RSN: Al Franken | Inflection Point

06 June 20

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06 June 20

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Al Franken | Inflection Point

Al Franken, AlFranken.com
Franken writes: "Late last week Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson said that outrage at the murder of George Floyd 'may be an inflection point.'"

That’s when I thought to myself, “I hope he’s right. I hope this is an inflection point. But, inexplicably, it never is. It wasn’t after Michael Brown, or after Trayvon Martin, or Philando Castile, or Ahmaud Arbery.

Then a few things happened. Demonstrations across the country continued to increase in size and number, showing that an incredibly diverse and growing number of Americans are, yes, angry, but also deadly serious and not going away.

Then came the president’s insane photo op and the indictments of the three Minneapolis police officers who abetted Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd. Americans began to feel that justice might actually be served this time. The demonstrations swelled yet again across the nation.

It’s beginning to look as if this might actually be an inflection point after all. But real, nationwide reform will be possible only if Democrats beat Donald Trump and his enablers in the Senate. If Democrats win both the White House and the Senate, Americans will expect them to comprehensively take on the brutalization of people of color that has been an unrelenting part our country’s history.

These are just some of the elements of reform that I would propose that Democrats take up in the first 100 days:

• A National Use-of-Force Standard – Here’s a shocking fact: We do not know how many Americans are killed every year by police. As of today, agencies representing only 40% of law enforcement officers report data to the National Use-of-Force Data Base. The day Joe Biden is sworn in, Congress needs to pass and the president sign legislation requiring every law enforcement agency in the country to report its data. The same day Biden should appoint a commission to study the data with the goal of writing a National-Use-of-Force Standard. Police forces that do not meet the standard must then be required to sign onto a consent-decree with the federal government like the dozen or so that the Obama Administration enforced in places like Ferguson.


• Consent Decrees – The Obama Administration entered into fifteen consent decree agreements with law enforcement agencies that had been using excessive force. Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ last act going out the door was to make it far more difficult for the Justice Department to enter into and enforce consent decrees with police departments that have a record of bad behavior. The new AG should reverse Sessions’ final order on Day One.


• Make it Easier to Get Rid of Bad Cops – Police have an essential and enormously difficult job. It is in the public’s interest that police be able to organize and bargain for their salaries and benefits. But too often police unions have used their strong negotiating position to make it harder to get rid of bad cops like Derek Chauvin who have an extensive history of excessively violent, racist behavior. Local independent review boards need the authority to override the unions to get rid of the Derek Chauvins. And those officers should not be able simply to move on to another police department in a separate jurisdiction where they can continue terrorizing members of that community.


• Training – In the Senate I led efforts to reauthorize and fund Crisis Intervention Training, which teaches police and corrections officers to recognize and successfully manage situations fueled by mental illness. A crucial piece of CIT is De-Escalation Training. After Miami Dade County adopted CIT training for each and every cop, police shootings plummeted from an average of two per month to a total of six over the next eight years. That’s not only saved lives. It has saved Miami taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements and improved bond ratings. And yet, four Republican senators (Coburn, Lee, Lankford, and Cruz) each placed holds on my bill to reduce the $25 million authorization I was seeking. (I tricked them and got it passed in an omnibus bill at a higher authorization.)


• Implicit Bias Training – This training is designed to expose people to their own unconscious biases. We all have them. For example, I think Jews are, on average, funnier than non-Jews like Coburn, Lee, Lankford, and Cruz. See what I did there? Police officers really need to be exposed to their own implicit biases and be given the tools to adjust their unconscious patterns of thinking and eliminate, or at least reduce, their own discriminatory behaviors. Implicit Bias Training has been proven to be more effective than giving police departments armored vehicles.


• Reform Qualified Immunity – Qualified immunity is a legal concept that protects public officials from being sued by civilians who have been harmed by their actions. It serves the purpose of allowing government officials to carry out their duties without fear of constantly being harassed by lawsuits. But in practice it can give sweeping legal immunity to officials (say, cops) who can inflict violence on citizens and even take their lives. Because of a few Supreme Court decisions, the balance has swung in the direction of providing protection to some bad actors. Congress has the power to change that. And it should.

Earlier this week, Terrence Floyd wiped away tears as he spoke to a crowd gathered at the site of his brother’s murder.  Hate and destruction, he implored them, “won’t bring my brother back.”  The crowd roared. “Let’s do this another way,” he shouted.  “Let’s stop thinking that our voice don’t matter, and vote.” Another roar. “Educate yourself…Educate yourself and know who you’re voting for. And that’s how we’re going to hit them, because it’s a lot of us. It’s a lot of us.”

Donald Trump didn’t count on Terrence Floyd. He didn’t count on the millions of peaceful protesters, mostly young people – African American, Latino, Native American, Asian-American, and White Americans. They, like George Floyd’s brother, Terrence, have taken the lead. Let’s follow through – past November. And to a more just and joyful future.

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People wait to say final goodbyes as the casket of George Floyd leaves after a memorial service. (photo: Salwan Georges/WP)

"Get Your Knee Off Our Necks": At Memorial for George Floyd, Mourners Condemn 400 Years of Racism
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "In Minneapolis, members of George Floyd89s family, loved ones and supporters gathered for a tribute to his life. During the memorial service, people stood in silence for eight minutes and 46 seconds - the amount of time police officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on Floyd's neck as he pleaded for his life."

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AP journalist Robert Bumsted reminds a police officer that the press are considered 'essential workers.' NYPD officers surrounded, shoved and yelled expletives at him and his co-worker. (photo: Wong Maye-E/AP)

Teargassed, Beaten Up, Arrested: What Freedom of the Press Looks Like in the US Right Now
Poppy Noor, Guardian UK
Noor writes: "Caught in the middle of a scrum covering protests in Minneapolis on Saturday, photojournalist Ed Ou could feel his hands and face were wet. For a long time, he didn't know if it was teargas, pepper spray, or blood - in the end, it turned out to be a combination of all three."
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'In response to the pandemic, immigrants in at least a dozen ICE facilities have announced protests and strikes.' (photo: Señor Salme/NYT)

Fear, Illness and Death in ICE Detention: How a Protest Grew on the Inside
Seth Freed Wessler, The New York Times
Wessler writes: "The tightly rolled piece of lined notebook paper had 'important' written on the outside in Spanish. Nilson Barahona-Marriaga, almost six feet tall with a scruffy beard and a shaved head, an immigrant from Honduras who had lived in Georgia for 20 years, unfurled it as if it were a precious scroll and began to read: 'We wanted to tell you that we are going to go on a hunger strike. We ask you to join us.'"
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'There is no guarantee that any drugs, vaccines, or tests will be provided to whoever requires them regardless of ability to pay.' (photo: Thana Prasongsin/Getty Images)

The Way We Produce and Patent Drugs Will Kill COVID-19 Patients
Leigh Phillips, Jacobin
Phillips writes: "It's hard to overstate the wickedness of Big Pharma's lobbying efforts to ensure patent protection for COVID-19 drugs and potential vaccines. But the real architect of these crimes is not CEOs or shareholders, but the market."

s the veil is starting to be lifted on the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic compared to our initial, very limited understanding, we are also learning how, far from viewing all of humanity as being “in this together,” pharmaceutical firms and their lobbyists view this disaster as a golden opportunity.

The vicious fights we’ve seen in the last couple of months between US states and EU member states over access to tests, ventilators, and personal protective equipment (PPE) is nothing compared to the global brawl that is emerging over patents with respect to drugs, diagnostics, and vaccines — even before they have been identified.

The tales we have heard of jurisdictions buying up drugs claimed to be effective against COVID-19 and causing worldwide shortages, of orders suddenly going missing and subsequently found to have been redirected to a wealthier buyer, of prioritization of distribution based on ability to pay rather than on need, and of profiteering that sees the price of the likes of masks, gloves, and hand sanitizer soar, is child’s play compared to the emerging wickedness of patent protection and profiteering with respect to COVID-19 drugs and potential vaccines.

VIP Treatment

In March, drug firm Gilead sought an extension to its patent monopoly on a potential treatment for the coronavirus, the existing drug remdesivir, and only backed down in the face of outrage. It is still likely to charge $4,000 per patient for the drug even though the cost is around $9 per patient.

This month, we have seen the British CEO of French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi, Paul Hudson, declare that the US government would get access to any vaccine first because it had contributed the most funding — a quid pro quo demanded by Washington.

The European Commission responded by saying that the firm had received tens of millions in domestic public funding, while the German press denounced the company as “soulless” and “disloyal” for wanting to squeeze governments into giving greater subsidies. A furious Emmanuel Macron summoned Hudson to the Élysée Palace to explain himself, and the normally pro-free-market French leader insisted that any vaccine be produced as a “public good for the world, not subject to the laws of the market.” Sanofi quickly rowed back its comments, with its chairman later assuring that no country would receive preferential access.

This is the second time that the Trump administration has been caught trying to poach therapeutics from elsewhere. In March, it was revealed that the US government had offered large sums of money to a German company, CureVac, with a vaccine candidate to relocate its research division to the United States and develop the vaccine “for the United States only.” Berlin denounced the move and offered its own incentives to try to ensure that the firm stays in Germany.

Meanwhile, AstraZeneca’s CEO Pascal Soriot has also said that the UK will enjoy priority for the fruits of its COVID-19 research endeavors.

But Gilead, Sanofi, AstraZeneca, and Washington are far from the only villains. In May, diplomats from the UK, Switzerland, Japan, and other countries with significant pharmaceutical sectors joined the United States in working to have language removed from a World Health Organization (WHO) resolution that referenced the right of countries to override patents during health emergencies.

It is grotesque for nations to be pushing and shoving to get themselves to the front of the line to access COVID-19 therapeutics, but to work to prevent access to them by those least well-off is another order of deviltry.

Uneven and Unnecessary

History is repeating itself in any case. In the mid-1990s after deaths from HIV/AIDS had peaked and begun to decline in the developed world thanks to the discovery of antiretroviral medicines (ARVs), the HIV/AIDS epidemic continued to cripple South Africa primarily due to the high cost of the drugs — some $10,000 per year per patient. The newly democratic nation was threatening to produce or import generic drugs to combat the disease, but the pharmaceutical industry was steadfastly opposed and the Clinton administration, whose health care policy was at the time overseen by Hillary Clinton, threatened Pretoria with trade sanctions.

In 2001, however, after years of campaigning by groups like South Africa’s Treatment Action Group, a militant and science-based AIDS activist organization, and of negotiations by developing nations, the Global South finally managed to win an amendment to the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), the “Doha Declaration,” which clarified that governments do not have to respect IP protections during public health emergencies.

Large pharmaceutical firms have never been happy with this defeat. Over the years, the United States in particular has attempted to restrict the number of medicines the declaration covers, while most developing countries have insisted that all drugs should count. The European Union has positioned itself somewhere in the middle, suggesting a long — but still finite — list of drugs that the Doha Declaration covers.

And now, in the past few weeks, diplomats from countries with sizable pharmaceutical sectors have pressed to strip any reference to the Doha Declaration in a resolution on COVID-19 at the World Health Assembly, the WHO’s decision-making body.

Instead, the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations (IFPMA) and its diplomatic water carriers argued that firms need their patents to recover their investment in therapeutic research, development, and production. The sector’s business model requires high prices in the developed world first for a number of years before it is willing to countenance production of low-cost generic versions.

“We have never needed innovation so much as now, and this is probably the worst possible time to weaken intellectual property,” the trade association said. Equitable access to drugs and vaccines is desirable, they feel, but this should occur essentially through charity, through government donation and partnerships.

The World Health Assembly resolution, which had been sponsored by the European Union, in the end did reference Doha, recognized COVID-19 drugs, tests, or vaccines are a “global public good,” and encourages the development of a voluntary patent pool to support equitable and affordable access to any. The United States did not vote against the resolution, but it immediately distanced itself from the document via an objection note, saying that it “sends the wrong message to innovators who will be essential to the solutions the whole world needs.”

Seizing the opportunity to present China as committed to the global commonwealth in contrast to its American rival, President Xi Jinping immediately declared that the vaccines that it is developing “will be treated as a public good.”

But development and medical NGOs such as Oxfam International and Médecins Sans Frontiers (MSF) were quick to remind that while the passage of the resolution is a victory, it has many flaws. Most egregiously, it does not require pharmaceutical firms to pool their patents, which would have allowed anyone with the capacity to manufacture generic copies of therapeutics to do so. There is also no guarantee that any drugs, vaccines, or tests will be provided to whoever requires them regardless of ability to pay.

This is not merely a question of justice with respect to those who cannot afford treatment; such market-based restriction of access encourages the spread of this infectious disease as those unable to pay — and the poorest billions of the planet count among them — continue to spread the virus. That is, universal, free access is in the interest of all humanity, even the rich.

As a result, these organizations want to see a two-step approach: a mandatory patent pool to allow international collaboration, sharing of knowledge, and a one-stop-shop for generic producers; and what is called compulsory licensing at the national level.

Under compulsory licensing, a government authorizes the use of intellectual property without the need to seek the patent owner’s consent, and pays the rights holder a fee decided via legislation or by some other public body instead of negotiation in the market between buyer and seller. A number of countries, including Canada, Germany, Israel, Chile, and Ecuador have already passed compulsory licensing legislation or resolutions backing compulsory licensing with respect to any COVID-19 therapeutics.

Costa Rica was the initiator of a request that the WHO set up a voluntary patent pool, potentially via the existing UN-backed Medicines Patent Pool (MPP), which was established in 2010 to expand access to tuberculosis, HIV, and hepatitis therapeutics. The MPP negotiates voluntary patent agreements with pharmaceutical companies to enable greater access for generic manufacturers. Extending this system to cover COVID-19 should make it easier for generic manufacturers to also produce these new drugs and vaccines at a lower cost than if they had to shop around to each patent owner.

But it is crucial to understand that a voluntary system, while perhaps the best we can currently hope for, provides an alternative to compulsory licensing. Even those who are at the forefront of working to extend access to drugs, tests, and vaccines, such as the chair of the MPP, Marie-Paule Kieny (also a special COVID-19 adviser to French president Emmanuel Macron), and the MPP’s director, Charles Gore, feel that right now it is essential that any patent spats that could inhibit product development be avoided at this crucial time.

Without an urgent establishment of a voluntary global master plan, Kieny and Gore argue, “the situation could quickly devolve into a competitive, litigious, country-by-country scrum for interventions in which some regions emerge as winners but most others will be losers — and with deadly consequences.” As with the production of generic HIV/AIDS drugs, some countries were able to stand up to US and other Western intimidation while others weren’t, and their populations suffered as a consequence.

Blame the Game

Prathiba Singh, a judge sitting on the High Court of Delhi, a career intellectual property litigator, and one of the authors of India’s intellectual property legislation, makes a similar argument. Writing in The Hindu, she worries that without a trustworthy and voluntary UN patent pool while patent holders create barriers to use of their IP on the basis of patent rights, there is a risk that “the world will start despising patents” and push forward with compulsory licensing.

Singh, a supporter of IP protections, argues that a rush to compulsory licensing or even state acquisition would inhibit innovation at a time when we need it more than ever. “To protect the sanctity and integrity of patent systems, and in order to ensure that an anti-IP sentiment is not generated globally,” a WHO-orchestrated patent pool is the best option. She reminds pharmaceutical firms that they are still likely to make billions under such a regime. After all, seven billion people is the largest market there has ever been for any product.

But all of this is essentially an admission of defeat, born of a belief that innovation only happens through the market. As Singh puts it, the purpose of creating intellectual property rights is for the common good. The quid pro quo that IP represents that in exchange for the costs of innovation, firms are awarded a limited-term monopoly on their discovery or invention.

However, as economist Mariana Mazzucato has shown in her investigations into innovation policy and the economics of innovation, market actors tend to be loath to spend resources on fundamental research, which typically offers an unknown return on investment. The bulk of innovation across most sectors over the past half-century, from mobile telephony and computer miniaturization to biotechnology and clean energy, was in fact developed in government or university labs, or via public-sector risk-sharing.

A 2015 report from California’s Institute for Health and Socio-Economic Policy found that of the top 100 pharmaceutical companies, 64 spent twice as much on marketing and sales than on research and development (R&D), 58 spent three times, 43 spent five times, and 27 spent ten times.

Facing down the globalized world’s first pandemic, we don’t have time at the moment to entirely decommodify the pharmaceutical sector. So perhaps a voluntary patent pool is the best we can hope for right now.

But over the long term, as we emerge from this pandemic, we should reject the notion that pharmaceutical discovery and production needs to be performed within the market. Just as many countries recognize that health care is too important to be left to the vagaries of the capitalist mode of allocation of resources, we need to remove the pharmaceutical sector from such competition, as well. We know that the public sector already does most of the work here, anyway.

Equally important, it is essential that we begin to recognize that the villainy of Gilead, Sanofi, AstraZeneca, the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations is simply the way that markets work. The US, UK, and Swiss diplomats are not wrong when they say that pharmaceutical firms need patents in order to charge sufficiently high prices to recoup their costs and make a profit. It is not “crude competition” that is at fault, as suggested in a well-meaning open letter signed by some 140 current and former world leaders calling for a patent-free, low-cost “people’s vaccine” that is free at the point of need. It is not “corporate capitalism,” for small businesses are just as beholden to this incentive structure.

All businesses, large and small, whether owned by private individuals, shareholders, or by workers or consumers (in the case of cooperatives) are governed by the same requirement to protect their profits or they will go under.

Thus, it is not the diplomats, lobbyists, or pharma executives who are the anti-humanist criminals, who are merely captives of the blind imperatives of the market, but the market system itself.

At the time firms were making their decisions about patent protection strategy with respect to COVID-19, the projection of deaths by the end of this year was as high as forty million, according to Imperial College London’s COVID-19 Response Team on March 26, in the absence of interventions. About fifteen million of these would occur in the Global South, some two and a half million in sub-Saharan Africa, and just over three million in Latin America and the Caribbean.

This was the infamous report that made everyone pause, the document that, alongside harrowing footage of overwhelmed Italian intensive care units filled with patients dying alone and scared, prompted such profound dread — and such unprecedented responses.

A pair of months later, as more about the disease has been revealed, as the scale of the threat has receded somewhat, and as we now see pharmaceutical firms squabble over threats to the patents for the presumptive suite of drugs, diagnostics, and ultimately vaccines to treat COVID-19, it is worth remembering that dread and those numbers.

Moral Calculation

Of course, there have been interventions, and we know much more about the virus, the disease it causes, and what medical and social interventions are working best to reduce transmission and prevent the worst outcomes.

In the developing world, a number of nations have had remarkable success in flattening the curve. Having been given a head start, many African nations engaged in pandemic planning and imposed social distancing measures (of varying levels of restriction on freedom of movement and association) much earlier than rich countries with respect to the timing of outbreaks. And some of the better-off developing states such as Senegal, Ethiopia, and Ghana might even consider themselves among the first tier of nations with respect to contact tracing, innovative and low-cost testing techniques, and commitment to health care provision regardless of ability to pay.

It also appears that the relative lack of road infrastructure in many parts of Africa that at other times is a frustrating barrier to economic development for its restriction of travel and trade, in the time of COVID-19 also restricts transmission of the disease.

Nevertheless, many countries in the Global South are performing much less well than the likes of Ethiopia and Senegal.

At the time of writing, the likes of Tanzania, Nigeria, and Somalia in Africa and of Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, and Chile in South America had been particularly badly hit. On May 20, the number of new daily cases in Latin America overtook the United States and Europe. The test positivity rate is 91 percent in Algeria and 87 percent in Sudan, which means it is very likely that large numbers of cases are going unrecognized — what the Economist magazine is calling “ghost hotspots.”

Doctors and gravediggers from African metropoles like Kano, Nigeria, and Mogadishu, Somalia, report being overwhelmed with infections and burials, again anecdotally suggesting the impacts in these regions are much greater than detailed in official case and mortality reports. Tanzania stopped releasing data three weeks ago after a spike in cases.

It is a mixed bag. Last week, the World Health Organization issued fresh projections for outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa using a model that for the first time took into account these sorts of specificities of the region, including meager road infrastructure and the continent’s younger demographic profile. There is actually a lower risk of exposure and transmission in much of Africa than there is in the developed world. Now with a greater understanding of the epidemiology than just weeks ago, the WHO report is much more optimistic than the early warnings from Imperial College.

Nevertheless, the numbers remain troubling. Even taking into account interventions, a quarter of a billion Africans are likely to be infected this year, the new WHO numbers say, and as many as 190,000 are likely to die. And that’s just 2020. The virus is here to stay until we develop a vaccine. And while transmission is lower than in the Global North, limited health care capacity is at much greater risk of being overwhelmed. The knock-on effects of the disease on other illnesses such as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria could double that figure.

And we are learning that survival, as welcome as that is over death, is not akin to recovering from a common cold or seasonal flu — regardless of what region of the world we consider. In its berserk march through the body, the virus is not just capable of inflicting profound potentially long-term or permanent damage to the lungs, but can also cause liver and kidney failure, strokes, seizures, neurological injury, blood clots, and heart attacks. Some 44 million Africans are still projected to have some sort of symptoms, resulting in anything from a couple weeks of sniffles to chronic lung conditions to brain damage.

There will not be 40 million dead, as in the original, worst projections. But when we consider the actions of the presumptive COVID-19 patent holders, at the time they made their decisions, they knew that up to 40 million could die, and still they pressed forward to protect their intellectual property. And in any case, there already have been, at the time of writing, 350,000 deaths and 5.5 million infected. And every effort to overcome patent protections will reduce the numbers of dead and infected and every effort to defend them will increase those numbers.

In terms of moral calculation even if not (yet) in outcome, how is this any different from some of the worst crimes against humanity of the twentieth century, the Ukrainian Holodomor or the Great Chinese Famine, where the crime was not that decision-makers consciously set out to kill millions as in the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide, but rather the crime lay in that they knew that millions could be killed as the result of their policies?

Such comparisons are not tossed out thoughtlessly, but deliberately, soberly, and fully cognizant of the resonances, for the ethics of decisions taken by such firms must have initially been assessed in those early days knowing full well the upper bound of how many could die. And now that the projections are much lower but still truly awful, they continue to act in the same way, always in the knowledge of what the consequences of their actions might be.

And yet, and yet, and yet, they also have had no choice but to do what they do.

The architect of these crimes is not a Big Pharma CEO, but the market.

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Chile's 'historic' protest march from above. (photo: BBC)

Social Progress Deferred in Chile
Angela Vergara, NACLA
Vergara writes: "The shopping mall is the icon of neoliberal Chile. Since the last years of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1989), they have mushroomed throughout the country, altering even the most remote landscapes."

EXCERPTS: 

Covid-19 and Chilean Workers

Chile registered the first Covid-19 cases in early March and traced them back to Chilean tourists traveling to Europe and the stop of cruise ships in the south. As of May 30, the government has confirmed nearly 100 thousand cases and over 1,000 deaths. The numbers keep rising. More than 80 percent of the cases are concentrated in the metropolitan region and Santiago, the capital city of about 5.6 million people. Because of its overcrowded transportation system and high-rise and low-income apartment buildings, the city has been especially vulnerable to the spread of the virus. In reality, only the rich can afford social distancing. Early government responses were disorganized and uncoordinated. They included partial quarantine measures in specific neighborhoods but not entire cities, unclear reporting, public disagreements regarding the exact figures, and disputes between the Ministry of Public Health and the head of the medical community. President Sebastián Piñera’s low approval ratings and the loss of legitimacy of the country’s most important public institutions, including the police force, have worsened the sanitary crisis. 

Government Responses

The government responses to the impact of the pandemic on employment have benefited large capital enterprises over workers. In March, the Ministry of Labor announced new regulations for remote work to protect employees’ rights when working from home. While the law guarantees salary and benefits, labor leaders and social organizations are concerned about the re-negotiation of the work-day in extraordinary circumstances and with little input from unions.

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Residents plant mangroves on the coast of West Aceh District in Indonesia on Feb. 21, 2020. Mangroves play a crucial role in stabilizing the coastline, providing protection from storms, waves and tidal erosion. (photo: Dekyon Eon/Opn Images/Barcroft Media/Getty Images)

Mangroves Threatened by Sea Level Rise Could Disappear by 2050
Jordan Davidson, EcoWatch
Davidson writes: 

angroves play a vital role in capturing carbon from the atmosphere. Mangrove forests are tremendous assets in the fight to stem the climate crisis. They store more carbon than a rainforest of the same size.

However, they are under threat from sea level rise. A new study found that if emissions continue unabated, mangroves will not be able to keep up and could disappear in 30 years, as The Verge reported.

The new study published in the journal Science found that mangroves will start to die out if sea levels rise just six millimeters per year. However, mangroves are more likely to survive when sea level rise is less than 5 millimeters (about 0.2 inches) per year, which is projected for low-emissions scenarios this century, according to a Rutgers University statement.

"Under high-emissions scenarios, rates of sea-level rise on many tropical coastlines will exceed 7 millimeters per year, the rate at which we concluded there's a 6.2 percent probability mangroves can sustain growth," said co-author Erica Ashe, a post-doctoral scientist in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Rutgers University, in the statement. "The loss of these mangrove ecosystems could result in increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and fewer vital buffers against storm surges in the long run."

Around the world, there are 80 different species of mangrove trees. All of them grow in warm, shallow, coastal waters around the tropics. They spread their roots in sediment that is under the water, while their upper trunks, branches and leaves are above the water. The forests usually flood twice a day during high tide, according to Newsweek.

They play a crucial role in stabilizing the coastline, providing protection from storms, waves, and tidal erosion. Their root systems provide a habitat for fish and other animals, according to Newsweek. Mangrove forests work their magic by pulling freshwater from salty seawater to serve as a nursery for fish, crustaceans and shellfish. But if their roots are completely submerged for too long, the mangroves will drown.

As The Verge noted, mangrove forests are a boon to people and the planet, which is why scientists in Florida have sought to use mangroves as a defense for coastal communities from the ravages of the climate crisis. However, for mangroves to help us, we will first need to help them.

"We have an opportunity here to take action and to keep the rates of sea level rise below these critical thresholds, which is part of the reason that this is an important study," says Ashe, as The Verge reported.

To figure out just how much sea level rise was too much for the mangroves, Ashe and her colleagues, led by Neil Saintilan from Macquarie University in Australia, examined sediment core samples from 78 locations around the world. Those samples shed light on how mangroves responded to past changes in the rate of sea level rise, which went from more than 10 millimeters (0.39 inches) per year nearly 10,000 years ago to almost stable around 4,000 years later, as Newsweek reported. They discovered that mangrove ecosystems only developed when rates of sea level rise dropped below about 7 millimeters a year.

"There was good news and bad news. The good news was that mangroves were clearly capable of surviving much higher rates of sea-level rise than we have around the world at present," Saintilan told Newsweek. "There were many examples where mangroves were able to keep pace with sea-level rise of 5 millimeters per year; the current rate is just over 3 millimeters per year."

"However, there was little evidence that mangroves could keep pace with sea-level rise of over 7 millimeters per year, and this threshold was lower for mangroves on coral reef settings, which failed to keep pace with sea-level rise above 5 millimeters per year. If the rate of sea-level rise doubles, mangroves are in serious trouble," he added.

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