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With electric vehicles sales soaring worldwide, potential buyers are not just weighing up the price tag, but also the logistics and expense of charging the planet-friendly cars. A new study shows households with solar panels and batteries will be the big winners.

Science Daily

More reasons to go solar when gearing up for a greener drive

An international research team has used satellite data to demonstrate that concentrations of pollutant particles have decreased significantly since the year 2000. This is desirable due to their impact on health.

Improved air quality accelerates global warming in recent decades

Climate change and habitat destruction may have already caused the loss of more than one-tenth of the world's terrestrial genetic diversity, according to new research.

It may already be too late to meet UN genetic diversity target, but new findings could guide conservation efforts

Electric vehicles will contribute to emissions reductions in the United States, but their charging may challenge electricity grid operations. We present a data-driven, realistic model of charging demand that captures the diverse charging behaviours of future adopters in the US Western Interconnection. 

Nature

Charging infrastructure access and operation to reduce the grid impacts of deep electric vehicle adoption

Promoting the sustainable development of marine environments requires planning, just as we have long had spatial planning for land-based activities. Now researchers are showing that marine planning must take climate change into consideration.


Climate change may impact marine environments more than anything else

Aviation's growing impact on the climate crisis requires radical solutions that may upend the industry, according to a new commentary article.


The aviation industry needs to overhaul its response to climate change

 Our new investigation details the role of oil and gas companies in hijacking science at elite universities in the US, mimicking the tactics of tobacco companies. By demanding more science, not less, and, crucially, influencing science to counter research that shows smoking to be harmful, the tobacco companies pulled off a “public relations masterstroke.” It’s a success that oil and gas companies have sought to emulate since the turn of the millennium.

The BMJ

How Big Oil is manipulating climate science

Paul Thacker examines how oil and gas companies have funded research to try to weaken messages on climate change and protect their interests

Stealing from the tobacco playbook, fossil fuel companies pour money into elite American universities

Shallow-water mining projects are already underway in Namibia and Indonesia, and projects have been proposed in Mexico, New Zealand, and Sweden, but the effects of these projects haven't been fully investigated. Scientists argue that shallow-water mining needs more rigorous environmental evaluation before it can be declared safe and sustainable.

Shallow-water mining is not a sustainable alternative to deep-water mining, scientists argue

A new report prepared by an international group of scientists and published in the authoritative journal Reviews of Geophysics, identifies the EMME* as a climate change hot spot, and concludes that the region is warming almost two times faster than the global average, and more rapidly than other inhabited parts of the world.

Overall warming of up to 5°C in this century projected for the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East

Researchers estimate that more than 1.1 million sea turtles have been illegally killed and, in some cases, trafficked between 1990 and 2020. 

More than 1.1 million sea turtles poached over last three decades

One barrier to enabling transitions to more environmentally sustainable food systems is the lack of detailed environmental impact information. By estimating the environmental impacts of food products in a standardized way, our approach provides a step to enable informed decision-making by end users such as consumers and policy makers.

PNAS

Estimating the environmental impacts of 57,000 food products

The growing demand for nickel, copper, cobalt, and zinc -- raw materials for solar panels and batteries -- puts the mining and metals sector in the spotlight of climate change mitigation. But how does the sector itself fare when it comes to meeting the sustainable development goals? Researchers analyzed the global trends of patents related to climate change mitigation technology filed by the mining and metals sectors to find out.


Digging through patents to make mining greener

Images of damaged coastlines, oily sheens, containment booms and endangered wildlife are part of every offshore oil spill. And while a response team arrives and the clean up gets underway, researchers are now exploring how to effectively handle the waste created from that spill.


What happens to the waste after an oil spill clean up?

All models agree that atmospheric CO2 and nitrogen deposition-driven gains in carbon stocks are partially offset by climate and land-use and land-cover change (LULCC) losses. However, there is a lack of consensus in partitioning the sink between vegetation and soil, where models do not even agree on the direction of change in carbon stocks over the past 60 years.

Process-oriented analysis of dominant sources of uncertainty in the land carbon sink

Findings from a new study offer a new potential method for cleaning wastewater after use by textiles, cosmetics or other industries.

New method can remove dyes from wastewater

A new model developed by Caltech and JPL researchers suggests that Antarctica's ice shelves may be melting at an accelerated rate, which could eventually contribute to more rapid sea level rise

Antarctica's ice shelves could be melting faster than we thought

From crop damage to cooling failures at cloud-based data centers, climate change affects a wide variety of economic sectors.

The cost of climate change on economic growth

Engineering enzymes to help solve the planet's plastic problem


The worst effects of global warming on the world's largest ice sheet could be avoided if nations around the world succeed in meeting climate targets outlined in the Paris Agreement. That's the call from an international team of climate scientists who have examined how much sea levels could rise if climate change melts the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS).

Clock is ticking to save East Antarctica from climate change

Even relatively modest climate warming and associated precipitation shifts may dramatically alter Earth's northernmost forests, which constitute one of the planet's largest nearly intact forested ecosystems and are home to a big chunk of the planet's terrestrial carbon.

Even modest climate change may lead to sweeping changes in northernmost forests

Increasing inertia is widely considered to be the solution to resolving unstable interactions between coupled oscillators. In power grids, Virtual Synchronous Generators (VSGs) are proposed to compensate for reducing inertia as rotating fossil-fuel-based generators are being phased out.

Coupled power generators require stability buffers in addition to inertia

Alongside the technological advancement, the existing studies indicate that the success of smart campus development mainly depends on three key dimensions: technology capability, sustainability, and student health and well-being. However, the state-of-the-art assessment on smart campus are mostly unilaterally dependent but lack a balanced evaluation of the three dimensions.

A hybrid assessment framework for human-centred sustainable smart campus

Local marine stewardship initiatives and ocean defenders are at the forefront of ocean sustainability efforts yet often receive insufficient recognition and support. Five recommendations to bring greater attention and support to local marine stewardship and ocean defenders in research, policy, practice, and funding.

Local marine stewardship and ocean defenders

The economy of Southern Africa is rapidly developing, driving a growing demand for electricity. Efficiently meeting this demand will require balancing social, economic, geographic, technological and environmental considerations.

Energizing Africa

Here we discuss how concerns about climate risks influence the way investors allocate their capital and exercise their oversight of firms and how this investor response affects companies in the energy sector

The effect of climate risks on the interactions between financial markets and energy companies

As the Earth’s warming continues to accelerate, children are set to bear the health risk brunt of rising global temperatures. Physical fitness has a direct impact on heat tolerance, yet children are less fit and more obese than ever before. Longitudinal research reveals that children have 30% lower aerobic fitness than their parents did at the same age; this deficit is greater than can be recovered by training alone. So, as the planet’s climate and weather patterns become more extreme, children may become less capable of tolerating it.

Temperature

Moving in a hotter world: Maintaining adequate childhood fitness as a climate change countermeasure

From July the NHS in England must consider climate change when making decisions.1 One of the more frequent complaints I hear from my ex-patients is about having to take a monthly trip to the pharmacy to collect their 28 day repeat prescription. 

NHS and climate change: stop 28 day prescriptions for drugs taken long term

This study analyses the potential for expanding renewable and nuclear energy use in Cambodia. They surveyed officials from the government and various institutions to derive practical recommendations for the political sector. 

Taylor & Francis Online

An analysis of Cambodia’s policy-maker’s acceptance of renewable and nuclear energy

Among the rechargeable batteries, aqueous zinc-ion batteries (ZIBs), due to their safety, low cost, eco-friendly, and simplicity in construction, have received much attentions. One of the most critical parts of the battery technology is the electrolyte additives, which have been less studied against their essential roles.

artaric acid as a novel additive for approaching high-performance capacity retention in zinc-ion battery

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Bruegel's analysis highlights that the current national energy and climate plans (NECPs) of EU countries are insufficient to achieve a cost-efficient pathway to EU-wide climate neutrality by 2050.



Bruegel

Decarbonisation of the energy system

Removing the greenhouse gas from the air will likely be necessary, along with radical emissions cuts, to keep temperatures from rising 2˚C.

MIT Technology Review

UN climate report: Carbon removal is now “essential”

As part of the Paris Agreement, governments committed to take into account: “the imperatives of a just transition of the workforce and the creation of decent work and quality jobs in accordance with nationally defined development priorities”. In this policy brief, the authors review the attention given to this crucial aspect of climate change action. 

Grantham Research Institute

Lessons from COP26 for financing the just transition

Microbiologists have shed light on the structure of an enzyme that produces formic acid from molecular hydrogen (H2) and carbon dioxide (CO2)

Electron highway for hydrogen and carbon dioxide storage discovered

Producing low-carbon hydrogen to use as a clean energy carrier is an important step towards a decarbonized economy.

Plasma pyrolysis for a sustainable hydrogen economy

Decarbonising the energy system requires a fundamental transformation in the way societies provide, transport and consume energy. Disagreement exists over how this system should look in 2050. The large-scale expansion of low-carbon electricity, phase out of unabated fossil fuels, and widespread direct electrification are uncontroversial. 

Decarbonisation of energy

The purpose of this report is to identify key similarities and differences between a carbon tax and a CES. The authors assess an example of a carbon tax and a CES in which electric power CO2 emission reductions are roughly equivalent.

Columbia SIPA

Comparing a Clean Electricity Standard and a Carbon Tax

Certain groups in the U.S.—Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, Latinos, and low-income populations—are being exposed to higher levels of dangerous fine particulate air pollution (PM2.5) than other groups, according to new research from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Harvard School of Public Health 

Racial, ethnic minorities and low-income groups in U.S. exposed to higher levels of air pollution

Next-generation batteries have long been heralded as a transition toward more sustainable storage technology. Now, the need to enable these lithium-ion alternatives is more pressing than ever.

Time for lithium-ion alternatives

By projecting the future path of carbon service production using a spatially explicit demographic model, the study places a credible value on the carbon capture services produced by African forest elephants.

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