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As with tropical trees around the world, the koa forests of Hawaii have been decimated — cut down to make way for sugar plantations and cattle ranches. One company is using an innovative business model to bring back koa forests. The secret is a digital tag that helps track individual trees.

At upscale Hawaiian shopping malls like Kings' Shops, wood from the native koa tree is in high demand. Its color ranges from light to dark brown. Koa's curving lines make it popular for furniture, or ukuleles.

"People love the koa," says John Kirkpatrick, owner of Genesis Gallery. "They like the idea that it only grows here in Hawaii."

He shows me a 3-foot vase made of lustrous koa wood that's priced at $9,000.

Koa is expensive because it's increasingly rare, as most of the native forests have been cut down.

Several projects aim to reforest the Big Island of Hawaii with koa. One of the most innovative efforts is run by Hawaiian Legacy Hardwoods.

From an all-terrain vehicle, company CEO Jeff Dunster tours the operation, climbing up steep dirt trails to reach 5,000 feet, toward tall grass overlooking fields of new koa.

Dunster started as a consumer of koa furniture. Then he discovered that he was part of the deforestation problem.

"We wanted to be creative with ways where we could put back forests, leave them intact and make it financially viable for the landowner," Dunster says.

The company's business model relies on investors, who pay around $110 per tree.

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Hawaiian Legacy Hardwoods COO Darrell Fox (left) and CEO Jeff Dunster stand beside the massive trunk of an old-growth koa tree. The company aims to grow similar trees from seeds. Courtesy of Hawaiian Legacy Hardwoods hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of Hawaiian Legacy Hardwoods

Hawaiian Legacy Hardwoods COO Darrell Fox (left) and CEO Jeff Dunster stand beside the massive trunk of an old-growth koa tree. The company aims to grow similar trees from seeds.

Courtesy of Hawaiian Legacy Hardwoods

Over the next few decades, the trees will be harvested for timber — a potential windfall for investors.

"The historical data shows that koa has appreciated 1,000 percent in the past 10 years," Dunster says.

Money from the investments helps the company buy land and plant koa trees that will never be harvested. The company calls them "legacy trees."

"For every investment tree we plant, we plant three legacy trees," Dunster says.

Chief Operating Officer Darrell Fox gets down on his hands and knees to plant a legacy tree. Next, he pours a little water. Finally, he inserts an RFID (radio frequency identification) tag in the soil next to the tree. The ID helps reassure both investors and conservationists.

"The biggest concern was — how do I know you're not selling my tree multiple times?" Fox says. "And that was one of the reasons we got involved in the RFID tagging program in the first place. So, if you look at the quarter-million-plus trees we've planted out here so far, every one of them has its own unique ID number."

That ID number allows customers anywhere in the world to zero in on specific trees via the Internet.

"The individual tree owner will be able to look at the database and see when the tree was planted, what its mother tree was — the one who provided the seed," Fox says. "They'll be able to see what the weather conditions were at the time of its planting."

Despite these innovations, there is some uncertainty in the process. For one thing, no one has successfully planted and grown koa trees for timber.

Though, people have tried.

J.B. Friday, a forester with the University of Hawaii, says, "I've seen koa plantations that I know the original owner had the idea that he was going to be harvesting trees, and in hindsight, it's not going to happen. So, I guess they lost money on that."

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Hawaiian Legacy Hardwoods has created an Internet interface so customers can zoom in and view information about specific Koa trees from their computers. Courtesy of Hawaiian Legacy Hardwoods hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of Hawaiian Legacy Hardwoods

Hawaiian Legacy Hardwoods has created an Internet interface so customers can zoom in and view information about specific Koa trees from their computers.

Courtesy of Hawaiian Legacy Hardwoods

There are threats from pests and diseases, and the possibility that these newly planted trees won't yield the kind of wood most valued in the marketplace.

Hawaiian Legacy Hardwoods advises investors about the risks, including the possibility of a total loss.

Nonetheless, the company already has a waitlist of investors lined up to buy trees for next year's planting season.

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reforestation

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Hawaii

Shanghai is one of the world's most vertical cities, a metropolis where 50-story buildings are routine. At night, the cityscape is so cinematic, it's been featured in both James Bond and Mission Impossible films.

This year, Shanghai Tower, the world's second-tallest building, will open and put an exclamation point on Shanghai's futuristic skyline. The structure, which measures 2,073 feet, is loaded with symbolism.

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Jun Xia, an architect and Shanghai native, gazes up at a circular opening in the roof of Shanghai Tower. The architects hope to create "a vertical urban community" with the new building. Frank Langfitt/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Frank Langfitt/NPR

Jun Xia, an architect and Shanghai native, gazes up at a circular opening in the roof of Shanghai Tower. The architects hope to create "a vertical urban community" with the new building.

Frank Langfitt/NPR

It rises out of Shanghai's riverside financial district, which as recently as the 1990s was a mix of warehouses and open fields, even home to a dairy farm. The tower twists and tapers like a glass and steel geyser hurtling toward the sky – illustrating both Shanghai's and China's ambitions.

The building is so tall – only the Burj Khalifa (2,717 feet) in Dubai is taller — the views can be disorienting. From an observation deck on the 120th floor, visitors can stare down about 600 feet to a neighboring skyscraper, the Jinmao Tower. By comparison, the Jinmao, which opened in 1999 and resembles a pagoda, is taller than the Empire State Building.

On a clear day, you can see more than 30 miles from Shanghai Tower to the East China Sea, says Jun Xia, a Shanghai native and regional design director for Gensler, the American firm that designed the building.

To prevent the building from swaying in heavy winds, workers used a crane to stack steel plates and build a 1,200-ton, tuned-mass damper near the top of the tower. The damper is computerized and surrounded by pistons, which push it in the direction of strong winds to counter-balance their force. Without a damper, the top of the building could sway as much as 5 feet during typhoons, says Daniel Winey, Gensler's managing principal for the Asia-Pacific region.

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It's estimated 20,000 to 30,000 people will pass through Shanghai Tower each day. Shen Zhonghai/Gensler hide caption

itoggle caption Shen Zhonghai/Gensler

It's estimated 20,000 to 30,000 people will pass through Shanghai Tower each day.

Shen Zhonghai/Gensler

"If you don't have something like this in a building of this height, you can actually get nauseous," says Winey.

Beyond its height, what distinguishes the structure is its design.

Shanghai Tower is a building within a building. The interior — where offices and a hotel will be located — is a cylinder wrapped in a skin of glass and steel, which creates a series of atriums that run up the sides of the structure. An atrium on the eighth floor is a dozen stories tall and has palm trees, granite benches and a panoramic view of the city.

"It creates what we call a vertical, urban community," says Xia.

Once the building is completely open, 20,000 to 30,000 people will pass through each day, says Winey. People can have lunch, grab a coffee or hold meetings in the atriums, called sky lobbies. Winey says the sky lobbies should offer enough amenities that some people won't feel compelled to leave the building during the work day, which will save on elevator rides and electricity.

"It's really more a study in urbanism than anything else," says Winey. "It's taking the ideas of Shanghai, where you have all these little parks and neighborhoods, and (turning it) from a horizontal plane to a vertical plane."

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In all, there are 21 sky lobbies – that's not a typo — which are mostly public space that can't be rented out to make money. Winey says these sorts of design elements ensure a building like this would never be constructed in the United States, because the return on investment would be a long way off.

"From an economic standpoint, it would never pencil out," he says. "I don't think there would be any U.S. developers who would make that kind of investment."

Shanghai Tower, though, isn't a conventional investment. It was built for about $3 billion by the Shanghai Tower Construction and Development Co., a state-owned enterprise. The company declined an interview request from NPR.

The structure, which is ultimately owned by the city, is more than a building. It's a statement, an anchor for Shanghai's showcase skyline and a symbol of China's economic rise. From the government's perspective, given the message it's trying to send to Chinese people and the world, the money is probably worth it.

Shanghai Tower's reign as the world's second-tallest building, though, won't last long. Ping An Financial Center in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen will surpass it when it opens next year.

Yang Zhuo contributed to this article.

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architecture

China

If you think trade deals are just about business, think again. They can also have a sweeping effect on how people eat. Take all those avocados, watermelon and cervezas from Mexico we now consume, and the meat and feed corn for livestock we send there in exchange.

The Obama administration hasn't shared much detail about the provisions in its controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership, the free trade deal between the U.S. and 11 countries currently being negotiated. But if it's anything like prior free trade agreements, two things are likely, trade experts say.

First, it will have a potentially troubling effect on food and diet in member countries. Second, no one will talk about these dimensions of the deal before it's inked.

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"Trade agreements don't deal at all with diet and health," Eric Holt-Gimenez, executive director of Food First, a national food and development nonprofit, tells The Salt. "What's a concern is opening up markets. They're not expanding businesses to improve diets, they're doing that to meet the bottom line."

One example of a trade deal that should have addressed nutrition and health, according to Holt-Gimenez? The North American Free Trade Agreement boosted American consumption of Mexican produce, but also paved the way for Walmart and American food manufacturers to export and sell a lot more less healthful, processed food in Mexico.

Yet "no-one even bothered to ... develop legislation that would address the impoverishment of the Mexican diet as a result of eating all of the processed foods sold out of Walmart," says Holt-Gimenez.

U.S. officials say they have no plans to explore the health impacts of the TPP. "We do not see conclusive evidence that trade agreements themselves have a major impact on diet and health one way or the other," Cullen Schwarz, press secretary for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, writes in an email. For that reason, he says, it has not been part of discussion.

The new trade agreement will renegotiate provisions in existing agreements like NAFTA and create one set of rules between its 12 member countries, including the U.S., Mexico, Canada, Australia and Vietnam. The agreement's stated goal is to "negotiate comprehensive and preferential access" for American businesses to foreign markets — including all the food items America sells, from agricultural products like meat and grain to processed foods like Doritos, Coca Cola and Cool Whip.

As Mark Bittman argued in a recent op-ed in the New York Times, the agreements can also be seen as an attack on farmers and food safety. "The pact would threaten local food, diminish labeling laws, likely keep environmentally destructive industrial meat production high (despite the fact that as a nation we're eating less meat) and probably maintain high yields of commodity crops while causing price cuts."

Across the Pacific, health officials in Australia issued a report warning of the likely health effects of the TPP — including on diet, obesity and diabetes—on that country's citizens. Their biggest concern? That the controversial "Investor State Dispute Settlement" provision, which allows corporations to sue governments for limiting their ability to compete in a market, would undercut food labeling policies that promote healthier food choices, making it more difficult to battle rising obesity rates.

U.S. officials say these concerns are likely unfounded. While they acknowledge that they haven't studied the nutrition effects of trade agreements, they argue that eliminating barriers to American food exports benefits everyone.

"The Grown in America brand stands for quality ... and you're making this type of product more easily accessible for people," says Trevor Kincaid, a spokesperson for the office of the U.S. Trade Representative, which is in charge of negotiating the agreement. Pointing to the rising demand for meat in regions like southeast Asia with a burgeoning middle class, Kincaid adds, "American farmers can help fill the void." What's more, he said, trade agreements can lower the cost of food because "even just introducing competition just drives down costs."

As for concerns that ISDS could overturn public health laws, trade officials say that while the provision allows companies to file suit, it only offers financial compensation as a remedy. To actually change the law, companies have to win in local courts. (Think New York City's failed soda ban.) Officials also say that procurement policies, such as those promoting the purchase of local food, are typically exempt from ISDS.

And as to whether the U.S. bears responsibility for rising obesity rates in its trading partners, Kincaid demurs. "It may be one of those things where other things are happening," he says, pointing to the fact that obesity has risen across Latin America, not just in Mexico. And, he says, "What your family chooses to purchase and eat is your decision."

Tracie McMillan is the author of The American Way of Eating, a New York Timesbestseller, and a senior fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University. You can follow her on Twitter @tmmcmillan.

trans pacific partnership

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NAFTA

The European Union has presented a proposal to the United Nations aiming to stem the flood of migrants from the Middle East and Africa to Europe. The plan includes seizing and destroying the boats that smugglers are using to transport the migrants across the Mediterranean Sea. The EU's foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, briefed the U.N. Security Council on the proposal Monday morning. "We need to count on your support to save lives," Mogherini told council members.

She outlined proposals agreed to by EU governments last month, including reinforcement of search and rescue efforts, tripling financial resources for this purpose over the next two years, disrupting smuggling networks and bringing the perpetrators to justice, and efforts to identify, capture and destroy the smugglers' vessels.

The EU has also proposed intervening on the ground in Libya, the departure country of many of the migrants. But Russia, which can veto any Security Council resolution, opposes the idea of destroying the smugglers' ships before they can be used.

An estimated 1,800 people have died attempting to cross the Mediterranean this year, according to the U.N.

The EU is also pushing a plan to accommodate those migrants who do make it to Europe, but it will not meet with universal approval on the continent. CNN reports the plan would call for quotas on the number of migrants each EU country would be required to take in.

A spokeswoman for the European Commission said repeatedly Monday that the document was still being redrafted, and she would not comment on whether any EU countries would be able to opt out of the quotas.

Under the plan, European nations could see as many as 20,000 refugees a year, reports The Wall Street Journal. Under the proposal crafted in Brussels, the distribution of migrants among EU states would use a formula that takes into account the size of the population, the strength of the economy and unemployment rates in each country, as well as the number of refugees they have taken in so far, according to a draft text seen by The Wall Street Journal.

The paper says the European Commission will take up the refugee plan during its meeting Wednesday.

migrants

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