Read the full story from the Stockholm Water Institute.
An innovative web-based platform combines hydrological modelling and stakeholder input to create a part tool, part game to improve management of river basins in Southeast Asia: Supporting Water Resources Management (SWARM).
Read the full story at Inside Climate News.
As climate change brings dangerous heat waves, too little is being done to better warn patients or physicians of the growing risk, medical experts say.
Read the full story in Fast Company.
Many cities are aiming for neutrality by 2030 or 2050. The Danish capital plans to be the first carbon-neutral capital in the world and to hit the goal by 2025.
Read the full story in The Guardian.
The New Jersey city’s lead contamination crisis has been more than three years in the making – and residents feel officials have been slow to act
Read the full story from the American Institute of Physics.
Advances in adapting the technology and better methods for predicting wind conditions have fanned significant growth of the use of wind turbines for electricity in the last 40 years. A new report takes stock of where the field is now and what lies ahead. Researchers surveyed the growth of wind technology as a source of renewable energy and assessed its viability for continuing to capture larger shares of the electricity market.
Read the full story from Consumer Reports.
For anyone living in the U.S. in 2019, plastic is nearly impossible to avoid: It lines soup cans, leaches out of storage containers, hides in household dust, and is found inside of toys, electronics, shampoo, cosmetics, and countless other products. It’s used to make thousands of single-use items, from grocery bags to forks to candy wrappers.
But what many people don’t know is that we’re doing more than just using plastic. We’re ingesting it, too. When you eat a bite of food or even have a sip of water, you’re almost certainly taking in tiny plastic particles along with it. These ubiquitous fragments are known as microplastics.
Because research into microplastics is so new, there’s not yet enough data to say exactly how they’re affecting human health, says Jodi Flaws, Ph.D., a professor of comparative biosciences and associate director of the Interdisciplinary Environmental Toxicology Program at the University of Illinois.
Read the full story from the University of Cambridge.
Detrimental economic effects of global warming are likely to go beyond those being discussed in policy circles — particularly for wealthier nations, say researchers. Study suggests that 7% of global GDP will disappear by 2100 as a result of business-as-usual carbon emissions — including over 10% of incomes in both Canada and the United States.
Read the full story in the Star Advertiser.
The rise of social media, travel apps and vacation rental hosting sites has made it more difficult for tourists and residents to find secluded experiences on any island, especially Maui, where tourism arrivals rose from 1.8 million in 2009 to 2.9 million in 2018, a 54% gain that was the largest increase on any island.
Maui, with a population of roughly 152,000, also boasts the state’s highest ratio of visitors to residents. On any given day some 30% of the people on the island are visitors, according to Hawaii Tourism Authority estimates from 2018. Testifiers at a Maui County Council committee meeting Tuesday said the island’s population was now, on average, one tourist for every 2.4 residents — a measure that’s nearly 10 percent over the suggesed limits set by the Maui Island Plan, the adopted guide for Maui County growth.
Maui also has the best rental car facility in the state, a $340 million, multilevel wonder with an electric tram which opened in May. The investment harks back to HTA’s plan of a few years ago to grow Hawaii tourism by boosting visits to the neighbor islands, which were perceived as offering more opportunity for growth in visitor arrivals.
HTA’s goal for neighbor island tourism now favors visitor experience, resident sentiment and spending over tourism arrivals.
But changing course is difficult. Through the first six months of the year, HTA reported that Maui visitor spending decreased nearly 2% to $2.6 billion, while visitor arrivals grew 4% to more than 1.5 million. That’s the opposite of HTA’s goal.
Read the full story from WXPR.
Governor Tony Evers issued an executive order concerning a group human-made chemicals in Wisconsin…
His administration is proposing a new PFAS enforcement standard of 20 parts per trillion. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources is already working to implement that. The federal standard is 70 parts per trillion.
The Pollution Prevention (P2) 101 LibGuide is designed to help P2 technical assistance providers find information quickly and efficiently and is targeted particularly at those new to the P2 field.
Start your journey with the Essential Information section, which has links to materials for training staff new to the P2 field. It includes links to foundational documents, networking sources, videos, and webinar series. Many of the materials included in this section were recommended by experienced P2 practitioners.
Continue on to the Technology Diffusion and P2 section, which discusses technology diffusion and how it relates to P2 technical assistance. It also includes links to essential reading and case studies of how technical assistance programs have used these principles to effectively provide sustainability assistance to companies.
The sector and subject pages are another useful feature. Some of the sectors covered include:
It also includes links to case studies; software tools and databases; compliance assistance; news and current awareness; statistics and data sets; and patents, methods, and standards, as well as advice on effectively locating P2 information.
Environmental News Bits 