hope-for-the-planet

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Good News for Sustainable Rice Cultivation

As you might imagine, rice is a very water-hungry crop and currently uses about a third of global freshwater--the cultivation of rice also produces 12% of global methane emissions.

New breakthroughs from researchers in Chile, Chine, and Sweden have developed one variety of rice that uses 50% less water and another that can reduce methane emissions by 70%.

For a staple crop that is produced in such massive numbers, this is a really huge deal both for preserving resources and for food security.

Source--Fix the News

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"Over the past decade, the population of the critically endangered Siberian crane has increased by nearly 50%, according to the International Crane Foundation.

The foundation said the boost in the snowy-white Siberian crane’s (Leucogeranus leucogeranus) numbers is the result of efforts to secure the migratory bird’s stopover sites along its eastern flyway, or migratory route, between Russia and China.

“It is a wonderful feeling to have this Critically Endangered species thriving with such a strong comeback from near extinction,” Rich Beilfuss, president and CEO of the International Crane Foundation, told Mongabay by email.

The Siberian crane, known for its extremely long and arduous annual journeys, is one of the world’s rarest cranes. It’s western and central populations, which once bred in western Russia, then migrated to parts of Central Asia and India, is nearly extinct today.

Most Siberian cranes that remain belong to the eastern population, which migrates between northeastern Russia and China. By 2012, researchers estimated there were around 3,500-4,000 individuals left in this eastern population.

The latest bird counts from Russia and China suggest their numbers have nearly doubled to 7,000 individuals, Beilfuss said.

The recovery of the eastern flyway is heartening, he added, because the western flyway of the species “was lost due to over-hunting and the entire population is now concentrated in this one eastern flyway between Russia and China.”

The eastern population, too, has declined in the past due to the loss and degradation of its summer breeding and wintering grounds, as well as its stopover wetland habitats. The habitat losses are driven largely by climate change and human activities like the construction of dams.

To help the Siberian cranes along this flyway, the International Crane Foundation, with support from the Disney Conservation Fund, has been working with organizations in Russia and China over the past decade to identify and secure the wetlands the bird relies on, Beilfuss said.

In China, for instance, the foundation has collaborated with local partners at Lake Poyang, which supports nearly the entire wintering population of Siberian cranes and several other threatened waterbirds. Beilfuss said they’re managing the lake system in a way that ensures enough feeding areas for the cranes. Additionally, the organizations have been raising awareness about the threatened status of the species along the flyway, including school curriculums about the crane.

The Disney funding ended in late 2024. However, the International Crane Foundation will continue to work on Lake Poyang, Beilfuss said. This includes focusing on “restoring the natural habitat for cranes and managing enough safe agricultural land as refugia, developing a water level control and vegetation restoration plan for two sub-lakes within Poyang, and strengthening community engagement to reduce disturbances to cranes,” he said. ��Still much to do to keep this species thriving!”"

-via Mongabay News, January 9, 2025

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From the article:

As the climate is continuously changing and the atmosphere is warming, many scientists fear that fresh water from melting polar ice sheets could significantly disrupt—or collapse—the AMOC. While a decline of the AMOC would have grave consequences, a collapse would be truly catastrophic [...] However, studies about the AMOC's long term future are uncertain. Instead of predicting the future, a team of scientists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) quantified the past to help inform where we could be going. In a new paper published in Nature Communications, scientists found that the AMOC has not declined in the last 60 years [...] "Based on the results, the AMOC is more stable than we thought," Vogt said. "This might mean that the AMOC isn't as close to a tipping point as previously suggested."

[hope-for-the-planet]

Sungai Watch is a nonprofit located in Bali, Indonesia that works to create barriers to remove plastic waste from rivers and then collect, recycle, or up-cycle it. This not only keeps the rivers healthier, but also prevents waste and keeps more plastic out of the ocean.

At this point they have stopped about 1 million kg of plastic from reaching the ocean, and their future goal is to create 1,000 barriers along Indonesia's most heavily polluted rivers.

[hope-for-the-planet]

From the article:

This past October 18th, 2024 the Bosque Escondido de Ingavi municipal conservation area was established which safeguards 1,132,127 acres (458,155 hectares) of Amazonian forests, representing 84.5% of Ingavi’s municipal territory. Its area encompasses both terra firma forests (tropical forest that does not get seasonally flooded) and flood forests, giving a high ecological value to the area and turning it into a refuge for flora and fauna. In addition, it is considered by communities as a key pillar for the local economy and a source of vital sustenance. The creation of the Bosque Escondido de Ingavi municipal conservation area also contributes to reducing the effects of climate change, preventing fires and conserving rivers and aquatic species. Within its limits flow important rivers such as the Orthon, Manu, Abuná and Río Negro, which play an important role in the water cycle and the ecological balance of the region and guarantee a sustainable future for the communities and the next generations, based on balanced coexistence with nature.

This is over one million acres of Amazonian forest conserved!

[hope-for-the-planet]

From the article:

Clean energy investment manager Greenbacker Renewable Energy has secured $950 million to build what will be New York State’s largest solar farm. Greenbacker acquired the 500-megawatt (MW) Cider project from renewable energy developer Hecate Energy. Work started in October, and the project is expected to come online in 2026. [...] The Solar Energy Industries Association ranks New York 8th nationally for solar capacity. With 6,493 megawatts, it has enough solar to power 1,127,865 homes. It’s expected to move to 5th place in five years.

[hope-for-the-planet]

https://english.radio.cz/beavers-build-planned-dams-protected-landscape-area-while-local-officials-still-8841536

A beaver colony in the Brdy region has gained overnight fame by building several dams in the Brdy protected landscape area, creating a natural wetland exactly where it was needed. It saved the local authorities 30 million crowns, and has the public cracking jokes about public administration and red tape.

The administration of the Brdy protected landscape area, which had gained approval for the 30 million crown project, was dealing with red tape and seeking the respective building permits from the Vltava River Basin authorities when the dam project was completed almost overnight by a local colony of beavers.

They could not have chosen their location better –erecting the dams on a bypass gully that was built by soldiers in the former military base years ago, so as to drain the area. The revitalization project drafted by environmentalists was supposed to remedy this. Bohumil Fišer, head of the Brdy Protected Landscape Area Administration says Nature took its course and the beavers created the necessary biotope conditions practically overnight.

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"In some cities, as many as one in four office spaces are vacant. Some start-ups are giving them a second life – as indoor farms growing crops as varied as kale, cucumber and herbs.

Since its 1967 construction, Canada's "Calgary Tower", a 190m (623ft) concrete-and-steel observation tower in Calgary, Alberta, has been home to an observation deck, panoramic restaurants and souvenir shops. Last year, it welcomed a different kind of business: a fully functioning indoor farm.

Sprawling across 6,000sq m (65,000 sq ft), the farm, which produces dozens of crops including strawberries, kale and cucumber, is a striking example of the search for city-grown food. But it's hardly alone. From Japan to Singapore to Dubai, vertical indoor farms – where crops can be grown in climate-controlled environments with hydroponics, aquaponics or aeroponics techniques – have been popping up around the world.

While indoor farming had been on the rise for years, a watershed moment came during the Covid-19 pandemic, when disruptions to the food supply chain underscored the need for local solutions. In 2021, $6bn (£4.8bn) in vertical farming deals were registered globally – the peak year for vertical farming investment. As the global economy entered its post-pandemic phase, some high-profile startups like Fifth Season went out of business, and others including Planted Detroit and AeroFarms running into a period of financial difficulty. Some commentators questioned whether a "vertical farming bubble" had popped.

But a new, post-pandemic trend may give the sector a boost. In countries including Canada and Australia, landlords are struggling to fill vacant office spaces as companies embrace remote and hybrid work. In the US, the office vacancy rate is more than 20%.

"Vertical farms may prove to be a cost-effective way to fill in vacant office buildings," says Warren Seay, Jr, a real estate finance partner in the Washington DC offices of US law firm ArentFox Schiff, who authored an article on urban farm reconversions. 

There are other reasons for the interest in urban farms, too. Though supply chains have largely recovered post-Covid-19, other global shocks, including climate change, geopolitical turmoil and farmers' strikes, mean that they continue to be vulnerable – driving more cities to look for local food production options...

Thanks to artificial light and controlled temperatures, offices are proving surprisingly good environments for indoor agriculture, spurring some companies to convert part of their facilities into small farms. Since 2022, Australia's start-up Greenspace has worked with clients like Deloitte and Commonwealth Bank to turn "dead zones", like the space between lifts and meeting rooms, into 2m (6ft) tall hydroponic cabinets growing leafy greens.

On top of being adaptable to indoor farm operations, vacant office buildings offer the advantage of proximity to final consumers.

In a former paper storage warehouse in Arlington, about a mile outside of Washington DC, Jacqueline Potter and the team at Area 2 Farms are growing over 180 organic varieties of lettuce, greens, root vegetables, herbs and micro-greens. By serving consumers 10 miles away or less, the company has driven down transport costs and associated greenhouse emissions.

This also frees the team up to grow other types of food that can be hard to find elsewhere – such as edible flower species like buzz buttons and nasturtium. "Most crops are now selected to be grown because of their ability to withstand a 1,500-mile journey," Potter says, referring to the average distance covered by crops in the US before reaching customers. "In our farm, we can select crops for other properties like their nutritional value or taste."

Overall, vertical farms have the potential to outperform regular farms on several environmental sustainability metrics like water usage, says Evan Fraser, professor of geography at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada and the director of the Arell Food Institute, a research centre on sustainable food production. Most indoor farms report using a tiny fraction of the water that outdoor farms use. Indoor farms also report greater output per square mile than regular farms.

Energy use, however, is the "Achilles heel" of this sector, says Fraser: vertical farms need a lot of electricity to run lighting and ventilation systems, smart sensors and automated harvesting technologies. But if energy is sourced from renewable sources, they can outperform regular farms on this metric too, he says. 

Because of variations in operational setup, it is hard to make a general assessment of the environmental, social and economic sustainability of indoor farms, says Jiangxiao Qiu, a landscape ecologist at the University of Florida and author of a study on urban agriculture's role in sustainability. Still, he agrees with Fraser: in general, urban indoor farms have higher crop yield per square foot, greater water and nutrient-use efficiency, better resistance to pests and shorter distance to market. Downsides include high energy use due to lighting, ventilation and air conditioning.

They face other challenges, too. As Seay notes, zoning laws often do not allow for agricultural activity within urban areas (although some cities like Arlington, Virginia, and Cincinnati, Ohio, have recently updated zoning to allow indoor farms). And, for now, indoor farms have limited crop range. It is hard to produce staple crops like wheat, corn or rice indoors, says Fraser. Aside from leafy greens, most indoor facilities cannot yet produce other types of crops at scale.

But as long as the post-pandemic trends of remote work and corporate downsizing will last, indoor farms may keep popping up in cities around the world, Seay says. 

"One thing cities dislike more than anything is unused spaces that don't drive economic growth," he says. "If indoor farm conversions in cities like Arlington prove successful, others may follow suit.""

-via BBC, January 27, 2025

[hope-for-the-planet]

The human negativity bias is such that when we make significant progress on fixing a problem it often just fades out of the public discourse in favor of the next crisis. Gradual, imperfect progress is not nearly as attention-grabbing as an emergency.

There's a reason you don't hear as much about "save the whales", acid rain, or other ozone hole. It's because we successfully did something about them.

[hope-for-the-planet]

From the article:

The Department of the Interior today announced that the Bureau of Land Management received no bids for the congressionally mandated oil and gas lease sale for the Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (Arctic Refuge). The deadline to submit bids was Monday, January 6. [...] “The lack of interest from oil companies in development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge reflects what we and they have known all along – there are some places too special and sacred to put at risk with oil and gas drilling. This proposal was misguided in 2017, and it’s misguided now,” said Acting Deputy Secretary Laura Daniel-Davis.

This is the second time that the lease sale for this area has fallen through. The writing is on the wall that investments like this have an expiration date as the world transitions to clean energy due to economics and public opinion.

[hope-for-the-planet]

So. Storytime for guerilla gardeners and solarpunk enthusiasts. This story comes to me 3rd hand but I believe the basic shape of it is true, even if details may be off.

So there’s this guy who lives in my parents’ town. Wanted to have a pocket farm but lives on an urban lot in a small city instead because y’know jobs and stuff. He could definitely get a few raised beds in the backyard but nothing all that impressive and the front yard is on a very busy road with the expectation that it’ll look reasonably traditional (plus planting food by busy roads isn’t always a good idea).

However

After he’s lived there for a while, he realizes his neighbors are all older people who maybe have more challenges taking care of their yards than they used to. So he goes to his next door neighbor and offers a deal: I’ll mow and maintain your front yard for free if you let me knock down the fences between our backyards and plant them both with food. And you’ll get a cut of the produce.

Presumably the neighbor already knew and trusted this guy because he said yes. So he starts mowing and maintaining his and his neighbor’s front yards and planting food in their now-shared backyards. After a season or two this goes well enough that the next neighbor down the street asks if he can be in on this too.

So now there’s 3 front yards to mow and three backyards full of produce. And it keeps going from there. Dude gets a rider lawnmower and does everyone’s front yards, and meanwhile he’s maintaining an entire block’s worth of produce in the back. His yields got so high that he was able to start offering boxes of produce outside of the block’s residents too. This is how I heard of him: my parents’ next door neighbors were picking up a regular box of produce from him.

I love a couple of things about this story:

Offering to maintain people’s front yards for them allows baby boomers to feed their thirst for keeping up appearances while still getting food production into the neighborhood

As homeowners age offering services like this is legitimately good community building

BLOCK-LONG POCKET FARM

These exact circumstances might not be replicable everywhere, but I love thinking about how these principles could be applied.

[hope-for-the-planet]

This is HUGE news! Sea otters have been absent from Oregon shorelines for more than a century due to overhunting for fur. While Washington and California have healthy populations, Oregon hasn't seen any new otters move in, other than the occasional transient. This is due largely to the fact that they are not normally migratory animals, and so are more likely to stick around relatively close to their birthplaces. Since all the sea otters of Oregon were exterminated to make coats and other fur products, there was no remaining population to rebuild locally.

However, reintroduction could make a difference by deliberately relocating sea otters from other areas to Oregon, particularly in places that have lots of food for them, like sea urchins. This grant would fund research in finding the best places to reintroduce them and the best existing populations to draw from, among other tasks that need to be addressed before the otters can meet their new homes.

This grant is an incredibly important move forward in returning this keystone species to a part of its native range. Bringing back sea otters would vastly improve the health of kelp forests in the ocean, which are currently being decimated by an overpopulation of sea urchins. In turn, healthier kelp forests means better marine biodiversity offering more food and shelter for a wider range of species, giving them more resilience in the years to come.

[hope-for-the-planet]

From the article:

[T]here are now signs that China’s thirst for crude is reaching a peak sooner than expected, a development that has sent shockwaves through the oil market. This week, China said its oil imports had fallen nearly 2 per cent, or 240,000 barrels a day, to just over 11mn b/d in 2024 compared with the year before, the first decline in two decades barring the disruption during the Covid pandemic[...]. [T]he decline stems from longer-term trends too. There was a boom in trucks switching from diesel to liquefied natural gas, and, most importantly, the rising number of electric vehicles helped to depress sales of petrol and diesel. Sales of both road fuels peaked in 2023, according to China National Petroleum Corp, and will now fall by 25-40 per cent over the next decade. In December, Sinopec, China’s biggest refiner, brought forward its forecast for crude oil consumption to reach a peak to 2027, compared with the range it previously gave of between 2026 and 2030. The implications of China hitting peak oil are enormous. If Chinese demand is reaching a plateau that would fulfil projections by the IEA of global oil demand peaking before 2030. The forecast sustains hope for the world to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050."

[hope-for-the-planet]

Trans person in the US. Bust some of the doomerism for me? Tell me it's going to be okay?

Hi Anon

Usually, I have boundaries for myself about keeping this blog focused on environment-related issues, because there are limits to what I can speak knowledgeably about. But now doesn’t feel like the time for that.

Anon, I will tell you that I live in the US, I am queer, my spouse is trans, and we have two young children. I am sitting right there with you in the fear and grief and every day when I ask myself “is there still hope” I find reasons to say “yes”.

They want us—all of us, not just queer folks—to feel overwhelmed and hopeless, because despair is a tool that keeps people from realizing their power and taking action.

They want us to feel so afraid that we lose our faith in other people and withdraw from our communities, because we are easier to conquer alone.

Do not give them what they want.

Hope is most necessary in the bad times. The ability to imagine a future that is better than things are now is exactly what gives us the power to begin making things better. Our community has been through terrible things before, and they did not lose hope or give up—otherwise we would not be where we are today.

When you start to feel like all the light is being blotted out, turn off the news, put away your phone, and go get in touch with something you love. Go outside and look at the sky, talk to a friend, listen to music, do some small thing to make something better even if it’s just cleaning your kitchen or picking up some litter around the block or returning an extra stranded cart in the grocery store parking lot. Remind your brain that you have agency to make positive change in the world through your actions.

I know it is really hard to pull out of the darkness sometimes. I know there will be days that hope seems like a foolish, naive thing, that despair and distrust seem like the only rational options. But hope is what keeps us alive. Hope is what allows us to save each other.

I wish I could give you a specific article or other source to reassure you that everything is going to be ok, but things are still too in flux day by day. I can tell you that people are already fighting back, in big and little ways, all over this country and the world. These orders and bills are being pushed by a loud but small minority—this is not how the majority of the country feels about trans rights.

Make a plan for staying safe. Reach out to your community. Find music, activities, podcasts, movies, whatever helps you feel uplifted and take mental breaks from dwelling on the news. If you can, find ways to get involved in making things better in whatever big or small way feels doable for you--it may help push back on the doomerism more than you think. And my inbox is open if you need to talk.

I wish I could invite you over for dinner. I wish I could look into your eyes and tell you that things may get hard for the next few years but that does not mean that your life can't still be full of joy and beauty and fulfillment in spite of that.

I’m right there with you. Let’s make it through this together <3

[hope-for-the-planet]

This is the beginning on the EU's crackdown on single use plastics. Loose bottle caps are one of the most common forms of single-use plastic litter--the idea is that by keeping them attached to the bottle they are more likely to be properly thrown away or (ideally) recycled.

Other items that the EU aims to ban by 2030 include single use plastics for condiments, grocery bags, fresh fruits and vegetables, and fast food.

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Former New York city mayor Michael Bloomberg is joining with other US climate organizations to fund the United States entire 21% contribution to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. This will allow the organization to remain fully functional in the wake of Trump's withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. This contribution will continue at least until the United States is able to rejoin the Paris Agreement.

I dislike the existence of billionaires as much as the next person, but it is refreshing to see one of them actually using their money to do a net good for the planet.

[hope-for-the-planet]

via @/_weloveyou__ on tiktok