Education leaders across the U.S. are trying to figure out how to effectively teach students about the risks and warning signs of human trafficking, which includes being forced into domestic servitude, commercial labor or sex work.

According to 2019 data gathered by the Polaris Project – a nonprofit that fights human trafficking, including sex trafficking – 24% of survivors reported that they were first trafficked before they turned 18.

In 2017, California became the first state to require human trafficking education for students and teachers. Tennessee, Florida and Virginia also now require school staff to receive formal training intended to stop human trafficking.

As cases of human trafficking continue to make headlines, similar prevention and education efforts are being made in schools across the country. Parents and community members in other states may also find similar efforts coming to their communities. As a scholar who studies business ethics – and as executive director of the Center for Ethics and Human Rights at Colorado State University – I recommend school leaders keep five key goals in mind when creating anti-trafficking educational programs.

1. Create a safe haven

Childhood researchers suggest that children need a safe haven where they can go when confronted with fear and threats. They also need a secure base, a place where they feel secure to explore the world around them.

Ideally, children’s homes would serve these purposes. But schools can also provide safe havens and secure bases. Children who feel more secure are less vulnerable to predatory people, who often fake affection and provide a false sense of love as a tactic to lure kids into the world of human trafficking.

2. Pay attention to triggers

When being taught about human trafficking, it’s possible that children’s memories of past trauma might be triggered. Educators who are aware of this possibility are more likely to be better at protecting kids from being triggered, and better able to respond properly if it happens.

Many children have been exposed to trauma, such as neglect or abandonment; physical, sexual or psychological abuse; loss of a loved one; or refugee or war experiences. When these memories are triggered, children feel distressed and unsafe.

Triggers may include words, tone of voice, facial expressions, smells, feelings or postures that are embedded in a child’s mind. And some can cause unexpected reactions in seemingly regular situations. For instance, a child whose abusive parent used to eat oranges may be triggered by the smell of an orange, and this memory may became linked with the abusive experience in the child’s mind. Or a common nickname might have been used by an abuser and can be a trigger.

Often, these memories are not conscious ones, so the child may not understand why they feel distressed or overwhelmed, and yet they respond to the trigger as if they are facing a real threat.

3. Be inclusive

When teachers show compassion, warmth and kindness to their students, students are more likely to develop a strong sense of belonging in the classroom space.

Without that sense of belonging, students might come to see themselves as unworthy of attention and love, which hurts their self-esteem and makes them more vulnerable to the influence of predators.

4. Dispel misconceptions and stereotypes

Young white women are often depicted in media as representative of trafficking victims, although women and girls of color experience high rates of trafficking.

Also, women of color who are forced to engage in sexual acts or labor are often stereotyped as deviants and treated with suspicion by officials and law enforcement.

And while boys are less commonly trafficking victims, they are still at risk of being trafficked. In addition, many human trafficking reports do not provide data on nonbinary or gender-nonconforming people.

Trafficking education materials work best when they accurately discuss who the perpetrators are. Effective anti-trafficking education teaches kids that traffickers are not just strangers or people belonging to another race or ethnicity. Traffickers are often friendly, charismatic, well-dressed and seemingly wealthy, and they may appear to be kind and warm. They may also be close family members and caregivers who exploit children in their care.

5. Use appropriate touch and tone

Teachers often use touch and tone of voice to build connections with children. But many children who have experienced trauma are sensitive to touch and avoid it. Teachers who learn how to use touch in reassuring and affirming ways – such as an encouraging pat on the back, an occasional handshake, high-five or fist bump – can help build a sense of safety and security in the classroom, building trust with students and making them less likely to fall prey to traffickers.

Similarly, using consistent tones of voice that are calm, reassuring and firm can help students’ development, engagement, learning and growth.

Schools can play an important role in helping students learn about and protect themselves from human trafficking. With these five concepts in mind, school leaders will be better prepared to help keep kids safe.

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Lumina Albert, Associate Professor of Management and Director of the CSU Center for Ethics and Human Rights, Colorado State University

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Imagine discovering a sea lion in the middle of the woods, more than a mile inland from the beach. Or coming face to face with one of these curious creatures in a local swimming pool or on your front porch.

These encounters are happening in New Zealand with the return of the endangered New Zealand sea lion, the world’s rarest sea lion species. The females normally move up to a mile (about 1.5 kilometers) inland with their pups during the breeding season to protect them from rougher conditions at the coast – but now there are a lot more humans in the way.

Encounters between wild animals and humans can be dangerous for both sides. Sea lions have been stabbed, clubbed, shot and accidentally hit by cars. Roads, fences and residential development can block their movement inland. Some females and pups have adapted to commercial pine forests on private lands that could one day be cleared or developed.

As an ecologist, I study species around the world whose populations are recovering after decades or even centuries of immense human pressures and exploitation. Nations are now preparing for a landmark U.N. conference on protecting Earth’s biodiversity that will take place in China from April 25 to May 8, 2022; one important question is how humans can strike a new balance with recovering species such as sea lions, sharks and whales, and make space for these resilient creatures to thrive.

Making way for sea lions

Like many other creatures valued for their meat or fur, New Zealand sea lions were historically hunted to near-extinction. For the past 150 years, remnant populations could only be found on New Zealand’s undeveloped subantarctic islands, more than 300 miles from the nation’s mainland. Today, their population is estimated at 12,000.

These animals typically return to and breed at the original location where they were born, but in 1993, a female sea lion gave birth on the mainland for the first time in centuries. Since then, her offspring have bred for five generations. Other females have followed, and some 20 pups are now born on the mainland each year.

When wild species recolonize areas or shift their ranges in this way, scientists can make predictive models to help determine where the animals could settle in the future and take steps to protect them. But traditional versions of these models can’t account for when and where the recovering species may interact with humans, because these encounters are new developments and may occur under conditions that differ from the past.

In a study published in November 2021, my team and I addressed this issue by creating an integrated species distribution model database, which pairs algorithmic models with expert knowledge to highlight suitable habitats and flag areas for concern. Through it, we found and mapped 395 potential breeding grounds for sea lions all over the New Zealand mainland. We also identified human-related challenges for the animals, such as roads and fences that could block their inland movement.

Our research can help wildlife managers and local officials search for sea lions, post sea lion crossing signs on roads, verify or restore breeding sites and determine where to work with landowners and spread awareness. This kind of tool can help inform similar efforts for other species that are recovering or moving into new habitats and regions in response to climate change.

Welcoming whales back

Of course, humans are happier to make space for some wild species than for others.

I did research in the Falkland Islands from 2015 to 2016 and found that residents welcomed the return of sei, fin, minke, southern right and blue whales to local waters. All of these species were intensively hunted beginning in the 1800s but started making noticeable comebacks after nations adopted the 1982 moratorium on commercial whaling.

For local residents, seeing whales offshore while tending sheep, taking the ferry or flying from island to island was a special experience. We used residents’ historical knowledge and thousands of whale observations from the 1940s to 2015 to inform scientific surveys around the islands. This work helped others analyze sei whale distribution around the islands and resulted in the creation of the world’s first Key Biodiversity Area for sei whales – a place that is considered globally significant for the rare, unique, or many species it contains.

Finding that Falkland residents enjoyed seeing whales offshore suggested to us that they would support processes like marine spatial planning to help protect them. Marine spatial planning is a public process for organizing human uses of the ocean, such as shipping, tourism, oil exploration and commercial fishing, in ways that balance them with environmental protection.

When predators rebound

Coexisting with some recovering species can be more controversial and delicate to manage, especially if they are perceived as threats to public safety or property.

Along the northeast U.S. coast and up into Canada, white sharks once were severely overfished but are now rebounding in response to climate change, protection efforts and growing populations of seals, their preferred prey. As top predators, sharks help control other ocean species and increase ocean carbon storage. They also are one of the few shark species known to attack humans.

Over the past several years, lifeguards have repeatedly closed popular beaches along Cape Cod in Massachusetts when white sharks are present. Warnings and restrictions intensified after a shark killed a swimmer in 2018. Such measures often spark declines in tourism, but in some places the presence of sharks is slowly becoming an attraction.

Nevertheless, the growing abundance of white sharks is divisive. As shark numbers and sightings increase, scientists and local officials are working to raise awareness and educate the public about them. Monitoring shark movement with drones and other equipment can also help lifeguards warn beachgoers that sharks are present in advance.

Know who’s moving in

Scientists widely agree that the Earth is losing species at a rapid rate, potentially representing the sixth mass extinction in its history. Against that background, these ongoing stories of species recovery take on new urgency, especially when conflicts arise.

Science can help. Predictive models and maps highlight where species may appear in the future. Monitoring species on the move can reveal how numerous they are, how they behave, what habitats they prefer and where they may interact with humans.

When wild species enter new areas, they inevitably will have to adapt, and often will have new kinds of interactions with humans. These encounters won’t always be easy to manage, but I believe that when communities understand the changes and are involved in planning for them, they can prepare for the unexpected, with coexistence in mind.

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Veronica Frans, PhD Student, Michigan State University

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Outside of the world’s oceans, groundwater is one of the largest stores of water on Earth. While it might appear that the planet is covered in vast lakes and river systems, they make up only 0.01 per cent of the Earth’s water. In fact, we now know there is 100 times as much groundwater on this planet as there is freshwater on its surface.

Groundwater is the water contained beneath the Earth’s surface. It’s stored in the tiny cracks found within rock and the spaces between soil particles. It can extend deep into the subsurface, at least as much as 10 kilometres.

As groundwater researchers, we’re interested in how governments and industries might use these extensive groundwater reservoirs, such as for storing liquid waste and carbon dioxide. But groundwater may also have environmental functions that have not yet been revealed — this body of water remains hidden, with very few windows available for us to explore it.

One of Earth’s largest stores of water

While scientists have known for at least five decades that groundwater makes up a large fraction of the world’s water, estimated volumes of groundwater had focused on the upper two kilometres of the Earth’s crust.

A recent analysis that looked 10 kilometres beneath the surface found that the true volume is likely twice as large. These new estimates mean that groundwater is the largest continental reservoir of water — even more than all the water contained in the continental ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland, which were long thought to be the Earth’s second-largest stores of water.

Previous groundwater estimates arrived at lower volumes because they only considered groundwaters at shallower depths. But permeable rocks are found down to at least 10 kilometres below the Earth’s surface and can hold water in cracks and pores. While these spaces only account for a small volume of the rock mass, they add up to nearly 44 million cubic kilometres of water in the upper 10 kilometres of rock, enough to fill more than 10,000 Grand Canyons.

Groundwater matters because it can provide reliable water for homes, irrigation and industry. But these wells tend to be less than 100 metres deep and they rarely approach one kilometre. Most of the groundwater contained in the rock below that is saline, sometimes several times saltier than seawater, and unusable for drinking water or irrigation.

Scientists know much less about the groundwater stored more than one kilometre deep. Yet they have determined that rain and snow falling in North America can circulate to depths of one to four kilometres. Beneath these depths there is only ancient water with other origins, last in contact with the atmosphere more than tens of thousands of years ago, but sometimes in excess of a billion years ago.

The circulation of this deep groundwater is controlled by the forces that drive flow, such as topography, and the permeability of the rock. For example, rainwater and snowmelt circulate more deeply in mountainous areas than flatter regions. Groundwater can flow at speeds of metres per year in sandstones and limestones, or nanometres per year in intact igneous and metamorphic rocks, due to extreme variations in the permeability of different rocks.

Environmental functions of deep groundwater

All of this has helped contribute to the treatment of deeper groundwater as being separate from shallow groundwater resources. For example, oil and gas producing regions often only protect groundwater to a certain depth, without consideration of the strength of the connections between shallow and deep groundwaters.

This assumed disconnect is also the basis for a number of waste isolation projects, including the geologic sequestration of carbon dioxide, also called carbon capture and storage, and of nuclear waste repositories in Canada, Finland and elsewhere.

Deep groundwaters may only be weakly connected to the rest of the hydrologic cycle but this does not mean they are unimportant to the functioning of our planet. Microbes have been found in most subsurface environments with temperatures below 80 C, typical for depths of three to four kilometres. This subsurface life likely accounts for more than 10 per cent of the Earth’s total biomass, and yet the links between deep groundwater circulation and subsurface life are largely unexplored at this time.

There’s clearly still much to learn about deep groundwater. Our windows into the deep subsurface are limited to deep mines, oil and gas wells and a handful of research sites.

New approaches are required to understand deep groundwater, its environmental functions and interactions with the rest of the hydrologic cycle over deep time, both in the past and into the future.

Grant Ferguson, Professor, Department of Civil, Geological and Environmental Engineering and School of Environment and Sustainability, University of Saskatchewan and Jennifer C. McIntosh, Professor, Department of Hydrology and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Arizona

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