Alternative energies

The programme can and will evolve into something which will be of major benefit to mankind; I don't think it is too melodramatic to say that. We need a planetary Earth-observing system to gather all the information to take remedial action on climate and environmental change. - Professor Alan O'Neill, the director of the UK's National Centre for Earth Observation.

• Mapping, including topography or road maps but also land-use and harvest, forestry monitoring, mineral and water resources that do contribute to short and long-term management of territories and natural resources. This service generally requires exhaustive coverage of the Earth surface, archiving and periodic updating of data.
• Support for emergency management in case of natural hazards and particularly civil protection institutions responsible for the security of people and property. This service concentrates on the provision of the latest possible data before intervening.
• Forecasting is applied for marine zones, air quality or crop yields. This service systematically provides data on extended areas permittin
  Posted on Wed, Nov 26 at 4:02pm
  UK researcher: corporate responses to climate change not working, state intervention needed

  The global economic crisis has seen the demise of a lot of 'corporate freedom' and the resurgence of the idea of direct government intervention. This comes at a time when more and more scientists are convinced of the fact that another planetary crisis with more far reaching consequences - namely climate change - needs to be tackled by strong state intervention as well. Especially so when it becomes apparent that corporate responses to this crisis may not be working.
  
  An example comes from the U.K., where the green credentials of British businesses are falling far short of their environmental claims and don't have an effect on mitigating climate change. That is the conclusion of Gareth Dale, a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Brunel University, writing in the International Journal of Management Concepts and Philosophy. Dale too maintains that only government intervention offers the power and tools required to do what corporations can't or won't.
  
  Dale has investigated how several major UK companies have responded to the threat of climate change. By comparing their public rhetoric with actual corporate adjustments made to address climate change, he has found that their business practices "fall far short of the claims made." This, he says, raises important questions about how far companies can go, particularly as we face impending recession, when confronting climate change. "Bad remedies may be diverting attention from and even driving out good ones," he says.
  
  Big companies including multitasking corporations like Richard Branson's Virgin and Tesco, bankers such as HSBC and Barclaycard, media companies such as BSkyB and the major oil companies like BP, have all embraced the wider trends of the green revolution. Until the economic downturn hijacked the nation's news desks barely a day would pass without a report on how blue-chip companies were investigating climate-change mitigation strategies. But, asks Dale, was this investigating followed up by investment or is the talk of address global warming nothing more than boardroom hot air?
  
  Several companies claim to have achieved carbon neutrality. Others are pumping cash into carbon sinks and surveys. Consumers are even rating the eco credentials of the likes of Virgin, Tesco, and Marks & Spencer, and BP as being in the top twenty of green firms:
  energy :: sustainability :: biomass :: bioenergy :: biofuels :: renewables :: capitalism :: state intervention :: climate change ::
  
  When it comes to biofuels, carbon offsetting, the use of renewables, carbon sequestration, many companies are flying the green flag and rebranding and relabelling themselves as champions of the green movement. Yet, Dale's analysis of the actual energy use and pollution production of many major corporations reveals this in many cases to be nothing more than a cynical attempt to trump their competitors with garbled ecological rationality in the name of profits.
  
  "A more effective and more just strategy would involve concerted state intervention focused upon investment in public transport, housing and renewable energy, coupled with regulatory measures to radically reduce fossil-fuel use," concludes Dale.
  
  References:
  Gareth Dale, "Green shift: an analysis of corporate responses to climate change", International Journal of Management Concepts and Philosophy, 2008, 3, n°2, 134-155, DOI: 10.1504/IJMCP.2008.021271
  
  

  Posted on Wed, Nov 26 at 2:19am
  Phytocapping: new technique reduces GHG emissions from landfill sites and turns them into green oases
  
  
  Landfill sites produce the greenhouse gases methane and carbon dioxide, as putrescible waste decays. Growing selected plants and trees on top of a landfill, a process known as 'phytocapping', could reduce the production and release of these gases, according to Australian scientists writing in a forthcoming issue of International Journal of Environmental Technology and Management. What is more, the technique allows urban communities to build new green spaces in and around their cities. When phytocapping is carried out well, the former garbage sites can even become biodiversity corridors for species that were previously chased out of the city-scape.
  
  Despite legislative pressures to reduce landfill use, in certain parts of the world it remains the most economical and simplest method of waste disposal. Biodegradation of organic matter in a landfill site occurs most rapidly when water comes into contact with the buried waste, explains Kartik Venkatraman and Nanjappa Ashwath of the Department of Molecular and Life Sciences, at Central Queensland University (CQU), Rockhampton, Australia. They point out that conventional approaches to reducing this effect involve placing compacted clay over the top of a landfill to form a cap that minimizes percolation of water into the landfill.
  
  Some sites do not attempt to prevent water percolation and biodegradation and instead install gas collection systems to trap the methane released. The use of clay capping has generally proved ineffective in trials in the USA, the researchers say. The problem being that in arid regions the clay cap dries out and cracks allowing water to easily percolate into the landfill. Equally problematic, methane gas collection can be an expensive option for many Australian landfills that do not reach the methane production threshold to enable efficiency. For commercial landfill gas collection, a certain scale is required.
  
  Hence, the new technique, known as phytocapping, which involves placing a layer of top soil and growing dense vegetation on top of a landfill, was tested at Rockhampton's Lakes Creek Landfill not far from Central Queensland University. This research was conducted by Kartik Venkatraman and Nanjappa Ashwath (CQU) in conjunction with the Rockhampton Regional Council and Phytolink Pty LTD. The tests proved that the technique is a viable alternative to both clay capping and methane gas collection.
  
  Professor Ashwath was so kind as to answer some of Biopact's questions on the innovative technique, as it may offer some interesting bioenergy applications.
  
  How it works
  Selected plant species are established on an unconsolidated soil placed over the waste. The soil acts both as "storage" and "sponge" and the plants as "bio-pumps" and "rainfall interceptors". For an effective site water balance, it is important that appropriate plant species are chosen and the soil depth optimized. As such, the team has investigated the effects of different ranges of species as well as soil depth.
  
  The team's studies of the benefits of a landfill phytocap show that the approach can reduce surface methane emission four to five times more than the adjacent un-vegetated site. They found that a cap of 1400 mm thickness also reduces surface methane emissions 45% more than a cap half as thick.
  
  The team also looked at the effects of nineteen tree species, including acacias, figs, eucalyptus, and other Australian native species, growing in the phytocap to determine which species are most effective at reducing water percolation and methane emissions. The root system acts as a good substrate to methanogens, which oxidizes methane thereby reducing methane emission into the atmosphere:
  biomass :: bioenergy :: waste management :: landfill :: methane :: climate change :: phytoremediation :: phytocapping :: biodiversity :: urban planning ::
  
  The benefits of phytocapping include, cutting in half the cost of landfill remediation and providing biodiversity corridors along which wild species can travel. The process also inverts the aesthetic qualities of landfills adjacent to urban communities. In some cases, phytocapping introduces additional economical benefits such as timber and fodder. The authors thus conclude that "the establishment of phytocaps would offer an additional and economical way of reducing methane emission from landfills".
  
  Bioenergy potential?
  Professor Ashwath told Biopact that it might be possible to harvest some of the biomass for use as a feedstock for bioenergy production. The team is testing biomass from phytocapped landfills for the production of biochar and green diesel obtained by refining bio-oil.
  
  The bioenergy option might find applications in some of the "mega-cities" of the developing world, where landfill sites are often poorly planned and managed, and where methane gas collection would be too expensive. At the same time, energy is often a scarce good amongst the poor living in and around these cities.
  
  We presented prof Ashwath with the example of Kinshasa, capital of the DRCongo, which was once known as 'Kin la belle' (Kinshasa the beautiful) but is now called 'Kin la poubelle' (Kinshasa the dirt bin) by its inhabitants. A perimeter of more than 30 kilometers in diameter around the city has been deforested to provide wood fuel for the poor in Kinshasa's vast slums. Phytocapping of landfills there could not only give the city some of its charm back, and make life for the slum-dwellers more bearable and healthy, it might actually yield a usable amount of biomass that could generate clean, renewable energy in low-cost bioenergy facilities (e.g. small to medium-scale gasification plants that generate power and heat).
  
  Of the 19 species tested in the Australian phytocapping trials, Ashwath and his colleagues found 10 of the 19 having the potential to grow well and produce large quantities of biomass. One species in particular, Hibiscus tiliaceus, produced twice the amount of biomass than other species. Likewise some acacias, bamboo and eucalypts also grow well and produce usable biomass.
  
  The team now has 8 field trials in various parts of Australia where it has tested over 100 different plant species. In each location up to 5 species are performing well on the landfills. This is a very good result, and in no site have the researchers lost planted native species.
  
  At one site near Pomona (north of Brisbane), one of the hardwood and sought after timber species, Araucaria cunninghamii (hoop pine), is growing extremely well (picture, click to enlarge). Likewise there are other timber species that are very suitable as phytocaps. In a few decades, Australia's hardwood timber could be exhausted, and these sites could help provide that resource in the future.
  
  The scientists are working to get the most out of the elegant synergy presented by phytocapping: they are collaborating with a local city council to convert one of its landfills into parkland with bike tracks and picnic spots. They are also making a case for growing koala fodder so that the site could attract wild life back to the cities.
  
  When all these elements are combined in phytocapping projects, the technique offers a low-cost solution with multiple additional benefits, to a problem that contributes significantly to global warming.
  
  
  The team is working in the context of the Australian Alternative Covers Assessment Project (A-ACAP), a $3 million program which began in April 2006, completed its construction phase in December 2007 when Lismore City Councils Wyrallah Rd Landfill came on stream as the 5th and final test pad built during that year. Other sites in order of construction were: SITAs Taylors Rd Landfill, Melbourne, January; Lucas Waste Managements Southern Waste Depot, McLaren Vale, April; Townsville City Councils Vantassel St Landfill, July and Cockburn City Councils Henderson Landfill, September.
  
  Professor Nanjappa Ashwath has been working as an Associate Professor at CQUniversity. He has a PhD from the Australian National University, Canberra, and has spent more than 25 years in studying Australian native plants. The focus of his research has been on selecting suitable species for degraded sites including landfills, mine sites, disturbed mangrove habits and other sites associated with drought, salinity, waterlogging and heavy metals. He is also involved in testing native species for biodiesel, bush medicine and bush tucker potential, and using the green waste in bioenergy and biodiesel production. Associate Professor Ashwath teaches under graduate courses, supervises post graduate students, and is an active researcher. He currently collaborates with a national research team (A-ACAP) to test suitability of phytocap as an alternative landfill cover. Associate Professor Ashwath is a keen promoter of Australian native plants to landscape architects (see http://cpws.cqu.edu.au) and he also contributes to conservation of rare and threatened plant species. He is a recipient of University Vice Chancellors award for research (CQU) and the University Teaching Fellowship from the Rotary Foundation.
  
  Picture: Araucaria cunninghamii, a much sought after hardwood species, growing remarkably well on a landfill near Pomona. The phytocap prevents the release of CH4 and CO2 from the garbage site. The picture shows the preparation of the site in 2004 and the trees in 2008. Credit: Prof. Ashwath.
  
  
  References:
  Kartik Venkatraman and Nanjappa Ashwath, "Can phytocapping technique reduce methane emission from municipal landfills?", International Journal of Environmental Technology and Management, 2009, 10, 4-15, forthcoming.
  
  Australian Alternative Covers Assessment Project (A-ACAP), a project of the Waste Management Association of Australia.
  
  Professor Nanjappa Ashwath, personal page at the CQ University.
  
  PhD Candidate Kartik Venkatraman, personal page at the CQ University.
  
  Center for Plant & Water Science, CQ University: see the summaries on phytocapping in the Conservation & Rehabilitation research section.
  
  
  
  Posted on Mon, Nov 24 at 12:29pm
  FAO reports major success: healthy cassava makes comeback in volatile Great Lakes region

  After years of massive crop losses caused by a devastating virus, farmers are harvesting healthy cassava again - one of Africa's principal foodstuffs - throughout the Great Lakes region, FAO announced, hailing the achievement as a milestone in its ever stronger partnership with the European Union. The successful cassava campaign is good news for the FAO, which is heavily criticized for its incapacity to combat the food crisis and which is undergoing fundamental reform.
  
  By the last planting season, virus-free cassava planting material had been distributed to some 330,000 smallholders in countries struck by the virus: Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Uganda. The improved crop now benefits a total of some 1.65 million people, and its uptake will speed up further.
  
  Having cassava back on the table is of major importance, especially to the region's most vulnerable, who have been hit hard by the recent upsurge in food prices, said Eric Kueneman Chief of FAO's Crop and Grassland Service. He added that boosting the production of local crops like cassava is a pillar of FAO's response to the current crisis, which was caused by commodity speculation.
  
  In the Great Lakes region though, high prices of food and fertilizer are just part of the problem. As the recent violence in eastern DR Congo tragically demonstrates, the region is still grappling with peace. But, especially under circumstances of extreme instability, cassava can make a crucial difference.
  
  Cassava roots can be harvested whenever there is a need, or left in the ground when farmers are driven from their land. Also, cassava is not an easy prey, when land is unattended: thieves will find it very difficult to dig it from the ground.
  
  Disease causes food shortage
  

  
  
  "We have come a long way in making this region self-sufficient in cassava again," says Cees Wittebrood of the European Commission's Humanitarian Aid department (ECHO), FAO's major partner in its regional cassava operations, adding, "One of our priorities is to ensure that every farmer can grow for his own subsistence, and collaboration with FAO is key in achieving that."
  
  Each person in Africa eats around 80 kg of cassava per year. So, when an aggressive strain of a virus called Cassava Mosaic Disease (CMD) decimated harvests throughout the Great Lakes region, consequences were disastrous.
  
  In Uganda, for instance, where CMD has destroyed 150,000 hectares of cassava since the early nineties - a loss estimated at $US 60 million per annum - food shortages resulting from CMD led to localized famines in 1993 and 1997. CMD appeared in Burundi in 2002. Yield losses attaining ninety percent were record. Prices sky-rocketed. And it came right on top of a devastating civil war. According to FAOs 2006 State of Food Insecurity in the World (SOFI) report, undernourishment affected two-thirds of the population in 2001/3, compared to less than half before hostilities begun ten years earlier.
  
  Tackling the epidemic began with a series of disease-free varieties developed by one of FAO's research partners, the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture in Nigeria, which were multiplied in nurseries of a multitude of partners, including national research institutions, local governments and civil society, eventually producing enough planting stakes for mass distribution to the population.
  
  Salvator Kaboneka, an FAO agronomist, explains how it all began on the mother plantation, as he calls it, a cassava field in Mparambo, not far from Munyika. Here, on 20 hectares, FAO started planting disease free stems in 2005, initially with Belgian and American support.
  

  Every cassava plant provides at least ten usable cuttings. At that rate, it will take only one more year to replant the 84,000 hectares of cassava this country had prior to the arrival of CMD. The mathematics are as simple as they are striking. The original 20 hectares have grown to 1600. Multiplied by ten, that will be 16,000 after the coming season, and 160,000 by the end of 2008.
  

  At the same time, FAO embarked on a campaign to boost the capacity and efforts of individual countries in the region, launching a regional cassava initiative in 2006 with funding of several donors led by ECHO - the European Union's humanitarian aid agency - , which has contributed 3.3 million to FAO's different cassava operations since:
  energy :: sustainability ::biomass :: bioenergy :: ethanol :: cassava :: manioc :: food security :: Africa ::
  
  Diner's ready
  Burundi's northern Cibitoke province lies in the epicentre of the CMD epidemic. Its fields, barren until a year ago, now bustle with green from cassava leaves. "It's sweet, not bitter," says Ernest Nduwimana, a young farmer who lost his father during Burundi's civil war, holding up a huge cassava root he has just unearthed.
  
  The crop was good this year, Ernest says. There is enough to feed his family until the next harvest, which he is already preparing to plant with quality cuttings from his own cassava plants. Then, after a long day, he returns home, where his mother has prepared bugari, a local dish based on cassava flour and served with beans and fish.
  
  EU support
  The European Union is one of FAO's most steadfast and generous partners in promoting sustainable rural development to improve the lives of the poor, contributing over US$ 100 million to FAO's field programme in 2007.
  
  Working together on the ground in developing countries worldwide, improving food security in emergencies, employing research to foster food safety and quality, stimulating information-gathering to build policy, sharing know-how and involving partners in policy-making, the EU and FAO fight poverty at its root.
  
  Cassava's potential: food and fuel
  At a global conference held recently in Gent, Belgium, the FAO together with cassava scientists and food security analysts called for a significant increase in investment in research and development to boost farmers yields of cassava and explore promising industrial uses for the crop, including production of biofuels.
  
  The tropical root crop could help protect both the food and energy security of poor countries now threatened by soaring food and oil prices, the congress concluded. The FAO reiterated what many tropical agronomists and development experts have said about cassava in the past (e.g. CIAT thinks cassava ethanol could benefit millions of the world's poorest farmers).
  
  The scientists, who have formed an international network called the Global Cassava Partnership (GCP21), said the world community could not continue to ignore the plight of low-income tropical countries that have been hardest hit by rising oil prices and galloping food price inflation.
  
  According t
  Posted on Sat, Nov 22 at 10:24am
  National Geographic documentary on terra preta and biochar: solve multiple environmental crises simultaneously
  
  
  Biochar, or the sequestration of char in nutrient-poor soils to make them more fertile, is gaining interest from a growing number of conservationists, ecologists, climate activists and anthropologists because it is increasingly seen as one of the few realistic ways to tackle multiple environmental and social crises simultaneously: hunger, soil depletion, deforestation and the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services that go with it, fresh water depletion, land ownership, energy poverty and even climate change. National Geographic is the latest to focus on this almost too-good-to-be-true land use strategy, which is based on the old, very fertile "terra preta" soils that have been discovered in the Amazon.
  
  NG's article 'Superdirt Made Lost Amazon Cities Possible?' is an introduction to a new documentary that analyses how pre-columbian Amazonian societies were built on the ingeniously engineered black soils. The film "Lost Cities of the Amazon" [video fragments here and here] builds on the recent insights that these forests may have been home to vast urban networks that sustained large populations for thousands of years. Scientists now think that the 'black gold' agriculture - the biochar these communities put in their soils - not only was the key to this sustainable way of life, but that it may help save the planet today.
  

  Now scientists are trying to recreate the recipe for the apparently human-made supersoil, which still covers up to 10 percent of the Amazon Basin. Key ingredients included of dirt, charcoal, pottery, human excrement and other waste.
  
  If recreated, the engineered soil could feed the hungry and may even help fight global warming, experts suggest.
  

  Scientists have long thought the river basin's tropical soils were too acidic to grow anything but the hardiest varieties of manioc, a starch-rich root crop.
  
  But over the past several decades, researchers have discovered tracts of productive terra preta"dark earth." The human-made soil's chocolaty color contrasts sharply with the region's natural yellowish soils.
  
  Research in the late 1980s was the first to show that charcoal made from slow burns of trees and woody waste is the key ingredient of terra preta.
  
  With the increased level of agriculture made possible by terra preta, ancient Amazonians would have been able to live in one place for long periods of time, says geographer and anthropologist William Woods of the University of Kansas, who studies ancient Amazonian settlements.
  

  As a result you get social stratification, hierarchy, intertwined settlement systems, very large scale. And then 1492 happens. The arrival of Europeans brought disease and warfare that obliterated the ancient Amazonian civilizations and sent the few survivors deep into the rain forest to live as hunter-gatherers. It completely changed their way of living. - Professor Woods
  

  Magic Soil?
  Today scientists are racing to tease apart the terra-preta recipe. The special soil has been touted as a way to restore more sustainable farming to the Amazon, feed the world's hungry, and combat global warming.
  
  The terra-preta charcoal, called biochar, attracts certain fungi and microorganisms. Those tiny life-forms allow the charcoal to absorb and retain nutrients that keep the soil fertile for hundreds of years, said Woods, whose team is among a few trying to identify the crucial microorganisms:
  energy :: sustainability :: biomass :: bioenergy :: terra preta :: biochar :: soil depletion :: poverty :: deforestation :: biodiversity :: climate change ::
  
  "The materials that go into the terra preta are just part of the story. The living member of it is much more," he said. For one thing, the microorganisms break up the charcoal into smaller pieces, creating more surface area for nutrients to cling to, Woods said.
  
  Anti-Global-Warming Weapon?
  Soil scientist Johannes Lehmann of Cornell University is also racing to recreate terra preta.
  
  The Amazonian dark soils, he said, are hundreds to thousands of years old, yet to this day they retain their nutrients and carbons, which are held mainly by the charcoal.
  
  This suggests that adding biochar could help other regions of the world with acidic soils to increase agricultural yields.
  
  Plus, Lehmann said, biochar could help reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions released into the atmosphere from the burning of wild lands to create new farm fields. (Learn how greenhouse gas emissions may worsen global warming.)
  
  For example, specialized power plants could char agricultural wastes to generate electricity.
  
  The process would "lock" much carbon that would have otherwise escaped into the atmosphere in the biochar. The biochar could then be put underground, in a new form of terra preta, thereby sequestering the carbon for centuries, Lehmann suggests.
  
  Current Amazonian farming relies heavily on slash-and-burn agriculturerazing forests, then burning all of what's left.
  
  By reverting to the ancient slash-and-char methodburning slowly and then mixing the charcoal into the soilAmazonian carbon dioxide emissions could be cut nearly in half, according to Woods, of the University of Kansas.
  
  With slash-and-burn, he noted, 95 percent of the carbon stored in a tree is emitted to the atmosphere. Slash-and-char emits about 50 percent, he said.
  
  "The rest is put into different forms of black carbon, most of which are chemically inert for long periods of timethousands of years."
  
  In addition, the technique would allow many farmers to stay sedentary, Woods said.
  
  Because the soil would apparently remain fertile for centuries, "they don't have to cut down the forest constantly and send it up into the atmosphere," he said.
  
  References:
  National Geographic: Superdirt Made Lost Amazon Cities Possible? - November 19, 2008.
  
  National Geographic: Ancient Amazon Cities Found; Were Vast Urban Network - August 28, 2008.
  
  University of California at Los Angeles: Susanna Hecht
  
  University of Florida: Michael Heckenberger
  
  Posted on Fri, Nov 21 at 2:33pm