With climate-enhanced droughts, heatwaves and fires ravaging three continents and the threat of a new surge in global warming, the world urgently needs to ramp-up solutions for slashing carbon pollution. But which solutions are most critical?
The organization Project Drawdown has detailed the potential, feasibility and cost of nearly a hundred climate solutions since it was set up in 2017.
Executive director Jonathan Foley, a leading climate scientist, spoke to AFP about how to assess and prioritize the actions needed to keep Earth liveable.
The following interview has been edited for length and flow:
Q: What are the three most important questions in assessing the usefulness and integrity of carbon-cutting solutions?
A: Is it available now and ready to deploy? Because we need to start bending the emissions curve immediately.
Is it cost-effective? Otherwise, it's not going to scale effectively.
Does it create co-benefits for people, especially in terms of health, jobs, equity, and justice? This will make it far more appealing.
Q: A lot of hope—and investment—is going into technological solutions such as filtering fossil fuel pollution or pulling CO2 out of the air. Comment?
A: While some very limited carbon removal will be needed by mid-century, the vast, vast majority of the work we need to do—more than 95 percent—is cutting emissions, and doing it now.
Of the five percent focused on carbon removal, I think it should be more than 90 percent nature-based removal, such as ecological restoration and regenerative agriculture. Machine-based removal is unlikely to work at any meaningful scale.
Q: We often hear that solutions are already available, all that's missing is political will. Is that it? READ MORE...
Scientists are certain that humans around the world are ingesting tiny pieces of plastic on a regular basis. Now, they are seeking to understand how the wide distribution of microplastics affects human health and the environment as a whole.
Eating a credit card's worth of plastic — a comparison often used to illustrate estimates that people consume about 5 grams of microplastics a week on average — sounds unhealthy on a very visceral level. Learning that those pieces of plastic could later show up in your lungs is even scarier.
Investigations into microplastics exposure and human health have confirmed that not all plastic ingested by humans comes out the other end; at least in some cases, microplastics can be absorbed into the bloodstream or trapped in the lungs.
But scientists don't yet know how the presence of microplastics in the body affects overall health, especially compared to exposures to other environmental chemicals and contaminants.
You may have heard that plastics never fully decompose. In fact, plastic waste slowly breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces, creating microplastics that are so light they can be swept up by the wind.
Microplastics are defined as particles measuring no more than 5 millimeters across, which is about the size of a grain of rice. In the 20-odd years since they were named, scientists have found microplastics in virtually every environment, from ocean floors to mountain peaks, National Geographic reported. READ MORE...
It is estimated that the world uses 129 billion disposable masks every month.
With a lifespan of around 450 years, environmental researchers are concerned about an ecological timebomb.
According to the United Nations, a staggering 75% of face masks end up in landfill or waterways. Read more...
