Meet the Peecyclers. Their Idea to Help Farmers Is No. 1

By -
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/17/climate/peecycling-farming-urine-fertilizer.html

By Catrin Einhorn, The New York Times. 

Excerpt: ...Human urine... is full of the same nutrients that plants need to flourish. It has a lot more, in fact, than Number Two, with almost none of the pathogens. Farmers typically apply those nutrients — nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium — to crops in the form of chemical fertilizers. But that comes with a high environmental cost from fossil fuels and mining. ...Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has worsened a worldwide fertilizer shortage that’s driving farmers to desperation and threatening food supplies. Scientists also warn that feeding a growing global population in a world of climate change will only get more difficult. ...Toilets, in fact, are by far the largest source of water use inside homes, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Wiser management could save vast amounts of water, an urgent need as climate change worsens drought in places like the American West. It could also help with another profound problem: Inadequate sanitation systems — including leaky septic tanks and aging wastewater infrastructure — overload rivers, lakes and coastal waters with nutrients from urine. ...algal blooms that trigger mass die offs of animals and other plants. In one dramatic example, manatees in the Indian River Lagoon in Florida are starving to death after sewage-fueled algal blooms destroyed the sea grass they depend on. “The urban environments and aquatic environments become hideously polluted while the rural environments are depleted of what they need,” said Rebecca Nelson, a professor of plant science and global development at Cornell University. ...some are also drawn to a transformative idea behind the endeavor. By reusing something once flushed away, they say, they are taking a revolutionary step toward tackling the biodiversity and climate crises: Moving away from a system that constantly extracts and discards, toward a more circular economy that reuses and recycles in a continuous loop.…

Popular posts from this blog

Lost history of Antarctica revealed in octopus DNA

By -
https://www.science.org/content/article/lost-history-antarctica-revealed-octopus-dna By ERIK STOKSTAD .  Excerpt: Some 100,000 years ago, scientists believe Antarctica’s massive western ice sheet collapsed, temporarily opening waterways between a trio of seas surrounding the continent. New evidence for that scenario comes from a surprising source: octopus DNA. ...About 129,000 to 116,000 years ago, a warm spell called the last interglacial gave our planet a brief break in between several million years of ice ages. The average temperature of the planet was about 0.5°C warmer than it is today—and climate projections predict it will be again within decades. The global sea level was also 5 meters to 10 meters higher than current levels. Many scientists believe  the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and consequent melting could have been a primary reason . ...The findings are consistent with growing geological evidence supporting the ice sheet collapse....
Read more

An architect has found a way to build flood-proof homes

By -
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/interactive/2023/flood-resistant-home-bamboo/ By Nick Aspinwall, The Washington Post.  Excerpt: Yasmeen Lari spent a …career designing …structures out of concrete, glass and steel before stumbling into her ideal material. It was at a camp for refugees…. Residents there were struggling to secure bricks and wood to build communal kitchens — until she spotted a nearby bamboo grove. “Let’s use it,” recalls Lari…. The material worked so well that over the last decade, Heritage Foundation of Pakistan …has built some 85,000 structures for displaced Pakistanis, including victims of last year’s devastating monsoon rains. That disaster, the worst flooding in Pakistani history, left a third of the country underwater and  destroyed more than 2.1 million homes . The thousands of bamboo structures Lari’s group had erected “all survived,” she said. …Many species of bamboo have been used as a building material in Asia for thousands of years and they are
Read more

Climate Change Drives New Cases of Malaria, Complicating Efforts to Fight the Disease

By -
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/health/malaria-climate-change.html By  Stephanie Nolen , The New York Times.  Excerpt: There were an estimated 249 million cases of malaria around the globe last year,  the World Health Organization said on Thursday , an increase of five million over 2021. Malaria remains a top killer of children. Those new cases were concentrated in just five countries: Pakistan, Nigeria, Uganda, Ethiopia and Papua-New Guinea. Climate change was a direct contributor in three of them, said Dr. Daniel Ngamije, who directs the W.H.O. malaria program. In July 2022, massive flooding left more than a third of Pakistan underwater and displaced 33 million people. An explosion of mosquitoes soon followed. The country reported 3.1 million confirmed cases of malaria that year, compared with 275,000 the year before, with a fivefold increase in the rate of transmission....
Read more