Wolf protection downgrade set for green light in EU
EU lawmakers are set on Thursday to give the green light to downgrading wolf protections in the bloc, in line with a landmark change to conservation rules late last year.
Members of the Bern Convention, tasked with the protection of wildlife in Europe as well as some African countries, agreed in December to lower the wolf's status from "strictly protected" to "protected".
The downgrade came into force in March, and the European Commission moved immediately to revise related EU laws to reflect the change, which allows hunting to resume under strict criteria.
Barring a last-minute upset, EU lawmakers will give their approval on Thursday to the rule change, backed by the conservative, centrist and socialist groups in the European Parliament.
The European Union -- as a party to the Bern Convention -- was the driving force behind the push to lower protections, arguing that the increase in wolf numbers has led to more frequent contact with humans and livestock.
But activists fear the measure would upset the recovery made by the species over the past 10 years after it faced near extinction a century ago.
Echoing their concerns, green and left-wing parties were expected to vote against a change they denounce as politically motivated and lacking scientific basis.
"Downgrading wolf protection... panders to fear, not facts," warned Sebastian Everding of the Left group in parliament, saying the move "ignores effective coexistence tools".
Grey wolves were virtually exterminated in Europe 100 years ago, but their numbers have surged to a current population of 20,300, mostly in the Balkans, Nordic countries, Italy and Spain.
- No 'licence to kill' -
Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has made the case that "wolf packs have become a real danger especially for livestock" in some parts of Europe.
Lowering protections "will help local authorities to actively manage wolf populations while protecting both biodiversity and our rural livelihoods", she said when the convention change took effect.
In late 2022, von der Leyen lost her beloved pony Dolly to a wolf that crept into its enclosure on her family's rural property in northern Germany -- leading some to suggest the matter had become personal.
In practice, the EU rule change would make it easier to hunt wolves in rural and mountainous regions where their proximity to livestock and sheepdogs is deemed too threatening.
Von der Leyen's European People's Party (EPP), which has spearheaded the change, has stressed that member states will remain in charge of wolf management on their soil -- but with more flexibility than before.
To date, there have been no human casualties linked to rising wolf populations -- but some lawmakers backing the change warn that it may only be a question of time.
Spain's Esther Herranz Garcia, a member of the conservative EPP, cited figures showing that wolves attacked more than 60,000 farm animals in the bloc every year.
"The people who feed our country cannot be expected to work with this fear hanging over them," said France's Valerie Deloge, a livestock farmer and lawmaker with the hard-right Patriots group, where the rule change has also found support.
Socialist and centrist lawmakers -- while agreeing to back the changes under a fast-track procedure -- have struck a more measured tone.
"This is not a licence to kill," Pascal Canfin, a French lawmaker with the centrist Renew group, told AFP. "We are providing more leeway for local exemptions -- wolves remain a protected species."
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The Hill
27 minutes ago
- The Hill
Eurasia is the future — the US needs to get on board
A major discovery of rare earth elements in central Kazakhstan earlier this year sent a jolt through global markets and policymaking circles, with early estimates suggesting it could place the country among the world's top three holders of rare earth reserves. As the Trump administration scrambles to secure alternatives to China's near-monopoly over these critical materials, used in modern technology such as smartphones, electric cars and computers, the spotlight is once again turning to a region long overlooked by Washington: the post-Soviet Turkic world. These Turkic nations — Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan — are unfamiliar to most Americans. Yet U.S. officials have long recognized the region's value, measured in energy, strategic minerals, rare earth elements and alternative supply routes. For many thorny reasons, Washington has failed to establish firm allies there. Diplomatic presence tells the story: while Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin have visited Central Asia 14 and 83 times, respectively, since taking office, no U.S. president has visited any Turkic nation besides Turkey. And now the U.S. has fallen behind. Russia, China and the European Union have all successfully made inroads in the Turkic world in recent years. Moscow, which has traditionally dominated the region, has largely taken control of Uzbekistan's gas industry, while partnering with Kazakhstan on gas and oil exports and nuclear technology for a planned power plant. In 2023, China increased trade with Central Asia by 27 percent from the year prior while signing strategic partnerships with Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan. And the EU recently held a large summit with Central Asian countries in Uzbekistan, announcing it would invest $12 billion in the region. These global powers understand the stakes. Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan together hold 6.5 percent of global gas reserves. Turkmenistan ranks sixth worldwide in gas, and Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan are major oil producers. And over the past several months, Astana has massively exceeded OPEC-plus production targets without signs of slowing. But most important today is the region's supply of minerals and rare earth elements. Besides Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan also has significant reserves and recently invested $2.6 billion to develop mineral extraction. Both Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan also have large reserves of strategic minerals with military, economic and technological uses, like gold, uranium, copper, tungsten, silicon, lithium and titanium. Given Central Asia's large reserves, Washington should invest in refining and mining rare earth elements, to break Beijing's dominance. Refining is particularly important, as these countries lack the ability to refine important strategic minerals like lithium, uranium, nickel and cobalt and often do so in China or Russia. To pave the way for such investment, Congress should consider granting the Turkic world Permanent Normal Trade Relations status. Besides having valuable resources, the region plays an important role in supply routes. During the height of the ancient Silk Road's importance, the Turkic world glued the continent together, serving as a thoroughfare between China, India and Europe. Today, it may be resuming its historic role as a bridge between the East and West, as the Middle Corridor gains in popularity — a transit route from East Asia to Europe bypassing both Russia and Iran. U.S. officials have spoken of the importance of the Middle Corridor in the past, and last year, Washington and Europe signed a Memorandum of Understanding to further develop the route. Such developments give the U.S. a clear opportunity. Should Washington start seriously developing the corridor, it would give Kazakhstani energy a bypass through Azerbaijan while weakening Russia's hold on Kazakhstan. An important step would be brokering a final peace deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan, widening the corridor and giving an alternative to Georgia, which has become closer to Russia in recent years. Many Turkic leaders, including former Kazakhstani President Nursultan Nazarbayev, former Kyrgyz President Almazbek Atambayev and former Azerbaijani President Heydar Aliyev, have spoken about decreasing their outward reliance by forming a Turkic bloc. The bloc would represent a total of roughly 175 million inhabitants, with a GDP of some $1.9 trillion — about 95 percent of the Russian GDP, and a growth rate 2 percent higher than the global average. Currently, Turkic countries have deepened cooperation through the Organization of Turkic States. Should Turkic countries increase cooperation further, they will be better able to dictate their own terms. Although Turkey was once expected to lead a unified Turkic bloc, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Islamist policies and Ankara's focus on the Arab world have alienated key regional powers. The secular Turkic governments are wary of ideological influence, and of becoming subordinate to Ankara. This has led to a leadership vacuum — although possibly not for long. After the conclusion of the 2020 Karabakh war with Armenia, Azerbaijan has begun to position itself along with Kazakhstan as a leader of the Turkic world. Both countries hold the largest reserves of energy and minerals and are most crucial to trade routes. Azerbaijan is located on the very bottleneck between Iran and Russia that crosses the Middle Corridor. Kazakhstan's location makes it the most feasible country for Chinese products to cross over to Europe. The U.S. must take the Turkic world seriously, and soon — not just in words, but with a presidential visit, sustained investment and a new Silk Road strategy. Joseph Epstein is director of the Turan Research Center, a nonpartisan research program at the Yorktown Institute focused on the Turkic and Persian worlds.


National Geographic
35 minutes ago
- National Geographic
How one woman is inspiring a new future for Africa's nomadic herders
Awa Sow, a community leader in Senegal's Ferlo reserve, is finding new ways to involve Fulani women in local herding groups and government. Photographs by Robin Hammond Long before European powers carved up West Africa and independent African states inherited their contemporary borders, a great nomadic tradition began—one that continues and evolves today. Around November, as the rainy season ends and the southern fringes of the Sahara desert begin to dry and brown again, hundreds of thousands of Fulani herders gather to drive millions of cattle, goats, and sheep toward cooler subtropical savannas. This annual movement has made the Fulani one of the largest nomadic groups on Earth, but it has also helped exclude them from politics: Despite their large numbers, the transient herders are less likely to be counted by states. An added obstacle to representation is the fact that many of the region's governments are more invested in farming than herding. That diminished political sway makes it hard to press for herders' interests in controlling the land, routes, and resources that they depend on. While there are large populations of Fulani people in places like Mali and Nigeria, many of these herders are living in constant jeopardy. (Discover more about Fulani herders and how they're reshaping their traditions.) Fulani herders raise cattle, goats, and sheep, which they move across vast distances to find the grasslands and water necessary to sustain their livestock. In Chad, near the city of Dourbali, a family moves livestock while carrying supplies including dried calabashes used to store fresh milk. In northern Senegal, on the vast Ferlo reserve, a different model of political participation has taken shape for the Fulani—and a galvanizing community leader is offering herders a fresh way to think about how problems might be solved. Her name is Awa Sow, an organizer whose decades of work have earned her respect and also rare authority. 'Awa is a woman warrior with unique authority in this region,' says Aliou Samba Ba, the leader of an influential herders association on the reserve. 'Anyone who wants to organize a successful activity in her area—whether political, development, cultural, or religious—has to pass by her.' And Sow foresees a very different future for the Fulani on the Ferlo reserve. Here, Fulani herders have political representation. As a result, in recent years the government has invested in rural development and boosting livestock production and trade. This has helped these Fulani avoid the conflict experienced in other areas. But rainfall levels are dropping, killing off native grasses and putting more pressure on water resources. Now, instead of whole families joining the seasonal migration, it is mostly the men who depart on donkey carts loaded with goods and supplies for ever longer trips, leaving women and children behind in arid villages. Sow's efforts, undertaken through the litany of programs and initiatives she leads, aim to engage those women—and perhaps create the kind of political system that could be a useful model for communities far beyond Ferlo. Usmaan Soh, 27, lives in Senegal with his wives (from left), Naana and Kura, and their children, Hadraan Usman and Haawa Kura. Sow, 63, lives in Barkedji, a rural community of roughly 25,000 people located in the northern part of the reserve. She holds no official governmental role, in part because her influence has grown far beyond that. The problems facing seminomadic Fulani across the region are complex, so her solutions attack them from different directions. Croatia's oldest coastal town One way has been rethinking how Fulani women can participate in politics to help them exert more control over their precious resources. When men leave the Ferlo reserve, for instance, it often diminishes the power of women. As warming temperatures have forced herders to go farther south to keep their livestock watered and fed, men are now gone even longer, coming back to the villages only a few months each year. Over time, that disappearance led Sow to challenge conventional assumptions about who should be leading discussions. 'Why should the women of Barkedji do so much work at home,' she says, 'and then have no input when decisions get made?' The eldest of nine, Sow grew up in a herding household in Barkedji, where she developed a deep appreciation for the beauty of her community's traditions. To care for her siblings, she learned to work together with other girls who collected wood for fires or carried water from nearby wells. At age 18, she married a man who taught her to view that collective power in another way. He was the chief of staff to the president of Senegal's main legislative body, the National Assembly, and encouraged her to travel to different compounds, where she pounded millet with women while persuading them to attend political assemblies and vote. 'If you don't participate in a meeting, you won't be informed,' she remembers telling them. 'If the information doesn't come to you, you must go find it.' There wasn't an established school within the commune when Sow was growing up, and she remained illiterate until her early 30s. After being elected to a rural governing council, she learned to read and write, and then focused more on local land law. The Ferlo, a 4,700-square-mile swath of protected land and buffer areas, exists as a protected zone today because it was developed for livestock breeding during the country's French occupation, when the government invested in wells and forbade commercial farming in hopes of encouraging more livestock production. Since Senegal's independence in 1960, seminomadic herders have continued to use resources along a string of human-made oases lining their migration routes. Now 300,000 herders are scattered across villages there. (How these women are facing the end of their way of life: herding.) Sow eventually directed the creation of local committees that work with the Senegalese government to manage regional water rights and shared herding corridors. Along the way, she encouraged more women to be appointed to top positions within those agencies. 'If the grasses are damaged, the women suffer just as much as the men,' she says, 'so they have a responsibility to manage these resources together.' Sow, shown at center in light blue, leads a discussion with female farmers at her home. They belong to an organization she founded called National Directorate of Women in Livestock, which offers loans to help the women run their own businesses. Members gain leadership experience that may translate into future opportunities. In addition to working on more active land management, Sow has focused on a counterintuitive way to safeguard traditional herding practices: creating more opportunity for those who stay behind. Many of the area's teenage girls and women in their early 20s are unemployed and not in school, so she launched a women's herding association that now comprises 1,500 local women and more than 5,000 across the region. The group has backed local initiatives to plant community gardens that can offer a reliable source of food and more shared income, and helped families in need gain access to health insurance. And it set up a $25,000 mutual aid fund for unexpected community needs. All of this has led to a new kind of cycle. For instance, Barkedji's first female deputy mayor, Diouma Sow (no relation to Awa), initially joined the herder association, which gave her the political experience to seek a series of higher and more influential roles. 'We want our children to be educated,' Diouma Sow says. 'And we also want our women to be autonomous and active in the local economy.' (Around the world, women are taking charge of their future.) Today, one of Awa Sow's most critical efforts may seem contradictory to the tradition of seminomadic herding. She's invested in small-scale ranching, which may offer a more dependable stream of income as the challenges of migratory herding deepen. This past dry season, Sow hired a herder to lead 45 cows and 300 sheep on the annual migration. The practice is common among wealthier Fulani. However, as she's done in recent years, she also kept part of her herd—five cows and 140 sheep—behind in pastures year-round. As she sees it, this separation doesn't undermine the ancient nomadic practice. It provides a new model for how the classic lifestyle can remain sustainable, hedging against any troubles that may befall the animals during their migration. 'Herders need to change their methods and strategies,' she says plainly. The idea originated from a meeting in 2017, when she and other community leaders spoke with Senegal's minister of livestock, who publicly raised concerns that drier rainy seasons were making conditions more difficult for herders. Native grasses that livestock rely on were disappearing. The official suggested that one way forward might be to grow climate-resistant crops that could generate a stockpile of animal feed as a defense against longer dry seasons. Other herders stormed out, clearly offended at an idea that resembled traditional farming. But Sow was intrigued. Several years ago, she fenced off enough space on her land for some of her sheep and cows to stay put year-round and plotted a 100-square-foot nursery to grow heat-resistant, nutrient-rich grasses like maralfalfa, which, when dried, is a cheap and plentiful alternative to wild vegetation. Fulani herders visit a cattle market in Dahra, a community of 45,000 people in central Senegal. Markets like this, where the Fulani sell their livestock, represent a vital point of connection between Fulani communities and the regional economies. The concept proved valuable in a different way during a recent rainy season, when a surprise cold snap dumped frigid rains and hail throughout the area. Sow ushered a flock of her sheep from the open fields back to her compound, where they could eat the grasses she'd grown and dried. Only one out of the 140 animals died. The other group was less fortunate because the sheep were in a more remote part of the reserve and had to shelter in place without food. Out of 300 animals, about 70 perished. The experience hardened Sow's conviction that diverse ways of raising livestock remain herders' best shield against climate change. She has since helped design and finance a grant project to introduce young herders to small-scale ranching. Grantees now receive eight sheep to keep in an enclosed pen, along with animal feed, water dispensers, and access to veterinary care. They can sell the animals but must reinvest profits in more livestock for two years. One grantee, a 28-year-old single mother of two, recently sold eight sheep and used the profits to buy nine younger ones. She planned to repeat the process again in a few months and was setting aside part of her garden to grow forage crops. Clearly, not every one of these strategies will work outside the Ferlo, where many Fulani still struggle for rights and resources. But over the past 15 years, Sow's work alongside the government has helped communities drill dozens of new wells, build better schools and health facilities, and secure bank loans for buying animals. Last November, in the days before an important parliamentary election, one of the leading candidates visited with an entourage that included security guards, tom-tom drummers, and a couple of traditional praise singers called griots, who opened the discussion by offering an oral history about Sow herself. 'Families once wished for a boy first,' one proclaimed melodically. 'But Awa, firstborn, is a great source of pride. Awa changed everything. She showed us that one woman can do what a thousand men cannot.' On election day, Awa glided into the courtyard at a nearby secondary school to cast her vote. 'Before, women didn't even come vote. It didn't interest them,' she says. 'But when you look at the lines today, things have changed.' More than half the people at the polls were women, which Awa considers her greatest accomplishment. A version of this story appears in the July 2025 issue of National Geographic magazine. A policy expert on Africa's Sahel region, Hannah Rae Armstrong traveled from her home in Dakar to Senegal's Ferlo reserve to profile Awa Sow, who leads a transformative women's herding association. She also writes for Foreign Affairs, MIT Technology Review, and Le Monde. An Explorer since 2019 and Barcelona-based photographer, Robin Hammond documented the traditions and challenges of nomadic Fulani people in communities across Chad, Niger, Cameroon, Ghana, Senegal, and elsewhere. The nonprofit National Geographic Society, committed to illuminating and protecting the wonder of our world, funded Explorer Robin Hammond's work. Learn more about the Society's support of Explorers.
Yahoo
41 minutes ago
- Yahoo
EU's new Russia sanctions to target energy sector and banks
BRUSSELS (Reuters) -The European Commission has proposed an 18th package of sanctions against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, aimed at Moscow's energy revenues, its banks and its military industry, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on Tuesday. The new package proposes banning transactions with Russia's Nord Stream gas pipelines as well as banks that engage in sanctions circumvention. "Russia's goal is not peace, it is to impose the rule of might ... strength is the only language that Russia will understand," von der Leyen told a news conference. The Commission has also proposed lowering the Group of Seven nations (G7) price cap on Russian crude oil to $45 a barrel from $60 barrel in a bid to cut Russia's energy revenues. Von der Leyen said that the oil price cap will be discussed at a G7 meeting this week. "My assumption is that we do that together as the G7. We started that as G7, it was successful as a measure from the G7, and I want to continue this measure as G7," she said. The proposal also lists more vessels that make up Russia's shadow fleet and oil trading companies. "The next round of EU sanctions against Russia will target Russia's energy revenues including the shadow fleet, its military industry and its banking sector," EU chief diplomat Kaja Kallas said. EU countries will start debating the proposal this week. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data