Cementing CO2

When we talk about the sectors that contribute to GHG emissions, which do we talk about most? The energy sector, land-use change, and transport. Which do we forget? The building industry. It emits 10% of the global CO₂ emissions (Zhang et al., 2022). A portion of this can be attributed to energy consumption. However, the construction of our built environment contributes to the global CO₂ emissions. This is not only homes, but also roads, bridges, damns, metro lines, tunnels, and other buildings. And what exactly makes the construction of our built environment so carbon heavy? Concrete. Concrete, specifically cement is the most used anthropogenic construction material (IPCC 2022, p. 975; Khan et al., 2021). The production of cement is responsible for 8% of the global CO₂ emissions (Kajaste & Hurme, 2016; Khan et al., 2021). On average cement constructions have 0.24 kg CO₂ kg^-1 embodied carbon (IPCC 2022, p. 976). That is a large amount of carbon!

So, let’s look at cement, what exactly makes it so polluting?

Cement is composed of limestone, which needs to be mined, fed to a grinder, and mixed with mineral additives. This mixture is put into a kiln at temperatures of 2000°C. This transforms the mixture into small pieces of material, known as clinker. This is then ground with gypsum into a fine powder, which becomes cement (How Cement Is Made, n.d.). For further explanation watch: How cement is made. There are two parts to this process which are highly polluting. The heating of the mixture at temperatures of 2000°C requires fuel to reach these temperatures. To generate this heat mainly fossil fuel burning is used, resulting in 40% of the CO₂ emissions of cement production. The reaction which creates clinker material produces the other 60% of the CO2 emissions (Favier et al., 2019).

Image 2: The cement chain in construction, from production to demolition (Favier et al., 2019).

What are alternatives?

Image 3: Rammed earth wall. (*South Africa’s Largest Earth Rammed Wall*, 2015)

Since cement seems to be such a polluting and damaging material, maybe we should consider alternative materials. There are two options, changing the entire material or altering the composition.

By adding olivine to the limestone mixture, the clinker material reacts with a different carbonate. Once this alternative material weathers after construction it leads to CO₂ sequestration (Westgate & Paine, 2019). Using yet another type of binder in cement production, such as an Alkali-Activated binder, could reduce the CO₂ emissions of concrete by 55-75% (Kajaste & Hurme, 2016).

Using biomass as an alternative to concrete in some structures is also viable, as new biomass can be grown, reducing the CO₂ emissions (IPCC 2022, p. 996). However, this is only an option for some types of buildings, and only when considering the strain on forest ecosystems. Bamboo, therefore, proves to be an option for some regions (IPCC 2022, p. 996). Another option is the use of clay for construction, as it is easier to produce, and has a significantly lower CO₂ emission. The restraints with clay constructions, (e.g., loam and rammed earth) are that the production is intensive and not as mechanized as concrete. In some construction methods, it is the primary material (IPCC 2022, p. 977). There are projects and organizations using this practice, like Stampleem in the Netherlands.

Other factors to change

There may be easier and more effective ways to improve construction-based CO₂ emissions.

Image 4: Recycling Concrete. (Ganiron & Chemical, 2015).

The first is to consider the fuel used for the heating of the clinker material. This is mainly done using fossil fuels, however, there have been promising results and attempts showing that solar energy can produce similar temperatures, reducing emissions (Lovins, 2021).
Secondly, re-using old and scrap material, as well as generally shifting towards a circular economy is more sustainable and results in fewer emissions (IPCC 2022, p. 977; Kajaste & Hurme, 2016; Lovins, 2021).
Third, the destruction and reconstruction of the built environment should be minimized for as long as possible to minimize additional emissions (Zhang et al., 2022).
Fourthly, building labels and certificates enforce the use of sustainable/less polluting materials (IPCC 2022, p.1009). Alongside certificate and material restrains, carbon pricing can be effective, but it is only effective for new buildings, not for decarbonizing the building sector (Braungardt et al., 2021).
And lastly, even if we do continue using concrete, there are ways of changing the way we construct and design the built environment so that it uses less cement to meet demand (Lovins, 2021).

What makes it difficult to achieve these changes?

There are a lot of things that make the shift away from concrete, complex. Most countries in Europe have reached a plateau in mass construction (Zhang et al., 2022). As population growth is slowing down and the majority of Europe has been urbanized, the need for large amounts of concrete is decreasing. However, large portions of the world do rely on concrete for the continued construction of their built environment. It, therefore, becomes difficult for governments and municipalities to shift away from cement when it is often the cheapest and fastest way to construct buildings, homes, and other services for people (IPCC 2022).

To move towards low-carbon materials we need (IPCC 2022, p.987-988):

Low costs, in particular low investment costs of low-carbon materials.
The political will to make the shift to these materials.
Large societal environmental considerations surrounding construction CO₂ emissions.
Governmental regulations on construction materials.

This means there needs to be enough political will, nationally and locally as well as an economic incentive to move towards low-carbon materials.

Though it is important to critically look at which sectors emit large amounts of CO₂, other factors are equally important to remember. The construction industry is not just about the production of cement, it also plays a large role in providing housing and living environments for huge portions of our global population. It is not just an issue about climate impact or environmental impact, but also one ensuring the quality and accessibility of living standards for the global population (IPCC 2022, p. 990).

References

Braungardt, S., Bürger, V., & Köhler, B. (2021). Carbon Pricing and Complementary Policies—Consistency of the Policy Mix for Decarbonizing Buildings in Germany. Energies, 14(21), 7143. https://doi.org/10.3390/en14217143

Cabeza, L. F., Q. Bai, P. Bertoldi, J.M. Kihila, A.F.P. Lucena, É. Mata, S. Mirasgedis, A. Novikova, Y. Saheb, 2022: Buildings. In IPCC, 2022: Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [P.R. Shukla, J. Skea, R. Slade, A. Al Khourdajie, R. van Diemen, D. McCollum, M. Pathak, S. Some, P. Vyas, R. Fradera, M. Belkacemi, A. Hasija, G. Lisboa, S. Luz, J. Malley, (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK and New York, NY, USA. doi: 10.1017/9781009157926.011

Chepkemoi, J. (2017). [Image]. Cement is used for a variety of purposes. World Atlas. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/top-cement-producing-countries-in-the-world.html

Favier, A., Scrivener, K., & Habert, G. (2019). Decarbonizing the cement and concrete sector: integration of the full value chain to reach net zero emissions in Europe. IOP Conference Series, 225, 012009. https://doi.org/10.1088/1755-1315/225/1/012009

Ganiron, T. U., & Chemical, A. (2015). Recycling Concrete Debris from Construction and Demolition Waste. International Journal of Advanced Science and Technology, 77, 7–24. https://doi.org/10.14257/ijast.2015.77.02

How Cement Is Made. (n.d.). [Video]. https://www.cement.org/cement-concrete/how-cement-is-made

Kajaste, R., & Hurme, M. (2016). Cement industry greenhouse gas emissions – management options and abatement cost. Journal of Cleaner Production, 112, 4041–4052. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2015.07.055

Khan, M. H., Havukainen, J., & Horttanainen, M. (2021). Impact of utilizing solid recovered fuel on the global warming potential of cement production and waste management system: A life cycle assessment approach. Waste Management & Research, 39(4), 561–572. https://doi.org/10.1177/0734242×20978277

Lovins, A. (2021). Decarbonizing Our Toughest Sectors — Profitably. MITSloan Management Review, 63(1), 46–55.

South Africa’s Largest Earth Rammed Wall. (2015, September 22). Themba. https://themba-africa.com/south-africas-largest-earth-rammed-wall/

Westgate, P. J., & Paine, K. (2019). Olivine as a reactive aggregate in lime mortars. Construction and Building Materials, 195, 115–126. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.conbuildmat.2018.11.062

Zhang, Y., Hu, S., Guo, F., Mastrucci, A., Zhang, S., Yang, Z., & Yan, D. (2022). Assessing the potential of decarbonizing China’s building construction by 2060 and synergy with industry sector. Journal of Cleaner Production, 359, 132086. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2022.132086

How to fight biodiversity loss in your own city?

Climate change is one of the most talked about topics across the globe and the importance of acting against it will only increase. Countless discussions, initiatives, and actions are being taken globally, regionally, nationwide, in cities, and by organizations. But there is also a lot that we, individuals can do. Although climate change is a broad, technical, and sometimes abstract subject and many actions are to be taken by institutions, we all have the opportunity to contribute. This blog post is about one aspect of climate change specifically, increasing the biodiversity in our living environment, and gives you some concrete ideas you can start with today.

What has the world agreed to improve biodiversity?

“We are treating nature like a toilet”, one of the most striking quotes of the 2023 COP15 by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres set the tone for the rest of the summit (United Nations, 2022). During this conference, the need for urgent and more stringent measures against biodiversity loss was stressed by many participants and was worked out in the Kunming-Montereal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). The framework consists of four overarching goals, namely: restoration and conservation goals, the sustainable use of lands and seas, the sustainable share of nature’s resources, and a call for action to mobilize necessary resources and policies (Convention on Biological Diversity, 2022). These goals are to be achieved through the following 23 ambitious targets:

Figure 1 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework: 23 Targets. Created from source Vandvik, 2023

Increasing biodiverse areas in urban environments

One of the targets, Target 12, focuses on increasing the area, quality, and connectivity of urban green and blue spaces in urban areas sustainably. The framework stipulates that this target has to be achieved by mainstreaming the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity and ensuring biodiversity-inclusive urban planning, enhancing native biodiversity, ecological connectivity and integrity, and improving human health and well-being and connection to nature and contributing to inclusive and sustainable urbanization and the provision of ecosystem functions and services. These seem abstract and focus on sustainable governance and policy action, but what are some things you can do as an individual to contribute?

What can you do to help?

There are many more opportunities than you could initially think. Just by looking and asking around in your neighborhood, you will find that there are many things you can do to help increase the area, quality, and connectivity of your urban environment. Most of them are easy to implement and can positively contribute to improving biodiversity in your urban area (Gaston & Gaston, 2010).

Here are some examples of what you can do:

Create your urban biodiversity hotspot at home.

This is a great way to promote biodiversity by providing habitat to different animal species like pollinators, birds, and small mammals, increasing connectivity and creating “green corridors” as well as reducing the urban heat island effect (Climate ADAPT, 2015; European Commission DG, 2022; Mayrand and Clergeau, 2018; Humaida et al., 2023). Nevertheless, you might wonder, how do I do this living in a small flat apartment? Well, there are multiple ways through which to start this, as even small spaces can create thriving ecosystems (Soanes et al., 2018) and contribute to creating a greener urban city. Even without a backyard a balcony can be sufficient to create your garden (Schneider et al., 2022).

Figure 2 Green Balcony. Created with labs.openai.com

Take advantage of the community gardens

The Netherlands offers many opportunities to create your own biodiversity garden, also in Amsterdam. In fact, only in Amsterdam, there are over 6000 community gardens with spaces up for rent (Gemeente Amsterdam, n.d.). Did you know that one of them is close to the AUC academic building, next to Flevopark: https://www.facebook.com/people/Buurttuin-Valentijn/100064730914805/?

Figure 3 and 4, Photographs of community garden “Buurtuin Valentijn” Source: Buurtuin Valentijn via Facebook

Take part in the Dutch “tegelwippen” competition.

This is a Dutch initiative to foment replacing pavement with grass and gardens in urban environments. Since last year, the city to replace more pavement with soil, or gardens wins the competition. Amsterdam is also one of the municipalities taking part and everyone can participate but they must ensure that the removed tiles are their own property or ask if the municipality allows taking up extra space. To check more information: https://nk-tegelwippen.nl/.

Put sedum on your rooftop.

If you have a garage or other outside building with a roof, consider putting a sedum on it to create additional habitat for birds and insects. Green roofs provide water and food mainly through insects, berries, and seeds for feeding birds (Mayrand & Clergeau, 2018). Also, provide space and cover that protect birds and their nests from predators. In the Netherlands, many municipalities have a subsidy program for residents who want to cover their roofs with sedum that you can benefit from.

Figure 5 Green roof, credit: Nancy Arazon, EPA

Some tips & tricks:

Assess the space: Start by assessing the amount of sunlight the area receives. Observe the space throughout the day and determine if it receives full sun, partial sun, or is shaded. This information will help you choose plants that will thrive in your specific environment.
Choose the right plants: Select plants that are native to your area, this is key to increasing the native biodiversity (Jha et al., 2023). In fact, many studies have shown this can help support pollinator populations and increase the abundance and diversity of bird species (Jha et al., 2023; Aronson et al., 2014; Threlfall et al., 2017). Choose a mix of flowering plants, herbs, and vegetables. Specifically in The Netherlands, for sunny areas, try catnip or stonecrops. For partially sunny areas, lungwort, or comfrey. For shady areas, ferns, or foamflower.
Create a welcoming environment: This is not mandatory but additional features like bird feeders, bird baths, or nesting boxes could attract more birds to your garden.
Maintain the garden: Keep the plants healthy by removing dead or diseased leaves, using organic fertilizers like compost, avoiding chemicals, and watering regularly.

Even though the current biodiversity loss decline cannot be solved solely through urban biodiversity hotspots and more research needs to be done on how different techniques can better promote biodiversity depending on the specific city, I hope that after reading this post, you start noticing the green gardens around your own city and feel inspired to start your own project to help fight biodiversity loss in urban areas, either by taking up one of the numerous possibilities that government and NGO initiatives offer or through your own ambition.

References

Aronson, M. F. J., La Sorte, F. A., Nilon, C. H., Katti, M., Goddard, M. A., Lepczyk, C. A., Warren, P. S., Williams, N. S. G., Cilliers, S., Clarkson, B., Dobbs, C., Dolan, R., Hedblom, M., Klotz, S., Kooijmans, J. L., Kühn, I., MacGregor-Fors, I., McDonnell, M., Mörtberg, U., & Pyšek, P. (2014). A global analysis of the impacts of urbanization on bird and plant diversity reveals key anthropogenic drivers. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 281(1780), 20133330. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2013.3330

Climate ADAPT. (2015). Green spaces and corridors in urban areas — English. Climate-Adapt.eea.europa.eu. https://climate-adapt.eea.europa.eu/en/metadata/adaptation-options/green-spaces-and-corridors-in-urban-areas

Convention on Biological Diversity. (2022). Nations Adopt Four Goals, 23 Targets for 2030 In Landmark UN Biodiversity Agreement. https://prod.drupal.www.infra.cbd.int/sites/default/files/2022-12/221219-CBD-PressRelease-COP15-Final_0.pdf

European Commission DG. (2022). Using blue-green infrastructure in cities increases regional habitat connectivity and benefits biodiversity. Environment.ec.europa.eu. https://environment.ec.europa.eu/news/using-blue-green-infrastructure-cities-increases-regional-habitat-connectivity-and-benefits-2022-11-16_en

Gaston, K. J., & Gaston, Si. (2010). Urban gardens and biodiversity. In The Routledge Handbook of Urban Ecology. Routledge.

Gemeente Amsterdam. (N.d.). Volkstuinen openbaar toegankelijk. Amsterdam.nl. Retrieved March 4, 2023, from https://www.amsterdam.nl/bestuur-organisatie/volg-beleid/coalitieakkoord-uitvoeringsagenda/gezonde-duurzame-stad/volkstuinen-openbaar-toegankelijk/

Humaida, N., Saputra, M. H., Sutomo, & Hadiyan, Y. (2023). Urban gardening for mitigating heat island effect. IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science, 1133(1), 012048. https://doi.org/10.1088/1755-1315/1133/1/012048

Jha, S., Egerer, M., Bichier, P., Cohen, H., Liere, H., Lin, B., Lucatero, A., & Philpott, S. M. (2023). Multiple ecosystem service synergies and landscape mediation of biodiversity within urban agroecosystems. Ecology Letters, 26(3). https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.14146

Mayrand, F., & Clergeau, P. (2018). Green Roofs and Green Walls for Biodiversity Conservation: A Contribution to Urban Connectivity? Sustainability, 10(4), 985. https://doi.org/10.3390/su10040985

Schneider, M., Wiegele, E., & Jungmeier, M. (2022). CONSERVATION ENGINEERING: INNOVATIONS FOR BIODIVERSITY-FRIENDLY CONSTRUCTION. http://ffhoarep.fh-ooe.at/bitstream/123456789/1538/1/FFH2022_219.pdf

Soanes, K., Sievers, M., Chee, Y. E., Williams, N. S. G., Bhardwaj, M., Marshall, A. J., & Parris, K. M. (2018). Correcting common misconceptions to inspire conservation action in urban environments. Conservation Biology, 33(2), 300–306. https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13193

Threlfall, C. G., Mata, L., Mackie, J. A., Hahs, A. K., Stork, N. E., Williams, N. S. G., & Livesley, S. J. (2017). Increasing biodiversity in urban green spaces through simple vegetation interventions. Journal of Applied Ecology, 54(6), 1874–1883. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2664.12876

United Nations. (2022, December 6). Warning Biological Diversity Conference “We are Treating Nature Like a Toilet”, Secretary-General Calls for Global Biodiversity Framework | UN Press. Press.un.org. https://press.un.org/en/2022/sgsm21619.doc.htm

Vandvik, V. (2023). Kumming Montereal Global Biodiversity Framework. In http://www.uib.no. https://www.uib.no/en/cesam/159846/cheat-sheet-kunming-montr%C3%A9al-global-biodiversity-framework

Uncovering the Impact of Gravity on Regional Sea Level Rise

Seventy years ago, on the night of 31 January to 1 February 1953, the North Sea flood hit the southwest of the Netherlands, causing major floods in Zeeland, South Holland and Brabant. A combination of a northwest storm and spring tide caused the water to rise so high that several dykes breached. This flood disaster was the greatest Dutch natural disaster of the 20th century. The Dutch government responded firmly by building one of the largest and most well-known flood defence systems in the world to protect the low-lying country.

*The Netherlands defeated by the sea: 1.836 people did not survive the disaster and tens of thousands of animals lost their lives*

Today, the sea remains the biggest natural threat to the Netherlands. Global sea levels have been rising at a faster rate since the late 20th century, along with global temperatures. In 2018, the global average sea level was about 15–25 cm higher than in 1900, and 7–15 cm higher than in 1971. The global average sea level will continue to rise by an additional 10–25 cm by 2050. Beyond 2050, the rise is uncertain. This has to do with the delayed response of the sea level to global warming and therefore it is highly dependent on the amount of greenhouse gases that will be emitted in the coming decades.

But the sea does not rise equally everywhere.

While sea level rise is commonly presented as a single, global phenomenon, it is important to recognize that the effects of climate change can lead to varying sea-level changes in different regions.

Whereas globally the main causes of sea level rise are thermal expansion and the melting of land ice, many other factors drive local sea levels. In the short term, this mostly has to do with natural climate variations (e.g. wind and ocean currents), and in the long term, other physical processes come into play, such as the gravitational pull of ice sheets and resulting changes to Earth’s gravity field. This phenomenon is also referred to as “sea-level fingerprinting”.

*Sound intimidating? No worries: just keep a cool head and read on.*

Right. Let’s dive into the science and find out how gravity and ice sheets influence regional sea level rise around the Netherlands.

From the top:

Gravity

Starting with the basics: gravity. What is gravity, what are its effects and what on Earth does it have to do with ice sheets?

You might have heard that gravity is the reason why objects fall down. Gravity is essential for life on Earth. For example, it holds down our atmosphere which enables us to breathe, but also all water on Earth is held down by gravity. In essence, gravity is a force of attraction. Anything with mass has gravity, including us humans, but also the Earth itself. The more mass an object has, the more gravity it has.

While gravity refers to the force between an object and the Earth’s surface, gravitation refers to the force between two objects. The gravitational pull of two objects becomes stronger the closer they are to each other.

Moving on to the Earth gravity field.

Earth’s gravity field

The distribution of gravity over the surface of the Earth is not equal. This has to do with the Earth not being a perfect sphere, but also with the difference in mass distribution of the Earth. This is not uniform due to the presence of mountains, oceans, and other geological features. In locations with a higher mass, gravity is stronger and sea level is higher (because, as Newton taught us, mass attracts mass).

*Warm colors (red, orange, yellow) represent areas with strong gravity. Cool colors (green, blue) represent areas with weak gravity. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center*

Ice sheets add a lot of mass to land. The ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are the largest bodies of ice in the world, but they are also melting at a rapid rate. In the period from 1992 until 2020, the Greenland ice sheet has lost 4.890 gigatons of mass and the Antarctic ice sheet has lost 2.670 gigatons of mass. For reference, that is enough to cover the Netherlands in a sheet 182 meters high. And the melting of these sheets will continue. The lost mass from ice sheets goes into the ocean, thereby contributing to global sea level rise.

But what does this have to do with sea level rise in the Netherlands?

Gravitational effects due to mass distribution

We know now that at locations with a higher mass, sea level is higher because of gravity (mass attracts mass). When land ice melts, it means that these glaciers or ice sheets turn into liquid water and flow into the ocean. This redistribution of mass from land to ocean causes the gravity field of the Earth to change.

Though the ocean as a whole gains volume, the rise in sea level is unequally distributed. Because the land surfaces of Greenland and Antarctica lose mass, they attract less ocean water (because mass attracts mass), so the sea level will fall in close proximity to the ice sheet and rise above average at far-field locations. To be exact, within a distance of 2.200 kilometers from the ice sheets, sea level drops. Between 2.200 and 6.700 kilometers, sea level rises less than the global average, and further than 6.700 kilometers, sea level rises more than the global average.

*A schematic representation of the gravitational interaction between ice sheets, the solid Earth*
*and the ocean. Credit: KNMI*

What are the implications for the Netherlands?

The celestial distance between the Netherlands and Greenland is 3.168 kilometers. The distance from the Netherlands to Antarctica is 16.259 kilometers. This means that the regional sea levels around the Netherlands are more sensitive to a melt of Antarctica than of Greenland.

You could say that the higher-than-average rise around the Netherlands due to the melting of Antarctica is more than compensated by the lower-than-average rise due to the melting of Greenland. But of course, regional sea level rise is dependent on a number of other factors, like wind and ocean currents. And not to forget, the relative sea level also continues to rise due to the continued subsidence of the Netherlands. Though the Dutch government claims to currently be able to protect the Netherlands from up to 1 meter of sea-level rise by 2100, predictions about sea level rise vary greatly due to many uncertainties, and the 1-meter boundary may be broken.

The gravitational pull of ice sheets may not be what does us in. But there is still much to learn about how much and how fast both global and regional sea levels will rise in the future. Only time will tell if the Dutch government will respond as firmly to the dangers of the sea as it did 70 years ago.

Upgrading the European Union’s energy grid: from fragmentation to integration

The cooperation between member states of the European Union (EU) creates the potential for optimizing clean energy provision. The EU aspires to become climate-neutral by the year 2050. Its second objective is to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases (GHGs) by 55% by 2030, with the emission levels of 1990 as a reference point (Cullinane et al., 2021). An important domain in which the EU strives to strengthen its sustainability is energy. Energy production accounts for 72% of the EU’s total GHG emissions. To reduce the emissions of GHGs in energy production, the EU should rely less on the most polluting energy sources such as fossil fuels. Cleaner energy can be produced by using renewable energy resources (RES). RES include solar, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal, biomass, tidal, and wave energy.

Member states’ suitability to produce certain types of clean energy varies. For example, North-western EU member states are more suited for producing offshore wind energy, and Mediterranean states are more suited to providing solar energy. Due to this variability, it is essential to connect all EU member states so that energy can be transported between them. The energy grid, the system consisting of all infrastructure moving energy from producers to consumers, should be optimized. Energy grids encompass multiple types of energy, such as electricity, natural gas, and oil. There are multiple ways in which the European energy grid can be optimized. I will outline some of them, describing what I think the EU should strive for if it wants to effectuate its climate missions.

The energy grid can be ameliorated by implementing and refining demand-response mechanisms. Demand-response energy provision entails that energy producers supply energy in amounts finetuned to the demand of consumers. In periods of high demand, producers will provide more energy, and they can lower the energy provision in periods of low demand. Additionally, consumers can be stimulated to use less energy in peak hours, so that producers can meet the peak demands (O’Neill, 2013). This can minimize energy losses because there will be little excess energy (which is often difficult to store) or deficit energy.

Furthermore, grid efficiency can be improved by integrating different energy systems and resources. At this moment, energy producers who use specific energy resources are directly linked to consumers of that specific energy type. The networks for electricity and gas are often not interlinked. Further integrating these different energy-type networks will prevent energy losses and open pathways to economic efficiency (European Commission, 2020). The European Commission has proposed plans for further integration of the energy system, illustrating their goals in the following image:

Fig 1. EU plans for the integration of the energy system

Applying smart grids can further enhance the effectiveness of demand-response mechanisms. Smart grids utilize technologies to regulate the demand-response energy system (International Energy Agency, 2011; Purvins et al., 2011). Smart grids employ different technologies in all components of the energy grid. For example, advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) collects specific data about consumer demand throughout different time periods and can give consumers accurate data on the current price of energy (International Energy Agency, 2011). Using these technologies, energy can be directed to certain end-users more productively and the distribution can be turned on and off more efficiently (International Energy Agency, 2011).

Moreover, the grid can also be optimized by interconnecting European Union countries’ grids. To illustrate, solar panels can only generate energy during the day. This means that, if there are no sufficient energy storage mechanisms present, countries cannot provide consumers with enough solar energy after sunset. For example, in Eastern Europe, solar panels would cease to generate energy after sunset. However, in Western Europe, the sun would still be shining at this time, so solar energy is still produced there. Western European countries, during these hours, could use solar energy and send their excess energy (for example in the form of natural gas) to Eastern European countries to offset their deficiency. This cooperation could manage excesses and deficiencies in a sustainable way.

To enhance this interconnectedness, a European electricity Supergrid has been proposed. A Supergrid would allow for the transport of energy over great distances, from areas where energy is produced to consumer areas (Purvins et al., 2011). Since the areas with the most renewable electricity produced are not distributed equally over Europe, this would allow for a better equal allocation of electricity. For example, Iceland’s share of low-carbon source energy was 86.87% in 2021, making it the big winner of clean energy in Europe. Even though Iceland is not a member state of the EU, its integration into the grid via subsea cables could make its excess energy useful for other European countries. Ireland could also play a leading role in the Supergrid, providing the EU with its offshore wind energy. Dr. Eddie O’Connor, Kevin O’Sullivan, and the Irish Times Environment scrutinized the opportunities of an EU Supergrid. They estimated that it would be a costly endeavor of about €900 billion euros, but that this could be regained within 8 years.

Fig 2. A visualization of a European Supergrid

If the system could be efficiently integrated, we would “have enough wind, solar, hydro, biomass and some nuclear to allow for complete decarbonisation of electricity, road transport, heating and cooling, steel making, chemical feedstocks, aviation and shipping”. This is a promising statement, and therefore the European Union should seriously consider and further investigate the potential of the European Supergrid. It is crucial to investigate sustainable options for energy provision, not only to reach climate goals but also because energy independence is ever so relevant within current geopolitics.

References

Cullinane, M., Judge, F., O’Shea, M., Thandayutham, K., & Murphy, J. (2021). Subsea superconductors: The future of offshore renewable energy transmission? Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 156. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2021.111943

European Commission. (2020). Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=COM:2020:299:FIN

International Energy Agency. (2010). Technology Roadmap Smart Grids. https://www.iea.org/reports/technology-roadmap-smart-grids

O’Neill, J. (2013). Demand Response: Electricity Market Benefits and Energy Efficiency Coordination.

Purvins, A., Wilkening, H., Fulli, G., Tzimas, E., Celli, G., Mocci, S., Pilo, F. G. L., & Tedde, S. (2011). A European supergrid for renewable energy: local impacts and far-reaching challenges. Journal of Cleaner Production, 19(17–18), 1909–1916. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2011.07.003

A Manu Kai Rehabilitation Story

When you ask someone “what do you know about animals and climate change?” The image of an emaciated polar bear on a melted ice flow directly pops into their mind. Because climate change is also known as “global warming”, there is a common misconception that the most affected regions are arctic regions. However, let’s not forget about warmer regions such as Hawaii and their native seabirds. Yes, climate change melts ice but it also affects tropical regions and their biodiversity.

Hawaii (U.S.) is an archipelago in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It encompasses four main islands: Oahu, Maui, Big Island and Kauai. It is one of the most biodiverse sites in the world, however, sadly, it is also known as the world capital of seabird extinction ! 32 seabird species have already gone extinct and 2 are on the verge of extinction: Newell’s shearwater (Puffinus newelli) and Hawaiian petrel (Pterodroma sandwichensis). Seabirds, also called Manu Kai in the hawaiian language, are sacred for the people. Legends of seabirds saving hawaiian fishermen, by indicating changes in weather patterns and abundant fish pods, are deeply entrenched in the hawaiian culture. However, nowadays, native seabirds are critically impacted by climate change on the archipelago of Hawaii.

How come? Well, cascading effects of climate change such as warmer oceans, sea level rise, ocean acidification, and increased frequency of severe weather events cause food scarcity (less healthy fish) and therefore starvation for the hawaiian seabirds. It’s alarming. “These escalations of seabird die-offs are big red flags that the rising temperature of the ocean is wreaking havoc.” (Shaye Wolf). In a vicious circle between seabird and ocean where both are indicators of the other’s downfall, how can we help the seabirds ?

How can we help?

Let me tell you the story that inspired me to write this Blog Post.

In January 2022, I did an Internship at the Hawaii Wildlife Rehabilitation Center (located on Big Island in Hawai’i, US). The Hawaii Wildlife Center is a non-profit organisation dedicated to the preservation of hawai’i’s wild treasures, including seabirds. It is currently the only rehabilitation center for seabirds in Hawaii. For a month, I observed and helped veterinarians and rehabilitators care for native Hawaiian seabirds. More than 500 seabirds across 25 species are rescued and rehabilitated each year at the center. I was lucky to witness the process. Rehabilitation is a step-by-step process called the four R’s : Rescue, Recover, Release and Research.

Step 1… Rescue

The Hawaii Wildlife Center (HWC) has a ‘rescue’ phone number. If an individual (tourist or local) encounters a ‘grounded’ seabird anywhere on the hawaiian islands, he has the duty to inform the center. A ‘grounded’ seabird is defined as a seabird found under abnormal circumstances: unable to walk, fly or swim properly. HWC filters the calls received on a daily basis and identifies the species of the bird. Under the U.S. fish and wildlife law, only native hawaiian species are allowed to be rehabilitated. Once the seabird has been located, volunteers are sent out to bring the seabird at the center. As HWC is situated on Big Island, if a bird was rescued on another island it will be shipped by the partner airline: Hawaiian Airlines, and brought directly to Big Island. Once the bird has arrived at the center, it undergoes a full body ‘intake examination’.

Step 2… Recover

To thrive in the wild, a seabird needs to be able to walk, fly, swim and feed itself on his own. Therefore, it is HWC’s mission to ensure all these abilities are functional before releasing the seabird. The bird’s weight, and motion abilities are monitored everyday and depending on the intake cause (ex. wing injury, broken leg, anorexic, feather distortion…) each seabird follows a specific rehabilitation protocol. Radios, chirurgical interventions or just regular care depend on the individual seabird. One of the most important interventions for all seabirds coming in the center is the waterproofing process. Indeed, due to causes such as air/water pollution or oil spills, the birds feather’s are ‘wet’. Waterproofing is ‘an intense cleaning process’ that aims to remove all external particles preventing the bird’s feathers to remain dry in the water. In order for a seabird to survive in the marine ecosystem, his feathers need to be completely hydrophobic.

Step 3… Release

After successful treatment, the seabird returns to the wild. Rehabilitators release the seabird on the beach. Depending on the location and species characteristics, they attempt to release the seabird at the original ‘rescue’ spot.

Filmed by Me : Video of Seabird Release at Hawaii Wildlife Center

Step 4… Research

As high numbers of seabirds are rescued at the Hawaii Wildlife Center, it provides valuable datasets to analyse trends among seabird ecosystems. Research on seasonality, intake causes and disposition rates are essential for conservation programs such as the Oahu Seabird Aid, the Manu o Ku Soft Release or external Conservation programs. These aim to recover seabird populations and to slow down their extinction.

Furthermore, lab analyses and dissections are performed on dead seabirds to understand related captive deaths such as genetics, diseases, food poisoning or untreatable conditions. These medical analyses are essential for all seabird rehabilitation centers around the world.

Finally, the Hawaii Wildlife Center organize outreach events and offers educational programs in universities to sensibilize the public and call for biodiversity research experts.

Conclusion

Seeing them fly off the beach, wild and free, made me realize the importance of these centers in our world today. As biodiversity is more and more affected by climate change, these rehabilitation centers are critically essential to fight species extinction. Let’s support rehabilitation centers by shedding light on their importance and by encouraging governments to properly fund conservation efforts.

P.S. If you ever find yourself visiting Hawaii and encounter a grounded seabird, PLEASE call (808) 884-5000.

Shark Species Demise and the Fin Trade

A few years ago I flew to Costa Rica for a short-term study abroad. The course was in tropical marine biology, but our professor decided to take this as a mere suggestion and instead focused our lectures primarily on his life passion: sharks. For anyone who has seen these magnificent creatures out in the wild, cutting through the water with ease, the very image of an apex predator, they will quickly come to share that passion.

Therefore, after weeks of our lecturer conjuring up these images, I was ecstatic it was finally time to enter the field and see these predators in their natural habitat. I visited three different marine reserves around Costa Rica, contributing to their elasmobranch population monitoring projects. During field work, I remembered something my professor said: over a third of elasmobranchs are in danger of extinction, but after seeing these species right in front of me, this statistic perplexed me. I was so mesmerized by their beauty, leading me to wonder – why are the populations of these magical creatures declining so quickly?

Sharks, who are from the subclass elasmobranchii, are a critical species for our marine ecosystems. Sharks are keystone species due to their role as apex predators and are necessary for proper ecosystem functioning and health. Sharks are responsible for maintaining species diversity and population levels; they remove weak and sick animals and ensure balance in the distribution of species in the marine food web. They are also a critical indicator for ocean health; a large shark population means a healthy ocean. Without sharks, there is a decline in coral reefs and seagrass beds; their absence allows for other predatory fish populations to increase, causing a decrease in herbivores in coral reef ecosystems. With fewer herbivores, algae flourish, robbing corals of sunlight, inducing coral death. Ecosystems have a rich interconnectivity and shifting to one of algae dominance negatively affects all species that inhabit coral reefs. Additionally, within seagrass environments, sharks maintain ecosystem health through fear; they scare certain species away, ensuring herbivores such as turtles feed over a broad area, allowing the seagrasses to thrive. Seagrasses are important habitats because they sequester large amounts of carbon, serving as carbon sinks and offsetting carbon dioxide levels.

What is the problem?

Sharks play a vital role in our marine ecosystems and they are currently at risk of extinction due to human behavior. An estimated 100 million sharks are killed annually. Some fisheries intentionally target shark species and are responsible for 73 million of the annual shark casualties, but many sharks are also killed due to bycatch and shark culling. Bycatch is the unintentional capture of undesired species; species are either killed and sold in market or simply discarded, left to asphyxiate. Many species suffer from the wasteful harm of bycatch, totalling an estimated 7.3 million tons annually. Shark culling, an additional issue, is the installation of nets at beaches in an attempt to reduce shark attacks. Shark nets are ineffective, and also capture and kill numerous other marine species such as rays and dolphins. Sharks are responsible for an average of 72 human deaths annually, while we, as humans, kill 100 million sharks annually. Even though sharks are some of the oldest species, having existed for over 400 million years, surviving 5 mass extinctions, humans are pushing them to the brink of extinction.

Sharks are intentionally fished for their liver oil and cartilage for medicinal purposes, meat for human consumption, skin for leather, teeth and jaws for curios, but are primarily fished for their fins. Shark fins are considered a luxury item and are used in many Asian countries to make shark fin soup. Due to the popularity of this delicacy, shark fins are extremely valuable; they can be sold for as much as $1,100 a kilogram. Shark fins are tasteless and have zero nutritional benefits but are still desirable due to their high economic value and symbol of status and wealth. The environmental impact of this industry is overlooked entirely, driven solely by human greed.

Legislation

Even though some countries have banned the practice of shark finning, there are still many countries with partial bans, laws solely on finning rather than fishing, or no laws at all. For example, many countries adopted laws that require the fins to be attached to the shark body but can still legally be fished and later finned on land. There are few laws on the export and import of shark fins allowing the industry to continue as sharks can be fished and exported to countries that have outlawed the practice. There are other loopholes and much of the shark fin trade occurs illegally, via smuggling protected species and recording fewer species than caught. Stopping the shark fin trade will require international collaboration, otherwise shipments of fins can travel around the world due to the lack of uniformity in laws and restrictions.

Environmental impact

Shark population declines are not only the result of overfishing. Sharks are also affected by climate change; global warming has been shown to weaken their populations even further. As with many species, our rapidly increasing ocean temperatures and acidity levels are causing sharks to seek colder waters, sometimes moving hundreds of kilometers away from their natural habitat. As a keystone species, these changes have widespread impacts, affecting species throughout the marine food web. Sharks are often forced to change their diet due to their migration, offsetting the population levels of other species and creating imbalances in ecosystems. Warming temperatures have also increased skin disease outbreaks and affect the size and strength of shark young. Some shark species are being born smaller and weaker, making it challenging for them to reach adulthood. With declining shark populations, sharks are unable to regulate our ecosystems. Not only are carbon levels increasing due to overfishing, but by decreasing their population size, carbon levels are increasing even further because there are fewer sharks in our oceans to prevent overgrazing in seagrass environments, which are a fundamental component for carbon sequestration.

I never imagined a few weeks in Costa Rica, sitting in a small classroom listening to lectures taught mostly in Spanish and working in marine reserves would instill in me such a strong passion and open my eyes to a dire problem our world is facing. We depend on sharks for ecosystem functioning and carbon emission reductions, but this fails to incentivize people to eradicate shark finning and its associated market. My lecturers’ devotion and adoration towards this species was contagious; I have fallen in love with these beautiful animals and because of this I seek to educate others on this issue and save our oceans sharks. Because with any species, once they are gone, we won’t be able to resurrect a species that has been overfished to the point of extinction.

What the Russo-Ukrainian War Reminds Us of about International Food Trade

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has reached its fourth month. Putin and his army, after playing countless smoke and mirrors, did not capture their targets as quickly as one might expect; instead, the battle line gradually stabilized into a long war of attrition, thanks to the heroic resistance of the Ukrainian people and army. While the world saw the decline of Pugin’s army, another thing was not particularly optimistic: Ukrainian food production was interrupted by this accident, which would have terrible repercussions on the international food trade and reveal how it is more fragile than what we have previously thought of.

A destroyed Ukrainian farm during the invasion.

Ukrainian soil has been deeply involved in the international grain trade. When people operating in Ukraine chose to settle more often rather than being nomadic as they had been historical, the country’s rich black land resources instantly made it one of the most productive regions in the world in terms of average food production. After Tsarist Russia ruled the Ukrainian region, it was this land that made Tsarist Russia an important base for grain trade in Europe, and the tariffs on grain trade became an important topic for Russian diplomacy for a long time.

The importance of food security was not as significant in those days. The wars of that era did not have the ability to fully cut off trade in a region; at the same time, at the beginning of industrialization, the percentage of peasants had not yet been reduced to less than one-tenth of a country’s population, as it is now. However, this sudden conflict, together with the powerful artillery fire, created a looming disaster. 2021 Ukraine produced a total of about 33 million tons of grain, of which about 20 million tons were exported, mainly to countries in North Africa and the Middle East – most of which are quite self-sufficient in grain. quite low. And this year, Ukraine’s grain production is expected to drop by about a third because the war has reportedly delayed the sowing of spring wheat grown in the Ukrainian region (usually in mid-to-late April each year). Alas.

There was a time when Egypt was a major food producer in the Mediterranean. However, Egypt’s agricultural output has long been insufficient to feed its huge population, most of which is concentrated in the Nile Valley. Egypt has been trying to solve the problem by buying food from places like Ukraine in foreign currency. However, as far as we can see, this supply chain – and indeed the matter of global trade in bulk products itself – may not be as reliable as we would like. So I also no longer consider dependence on food trade to be a SUSTAINABLE behavior: what can be forced to stop by external forces is not SUSTAINABLE. Literally.

What are the alternatives?

Localization of food production. This may sound like a “here we go again” solution: aren’t we importing food because we don’t produce enough locally? Yes, that’s true, because we can’t produce enough land to meet demand. There are two ways to increase local food production under existing conditions: first, create more arable land; second, increase food yields per acre. Options for increasing food acres include supplemental lighting and greenhouse control using cheap electricity, more potent fertilizers, hydroponics, genetically modified crops that can accept the entire spectrum, and so on. However, I am more interested and sci-fi in the second option: creating a lot of arable land “out of thin air” in an area with urban and rural areas. The method is vertical farming; as the name suggests, it’s a series of solutions that I’ve just described packaged together and built into one or more skyscrapers. In this way, a city can be truly self-sufficient in its own food supply, as long as energy is available.

Development of alternative foods. For greater precision, the technologies described above for increasing yields are focused on the types of agricultural production already available. However, modern biological discoveries have taught us that there are many other species that are so nutrient-rich and so simple to cultivate that they are literally the saviors of food security. A single-celled alga called Chlorella has 40% protein content in its cytoplasm, twice that of beef. This alga grows faster than the vast majority of pathogens and fungi, so much so that sufficient quantities of chlorella can ensure almost absolute food hygiene. If people’s consumption habits can be cultivated, chlorella can be considered almost a free nutrient. Currently, Chlorella is being developed as a nutritional supplement. The main obstacle to his promotion is the taste of chlorella: as an aquatic alga, it has a fishy smell. Chlorella tablets as a supplement can have this drawback, however, as food for mass consumption Chlorella needs to overcome this with the help of the modern food industry.

Unfortunately, these promising technological advances could not be used immediately to help the people affected by the disaster. What is needed for food security in the short term is more innovation in distribution. If Ukraine drastically reduced its food exports, could it buy food from another country, regardless of price? Can we achieve a significant reduction in the total waste of food? Perhaps our social institutions cannot support us in doing so; radical political reform is the solution. And that is a much heavier topic.

Plump or Dump? The case for Solar Radiation Management

The Plump:

First, it is essential to discuss the “plump” in question. Solar Radiation Management is, in fact, just a fancy way of describing a process where aerosol particles are injected into the atmosphere as a way to ensure that fewer sun rays reach the planet. As can be seen circled in pink in the diagram below (Joseph and Remadevi, 2018), the technology itself is not too complex :

Plumping the atmosphere with aerosol particles is, perhaps, the cheapest and easiest quick fix to some of the problems caused by climate change. In particular, according to even more conservative models, it could lead to a 15 to 20% decrease in the loss of polar ice sheets (Moore et al., 2019). Even more importantly, in today’s socio-economic context, the cost of its implementation is extremely low, especially compared to the cost of other emission mitigation projects (McClellan et al., 2012). Although it is a relatively new technological development, meaning that the models predicting its outcome are not yet entirely conclusive, some studies suggest that there can be a lot of unexpected positive side effects. For instance, the resulting cooling of global temperatures is also expected to reduce the rate of malaria infections in developing countries (Carlson et al., 2022).

In short, Solar Radiation Management (in the form of aerosol injections) is a very cost-efficient (partial) solution to a very costly problem.

The Dump:

For nearly every positive review of injecting aerosol particles in the stratosphere, there is a negative one:

Of course, some of those millions of results would have both positive and negative impacts discussed in them, but the general trend of indecisiveness remains evident.

There are numerous reasons why the whole idea of Solar Management Radiation through injecting aerosol particles into the stratosphere should simply be “dumped”. First off, there is a large amount of uncertainty regarding the potential long-term effects of this practice (Ban-Weiss, 2010). While this uncertainty could be partially resolved by looking into the effects of volcanic eruptions (who have a very similar but short-lived effect on the surrounding area), the fact that these injections would have to be done several times to truly achieve the desired outcome makes actual certainty practically impossible to achieve. Secondly, because of the low cost and low effort needed to implement this technology, it is likely to lead to an indefinite postponement of current mitigation efforts (Bracmort et al., 2013). While the reduction in solar radiation would account for some of the said postponement, it would not be nearly enough to mitigate the human impact on this planet. Last but not least, it is essential to note that while the global aggregate benefit is positive, it would be at the expense of some regions. Some potential negative impacts on vulnerable areas include but are not limited to unpredictable cyclones and ocean acidification (Heyen et al., 2015).

In short, injecting aerosol particles into the stratosphere is not as unproblematic as some plump proponents would like you to believe.

A Quick Side Note (if you bear with this post until the end, you will see the purpose behind this side note):

In 2012, the no longer operating organisation Haida Salmon Restoration single-handedly decided to test out a theory that dumping iron sulphate in the water would help restore fish populations. More specifically, they dumped 100 tonnes of iron sulphate in the waters off the coast of Haida Gwaii. While the so-called experiment did turn out to be successful, it created a lot of controversy on both a local and global level.

The issue was that it was an untested practice, and the fact that the outcome was positive can be considered more a coincidence than an actual testament to the success of this method. This then begs the question of whether Haida Salmon Restoration even had the right to simply decide to experiment and, potentially, cause unforeseen damages.

So What Can We Expect?

As you can see, there are just as many potential benefits as costs from injecting aerosol particles in the stratosphere, and the uncertainty behind both creates the perfect environment for a lot of congressional/ municipal/ regions/ national reports and briefings and meetings on the topic. This, in turn, creates an even better environment for studies into the probability of collaboration before implementation (as opposed to a single-handed decision by one country/ organisation), which can be extremely helpful for the average person who is simply looking for an answer as to what to expect.

Current studies suggest that the high-risk worst-case scenario that this method can create is expected to inspire a lot of countries to join in the discussion of its global implementation (Heyen et al., 2019). While this means that no one would be absent from the discussion itself, it does not necessarily translate into everyone being on board with its outcome (Rickels et al., 2020).

As seen from the quick side note included in this post, the mere discussion of cooperation before implementation does not guarantee its realisation. The very low cost of injecting aerosol particles into the stratosphere, combined with the fact that its effects will be felt almost instantaneously, in the opinion of this author, make the probability of a single-handed decision to “plump” the stratosphere much higher than the “dumping” of the idea.

What Do You Think We Can Expect?

References (with more information on the subject):

Ban-Weiss, George A., and Ken Caldeira. “Geoengineering as an optimization problem.” Environmental Research Letters, vol. 5, no. 3, 2010, p. 034009.

Bracmort, Kelsi, and Richard Lattanzio. Geoengineering: Governance and Technology Policy. Congressional Research Service, 2013.

Carlson, C.J., Colwell, R., Hossain, M.S. et al. Solar geoengineering could redistribute malaria risk in developing countries. Nat Commun 13, 2150 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-29613-w

Heyen, D., J. Horton, and J. Moreno-Cruz (2019). “Strategic implications of counter- geoengineering: Clash or cooperation?” Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 95, 153–177.

Heyen, Daniel, Wiertz, Thilo, and Peter Irvine. Regional Disparities in Solar Radiation Management Impacts: Limitations to Simple Assessments and the Role of Diverging Preferences. Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS), 2015.

Joseph, Cruz, and O. Remadevi. Schematic Representation of SRM (Solar Radiation Management) Geoengineering Methods. ResearchGate, June 2018, http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Cruz-Antony-Joseph/publication/326534456/figure/fig1/AS:652955086766082@1532688032648/Schematic-Representation-of-SRM-Solar-Radiation-Management-Geoengineering-Methods.png.

McClellan, Justin, Keith, David, and Jay Apt “Cost analysis of stratospheric albedo modification delivery systems.” Environmental Research Letters, vol. 7, no. 3, 2012.

Moore, John C., Yue, Chao, Zhao, Liyun, Guo, Xiaoran, and Duoying Ji. “Greenland Ice Sheet Response to Stratospheric Aerosol Injection Geoengineering.” Earth’s Future, vol. 7, no. 12, 2019, pp. 1451-1463.Rickels, W., M. F. Quaas, K. Ricke, J. Quaas, J. Moreno-Cruz, and S. Smulders (2020). “Who turns the global thermostat and by how much?” Energy Economics 91, 104-852.

Hold Jair Bolsonaro accountable: Environmental degradation as an international crime

Jair Bolsonaro is well known as the leader of Brazil and is a notorious climate change denier who showed complete disregard for the deforestation happening in the Amazon. Ever since he came to power in 2019, he has decreased protective regulations, cut funding for enforcement, and has been actively working against environmental agencies who are trying to change this. It was even reported that deforestation levels almost doubled since he took office. This is why AllRise, an Austrian climate activism group, filed a request at the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate if the environmental policies of the Bolsanaro administration could be considered ‘crimes against humanity’.

How does the ICC work?

This is not the first time that there have been investigations into Jair Bolsonaro. Previously, Bolsonaro has been accused of inciting genocide of Indigenous Peoples in the Amazon. However, what makes this case different is that it is more aligned with the current efforts of trying to nudge the ICC toward considering environmental harms a crime. What is important to realize is that the ICC only has the mandate to prosecute crimes that can be considered genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crime of aggression. It has an anthropocentric scope and is limited to the harm done to humans only. There has been talk about adding a fifth crime concerning environmental degradation, but this hasn’t gotten anywhere yet within the ICC. This means that when trying to prosecute an individual for environmental harm there needs to be a “human factor”. This is why AllRise filled this complaint under crimes of humanity arguing that “crimes against nature are crimes against humanity”. To support this claim, they put together an elaborate report that estimated that there will be 180,000 excess deaths this century due to the heat caused by deforestation under the current environmental policy in Brazil. It is now up to the ICC to decide if there is enough evidence to start an investigation and possibly prosecute Bolsonaro further.

Will Jair Bolsonaro end up in jail?

The simple answer is no. The ICC does have jurisdiction and competence to start a formal investigation and the requirements for a case are predominantly given but there are also other things to consider. In the last 20 years, only a limited amount of the cases the ICC took on have been sentenced and this is due to how much time, money, and effort it takes. The ICC does not have a police enforcement and relies fully on the cooperation of states. Besides that, it also must take the current political climate into regard. Even though it’s a judicial institution that should maintain a level of impartiality, it functions in a fiercely political environment and has to avoid creating conflicts between and within countries. Lastly, in the context of environmental harms, it can be hard to establish direct evidence due to the multitude of actors involved and the complexity surrounding deforestation. When an individual kills someone, it is relatively easy to prove who did it with the help of evidence linking them to the crime. But the higher up the chain, the harder it becomes to link them to the crimes they incited. This gets even more impossible when the evidence isn’t a body, but an environmental problem with global consequences. This doesn’t mean that this complaint is a lost cause because initiatives like AllRise are exactly what we need in the long run.

The steps the ICC will take once a complaint is filled (Source)

Why is this complaint important within international criminal law?

The purpose of the complaint that AllRise filled wasn’t necessarily to get Bolosnaro in jail but to increase the awareness of the global ecological crisis. Allrise founder Wesemann stated that “it is about making a precedent so that similar cases involving environmental degradation with global implications can be legally pursued.” This is not a weird thought because initiatives like this can pave the way to a legal route that can be used in addressing environmental harm. International criminal law isn’t supposed to be set in stone and instead, grow with our society in addressing international crimes that are happening. AllRise is a great example of how our definition of crime is growing and no longer just concerns crimes as we know it. Besides that, legal prosecution or even the prospect of it can already have a deterring effect on other leaders (e.g. political leaders, CEO’s etc). If the ICC decides to start preliminary investigations, it is proof that the ICC sees the relevance of the case and could make leaders more careful in their decision-making when the environment is concerned. While waiting for the ICC’s decision there are also other things happening on the legal front. Over the years, there have been several cases taken to Brazil’s supreme court involving petitions that challenge the environmental policies of Bolsonaro’s administration. Last month, the supreme court boldly launched a review of seven of these cases. Launching this many environmental cases in one day hadn’t been done before and is a positive development for the Amazon rainforest and the people living there. Due to factors like corruption, it is still unclear how these cases are going to proceed. But even if nothing changes, these cases can still serve as a reminder of the growing need for international intervention. The ICC is an institution to help with those problems that can’t be solved on a national level and can strengthen the call for expanding the ICC’s mandate to address environmental harms.

In the end, the hope is that by continuing on this road, there will be a shift in perspective when it comes to environmental degradation. Ultimately this could lead to ecocide being established as a fifth crime within the mandate of the ICC, which will acknowledge that our long-term survival is dependent on addressing these issues that are impacting us all.

Have faith in the feedback

Everything is connected: is not a mere slogan of wokeness but a fundamental property of our world. Studying the earth system, we realize how all its components bare a mutual dependence on each other. In a similar way the dynamics that shape our society respond to the influence of all individual actors operating within it. Further, these two systems -commonly identified as nature and culture- take part in a complex relationship that is constantly evolving, blurring the boundary between them. The highly interconnected structure of our world is no novelty but with the advent of globalization and the expansion of human activities into natural areas this is becoming ever much so the case.

This high level of connections within and between the systems of nature and culture is at the root of climate change. The complexity behind this global issue makes the extent of its impacts highly unpredictable and may therefore be an important reason of worry. Yet this same property means that small changes in few key variables may resonate across the system. This leaves space for hope that major systemic changes may still be possible. With this article I aim to provide a rough introduction to the study of complexity applied to climate change.

Complexity Theory

Complexity science is a relatively young field of study which deals with revealing the principles that govern self-organizing systems. These systems tend to exhibit non-linear behaviours, meaning that the interactions between the individual parts gives rise to emergent properties, which cannot be understood or predicted by the isolated study of its components. Complex systems can be found anywhere from biology to economics. They are inherent to the workings of nature and are becoming ever more present in society.

Fig1: The image shows the typical look of a complex system: composed of many nodes and even more connections

Examples of such systems are the immune system and the stock market. At first, it may seem ridicule to draw a comparison between them since they are vastly different in their scale and scope. Yet as we look closer, we can identify three common properties fundamental to their dynamics. One is the already mentioned complex collective behaviour i.e., how the whole is greater than its individual parts. This behaviour is dictated by their mode of signalling and information processing, because both systems are sensitive to the information used and produced by their internal and external environments. Finally, these systems can adapt through learning or evolutionary processes to increase their chances of success or survival. Complex systems exist at many levels, which means that components of a system can also be whole new systems. In fact, climate change can be thought of as the result of the interaction between the two macrosystems of nature and culture. Let’s now have a look at how these concepts apply to climate change and what are their implications.

Complexity in Climate Change

As much as common sense attempts to draw a distinction between society and nature, these two systems are essentially inseparable. It is then no surprise that the behaviour of one will go and affect that of the other. Ever since the begging, economic activities have relied on the exploitation of natural resources to produce goods and services. This has imposed a strain on the natural environment which is now starting to reverberate across society. Greenhouse gas emissions together with the expansion of human activities have activated a series of strong feedback loops which contribute to the non-linearity of human impacts on the earth system. These feedbacks are at the core of the complex behaviour of climate change. Each interaction in this cluster of systems feeds off each other leading to a behaviour characterised by both determinism and randomness. This is important to bear in mind especially when assessing risks and their respective policies.

The stochastic character of climate change means that this system can generate unlikely behaviours (outliers) with a huge impact on the overall structure of the system. We tend to think of the world from a Gaussian (normal distribution) perspective where the majority of variables, in terms of the average, dictate the behaviour of the system. Yet studying complex systems we observe this is not always the case. In fact, complex systems, including climate change, usually follow power law distributions (Pareto distributions) where a few variables are responsible for large changes in the system.

Fig 2: Pareto (Power-law) vs Gaussian (Normal) distribution

This can be clearly seen in the skewed values related to the causes of climate change, mainly how the world richest 10% are responsible for 52% of carbon emissions, while the poorest 50% contribute a mere 7% of the total. A similar pattern can also be seen when assessing its consequences. For example, if we were to plot the probability of natural hazard in terms of their relative impact, the graph would exhibit a fat tail distribution (i.e., the least probable hazards will account for most of the impact). This is because a hazard with a low probability, such as a hurricane, earthquake or tsunami, in the moment of its occurrence can compound, aggregate or cascade with other risks making the extent of its impact largely unpredictable. The same applies to the risks associated with temperature increases relative to pre-industrial times. Although the average temperature of the Earth increases by 1.5°C, there may be some areas of the planet where the warming effect is much greater because of the acting of reinforcing feedbacks in that region. This makes the distribution and extent of risks disproportionate to the increase in average temperatures. Such outliers carry an important weight in the development of climate change because they characterise the many thresholds and tipping points inherent to the system. Its dramatic sensitivity to relatively small changes makes the system capable of “black swan” behaviours which carry serious practical implications. This is not to be underestimated by policy makers during the framing of possible solutions.

Moving away from the average

Outliers are usually ignored in favour of the average, yet complexity science tells us that it is the former which in fact has most of the impact. The world’s sensitivity to unlikely behaviours may appear as a daunting conclusion: dooming science and politics with unbounded uncertainty. But there is an upside. The stubbornness of the climate change system (which includes both its causes and consequences) to follow Pareto distributions means that systemic change is much easier and faster to achieve. Policies need to move away from a Gaussian framework if we want to achieve any substantial change. Shifting all elements in the system may be extremely laborious and time consuming yet through targeted operations in the tail we can generate positive changes with a cascading effect. Complexity science teaches us to have faith in the feedback and provides the tools necessary to identify the key variables from which this can initiate.

Reclaiming space for resistance: towards a feminist politics of the commons

Figure 1. Zapatista women. Retrieved from https://feedbacklabs.org/blog/2021/10/18/zapatista-womens-journey-in-radical-listening/ on 18 April, 2022.

[Disclaimer: this blogpost repeatedly refers to ‘women’ in its argument for a feminist politics of the commons. Acknowledging individualities, this includes all persons who identify as women. It also recognises the many and multidimensional inequalities concerning the access to the commons, but focuses specifically on women and land proprietorship for the sake of scope limitations.]

The commons, you’ve probably all heard of them, at least once. It may remind some of you of Elinor Ostrom’s principles for sustainable governance of common pool resources, for example. Personally, I’m very fond of Silvia Federici’s definition of the commons as entities which are constructed through a community’s productive and reproductive work (2009). Commons, Federici argues, do not exist a priori. Instead, they are constructed, identified, labeled, appropriated and sometimes enclosed depending on the community’s needs and demands. Vandana Shiva, another prominent marxist ecofeminist, has a similar approach to commons, arguing that the commons cannot be reduced to mere resources (Sato, 2019). Reading this theory reminded me of the first time I, and I suspect many of us, learned about the commons. For me, this happened in the context of global environmental governance, and the examples I was given were the ocean, the atmosphere, and outer space; mostly, you guessed it, resources. And indeed, ‘commons’ include land, water, digital commons such as the internet, and air. But languages, art and cultural symbols are also commons, and so is access to land ownership. In fact, anything which exists within a community, and provides meaning and/or utility, can be considered a common. As such, the commons is a fundamentally anthropocentric term. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s certainly worth noting.

Many of you might be familiar with Hardin’s (1968) ‘Tragedy of the Commons’: the process in which a common pool resource is exploited or appropriated by individual actors to the extent where the common pool resource is exploited. However, in the original ‘tragedy of the commons’, the proposed competition between individuals assumes equal access to, agency over and demand for these resources, when the opposite seems to be the case. Throughout history, women (as well as queer, BIPOC and less-abled persons) have relied significantly more than men on access to the commons, because a lack of private ownership rights has made them more dependent on public entities. In Colombia, for instance, land ownership – an indicator of control over the commons – is highly skewed despite national efforts towards land ownership equity; only 26% of all landholdings are by women, an inequality which is further exacerbated by unequal access to digital technology, education and institutional and legal standing (Guereña, 2017). And this is only one example of a global issue concerning property rights and land ownership; the right to land is significantly limited in over half of all countries. All this, while women encompass key positions in subsistence agriculture throughout the world. Indeed, in her book, Federici (2019) highlights the (re)productive role of women concerning the commons, rather than an exploitative. Granted, it is not all black and white, but in projects which regenerate natural ‘resources’ like biodiversity or the de-privatisation of water, women have often taken key positions, from the Philippines to Argentina and from Amsterdam to Detroit (Federici, 2019; Shiva, 2016; Sue-Stuart Smith, 2020; White, 2015). Maybe, the real tragedy in the resource crisis and ecological breakdown is the skewed distribution of access to and control over the commons.

Figure 2. Infographic showing the imbalance between the labor that women contribute to agriculture and the recognition they receive for it (NB: the top is about Sub Saharan Africa, while the bottom one is at a global scale). Source: Farming First & FAO, 2012. Retrieved from https://farmingfirst.org/women_infographic/ on 19 April 2022.

In sum, the access to and the competition over the global commons’ resources is distributed very disproportionately, especially if we take into account the contribution that women make to the production and reproduction of the commons (see figure above). Federici (2009) explains the concentration and privatisation of the commons as characteristic of “the new enclosures”, based on Marx’ and Engels’ theory of the “old enclosures”. However, in contrast to autonomist Marxist theory, which frames the breaking of local boundaries as an instrument towards the global unification of the proletariat class, and therefore as a transitory stage from a capitalist to a communist society, Federici describes the new enclosures as conducive to the growth of the transnational capitalist class. It is the result of the delineation and exclusivity of the commons to the extent that control and access to its resources become a currency, and land can be seized as payment for debt, she argues. In the new enclosures, boundaries are a means towards the accumulation of land and resources, driven by the commodification of the earth’s resources and international and inter-community relations of dependency.

But if the patriarchalisation of the commons is so deep-rooted and widespread, what might resistance look like? Fortunately, it is not all doom and gloom. The Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico, or the EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional) was one of the first popular indigenous movements to rise up against capitalism, neoliberalism, globalisation, and imperialism, and almost entirely led by women. Chiapas is one of the most resource-rich states in Mexico, and the Latin American commodity boom, in combination with global capitalism and increasing US-influence, posed an enormous threat to already-poor Mexican peasants and indigenous peoples. Interestingly, the Zapatista movement emphasised the land’s importance for self-organisation, cultural memory, and community-building, rather than the accumulation of resource access. They asserted and established their own local-based narrative, norms and values and created rules and institutions based on them, together compiling an alternative to the dominant narrative of extractivism, which in the time of the Zapatista uprising became the main proposed trajectory of development in Latin America (Gudynas, 2019). Now, the Zapatistas have never identified themselves as “environmentalists”. Instead, however, they emphasise that the forests are and ought to be exclusively “for their stewards”. In other words, only the ones who work for the forest’s regeneration can make use of it. This notion is reflected in the Zapatista Revolutionary Agrarian Law, urging for an end to the “plunder of our natural wealth” and the preservation of forest areas (Faye, 2021; Ross, 2007). In Zapatista territory, biocultural diversity is imperative and its preservation is central to decision-making. This is also reflected in in their food production patterns; overall, the Zapatista organisation has had a positive influence on agrobiodiversity conservation and food sovereignty in Chiapas (Hernández et al., 2020). Moreover, their resistance against development and growth narratives has created space for regenerative policies over extractivist ones.

However, there is no need to travel all the way to Mexico to find projects which combine the depatriarchalisation of the commons with self-sustenance and agrobiodiversity. More close to home, we find the Bloei & Groei project, located in de Bijlmer, Amsterdam Zuidoost. The project sprouts from the Venserpolder, a building block which was long tormented by high rates of crime and violence. In an effort to make their neighbourhood safer, a group of women created a community garden in the center of the buildings, and indeed, after a couple of years, the Venserpolder was transformed from a meeting point for dealers into a space for community harvests and dinners. (For the Dutchies who are interested, this short documentary very beautifully tells the story of Bloei & Groei.) Bloei & Groei’s mission goes beyond female empowerment; they give workshops on sustainability and self-sustenance, and have a mission to transform as many neglected and non-utilised patches of urban land into urban gardens. Granted, although the Bloei & Groei provides an abundance of food for the gardeners and their micro-communities, it is certainly not enough to sustain the whole community, and will not solve key issues of agricultural mass production, industrialisation and globalisation. However, the sustainability of these approaches lie in the values which guide them, in which care for and regeneration of resources exist a priori to their appropriation.

What connects these projects is the appreciation and appropriation as land towards the creation of community, rather than growth. As such, they break with the dominant paradigm of capitalist growth, and integrate the use of nature with its regeneration. There is an acknowledgement that commons are produced and reproduced, and that if we want to use them, we should acknowledge our responsibility for their reproduction. Through this blogpost, I hoped to have introduced a new view on the governance of commons to some of you, and maybe even inspired you to engage in such organizations yourselves. I look forward to reading your thoughts.

References

Faye, N. H. S. (2021). A Degrowth Approach to Deforestation: The Zapatista Alternative [Leiden University]. https://hdl.handle.net/1887/3214011

Fournier, V. (2013). Commoning: On the social organisation of the commons. Management, 16(4), 433–453. Retrieved from https://www.cairn.info/revue-management-2013-4-page-433.htm

Gudynas, E. (2019). Modes of Development and the Appropriation of Nature. In Cupples, J., Palomino-Schalscha, M., Prieto, M. (Eds.): The Routledge Handbook of Latin American Development. (p. 389 – 399).

Hernández, C., Perales, H., & Jaffee, D. (2020). “Without Food there is No Resistance”: The impact of the Zapatista conflict on agrobiodiversity and seed sovereignty in Chiapas, Mexico. Geoforum. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.08.016

Sato, C., & Alarcón, J. M. S. (2019). Toward a postcapitalist feminist political ecology’ approach to the commons and commoning. International Journal of the Commons, 13(1), 36–61. https://doi.org/10.18352/ijc.933

Shiva, V. (2016). Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development. North Atlantic Books.

Stuart-Smith, S. (2020). The Well Gardened Mind: Rediscovering Nature in the Modern World. HarperCollins Publishers Limited.

White, M. M. (2011). Sisters of the Soil: Urban Gardening as Resistance in Detroit. Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts, 5(1), 13–28. https://doi.org/10.2979/racethmulglocon.5.1.13

“1.5 to stay alive”

How 0.5°C can mean the difference between life and death

You have likely heard of the 1.5°C limit for global warming. Perhaps you are even familiar with the saying: “1.5 to stay alive.” But do you know where this saying came from or why such a seemingly small and arbitrary number was chosen to be our goal not to surpass? And what happens if we do surpass 1.5°C of warming? And how likely is that to happen? In order to answer these questions, one must examine a combination of scientific studies, data sets, public policy agreements, and historical happenings. This blogpost will do just that. The story of the introduction of the 1.5°C limit is a tale of triumph for the underdogs, while the story of what will happen if we don’t limit warming to 1.5°C (and we probably won’t) fits more into the apocalyptic genre.

Introduction to the 1.5°C limit

The 1.5°C limit for global warming is part of the Paris agreement and was established at the United Nations COP21 (21st Conference of the Parties) in Paris in December 2015. The Paris agreement is a legally binding international treaty that instructs nations to “limit global warming to well below 2, preferably to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to pre-industrial levels.” These so-called “pre-industrial levels” are based on temperatures recorded between 1850 and 1900. As part of the agreement, nations must begin to implement changes in their infrastructure that significantly reduce their carbon emissions. In addition to initiating infrastructure changes, these nations are encouraged to create long-term plans which describe how they will keep warming below 1.5°C. In addition to this, wealthier countries are encouraged to provide financial and technological support for climate mitigation to countries that require it.

Before the Paris agreement, the only official goal for limiting global warming was placed at 2°C. However, in the years leading up to the Paris agreement, public support for a 1.5°C limit had been rising, with the smallest, most vulnerable countries on the front lines of this campaign.

This is a timeline from the IPCC report showing the history of how the 1.5 degree limit came to be.

How the 1.5°C limit came to be

“How can you ask my country to go extinct” were the words that echoed through the room during the Copenhagen Accord of 2009. Mohamed Nasheed, the president of the Maldives, posed this question in response to resistance to commit to a 1.5°C warming limit. Although the Maldives is a small nation whom one would not typically imagine being dominant on the UN stage, they, along with other small island nations, managed to steal the stage in Copenhagen and gather crucial support that led to the 1.5°C limit.

Low lying islands, especially those with limited financial resources, will be the first to suffer the severe consequences of climate change. Thus, it is in the interest of these nations to encourage larger, high emitting nations to limit their emissions and prevent further climate change. In 1990, a group of island nations from all different parts of the world formed the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) in order to advocate for the common interests of small island states regarding climate change. The AOSIS initiated studies on the difference between 1.5 and 2 degrees of warming which led to the conclusion that the difference between this seemingly insignificant half a degree could be the difference between entire islands, such as Tuvalu, being inhabitable or not.

Once knowing how crucial it would be to limit warming to 1.5°C, different campaigns were launched to create support for making this an official limit. One of these campaigns, started in St. Lucia, coined the slogan “1.5°C to stay alive” which has become the catchphrase of this movement. AOSIS, along with individual island nations gradually gained the support of other nations which eventually led to the successful implementation of their requested 1.5°C limit as a part of the Paris Agreement.

What happens if we go beyond 1.5°C?

After understanding what the 1.5 degree limit is and how it came to be, you may find yourself wondering what would actually happen if the world warmed more than 1.5 degrees. After all, 1.5 sounds like a reasonably small number, but in terms of climate change it has major implications. To put this number into context, it helps to know that the Earth is already 1.2°C warmer overall than it was in preindustrial times. But, just because the average warming across the globe is only 1.2°C, does not mean that that level of warming is ubiquitous across the globe. Some regions have already reached 1.5°C of warming and that means that if the global average went that high, some places would be even warmer. In fact, 20-40% of people already live in regions that have, for at least one season, exhibited warming of 1.5°C above pre industrial levels.

With the level of warming we have now, we already see widespread effects of climate change. Some islands have already disappeared, disastrous wildfires and are ever more prevalent, and extended droughts and heavy rainfall and flooding are both common occurrences. Thus, if we already see this at a global warming level of 1.2 degrees, it will only get worse at 1.5, and even more catastrophic at 2.

In 2018, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) produced a special report that highlights some of the differences between 1.5 and 2°C warming. Some of the most severe examples of this include the projection that with 1.5°C warming, the arctic would be iceless every 100 years while with 2°C warming, this would happen every 10 years. Other effects include the bleaching of nearly all coral reefs after 2°C warming as well as more severe heat waves and higher sea levels. The report also describes economic and social challenges of these changes. For example, destruction of coral reefs could lead to declines in tourism in certain areas and therefore negatively impact regional economies. Thus, according to climate research, there is a vast difference between 1.5 and 2 degrees that we will be able to feel the effects of.

This infographic about the sustainable development goal regarding climate action highlights how difficult it will be for us to achieve the 1.5 degree limit if we continue emitting at our current rates.

Are we on track to go beyond 1.5°C?

The answer is yes. We do not know for certain how warm the Earth will be in the future because we do not know how much we will reduce our emissions. While there are some efforts currently being made to reduce emissions, they are nowhere near close enough to reduce global warming to 1.5°C. Which means the Earth will warm much more than that. So, we now come back to the beginning of our story in which a number of small island nations banded together and convinced the world that limiting warming was something worth fighting for. While this was an important triumph, it seems like we are not willing enough to actually follow the guidelines of the Paris agreement which many tried so hard to push for. So in the end, the very countries that fought for this treaty will likely be uninhabitable in due time.

Are you curious about the sources I used for this blogpost? Then click here to find links to all the sources I used.

One Must Imagine Greta Happy: What Absurdism Can Teach Us About Climate Doomism

You wake up in the morning and you grab your phone. You open your social media app of choice, and you start scrolling. After scrolling past the daily bad news about the war, inflation, Covid-19 etc. you end up reading some news about climate change. You read stories which sound very familiar, x number of years left before a climate catastrophe, governments missing climate targets , greenhouse gas emissions increasing and so on.

You have been reading such news for a few years now, and every time it seems to be getting worse, or at least it is not getting any better, and you start thinking that we might never get through this climate change mess we got ourselves into. You might even start thinking that it is all pointless, that there is no need to put so much of your time, effort, and energy into something if we are all doomed anyways. You would be far from the first to experience this emotion, it has been well documented and it has many names climate despair, eco nihilism , climate doomism, but no matter what you call it is real and it is affecting many people. What makes this especially dangerous is that it affects people who otherwise would be fighting against climate change, but instead they choose to not do anything. As you could imagine if people who are likely to advocate for change give up, it makes the status quo even more powerful.

So, you might ask yourself what can be done against this, and the answer is a lot. One could try to convince people that it is not too late through scientific evidence, or one could try and take a more philosophical approach. Many have talked about the scientific reason why it is not too late, and many continue to do so, and since those who feel this sense of despair do believe in climate change, it is very likely that they will listen to scientific evidence. But sometimes scientific evidence does not address the emotional and philosophical reaction people have, and therefore this blog post will look at the philosophical aspect of things.

Since the idea of climate doomism is relatively new, not that many people have taken the opportunity to look at it through a more philosophical lens, but that does not mean that we can’t take ideas from other aspects of philosophy and try to apply them to this specific topic. In this blog post I will do exactly that, I will look at what absurdism can teach us about dealing with climate doomism.

While today we will be discussing whether it makes sense to continue the climate fight, absurdism looked at whether it makes sense to continue living and if life itself has any meaning. Absurdism itself dates back to the post World War 2 period in Europe, and its most important work is The Myth of Sisyphus by the French author and philosopher Albert Camus. The need to discuss the meaning (or lack thereof) of human life came after such a major and traumatic global event, and therefore it makes sense to have a similar discussion about the fight against climate change while we are experiencing the consequences of another major event.

If we accept the premise of climate doomists that climate change will mean the end of the world, that it will mark the doom of humanity, and that this destiny is set in stone, we can easily see how it relates to Camus’s absurd. Camus says that we go about our day to day trying to improve ourselves to try and find some meaning, but at the end it falls on the universe’s deaf ear. Similarly, climate doomist believe that all the effort to fight against climate change is also useless, and that it will also fall onto the deaf ears of the universe (or in this case planet) since the consequences are set in stone and we are already too late to do anything.

The main idea Camus brings forward to deal with the absurd, and the idea I want to reshape slightly to fit the climate context, is that one should accept and even embrace the absurd. He illustrates this through the old myth of Sisyphus, who was punished by the Greek Gods to push a boulder up a mountain forever, only to see if roll down at the end of the day. Camus says that “one must imagine Sisyphus happy” and that the struggle itself is what matters at the end of the day and what gives Sisyphus happiness and meaning.

This brings us all the way back to the title of this blog post. As you might have noticed, this blog has nothing to do with Greta Thunberg. In the same way that The Myth of Sisyphus is not about Sisyphus but rather humanity, this blog post is not about her, but rather all people who care about climate change and spend their time fighting against it.

The fight against climate change is not a simple one, it takes many forms, and it involves many different aspects. In some cases, we might be able to push the boulder all the way up the mountain and enjoy some success. In other cases we might believe that we have pushed the boulder all the way up the mountain, only to see it roll down again. Even when we finally deal with one boulder, one aspect of climate change, there are many more boulders that need to be pushed up the mountain, and there will always be more.

What absurdism teaches us is that we should not care if we push the boulder all the way up, we should not care if it rolls back down, what matters is that we keep pushing it. Camus argued that Sisyphus’s happiness comes not from denying the reality that he will push the boulder forever, but rather from accepting the fact and embracing the struggle itself as your source of happiness. In the same way, people fighting against climate change should not deny the fact that this fight can and will go on forever, people should not despair because of it, but should rather embrace it and accept the struggle itself as their source of meaning and happiness.

From changing the human body to mitigating climate change

Despite the increasingly urgent need to change the way we live, consume and behave, we as humanity do not seem to make nearly enough progress towards halting climate change. Thus far, attempts to promote behavioral change with regards to food consumption, energy use and mobility have had limited effects. Likewise, effective market regulation strategies are limited, as international agreements are difficult to accomplish. Meanwhile, the clock ticks on and ‘last resort solutions’, such as geo-engineering, are considered more seriously as global temperatures continue to rise.

A relatively unexplored field that could be considered as a ‘last resort solution’ is human engineering. The concept of human engineering was introduced in 2012 by scientists Matthew Liao from New York University and Anders Sandberg and Rebecca Roache from the University of Oxford. They propose that biomedical interventions in the human body could be used to mitigate climate change, for example by reducing a person’s ecological footprint and influencing our ability to take collective action.

Before introducing some examples of human engineering and explaining how human engineering could contribute to climate mitigation, I need to emphasize that I do not try to argue in favor of actual implementation of the biomedical interventions mentioned. Rather, I want to explore how our increasing knowledge about the human body can be considered when thinking about mitigating climate change to allow more discussion around this topic.

An example of an environmental problem that could be influenced by human engineering is meat consumption. Animal-based products produce more than twice as much greenhouse gas emissions compared to plant-based foods, beef being the most polluting type of meat (see figure 1 and 2). Reducing meat consumption could reduce land use for agriculture by 75%, thereby reducing greenhouse gas emissions, while limiting further deforestation events and biodiversity loss. There might be a substantial group of people who are aware of this who would like to reduce their meat consumption, but still do not do so. The irresistible taste of meat, difficulties in breaking a pattern of habit or other reasons might be in their way.

**Figure 1.** Emissions from animal-based food vs plant-based food in different continents

**Figure 2.** Greenhouse gas emission for different types of animal-based products

To help this group reduce their meat consumption, biomedical interventions could help by making eating meat less pleasant. By human engineering, the immune system could be primed to react to certain proteins in meat. Therefore, consuming meat results in an unpleasant physical reaction, which creates an aversion against eating eco-unfriendly food. There are examples of natural occurring meat intolerance, for example as a result of a tick bite. After a tick bite, a sugar molecule similar to sugar in red meat enters the bloodstream, causing the immune system to produce antibodies against this molecule. Consequently, the next time this person eats a steak, the immune system responds and causes an allergic reaction. Thus, strategies to induce mild allergic reactions against certain types of meat could be developed for people who want to eat less meat. Even though as a voluntary method this approach might not be effective (and as a forced approach comes with major ethical issues for obvious reasons), this example shows how the connection between our bodies and ecological footprints could be exploited to think about climate solutions.

Other, even more extreme suggestions made by Liao, Sandberg and Roache, include embryonic selection to select for short people, since height correlates with ecological footprint (as taller people consume more, use more fuel for transportation and use more material for clothing). They also propose cognitive enhancement by drugs such as Ritalin to decrease birth rates, because there is a negative correlation between cognitive ability and pregnancy at a young age. These are just arbitrary examples of how changes in human biology could theoretically contribute to a more sustainable world. Of course, many other interventions in human anatomy and physiology could be thought of.

Perhaps, a more powerful approach to combat climate change is to move beyond the individual level and orchestrate groups and communities to adopt a more environmentally friendly lifestyle. However, different worldviews, values and interests give rise to what is called the ‘collective action problem’, which makes it difficult to cooperate efficiently to achieve a collective goal, such as climate change mitigation. Philosophists Julian Savulescu and Ingmar Persson argue that we struggle with problems that act over large spatial and temporal scales, because human psychological abilities have not evolved as rapidly as our changing environment required. Climate change typically is a problem that will impact future generations more than it impacts us now and is difficult to observe locally. Our limited moral capacity prevents us from finding motivation to adopt drastic behavioral changes and give up (part of) our current lifestyle. To deal with this psychological obstacle, Savulescu and Persson have proposed the concept of moral bioenhancement in their book ‘Unfit for the future: The urgent need for moral enhancement’. By enhancing the moral decision making of humanity we would be better able to consider the needs of people far away in time or space when making decisions that impact the climate.

How would ‘enhancing morality’ work in practice? Our increasing knowledge about regulation of moral decision making in the brain allows us to interfere with these biological processes. Therefore, certain qualities such as altruism and empathy, could be enhanced using human bioengineering to improve our moral decision making. The hormone oxytocin, for example, is known to enhance trust, conformism and the capacity to interpret social cues. Increasing the levels of this hormone could improve collaboration between people. In addition, noradrenaline reuptake inhibitors can affect moral decision making and could result in increased willingness to cooperate and increased desire to connect to other people. Thus, if we would ‘enhance morality’ on a larger scale, this could potentially benefit climate mitigation by enabling more effective collective action.

Reading about these possible interventions in the human body might evoke feelings of discomfort or even aversion. Clearly, many different reasons can be thought of (and have been put forward by others) to argue why human engineering should not be implemented: fundamental ethical objections to interfering with human nature, practical issues with large scale implementation and uncertainty about effectiveness and safety, being just a few examples. I want to point out, however, that geo-engineering is part of the conversation, despite the consensus that modifying the climate at a global scale will pose major risks impacting all living beings on earth. Considering that human engineering carries lesser risks, as interventions would be based on administration of drugs that are already used safely in different contexts and can be tailored to individuals, I want to suggest human engineering should be discussed alongside ‘last resort solutions’ such as geoengineering. Even though biomedical interventions to combat climate change might seem unthinkable now, future generations might embrace the prospect of physical adaptation to climate change. From their perspective, I can imagine adopting some characteristics of the desert slender salamander could be useful when the next ‘hottest heat wave ever’ arrives…

Putting your money where your mouth is – the story of two fossil fuel companies trying to rebrand

Starting from 2001, the British fossil fuel company BP tried to rebrand itself from British Petroleum to Beyond Petroleum. More recently, the Danish Oil and Natural Gas company (DONG) renamed itself Ørsted, after one of the discovers of electromagnetism – the process at the basis of all electricity generation. These name changes were supposed to come paired with a new vision for the companies, one that moved away from fossil fuel and towards renewable energy. Was this all just a PR campaign, a form of greenwashing, or did BP and Ørsted actually change?

There is no denying that the stakes have increased for the fossil fuel industry to shift away from oil and gas. Even if the pace is not as high as we would like, the world is moving to renewable energy. Many are divesting away from fossil fuels in fear of stranded assets. To stay in business, they will eventually have to change. However, this pressure is not being felt. With a strong lobbying presence and billions in subsidies the fossil fuel industry is very comfortable in the status quo, and its members are not exactly on pace to become CO₂neutral by 2050. Despite having some of the highest profit margins of any industry, little has been spent on innovation in alternative energy sources. Of course, there are outliers, and both BP and DONG made impressive initial pledges.

A comparison

Let’s start with BP. Allocating a budget upwards of €100 million along with their name change, they started a rigorous campaign to change their public image. In the first few years the company certainly moved into the right direction, becoming one of the greenest oil company in only five years. Despite a huge oil spill in 2006 in Alaska, the public’s opinion of the company was improving. However, their share of renewables never really increased – ten years later it made up only 2% of their revenue stream. Although their budget might have sounded rather large, they also continued to spend €8 billion each year to search for further oil fields to exploit. Once the 2008 financial crisis hit, BP actually sold of most of their assets in wind and solar energy, marking the end of their ‘Beyond Petroleum’ endeavour. The last slither of hope for a better image was destroyed in another oil spill in 2010, this time one of the largest in history.

This all should not have been too surprising: at the time of rebranding, they spent more on changing their names than they did on renewable projects in the past year (€7 million). Renewables never became the priority for BP, it was all about a better image. Yet, DONG has been a different story, which traces back long before their name change. Around 2006 the company first started changing. At that point, 90% of their revenue consisted of fossil fuel. Instead of ‘exploring’ alternative energy sources, they very quickly phased out any new projects in oil or gas. Over the past decade and a half, they transformed their entire business and now rely on renewables for 90% of their core business – a complete 180° from 2006. They are now on pace to become carbon neutral by 2025. Only after all this they changed their name, a very different strategy from BP.

Figure 2: DONG’s/Ørsted’s changing revenue stream: phasing out oil and gas.

What could have been

Of course BP and DONG were in very different positions. Just in terms of size BP had a revenue of €163 billion in 2001, versus that of €4.8 billion of DONG in 2006. Changing a company of that size is an enormous effort. But from the numbers it is clear that BP did not try very hard. Ørsted, while being a much smaller company, was able to become the world’s leading off-shore wind supplier, controlling 30% of the market share. Imagine what BP could have done with the resources at its disposal.

All this innovation has also helped Ørsted grow significantly, more than doubling the size of the company. In that timespan BP’s business shrunk significantly. Through a combination of selling off its fossil fuel assets and being one of the first to embrace off-shore wind (long before it became cheaper than oil in 2017), they have become a prime example of how an oil company can contribute to the energy transition instead of working against it.

Paving the way?

The question is not: “Can other oil companies follow in DONG’s footsteps?” but rather “will they?” Oil giants Shell and ExxonMobil have pledged to bring their emissions down to net-zero by 2050, but that only applies to their internal operations, meaning that they do not feel responsible for the emissions of products they sell even though those make up over 80% of total emissions. As long as fossil fuels remain the focus of their business, such a promise holds little value. One thing that changed is that the public has caught on. Simply rebranding itself is not an option anymore, as was recently shown in the Netherlands when Shell was banned from calling itself a “driver of the energy transition” without substantial proof. Real change has to precede a good image, as it did with Ørsted.

Figure 3: BP’s continuous investment in oil and gas.

BP seems to have learned this at last. It now has the most intense decarbonisation strategies of the three giants: also including upstream emissions in its pledge for net neutrality, and finally slashing its oil exploration budget. Since 2020 it has started a new round of aggressive campaigning to change its public image, also profiting of new pledges by the British government to become a leader in climate change mitigation. However, it will not undergo the rapid change we saw with Ørsted, and it is unlikely any of the other large oil companies will either. In the end they are purely profit driven, and in the current political climate there is still profit to be made as a fossil fuel company. Only one group has been able to stand up against them: ordinary citizens. But these companies are to big to fail, and unless governments start holding them accountablentil changes, Ørsted will remain an example of what could have been.

Throw the Baby Out with the (Climate) Bath Water?

I will begin this blog post by making two disclaimers. First, this article, published in 2011, sheds light on topics that today may seem obvious to the point of redundancy: we all know that climate change is bad and that it is creating (and will continue to create) negative impacts on future generations. Second, I write this blog post from a place of privilege, where I and those who will read and grade this blog post live in the conditions and circumstances where having children is not required as a means of supporting livelihood (Rupnarain, 2020). Nevertheless, this post does not intend to take away from the urgency of acknowledging the problem that children’s wellbeing is becoming severely compromised in the face of climate change.

I chose to write this blog post inspired by this often heard myth list. From this list I chose the article by Lyndall Strazdins Climate inaction risks children’s well-being. The title of the article in and of itself is the farthest possible from being a myth. In fact, countless children around the world are suffering from inadequate fulfillment of basic human rights, from access to school to clean water (United Nations Economic and Social Council, 2015). This is true in terms of lack of adequate WASH services in Zambia as much as it is true in terms of energy poverty in the Netherlands (End Water Poverty & Vision Africa Regional Network, 2015; Feenstra et al., 2021).

The English dictionary defines the word myth (or “mythus” from Latin and “mathus” from Greek) as “a widely held but false belief or idea”. It seems that when talking about climate change, so much uncertainty and confusion exists in the public’s mind despite ample and comprehensive scientific consensus about the issue at hand. Therefore, in a way, thinking about the fact that our children and grandchildren may have worse immune systems and a fluctuating economy could sound like a myth while we live in a capitalistic, technology-driven society. However, climate change is here, and it is probably here to stay.

The purpose of this blog post is to provide an updated take on the topic of Strazdins’s (2011) article that was published more than a decade ago and show that although it highlights climate-related issues that are evermore worrisome, it might not be as threatening to the modern reader. I would like to not only employ a critical lens on the article, but to also highlight a relevant issue that the article does not mention: in the face of climate change, inflation, and a (somewhat) closing gender-gap in the workforce, our generation might just not have as many children.

They say it takes a village to raise a child

Strazdins (2011) correctly outlines the associated risks that children will have to bear as a result of living in a climate that has changed for the worse. Children face higher chances of contracting diseases such as malaria and asthma due to deteriorated water and air quality, respectively. It is evident that communities in the Global South have, on average, more children per family and relatively high birth rates. For the most part, children do not contribute to the economy, and their lifestyle does not directly harm the environment simply because they depend on their parents or guardians. Thus, this is a prime example of a negative externality, a type of market failure in which a third party has to bear the costs (or consequences) of a negative impact. The economic activities harming the environment do not reflect the cost on the next generation(s). In this case, children have to bear the negative externalities caused by the economy and the current political powers to their environment. We tend to impose discount rates that are too high for our children to mitigate later on as we move closer and closer towards a tipping point. Whether it is selfishness or climate denialism, it is simply foolish to ignore the long-term impact that our current actions will have on our children’s lives (Diethelm & McKee, 2008). Therefore, Strazdins correctly emphasizes that as much as children’s interest and needs cannot be ignored, they cannot operate without the adult, professional guidance and cooperation.

Children are costly. The infrastructure, facilities, love, and care that it takes to bring a child into the world and prepare them for their adulthood truly takes a toll on parents as much as on governments. But, we must stop kicking the can farther down the road while reaping the benefits of low-hanging fruit and start considering children as an investment. By investing high, short-term costs into environmental action and prevention methods, we will be able to boost innovation, technology, and policymaking to a point where children can live sustainably while acquiring the knowledge and ethical codes required to take care of this planet and all those who inhabit it. I believe it is possible, but we must act with an open mind and see children as an asset, not a burden to society.

So why are more people choosing to go childless? In America and other Western nations, it is because the economy has becoming less and less desirable to participate in and living in society is harder under great political and economic uncertainty.

When people struggle to find stable jobs and cozy apartments, having a child is the last of their priorities. So if people are having less children, should we stop caring?

The kids turned out fine

A point that is made in the 11-year-old article yet remains just as relevant is the notion that children are not involved enough in crucial decision making processes concerning environmental policy and regulation. Intuitively, it may seem that children are not knowledgeable enough or have the ability to think critically about climate-related aspects that still prove difficult to grasp for our adult, educated leaders. We see this reflected in unfortunate trends of climate denialism and climate delay (Lamb et al., 2020). But after reading Strazdins’s (2011) work, and ample reports by UNICEF and other NGOs that have followed since, it is almost impossible to reject the significant impacts that climate change will have on the young and future generations. It has already begun. As a result, it is no wonder we see in the media mass movements such as Fridays for Future started by Gretta Thunberg and being carried out by dozens of ambitious (and frustrated) children around the world.

Fridays for Future (or “skolstrejk för klimatet” in its Swedish origin) demonstrates a time in society in which those who were previously considered neglected and voiceless due to their lack of economic and political contribution are now an undeniable force pushing for climate action and a chance of achieving ecological security. It is inspiring yet disappointing to see children take up behaviors and responsibilities expected from our world leaders. There is an ironic oxymoron of children skipping school for the sake of protesting against climate change. School should be a framework to provide them with the tools to combat global issues. It almost projects a sense of privilege, as children in the Global North can afford to skip school while many children in the Global South are deprived of their right to access education, partly due to climate change. In either case, children are marginalized from the climate debate, where they should be considered vital stakeholders.

There is a long way to go in ensuring equitable and ethical climate action in order to protect our planet and those who will continue to inhabit it after we are gone. The growing trends in childless families in the Global North due to climate anxiety and job security in a growingly scarce world, and the stagnating birth rates in the Global South as the result of economic growth paint an untraditional picture.

In a world where we continue to overshoot and underestimate, is having less children an act against our current climate crisis and a measure of mitigation, or are we slowly giving up on a future once promised, but no longer deemed realistic?

References

Diethelm, P., & McKee, M. (2008). Denialism: what is it and how should scientists respond? The

European Journal of Public Health, 19(1), 2–4. https://doi.org/10.1093/eurpub/ckn139

End Water Poverty, & Vision Africa Regional Network. (2015). The Republic of Zambia: Realising the human right to water and sanitation. In WASH Watch (pp. 1–12). https://www.endwaterpoverty.org/sites/default/files/oldfiles/Zambia%20country%20briefing%202015%20FOR%20DOWNLOAD.pdf

Feenstra, M., Middlemiss, L., Hesselman, M., Straver, K., & Tirado Herrero, S. (2021).

Humanising the Energy Transition: Towards a National Policy on Energy Poverty in the

Netherlands. Frontiers in Sustainable Cities, 3. https://doi.org/10.3389/frsc.2021.645624

Lamb, W. F., Mattioli, G., Levi, S., Roberts, J. T., Capstick, S., Creutzig, F., Minx, J. C.,

Müller-Hansen, F., Culhane, T., & Steinberger, J. K. (2020). Discourses of climate delay.

Global Sustainability, 3. https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2020.13

‌Lyndall Strazdins. (2011, July 5). Climate inaction risks children’s well-being. The Age; The

Age.

https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/climate-inaction-risks-childrens-well-being-2

0110705-1h0mj.html

Rupnarain, K. (2020). Why do the poor have large families? Worldvision.ca; Organization.

https://www.worldvision.ca/stories/why-do-the-poor-have-large-families

United Nations Economic and Social Council. (2015). Economic and Social Council. In UNICEF (pp. 1–18). United Nations Children’s Fund. https://www.unicef.org/zambia/media/961/file/Zambia-CPD-2016-2020.pdf

Should the poop stay in the loop?

Poop is usually a taboo topic in human societies. It is smelly, dirty, disgusting, and should only be talked about in the context of a joke or with a doctor. Mentioning it is usually avoided by sayings such as “going number two” or “dropping the kids off at the pool”, covering up the simple truth that everyone poops, often more than once a day. But what most people don’t realize, is that human excreta, similarly to cow manure (commonly used as fertilizer), is full of valuable nutrients such as Nitrogen and Phosphorous (see table below).

What happens to these resources after they have been flushed down a toilet? Could they not be recovered and used as fertilizers? Would this solve agricultural soil degradation and eutrophication? These are questions that struck me when watching the Netflix documentary “Kiss The Ground”. When actress Patricia Arquette said the beautifully simple but powerful phrase “the poop has to stay in the loop” many people probably thought she was crazy. However, it is also what most people, including me, remember after watching Kiss The Ground. So let’s talk about it, should we be keeping or poop in the loop?

Why should we go through the trouble?

Closing the poop loop is an important step in closing the nutrient cycle that is broken by modern agricultural systems. Plants do not only need CO2 and sunlight to grow, but also require essential nutrients such as Nitrogen, Phosphorous, and Potassium for various functions including the growth of biomass. This makes it possible for fruits, vegetables, and other plant products to be produced. In a natural system, these nutrients would return to the soil after the plant dies and decomposes on the ground or as animal feces. However, when humans harvest plant products, the nutrients are transported elsewhere and treated in sewage plants, breaking the nutrient cycle and depleting the soil. Common solutions to this include industrial fertilizers or cow manure. However fertilizers are energy-intensive to produce and cows famously produce the greenhouse gas methane, while requiring the growth of additional feed and needing lots of water and land. Furthermore, excess application and improper management of these have caused widespread nutrient pollution related to eutrophication, depleting oxygen levels in water bodies, and decreasing biodiversity. Doesn’t really sound like an ideal situation does it?

If we take the nutrients from plants and excrete them afterward, why don’t we just return them to the agricultural field instead of going to the trouble of using other animals or industrial fertilizers for this? This is what Arquette and foundations like Kenya Connect are trying to achieve through composting toilets and community education.

What are composting toilets?

*Example of a composting toilet you can build yourself*

Composting toilets basically work like this: You do your business, you add some sawdust or other material, you close the lid, you let nature do its job and after some time you end up with valuable dirt. Through thermophilic composting, heat-loving bacteria break down biological waste and kill dangerous pathogens. Water usage and smell are reduced, while resources from “humanure” are recovered. These toilets have helped improve sanitation and hygiene in places such as Haiti and Uganda, enhancing people’s quality of life while giving them resources to grow their own food. Sounds great right?

However as always, there is a BUT(T) to this story.

Human feces is not just filled with valuable nutrients and water. Unfortunately, it also contains dangerous pathogens, microplastics, and pharmaceuticals, including all the chemicals and hormones humans ingest (intentionally or unintentionally) every day and are not taken up or biotransformed.

According to Geoff Hill, the director of Toilet Tech, composting toilets sometimes do not kill off all pathogens since they are not raised to high enough temperatures. Therefore, in warm climates such as in Haiti or Uganda final compost can be reused effectively, but in colder climates, an additional step needs to be implemented to properly eliminate pathogens. Furthermore, this does not solve the issue of pharmaceuticals such as antibiotics and hormones that would usually undergo complex treatment to be removed in wastewater treatment plants. Lastly, public perception of poop is still really bad, and it will require a lot of education and a change in mindset to implement and expand these practices.

So what other options are there to loop-in the poop-in?

The reuse of wastewater for agricultural purposes is not a new idea. Human waste has been reused in agricultural fields for centuries. Currently, this is also a common practice in the Middle East, South and North Africa, and other Mediterranean countries. Due to increasing water shortages and a growing drive towards more sustainable and circular agricultural practices, scientific research in the field of wastewater reuse has been growing. This includes a variety of treatment methods that remove dangerous pathogens, as well as underground irrigation techniques that avoid human contact with possibly contaminated wastewater. Successful implementation of wastewater reuse can be seen all over the world, with countries such as Singapore, Namibia, and Germany treating their wastewater to reach potable quality standards.

The case of Braunschweig in Germany is a great example of how the poop loop can be closed. Agricultural fields are fertilized and irrigated with treated wastewater, and the energy for the treatment comes from biogas produced from the residues of the crops that are grown. The food produced is for the most part eaten by the residents of the municipality, before being returned to the soil after going through the treatment plant. Water and fertilizer consumption is reduced, and the soil is kept healthy.

*The wastewater reuse and treatment system in Braunschweig, Germany*

So the simple answer is yes, our poop should stay in the loop. But like most things in life, it is not as simple as just chucking poo on agricultural fields. Humanure management is context-dependent and complex, and even if this is done right, public perception still presents a very big obstacle towards its implementation.

Vegan food was one step, local and seasonal food is the next one.

Most of us -privileged young students of intellectual and liberal studies- have taken up the challenge for at least a few days to become vegetarian/vegan. Even more, have probably closed their eyes on the juicy entrecôte to choose the vegetarian option at a restaurant. This trend has been becoming increasingly present within general conversations and visions of the perceived future, as one of the solutions to reduce the negative impact of the agricultural system. Various agricultural alternatives have arisen, questioning the role of agriculture in a growing urban environment. Some of these alternatives, turn out to be influenced by methods that were previously used in history. Examples of this are permaculture, regenerative, poly culture, and agro forestry, which are considered “more natural”. On the contrary, some more technical approaches have been considered, namely genetic engineering and intensive farming. In a context of a continuous growing demand for food, bottom-up initiatives have been taken by individuals to question and experiment with the way we produce food.

This first and last episode of the AUC loves nature podcast hosted by Matthieu Mistral will interview Victor Lombard who is a director of Local Food Amsterdam. The discussion will introduce the notion of shift from global monocultural crops to more local, seasonal and sustainable crops. Lombard introduces two Amsterdam based restaurant (De Kas and Mediamatic restaurant) who have taken the challenge of producing their own crops to cater to the customer demands of their restaurant. These two restaurants have been quite successful in attracting a more privileged clientele, but Lombard affirms that there is hope that this trend will shift to a broader public in upcoming years, as it is happening with the vegan/vegetarian movement. Lombard accentuates the crucial need for a paradigm shift from eating global foods to more locally grown foods, similarly with a shift to embracing bottoms-up approaches to our agricultural systems rather than relying on top-down changes to the current monocultural practices across the globe. But is this paradigm shift plausible?

Listen to the podcast to find out 😉

Sources :

4, Renee Cho |September, et al. “How Green Is Local Food?” State of the Planet, 25 Apr. 2019, https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2012/09/04/how-green-is-local-food/.

“Aquaponics Plants.” Mediamatic, https://www.mediamatic.net/en/page/195438/aquaponics-plants.

“Are Seasonal Fruit and Vegetables Better for the Environment?” Eufic, https://www.eufic.org/en/healthy-living/article/are-seasonal-fruit-and-vegetables-better-for-the-environment.

Goddek, Simon, et al. “Challenges of Sustainable and Commercial Aquaponics.” Sustainability, vol. 7, no. 4, 2015, pp. 4199–4224., https://doi.org/10.3390/su7044199.

Ruby, Matthew B. “Vegetarianism. A Blossoming Field of Study.” Appetite, vol. 58, no. 1, 2012, pp. 141–150., https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2011.09.019.

“The Unstoppable Rise of Veganism: How a Fringe Movement Went Mainstream.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 1 Apr. 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/apr/01/vegans-are-coming-millennials-health-climate-change-animal-welfare. 

Architecture & Sustainability: what concrete(ly) is eco-housing? Or how desert sand can become four walls and a roof

September 2020. As a preparatory exercise for the first class, my Environmental Law & Policy teacher asked us to calculate our ecological footprint. Just before writing this blog post, I took the quiz again, and the same confusing element triggered me when getting the result: housing is the most important factor of my CO2 emissions, before alimentation and transport. Like all AUC alumni, I live in the student dormitories. The 54 square meters flat that I share with my roommate is more than comfortable for the two of us, yet it would be unfitting to describe it as a huge space that requires excessive heating or isolating system. Moreover, the housing company Duwo guarantees taking measures aimed at sustainable energy production for our buildings. This made me reflect upon questions of sustainable architecture and look for instances of ecological housing. Until I remembered my own experience in that field.

January 2019. For the past 3 months, my ex-partner and I were traveling through South America doing Workaway. That’s how we met Cony, a 35 years old woman who decided to leave Santiago, the capital city of Chile, to make a fresh start in the Atacama Desert. What motivated Cony’s departure was her desire to live in a sustainable and autonomous way. To her, this did not just imply quitting her company job or leaving her friends and family behind. What truly mattered was freedom and independence, achieved through seclusion in nature. To that effect, Cony undertook what would become a months-long project: build her own, ecological house. And we thought leaving Europe to discover Latin America backpacking was a radical lifestyle change…

There are several designs to build an environmentally friendly house. Of course, it depends on variables such as location and budget, but other factors like construction skills and labor, as well as time restrictions, are equally important to take into account. Cony didn’t bother to conduct a cost and benefits analysis before getting started on her project. As she bought a plot of land in the desert, she was restricted to the material available to her there, meaning sand was the main building resource. Cony had drawn plans for her future home; it looked like a mix of an igloo and a yurt. Every morning from 6:00 till 10:00, we would build bricks by mashing earth (condensed dust from the desert) and water (collected at the nearby oasis) with our feet. After obtaining a dense paste, the task was to pour it into a mold the size of a laptop (just way thicker, like the old ones) and let it dry until the bricks became solid. These were the foundations of the house; once we had obtained a sufficient amount of bricks, we piled them together and made them stick with ecological mortar clay.

Besides, we also built ecological toilets. Cony had already taken care of constructing a shower that uses a limited amount of water, and the kitchen functioned with gas bottles – which we could again only use sparingly, as it was a scarce resource (the nearest shop was a 20 minutes drive). Cony definitely tried to live more environmentally friendly, yet she was also restricted in her eco-actions by the location she chose. Already at the time when I worked for her, I wondered, how much does this eco-housing project compensate for the long 4×4 diesel car drives to the city? As the individual VS. systemic change debate displays, one cannot always behave perfectly, which does not necessarily reflect neglected concern towards environmentally-related issues. For instance, many people care about reducing their carbon footprint, yet their professional and/or personal situation does not allow them to engage in all the necessary practices to be “completely” exemplar.

As a matter of fact, few people have the possibility or are willing to build an eco-house. Especially for those who live in urban areas, it’s not a doable challenge. Yet, as P.F. Downton’s concept of the “Ecopolis” has shown, there exist other methods to support sustainable housing, even in big cities. Rethinking cohabitation with other living species in urban areas, investing in isolation technology as well as in renewable energy distribution; all these elements play an important role in the ecological transition, on a housing level. For the past few decades, there is a growing emphasis on teaching sustainable construction in architecture schools. Furthermore, as the C40 initiative demonstrates, several ways of “greening” our cities exist. Innovative ideas for sustainable architecture are constantly emerging. If constructing your own, ecological house is a great project, there are multiple alternatives to such a drastic enterprise.

Eventually, the adventure came to an end. Once our camping tent was folded again, we decided to head towards Bolivia. A couple of borders crossed later, I met someone who gave me Sylvain Tesson’s book Dans les forêts de Sibérie (I recommend the lecture!). The author writes an autoethnography about 6 months he spent isolated in Siberia. I read it and thought of Cony again. My travel buddy was so fascinated by our experience that they decided to live a similar life; after becoming a cabinetmaker, they’re now working in a wood company, saving money to buy a small plot of land in the French countryside and build their own, ecological house. A convincing and concrete way to improve your housing CO2 emissions score when taking the ecological footprint test.

Time to gas up?

On Thursday February 24^th2022, Russian troops marched over the Ukrainian border. On that same day there was 69 million m³ of Russian gas flowing, through Ukraine, to Europe. For a long time, the European Union (EU) has been importing a big share of its gas demand from Russia. In 2021, the EU imported 155 billion m³ of natural gas from Russia, accounting for around 45% of the overall gas imports and close to 40% of its total gas consumption (see the figure below). While the EU has declared an “economic war” against Russia following the invasion of Ukraine, it is still sending billions of euros to Gazprom (the Russian state-owned gas company) to ensure a continuation of the gas supply. The fact that gas can be used as a geopolitical weapon by Russia has become abundantly clear in these last few weeks. Therefore, both the EU and the International Energy Agency (IEA) have created elaborate plans to decrease, and preferably stop, the dependence on Russian gas. The plans include switching to renewable energy alternatives, increasing imports from other countries and drastic demand reductions. However, even if all these measures are successfully implemented, there is still a significant gap of 100 billion m³ that would need to be filled up by Russian gas – unless Europe is willing to divert to measures such as restarting coal fired power plants to meet our energy demand.

*Share of EU natural gas imports from Russia*

The Netherlands possesses the largest gas field of Europe in Groningen (see the map below). In the past, the Groningen gas field was very important for the European energy market; up until 2013 the field supplied more than 10% of the European gas market. However, following local earthquakes in 2003, 2012 and 2018, strong public opposition to the gas field emerged. Upon which, the Dutch government decided that the gas production from Groningen needed to be capped and eventually stopped. Consequently, the gas extraction of the field was forced to lower significantly after 2018 and was expected stop by 2030. In 2020, it was decided that in a year with regular temperatures no more gas from Groningen would be needed by 2022. As a consequence of these measures, there was a switch in Europe’s gas consumption from Dutch gas to imported Russian gas. However, as Europe was shaken by the Russian invasion of Ukraine – is it time to restart the gas production from Groningen? Reopening the Groningen gas field could hit two birds with one stone by decreasing the reliance on Russian gas, which has proven ever more important, and supporting climate ambitions, such as lowering greenhouse gas emissions.

Considering this, what could the Groningen gas field do for Europe? Of course, the Netherlands is not Russia, but with a gas production of 80 billion m³ in 2013, it can be seen as a potential half Russia. Taking into account the drastic measures that would need to be implemented to reduce Russian dependence it might not be so strange to consider opening the gas field again. Is it time to gas up?

The people of Groningen think so, 83% are currently in favour of opening the gas fields to thwart Putin and stop the imports of Russian gas. Personally, I also believe it is a good idea. Using Groningen gas will not only assist in decreasing the EU dependence on Russian gas but will also support climate mitigation efforts and thus create a win-win. It is likely that the EU will continue to need gas for many more years. In the EU climate plans, natural gas is regarded as a ‘transition fuel’ in the energy transition towards renewable energy sources. Which means that the demand for natural gas is expected to rise in the coming decade. While it is of utmost importance to stop using natural gas to combat climate change, it is hypocritical to continue to consume gas while not wanting to produce it, since that does not mean that less CO₂ molecules will end up in the atmosphere. On the contrary, imported gas from Russia is a lot worse for our climate than Dutch local gas. Dutch gas is won without additional methane emissions and does not need to be imported from far. This results in the fact that Russian gas has a CO₂-equivalent of 31.8 megatons higher than Groningen gas. For comparison, this is about the same amount as all the emissions from transport in the Netherlands. CE Delft has calculated that for every 10 billion m³ of natural gas that was imported from Russia instead of produced in Groningen, an extra 5.3 megatons of CO₂-equivalent would be added to the atmosphere. Evidently, it is better to consume Groningen gas in Europe than Russian gas when you want to combat climate change.

On top of that, due to the current high gas prices, the gas in Groningen is now worth more than ever. The Groningen gas field still contains 500 billion m³of gas. Let’s say that we would extract 40 billion m³ from Groningen this year, at the current gas price of around 215€ per megawatt hour, this would result in revenues of 84 billion euros. Despite the fact that these revenues are not realistic because the gas prices will go down once the gas field opens, the revenues will still be absurdly high. It is logical that a share of this money will go to those in Groningen who will experience losses due to the gas winning, for example in property damage due to seismic activity. However, this still means that there is a lot of money that can be spend elsewhere. A good way to use it would be in a climate fund, like they do in Norway. The money in the climate fund can be spend on research and development of projects that will enable a faster halt to the gas demand and support the climate ambitions.

Last week, the Dutch government released a statement that increasing the production of the Groningen gas field will only be a means of last resort, if there would be an energy crisis in Europe. The Dutch minister of Climate and Energy also expressed that he is not in favour of reopening the gas fields. To me this feels illogical – why would we continue to be dependent on Russia for gas that is more harmful to the climate? I suggest that the Groningen gas field is reopened to support the European geopolitical efforts to be independent from Russian gas while simultaneously lowering the impact of gas consumption on the climate. Time to gas up!