The UN’s International Maritime Association reported in 2020 that the shipping industry — the ships moving freight between the continents — accounts for 2.89% of annual global CO2 emissions. Between 1990 and 2020, shipping volumes “more than doubled,” according to Statista, and during the COVID-19 pandemic, shipping grew faster, at as much as 16.4% a year, according to the U.S. International Trade Commission. Meet Eric Leveridge, the Pacific Environment Lead at Ship It Zero, a nonprofit coalition of environmental, public health, and shipping experts. The organization reports that the shipping emissions of just 15 retail companies, including Home Depot, Lowe’s, Walmart, Amazon, and Target, are responsible for 12.7 million tons of CO2 and as much particulate pollution as the entire U.S. mining industry.

Eric also digs into recent news that Amazon reversed its Climate Pledge commitment that would have made half of its shipping emissions-free by 2030. As reported by Business Insider, Amazon’s reason was, “We realized that it no longer made sense to have a separate and more narrow Shipment Zero goal that applied to only one part of our business, so we’ve decided to eliminate it.” Ship It Zero called on Amazon to reinstate its 50% net-zero shipping goals.

Shipping has many routes to lower emissions, including the use of hydrogen- or ammonia-based fuels, augmenting engines with wind power, and the addition of emissions scrubbing technology that captures and sequesters carbon, sulfur oxide, and nitrous oxide emissions instead of letting them escape into the atmosphere. Eric joins us to explore the challenge of lowering retailers’ shipping-related emissions and tell us about Ship It Zero’s recommendations.

You can learn more at shipitzero.org, which features several helpful e-books for those who want to read up on shipping emissions and pollution.

Chenliang Wu, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher at Tulane University School of Science and Engineering, began this research by looking at the Mississippi River before adding other rivers on Earth and ancient riverbeds on Mars to the study.

The study specifically looks at river sinuosity, or how much rivers curve. The sinuosity of rivers changes over time, depending on the age of the river and environmental changes. Some of these changes include sediment and water supply and riverbank vegetation, all of which are affected by climate change. The study found that river sinuosity is related to the changes in how much water flows through the river. Rivers have different water levels depending on environmental factors, like precipitation levels.

The researchers looked at maps of the rivers on Earth over time by using historical data from as early as the fifth century and images from as early as 1939. They used data of 21 lowland meandering rivers. For the ancient riverbeds on Mars, they used previously identified ancient river channels from remote sensing data.

The ancient riverbeds on Mars, untouched by human influence, gave Wu and his team a system to test their hypotheses on how the river systems migrated and what their sinuosity looked like by the time they dried up. Their analysis is also a step toward understanding what the hydroclimate on Mars was like when there was still surface water.

“It really lays the foundation for more advanced topics,” Wu said, “like, were the environmental conditions suitable for life on Mars?”

After performing analysis on the rivers, the researchers separated them into two categories: variable-sinuosity and constant-sinuosity. The variable-sinuosity rivers never reached a steady state, meaning their sinuosities continue changing, and the constant sinuosity rivers did reach a steady state, meaning their average sinuosity remained relatively constant. Of the 21 Earth rivers studied, 13, including the Mississippi River, had variable sinuosity, while 8 had constant sinuosity.

Understanding what factors affect the sinuosity of rivers will give researchers and engineers insight into how to manage rivers in the future. It can help with river restoration, future infrastructure projects and flood management. This insight can be invaluable in attempts to mitigate the impacts of climate change.

As more extreme weather happens more frequently due to the effects of climate change, research like Wu’s will become even more important when it comes to protecting and helping populations who live near rivers. According to a 2019 study in the International Journal of Water Resources Development, half of the world’s population lives in river basins, all of whom could be affected by future floods from extreme weather events.

Known as the Maillard reaction after the French scientist who discovered it, the process converts small molecules of organic carbon into bigger molecules known as polymers. In the kitchen, it is used to create flavours and aromas out of sugars.

But a research team led by Professor Caroline Peacock at the University of Leeds argues that on the sea floor, the process has had a more fundamental effect, where it has helped to raise oxygen and reduce carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, to create the conditions for complex life forms to emerge and thrive on Earth.

Source of organic carbon

Organic carbon in the oceans mostly comes from microscopic living organisms. When those organisms die, they sink to the sea floor and are consumed by bacteria. That decay process uses oxygen and releases carbon dioxide into the ocean which eventually ends up in the atmosphere.

As a result of the Maillard reaction, the smaller molecules are converted into larger molecules. Those larger molecules are harder for microorganisms to breakdown and remain stored in the sediment for tens of thousands — if not millions — of years.

The scientists describe this as the “preservation of organic carbon.”

That long-term storage or preservation of organic carbon on the seabed had major consequences for conditions that developed on the surface of the Earth. It limited the release of carbon dioxide, allowing more oxygen to reach the Earth’s atmosphere and limited variation in the warming of the Earth’s land surface over the last 400 million years to an average of about five degrees Celsius.

‘Too slow to have any impact’

Dr Oliver Moore, first author in the study and a Research Fellow in Biogeochemistry in the School of Earth and Environment at Leeds, said: “It had been suggested back in the 1970’s that the Maillard reaction might occur in marine sediments, but the process was thought to be too slow to impact the conditions that exist on Earth.

“Our experiments have shown that in the presence of key elements, namely iron and manganese which are found in sea water, the rate of reaction is increased by tens of times.

“Over Earth’s long history, this may have helped create the conditions necessary for complex life to inhabit the Earth.”

As part of the study, the scientists modelled how much organic carbon has been locked into the seabed because of the Maillard reaction. They estimate it has resulted in around 4 million tonnes of organic carbon each year being locked into the seabed. That is the equivalent weight of around 50 London Tower Bridges.

To test their theory, the researchers looked at what happened to simple organic compounds when mixed with different forms of iron and manganese in the laboratory at 10 degrees Celsius, the temperature of the seabed.

Analysis revealed that the “chemical fingerprint” of the laboratory samples — which had undergone the Maillard reaction — matched those from sediment samples taken from seabed locations around the world.

That “fingerprint” analysis was conducted at the Diamond Light Source in Oxfordshire, the UK’s synchrotron which generates intense beams of light energy to reveal the atomic structure of samples.

Dr Burkhard Kaulich, Principal Beamline Scientist of the Scanning X-ray Microscopy beamline (I08-SXM) at Diamond Light Source, said: “Our advanced I08-SXM instrumentation with its high stability, energy and optical resolution was developed and optimised to help probe carbon chemistry and reactions which take place in environmental systems.

“We are very proud to have been able to contribute to a better understanding of the fundamental chemical processes involved in the creation of complex life forms and climate on Earth.”

Professor Peacock, from Leeds, said: “It’s immensely exciting to discover that reactive minerals such as those made from iron and manganese within the ocean have been instrumental in creating the stable conditions necessary for life to have evolved on Earth.”

The lessons learned from a better understanding of the Earth’s geochemical processes could be used to harness new approaches to tackling modern-day climate change.

Dr James Bradley, an environmental scientist at Queen Mary University of London and one of the authors of the paper, said: “Understanding the complex processes affecting the fate of organic carbon that is deposited on the seafloor is crucial to pinpointing how Earth’s climate changes in response to both natural processes and human activity, and helping humanity better manage climate change, since the application and long-term success of carbon capture technologies relies on carbon being locked away in stable forms rather than being transformed into carbon dioxide.”

The research found that 33% of NBS were what are known as green solutions. These can include urban green spaces such as parks, green roofs, and green walls that can provide cooling and shade, absorb rainfall, and improve air quality.

A significant proportion (31%) of NBS were hybrid solutions. These can include green roofs that incorporate solar panels or rainwater harvesting systems to capture and use rainwater.

Professor Prashant Kumar, Director of the Global Centre for Clean Air Research (GCARE) and corresponding author of the study, said:

“The good news is that we found a wealth of evidence of more communities successfully adopting nature-based solutions to not only deal with climate change and hazards but societal issues such as water and food security. What is very concerning is that we found a lack of evidence of authorities or organisations investing in nature-based solutions for vulnerable communities outside of Europe.”

The team from GCARE analysed the implementation of more than 500 NBS case studies from across the globe. They found more than 88% of them were supported by national policies, which ensured the financial viability of the NBS.

The most common use of NBS was to address water-based hazards such as floods and landslides. This accounted for 45% of all case studies.

The second most common type of hazard addressed by NBS was meteorological/climatological hazards like heatwaves and droughts, which accounted for around 30% of the case studies. Around 24% of the case studies were focused on environmental hazards like soil degradation and air pollution. Fire hazards were the least common type of hazard addressed by NBS, accounting for only around 1% of the case studies.

Professor Kumar commented:

“We believe that as much as 68% of the case studies we analysed addressed UN Sustainability goals for life on land, climate action and clean water. Imagine the impact these innovations could have if they were implemented in our most vulnerable communities.

“This is why we believe that knowledge transfer must be near the top of the agenda so we can all benefit from the transformational benefit of nature-based solutions.”

The study was supported by the EU project, OPERANDUM (Grant Agreement No: 776848) and published in the Science of the Total Environment journal.

The University of Surrey is a world-leading centre for excellence in sustainability — where our multi-disciplinary research connects society and technology to equip humanity with the tools to tackle climate change, clean our air, reduce the impacts of pollution on health and help us live better, more sustainable lives. The University is committed to improving its own resource efficiency on its estate and being a sector leader, aiming to be carbon neutral by 2030. A focus on research that makes a difference to the world has contributed to Surrey being ranked 55th in the world in the Times Higher Education (THE) University Impact Rankings 2022, which assesses more than 1,400 universities’ performance against the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

But new research shows a troubling bottleneck that could threaten these efforts: U.S. tree nurseries don’t grow close to enough trees — nor have the species diversity needed — to meet ambitious plans.

The study was published in the journal Bioscience on July 31, 2023.

Seedling Scarcity

“Trees are this amazing natural solution to a lot of our challenges, including climate change. We urgently need to plant many millions of them,” says University of Vermont scientist Tony D’Amato who co-led the new research. “But what this paper points out is that we are woefully underserved by any kind of regional or national scale inventory of seedlings to get the job done.”

A team of 13 scientists, led by D’Amato and UVM post-doctoral scientist Peter Clark, studied 605 plant nurseries across twenty northern states. Only 56 of these grow and sell seedlings in the volumes needed for conservation and reforestation and only 14 of them were government-operated, they report. The team was more dismayed to discover an “overwhelming scarcity of seedlings,” they write, from different species and “seed collection zones” — trees adapted to local conditions and climate. In essence, forest nurseries tended to maintain a limited inventory of a select few species, electing to prioritize those valued for commercial timber production over species required for conservation, ecological restoration, or climate adaptation. Moreover, many areas had no locally adapted tree stock available.  And within the seedlings available, there were not enough types of trees and “future-climate-suitable” genetics to meet goals for conservation and forest restoration in a hot future.

“The world is thinking about a warming climate — can we plant towards that warming climate? We know we’re losing ecologically important species across North America and around the world. So, the goal is: can we restore these trees or replace them with similar species? It’s a powerful idea,” says UVM’s Peter Clark, the lead author on the new study. “But — despite the excitement and novelty of that idea in many policy and philanthropy circles — when push comes to shove, it’s very challenging on the ground to actually find either the species or the seed sources needed.”

“The number of seedlings is a challenge,” Clark says, “but finding the diversity we need to restore ecologically complex forests — not just a few industrial workhorse species commonly used for commercial timber operations, like white pine — is an even bigger bottleneck.”

One extreme example is red spruce. This ecologically important species along hundreds of miles of eastern North America has been under stress for decades from climate change, pests, and land clearing. Yet, in their 20-state survey, the team only found two tree nurseries that had inventory of red spruce, a species from which many millions of seedlings are needed to meet restoration goals. “Remarkably, only 800 red spruce seedlings were commercially available for purchase in 2022,” the team reports in their new Bioscience study, ” — enough to reforest less than one hectare.”

“It really points to just how bare the cupboard is when it comes to the diversity of options,” says Tony D’Amato, director of the Forestry Program in UVM’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, “but also the quantity that’s needed to make any meaningful impact.”

Increased Investment

The team argues that dramatic increases in both seedling production and diversity at many regional nurseries will be central to any successful campaign to address climate change with tree planting. However, the novelty and risk involved, “likely generates uncertainty among forest nurseries, hampering investment,” they write. This appears to be especially true in regions, like the Northeast, where nurseries have declined over recent decades, the study reports, and where speculative investment — in growing new, future-climate-adapted, non-timber species and seedlots — may carry high financial risk.

Additionally, seedlings brought in from outside a region may be less likely to succeed. The new study reports that the vast majority (80%) of seedlings in the northern states, where the study was conducted, are produced in the North Central states — and very few in the Northeastern states. “Such concentration of production will hinder tree planting efforts,” they write, “because species and seed sources likely originate from similar geographic or bioclimatic zones.” On top of this challenge, seedlings are sensitive to stress. A misalignment between when seedlings are available — say in a southern nursery months before northern soils are frost free — and when they are needed, may doom their chances.

The team of researchers — including scientists from UVM; the USDA’s Northern Forest Research Stations in Minnesota, Michigan and New Hampshire; Minnesota Department of Natural Resources; Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources; Michigan Department of Natural Resources; University of Minnesota; the USDA’s Northern Institute of Applied Climate Science; and The Nature Conservancy (Albany, NY) — recommend a series of improvements from improved policy and financing to better training and expanded research.

For example, today government agencies, such as the US Forest Service and many US state governments, lack clear policies about the movement of tree species and tree genetics. They often rely on seed zones established in the 1970s based on historical climate conditions, not future ones — even though up-to-date guidelines for moving species under a warming climate are becoming available. Additionally, much forest policy and research has been framed around species important for timber production — rather than efforts to diversify species and climate-adapted seed-sourcing.

The team of scientists suggest that expanded federal and state investment will be needed to boost both public tree nurseries and seed collection efforts. “This strategy may stimulate production from private nurseries once a stable demand is apparent,” they write. In 2023, the federal government made an investment of $35 million in expanding federal nursery capacity. “However, given the existing (and growing) reforestation backlog, declines in nursery infrastructure, and complex needs for diverse seeds and seedlings, it is likely that substantially more public investment in the form of grants, loans, and cost-share programs will be needed to reinvigorate, diversify, and expand forest nurseries,” they write.

“People want trillions of trees,” says the University of Vermont’s Peter Clark, “but often, on the ground, it’s one old farmer walking around to collect acorns. There’s a massive disconnect.”

Welcome to the hottest part of summer, when the heat and smoke season may have you looking at your yard and thinking that it’s time to upgrade from gas lawn equipment to electric, or to go back to manual tools. Tobie Stanger, a senior editor at Consumer Reports, joins the conversation to talk about the independent, nonprofit product review site’s decision to endorse electric lawn equipment, especially for smaller lawns. According to the National Resources Defense Council, gas mowers, edgers, trimmers, and blowers are noisy, and their two-stroke engines pollute 20 to 300 times more than a car per hour of operation. A 2011 Environmental Protection Agency report concluded that gas lawn equipment emits large amounts of three volatile organic compounds that are known carcinogens, benzene, 1,3 butadiene, and formaldehyde. The environment and our neighborhoods would be better off without gas-powered lawn equipment.

Tobie has covered appliances, generators, lawnmowers, and much more for more than 30 years and is one of the most tuned-in observers of the electrification of consumer products. We’ll find out why Consumer Reports concludes that gas yard equipment still has the advantage in some cases and explore the key features and functionality to look for when choosing electric alternatives to polluting gas equipment. Check out the electric yard equipment brands she discusses when shopping, including Ryobi, Kobalt, Stihl, Greenworks, Husquarvana, and EGO. To find a collection of Consumer Reports reviews of electric lawn tools, visit Gas vs. Electric Lawn Mower: Which Is Better? (membership is required to see product ratings).

Climate change is expected to have a major impact on species around the world, especially endangered species, which are already rare. A majority of the organisms listed under the Endangered Species Act are plants and lichen, and yet the risk that climate change poses to endangered plants has not been systematically evaluated in over a decade.

To address this gap, Wrobleski’s team adapted existing assessment tools used to examine the threat of climate change for wild animals and applied them to 771 listed plant species. Specifically, they evaluated how sensitive the listed plants and lichens were to climate change, if climate change was recognized as a threat for each species and if actions were underway to address the threat.

The researchers discovered that all listed plant and lichen species are at least slightly threatened by climate change. While a majority of the documentation for these species recognized climate change as a threat, there were few actions being taken to protect the listed species.

While acknowledging the threat that climate change poses to rare plants is an important first step, direct action must be taken to ensure the recovery of many of these species, the team concludes. As conditions continue to shift over the next century, clear and focused objectives will become even more vital for successful species recovery. They urge that their findings be used to aid in conservation planning for endangered plants and lichens, and to inform future recommendations for listing species and planning their recovery.

The authors add: “We evaluated the conservation plans for all endangered plant and lichen species listed in the Endangered Species Act and found that while climate change is recognized as a threat to the species, few conservation plans include actions to address climate change directly. Climate change will not only impact the lives of people, but also rare and endangered species and the ecosystems we interact with every day.”

In mid-June, a team of freshwater researchers spent their nights drifting down Alaska’s Yukon River in an area that straddles the Arctic Circle. The hydrologists were using a GPS unit installed on their boat to measure the slope of the river at the same time that the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite passed overhead, collecting its own data on the waterway. The midnight rendezvous were part of a larger effort by ocean and freshwater scientists to validate the measurements from the recently launched spacecraft, which begins science operations Tuesday, July 25.

A collaboration between NASA and the French space agency, CNES (Centre National d’Études Spatiales), SWOT is measuring the height of nearly all water on Earth’s surface and will provide one of the most detailed, comprehensive views yet of the planet’s ocean and fresh water. The mission will address some of the most pressing climate change questions of our time, offering insights into areas including how a warming world is accelerating Earth’s water cycle, leading to more volatile precipitation patterns. SWOT will also help researchers better understand how climate change affects water storage in lakes, rivers, and reservoirs, and how communities can better manage water resources and prepare for floods and other disasters.

But first, the mission needed to ensure the accuracy of its data. “If I want to monitor my weight, I wouldn’t want to buy a scale that has an uncertainty of 20 pounds – that wouldn’t be useful,” said Jinbo Wang, SWOT oceanography field campaign lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

Shortly after the spacecraft’s December 2022 launch, science and engineering teams began what’s known as calibration and validation. Calibration involved ensuring SWOT’s software and hardware – including its main scientific instrument, the Ka-band Radar Interferometer (KaRIn) and its antenna – operate as designed.

“There are things we can model on the computer about how the spacecraft will behave in space before we launch it,” said JPL’s Curtis Chen, U.S. calibration-validation lead for SWOT. “But there are things we can’t predict about SWOT’s behavior until it’s in space, so we adjust things as necessary once the satellite’s in orbit.”

“Because of the novelty of SWOT’s measurements, we kept the satellite in a dedicated calibration-validation orbit for six months before moving it into to its operational, science orbit,” said Nadya Vinogradova Shiffer, SWOT program scientist and manager at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “This opportunity mobilized the global community of water scientists to head out to sea, land, and air in campaigns from Australia to Alaska, helping NASA and CNES validate the new measurements from SWOT.”

By Land

During SWOT’s validation phase, dozens of research teams headed into the field to measure water levels and the slope of rivers. For the ocean, teams looked at sea surface height.

“We’ve been installing instruments called water level loggers that measure how water levels go up and down,” said Tamlin Pavelsky, the NASA freshwater science lead for SWOT at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Pavelsky directed teams that went to New Zealand’s Waimakariri River and the Yukon River in Alaska.

In addition, teams sampled freshwater bodies in Connecticut, Canada, and France, among other locations. They wanted to survey the types of lakes and rivers they expect SWOT to measure, and to sample freshwater bodies in areas that intersect with the satellite’s orbit to compare measurements from the ground and from space.

The calibration-validation data on rivers and lakes from SWOT looked good. “We were expecting to be able to measure rivers wider than 100 meters, but there are cases where we can see things as narrow as 50 meters, and sometimes as narrow as 20 meters,” said Pavelsky.

By Sea

SWOT sea level measurements were also promising when compared with ocean sampling data. “My fear before launch was that we were going to get a lot of surprises in the data because SWOT is unlike anything that we’ve done before,” said Chen. But that hasn’t been the case.

Researchers used two approaches to measure sea levels: airborne- and ship-deployed sensors. Using an airplane-mounted lidar instrument, the team collected sea level information in a manner similar to how SWOT takes measurements. This provided the most direct comparison between data from the field and the satellite.

The team also collected temperature and salinity data that can reveal ocean features – like internal waves and currents – that drive sea level changes. They deployed temperature and salinity sensors on 11 moorings roughly 200 miles (300 kilometers) off California’s central coast. And they used 11 autonomous underwater robots – some of which were also collecting data for a separate NASA project called the Sub-Mesoscale Ocean Dynamics Experiment.

These efforts are key because as analysis methods improve and researchers find new questions to answer using SWOT data, the measurements will help to gauge their accuracy. “It’s our benchmark data,” said Pavelsky. “It will be important for years to come.”

More About the SWOT Mission

SWOT was jointly developed by NASA and CNES, with contributions from the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and the UK Space Agency. JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California, leads the U.S. component of the project. For the flight system payload, NASA provided the KaRIn instrument, a GPS science receiver, a laser retroreflector, a two-beam microwave radiometer, and NASA instrument operations. CNES provided the Doppler Orbitography and Radioposition Integrated by Satellite (DORIS) system, the dual frequency Poseidon altimeter (developed by Thales Alenia Space), the KaRIn radio-frequency subsystem (together with Thales Alenia Space and with support from the UK Space Agency), the satellite platform, and ground operations. CSA provided the KaRIn high-power transmitter assembly. NASA provided the launch vehicle and the agency’s Launch Services Program, based at Kennedy Space Center, managed the associated launch services.

To learn more about SWOT, visit:

https://swot.jpl.nasa.gov/

News Media Contacts

Jane J. Lee / Andrew Wang

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

818-354-0307 / 626-379-6874

[email protected] / [email protected]