Monday, June 24, 2013

Cut pollution and maybe, the planet will cool

Recent research suggests that if we can clean up diesel engines and inefficient cook stoves in India and China for example, that could delay the effects of greenhouse-gas buildup even if pollution from coal-fired power plants persists. The study concludes that if every country were to do what California has done in the last couple of decades to clean up diesel emissions, it would slow down global warming by 15 percent.
Aerosol pollutants such as sulfur dioxide, soot, and ozone are all bad for human health, but they have different effects on the climate. Some of the aerosols are warming the planet, and some are cooling the planet. For example, sulfates that form from coal-plant exhaust reflect sunlight back into space, acting to shade the planet and cool it off. Black-carbon particles from diesel exhaust, on the other hand, absorb sunlight and heat up, warming the atmosphere. Add them together, and on balance they could be cooling the planet! That is, they mask some of the temperature increase that would have occurred as a result of carbon dioxide emissions. But this effect would be more significant if the particulates that help heat up the atmosphere were removed.
What would happen if we immediately got rid of only the black-carbon aerosols? Doing that might lead to a cooling of the planet by half a degree to a degree Celsius. However the impact on temperature is hard to pin down. For one thing, pollution affects clouds and rainfall, which have complicated effects on climate. So it is not easy to assess.

Sunday, June 23, 2013

Cut carbon, increase productivity

U.S. businesses that commit to cutting carbon emissions by 3 percent annually through 2020 could reap as much as $190 billion from reduced energy bills, increased productivity and innovation, and the tapping of new clean energy sources such as solar, a new report from the World Wildlife Fund and CDP has found.
But with the atmospheric concentrations of carbon touching 400 ppm, the window of opportunity is closing fast, and failure to begin curbing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by the end of this decade will make it much harder to meet carbon reduction goals over the long term, according to the report.

In real numbers, that means U.S. businesses must shave 1.2 billion tons (1.2 gigatons), or 25 percent, from their current annual emissions levels of 4.2 billion tons of CO2 equivalent by 2020, according to the report. The glide path for meeting such a target would require a roughly 3 percent reduction in the U.S. business sector's CO2 every year for the next six years.
"Increasing the global average temperature more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels -- a path we are now on -- would cross a threshold beyond which climate change is expected to have long term, irreversible, and dangerous effects," states the report, titled "The 3% Solution."
"It's a big goal. It's a tough goal. But we think it's achievable, and we think it can be done profitably," said Steve Swartz, a partner with McKinsey & Co. and lead author of the report. Paul Simpson, chief executive officer of London-based CDP, formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project, said the new report points to specific financial opportunities that U.S. corporations can seize to drive down carbon emissions while enhancing other measures of business productivity, including profit margins.
The report, based on an analysis by McKinsey, makes clear that the old business paradigm that held that profit and environmental protection objectives run counter to each other no longer holds true. In fact, many U.S. businesses, including numerous Standard & Poor's 500 index firms, have reported a higher rate of return on investments in carbon-reduction technologies than on overall corporate capital investments.
McKinsey also found that nearly 80 percent of S&P 500 companies that report emissions to CDP see bigger financial returns on their carbon reduction investments than their overall capital investments, making reallocation of their capital expenditures a sound business decision.
Yet to unlock the billions of dollars in cost savings, the U.S. corporate sector would need to invest on average 3 to 4 percent of total capital expenditures each year on low-risk, profitable carbon reduction projects.

Thursday, June 20, 2013

Small dams, big issues?

A new report concludes that a global push for small hydropower projects, supported by various nations and also the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, may cause unanticipated and potentially significant losses of habitat and biodiversity. The five-year study, one of the first of its type, concluded that for certain environmental impacts the cumulative damage caused by small dams is worse than their larger counterparts.

The findings were reported by scientists from Oregon State University in the journal Water Resources Research, in work supported by the National Science Foundation.

The conclusions were based on studies of the Nu River system in China but are said to be relevant to national energy policies in many nations or regions -- India, Turkey, Latin America -- that seek to expand hydroelectric power generation. The social and environmental problems caused by large dam projects have resulted in a recent trend toward increased construction of small dams.
Besides the damage to streams, fisheries, wildlife, threatened species and communities, the projects are often located in areas where poverty and illiteracy are high. The benefit to these local people is not always clear, as some of the small hydropower stations are connected to the national grid, indicating that the electricity is being sent outside of the local region.

This study was one of the first of its type to look at the complete range of impacts caused by multiple, small hydroelectric projects, both in a biophysical, ecological and geopolitical basis, and compare them to large dam projects. It focused on the remote Nu River in China's Yunnan Province, where many small dams producing 50 megawatts of power or less are built on tributaries that fall rapidly out of steep mountains. There are already 750,000 dams in China and about one new dam is being built every day, researchers say.
Policies encouraging more construction of small dams are often developed at the national or international level, but construction and management of the projects happen at the local level. As a result, mitigation actions and governance structures that would limit social and environmental impacts of small hydropower stations are not adequately implemented.
One of the things found generally with small dams was that there was much less oversight and governance with the construction, operation and monitoring of small hydropower. On the large, main stem dams, people pay attention to what's going on. On a small hydropower project, no one notices if minimum flows are being maintained. Or if a pump breaks, the hydropower station might sit idle for long periods of time, said a team member.

Monday, June 10, 2013

Photosynthesis interrupted

Everything you have ever eaten, or will ever eat, can ultimately be traced back to an organism carrying out photosynthesis.  The oldest known fossils are those of cyanobacteria, microscopic organisms that 3.5 billion years ago evolved the ability to turn water, carbon dioxide and sunlight into sugar, which fuels all cellular life. Cyanobacteria eventually gave rise to the ancestor of plants.Today those remnant cyanobacteria are known as chloroplasts.
The first step in photosynthesis uses the energy of sunlight to break a water molecule into its basic parts; an atom of oxygen and two atoms of hydrogen.  The hydrogen protons are stripped away from a water molecule and two atoms of oxygen are joined together released as a ‘waste product’.
As positively charged protons accumulate on one side of a membrane a sort of chemical battery is created, the power of which is then used to generate the energy-rich molecule ATP which in turn is used to fix CO2 into the sugars that feed almost all life on the planet.
Now researchers at the University of Georgia have figured out a way to tap into these most ancient of power plants.  By coupling the isolated chloroplast membranes from a spinach plant onto carbon nanotubes Ramaraja Ramasamy and colleagues have succeeded in generating a small electrical current when light strikes the sample. This is different from generating electricity by recombining the hydrogen and oxygen atoms from a split molecule of water – used in fuel cells.
Dr. Ramasamy’s device generates electricity directly from the plant material itself.  What he developed was a way to interrupt photosynthesis to capture the electrons before the plant uses them to make these sugars. Powering our nation’s cities and factories from plant chloroplasts is not something that is going to happen anytime soon but in the near future this technology may enable power generation in remote or isolated places in which even a small amount of electricity is enough to make a difference.

Thursday, June 6, 2013

Learning from the 'informal city'

Slums are becoming tourist destinations, there is ‘slum tourism’. Why? There is so much innovation happening there in the midst of resource crunch, that’s why!
Developed nations can learn directly from developing and emerging economies how to create innovative solutions from limited resources and challenging environmental requirements. There are projects such as that in the Kibera slum of Nairobi, Kenya – often cited as the largest slum in Africa – where a community cooker designed by local firm Planning Systems runs by burning waste: members bring their collected waste in exchange for use of the cooker, to cook a meal or boil water. Green energy initiatives, from biogas from human waste to solar schemes are many. Many off-grid, micro-generated renewable energy are happening in the slums.

But championing slum innovations tends to romanticise the conditions, and ignores the poverty, crime and disease that slum inhabitants face daily.

In 2010, the UN estimated that 830 million people lived in slums worldwide, and predicted the number to rise to 900 million by 2020. In Latin America, almost 80% of the population live in urban areas; in Dhaka, Bangladesh, an estimated 3.4 million people live across the city's 5,000-plus slums. These are huge numbers living in dangerous conditions.

Yet people like Alfredo Brillembourg, Columbia University professor, feel that the formal city cannot survive without the informal city. “… in the slums I discovered a whole new social geography … I began rethinking my whole profession, unlearning what I had learned, and then re-focused on adaptation and reuse and using scarcity as a resource."

It became his life work to not only improve the conditions within slums, but to highlight the aspects that function better than the formal city around it. "Number one: slums are more resilient," he explains. "Why? Because they work in approximation, they work organically, they grow and adapt together. Number two: they produce less trash than the regular city. They use fewer resources.”

He isn't the only urbanist who argues that while improving the conditions must come first, the innovations that arise from slums should not be ignored. Others see slums as symbolising both the individual and the collective. “Composed of incredible individual effort, [the houses] retain this incredible sense of community because they are connected in incredible ways. This cohesion, the new urban village, is the greatest innovation that I see coming out of what you call a slum, but they call their home."

Learning from adversity has always been advocated. And while improving the slums, if we can pick a few lessons in living with less, why not?

Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Think. Eat. Save.

The UNEP theme for this year’s World Environment Day celebrations is Think.Eat.Save. This is an anti-food waste and food loss campaign that encourages you to reduce your foodprint. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), every year 1.3 billion tonnes of food is wasted. This is equivalent to the same amount produced in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. At the same time, 1 in every 7 people in the world go to bed hungry and more than 20,000 children under the age of 5 die daily from hunger.

While the planet is struggling to provide us with enough resources to sustain its 7 billion people (growing to 9 billion by 2050), FAO estimates that a third of global food production is either wasted or lost. Food waste is an enormous drain on natural resources and a contributor to negative environmental impacts.

If food is wasted, it means that all the resources and inputs used in the production of all the food are also lost. For example, it takes about 1,000 litres of water to produce 1 litre of milk and about 16,000 litres goes into a cow’s food to make a hamburger. The resulting greenhouse gas emissions from the cows themselves, and throughout the food supply chain, all end up in vain when we waste food.

In fact, the global food production occupies 25% of all habitable land and is responsible for 70% of fresh water ocnsumption, 80% of deforestation, and 30% of greenhouse gas emissions. It is the largest single driver of biodiversity loss and land-use change.

So, become more aware of the environmental impact of the food choices you make and take informed decisions.
Select foods that have less of an environmental impact, such as organic foods that do not use chemicals in the production process. Choosing to buy locally can also mean that foods are not flown halfway across the world and therefore limit emissions. Above all, say NO to wasting food.