TL;DR
- Flash Joule heating recovers valuable and toxic metals from electronic waste. The process allows for “urban mining” of resources that could be a win for the environment as well as for manufacturers. It would also use up to 500 times less energy than current lab methods and produce a byproduct clean enough for agricultural land.
- Researchers describe how a unique combination of new hardware and software allows defects in solar panels to be clearly imaged and analyzed even in bright light.
- Scientists have identified a key mechanism responsible for the lower efficiencies of organic solar cells and shown a way that this hurdle might be overcome.
- Researchers have developed a clean and cost-effective way to upcycle used plastic, transforming it into valuable nanomaterials and high-quality fuel.
- An international research team says the health of a terrestrial ecosystem can be largely determined by three variables: vegetations’ ability to uptake carbon, its efficiency in using carbon and its efficiency in using water.
- Scientists used a nuclear dating technique to study the dynamics of the Floridan Aquifer. The findings show the promise of this emerging technique to help understand geological processes and to forecast the effects of climate change on coastal aquifers.
- Almost one-in-three people around the world will still be mainly using polluting cooking fuels and technologies — a major source of disease and environmental destruction and devastation — in 2030, new research warned.
- In a new study, researchers explore how climate change could challenge efforts to protect biodiversity within the network of protected areas around the globe.
- Warming ocean waters have caused a drop in the brightness of the Earth, according to a new study.
- Mature oak trees will increase their rate of photosynthesis by up to a third in response to the raised CO2 levels expected to be the world average by about 2050, new research shows.
- And more!
Green Technology Market
Green technology is an applicable combination of advanced tools and solutions to conserve natural resources and environment, minimize or mitigate negative impacts from human activities on the environment, and ensure sustainability development. Green technology is also referred to as clean technology or environmental technology which includes technologies, such as IoT, AI, analytics, blockchain, digital twin, security, and cloud, which collect, integrate, and analyze data from various real-time data sources, such as sensors, cameras, and Global Positioning System (GPS).
Green technology, also known as sustainable technology, protects the environment by using various forms of sustainable energy. Some of the best examples of green technologies include solar panels, LED lighting, wind energy, electric vehicles, vertical farming, and composting.
The global Green Technology and Sustainability market size to grow from USD 11.2 billion in 2020 to USD 36.6 billion by 2025, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 26.6% during the forecast period. The growing consumer and industrial interest for the use of clean energy resources to conserve environment and increasing use of Radio Frequency Identification sensors across industries are driving the adoption of green technology and sustainability solutions and services in the market.
The blockchain segment is estimated to grow at the highest CAGR: Energy-intensive cryptocurrency mining has caused a spike in carbon emission, and hence blockchain is capable of driving innovation in the field of green technology.
Latest News
- Industrial Air Pollution Costs Europe 2–3% Of GDP: The briefing also shows that a relatively small number of facilities continue to be responsible for most of the pollution.
- US Needs 10X More Rare Earth Metals To Hit Biden’s Electric Vehicle Goals: The US needs ten times the amount of rare earth metals it currently has to meet Biden’s ambitious EV goals.
- 15mph Speed Limit To Be Introduced Across City Of London In 2022, Reveals Planning Document: London is aiming to introduce a blanket speed limit of 15mph “citywide,” says a planning document to be discussed in a transport committee next month.
- Shell partners to deploy 800 MW of solar in the U.K.: The company signed a framework agreement with Green Power to develop solar projects with potential co-located battery storage.
- How Putin’s Advisers Convinced Him to Take Climate Risks Seriously: The Kremlin may unveil a new approach to coordinate with European emissions at the COP26 summit
- SSE Renewables enters Japanese offshore wind market: The creation of the joint ownership company involves the acquisition by SSE Renewables of an 80% stake in an offshore wind development platform from Pacifico Energy.
- When Predictions Come True: LED Is Lighting Up The World: A decade ago, the predictions for LED lighting were hard to believe. But they appear to be coming true, according to new data.
- Denmark Agrees to Binding 2030 Climate Target for Agriculture: Lawmakers in Denmark set binding carbon emission targets for the Nordic country’s agricultural industry to ensure a green transition.
- China orders energy firms to secure supplies amid power crisis: China’s top state-owned energy companies have been ordered to ensure there are adequate fuel supplies for the approaching winter at all costs.
- The World’s №1 in Geothermal Electricity, Kenya Aims to Export Its Know-How: By 2030 the country aims to almost double geothermal capacity, to 1.6GW.
- Airline Industry Targets Net-Zero Carbon Emissions by 2050: The airline industry’s main lobby group adopted a target of eliminating carbon emissions on a net basis by 2050.
- Alcoa Joins Metal Firms in Pledge to Eliminate Emissions by 2050: Alcoa Corp. set a goal to be carbon neutral by 2050 as the largest U.S. aluminum producer joins a number of metals producers that have already pledged to curb GHG emissions.
- Sustainable Lawn Care Startup Sunday Nearly Triples Funding With $50 Million Series C: The Boulder, Colorado-based company sends consumers boxes of the lawn care they need for their exact lawn conditions.
- Automotive Among Industries Targeted For Greenwashing By European Group: The auto industry was among those targeted by a high-level meeting aimed at eliminating greenwashing.
- 126,000 Gallons Of Oil Just Spilled Along The Southern California Coast: A recent oil spill near Huntington Beach has caused beach closures and dead wildlife to wash ashore.
- Why Toyota Has Got It Wrong On Electric Cars: Toyota’s continual reliance on hybrids and unrealistic hydrogen fuel cell dreams make it extremely vulnerable as pure battery-electric car sales grow exponentially.
- Why The Future Of Beauty Needs To Be Circular: The Jane Goodall-endorsed brand is setting a new standard for sustainable beauty as the world’s first to achieve a 100% circular business model.
- ClimateTech Updates For September 2021: Announcements by Xpansiv, Stem, Storegga, LanzaTech, and EnergyVault, as well as conversations with Ubiquitous Energy, IncubEx, and the Foundation for Climate Restoration.
Latest Research
Urban mining by flash Joule heating
by Bing Deng, Duy Xuan Luong, Zhe Wang, Carter Kittrell, Emily A. McHugh, James M. Tour in Nature Communications
In what should be a win-win-win for the environment, a process developed at Rice University to extract valuable metals from electronic waste would also use up to 500 times less energy than current lab methods and produce a byproduct clean enough for agricultural land.
The flash Joule heating method introduced last year to produce graphene from carbon sources like waste food and plastic has been adapted to recover rhodium, palladium, gold and silver for reuse.
A report by the Rice lab of chemist James Tour also shows highly toxic heavy metals including chromium, arsenic, cadmium, mercury and lead are removed from the flashed materials, leaving a byproduct with minimal metal content.
Instantly heating the waste to 3,400 Kelvin (5,660 degrees Fahrenheit) with a jolt of electricity vaporizes the precious metals, and the gases are vented away for separation, storage or disposal. Tour said that with more than 40 million tons of e-waste produced globally every year, there is plenty of potential for “urban mining.”
“Here, the largest growing source of waste becomes a treasure,” Tour said. “This will curtail the need to go all over the world to mine from ores in remote and dangerous places, stripping the Earth’s surface and using gobs of water resources. The treasure is in our dumpsters.”
He noted an increasingly rapid turnover of personal devices like cell phones has driven the worldwide rise of electronic waste, with only about 20% of landfill waste currently being recycled.
“We found a way to get the precious metals back and turn e-waste into a sustainable resource,” he said. “The toxic metals can be removed to spare the environment.”
The lab found flashing e-waste requires some preparation. Guided by lead author and Rice postdoctoral research associate Bing Deng, the researchers powdered circuit boards they used to test the process and added halides, like Teflon or table salt, and a dash of carbon black to improve the recovery yield.
Once flashed, the process relies on “evaporative separation” of the metal vapors. The vapors are transported from the flash chamber under vacuum to another vessel, a cold trap, where they condense into their constituent metals. “The reclaimed metal mixtures in the trap can be further purified to individual metals by well-established refining methods,” Deng said.
The researchers reported that one flash Joule reaction reduced the concentration of lead in the remaining char to below 0.05 parts per million, the level deemed safe for agricultural soils. Levels of arsenic, mercury and chromium were all further reduced by increasing the number of flashes.
“Since each flash takes less than a second, this is easy to do,” Tour said.
The scalable Rice process consumes about 939 kilowatt-hours per ton of material processed, 80 times less energy than commercial smelting furnaces and 500 times less than laboratory tube furnaces, according to the researchers. It also eliminates the lengthy purification required by smelting and leaching processes.
The role of charge recombination to triplet excitons in organic solar cells
by Gillett, A.J., Privitera, A., Dilmurat, R. et al. in Nature
Researchers have identified a key mechanism responsible for the lower efficiencies of organic solar cells and shown a way that this hurdle might be overcome.
The international group of researchers, led by the University of Cambridge, identified a loss pathway in organic solar cells which makes them less efficient than silicon-based cells at converting sunlight into electricity. In addition, they identified a way to supress this pathway by manipulating molecules inside the solar cell to prevent the loss of electrical current through an undesirable state, known as a triplet exciton.
Their results suggest that it could be possible for organic solar cells to compete more closely with silicon-based cells for efficiency.
Organic solar cells, which are flexible, semi-transparent, and cheap, can greatly expand the range of applications for solar technology. They could be wrapped around the exteriors of buildings and can be used for the efficient recycling of the energy used for indoor lighting, neither of which are possible with conventional silicon panels. They are also far more environmentally friendly to produce.
“Organic solar cells can do lots of things that inorganic solar cells can’t, but their commercial development has plateaued in recent years, in part due to their inferior efficiency,” said Dr Alexander Gillett from Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, the paper’s first author. “A typical silicon-based solar cell can reach efficiencies as high as 20 to 25%, while organic solar cells can reach efficiencies of around 19% under laboratory conditions, and real-world efficiencies of about 10 to 12%.”
Organic solar cells generate electricity by loosely mimicking the natural process of photosynthesis in plants, except they ultimately use the energy of the sun to create electricity rather than convert carbon dioxide and water into glucose. When a light particle, or photon, hits a solar cell, an electron is excited by the light and leaves behind a ‘hole’ in the material’s electronic structure. The combination of this excited electron and hole is known as an exciton. If the mutual attraction between the negatively charged electron and the positively charged hole in the exciton, akin to the attraction between the positive and negative poles of a magnet, can be overcome, it is possible to harvest these electrons and holes as an electrical current.
However, electrons in solar cells can be lost through a process called recombination, where electrons lose their energy — or excitation state — and fall back into the empty ‘hole’ state. As there is a stronger attraction between the electron and hole in carbon-based materials than in silicon, organic solar cells are more prone to recombination, which in turn affects their efficiency. This necessitates the use of two components to stop the electron and hole from recombining rapidly: an electron ‘donor’ material and an electron ‘acceptor’ material.
Using a combination of spectroscopy and computer modelling, the researchers were able to track the mechanisms at work in organic solar cells, from the absorption of photons to recombination. They found that a key loss mechanism in organic solar cells is caused by recombination to a particular type of exciton, known as a triplet exciton.
In organic solar cells, triplet excitons present a difficult problem to overcome, as it is energetically favourable for them to form from the electrons and holes. The researchers found that by engineering strong molecular interactions between the electron donor and electron acceptor materials, it is possible to keep the electron and hole further apart, preventing recombination into triplet excitons from occurring.
Computational modelling suggests that by tuning the components of the organic solar cells in this way, the timescales of recombination to these triplet exciton states could be reduced by an order of magnitude, allowing for more efficient solar cell operation.
“The fact that we can use the interactions between components in a solar cell to turn off the triplet exciton loss pathway was really surprising,” said Gillett. “Our method shows how you can manipulate molecules to stop recombination from happening.”
“Now, synthetic chemists can design the next generation of donor and acceptor materials with strong molecular interactions to suppress this loss pathway,” said co-author Dr Thuc-Quyen Nguyen from the University of California, Santa Barbara. “The work shows the path forward to achieve higher device efficiency.”
The researchers say their method provides a clear strategy to achieve organic solar cells with efficiencies of 20% or more by stopping recombination into triplet exciton states. As part of their study, the authors were also able to provide design rules for the electron donor and electron acceptor materials to achieve this aim. They believe that these guidelines will allow chemistry groups to design new materials which block recombination into triplet excitons, enabling organic solar cells with efficiencies closer to silicon to be realised.
Defect detection system for silicon solar panels under all-day irradiation
by Sheng Wu, Yijun Zhang, Yunsheng Qian, Yizheng Lang, Minjie Yang, Mohan Sun in Applied Optics
Researchers have developed and demonstrated a new system that can detect defects in silicon solar panels in full and partial sunlight under any weather conditions. Because current defect detection methods cannot be used in daylight conditions, the new system could make it much easier to keep solar panels working optimally.
Silicon solar panels, which make up around 90 percent of the world’s solar panels, often have defects that occur during their manufacturing, handling or installation. These defects can greatly lower the efficiency of the solar panels, so it is important that they be detected quickly and easily.
Researchers from Nanjing University of Science and Technology in China describe how a unique combination of new hardware and software allows defects in solar panels to be clearly imaged and analyzed even in bright light.
“Today’s defect detection systems can only be used to find defects at night or on solar panel modules that have been removed and moved inside or into a shaded environment,” said Yunsheng Qian, who led the research team. “We hope that this system can be used to help inspectors at photovoltaic power stations locate defects and identify them more quickly, so that these systems can produce electricity at their maximum levels.”
In the new work, the researchers created an all-weather imaging system that works in any lighting conditions. To make defects visible, they developed software that applies a modulated electric current to a solar panel, which causes it to emit light that turns off and on very quickly. An InGaAs detector with a very high frame rate is used to acquire a sequence of images of the solar panels as the electric current is applied. The researchers also added a filter that limits the wavelengths detected to those around 1150 nm to remove some of the stray sunlight from the images.
“The very fast imaging speed allows more images to be collected so that a greater number of changes between images can be distinguished,” said Sheng Wu, first author of the paper. “The key development was a new algorithm that distinguishes the modulated and unmodulated parts of the image sequence and then magnifies this difference. This allows the defects in the solar panel to be clearly imaged under high irradiance.”
To test the system, the researchers applied it to both monocrystalline silicon and polycrystalline silicon solar panels. The results showed that the system can detect defects on silicon-based solar panels with irradiances from 0 to 1300 Watts per meter squared, which equates to light conditions ranging from complete darkness to full sunlight.
The researchers are now working on software to help reduce digital noise to further improve image quality, so that the detector can collect image changes more accurately. They also want to see if artificial intelligence could be applied to the acquired images to automatically identify the types of defects and further streamline the inspection process.
Conversion of pyrolytic non-condensable gases from polypropylene co-polymer into bamboo-type carbon nanotubes and high-quality oil using biochar as catalyst
by Kalpit Shah, Savankumar Patel, Pobitra Halder, Sazal Kundu, Mojtaba Hedayati Marzbali, Ibrahim Gbolahan Hakeem, Biplob Kumar Pramanik, Ken Chiang, Tejas Patel in Journal of Environmental Management
Researchers have developed a clean and cost-effective way to upcycle used plastic, transforming it into valuable nanomaterials and high-quality fuel. New tech produces carbon nanotubes and clean liquid fuel from used plastic.
Globally only about 20% of waste plastics are recycled. Boosting that figure remains a challenge as recycling plastic cleanly can be expensive and usually produces lower-value products, often making it financially unviable.
The new method from researchers at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, can produce high-value products from plastic — carbon nanotubes and clean liquid fuel — while simultaneously upcycling agricultural and organic waste.
The team’s two-step process converts organic waste into a carbon-rich and high-value form of charcoal, then uses this as a catalyst to upcycle the plastic. Lead researcher Associate Professor Kalpit Shah said upcycling two massive waste streams through one circular economy approach could deliver significant financial and environmental benefits.
“Our method is clean, cost-effective and readily scaleable,” Shah said. “It’s a smart solution for transforming both used plastic and organic waste — whether tonnes of biomass from a farm or food waste and garden clippings from household green bins. “We hope this technology could be used in future by local councils and municipal governments to help turn this waste into genuine revenue streams.”
The new plastic upcycling approach offers a sustainable alternative for the production of carbon nanotubes (CNTs). These hollow, cylindrical structures have exceptional electronic and mechanical properties, with applications across a broad range of sectors including hydrogen storage, composite materials, electronics, fuel cells and biomedical technologies.
Carbon nanotubes are in growing demand, particularly in aerospace and defence, where they can facilitate the design of lightweight parts. The global market for CNTs has been projected to reach $5.8 billion by 2027.
The new method starts with converting agricultural or organic waste to biochar — a carbon-rich form of charcoal often used for improving soil health. The biochar is used to eliminate toxic contaminants — such as Poly-cyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons, known as PAHs — as the waste plastic is broken down into its components of gas and oil.
The process eliminates those contaminants and convert plastics into high-quality liquid fuel. At the same time, the carbon in the plastic is converted into carbon nanotubes, which coat the biochar. These nanotubes can be exfoliated for use by various industries or the nano-enhanced biochar can be used directly for environmental remediation and boosting agricultural soils.
The study is the first to use low-cost and widely available biochar as a catalyst for making contaminant-free fuel and carbon nanomaterials from plastic. Shah, the Deputy Director (Academic) of the ARC Training Centre for Transformation of Australia’s Biosolids Resource at RMIT, said while the study only investigated one type of plastic the approach would be applicable to a range of plastic types.
“We focused on polypropylene as this is widely used in the packaging industry,” he said. “While we need to do further research to test different plastics, as the quality of the fuel produced will vary, the method we’ve developed is generally suitable for upcycling any polymers — the base ingredients for all plastic.”
The experimental study conducted at lab scale can also be replicated in a new type of hyper-efficient reactor that has been developed and patented by RMIT. The reactor is based on fluidised bed technology and offers significant improvement in heat and mass transfer, to reduce overall capital and operating costs. The next steps for the upcycling research will involve detailed computer modelling to optimise the methodology, followed by pilot trials in the reactor.
The three major axes of terrestrial ecosystem function
by Mirco Migliavacca, Talie Musavi, Miguel D. Mahecha, Jacob A. Nelson, Jürgen Knauer, Dennis D. Baldocchi, et al. in Nature
An international collaboration including Oregon State University researcher Bev Law says the health of a terrestrial ecosystem can be largely determined by three variables: vegetations’ ability to uptake carbon, its efficiency in using carbon and its efficiency in using water.
Findings are important because scientists and policymakers need easier, faster and less expensive ways to determine how the ecosystems relied on by humans respond to climate and environmental changes, including impacts caused by people.
“We used these complex, continuous data to develop equations that can be applied with fewer measurements to monitor forest response to climate and other factors,” Law said.
The team of researchers, led by the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany, used satellite observations, mathematical models and multiple environmental data streams to determine that those three factors combine to represent more than 70% of total ecosystem function.
Put another way, if an ecosystem’s carbon uptake, carbon-use efficiency and water-use efficiency are all strong, that means at least 70% of everything the ecosystem is supposed to do is being done well.
“Ecosystems on the Earth’s land surface support multiple functions and services that are critical for society,” said Law, professor emeritus in the OSU College of Forestry. “Those functions and services include biomass production, plants’ efficiency in using sunlight and water, water retention, climate regulation and, ultimately, food security. Monitoring these key indicators allows for describing ecosystem function in a way that summarizes its ability to adapt, survive and thrive as the climate and environment change.”
Water-and carbon-use efficiency are linked closely with climate and also with aridity, which suggests climate change will play a big role in shaping ecosystem function over the coming years, the scientists say. Among the building blocks of the current research are data from five semi-arid ponderosa pine sites where Law has been conducting research for 25 years.
Those sites are in the AmeriFlux network, a collection of locations in North, South and Central America managed by principal investigators like Law that measure ecosystem carbon dioxide, water and energy “fluxes,” or exchanges with the atmosphere. AmeriFlux is part of the international FLUXNET project, and data from 203 FLUXNET sites representing a variety of climate zones and vegetation types were analyzed for the study.
Measuring ecosystem health has long been challenging given the complexities of ecosystem structure and how systems respond to environmental change, said Law, who has been researching the quantification of forest health for decades.
“In the 1980s, I was working on the development of indicators including similar carbon-use efficiency, and many of the measurements were incorporated in the Forest Service’s Forest Health Monitoring plots,” Law said. “The new flux paper shows how continuous data can be used to develop algorithms to apply in monitoring forest condition, and for evaluating and improving ecosystem models that are used in estimating the effects of climate on ecosystem carbon uptake and water use.”
The water-use indicator is a combination of metrics that relate to an ecosystem’s water-use efficiency, which is the carbon taken up per amount of water transpired by plants through their leaves. The carbon-use efficiency indicator compares the carbon that’s respired versus carbon taken up; plant respiration means converting into energy the sugars produced during photosynthesis.
“Using three major factors, we can explain almost 72% of the variability within ecosystem functions,” said Mirco Migliavacca, the study’s lead author and a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry.
The three functional indicators depend heavily, Law said, on the structure of vegetation — greenness, nitrogen content of leaves, vegetation height and biomass. That points to the importance of ecosystem structure, which can be altered by disturbances such as fire and also by forest management practices.
Origin of water masses in Floridan Aquifer System revealed by 81Kr
by Reika Yokochi, Jake C. Zappala, Roland Purtschert, Peter Mueller in Earth and Planetary Science Letters
As rising sea levels threaten coastal areas, scientists are using an emerging nuclear dating technique to track the ins and outs of water flow.
Florida is known for water. Between its beaches, swamps, storms and humidity, the state is soaked. And below its entire surface lies the largest freshwater aquifer in the nation. The Floridan Aquifer produces 1.2 trillion gallons of water each year — that’s almost 2 million Olympic-sized swimming pools. It serves as a primary source of drinking water for over 10 million people and supports the irrigation of over 2 million acres. It also supplies thousands of lakes, springs and wetlands, and the environments they nurture.
But as glaciers melt due to global warming, rising sea levels threaten this water source — and other coastal aquifers — with the intrusion of saltwater. It’s more crucial than ever to study the history and behavior of water in these aquifers, and Florida’s dynamic water systems make it a prime testbed.
In a study led by the University of Chicago, scientists applied a dating technique developed by nuclear physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory that uses a radioactive version of the element krypton to study the origin and flow of freshwater and saltwater in the Floridan Aquifer. Their findings demonstrate the promise of this novel technique to help understand and forecast the effects of climate change on coastal aquifers, to inform water resource management and to reveal insight into other geological processes.
To study the flow of water in the aquifer, the scientists used the TRACER Center at Argonne to perform radiokrypton dating. This technique works by the same principles as carbon dating, where the age of something is determined based on the amount of a certain element remaining in the sample. But instead of carbon, it uses the radioactive isotope krypton-81.
A small amount of krypton-81 is naturally produced in the atmosphere and can dissolve into the water droplets in clouds and bodies of water. Once the water goes underground, it stops absorbing krypton-81 from the atmosphere, and what remains slowly changes into other elements overtime.
If scientists can figure out the ratio between the krypton-81 in the water and in the atmosphere, they can calculate how long it has been underground.
“This is extremely challenging,” said Peter Mueller, a scientist in Argonne’s Physics division. “Since krypton-81 is so rare, you need very sensitive measurement tools to detect the tiny amount within a sample.”
Only one in a million atoms in the atmosphere is krypton. What’s more, only one in a trillion krypton atoms is krypton-81 specifically. This leaves so few atoms to detect in a sample that scientists count them one by one using a technique called Atom Trap Trace Analysis developed at Argonne.
The team collected samples from eight wells tapping the aquifer and extracted the gas dissolved in the water, including the krypton-81. At the TRACER Center, they sent the gas down a beamline where six laser beams come together to create a trap unique to the isotope of interest (in this case, krypton-81). The trapped atoms show up on a camera, and scientists can count them down to the individual atom.
This study is the first application of radiokrypton dating on the Floridan Aquifer. Some of the samples contained 40,000-year-old saltwater from just before the last glacial maximum at around 25,000 years ago, when much of the water that is now in the ocean was captured in huge glaciers. During this period, the sea level was over 100 meters lower than it is now.
“Because of global warming, the sea level is rising, causing seawater to spoil freshwater sources,” said Reika Yokochi, research professor at the University of Chicago and lead scientist on the study. ?”The presence of the moderately old water means saltwater persists in the aquifer once it gets in. This is bad news. We have to minimize the rate of this pollution.”
While the salty samples are concerning, there is good news, too. The scientists confirmed that the water in the southern part of the Floridan Aquifer was recharged with freshwater during the last glacial period (sometime between 12,000 to 115,000 years ago), bolstering the current understanding of freshwater dynamics.
“We also found a sample with relatively young freshwater, which is good news for Florida because it means that the water is actively flowing and renewable near central Florida,” said Yokochi.
Radiokrypton dating is a relatively new technique, and the scientists are just getting started. This tool has incredible potential to drive discovery in physics, geology and beyond. For example, scientists armed with radiokrypton dating can use the water in coastal aquifers as potential messengers of changes in water cycles and the composition of ancient seawater. The technique can also provide insight about the movement of elements across land-ocean boundaries, which impacts carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere.
“As water flows on the surface or underground, it reacts with surrounding rock and picks up signatures that tell a story,” said Yokochi. “This information can help to improve and validate our models of Earth’s systems and the cycle of the elements, which are tightly linked with global climate.”
Radiokrypton dating also serves as a complement to carbon dating when performed on the same samples. Scientists can use results from radiokrypton dating to calibrate carbon dating analysis. Once corrected, the carbon data can provide additional insight, especially on rates of water-carbonate reactions.
“When you have a new tool like this and apply it for the first time, even in an aquifer that has been studied a lot, suddenly you get a new perspective and new insight,” said Mueller. ‘The data from just a few samples is rich with opportunity, and this study demonstrates the great potential of krypton-81 in multiple fields of geochemistry.”
Protected-area targets could be undermined by climate change-driven shifts in ecoregions and biomes
by Solomon Z. Dobrowski, Caitlin E. Littlefield, Drew S. Lyons, Clark Hollenberg, Carlos Carroll, Sean A. Parks, John T. Abatzoglou, Katherine Hegewisch, Josh Gage in Communications Earth & Environment
In a new study, University of Montana researchers and colleagues explore how climate change could challenge efforts to protect biodiversity within the network of protected areas around the globe.
The team examined how potential shifts in ecoregions and biomes caused by climate change might change their representation within the global protected area network. They also considered the implications for conservation targets that call for 30% of Earth’s habitats to be formally protected by 2030.
“At its most basic level, this study attempts to understand what shifts in the distribution of the Earth’s ecoregions and biomes will mean for the capacity to conserve and protect biological diversity using protected areas,” said Solomon Dobrowski, the paper’s lead author and a professor of forest landscape ecology in the University’s W.A. Franke College of Forestry and Conservation.
Scientists have divided Earth’s terrestrial areas into roughly 800 ecoregions. An ecoregion is an ecosystem defined by distinctive geography and biota. These combinations of plants and animals act as surrogates for the planet’s biodiversity and provide a means for scientists, international organizations and countries to track whether protected areas represent the planet’s biodiversity.
Countries around the world use protected-area designations to conserve biodiversity. Protected areas come in lots of flavors, Dobrowski said, like national parks in the U.S. But one thing they all have in common are fixed boundaries that delineate a place on the ground.
Climate change will likely affect what ecosystems are represented in protected areas, Dobrowski and his co-authors contend in the new study, but how remains unclear. It’s also unclear how that could affect the effectiveness of conservation strategies that rely on protected areas — like the United Nations’s draft of the Post-2020 Global Diversity Framework, better known as 30 by 30, which calls for permanently protecting 30% of the Earth by 2030 through expanding the protected area network, among other initiatives. (In the U.S., there also is the America the Beautiful initiative, which aims to conserve 30% of America’s lands and waters by 2030.) The 30 by 30 framework will be addressed at the UN Biodiversity Conference COP-15, which kicks off online in October.
“The UN, in coordination with many countries and international conservation organizations, is promoting the expansion of the protected area network so that 30% of all ecoregions are protected by 2030,” Dobrowski said. “But what happens when plants and animals, and therefore ecoregions, move over time to track their optimal climate but the protected area boundaries stay fixed in place?
“Even if 30% of a given ecoregion may be protected now, as the ecoregions shift in response to climate change, that protection and representation within the protected area network will change,” he said.
To address these questions, the scientists used spatial climate analogs — present day locations that share similar climates to those projected for a location in the future — to examine how a 2-degree Celsius rise in global temperatures could alter the distribution of ecoregions. Then the scientists analyzed what that those changes could mean for achieving 30 by 30. They found that roughly half of the Earth’s land area will experience climate conditions that correspond with different ecoregions.
“Climate change has the potential to dramatically shift the ecosystems of the planet,” Dobrowski said. “We project by mid-century that over 50% of ecoregions globally will have a climate associated with a totally different ecoregion. We look at the world around us, and we see ecosystems that we are used to seeing. We think they’re stable, but they’re not. And those kinds of changes are going to challenge our ability to conserve biodiversity globally.”
The authors recommend that efforts to protect biodiversity will need to explicitly consider how climate change will drive changes in the patterns of biodiversity.
“We’re dealing with a moving target in terms of trying to capture the planet’s biodiversity in protected areas,” said co-author Caitlin Littlefield, formerly a UM postdoc and now with Conservation Science Partners. “In this work, we provide a model for how people can anticipate dynamic and shifting patterns of biodiversity and respond with strategic conservation investments.”
To extend their results more broadly, the group also created an online tool, Analog Atlas (https://plus2c.org/), to inform the public of the ways climate change could alter the ecosystems where they live and play. Climate analogs contextualize climate change by asking a simple question: “Where can I find the climate of my future, today?” Dobrowski said. Users can select any land area on the globe and see another location where the current climate matches future predicted conditions for that selected location.
“We are really excited about the Analog Atlas,” said co-author Sean Parks of the Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute. “It allows users to conceptualize climate change through maps, street views and statistics such as expected changes in the number of hot days, freezing nights and fire conducive days”.
Earth’s Albedo 1998–2017 as Measured From Earthshine
by P. R. Goode, E. Pallé, A. Shoumko, S. Shoumko, P. Montañes‐Rodriguez, S. E. Koonin in Geophysical Research Letters
Warming ocean waters have caused a drop in the brightness of the Earth, according to a new study.
Researchers used decades of measurements of earthshine — the light reflected from Earth that illuminates the surface of the Moon — as well as satellite measurements to find that there has been a significant drop in Earth’s reflectance, or albedo, over the past two decades.
The Earth is now reflecting about half a watt less light per square meter than it was 20 years ago, with most of the drop occurring in the last three years of earthshine data, according to the new study. That’s the equivalent of 0.5% decrease in the Earth’s reflectance. Earth reflects about 30% of the sunlight that shines on it.
“The albedo drop was such a surprise to us when we analyzed the last three years of data after 17 years of nearly flat albedo,” said Philip Goode, a researcher at New Jersey Institute of Technology and the lead author of the new study, referring to the earthshine data from 1998 to 2017 gathered by the Big Bear Solar Observatory in Southern California. When the latest data were added to the previous years, the dimming trend became clear.
Two things affect the net sunlight reaching the Earth: the Sun’s brightness and the planet’s reflectivity. The changes in Earth’s albedo observed by the researchers did not correlate with periodic changes in the Sun’s brightness, so that means changes in Earth’s reflectiveness are caused by something on the Earth. Specifically, there has been a reduction of bright, reflective low-lying clouds over the eastern Pacific Ocean in the most recent years, according to satellite measurements made as part of NASA’s Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) project.
That’s the same area, off the west coasts of North and South America, where increases in sea surface temperatures have been recorded because of the reversal of a climatic condition called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, with likely connections to global climate change.
The dimming of the Earth can also be seen in terms of how much more solar energy is being captured by Earth’s climate system. Once this significant additional solar energy is in Earth’s atmosphere and oceans, it may contribute to global warming, as the extra sunlight is of the same magnitude as the total anthropogenic climate forcing over the last two decades.
“It’s actually quite concerning,” said Edward Schwieterman, a planetary scientist at the University of California at Riverside who was not involved in the new study. For some time, many scientists had hoped that a warmer Earth might lead to more clouds and higher albedo, which would then help to moderate warming and balance the climate system, he said. “But this shows the opposite is true.”
Household cooking fuel estimates at global and country level for 1990 to 2030
by Oliver Stoner, Jessica Lewis, Itzel Lucio Martínez, Sophie Gumy, Theo Economou, Heather Adair-Rohani in Nature Communications
Almost one-in-three people around the world will still be mainly using polluting cooking fuels and technologies- a major source of disease and environmental destruction and devastation — in 2030, new research warned. This rises to more than four-in-five in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the number of people mainly using polluting fuels is growing at an alarming rate.
A new study, carried out by UK researchers and the World Health Organization (WHO), has estimated that just under 3 billion people worldwide — including more than one billion in Sub-Saharan Africa — will still mainly be using polluting fuels such as wood fuels and charcoal at the end of the decade.
These ‘dirty’ fuels are a source of major health risk as they produce high levels of household air pollution — chronic exposure to which increases the risk of heart disease, pneumonia, lung cancer and strokes, amongst others.
While the overall percentage of the global population mainly using polluting cooking fuels has been steadily decreasing since 1990, this trend is already showing signs of stagnation. Six in in ten people in rural areas are still reliant on biomass fuels such as wood and charcoal.
Reports by the WHO and others have attributed household air pollution from these fuels to millions of deaths per year — comparable to the death toll from outdoor air pollution. At the same time, fuel collection is often tasked to women and children, reducing opportunities for educationor income generation
Polluting fuels are also an important cause of environmental degradation and climate change, with the black carbon from residential biomass cooking estimate to account for 25% of anthropogenic global black carbon emissions each year.
The researchers insist the pivotal new study shows that, although progress has been made, the quest to deliver universal access to clean cooking by 2030 is “far off track.” They believe that global leaders and policy makers need to make significant advancements, in the short-term future, to help combat the health and environmental risks of household air pollution.
The lead author of the study, Dr Oliver Stoner, who carried out the research at the University of Exeter but is now at the University of Glasgow said: “Analysing global trends suggests incremental progress in the direction of clean cooking fuels, but the simple reality is that there can be no global success while the number of people using polluting fuels in Sub-Saharan Africa grows by 10s of millions every year.”
Heather Adair-Rohani, TechnicalLead on Health and Energy in the Department of Environment, Climate Change and Health at the WHO headquarters in Geneva, and a senior author on the study, stressed the importance of tackling the root causes household air pollution, “Accelerating access to clean cooking solutions must be a developmental priority. Ensuring the sustained adoption of clean cooking solutions can prevent disease and improve the livelihoods of the poorest populations as well as protect our climate.”
The crucial need to provide access to clean cooking globally was enshrined in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by all United Nations member states, as one of three targets for Sustainable Development Goal (SDG), to “ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy.”
As part of its mandate to monitor and inform policy towards this goal, WHO publishes estimates of exposure to HAP and related disease burdens, which have traditionally examined use of polluting fuels as a group, without distinguishing between the different fuels used.
For the new study, the researchers used sophisticated modelling combined with increasingly detailed household survey data to give a more accurate portrayal of the extent polluting cooking fuels are still used. The research provides comprehensive and reliable estimate for the use of six types of fuel — electricity, gaseous fuels, kerosene, biomass, charcoal, coal — as well as overall clean and polluting fuel use from 1990 to 2020, and subsequent predictions up until 2030.
Dr Stoner added: “While our analysis already paints a bleak picture, we don’t yet know the full extent to which the COVID-19 pandemic has threatened or even undone recent progress.”
Is photosynthetic enhancement sustained through three years of elevated CO2 exposure in 175-year-old Quercus robur?
by A Gardner, D S Ellsworth, K Y Crous, J Pritchard, A R MacKenzie in Tree Physiology
Mature oak trees will increase their rate of photosynthesis by up to a third in response to the raised CO2 levels expected to be the world average by about 2050, new research shows.
The results are the first to emerge from a giant outdoor experiment, led by the University of Birmingham in which an old oak forest is bathed in elevated levels of CO2. Over the first three years of a ten-year project, the 175-year-old oaks clearly responded to the CO2 by consistently increasing their rate of photosynthesis.
Researchers are now measuring leaves, wood, roots, and soil to find out where the extra carbon captured ends up and for how long it stays locked up in the forest.
The increase in photosynthesis was greatest in strong sunlight. The overall balance of key nutrient elements carbon and nitrogen did not change in the leaves. Keeping the carbon to nitrogen ratio constant suggests that the old trees have found ways of redirecting their elements, or found ways of bringing more nitrogen in from the soil to balance the carbon they are gaining from the air.
Time series showing the daily meteorological data at the BIFoR FACE facility covering the period of 1 January 2015–1 January 2021. The research was carried out at the Free-Air CO2 Enrichment (FACE) facility of the Birmingham Institute of Forest Research (BIFoR) in close collaboration with colleagues from Western Sydney University who run a very similar experiment in old eucalyptus forest (EucFACE). BIFoR FACE and EucFACE are the world’s two largest experiments investigating the effect of global change on nature.
Birmingham researcher Anna Gardner, who carried out the measurements, said “I’m really excited to contribute the first published science results to BIFoR FACE, an experiment of global importance. It was hard work conducting measurements at the top of a 25 m oak day after day, but it was the only way to be sure how much extra the trees were photosynthesising.”
Professor David Ellsworth, EucFACE lead scientist, said “Previous work at EucFACE measured photosynthesis increased by up to a fifth in increased carbon dioxide. So, we now know how old forest responds in the warm-temperate climate that we have here in Sydney, and the mild temperate climate of the northern middle latitudes where Birmingham sits. At EucFACE we found no additional growth in higher CO2, and it remains to be seen if that will be the case for BIFOR as well.”
Professor Rob MacKenzie, founding Director of BIFoR, said “It’s a delight to see the first piece of the carbon jigsaw for BIFoR FACE fall into place. We are sure now that the old trees are responding to future carbon dioxide levels. How the entire forest ecosystem responds is a much bigger question requiring many more detailed investigations. We are now pushing ahead with those investigations.”
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