Environment

Fig Trees Figured Out Carbon Storage

- Adam Clare

The humble fig tree can help us in extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by converting it in into stone. All trees remove CO2 from the air and store it in their wood, however as the wood biodegrades the CO2 is released again. Fig trees, on the other hand, combine the CO2 within itself to form stone!

“What was really a surprise, and I’m still kind of reeling from, is that the [calcium carbonate] had really gone far deeper into the wood structures than I expected,” says Rowley, who will present the work at the Goldschmidt Conference in Prague, the Czech Republic, this week. “I expected it to be a superficial process in the cracks and weaknesses within the wood structure.”

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Cities Address Climate Crisis Faster than Nations

- Adam Clare
bike parking

Your local city council is doing more to protect the future than your national leaders. Cities are on the front lines of the climate crisis and are working hard to ensue that their people are protected from the effects of a warming planet. Cities can react swiftly to climate related issues due to a variety of factors and by addressing issues head on cities can solve more than one problem at a time.

And by literally greening their cities, mayors solve a bunch of their citizens’ problems at once. In Quezon City in the Philippines, the government turned unused land into 337 gardens and 10 model farms, while training more than 4,000 urban farmers. The report also notes that Freetown, Sierra Leone, planted more than 550,000 trees, creating more than 600 jobs. In addition to significantly reducing urban temperatures, these green spaces also mitigate flooding by soaking up rainwater. “It is becoming clear, I think, to a lot of municipalities that this type of action will be absolutely essential,” said Dan Jasper, senior policy advisor at the climate solutions group Project Drawdown, which wasn’t involved in the report. “It’s not just about being uncomfortable. This is about protecting people’s lives.”

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House Eating Mushrooms are Good for the Planet

- Adam Clare

the suburbs

For the last one hundred years in North America we’ve been building low density energy inefficient housing and now we need to deal with the economic and environmental harm from this approach. In Cleveland they are using mushrooms to deal with housing that is no longer habitable while also cleaning the local environment. Cleveland has a lot of homes left to the elements which are leaking dangerous chemicals into the soil, to address this there’s a company that takes the shreds of a building and converts into a great spot for mycelium to grow. It’s a very novel use of fungi and I’m sure we’ll see more fungi being used to address climate change at a local and even global level.

While digesting entire houses may seem like a mighty task for the humble mushroom, some species’ ability to devour waste and eradicate pollutants – among other characteristics – means they present an oversized opportunity to extract harmful toxins from both our built and natural environments. Along the way they may help to address a spectrum of additional ecological concerns. This is the emerging field of mycoremediation, which researchers assert could also create a “circular bioeconomy” in which less waste and contaminants are produced in the first place.

Its applications are abundant. In Delhi, India, the hope is that fungi will help to clean the infamously polluted air. In New Zealand, mushrooms have been used to filter oil from a canal. Operating across Europe, the LIFE MySOIL project has leveraged mycoremediation to reduce Total Petroleum Hydrocarbons in soil by 90% spanning three pilot sites. The list goes on.

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Thanks to Mike!

Brazilian City Planting Mangroves to Protect Itself Against Climate Change

- Adam Clare

Down in Brazil there’s a city in that is increasing the size of their local mangrove forest to protect itself against raising seas and more intense storms. Mangrove forests are excellent at buffering against storms due to their root systems (and that trees in general are good at slowing storms) and how they start beyond the shore line which reduces coastal erosion. The Greater Florianópolis of Brazil’s program to expand their mangroves is improving the local environment while also helping the city’s coastal economy, it;s a win-win.

As a bonus, mangroves are really good at capturing carbon and putting it in the soil so everyone on earth benefits when Brazilians increase their mangroves.

Master’s students are currently comparing the potential for carbon sequestration and storage in natural mangroves and those growing in the landfills of the Greater Florianópolis area. To do this, they’ve collected soil samples from four mangrove areas: two natural ones and two from the artificially created landfills.

The study aims to find out whether mangroves in the latter, human-generated ecosystem have the same carbon-absorbing capacity as natural ones. “Mangrove soil has a high carbon storage capacity, which is why we chose to focus our main analysis on soil rather than roots and leaves,” says Aline Zanetti, a master’s student working on the project.

Mangroves accumulate 50-90% of their carbon in the soil. The waterlogged soil gives rise to a low-oxygen environment, which means that the organic matter that piles up here — leaves, branches, dead animals — don’t decompose as quickly as they would in the open air, thus keeping the carbon they hold in the soil for longer. It’s this waterlogged property that makes coastal ecosystems much more effective carbon sinks than terrestrial forests. For their study, the researchers will also collect samples of mangrove roots to see if there’s a difference in the carbon stock potential of created and natural mangrove roots.

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Greenhouse Gases Now Count as Maritime Pollution

- Adam Clare

The International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea has ruled the greenhouse gas emissions can count towards damage to our oceans. Small island nations have praised the ruling because they are the most threatened by raising sea levels and the boiling of local waters. The ruling also shows how science can inform policy in a meaningful way because the court clearly understood how oceans absorb our emissions over time and lead to acidification and other problems.

This ruling is merely a step towards better protections of our common waters and it will only mean smoother sailing for future efforts.

What happened today was that the law and science met together in this tribunal, and both won,” said Cheryl Bazard, ambassador to the European Union of the Bahamas, one of nine Caribbean and Pacific island nations that sought the opinion.

Small island nations with scant economic power but acutely vulnerable to climate change have long felt neglected by successive global summits where pledges to cut carbon emissions have fallen far short of the minimum for limiting the worst effects of global warming.
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A similar potential precedent was laid down last month, when the European Court of Human Rights agreed with plaintiffs who argued that Switzerland was violating their human rights by not doing enough to combat climate warming.

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