Archive for the 'Newsletter' Category

Icelandic Volcanoes to Power British Homes

Published on May 17, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Grimsvotn volcano billows steam

By George Sargent from Sky News Online

Icelandic volcanoes could soon power British homes if the Government secures a new energy deal.

Energy minister Charles Hendry will visit Iceland in May to negotiate an agreement that would mean laying hundreds of miles of cables underwater to satisfy the UK’s energy needs.

The cables, known as interconnectors, would carry low carbon energy harvested from Iceland’s geothermal sources such as volcanoes and geysers.

The plan could supply a third of the nation’s average electricity demand.

Mr Hendry told Sky News Online: “We are looking to a low carbon economy. I think the best way is to get a number of different interconnectors first.”

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The plan could supply a third of the nation’s average electricity demand.

Mr Hendry told Sky News Online: “We are looking to a low carbon economy. I think the best way is to get a number of different interconnectors first.”

Study Points to Roles for Industry and Organics in Agriculture

Published on May 13, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Harvesting wheat in Kansas. Photo by: Charlie Riedel/Associated Press

From The New York Times

A paper in this week’s issue of Nature reinforces the argument that a hybrid path in agriculture — incorporating both industrial-style production and organic practices where they make sense — gives the best chance of feeding some 9 billion people by midcentury with the fewest regrets.

The paper, “Comparing the yields of organic and conventional agriculture,” is by a doctoral student, Verena Seufert, and the geography professor Navin Ramankutty, both of McGill University, and Jonathan Foley, the director of the Institute on the Environment of the University of Minnesota. They found that, over all, conventional farming methods produced 25 percent higher yields than organic techniques, but organic came close for certain crops in certain soils. The authors’ core conclusion?

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Rivers Flowing Into the Sea Offer Vast Potential as Electricity Source

Published on May 4, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From ScienceDaily

A new genre of electric power-generating stations could supply electricity for more than a half billion people by tapping just one-tenth of the global potential of a little-known energy source that exists where rivers flow into the ocean, a new analysis has concluded. A report on the process — which requires no fuel, is sustainable and releases no carbon dioxide (the main greenhouse gas) — appears in ACS’ journal Environmental Science & Technology.

Menachem Elimelech and Ngai Yin Yip explain that the little-known process, called pressure-retarded osmosis (PRO), exploits the so-called salinity gradient — or difference in saltiness — between freshwater and seawater. In PRO, freshwater flows naturally by osmosis through a special membrane to dilute seawater on the other side. The pressure from the flow spins a turbine generator and produces electricity. The world’s first PRO prototype power plant was inaugurated in Norway in 2009. With PRO appearing to have great potential, the scientists set out to make better calculations on how much it actually could contribute to future energy needs under real-world conditions.

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The Sustainability Family of Journals

Published on April 30, 2012 in Headline, Journal and Newsletter. 0 Comments

In recent years, the The International Journal of Environmental, Cultural, Economic, and Social Sustainability has become larger, too large in fact as the amount of top-quality material we are receiving has grown. This has occurred even though we have continued to tighten our already-rigorous acceptance procedures.

As a consequence, we have decided to divide the journal into a number of thematically focused journals, plus a highlights journal which contains reprints of top-ranked and invited articles from plenary speakers at the Sustainability Conference.

This development will have a number of advantages to authors and readers. The journals will be of a more ‘normal’ size. Individual papers will be published electronically and as a single-article paper offprint as soon as they are ready, followed by the full issue of each journal on regular, scheduled publication dates four times per year both electronically and in print. The journals will be more accessible and coherent, as more closely aligned articles will now be better grouped. For these reasons, the new journals are likely to gain enhanced recognition in journal indexes and citation counts.

In the area addressed by the Sustainability knowledge community, these will be the journals into which articles will be published:

- The International Journal of Environmental Sustainability

- The International Journal of Cultural, Economic, and Social Sustainability

- The International Journal of Sustainability Policy and Practice

- The International Journal of Sustainability Education

Each of these thematically focused journals will be clearly linked to the highlights journal with the following subtitle, ‘A section of The International Journal of Environmental, Cultural, Economic, and Social Sustainability’.

Authors can request which of the thematic journals they would prefer for the publication of their article, should it receive a favorable review and a reviewer recommendation to publish. Alternatively, when the author does not opt to make a selection, the Common Ground editorial team will curate each paper into the appropriate thematic journal.

Authors will not submit directly to the highlights journal. This journal will consist only of reprints of articles from the thematic journals. This will not be a second publication of the article, and the subtitle of the highlights journal will clearly indicate that this journal only consists of reprints of highlights of general interest from the thematic journals.

Participants at the Sustainability Conference and members of the Sustainability Open Institute are provided subscription access to all journals in this family of journals for the 12-month period associated with their conference registration or Institute membership dues.

This is an exciting development for the Sustainability knowledge community, one which we believe will greatly benefit both authors and readers.

Hydrogen Storage Could Be Key to Germany’s Energy Plans

Published on April 29, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Photo by: Jens Kuhfs

By Kevin Bullis from Technology Review

If Germany is to meet its ambitious goals of getting a third of its electricity from renewable energy by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050, it must find a way to store huge quantities of electricity in order to make up for the intermittency of renewable energy.

Siemens says it has just the technology: electrolyzer plants, each the size of a large warehouse, that split water to make hydrogen gas. The hydrogen could be used when the wind isn’t blowing to generate electricity in gas-fired power plants, or it could be used to fuel cars.

Producing hydrogen is an inefficient way to store energy—about two-thirds of the power is lost in the processes of making the hydrogen and using the hydrogen to generate electricity. But Siemens says it’s the only storage option that can achieve the scale that’s going to be needed in Germany.

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Earth Warming Faster Than Expected

Published on April 25, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Results of climate simulations that best match observations since 1960 (those depicted in darker shades of blue) suggest that global average temperature in 2050 will be between 1.4°C and 3°C warmer than the global average measured between 1961 and 1990. Photo by: D. J. Rowlands et al., Nature Geoscience, Advanced Online Publication (25 March)

By Sid Perkins from sciencemag.org

By 2050, global average temperature could be between 1.4°C and 3°C warmer than it was just a couple of decades ago, according to a new study that seeks to address the largest sources of uncertainty in current climate models. That’s substantially higher than estimates produced by other climate analyses, suggesting that Earth’s climate could warm much more quickly than previously thought.

Many factors affect global and regional climate, including planet-warming “greenhouse” gases, solar activity, light-scattering atmospheric pollutants, and heat transfer among the land, sea, and air, to name just a few. There are so many influences to consider that it makes determining the effect of any one factor—despite years and sometimes decades of measurements—difficult.

Germany’s $263 Billion Renewables Shift Biggest Since War

Published on April 10, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Vestas Wind Systems A/S. is the largest maker of wind turbines. Photo by: Ken James from Bloomberg

By Stefan Nicola from Bloomberg.com

Not since the allies leveled Germany in World War II has Europe’s biggest economy undertaken a reconstruction of its energy market on this scale.

Chancellor Angela Merkel is planning to build offshore wind farms that will cover an area six times the size of New York City and erect power lines that could stretch from London to Baghdad. The program will cost 200 billion euros ($263 billion), about 8 percent of the country’s gross domestic product in 2011, according to the DIW economic institute in Berlin.

Germany aims to replace 17 nuclear reactors that supplied about a fifth of its electricity with renewables such as solar and wind. Merkel to succeed must experiment with untested systems and policies and overcome technical hurdles threatening the project, said Stephan Reimelt, chief executive officer of General Electric Co. (GE)’s energy unit in the country.

Utilities running gas-generating plants in Germany lost 10.92 euros a megawatt-hour today at 12:16 p.m. local time, based on so-called clean-spark spreads for the next month that take account of gas, power and emissions prices. That compared with a profit of 20.95 euros in October 2009, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. U.K. generators earned 2.06 pounds ($3.27), down from a profit of 7.02 pounds in October.

With Reef Ecosystems, It May Be All or Nothing

Published on April 2, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

By David Jolly from The New York Times

There might just be something to the idea of marine reserves, a recent survey of the Mediterranean Sea suggests.

Scientists led by Enric Sala, a National Geographic explorer-in-residence and a marine ecologist with the Center for Advanced Studies of Blanes in Spain, studied rocky reefs around Mediterranean shores, comparing places that ranged from strictly enforced “no-take” marine protected areas to open-access sites accorded no protection at all.

The results, they said, showed a “remarkable variation in the structure of rocky reef ecosystems,” with three distinct groups: reefs with large fish biomass and algae, the healthiest sites; sites with fewer fish, though with an abundance of algae; and reefs with both few fish and “extensive barrens.”

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The Brazilian Rainforest : Caught Between Biodiversity and Business

Published on March 30, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From ScienceDaily

Brazil is exporting more and more agricultural produce: soya beans and beef in particular, but also corn, rice and sugar. Taken together, these exports represent half of Brazil’s total today. The increase in the export of commodities brings both a higher degree of economic dependency and a threat to the Amazon rainforest, as outlined by an IRD geographer and his Brazilian counterparts (1). Agricultural produce is actually the cause of almost all deforestation in Brazil, where 750,000 km² of forest have disappeared — and 80% of that was converted into grazing land for cattle. Recently, the increase of single-crop farming, especially of soya beans, has pushed herds further and further into forested areas, and so accelerated the process of deforestation.

These studies demonstrate the dangers of economic growth that depends on exporting agricultural produce, which may be appealing but is not sustainable.

For the past several years in Brazil, the export of agricultural produce has grown ceaselessly. Soya beans, beef and sugar today constitute more than half of Brazil’s foreign trade. From the 1990s until just recently, such produce fluctuated around 40% of Brazilian exports. But between 2007 and 2010, their share jumped sharply and reached half the total amount, ahead of value-added manufactured goods such as cars, machinery and capital goods.

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Announcing Dr. Hideyuki Doi as Plenary Speaker at the 2013 Sustainability Conference

Published on March 21, 2012 in Conference, Headline and Newsletter. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Announcing Dr. Hideyuki Doi to speak as a plenary speaker at the 2013 Sustainability Conference.

Hideyuki Doi is currently working as Tenure-track lecturer in Institute for Sustainable Sciences and Development (ISSD) at Hiroshima University, Japan. His current interests are general ecology and sustainability of ecosystems. His current works in ISSD have focused on ecological sustainability under environmental changes, such as eutrophication, climate change and radiation fallout. For the ongoing projects in ISSD, he is surveying natural aquatic fields to monitor sustainability of ecosystems, and testing the ecological hypotheses to predict sustainability of ecosystem and ecological communities using the microcosm experiment series. More recently, with concerning radiation fallout effect on ecosystems, his group established the models to predict the long-term fate of radioactive cesium concentration in freshwater fish species using ecological/biological traits of fish species. He will address the ecological view points for considering sustainability of ecosystems and human lives in changing world.

To read more about Dr. Hideyuki Doi and other plenary speakers for the 2013 conference, please visit the following link.