It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Monday, April 27, 2020
Long-term efficacy of managed wildfires in restoration efforts
Land managers are increasingly interested in using lightning-ignited wildfires as a tool to restore forests and reduce fuel loads. But little is known about the effectiveness of managing wildfires to meet restoration goals.
For several years, ecologists at the Ecological Restoration Institute at Northern Arizona University have been working to better understand ecological outcomes of wildfires managed to achieve resource objectives and conditions under which practitioners can expect beneficial results.
A new article in the International Journal of Wildland Fire contributes to this line of research by testing the long-term effects of managed wildfire on three different forest types (pine-oak, mixed-conifer, and spruce fir).
To examine the long-term impacts of wildfire applications, a team of ERI-NAU ecologists remeasured permanent monitoring plots on the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park 12 years after three wildfires were allowed to burn to meet resource objectives in 2003. The ecologists evaluated fire outcomes and measured effects on forest structure—for example, tree density—and species composition (the relative numbers of different tree species) over time.
Mike Stoddard, an ERI senior research specialist and lead author of the study, said managing for forests that are resilient to climate change and severe fire can require bold management to overcome more than a century of fire exclusion. But, he added, it is important that these management decisions are informed by science.
And while wildfires managed under mild weather conditions may be less expensive than other treatment methods, like mechanical thinning or prescribed fire, more research is needed to understand tradeoffs between methods in terms of ecological outcomes.
"Wildfires can accomplish a range of management objectives and some may build resilience to a changing climate, at least in the short-term," Stoddard said. "However, delayed effects on tree mortality and tree regeneration may shift our perception of the efficacy of fire treatment."
Overall, the 2003 resource objective wildfires in Grand Canyon National Park achieved several beneficial management outcomes, but researchers say there is much more to learn about the effectiveness of wildfires at accomplishing restoration objectives and promoting resilient forest conditions, particularly in less-remote areas.
More information: Michael T. Stoddard et al. Ecosystem management applications of resource objective wildfires in forests of the Grand Canyon National Park, USA, International Journal of Wildland Fire (2020). DOI: 10.1071/WF19067
Human pressure from agriculture, livestock grazing, and development is often more intense at mountain bases, as in this Himalayan landscape in north India. Species shifting upslope tracking rising temperatures may find more intact habitats. Credit: Paul R. Elsen WCS
A new WCS-led study reveals that mountain-dwelling species fleeing warming temperatures by retreating to higher elevations may find refuge from reduced human pressure.
A new study published in Nature Communications by scientists at WCS, the University of California, Berkeley, and the United States Forest Service shows that nearly 60 percent of all mountainous area is under intense human pressure. Most of the pressure is at low elevations and mountain bases, which tend to be easier places for people to live, grow food, and build roads. The scientists then used climate models to make predictions about how species would move under climate change. Based on their predictions, they found that species tend to move to higher elevations, and that these higher elevations tend to have more intact land for species because there is less human pressure.
Without factoring in human pressure, the authors warn that conservation actions may be misguided. Factoring in human pressure reveals the true 'shape' of a mountain for species that are restricted to intact landscapes, which are often the species of greatest conservation concern. Here, the 'true shape' refers to how much land area is potentially available as habitat for a species as it moves up in elevation, not simply how much total land area is available. The true shape can reveal where species will tend to lose versus gain intact land area as they shift under climate change: the elevations where species are expected to lose area represent the priority zones for conservation.
Mountains are home to over 85 percent of the world's amphibians, birds, and mammals, making them global conservation priorities. But mountain-dwelling species are at risk from human activities, such as agriculture, livestock grazing, and development that reduce their habitat, and climate change that threatens to push species upslope as they struggle to find tolerable temperatures.
"Species are adapted to certain temperature conditions. As temperatures warm in mountains, scientists have documented species moving to higher elevations to maintain the same temperatures," said Paul Elsen, a WCS Climate Adaptation Scientist and lead author of the study. "This was always seen as a problem, because species would have less land area and less habitat to occupy at high elevations. But what we found is that as species move upslope, they tend to move away from areas that are already under intense human pressure and into areas with reduced human pressure. As a result, they can occupy more intact land area, even if the total amount of land area declines."
The authors combined several global databases to make their assessments: high-resolution digital elevation models gave a picture about how much surface area is available at different elevations. The Human Footprint Index provided information on pressure from human activities. Global climate models projected how temperatures are likely to change by the late 21st century.
The authors then used computer simulations to place hundreds of thousands of hypothetical 'species' across all mountain ranges at different elevations and then predicted how they would shift their ranges based on climate projections. For each simulation, they compared the amount of area the species had to begin with to the amount they would have after the range shift under climate change.
Said Elsen: "We were surprised to find that many species had more intact land area available after the range shift compared to when they started."
The results suggest that many species in mountain ranges may have more intact land area available in the future if they track warming temperatures to higher slopes, though there were exceptions.
"Our results offer a glimmer of hope for montane species under climate change," Elsen said. "Montane species are still facing tremendous human pressure, especially at low elevations, but we have the opportunity now to protect intact habitats at higher elevations to give these species the best possible chance going forward."
More information: Paul R. Elsen et al, Topography and human pressure in mountain ranges alter expected species responses to climate change, Nature Communications (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-15881-x
Humanity bounces from one crisis to another as history shows us. Food waste and climate change are perhaps part of the same crisis. Now, research published in the International Journal of Global Warming suggests that finding secondary uses for food waste might reduce the overall impact of this problem.
Mustafa Özilgen and colleagues at Yeditepe University, in Istanbul, Turkey, explain how the issue is a self-perpetuating problem: "Global warming increases the food waste; in return, the food waste causes further increase in global warming," they say. Remedies that have been suggested at least for kitchen waste suggest that burning such waste instead of fossil fuels might help. The team has now used thermodynamic calculations to show that food waste from a fast food outlet after compression and drying to produce one ton of waste could be used to generate 3.5 gigawatts.
They have estimated that all the fruit and vegetable waste in Turkey, including agricultural waste, could produce 7.2 gigajoules of energy each year. Of course, part of the problem of food waste is the plastic and paper packaging and some of this will be a component of the overall dried and compressed material from the food outlets.
"Our analysis indicates that trying to find a secondary use for food waste is not a feasible process, when compared with electric power production via combustion in a Rankine cycle with regeneration," the team reports. There may well be niche secondary uses for normally inedible fruit peel, vegetable stems, and other unusable plant materials that do not simply involve burning them for energy, but thermodynamically we would benefit more from burning such food waste instead of fossil fuels.
More information: Sungur Kaan Gökbulak et al. How to benefit from the food waste in the era of global warming, International Journal of Global Warming (2020). DOI: 10.1504/IJGW.2020.106595
Assessing El Niño's impact on fisheries and aquaculture around the world
by Institut de recherche pour le développement
Peruvian industrial purse seiners in full activity of anchovy fishing. Credit: IRD - Arnaud Bertrand
While considerable resources are invested in seasonal forecasts and early-warning systems for food security, not enough is known about El Niño's impact on the fisheries and aquaculture sectors, even though its name was given in the 1600s by fishers off the coast of Peru.
To remedy that, FAO is publishing, in partnership with French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD France), the report El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) effects on fisheries and aquaculture. This report captures the current state of knowledge on the impacts of ENSO events across sectors, from food security to safety at sea, from fish biology and fishing operation to management measures.
El Niño is widely known as a climate pattern that begins over the Pacific Ocean but wreaks havoc on ecosystems in land and water far away from its origin. Its consequences include droughts and major harvest shortfalls in large swatches of Africa and Indonesia, forest fires in Australia, and serious flooding in South America.
ENSOs are often simplified to reflect two main phases: El Niño, an anomalous warming phase in the central and/or eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean, and an opposite cooling phase called La Niña.
In the former phase, a thickened surface layer of warm water prevents cold and nutrient-rich deep ocean water to reach the surface layer where photosynthesis occurs, putting a break on ocean production. This lowers the availability of food to local fish species such as anchoveta, which in turn either migrate southwards or suffer a productivity collapse.
While understanding of ENSOs has developed greatly since the 1950s, researchers have also been stymied as its incidences are rarely similar. Adding to the complexity is that the frequency and intensity of these events appear to have intensified in the past two decades, with some climate models suggesting these trends may continue as the climate changes.
"ENSO is not just a binary phenomenon (either warm or cold). Every ENSO event is different in signal, intensity, duration, and so are their consequences," says Arnaud Bertrand, marine ecologist at IRD, who coordinated the report. "Understanding the diversity is key to developing predictive and preparatory capacities".
Key points :
International experts based in Chile, France and Peru were recruited to produce this report. It addresses successively the diversity of ENSO events; ENSO forecasting; ENSO in the context of climate change; global overview of ENSO impacts; Assessment of regional ENSO impacts on marine capture fisheries; coral bleaching and damage to reefs and related fisheries; ENSO and aquaculture; ENSO and inland capture fisheries.
Five broad types of ENSO were identified:
Extreme El Niño, Moderate Eastern Pacific (EP) El Niño, Moderate Central Pacific (CP) El Niño, Coastal El Niño, Strong La Niña. The authors also recognize that these five types are not static. ENSO events generally worsen with the effects of climate change on fish and fisheries, but the evidence is not yet conclusive enough.
For marine fisheries, the volume as well as the dominant species in fish catches can change dramatically depending on the type of ENSO. While the bulk of the net change is on Eastern Pacific fisheries, there are notable impacts on some fish populations in the Atlantic Ocean and some impact on tuna fisheries in the Indian Ocean. Further analysis of fish populations and sizes could shed light on longer-term effects as ENSO events alter habitats and marine food webs long after they are over.
Fostering nimble fishing techniques can contribute to resilience, as Peruvian fishers showed when they adjusted to catch more shrimp that moved into warmer waters and thus offset the missing anchoveta. At the same time, the authors note that El Niño events do not necessarily favour alternative species productivity of sardine and mackerel populations but rather increase their susceptibility to capture—relevant information for fisheries management systems in operation.
Evidence also suggests that ENSO events can significantly impact aquaculture output, particularly for marine plants, mollusks and crustaceans, while triggering shifts to more drought-resistance species in inland fisheries in countries such as Uganda.
Currently, reasonable forecasts can be made up to six months in advance, but with very little ability to predict which (ENSO) type will occur. ENSO has important impacts on cyclonic activity, ocean conditions or precipitation.
The authors conclude the report with perspectives for ENSO preparedness in a warmer world.
Network of Covid-19 projects on the JOGL platform. Credit: Marc Santolini/JOGL, Author provided
All around the world, scientists and practitioners are relentlessly harnessing data on the pandemic to model its progression, predict the impact of possible interventions and develop solutions to medical equipment shortages, generating open-source data and codes to be reused by others.
Research and innovation is now in a collaborative frenzy just as contagious as the coronavirus. Is this the rise of the famous "collective intelligence" supposed to solve our major global problems?
The rise of a global collective intelligence
The beginning of the epidemic saw "traditional" research considerably accelerate and open its means of production, with journals such as Science, Nature and The Lancet immediately granting public access to publications on the coronavirus and COVID-19.
More recently, popular initiatives bringing together a variety of actors have emerged outside institutional frameworks, using online platforms. For example, a community of biologists, engineers and developers has emerged on the Just One Giant Lab (JOGL) collaborative platform to develop low-cost, open-source solutions against the virus. This platform, which we developed with Leo Blondel (Harvard University) and Thomas Landrain (La Paillasse, PILI) over the past three years, is designed as a virtual, open and distributed research institute aimed at developing solutions to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) defined by the United Nations. Communities use it to self-organize and provide innovative solutions to urgent problems requiring fundamentally interdisciplinary skills and knowledge. The platform facilitates coordination by linking needs and resources within the community, animating research programs, and organising challenges.
When the first project related to COVID-19—a low-cost, open source diagnostic test—was born in early March, there was a rush on the platform. The number of contributions per minute kept increasing: hundreds of interactions, project creation, communications… So much so that the server hosting the platform couldn't hold anymore! In only one month, there were more than 60,000 visitors coming from 183 countries, including 3,000 active contributors generating more than 90 projects, ranging from mask designs to low-cost ventilator prototypes, or cough-classification AI apps.
This massive community quickly self-organized into working groups, mixing different skills and universes; unexpected combinations of data scientists from large companies, researchers in anthropology, engineers or biologists come together in this virtual universe.
The most active person and emerging coordinator of the community even turns out to be… a 17-year-old high school student from Seattle! This initiative is now a full-fledged research program, OpenCOVID19, with 100,000 euros of funding from the Axa Research Fund currently redistributed as micro-grants to emerging projects through a community peer-review system, a partnership with the Paris hospital system (AP-HP) to facilitate the evaluation and validation of designs intended for hospital use, and several major themes: diagnosis, prevention, treatment, validation, and data analysis and modelling.
The open-source world has in the past decades spearheaded community self-organization and is at the origin of massive collaborative projects such as Linux or Wikipedia. Similar efforts are now emerging to solve global and multi-disciplinary issues, leveraging skill diversity at the service of project complexity.
Map of shared skills across Covid-19 projects on the JOGL platform. Credit: Marc Santolini, JOGL, CRI, Author provided
What is "collective intelligence"?
If we can measure individual intelligence using performance indicators for various tasks and deriving individual "IQ", why not measure the intelligence of a group through their performance on collective tasks?
Researchers have exhibited the existence of a collective intelligence factor. It turns out that an intelligent group is not a group of intelligent individuals, but rather a group of individuals who interact efficiently—for example though their ability to speak equitably in discussions. The authors conclude: "it would seem to be much easier to raise the intelligence of a group than an individual. Could a group's collective intelligence be increased by, for example, better electronic collaboration tools?".
This is the spirit of collaborative platforms such as JOGL: we can monitor in real time community evolution and project progress, allowing to facilitate the coordination of the various programs, including OpenCOVID19.
The generated data also provide a quantitative ground to explore "good practices" facilitating collective intelligence. By analysing it with the tools of network science, we study how collaborative dynamics underpin the advancement of knowledge.
Ephemeral awakening or long-term revolution?
While it is too early to draw conclusions in the case of the OpenCOVID19 program, designing the future of such massive collaborations starts now. In particular, members of communities that scale up quickly often get lost, and smart onboarding strategies are key to sustaining such efforts. The grail of these communities resides in building an architecture of attention through recommender systems, the same algorithms that made the success of social networks such as Twitter, Instagram or Facebook. This approach, based on fundamental results from team science and network science, leverages the digital traces of the community to suggest the best person to contact, the most relevant project to help or pressing task to complete. At the heart of the JOGL architecture, such algorithms help promote serendipity and facilitate coordination.
Developing recommender systems for massive collaborations requires vastly diverse contributions, from computer science to social sciences, mathematics or ethics. Ironically, collective intelligence will be the key to its own design.
Shane Clark of the Keeling lab at Scripps Institution of Oceanography collects an air sample at the end of Scripps Pier. Credit: University of California - San Diego
The coronavirus pandemic has produced startling images, not just of besieged emergency rooms, but of deserted highways, beaches, and other public places—of life interrupted everywhere.
The economic effect produced other surreal images in the run up to Earth Day that hint at what could either be a new normal or mere apparition: jellies swimming through Venice canals, blue skies over urban skylines normally tinted brown year-round. In India, people living at the feet of the Himalayas have been able to see the mountains for the first time in years, as if in a dream."
These will be among the immediate effects of coronavirus, say scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego who have been monitoring pollution, tracking the chief greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, and documenting ecosystem responses. While lamenting the terrible circumstances that have led to various changes in nature, they predict CO2 levels will show a slight drop if economic activity is slowed for a full year, air pollution will be expected to kill fewer people, and fishes that would have been caught as seafood will instead live another season to reproduce. That will improve fish stocks and the overall health of the oceans now that fishing vessels are, by and large, docked.
But what is more debatable is whether things return to normal or not after all this, they say. After this tragedy-induced alteration of life is declared over, what is left is a public mindset now open to re-scripting.
Climate scientist Veerabhadran Ramanathan spent much of his career documenting the effect that pollutants other than carbon dioxide have on global warming. He defined the composition and size of large masses of persistent air pollution filled with black carbon soot and other harmful compounds that form around the world. More than a decade ago, he began Project Surya to see what would happen—to climate and to public health—if local cooking practices in pockets of his native India could be made cleaner. Now, it is as if the Project Surya study area has expanded to include all of South Asia.
"We would hope that the evidence drives public support for drastic climate actions such as a zero-emission carbon-free economy," said Ramanathan, who is co-author of Bending the Curve: Climate Change Solutions. "The climate crisis can be solved if we quickly cut super pollutants such as soot, while also pursuing transition to clean energy worldwide."
Scripps Oceanography geochemist Ralph Keeling maintains the Keeling Curve, a record of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere begun by his late father, Charles David Keeling, in 1958. Those levels have steadily risen save for a few blips over the years such as the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and the 2008 recession. All such fleeting downturns have revived after periods of months to rise with renewed ferocity, said Keeling. If this episode slows down economic activity by 10 percent for a full year, that would translate to about a 0.5 percent drop in carbon dioxide levels.
In the scheme of climate change, Keeling said what is happening now might be hard to evaluate.
"It's like turning down the tap on a bathtub. You can see the tap is turned down just by looking at it," he said. "But it takes a while to notice that the tub is filling more slowly."
But what could last is a change in the way people live. Telecommuting could become more accepted by many employers some of whose operations have continued with only minimal disruptions as employees work from home. Keeling noted in a recent interview that the current crisis has shown society "how we can live differently if we have to."
Keeling and Scripps Oceanography colleague Ray Weiss are part of the L.A. Megacities project, a multi-institutional attempt to isolate the greenhouse gas emissions of metropolitan areas. Megacities researchers monitor Los Angeles and Paris at the moment. Weiss said that Los Angeles is indeed registering signs of a change in lifestyle at first glance, though the nuances of the coronavirus effect will take longer to tease out. Carbon monoxide, a pollutant specific to vehicles more than any other, has been precipitously falling since March, the time of year when levels typically begin to increase. Heavy March rains also helped clean the air so determining the relative influences will take time.
Jeremy Jackson, an emeritus professor of oceanography at Scripps, spent much of his career documenting how natural systems decline and how perceptions of what is normal in nature deteriorate over generations. The concept is known as "shifting baselines." For instance, one might see a dozen sharks in a square mile of ocean and conclude the ocean is healthy though there might have been 500 sharks in that same area several hundred years ago before human intrusion.
Jackson sees the global economy not being where it was pre-coronavirus for up to five years–even if a vaccine were to be available next week. There will be a lingering fear of large gatherings, of getting on airplanes, of eating at restaurants, imprinted even after restrictions are lifted. Though not worth the tragedy that precipitates it, the pandemic will effect substantial change, he said.
"It's not an exaggeration to say that if air quality is good for one year, 100,000 people will not die unnecessarily," he said.
Americans are realizing, for instance, their reliance on goods that come from far away and are beginning to see value in reasserting control over their supply chains. People in Maine, where Jackson currently lives, are sourcing their lettuce from local greenhouses now that deliveries from California are disrupted. That change in consumer habits might endure even after delivery trucks are rolling again.
"The notion that we don't care where in the world something comes from is over," he said.
But the most lasting outcome might be that this generation will adopt the mentality of people who lived through the Great Depression, he said.
"What this is doing is forcing us to be more introspective in our lives," said Jackson. "I think there will be a mental evolution of our society, one that's more cautious and conservative of our resources."
Weiss does not hold out great hope for the wholesale lifestyle changes that need to happen for global warming to permanently attenuate. He sees emissions returning to full strength once the economy does. He does have a more modest hope that one effect will live on even when life turns back to normal.
"The only silver lining I'm hoping for is that this may help the public listen again and have respect for the value of science," he said.
These images, using data from the Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite, show the average nitrogen dioxide concentrations from 1 January to 24 March 2020 and 25 March (the first day of the lockdown) to 20 April 2020. A trail of nitrogen dioxide emissions from maritime traffic can be seen as a faint line over the Indian Ocean (visible in the bottom of the image.) Shipping lanes appear as straight lines owing to commercial ships following more or less the same route. The concentrations of nitrogen dioxide in our atmosphere vary widely on a daily basis. Variations owing to weather conditions make it necessary to average data over substantial periods of time – allowing for more accurate assessments to be made. Credit: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2019-20), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
Lockdowns imposed to halt the spread of the coronavirus have been recently linked with cleaner air quality over Europe and China. New images, from the Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite, from the European Union Copernicus programme, now show some cities across India seeing levels drop by around 40–50% owing to its nationwide quarantine.
On 25 March 2020, the Indian government placed its population of more than 1.3 billion citizens under lockdown in an effort to reduce the spread of the COVID-19 disease. All non-essential shops, markets and places of worship were closed with only essential services including water, electricity and health services remaining active.
New satellite maps, produced using data from the Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite, show averaged nitrogen dioxide concentrations over India from 1 January to 24 March 2020 and 25 March (the first day of the lockdown) to 20 April 2020—compared to the same time-frame as last year.
The significant reduction in the concentrations can be seen over major cities across India. Mumbai and Delhi saw drops of around 40-50% compared to the same time last year.
Claus Zehner, ESA's Copernicus Sentinel-5P mission manager, says, "Thanks to the Tropomi instrument on the Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite, we are able to observe such high reductions in concentrations in Europe, China, and now India because of the national quarantine measures put in place.
These images, using data from the Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite, show the average nitrogen dioxide concentrations from 1 January to 24 March 2020 and 25 March (the first day of the lockdown) to 20 April 2020 – compared to the same time-frame as last year. The significant reduction in the concentrations can be seen over major cities across India. Mumbai and Delhi saw drops of around 40-50% compared to the same time last year. A trail of nitrogen dioxide emissions from maritime traffic can be seen as a faint line over the Indian Ocean (visible in the bottom of the image.) Shipping lanes appear as straight lines owing to commercial ships following more or less the same route. The concentrations of nitrogen dioxide in our atmosphere vary widely on a daily basis. Variations owing to weather conditions make it necessary to average data over substantial periods of time – allowing for more accurate assessments to be made. Credit: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2019-20), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
"What is interesting in these new maps are the high values of nitrogen dioxide concentrations over northeast India. Our analysis shows that these clusters are directly linked with the locations of the ongoing coal-based power plants. The largest power station in India, the Vindhyachal Super Thermal Power Station, shows a reduction of only around 15% compared to the same time last year."
According to a recent report by Reuters, India's electricity consumption fell by 9.2% in March 2020. Using data from the Power System Operation Corp Ltd (POSOCO), they found that consumers used 100.2 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) in March 2020, compared with 110.33 billion units from 2019.
ESA's Director of Earth Observation Programmes, Josef Aschbacher, comments, "Another interesting feature we can see from these images is the maritime traffic across the Indian Ocean. We can clearly see a faint trail of nitrogen dioxide emissions left in the atmosphere as commercial ship traffic appears almost the same as last year. The shipping lanes appear as a straight line because the ships follow more or less the exact same route."
Nitrogen dioxide is usually emitted into the atmosphere as a result from power plants, industrial facilities and vehicles—increasing the likelihood of developing respiratory problems. Because concentrations in our atmosphere vary widely on a daily basis, it is necessary to analyse data over substantial periods of time—allowing for more accurate assessments to be made.
Claus comments, "Weather variability is an important factor to consider when making assessments such as these, which is why our team has averaged the data over a longer period of time. In this case, we can clearly see the decreased concentrations are due to human activity."
These images, using data from the Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite, show the average nitrogen dioxide concentrations from 25 March to 20 April 2019 and average concentrations from 25 March to 20 April 2020. The spikes in the top image show concentrations from 2019 over Delhi and Mumbai. Owing to COVID-19 restrictions, the 2020 image shows high concentrations in northeast India, which coincides with the ongoing activity in coal-based power plants in east India. A trail of nitrogen dioxide emissions from maritime traffic can be seen as a faint line over the Indian Ocean (visible in the bottom of the image.) Shipping lanes appear as straight lines owing to commercial ships following more or less the same route. The concentrations of nitrogen dioxide in our atmosphere vary widely on a daily basis. Variations owing to weather conditions make it necessary to average data over substantial periods of time – allowing for more accurate assessments to be made. Credit: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2019-20), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
Air pollution is a major environmental health problem that affects people in developed and developing countries alike. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), air pollution kills an estimated seven million people worldwide each year.
According to a report using data from the World Air Quality Report from IQAir, Indian cities make up six of the world's ten most-polluted urban areas. Air pollution in New Delhi, considered the world's most polluted city, is caused by fumes from sclerotic traffic, the burning of fossil fuels, as well as industrial activity.
Josef Aschbacher, says, "It has never been more important to monitor the air we breathe. As we have seen over the previous months, the Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite is the best satellite equipped to monitor nitrogen dioxide concentrations on a global scale"
With more than 23 000 reported cases of coronavirus across the country, India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi has extended the nationwide lockdown until at least 3 May.
by Daryush Nourbaha, Earth Institute, Columbia University
Social distancing while lining up at a supermarket. Credit: Philafrenzy/Wikimedia Commons
The coronavirus strain that causes COVID-19 has infected over two million people in more than 160 countries. The rising death counts are heartbreaking, and the fact that we can't even go through the customary funeral rituals to help us heal emotionally has made the crisis that much harder for many of us. We're also feeling the economic impacts of the pandemic, with unemployment rates climbing, the financial markets indicating a global recession and small businesses being forced to close in a number of areas. While dealing with my own losses and self-isolation, as a graduate student in Columbia's Sustainability Science program, I can't help but notice the parallels between what this virus is doing to us and what we've been doing to our planet.
Sustainability is the concept of maintaining equitable conditions across not only socioeconomic and geographic barriers, but also across generations and through time. Sustainability seeks to demonstrate that there is a way for society to progress and prosper in harmony with the planet. It's about maintaining a healthy balance between people and the environment.
When a virus like the coronavirus invades its host, it disturbs the natural order in that system. A virus seeks to replicate not only to the detriment of its host but with complete disregard to all the other cells and microbiomes within the system. Analogously, sustainability teaches us about our planet, which can be thought of as a system much like the human body. Except, rather than a virus disrupting the natural order, we, the humans, have disrupted the system. We have sought to replicate and grow to the detriment of our planet and all of the species within it.
What we know so far is that the coronavirus is replicating at high levels in the upper respiratory tract for several days before people become symptomatic. This is part of why the virus has been so successful in spreading at such a high rate. Similarly, humans started to spread all over the planet before they began to damage it. Damage for COVID-19 can be thought of as the symptoms of a dry cough, tightness of the chest and a fever. Damage for the planet can be extrapolated from rising sea levels, deforestation and increasing global temperatures.
But coronavirus isn't always devastating. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has stated that up to 25 percent of all positive COVID-19 cases can be entirely asymptomatic—they cause no symptoms whatsoever. The sustainability analogy here are the people that are living their lives in a way that minimizes their impact on the rest of the world. These people are careful to lower their carbon footprint. They make conscious decisions when making a purchase. And when they need to go somewhere, they do so in an environmentally friendly way. Ultimately, however, they are still a part of the spread of humankind—the COVID-19 of planet Earth.
While this critique may seem harsh, the parallels are all there. But, if more people lived their lives in harmony with their environment and in a truly equitable way, then humans wouldn't pose a threat to the planet. We would still proliferate, but entirely asymptomatically—more akin to the natural bacteria in our intestines than an invasive virus.
So many things have changed in our daily lives during this short battle with the coronavirus. There is less smog in cities, the homeless have been brought indoors and people are making sincere efforts to stay in touch with friends and family like never before. So, while the pandemic is awful, the deaths are tragic and the isolation suffocating, the virus has certainly brought perspective to the ways our societies work.
It's hard for anyone to say what the world will look like after COVID-19, since it has brought into question so many things that we have always accepted as the norm. Commuting to work or school, sitting at a coffee shop and going to the gym are all examples of things that many of us used to do. By not engaging in these activities anymore, we have reduced energy consumption and emissions in our respective cities and as a result, the air is cleaner, for now.
The true test of the sustainability movement will come after we win the battle against COVID-19 and achieve a new semblance of normalcy. When the new normal arrives, we must leverage the changes that COVID-19 brought to our societies as concrete examples of what we can achieve from an energy efficiency perspective. Cities in America have recorded 15-30 percent reductions in carbon monoxide, particulate matter, nitrogen dioxide and black carbon. Many companies have found ways to accommodate employees with remote work policies and alternate work setups that have allowed productivity to continue without the traditional barricades. If these narratives become a part of the conversation, then we can be hopeful that the sustainability movement will continue forward and be more powerful than ever before.
