Monica Contestabile 00:09
Hello. This is How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals, a podcast brought to you by Nature Careers, in partnership with Nature Sustainability.
I am Monica Contestabile, chief editor of Nature Sustainability.
This is the series where we meet the researchers working towards the Sustainable Development Goals agreed by the United Nations and world leaders in 2015.
Since then, in a huge global effort, thousands of academics have been using those targets to tackle the biggest problems that the planet faces today.
Each episode ends with a sponsored slot from La Trobe Institute for Sustainable Agriculture and Food in Melbourne, Australia, where we hear about how its researchers are focusing on the SDGs.
In this episode, we look at Sustainable Development Goal Number 14: To conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine sources for sustainable development. And hear from an American ocean scientist who measures the impact of mining for rare minerals on the world’s sea beds.
Beth Orcutt 01:28
I am Dr Beth Orcutt. I am the Vice President for Research and a senior research scientist at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in Maine in the United States.
Bigelow Laboratory is an independent research institution with a mission to kind of understand global ocean health and unlock its potential to improve the future for all life on the planet.
We primarily study life in the microscopic realm in the oceans, because they’re really the foundation of the ocean and its productivity and its health.
But we come with that from multiple disciplines, and we’ve been around for 50 years. This is our 50th anniversary.
The Sustainable Development Goal Number 14, I believe, is to conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine sources for sustainable development.
And so the Bigelow Laboratory kind of aligns and contributes to that goal by really understanding what the ocean is, how it functions, and what are the consequences of different decisions we might make about conserving it or using resources in the ocean.
Beth Orcutt 02:38
So my background is as a deep sea microbiologist. I’m fascinated by how microscopic life lives in really extreme environments on Earth, because I want to understand if life might exist on other planets.
Studying some of the deep sea ecosystems is really one of the best ways to think about that. There’s so many different types of microbes down there that do all kinds of crazy chemistry.
And so I got into this a little over 20 years ago, studying this. I’ve been on 35 different deep sea expeditions, really building a foundation of knowledge about life in the deep sea.
I think I got inspired to do this by watching documentaries about the Titanic and the discovery of the Titanic, and seeing some of that footage and the relics that were picked up.
It really, I mean, I think I broke our VCR tape that we made of the Telly Savalas documentary about that. I think that’s really where it got me started.
Beth Orcutt 03:47
So one of the issues I’m most concerned about in our oceans, and thinking about this sustainable development goal, is the emerging industry of deep sea mining.
When I was a student, this was kind of talked about as sci fi, like it wasn’t going to happen, right? Because it would cost so much money to go down there.
But that conversation has really changed over the last five years, and the idea here is that we would use very large vehicles – like you would use for mining on land – to scoop up the seafloor and pick up rocks in the form of these nodules and lift them up to the ocean surface and then bring them back to land for processing.
Or using open pit mining, style mining, where you would dig into the seafloor to get at some of those metals.
And the spatial scale on which we’re talking about doing this, any individual contractor trying to, for instance, mine for nodules, would be impacting an area of about 300 kilometres squared, or 120 miles squared per year for about 10 years, right?
And that’s like the size of small cities in the United States, like Charleston, Tampa. You would mine that spatial area every year, right?
So the scale of these impacts would dwarf the scale of impacts that we experience on land, and we really don’t understand what those potential impacts might be in the deep sea.
How would we say this is sustainable development? Because it would potentially cause permanent damage in these environments.
Beth Orcutt 05:32
I’ve been involved in a few studies to try to understand what the potential impacts of deep sea mining might be.
So the first study that I would point to is one that was led by my colleague, Dr Diva Amon, that came out in 2022.
That was a survey of all the scientific literature we could find the last 10 plus years about, what do we know about these ecosystems, and identifying where there are knowledge gaps.
We don’t even know how animals in these ecosystems reproduce, for example, like that’s a big knowledge gap for many of these environments.
For the few studies that have been done, to try to understand the impacts, or to look at comparable data sets, so for instance, there’s data about how ecosystems recover from deep sea trawling, for example, right?
And that is a similar type of impact in terms of ripping up rocks from the sea floor, removing animals that create structure.
So when you look at those data sets, you can see that recovery is very, very slow, if at all, especially for animals that attach to the seafloor and don’t move right.
So there are some studies that, for instance, you make an impact, and maybe fish come back because they’re scavengers, they can move around.
But the keystone species that create structure, like corals, like sponges, they have decades or longer recovery time scales, and it may not be the same species that come back.
There’s also some evidence from kind of prototype mining experiments, where a scientist has gone in and dredged the seafloor, has come back decades later, and it’s like the impact is fresh.
You don’t see any animals have come back. You also don’t see that the services that the ecosystem provides, they haven’t recovered, even after decades. You still see this net loss.
So that’s some of the evidence we currently have, but a lot more information is needed.
Beth Orcutt 07:44
The research dives that I did where we were studying octopus nurseries, those sites were three kilometres water depth, so about two miles down.
It takes about an hour and a half to get down there in the research submersible. It feels like going to another planet.
I’ve had the luck of being able to do deep sea dives at hydrothermal vent ecosystems, where you find these huge, towering chimneys with hot water spewing out and weird shrimp and all kinds of weird animals just swimming right by your window.
Likewise, going to these underwater deep sea mounts, we were going to a seamount where we thought there was low temperature venting happening, and we had no idea what kind of animals we were going to find in that ecosystem.
Turns out those ecosystems support octopus nurseries, right? So I was part of a team that discovered these low temperature hydrothermal springs that support octopus nurseries.
About 10 years ago, we did some dives, and it’s just amazing, right, to like, see hundreds of octopus outside the window of your research submersible. It’s fantastic.
Beth Orcutt 08:55
There’s so much we don’t know about the deep sea.
You know, humanity has only seen like 5% of our seafloor. There’s so much left to discover.
In the sites where we might, where mining is proposed to go after hydrothermal sulfides, those are formed along mid ocean ridges where you have these charismatic – I would describe them – deep sea hydrothermal vent ecosystems, with the hot water spewing out really unique animals, animals that live in symbiosis with microbes to survive in these extreme environments.
And almost every single vent system is unique.
If you were to add up all of the vent systems on Earth and put them together in one place, they would be smaller than the island of Manhattan, right? It’s not a lot of our area of the seafloor where these very unique environments exist.
You know, we’ve created novel drugs from some of the genetic diversity that is in these ecosystems.
You know, they represent stepping stones for other life to move through the ocean. They’re really important, and they may be susceptible to impacts that occur nearby, right?
So maybe a mining company wouldn’t want to mine an active vent and put their machinery in hot water, but they might be trying to do it nearby.
Those impacts may still move over to where the active sites are. They might change the underwater movement of water that feeds those ecosystems.
And so of all the ecosystems, that was the one that scientists have raised the most concern about, because of its uniqueness and its rareness and its vulnerability.
Nodule ecosystems that are in, you know, like the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean, they’re much larger in aerial extent, but there’s still an incredible amount of novelty down there.
There was a recent study earlier this year that there’s tens of thousands of species that are unknown in these ecosystems, many of which seem to have a direct relationship to the rocks themselves.
They don’t exist in the sediment, in the mud nearby. They only live on the rocks.
So if you were to remove the rocks, you might impact the species diversity in these areas.
And again, we don’t know how a lot of those animal species reproduce, like, how far does their larva travel? What signals their larva to settle down?
You know, we’ve never seen coral spawn in these environments, and so there’s just so much we don’t know about the vulnerability of these ecosystems.
Beth Orcutt 12:01
As a scientist at the Bigelow Laboratory, we have research projects where we’re trying to contribute to understanding these topics, like deep sea mining.
One of the biggest things that we’re working on is through the COBRA [Crustal Ocean Biosphere Research Accelerator] project that’s funded by the US National Science Foundation.
And this is an international network of networks, where we’re trying to bring together a diversity of stakeholders, researchers, policymakers, science communicators, to really understand and accelerate research about the deep sea and translate that knowledge for policymakers.
We do that through webinars, through, you know, supporting people to go on research expeditions, to write policy briefs or other types of reviews of what we know about the science to help policymakers make informed decisions.
That’s probably the biggest thing that we’re doing, where I work, it’s part of the research that I’m involved in.
So within the COBRA project, one of the things we’re doing is try to encourage scientists to translate information for policymakers.
We do that in collaboration with our partners, one of the biggest being the Deep Ocean Stewardship Initiative. They have a working group focused on this topic.
So, for instance, scientists like myself, go to meetings of the International Seabed Authority, which is tasked with coming up with the rules for mining in international waters or on the seabed under international waters, and I go.
I participate as a delegate of the Deep Ocean Stewardship Initiative, and we try to provide scientific information to the diplomats and delegates that come to these meetings and are making the rules.
We share what we know. We share the concerns to try to help them make informed decisions. Side events, giving presentations, writing information briefs.
I also go down to, for instance, to Washington, DC, and I try to meet with policymakers there and explain this is what we know about the deep sea. These are some of the concerns.
You know, if we make decisions like this, these could be some of the outcomes.
So we’re not necessarily lobbying for a particular cause, but trying to share information and provide information when requested.
Beth Orcutt 14:27
Interest in deep sea mining is not only growing on an industry side, it’s also more and more scientists are understanding that this is a topic that they need to bring their expertise to, and trying to be involved in sharing information, trying to steer research directions to study this.
So that’s for sure, a positive right? We’re going to learn more about the deep sea to help inform this decision making.
I personally am encouraged to see that more and more nations have said, let’s take a precautionary. approach, that we shouldn’t jump into this industry before we have enough information to decide if it can be sustainable.
I think now the count is about 25 countries that have expressed publicly a precautionary approach.
And you know, bring that lens to these types of international discussions.
We also see that more and more industry, banks, financing, are also kind of saying a precautionary approach.
We’re not sure that the metals that could be sourced from the deep sea are sustainable, or we haven’t seen enough evidence that they would be better than land based mining or circular economy approaches, you know, trying to recycle metals.
That also gives a sign that we should be thoughtful about deciding what to do.
I’m also incredibly encouraged, and I don’t know enough about this field, but when I see these studies about improvements in battery technology, right?
If we want to get off fossil fuels, we need better technologies that help us do that. And if we can lower their metal burden, then that decreases the need to go into the deep sea.
So we’re seeing increases in battery chemistry. I think it’s already like Tesla EVs like don’t need some of the metals they needed 10 years ago.
So it’s accelerating rapidly. I think there’s amazing advancements there. If you don’t need those metals, then you definitely don’t need to go in the deep sea to get them.
Also, if we were better stewards of the metals that are already in our economy, we would lower the need for mining metals anywhere.
So being smarter about how we develop products, so that we can recover the metals after the product’s lifetime, would surely help with all mining impacts.
Sustainable Development Goal 14 about our oceans, right, really is a broad goal that encompasses so much.
Achieving that goal requires, you know, international collaboration and on a scale that I’m not sure we’ve seen yet, but we still have time to make it happen.
Whether that be fisheries, minerals, any of the resources in the ocean, right?
Using science to help us understand what is a sustainable use of these materials, and how we work together to achieve that, is still possible. But it takes that political will.
Monica Contestabile 17:53
Thanks for listening to this series, How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals.
Join us again next time when we look at Sustainable Development Goal Number 15: How to protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems.
But before we do, next up, we’ll hear how researchers at La Trobe Institute for Sustainable Agriculture and Food in Melbourne, Australia, the sponsor of this series, are working towards the targets set by the UN.
Caris Bizzaca: 18:28
I’m Caris Bizzaca, and welcome to this podcast series from the La Trobe Institute for Sustainable Agriculture and Food at La Trobe University in Australia. I would like to start by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the lands where La Trobe University campuses are located in Australia, and to pay respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures, as well as to Elders past, present and emerging.
Across this six-episode series, you’ll hear from academics at the top of their fields as they discuss groundbreaking research happening at the La Trobe Institute for Sustainable Agriculture and Food, also known as LISAF. Through LISAF, La Trobe has developed a holistic approach to food security, and this ‘paddock-to-gut’ philosophy is delivering innovative research and significant academic and industry partnerships across the entire value chain.
Its success so far can already be seen in the Times Higher Education Impact Rankings, which measure university performance against the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs. In 2024, La Trobe was ranked first in Australia and fifth globally for SDG 2: Zero Hunger.
Now, stay tuned to hear first-hand about the research of LISAF as it delivers innovative solutions for sustainable and nutritious food production in a resource and climate-constrained world.
Tony Bacic: 19:54
When you look at the predictions for population increase of 25% to 2050, what is really stark is that with that 25% increase in population, we need 70% more calories. So, generally, the more affluent we become, the more we eat.
Caris Bizzaca: 20:12
That is Tony Bacic, Professor of Plant Biology and Director of the La Trobe Institute for Sustainable Agriculture and Food, talking about some of the looming threats when it comes to food security.
Tony Bacic: 20:24
We need nutritious foods because what is happening is that malnutrition is increasing. Currently, 40% of the world’s population suffers from malnutrition. The other thing that I should mention is about food waste. We actually, now globally, waste 30% of our agricultural production. In the developing countries it’s pre farm gate. In the developed countries, it’s post farm gate. I think this is something that needs to be looked at very seriously when you have such a huge population of malnutrition.
The other area, of course, is around sovereign security. So, COVID really exposed problems in the supply chains that are associated with the production of food globally. For example, in Australia at the time of COVID, an analysis has been done where we had 5 days of fresh food and 14 days of non-perishable food on the supermarket shelves. The other is, as we have globalization and increasing travel, is biosecurity. As well, as the climate is changing, is the capacity to have climate-adapted crops that are being produced.
Caris Bizzaca: 21:37
Enter LISAF, which was officially launched in early 2023.
Tony Bacic: 21:42
LISAF was established to provide a holistic approach to some wicked challenges we have on this planet, in particular around food security. It has representatives in it right through the value chain. So, we have members of the agriculture school, we have members from engineering, from social sciences and humanities, from the health portfolio, and also from the business school and digital, as well. So, a truly holistic approach to try and address some of the key problems that are facing us as a planet.
Caris Bizzaca: 22:16
These different representatives feed into LISAF’s paddock-to-gut approach.
Tony Bacic: 22:21
For a long time, we just saw food as an energy source. What is now very apparent is that what we eat is who we are. So, the gut microbiome plays a big part in our health and well-being. So, the paddock-to-gut was developed because we felt that we had to overcome, what are essentially, very siloed systems. So, traditionally we’ve thought about agriculture, which is producing commodities. We then have the food industry, with manufacturing and processing of foods, and then we have the health space. All three really weren’t working in unison. So I think we’ve got to reimagine that supply chain in a way that integrates our food-production system with our health outcomes.
Caris Bizzaca: 23:06
There are five overlapping areas for paddock to gut. The first is farming systems, soils and agronomy.
Tony Bacic: 23:13
We clearly have diminishing amounts of arable land, and part of that is due to climate change, part of it is due to population encroaching on fertile lands, and part of it is the farming systems we’ve been using. In Australia, in particular, we have some of the oldest topsoils on the planet. They’re very depleted in nutrients, and we’ve had to develop new farming systems, which are very different to what you see in, for example, Europe and the Americas, so that we retain the quality of the topsoil as much as possible.
Caris Bizzaca: 23:48
The second area is protected cropping, which will also be explored further in a later episode.
Tony Bacic: 23:54
Increasingly, we’re needing to see some of the horticultural production systems move into enclosed growing environments. For example, the Netherlands is the second-largest exporter of horticultural products in the world on a landmass that’s really pretty small. When you grow your crops in a protected-cropping environment, it’s demonstrated that you get higher yields, you can control the quality and, importantly, minimize the inputs into that crop. So, fertilizers and water and energy. Therefore, as much as possible, we need to move some of our production systems into a protected-cropping environment.
Caris Bizzaca: 24:33
The three other domains of paddock to gut are fit-for-purpose seeds, food nutrition and health and, finally, food business and food security, and digital agriculture.
Tony Bacic: 24:44
Fit-for-purpose seeds – what this is really about is producing seeds that have nutritional quality, as opposed to energy content. Our agricultural production systems largely focused on producing yield in our crops and with the lower of measurement of quality. Those quality characteristics are ones that we thought about as quality in the ’50s, and they were mostly focused towards protein content. What we now know as quality in this century, and the importance of the impact on gut health, in particular, is that we need to think about other nutritional contents in our grains.
For example, dietary fibre, which is critically important, minerals and nutrition, as well, and the protein quality has to be different, and the carbohydrate composition has to vary, and the types of fats and oils that are present also has to be varied. So, that’s what we mean by the fit-for-purpose seeds, is that we want to grow crops to develop grains, legumes and cereals that are beneficial to human health and well-being.
The next one is linking that with food, nutrition and health. And that’s really understanding how the quality of our food impacts on our health and well-being. And then the last one around this to have a holistic approach is around food business and food security and digital agriculture. Digitization is having a huge impact in agriculture and food systems, and this is all the way through the supply chain.
So, for example, in many countries, people want to know where their food comes from, so you can track it all the way from a paddock through to the plate. But more importantly, for example, in medicinal agriculture, you can also track production of the medicine from a crop right through to the medicine that’s being prescribed to you by the doctor.
The other reason to get into this space is that increasingly, we think it’s important to influence government policy in this area, in terms of really understanding the consequences of decisions that are being made or policies that are being implemented. So, we need to understand that if we have poor nutritional quality in our food, what impact it’s going to have on our health budget.
Caris Bizzaca: 27:04
This series, we’ll look at several research highlights from those five different domains of paddock to gut, but Professor Bacic says one of the biggest, so far, has been La Trobe’s research and support in the growth of protected cropping with medical cannabis.
Tony Bacic: 27:17
We started specifically around a medicinal-agriculture approach in protected cropping, and that was partly because of many of the international narcotics act and regulations. It’s a prohibited drug, but it obviously has huge potential as a medicinal therapy and, really, our whole basis was to establish the facts behind a lot of the anecdotal evidence that suggests it’s very good.
So, we wanted to optimize growing a crop in a glasshouse. Essentially, that’s what a protected environment is. Protected environments can vary from polyhouses right through to very sophisticated glasshouses, as we have for medicinal agriculture.
But what we were able to do in that situation was to sustain what is a new Australian industry in producing medicinal cannabis, with industry partners and with support from the federal government. And we were able to really make the industry much more competitive, have fast breeding programmes that produce the plants with the drugs of interest, the cannabinoids, particularly CBD, and we were also able to optimize extraction processes. And also have value add, in terms of being able to streamline many of the processes there.
We’ve recently been re-funded as a consequence of that to extend this into the horticultural sector, which we hope also will grow, not just in Australia, but globally. So, that’s one outstanding example of the research that’s come from having this holistic approach and having a multidisciplinary approach to the work.
Caris Bizzaca: 28:54
The work of LISAF has not been without its challenges. The biggest of these is to help break down the traditionally siloed industries of agriculture, food and health in La Trobe’s innovative approach. But there are other hurdles, too.
Tony Bacic: 29:07
We’ve got to reimagine that supply chain for food. We have this huge energy crisis, yet when you think about what we’re doing with agricultural supply chains, it’s essentially moving water around the planet. And we have to have governments working in terms of ensuring that the policy frameworks in which industry can operate are really addressing the challenges we have into the future.
From the point of view of the institute, funding is always a challenge. The returns on investment to government in many of these things have now been quantified four- to six-fold, but they can take anywhere from 10–20 years in agriculture to translate. We are shortening that gap, but we need to invest into this into the future.
Caris Bizzaca: 29:53
As with the paddock-to-gut holistic approach, it’s not up to any one individual or company. La Trobe has established academic and industry partnerships with growers, health and nutrition specialists, and leading researchers in Australia and around the world – including the NASA Kennedy Space Center and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation subsidiary Gates Ag One. That will be expanded on in the coming episodes.
Here’s Professor Bacic’s hope for the future of LISAF’s research and outcomes.
Tony Bacic: 30:23
What I’d like to see is a sustainable production system, producing nutritious food, that really leads to benefits to the health and outcomes for our population so that we have healthier lives, more productive and beneficial lives for longer, and lower the footprint of humans on this planet.
Caris Bizzaca: 30:44
That was Tony Bacic, Professor of Plant Biology and Director of the La Trobe Institute for Sustainable Agriculture and Food. Join us for the next episode in the series, which will focus on an international team’s discovery in legume genetics that could have huge outcomes for crop growth, particularly in developing countries.