Read the full interview in Pacific Standard.
A conversation with Fiona Hesselden, a researcher with the Centre for Sustainable and Resilient Communities at the University of Huddersfield, about the globally powerful coffee plant and its little bean.
Day: November 16, 2016
Want Green Infrastructure? First, Invest in Infrastructure
Read the full story in Pacific Standard.
Throughout the election, one of the few points Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton could agree on was the country’s need for improved infrastructure—transportation systems, energy, and so on. But tradeoffs between sustainability and economic growth make it unclear how exactly to proceed. Now, researchers argue that, to create environmentally sustainable infrastructure, we need to pay attention to what’s keeping us from investing in infrastructure more broadly.
US envoy says climate deal is bigger than any one head of state
Read the full story from the BBC.
The Paris climate agreement will survive a Trump presidency says the US special envoy on climate change Dr Jonathan Pershing.
Obama cautions against bailing on Paris climate accord, weakening environmental rules
Read the full story from the Washington Post.
Faced with the prospect of his successor unraveling a slew of environmental regulations and withdrawing the country from a historic climate pact, President Obama on Monday made the case that his push to move the United States toward cleaner energy sources had helped boost the economy.
Climate Change’s Effects Won’t Wait for a President Trump
Read the full opinion piece in Newsweek.
Donald Trump will take office at a singular time in the history of our planet. The year 2016 is the first in well over a million in which the concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere did not fall below 400 parts per million. Physics that has been known since the 19th century tells us that these high levels of carbon dioxide should make the planet warmer; and, indeed, this year will almost certainly be the warmest on record, with a global average temperature gearing up to be about 2.2°F (1.2°C) warmer than the late 19th century average. And, over the past quarter century, global average sea level has risen at a rate of about 1.2 inches per decade—more than twice as fast as the average 20th century rate. These are all well-established scientific facts.
Yet if the new administration governs as the Republican nominee campaigned, it will not be auspicious for U.S. climate policy. This means the U.S will face a growing set of risks linked to climate change.
New Call2Recycle Study Highlights the Importance of Accessibility in Driving Recycling Behavior
Read the full story from Environmental Leader.
Ask consumers why they don’t recycle and the number one complaint is simple: It’s inconvenient. You have to collect it. You have to store it. If it isn’t paper, glass, aluminum or recycled curbside, you have to haul it somewhere. For recyclables that aren’t part of a curbside recycling program, action requires a commitment of time and effort.
But change may be on the way. In a recent online Nielsen survey of 6,000 North American consumers, the respondents who didn’t recycle regularly indicated that they would if it was more convenient. The survey, commissioned by Call2Recycle® North America’s first and largest consumer battery stewardship program, also confirmed progress in the adoption of battery recycling, with more than half of respondents professing awareness of battery programs. Making battery recycling convenient for people throughout North America has been a primary focus for Call2Recycle for the past two decades.
The War On Carbon Is Over
Read the full story from Environmental Leader.
Carbon is not the enemy and can be used as a resource and in circular economy systems “safely, productively and profitably,” according to architect William McDonough, founder of William McDonough + Partners and co-founder of the sustainable design Cradle to Cradle methodology.
McDonough has proposed a new language of carbon, published today in the scientific journal Nature, and he will present it tomorrow in Marrakech at a COP22 affiliated event.
NPLCC Priorities Tool
The Priorities Tool is a watershed visualization and priorities decision support system for the North Pacific LCC developed by Ecotrust.
This spatially explicit, online tool is intended to assist the North Pacific LCC and other natural resource managers, individuals, and community organizations in accessing disparate data sources for understanding and visualizing a wide variety of data sets pertaining to species, threats and potential effects of climate change on freshwater and forest ecosystems throughout the North Pacific LCC geographic area.
At the heart of the tool is a prioritization process that allows users to specify an area of interest, species of interest and constraints (such as vulnerability to climate change or threats to watershed condition).
Regional Aquatic Prioritization and Mapping Tool
This tool was designed as a web interface to solve the question, “Given a set of constraints, which sub-basins should I focus on to maximize conservation objectives for specified fish species.” Typically, solving these problems, compiling the data and analyzing it, is prohibitively complex and too time-consuming for the majority of potential users. Ecotrust created a suite of GIS datasets coupled with a back-end decision support model, packaged within this web-based tool to facilitate iterative and collaborative exploration of regional aquatic priorities.
How much can studies of one region tell us about another?
Read the full story at EnvironmentalResearchWeb.
What similarities does a windswept field of wheat in Western Siberia share with a wheat crop in the midwestern US “corn belt”? Will fertilizers produce comparable yield increases for both fields? Will the irrigation methods used by American farmers work for Russians too? And what impact would government farming subsidies have in each of these places?
Many land-based research projects are specific to a small region, but now a study has developed a method to match up similar land-types around the world, enabling researchers to transfer the benefits of their local knowledge to a multitude of sites.
Environmental News Bits 