Environment

Rahaman-Noronha hasn't just reforested his land; he is passionate about ensuring the buildings on his farm are sustainable too. As you enter the farm a concrete house greets you – one of the older buildings on the land. But every other structure has touches of the earth. Clay, harvested from the land nearby; timber from the trees further back on the farm; repurposed glass bottles of all colours that glitter as the light hits them; rounded formations that only hint at the old, upcycled tires buried underneath to provide structure; and textured walls containing patchworks of dried grasses.

The farmer is embracing the old Trinidadian ways of building, when residents would use what was available to them, rather than mass importing materials. Not only is he putting waste products that would otherwise end up in landfill to use, Rahaman-Noronha is employing building styles that provide resilience against the island's changing climate.

For a quick build, there isn't as much time put into observing the environment: patterns of rainfall, plant and animal life, where the wind blows. "It's these things that we have been disconnected from." Instead, she says, it's common to level the ground, remove any trees and start the build with a blank slate, without considering what is already there and how that can be integrated into the design. With deforestation and loss of native species being a widespread environmental issue, the practice of clearing what exists and creating something entirely new can have wider ripple effects on the land, like causing increased land slippage on slopes.

This disconnection from the environment is a feature of the "concrete culture" that became prevalent in Trinidad in the 1900s. Asad Mohammed, director of the Caribbean Network for Urban and Land Management, attributes this to "the impact of Western architectural inputs that have little relevance to the context we live in". He describes a "modernistic style of square buildings" that are not climate-adapted to the intense heat of the dry season or the hurricanes and flooding of the wet season.

“The combination of accelerating clean energy growth and moderating power demand growth promises to bend China’s emissions down further from the current plateau,” Myllyvirta said in a post.

That’s despite coal- and gas-fired power capacity additions of 54GW in 2024, a slight decline from the prior year.

Myllyvirta said energy capacity additions tend to accelerate towards the end of each year, which means last year’s new installations will only fully show up in generation statistics from 2025.

“So the record additions in the end of 2024 are highly relevant for the 2025 emission trend,” Myllyvirta said.

Close to half of the experts surveyed by CREA last year said China’s carbon dioxide emissions had probably already peaked, or would do so in 2025, thanks in large part to its unprecedented wind and solar boom.

However, it’s still too soon to call the top. China’s fossil fuel power plants generated 1.5% more electricity in 2024 than the previous year, per the National Bureau of Statistics. This indicates that electricity consumption continued to grow faster than clean energy output.

Now, Blue Lake Rancheria is set to greatly expand its microgrid system through the Tribal Energy Resilience and Sovereignty project, a $177 million initiative that will add 20,000 kilowatts of solar capacity and will connect Blue Lake to the land of three other communities — comprising Hoopa, Yurok and Karuk Indians — with a 142-mile-long distribution circuit to increase regional resiliency between the tribes. Moreover, the expanded grid system will enable staff to choose between five priority levels for energy usage, allowing the operators to turn off non-essential power during outages — which will in turn allow the system to operate indefinitely during extended emergencies. Altogether, the expanded microgrid will “radically expand” the capacity of microgrids to “provide energy reliability in high-risk locations,” says Schatz Center director Arne Jacobson. “These tribes are already leading the field in dam removal, healthy fire on the land, middle and last-mile telecommunications access, and renewable energy systems deployment — and will now support development of what we hope will be a game-changing climate resilience solution.”

In expanding its microgrid capacity, Blue Lake Rancheria is not alone. Across the United States, communities, hospitals, companies and more are turning to microgrids to expand stable and clean electric power — for reliability, affordability and flexibility — to new frontiers. According to the Department of Energy, there are some 1,100 active microgrid installations in the U.S., with new installations planned everywhere from Maine to Hawaii. These installations boast a total generating capacity of over five million kilowatts — a 170 percent increase from a decade ago — and over two million kilowatt-hours of storage capacity.

Archived

Viktor Danilov-Danilyan, head of the Institute of Water Problems at the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), has called the recent Black Sea oil spill “the most serious environmental disaster in Russia since the beginning of the 21st century.” His comments came in an interview with Kommersant published on Jan. 17.

The story began on Dec. 15, when two tankers — Volgoneft-212 and Volgoneft-239 — sank in the Kerch Strait, releasing approximately 8,000 tons of heavy fuel oil into the Black Sea. Danilov-Danilyan called the resulting environmental catastrophe an “unprecedented event”:

“This is the first time such a large amount of fuel oil has been spilled. In my view, this is the most serious environmental disaster in Russia since the beginning of the 21st century… The diesel fuel spill in Norilsk in 2020 cannot be compared to today's situation. That incident was localized and quickly addressed due to favorable natural and weather conditions, as well as the availability of sufficient equipment.”

According to the scientist, the pollution threatens not only Russia's coastline but also Ukraine’s port city of Odesa, along with coastal areas in Bulgaria, Romania, and even Turkey.

The oil spill is expected to cause significant wildlife losses, including the death of birds and fish. Cleanup operations are anticipated to reshape the shoreline, resulting in unexpected costs for local municipalities. Danilov-Danilyan noted that the removal of contaminated sand has already shifted the coastline 30-50 meters inland in some areas.

“At the very least, vessels that should have been decommissioned as unfit for use 20 years ago should not have been used… It is impossible to prevent catastrophic consequences with such an approach: sooner or later, they were bound to happen.”

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It’s time to salute the herder conservationists of Africa. Once, the term would have seemed an oxymoron. The people shepherding livestock across the continent’s great open grasslands have been widely seen as the enemies of its charismatic wild mammals — to be fenced out of protected areas and policed by armed rangers. But that image is outdated.

Today, in hundreds of community-run “conservancies” being established across tens of millions of acres of Africa, herders and their cattle are sharing the unfenced land with elephants, giraffes, wildebeest, and buffalo. Armed only with mobile phones, the herders keep their livestock safe while protecting wildlife — by alerting their fellows to marauding lions and driving off poachers in places that rangers in four-wheel drives rarely venture — and accompany high-rolling tourists who fund their conservation endeavors.

The scale and success of these community conservancies on the only continent where large mammals still run free across huge stretches of land is still a largely untold story. But a new analysis from Maliasili, a Vermont-based NGO dedicated to bolstering local African conservation initiatives, demonstrates for the first time the full extent to which wildlife is often more effectively protected within conservancies than within state-run national parks.

Maliasili found that 16 percent of Kenya’s total land mass is managed by the 230 conservancies that cover more than 22 million acres, an area the size of Indiana. In Namibia the figure is 20 percent and in Zimbabwe 12 percent. Tanzania has an area equivalent to seven Yellowstones managed for wildlife by herders, farmers, and hunter-gatherers.

Insurance generally operates by pooling risks. Most property owners buy home and vehicle insurance policies, and from that large pool of customers, insurance companies only have to make payouts to the few who experience costly damages. When climate change increases the frequency and intensity of disasters, insurance companies will spread the costs across the customer pool in the form of higher rates.

So even if you haven’t been directly harmed by extreme weather, you’re paying for some of the costs of those climate-worsened disasters. According to realtor.com, average U.S. home insurance rates rose nearly 34% from 2018 to 2023 – and over 11% in 2023 alone.

Some of those higher prices are related to rising inflation because repairing damaged homes has become more costly. But both home and auto insurance rates have consistently risen much faster than the rate of inflation over the past 15 years.

That’s in large part due to climate change. As one example, scientists estimated that climate change made Hurricane Helene twice as destructive and increased its rainfall by over 50% in some areas. Auto data company CARFAX estimated that the storm left as many as 138,000 vehicles flood-damaged across six states in addition to causing tens of billions of dollars in property damage.

Insurance companies themselves purchase reinsurance to make sure they can cover large losses, and reinsurance prices are rising fast to account for climate change. The world’s largest reinsurer, Munich Re, recently noted that 2024 was one of the most expensive years for weather disasters on record, with $320 billion in global losses, of which around $140 billion were insured.

I’ve watched the California fires over the last few days with the same horror as everyone else; we’re watching major parts of one of the nation’s major cities burn in real-time, in an event that’s best described as a fire-hurricane, an event all-but unthinkable not that long ago but one that is increasingly common as decades of misguided fire-management policies collide with expanding population in the so-called “wildland–urban interface,” all accelerated by changing, hotter, drier climate conditions. It is a literal recipe for epic disaster.

Unfortunately, California’s fires are a harbinger of what’s to come in a world where we increasingly feel the effects of climate change—but it’s also a warning about HOW our world is going to change in the years and decades ahead. I don’t pretend to be a climate scientist or to understand the precise feedback loops that may, for instance, cause the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation or the melting of Greenland. However, I have in recent years spent a lot of time thinking about climate as a political threat.

Over the past few decades, we’ve spent most of our national focus thinking about climate change as a technology and economic challenge. Can we move away from fossil fuels and adopt renewables at a fast enough pace to change the arc of warming? How can we use tax incentives and industrial policy to drive the adoption of electrical vehicles faster? How can we better create batteries and power storage solutions to smooth out the variability of solar and wind energy? How quickly will the cost of solar panels continue to fall? How do we impose more appropriate costs on carbon?

In that time tackling this as a tech and economic challenge, we’ve actually made substantial progress on a lot of these problems and have, so far, fundamentally altered the arc of our planet’s climate. As one leading climate thinker I spoke with last fall told me, “We were on a course to four-and-a-half to six degrees of warming. That is not a world that is livable. Today, maybe we’re on a path for two-and-a-half or three-and-a-half degrees of warming—still bad, but better. That trajectory is headed in the right direction.”

But the California fires underscore how, as we actually begin to live the effects of even that “better-than-it-could-have-been” era of warming, the tech and economic challenge is going to take a backseat to a bigger crisis.

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17941012

Dozens of sea mammals have been found dead since last month's Russian oil tanker spill in the Black Sea, a dolphin rescue center said Sunday, as authorities raced to contain the disaster.

The spill began on December 15, when two aging Russian tankers were caught in a storm off the Kerch Strait linking Crimea to southern Russia.

One sank and the other ran aground, pouring around 2,400 tonnes of a heavy fuel oil called mazut into the surrounding waters, authorities estimate.

Russia's Delfa center, which rescues and rehabilitates dolphins, said it had recorded 61 dead cetaceans since the incident, 32 of whom "most likely" died due to the spill.

Cetaceans are a type of aquatic mammal that includes whales, dolphins and porpoises.

[...]

Well, well, well ...

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/172650

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Cross posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17832023

Archived version

The International Energy Agency (IEA) reported that global coal demand is expected to reach unprecedented levels in 2024. In its latest report, "Coal 2024: Analysis and Forecast for 2024," the agency predicts coal consumption will climb to 877 crore tonnes, marking a new record.

The report notes that while global coal demand increased by 1% in 2023, the growth rate has slowed compared to previous years. In 2021, coal demand surged by 7.7% following the COVID-19 recovery, while growth rates moderated to 4.7% in 2022 and 2.4% in 2023.

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China, the world's largest coal consumer, will significantly drive global demand. The IEA estimates China's coal consumption will grow by 1% in 2024, reaching 490 crore tonnes. India, the second-largest consumer, is expected to see a 5% increase, bringing its consumption to 130 crore metric tonnes—a level previously achieved only by China.

Conversely, coal demand in developed regions like the European Union and the United States continues to decline. The European Union’s demand is projected to drop by 12% in 2024, while the US is expected to see a 5% decline. However, these decreases are less steep compared to the significant drops in 2023.

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Grassroots activists and marine scientists in Algeria are building artificial reefs to restore biodiversity and sustain fishing communities, but scaling up requires more than passion—it needs institutional support and political will.

In Algeria, the average quantity of fish taken out of sea has been recorded at a consistent 100,000 tons per annum over the last three decades. However, as Algeria’s population continues to grow, authorities estimate that they will need to rely on techniques such as fish farming to reach the 200,000 tons that will be necessary to meet domestic needs.

Artificial reefs at a larger scale might also provide support for fishing by promoting the reproduction of fish and other marine species close to the coast. But Algeria has a long way to go, since artificial reefs have only been immersed on an experimental level by diving associations helped by scientists the last ten years. “There has been a drop-off in the number of fish over the last few years. We have to go farther and farther into sea. In other countries fishing is halted for a few weeks every year so that the species can repopulate, but not here,” Fatah claims.

Thanks to their advocacy, Hippone Sub in coordination with the Probiom Foundation—Algeria’s network for marine biodiversity protection, created in 2009—managed to attract the attention of the highest authorities in Algeria. In 2017, just one year after the first reef was submerged by the association in Annaba, the government passed a law to regulate the immersion of artificial reefs.

“This law allows a local wilaya (provincial) commission to grant permission for the immersion of artificial reefs to project sponsors, whether they are associations, institutions, or others,” explains Emir Berkane, a doctor, environmental activist, and president of the Probiom Foundation. The legislation also enabled Hippone Sub and Probiom to begin their second project in 2021 with “two new pyramidal immersions that measure 33 m³ and 66 m³,” creating one of the largest reefs in Algeria, says Emir Berkane. In Annaba, “one of the two pyramids is still thriving, along with the first artificial reef,” the environmental activist notes.

Over the last decade, there has been a surge in activity surrounding this issue, observes Professor Grimes. Several artificial reefs have been submerged off the Algerian coast by associations and researchers, notably in Oran and Mostaganem, which are located 420 and 330 kilometers west of Algiers, respectively. Other projects are in preliminary stages, including one in Aïn Témouchent, 490 kilometers west of Algiers, which is being worked on by Professor Grimes, himself.

Thanks to the efforts of dedicated organisations, scientists, engaged private-sector partners and thousands of committed local people, there is an abundance of biodiversity success stories springing up in the UK. While beavers and eagles may hog the headlines, there is so much more out there, from striking butterflies to diminutive plants, reimagined rivers to revived mountain slopes.

Conservation is a complex business, but new methods are emerging to preserve, improve and generate new habitat and, in many cases, attract back or reintroduce species not seen for decades. After a nudge, ecosystems are often doing much of the heavy work themselves. Inspiring examples can be the root of a wholesale fightback. It’s time to fight inertia and look towards a brighter future for UK biodiversity, with a selection of site visits worth putting on your calendar for the coming year.

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17552794

"Our findings indicate that the spatial risk of TC-induced damage to OSW turbines along the US Atlantic and Gulf Coast regions is broadly expected to increase, with strong intermodel agreement on the sign of change (i.e., increase or decrease) in all regions assessed. Detailed regional estimates and their associated uncertainties are outlined in Table 1. Significant increases in yielding risk are expected for the Gulf Coast and Florida peninsula resulting from 20- and 50-year storms (Fig. 1), with the average risk of turbine yielding estimated to increase by nearly 40% for a 20-year storm (Fig. 1c) and 27% for a 50-year storm (Fig. 1f). The Atlantic Coast exhibits similar changes, with projected increases in turbine yielding risk of about 35% for 20-year TCs and 31% for 50-year TCs.

Buckling, being a more acute damage state than yielding, requires higher wind speeds to surpass the structural limit. Historically, the probability that 20- or 50-year storms would induce turbine buckling has been below 10% across all regions assessed. However, under future climate change, this probability is estimated to rise to as high as 57% (Table 1), with the strongest increases and future risk expected for the Southeast and Gulf Coast regions (Fig. 2). For the Gulf Coast and Florida, buckling risk from a 20-year storm is projected to increase from nearly 0% to almost 18% (Fig. 2c). This increase is far more severe when considering a 50-year storm, with the buckling risk in this region expected to grow by almost a factor of eight. Along the Atlantic Coast, the likelihood of TC-induced turbine buckling is projected to rise as well, with anticipated increases in risk of about 9% for a 20-year TC and 34% for a 50-year TC. For both turbine yielding and buckling, the likelihood of damage is markedly higher for the Southeast than the Northeast, differing by almost 12% historically and by over 24% in a simulated future climate (Table 1)."

It’s not yet game over for the AMOC. As we discussed in part one of this post, the actual observations of 3D AMOC flow through the North Atlantic are still too brief to separate natural variations from long-term trends. And a modest decrease observed over the last 40 years has just been revised in an even more modest direction.

More papers on AMOC evolution, including follow-up studies by several of the authors above, are already in the pipeline. And more forecasts of AMOC-collapse timing are surely on the way. Some 100 presentations and posters related to AMOC were featured in December at the American Geophysical Union’s 2024 annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

There are myriad ways to adapt to climate change that’s already unfolding or imminent, many of them spotlighted here at Yale Climate Connections, such as moving to higher ground and making communities more heat-resilient. It’s far less clear how one might prepare at this point for a possible AMOC collapse, given the huge uncertainties in both the timing and details of potential impacts.

Perhaps the best way to channel AMOC anxiety would be to work toward emission reductions that could help prevent or at least forestall an AMOC collapse in the first place. That can include everything from demanding climate action on the local, state, and federal levels to talking climate with neighbors and colleagues, as well as inspiring others by example through a lower-emissions lifestyle.

Archived version

What was supposed to be the final round of United Nations negotiations for a global plastics treaty ended without an agreement on Sunday, as delegates failed to reconcile opposing views on whether to impose a cap on plastic production.

Another negotiating session — dubbed INC-5.2 after this week’s INC-5 — will be held in 2025, but it’s unclear how countries will make further progress without a change in the treaty’s consensus-based decision-making process. As it stands, any delegation can essentially veto a proposal they don’t like, even if they’re opposed by most of the rest of the world.

“If it wasn’t for Saudi and Russia we would have reached an agreement here,” one European negotiator told the Financial Times. Those two countries, along with other oil producers like Iran and Kuwait, want the plastics treaty to leave production untouched and focus only on downstream measures: boosting the plastics recycling rate, for example, and cleaning up existing plastic pollution.

[...]

Dozens of countries — supported by scientists and environmental groups — say that approach is futile while the plastics industry plans to dramatically increase plastic production. “You can talk about waste management all you want, but this is not the silver bullet,” one of the European Union’s delegates said last week. “Mopping the floor when the tap is open is useless.”

[...]

Technically, the treaty could move forward without Saudi Arabia, Russia, and their allies, either continuing under the U.N. framework or — a more radical scenario — in a new forum led by a breakaway alliance of countries. The latter is unlikely given the time and energy countries have invested in the U.N. system, and because they still value the baseline mandate they agreed to two years ago: to “end plastic pollution” by addressing the “full life cycle of plastics.” But a smaller group of signatories could still make a global impact by using import tariffs and other trade policies to indirectly influence plastic production in non-signatory nations.

[...]