Earth911 is honoring the 52 years of Earth Day with 52 Actions for the Earth. Each week through Earth Day 2023, we will share an action you can take to invest in the Earth and make your own life more sustainable. Getting dinner on the table every day is hard enough without worrying about the state of the planet, but this week you can reduce your foodprint by making one vegetarian meal.

Action: Make a Vegetarian Meal

The Matter With Meat

In 2018, the journal Science published a comprehensive study of agriculture’s environmental impacts. They concluded that while meat and dairy provide one-fifth of the world’s calories and about a third of its protein, they use 83% of farmland and produce 60% of agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions. By contrast, at least one study has found that a vegan diet can be healthier while generating only 20% of the greenhouse gases of a meat-heavy diet. Eliminating meat and dairy is the best way to cut carbon from your diet.

The Matter With Meatless

As anyone who has tried to lose a few pounds can attest, any dietary change is hard. Many factors, such as access, affordability, health, and culture, influence our food choices. A major dietary shift like cutting out meat and dairy may simply not be possible. Even people who are determined to make the switch to vegan are advised to do so slowly. There is a significant learning curve when figuring out how to replace meat’s protein and amino acids with plant-based food sources. A healthy vegan or vegetarian diet often includes ingredients and requires cooking techniques that are not common in the standard American diet.

Make a Vegetarian Meal

One vegetarian meal is not going to make a significant difference to your environmental impact. A family of four eats one to two pounds of meat in a single meal. But at 6.61 pounds of CO2-eq per serving of beef, every pound of meat you don’t eat trims a tiny bit off the climate impact of your overall diet. And if you add one new climate-friendly meal to your regular rotation, that reduction can add up over time.

So whether you are on a journey towards veganism, a bad vegetarian, or just trying to cut down on red meat, there are a lot of hacks for eating more plants and cutting meat consumption.

This week, start with a little research on vegetarian protein sources and then add one new vegetarian meal to your cooking repertoire. It doesn’t have to be dinner – a meatless breakfast or lunch is just as helpful. A vegan slow cooker recipe has the added benefit of saving time. Learn how to make a meal based on legumes or a dish that uses a favorite vegan ingredient like peanuts. Test out one of the plant-based meat options or try a vegan version of a favorite dish like mac & cheese.

Whatever you make, you’re helping the environment. And with any luck, you’ll find a dish that your family will happily eat again. Then you’ll be helping the environment a little bit more every time you make it.

That makes the Laramie chickensage unusual among the hundreds of species of sagebrush, most of which are primarily pollinated by the wind, according to the research published in the Nordic Journal of Botany.

Madison Crawford, a recent UW master’s degree recipient from Newcastle, led the research. She also holds a bachelor’s degree in botany from UW, where she was an undergraduate Wyoming Research Scholar in 2017-19. Co-authors of the paper are Lusha Tronstad, lead invertebrate zoologist, and Joy Handley, an assistant research scientist, both with the Wyoming Natural Diversity Database at UW.

The Laramie chickensage is found only in the foothills of the Laramie Range, Shirley Basin and Shirley Mountains of southeast Wyoming. Listed as a sensitive species by the Bureau of Land Management — which funded this study — the plant features large, showy, yellow flowerheads, unlike the vast majority of sagebrush varieties.

The scientists theorized that the showy flowerheads might attract insect pollinators, and that’s what the research showed. While the Laramie chickensage is partially wind-pollinated, some 61 percent of the viable seeds produced by the plants in the study were from insect pollination.

“Despite ideal environmental conditions for wind pollination, we think that pollen transported by insects is needed to produce the most seeds,” the researchers wrote.

The experimental study involved eight patches of Laramie chickensage in the region, where mesh bags were used to prevent insect pollination and cloth bags were used to prevent both insect and wind pollination. Seeds were counted and weighed in each area.

The scientists also trapped and identified a variety of bees at those locations, then collected pollen from the insects.

Previous research covering a broad range of plants has shown that pollination by insects and other animals is more widespread than wind pollination. When plants transition from animal to wind pollination to compensate for changing environments, the plants display both pollination mechanisms.

“We observed that (Laramie chickensage) shows more animal than wind pollination, which may suggest that this plant is in a transitional period and is adapting to a changing habitat,” the researchers wrote.

They suggest that similar research should be done to help inform management decisions for other types of rare plants.

“We demonstrated that assuming a plant is pollinated the same way as other members of the genus can be misleading, and we urge others to investigate the pollination of rare and endemic plants,” they wrote. “The widespread decline of pollinating insects makes this need even more urgent.”

Story Source:

Materials provided by University of Wyoming. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

“Tropical cyclones draw their energy from ocean surface heat. Also, warmer air can hold more water which eventually can get released in heavy rains and flooding that often occur when a hurricane makes landfall,” says Robin Middelanis from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and Potsdam University, lead author of the study. “It’s thus clear since long that hurricane damages will become bigger if we continue to heat up our Earth system.” While we might not have more hurricanes in the future, the strongest among them could get more devastating.

“Now, one of the important questions is: can we deal with that, economically? The answer is: not like this, we can’t,” says Middelanis. “Our calculations show, for the first time, that the US economy as one of the strongest on our planet, will eventually not be able to offset the losses in their supply chains on their own. Increasing hurricane damages will exceed the coping capacities of this economic super-power.”

Local production losses propagate throughout supply chain networks

The scientists looked at the 2017 hurricane Harvey that hit Texas and Louisiana and already then cost the enormous sum of 125 billion US Dollars in direct damages alone, and computed what its impacts would be like under different levels of warming. Importantly, losses from local business interruption propagate through the national and global supply chain network, leading to additional indirect economic effects. In their simulations of over 7000 regional economic sectors with more than 1.8 million supply chain connections, the scientists find that the US national economy’s supply chains cannot compensate future local production losses from hurricanes if climate change continues.

“We investigated global warming levels of up to 5°C — which unfortunately might be reached by the end of our century if climate policy fails us,” says Anders Levermann, head of complexity science at PIK and scientist at New York’s Columbia University, a co-author of the study. “We do not want to quantify temperature thresholds for the limit of adaptation of the US economy’s national supply chains, since we feel there’s too much uncertainty involved. Yet we are certain that eventually the US economy’s supply chain capacities as they are now will not be enough if global warming continues. There is a limit of how much the US economy can take, we just don’t know exactly where it is.”

“Bad for people”

Ironically, in the case of hurricane Harvey it is in particular the oil and gas industry in Texas which suffers from the impacts of hurricanes driven by global warming — while global warming is in turn driven by the emissions from burning oil and gas, plus of course coal. The fossil fuel extraction sector is big in that region of the US, and it is vulnerable to cyclone damages. The computer simulations show that production losses in the fuel sector will be amongst those which will be most strongly compensated by countries like Canada and Norway, but also Venezuela and Indonesia, at the expense of the US economy.

“When things break and production fails locally, there’s always someone in the world who is happy to make money by selling the replacement goods,” says Levermann. “So why worry? Well, reduced production means increasing prices, and even if that means it’s good for some economies, it is generally bad for the consumers — the people. Also from a global economic perspective, shifts due to disrupted supply chains can mean that less efficient producers step in. It’s a pragmatic, straightforward conclusion that we need to avoid increasing greenhouse gas emissions which amplify this kind of disruptions.”

To honor Earth Day’s 52 years of environmental action, Earth911 is presenting 52 Actions for the Earth. Each week through Earth Day 2023, we will share an action you can take to invest in the Earth and make your own life more sustainable. Even if you don’t have a sweet tooth, you probably indulge in a few pieces of Halloween candy each year. But all those little candy wrappers add up to a scary waste problem. This week, you can invest in the Earth by recycling Halloween candy wrappers.

Action: Recycle Wrappers

Wrapper Waste

There’s a lot to love about Halloween, and candy lands near the top of the list for a lot of people. But Halloween candy poses a quandary for ethical consumers. You don’t want to be part of the problem of childhood obesity in America or global child slavery on cacao plantations. You can offer trick-or-treaters healthier and more sustainable snacks, or even some fun alternatives to food, but completely avoiding individually wrapped, fun-sized candies in October is pretty hard; Americans buy 300,000 tons of candy and 90 million pounds of chocolate just during Halloween week.

Recycling Dilemma

You’re going to have to deal with some candy wrappers in October. But you can’t put candy wrappers in the recycle bin. Those little plastic wrappers usually comprise multiple materials, which makes their recovery difficult and expensive. Recycling is also complicated by the fact that individual candy wrappers are a low-volume product, which adds to the technical and economic challenges of collection and recycling. Unfortunately, their small size also makes them more likely to escape the waste stream and end up in the ocean as plastic pollution. Even paper cartons like the ones containing Nerds and Milk Duds may not be recyclable either. Many of them are plastic-coated.

Holiday Opportunity

It’s not cost-effective to separate the odd KitKat wrapper throughout the year from the recycling stream, but the sheer numbers of Halloween candy wrappers make it possible to bundle them. There are two mail-in recycling programs that accept source-separated candy wrappers.

TerraCycle offers both prepaid boxes and pouches. The boxes come in three sizes (the smallest is 11″ x 11″ x 20″) with prices ranging from $86 to $218. The pouches are 7.5″ x 10.5″ and cost $43. Rubicon’s Trick or Trash boxes are the same size as a small TerraCycle box and cost $100 for individual purchase. Neither company’s option is cheap, but they do better reflect the true cost of the candy we consume. Neighbors may want to pool their resources to share a box.

Fortunately, Rubicon offers an option that doesn’t put the burden of disposal costs on individual families. They offer their boxes at no charge to schools, community organizations, and businesses that want to serve as collection points. Parent groups could organize a post-holiday wrapper collection at school, or shops that participate in neighborhood trick-or-treat programs could choose to be part of the solution for free.

Act fast to receive your box in time for Halloween, and if the system works for you, consider repeating it at Easter – the only holiday that consumes more candy than Halloween.

In the latest issue of Psychological Science in the Public Interest, an interdisciplinary team of researchers reports on how social norms — “patterns of behaviors or values that depend on expectations about what others do and/or think should be done” — can be harnessed to bring about collective climate action and policy change. They emphasize that although social norm interventions can be powerful drivers of social change, they can also reinforce unsustainable behaviors and attitudes and require deep contextual knowledge to be used effectively.

“Demand-side changes can be integral components of broader climate policy by creating public acceptance for new measures and accelerating or strengthening their impacts,” said Sara M. Constantino, an assistant professor at Northeastern University and lead author on the paper. “However, the efficacy and ethics of interventions aimed at shifting social norms depend critically on the details of the behaviors or attitudes in question, a host of structural and cultural factors, psychological processes, and myriad design and implementation decisions.”

In this paper, Constantino and her colleagues review the literature on how social-norm change occurs, how the tendency to conform or coordinate with others can drive rapid social change, and the circumstances under which this is likely to happen. They base their conclusions on the review and synthesis of a large body of literature on social-norm influence, measurement, and change from the perspectives of psychology, anthropology, sociology, and economics, published between 1951 and 2021.

Harnessing the power of social norms for climate action can take two interrelated forms, the authors explain. Social-norm interventions attempt to increase the adoption of sustainable social norms within social networks by providing information about what people in a group do or believe should be done. They can reshape individuals’ and communities’ behaviors by correcting social misperceptions (e.g., people believe there is limited support for climate action when in fact there is large support) and/or by rendering visible the prevalence of certain private behaviors (e.g., water and energy conservation, recycling, voting).

However, many prevailing behaviors are unsustainable. In such cases, social-tipping interventions aim to create change that disrupts these unsustainable norms. Interventions (e.g., subsidies) can be used to incentivize change in a subset of a population. Once enough individuals adopt sustainable nonnormative behaviors and beliefs, this can lead to broader social change, “tipping” societies toward a new social norm even in the absence of sustained interventions.

Structural, social, and other factors will shape the success of social-norm interventions, and Constantino and colleagues suggest taking a number of steps before designing and implementing them. These include identifying key properties of the target behavior and population, measuring existing social norms and expectations, and considering an intervention’s potential adverse consequences, such as perceived threats to people’s sense of agency and autonomy or a phenomenon known as “moral licensing,” where taking action on an issue can lead people to feel they have done enough, crowding out other actions.

Finally, the authors highlight the importance of piloting any intervention with local stakeholders — that is, conducting small trials, evaluating the results, and then conducting more trials — before adopting it. “An intervention should be scaled up only after it has been piloted in the context of interest and deemed successful,” they write.

“Social-norm and social-tipping interventions can drive rapid social change under certain conditions,” said Constantino. “However, they are not a replacement for other forms of climate action, and designing an effective and responsible intervention will depend on many factors.”

In an accompanying commentary, Stephan Lewandowsky (University of Bristol; University of Western Australia) and Sander van der Linden (University of Cambridge) propose that the challenge of turning scientific consensus on climate action into social consensus is more likely to be overcome if practitioners consider “the adversarial, misinformation-rich environments in which normative information is communicated, the role of pervasive misperceptions about norms and the behavior of other people, the possibility that community norms can unravel quickly following key political events, and the fact that there are important differences in how susceptible people are to social influence.”

However, it is usually very time-​consuming and costly for farmers to collect and dispose of conventional polyethylene (PE) film after use. In addition, it isn’t possible to re-​collect all of the thin PE films, as they tear easily. This means PE-​pieces remain on and in the soil and accumulate there, because PE doesn’t degrade.

Biodegradable mulch film is a promising alternative, because — in contrast to PE film — it ideally does not to leave behind any polymer components in the soil environment. The biodegradable polymers it contains are deliberately designed so that microorganisms can use them to generate energy and build cell biomass. The biodegradable polymers have intended chemical “breaking points” in their backbone structure. Naturally occurring microorganisms, such as those in soil, can release enzymes into their environment that attack these points in the polymers and break them down. The small degradation products released are then taken up by the microbes and ultimately respired to form the final product, CO₂.

That’s why proving CO₂ formation from polymer carbon is crucial for biodegradation. Also because in addition to truly biodegradable plastics, there are falsely labelled ones based on PE containing specific additives. These films break down only into very small microplastics that are no longer visible to the naked eye. And because these aren’t degraded by microorganisms, they accumulate in the environment.

New approach captures all aspects of biodegradation

Until now based on existing methods, it hasn’t been possible to follow the process of polymer biodegradation in its entirety. But over the past few years, the Environmental Chemistry Group at ETH Zurich has developed a new approach to track and measure whether and to what degree a polymer biodegrades in a soil. Their findings have just been published in NatureCommunications.

These results could change the way polymer biodegradation is studied in the future. The project also involved researchers from ETH’s Earth Sciences department and Eawag, in addition to employees from the chemical company BASF.

This new approach is based on using polymers labelled with stable carbon isotopes (¹³C). This labelling allows the researchers to selectively track the polymer’s ¹³C during biodegradation in the soil, so they can unmistakably demonstrate that biodegradation is indeed occurring. Until now, plastic biodegradability had been tested only with non-​isotopically labelled polymers. A polymer (or a plastic material consisting of one or more polymers) is certified as biodegradable if the fraction of added polymer carbon converted into CO₂ exceeds a predefined level over a specific incubation period. The standard for biodegradable mulch film, for example, requires two-​year soil incubations in which at least 90 percent of the mulch film carbon is “mineralised” into CO₂.

These test methods are well established as a suitable means for detecting polymer mineralisation. However, they do not capture the full extent of the biodegradation, as they measure only CO₂ formation. Consequently, researchers using today’s standard methods have been unable to detect the amount of polymer carbon remaining in the soil at the end of an incubation period. In addition, it was unclear whether this remaining carbon was present still in the form of the added polymer or whether microorganisms had already incorporated it into their biomass.

Closed carbon mass balances

The approach developed by the ETH researchers and their colleagues eliminates these ambiguities. In their tests, they used ¹³C-​labelled polybutylene succinate, or PBS — a commercially important biodegradable polyester that is also used in mulch films.

The researchers were now able to selectively track the ¹³C in the PBS during biodegradation: in addition to determining mineralisation to ¹³CO₂, the authors demonstrated complete mass balances for the PBS carbon by quantifying the residual amount of PBS-​derived ¹³C that remained in the soil after incubation.

“It was gratifying for us to see closed carbon mass balances over the 425 days of soil incubation. This showed that we can accurately determine where the polymer carbon ends up — about two-​thirds in CO₂ and one-​third in soil — over these very long incubation periods,” explains the study’s lead author, Taylor Nelson, who earned his doctorate in the Environmental Chemistry Group.

The researchers also wanted to know in which form the carbon added as PBS remained in the soil. How much was incorporated into the microbial biomass and how much was still present as residual PBS?

To answer this question, the authors extracted and quantified the residual PBS from the soil at the end of the incubations. They were able to show that while most of the carbon was still present as PBS, a significant amount — 7 percent — of the added PBS carbon had been incorporated into the microbial biomass.

The ability to determine exactly how much polymer remains and how much polymer carbon has been incorporated into biomass is essential for future studies and for the development of new biodegradable polymers. “We can now systematically test for soil conditions and polymer properties that allow for complete biodegradation of the polymers to CO₂ and to microbial biomass — and we can assess factors that may slow down polymer biodegradation over time,” explains Michael Sander, Professor in the ETH Environmental Chemistry Group.

This work is already underway: using the new approach, the group is currently investigating the biodegradation of further polymers in various agricultural soils, including in the field. “In this way, we want to ensure that biodegradable polymers live up to their name and don’t remain in the environment,” says Kristopher McNeill, Professor of Environmental Chemistry at ETH Zurich and head of an eponymous research subgroup.

“Replacing conventional polymers with biodegradable ones can help reduce plastic pollution, especially for applications in which polymers are used directly in the environment such that there’s a high likelihood that the polymers will remain there after use,” Sander points out.

In August 2020, the southern area of Japan and the northwestern Pacific Ocean experienced unprecedentedly high SSTs, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA). A recent study published in January 2021 revealed that the record-high northwestern Pacific SST observed in August 2020 could not be expected to occur without human-induced climate changes. Since then, the JMA again announced that the record high SSTs were observed near Japan in July and October 2021 and from June to August 2022, but it remains unclear to what extent climate change has altered the occurrence likelihood of these regional extreme warming events.

“Impacts of global warming is not uniform, rather show regional and seasonal differences,” said a co-author Hideo Shiogama, the head of the Earth System Risk Assessment Section at Earth System Division, NIES. “A comprehensive analysis on regional SSTs for a long period may provide a quantitative understanding of how much ocean condition near Japan has been and will be affected by global warming. This better informs policymakers to plan climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies.”

The paper published in Geophysical Research Letters today figures out the contribution of global warming to discrete monthly extreme ocean warming events in Japan’s marginal seas, which could occur less than once per 20 years in the preindustrial era. A climate research group at NIES focused on ten monitoring areas operationally used by the JMA, including the Japan Sea, East China Sea, Okinawa Islands, east of Taiwan, and the Pacific coasts of Japan. The scientists confirmed that observed SST changes from 1982 to 2021 were well reproduced by 24 climate models participating in the sixth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6), except for the region east of Hokkaido. Then, the extreme ocean warming events were identified in nine monitoring areas to reveal the contribution of climate change therein.

Extreme ocean warming and climate change

“In the present climate, every extreme ocean warming event is linked to global warming,” said corresponding lead author Michiya Hayashi, a research associate at NIES. The scientists estimated the occurrence frequencies of each event in the present and preindustrial climate conditions from January 1982 through July 2022 based on the CMIP6 climate models. “We found that the occurrence probability of almost all the extreme ocean warming events has already at least doubled since the 2000s than the preindustrial era. It is increased more than tenfold in sizeable cases since the mid-2010s, especially in southern Japan.”

For instance, in July 2022, anomalously high SSTs observed in five monitoring areas, including the Japan Sea (Areas 1, 3), East China Sea (Areas 5, 8), and south of Okinawa near Taiwan (Area 10), are identified as the extreme ocean warming events. The updated results based on the preliminary data retrieved from the NEAR-GOOS RRTDB website on 15 September 2022 (not included in the published paper) show that, in August 2022, the events are also identified in six monitoring areas at the south of 35°N: the East China Sea (Areas 5, 8), south and east of Okinawa (Areas 10, 9), southeastern Kanto (Area 7), and seas off Shikoku and Tokai (Area 6). “We estimate that, in all of these identified events in July and August 2022, the occurrence frequencies are increased at least doubled due to climate change, and more than tenfold for those in the south of 35°N except for the north of East China Sea,” stated Hayashi.

“Climate change impacts on extreme ocean warming events in northern Japan began to emerge relatively late compared to southern Japan,” noted Shiogama. The increased global aerosol emissions until the 1980s tend to cool the Earth’s surface, which is more substantial in the North Pacific especially near northern Japan via atmospheric large-scale circulation changes. In addition, the year-to-year natural variability of SST is large in northern Japan so the global warming signal was less detectable than in southern Japan. Since in the last decades global aerosol emissions have been reduced, the cooling effect becomes less dominant to human-induced greenhouse gas warming. “Our study indicates,” continued Shiogama, “that the contribution of climate change to SST extremes has been already discernible beyond natural variability even in northern Japan under the present climate condition.”

What about the ocean conditions expected in the future? The researchers further compared the probabilities of exceeding the monthly record high SSTs around Japan at different global warming levels from 0°C to 2°C using the 24 CMIP6 climate model outputs from 1901 to 2100. “Once global warming reaches 2°C, all of nine monitoring areas are expected to experience SSTs warmer than the past highest levels at least every two years,” said Tomoo Ogura, a co-author and the head of the Climate Modeling and Analysis Section at Earth System Division, NIES. He added, “Limiting global warming below 1.5°C is necessary not to have the record warm conditions in Japan’s marginal seas as the new normal climate.”

The quantitative analysis of SSTs around Japan implies that climate change has already become the major factor for most of the record high SSTs in recent years. “In the future, dynamics of each extreme warming event need to be examined by taking the long-term climate change and year-to-year natural variability into account,” noted Hayashi. “Nevertheless, we expect that our statistical results based on the latest climate models will help to implement adaptation and mitigation measures for climate change.”