Read the full story at Dezeen. See also Eight ways to prevent birds flying into buildings with glass facades.
Legislation is needed to force architects to prevent the mass slaughter of birds that “didn’t evolve to deal with glass”, experts have told Dezeen.
Read the full story at The Hill.
Opinions surrounding climate change are the biggest “dealbreaker” out of several topics when it comes to finding a match on the popular dating app OKCupid, new data from the company shows.
Among 250,000 users surveyed worldwide over the past year, OKCupid found that 90 percent of daters said that it’s “important” for their match to care about climate change.
Meanwhile, among 6 million users surveyed over the past three years, 81 percent of daters said they were “concerned” about climate change — topping other potential dealbreaker issues like gender equality and gun control.
Read the full story from Frontiers.
Endangered mountain gorillas increase the frequency they drink water as the temperature increases, suggesting a likely impact of climate change on their behavior, finds a new study published in Frontiers in Conservation Science.
Researchers used 10 years of data from observations on the only two existing mountain gorilla populations and found that both populations drank water significantly more often at higher average temperatures than cooler ones. The results have important implications for the behavior and conservation of mountain gorillas, which are faced with continued increases in temperature and frequency of extreme weather events due to the climate crisis.
Read the full story at Solar Power World.
Solar shingles, solar tiles, solar roofs — whatever you call them — are trendy once again with the announcement of a “nailable” product from GAF Energy. These products in the building-applied or building-integrated photovoltaics (BIPV) category of the market take solar cells and condense them into smaller panel sizes that attach to a residential roof on a lower-profile than traditional rack-mounted solar systems.
Read the full story at Ms. Magazine.
Late last month, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released their sixth assessment report, which examines the impacts and solutions to climate change. It showed that society is not doing enough to mitigate the effects of climate change. From extreme flooding in Florida from Tropical Storm Elsa in July, to the wildfires that ravaged California last year, climate change is being realized in our everyday lives—with no end in sight. In fact, in the next 30 years, the cost of flood damage is expected to rise by 26 percent, according to a recent study. The IPCC report identifies half of the global population as living in highly vulnerable locations.
While these events are terrifying for all, climate-induced catastrophes disproportionately affect people who are incarcerated, as they are physically unable to flee. There are “54 jails, prisons, and detention centers nationwide that hold more than 1,000 people that are above the 95th percentile for wildfire risk,” according to The Intercept. There are also approximately 621 correctional facilities in the U.S. that are posed to major flood risks—even in landlocked states such as Tennessee, Ohio and West Virginia.
Read the full story at Food Engineering.
The company mixes CO2, hydrogen and a naturally occurring microbe, then ferments it to create high-grade protein with several potential uses.
Read the full story at The Manufacturer.
The timing of COP26, at the tail-end of 2021, means many of us have started 2022 with a renewed urgency around sustainability. World leaders’ pledges around methane reduction and halting deforestation may have initially seemed a few steps removed from everyday activity for manufacturers, but they will have an impact in several places along the value chain.
Started in 2016 as a competition between San Francisco and Los Angeles, the City Nature Challenge (CNC) has grown into an international event, motivating people around the world to find and document wildlife in their cities.
Run by the Community Science teams at the California Academy of Sciences and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, the CNC is an annual four-day global bioblitz at the end of April, where cities are in a collaboration-meets-friendly-competition to see not only what can be accomplished when we all work toward a common goal, but also which city can gather the most observations of nature, find the most species, and engage the most people in the event.
Read the full story from the New Buildings Institute.
With the rapid growth of new indoor agriculture facilities growing vegetables, cannabis and other plants, the increased demand for energy and carbon intensive lighting and dehumidification for plant growth has skyrocketed. Lighting can consume between 50-70% of an indoor grow facility’s energy. HVAC and dehumidification accounts for most of the rest. For cities and states trying to meet climate action targets to reduce emissions, the data tells us that unless states can incentivize the growth of crops outdoors or in greenhouses it is necessary to enact standardized requirements for indoor horticultural facilities as soon as possible.
The current development of the 2024 International Energy Conservation Code (IECC) is the best near-term opportunity to capture these savings in future growing facilities. Last month, the first of two proposals submitted by NBI in October 2021 was approved by the commercial consensus committee, and will be included in the first draft of the new energy code to be released for public comment this summer. The committee-approved proposal (CEPI-185) addresses lighting efficiency with the second proposal (CEPI-84) targeting dehumidification efficiency to be considered in the coming weeks. Taken together, these requirements could drastically reduce the energy and carbon footprint of these facilities. According to one study, if all horticultural lighting today was converted to LED technology, they would achieve a lighting energy savings of 34% and save $350 million annually.
Read the full story from North Carolina State University.
Researchers have developed a new membrane technology that allows for more efficient removal of carbon dioxide from mixed gases, such as emissions from power plants.
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