In a new study, the research team, which includes entomologists with the University of Florida, the Agricultural Research Service-USDA, Louisiana State University and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, showed that prompting honey bees’ cells to produce free radicals helped the bees weather a host of viruses. In fact, the treatment greatly reduced, and in some cases, nearly eliminated virus activity in full scale field studies.

“This approach is especially exciting because it doesn’t just target a specific type of virus but helps with many different viruses,” said Daniel Swale, senior author of the study. Swale is the associate director for training and special projects in the UF Emerging Pathogens Institute and associate professor in the UF/IFAS entomology and nematology department.

“Additionally, we demonstrated that our treatment works both in the lab and in colonies that each contain 80,000 bees in the field. This is huge because, in a hive setting, bees are exposed to so many different viruses and stressors, so successfully controlling viruses in that environment is very encouraging,” said Swale, who completed some of this research while at Louisiana State University.

Honey bee colonies, and the beekeepers who manage them, play an important role in food production by pollinating many crops. In recent years, honey bee populations have seen significant declines, and viruses, while not the top cause of honey bee deaths, are among the main contributors.

“Varroa mites are the number one cause of honey bee losses, but it’s important to point out that varroa mites, aside from physically weakening bees, also transmit viruses to bees. If we can mitigate viruses in honey bee colonies, that would be a big step forward,” said Michael Simone-Finstrom, a co-author of the study and a research molecular biologist with the ARS Honey Bee Breeding, Genetics, and Physiology Research Lab in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

In the experiment, the researchers used a compound called pinacidil to alter potassium ion channels, a protein found in the cells of bees’ and most living things. Altering these channels produced slightly more free radicals.

“While free radicals are often bad for cell health, in moderate amounts they can be therapeutic, as we see in this study. In this case, the additional free radicals signal to the immune system to ramp up, which helps the bees fight off viruses,” said Troy Anderson, a co-author of the paper and a professor of entomology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

The scientists administered the drug to honey bee colonies by mixing it into sugar water and drizzling the water over the honey comb at night. The bees then consumed the sugar water and fed it to their young. During the day, bees are constantly moving in an out of the hive, so giving them the treatment at night maximizes the number of bees that will receive it.

The treatment protected bees from six potentially deadly honey bee viruses: Israeli acute paralysis virus, deformed wing viruses A and B, black queen cell virus and Lake Sinai viruses 1 and 2. The researchers also showed that pinacidil helped more bees survive in colonies heavily infested with varroa mites.

Administering pinacidil to commercial honey bee hives may only be feasible for some beekeepers, the researchers said, but the study opens the door to identifying other active ingredients that may work better and cost less.

“One of the big take-aways from this study is that potassium ion channels can be a target for improving immune system function in honey bees and possibly other insects. We would like to find a molecule, such as a peptide, or a new technology that has the same effect as pinacidil but is more accessible to beekeepers,” Swale said.

Follow a river of water vapor as it travels through Earth’s atmosphere and becomes heavy rain. Watch polar ice expand and contract as if our planet is breathing in slow motion. Discover how river channels and wind currents resemble the human nervous and circulatory systems.

In an interactive new exhibit at the NASA Headquarters in Washington, visitors are invited to see Earth as NASA sees it from space. For six decades, NASA satellites, sensors, and scientists have collected data on Earth’s land, water, air, and climate. At the Earth Information Center, the public can glimpse what this data has taught us about sea level rise, air quality, wildfires, greenhouse gases, ice cover, and agriculture.

NASA and its partners gather observations and provide information that supports decision-makers in developing the tools they need to mitigate, adapt, and respond to climate change. Such information also helps people prepare for the impacts of natural hazards—from emergency managers assessing landslide risks to farmers accessing drought and storm information to land-use planners assessing development and recovery in wildfire-prone areas.

The Earth Information Center is both a physical space and a web-based experience drawing on research conducted by teams at NASA’s different centers, at academic institutions, and by industry partners. The physical space is in the east lobby of NASA Headquarters. It is open to visitors from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. EDT each Monday through Friday. The website is still in beta testing.

“Teamwork enabled the success of this project, which included contributions from just about every NASA center and six partners across the government,” said Laura Rogers, a NASA scientist and strategic lead of the center. “We brought together very different perspectives — blending things like the view from space with the view from behind the wheel of a tractor — to make complex data and concepts more accessible through visuals and sound. The center is a powerful combination of space, science, Earth, and art.”

“There is a bit of beauty and mystery which draws you into the center and leads you to start asking questions,” said Daniel Goods, who leads The Studio at JPL, one of the designers of the center. “Then you’re in the mindset for learning.”

Seeing Earth as NASA Sees It

As visitors enter the exhibit, they will be greeted by chirping birds and other natural sounds. Once inside, they will find a 22-foot LED hyperwall framed by two circular 4K screens. The hyperwall show tells the story of our planet through videos and visualizations on subjects like air pollution, agriculture, and hurricanes. It also includes dashboards with real-time data and imagery of our planet.

The data visualizations reflect how the study of Earth system science works, combining scientific models, satellite observations, and ground measurements from teams across the agency and across the government, said Helen-Nicole Kostis, a data visualization developer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and key member of the Earth Information Center team. “The visualizations feature the latest data available, updated as often as six minutes, with the goal of making scientific data accessible to people,” Kostis said.

The Earth Information Center also includes a chandelier-like sculpture that depicts real-time satellite data transfers between space and ground receivers. Different patterns and speeds represent the amount of data being transferred and how quickly it reaches its destination.

Visitors can also track NASA’s Earth science missions in real time by using the exhibit’s touchscreen kiosk, which allows visitors to interact with a 3D globe and zoom in to areas of interest. They can view satellite imagery of recent natural events while also monitoring Earth’s vital signs such as carbon dioxide concentrations, ozone holes, and sea level.

An exhibit titled Space for Earth invites viewers to experience Earth as an interconnected world, lacking boundaries or limits. Narrated by NASA astronaut Drew Feustel and retired NASA astronaut Nicole Stott, the seven-minute story is told in an immersive room with data visualizations and images projected onto the walls and floor to connect visitors to their home planet.

“When you’ve gone through this experience—whether you are a teenager or a college student or an adult or a senior—there’s something there that can open a window into our world as NASA studies it,” Goods said. “When you go into the Space for Earth space, it’s still showing you real data, but it’s showing it to you in a way that touches the senses as much as the mind.”

NASA is continuing to develop the Earth Information Center with its founding partners from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA).

“The public rarely thinks about how science changes — we learn odd facts from classes or news stories, but assume that the overall knowledge stays relatively constant. The reality is quite different,” Fink said. “Volcano science advances steadily, in step with technological progress. But it also can change immediately and radically, in response to unusually large or impactful eruptions.”

Consider Washington’s Mount St. Helens’ eruption in 1980, which taught the world about catastrophic volcanic landslides and blasts, or Campi Flegrei in Naples, Italy which threatens to erupt explosively any day. In 1980, geologists thought the earth’s crust behaved like a solid layer containing isolated pools of molten magma. Today we know it’s more like a complex mush, making predicting when large volcanoes eruptions will occur considerably more difficult.

“Governments use past experience to forecast what might happen next. But because volcanoes can lie dormant for centuries, the policy toolbox may be relatively empty or outdated,” Fink said. “This collection of papers, and the scientific symposia that they are based upon from 2000, 2010 and 2020, focus not only on the ingredients in the box of volcano knowledge, but also on how new ideas get added over a period of decades. From dozens of different perspectives, we’ve examined how the current knowledge about how volcanoes work has been assembled, which helps us anticipate how it will continue to change in the future.”

Understanding how volcano activity may change over time is particularly important as climate change continues to have direct and indirect effects on how volcanoes behave.

“Sea level rise, glacial melting, aquifer depletion, and mountain erosion can all affect the likelihood and frequency of volcanic eruptions,” he said. “With the increasing seriousness of climate impacts on society, the search for ‘geoengineering’ solutions will make it more likely that countries will consider volcano-mimicking interventions — like an injection of aerosols into the stratosphere to cool the Earth’s surface. Volcano scientists will need to advise policymakers on the details of how such events would likely evolve.”

The Pacific Northwest has the largest variety of potential natural and humanmade disasters in North America, Fink adds, which have only increased in frequency and overlap in the last 20 years.

“This region is characterized by volcanic eruptions of different scales and types, catastrophic subduction zone earthquakes, mega-wildfires that can wipe out cities, wildfire smoke events that can make our air unbreathable, tsunamis that can drown coastal communities, landslides that can shut down transportation corridors, floods that can inundate cities, and heat dome events that can kill thousands of individuals,” he said.

Fink’s research with Ajibade shows that the likelihood of volcanic eruptions coinciding with climate-related storms, droughts, floods or other disasters is increasing, making planning and responding to crises more challenging.

“These kinds of ‘cascading’ or ‘compound’ disasters pose large challenges for public officials and for university faculty trying to train future volcano scientists,” Fink said. “Rather than focusing exclusively on one aspect of volcanology, such as volcanic gasses, volcanic earthquakes, or lava flows, future volcano scientists will need to know at least a little bit about a great many more fields, including social science, public health, and communication.”

Truly sustainable businesses avoid waste by turning byproducts into high-value products. Yet, waste and high disposal costs plagued the fishing industry in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and beyond. The fillet comprises just 30% to 40% of the fish. But for the fishing industry, the remaining 60% to 70%, called gurry, consists of bones, guts, fins, scales, and organs. Disposing of the gurry from cod, haddock, flounder, and other species can be expensive for fish processing plants and is often harmful to the environment. But what if seafood byproducts could become a useful product?

This article contains affiliate links. If you purchase an item through one of these links, we receive a small commission that helps fund our Recycling Directory.

Turning Seafood Byproducts Into Fertilizer

The origins of Neptune’s Harvest’s fish-byproducts-based fertilizer start with its parent company, Ocean Crest Seafood, a family-owned wholesale fish and seafood business. To dispose of the gurry, it was paying fishermen to dump it out at sea, yet this approach was clearly wasteful and costly. The company owner had another idea.

Why not turn this organic waste into a high-quality organic garden fertilizer? This notion inspired the creation of Neptune’s Harvest in 1986. Using a process that the company created in conjunction with the State of Massachusetts and its local universities, Neptune’s Harvest started making its natural fertilizer out of fish byproducts.

“We grind up the byproducts, liquify them, and then stabilize and screen the mixture, in a cold process that keeps heat-sensitive nutrients and oils intact,” explains Ann Molloy, co-owner and director of sales and marketing at Neptune’s Harvest. “This innovative approach utilizes 100% of the fish and is the perfect organic fertilizer. It is the consistency of chocolate milk and safe for pets and kids.”

Neptune’s Harvest uses wild-caught, deep-ocean fish from the North Atlantic. “They are caught well offshore, in cold, clean, mineral-rich ocean water, so they are a good source for nutrients,” says Molloy.

Today, Neptune’s Harvest has a full line of organic garden fertilizers, including liquid fish fertilizer, liquid seaweed plant food, and powdered crab and lobster shells. The ingredients are harvested from the North Atlantic and processed by Neptune’s Harvest in their Gloucester facility.

How To Use Neptune’s Harvest Garden Fertilizers

The company’s products fall into two general categories: liquid fertilizers and powders, each with different uses.

Using Liquid Fertilizers in Home Gardens

Neptune’s Harvest Fish Fertilizer has an NPK ratio of 2-4-1 (2% nitrogen, 4% phosphorus, and 1% potassium). The Seaweed Fertilizer has an NPK ratio of 0-0-1, but seaweed is rich in trace elements. The nutrients in liquid garden fertilizers tend to break down more readily, making them available to the plants more quickly. Therefore, liquid fertilizers are especially beneficial to distressed, sick, or malnourished plants that could use a quick nutrient boost.

Molloy recommends using the fish and seaweed fertilizers throughout the growing season to provide plants with nutrients and trace minerals. Dilute the liquid organic garden fertilizers at 1 oz. per gallon of water before applying them to soil or plant leaves. You can simply add them to a watering can or use a hose attachment for a garden hose or a backpack sprayer. Because Neptune’s Harvest products are filtered, gardeners can use them in sprayers without clogging.

“The more people are learning and getting into organic farming, the more they are realizing the benefits of liquid fertilizers,” says Molloy. “Our fertilizers feed the biological life in the soil, draw nitrogen from the atmosphere, and sequester carbon.”

Either apply the organic liquid fertilizer to the soil or the leaves directly to allow uptake through the leaves, in a method known as foliar feeding. Molloy recommends foliar feeding gardens in the early morning when dew is still on the plants to promote plant uptake of nutrients.

“Plants with big leaves like pumpkins really thrive with the foliar feeding,” says Molloy. “Neptune’s Harvest has a cult-like following of giant pumpkin growers, and last year a grower in Minnesota grew a 2,560-pound pumpkin using our products. It was the largest pumpkin ever grown in North America!”

Powdered Garden Fertilizers

Neptune’s Harvest Crab and Lobster Shell fertilizer has an NPK ratio of 5-3-0, so it is rich in nitrogen, and contains 17% calcium, yet has little potassium. Molloy recommends using the crab and lobster shell powder in the garden in the spring when preparing beds, as she said it helps minimize insect damage and blossom end rot, while promoting moisture retention and deep root growth.

Neptune’s Harvest continues to be a locally-owned business with 45 employees and now has a full line of garden fertilizers. Many of its products take what would otherwise be an environmental hazard and transform it into something that helps organic farmers and gardeners produce healthy vegetable crops, fruit trees, ornamentals, and flowers.

The study shows that more than 90% of global “blue” food production, in both capture fisheries and aquaculture, faces substantial risks from environmental change, with several leading countries in Asia and the United States set to face the greatest threats to production.

The authors behind the new paper produced the first-ever global analysis of environmental stressors impacting the production quantity and safety of blue foods around the world, ranking countries for the first time according to their exposure from key stressors. A total of 17 stressors were surveyed, including algal blooms, sea level rise, changing temperatures and pesticide exposure.

“Environmental stressors do not care about national borders,” noted Ben Halpern, co-lead author and professor at UC Santa Barbara and director of the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis. “Stressors get moved by air, water, species, and humans, connecting land to sea and ecosystem to ecosystem.”

The research published by Nature Sustainability, titled “Vulnerability of Blue Foods to Human-induced Environmental Change” is one of seven scientific papers published by the Blue Food Assessment (BFA) as part of a global effort to inform future aquatic food sustainability.

Alongside climate change, the report highlights that highly vulnerable blue food production systems are found across all continents, including some of the world’s largest blue food producers such as Norway, China, and the United States, yet also argues there is too often a lack of understanding around the complexity of stressors causing environmental change.

“We have only scratched the surface in our understanding of how environmental stressors are connected, and how they can both negatively impact the production and safety of the resulting blue foods,” said Ling Cao, co-lead author and professor at the State Key Laboratory of Marine Environmental Science at Xiamen University.

“Understanding the complexity of these stressors, and their cascading impacts, will be essential in developing successful adaptation and mitigation strategies,” she said.

Species invasion, inland eutrophication or algal blooms, ocean warming and sea level rise were cited by the paper as the main threats to blue food production in the U.S., with freshwater and marine fisheries facing disproportionately large risks.

As the largest blue food producer, China’s freshwater aquaculture is also highly exposed to inland eutrophication and severe weather events, the research shows.

The authors also argue that special attention should be paid to countries facing high exposure to environmental change yet not possessing adequate capacity for adaptation, including Bangladesh, Eswatini, Guatemala, Honduras and Uganda.

In terms of production systems, the paper finds that marine fisheries were generally more vulnerable to climate-related stressors, particularly rising temperatures and acidification, whilst aquaculture was more susceptible to the effects of diseases and hypoxia, or low oxygen levels.

“Although we have made some progress with climate change, our adaptation strategies for blue food systems facing environmental change are still underdeveloped and need urgent attention,” said Rebecca Short, co-lead author and researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

Among the report’s key recommendations is a call for more transboundary collaboration and adaptation strategies which recognize that the ecosystems that blue food production rely upon are highly interconnected, with environmental change in one area having potential knock-on effects elsewhere.

The authors also call for a diversification of blue food production in high-risk countries to cope with the impact of environmental change unless sufficient mitigation and adaptation strategies are adopted.

Likewise, the paper highlights the urgent need for greater stakeholder engagement in understanding, monitoring and mitigating pressures on blue food production systems. Indigenous knowledge will be critical for strategic planning and policies to mitigate and adapt to environmental change, particularly for artisanal fisheries and heavy marine fisheries-dependent countries, such as Small Island Developing States (SIDS).

The research also includes an extended dataset which ranks countries around the world based on the exposure of their blue food production systems to the various environmental stressors.

Man-made climate change is one of the greatest challenges facing us today, but uncertainty in the exact magnitude of global change hampers effective policy responses.

A significant source of uncertainty relates to future changes to water vapour in the stratosphere, an extremely dry region of the atmosphere 15-50 km above the Earth’s surface.

Future increases in water vapour here risk amplifying climate change and slowing down the recovery of the ozone layer, which protects life on Earth from harmful solar ultraviolet radiation.

Now an international team led by Peer Nowack, until recently a member of the Climatic Research Unit at UEA, has developed a new statistical learning approach that combines information from satellite observations with state-of-the-art climate model data to narrow the range of likely future stratospheric water vapour amounts.

One of the key results, published today in the journal Nature Geoscience, effectively rules out the most extreme scenarios, which imply that water vapour concentrations could increase by more than 25% per degree of global warming. The new approach represents a 50% reduction in the 95th percentile of climate model responses.

“Man-made climate change affects Earth’s atmosphere in many important and often surprising ways,” said Prof Nowack, now at the Institute of Theoretical Informatics at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany.

“In our paper, we look at changes in stratospheric water vapour under global warming, an effect that is still poorly understood. Since water vapour is central to the physics and chemistry of the stratosphere, I felt that we crucially need a new approach to address this longstanding uncertainty factor.

“With our new data-driven approach, which exploits machine learning ideas, we were able to make highly effective use of Earth observations to reduce this uncertainty. This required us to develop a framework in which we could combine scientific understanding and mathematical relationships learned from satellite data in innovative ways.”

“With this approach, we were able to show that many climate model projections of very large stratospheric water vapour changes are now inconsistent with observational evidence,” said co-author Dr Sean Davis, a Research Scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the US, specializing in satellite measurements of stratospheric water vapour.

Quantifying stratospheric water vapour trends under global warming is a longstanding research challenge. The complexity of the underlying processes that control stratospheric water vapour and the relatively short record of high-quality satellite observations has made this task difficult.

The presence of so-called climate feedbacks presents an additional challenge, as these can act to further amplify or dampen global warming, therefore leading to a wider range of possible future temperature increases.

The amount of water vapour that the stratosphere holds is an example of one such feedback, which climate models have predicted to increase, but the range of modelled increases has remained very wide for decades.

This is important, because large climate-driven increases in stratospheric water vapour, like those projected by many climate models, could delay the recovery of the ozone layer and of the Antarctic ozone hole over the course of this century.

However, Manoj Joshi, Professor of Climate Dynamics at UEA and a co-author on the paper, said: “Our research implies that while stratospheric water vapour concentrations are still likely to increase with global warming, the large changes that could substantially delay ozone recovery are highly unlikely.”

The research was funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) through the ML4CLOUDS project.

This finding may explain why many animals besides turtles have temperature-dependent sex determination and why the system persists, despite seeming like a risky strategy. It may also provide a troubling glimpse of what could lie ahead in a warming world.

What the researchers found, as published June 23 the journal Current Biology, is that the number of “germ cells” — pre-eggs — that an embryo carries is increased by higher incubation temperatures. In fact, they found that those germ cells themselves play a role in the embryo becoming female.

“Sex determination by temperature isn’t just one mechanism,” said senior author Blanche Capel, the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Cell Biology in the Duke School of Medicine. “Higher temperatures seem to affect sex determination in incremental ways through multiple cell types in the embryo.”

The more abundant germ cells themselves seem to drive feminization, said Boris Tezak, a postdoctoral researcher in the Capel lab who led this project. “The temperatures that produce females are also the temperatures that increase germ cell number,” he said.

Higher numbers of germ cells are known to control female development in fish as well, Capel said. But to prove the point that more germ cells lead to female turtles, they removed some germ cells from red-eared slider embryos raised at an intermediate temperature that should have yielded 50-50 proportions, and saw more males than expected.

Scientists have known about temperature-dependent sex development for decades and have found it in many different parts of the tree of life, apparently because it evolved multiple times in multiple ways.

“It popped up everywhere,” Tezak said. “It seems like a really risky strategy, especially in the context of weather variations and climate change, so why would this system persist?”

They think it’s because temperature-dependent sex development creates a reproductive advantage.

“A female that hatches with more germ cells is presumably more reproductively fit — it increases her reproductive potential to carry more eggs,” Tezak said. “We’ve linked the female pathway to the increased number of germ cells, and if that does make her more reproductively fit, that would go a long way toward explaining why temperature-dependent sex development persists.”

As global temperatures continue to rise, the question becomes: what will happen to the turtles and other temperature-sensitive breeders? “We’ll be looking at how further increases in temperature will affect the pool of germ cells,” Tezak said. “Will it produce less-fit females?”

To answer these questions, Tezak carefully nurtures clutches of red-eared slider eggs obtained from a Louisiana breeder in plastic boxes filled with moist medium and kept at a constant temperature in the lab. One incubator runs at 26 degrees Celsius, producing more males. Another is at 31 degrees, the optimum temperature for producing more females.

When he takes out one of each to check on their progress with a very bright light, the embryo that was incubated warmer is markedly larger and more active inside the egg.

“We are hypothesizing that there’s a temperature ‘sweet-spot,'” Capel said. “There is a short range where you get a large number of germ cells, and beyond that you start to see declines,” Capel said.

“We have incubated some eggs at 33.5 degrees, only two and a half degrees higher than the optimal temperature for females,” Tezak said. “It created some really wonky embryos — there were cyclops and two-headed embryos. We haven’t counted their germ cells yet.”

The lab is also about to take delivery on some alligator eggs to continue the temperature experiments. Alligators are known to produce females at low temperatures and males at high temperatures, the opposite pattern from the red-eared slider turtle. However, the low temperature in alligators is the same as the high temperature in turtles, so both species produce females at 31 degrees Celsius. “The interesting question is whether we see more germ cells in both species at this temperature,” Tezak said.

Funding for this study was provided by the U.S. National Science Foundation (1854642) and the Czech Science Foundation (23-07658S).

Meeting the 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement will require ambitious climate action this decade. Difficult questions remain as to how warming can be limited within technical realities while respecting the common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities of nations on the way to a sustainable future. Meeting this challenge requires substantial emissions reductions to reach net-zero emissions globally.

Among the new options being studied in scientific literature, engineered Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) like Direct Air Capture of CO₂ with Carbon Capture and Storage (DACCS), is a potentially promising technology to help bridge this gap. DACCS captures carbon by passing ambient air over chemical solvents, which can be considered a form of CDR if the captured carbon is stored permanently underground. But whether these novel technologies can help make ambitious goals more attainable, or whether they can help reach them more equitably remains an open question.

In their study published in Environmental Research Letters, an interdisciplinary research group led by IIASA scientists developed new scenarios exploring fairness and feasibility in deep mitigation pathways, including novel CDR technologies. For the first time, the team implemented DACCS in a well-established integrated assessment model called MESSAGEix-GLOBIOM, and studied how this technology could impact global mitigation pathways under different scenarios of environmental policy effectiveness based on country-level governance indicators.

“In current policy debates, concerns about the political feasibility and fairness of the current generation of climate mitigation scenarios are raised, and DACCS is often proposed as a possible solution. In our study we quantified under what conditions and how DACCS might address those concerns,” explains Elina Brutschin, a study coauthor and researcher in the Transformative Institutional and Social Solutions Research Group of the IIASA Energy, Climate, and Environment Program.

The researchers emphasize that the goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C does not change when considering novel forms of CDR. For a broader perspective on pathways to limit warming, the research team investigated how novel CDR interacts under different assumptions of technoeconomic progress and the evolution of regional institutional capacity. The researchers highlight the risks of dependency on unproven carbon removal while also discussing the role novel CDR and similar technologies could play in the future for developing countries.

The results indicate that novel CDR can keep pre-Paris climate targets within reach when accounting for such risks, but that increasing institutional capacity beyond historical trends is necessary for limiting warming to the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C goal, even with novel CDR processes. The study also suggests that substantially improving institutional capacity to implement environmental policies, regulations, and legislation is critical to keep warming below 2°C if new forms of CDR fail to emerge in the near future.

The authors further point out that, when accounting for the possible future evolution of novel CDR technologies combined with inherent risks, the ‘fairness’ of overall outcomes did not meaningfully improve. DACCS did not impact near-term required global mitigation ambition, and additional carbon removal in developed economies accounted for only a small component of the mitigation necessary to achieve stringent climate targets. This is because the removal of carbon dioxide in these areas does not compensate sufficiently for their historical emissions by mid-century.

The inability of DACCS to enhance the fairness of outcomes, like cumulative carbon emissions, in 1.5°C scenarios, emphasizes the notion that meeting global climate targets is a global effort requiring an ‘all-of-the-above’ mitigation strategy. There is no room for flexibility when it comes to reaching climate goals.

The results, however, show that engineered removals can play a role in making the post-peak temperature stabilization (or decline) phase more equitable. This means that the full timeframe under which accounting takes place is critical for exploring fair outcomes that are agreeable by most Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

“Our results show that new technologies for removing carbon from the atmosphere can play a role in ambitious climate policy, but they won’t be a silver bullet for solving the climate crisis. Developed countries especially need to cut emissions by more than half this decade, primarily by reducing existing sources of emissions while scaling up CDR technologies to be in line with the Paris Agreement,” says study lead author Matthew Gidden, a researcher in the IIASA Energy, Climate, and Environment Program.

The researchers emphasize that there is a clear need for the modeling community to assess the role of novel CDR in a structured way to better understand robust outcomes and insights versus observations related to a given model framework or approach. Looking forward, these issues can be explicitly included in scenario design to arrive at more equitable outcomes while incorporating political realities of the capabilities of governments and institutions to enact strong climate policy.

Turn World Refugee Day into positive action. Join a very special conversation with actor-activist Ger Duany, who escaped from life as a child soldier during the civil war in Sudan to become a model, actor, and international advocate for refugees and environmental responsibility. Ger points out that we are entering an “Era of Displacement.” This phrase succinctly captures the dire planetary predicament we face due to climate change. We also talk with two of Ger’s partners in his advocacy work on behalf of refugees, Newday Impact Investing CEO and our frequent guest Doug Heske and Bernice Romero, executive director of the Norwegian Refugee Council USA, a humanitarian organization that helps people forced to flee from disaster, war, and climate change build a new future for themselves. 

Ger’s life journey started in South Sudan, where a generation of youth known as “the Lost Boys” endured Sudan’s brutal civil wars. After escaping and finding refuge in the United States, Ger was catapulted to prominence in the entertainment industry with notable roles in the films “I Heart Huckabees,” “The Good Lie,” and the recent, Cannes-debuted “Goodbye Julia.” He also wrote about his experiences and journey in the book, “Walk Toward the Rising Sun.” 

True to his roots, Ger used his newfound fame to become an ardent advocate for refugees, mental health support for displaced individuals, and African environmental responsibility. Having served as a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, he recently took on the leadership of the Advocacy, Corporate Engagement, and Stewardship program at Newday Impact Investing, which is devoted to corporate education and outreach to support individuals displaced by the climate crisis. We’ll explore how private and nonprofit organizations are preparing for the Era of Displacement and what we, collectively and individually, can do to alleviate the suffering of millions displaced from their homes and communities. Tune in to an enlightening and sobering discussion — it’s an episode not to be missed on World Refugee Day.

You can learn more about Ger Duany and how to support his work at gerduany.com. The Norwegian Refugee Council USA’s website is at nrc.no and follow them at @nrc_norway on Instagram and Twitter. For more information about Newday Impact Investing and its environmental and socially responsible portfolio programs, visit newdayimpact.com.