New Innovations in Geoengineering Are Needed to Save the Coral Reefs

08.12.2018

coral reef unsplash — Photo-illustration: Unsplash

The coral reef crisis continues thanks to threats like climate change and pollution. With that in mind, the National Academy of Sciences released a major report last week detailing the high-tech interventions that may be necessary to stop the damage and save the coral reefs.

The report — commissioned by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — outlined two different ways to save coral. One focuses on engineering the coral, and the other involves wild interventions like freezing coral embryos and sperm to preserve biodiversity and then thawing them out in the future. None of the solutions in the report are close to being ready, but the report reveals the urgency of the situation.

“We’re losing reefs so fast,” said Mark Eakin, the program manager of Coral Reef Watch. “It is so critical that we do everything we can to keep coral reefs alive and healthy.”

Some ideas of geoengineering include pumping cooler water from the depths of the ocean to create artificial shade to cool the surface water. Another idea is to alter seawater’s chemistry to make it less acidic. This would include solutions like planting seagrasses to make the ocean more alkaline.

As for the freezing of coral embryos and sperm, scientists have done this successfully with 16 species of coral, but there is a high risk that the freezing process could damage the cells.

Since 1980, coral reefs have declined up to 50 percent in oceans around the world. As the planet warms, the problem will only worsen. This is a life and death situation for the coral as well as the millions of people whose livelihoods depend on coral reefs.

The report from the National Academy of Sciences is one of the most comprehensive of its kind, and an expected follow-up will offer resources to put these ideas into action.

Source: Inhabitat

Beef-Eating ‘Must Fall Drastically’ as World Population Grows

08.12.2018

meat unsplash — Photo-illustration: Unsplash

People in rich nations will have to make big cuts to the amount of beef and lamb they eat if the world is to be able to feed 10 billion people, according to a new report. These cuts and a series of other measures are also needed to prevent catastrophic climate change, it says.

More than 50% more food will be needed by 2050, according to the World Resources Institute (WRI) report, but greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture will have to fall by two-thirds at the same time. The extra food will have to be produced without creating new farmland, it says, otherwise the world’s remaining forests face destruction. Meat and dairy production use 83% of farmland and produce 60% of agriculture’s emissions.

Increasing the amount of food produced per hectare was the most critical step, the experts said, followed by cutting meat-eating and putting a stop to the wasting of one-third of food produced.

“We have to change how we produce and consume food, not just for environmental reasons, but because this is an existential issue for humans,” said Janet Ranganathan, vice-president for science and research at the WRI.

Tim Searchinger, of the WRI and Princeton University, said: “If we tried to produce all the food needed in 2050 using today’s production systems, the world would have to convert most of its remaining forest, and agriculture alone would produce almost twice the emissions allowable from all human activities.”

The new report, launched at the UN climate summit in Katowice, Poland, follows other major scientific analyses showing that huge reductions in meat-eating are “essential” to avoid dangerous climate change. Another found that avoiding meat and dairy products was the single biggest way to reduce an individual’s environmental impact on the planet, from slowing the annihilation of wildlife to healing dead zones in the oceans.

The world’s science academies concluded last week that the global food system was “broken”, leaving billions of people either underfed or overweight and driving dangerous global warming. Another new report concluded that the global food system required “radical transformation” if climate change and development goals were to be met, including “widespread dietary change”.

After increased productivity, the WRI report focuses on meat from ruminant animals. The digestion of cattle and sheep produces methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Beef provided 3% of the calories in the diet of US citizens but was responsible for half the emissions, the WRI said.

The report recommends that 2 billion people across countries including the US, Russia and Brazil cut their beef and lamb consumption by 40%, limiting it to 1.5 servings a week on average. Most of the world’s citizens would continue to eat relatively little beef in the WRI scenario.

But Searchinger said: “The world’s poor people are entitled to consume at least a little more.” The 40% reduction is a smaller cut than in other studies. “We think that is a realistic goal,” he said. “In the US and Europe, beef consumption has already reduced by one-third from the 1960s until today.”

Tobias Baedeker, of the World Bank, said farmers would require a lot of support to make the changes required but that redirecting the world’s huge subsidies could be a “game-changer”. Subsidies of more than $590bn (£460bn) a year are given to farmers in 51 nations, representing two-thirds of global food output, according to the OECD. In the US, these subsidies halve the current price of beef, the WRI says.

Richard Waite, of the WRI’s food programme, said: “Given the scale of change needed, it is going to require government intervention, certainly to get there quick enough. I think a meat tax is something that will ultimately come about, in a five-year-plus timeframe. It took a long time for a sugar tax to become credible [but] it’s been put in place.”

The sophisticated marketing and behaviour-change strategies that food companies already used to influence customers could help shift diets, said Ranganathan, as could governments encouraging less meat in schools, hospitals and other public institutions.

Other changes to farming that are needed, according to the WRI, include better feed to reduce methane production from cows, limiting biofuels made from food crops, managing manure and fertiliser better and cutting energy use by farm machinery. It also said the overall demand for food could be cut, with policies to curb population growth such as “improving women’s access to education and healthcare in Africa to accelerate voluntary reductions in fertility levels”.

The WRI report was launched at the UN climate summit in Poland where almost 200 nations are aiming to turn the carbon-cutting vision set out in Paris in 2015 into reality. The rapid ramping up of action is another key goal. Climate action must be increased fivefold to limit warming to the 1.5C scientists advise, according to the UN.

Source: Guardian

Love Triangles Kill: Swift Parrot Polyamory a New Threat to Critically Endangered Species’ Survival

07.12.2018

parrots kissing unsplash — Photo-illustration: Unsplash

Tasmania’s critically endangered swift parrots are facing a new threat to survival – polyamory.

A study by researchers at the Australian National University, published in the Journal of Animal Ecology, has found that a chronic shortage of female swift parrots caused by intensive predation by sugar gliders has wreaked havoc on the bird’s usually monogamous breeding habits and lowered the survival rate for young hatchlings.

Lead researcher Prof Rob Heinsohn said the unusual behaviour was caused by a significant disparity in the number of males and females in the parrots’ breeding grounds of the blue gum forests in south-east Tasmania. Surplus bachelor males were pressuring paired-up females for sex and getting into fights with paired males.

Heinsohn said that predation by sugar gliders, which were introduced to Tasmania from mainland Australia in the 1800s, had changed the gender ratio in the swift parrot population from a roughly equal number of male and female birds to three males to every female.

Females are at more risk from sugar gliders because the marsupials attack their tree-hollow nests while the females are incubating their eggs.

The gender imbalance was “really causing havoc with their love lives and their usual mating system”, Heinsohn said.

“Usually they would be quite conservative, boring even, with their mating habits, they are just monogamous pairings,” he said. “At the moment there are all these bachelor males … they turn up at the nests of the breeding pairs and they harass the females endlessly.

“They are just pressuring them constantly for sex, basically, and just making a real nuisance of themselves.”

Heinsohn said the females usually gave in “but they do it sneakily behind the resident male’s back”. Breeding males spend their time fighting off bachelors.

Researchers took blood samples from hatchlings to conduct a DNA analysis and found that more than half the nests had more than one father.

Heinsohn said the pressure from bachelor males distracted the breeding pair from feeding, which reduced survival rates. The number of eggs being produced has not fallen but fewer were making it out of the nest.

“They are spending so much of their time, the male in defending the female and the female avoiding being harassed, that it’s affecting their ability to get food,” he said.

Swift parrot numbers have declined significantly in the past four years. It is estimated only 1,000 breeding pairs remain.

ANU researcher Dejan Stojanovic, who co-authored the most recent paper, said he had been hopeful of a more successful breeding season this year because the majority of the wild population settled on Bruny Island, which is free of sugar gliders. But three weeks of rain washed most of the nectar out of the native flowers, meaning a lot of the hatchlings have died from lack of food.

Conservationists have introduced measures to control sugar gliders, such as installing light sensitive nest boxes that close off at night, locking out the nocturnal gliders, and working with the Tasmanian government on possible methods of reducing glider numbers.

But Stojanovic said the underlying issue of habitat loss had not been addressed.

Logging of blue gum forests in southern Tasmania has reduced appropriate breeding habitat by one-third over the past 20 years and conservationists have warned that a decision in August to extend the regional forest agreement allowing that logging for another 20 years had effectively condemned the species.

“I am not confident at all [that the species will survive],” Stojanovic said. “We have been working on swift parrots for the last decade, we know so much about them, even to the point that we know about their sex lives now … but even though we know so much, we are actively logging their habitat.

“We are wilfully pushing the things that are going to lead to their extinction.”

Source: Guardian

Australian Renewables on Track for 78% by 2030 on Current Trends

07.12.2018

solarni paneli-1794467_960_720 — Photo-illustration: Pixabay

If Australia maintains its current rate of solar and wind installations through the next decade, the industry could feasibly account for 78% of the country’s electricity supply along its west and east coast main grids, a substantial increase from its current contribution of 22.5%.

Australian energy analysts Green Energy Markets published its Renewable Energy Index for October last week, which tracks the contribution of Australia’s renewable energy sector to meeting the country’s energy needs. Despite significant obstructionism from the current Federal Government, according to Green Energy Markets, the recent rapid rate of wind and solar installations across Australia — driven by states and corporations — has put the country on track to secure three-quarters of its electricity needs from renewable energy sources by 2030.

Specifically, according to Green Energy Markets, if Australia maintains its current record rate of both rooftop solar installations, as well as wind and solar farm construction commitments that have prevailed since 2017, then renewable energy would account for 78% of electricity supply across Australia’s west and east coast main grids by 2030 — up from their current contribution of 22.5% in October.

October saw the Australian solar industry install another 150 megawatts (MW) of residential and business solar, a new record, 76% higher than the monthly average of 2017 — which itself was a record year for installations. So far this year, rooftop solar installations have reached 1,243 MW for the year so far. Meanwhile, a total of 412 MW worth of large-scale wind and solar projects committed to construction in October, bringing the year-to-date total commitments up over 3,200 MW.

If Australia were to meet only a 50% target, it would need to install around 1,850 MW of new renewable energy capacity each year out to 2030. To achieve this, however, would be to severely constrain the industry. According to Green Energy Markets, the average rate of construction commitments and rooftop solar installations between January 2017 to October 2018 is running at almost 5,150 MW per year. As such, constraining the industry to the Labor Party’s promised 50% target would see significant harm to the industry, while adhering to the Coalition Government’s 2030 emissions target — as set out in the mediocre National Energy Guarantee — would see the industry collapse to 839 MW per year.

“In the past there have been valid concerns regarding high penetration of intermittent supplies on the national grid, especially in relation to voltage and frequency stability,” explained Brian England, National Chairman of Australia’s Solar Energy Industries Association. “But this is 2018 and things are changing and by 2030 with appropriate planning in place, these concerns will be redundant.”

“This boom in renewable energy construction is bringing thousands of construction jobs to regional,” added Andrew Bray, National Coordinator of the Australian Wind Alliance. “It’s creating a long term industry to boost employment and economic activity in towns and regions previously reliant on agriculture and, in many cases, hit by drought. The industry has ramped up spectacularly in the last two years and has demonstrated it is more than able to transform Australia’s electricity sector in short order. The challenge in Australia now is for policy makers to keep up.”

As the SEIA’s Brian England points out, the current trends are being well supported by naturally occurring market economics:

“With the LCOE for solar and wind with storage now cheaper than new coal-fired power stations, there is a real opportunity to replace many of the ageing, unreliable and soon to be closed down coal fired power stations with renewable power supply with storage. This has already shown itself to be able to stabilise the grid and provide a back up for peak loading far better than was forecast, at less cost, with quicker construction times and as well has actually provided a good return on investment.”

“In addition, there are around 2000 sites identified across Australia for pumped storage hydro which in the future can have the pumping cycle run on renewables, and with a drop in the cost of thermal solar using molten salt storage, there are many options for a grid with 78% renewables,” England continued. “This mix of technologies can provide base load, short term load as well as peak load and frequency control for unexpected grid failures. In addition this mix of technologies is supported by the AEMO (Australian Energy Market Operator) as the way forward as the grid is decarbonised.”

Source: Clean Technica

Britain Blown Away by New Wind Energy Record

06.12.2018

The strong winds in the UK helped set a new renewable energy generation record last week.

According to official figures from National Grid, onshore and offshore wind farms hit a new high of 14.9GW between 6pm and 6.30pm on Wednesday.

The previous record was set on 9th November, when wind turbines generated 14.5GW of electricity.

Overall, wind farms produced 32.2% of Britain’s power needs last week, more than gas which stood at 23.5%.

Nuclear power stations supplied 17.9%, coal 8.7%, biomass 8%, imports stood at 7.8% while hydro provided 1.7% of electricity.

The news was welcomed by trade association RenewableUK.

Executive Director Emma Pinchbeck said: “It’s great to see British wind power setting new records at one of the coldest, darkest, wettest times of the year, providing clean energy for people as they came home, switched everything on, turned up the power and cooked dinner.

“As well as tackling climate change, wind is good for everyone who has to pay an electricity bill as cost of new offshore wind has fallen spectacularly so it’s now cheaper than new gas and nuclear projects and onshore wind is the cheapest power source of all.”

Source: Energy Live News

The Bornean Orangutan Population Has Fallen by Nearly 150,000 in Just 16 Years

06.12.2018

At the end of September, four rescued orangutans returned to their home in the rainforest after undergoing lengthy rehabilitation at International Animal Rescue’s (IAR) conservation center in West Borneo, where I work as a chief executive. Amy, Kepo, Ongky and Rambo had been rescued by our Orangutan Protection Unit at various times during the previous eight years. They then joined 100 other orangutans at the center being meticulously prepared for life back in the wild by our dedicated team of vets and caregivers.

The majority of the orangutans at our center are victims of the illegal pet trade. They have all suffered terrible cruelty and neglect after being taken from the wild as babies. They likely saw their mothers being killed as they fought to protect their infants. The traumatized young orphans were then sold or kept as pets by their captors, often living as part of the family until they grew too big and strong to handle. Then they were chained or cooped up in small wooden crates and soon forgotten, left to languish in misery far from the forest where they belong.

Amy’s story is a typical one. She was being kept as a pet by villagers in Jambi, Sukamarau, in Central Borneo. When our rescue team found her, she was slumped in a dark wooden cage with a heavy chain around her neck. She was thin, dirty and depressed, and her brown eyes gazed blankly at Dewi, our vet, when she approached her. Poor Amy had nothing but a filthy piece of old cloth in her cage to comfort her.

Amy’s rescue was the first step on her journey to a new life. After spending eight weeks in quarantine, she was given a clean bill of health by the veterinary team, and her rehabilitation could begin. At 6 years old, she was too big to go to school for baby orangutans and so entered the next stage of rehabilitation at our center—forest school. Here, among others of her own kind, Amy gradually developed the skills she would need to survive in the wild. She spent her time climbing and moving around in the trees, foraging for food and building a new nest each night to sleep in. Our monitoring team gathered data on her progress, reporting that she was a fast learner, was making excellent progress and would soon be a candidate for reintroduction into the wild.

The day of her release was a joyful one. It is so uplifting to see an orangutan return to their rightful home in the forest. It makes all the team’s hard work worthwhile. At the same time, however, everyone at IAR is acutely aware that our work rescuing, rehabilitating and releasing orangutans only addresses the symptoms of the problem but not the problem itself. Habitat loss and illegal hunting are the primary causes of the decline in orangutan populations.

Rapid and relentless deforestation for industrial-scale agriculture, particularly palm oil and timber plantations, leaves orangutans without food and shelter, exposing them to hunters who kill orangutans and capture their babies to sell as pets. The apes are also in danger of coming into conflict with local people as they stray into villages and onto farmland in search of food. Fires started on an annual basis as part of land clearance operations in Indonesia are also responsible for the loss of thousands of acres of rainforest and the lives of hundreds if not thousands of orangutans.

In 2016, the Bornean orangutan joined the Sumatran orangutan on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species, an indication that the species is coming perilously close to extinction. Further evidence of the population’s decline came in a report published in the journal Biology in February this year. Its authors concluded that the Bornean orangutan population had fallen by 148,000 between 1999 and 2015 and now stands at between 70,000 and 100,000 individuals. The numbers could fall by at least another 45,000 in the next 35 years, the conservationists predict. What, then, can be done to pull the orangutan back from the brink of extinction?

In addition to supporting the work of groups fighting to save the orangutan, we conscientious consumers can all ensure our choices and purchasing habits are not contributing to the orangutan’s desperate plight. “Buyer beware,” as the saying goes, More than 50 percent of groceries contain palm oil, from toothpaste and shampoo, to ice cream and pizza. And it’s frankly impossible to know for sure from a label whether something has genuinely been ethically and sustainably produced.

None of us wants the orangutan to pay the price for our lifestyle choices, and therefore it’s better, wherever possible, to shop locally and steer clear of items whose origins are unclear. It is, after all, better for the environment as a whole—and better for our own health—to consume products grown closer to home that don’t leave a giant carbon footprint on the planet as they travel to reach us.

Further action we can all take to help our critically endangered cousin is to raise awareness among friends, family and colleagues of their plight. And raising the alarm about the threats facing the species couldn’t be easier thanks to social media.

The name “orangutan” is derived from the Malay and Indonesian words orang meaning “person” and hutan meaning “forest.” What a tragedy it would be to let this precious “person of the forest” vanish from the face of the Earth forever. But if we all have the will and determination to step up and prevent that from happening, I do believe we still can.

Author: Alan Knight

Source: Eco Watch