Tag: environment

Great Green Wall

The “Great Green Wall”, has helped raise total forest coverage to nearly 25% of China’s total area, up from less than 10% in 1949. In the remote northwest, though, tree planting is not merely about meeting state reforestation targets or protecting Beijing. When it comes to making a living from the most marginal farmland, every tree, bush and blade of grass counts – especially as climate change drives up temperatures and puts water supplies under further pressure.

2022-02-04: Apparently people are really bad at naming, since there’s another Great Green Wall project in Africa:

In the mid-2000s, African leaders envisioned creating a huge swath of green that could help combat desertification and land degradation. The project, called the Great Green Wall, began in 2007 with the aim of planting a 15 km wide belt of trees and shrubs that would extend from the coast of Senegal on the Atlantic to Djibouti on the Horn of Africa. The World Bank has poured over $1b into this endeavor, and the initiative’s scope has grown to include efforts to fight poverty, reduce inequality and build climate-resilient infrastructure. In ecological terms, the program has been a huge success. As of 2020, nearly 4000 km2 of land has been restored to arability in Niger alone.

2023-05-13: As always, projects in developing countries that are declared “huge successes” are not, on closer look

The pace of financing is too slow to achieve this target. As of 2020, 20% of degraded land (200k km2) had been restored and 350k of the promised 10m jobs had been created. That is mainly, although not solely, because just US$2.5b of a required $30b has been spent since the project began. Donors have committed $15b to a pipeline of 150 projects. It’s not clear how much of this is grants, how much is loans and how much is existing funding relabelled as Great Green Wall money. Moreover, coordination between Great Green Wall countries and donors is weak. Trust between the African Union and international donors is in short supply. Donor nations seem to be picking and choosing which countries to invest in, with a preference for those in relatively stable regions.

Recycling robots

Although labor costs vary by region, recycling workers make around $25K per year. But the robots are far more productive than humans, with an ability to pick up 80 pieces of material per minute versus 40, so each machine can handle the work of at least 2 employees, while freeing those workers to do other jobs at the recycling center. Add in other employment costs, such as training expenses, workers’ comp and PPE, and just 2 employees could cost a facility at least $70K a year, meaning the hefty price tag for the robots should be repaid within 3 to 4 years. It can help the facilities get the cleanest, best streams. AMP is making a lot of headway cleaning up the end bales that are sold and getting them to be sold for a higher value.”

South Korea Composting

How did South Korea achieve this success? Sometimes it is attributed to the fancy technology that weighs and tracks the compost, and to the R.F.I.D. chips used in some municipalities to insure that households pay in proportion to the amount of waste they produce. That is important, but also I say the government shouldn’t act directly. There needs to be an intermediary between the government and the people. Groups like us.

River cleaning

While countries and companies try to make more fundamental changes—like reusable and refillable packaging, single-use packaging bans, and recycling systems that actually work—it’s clear that tackling the problem in rivers is one part of the short-term solution. When it comes to cleanup, it’s also far more effective to start on beaches and on rivers rather than trying to tackle the problem in the middle of the ocean. The Ocean Conservancy, which conducts beach cleanups, is also beginning work on a river cleanup system in Vietnam.

Falling Emissions

On average, the 30 cities identified by C40 have curbed emissions by 22%. Some of the most significant reductions came from London, Berlin, and Madrid, with 30% reductions, while Copenhagen lowered emissions by a dramatic 61%. Granted, when Copenhagen hit its highest emission levels to date in 1991, it was only releasing 4m tons of emissions, compared to, say, the 50m tons from London in 2000.

GMO Eggplant

Conventionally grown brinjal is one of the most heavily sprayed crops in South Asia. Historically, farmers have sprayed as many as 84x in a growing season to protect their crops. Genetically modified insect-resistant eggplant (Bt brinjal) had a 39% reduction of pesticides and a 51% reduction in the number of times that farmers applied pesticides.

2020-11-19:

Bt eggplant offers a 51% increase in yield, a 37.5% decrease in pesticide use, increased farmer profits and decreased farmer sickness. Wow!

Dematerialization

Andrew McAfee argues that the Earth Day environmentalists correctly diagnosed the problem, a worsening environment, but were wrong about the solution, degrowth. In fact, the drive to reduce costs by making better use of resources has led to a dramatic decrease in resource use even as production has increased, a dematerialization. Poverty not prosperity is the enemy of the environment.