There’s a Battle Over Carbon Emerging from the War in Ukraine
A new international effort is working to hold Russia accountable for the climate impact of its invasion.
Day after day, Lennard de Klerk’s home in Hungary’s sleepy countryside was filling up with Ukrainian refugees, their haggard expressions putting a literal face on the tragedy unraveling just a country away. It was March 2022, just a few weeks after Russia invaded their homeland, and de Klerk was troubled. Seeking a quiet place to think, the 50-year-old Dutch carbon expert-turned-hotelier went to swim laps in a municipal pool. “What more can I do to help Ukraine?” he asked himself. Between two strokes, an idea he liked flashed into his head: “Why don’t we calculate the carbon impacts of this war?”
Putting a figure on the carbon emissions tied to Russia’s invasion might help people outside of Ukraine understand the massive stakes of the conflict and care more about it. “The human tragedy is constrained to the territory of Ukraine,” he recalls thinking. “Carbon emissions are a different story; they impact everyone’s climate.”
But doing that would be no small job. Tallying an ongoing conflict’s emissions had never been done before. In fact, calculating the emissions of an entire war had been done only once — by advocates critical of fossil fuels who estimated emissions of the 1991 Gulf War. That war lasted less than six months and the calculations were done nearly two decades after the conflict had ended.
Still, de Klerk was not deterred. In a previous life, during which he had worked as a respected expert in greenhouse gas measurement, he had learned that with a bit of accounting magic, the carbon emissions of almost anything can be counted. Doing so was his hammer — the versatile tool he applied generously to myriad problems for much of his life. He had helped the Netherlands source in Ukraine some of the 100 million metric tons of carbon dioxide it purchased as offsets from foreign governments in the early 2000s, eventually running a 50-employee company dedicated to such services. When he and his husband, Jeroen, purchased a dilapidated Hungarian mansion to set up the carbon-neutral ecolodge they now run in the town of Irota, population 59, he started computing its emissions. (Negative 1,744 kilograms of carbon dioxide annually last he checked.) Ditto for a Budapest apartment he rents out. And his household.
So he messaged a handful of former colleagues, including Ukrainian climate expert Olga Gassan-zade, to enlist their support. “Do you know what the default emission factor of a cruise missile is?” he asked her. When replaying that exchange over drinks in June, Gassan-zade exploded in laughter as she recalled the timing of his outreach. “We had been out of touch for 10 years — and then there was war,” she teased. But she was on board: “Then you knew who your friends were,” she quipped.
The friends got to work tabulating and calculating the excess carbon emissions caused by the war. Their initiative is the most prominent among a number of efforts that are measuring the greenhouse gases of the conflict in Ukraine and challenging previous notions of what constitutes an injury of war.
Armed with the can-do attitude of math heads, de Klerk and his friends soon found themselves grappling with a status quo they did not suspect existed. For two decades, global rules have required countries to report their annual carbon emissions, but allowed them to publicly release only limited data on their emissions from military activities. Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, nations disclose their national emissions and commit to cutting them. But drafters of the treaty’s predecessor, the Kyoto Protocol, carved out reporting exemptions that cover large portions of military emissions abroad, and that loophole remains, said Axel Michaelowa, a senior researcher at the University of Zurich, in Switzerland. Yet, direct and indirect emissions of militaries might account for 5.5 percent of total global emissions, according to estimates by Scientists for Global Responsibility and the Conflict and Environment Observatory, two U.K.-based nonprofits. That’s nearly as much as the annual emissions of the world’s entire fleet of passenger cars.
The result of this loophole has been a lack of agreed-upon standards that could help carbon accountants bring some order to the climate chaos caused by an all-out war. De Klerk’s team members have employed all their ingenuity to fill that void. Since the war began, they have worked to compute emissions from all types of war-triggered emissions, from fires set off by explosives to fuel consumed by tanks and armored vehicles to the tailpipe pollution from cars driven by Ukrainians fleeing their homes — and everything in between.
Anatolii Shmurak’s is the team’s man in Kyiv and his daily routine includes collecting reports of Russian attacks from sources including social media like Telegram. He then verifies them using open-source satellite images delineating burnt areas to appraise the carbon emissions of hostilities-related wildfires. Mykola Shlapak, another team member, has also repurposed his peacetime expertise as an environmental consultant and closely tracks reports of fuel shipments to areas nearing the frontlines. Military vehicles like tanks and fighter jets, known as an armed force’s “fighting tooth” in military literature, are big fuel-guzzlers. An unexpected lesson he has learned from his wartime accounting is that their fuel needs can pale compared with those of the logistical “tail” that supplies them, he said.
De Klerk’s audacious idea hasn’t been just an academic exercise. The Initiative on GHG Accounting of War, as it is now known, brings together seven experts in four countries who produce two reports a year that influence decision-making by the Ukrainian government and international organizations. Ukraine’s Ministry of Environmental Protection’s climate department, which from the war’s onset had separately been investigating war-related emissions from fires, has even adorned the team’s reports with its logo and endorsed them.
Last November, more than half a year after de Klerk daydreamed his climate accounting vision, he and his small team presented a first batch of results at a yearly United Nations climate summit held in Egypt. The findings contained in their report revealed that emissions attributable to the war’s first seven months totaled at least 100 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in direct, indirect and prospective reconstruction-related emissions. The figure is equivalent to the Netherlands’ entire emissions over the same period. A second report released in June updates that figure to 120 million metric tons of carbon dioxide for the war’s first 12 months.
Everyone knows that war is destructive to humans and buildings and land and societies, usually concentrated to the combatant countries. But as the world has slowly come to terms with the planet’s warming, it’s become clear that war is also destructive to the Earth’s climate, damage that spreads to all humans and all countries regardless of their relationship to the conflict. That damage will be expensive to mitigate, and de Klerk is part of a two-part effort to first, account for the destruction and second, to hold Russia accountable for it.
But first, there’s a lot of math to do. As for cruise missiles, it turns out they emit only trace amounts of carbon dioxide when fired.
To the uninitiated, accounting can seem an exercise in monotony, one that conjures images of impenetrable Excel sheets and uninspired afternoons rather than passionate political contests. Jacob Soll, a professor at the University of Southern California who has written a best-selling book on accounting’s political history, begs to disagree.
“It helps make empires, and it often brings them down,” he told me in an interview. In “The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations,” Soll explains that “good accounting practices have produced the levels of trust necessary to found stable governments.” It is no accident savvy rulers open their account books for all to verify.
Yet the accounting of military expenditures has followed a long, separate tradition. Military expenditures “reveal secrets,” Soll said. As a result, they historically have remained off the books by authorities often citing the national interest. Eighteenth-century France offers an early example. In the lead-up to the French Revolution, the dismal state of government accounts became the focus of so much controversy that nearly a third of pamphlets argued over that question. Nothing a bit of creative accounting couldn’t fix: Then-Finance Minister Jacques Necker simply removed the military deficit from the official books. He would later explain he could not show its numbers due to the expense’s “extraordinary” nature, Soll said.
As if replaying a version of those times, when negotiators of the Kyoto Protocol sought to create loopholes for military emissions back in 1997, they cited national security concerns to make their case. Internal U.S. documents of that era, made public by George Washington University, show that the Pentagon first raised those concerns. Its leadership argued that U.S. military fuel-reduction requirements could handicap military training and operations, eventually sending representatives to diplomatic talks in Kyoto who advocated the position to allies. Diplomatic cables dating from that time warn that the European Union was “becoming rather ‘fatigued’” amid confusion about “why this issue is so important to the U.S.” Eventually, exemptions for the fuels that power military ships and aircraft on overseas missions and for military operations deemed “multilateral” were adopted. A diplomatic memo concluded it was “a major victory.”
History has, of late, taken a different turn. Tara Sonenshine, a professor of practice at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy who has written on the war’s environmental toll, says Ukraine’s emphasis on throwing light on the conflict’s emissions not only reflects a preoccupation over climate damage but also serves a second purpose: It ties Ukraine’s battle for survival to a major issue also threatening Western societies. “The Ukrainians have to constantly connect the dots to build support,” she said. The professor calls the strategy “Western values alignment.” “That includes at the top of the list, right now, climate change,” she added. Part messaging or not, Ukraine’s position has brought to the forefront a debate long overlooked.
“It is the first time that serious attention has been focused on how the war has contributed to global emissions,” said Doug Weir, who heads the Conflict and Environment Observatory.
To be sure, the war’s emissions do not command more attention in Kyiv and other capitals than its human cost. But Ukrainian officials broadcasting the findings of de Klerk and his colleagues, sometimes to great effect, have raised the issue’s profile. Speaking to diplomats at a United Nations climate change summit in Bonn this June, a Ukrainian delegate cited the findings of the “international group of experts,” as he called them, to voice accusations that Russia was harming the environment with the invasion of Ukraine. The intervention, during which the Ukrainian delegate also faulted Moscow with broader accusations over the war, prompted a stern response from Russia, whose representative objected to the “anti-Russian rhetoric.” Ukraine’s minister of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources, Ruslan Strilets, has also highlighted the findings of de Klerk and his team. In July remarks, he cited their estimate to accuse Russia of setting his country back by 120 million metric tons of carbon dioxide because of the war.
Even Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has had things to say about the emissions of the war. Midway through his opening speech at a November U.N. meeting in Egypt’s Sharm el-Sheikh, he invited other leaders to help Ukraine “assess the impact of military actions on (the) climate and environment.”
Zelenskyy was referring to the Ukrainian government’s effort to measure not just climate but all environmental damages caused by the hostilities. That initiative has received the backing of a high-profile cast, including Greta Thunberg, the youth climate activist, and Mary Robinson, a former president of Ireland. And when it comes to the conflict’s greenhouse gases, it goes a step further than that of de Klerk and his colleagues by aiming to put an actual price tag on direct ones.
It is all part of a broader push to prepare for another battle: Ukraine’s counterattack, in court, to seek monetary compensation for the damages.
Thirty-two air raid sirens wailed across Ukraine and missiles hit a residential building in the southern city of Odesa on the hot, sun-drenched July day last year when Mykhailo Savenets, a good-natured, 31-year-old meteorologist in Kyiv, took a decisive step in the effort to calculate the war’s damages. On that day, he introduced his colleagues at Ukraine’s State Environmental Inspectorate to a formula with which they could estimate the greenhouse gases of the war. The move could alter what it means to suffer compensable war damages. But Savenets recalls it as a simple matter of scientific logic that required only a little discussion: All are experts who work pro bono on estimating the war’s air pollution value for the government body.
The experts were meeting, on Zoom, to decide which air pollutants’ emissions they would help measure. Under a ministerial decree signed less than a month into the war, dozens of experts like them were asked to come up with “methods” to value the war’s damages, environmental and not. (The temporary methodologies adopted early in the war exclude greenhouse gas emissions, but they will be updated.)
The mathematical rendition of Savenets’ formula is deceptively dry:
C(loss) = EMGHx CT x Kl x Kf
(where C(loss) is the cost of greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide; EMGH is the mass of emitted greenhouse gases; CT is the value of carbon taxes, and Kl and Kf are coefficients that measure the emission’s negative impacts)
It can be translated to this: To put a price on the war’s emissions, take the mass of a fuel whose burning generates emissions (such as the known volume of fuel stored in a tank hit by an airstrike); multiply it by the value of Ukraine’s carbon tax; and again by a few more coefficients like one correcting for the duration of the war, and you get a total figure in Ukrainian hryvnia.
Apply the draft formula to real life, and it tells a crushing story. Take the shelling, in the northern city of Chernihiv, of a 5,000-cubic-meter oil tank containing diesel fuel on March 3, 2022, and you get one large and surprisingly precise estimate: it caused the release of 4,531 metric tons of carbon dioxide worth 1.1 million hryvnias, about $30,000. Or consider wildfires that raged near the frontlines in the Kyiv region on March 28, 2022, about a month into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. That attack is estimated to have burned about 24,430 hectares, causing the emission of 235,161 metric tons of carbon dioxide valued at 58.2 million hyrvnias, about $1.5 million.
In contrast to de Klerk’s initiative, the State Environmental Inspectorate’s methodology isn’t designed to tally indirect emissions like those from the displacement of Ukrainian victims of the war. Neither does it account for prospective emissions from the eventual reconstruction. Rather, for now, the draft methods will inventory emissions from only hostilities-related wildfires, damages to industrial facilities and fuel consumption by military equipment — and nothing else. (The methods might be expanded in the future, for instance, to include emissions from infrastructure fires). It’s the difference between making scientifically sound estimations — the Initiative on GHG Accounting of War’s present domain — and only collecting data that will meet a particular legal threshold and withstand the scrutiny of a judge picking them apart during a court case. The draft methods of the State Environmental Inspectorate of Ukraine are meant to fulfill the latter goal. They will, therefore, measure only those direct greenhouse gas emissions that can be calculated “precisely” and with what information is currently available, said Andrii Moroz, a lawyer who is advising the State Environmental Inspectorate.
For instance, wildfires from shelling often must meet criteria that ensure they aren’t naturally occurring. An atypically shaped blaze that follows a streak-line pattern characteristic of shelling, for instance, is a sign that it has not occurred randomly but is due to “anthropogenic influence,” as Savenets sometimes calls acts of war out of scientific habit. Meanwhile, the destruction of industrial property, say a pipeline or a power plant, must be formally attributed to Russian troops by official bodies like the State Emergency Service of Ukraine or the State Environmental Inspectorate of Ukraine, in order to attribute those emissions to Russia.
Alina Sokolenko, a sustainability expert who analyzes the legal questions arising from the war’s environmental damages for Ukraine’s State Environmental Inspectorate, sums it up this way: “It’s not only a matter of how to measure, but [also] how to prove and how to receive compensation for these losses.”
Should Ukraine go ahead with claims for greenhouse gas emissions, it would mark the first time a country seeks compensation for such damages resulting from an all-out war, Rutgers Law School professor Cymie Payne, an expert on international environmental reparations, told me. “It would push our understanding of the harms of war to the environment in new directions.”
The road to compensation would likely follow the usual legal procedures. First, the plaintiff — Ukraine — would have to show that it was injured because the defendant — Russia — broke the law. It would then have to show the extent and kind of harm it suffered, and also that the law is one that requires compensation.
Yes, the climate claims would be a long shot, largely because it will not be easy for the plaintiffs to establish that the greenhouse gases have caused Ukraine harm that is specific enough to be compensated. Still, Ukrainian experts point to a relevant precedent in international courts where a handful of lawsuits have resulted in the awarding of environmental damages from cross-border conflict. In the foremost of these cases, Kuwait accused Iraq of breaching the international law doctrine prohibiting unprovoked attacks when it spilled massive amounts of oil across the Kuwaiti desert during the Gulf War of the early 1990s. The United Nations Compensation Commission awarded Kuwait about $3 billion in monetary compensation just for those claims. In 2018, the International Court of Justice ruled that Nicaragua had to pay Costa Rica a few hundred thousand dollars in environmental compensation for illegally dredging a canal that damaged its wetlands.
Karen Hulme, at the University of Essex School of Law, thinks one possible, but never-before-tested path that Ukraine could take to make its claims would involve arguing that, like with Iraq, Russia’s invasion constitutes a breach of the prohibition on states to use unprovoked force against one another. That doctrine is enshrined in the United Nations Charter. Ukraine would need to further argue that Russia must make amends for all the resulting damage to the climate with monetary damages. Alternative arguments could claim breaches of the global climate rules tied to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or of states’ duty to prevent significant transboundary environmental damage, a doctrine of international law, Hulme said. “It is so far unprecedented in international law for greenhouse gas emissions to qualify as damage in such claims,” she warned. “And so there would be many legal hurdles to pass.”
The venue where such claims and more conventional ones could be filed is already being set up in The Hague. In a May decision by the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, some 40 countries established a so-called register of damage whose mission is to “serve as a record … of evidence and claims information on damage, loss or injury” caused by Russian troops after the Feb. 24, 2022 invasion. The body is intended to be “the first component” of a future, fuller legal body whose main arm will be a “claims commission,” its founding document says. Its board will eventually determine categories of eligible claims. Markiyan Kliuchkovskyi, its executive director, told me that claims for greenhouse gases emitted in Ukraine due to the invasion “could, in principle, be submitted to and recorded in the register.”
How payments for any war-related award would be made is its own thorny issue. Leaders of G-7 countries have taken a hard line on the matter, declaring at their yearly summit in May that Russian sovereign assets they have “immobilized” would remain so “until Russia pays for the damage it has caused to Ukraine.” So far, G-7 countries, together with Australia and the European Commission, have frozen some $300 billion of Russian Central Bank assets and $58 billion worth of sanctioned Russians’ assets, according to research by the Atlantic Council, a Washington, D.C., think tank. For reference, Ukraine puts the war’s environmental damages at about only $57 billion. The total excludes greenhouse emissions, whose price cannot be appraised until Kyiv adopts a final accounting formula.
For now, Ukrainians are trying to avoid the mistakes of the past. A June 2022 State Environmental Inspectorate report that goes over lessons learned from the Iraqi and Nicaraguan cases says good accounting is a must. “The key success factors are the ability to measure the amount of environmental damage and to prove the cause-and-effect relationship between the actions of the aggressor and the environmental damage caused,” it reads. And so Ukrainian authorities will continue to turn the ravages of the war into data that does just that.
In written remarks, Strilets, the Ukraine minister of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources, made sure to connect the dots between climate and the war. Any compensation for the war’s environmental damages would finance a “green reconstruction” and Ukraine’s “transition to a carbon-free economy,” the minister said. “Everyone knows the ‘polluter pays’ principle! We propose to introduce the new principle — ‘aggressor pays’,” he added. “After all, the war in Ukraine is not the last war in the world’s history, but if ‘the aggressor pays’ principle works, there is a chance that everyone will understand that waging war is costly.”
As for de Klerk, today, he is typing away at his ecolodge reception desk, his usual workstation. He is laboring on the next iteration of his report, due to be unveiled in December. In addition to updating the account to include the war’s longer timeframe, it’s also expected to be a deep dive into how best to bring about climate damage litigation.
“Registering the damage that’s been done through the additional emissions is one [goal],” he says, “but in the end, you want to get compensated for it.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/09/03/ukraine-russia-invasion-carbon-footprint-00111652
The Green Dream to Rebuild a Sustainable Ukraine from the Rubble of War
The war’s widespread devastation provides an opportunity to rebuild the nation on more sustainable grounds. Plans are already circulating.
In the first days of the war, as Russian troops rolled across the border and bombs threatened the Ukrainian capital, Alexander Shevchenko climbed into his black Mini Cooper and left his hometown in the rearview mirror.
But Shevchenko, an urban planner who runs his own agency in Kyiv, also had an eye on the future. On March 1, a mere six days after the invasion began, the 31-year-old posted a message on Facebook:
“As we all support the army financially our Zvidsy Agency opens additional (front)… – preparation to rebuild our country…Contact me…in case you are interested to support our idea, our country, our new chapter.”
The non-profit he has since founded, ReStart Ukraine, is one of a handful of initiatives where green-minded Ukrainians are sketching long-term reconstruction blueprints with a focus on sustainability. His rallying call prompted hundreds to answer with offers to volunteer. A week after his Facebook post, about 300 people from some 30 countries had filled out a form to help out as volunteers. A recently unveiled governmental reconstruction vision similarly conceives a country rising from its ashes and transitioning to a green economy. It marks what some experts consider the world’s first attempt at a low-carbon reconstruction.
There is much to repair.
Six months into the war, hostilities have damaged or destroyed an estimated 131,000 residential buildings, 25,000 kilometers of road and about 2,000 shops across the country. The war has also displaced nearly 14 million people — a third of Ukraine’s population — since Russia began its invasion in February. In early September, more than 600,000 electricity consumers were cut off from the power grid while 235,000 homes remained without gas supply.
Yet, for all its destruction, the Ukrainian war also presents an opportunity to rebuild the country in ways that could remedy the ills of outdated, Soviet-era urban design and even slash national greenhouse gas emissions. Pre-war Ukraine, despite its economy’s reliance on pollution-intensive sectors like iron and steel, had made steady progress toward a green energy transition. The share of renewable energies has grown to 8.1 percent of the country’s energy consumption, still less than half the European Union average, data by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development show. The war has upended that transition, but it also drove some to imagine how Ukraine could make the most of the reconstruction that will inevitably follow to leapfrog its way toward a more sustainable economy.
The price tag for a total rebuilding of the nation could be astronomical — but so could the potential rewards, both for Ukraine and neighboring European Union, which has encouraged bringing a post-war Ukraine into its fold. For now, the reconstruction plans are multiplying on pace with the devastated cities of the war-torn nation. Different architects and urban planners have started plans for at least three cities. And that doesn’t include the Ukrainian government’s own plan.
Before the war, Shevchenko’s Zvidsy Agency designed public spaces and organized workshops where urbanists like him geeked out on good zoning for recreation. When hostilities broke out, the agency was on the verge of delivering its biggest project so far: a spatial development plan for Melitopol, a city in the southeast that is now occupied. The war upset that mission. But in some ways, it opened a window of opportunity for more ambitious work. In a video conversation with POLITICO, Shevchenko, who is now based in the unoccupied western Ukraine city of Lviv, exuded calm. He pondered aloud some big questions: “What would be the green structure of the city so it is stable and the environmental aspect won’t be decreasing with the economic growth?” “What would be the alternative sources of energy?”
ReStart Ukraine’s most daring project is a master plan, due to be released this month, for the reinvention of the northern city of Chernihiv as a green pioneer. Pre-war street photography of the century-old city shows teen boys on colorful skateboards, and men and women shopping in the old town as a golden sun glows on the cobblestones. More recent photos resemble Dante’s Inferno. A stone-faced child holds a wooden rifle amid the rubble. A Ukrainian soldier smiles gleefully as he poses before a captured enemy tank. Though Russia’s tanks and foot soldiers withdrew in April, the Russian military still shells the wider Chernihiv region, according to the Institute for the Study of War. It is the canvas on which Shevchenko and his peers are working, one that includes brutalist Soviet-style architecture and dated urban grids of the olden days, when Ukraine was part of the USSR.
Like elsewhere in Ukraine, the war has mostly damaged Chernihiv’s residential buildings, scarring or destroying about 20 percent of homes. To repair or rebuild them, ReStart Ukraine envisions a reconstruction that would resort to green technologies like so-called mass timber — load-bearing walls made with wooden panels bound together with glue or nails. It has emerged as a climate-friendly alternative to concrete, a material that contains cement whose manufacturing is responsible for about 7 percent of man-made carbon emissions worldwide.
ReStart Ukraine’s plan also proposes reusing timber, plastic and concrete debris from bombed-out structures. Some of the concrete, after being pulverized, could be reused as fill material in new concrete. Plastic and wood meanwhile could serve as primary materials to manufacture exterior siding panels that cover facades. A post-war Chernihiv could also better integrate the nearby Desna River, using its banks for pedestrians and featuring ferries to limit vehicle traffic over a bridge, Shevchenko said.
All this, of course, depends on Ukraine surviving the war and controlling its destiny.
Building a greener Ukraine is not just the dream of a handful of Ukrainian planners. It’s a project that has the attention of the highest-level officials in Europe.
In July, European Union president Ursula von der Leyen, speaking at the all-important Ukraine Recovery Conference in ritzy Lugano, Switzerland, announced the EU would help salvage the nation and pull it toward greener horizons. Von der Leyen, who is Belgian, explained that the war had served a broader purpose: to realize “the dream of a new Ukraine, not only free, democratic and European, but also green and prosperous.” Later that day, Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal echoed that vision.
Donning a neatly fitted ash gray suit, Shmyhal unveiled the Ukraine Recovery Plan’s first draft to world leaders. The plan calls for a “long-term transformation” of his country that includes a “green transition” to “become a member of the EU and make the Ukrainian economic miracle come true,” Shmyhal said. The price tag of rebuilding Ukraine would be $750 billion, he announced. That kind of price tag harkens back to the post-World War II Marshall Plan, which has become the model for post-conflict reconstruction.
The $13-billion Marshall Plan famously bankrolled western Europe’s economic resurrection, including, of course, the devastated nation that had launched the war in the first place. The notion of rehabilitating a former enemy was a 180-degree turn from what had transpired after the previous world war when the victors had crippled a vanquished Germany with reparations, ultimately leading to Hitler’s rise. The ultimate lesson of the Marshall Plan, argues Andrew Williams, an emeritus professor at the University of St. Andrews who wrote the 2005 book “Liberalism and War,” was that rebuilding an enemy could ultimately enhance free trade relations by enabling a broken country to leapfrog technologically. “Wars are the best accelerators of technology, I’m afraid,” he said.
In early April, just a month and a half into the war, leading economists at the influential Centre for Economic Policy Research — a London-based think tank whose work focuses on European policymaking — had solidly anchored the Ukraine reconstruction debate into the familiar territory of the Marshall Plan. In a 40-page “rapid response” Blueprint for the Reconstruction of Ukraine, heavyweights of the profession, including the Ukrainian national Tymofiy Mylovanov, Beatrice Weder di Mauro and Barry Eichengreen, made many references to the 1948 recovery plan. Days later, Eichengreen published an op-ed whose title, “Shaping a Marshall Plan for Ukraine,” decisively drove home the point.
The parallels between post-war Europe and Ukraine are many. Like Europe at the time, Ukraine will need additional manpower and a cascade of funds to reconstruct an economy in tatters, said Williams. Case in point: architects accounted for a mere 0.08 percent of Ukraine’s total population before the war (compared to 0.25 percent in the larger EU), far too few for the country to rebuild on its own, the National Union of Architects of Ukraine’s Lidiia Chyzhevska told a panel on Ukraine’s reconstruction at a United Nations June gathering in the Polish city of Katowice. And as with post-World War II Europe, the geopolitics at play have aroused a desire to “annoy” and “exclude” Russia, Williams said.
But, in contrast with that era, it is a desire to play up the EU’s “current obsessions,” rather than those of the United States, that drives the reconstruction plan currently being shaped, Williams added. “That could be because they want to integrate Ukraine into the future of Europe,” he said. These obsessions include the European Green Deal, a set of policy proposals to make the bloc climate neutral by 2050, the professor added.
Pre-war Ukraine’s reliance on Russian fossil fuels reminds Olena Pavlenko, the president of the DiXi Group think tank in Kyiv, of the Ukrainian saying “life or wallet,” a tricky no-win question thieves ask “in dark streets.”
One way out of the problematic relationship would be for Ukraine to implement the European Green Deal’s renewable-energy target of at least 32 percent by 2030, said Andrian Prokip of the Ukrainian Institute for the Future, another Kyiv think tank.
In a May video interview, Irina Stavchuk, then a deputy minister at Ukraine’s Ministry of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources, argued that dotting the landscape with sources of renewable energy would not only serve the environment and help achieve Ukraine’s energy independence, but also decentralize its sources of electricity, and in turn boost the system’s safety “if something happens.” When asked to clarify what she meant, Stavchuk said with a somber chuckle: “I just don’t want to think that Russia would invade us again.” (Stavchuk has since left her role as deputy minister following the appointment of a new minister.) Prokip was more direct about Russia’s wartime damage to Ukraine’s renewable and non-renewable energy plants: “It’s much more difficult to destroy renewable power plants with missiles compared to conventional power plants,” he said, because renewable sources like solar and wind farms are more scattered than thermal or nuclear power plants for the same amount of energy produced.
Ukraine’s EU candidacy could partly fund its adoption of the low-carbon practices Stavchuk evoked. To be sure, Ukraine’s climate policies have been gravitating toward those of the EU since it took its first, tentative step to enter the bloc in 2014 by signing the European Union-Ukraine Association Agreement, said Tibor Schaffhauser, who co-founded the Green Policy Center, a Hungarian climate-policy think tank. Under such pacts, non-EU nations must begin adopting the bloc’s rules on multiple fronts, including in the realm of climate and energy policy, as a prerequisite to moving their candidacy forward. Already, before the war, Ukraine had done so quite diligently and somewhat faster than Moldova and Georgia, two comparable countries that also harbor EU membership ambitions, Schaffhauser said.
In 2019, Ukraine banned hydrofluorocarbons, the greenhouse gas widely used in refrigeration. That same year, it adopted legislation to measure its greenhouse gas emissions, known as a monitoring, reporting and verifying system. The move is needed to set up national cap-and-trade systems, and it would ultimately enable Ukraine to join the European Union Emissions Trading System, a pillar of the EU’s policy to combat climate change. Then, five days into the war, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy rushed his country’s EU application, imploring the bloc to grant it “immediate accession” in the face of Russia’s invasion. Just four months later, the EU largely acquiesced, granting it the status of candidate.
The step has been hailed as a symbolic milestone. But Marie-Eve Bélanger, a senior researcher at Swiss university ETH Zurich, argues that the impact of the major funding the EU will channel toward Ukraine due to its candidate status should not be discounted. Bélanger estimates that based on Ukraine’s population size, it could reap more than $696 million yearly as an EU candidate. Last year, by comparison, Ukraine received $140 million in support which the EU disburses to neighboring countries, the researcher said. The new influx of money, on top of reconstruction funds, represents one additional channel through which the bloc could encourage a climate-friendly reconstruction by conditioning the money to low-carbon policies, she said.
Whether Ukraine will find a way to make good on its promises remains to be seen. Environmentalists’ criticism of the government’s draft Ukraine Recovery Plan has ranged from “scattered” to outright “anti-environmental” due, for instance, to proposed projects that would facilitate timber extraction. The draft plan has also been criticized because it proposes fast-tracking a process that normally requires in-depth measurement of the environmental impact of planned industrial facilities.
For Andriy Andrusevych, a senior policy expert at Resource & Analysis Center “Society and Environment,” a Lviv-based think tank, the jury is still out as to whether the plan will deliver on Zelenskyy’s political agenda of seizing the moment to align the country with the EU and its low-carbon policies. The National Council for the Recovery of Ukraine from the Consequences of the War, a body established by the president, is still finalizing the draft plan.
The plan’s latest version encourages energy efficiency and a low-carbon steel industry fueled by clean hydrogen rather than dirty fossil fuels, said Andrusevych. The analyst views such mid-term objectives as merely “declarative,” lacking economic modeling to back them. Yet, he also warns against viewing the commitments as “just window dressing.” That’s because “the political will is very strong to implement these reforms as soon as possible so that we can qualify to enter the EU on these technical grounds,” he said.
The bottom line is this: “If the reconstruction plan is not green, then the environmental reforms will be the last ones to be implemented,” he said. “If it’s a green reconstruction plan, then the environmental reforms will go higher on the agenda.”
In Ukraine, Shevchenko, his team of a dozen urban design professionals and 300 volunteers aren’t the only ones envisioning war-ravaged cities going green.
Even the devastated eastern Ukrainian city of Mariupol is getting the special treatment of being reimagined with a green and low-carbon future via a reconstruction project dubbed Re: Mariupol. Mariupol, pre-war Ukraine’s industrial nerve center where factory smokestacks defined the cityscape, is now solidly in Russia’s grips after a four-month siege that damaged 95 percent of its housing.
The city “was developed in a very strange way” compared to modern standards, Re: Mariupol’s Sergii Rodionov said. As in many Soviet-era cities, planners built its steelworks — now damaged by the fighting — on Mariupol’s immediate outskirts in the 1930s, he said. A metastasizing downtown quickly swallowed up the area. With dwellings and polluting industries in such proximity, city planners eventually moved Mariupol’s center to the city’s west. Theaters and libraries began sprouting there in the 1960s and 1970s. But the out-of-step move created a disharmonious ensemble, he said.
So in mid-March, Rodionov and his colleagues published a reconstruction manifesto that emphasizes a break with the Mariupol of yesteryear and promises to redo its imperfect city grid. “While we mourn, we must also imagine,” the manifesto says. “We will reimagine metallurgy, engineering and the harbor: with more hi-tech production, less dependence on fossil fuels, smaller carbon footprint.” The document goes on to paint a city born again through better transportation and public spaces.
Sure, the planning is for now “speculative,” Rodionov said. The city’s authorities are, after all, in exile across Ukraine. Russian forces captured the last Ukrainian soldiers defending the city of more than 400,000 people. But Mariupol’s municipal authorities support the initiative and have even asked other groups of professionals — including a political scientist — to come up with more proposals, said Sergei Orlov, the city’s deputy mayor. Orlov believes Mariupol will be liberated by year’s end. One way or another, Rodionov said, the exercise will create a benchmark for redesigning post-Soviet industrial cities.
The northeast city of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, has invited architect Norman Foster, an English lord whose architectural feats include Apple’s neo-futuristic, ring-shaped headquarters and the glass dome atop the rebuilt German Reichstag, to develop the city’s new master plan. A blistering frontal assault brought Kharkiv to its knees in the very first days of the war. By June, Ihor Terekhov, its mayor, estimated that Russian forces had wiped out nearly a third of the city’s apartment blocks and houses. Foster, like Rodionov, kicked off the Kharkiv project with a reconstruction manifesto. It promises, somewhat vaguely, the “greenest elements of infrastructure and buildings.” The reconstruction plan, like Mariupol’s, is “expected to become a blueprint for the reconstruction of other Ukrainian cities,” said a press release by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, which is helping with Foster’s project.
The still-nascent plans aren’t without their detractors. Oleg Drozdov, a co-founder of the Kharkiv School of Architecture, has been critical of Kharkiv’s reliance on an outsider. During an April webinar, he warned against the Briton’s involvement turning into “intellectual colonization.” Drozdov has launched a Ukrainian-majority coalition of 50 experts, called ro3kvit, to help re-think the future of cities and better rebuild a post-war Ukraine. He later told me that he sees the reconstruction as “a good time for Ukrainian experts to learn by doing.” Post-independence Ukraine has never built an entire city on its own, he said. “This is a good chance to switch from very raw industries to more high-tech stuff,” he added.
The windows of opportunity that open when bombs damage cities are a reality that Peter Larkham, a professor at the UK’s Birmingham City University, has come to embrace after 25 years of digging into the history of British towns damaged by the German Luftwaffe during World War II. For example, a single air raid in November 1940 badly damaged the city center of Coventry, leaving nearly 600 dead. Yet, simultaneously, the destruction served to overcome a political gridlock that had prevented the redesign — already drawn-up — of a packed city center where homes, factories and winding streets formed an uncomfortable maelstrom, Larkham said. “So when the bombing happened, of course, that was the opportunity,” he said.
Post-World War II Coventry gave pedestrians space to safely walk in shopping areas, featured new quality housing outside the city’s core, and in a sign of its times, boasted a then cutting-edge ring road. Ukraine is fated to follow a similar path, Larkham argues. As it happens, Coventry is one of a dozen post-war reconstruction cases that architects at the National Union of Architects of Ukraine and the Kyiv-based PRO PM School of Construction Project Management are dissecting to learn from past mistakes and successes, said Natasha Prysukhina, PRO PM’s chief executive.
The looming winter and the ongoing war, of course, mean that a post-war reconstruction with a long-term vision, green or not, is a few chapters away.
Addressing a gathering on post-war reconstruction, Oleksandr Sienkevych, the mayor of the riverside city of Mykolayiv, spoke plainly: The 10,000 broken windows in his town meant proper redevelopment will have to wait, he said. Before the war, the city had looked into decentralizing its heating system, a way to save energy. Not anymore.
“It’s hard,” Sienkevych said, “to think about development of the city while you’re under shelling.”
No trash goes to waste as Tilos races to recycle
TILOS, Greece - Before the tiny Greek island of Tilos became a big name in recycling, taverna owner Aristoteles Chatzifountas knew that whenever he threw his restaurant’s trash into a municipal bin down the street it would end up in the local landfill.
The garbage site had become a growing blight on the island of now 500 inhabitants, off Greece’s south coast, since ships started bringing over packaged goods from neighbouring islands in 1960.
Six decades later, in December last year, the island launched a major campaign to fix its pollution problem. Now it recycles up to 86% of its rubbish, a record high in Greece, according to authorities, and the landfill is shut.
Chatzifountas said it took only a month to get used to separating his trash into three bins - one for organic matter; the other for paper, plastic, aluminium and glass; and the third for everything else.
“The closing of the landfill was the right solution,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “We need a permanent and more ecological answer.”
Tilos' triumph over trash puts it ahead in an inter-island race of sorts, as Greece plays catch-up to meet stringent recycling goals set by the European Union (EU) and as institutions, companies and governments around the world adopt zero-waste policies in efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
“We know how to win races,” said Tilos’ deputy mayor Spyros Aliferis. “But it’s not a sprint. This is the first step (and) it’s not easy.”
The island’s performance contrasts with that of Greece at large. In 2019, the country recycled and composted only a fifth of its municipal waste, placing it 24th among 27 countries ranked by the EU’s statistics office.
That’s a far cry from EU targets to recycle or prepare for reuse 55% of municipal waste by weight by 2025 and 65% by 2035.
Greece has taken some steps against throwaway culture, such as making stores charge customers for single-use plastic bags.
Still, “we are quite backward when it comes to recycling and reusing here,” said Dimitrios Komilis, a professor of solid waste management at the Democritus University of Thrace, in northern Greece.
Recycling can lower planet-warming emissions by reducing the need to manufacture new products with raw materials, whose extraction is carbon-heavy, Komilis added.
Getting rid of landfills can also slow the release of methane, another potent greenhouse gas produced when organic materials like food and vegetation are buried in landfills and rot in low-oxygen conditions.
And green groups note that zero-waste schemes can generate more jobs than landfill disposal or incineration as collecting, sorting and recycling trash is more labour-intensive.
But reaching zero waste isn’t as simple as following Tilos’ lead - each region or city generates and handles rubbish differently, said researcher Dominik Noll, who works on sustainable island transitions at Vienna’s Institute of Social Ecology.
“Technical solutions can be up-scaled, but socioeconomic and sociocultural contexts are always different,” he said.
“Every project or programme needs to pay attention to these contexts in order to implement solutions for waste reduction and treatment.”
HIGH-VALUE TRASH
Tilos has built a reputation as a testing ground for Greece's green ambitions, becoming the first Greek island to ban hunting in 1993 and, in 2018, becoming one of the first islands in the Mediterranean to run mainly on wind and solar power.
For its "Just Go Zero" project, the island teamed up with Polygreen, a Piraeus-based network of companies promoting a circular economy, which aims to design waste and pollution out of supply chains.
Several times a week, Polygreen sends a dozen or so local workers door-to-door collecting household and business waste, which they then sort manually.
Antonis Mavropoulos, a consultant who designed Polygreen’s operation, said the “secret” to successful recycling is to maximise the waste’s market value.
“The more you separate, the more valuable the materials are,” he said, explaining that waste collected in Tilos is sold to recycling companies in Athens.
On a June morning, workers bustled around the floor of Polygreen’s recycling facility, perched next to the defunct landfill in Tilos’ arid mountains.
They swiftly separated a colourful assortment of garbage into 25 streams - from used vegetable oil, destined to become biodiesel, to cigarette butts, which are taken apart to be composted or turned into materials like sound insulation.
Organic waste is composted. But some trash, like medical masks or used napkins, cannot be recycled, so Polygreen shreds it, to be turned into solid recovered fuel for the cement industry on the mainland.
More than 100 tonnes of municipal solid waste - the equivalent weight of nearly 15 large African elephants - have been sorted so far, said project manager Daphne Mantziou.
Setting up the project cost less than 250,000 euros ($254,550) - and, according to Polygreen figures, running it does not exceed the combined cost of a regular municipal waste-management operation and the new tax of 20 euros per tonne of landfilled waste that Greece introduced in January.
More than ten Greek municipalities and some small countries have expressed interest in duplicating the project, said company spokesperson Elli Panagiotopoulou, who declined to give details.
NO TIME TO WASTE
Replicating Tilos’ success on a larger scale could prove tricky, said Noll, the sustainability researcher.
Big cities may have the money and infrastructure to efficiently handle their waste, but enlisting key officials and millions of households is a tougher undertaking, he said.
“It’s simply easier to engage with people on a more personal level in a smaller-sized municipality,” said Noll.
When the island of Paros, about 200 km (124 miles) northwest of Tilos, decided to clean up its act, it took on a city-sized challenge, said Zana Kontomanoli, who leads the Clean Blue Paros initiative run by Common Seas, a UK-based social enterprise.
The island’s population of about 12,000 swells during the tourist season when hundreds of thousands of visitors drive a 5,000% spike in waste, including 4.5 million plastic bottles annually, said Kontomanoli.
In response, Common Seas launched an island-wide campaign in 2019 to curb the consumption of bottled water, one of a number of its anti-plastic pollution projects.
Using street banners and on-screen messages on ferries, the idea was to dispel the common but mistaken belief that the local water is non-potable.
The share of visitors who think they can’t drink the island’s tap water has since dropped from 100% to 33%, said Kontomanoli.
“If we can avoid those plastic bottles coming to the island altogether, we feel it’s a better solution” than recycling them, she said.
Another anti-waste group thinking big is the nonprofit DAFNI Network of Sustainable Greek Islands, which has been sending workers in electric vehicles to collect trash for recycling and reuse on Kythnos island since last summer.
Project manager Despina Bakogianni said this was once billed as “the largest technological innovation project ever implemented on a Greek island” - but the race to zero waste is now heating up, and already there are more ambitious plans in the works.
Those include CircularGreece, a new 16-million-euro initiative DAFNI joined along with five Greek islands and several mainland areas, such as Athens, all aiming to reuse and recycle more and boost renewable energy use.
“That will be the biggest circular economy project in Greece,” said Bakogianni.
https://www.reuters.com/article/greece-environment-waste-idUKL8N2YS326
Future cool: Minnesota city ponders new boom as a climate migrant destination
DULUTH, Minnesota - Before the advent of air conditioning, this northern U.S. city on the shore of Lake Superior promoted itself as a cool summer haven for the sweaty and allergy affected.
One day Duluth might offer another kind of relief: As a haven for future U.S. migrants fleeing runaway heatwaves and other extreme weather elsewhere in the country.
The Minnesota town, nestled along the world’s largest freshwater lake, is among a small group of cities that scientists predict will become top destinations for Americans abandoning parts of the country one day made inhospitable by climate change.
Up to now, frigid winters in Duluth - often ranked one of the coldest cities in the United States - have limited its appeal. The city, planned to one day become as large as Chicago, never quite achieved its aims, as vacant lots testify.
But Sandy Hoff, the president and owner of local real estate development firm F.I. Salter, said a changing climate could spur a property boom that would “no doubt” propel his company in ways unseen since his grandfather acquired it 90 years ago.
“Duluth, in particular on the shore of the lake here, has tended to be a little cooler maybe than people have wanted at times in the past,” he admitted.
“Maybe a little climate change, where we’re getting a little warmer, is beneficial to us,” he said.
NO JOKE
Predictions that a wave of Americans could one day wash in as a result of climate threats leave many residents part intrigued, part skeptical.
Karen Pagel Guerndt, a realtor, joked that she hopes people don’t hear about Harvard professor Jesse Keenan’s research suggesting Duluth is well-situated to become a climate sanctuary.
“We don’t want to be a big city,” she said.
She’s kidding, of course, she said – after all, she sells homes in Duluth for a living.
Some early climate migrants already are already buying them.
Angel Dobrow, her husband Bob and their dog arrived in Duluth in 2017 from Northfield, about three hours south, and bought a sandy brown brick bungalow on two acres, with a backyard forest included.
Dobrow, who works as a herbalist and for a small company that supports farmers, said they made the move with the future – and growing worries about how climate change might affect them – a top priority.
“The number one criteria for me was access to freshwater. I’m nervous about climate change. I wanted to be where – I mean it’s a little hokey – we could walk and have water,” she said.
Leaving their home of 16 years “was hard,” said Dobrow, 59. “But we felt like we were being freed” from ongoing worries about where they would best be able to ride out climate change impacts.
LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION
Harvard’s Keenan, an idiosyncratic bow tie wearer, first set foot in Duluth in March - three months after he began fleshing out why the quiet town of 86,000 might one day see tens of thousands of new residents settle in.
The professor and his team had identified Duluth after more than 2,000 hours of work studying which U.S. towns might appeal to tomorrow’s climate migrants and have room for them.
In Duluth’s case, the attraction can partly be summed up in an old real estate adage: Location, location, location, said Keenan, an expert in climate adaptation and design.
Duluth abuts the cooling breeze of Lake Superior - a big source of freshwater - and is a reasonable 2.5-hour drive to a dynamic economic hub, Minneapolis.
The northern city’s infamous cool weather means it will be temperate when most of the country sweats in a world climate experts say could be up to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than preindustrial times as early as 2030.
With its secure water supply, it is also less likely to face some of the climate-driven threats other parts of the country may grapple with, including worsening droughts and water shortages.
Other U.S. “Rust Belt” cities - which lost population as heavy industry declined - also have been floated as potential climate refuges, including New York state’s Buffalo and Cincinnati in Ohio.
On a visit to the University of Minnesota Duluth in March, Keenan offered a few sleek potential slogans for the city: “Duluth - not as cold as you think”, “The most climate-proof city in America”, or “Duluth: 99% climate-proof”.
The social scientist was riffing off some of Duluth’s own marketing ideas from another era, when it tried to persuade tourists that the lake-side city was worth a detour.
Duluth’s cool weather has long been the best draw for summer tourists, said Tony Dierckins, a local historian.
Vintage postcards tout the town as “the air-conditioned city” and it was dubbed the country’s “hay fever haven” until the arrival of antihistamines blunted that appeal, Dierckins said.
The invention of air conditioning meant some residents of Rust Belt cities such as Duluth eventually departed for warmer destinations in the south of the United States, following jobs, said David Woodward, a professor of history at UMD.
As a result, Duluth represents a “time capsule” of sorts, with a population virtually unchanged in half a century, Woodward said.
That means there is room for newcomers - but after decades of a somewhat-depressed economy and no need for fresh housing, many of Duluth’s homes have aged. Some fear the city is not ready for an influx.
SERENDIPITY
On Jefferson Street, amid chirping birds and bushy trees, four neat houses speak to Duluth’s housing crisis.
The Loaves and Fishes residences are for Duluth’s homeless residents, most of whom work but cannot afford the high rents landlords typically charge, said Joel Kilgour, who volunteers at the non-profit and chairs the Affordable Housing Coalition.
Rents have skyrocketed largely due to a housing shortage of about 3,000 units. Local housing is shared with about 30,000 college students who need a home during the school year, said UMD’s Woodward.
Kilgour fears a surge of climate migrants could increase pressures on housing, compounding an already “serious internal displacement crisis” and creating a more unjust future for current residents.
“If we as a community can’t solve (current problems), there’s no way that we’re going to be able to handle an influx of climate refugees in an equitable manner,” he said.
That conundrum is on the mind of many more Duluth residents as well, including elected officials such as Mayor Emily Larson, a former Loaves and Fishes volunteer.
In the heart of the Civic Center, Larson’s stately office, with ornate brass lamps hanging from the ceiling, acts as a reminder that this mid-size city hall was intended for a “big city mayor”, she quipped.
If climate migration puts to better use Duluth’s oversize territory and infrastructure - there are 29% more road miles per person here than in the similarly-sized Minnesota town of St. Cloud, federal data shows - the result could be a kind of “ironic serendipity,” said Larson.
But she concedes she has “trepidations” about rapid future growth.
“We struggle like many communities to ensure we have economic opportunity and safety and housing,” she said.
Preservationists such as Dennis Lamkin also fear for the city’s historic housing stock.
After developers build on the ample vacant and forested land on the city’s periphery to meet growing demand for homes, continuing waves of climate migrants could prompt razing of the city’s myriad aging historic mansions to make room for apartments, he worries.
Many mansions were erected during the city’s heyday at the turn of the last century, when more millionaires lived here than anywhere else in the nation, thanks to thriving mining, lumber and wheat industries.
“I would hate to see developers come into town, tear down the historic architecture that we have, and just build non-descript housing units to accommodate climate refugees,” he said.
FUTURES
Harvard’s Keenan said after his presentation in March he received at least two dozen emails from people who had recently moved to Duluth with climate change in mind.
“Last October I bought a house in Duluth. It’s my retirement plan,” said New Yorker Lacy Shelby by email. “I needed ... a lower ‘dose’ of noticeable climate change,” she said.
Word is spreading among physicians too. At St. Luke’s Hospital, recruiter April Knapp, whose job it is to convince in-demand physicians to take a job in Duluth, said reading up on climate change was now on her “to-do list” as she finesses her pitch.
Already, about 10 potential job candidates have mentioned hearing that Duluth may be a climate-proof destination, she said.
In a brutalist campus building next to a highway, Patrick Schoff, the biology research associate at UMD who invited Keenan to present his vision for Duluth, is already plotting next steps.
A conference looking at the economic aspects of positioning Duluth as a climate refuge is in very early planning stages, he explained, and other ideas are circulating as well.
For Dobrow’s close friend, Karen Olson, a future in Duluth is already in the works.
Olson, 51, is also planning in a year or two to leave the Minnesota town of Northfield for Duluth, looking for the best place to ride out forecasted climate threats.
“This feels like the last big thing that I can do in order to have at least tried to be as responsible as I could to my children,” she said.
“I wanted to leave something, a place for my children to potentially have some kind of a chance, some sort of safe harbor.”
Fewer children, fewer climate risks? Niger ponders a controversial option
NIAMEY - Abdulaziz, Aminatu, Absatu, Abdulmanaf. Fahad. And, well, also Mansour. They are the names Zeinab Garba has in mind for any future children she has.
But for now the mother of two has decided to set aside plans for more offspring by using a contraceptive, to give a better future to Rachid, her restless 3-year-old boy, and her newborn son Bilyaminou, mostly a passionate sleeper for now.
“I’m proud to wear the (contraceptive) implant,” said Garba, 20.
In a country with the world’s highest birth rate per woman, hers is an uncommon move and, to some, a controversial one.
But environmentalists and youth activists in Niger hope it is one more families will embrace, to help reduce threats from the destructive effects of a changing climate.
Climate change has meant Niger has seen a swift rise in temperatures and less abundant water flows in rivers, in addition to more intense droughts and floods, said Issa Lele, a meteorologist with the United Nations Development Programme.
That is a growing threat to food and water supplies - and the pressures heighten as the nation’s population booms, with each woman having on average 7.6 children, said Sani Ayouba, the director of environmental group Young Volunteers for the Environment.
“We’re not saying to stop having children,” Ayouba, who has three offspring of his own, said at a September meeting with local non-profit leaders, prompting a wave of laughter.
Instead, he said, his group advocates the use of contraceptives to slow the rate of births - a relief to one listener who said he was expecting his fifth child.
Around the world, a rising global population is increasing pressure on the world’s limited resources, with every additional person in need of food, transport, energy and other resources that drive climate change.
That pressure is worst in the richest countries, where each additional person consumes far more resources than an added child in a poorer country.
But very high birthrates in places like Niger also mean the country’s own limited resources must be shared among more people - a particular problem as climate change disrupts farming and herding, threatening food supplies.
EFFECTIVE - BUT CONTROVERSIAL
At the clinic where Garba was getting a contraceptive implant on a September afternoon, in the district of Talladje in Niamey, herds of cows made their way to pasture just outside.
She breathed deeply when a midwife poked two tiny holes in her arm with a needle and slid in the small, elongated implant.
The five-minute procedure will give her three years without a pregnancy, with a 99% effectiveness rate, the midwife said.
The pill is by far the most popular birth control method in Niger, but at this clinic of the international charity Marie Stopes it is an implant, placed under the skin, that most women seek, said Adama Abdoulaye, a doctor who coordinates the clinic.
More women like Garba streamed in and out of the center’s waiting room, glancing at soap operas playing on the television.
Nigerien authorities back some aspects of family planning, and have begun to allocate money toward the push, said Issoufou Harou, director of family planning at Niger’s Ministry of Public Health.
But a national budget of 200 million FCFA ($340,000) for purchasing contraceptives doesn’t go far enough, said Salamatou Traore, president of the Coalition of Stakeholders for the Repositioning of Family Planning in Niger.
Even that budget - and Garba’s tiny implant - raise big questions in this highly devout Islamic society, however.
Some 99% of Nigerians are Muslim, census data shows, and Islam does not advocate limiting the number of children in a family if they are well cared for, said Sita Amadou of the Islamic Association of Niger, the chief Islamic organisation in the country.
That complicates the ambitious plans of environmental activists who since last year have been working to spread family planning as a buffer against the effects of climate change in Niger.
The activists have met with parliamentarians and cabinet ministers, as well as a range of community groups.
At a recent gathering, in a small, damp room in Niamey, a dozen representatives listened, silently at first, to the pitch about a novel way of fighting growing climate pressures.
“It’s not just about investing in agriculture so that it is organic or sustainable but also in contraceptive methods and family planning everywhere,” said Ayouba, who spoke alongside Issa Garba, who heads the Nigerien Youth Network on Climate Change.
But worries quickly arose from a handful of listeners. Muslim authorities will not accept the proposal, one participant commented.
Ayouba and Garba said current projections - which show the population of Niger tripling by 2050, from 22 million people today, according to U.N. estimates - are untenable.
By some estimates, Niamey, Niger’s sleepy capital of 1 million, could become one of the 10 largest cities in Africa by 2100, with as many as 50 million residents as a result of population growth and urbanisation, European scientists said in the journal Earth’s Future earlier this year.
The country’s 2012-2020 Action Plan for Family Planning commits to making contraceptives available to half of the population by next year - though their availability is less than 20% for now, government data shows.
But Niger’s population growth rate is not simply the result of lack of access to contraception, said Abdou Batouati, a researcher at the Institute for Research in Human Sciences at Niamey’s Abdou Moumouni University.
“Culturally, in Niger, women space out their births at a rate of a child every two years,” he said.
In the city’s open markets, among bars of soap, stalls of lemons and the calls of salesmen, some vendors sell boxes of contraceptive pills, stacked in colorful towers atop trays carried on the vendors’ heads.
The Pharmacy du Point, in the affluent district of Plateau, also sells them. On a table, the manager spreads out rectangular peach, blue and orange boxes of the contraceptives, which sell for anywhere from 300 to 3,060 FCFA ($0.50 to $5.10).
But some people think that the pill “is a way to get people into debauchery,” said Adama Jonathan, a midwife at the clinic that helped Garba with her contraceptive implant.
IN THE PLAN?
Niger is currently a national plan on how it will adapt to climate threats, aiming to integrate those efforts into government planning and budgeting.
In what would be a pioneering move, it may include a section noting the links between boosting family planning and lessening climate change impacts.
“I do not mind doing it, but before that I need to have the approval of my officials” to do so, said Gousmane Moussa, the plan’s liaison to national authorities.
He said U.N. guidelines that inform such adaptation plans do not urge family planning be a part of them.
Should Niger make clear the link between reducing birthrates and lowering climate risks, it might be the first such case in a national plan, said Christian Ledwell, an adaptation plan specialist at the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a Canadian think tank.
But the idea ruffles plenty of feathers in the Sahelian country.
While preparing for the afternoon prayer on the campus of the Abdou Moumouni University, Laminou Adamou Abdoul Azize - a member of the Association of Muslim Students of Niger - said the the idea of a family planning awareness campaign left him lukewarm.
Islam already demands that births be spaced by 30 months, more than the World Health Organization recommendation of 24 months, said Azize, who at 30 has two children and says he will take as many as God provides.
Seydou Boubacar, the former head of the Islamic Association of Niger, offered a blunter rationale for opposing family planning.
“Non-profits, when speaking of family planning, encourage youth to debauchery,” he insisted.
“As soon as they speak of spacing out births, all they do is show rubbers, and that is not okay.”
Russia, China back nuclear as a clean-power fix for Africa
ADDIS ABABA - In a damp office at Ethiopia’s Addis Ababa University, doctoral student Hailu Geremew fantasizes about working on the nuclear reactor his country is now pondering building.
“Oh that is my dream, my dream, my dream,” said the nuclear physicist, 32, wearing rectangular glasses and a cardigan.
Geremew is part of a new generation of African scientists whose prospects are expanding as their governments team up with foreign powers on a potential fast-track to electrification.
For now, South Africa is the only country on the continent operating a nuclear power plant.
But in recent years, at least seven other sub-Saharan African states have signed agreements to deploy nuclear power with backing from Russia, according to public announcements and the World Nuclear Association (WNA), an industry body.
Geremew first heard about the ambitious nuclear deal Ethiopia had struck with Moscow on the television news two years ago. The next day, his university department was buzzing with talk about it.
Ethiopia’s memorandum of understanding on nuclear cooperation with Russia paves the way for the construction of a nuclear power plant and a research reactor in the long term, said Frehiwot Woldehanna, Ethiopia’s state minister for the energy sector.
The East African country has been electrifying rapidly to meet rising energy demand and its own goal to become the biggest power exporter on the continent, while sticking to pledges to remain a low emitter of planet-warming greenhouse gases.
Under a 2015-2020 development plan, Addis Ababa wants to raise power generation to more than 17,000 megawatts (MW) from current capacity of just over 4,200 MW, mainly by harnessing hydro, wind and geothermal sources.
Its most ambitious project under construction is the Grand Renaissance Dam on the Nile river that will churn out 6,000 MW at full capacity when completed within the next four years, according to Ethiopian Electric Power, the state-owned utility.
But Woldehanna worries about betting on an abundance of water for the country’s main source of electricity, as droughts become more frequent.
With rivers sometimes drying up, “you cannot fully rely on hydropower”, he said, adding that nuclear technologies have “environmental” advantages over others.
Plans for a nuclear power plant in Ethiopia remain at the “pre-feasibility stage”, but the country is serious about building one, he emphasized.
‘ATOMS FOR AFRICA’
With sub-Saharan Africa’s 48 countries generating the same amount of power as Spain, despite a population 18 times larger, the option to bring electricity access to their people on a bigger scale using nuclear energy is gaining momentum.
Nearly six out of 10 sub-Saharan Africans still lack access to electricity, according to World Bank data.
Like Ethiopia, emerging nuclear states Sudan, Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Rwanda, Zambia and Ghana have signed agreements with Russia’s state nuclear corporation, ROSATOM – most since 2016.
Their content ranges from language on the construction of nuclear reactors to assistance with feasibility studies and personnel training, press statements show.
ROSATOM’s solutions for managing spent fuel and radioactive waste vary from country to country, but are normally worked out at the later stages of a nuclear new-build program “in the strictest compliance with international law”, a spokeswoman told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Chinese state-owned nuclear firms have also taken the lead in the region, sealing deals with Kenya, Sudan and Uganda, WNA data shows.
South African student Masamaki Masanja, 23, won a ROSATOM competition for young people to make videos about Africa’s nuclear potential, and got to visit the Novovoronezh nuclear power plant in western Russia in 2017.
“It was mind-blowing,” said the second-year mechanical engineering student, via Skype.
The experience left him with a strong sense that nuclear power should be adapted quickly for Africa’s needs.
Sub-Saharan African nations have shown an interest in nuclear because coal is scarce, while large volumes of natural gas in Nigeria and Tanzania tend to be exported for profit, said Jessica Lovering, co-author of a 2018 report, “Atoms for Africa”, from the U.S.-based Center for Global Development.
Booming populations and international pressure to curb greenhouse gas emissions also play a role, she added.
Ethiopia, for instance, has pledged under the Paris Agreement on climate change to curb its already meager emissions by two-thirds from business-as-usual projections by 2030.
The Paris accord, agreed in 2015 by about 195 nations, seeks to wean the global economy off fossil fuels in the second half of this century, limiting the rise in average temperatures to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times.
Ramping up nuclear power may be a carbon-neutral option, but presents dilemmas such as the high cost of building a plant and setting up supporting infrastructure, including safe management of nuclear fuel, said Lovering.
Yet gaining access to large amounts of cheap electricity from nuclear plants that run 24/7 could boost domestic manufacturing, as well as lighting up homes, she said.
REBEL RISK
Some political observers, however, are concerned about the prospect of nuclear reactors backed by Russia in some countries with rebel groups and weak government institutions.
An Africa-based Western diplomat, who asked to remain anonymous, doubted Russia’s assurances it would collect nuclear waste from projects it helped establish.
“You could end up with very unfortunate situations in parts of Africa ... if you have a decaying nuclear power plant overrun by rebels, with waste that’s not going away,” he said.
Multiple requests for an interview with Russia’s ambassador in Ethiopia were declined.
So-called dirty bombs can combine conventional explosives like dynamite with radioactive material such as nuclear waste.
Noel Stott, a South Africa-based researcher with VERTIC, a non-profit that tracks the implementation of international treaties, highlighted an array of agreements in place to control the weaponization of nuclear technology.
The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, to which all African countries but South Sudan are party, mandates safeguards to secure nuclear material, for example.
And 40 nations have joined the Treaty of Pelindaba that creates a nuclear-weapon-free zone in Africa.
HALF-BAKED?
At family-run cookie factory Mo-Ya, which towers over surrounding homes in Addis Ababa, chief executive officer Sara Zemui said Ethiopia’s plans to grow and modernize its energy production would mean better-powered businesses – and more jobs.
Frequent electricity cuts have long disrupted baking at the factory, spoiling batches of the cookies whose sugary scent perfumes Sunday mass at a nearby church.
A few months ago, Mo-Ya forked out more than $100,000 to purchase equipment that, in a blackout, enables a seamless transition to generator power, Zemui said.
Here, as in the nearly two-thirds of Ethiopia with access to an electricity connection, power cuts – and associated costs – are caused mainly by overloads on the ageing grid, said Tilahun Legesse, a director at the Ethiopian Electric Utility.
In other parts of Africa, however, similar daily outages are due to insufficient power production, said Lovering.
At Addis Ababa University, assistant professor Tilahun Tesfaye cannot wait for his country to reap the benefits of a nuclear reactor.
“It’s long, long overdue,” he said. “The need is very high.”
But the road will be a long one, he said, pointing to out-of-order machinery in his nuclear physics laboratory, the largest such facility in this country of 105 million people.
It could take 20 years for Ethiopia to build a nuclear power plant, estimated Hong-Jun Ahn, a Korean electrical engineer who advises the Ethiopian government on its nuclear plans.
Yonas Gebru, director of Addis Ababa-based advocacy group Forum for Environment, said green activists could prove another hurdle amid debate over whether nuclear power is “clean” energy.
“It would be good, and it would be wise also ... to better capitalize on already started initiatives such as hydropower, wind energy (and) solar energy,” said Gebru.
In Ethiopia, climate change leads herders to retrain as farmers
DEMIKA, Ethiopia - The first time Mukulo Orgo cut open a tomato, he expected a mango-like fruit. Did it come from a factory, he wondered?
“People said first you wash it, and you cut with a knife and you prepare it with onion and you cook it, using oil,” said the 40-year-old.
But the first time he butchered a cow, well, he knew perfectly well what to expect.
That is because, like many of his peers, the herder - born in a community where caring for livestock goes back millennia - is retraining as a farmer due the pressures of a changing climate.
For herders like him, an occupation long scorned has become an unlikely lifeline amid droughts that come with ever more frequency in this East African country.
With extreme droughts as much as five times more likely than 60 years ago in parts of the country, the estimated 12 million pastoralists in Ethiopia living off flocks of cows, goats and sheep have been hit hard in recent years.
In the Hamar region, where Orgo lives, 1.5 million of the 3 million animals that herders owned perished during the particularly brutal 2015-2016 drought, when the region saw poor rainfall for 18 months, according to district authorities.
Locals speak of foul-smelling, dried-out carcasses littering the ground as far as the eye could see, flies buzzing only over the freshest specimens.
Orgo, who lost nearly two dozen cows and a dozen goats, said he worries his children’s childhood will not be the same without the animals.
“Without the livestock there is not childhood,” he said, reminiscing about their companionship when he was a small child. “Livestock is everything for Hamar people.”
A TOMATO OMELET
Still, with two wives to feed and seven children, Orgo was the first herder in this town of 2,000 people to take the offer of a free quarter-hectare (0.6 acre) plot of land to cultivate two years ago.
The initial bush clearing was not done without the mockery of other villagers.
“They laughed,” he said. “Why are you working on this land?”
Traditionally, pastoralists have grown only sorghum and maize, relying on the ancient method of sowing seeds on the floodplains, then leaving them alone to grow.
But when he grew 1,900 pounds (850 kg) of tomatoes and onions on his tiny plot the first year, the stocky man who wears a white and blue beaded headband took a liking to the new produce.
A tomato omelet is “sweet”, he said. Skewered goat, though, remains his favorite dish.
Orgo has since purchased a cow with the profit and plans to expand his business selling oil and sugar from a small shop in town.
Amsalu Amane, whose non-profit Farm Africa has been helping the neophyte farmers with materials - including a drip-irrigation system - and aiding them in finding financing and in selling their produce, said farming is gaining in popularity in the herding community.
Some snubbed clearing bush at first, said Amane, the project coordinator. Eventually, however, curious residents paid visits to the plots.
One elder, after making a 3-mile (5 km) trip to the farm by foot each day, eventually took up farming as well, Amande said.
Nearly 70 people have since elected to become “agro-pastoralists”, working on adjacent parcels, usually while holding onto their animals as well.
And the project has expanded to three more areas, said Negusu Aklilu, who heads the aid project, funded by Britain, for UK-based Farm Africa.
UNDER PRESSURE
If all goes well, nearly 70,000 herders will have diversified their income by the end of the aid project in March, through farming but also other activities such as honey and timber production, Aklilu said.
“It’s not easy (to make changes) but they don’t have any other option,” he said.
Climate change “is putting more pressure on the communities to do something else, or to eat something else, rather than just depend on that earlier kind of lifestyle.”
Experts disagree about how effective a pastoralist lifestyle is in the face of worsening drought, with some arguing herders well supported with enough land, water points and veterinary care can continue to thrive.
But shrinking amounts of land available to herd animals, as many African nations try to develop and expand farming, is making herding more challenging - and vulnerable to conflicts with farmers - in many places.
Herders or farmers who can expand the number of products they produce and their sources of income are likely to be more resilient to climate and other shocks, experts say.
Hamar and Borana people, and other pastoral tribes who live in arid and lowland parts of Ethiopia, have long felt government pressure to conform to a sedentary lifestyle.
As they cross borders in search of feed during transhumance journeys, the herders are sometimes viewed as a security threat, amid fears they could traffick weapons to rebels, said Argaw Ambelu, a professor at Ethiopia’s Jimma University.
The moving population also is a challenge to the government’s ability to provide herders with basic public services, from hospitals to schools, Ambelu said.
Ethiopia’s booming economy, as well, has meant public land on which animals once grazed is increasingly dedicated to industrial projects.
Ethiopia’s plan to develop its sugar industry has extended to this area, with sugar plantations planned in two districts neighboring Hamar, according to the Ethiopian Sugar Corporation.
The result, said Ambelu, has often been herders feeling frustrated as their way of life slowly withers under new constraints.
Still, cattle weigh heavily in Hamar traditions. A young man who has proposed, for instance, must jump over a line of up to 30 bulls, one by one, under the judging gaze of his love, said Farm Africa’s Amane. A fall means he is not yet wedding material.
Cows are also offered as dowry.
“Settlement activities definitely erode the rich culture of pastoralists,” Ambelu said.
CASH COWS
Back in the Demika countryside, 42-year-old Turimi Turga, for one, said she liked how adding farming to her skills was working out.
“Before, out grandfathers, if there was a drought, they traveled nearby and they took water. Now they fight each other ... for water and grazing land” as water becomes scarcer, she said.
She could not wait for plump tomatoes and shiny green peppers to hang from her plants come the April harvest.
Turga and another three dozen women share a small plot of land neighboring that of Orgo, on a flat plane broken by a lone acacia tree and crisscrossed by black rubber hoses - the drip-irrigation system.
She said she hoped to purchase cattle with the profits she expects to reap from selling produce.
She still views herself as a pastoralist - but it has been some two years since she last had cattle to care for. The 2016 drought killed all 15 of her animals, she said.
The Story of the Black Band-Aid
A reinvention of "flesh-colored"
Since its unpretentious invention in 1920 by Johnson & Johnson in New Brunswick, New Jersey, the Band-Aid was long manufactured in a single color: a soft pink. In a 1955 TV commercial, the company showed one on the hand of a Caucasian woman: "Neat, flesh-colored, almost invisible," a voice-over said.
Orundu Johnson, a 66-year-old African American woman living in Harlem, remembers. "The bandages would say flesh color, and I'd explain to my kids, 'Well, that's not your flesh.'
"The bandages would say flesh color, and I'd explain to my kids, 'Well, that's not your flesh.'"
The irony of African-Americans sticking pink patches on their darker flesh did not go unnoticed by the black liberation movement either. In White Is, a militant cartoon book published in 1969 at the initiative of Harlem-based activist Preston Wilcox, a drawing depicted a young man in Black Panther garb with eyes rolled upwards, fixated at the protuberant white adhesive bandage on his forehead. The caption read: "White is a flesh colored band-aid."
Johnson & Johnson, the market leader, estimates that it has sold more than 100 billion Band-Aids worldwide. As of 2011, the multinational claimed 62 percent of the adhesive bandage sales in the United States. While there are now clear Band-Aids, it is still to the chagrin of Orundu Johnson that none of the dozens of designs, from the standard beige to the model embellished with Muppet characters, are made to blend with African-American skin.
The persistent market gap for black bandages doesn't surprise marketing consultant Pepper Miller. In recent years, the African-American population has become a driving force in the U.S. market at large, increasing at a faster pace than that of the rest of the country and projected to represent a market share worth $1.1 trillion by 2015, according to Nielsen. That was not always so, though. Cosmetics giants such as Cover Girl and Estee Lauder only began offering makeup lines for dark-skinned women in the 1980s.
It was 15 years ago that New York entrepreneur Michael Panayiotis created Ebon-Aid. The orange box read: "The bandage exclusively designed for people of color," and they came in shades called black licorice, coffee brown, cinnamon, and honey beige.
Johnson recalls the day she found Ebon-Aide in a Harlem pharmacy. She bought dozens of boxes. For her kids, but also to pack into the first-aid kits of the Harlem school where she worked as a director. "It was always a political statement for me," she said.
But one day, Ebon-Aides disappeared from the shelves. Johnson reached out to the manufacturer repeatedly.
Panayiotis remembers her requests.
A Cyprus-born father of two, Panayiotis thought he had found a niche market with promising returns when he launched Ebon-Aide. Retail giants from Wal-Mart to Rite Aid agreed to carry his product. "We found out with our market research that between the African American market and the Hispanic market we would capture about 25 percent to 28 percent of the market," he said. "We wanted to do all the first-aid products in black."
But Panayiotis was frustrated by the placement of his product, which usually ended up on separate shelves dedicated to satisfying the needs of Afro-American customers. "If you don't show it to people, how are they going to buy it?" he said.
By late 2002, out of an original lot of 1 million boxes of bandages, he had sold only around 20,000. After losing his original $2 million investment -- including $600,000 to manufacture the product in South Korea and Canada -- Panayiotis' company folded.
He stored his inventory in a 10,000-square foot warehouse, donating the bandage boxes little by little to whoever showed some interest, and selling the last lot to a Miami company. Panayiotis, now 65, has since moved on to run an IT service company.
Los Angeles-based marketing consultant Harry Webber, who was responsible for the advertising of Johnson & Johnson's Band-Aid between 1963 and 1968, said that the product's flesh color was "a non-issue" during his years promoting it. "Johnson & Johnson's consideration was this was a mass market product, and as mass market product you look at what is the largest faction of that market and you create the product for that faction," he said. "So for non-whites, at that time being between 12 percent and 15 percent of the total population, there was no way anybody was considering making a Band-Aid Brand adhesive bandage to mask the color of skin that is the complete spectrum, from pink to ebony."
Panayiotis, for his part, said the he felt the market was ripe for his product once more. "Still today, after so many years, I get phone calls and emails by people who want to see it."
"You're going to see it in the market again," he said.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/06/the-story-of-the-black-band-aid/276542/
In Louisiana, an appetite for oysters shields retreating shores
POINTE-AUX-CHENES, Louisiana - Brendan Causgrove’s first encounter with an oyster did not go well. He choked on the plump specimen at the bottom of a hard-alcohol shot after knocking it back.
Now the manager of a smart New Orleans restaurant whose menu features 13 kinds of oysters, the 37-year-old describes them as if they were fine wine - “herbaceous”, “buttery” or “briny”.
His fervor also means Seaworthy is among 19 restaurants in this coastal U.S. city that have joined an oyster-shell recycling program aiming to help save the state’s shrinking shoreline.
The nerve center of the push to turn good food into a good deed for the environment is a fourth-floor office suite in Mid-City, a 10-minute drive from New Orleans’ French Quarter, known to some as the oyster capital of the world.
Since 2014, Deborah Abibou and her small team at the non-profit Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana have recycled 7.8 million pounds (3.5 million kg) of oyster shells, which they have returned to the water in the form of manmade reefs.
The aim is to stop Louisiana’s shoreline crumbling away at the current rate of a football field every 100 minutes.
Early each weekday morning, a recycling truck zig zags through the city to pick up the mollusk shells from restaurants.
The shells are then left to dry in the sun for six months, to kill off any bacteria, before being put into cages that are planted on bare seafloors or riverbeds to form protective walls.
The brand new reefs offer an inviting home for oysters.
But to humans, the “living shorelines”, which grow as they attract oyster larvae, serve as robust buffers that dissipate wave energy, prevent coastal erosion, and trap sediment that can build up new land, said Abibou.
Those benefits are boosting the popularity of manmade oyster reefs as a natural alternative to hard infrastructure like seawalls, which are often made with cement, said Alex Kolker, a professor at Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium.
There is no national database tracking the total mileage of oyster-shell coastal protection projects, experts say.
But Bryan DeAngelis, a program coordinator at The Nature Conservancy (TNC), said there are signs the technique is entering the mainstream.
Just in Louisiana, 6 miles (10 km) of protective oyster reefs have been set up with TNC’s help, he said.
In New York City, nearly three-quarters of a mile of breakwaters seeded with oysters are in the works off the coast.
And last year, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers created a nationwide permit that allows “living shorelines”, encompassing oyster reefs.
SACRED SITE
The dangers of failing to arm the coast against creeping waters are especially real for communities whose lives are tied to the disappearing land.
Authorities fear Louisiana, which has already lost more than 1,800 square miles (4,700 square km) of land since the 1930s, will cede another 2,250 square miles over the next half century.
Declaring a coastal “state of emergency” last year, the state’s governor said natural and human factors had contributed to the problem, including the effects of climate change, sea-level rise, subsidence, hurricanes, storm surges and flooding.
In Pointe-aux-Chenes, a village on the frontier of solid land and marshland, where locally caught crabs, oysters and fish have fed a small native American community, the water has turned from friend to foe since eating away at a sacred site.
Ancestors of the Pointe-au-Chien Indian Tribe settled here “before America”, said member Donald Dardar.
In the wetlands outside town, a 10-foot (3-m) mound stands shrouded in dense vegetation, said to be a burial or ceremonial ground, according to the 63-year-old with leathery skin and piercing green eyes.
“So we respect it, stay off of it,” he said.
But the mound, where dusty pieces of broken pottery have been found, is now at risk of being washed away from one side, flanked by a canal or bayou.
Dug decades ago for transportation, the channel has widened over the years, gobbling about a quarter of the site in 10 years, said Dardar.
Two years ago, the shrimp fisherman decided to act.
“It’s just part of history that I don’t want to see washed away,” he said.
He looked into building a wall to protect the mound and secured a government grant of nearly $70,000 for an oyster reef.
If all goes well, tribe members will hoist 8,400 bags of oyster shells, each weighing some 35 pounds, into their boats next February. Volunteers will then help plunge them into the bayou’s muddy waters to form a half-a-mile barrier.
RED TAPE
But not all is plain sailing. At a recent meeting, tribe members expressed frustration at red tape holding things back.
“It still bothers me big time right now because it’s taking so long to get this going and protect (the site),” said Dardar.
An environmental assessment took a year to complete and some permits have still to come through, said the CRCL’s Abibou.
Getting the necessary approvals to install oyster reefs has slowed down projects across the United States, said Pete Malinowski, head of the Billion Oyster Project, a non-profit that restores reefs in New York.
Rules vary by state, but initiatives often hit bureaucratic barriers because oyster reefs are regulated as a food product rather than in their new role as an ecological tool.
“That doesn’t make sense because that’s not why they’re there: no one’s eating them,” Malinowski said.
“We often find ourselves with the funding, the technical expertise, the community support at a much grander scale than we’re able to get permission for.”
Today’s changing mindset around oysters has been in the making for decades, said Matthew Booker, a professor at North Carolina State University who has written on the theme.
Recognition of their value independent of food can be traced to the 1950s, when shells started to be used in the United States as paving material and railroad ballast, as well as to make cement, he said.
“By the late 20th century some scientists realized, ‘These things are buffering storms’,” said Booker.
At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Antonio Rodriguez, a marine geologist, said his interest was sparked by visiting oyster reefs his predecessors had planted near campus.
Seven years on, the academic - one of the first to promote protective oyster reefs through his research - warned the measure was buying time, but as sea levels rise with climate change, more drastic action may be needed.
"What people really need to be thinking about is maybe moving away from the shoreline a little bit," he said.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-climatechange-coast-idUSKBN1O10K0
U.N. reform needed to stop companies fighting climate rules: Nobel laureate Stiglitz
NEW YORK - Multinational companies will increasingly file massive cases against host countries when climate change policies affect their profits, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said.
To stop governments from weakening their environmental laws to avoid such disputes, reform of a little-known international trade process - the investor state dispute settlement (ISDS) - is needed, he said.
Under ISDS, a nation that hurts a company’s profits by imposing new rules that add to the cost of building a natural gas pipeline, for example, could be sued by the company, Stiglitz said.
ISDS cases can “instill fear of environmental regulations, climate regulations because you know that it’s going to be costly” for governments, he said.
“It’s litigation terrorism.”
With ISDS claims possible under more than 3,000 trade agreements worldwide, cases have proliferated in the last decade or so, according to the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment (CCSI).
There are now nearly 950 ISDS suits on record, a United Nations Conference on Trade and Development database showed.
Typical claims are brought against developing and middle-income nations by ultra-wealthy corporations or individuals and seek damages of nearly $300 million on average, CCSI said.
At least five cases have been filed in direct response to environmental regulations, the research center found.
Another four cases were related to the enforcement of environmental provisions, but environmental rules were not the only source of the dispute, it found.
In the latest such case, filed in November 2018, U.S. coal producer Westmoreland said a Canadian plan to phase out coal by 2030 in the province of Alberta treated the company’s coal mines in a “grossly unfair” way.
The company has claimed at least $470 million in damages in the case, which remains active.
Elliot Feldman, a counsel for Westmoreland, said the dispute concerned the company’s exclusion from a compensation plan for Canadian coal power firms affected by Alberta’s phase-out policy.
“Westmoreland is contesting the failure of the government of Alberta to accord it fair and equitable treatment,” he said.
Canada’s ministry of foreign affairs did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
ISDS cases risk having a “chilling effect” on implementing the stringent climate regulations required to fulfill a pact to curb global warming, Stiglitz said.
The 2015 Paris Agreement agreed by nearly 200 nations aims to limit a rise in average world temperatures to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times.
An ongoing attempt at reforming the U.N.-administered ISDS rules that are embedded in thousands of bilateral trade treaties offer a rare opportunity to put an end to the “pernicious litigation”, said Stiglitz.
“Until we resolve this ... we (ought) not to have any more agreements” including ISDS clauses, he said.
More than 100 governments agreed to address ISDS shortcomings and look at developing alternatives at a U.N. meeting last month, including a European Union proposal for an investment court system, CCSI said.
Reform should include lifting the “secrecy” that clouds ISDS cases, limiting grounds for filing a case, making compulsory the use of domestic courts before the ISDS system, and excluding from damages the loss of expected profits, said Stiglitz.
“Until you resolve all these issues there should be a total moratorium,” he said.
Syrian Americans draw domestic battle lines as civil war finds foothold in US
New Yorker Sarab Al-Jijakli has long lived by a simple rule: food is just that much better in New Jersey. The 37-year-old had been an advertising executive by day and gourmet by night for many years. But it all changed when the war between President Bashar Al-Assad and rebel forces erupted in his native Syria.
Since then, the Brooklyn resident has stopped going to Sultan, a cozy Middle Eastern restaurant with a lavish menu in Clifton, New Jersey. No more fattoush sprinkled with crispy triangles of fried pita, and goodbye eras naana, a grilled meat cooked with mint. A sacrifice, certainly, but one Al-Jijakli does not regret.
That's because the restaurant, like many other establishments across the country, has become one of the many battlegrounds where the conflict has taken a domestic foothold. Founded by a pair of Syrian American friends in 1995, Sultan became mired in controversy, its mezze a guilty pleasure, when in the first months of the conflict in 2011 the pair were rumored to have quarreled, one partner in favor of Assad, the other against. When the latter walked out, leaving the pro-Assad partner in charge, opposition sympathizers like Al-Jijakli began boycotting the restaurant.
At a time when Syria is torn apart by a conflict that has divided its population along sectarian lines, Syrians in the United States have also been waging a battle along imaginary frontlines that criss-cross the everyday institutions that once brought them together. Although the war rages thousands of kilometers away and such violence here is unthinkable, Syrian Americans have still mobilized to fight a mirroring conflict that consumes personal and professional life.
Syrians have never had a big presence in the United States, but the Syrian American diaspora has trickled into the country at a regular pace since the first important wave of immigrants arrived in the late 19th century. In 2005, there were 154,560 Syrians in America, according to the US census bureau – a drop in the US melting pot that finds its collective identity in its restaurants, temples and associations. Or at least it did, until the Syrian homeland spiralled into a conflict that has seen bloodletting on an unprecedented scale. The United Nations estimates that some 70,000 Syrians have perished so far since the beginning of the Syrian civil war in March 2011.
Mohamed Khairullah, too, frequented Sultan Restaurant, until he learned about the political convictions of its owner. He now shuns it. Khairullah traveled with his family from Aleppo, Syria, to Prospect Park, a small town in New Jersey, at the age of five, and grew up to become the small town's mayor, a position he has held since 2007. Throughout the years, he has kept a close connection with his cousins, aunts and uncles in Aleppo, a city of two million that was transformed into an urban warzone last summer and has yet to recover. When he was invited by a charity group to attend a function at Sultan, Kahirulla's took a stance. "I flat out said I wouldn't attend." The group changed the venue. (The owner of Sultan Restaurant turned down a request for comment.)
Pro-Assad Syrian businesses are not the only ones to be targeted. Syrian Americans supporting the revolution have also been avoiding small businesses they deem to be uncooperative with revolution activists. In the town of Paterson, New Jersey, some like Khairullah have declared two supermarkets owned by Syrian immigrants and frequented by the diaspora, Nouri Brothers and Fattal, a no man's land for pro-revolutionaries. The owners of the two supermarkets specialized in Middle Eastern products had refused to pin to their billboards pro-revolution posters that advertised fundraising efforts or protests in the early days of the revolution. "When we asked them to post something that has to do with the revolution, they would refuse," he said.
Albert Nouri, a co-owner of Nouri Brothers, said he was unaware of the informal boycott, and that he wanted to stay clear of any discussion on the Syrian conflict. Nouri was born in Syria and planted his roots in the United States more than three decades ago, though he still has distant family members in his home country. "Anybody who talks to me here about politics I say 'Please, no, this place is not for politics,'" he said. "We sell cheese and olive and bread. This is a place to do business, not politics."
Still, Kahirulla said that kind of attitude was sufficient ground for boycott. "The wishy washiness in itself, with the amount of killing that's going on, it forces us to take a stance," he said. "As silly as this might sound, it's important to us now because it's our families that are getting killed, and anybody who stands with the killer is not someone we want to support financially."
Associations have also been affected. Al-Jijakli heads the Network of Arab-American Professionals, a non-profit with chapters across the country. As president, he has pushed for the organization to take a stance in favor of the anti-Assad opposition. The group, with about 2,000 members in New York and New Jersey, has sent hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of humanitarian aid to towns and cities under rebel control in Syria. But the move also sent his organization temporarily spinning out of control, as members disagreed over which side of the conflict to root for. When at its annual street festival the group raised the green-white-black Syrian flag of independence instead of red-white-black one which the current Syrian government uses, some pro-Assad members expressed their irritation.
"When the revolution hit, pretty much across all Syrian American organizations a couple of things happened," he said. "One was, for the most part, the organizations pretty much had to make a choice and internally, there were squabbles which kicked out the pro-Assad leadership."
That polarization does not surprise University of Oklahoma professor and Syria expert Joshua Landis, who says it merely reflects the sectarian divide in Syria. The Syrian civil war is widely read as a conflict between the majority Sunni Muslim community and a patchwork of religious minorities – among them Alawite Muslims, Christians and Druze Muslims. "Sectarian identity is a large part of Syrians, and it gets imported to America," he said. "Anti-Assad is just a code word for Sunni, for people who don't like to speak about it."
But some Syrians say the phenomenon has also resulted in the rebirth of their community. In Syria and in the US, without the usual heavy involvement of the Syrian government – known for its authoritarianism – in civil society, genuine grassroots organizations have grown for the first time in decades. Zaher Sahloul, a Chicago-based 47-year-old physician specializing in pulmonary disease, is another anti-Assad activist and the volunteer director of the Syrian American Medical Society.
The group went through a lengthy period of internal discord before taking a pro-revolution stance; members were uneasy when in the months following the beginning of the conflict the organization ignored it. "Our people were restless," he said.
When the organization finally sent medical doctors to Syria and bordering countries to treat civilians, two board members stepped down. "One of them is known to be a friend of one of the very close circles of Assad – the cousin of Assad. The other person, his family owns a hospital that is frequented by government fighters," Sahloul said. But after the initial backlash, participation in the organization spiked, surging to 500 members from an original 140. "Of course, people who thought sending medical relief was a political statement left the organization," he said.
At the Nouri Brothers supermarket, Albert Nouri said he had no doubt customers would see past the boycott. "We've been here for a long time, we know what we're doing in the business."
His boycotter, Kahirulla, agreed that he could foresee the day when the boycott would end and business would resume as usual. Resuming life as usual, however, could take longer. "We have a long way to heal, because people have put their trenches in the ground," he said.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/09/syria-america-diaspora-new-york
U.S. lawmakers tuck into juicy debate over meat substitutes
NEW YORK - Towering over a wooden podium in the Arkansas General Assembly this month, Republican representative David Hillman, a self-declared calf-roper, spoke of steak to pitch his latest bill.
“I want my rib-eye steak to have been walking around on four feet at one time or another,” he said. His proposal, making it illegal for meat-substitute products to be labeled as meat, was swiftly adopted.
Across the United States, tens of similar bills have been introduced - some unsuccessfully - as well as half a dozen with opposing aims, as an out-of-sight battle heats up between friends and foes of plant-based meat.
One key issue at stake is whether the rise of alternative meat in the world’s largest beef and veal-producing nation could substantially reduce its planet-warming emissions.
Rearing animals is a major driver of climate change - accounting for nearly 15 percent of greenhouse gas emissions - while producing meat uses land and water less efficiently than growing crops, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization says.
Increasingly, many environmentalists are placing their hopes in greener alternatives for carnivores, including lab-grown meat.
Led by plant-based foods, which mimic the taste, texture and look of meat, the U.S. alt-meat market is forecast to nearly double to $2.5 billion by 2023, according to market research firm Euromonitor International.
Lab-grown meat is not yet being sold.
The trend has put the country’s half-a-million meat-industry workers on edge, and prompted more than 20 meat-producing states, from Wyoming to Indiana and Nebraska, to look at adopting legislation similar to Hillman’s, according to The Good Food Institute, a nonprofit that promotes meat alternatives.
In contrast, legislative bodies in states with enthusiastic backers of vegan diets - green groups, animal rights activists and health campaigners - have pushed bills encouraging plant-based food, first in California, followed by Washington D.C., New York and Oregon.
HOSPITALS AND SCHOOLS
In California, which made history last year with a law guaranteeing “plant-based meals” for hospital patients, tutor and homemaker Genelle Palacio said her support for a follow-up effort aimed at schools came from personal experience.
The bill for schools has a “reasonable chance” of making it past the committee examining it, said Kristin Olsen, a former California Republican lawmaker who was vice chairwoman of that committee.
Palacio, 40, recounted her wild goose-chase for a vegan option in a southern California hospital in the summer of 2014, about two hours after she gave birth to her second son.
The mother of four was offered Oreo cookies, potato chips, a turkey sandwich, Pepsi and coffee, which she rebuffed.
“They sent me chicken broth next,” she told state lawmakers at a hearing last April. “They said there’s no chicken in the soup,” she added, prompting laughter in the audience.
Her ordeal, which ended with a Chinese stir-fry her husband fetched from a nearby restaurant, ignited her quest to make plant-based options more widely accessible, including for her vegan children in their school cafeteria.
“My kids should be able to eat at their school just like their peers,” she said in a phone interview.
New York City became on Monday the largest U.S. school system to serve all-vegetarian food in public schools once a week as part of a global movement to cut down on meat-eating.
In the Palacio household, a “Beyond Burger” patty made from plants, including pea protein, has become a popular dinner dish for the children.
The product is sold in 13,000 grocery stores since California-based firm Beyond Meat, which is backed by Microsoft Corp founder Bill Gates, launched it on the retail market in 2016. Two patties cost $5.99 at one New York City supermarket.
WORRIED CATTLEMEN
In Nebraska, which has the nation’s second-highest heads of cattle after Texas, Pete McClymont of the state cattlemen’s association described the worry among his 4,000 members at the rise in plant-based products like Beyond Burger, which looks just like ground beef.
On one day alone in early March, the executive vice-president of Nebraska Cattlemen received three emails from members asking him to soldier on in defense of real meat.
“This goes to their livelihood and what they do every day,” he said. “You get tied to the land, you get tied to the animals and it’s just part of who you are.”
His group is among those that helped shape a state bill seeking to outlaw the marketing of meat alternatives as meat.
If alarm bells are ringing in cattle country, it is largely because farmers fear a repeat of what many consider a debacle over milk, said McClymont, a fourth-generation cattle farmer.
While cow milk remains an American home staple, its sales have tumbled by nearly 19 percent since the market peaked four years back, according to research firm Mintel.
More than half of consumers who now buy less dairy milk consume more of the non-dairy kind, including almond, coconut and soy, a 2018 report by Mintel noted.
The popularity of those beverages has been partly attributed to their labeling as milk.
Similarly, if plant-based and lab-grown meats continue to be loosely identified as “meat”, they could make a dent in the $110-billion U.S. meat market, said Ernest Baskin, an assistant professor of food marketing at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.
“If you label something a meat, that means this is a substitute for a dinner or lunch opportunity where I would otherwise eat meat,” said Baskin.
Ultimately an acquired taste for meat alternatives, rather than laws, will likely determine whether consumers call them meat, he added.
Arkansas politician Hillman disagreed. “It’s led by the businesses,” he said.
In warming Mali, weather forecasts help cool flaring tempers
PARANA, Mali - Baba Coulibaly, a farmer in Mali, knows just how bitter disputes over food and fodder can become in a time of worsening drought.
Last year, a fellow villager pulled out a rifle and shot dead a nomadic herder because he and his cows had trespassed on the man’s field, he recalls.
It was a year of punishing drought in the central Malian village of Parana, he said, and subsistence farmers like Coulibaly saw some half of their harvest lost, forcing them to dip into their savings to escape hunger.
“For sure, if harvests aren’t good, the climate is increasingly unpredictable, and herders come on our fields spoiling the little we have, it’s going to end violently,” said Coulibaly.
Climate change is driving much drier conditions in Africa’s Sahel, a belt below the Sahara that has experienced a 50 percent hike in record dry months in recent decades, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research said in a report earlier this month.
In arid Mali, age-old tensions that pit farmers against herders crossing their land in search of fodder are at risk of flaring as warming drives droughts, leading to more crops failing.
Finding ways to reduce those tensions can be a matter of life or death.
Coulibay said it was in 2002 that he and others in the village first noticed the seasons had gone awry.
Rain arrived a month later than usual that year, delaying the planting of seeds in the village, whose hundred inhabitants live in sculpted mud houses baked by an abundant sun.
“It was a shock,” said the 32-year-old. Before, frogs croaking or the arrival of stocks signaled the start of the rain season, Coulibaly said.
But “now it doesn’t work,” he said, with the birds arriving even if there is no rain.
To supplement their falling income from crops, farmers increasingly have taken small contracts as security guards, handymen or house helpers in Mali’s cities, Coulibaly said.
But with criminal groups roaming the area, and Islamist groups pushing into once peaceful regions nearby, most would rather stay home and watch over their land and family.
‘THINGS CAN DEGENERATE’
On a recent morning, in the neighboring village of Terekungo, women carried on their heads metal basins that shone in the sun, streaming in small groups to the fields to harvest beans.
But the peaceful scene hid a more complicated backdrop.
Ibrahim Toumagnon, a 55-year-old with a salt-and-pepper beard, said conflicts with herders are a regular problem in the area.
Earlier that week, Toumagnon, who cultivates about 10 hectares (25 acres) of millet, rice and beans, surprised a herder snoozing under a tree on his land.
Nearby the herder’s animals were busy eating Toumagnon’s healthy millet plants, he said.
“When I saw him, I felt like striking him on the head!” said the farmer, laughing loudly as he raised his hoe high in the air to mimick the blow. Instead, he shook the young herder awake and showed him the exit.
But a few years earlier, he recalled, another farmer in a similar situation beat a herder to death.
As farming grows more uncertain even as the pressure to feed sometimes multiple wives and flocks of children remains steady, “for sure things can degenerate,” he said.
“People were unhappy because there was little to harvest - it made them impulsive,” he said.
WARNING SIGNS
For Serigne Bamba Gaye, who teaches at the Center for High Defense and Security Studies in Dakar, harsher climate variations that exacerbate conflict have become a “central” issue across the Sahel, a semi-arid region that includes Mali.
Small farmers losing their cool, with fatal results, in Parana and Terekungo are examples “that can be multiplied infinitely,” he said in a telephone interview.
A range of efforts to curb such tensions are underway, including a U.K. government-funded effort to set up pastoralist corridors in the Sahel, to ensure herders can move their livestock - including across national borders - safely.
Another way to help ease the pressure, experts say, is to help farmers grow more in harsher times.
Since the 1990s, humanitarian projects seeking to help farmers by equipping them with state-of-the-art data on climate and weather have been expanding in the region, said Amanda King, a researcher at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a Washington think tank.
“That early intervention is among the best kinds of humanitarian assistance to keep from crossing tipping points that could lead to conflict,” said King, who works for the group’s environmental change and security program.
“You need to look at early warning signs in order to prevent these risks.”
Sandji - one such initiative that kicked off in April - offers farmers in the two villages a text with a daily weather forecast for 25 CFA francs ($0.05) a day - the cost of about two tomatoes.
Forecasts are not new here, with radios countrywide relaying the Mali’s weather agency’s predictions.
But those forecasts cover tens to hundreds of square kilometers, a far cry from the pinpoint accuracy of Sandji, which the U.K. government has been funding through the Building Resilience and Adaptation to Climate Extremes and Disasters (BRACED) program, said Bouba Traore, a scientist working on the project.
Farmers who use Sandji receive forecasts tailored to a 3-square kilometer (1-square mile) area from their exact geo-location at the time they registered for the service, he said.
Poor mobile phone network quality has been an issue in three of the 30 villages where the project operates, Bouba said.
But farmers find ways to manage: some climb on their house to grab a signal, while others walk the area looking for a connection.
Service has not been a problem for Sonou Toumagnon, Ibrahim’s younger brother.
“Today, probable rain in the afternoon. Tomorrow, probable rain,” read a text on the 36-year-old’s old Tecno cell phone. The brothers share the information, he said.
It’s already had one big payoff, he said.
Weeks earlier, Ibrahim and two of his brothers laid their freshly-harvested beans on their shared house’s corrugated tin roof to dry them in the sun.
Sandji, however, forecast rain that day, raising the risk the crop could be spoiled.
“The weather wasn’t at all menacing,” Ibrahim remembers. But hours later, when the sky opened up with rain, the beans stayed dry - tucked away in a metal drum ahead of the showers.
U.S. climate summit ends with California promising satellite carbon monitoring
SAN FRANCISCO - After a week in which cities and companies announced plans to speed action on global warming, a San Francisco climate summit ended Friday with host California promising to launch its own satellite to track major emissions sources.
The commitment came as Hurricane Florence swept into North Carolina, battering residents with heavy rain and 90-mph (144-kph) winds. Scientists say climate change is likely to increase the intensity and frequency of such extreme weather.
“Against this urgent and scary backdrop and against the backdrop of inaction in Washington DC ... we also heard a way forward” against climate change at the summit, said Jennifer Granholm, a former Michigan state governor.
Company executives unveiled expanded plans to reduced climate-changing emissions, and mayors and governors committed to abandon coal and champion clean energy, she told 4,500 delegates to the summit.
Frances Seymour, a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute, a Washington-based think tank, said the gathering marked the start of more united climate action by government bodies and agencies beyond the U.S. national government, with disparate alliances and initiatives now “gelling”.
The gathering organized by California Governor Jerry Brown ended with Brown announcing the West Coast state was venturing into space monitoring of climate-changing emissions.
“We’re gonna launch our own satellite ... to figure out where the pollution is and where we’re going to end it,” the governor said.
The satellite would help pinpoint the source of highly potent greenhouse gases, including methane, the governor’s office said in a press release.
In May, the journal Science reported that the White House planned to cut funding for a satellite and aircraft-based system to monitor climate-changing emissions.
Brown has been particularly outspoken in the face of the President Donald Trump’s plans, announced last year, to retreat from the 2015 Paris climate pact.
The governor had previously vowed to launch a satellite to track climate change data if the federal government suspended its own efforts.
The Paris accord aims to limit the rise in global temperatures to well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit), and ideally to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
‘ADDED MOMENTUM’
The San Francisco summit saw a torrent of new pledges of climate action, from companies promising to bring their greenhouse gas emissions to zero to governors committing to work with indigenous people to protect forests.
Major announcements included 21 tech companies joining forces to cut greenhouse gases, investors managing $5.6 trillion in assets saying they would halt deforestation and Indian conglomerate Mahindra promising to slash its greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2040.
The commitments “have added momentum to that global movement,” said former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, an outspoken climate change campaigner.
“We are seeing businesses lead the way, we are seeing investors lead the way, we are seeing cities and counties and all kinds of civic organizations leading the way,” he said.
The summit also included a push for more efforts to trap climate-changing emissions in forests, soils, oceans and other natural systems.
The summit included “many bold commitments in areas that were already maturing, like renewable energy,” Nick Nuttall, a conference spokesman, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
But it was also clear that natural ways to store carbon need to be used more effectively quickly to deal with growing climate threats, he said.
Earth’s oceans, forests and other ecosystems soak up about half the carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere by human activities each year, scientists say.
In closing remarks, U.N. climate chief Patricia Espinosa also called for a new era of climate diplomacy that includes not just national governments but also cities and regional bodies as well as industries - an approach she dubbed “inclusive multilateralism”.
Storm spurs Caribbean island resort to recover lost paradise
CANE GARDEN BAY, British Virgin Islands - Sun loungers dot the white sand of Cane Garden Bay, a beach resort tucked between steep hillsides and the azure sea in the British Virgin Islands. Yachts bob in the harbor and brightly painted homes line quiet streets.
But behind this tranquil scene, locals are on edge after the destruction wrought by Hurricane Irma last September.
Amid fears more wild weather could decimate their incomes - which depend on tourists enjoying the bay’s stunning beauty - the close-knit community is acting to keep its head above water.
Wetlands, mangroves, ponds and coral reefs are being restored to protect the village from future floods and storms.
Local celebrity Quito Rymer, a reggae singer-songwriter, is among those whose property was gutted by Hurricane Irma.
Packing winds of 185 miles per hour (300 kph), the storm whipped up waves 30-feet (9 m) high that crashed against buildings, and sent roofs flying through the air.
Rymer, sporting dreadlocks and his trademark orange cap, used to play two or three times a week to a loyal audience at his oceanfront restaurant-bar. The hurricane stopped that.
Now he is rebuilding “Quito’s Gazebo” from scratch for the winter tourist season.
Cane Garden Bay has been transformed in recent decades from a rustic hamlet into a must-see tourist destination, Rymer said.
That has been a boon for the local economy. But the process of rapid development has scarred wetlands, ponds and other natural features that once kept low-lying areas from flooding.
“It was a little bit of short-sightedness on our part,” said Rymer. “You have to have a balance, or you lose what you love.”
Since February, the 66-year-old has mobilized green-minded residents - many still rebuilding their homes and businesses - to work as volunteers restoring the damaged ecosystem.
“We know for a fact the government cannot do everything,” said Rymer. “We have decided to take things in our hands.”
STINKY WATER
For the village of about 500 people, it is a tough task.
In the past, ponds captured stormwater coursing down the hillsides, said Shannon Gore, a U.S.-born environmental consultant and Cane Garden Bay resident.
But when houses started sprouting in the 1960s and 70s on the Manhattan-sized island of Tortola, where Cane Garden Bay is located, excavated soil was dumped in coastal wetlands and ponds.
“Ponds were considered useless stinky swamp water,” said Gore. But now, with nowhere to go, heavy rains flood properties.
Water running into the sea without natural filtration carries sediments that can kill the bay’s colorful coral reefs by blocking sunlight or infecting them with diseases and fungi.
Half of the reefs have disappeared around most of the British Virgin Islands (BVI) over the last 25 years, according to the University of Rhode Island.
Cane Garden Bay’s beaches - whose white sands depend on healthy coral reefs - have lost some 24 feet in width since 1953, Gore’s research found.
Reefs are a natural buffer against powerful waves, and when they shrink, the coast floods more easily, said Clive Petrovic, marine studies head at the H. Lavity Stoutt Community College outside Road Town.
Sea level rise linked to climate change will make the situation “that much worse”, he added.
Just a month before Irma, Cane Garden Bay was already dealing with disastrous flooding after 10 inches (25 cm) of rain fell in less than 17 hours - the third major flood this decade.
COMMUNITY CLEAN-UP
As a child, Lorenzo Hodge used to fish in one of the village ponds, alive with mangroves and birds.
These days, the 46-year-old pumps gas into ships at the business his father built, next to a dirt pile 25-feet tall now covering most of the pond.
It is a reminder of development gone awry.
“Back then I didn’t really pay attention to things like that. Now the problems it is creating make me wonder,” he said.
On a Saturday in June, Hodge joined the bay’s restoration committee, jumping into a clogged stormwater channel.
Slicing uprooted trees with a chainsaw, they gathered wood, coconuts and other debris blocking the waterway since Irma.
Organizer John Cline, a 55-year-old pastor, said tourists visit the British overseas territory to sail in clear waters and relax on pristine beaches.
“If that goes, why do they come?” he asked. “It’s important for us not only to restore it, but to keep it from getting any worse.”
The committee is also replanting vegetation and cleaning the ocean floor, with plans to replant mangroves damaged by Irma.
‘ON THE EDGE’
Contemplating a car rental business built on one of Cane Garden’s four filled-in ponds, Gore sketched out her idea for a walkway around the bay to showcase “the Caribbean picture of idyllic tropical nature”.
The battle to rescue what has been spoiled can still be won, she and others insist.
The stakes extend well beyond Cane Garden Bay’s residents.
About a third of the BVI’s gross domestic product comes from its nature-based tourism industry that draws international yacht owners and cruise ships, authorities say.
At the epicenter, Cane Garden Bay punches above its weight, hosting many of the hundreds of thousands of cruise-ship passengers who flock to the BVI’s renowned beaches each year.
Two years ago, the government launched a project to stop this community “right on the edge”, as one official described it, from degrading irreparably - so far investing about $500,000 provided by the European Union.
The work includes restoring a pond key to flood control and installing a drainage system, said the Ministry of Natural Resources and Labour.
Irma, for all the pain it caused, may have opened up an opportunity to finance the village’s vision of a greener future.
Cane Garden Bay’s district representative, Melvin Turnbull, is tasked with allocating some $1 million in reconstruction funds for the area, and has earmarked a quarter to rehabilitate natural flood barriers.
The young politician said the hurricane created “a level-playing field” to tackle pre-existing problems.
“It just gives us a fresh opportunity to rebuild what we want to have for the next 20, 50 years,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
On the to-do list are planting rain-sucking gardens and installing a “biorock”, a steel structure tingling with electric currents that grows into an artificial coral reef.
Where the remaining $2.7 million needed for longer-term measures will come from remains unclear, Turnbull added.
SHIPS STAY AWAY
On the beach, massage therapist Jem Marques, 39, said her customers had dwindled this summer from ten a day to a handful or none, as cruise companies took the BVI off their itinerary due to Irma.
Previously, the ships could disgorge thousands of people onto the beach daily.
But not everyone wants them back, with detractors saying they put “a lot of stress” on the bay, said local journalist Freeman Rogers.
“Sure, they make a little mess,” said Marques, who had to quit her apartment when her income dived after the storm. “But we appreciate them, because if they feel like a $20 massage, they do it.”
Reggae star Rymer is also preparing for their return, building a six-floor hotel to replace the smaller one he opened in 1981.
“Development will happen - and it has happened here in a really big way,” he said. “Nothing stays the same.”
At U.N. summit, an evangelical Christian makes the case for climate change
EDMONTON, Canada - Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist and evangelical Christian, says she gets slammed every day on social media for her contributions to establishing that climate change is human-made.
But on Monday, she was welcomed with applause at a United Nations-backed climate summit in the capital of Canada’s western province of Alberta, where polls show that climate skepticism rates are among the highest in the country.
Hayhoe, a professor at Texas Tech University, has emerged in recent years as a leading voice sharing the science of climate change to skeptics - many of whom are fellow evangelical churchgoers.
A 2015 survey from the Washington D.C.-based Pew Research Center found that just one quarter of white evangelicals in the United States believe that climate change is caused by humans.
A separate Pew poll from 2016 showed that white evangelicals voted overwhelmingly to elect United States President Donald Trump, who has pulled his country out of the Paris agreement, a global pact to curb climate change.
But Hayhoe said it is that same Christianity that fuels her dedication to climate science.
“I study climate change because I think it’s the greatest humanitarian crisis of our times,” she said.
“It exacerbates poverty and hunger and disease and civil conflicts and refugee crises,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Traits that have made Hayhoe uniquely qualified to speak authoritatively in such conservative circles are best summed up by two accolades she has received.
For her work in explaining climate change, Hayhoe has made TIME magazine’s list of most influential people, and she was named one of the 50 Women to Watch by the evangelical magazine Christianity Today.
Her calling came “completely serendipitously.”
Six months into her marriage, her husband, a linguistics professor, told her about his disbelief in global warming.
“You have somebody you respect and you also love, and you also want to stay married. I said well, ‘Let’s talk about it.’”
It took two years of discussion to agree that heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions attributable to human activity are driving today’s climate change.
The marital episode and her subsequent engagement with faith groups have firmed up her views that the traditional conservative tenet of small government - not science - usually explains why some resist the issue.
“(It’s) not because they really have a problem with the science,” she said. “It’s because they have a problem with the perceived solutions.”
“Taxes, government legislation, loss of personal liberty ... that’s the real problem people have.”
Hayhoe did not field any questions from climate change skeptics during her talk at the summit in Edmonton. And her message struck particularly close to home in a province that is Canada’s main oil producer.
“The world energy system is undergoing an energy revolution ... from old dirty energies that we have been using for hundreds of years to clean, endless sources of energy like wind,” she said, in an interview after her speech.
“Oil and gas companies, they look down the road and they understand that the world is changing.”
Under the Paris agreement, nearly 200 countries agreed to curb planet-warming emissions enough to keep the rise in global temperatures to well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times, ideally to 1.5 degrees.
But without unprecedented action temperatures could rise above 1.5 degrees, according to a draft report by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change seen by Reuters earlier this year.
Ice core sighted in NYC as art tackles climate
NEW YORK - You don’t get a lot of ice cores in downtown Manhattan.
But visitors to the inaugural show at New York’s Climate Museum can watch 269 soothing minutes of film featuring nothing but turquoise ice cores, drilled from the depths of the Greenland Ice Sheet.
For scientists, the cylinder-shaped ice blocks open magical windows into prehistoric atmospheric conditions, but in this New York gallery, the goal is to prod the imagination as well as feed the mind.
“If this installation can create even a momentary sense that climate change occurs over millennia, that can help us comprehend the phenomenon’s enormity,” said Peggy Weil, the U.S. artist behind the work.
Ice cores are samples of ice excavated from miles below the surface - vital in tracking atmospheric conditions, including rising temperatures, over hundreds of thousands of years.
The film captures the details of 88 such cores in an attempt to reconstruct some of the data scientists use to compare past periods of climate change with today’s.
Art student Leonard Yang said he felt bitter-sweet as he strolled between photographs of the ice cores, which were exhibited at Manhattan’s Parsons School of Design.
“It just makes me feel like all of this is just going to disappear,” said the 29-year-old, wandering the small museum that is now part of a growing global trend.
For as world leaders increasingly face up to the fallout of climate change, curators are planning a new wave of museums, devoted to what many consider a defining issue of the times.
From Germany to Denmark, Hong Kong to Canada, talk of climate museums is on the rise.
In the German city of Bremerhaven, the Klimahaus Bremerhaven 8° Ost exhibits recreations of different climate zones so museum goers can follow the tracks of changing temperatures.
Last year, about half a million people visited the museum, a vessel-like building north of Bremen which opened in 2009, according to a spokeswoman.
In Hong Kong, the smaller Jockey Club Museum of Climate Change chronicles grand scientific expeditions, including those of the Xuelong, an icebreaker that went on voyages to probe the Arctic’s response to global warming.
THINK BIG
Scientists say that left unchecked, projected levels of rising temperatures may displace entire populations, flood cities and trigger conflict.
So museums want to fuse art and science to raise awareness.
In Norway, the University of Oslo will this spring start building a 7,000-square-feet (650 square meters) climate museum thanks to a donation of nearly $9 million, said a spokeswoman.
The Klimahuset (Climate House) has big ambitions.
The museum - its designers call it a “climate machine” - will open with an exhibition that will include a section tracking the “fingerprints” left on the atmosphere by carbon dioxide, a potent greenhouse gas, said project leader Torkjell Leira by phone.
In Britain, entrepreneur Joe Inglis was in talks with the University of Oxford’s School of Geography in the hope of creating a first British climate change museum, dubbed Climatic. His initial plans stalled but he hopes to resurrect the dream.
More than 500 museum staff have joined Canada’s Coalition of Museums for Climate Justice, hoping to push their places of work into staging more exhibits on the issue, said a spokesman.
And near the Danish capital of Copenhagen, Jay Sterling Gregg, a scientist whose day job revolves around climate, formed a group that aims to open the country’s first climate museum.
Stil in its infancy, the plan is to start with pop-up exhibitions then open a physical museum after 2020, he said.
A museum, the university researcher said, was needed because it could reach people in a way that academics cannot.
“It reaches deeper; it evokes emotions; it inspires,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by email.
TALK ABOUT IT
Citing climate change, scientists predict sea levels are on track to surge as temperatures rise, posing threats such as deadly heat, extreme weather and land swallowed by rising water.
While the world has rallied around a landmark 2015 agreement to fight global warming by cutting greenhouse gas emissions, U.S. President Donald Trump has pulled his country out of the pact and repeatedly cast doubt on the phenomenon.
And opponents of climate change science remain vocal in the United States, despite research showing that most U.S. adults are believers and think man-made emissions are to blame.
But some experts say climate-change nay-sayers are better at spreading their views, especially if science stays off the menu for many Americans when it comes to dinner-time chat.
“One of the issues is that Americans don’t talk about (climate change) with their friends and family,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, of Yale University in the state of Connecticut.
“Museums give them an opportunity to engage these themes.”
Extreme heat - an "unseen threat" – burns U.S. urban poor
When scorching heat descends on New York City in the summer, Harlem resident Evelyn Jenkins-Smith finds breathing difficult when she goes outside.
“My chest feels heavy,” said the retiree, who suffered a minor stroke two years ago.
So the 73-year-old widow cloisters herself in her sweltering apartment, which lacks air conditioning.
Jenkins-Smith is among the growing number of city dwellers whose health is at risk from increasingly hotter summers - a threat that has prompted cities nationwide to look for innovative ways to keep their most vulnerable residents safe and cool.
Rife with asphalt and concrete that absorb and radiate heat, many U.S. cities amount to giant heat traps, scientists say.
The phenomenon is known as the urban heat island effect. It can add as much as 5 degrees Fahrenheit (3 degrees Celsius) to daytime temperatures in cities, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
The problem is even worse at night, when city temperatures can be as much as a whopping 22 degrees Fahrenheit (12 degrees Celsius) warmer than green rural areas, where heat is more effectively released back into the atmosphere, the agency said.
Countrywide, heat is the number one cause of death from extreme weather events - including threats such as floods and hurricanes, according to the National Weather Service. Its data show that high temperatures killed an average of 131 people a year in the United States between 1987 and 2016.
When the heat index - a measure that combines temperature and humidity - climbs above 95 degrees Fahrenheit (35 degrees Celsius), it becomes harder to sweat off heat, leaving older adults, in particular, at risk of suffering heat stroke.
High temperatures also can aggravate pre-existing health issues, such as heart conditions, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Future risks look even even greater, unless there is quick action to curb climate change, scientists say.
In New York City, an estimated 3,300 people could die each year, beginning in 2080, from intense heat due to climate change, according to a study published last year in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.
“We underestimate the threat of extreme heat because it’s an unseen threat,” said Larissa Larsen, a University of Michigan urban planning professor who has studied the effects of extreme heat on health for 15 years.
CITIES STEP UP
But as climate change has sent temperatures skyrocketing, urban planners and health officials have scurried to find solutions, said Kurt Shickman, who heads the Global Cool Cities Alliance. The non-profit in Washington D.C. helps dozens of cities devise urban-cooling policies.
From Louisville to Chicago, and Los Angeles to New York, mayors and city councilors are pouring millions of dollars into plans to fight intensifying urban heat, Shickman said.
Flat rooftops are being painted white to reflect light and cool homes. Armies of seasonal workers plant trees, which cool the air due to their ability to evaporate water. And dark pavement is being replaced with materials that cool faster.
In addition, many cities have designated public cooling centers - such as air-conditioned libraries and community centers - for use when the blistering heat becomes a particular health danger.
“Cities are really taking the lead,” Shickman said.
But in their efforts to work out where they should paint roofs, plant trees and replace pavement, cities have uncovered an unpleasant truth: Heat doesn’t strike evenly, and it’s the poorest neighborhoods that are most at risk.
In New York City for instance, municipal authorities have produced a map that combines the thermal and socio-economic characteristics of neighborhoods to zero in on areas where residents are most likely to die during heatwaves.
They turn out to be some of the metropolis’ poorest areas: the South Bronx, Central Brooklyn and Jenkins-Smith’s Harlem.
Such mapping confirms the intertwining of poverty and urban heat risk that social-justice advocates and researchers have suspected for two decades.
“Heat affects everyone but there are some people it impacts with harder consequences,” said Brooke Havlik, a spokeswoman for WE ACT for Environmental Justice, a Harlem-based advocacy group.
CASH EQUALS COOL
Sharon Harlan, a professor of health sciences and sociology at Northeastern University in Boston, says she and colleagues have discovered a simple reality: Access to cash can equate with the ability to cool down.
In Phoenix, Arizona’s broiling capital where the July average daytime temperature is 104 degrees Farenheit (40 degrees Celsius), “people can buy cooler temperatures”, she said.
Analyzing data from Phoenix’s metropolitan area, Harlan and her colleagues found that for every $10,000 increment in average household income in a neighborhood, the area’s outside temperature was lower by half a degree.
Wealthier neighborhoods with verdant yards and trees had cooler air, they found, while low-income neighborhoods, with few trees, accumulated daytime heat.
But it is indoors - in homes that can be 20 degrees Farenheit (11 degrees Celsius) hotter than outside and where most heat-related deaths occur - that being poor takes the biggest toll.
That’s because “low income households are hesitant to use air conditioning because of the utility costs,” said the University of Michigan’s Larsen.
In New York City, city authorities have tried to address the problem by helping low-income people with medical conditions buy subsidized air-conditioning units.
But such efforts are greatly underfunded, according to the mayor’s office, and the poor remain without air conditioning in much larger numbers than the rich, according to 2014 city data.
In Brownsville, one of New York’s poorest neighborhoods, just 70 percent of households had air conditioning compared to 99 percent in South Shore, one its wealthiest neighborhoods.
Jenkins-Smith, who lives on a tight budget, says she is no fan of air conditioning, which she finds gives her a sore throat.
But neither would she be able to easily afford it since her husband’s death last year left her with a single income.
“It would be a tight squeeze” to afford the bills, she admitted.
COOLING - AND HEATING
Even when it’s affordable, air conditioning shouldn’t be looked at as a clear solution to threats from hotter temperatures, as it comes with problems of its own, warned Forrest Meggers of Princeton University in New Jersey.
Meggers, a professor of architecture, has researched how the use of air conditioning adds to outdoor heat levels in cities.
Heat emitted by cooling systems and cars can account for about a fifth of the heat island effect, he said.
“All machines have to work harder when it gets hotter out, and when they work harder they emit more heat,” said Meggers in a telephone interview.
Using thermal cameras he developed to snap photos of buildings, Meggers captured images of window air-conditioning units shooting plumes of hot air back outside.
“If you’re in a Manhattan business-district building, there’s a huge air-conditioning system exhausting heat up (near) the roof,” he said.
“But as soon as you get to the Bronx or Harlem, you’re going to just see a window air conditioner stuck under an awning, spewing out heat onto the side walk,” he said.
“So your neighborhood environment is being negatively impacted because the only affordable air conditioners are small, inefficient units.”
NEW TECHNOLOGY
In the long run, new technology will play a pivotal role in helping solve this problem, Meggers said.
The scientist is among scores toiling in laboratories to engineer new cooling materials. Those include paint or roof shingles that better reflect the sun, and rolls of thin glass polymer that both reflect the sun and help objects they are applied to shed heat.
Using such materials, “we can manipulate the way people perceive temperature without depending on air conditioning,” Meggers told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Back in Harlem, Jenkins-Smith says that, for now, she’ll stick to her habit of drinking plenty of water and staying put indoors during heatwaves, without turning to air conditioning.
“I don’t need any extra expense,” she said. “Me and heat get along.”
Faced with rising seas, French Polynesia ponders floating islands
NEW YORK - When former Google software engineer Patri Friedman came up with the idea of building floating islands, he had in mind an unusual buyer: Libertarians, seeking freedom to live beyond the reach of governments.
But his futuristic plan has now found a new, motivated and very different audience - small islands halfway around the world that are slowly being submerged by sea level rise.
The Pacific nation of French Polynesia, looking for a potential lifeline as global warming takes hold, in January became the first country to sign an agreement to deploy the floating islands off its coast.
“Dreams belong to those who want to move forward and make them happen,” said Jean-Christophe Bouissou, the country’s housing minister, at a San Francisco ceremony where he inked a memorandum of understanding with The Seasteading Institute.
The institute - the name combines combines “sea” and “homesteading” - is the brainchild of Friedman and Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel, who helped found it and initially pumped more than $1 million into the floating islands project.
He is now no longer involved in the institute, but Friedman is taking forward the project.
With its possibility of creating new floating nation states, it has won converts among libertarians, whose ideology argues that greater freedom makes people thrive, said Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a Washington D.C.-based libertarian thinktank.
But the possibility of keeping a sinking nation afloat clearly presents another opportunity for the technology, he said.
“If (island nations) feel threatened by the rising sea ... they might view this as being the best option for their people,” Bandow said.
“Obviously, living on a seastead is very different from even living on an island. Nevertheless, if you figure there’s going to be relocation, maybe this is a better option to stay in the region as opposed to having to literally move en masse to another country,” he said.
RISING RISK
Low-lying, small islands of the Pacific are disproportionately at risk of losing land as sea level climbs by an expected 10 inches to 32 inches (26-82 cm) by the late 21st century, according to the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
In a 2013 study of more than 1,200 French-controlled islands, researchers at the Paris-Sud University found that French Polynesia and the territory of New Caledonia, also in the South Pacific, were most at risk of seeing their islands entirely submerged.
Bouissou, of French Polynesia, says he sees in floating cities the kind of outside-the-box thinking that could solve such a problem.
“There are very few people that have this kind of ability to be forward looking,” said Bouissou in a telephone interview.
Many among his country’s 270,000 residents have in the last two decades already begun seeing their houses more frequently flooded, he said.
A LOOK AT THE ISLANDS
Under the terms of the deal with French Polynesia, The Seasteading Institute will first study the project’s economic and environmental impact, at the institute’s own cost, said Joe Quirk, a project’s spokesman.
If the study looks positive, the institute will try to raise investment to put in place three solar-powered pilot platforms, each roughly 165 by 165 feet (50 by 50 meters), Quirk said.
Under the plan, the islands - likely to be located inside a lagoon near French Polynesia’s Tahiti - would be made a “special economic zone”, in the hope of attracting tech companies, he said.
“I expect French Polynesian and foreign people to live there and commute there for work, and schoolchildren to take class trips there,” Quirk said.
One rendering shows a floating island dotted with palm trees and supporting a multi-story building designed to resemble French Polynesia’s national flower, the Tahitian gardenia, said Quirk.
Sailing ships are docked in calm waters, just footsteps from an inviting beach, the drawings by Dutch engineering firm Blue21 show.
The islands’ engineering details remain to be developed, Quirk said. But in a 2013 study commissioned by the institute, Dutch design firm DeltaSync concluded that the artificial islands could best withstand the ocean’s elements as modular platforms that can be connected and arranged in branch-like structures.
Construction of the islands, which the institute hopes to fund with investor cash, could cost between $10 and $50 million and begin as early as 2018, Quirk said. The institute is in the process of recruiting investors, he said.
“We’re not going ask for any money (from French Polynesia). We’re just going to ask for permission, legislation. And if it fails, we absorb the risks. We’ll disassemble and move on,” Quirk said.
SKEPTICAL VOICES
The vision of floating cities has drawn some skepticism.
Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University in New York City, warned that such technological initiatives could divert attention from dealing with the root causes of climate change.
“The caution I have is that sometimes people advance futuristic ideas of this sort as a way of saying climate change isn’t so bad because if it happens we’ll find a way around it,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a telephone interview.
“Clearly, the most important thing that can be done is to control greenhouse gas emissions so that these islands are not submerged.”
Alexandre Le Quéré, a radio host for station Polynésie 1ère in French Polynesia, said that in his view the floating island project had yet to get most citizens fired up.
The repeated scaling back of another mammoth project - the holiday resort Mahana Beach, aimed at spurring the tourism industry - has left a bitter taste in the mouths of French Polynesians, he said in an online interview.
An initiative by The Seasteading Institute to establish a floating island community off the coast of Honduras was delayed in 2015 due to political unrest in the country, Quirk said.
But the institute remains optimistic about resuming its project there, he said. The French Polynesian initiative is in a stronger position to succeed, he said, in that the institute has for the first time secured an agreement with a host nation.
That one factor could be key, said the Cato Institute’s Bandow.
“If you can start finding governments that are willing to at least contemplate an arrangement - if you get one of them working somewhere - then suddenly it makes the whole enterprise look a lot more practical,” he said.
In New York, neighbors trading solar energy electrify community
NEW YORK - A quiet energy revolution is taking place in the homes that light up in the evening in the New York City neighborhoods of Gowanus Canal and Park Slope.
It isn’t just power plant electricity that keeps this community lit at night, but also energy generated by neighbors across the street or a few houses away, who send one another their excess production of solar power.
The experiment, called TransActive Grid, aims to soon allow homes and businesses fitted with solar panels and “smart” meters to sell spare electricity to neighbors, rather than simply give it away as they do now.
The change could herald a revolution in the way power is produced and sold not only in New York but potentially across the country and around the world, with roof-mounted solar panels joined to become neighbourhood-controlled power plants.
The idea has inspired a slew of entrepreneurs - from Australia to Finland to South Africa - to launch startups, and caught the attention of large power utilities worldwide.
The prospect of producing, buying and selling locally-generated clean energy is precisely why Gowanus Canal resident Lowell Kaplan hooked up his townhouse to the TransActive Grid earlier this year.
“It’s pretty cool,” said the 44-year-old father of two. “If I happen to produce extra why not get some local usage out of it? This is the way things should work.”
Another 40 or so solar power producers - residential buildings but also businesses and industrial buildings - have also signed up to plug into TransActive Grid’s two micro electrical grids, which span a total of about 10 street blocks.
The project is still in its demonstration phase and a relatively small undertaking so far.
But it is fueled by an idea so big it could fundamentally alter the renewable energy landscape in the United States and across the world, said Lawrence Orsini, who heads the New York startup behind the project, LO3 Energy.
Since LO3 Energy engineered the world’s first paid transaction between two people producing solar power, in April last year, the energy industry has been abuzz with talk about the internet technology behind the deal: blockchain.
Blockchain first emerged as the system underpinning the digital currency bitcoin. Applied to the energy sector, the shared electronic ledger, with no need for third-party enforcement, enables consumers producing renewable energy to trade excess energy with each other, risk-free.
“Looking at the way the utility grid runs today, and how little it has changed in over the past 100 years, it is just ridiculously antiquated,” said Orsini.
“So what we’re doing ... is we’re taking the meter off the wall, just like we took the phone off the wall.”
ELECTRIFYING TIMES
For David Groarke, managing director at Indigo Advisory, a New York-based energy and utilities consulting firm, it’s easy to see why the notion of blockchain-backed grids has electrified the industry by changing the ground rules governing who is a seller and a buyer of power.
“To get that right is a multi-decade process,” Groarke said in a phone interview.
“But if all the pieces come together, we could see something extraordinary happen.”
For one, the multiplication of micro-grids such as New York’s TransActive Grid could cut energy losses. In current grids, as electricity travels long distances from power plants to electricity pylons to meters, some power gets lost, he said.
About five percent of the electricity transmitted and distributed in the United States disappears as it crosses long distances, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Widespread use of autonomous micro-grids also could make communities more resilient to disasters because they could continue operating if broader conventional grids went down, Groarke said.
Current grids are prone to failure when disaster strikes, a weakness that caused more than 8.6 million utility customers to lose power when Hurricane Sandy struck the U.S. Atlantic Coast in 2012.
Such potential has piqued the interest of large utilities worldwide and inspired a slew of startups to try their hand at the market.
In a 2016 survey, German energy agency DENA found more than half of the electricity industry executives who responded to its survey either planned or had already implemented activities with respect to blockchain.
Germany has been one of the most active countries experimenting with blockchain-backed micro-grids, experts say.
Altogether about 40 startups on all continents have been toiling to find innovative ways to marry energy and blockchain, according to Indigo Advisory.
In Australia, startup Power Ledger has set up a platform allowing residents of a housing development to trade among themselves solar electricity stored onsite.
And in South Africa, software company Bankymoon has been installing blockchain-backed meters in underfunded schools to let people anywhere on the planet give the schools electricity credits with donations in blockchain-based currencies like bitcoin.
REAL MONEY
Still, one major hurdle stands in the way in the United States: It is illegal for individuals to sell or buy electricity from each other without a utility’s involvement.
The sole alternative so far for solar-panel owners like Kaplan - who with his 13 rooftop solar panels expects to generate more power than he needs in the fall and spring - has been to sell their surplus to their utility at a retail rate.
The policy, known as net metering, has been adopted by 41 states including New York, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, which tracks state laws.
Orsini, however, says he is looking into ways to help Kaplan and other members of his micro-grid legally sell their surplus electricity to each other sooner rather than later.
Though declining to discuss in detail exactly how TransActive participants will do that, Orsini said LO3 Energy is looking at three possible options. The system should be fully operational by mid-2017, a LO3 Energy spokesman said.
“What I will tell you is that when we’re ready to actually do the transactions, they will be real transactions. They will be real dollars being traded for real energy, legally,” Orsini said.
New York paupers' cemetery opens to mourners for first time
NEW YORK - It takes a mere 10 minutes by boat to navigate to New York City’s Hart Island, one of the United States’ largest paupers’ cemetery.
But it took Rosalee Grable more than a year to reach the gravesite where her mother was buried on the uninhabited strip of land off the city’s Bronx borough.
Grable, 64, was one of a few dozen mourners who for the first time walked across the barren island on Sunday. The trip marked the end of the long isolation of the site, where about 1 million people are buried.
“I’m so grateful to be able to go there and stand at her grave,” she said, holding a bouquet of flowers she planned to leave on the island.
For years, city rules confined mourners to a small memorial gazebo, furnished with a few benches and tucked away on an island’s corner.
The city’s Department of Correction, which runs the island, had long argued that it needed to limit access to the cemetery due to security concerns and a lack of amenities.
But following the settlement of a class-action lawsuit earlier this month, authorities have begun ferrying relatives and their guests, at least once a month, to the island for visits beyond the restricted area.
The settlement, the result of a lawsuit brought against New York City by the New York Civil Liberties Union, is awaiting a federal judge’s final approval.
Purchased in 1869 by city authorities, Hart Island has at various times been a prison, a hospital, an insane asylum, and finally a 131-acre (53-hectare) potter’s field where the unlucky many have been laid to rest in unmarked, graves which orange-clad inmates, dig to this day.
As many as one million people have been interred in the graveyard, according to local authorities. Many are in mass graves. Their remains were either unclaimed or their families could not afford a burial.
Grable’s mother, Gladys Van Aelst, who died aged 85, ended up on the city-administered potter’s field because her family lacked the resources to pay for a private burial, she said.
“She had a $2,500 burial fund stashed away in her savings, but she sent that to my sister to buy a car with, about three months before she got sick,” Grable said.
The island’s successive incarnations have carved a landscape both strikingly beautiful and desolate. Buildings ripped open dot an expanse of otherwise seemingly untouched vegetation. A 30-foot (9 m) tall, monolithic monument to the unclaimed dead, engraved with a cross and the word ‘Peace’, towers over the graveyard.
“It’s like this big open-air cathedral,” said Melinda Hunt, a Canada-born artist who has championed the rights of the deceased and grieving of Hart Island, who accompanied the mourners on Sunday.
New York City's Shoddy Sidewalk Sheds Are Disasters Waiting To Happen
On a May 2012 afternoon in the East Village, Rafal Nieznalski took a path followed by countless New Yorkers every day: right under a sidewalk shed, the wood plank and steel-pipe contraptions designed to protect pedestrians from falling construction debris.
But Nieznalski says that as he walked under the shed, debris slammed into his head.
“I felt ‘boom,’ I grabbed my head, and after a few seconds I was out,” recalled Nieznalski, who has filed an ongoing lawsuit against the companies responsible for the shed. Nieznalski was taken to Bellevue Hospital, where he received eight stitches.
A few months later, in Red Hook, Brooklyn, 4-year-old Laila Davis was rushed from a housing project to the emergency room at New York Presbyterian Hospital after she touched a sidewalk shed carrying a live electrical voltage and was thrown off her feet.
Davis survived but suffered injuries including chest pain. She also had difficulty breathing according to a lawsuit filed by her family. The suit is ongoing.
Sidewalk sheds have become a fixture of New York City’s landscape, with the number of permits more than doubling since 1998 to nearly 10,000.
The sheds are mandated by the city whenever construction, remodeling or demolition is taking place and several private contractors specialize in building the structures.
But the city’s effort to ensure that the structures are safe and effective has faltered, a New York World investigation found.
Among the findings:
● A special Scaffold Safety Team, created in late 2007 by the Bloomberg administration to monitor construction scaffolds and sidewalks sheds, has seen its staff reduced from 14 field inspectors in 2008 to 9 in 2013.
● The number of violations issued for faulty sheds has plummeted, from 855 in 2009 to 337 in 2013.
● At least 39 pedestrians and construction workers have been injured since January 2011 in accidents involving sidewalk sheds
The Department of Buildings defended its efforts.
“The Department’s Scaffold Safety Team responds to complaints and conducts proactive inspections of scaffolds and sidewalk sheds throughout the City,” Kelly Magee, a DOB spokesperson, said. “In 2013, this specialized unit issued more than 2,100 ECB [Environmental Control Board] violations totaling more than $2.3 million in penalties. This unit performs over 9,000 inspections a year to help ensure that property owners and contractors maintain their sheds and scaffolds in a safe and lawful manner at all times.”
The 2,100 violations issued by the team include violations of all types, not just issues related to sidewalk sheds.
By comparison, in 2009 the team performed nearly 12,700 inspections and issued 4,840 violations of all types according to a DOB report.
The safety team was created in 2007 and, within a few months, the city announced a 30-day inspection sweep after a series of accidents, including the collapse of several scaffolds during windy days in early 2008.
The city issued violations against 28 percent of the more than 1,600 sidewalk sheds and supported scaffolds inspected during the sweep.
Then in 2009, the Bloomberg administration launched a contest to create a safer and more attractive sidewalk shed design. When the winning proposal, the “Urban Umbrella,” was announced a year later, Bloomberg said the new design “would improve public safety,” although adoption of the design was recommended and not required.
In the years since the creation of the Scaffold Safety Team and the unveiling of the new design funding and manpower for the team has been cut. And the Urban Umbrella is nowhere to be seen.
Meanwhile, the number of sidewalk shed permits issued by the Department of Buildings has risen to record levels — nearly 10,000 in 2013. The growth came, in part, due to local law 11, a 1998 law which led to an increase in sidewalk sheds through tougher building facade repair requirements.
The Urban Umbrella isn’t used, at least in part, because it costs up to 25 percent more than the 60-year-old design it was intended to replace.
“When it comes time to do restoration or rehabilitation work on the building it’s up to the property owner to install the bridge to comply with local law 11, and their agenda tends to be what is the cheapest to do that,” Andrés Cortés, an architect and principal at Agencie Group, the firm behind the Urban Umbrella, said. “The cheapest way to do that is to hire the least expensive sidewalk shed.”
There are currently no Urban Umbrellas sidewalk sheds in use in New York City, according to Cortés.
In 2012 the city cut funding for the DOB Scaffold Safety Team from $1.2 million to just over $500,000. Funding has remained at that level ever since.
DOB officials said that the cut was the result of the recession-induced budget crunch. However, the budgets for several other specialty teams including the Cranes and Derricks inspection squad and the Building Enforcement Safety Team remained intact.
Robert deMarco, who left the DOB in November 2010 and now trains DOB inspectors, said there were only three inspectors on the job for several months in 2011, a claim the DOB denies.
“It’s just impossible for them to cover all five boroughs comprehensively with that amount of inspectors,” deMarco said. “Even now they’re still spread thin.”
While each city inspector currently conducts 3 or 4 inspections a day, the daily responsibility for ensuring the structural integrity of the sheds rests with the private contractors and licensees who build and maintain them.
The standards described in the code reflect basic engineering principles, said Richard Miller, a structural engineer and owner of MRES Engineering PC, a private consulting firm: “There are three components that make a structure stand up: strength, stability and stiffness. Any one of them that’s out of whack can lead to a failure.”
The lightest version of a ten by ten foot shed as described in the building code should withstand the weight of roughly four cars.
But Miller says he’s seen too many instances of safety standards being flouted by scaffold firms.
He recalls an incident in the East Village two years ago, when the engineer who designed the shed set up by a contractor ignored his warning against a major flaw in the design that greatly weakened a portion of the shed.
“I objected, I said ‘This is not accepted structural theory’,” Miller said. “The answer I got back is, ‘Well this is how we always do it’.”
Beginning in October the city will require sidewalk shed permit holders to designate a “qualified” person to conduct an inspection every six months and prepare an inspection report.
City regulations already require contractors to inspect the structural integrity of sidewalk sheds each day and maintain daily maintenance logs.
John Filingeri, a former member of the DOB Scaffold Safety Team, says he did request daily maintenance logs for sidewalk sheds — but never when a sidewalk shed stood idle.
“The code does say that it has to be maintained every day by the responsible party. But the way the inspectors looked at it is that if there wasn’t anybody working on a job, we’d let it go until we actually had a contractor working on the site,” he said.
As for pedestrians, “If something happens to fall, it’s sad and it is an issue, but it happens,” Filingeri said. “Whoever got hit is going to sue the building, sue the scaffold company, and they’ll make whatever they settle for.”
Since the beginning of 2011 at least 29 pedestrians and 10 construction workers have suffered injuries as a result of accidents involving sidewalk sheds, a New York World review of city records, lawsuits, and media reports revealed.
While no deaths have been recorded over the last four years, victims have suffered serious injuries, including concussions and electric shock.
In most cases reviewed by the World, the shed collapse occurred during the construction or removal of the shed, as the result of falling construction debris, or from high winds.
William Roberts, 31, is suing sidewalk shed contractor Colgate Scaffolding after a pipe and a light fixture fell from a shed and struck him in the head on June 28, 2012.
Robert’s head split open and he was taken to Woodhull Hospital where staples were required to close the wound. Since the incident, he has dealt with severe headaches and neck pain, according to his attorney, Ilya Novofastovsky.
Colgate Scaffolding declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation.
There are also instances when sidewalk sheds fail but no one happened to be walking under the shed at the time.
The World found a dozen cases between 2012 and 2013 when portions of a sidewalk shed collapsed without injury to pedestrians or workers.
For instance, on February 1, 2013, a sidewalk shed partially collapsed outside of the Hanson Place Central Methodist Church in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn.
The DOB issued a violation against the church for failing to maintain the shed, and the inspector noted that additional sections of the shed were in danger of collapsing.
After spending a 20-year career advising private-sector clients in New York City on sheds, Miller lives by this principle: “I always cross the street to avoid walking under sheds,” he said. “And I recommend others do the same.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/new-york-sidewalks-shoddy-sheds-_n_5440198