Agent Jeff Seipenko said Wednesday, according to WOOD News. He later said he hesitated to disclose the information before the state’s Health and Human Services Department finished its own investigation.

The director of the department, as well as his top spokesperson, resigned in late December. Liane Shekter Smith, who oversaw the DEQ’s drinking water unit, was the first person to be fired as a result of the crisis. The regional administrator for the EPA region that includes Michigan also resigned. Corrine Miller, the state’s former director of disease control, was sentenced to probation earlier this year after admitting she was aware of dozens of cases of Legionnaires’ disease and did not act.

Gov. Rick Snyder has defended Lyon and Wells as being “instrumental in Flint’s recovery. They have my full faith and confidence, and will remain on duty at DHHS.” Lyon is the highest-ranking member of Snyder’s administration to be charged for the debacle, the Associated Press reports.

The official actions (or inactions) that led to this moment

The state’s Department of Environmental Quality downplayed months of complaints from Flint residents that their water was discolored, smelly, and undrinkable. General Motors stopped using the water in its Flint plant, saying it was too corrosive. But the state didn’t think to ask if the water might also be corroding the city’s lead pipes.

Even after the city announced the water was briefly contaminated with a different bacteria and, later, chemicals that cause cancer, state officials insisted that nothing was seriously wrong. A leaked report from the federal Environmental Protection Agency warning of lead contamination was dismissed as the work of a “rogue employee.” When pediatricians in Flint reported a spike in lead in children’s blood, a state referred to it as “data” — with the scare quotes in the original.

The state admitted something was wrong only after scientists from Virginia Tech went to Flint to test the water and found elevated lead levels in 40 percent of homes.

The city switched back to water from Detroit. But the damage was long-lasting. Even with water filters, recent samples found that the city’s water has unacceptably high levels of lead.

The series of emergency managers who oversaw Flint as the crisis unfolded are the most directly responsible for using Flint River water in the first place. After the switch, the state Department of Environmental Quality refused to admit that the city’s water had serious problems.

It’s still not clear how much Michigan’s governor knew about the extent of the crisis, or when he knew it. Snyder pushed for the emergency manager law that took decisions out of the hands of Flint’s city council. A batch of emails he released last year made clear that his advisers were downplaying the situation.

But whether Snyder purposely turned a blind eye to the situation in Flint or was misled about its severity is still unclear.

Flint’s residents continue to live with resounding environmental problems

Flint, which is 57 percent black and where 42 percent of its 100,000 residents live in poverty, is still reeling from this health crisis. In fact, earlier this year, the state’s Civil Rights Commission issued a 131-page report on the crisis calling it a clear display of systemic racism.

Since the contamination was made public, residents with young children resorted to drinking and preparing food with bottled water because the city cannot guarantee that its tap water, even when filtered, is safe. According to WOOD, water in the area has improved, but people have still been directed to use bottled water or faucet filters until January 2020. That’s the deadline set for corroded lead pipes to be replaced for 18,000 homes.

Meanwhile, Flint residents are still getting some of the highest water bills in Michigan, but there is finally a plan in place to replace the pipes. The city will receive a settlement for at least $97 million in federal and state money to pay for new, lead-free pipes. A federal judge approved the plan to rebuild Flint’s water infrastructure and supporting ongoing health interventions in a lawsuit that sought compensation for widespread lead contamination caused by city officials. The lawsuit was filed last year by a coalition of religious, environmental, and civil rights activists arguing that the water in Flint was unsafe to drink and that state and city officials were in direct violation of the federal Safe Drinking Water Act.

“For the first time, there will be an enforceable commitment to get the lead pipes out of the ground,” said Dimple Chaudhary, a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, in a statement.

Experts: The Great Barrier Reef cannot be saved

2017-05-27T08:20:07-04:00

Photo of a fire coral that experienced severe bleaching in the 2016 mass bleaching event. | The Ocean Agency / XL Catlin Seaview Survey / Richard Vevers

It’s official. The Great Barrier Reef cannot be saved.

The prognosis comes from the Australian government’s Reef 2050 advisory committee, made up of experts and scientists responsible for managing the reef’s future.

In the more optimistic times of 2015, the committee put out a report on how to best preserve the reef. But now two of the committee’s experts have told the Guardian that the plan is no longer feasible “due to the dramatic impacts of climate change.”

Instead, they recommend that the goal be revised to “maintain the ecological function” of the Great Barrier Reef. And the reef may now have a better shot of being listed as a “World Heritage site in danger,” a designation the Australian government has fought for for years.

Record temperatures have killed almost half of the coral in the Great Barrier Reef

One reason for the bleaker forecast for the reef is the record ocean temperatures for the second year in a row that produced mass bleaching along the reef, leaving almost half of the coral dead.

The latest aerial surveys released by scientists in April show a recent bleaching event almost as severe as the record bleaching of 2016 that left two-thirds of the reef damaged. Bleaching occurs when extreme heat forces algae to abandon coral, turning them pale white.

In 2016, El Niño was responsible for a spike in ocean temperatures, which led to an unprecedented level of bleaching along the northern third of the reef. Scientists found as many as 95 percent of the corals surveyed in 2016 were severely bleached.

Bleaching is not necessarily fatal for coral, but 2016 was also the highest level of coral mortality ever recorded on the Great Barrier Reef. In the worst-affected area, a 435-mile region in the north near Cooktown, Australia, as much as 67 percent of shallow-water corals died.

This year, scientists says climate change and rising ocean temperatures are behind the bleaching of the reef, with bleaching spread further south, hitting the middle third particularly hard. Only the southern third of the reef is unharmed.

Scientists say it’s too soon to calculate this year’s coral death toll, but it’s already clear the damage extends further south than last year.

Bleached coral reefs can recover, but rising ocean temperatures are making this increasingly difficult

Scientists have now documented four major bleaching episodes along the Great Barrier Reef — 1998, 2002, 2016, and now 2017 — which means that most of the reef has undergone some form of severe bleaching in the past 18 years. (If you want to read more about why recent bleaching events are putting the reef in serious jeopardy, you should check out Brad Plumer’s excellent explainer).

Corals can bounce back from bleaching. But recovery is a slow and uneven process, particularly for coral that are centuries old.

“It takes at least a decade for a full recovery of even the fastest-growing corals, so mass bleaching events 12 months apart offers zero prospect of recovery for reefs that were damaged in 2016,” said James Kerry, one of the researchers at James Cook University’s Australian Research Council Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, in a statement on the most recent findings.

Complicating coral recovery now is the fact that the bouts of bleaching are growing longer and more severe, while the much-needed recovery periods are shorter and less frequent.

The culprit? Record-high ocean temperatures that don’t appear to be dropping anytime soon. As you can see in the map below, this February marked yet another unseasonably hot month. NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch recorded abnormal heat stress at nearly every point along Australia’s eastern coast from February 21 to 27, 2017.

Source: NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch | Sarah Frostenson / Vox" data-portal-copyright="Sarah Frostenson / Vox" />

Mark Eakin, coordinator of Coral Reef Watch, told NASA that this is alarming because the current bleaching along the Great Barrier Reef is ongoing.

“Unlike past global bleaching events (in 1998 and 2010) that lasted less than 12 months, this event is in its 33rd month and shows no sign of stopping,” he said. “It has been the longest, most widespread, and most damaging coral bleaching event ever recorded.”

What’s more, some experts believe efforts to combat coral bleaching have been in vain. Jon Brodie, a researcher at James Cook University and water quality expert, told the Guardian that projects to improve Australia’s water quality, which were at the heart of the government’s response, were failing.

“Last year was bad enough, this year is a disaster year,” Brodie told the Guardian. “The federal government is doing nothing really, and the current programs, the water quality management is having very limited success. It’s unsuccessful.”

The real answer to stop coral bleaching lies in reducing our CO2 emissions, which are causing ocean waters to warm. But emissions are not on track to stay below the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold, and coral reefs could perish if the planet continues to warm.

As Terry Hughes, head of the Australian Research Council Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, said in a statement, the “window to do so is rapidly closing.” Otherwise, we are looking at unabated bleaching of the reef.

Here’s a short video researchers compiled of aerial shots that capture the extent of bleaching along the Great Barrier Reef in 2017:

Another Obamacare insurer just quit, leaving 25 Missouri counties with no options

2017-05-24T14:53:00-04:00

Another health insurer will quit the Obamacare marketplace next year, leaving 19,000 Obamacare enrollees with no options in 2018.

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas City announced Wednesday that it will not sell coverage on the Obamacare marketplaces next year. The plan has experienced significant losses in recent years and is scared off by the current uncertainty over the health law’s future.

“Like many other health insurers across the country, we have been faced with challenges in this market,” Blue KC chief executive Danette Wilson said in a statement. “Through 2016, we have lost more than $100 million. This is unsustainable for our company. We have a responsibility to our members and the greater community to remain stable and secure, and the uncertain direction of this market is a barrier to our continued participation.”

Blue KC currently sells coverage in 32 counties in both Kansas and Missouri. Its exit will hit Missouri hardest, however, because it will leave 25 counties in the Western part of the state with no Obamacare insurers.

Cynthia Cox with the Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that the area has about 19,000 Obamacare enrollees.

The Affordable Care Act doesn’t have a back-up plan for this situation. There is nothing in the law that compels health insurance plans to participate in the marketplaces. States can take action to increase participation. Nevada, for example, requires health insurers who want to bid on Medicaid contracts to sell marketplace coverage, too.

It’s possible that another health plan could sign up to sell coverage in the area. This scenario recently played out in Tennessee: After Humana’s exit from Obamacare left 16 counties surrounding Knoxville with no health plans, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee decided it would cover that area.

But it’s also possible that no insurer will show up. The nonprofit Blue plans have, so far, been the marketplaces’ backbone. They tend to be the insurers who turn up to sell coverage in the areas no for-profit insurer wants. The fact that it’s the Blue Cross plan quitting the Missouri market and leaving parts of it bare is a worrisome sign for the state, suggesting there are fewer health plans left to save the day.

Why are some places facing a future with zero Obamacare insurers? I did a deep dive into the situation in Tennessee, and much of that analysis applies to Missouri, too.
Insurers might be lured into these empty areas with the promise of a monopoly market. But so far, that hasn’t been a big draw — and I wrote a bit more about that here.
Want to see what Obamacare would look like if other big insurers quit? Sarah Frostenson and I built an interactive that does just that.

Mar-a-Lago has a sinkhole. They’re a serious problem in Florida.

2017-05-24T16:00:23-04:00

On Monday, a sinkhole opened in front of President Trump’s private club, Mar-a-Lago. | Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images

There’s a 4-foot-wide sinkhole outside President Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, apparently caused by a recently installed water main, according to a Palm Beach traffic alert issue Monday.

The news prompted an inevitable flurry of wisecracks, from Vox’s own Matt Yglesias among others.

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But sinkholes aren’t all that funny when they happen in your backyard. The US Geological Service estimates that sinkhole damages average at least $300 million a year. And Florida leads the nation in sinkhole damage, reporting some of the most shocking incidents in recent years.

There was the sinkhole in 2013 near Tampa that swallowed an entire bedroom in a house, killing one of the residents. And later that same year there was a 60-foot-wide sinkhole outside Walt Disney World amusement park in Orlando that destroyed a resort (luckily none of the guests were injured).

We’re still really bad at predicting when sinkholes might occur, as there are few warning signs. As a result, sinkholes can often be catastrophic.

What’s more, we could be seeing more sinkholes as our population grows and climate change triggers more extreme events like tropical storms and flooding (although the science here is tenuous and more research is needed).

Sinkholes happen when water erodes the soil, making deep, unstable holes under ground

A sinkhole is formed when water pools underground because it doesn’t have a way to drain naturally and instead slowly erodes the underlying rock. Over time, this process weakens the subterranean structure and creates a cavernous hole that eventually causes the ground to collapse.

Generally speaking, sinkholes are most prevalent where the bedrock is made up of rock like limestone, dolomite, and gypsum that dissolve over time from water — particularly acidic water, or most rainwater in the US. This type of soil structure is referred to as “karst” and can be thought of as a block of Swiss cheese — with holes beneath the earth’s surface formed by groundwater eroding the rock.

Below is a map of regions in the US where this type of soil structure is most common. The USGS estimates that anywhere from 35 to 40 percent of soil in the US is composed of karst.

And as you can see, large swaths of Florida are at risk of sinkholes:

In Florida, nearly all sinkholes are the result of rocks beneath the surface gradually dissolving from rainfall and groundwater.

There are two other sinkhole types. One is known as “cover subsidence” and is most common in sandier soils. The process of soil leaching into a hole below ground is usually very slow — taking years or even hundreds of thousands of years — and is most common in areas like the Shenandoah Valley where there are many naturally occurring caves.

And then there are “cover-collapse” sinkholes, which can happen in a matter of hours and are far more dramatic and headline-grabbing. They usually occur in areas with large amounts of clay in the soil; as soil is deposited into a hole below, an arched cavity is created just beneath the surface that moves upward as more soil is eroded.

According to the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation, reported claims from sinkhole damages nearly tripled over four years, from 2,300 in 2006 to 6,700 in 2010, and cost Florida insurers $1.4 billion in damages over this time period. The office also found an increase in reported sinkholes in parts of South Florida where they traditionally had not been an issue.

(State insurance officials told Weather.com there’s no geological explanation driving this spike and it’s instead a reflection of better reporting practices and, in some instances, dubious claims.)

Climate change might make sinkholes happen more frequently, but remote sensing could let us detect them sooner

Sinkholes occur naturally, but can also be triggered by extreme weather events like flooding and tropical storms, and other kinds of human activity. (It’s thought that the installation of a new water main on South Boulevard triggered the sinkhole in front of Mar-a-Lago.)

Now some scientists are trying to better understand the relationship between sinkholes and climate change. It’s a relatively new question in climate science, and at this stage, researchers haven’t definitively established a relationship. But Harley Means, a geologist at the Florida Geological Survey (FGS), told New Scientist in 2013 that studies that examined periods of high sinkhole activity with corresponding climatic conditions could potentially provide evidence of a cause-and-effect relationship.

The USGS doesn’t currently collect national data on sinkholes, which makes it incredibly difficult for scientists to determine if sinkholes are increasing in frequency or severity — let alone what is driving these changes.

But there is hope that a new remote sensing technology that NASA developed might make detecting sinkholes earlier. It’s called interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR), and it works through having satellites and drones capture changes in ground elevation. The thought is that because sinkholes often show signs of gradually caving downward (though not always), InSAR can be used to detect when a sinkhole has reached a critical point and collapse is imminent.

Ronald Blom, a geologist with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, cautioned the Atlantic that “InSAR is not a magic bullet” and won’t capture every sinkhole, but it could be useful for detecting sinkholes earlier.