Thirty weeks out from this year’s COP30 climate summit in Belém, Brazil, an advance brief of a report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) finds that doubling down on global efforts to keep planetary heating to 1.5°C will lead to a significant net gain in global gross domestic product.

The economic benefits of climate action will accrue rapidly, UNDP administrator Achim Steiner said last week at the 16th annual Petersberg Climate Dialogue in Berlin.

“Over the next 20 to 25 years, you’re talking about growth rates that translate into literally billions and billions of additional economic investments and returns on investments,” Steiner said.

With serious collective climate action, some wealthy countries will see their per capita GDP growth increase by more than 60% by 2050, while some poor ones could see that same metric soar by a “remarkable“ 124% from 2025 levels by the end of the century, Steiner says.

On the other hand, business-as-usual approaches to the climate crisis could see global GDP reduced by 33% by 2100.

Existing climate commitments won’t deliver

Titled “Investing in Climate for Growth and Development: The Case for Enhanced NDCs,” the brief claps back against claims that aggressive climate action is an economic non-starter.

First submitted in 2015, and due every five years, NDCs (nationally determined contributions) are voluntary plans that signatories to the Paris Agreement submit to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change outlining how their domestic policies will contribute to global climate action.

Countries are being urged to submit “enhanced” NDCs this year because the current trajectory of emissions is insufficient to keep warming to the Paris target of 1.5°C.

While Paris-aligned NDCs would provide a rapid and rising boost to global GDP, weak or unclear policies “risk delaying private investments and reducing GDP by 0.75% as early as 2030,” the brief’s authors say.

And those costs will multiply. “We’re actually talking about losing perhaps up to a third of global GDP this century,” Steiner warned his audience in Berlin.

When avoided climate impacts are factored in, the economic case for Paris-aligned climate action – beginning with a projected net GDP gain of 0.23% by 2040 – gets even stronger. “By reducing the risk of climate-induced events, an enhanced NDC scenario could prevent significant economic losses and increase global GDP by up to 3% by 2050 and up to 13% by 2100,” the OECD and UNDP say.

A (narrowing) window of opportunity

Most of the countries that signed on to the Paris Agreement missed this year’s February 10 deadline to submit their NDCs.

As of the end of February, only 18 of 195 NDCs had been submitted, and of those, only the United Kingdom’s is “in the right ballpark for a cost-effective path to 1.5ºC,” writes Climate Action Tracker. (Canada submitted its not-in-the-right-ballpark NDC on February 12.)

Countries are dragging their feet on their NDCs because of “shifting priorities” amidst “mounting economic uncertainty, geopolitical tensions, and rising public debts,” the OECD and UNDP note.

That so many countries have yet to submit their NDCs means there is still time to change the global climate-action script, U.K.-based climate think tank E3G observes. “Key players still in the consultation phase – notably the EU, China, Japan, Australia, Indonesia, and Mexico – have a chance to lead the way ahead for the next decade and signal a cycle of positive reinforcement for other countries to follow suit in their ambition,” the think tank writes.

But again, much is at stake. Speaking at the Petersberg conference, UN climate secretary Simon Stiell warned that Europe’s economy will not survive the decades of extreme weather that are in the offing should strong global climate action fail to materialize, The Guardian reports.

By 2050, climate impacts would be shrinking Europe’s economy by 2.3% per year, Stiell told his audience. “Although those figures may appear small, the crucial point is that the economic contraction would continue year after year,” The Guardian’s Fiona Harvey writes. “By the end of two decades of such damage, the EU economy would cease to exist.”

All NDCs must be submitted by September if they are to be included in the UN’s next global synthesis of climate action, due out ahead of COP30.

The full OECD/UNDP report on the economic case for enhanced NDCs will be released in May.

This article was first published by The Energy Mix. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Read the original story here.

The post UN agencies find that ambitious climate action brings big GDP gains appeared first on Corporate Knights.

In Canada, cities like Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver are leading the way in disclosing climate-related financial risks and leveraging municipal green bonds, fixed-income investments issued by cities to finance infrastructure resilience and climate initiatives. Toronto alone had raised more than US$1 billion in green bond issuances as of November 2023, the World Economic Forum (WEF) writes.

But the heightened risk is still out there. On January 14, in an industry first, S&P Global Ratings downgraded the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) two notches from a very secure AA- rating to an A, which remains secure, but with vulnerabilities.

S&P cited the “increasing frequency and severity of highly destructive wildfires within LADWP’s service territory.” One week earlier, ferocious urban firestorms had broken out across Los Angeles County. At least 29 people died, and damage estimates ran as high as US$275 billion.

Safe haven no longer

The immediate impact of the downgrade was that “bond values fell, default risk rose, and some bondholders sold at a loss,” E&E News wrote in February. But J.P. Morgan remained optimistic on long-term impacts: On February 18, the bank published an analysis titled “Municipal Bonds Today Offer U.S. Taxpayers a Rare, Compelling Opportunity.”

“We do not forecast any payment defaults to occur for any city, county, or school district adversely impacted by the Los Angeles fires,” North America’s largest bank wrote – a green flag for the individual investors who own 40% of U.S. municipal bonds, earning a yield that, for now, is exempt from federal taxes.

U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) expressed similar confidence one year earlier at a Senate Budget Committee hearing on climate risks to municipal bonds. The US$4-trillion municipal bond market, which is said to finance 70% of U.S. infrastructure – including schools and water and sewer systems – “is very resilient,” Grassley said in January 2024. “Where there have been defaults in municipal bonds, it’s been in places that have been mismanaged for decades,” he added, citing the city of Detroit as an example.

Grassley added that he was sure that U.S. municipalities were up to the challenges climate change poses: “Climate doomsday isn’t around the corner,” he said, adding that municipalities understand the risks and “are uniquely qualified to so adapt.”

But LADWP’s downgrading may herald “the beginning of a crack” in the country’s municipal bond market, Alice Hill, who served as U.S. National Security Council senior director for resilience policy in the Obama administration, told E&E. “We know that with climate change, there’ll be bigger and worse disasters that will affect communities’ abilities to repay those bonds.”

Municipalities in climate’s crosshairs

At the same Senate hearing, environmental data analyst Chris Hartshorn expanded on how climate impacts can strain municipal finances, warning of the delayed onset of harms following disasters like wildfires or hurricanes.

Five years after a fire, affected communities are “25% more likely” to experience a budget deficit due to declining revenue and increasing expenditures, while hurricane-stricken municipalities can see financial blowback up to a decade later, Hartshorn said.

Chronic impacts like heat – “a critical issue across much of the municipal U.S.” – can add to the financial grind, he added. K–12 schools are a particularly urgent concern, with an estimated US$40 billion of new air conditioning installation required to keep schools safe and productive for children in the United States.

Meanwhile, insurers are retreating from “higher climate risk,” Hartshorn said, citing states like Florida and California. The withdrawal has a domino effect on property values, which in turn reduces the property tax stream that underpins municipal debt servicing.

The diminishing of this “historically critical pillar of past disaster recovery” will heighten financial pressure on the municipal system after disasters, Hartshorn warned.

FEMA backstop pulled

At the hearing, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) compared municipal bonds to the 30-year mortgage, calling them “a bedrock” of the American economic system.

For decades, the U.S. Federal Environmental Management Agency (FEMA) has reinforced this bedrock by stepping in to fund disaster recovery, municipal market analyst Thomas Doe told E&E. “FEMA money would come in and provide the support for the rebuilding, and everybody’s made whole and the world goes on,” he said.

That status quo was more fragile than it might appear, Doe warned at the Senate hearing. “An industry pivot could be hastened if FEMA changes its criteria and raises more hurdles between disasters and federal aid, undermining traditional views of FEMA as a credit stabilizer.”

Now, making good on his presidential campaign promises, and his threats after the L.A. wildfires, Donald Trump is taking the axe to FEMA. Hundreds of FEMA staff have been laid off, and more losses are to come, especially among those who work on climate and resilience, the Natural Resources Defense Council wrote in February.

Canadian cities awaken to climate risk

In Canada, awareness of climate-related financial risk is gaining momentum. Gaby Kalapos, executive director of the Clean Air Partnership, sees a growing number of Canadian municipalities disclosing these risks as part of their financial planning.

A decade after the G20 created the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosure (TCFD), and four years after Canada’s pledge to integrate TCFD into financial reporting across the economy, cities like Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver are “leading the pack,” Kalapos told The Energy Mix.

Toronto’s $1 billion will finance its goal of achieving net-zero emissions by 2040, WEF writes. Funded by the Green Debenture Program, eligible capital projects will boost renewable-energy-generation capacity, energy efficiency and green building projects in the municipality.

Such positive developments are occurring even as climate damages rapidly worsen, Kalapos said. “It is not a matter of if climate impacts affect municipalities credit rating, but when,” she warned. “The risks are real, and repeated impacts will greatly reduce a community’s ability to recover.”

Strengthening climate resilience

Ujala Qadir, director of strategic programmes at the U.K.–based Climate Bonds Initiative, sees the sector-wide focus on climate risk as a positive shift, citing the move by S&P as the “shakeup” everyone needed to recognize that “the risks we thought were 20 years away are actually starting to materialize already.”

Qadir told The Mix that the conversation must now turn to “future-proofing” both municipalities and municipal bonds. This will naturally create a “virtuous circle” that builds resilience for both communities and bond markets.

Municipalities that embrace climate adaptation through green municipal bonds – as Toronto is doing – will further secure their credit ratings even as they protect households, businesses and infrastructure from destructive climate impacts.

“There’s a lot you can do, right? There’s so much evidence that investments in resilience and adaptation can actually prevent major losses,” Qadir said.

The Climate Bond Initiative is at the forefront of the green bond market’s evolution, with Qadir herself working to develop a “resilience bond,” the rigorous parameters of which would require issuers to “demonstrate a clear impact on reduction of climate risk.”

“We see this as a huge opportunity to expand the market of green and climate bonds to explicitly include resilience and really integrate that across the board,” she said.

This article was originally published by The Energy Mix. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Read the original article here. 

The post Municipalities are waking up to climate risk, and that’s a good thing appeared first on Corporate Knights.

At least 39 fossil fuel companies and 12 industry-linked organizations – including Shell, TC Energy, and the Pathways Alliance – have supplied classroom resources that downplay the sector’s role in driving global heating, states a new report. The materials emphasize consumer responsibility and technological solutions, while largely omitting the need for a rapid transition away from fossil fuels.

The post How Big Oil promotes climate change misinformation in Canadian schools appeared first on Corporate Knights.

In the report, CCI suggests that permissive land-use policies coupled with a pervasive lack of awareness of climate risks could lead to more than 760,000 homes being built in areas prone to flooding or fire – an outcome that could cost Canadians as much as $3 billion in damages each year.

“The most affordable home is the one you don’t have to rebuild after a disaster,” Ryan Ness, the CCI’s director of adaptation, said in a release. “Our new report outlines the tools policymakers have to steer new housing to safer ground and support affordability in the process.” Wielding those tools could deliver savings, especially in flood zones: “redirecting just 3% of new homes away from the highest-risk flood areas to safer ground could save nearly 80% of all losses by 2030,” the report authors write.

British Columbia is far and away the most exposed, with new housing facing $2.2 billion in annual damages from flood and wildfire combined under a worst-case scenario. Out of the 20 municipalities most exposed to wildfire threat in Canada, 16 are in its westernmost province. Constructing new houses in the wrong places could more than double wildfire losses in Canada, tripling them in B.C.

Manitoba comes next, facing $360 million in damages to new housing, mostly in flood zones.

RELATED

Banks won’t solve the housing crisis, but community bonds just might

The rental market has a carbon problem – here’s how to solve it

Six ways to produce rapid affordable housing

“Building more homes in unsafe places would be an incredibly costly mistake,” CCI president Rick Smith says in the release. “Fortunately, there are ways to build millions of much-needed homes that avoid these future costs.”

Policy gaps contribute to increased climate risks

The report finds major gaps in land-use policies across much of Canada, where most provincial and territorial governments delegate responsibility and decisions to municipalities that “often lack the capacity and political leverage to prioritize long-term risk prevention over immediate housing needs and local economic pressures.”

Ontario and Saskatchewan buck the trend here, both provinces named as leaders in land-use policies.

“Provincial and territorial governments should urgently enact or enhance land use regulations that explicitly direct development away from the most flood- and wildfire-prone areas,” the report authors say.

Other policy gaps stand to further increase the odds of new housing being built in hazard zones. Infrastructure funding programs that lack a climate lens will worsen the problem, as will insufficiently restrictive disaster-assistance programs that encourage municipalities to “rely on post-disaster recovery rather than proactive risk avoidance.”

As well, Canadians at large, including municipalities, developers and homeowners, remain severely under-informed about the climate risks to housing, the report warns. The authors call on all levels of government to develop accurate, up-to-date flood and wildfire hazard maps and make them freely accessible.

The CCI also urges all jurisdictions to “leverage data from private firms to guide housing decisions” and recommends that real estate and insurance regulators mandate disclosure of flood and wildfire risks in all sales and rental transactions.

Indigenous communities face unique housing challenges

Minimizing flood and fire risk to new homes in Indigenous communities is particularly challenging. Key obstacles include the acute need for housing, capacity and funding challenges, and infrastructure issues that range from isolation to melting permafrost. “Policies and practices that are having success include training programs, cultural burns, [and] merging Western science and Indigenous traditional knowledge,” the report states.

To address the specific challenges faced by Indigenous communities looking to build climate-resilient homes in safe places, CCI commissioned a companion report on Indigenous housing and climate resilience.

This article was first published by The Energy Mix and has been edited to conform to Corporate Knights style. Read the original story here.

The post New report finds Canada’s rush to solve housing shortage leaves out climate risks appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The need to address these blockages is critical, the clean energy think tank writes [pdf] in a new report, noting that Canada’s building sector contributes 13% of the country’s total emissions. And with an estimated C$3.1 billion in extreme weather event losses accrued in 2023 alone, Canada also needs to rapidly build resilience.

“Retrofitting existing buildings is the only climate action that can both drive down emissions and protect Canadians from weather events that are increasing in severity and frequency as our climate changes,” Pembina says.

But it will be a long road ahead to decarbonizing enough buildings to meet Canada’s 2050 net zero emission goals: “We will need to retrofit 4% to 6% of our building stock, or roughly 600,000 homes, each year,” writes Pembina analyst Raidin Blue in a blog post.

And only deep retrofits going beyond simple renovations—“holistic energy efficiency upgrades to homes that improve occupant health and make housing more affordable by lowering bills that are achieved through the use of low-carbon materials, new technologies (like heat pumps), and the use of smart electricity grids”—will serve both to lower emissions, and protect Canadians from harm.

To get the job done, Canada’s deep retrofit supply chain will need to be substantially improved, Pembina notes. After surveying some 80 people employed along that supply chain—from designers, to contractors, to those who monitor building operations post-retrofit—Pembina cites the lack of market certainty, resulting from a lax regulatory environment, as the weakest link in the retrofit chain.

That means “implementing regulations that require deep building decarbonization” and help reassure prospective investors, will be job one.

“Setting energy performance standards for new buildings” and introducing “high-efficiency equipment standards to require replacement heating equipment be at least 100% efficient,” are two of the regulatory changes recommended by sector workers.

“Such regulations can take time but are coming in some jurisdictions,” Pembina adds, citing Ottawa’s efforts to craft its Alterations to Existing Buildings code, now delayed to 2030. British Columbia’s Highest Efficiency Equipment Standards for Space and Water Heating is also slated for that year.

Canadian policy-makers also need to address the persistent problem of low demand, which owes significantly to consumer ignorance about deep retrofit processes. “Clarifying the benefits of deep retrofits, helping to build trust in industry, and helping reduce complexity” will help solve this problem, says Pembina.

Canada also needs more grants and incentives to mitigate “the high cost of innovative, low-carbon technologies used in deep retrofits.” Those currently working in the residential deep retrofit sector identify a shortage of skilled labour as the third major pinch point.

“Deep retrofits require unique skill sets,” notes Pembina. “As such, the federal government should commit C$1.5 billion over five years for skill development, capacity building, and recruitment.”

That commitment should prioritize inclusivity and equity, recognizing that “deep retrofits present an opportunity for communities throughout the country.”

Local job creation and training “will help to build inclusive and equitable workplaces that attract workers from equity-seeking groups—a win-win-win for people in Canada, industry, and policymakers alike,” Pembina says.

The article first appeared in The Energy Mix. Read the original story here. 

The post How Canada can climate-proof more than half a million homes appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Meanwhile, the very communities meant to benefit from a tourism boom have been grappling with record-breaking summer heat, their landscapes charred by wildfires as global heating alters ecosystems and drives extreme weather at beloved destinations.

The post Blistering heat is ravaging tourism hotspots. Can the industry reinvent itself? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Blue sky summer days are common in Nelson, a town of 11,000 perched on the shores of Kootenay Lake, all around which rise forested slopes, some still untouched by logging. They culminate in succeeding waves of high mountains, named for Norse gods, Scottish administrators, amphibians (see Frog Peak and Mt. Toad), and more than one optimistic miner.

What made that blue-sky Friday morning striking was that it arrived as a reprieve, a blessing after two days of dense smoke. Winds being what they were that week, the smoke from McDougall had snaked east, racing across mountain tops, tracking valley floors, and smothering communities like Nelson hundreds of kilometres away, within hours.

And that morning was doubly-blessed because the two days of preceding smoke—thick and acrid—had felt like the down-chop across the neck that locals had been anticipating for weeks.

After a dry spring and weeks without a drop of summer rain, my tinder-dry hometown and the forests that surround it were parched. If fire itself did not arrive, residents knew smoke surely would. And it did.

The first wisps arrived early on August 16, and by noon, forested slopes 500 metres away had vanished behind a grey and acrid wall of smoke.

That Nelson woke to a blue-sky that Friday owed only to a shift in the winds—the McDougall Creek fire was still raging, as those who were cautiously watching would know.

I certainly knew it as a writer for The Energy Mix. But I also knew it as someone born and raised in Nelson and the surrounding valleys; someone who has been incredibly lucky enough to be able to return every summer to one of the most beautiful places on Earth; someone who knows, by profession and direct exposure, just how fragile such beauty has become.

I have been, and remain, one of the lucky ones. I knew the childhood experience of diving into lake water so blue-green and clear that anyone inclined to believe in Paradise might think it had returned.

As a child, I hiked up through the lichen-draped, moss floored forests, past roaring creeks, and into a soaring sub-alpine world of rocks and grizzly bears. I knew early on what the sublime felt like, that combination of beauty (the sky, the wildflowers, the mountains golden at sunrise and sunset) and terror (see above, grizzly bears, plus the fear of falling down a cliff, getting hit on the head by a rock, and so on). I will never forget camping in the high country under the stars, and how much bigger they seemed at 7,000 feet.

And the sky was so clear, so free of smoke.

Writing that last line makes me recall a small, but illustrative, example of the mind-bending ironies of these times. Consulting my phone for weather this morning, I note that it records the day as simultaneously “sunny” and “perfectly clear” (thank you, satellite!), and shrouded in toxic smoke. Air quality index is 8 out of 10, “worse than yesterday at about this time.”

At sunrise on that suddenly blue-sky August 18 morning, I took my bike out on the road, challenging my legs and lungs and heart on the steep mountain roads that stitch the town together. As I rode, I thought about the several ways I might begin this story.

One option was to begin with the idea that “fire is coming for us all,” a phrase I read in Slate shortly after news broke about the incineration of Lāhainā in Maui. For the Slate author, part of the unsettling horror of Lāhainā was that if a place like lush Hawai’i could go up like a candle, nowhere was safe.

But as that author, and I, would quickly discover, the story of Lāhainā’s immolation is anything but a tale of another paradise turning to ashes overnight. That particular “apocalypse” was years in the making.

Any surviving inclination to use “fire is coming for us” as the leaping off point for my Kootenay tale was extinguished in the flood of tens of thousands of people across British Columbia currently forced from their homes by actual flames.

Another option was to begin by talking about “solastalgia.” Coined by Australian environmental philosopher, Glenn Albrecht, solastalgia describes the distress—which can be motivating—of witnessing the defamiliarizing degradation of ecosystems, especially those one knows intimately, either directly or by some kind of association. For instance, born into the West Kootenay inland rainforest ecosystem, I know it at that level. And though I have never been to the Arctic, my love of winter and vast spaces makes my mourning for that ecosystem likewise acute. Asked to explainsolastalgia, Albrecht described it as “the homesickness we feel even whilst at home.”

But as distressed as I become when I think about the fires that have, this year alone, “come for” Lāhainā, Yellowknife, and Kelowna (and Tenerife, Canary Islands, to name just one of dozens of currently fire-stricken communities outside North America), solastalgia was simply not true to what I felt that morning on my bike as the sun rose into a miraculously clear sky.

It wasn’t true to what I had felt when I looked out the window at dawn and said, “Oh my goodness! NO SMOKE!”

All of my distress, my grief, my worry, that had been building over the past 48 hours, had been extinguished by a simple shift in the wind’s direction.

I knew that the fire still burned in Kelowna, and that there was another much smaller one, burning 20 kilometres south, near the town where I was born. And later that day, a patch of forest in the hills directly above Nelson would burst into flames and fill the sky with thick brown smoke.

But on that morning, despite knowing better, my heart was so light, and my mind chose to follow.

Riding back down into the town an hour later, I noticed how many people seemed to be doing the same. Out on the streets, laughing and talking as if they did not have a care in the world.

As if without smoke, there could be no fire.

As if they, like me, did not feel they were living in the shadow of end times.

As if we were not, all of us, living with increasingly broken hearts.

Less than 24 hours later, the smoke rolled back in.

Looking up as I write, I see that the smoke seems slightly lighter than yesterday. There may even be a hint of blue. Yesterday’s London 1950s pea-fog thick smoke was an eye-watering, throat-coating, lung-destroying miasma that blotted out the sun.

Much of the smoke is likely from Kelowna, but there are other fires burning now, to the south and to the east.

It is next-to-impossible to know when the smoke will lift. If the wind changes direction again—and no fires break out to the north—we may get a blue-sky day again. Or the smoke may last into September.

There are many possible endings to the story of Nelson, B.C, my hometown, the town famous for powder skiing, the Steve Martin remake of Cyrano de Bergerac, and the now-steadily shrinking glacier that is the namesake of a local beer.

On bright-blue sky days like the precious one just passed, even I—climate reporter—slip so easily into old habits of mind and body that recall a time before the devastating reality of anthropogenic global heating made itself felt. From when a blue-sky summer day felt like it would last forever, or at least come dependably round again after the equally dependable, and sweet, delights of autumn, winter, and spring.

For those of us who are still lucky enough to witness such tender stability in our days, if not our seasons, the trick is to rejoice and delight in that sweetness—even as we do not forget the acrid taste of smoke that stung our eyes and hurt our lungs.

We cannot forget, because if humanity fails to rein in global heating to below 1.5°C, the still lush rainforest that rises above Nelson will one day transition to grasslands like those aflame in the hills around Kelowna, till one day the entire valley itself will go up in flames.

I am no scientist, but I know enough science to know that this prophecy will come to pass, unless we all learn to live better in a shifting reality—even as we attune to the present, with all its joys and sorrows.

Above all, we must remember that what global heating means is that the absence of smoke will never again mean the absence of fire. Somewhere, living things are burning. And it is our job to help put those fires out.

Should we fail to help, there will one day be no more blue-sky days for anyone. Just endless smoky days like the ones I now experience in Nelson, which at their bleakest, feel like they are moments away from the world’s end.

This story was originally published by The Energy Mix.

The post My clear-sky reflections on living with B.C.‘s smoke and wildfire appeared first on Corporate Knights.

When testing begins next year, the “bioclimatic bus stops” will combine the oldest, most fundamental form of cooling (through heat transfer) with tried and true solar panels and the latest in high-tech thermal sensors to lower temperatures inside the shelters by as much as 20°C.

Such solutions are urgently needed in a city where the high temperature broke 40°C last week.

The Andalusian capital has always been hot and dry. But climate models show that Seville, the largest city in southern Spain with a population of 710,000, could face an average temperature increase of 4.5°C and a 20% reduction in rainfall by 2100.

With those future risks in mind, the European Climate Adaptation Platform Climate-ADAPT, a partnership between the European Commission and the European Environmental Agency, launched its LifeWaterCool initiative in July, 2020.

The project issued a call for urban planners, architects, and engineers to develop and test solutions that would help Seville cope with increasingly high outdoor and indoor temperatures, flash floods and, especially, drought.

With an extended drought looming large in Spain, water stands at the very heart of the LifeWaterCool initiative. The call for proposals states that Seville’s “urban water network will act as the basic structure for the development of urban green solutions and cooling measures to adapt to the effects of climate change, maximizing the sustainability of the city and citizens’ well-being.”

Drawing on the age-old principle of “bioclimatic” construction, which relies on the natural environment in shared public spaces for heating and cooling, LifeWaterCool sought cost-effective “demonstrations of a bioclimatic comfort, for short-, medium- and long-term stays”. It defined a short-term stay as “one with a high density of occupation for a short period of time,” such as a bus stop or pedestrian crossing.

The bioclimatic bus stops are meant to be cooled by thermal radiation, the University of Seville team says. When sensors in the stop’s “intelligent” canopy register a waiting passenger, the system will send cold water from an underground tank through tubing in the back of the shelter, quickly lowering the inside temperature.

The canopy sensors will also monitor the outside temperature, ensuring that the cooling mechanism kicks in only on hot days, and only between 1:00 and 7:00 PM, typically the warmest hours of the day.

Solar-generated electricity will propel water from the underground tank and through the structure as needed during the day.

At night, the water in the tank will rise toward the solar panels through a separate set of tubes, to be cooled using the night sky as a heat sink. That natural action will be supplemented by “falling film technology,” which uses gravity to help a specially-designed liquid film accelerate heat transfer from the water inside the tubes into the colder night sky. The cooled water will then be returned to the underground storage tank for use when the sun is high.

The research team that designed the bus stop is also working on extending the concept to create climate shelters for children at school.

“We are installing a 1,000-square-metre roof at the Arias Montano school in Seville to block the sun and create a cool thermal sensation,” research lead José Sánchez told The Telegraph. “In this way, the children will be able to play and [learn] outside, even in the hottest moments.”

This article is republished from The Energy Mix. Read the original article.

The post These solar bus stops could combat heat stroke in blistering heat wave appeared first on Corporate Knights.

“In an attempt to solve two environmental problems at once, researchers at the University of Kitakyushu in Japan have found that shredded nappies can be used to replace between 9 and 40% of the sand used in making concrete without reducing its strength,” reports the journal Nature.

Siswanti Zuraida, a civil engineer at the University of Kitakyushu—and mother of a toddler—began to think about diapers as a potential resource while lecturing at the Bandung Science Technology Institute near Jakarta.

“Single-use nappies are typically made from wood pulp, cotton, and super-absorbent polymers, small amounts of which have been shown to improve the mechanical properties of concrete,” the news story states. They are also widely available in places like Indonesia and other low- and middle-income countries, where population numbers are growing, “leading to more babies, more nappies, and more demand for low-cost housing.”

Zuraida decided to replace different percentages of sand with cleaned and shredded diapers in a concrete slurry, to see how it would affect durability. The experiment did end up lowering concrete’s comprehensive strength, so structural elements like beams and floors needed greater concentrations of sand than “architectural elements” like concrete blocks and wall panels.

The latter remained functional even when 40% of the sand was replaced by shredded diapers. Floors, on the other hand, stopped being weight-bearing when the percentage of diaper waste went above 9%. Demonstrating that a significant amount of diaper waste could be used as a building material—thereby curbing landfill waste and increasing affordable housing—Zuraida and her team calculated that up to 27% of the sand needed for a small, 36-square-metre single-story concrete house could be replaced by shredded diapers.

Single-use nappies are typically made from wood pulp, cotton, and super-absorbent polymers, small amounts of which have been shown to improve the mechanical properties of concrete.

 

– Nature journal

But multi-floored dwellings would need far more sand: a three-storey house would not stand with more than 10% of diaper waste in its concrete mix. Pressed for time, the researchers ended up using metal beams for the structural components in their demonstration house, using diaper-infused concrete only for architectural elements. “In total, the house used around 1.7 cubic metres of nappy waste, which made up roughly 8% of the total composite material volume,” Nature reports.

That could make a decent dent in the construction world, where as things stand, cement production is responsible for almost 7% of global greenhouse gas emissions, consuming around 50 billion tonnes of sand each year, with a devastating toll on ecosystems.

Christof Schröfl, a chemist who researches sustainable building materials at Dresden University of Technology, praised the team’s effort to turn non-recyclable waste into a resource as “a nice and really worthwhile piece within a step-wise process.” But he cautioned that keeping the supply chain between households, processing plants, and construction sites simple and short could prove tricky.

Zuraida agreed that pulling nappies from the waste stream would be challenging in the real world, Nature writes. “There’s no supporting system in the municipal waste management to separate diapers,” she said.

This article is republished from The Energy Mix. Read the original article.

The post Can we build greener homes with used diapers? These engineers did appeared first on Corporate Knights.

In a Shell scenario where the world limits global warming in line with the Paris climate agreement, energy demand for direct air capture (DAC) technology rises “from about nothing today to almost 66 exajoules in 2100,” reports Bloomberg.

“That would be more than the energy needed to heat and power all the world’s homes by then,” the news agency adds. (It isn’t clear how much energy efficiency or fuel switching is built into that comparison, but 66 exajoules is still a huge amount of energy.)

Bloomberg cites Sky 2050, the more optimistic of Shell’s two latest energy security scenarios, in which long-term climate security is the priority embraced by all. In this pathway, DAC with carbon storage (DACCS) deployment is in full swing by 2040, absorbing more than five billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. The united efforts of politicians, the public, and the private sector achieve net-zero by 2050, and although 1.5°C is breached sometime mid-century, collective action brings temperatures back down to 1.24°C by the century’s end.

In Shell’s bleaker Archipelagos pathway, energy security fears trump climate concerns, with no apparent reference to the potential of less expensive solar and wind to meet both objectives. Efforts at collective action fall by the wayside, and DACCS is virtually abandoned until 2080. “The global average surface temperature is still rising in 2100 but is levelling off at around 2.2°C as emissions close in on net zero,” Shell projects.

That’s after years of hearing that 1.5°C is the guardrail for averting the worst effects of climate change, and that every 0.1° between 1.5 and 2.0°C will be measured in lives saved or lost.

These models come nearly four years after researchers at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute for Climate Change wrote in a Nature Communications study that in 2100, DAC machines could needed 300 exajoules of energy annually, or 25% of total global energy demand.

“To put it another way, it would be equivalent to the current annual energy demand of China, the United States, the European Union, and Japan combined,” Carbon Brief wrote at the time.

According to the Grantham Institute researchers, DAC—still at an experimental stage but generally involving an energy-intensive process where the greenhouse gas is “captured” using chemical “sorbents”—could “allow a reduction in near-term mitigation effort in some energy-intensive sectors that are difficult to decarbonize, such as transport and industry.”

Work by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) maintained that negative emissions technologies like DAC will be required to keep global heating below 1.5°C, but warned that such technologies must never be deployed as an alternative to emissions reductions. The IPCC’s Summary for Policymakers issued last month made no mention of DAC as a realistic element of a decarbonization plan; it identified solar, wind, and methane capture from the fossil industry as the quickest, most cost-effective ways to drive down emissions.

At the time of their study, the Grantham researchers did conclude that DACCS “reduces the marginal abatement costs to achieve the climate target by between 60 to more than 90%.” But there remained uncertainty about whether it is possible to scale DAC technology fast enough to capture the necessary target of 30 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide per year. A 2019 study found that this would require building 30,000 large-scale DAC factories. “For comparison, there are fewer than 10,000 coal-fired power stations in the world today,” Carbon Brief said.

“The risk of assuming that DACCS can be deployed at scale, and finding it to be subsequently unavailable, leads to a global temperature overshoot of up to 0.8°C,” the study authors warned.

Shell’s scenarios do not address the problems of scaling DACCS, nor the danger of overshoot.

And such dangers should not be discounted, Carbon Brief deputy editor and climate and energy policy editor Dr. Simon Evans told The Energy Mix in an email: “The evidence suggests it would be risky to assume we will be able to deploy lots of direct capture at low cost.”

That risk could be minimized by cutting emissions more quickly and reducing the need for carbon removals, Evans added. “For example, by tackling energy demand as well as supply.”

Despite the unknowns, there’s major interest in DAC, Bloomberg reports, with governments as well as the private sector heavily invested in its success. The Biden administration has a new US$3.5-billion DAC program, and fossil mammoth Occidental Petroleum is planning a 2024 launch of the world’s first million-tonne DAC plant, known as DAC1, in the Permian Basin, the massive U.S. fracking fields in Texas and New Mexico.

1PointFive, the Occidental subsidiary developing DAC1, has pledged that all its DAC plants “will be powered by zero-emission energy sources, such as wind, solar, or NET power.”

According to Net Power (another Occidental subsidiary), “NET power” is produced by burning natural gas in the presence of oxygen, then using the resultant carbon dioxide in a “turbo-expander” to produce electricity. It is then either pressurized for export or recirculated. Located as it is in the Permian Basin, DAC1 will have plenty of natural gas close at hand.

This article is republished from The Energy Mix. Read the original article.

The post Capturing carbon dioxide from the air could take more energy than all homes combined, says Shell appeared first on Corporate Knights.