Young scientists debate sustainability research

universityworldnews.com | By Michael Gardner

An interdisciplinary symposium on sustainability research involving young academics from South Africa, Germany and several other countries was held in Berlin in late March. It was the latest event of the Global Young Academy of up-and-coming researchers.

The symposium was part of the German-South African Year of Science, and scientists at the meeting, who are members of the German and South African young academies as well as the Global Young Academy, discussed a wide range of issues relating to ecological novelty.

“Socio-ecological Novelty – Frontiers in Sustainability Research” centred on the concept of ecological novelty – new ecosystems created by humans that have become irreversible, are having novel effects and demand attention from researchers and politicians.

Caradee Wright, an environmental health specialist at South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research and co-chair of the South African Young Academy of Science (SAYAS), stressed the importance of integrating the issue of sustainability into people’s basic needs, but also pointed to the difficulty of getting such a task onto the political agenda.

Giving young scientists a voice and providing them with a platform to influence policy decisions is a key objective of SAYAS, which was launched in 2011.

Silja Klepp, a sustainability researcher at Germany’s University of Bremen, gave a vivid account of the future that the island republic of Kuribati is facing given rising ocean levels, demonstrating the wide range of issues ecological changes trigger.

Klepp, a member of Junge Akademie – German Young Academy – explained that it also aimed to engage with politics and maintained that sustainability could only be achieved if fair solutions were worked out for people at both the global and local levels. Read More...

 

Image Courtsey of BSD

The World’s Largest Solar Plant Shimmers In The Desert But why is the oil-rich UAE investing in new

fastcodesign.com | By Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan

Last week Abu Dhabi, the home to the Emir and most of the UAE’s oil wealth, celebrated the opening of the largest solar plant on Earth. Shams 1, as the plant is called, is a development of 258,048 parabolic trough mirrors that produce enough energy to power 20,000 homes. The one-square-mile plant sits about 70 miles outside of Abu Dhabi, and took only two years to build.

The founder of the clean energy site CleanTechnica explains the engineering behind the development after visiting this spring:

"It is a concentrated solar power (CSP) plant, but it is a bit unique. Very simply, here’s how the power plant works: 768 parabolic trough collectors track the sun from sunrise to sunset and use parabolic mirrors to focus the energy of the sun on a central tube containing oil. The concentrated heat is then passed through the system until it is used to boil water and produce steam, which drives a conventional turbine that generates electricity. Additionally, a middle step is the use of natural gas to 'superheat’ the water. Project managers informed us that this accounts for about 20% of the heat."

Why does an oil-rich country like the UAE need a solar plant? To free up more oil to export. According to a report from Bloomberg, Shams 1 will allow the country to sell more of their fossil fuels abroad, especially to oil-hungry countries like China. Shams 1 is actually a joint venture between two European sustainable energy companies and the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company, also known as Masdar, the developer of the eponymous “sustainable city” outside of Abu Dhabi. It’s part of Masdar’s plan to make the UAE a clean-energy powerhouse over the next decade--other investments include a wind farm in the Seychelles and a wind turbine plant in Finland. Read More...

 

Splendour in the grass

ft.com | By Melissa Harrison

As wildlife and landscape enjoy a resurgence in literature, Melissa Harrison finds a new willingness to celebrate the natural world in urban settings.

Nature writing is undergoing a renaissance in the UK; there are even courses now, aimed at teaching students how to write about landscape and wildlife. Previously centred around a few texts by committed environmentalists such as Richard Mabey and the late Roger Deakin, the genre has drawn in poets, travel writers, philosophers, academics and essayists until the definition itself has begun to split open like the husk around a burgeoning seed. My own contribution, Clay, is a novel: further proof, perhaps, that the term “nature writing” (usually understood to mean non-fiction) is no longer helpful – or a sign that we should leave off trying to ringfence environmental literature and accept that these concerns are no longer niche, but part of our common consciousness.

In some ways “nature writing” never really went away. Robert Macfarlane, author of The Wild Places (2007) and The Old Ways (2012), has recently been championing “lost” works such as Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain (1977) and JA Baker’s The Peregrine (1967). If you trace the tradition back via Ronald Blythe, Kenneth Allsop, JHB Peel, TH White and others, you’ll find John Stewart Collis, Edward Thomas’s prose, Richard Jefferies and, of course, Gilbert White and his Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, published in 1789 and which has never been out of print. And that’s before you consider the nature poets. Read More...

Image Courtsey of Melissa Harrison

Pentagon weapons-maker finds method for cheap, clean water

reuters.com | By David Alexander

A defense contractor better known for building jet fighters and lethal missiles says it has found a way to slash the amount of energy needed to remove salt from seawater, potentially making it vastly cheaper to produce clean water at a time when scarcity has become a global security issue.

The process, officials and engineers at Lockheed Martin Corp say, would enable filter manufacturers to produce thin carbon membranes with regular holes about a nanometer in size that are large enough to allow water to pass through but small enough to block the molecules of salt in seawater. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter.

Because the sheets of pure carbon known as graphene are so thin - just one atom in thickness - it takes much less energy to push the seawater through the filter with the force required to separate the salt from the water, they said.

The development could spare underdeveloped countries from having to build exotic, expensive pumping stations needed in plants that use a desalination process called reverse osmosis.

"It's 500 times thinner than the best filter on the market today and a thousand times stronger," said John Stetson, the engineer who has been working on the idea. "The energy that's required and the pressure that's required to filter salt is approximately 100 times less."

Access to clean drinking water is increasingly seen as a major global security issue. Competition for water is likely to lead to instability and potential state failure in countries important to the United States, according to a U.S. intelligence community report last year. Read More...

Image Courtsey of UK Departmnet of Intenational Development

View Comments in Scholar…

This Whimsical Video Beautifully Illustrates Humanity’s Dominion Over Nature

fastcoexist.com | By Morgan Clendaniel

There are times--Hurricane Sandy, say--when nature rears up and reminds humankind that it’s the ultimately powerful force on this planet. But most of the rest of the time, we’re very happily dominating the natural world. It’s come to the point where scientists have come up with a name for the time humans have been on the Earth: The Anthropocene, a geological age where people are the dominant factor in shaping the physical space of the planet.

These amazing videos and pictures do an excellent job of illustrating the extent to which the Anthropocene has altered the planet. The video above, by British artist and animator Steve Cutts, takes a more cartoonish (and admonishing) road to show the same thing. Read More...

Cryosat spots Arctic sea-ice loss in autumn

bbc.co.uk | By Jonathan Amos

The dramatic recent decline in Arctic sea-ice cover is illustrated in new data from Europe's Cryosat mission.

The spacecraft, which uses radar to estimate the thickness of marine floes, has observed a deep reduction in the volume of ice during autumn months.

For the years 2010-2012, this is down a third compared with data for 2003-2008.

For winter months, the fall in volume is not so great - down 9% over the same period.

A lot of thicker ice appears to have been lost from a region to the north of Greenland, the Canadian archipelago, and to a lesser extent the northeast of Svalbard.

We have become accustomed to the big retreats in sea-ice area that occur in summer. Last year saw the smallest extent yet measured in the satellite era. Read More...

 

The Government Open-Data Program At The Root Of Energy-Efficiency Startups

fastcoexist.com | By Ben Schiller

The Green Button program has forced utilities to standardize the way they present their energy use numbers to their customers. In turn, that data has caused an explosion of apps and services to help you save energy--and money.

It’s only a voluntary initiative. And, at the moment, not more than two dozen utilities have signed up. But the government-created Green Button is already showing how standardizing energy data could pay big efficiency dividends.

Launched in early 2012, the plan aims to the end the haphazard way utilities distribute energy-usage data to their customers. Instead of multiple formats, the Button codifies a single layout--all available from the click of a button on a web site. Once the committed companies have complied, more than 27 million households will have access.

Importantly, the Green Button is spurring a host of info-intermediaries, allowing customers not only to get their data, but to manipulate it in new ways, benchmark buildings against peers, and apply for efficiency ratings, like the Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star. Read More...

Image Courtsey of Environmental Protection Agency

The World’s Biggest Wind Turbine Has Blades The Length Of A Football Field

fastcoexist.com | By Ben Schiller

When it comes to wind turbines, bigger is generally better. Longer blades equate to greater power production, and taller structures are cheaper to construct and maintain than several smaller ones with the same output. That’s why turbines have been growing steadily in the last 20 years: from minnows the size of Dutch windmills, to modern engineering feats half the height of the Empire State Building.

The latest milestone comes from the U.K., which is investing heavily in offshore wind, and has the most capacity in the world. A British company, called Blade Dynamics, recently announced it was developing blades of up to 100 meters in length (that’s more than 300 feet)--dwarfing the size of existing technology in the 60-meter range. Sitting on top of a tower 170 meters high, the structure will be 270 meters in all, or 885 feet. That’s about one-sixth of a mile. Read More...

 

Image Courtsey of: ldsseminary.wordpress.com

Richest Universities Are Too Quiet on Sustainable Investing

bloomberg.com | By Robert G. Eccles & George Serafeim

In its mission statement, Harvard University says it “expects that the scholarship and collegiality it fosters in its students will lead them in their later lives to advance knowledge, to promote understanding, and to serve society.” Similar aspirations can be found at Yale, Stanford, the University of Chicago, Emory University, and probably all of their peers. These missions are similar and laudable — for their graduates to contribute to society as a whole.

These five schools share another thing: None of their endowments is a member of the U.N.-backed Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI). The PRI initiative encourages major investors to begin future-proofing their portfolios. They agree to embed analysis of environmental, social and corporate-governance (ESG) risks into their practices and decisions. They seek better risk disclosure from companies they invest in. They promote PRI-backed practices within the investment industry. They also each report every year on their own progress.

In short, the mission of the PRI is to push the investment community to reward companies that are orienting their strategies toward long-term success -- sustainable companies. Read More...

Image Courtsey of Nancy Nehring

View Comments in Scholar…

Fish in drug-tainted water suffer reaction

apnews.com | By Jeff Donn | Image Courtsey of Bent Christensen

What happens to fish that swim in waters tainted by traces of drugs that people take? When it's an anti-anxiety drug, they become hyper, anti-social and aggressive, a study found. They even get the munchies.

It may sound funny, but it could threaten the fish population and upset the delicate dynamics of the marine environment, scientists say.

The findings, published online Thursday in the journal Science, add to the mounting evidence that minuscule amounts of medicines in rivers and streams can alter the biology and behavior of fish and other marine animals.

"I think people are starting to understand that pharmaceuticals are environmental contaminants," said Dana Kolpin, a researcher for the U.S. Geological Survey who is familiar with the study.

Calling their results alarming, the Swedish researchers who did the study suspect the little drugged fish could become easier targets for bigger fish because they are more likely to venture alone into unfamiliar places. Read More...