Earth and Environment
Explore Earth and Environment
Julius Reiff | Soil, Seeds, and Sustainability: The Power of Permaculture during Environmental Breakdown
Pressing environmental challenges, such as soil degradation, biodiversity loss, and climate change, can negatively affect agriculture, while also being driven by common agricultural practices. To ensure food security while promoting environmental sustainability, innovative agricultural practices are essential in order to prevent this destructive and vicious cycle. Permaculture, a holistic approach to farming that mimics the resilience of natural ecosystems, offers a promising solution. Despite this, it has not been thoroughly appraised by researchers in its potential to protect and improve the environment and facilitate agricultural goals, such as improving soil conditions.
Root Collar Excavation – ARR Solutions
Lazy summer afternoons are vastly improved by a delicious ripe peach. But what if one day peaches just disappeared? In this dystopia, people would find their grocer’s shelves starkly empty of peaches and other stone fruits. Unfortunately, this future scenario is far from fictional. A fungus is seriously threatening peach production in the southeastern United States. It infects and destroys the roots of fruit trees, later spreading into the trunk and killing the tree. The disease it causes, called Armillaria root rot, is the leading cause of premature peach tree decline in southeastern USA, costing growers around 8 million dollars in losses annually.
Empowering Communities to be Sustainable Custodians of African Water Resources
The UN sustainable development goals serve as a blueprint for a sustainable future. These goals include The Africa Water Vision for 2025 by the African Union, which entails re-thinking the governance of water resources in African countries. However, strategies to meet such goals are not consistently implemented. The ‘Unlocking Resilient Benefits from African Water Resources’ – or RESBEN – project, funded by the UKRI, is a large-scale project that engages communities in research, towards re-thinking how water resources are managed in African countries. The project includes all the partners of the African Research University Alliance Water Centre of Excellence, and two UK universities: Lancaster University and the University of Sheffield.
Dr Laurie Durel – Laure Gosselin | How Conversations Shape the Effectiveness of New Climate Policies
Climate change has become a topic of public discussion, no longer confined to scientists and politicians. Various stakeholders, including environmental NGOs and industry representatives, hold different perspectives on how to address climate change. This web of actors and ideas in a given political debate, combined with their interactions, is called a discursive field. Discursive fields influence our thinking and determine whether certain ideas gain political traction. They can enable or constrain the ability of political institutions to adopt new policies. As agreeing on efficient climate change policies becomes increasingly urgent, it is vital that we consider how discursive fields impact climate change policy.
RECROP COST Action: Ensuring Crop Resilience in Extreme Climate Conditions
In a world increasingly shaped by extreme climate conditions, our agricultural systems face unprecedented threats. Rising temperatures, prolonged droughts, and intense rainfall events put immense pressure on crops, especially during their most vulnerable stage: reproduction. Plant reproduction is crucial for producing the seeds and fruits that form the backbone of our food supply. Yet, extreme weather can disrupt this delicate process, leading to reduced yields and threatening global food security. RECROP, a visionary COST Action consortium, is dedicated to addressing these challenges.
A Decision-Making Toolbox for Prioritising Ecological Restoration
The fate of humanity is intricately intertwined with the state of the environment. Vital ecosystem services, such as freshwater provision, underpin food security, health, wellbeing, and economic prosperity. However, ecosystems everywhere face mounting challenges, including pollution and the impacts of climate change. Approximately one-quarter of the Earth’s land-based ecosystems suffer degradation, impacting over 41% of the global population. Without intervention, 95% could be degraded by 2050. Additionally, climate change presents a significant threat to water availability and the sustainability of ecosystems.
RECROP COST Action: Ensuring Sustainable Food Systems for Future Generations
In a world increasingly shaped by the challenges of climate change, our agricultural systems face a threat that undermines food production worldwide. As the core of our diet relies heavily on plants, the increasing demand for higher yields to feed a growing population has never been more critical. Yet, this demand collides with the harsh reality of climate change: rising temperatures and heat waves, long droughts or heavy rainfalls and floods make our naturally stress-sensitive crops even more vulnerable.
Dr. Ted Moore | Investigating Pits in the Pacific Ocean Seafloor
Across the seafloor of the equatorial Pacific Ocean, scientists have discovered unusual pits. Similar depressions have been found around the world, caused by fluids escaping from sediments or salt dissolving in rocks below the seabed. However, during 40 years of drilling into the tropical Pacific Ocean’s seafloor, no one has found pressurized fluids to explain how these pits formed. Another mechanism for the creation of seafloor depressions is the flow of hot, hydrothermal fluids circulating in the upper crustal rocks.
Professor Dawn Roberts-Semple | Measuring Air Pollution with Inexpensive Passive Diffusion Tubes
Air pollutants, such as nitrogen dioxide and ground-level ozone, are a significant threat to public health, contributing to respiratory symptoms and cardiovascular disease. Such pollutants are often caused by traffic emissions, and tend to accumulate in urban areas. Assessing when and where such pollutants tend to be present at dangerous levels is important for protecting public health, but concentrations may vary dramatically and can be influenced by wind patterns, temperature, traffic levels and urban architecture.
Dr Martin Van Den Berghe | Combatting Climate Change with Microbe-Enhanced Rock Weathering
In the fight against climate change, carbon capture and storage technologies are widely seen as a critical tool in avoiding the worst effects of global warming. The problem is being approached from many different angles, but many proposed solutions have a long way to go before they can have any meaningful impact on the health of Earth’s climate. According to Dr Martin Van Den Berghe at Cytochrome Technologies, one of the most promising approaches to carbon capture could be to enhance a chemical mechanism that has naturally shaped Earth’s geology for billions of years.
Dr Gabriel Popescu | Reconstructing the History of a Prehistoric Society in the Eastern Balkans
When studying the earliest human societies, researchers use a combination of archaeological records and radiocarbon dating to create comprehensive models of population patterns. By applying advanced mathematical techniques, they can now estimate the changing sizes and distributions of ancient human populations and make more informed inferences about how societies were structured. In many regions, these models have allowed researchers to better understand the social and environmental changes that shaped the prehistoric world.
Dr Catherine Richter | Exploring Enzymes in Fish to Accelerate Conservation
Thiamine – commonly known as Vitamin B1 – is required by almost all life on Earth. Humans and other animals need to consume sufficient amounts of this vitamin to support brain and heart health. Some organisms, including certain molluscs, fish and bacteria, contain thiamine-degrading enzymes known as thiaminases. As such, consuming these organisms can lead to thiamine-deficiency.
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