Green to grey

According to a recent state-by-state US Forest Service study, urban forests are responsible for storing 708 million tons of carbon. As an environmental service necessary to clean air and stabilize climate, this carbon sequestration has an estimated value of $50 billion. Each year, our leafy friends capture an additional 21 million tons of carbon to the tune of a $1.5 billion benefit. Led by Dave Nowak, the research was published in the journal, Environmental Pollution.

The team took field data from 28 cities, six states, and national tree coverage information to calculate the carbon storage in urban areas of the United States. In a previous study done in 2008, total carbon storage from forest land was determined to be 22.3 billion tons. Adding city trees, the number increased to 22.7 billion tons. Rates of sequestration vary across the states depending on the amount of tree cover and growth rate.

The amount of carbon stored in urban trees is expected to increase as cities expand. Urban areas grew from 2.5% of land in 1990 to 3.1% in 2000. However, more development does not always directly translate into more trees being planted. It has already been shown that tree cover helps bring down temperature. As we cut the trees, the heat builds up, requiring more air-conditioners which in turn spew hot air outside, which in turn breeds high humidity, and so on and on. It all begins with a tree that falls down!

It is happening now

The Global Estimates report reveals that 32.4 million people were forced to flee their homes in 2012 by disasters such as floods, storms and earthquakes. While Asia and west and central Africa bore the brunt, 1.3 million were displaced in rich countries, with the USA particularly affected.

98% of all displacement in 2012 was related to climate- and weather-related events, with flood disasters in India and Nigeria accounting for 41% of global displacement in 2012. In India, monsoon floods displaced 6.9 million, and in Nigeria 6.1 million people were newly displaced. While over the past five years 81% of global displacement has occurred in Asia, in 2012 Africa had a record high for the region of 8.2 million people newly displaced, over four times more than in any of the previous four years.

It is increasingly likely that hundreds of millions of people will be displaced from their homelands in the near future as a result of global warming. That is the stark warning of economist and climate change expert Lord Stern following the news last week that concentrations of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere had reached a level of 400 parts per million (ppm). Hundreds of millions of people will be forced to leave their homelands because their crops and animals will have died. The trouble will come when they try to migrate into new lands, however. That will bring them into armed conflict with people already living there. Nor will it be an occasional occurrence. It could become a permanent feature of life on Earth.”

Garbage exports?

We truly live in a small world. After dumping industrial and toxic trash in the developing world all these years, Europe is now shopping for garbage to keep its cities, schools and homes heated. What better place than the developing world to shop for garbage!

Reports indicate that northern Europe needs more than 700 million tons of trash to keep its waste-to-energy plants running. Most of its current demand is either domestically met or from garbage shipped from southern Europe. Yet, the demand is far more than what neighboring countries can spare after meeting their domestic needs.  

As more waste incinerators are being built in Sweden, Norway, Austria and Germany to meet the growing demand for heating public places these countries are left with two options - either encourage households to produce more trash or else import garbage from across the world. Easier to import when garbage is mounting in the poor world. A company in England is already shipping some 1,000 tons of garbage to keep its systems running.
Since incinerators have cornered environmental controversy in India and for rightful reasons, there exists an opportunity to explore feasibility of exporting as much as 109,589 tonnes of garbage that piles our streets on a daily basis.  Win-win solution? Will we see nations fighting for garbage? Jokes apart, many fear the quality of garbage and lack of segregation in developing world could be a detractor.

Solar PV to more than double in 5 years

A recent research report anticipates that the world will add 220 new gigawatts of distributed solar photovoltaics by 2018 as solar comes into parity with other energy sources, creating $540.3 billion in revenue in the process. That’s a significant jump in the amount of solar that is currently installed throughout world, which the European Photovoltaic Industry Association (EPIA) said reached 100 gigawatts at the end of 2012.

In recent years, much of the growth in solar is attributable to the giant PV projects being installed to meet utility demand in certain markets. The Navigant report anticipates that just the distributed generation projects — or projects under 1 megawatt in size — being installed over the next five years will more than double the world’s total solar capacity that is now online.

Used in applications ranging from residential to small commercial to industrial settings, distributed solar generation offers significant benefits to consumers while adding resilience to an electric grid evolving beyond the traditional centralized model, says the research. Though this market is still primarily driven by government incentives, distributed solar PV will continue its steady march toward grid parity in major markets over the next few years.

The report anticipates that the solar market is transitioning from one that relies on a financial and engineering model (based on the wants and needs of utilities to own or source electric generation from large projects) to a more diverse model. Under the emerging model, both the sources of generation and the ownership of the generation assets will be more diverse, include third-party financing from companies. These changes will partly be driven by some of distributed solar’s advantages, which include generating electricity onsite to offset the need to build new transmission capacity while avoiding line losses.

Unkind cut!

More than 50,000 high-polluting diesel engines have been cleaned up or removed from U.S. roads in a federal program designed to reduce smog and greenhouse gases, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. School buses and long-haul trucks accounted for almost 40,000 of the approximately 52,000 engines that were replaced or upgraded to cleaner technologies between 2008 and 2010. There are about 15 million diesel trucks and buses in the United States, according to the EPA. Now that programme stands starved of funds with the government slashing funds by more than half!

About 230,000 tons of soot and smog-causing pollutants and more than two million tons of carbon dioxide were eliminated, according to the report. In addition, 205 million gallons of fuel were saved.

Roughly 11 million pre-2006 vehicles and other diesel engines remain – spewing a harmful mix of gas and particles linked to cancer and deaths from respiratory disease and heart attacks, according to the EPA.

A 2005 report from the Clean Air Task Force, a nonprofit environmental group, estimated diesel fumes are responsible for about 21,000 premature deaths in the United States per year. About 45 million people live within 300 feet of a freeway in the United States, according to the EPA.

Diesel also is a major contributor of black carbon, a component of particulate matter linked to a short-term warming effect. The EPA estimates about 52 percent of black carbon emitted in the United States is from diesel vehicles. The 12,500-ton reduction in particulate matter attributed to the program suggests big black carbon reductions as well. Overall black carbon emissions are on pace to be reduced 80 percent by 2020 compared to 1990 levels, according to the EPA.

So why the budget cuts one wonders!

Going through the ceiling!

Sometime in the next month, the analyser at Hawai is expected to record a daily concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of more than 400 parts per million (p.p.m.)At 400 p.p.m., nations will have a difficult time keeping global warming in check, says Corinne Le Quéré, a climate researcher at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, who says that the impact “is getting very dangerously close to reaching the 2 °C target that governments around the world have pledged not to exceed”.

Emissions of other greenhouse gases are also increasing, pushing the total equivalent concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere to around 478 p.p.m. in April, according to Ronald Prinn, an atmospheric scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

Data compiled by Le Quéré and other members of the Global Carbon Project suggest that humans contributed around 10.4 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere in 2011. About half of that is taken up each year by carbon ‘sinks’ such as the ocean and vegetation on land; the rest remains in the atmosphere and raises the global concentration of CO₂.

The sinks have grown substantially but climate models suggest that the land and ocean will not keep pace for long. Some researchers have suggested that the sinks have already started to clog up, reducing their ability to take up more CO₂ (J. G. Canadell et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 104, 18866–18870; 2007). Others disagree.

For universal access to energy, policies a must

Universal access to modern energy could be achieved with an investment of between 65 and 86 billion US dollars a year up until 2030, new research has shown. The findings, in IOP Publishing's Environmental Research Letters, also include, for the first time, the policy costs for worldwide access to clean-combusting cooking fuels and stoves by 2030. The analysis indicates that without new policies and efforts, universal access to modern energy will not be achieved by 2030. Without policies to accelerate electrification, between 480 and 810 million additional people are estimated to gain access to electricity by 2030, but 600 to 850 million people in rural South and Pacific Asia and sub-Saharan Africa -- the main regions of interest in this study -- could still remain without electricity.

In their study, the researchers calculate that improved access to modern cooking fuels could avert between 0.6 and 1.8 million premature deaths in 2030 and enhance wellbeing substantially. The international group  of researchers estimate that an additional generation capacity of between 21 and 28 gigawatts would be required to provide a modest amount of electricity to all rural households. This is less than the annual additions to generation capacity being made by China alone.

They estimate this will cost around 180 to 250 billion dollars over the next 20 years with dedicated policies and measures also needed. Added to this will be the policy costs to help ease the transition to clean cooking for more than 40 per cent of the world's population. The policies would include subsidies supporting the costs of new fuels, new stoves, and improved biomass stoves. The researchers estimate the costs to be in the region of 750 to 1000 billion dollars over the next 20 years.