d by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), the University of Southern California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and Zayed University. The first study appears in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management; the second is published in Environmental and Resource Economics.

“Those seeking to develop efficient climate policies must understand how to adapt to a changing climate,” says Edson Severnini, associate professor of economics and public policy at CMU’s Heinz College, who coauthored the studies. “Faced with the political challenges of creating new, first-best climate policies; the urgency to address climate change; and the slow pace of market-based adaptation, it may be relatively easier in the short-run to adjust existing policy to maximize adaptation benefits while working toward comprehensive climate policy.”

The first study compared how economic agents in the same season and location responded to weather shocks with their own response to climatic changes, which should incorporate adaptive behavior. Researchers applied their novel unifying approach to the context of daily temperature and ambient ozone concentration across the continental United States, merging location-by-day ozone concentration data with temperature data from 1980 to 2013.

By bridging two earlier strands of climate-economy literature, the study overcame identification concerns from earlier cross-sectional studies; improved on the measurement of adaptation; and provided a test for the statistical significance of this measure. Using their new approach, the researchers came to four conclusions:

The evolution of plastic recycling is essential to cleaning up a plastic-addicted world and eliminating the need for oil extraction. Meet Jodie Morgan, CEO of Nexus Circular, who discusses the company’s progress and a flurry of news that has placed it at the forefront of the next generation of plastics recycling. In June of 2021, we talked with Jeff Gold, founder and CEO of Nexus Circular. At the time, the company had been operating a test facility for a couple of years. Nexus Circular developed an advanced chemical recycling technology that can make plastic as recyclable as metals, losing only a small percent of the material each time it is processed. By contrast, traditional mechanical recycling technologies are effective only once or twice before the plastic molecules are degraded and become useless.

Recyclable plastic does not justify buying more plastic. Still, the prospect of recycling mixed Plastics #2, #4, #5, and #6 to make new plastics means even landfilled plastics could be mined to replace raw petroleum as a feedstock. In January, Nexus raised $150 million to build additional capacity and launched a 10-year agreement to provide recycled plastic to Braskem America. In February, Nexus announced a long-term partnership with Chevron Phillips Chemical to make a circular form of polyethylene, the plastic used in food wraps, shopping bags, and detergent bottles. Given their progress, could a Nexus Circular IPO in the offing represent the first next-generation sustainable company to go public and ignite a stock market rally in green investing? You can learn more about Nexus Circular at nexuscircular.com.

Originally aired on Apr 17, 2023

Dozens of international biodiversity researchers are authors of the report, including University of Houston Associate Professor of Biology and Biochemistry Martín Nuñez, who was a coordinating lead author of the chapter covering the impacts of invasive species.

“This is the greatest collection of information ever created on the impacts of invasions,” Nuñez said. “We found that the impacts are huge and bigger than we expected. We have about 13,000 references on this topic to compile a huge database.”

Approved on Saturday, Sept. 2 in Bonn, Germany, by representatives of the 143 member States of IPBES, the “Invasive Alien Species Assessment: Summary for Policymakers” finds that alongside dramatic changes to biodiversity and ecosystems, the global economic cost of invasive alien species exceeded $423 billion annually in 2019, with costs having at least quadrupled every decade since 1970.

“Invasive alien species have been a major factor in 60% and the only driver in 16% of global animal and plant extinctions that we have recorded,” said Anibal Pauchard, co-chair of the assessment.

Invasive species affect food supplies, as evidenced by the negative impacts of the European shore crab on commercial shellfish beds in New England and the damage caused by the Caribbean false mussel to fishery resources in India.

There also impacts on people’s health, including diseases such as malaria, Zika and West Nile Fever, spread by invasive alien mosquito species like Aedes albopictusand Aedes aegyptii. Invasive alien species also damage livelihoods, for example in Lake Victoria where fisheries have declined due to the depletion of tilapia, because of the spread of water hyacinth, the world’s most widespread terrestrial invasive alien species.

The report shows that 34% of the impacts of biological invasions were reported from the Americas, 31% from Europe and Central Asia, 25% from Asia and the Pacific and about 7% from Africa. Most negative impacts are reported on land (about 75%), with considerably fewer reported in freshwater (14%) and marine (10%) habitats. Invasive alien species are most damaging on islands, with alien plants now exceeding native plants on more than 25% of all islands.

Prevention measures, such as border biosecurity and strictly enforced import controls, are identified in the report as having worked in many instances, such as the successes achieved in Australia, New Zealand and neighboring islands in reducing the spread of the brown marmorated stink bug.

Preparedness, early detection and rapid response are shown to be effective at reducing rates of alien species establishment. Eradication has been successful and cost-effective for some species, especially when their populations are small and slow spreading in isolated ecosystems such as islands. For example, the black rat and rabbit have been successfully eradicated from French Polynesia.

“Our recommendations are not policy prescriptive,” Nuñez said. “We are helping policy makers, but we are not telling them what to do; we are offering options.”

Further information: https://www.ipbes.net/IASmediarelease

Where is the logic in that, you might object, because wouldn’t the large animals also eat and trample native plants?

But this is not the case. Native plants have evolved such that they can withstand brutal treatment from species of herbivores they have co-existed with for millennia, while invasive plants usually cannot.

A natural weapon

This is the conclusion of a new study from Aarhus University and the Wildlife Institute of India, which has just been published in the scientific journal, Nature Ecology & Evolution. The study shows great potential for using large herbivores as a natural weapon to prevent invasive plants from out-competing native species.

At least it works in India, where the researchers gathered their data. More specifically from the world’s largest wildlife survey using camera traps, which takes place every four years, as well as India’s extensive monitoring programme for plants. 

However, the researchers point out that the results are also relevant for areas that do not have herbivores quite as large as those in India. 

Mega-herbivores

The study is based on what the researchers call mega-herbivores, i.e. animals weighing more than one tonne. In India, these are elephants, rhinos, wild water buffalo and Indian bison (the largest and heaviest bovine in the world).

The study demonstrates a positive correlation between the number of mega-herbivores and the balance between native and invasive plant species: Where there are many mega-herbivores, there are also many native plants and fewer invasive plants.

And vice versa. In places where invasive species predominate, there are few or no mega-herbivores.

Except in some areas in India where invasive plant growth has become so tall and dense that mega-herbivores cannot get to it.

Why is this important?

Because the UN has designated invasive species as one of the five most important threats to global biodiversity.

Invasive species are animals, plants and fungi that are introduced to areas to which they could not spread themselves, and that also harm native biodiversity.

These biological invasions also impose enormous costs on society, and more than USD 120 billion has been spent world-wide over the last 50 years on combating and controlling them. Without any great success.

Why mega-herbivores exactly?

Because their large size means that they have to eat a lot. And they are used to eating many different plant species, even species with less nutritional value, because they simple cannot afford to be picky. Therefore, they are more likely to include unfamiliar plants in their diet.

The research team could have included smaller species of herbivores in the study, but their roles in local ecosystems are more complex; they are also on the menu for tigers and leopards. Elephants etc. are not.

Big is good, but not decisive

And so we return to how we can apply the study in countries without elephants, rhinos, etc.

You don’t need mega-herbivores to keep invasive plant species at bay — slightly less large and medium-sized species can have similar effects.

“Although some of the cattle released in rewilding projects in Europe can grow to more than a tonne, animals weighing less than a tonne can have similar effects. In Hungary, it’s been shown that water buffalo drive away the invasive giant goldenrod; a species that is also a problem in Denmark. Scottish Highland cattle are also used in Denmark to keep down rosehip bushes; an Asian species that is often considered problematic in Danish nature,” says Professor Jens-Christian Svenning from Aarhus University.

Go ahead and copy in Europe

The study’s lead author, Ninad Avinash Mungi, is a postdoc at Aarhus University, and he stresses that the size of grazing animals is not decisive in the fight against invasive species.

“You can easily use a mixture of large, medium and small herbivores. Deer, buffalo, cattle and horses work well together in rewilding projects, and together they can also target different invasive plant species. This also makes efforts more flexible and resilient,” he says, and continues:

“It’d be a really good idea to carry out a large-scale European biodiversity survey like the one in India, which holds the Guinness World Record. Europe has more money to invest in nature and nature restoration.”

Facts:

It is no exaggeration to call the Indian survey the world’s largest. With 26,838 camera traps, it has earned a place as a Guinness World Records, and it even involves field work, with tens of thousands of participants on foot covering a forest area totalling 381,200 km². The survey is carried out every four years. The main purpose is to find out how the country’s tiger populations are faring, but the motion sensors in the cameras detect much more than the striped predators. Thousands of elephants, rhinos, wild water buffaloes and Indian bison (the world’s largest species of wild cattle) have also appeared in the almost 35 million photos. The enormous volumes of data also include large amounts of vegetation and dung samples.

Reduced water availability in India due to groundwater depletion and climate change could threaten the livelihoods of more than one-third of the country’s 1.4 billion residents and has global implications. India recently overtook China to become the world’s most populous nation and is the second-largest global producer of common cereal grains including rice and wheat.

“We find that farmers are already increasing irrigation use in response to warming temperatures, an adaptation strategy that has not been accounted for in previous projections of groundwater depletion in India,” said study senior author Meha Jain, assistant professor at U-M’s School for Environment and Sustainability. “This is of concern, given that India is the world’s largest consumer of groundwater and is a critical resource for the regional and global food supply.”

The lead author is Nishan Bhattarai of the Department of Geography and Environmental Sustainability at the University of Oklahoma, formerly a postdoctoral researcher in Jain’s U-M lab.

The study, scheduled for online publication Sept. 1 in the journal Science Advances, analyzed historical data on groundwater levels, climate and crop water stress to look for recent changes in withdrawal rates due to warming. The researchers also used temperature and precipitation projections from 10 climate models to estimate future rates of groundwater loss across India.

Previous studies have focused on the individual effects of climate change and groundwater depletion on crop production in India. Those studies did not account for farmer decision-making, including how farmers may adapt to changing climate through changes in irrigation decisions.

The new study takes into account the fact that warmer temperatures may increase water demand from stressed crops, which in turn may lead to increased irrigation by farmers.

“Using our model estimates, we project that under a business-as-usual scenario, warming temperatures may triple groundwater depletion rates in the future and expand groundwater depletion hotspots to include south and central India,” Bhattarai said.

“Without policies and interventions to conserve groundwater, we find that warming temperatures will likely amplify India’s already existing groundwater depletion problem, further challenging India’s food and water security in the face of climate change.”

Previous studies found that climate change could decrease the yield of staple Indian crops by up to 20% by mid-century. At the same time, the country’s groundwater is being depleted at an alarming rate, primarily because of water withdrawal for irrigation.

For the newly published study, the researchers developed a dataset that contains groundwater depths from thousands of wells across India, high-resolution satellite observations that measured crop water stress, and temperature and precipitation records.

Most climate models call for increased temperature, increased monsoon (June through September) precipitation and decreased winter precipitation in India over the coming decades. The U-M-led research team found that warming temperatures coupled with declining winter precipitation more than offset added groundwater recharge from increased monsoon precipitation, resulting in accelerated groundwater declines.

Across various climate-change scenarios, their estimates of groundwater-level declines between 2041 and 2080 were more than three times current depletion rates, on average.

In addition to Jain and Bhattarai, authors of the Science Advances study are David Lobell of Stanford University, Balwinder Singh of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in India and the Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development in Western Australia, Ram Fishman of Tel Aviv University, William Kustas of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Yadu Pokhrel of Michigan State University.

The research was funded by a NASA Land-Cover Land-Use Change Grant and a NASA new investigator program award to Jain. It was supported in part by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service.

Pickleball, one of the fastest-growing sports in America, has gained immense popularity. However, pickleball players often face disposing of old or damaged balls. Many players seek to recycle these balls rather than merely throw them away.

To recycle pickleballs, first, identify the type of plastic from which your ball is made. You will likely find this information on the packaging or by visiting the manufacturer’s website. Pickleballs are usually made of LDPE (#4 plastic), which is generally more recyclable.

Use the Earth911 Recycling Locator, enter your ZIP code, and search for “#4 rigid plastic” to find nearby recycling facilities that accept this type of plastic. However, please be aware that curbside programs and recycling centers that take these rigid plastics may not accept pickleballs because they are small and could jam sorting machinery. Call before you bin or drop-off.

Ask Your Court To Add a Recycling Bin

P3 Pickleball has introduced collection boxes for use at local courts — when full, the boxes are shipped back to the company for recycling. Other organizations and pickleball makers are working to create collection programs. Although these initiatives are still early, players can express their interest in participating. One such project is Service Pickleball; court operators can request a recycling bin, which comes with a postage-paid label to return it when full. Another is the Re-Pickle Project, which is organizing a pickleball recycling network but has not begun collecting balls yet.

If no recycling is available, try reusing old pickleballs as garage parking guides and other creative projects. Visit Pickleball Central and Jennifer’s Pickleball Blog for craft ideas.

As the sport grows, players must be attentive precyclers, choosing pickleballs that will be recyclable when broken or worn out. Ask at the court about getting a collection bin, and emphasize that the bin needs to be associated with a reliable recycler that will process the balls responsibly. If you take the time to put balls in a bin, be sure the court is following through on its recycling promise.

Help Grow a Sustainable Sport

With some research and effort, players can take steps towards more sustainable disposal of their used pickleballs. Also, do everything you can to extend the life of your pickleballs by using them for practice or drills even after they’ve lost their bounce for competitive play.

Now, get out to the court and practice your dink shot. Dominate the court, and encourage your friends to choose recyclable equipment.

“The lethal combination of habitat loss, the exploitation of natural populations, and climate change is causing species extinction rates not seen since the last mass extinction 65 million years ago,” said Prof. Andrew Gonzalez, Liber Ero Chair in Conservation Biology at McGill University and co-Chair of GEO BON. “We lack the means to monitor these impacts fast enough across most areas of the planet.”

Operating much like the existing global network of weather stations that monitor climate change and its impacts, the Global Biodiversity Observing System (GBiOS), is a proposal developed by scientists from the Group of Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO BON), and its partners, that will combine technology, data, and knowledge from around the world to foster collaboration and data sharing among countries and to provide the data urgently needed to monitor change and target action.

GBiOS can galvanize collaboration on the critical issue of biodiversity data access, sharing, and equitable use. “It can provide the information we need at the pace we need it to support countries as they make progress towards their biodiversity goals,” said Prof. Alice Hughes, Associate Professor at The University of Hong Kong, and one of the dozens of scientists who collaborated to develop the proposal for GBiOS.

GBiOS is a missing piece of the science-policy puzzle needed to support the Global Biodiversity Framework agreed upon at the COP-15 conference in Montreal last year, contributing to a representative and inclusive understanding of biodiversity change and supporting effective implementation of policies that are designed to reverse biodiversity loss and achieve the global goals for nature in the coming decades.

Climate change deniers focus on what they can see and have experienced personally, so solutions need to be framed in a way which makes sense to local communities.

But for this to work the political-media ecosystem also needs to shift to support climate action, and their corporate backers held accountable for the damage they have wrought, according to the research.

The study, published in Ethnos Journal of Anthropology, was carried out by Dr Susannah Crockford from the University of Exeter.

Dr Crockford spent time in rural areas in three states in the southern US — Arizona, Louisiana, and Missouri. She found denial, a political-media ecosystem funded by fossil fuel companies, and the influence of conservative white evangelicalism.

Those who Dr Crockford spoke to did care about erosion and storms and fire and flood and their homes and their livelihoods and their communities. They were aware of climate changes and impacts from extreme weather events. However, they understand these events through what they had personally experienced — which they saw as caused by natural and supernatural factors — rather than through climate science.

Dr Crockford said: “I found a lack of belief in climate change or action comes not from emotional reactions or information deficit but because people’s knowledge is insufficient for the scale of the problem faced. People could claim a sense of innocence by refusing to accept climate change.

“Some people thought climate change was just a plot cooked up by the Democrats to force through socialist policies by inventing a phoney crisis to solve. Those with religious faith thought what happened in nature could only be determined by God not affected by human activity.

“Fewer people worked in the oil industry but it maintained its symbolic status. ‘People need power’, I was told, ‘we gotta keep the lights on’. This was said with a shrug, indicating a level of resignation over the loss of land and pollution from oil spills as the price to pay for the benefits that fossil fuels brought.”

James, a man in his 60’s whose house had flooded twice, told Dr Crockford he did not believe in climate change. He did not see the proof of riding water visibly on his dock, so he rejected the association between increases in atmospheric carbon levels and sea level rise, although he conceded that he had not paid attention to what he called ‘the graphs’. Even though James held out the possibility that it was getting warmer every summer, he thought this was because he had become more sensitive to the temperature with age.

On the subject of erosion, however, James was clear-sighted: ‘the erosion’s killing us’, he told Dr Crockford, reflecting on the changes he had seen in his lifetime: ‘I saw the environment change from a young age to what it is now?…?all the places I used to fish are no longer there, it’s just open water’.

Dr Crockford said: “In Louisiana people interviewed had an acute awareness of the fragility of the land they lived on and the risks to their way of life that they could observe and experience personally. However, their own direct observation and personal experience was prior to, and more important than, the computational models and numerical abstractions — ‘the graphs’ — of climate science. Climate changes such as erosion and oil spills could be seen, whereas sea level rise could not.”