The living things that feast on plastic

Scientists are scouring garbage sites around the world for bacteria, fungi and even insects that harbor enzymes that could be harnessed for breaking down various polymers. It’s early days, but if the efforts can be efficiently scaled-up, such biological recycling could put a dent in the plastic waste problem.

By Sandy Ong

On an overcast spring morning in 2012, Federica Bertocchini was tending to her honeybees close to where she lived in Santander, on Spain’s picturesque northern coast. One of the honeycombs “was plagued with worms,” says the amateur apiarist, referring to the pesky larvae of wax moths that have a voracious — and destructive — appetite.

Bertocchini picked out the worms, placed them in a plastic bag, and carried on with her beekeeping chores. When she retrieved the bag a few hours later, she noticed something strange: It was full of tiny holes.

The scientist’s interest was piqued. Had the hungry worms simply chewed up the plastic, or had they changed its chemical makeup too? Quick tests in her lab confirmed, surprisingly, the latter: Something in the worms’ saliva had degraded the plastic. “From that point, the research started,” says Bertocchini, a developmental biologist formerly with the Spanish National Research Council.

She is now the cofounder of Plasticentropy — one of the numerous startups and research groups that have sprouted in recent years seeking bio-inspired means to recycle plastic. This biological recycling, as it’s called, could offer more effective and environmentally friendly alternatives to some of today’s problem-riddled recycling methods.

The effort has scientists scouring landfills, auto wrecking yards and other sites teeming with plastic pollution in search of organisms that might be able to break down plastic into its component pieces. By taking these microbes and enhancing their polymer-munching abilities in the lab, scientists hope to find an efficient way of reclaiming the building blocks of plastics. They would then use these subunits to manufacture new materials, thus creating an “infinite recycling” loop.

It’s early days, and finding enzymes fit for the task is just a first step. But biological recycling could be a valuable tool for fighting the ever-growing plastics problem.

“There are groups all over the world working on this — hundreds of groups, thousands of scientists — it’s really quite amazing,” says structural biologist John McGeehan, a consultant in plastics deconstruction who specializes in the discovery and engineering of enzymes for plastic recycling.

Recycling woes

These efforts could not come soon enough. Ever since plastics manufacturing began in earnest in the 1950s, production has soared. Estimates suggest that we make close to 460 million tons of plastic annually, equivalent to the weight of roughly 2.3 million blue whales.

Unfortunately, most of that plastic ends up burned, buried in landfills or dumped in the environment. It’s no wonder that plastic has penetrated every corner of our planet — from the deep oceans to both poles, it even comes down in the rain. It’s also in our bodies, with traces reported in placentas, breast milk and human blood; the use and disposal of plastics has been linked with several health and environmental issues.

Despite these problems, demand remains unabated, with production forecast to hit more than 1,000 million tons by 2050. That’s largely because plastics are hard to substitute — the material is a manufacturer’s delight: lightweight and easy to shape, with near-endless possibilities of properties it can be imbued with.

Given that replacing all plastics isn’t realistic, a next-best option is to make less virgin material from fossil fuels and to recapture more of what already exists. In other words, raise global plastic recycling rates from their present, dismal figure of roughly 9 percent.

The reasons behind that low rate are plentiful: Plastic is tough to break down; it can absorb harmful chemicals in the recycling process; and there are thousands of plastic types, each with its own composition, chemical additives and colorants. Many of these types cannot be recycled together.

“We have this major plastics circularity problem,” says Johan Kers, a synthetic biologist and cofounder of the Oregon-based enzymatic recycling company Birch Biosciences. “We can recycle aluminum; we can recycle paper; but we cannot, to save our lives, do a good job of recycling plastic.”

Nature offers a blueprint

Biological recycling could put a dent in the plastics problem. It involves using enzymes — the workhorses of biochemistry that speed up reactions — to break down plastic polymers into their subunits, called monomers. These monomers can then be used to make new plastics.

“The nice thing about enzymes is you get the building blocks back,” says McGeehan. “That’s potentially an infinite process, so it’s really attractive.”

This approach could turn used plastics into a valuable resource, instead of a source of waste, says Ting Xu, a polymer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who cowrote an overview of biological-synthetic hybrid materials in the 2013 Annual Review of Physical Chemistry.

Research on plastic-eating enzymes goes back to at least the 1970s, but the field was reinvigorated in 2016, when a team of Japanese scientists published a landmark paper in Science describing a new strain of plastic-eating bacteria. Led by microbiologist Kohei Oda at the Kyoto Institute of Technology, the team found that the microbe, called Ideonella sakaiensis 201-F6, uses PET plastic — a polyester widely used in beverage bottles and fibers — as its major energy and food source.

The researchers came across the microbe in some scooped-up sediment when they were painstakingly shifting through 250 environmental samples they had collected from a bottle-recycling factory just outside of Osaka. Further testing revealed that I. sakaiensis could almost fully break down PET within six weeks.

Since then, scientists have discovered plastic-eating microbes at various sites around the world, including a compost heap at a cemetery in Leipzig, Germany; a waste disposal site in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad; and weathered debris washed up on two beaches in Chania, Greece. A large-scale analysis of more than 200 million genes found in free-floating DNA in environments including the oceans, Arctic tundra topsoil, savannas and various forests turned up 30,000 different enzymes with plastic-degrading potential, a team reported in 2021.

Discovering enzymes, however, is only the first step. While many of the ones now under study are quick-acting and function well under mild conditions, scientists typically have to tweak them to perform better. For example, McGeehan, along with colleagues at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado and elsewhere, engineered two enzymes responsible for the plastic-eating abilities of I. sakaiensis to dial up their performance and then linked them, creating an enzyme cocktail that can break down PET six times quicker than previously possible.

Scientists are also using artificial intelligence to dial up desirable attributes in the enzymes that depolymerize plastics quicker, are less picky about target substrates, and can withstand a wider range of temperatures.

Early data suggest that biological recycling could have a smaller carbon footprint than making plastics anew. For example, using enzymes to break down PET to get one of its monomers, terephthalic acid (TPA), cut greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 43 percent compared with making TPA from scratch, according to a 2021 estimate.

Good targets for enzymes

Of course, PET is just one of many kinds of plastic — they are generally divided into seven or more classes, depending on factors like their chemical structure. On one end of the scale sit plastics with mixed-carbon backbones — polymers with a central spine comprising carbon interlaced with other atoms such as oxygen and nitrogen. For now, these plastics are most suited to biological recycling largely because the enzymes available can chew through the type of chemical bond in that mixed carbon backbone. It’s “a kind of Achilles’ heel” for the material says Andy Pickford, a molecular biophysicist at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom.

PETs have such a backbone — in this case, carbon interlaced with oxygen. Commonly found in textiles and soda bottles and accounting for roughly one-fifth of plastics created every year, PETs are a popular first target among biological recyclers and the closest to implementation at a commercial scale. The French firm Carbios, for example, plans to open a bio-recycling plant in northern France in 2025, with the aim of recycling 50,000 tons of PET waste annually.

The company is using a proprietary enzyme first identified in a pile of compost that researchers then modified to enhance its PET-bond-breaking ability and to withstand the higher temperatures at which the plastic becomes molten and soft. The enzyme can depolymerize 90 percent of PET in 10 hours, scientists from Carbios and its academic partner, the Toulouse Biotechnology Institute, reported in Nature in 2020.

Another startup, Australia-based Samsara Eco, plans to launch a similar 20,000-ton facility in Melbourne in 2024 that will also focus on PET.

Plastics with a similar chemical makeup to PET, the polyamides and polyurethanes, are also promising targets for enzymatic recycling, as they are intrinsically susceptible to breakdown by enzymes, says Pickford, whose team at Portsmouth works on all three plastic types.

In addition to PET, Samsara now works on nylon, a type of synthetic polyamide commonly found in fabrics and textiles. In May, the firm announced a multiyear partnership with popular athletic brand Lululemon to produce “the world’s first infinitely recycled” nylon-polyester apparel from discarded clothes.

Researchers are also investigating polyurethanes, which comprise roughly 8 percent, or 25 million tons, of the global plastics pie and are common in foams such as furniture cushions and in diapers, sponges and sneakers. Various microbes can degrade some kinds of polyurethanes and Kers’ team at Birch Biosciences has zeroed in on some 50 different polyurethane-eating enzymes for testing, but the polymers are a structurally diverse group and will probably require diverse strategies.

Some tougher problems

While enzymatic recycling looks promising for plastics with mixed backbones, the outlook isn’t as rosy for those at the other end of the scale: plastics with backbones of pure carbon. This is an eclectic group that includes polyvinyl chloride (PVC), polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), polystyrene and polyethylene, which is used to make the ubiquitous plastic bag. Biological recycling of these plastics is far more challenging, says Pickford. “They’re kind of greasy, in a way, for enzymes. There’s not really much for an enzyme to grab hold of.”

Still, some scientists are working on these recalcitrant plastics — among them, Spain’s Bertocchini. “For some reason, I fixed on plastic bags, which are polyethylene-based,” she says. Also commonly used in food packaging film and takeout containers, polyethylene is by far the largest class of plastics manufactured today, accounting for more than 25 percent of the market. A decade on from their serendipitous discovery, Bertocchini and her team at Plasticentropy have identified the plastic-degrading enzymes in wax worm saliva — and have named them Demetra and Ceres. The enzymes degrade polyethylene within a matter of hours at room temperature by introducing oxygen into the carbon backbone.

Enzymes found in insects may hold the key for these tougher plastics. Microbiologist Chris Rinke at the University of Queensland in Australia, who works on polystyrene, commonly found in takeout food containers and disposable cutlery, is among the scientists looking at insect larvae, which have tough mouthparts that make them “very good at chewing through things” and breaking them down into smaller particles. “Then the microbes in the guts take it from there,” Rinke says.

Rinke came across the larva of a beetle called Zophobas morio — dubbed the Superworm — that breaks down polystyrene via a twofold process: mechanically shredding the plastic into smaller pieces, which “ages” it by introducing oxygen atoms, and then depolymerizing those bits using special bacterial gut enzymes that have yet to be identified.

But some experts are less optimistic about the outlook for biological recycling — especially for tackling plastics with harder-to-break backbones. “I’ve yet to be convinced that polyolefins like polyethylene and polypropylene and PVC will ever be realistic targets for enzymatic recycling at scale,” says Pickford. “There have been some interesting observations but converting those into an industrial process is going to be extremely difficult. I hope I’m wrong.”

There are hints of progress for PVC, but for now the brittle plastic, along with its cousins PVA and polylactic acid (PLA), remains largely unconquerable by enzymes. For such cases, it might be more feasible to shift toward creating new plastics that are recyclable, says Pickford.

Yet the findings keep coming: In 2020, a team from South Korea reported on a gut bacterium, Serratia fonticola, that conferred polystyrene-digesting abilities to the larvae of a black beetle called Plesiophthalmus davidis. Another group reported finding two cold-adapted fungal strains — Lachnellula and Neodevriesia, isolated from alpine soil and the Arctic shore, respectively — that could break down certain types of biodegradable plastic, including PLA.

Still, enzymes are only part of the battle. It’s unclear how easy it would be to scale up processes that harness these enzymes and what that scaled-up environmental footprint might look like.

“I think there’s never going to be one solution to all this,” says Vanessa Vongsouthi, head of protein engineering and research founder at Samsara Eco. “We have to work on advanced recycling, but in addition to that, policy, product redesign, reuse and even elimination … are all part of the bigger picture.”

Some policy changes are in the works. The United Nations is set to create the world’s first global plastic pollution treaty in 2024. It is aimed at curbing plastic pollution, and is expected to introduce new rules for production and the design of plastic products to make recycling easier, among other measures. And in the following year, laws mandating that 25 percent of the material in plastic containers and beverage bottles be recycled plastic will kick in in Washington, California and the European Union. But without additional changes and incentives, those efforts may be a drop in the bucket. As long as virgin plastic remains cheap due to the low price of fossil fuels, biological enzymes might not be able to compete.

“The main problem is cost,” says McGeehan. “Fossil-derived plastics are really cheap because they’re made at huge scale on a global market that’s very mature.” It also doesn’t help that some governments still incentivize producing plastics in this way, he says. “We need to really switch our thinking there and start incentivizing the PET or the other biodegradable processes in the way that the oil and gas industry benefited from in the past.”

McGeehan remains optimistic that once the technology for biological recycling improves, it will quickly become cost-efficient enough to compete with virgin plastic. Until then, researchers like Bertocchini will keep plugging away. She gave up her beloved beehives when she moved to Madrid in 2019, but today continues to expand her firm’s enzyme portfolio with moth and butterfly larvae. Enzymes will not solve the entire plastics problem, she says — “but this is a start.”

Editor’s note: This story was updated on August 25, 2023, to clarify that enzymes from insects that help break down certain plastics could be microbial in origin.

Sandy Ong is a science writer based in Singapore. Find her on twitter @sandyong_yx.

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews. 

The quest to understand tornadoes

Scientists are still grappling with how and why violent twisters form. Will new technology and computing power help?

By Carolyn Wilke

One muggy day in July 1986, a news helicopter was recording footage of a festival in Minneapolis when the pilot and photographer glimpsed a tornado over nearby Brooklyn Park. They moved toward it, filming the powerful twister for 25 minutes, mesmerizing viewers watching it live on TV.

Watching as the helicopter hovered within maybe a half-mile of the twister was Robin Tanamachi, who was a kid growing up in Minneapolis at the time. “We were seeing all this really beautiful interior vortex structure,” she says. “I was just absolutely hooked on that, and I know I was not the only one.” Today, Tanamachi is a research meteorologist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, and one of many researchers delving into twisters’ mysteries, searching for details about their formation that may bolster future forecasts.

Tornadoes can be elusive research subjects. Through chasing storms and using computer simulations, scientists have worked out the basic ingredients needed to spin up a twister, but two crucial questions continue to vex them: Why do some thunderstorms form tornadoes while others don’t? And how exactly do tornadoes get their spin?

Despite the logistically and scientifically challenging nature of the work, scientists are motivated to keep trying: Tornadoes can kill dozens to hundreds of people in the United States every year and cause billions of dollars in damage. Now researchers are chasing the killer storms that spawn tornadoes with cutting-edge technology, flying drones into the storms and harnessing more computing power than ever to simulate them in search of answers.

“Today, we’re simulating the atmosphere with unprecedented spatial resolution. We’re observing storms with unprecedented temporal and spatial resolution,” says atmospheric scientist Howie Bluestein of the University of Oklahoma in Norman. “But there’s still a lot of problems and a lot of things that need to be solved.”

Scientists may be turning up new clues to tornado formation by studying what’s happening in the atmosphere around them and on the ground below them, and by comparing what they find in the field with new, higher-resolution models of the thunderstorms that generate them. Even as they chase these new leads, researchers are also trying to understand how climate change may affect when and where tornadoes form.

Chasing answers

Since scientists began studying tornadoes in earnest in the mid-20th century, they’ve put together a pretty good outline of the steps required to generate a twister. Most destructive tornadoes are spawned by supercell thunderstorms — giants that typically have a very tall cloud that widens into an anvil shape at the top. Supercells are characterized by a kilometers-wide rotating updraft called a mesocyclone that can last for hours. That rotation comes from wind shear, which sets wind nearer to the ground spinning horizontally like a spiraling football. These winds then become vertically oriented within an updraft like a spinning top.

A couple of things need to happen for a supercell to become tornadic: First, the giant mesocyclone at the heart of the storm needs to get air rotating closer to the ground. Then this vortex needs to be stretched upward. Stretching tightens the twister’s footprint, speeding its rotation, similar to what happens when figure skaters pull in their arms during a spin.

The first clues to the physics of tornadoes came from secondhand information and damage reports, as scientists tried to figure out what sorts of winds could blow down a barn or pluck a chicken, says Richard Rotunno, an atmospheric scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, and the author of an overview of the fluid dynamics of tornadoes in the 2013 Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics.

The construction of the Interstate Highway System in the 1950s created a grid across the flat Great Plains that allowed enterprising scientists to get out in front of storms and sometimes directly observe tornadoes. A big advance came with the development of Doppler radar for meteorology. By emitting pulses of energy and detecting the reflected signal, the technology captures information about wind and precipitation. Radar allowed the detection of mesocyclones, which became the basis for tornado forecasts and a boon for chasers, who would stop at payphones periodically to call the lab for the latest radar intel.

But radar doesn’t catch all the clues scientists are after — such as the invisible forces in a storm that get winds moving — so they turned to models that simulate the physics of storms, says atmospheric scientist Paul Markowski at Penn State University in University Park. “In a computer simulation, we have all of those forces.”

The first three-dimensional simulations of supercells were created in the 1970s, helping scientists study the structures of updrafts and downdrafts and how precipitation evolves. As models improved over time, they revealed that updrafts can turn rotating areas of air into the massive mesocyclones in supercells. The models also showed how thunderstorms in the Northern Hemisphere can split into a left and a right cell, with the right one more likely to result in severe weather. These models were finally reproducing behavior observed in actual supercells and providing hints to how areas of cooler air, called cold pools, might play into tornado formation by shortening the time it takes for a twister to develop.

These models had relatively coarse resolution, but as computational power increased, simulations started to capture more detail about supercells, and researchers also worked to realistically capture the effects of rain, snow and hail. Still, the resolution was on the order of hundreds of meters — far too large to catch tornadoes, which tend to be closer to 20 meters wide.

Radar also got better and faster, and researchers started taking it into the field on trucks. In 1994, a host of scientists hoping to understand where tornadoes got their rotation began a multiyear campaign named Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment, or VORTEX. They chased storms with all sorts of equipment, including sensor-loaded weather balloons, and instrumented cars that took temperature, pressure and wind measurements within supercells. But the scientists felt they needed further observations, leading to VORTEX-2 in 2009. “The big takeaway that we got from VORTEX-2 was that you can’t really tell whether a storm is going to be tornadic or non-tornadic just by how it looks on radar or what the weather balloons in its proximity show you,” Tanamachi says.

Other field campaigns followed, but scientists still haven’t definitively answered why some supercell thunderstorms create tornadoes while others don’t progress beyond a mesocyclone. Now they are looking to new strategies and tools to fill in the rest of the story.

Send in the drones

Despite the drama of a churning twister, the center of a tornado probably isn’t where the answers lie. “Getting something into the tornado — it makes for good television, but it actually doesn’t tell us a whole lot,” Markowski says. “It tells us that it’s windy there and the pressure is low.”

Instead, scientists are using new tools to glean clues from the environment that could help them sift the tornadic supercells from the non-tornadic. “Detailed data on the structure of the atmosphere — its temperature, pressure, wind — below cloud base is largely absent,” Rotunno says. Researchers are starting to fly drones into storms to capture these observations.

Drones can take detailed measurements at higher altitudes than cars. And unlike weather balloons, they can cross boundaries between areas of a storm with different pressure or air density. “The reason we think they’re important is because tornadoes tend to form on these boundaries,” says atmospheric scientist Adam Houston of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Houston and his colleagues have been pairing drone observations with radar and other techniques in the field as part of the TORUS project since 2019. Now Houston’s team is digging through the data, looking for trends across storms for hints about whether these relatively small features influence tornado formation.

Scientists are also gathering information on what’s going on near the ground where the tornado forms. Both modeling and observations have shown that this is where the highest speeds occur. How air interacts with the land surface — features such as hills and forests — may play a role in starting and intensifying twisters, but radar tends to miss at least the first hundred meters just above the ground because of the geometry of the beam. Atmospheric scientist Jana Houser of Ohio State University in Columbus is hoping to learn more about what’s going on in that gap.

Houser’s team chases storms, capturing radar measurements of a tornado’s size and intensity over time. Then they search for links between those data and the topography and roughness of the surface the storm has swept over. They’ve found that in most cases, changes in terrain affect the air getting sucked into the tornado and change the twister’s strength. This could be an important clue, but it’s proving difficult to puzzle out. “The problem,” Houser says, “is that sometimes the same type of occurrence in one case results in an intensification, and then in the next case, it results in a weakening.”

There may be a limit to how well researchers can understand and predict these storms, Markowski says. “When it comes tornadoes, I think we’re kind of butting up against chaos.” Perturbations that are so small they are essentially unmeasurable are everywhere in the atmosphere and may influence the formation of a tornado. Markowski and other scientists are starting to use machine learning to help better predict how these storms behave.

Finding the twist

Another big question has been swirling around twisters for decades: “We really don’t understand where the rotation that feeds the tornado ultimately comes from,” Houser says. The rotating air in a supercell’s mesocyclone is too high by the time it starts spinning vertically; the storms need additional rotation nearer to the ground to become tornadic. There are at least three hypotheses as to where this near-ground rotation comes from and, in any given twister, there may be multiple mechanisms at play, she says.

One hypothesis is based on how friction slows air moving near the ground. Air at higher altitudes moves faster and tumbles over the slower air and starts rolling like a barrel. The idea is that this rotating air could then be turned upright when it gets sucked into an updraft. Other hypotheses point to downdrafts related to precipitation and cooling air. The difference in density between cool air and neighboring warmer air can generate an air current that prompts spinning. Both observations and models have backed this idea and point to different areas of the storm where this may occur.

During either of these scenarios, there may also be many smaller pockets of swirling air that merge, combining into an area with enough rotation to get a tornado spinning. New support for this theory is emerging through higher-resolution storm simulations.

Most models working at coarser resolutions can’t actually see simulated tornadoes, inferring them instead based on areas of air with a lot of spin. Atmospheric scientist Leigh Orf of the University of Wisconsin-Madison has taken advantage of advances in supercomputing to build 10-meter-resolution models that can directly simulate tornadoes. At this scale, turbulence comes alive, Orf says. His models reveal how small areas of rotation could combine to kick off a tornado. “It fully resolves non-tornadic vortices that merge together in ways that are very compelling and I’ve never seen before,” he says.

Models can also provide hints of behavior to look for in the field. Orf’s models have helped him and his colleagues explore a feature they named the streamwise vorticity current, or SVC — a tail of swirling air off to the side of the storm that may amplify air rotation near the ground. Other scientists have now observed this feature in actual tornadic supercells.

Real-world observations don’t yet exist for the rotation mergers, but they may be coming. Plans to revamp the US radar system would employ a new generation of faster radar that can capture features that develop in a flash. “I am very confident that the things I’m seeing in the simulations will eventually be detected in the atmosphere, just like the SVC was,” Orf says.

High stakes

The landscape of tornado research has expanded from the Great Plains into the southeastern United States, driven by deadly storms and increasing tornado activity there. When a rash of tornadoes hit the region in 2011 starting in mid-April, more than 300 people were killed. “It was the largest outbreak on record since the super outbreak of 1974,” Tanamachi says. That motivated another campaign in 2015, VORTEX-SE, to study tornadoes there, but the work has proved difficult.

Not only do atmospheric conditions in the Southeast differ from the Great Plains, it’s also harder to observe twisters, Tanamachi’s team found. The hilly landscapes block views of storms, mucking up storm-chasing efforts. Instead, researchers have to forecast where a tornado might form and hunker down there. The one time this approach yielded a tornado sighting during VORTEX-SE, the radar was blocked by a stand of trees.

Much of what scientists have learned about tornadoes elsewhere doesn’t apply to the Southeast because many of the tornadoes that occur there are not seeded by supercells. Instead, they grow from a line of storms called a squall line. “We have no clue how these work,” says atmospheric scientist Johannes Dahl of Texas Tech University in Lubbock. While these tornadoes are typically weaker than those from supercells, they can still cause damage and death.

Despite the challenges, understanding tornadoes in the Southeast remains a priority, especially as tornado activity has kicked up in the region in the last four decades or so. It’s not clear yet if this is due to climate change or something else, such as the climate pattern known as El Niño, Dahl says. Still, researchers have started to see some trends related to climate. A look at 60 years of US tornado data revealed that while the number of tornadoes didn’t change, the number of days on which multiple twisters occur has increased. Climate change appears to be aiding some of the ingredients for tornadoes at the expense of others. But it seems that on a good day for tornadoes, the conditions are very favorable, Houser says.

With increasingly powerful models, a possible upgrade to the US radar system and the help of machine learning, researchers will continue in their quest to unveil the inner workings of tornadoes. “Although research in this area has been going on for decades,” Dahl says, “it always seems like there are surprises.”

Even after 20 years of studying tornadoes, Houser finds herself “giddy, excited” by the prospect of catching a tornado in action — ideally over a field where it isn’t destroying someone’s home. “There’s this weird dichotomy between the beauty that they have and the volatility and intensity and violence that they wreak,” Houser says. “They’re so mysterious.”

Carolyn Wilke is a Chicago-based freelance science journalist who covers archaeology, chemistry and the natural world. Find her  @carolynmwilke.

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews. 

Saudi plans to ‘de-risk’ region have taken a hit with Gaza violence − but hitting pause on normalization with Israel will buy kingdom time

Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, Rice University

Saudi Arabia and Israel had seemingly been edging closer to a landmark deal to normalize their diplomatic relations – and then the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023, happened.

Since then, thousands have died in Gaza and in Israel. And fears of the conflict spreading across the region form the backdrop to frenzied diplomacy across the region, including a visit to Israel by U.S. President Joe Biden on Oct. 18.

It also threatens to undermine a key pillar of Saudi Arabia’s foreign and domestic agenda: the “de-risking” of the region. With Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman set on implementing “Vision 2030” – an ambitious economic, social and cultural program – and developing the kingdom as a destination for tourism and investment, a renewal of regional instability is the last thing the crown prince needs.

De-escalating tensions

Certainly, the escalating violence in the Middle East presents a challenge to the shift toward de-escalation of tensions across much of the broader region in recent years.

This has included the signing of the Abraham Accords in 2020, which established diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco. But it goes further, including multiple-state treaties that have healed rifts across the Gulf, culminating in the signing of a deal in March 2023 to restore Saudi-Iranian relations.

These diplomatic breakthroughs opened up a space for greater regional cooperation through initiatives such as the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor unveiled at the G20 meeting in India in September 2023.

The hope of officials across the region was that economic development could integrate the region and move discussion away from the failure to make progress on resolving the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

The Palestinian question

Violence in Israel and Gaza threatens to knock Gulf states off a delicate balancing act of supporting the Palestinian cause in front of their largely Muslim populations while also making overtures to Israel and the U.S.

Qatar, for example, has long hosted the political leaders of Hamas while remaining on friendly terms with the U.S.. It will now likely face significant Israeli and U.S. pressure to expel Hamas leadership.

The UAE and Bahrain both normalized relations with Israel in 2020, along with Morocco. But public support for the Abraham Accords across the region was always lukewarm at best and may now dwindle away.

Meanwhile, Dubai, the UAE’s largest city, is gearing up to host COP28, the international climate change conference, starting Nov. 30. The UAE will not want the event overshadowed or put at risk by a new regional war.

Reaching out to Israel

But nowhere is the tightrope more delicate than in Saudi Arabia. This is by virtue of the kingdom’s religious standing in the Islamic world – it is custodian of the faith’s two most holy sites, Mecca and Medina – and the ambitious raft of economic reforms the kingdom has rolled out as part of Vision 2030.

The campaign for Palestinian statehood has long been a cause célèbre in the Muslim world, and the current king of Saudi Arabia, Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, has been a staunch supporter of Palestine all his life.

But his son and heir, the crown prince, has increasingly shown an interest in dialogue with Israel. This has culminated in the talks to “normalize” relations between the two countries – something that would represent a historic breakthrough in Israel’s acceptance within the Arab and Islamic world. As recently as Sept. 20, Crown Prince Mohammed told Fox News that “every day, we get closer” to a deal.

Indeed, a series of leaks to U.S. media in the days and weeks prior to the Hamas attack suggested that the outlines of an agreement were taking shape, driven by the Biden administration.

Public shows, private diplomacy

But the Hamas attack and Israel’s response have punctured this momentum. Saudi sources briefed the media on Oct. 13 that talks on normalization had been paused – but not abandoned.

Such messaging is in line with Saudi attempts to balance domestic and external interests. An initial Saudi Foreign Ministry statement on Oct. 7 appealed to both the “Palestinian factions” and “Israeli occupation forces” to de-escalate. But at the first Friday prayer at the Grand Mosque in Mecca after the attacks, Saudi authorities were more forthcoming in taking sides, with the state-appointed cleric urging support for “our brothers in Palestine.”

Behind the public shows of support for Palestinians, there is evidence that Saudis are trying to spearhead diplomatic efforts to prevent the war between Israel ad Hamas from developing into a wider conflagration that might bring in Lebanon, Iran and others.

On Oct. 12, Crown Prince Mohammed discussed the unfolding developments in Israel and Gaza with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi – their first conversation since ties between the two countries were restored in March.

Three days later, the crown prince received U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Riyadh amid media reports of differences between the Saudi and U.S. positions on the conflict and the need for de-escalation.

Oil and foreign investment

Such diplomatic moves fall in line with the crown prince’s desire to “de-risk” the region. He is eager to see that nothing jeopardizes a series of “giga-projects” – such as Neom, the futuristic new city on the Red Sea coastline – that have become synonymous with Vision 2030.

The Saudi fear is that a prolonged or regional conflict will deter foreign investment in Vision 2030.

Foreign investment was seen as key to the project’s success. But levels of foreign investment plunged after the detention by the Saudi authorities of dozens of senior Saudi business figures at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in 2017 over allegations of corruption. Investors took fright at the prospect that their business partners might suddenly disappear or be shaken down.

As a result, the Saudis are having to shoulder a greater proportion of the costs of Vision 2030 themselves. This explains why Saudi officials have cooperated with their Russian counterparts in OPEC+ meetings to keep the price of oil at a level high enough to generate enough revenues to fund the projects.

The deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia was big news. Atta Kenare/AFP via Getty Images)

Vision 2030 has become so bound up with Crown Prince Mohammed’s pledge to transform Saudi Arabia that he cannot afford for it to fail – hence his determination to reduce sources of regional tension, including with Iran.

Saudi officials also recently revised their plans to attract 100 million visitors a year by 2030 upward to 150 million and launched a bid to host the 2034 FIFA World Cup.

Underlying these initiatives is the Saudis’ desire to diversify the kingdom’s economy away from an overdependence on oil, turning the kingdom into a destination for capital and people alike. These ambitions would be endangered by another regional war in the Middle East – especially if it drew in Iran.

Playing the ‘normalization’ card

So where does the “normalization” of Saudi-Israeli relations go from here?

Putting the process on ice – for now – fits Crown Prince Mohammed’s careful balancing act. Proceeding at full speed would have risked blowback from other Arab and Middle Eastern states, undermining the process of “de-risking” of the region.

It also may provide Saudi Arabia with greater leverage – Israel and the U.S. will be keen that the current violence does not derail the process entirely.

So pausing the process, I argue, now makes tactical sense for Saudi Arabia, given the outpouring of anger in the Islamic world at developments in Gaza – and it provides the Saudi leadership with an opportunity to control the next phase of what remains an extremely delicate endeavor.

Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, Fellow for the Middle East at the Baker Institute, Rice University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. 

4 Steps to Monitor Blood Pressure at Home

4 Steps to Monitor Blood Pressure at Home

Nearly half of all adults in the United States have high blood pressure, or hypertension, and many don’t even know it.

High blood pressure is a leading cause of heart attack, stroke, heart failure and even death, but can be controllable.

To stay on top of your blood pressure and manage risks, follow these easy steps from the American Heart Association to self-monitor blood pressure:

• Get It – grab your validated self-monitoring blood pressure (SMBP) device
• Slip It – slide the SMBP cuff up your arm
• Cuff It – wrap the cuff snugly, but not too tight
• Check It – check your blood pressure on the device

Then be sure to share those numbers with your doctor.

Did you know that certain OTC pain relievers can elevate blood pressure? Ask your doctor about over the counter pain relievers that won’t raise your blood pressure.

Visit heart.org/hbptools to watch a video and find of list of resources.

SOURCE:
American Heart Association

Honey Mustard Crunch Salmon

Quick and easy family dinners often feel few and far between, but you can make them a more frequent occurrence by depending on seafood as a flavorful, easy-to-prepare protein.

Today, more than half of all seafood consumed in the U.S. is raised by aquaculture, also known as seafood farming. While this industry has made strides throughout the last few decades, from increasingly sustainable farming practices to technological advancements, not all seafood farms are equal and neither are the certifications you see on the packaging.

Aquaculture helps meet the ever-growing popularity of seafood and provides people in developing countries with healthy protein. It also aids in rebuilding populations of threatened and endangered species along with boosting wild stocks of freshwater and seawater species. By ensuring supply chain integrity from farm to the store, the Aquaculture Stewardship Council’s (ASC) Sea Green certification label lets shoppers know they’re protecting oceans, coasts and wildlife while also investing in restoring them.

With a mission to help the industry feed a growing global population while respecting the planet and its people, the council aims to minimize the industry’s impact on climate change and protect fish welfare. To achieve these goals, the certification label helps shoppers identify products that meet strict standards for responsibly farmed seafood, raising the bar for farm performance, verification and traceability.

With increased demand from the culinary community for alternative seafood sources that preserve wild populations without compromising farm-to-fork flavor or freshness, ASC’s certification helps ensure the seafood you’re buying is what it claims to be. That way, you can enjoy make-at-home recipes like Honey Mustard Crunch Salmon.

Visit SeaGreenBeGreen.org to find family-friendly recipes and certification information.

Watch video to see how to make this recipe!

Honey Mustard Crunch Salmon

• 1          bag (1 pound, three 6-ounce portions) ASC-certified North Coast Seafoods Naked Norwegian Salmon
• salt, to taste
• pepper, to taste

Honey Mustard Glaze:

• 1/3       cup honey
• 1/4       cup whole-grain mustard
• 2          tablespoons smooth Dijon mustard
• 2          tablespoons mayonnaise
• 2          teaspoons horseradish
• 1          teaspoon smoked paprika

Crunch:

• 3/4       cup panko breadcrumbs
• 2          tablespoons dried parsley
• 2          tablespoons olive oil

1. Thaw salmon and pat dry. Arrange on oiled baking tray. Season with salt and pepper, to taste.
2. To make glaze: In small bowl, combine honey, mustard, Dijon mustard, mayonnaise, horseradish and paprika; mix until well combined. Chill glaze until ready to use.
3. To make crunch: In bowl, combine breadcrumbs, parsley and oil; mix well. Reserve.
4. Preheat oven to 400 F.
5. Top each salmon portion with 1 tablespoon glaze and spread evenly over fish. Press crunch evenly onto glaze.
6. Bake 15-17 minutes until fish is cooked through.
7. Serve with drizzle of remaining glaze.

SOURCE:
Aquaculture Stewardship Council

Leaning into Indigenous knowledge on climate change

Native peoples attuned to the natural world have long collected detailed environmental information. Now scientists are cataloging these observations and learning how they’re affecting Indigenous communities globally.

By Chris Baraniuk

It used to be that when the warm nights came each summer, Frank Ettawageshik would spend most of his time outdoors, often sleeping outside, right on the ground. He balks at the thought of that today without the proper precautions. “I was 35 or so before I ever saw a tick,” says the 74-year-old executive director of the United Tribes of Michigan, a Native American advocacy group. In northern Michigan today, he says, “there’s ticks all over the place.”

Ettawageshik is part of the Anishinaabe culture, whose members are from the Great Lakes. His own Tribal Nation is the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians, who have lived in the northwestern shores of Michigan’s lower peninsula for centuries. Besides the spread of ticks, a phenomenon exacerbated by rising temperatures, they’ve witnessed the struggling populations of whitefish in nearby Lake Michigan and the gradual changes in harvests from the sugar maple tree, whose name in Odawa is “ niinatig” — our tree. Research suggesting that warmer temperatures might force sugar maples out of Michigan add to Ettawageshik’s concerns. “Our tree is going to be moving away from us,” he says.

Ettawageshik’s tribe has observed many changes to their ancestral lands over hundreds of years, but Ettawageshik says human-caused climate change is different. “It’s happening at a pace that we don’t normally see.”

“Climate science,” for many people, brings to mind satellite observations, temperature records or the analysis of ice cores. But there’s plenty more data besides that. Indigenous communities that have long lived close to the land — and have traditionally depended on deep knowledge of their environments to survive — often hold their own records and recollections. These can include extraordinary details about alterations in weather patterns, changes in vegetation or unfamiliar behavior of animals that have emerged under their watch.

Today, anthropologists and climate researchers in Western institutions are increasingly turning to Indigenous people to ask what they have observed about the world around them. In the process, these scientists are learning that Indigenous communities have been cataloging, in their own way, data about change at a hyper-local level — insights that Westernized climate science might miss — and also how that change is affecting people.

“I believe in Native science — that it’s real science,” says Richard Stoffle, an anthropologist at the University of Arizona, lead author on a 2023 paper that lists various observations from Anishinaabe people belonging to three tribes in the Upper Great Lakes. The anonymous interviews, conducted in 1998 and 2014, featured comments on a wide range of environmental changes witnessed by Anishinaabe people over the decades: hotter summers, drier springs, mushrooms emerging at weird times of the year, or plants that don’t yield as much fruit or sap as they used to.

The recollections, Stoffle says, make it clear that the Anishinaabe people have been monitoring anthropogenic climate change long before it was a regular topic of public discussion.

“It’s not like it was in the old days, I think the nights and days aren’t as cold as they used to be,” said one contributor. “That’s what brings that sap up into the trees. It draws it and pushes that sap up. I used to hear those trees snap up there in the woods because, those maple trees, that sap would freeze and crack the trees. I used to have to wait for the bus and hear the trees out there.”

“Wow, that is a spring morel! Finding it here in September is insane!” another participant commented on a mushroom observation.

Asking Indigenous people about the changes that they are witnessing helps us to understand what matters to them, what issues require attention, says Victoria Reyes-García, an anthropologist at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies, and coauthor of a 2021 article in the Ann ual Review of Environment and Resources about turning to Indigenous knowledge and values to help address environmental problems.

Plus, adds Sergio Jarillo, an anthropologist at the University of Melbourne, it benefits science globally because, by speaking to people, you can find out the true impact of what climatology suggests is happening in the world.

“Consulting with local people gives you a more complete, and holistic, picture than you would ever get just using measurements,” he says.

Sea levels in the Southern Hemisphere

Off the north coast of Australia lie the Tiwi Islands, where Jarillo has been asking Indigenous people about the environmental changes they are seeing. In a paper published in March 2023, he and colleagues present comments from participants alongside drone-captured imagery of coastlines that show the coastal erosion that worries many members of the community. Erosion is a natural process, but in this case it is probably exacerbated by rising sea levels caused by anthropogenic climate change, says Jarillo.

To geomorphologists, that development would be far from surprising. So why make the effort to ask Indigenous people about it? The difference is that you find granular data that a satellite image could never provide — such as photos of the beach, shown to Jarillo and colleagues, that were taken around the 1950s and 1960s by islanders. “There was a fish trap that was permanently on the beach,” Jarillo says, referring to a traditional structure for catching fish. “There’s no longer space.”

The Tiwi community has been around for long enough to notice lots of changes, and they spend a lot of time in direct contact with the environment, adds Jarillo: “They know where there is erosion, they know if there’s a creek that is drying up.”

It is a justice issue, too, because these environmental changes can have significant effects on the health and well-being of people who live in these islands. Many participants who contributed to the research expressed concerns about land lost to erosion near to a renal center in the settlement of Wurrumiyanga — an important health-care facility in a community where kidney failure is the leading cause of death. Highlighting Indigenous people’s knowledge of threats like this might prompt action. The very act of documenting such information is potentially significant because, the paper authors note, “in the case of the Tiwi, there has been no local, Territory, or Commonwealth government initiatives to support climate change adaptation.”

Nelson Chanza, a climate adaptation scientist at the University of Johannesburg, also recorded finer details after talking to direct witnesses of changes to the environment in Zimbabwe. In a study published in 2022, he and a colleague gathered observations made by 37 Indigenous elders from the Mbire District in northern Zimbabwe. This, Chanza says, is a part of the world where meteorological data collection is relatively sparse: The study area is about 80 kilometers (roughly 50 miles) from the nearest weather station.

The elders, whose average age was 63, helped to fill in the gaps by recounting memories of how the environment had changed over the years. Many observed that the rainy season now starts later and ends sooner than it once did. But there were variations on this point, suggesting different areas were drying up at different rates. “That detail: You tend to lose it if you only rely on the meteorological data,” says Chanza. In addition, elders related how various fruits, such as Uapaca kirkiana (mazhanje), also known as sugar plums, are becoming less abundant, smaller in size and poorer in quality.

Reports like this are full of information and yet “they might be treated as anecdotal,” says Reyes-García. In an attempt to encourage non-anthropologists to take such information seriously, and to standardize data collection involving Indigenous communities, Reyes-García and colleagues have developed a study protocol that could be applied to any community anywhere in the world.

It involves collecting, for example, meteorological data as well as carrying out multiple interviews with Indigenous individuals who have lived a long time in a particular place. Comments with group consensus would then be classified in a database. Entries in this database could catalog anything from observations about wind speed and temperature to animal behavior. Such standardization could help to make such information, though admittedly stripped of its color and richness, appealing to climate researchers and international bodies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says Reyes-García.

Knowing what is important to Indigenous communities is also beneficial because it helps anyone involved in planning mitigation or adaptation strategies to do so appropriately, says Reyes- García.

Data and a way of life

Listening carefully can reveal the true depth of the challenges faced by Indigenous communities, too — so by recording their observations of climate change, there is an opportunity to work on climate justice. “I see my culture starting to disappear,” is how one Indigenous participant in a 2022 study described the severity of change. The paper resulted from a two-day workshop attended by elders, knowledge holders and young adults (ages 19 to 30) from 12 Anishinaabe communities around the Great Lakes region.

One of those communities, the Magnetawan First Nation, had the initial idea for an information-gathering session. “They just said, ‘Hey, this is something we’re concerned about. Can you organize something?’” says lead author Allyson Menzies, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Guelph. As Menzies and her coauthors reported, the 37 participants discussed a range of effects they had noticed, such as how strawberries were appearing later in the year — July rather than June — and how fish spawning, which used to last a month, now continues for only about two and a half weeks because of rising river water temperatures.

The participants also said that passing on traditional harvesting and hunting techniques was becoming difficult since these depend on the climate behaving in a way that it no longer does. This concept of evaporating culture is familiar to many Indigenous people. Inuit communities on Baffin Island, Canada, for instance, frequently report that, as temperatures soar, they are finding it harder to predict the weather, navigate the ice and pass on hunting skills to younger members.

In that sense, we might miss something important if we treat research involving Indigenous communities as merely an exercise in filling in cells on a giant spreadsheet, says Ben Orlove, an anthropologist at Columbia University who coauthored an article about climate anthropology in the 2020 Annual Review of Anthropology. “I think the Indigenous people are saying the whole problem with climate change is not the data gaps,” he says. “It’s the limits in your framework.” Speaking broadly, he says there’s a tension between the Western view of the natural world as a resource to be exploited and the Indigenous view of a world where humans and nature are part of one single whole.

Ettawageshik of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians agrees: Traditional knowledge is not just an encyclopedic list of facts. What matters, he says, is the Odawas’ ongoing relationship with beings — plants, animals and natural places.

“We’re but one spot in that web of life,” he says. “We knew that in that web of life we could not survive without the other beings and, those other beings, they agreed to take care of us. And we agreed to take care of them.”

Chris Baraniuk is a freelance science journalist and nature lover who lives in Belfast, Northern Ireland. His work has been published by the BBC, the Guardian, New Scientist, Scientific American and Hakai Magazine, among other publications.

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews. 

Career Ready: 3 strategies to prepare teens for life after school

For some time, heading to college or joining the workforce have been the standard choices for teens upon high school graduation. Today, in part due to technology and social media, students have access to myriad career paths that are all but traditional.

With an increasingly dynamic career landscape creating an awareness of jobs that didn’t exist even 10 years ago and a shortage in the workforce, there’s a willingness for both potential employees and employers to look at careers and young talent from a whole new perspective.

“There isn’t a ‘typical’ career anymore,” said Dr. Lorna Bryant, Gen Z career expert and head of career education for Pearson Virtual Schools. “With the perfect storm in the workforce of boomers retiring, many people still not returning to work in the wake of the pandemic and a population that has declined for the last 50 years, this generation (ages 11-26) is positioned extremely well. Employers want and need them. In short, the scales have flipped to the supply side and demand is causing many employers to remove barriers to work entry. Whether high school grads go to college or work, developing in-demand skills early will help them secure and succeed in the jobs of the future.”

Consider these tips from Bryant to help students explore the many options in front of them and prepare for the possibilities that await after high school.

Help Kids Cultivate Durable Skills
While technology has transformed the world of work, an increasing number of careers prioritize durable skills over technical or hard skills. Durable skills (also known as “soft” or “human” skills) include collaboration, leadership, communication and attention to detail, along with traits like empathy, grit and resilience. According to Pearson’s Power Skills report, these are some of the most in-demand skills for employers. In addition, research from America Succeeds found employers seek durable skills 3.8 times more frequently than the top five technical or hard skills in every location, industry sector and educational attainment level. Possessing these skills is not only attractive to employers but colleges and universities, too. One of the best ways to prepare for the jobs of tomorrow, which don’t exist today, is to focus on timeless durable skills.

Many students already possess or are actively developing these skills in high school. The key is to raise awareness of their importance, seek ways to boost them and showcase them on college and job applications or resumes. For example, teens can display their leadership skills by captaining sports teams or starting a club at school. They can showcase collaboration and communication abilities by holding and thriving in student government positions, volunteering or working part-time jobs.

Bridge Passions and Hobbies to Careers
Beginning conversations with children as early as middle school that expose students to job roles, responsibilities and salaries connected to areas of interest is important for setting them up for long-term success. Nurturing interests – rather than dismissing them as flights of fancy – and finding paths to explore that align with those hobbies or interests in real-world applications can open doors to potential careers that may not have previously been considered.

For example, Lake Liao, a 2023 Lighthouse Connections Academy grad, is attending Princeton University on a pre-law track. The flexibility of online school enabled him to dig into his passions for political and community organizing and activism in high school, including activism around climate and environmental policy. It was through joining local nurses in their fight for a fair contract he realized he wanted to be a lawyer and make a difference in the labor rights cause.

To help students align their values and interests with potential careers, ask questions such as:

• What is it, specifically, you enjoy about your interests? What jobs rely on related skills (working with your hands, serving others, being creative, etc.)?
• Do you have the skills to do those jobs? If not, what research and training do you need to acquire the necessary skillset?
• Are there related jobs available in the geographic location you want to live?
• Can you make enough money to live the lifestyle you want doing this job?
• Can you envision enjoying this type of work for 8 (or more) hours per day?

Get a Head Start on Credentials or College Credit
As earning college credits, career-ready credentials and specialized training for future careers is becoming more accessible for high school and middle school students, it’s important to research available options. From online resources, workshops, career counselors and accelerated career readiness programs that allow students to enter college or the workforce “job-ready,” there are more options available now than ever before.

One example, Connections Academy, a K-12 online school program, has expanded its slate of college and career readiness initiatives for middle and high school students to offer an innovative tri-credit approach where courses can deliver high school credit; industry-recognized micro-credentials (to help qualify for careers in data analytics, UX design, software development, cybersecurity and more); and eligibility for college credit toward more than 150 bachelor’s degree programs at partner universities in the United States. In addition, the Career Pathways program delivers curated learning experiences in fields such as IT, business and health care, allowing students to connect with employers, internships and clubs, and take advantage of specialized classes that transition seamlessly to higher education or nationally recognized, industry certifications.

Taking advantage of program offerings, aspiring paramedic Maeson Frymire, a 2022 Inspire Connections Academy graduate, became certified as an EMT before graduating high school. After graduation, he became a firefighter and is now working toward becoming an advanced certified EMT, carving out a career path toward flight paramedicine.

Or consider Abigail Sanders, also a 2022 graduate, who completed her bachelor’s degree by the time she graduated high school. Now in the second year of her doctorate program in medical school, she aspires to be a doctor by the age of 22 and uses her love of learning and passion for science to advance her career while seeking to become an oncologist.

For more information on online schools and career readiness programs for teens, visit ConnectionsAcademy.com.

SOURCE:
Connections Academy

Nonprofits can become more resilient by spending more on fundraising and admin − new research

Food banks can operate on a large scale that requires expensive equipment and skilled management. Brittany Murray/MediaNews Group/Long Beach Press-Telegram via Getty Images

Telesilla Kotsi, The Ohio State University and Alfonso J. Pedraza Martinez, University of Notre Dame

Most food banks, homeless shelters and other social services nonprofits constantly face hard decisions about how to use their limited funds. Should they spend as much as possible on meeting the immediate needs of people who need help? How much of their budget is appropriate to spend on new equipment, skilled managers and everything else required for an organization to thrive and endure?

To help nonprofits tackle this quandary, we teamed up with two other business professors, Arian Aflaki and Goker Aydin, to develop a mathematical model to guide nonprofits on how to divvy up their spending to optimize both current performance and future resilience through their spending priorities.

Having observed how charity watchdogs like Charity Navigator rate nonprofits, our model takes into account that spending more on core programs leads to increased funding for a nonprofit. In consultation with the Indiana Hoosier Hills Food Bank, we also studied the relationship of administration costs with a nonprofit’s capacity, which comprises the organization’s infrastructure, equipment, staff and other resources. This capacity is crucial for the nonprofit’s ability to meet its immediate and future needs.

Building on this, our research challenges the conventional wisdom that nonprofits should allocate nearly all of their budget to program costs. We found that striking the right balance depends on an organization’s existing capacity.

Our model indicates that new organizations and groups that are operating on small budgets need to spend a larger share of their revenue on administrative costs than larger, more established nonprofits. This investment lays a solid foundation for long-term resilience and ensures they are better equipped to serve their beneficiaries.

As nonprofits grow and establish some level of capacity, the emphasis should then shift to fundraising. That approach allows them to gather the funding necessary to maximize their existing capabilities. Importantly, the share of spending for administration or fundraising should align with the organization’s anticipated future needs.

For instance, if a nonprofit expects to take on larger projects or greater responsibilities in the future, it would be prudent to increase administrative spending now to prepare for those challenges.

Why it matters

Administrative costs, also known as overhead, encompass salaries, training, infrastructure, equipment and upkeep.

Donors and grantmakers often pressure nonprofits to devote as much of their budgets as possible to providing services, generally known as a nonprofit’s program. Many funders even set admin and fundraising caps in grant agreements. These well-meaning practices can compel nonprofits to scrimp in ways that make them less effective.

After years of investing too little money in, say, computers and professional development, nonprofits eventually have to pivot and devote more money to those neglected needs. Once their financial health is no longer shaky, those groups tend to cave again to their donors’ concerns, cutting their budgets for fundraising and administrative activities.

Scholars of nonprofit management have sounded the alarm about this “starvation cycle,” for two decades. But there are some signs that this loop might be breaking.

Big donors like the Ford Foundation are now dedicating 20%-25% of their grants to cover overhead – or even providing their support with no strings attached, recognizing that for a nonprofit to be successful it needs to be well managed. Meanwhile, organizations that rate nonprofits, like Charity Navigator, are starting to broaden their criteria to look at an organization’s overall well-being and impact, not just how they minimize spending on administration and fundraising.

Rather than neglect urgent spending priorities, some nonprofits resort to misclassifying certain expenses. That is, they pay for administrative work with money designated as program related in their budgets. This strategy makes financial distress less likely but interferes with transparency and can undermine budget discipline.

What isn’t known

In the future, we plan to collaborate with charity watchdogs to gain their insights on how our evaluation recommendations could be applied to reflect each organization’s specific capabilities and goals. This will help us understand any limitations and make necessary adjustments for broader use.

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.

Telesilla Kotsi, Assistant Professor of Operations and Business Analytics, The Ohio State University and Alfonso J. Pedraza Martinez, Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations, University of Notre Dame

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.