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Low-Water Landscape and Garden Designs for Water-Wise Yards

Since the beginning of the 21st century, the western United States has been experiencing some of the driest conditions on record, and according to the UN, more than 75% of the world could be facing drought conditions by 2050. Bottom line: as climate change continues to cause water stress, we need to find ways to conserve water and adapt to drier conditions — including in our yards and gardens. 

The traditional expanses of pristine green grass that characterize most lawns use huge amounts of water. It’s estimated that 30% of residential drinking water is used outdoors, and even more in the summer. This can be a huge expense and a drain on water resources, especially in areas of the country facing water shortages

The goal of creating a water-wise yard is threefold: to increase the amount of moisture your soil can hold, capitalize on naturally available water, and choose plants and designs that require less water to begin with. Landscaping using water-wise methods is often called “xeriscaping,” a term first used by the Denver Water Board to describe landscaping methods that reduce the need for irrigation, capitalize on natural precipitation, and overall require less water than traditional landscaping methods. Whatever the name, there are many ways to increase the resilience of your yard in the face of drought. 

Sustainable Hardscaping 

Hardscaping can replace a lawn and conserve water. JaimePharr / iStock / Getty Images Plus

Usually integrated with xeriscaping, hardscaping basically means designing and decorating your yard with non-organic features like walls, paths, patios, or driveways. Hardscaping itself is not inherently sustainable, but sustainable hardscaping works in harmony with the ecosystem, built intentionally with the goal of having a positive effect on the environment rather than a negative one. 

Use Well-Draining Materials

A primary feature of sustainable hardscaping is allowing for permeability, which traditional materials and methods — like building expanses of unbroken concrete for patios or sidewalks — don’t reflect. These impermeable surfaces don’t allow water to percolate through to the soil, but instead allow it to run off to other areas and deprive the soil of water. Using materials like gravel or stones with gaps in between to build walkways and other yard features will allow rainwater to infiltrate rather than run off. 

Build a Dry Creek Bed to Capture Runoff 

After a heavy rain, you might notice that water pools in a specific area of your yard, or rushes down gulleys in the dirt. Building a dry creek bed from rocks in the areas where water usually collects will force it to percolate back into the soil. There are many different ways to design these beds, but the main goal is to dig a trench, using the displaced soil to build up the walls. Line the bed with larger rocks, and cover the inside with medium-sized rocks. There will be some spaces in between, which you can fill in with gravel or river rock. 

To beautify the creek bed, plant some native greenery along the top of the trench around the large rocks, or create a rain garden at the bottom with your garden’s moisture-loving plants to put that water to use and prevent further erosion.

Capture Rainwater 

Using municipal water to water your garden can be expensive — especially in the heat of summer — and some municipalities facing water shortages might impose restrictions on water use for yards and gardens. Instead, use the water that’s being given to you for free! Capture rainwater in a store-bought rain barrel, or make an easy DIY version yourself. Most connect to a drain spout, and have a spigot at the bottom for easily accessing the water. For a low-tech solution, put out some buckets and barrels right before a rainstorm to collect water for tomorrow’s watering. Note that collected rainwater should never be used for drinking, and when watering the garden, water plants right at their base in case of any contaminants in the water, then thoroughly wash any produce. 

A wooden barrel for collecting rainwater.
Wirestock / iStock / Getty Images Plus

Choose Better Plants 

Kentucky bluegrass — the grass that usually coats our lawns — is thirsty, and requires a lot of water to stay green. Choosing plants with greater tolerance to low-water conditions will require less attention, and less water. 

Perennials 

Unlike annuals — which have a single-year life cycle — perennials overwinter in gardens and come back year after year. Because of this, their root systems are robust and much more well-established, meaning they require less watering. Planting perennials also results in less soil disturbance (since you aren’t replanting every year), which leaves the organic matter of the soil intact and thus maintains high water retention. Foxglove beardtongue, purple coneflower, yarrow, and Russian sage are among the many beautiful perennials that are especially drought-tolerant.  

Purple coneflower (echinacea). Jill Brady / Portland Press Herald via Getty Images

Drought-Tolerant Plants

Because they only live for one year, annuals have shallow roots and generally require more water than perennials. However, some annuals — like California poppies, cleomes (or “spider flowers”), cosmos, creeping zinnias, marigolds, sunflowers, and vinca (aka periwinkle) — have a higher tolerance for drought. For grasses and greenery, try fountain grass, pampas grass, blue fescue, lamb’s-ear, and sweet potato vine. Succulents and cacti do especially well without much water, although check the tag to make sure they are suited for your hardiness zone.

Native Plants 

Among all of the options for ornamental plants, you’ll likely find the greatest success with those that naturally grow in your region. Native plants have adapted over time to the climate, soil, and other local conditions, which means they don’t require as much attention, are more resistant to pests and disease, and usually require less water. Blanketing your yard with species native to your area will lead to a biodiverse, successful, and water-wise yard. 

Nontraditional hedges featuring native plants at a home in Los Angeles, California. Robert Lachman / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Cluster Thirsty Plants Together 

Put your thirstiest plants in the same area of the garden, especially if you water with a hose. By concentrating your heavy watering into just one area (rather than all over the yard), you’ll save a good deal of water; even just walking around with the hose spraying as you move from area to area can be a drain on water. 

Garden Maintenance 

Maintain Healthy Soil

Paying attention to the health of your soil is important for growing robust plants above the ground. While soil composition varies widely by region, healthy soil acts like a sponge, retaining water for when the plants need it while still being porous enough for roots to penetrate. Organic matter increases the water-retention capacity of soil — add compost at the beginning of the growing season to deliver more nutrients to the ground before planting. 

Mulching 

A layer of mulch overtop a garden can greatly reduce loss of moisture through evaporation. Store-bought wood chips aren’t the only option for mulching — fallen leaves, leaf mold, pine needles, and grass and garden clippings will work just as well. When you chop perennials at the end of their life, (or do any pruning of plants) leave the clippings over top of the soil to trap in moisture. Inorganic mulch like gravel and shells can work, but it can make it harder to work in the garden.

Plant Hedgerows

Both wind and strong sunlight can decrease soil moisture during the day. To combat this, plant tall shrubs and plants around the perimeter of the garden to act as a barrier. Before doing this, notice how shadows work in your yard, and plant accordingly. Some plants want full sun all day, so plant those away from the shade, and plant more shade-loving plants closer. 

Hedges in a garden can help control plants’ exposure to sunlight and shade. Mint Images RF / Getty Images

Targeted Irrigation 

When watering with the hose, we tend to spray over a wide range, likely wetting areas that don’t need the moisture. In general, plants do better with less frequent waterings that penetrate deeper into the soil, which encourages them to grow deeper root systems. Instead of a typical garden hose, try a drip irrigation system or soaker hose instead, which targets the roots directly and wastes no water in the process. 

Use a Rain Gauge

These low-tech, relatively inexpensive tools measure the amount of water your garden is getting so you can adjust your watering schedule accordingly — you may be watering much more than is necessary without realizing. Most gardens are okay with one inch of water per week (although arid climates will need slightly more), aside from especially hot periods. When you water, check to make sure the soil actually needs it. If it’s dry an inch below the surface, it’s time to water, but if not, wait until it’s dried out a bit more.

The post Low-Water Landscape and Garden Designs for Water-Wise Yards appeared first on EcoWatch.

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Soil improvements could keep planet within 1.5C heating target, research shows

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Marginal improvements to agricultural soils around the world would store enough carbon to keep the world within 1.5C of global heating, new research suggests.

Farming techniques that improve long-term fertility and yields can also help to store more carbon in soils but are often ignored in favor of intensive techniques using large amounts of artificial fertilizer, much of it wasted, that can increase greenhouse gas emissions.

Using better farming techniques to store 1 percent more carbon in about half of the world’s agricultural soils would be enough to absorb about 31 gigatons of carbon dioxide a year, according to new data. That amount is not far off the 32 gigaton gap between current planned emissions reduction globally per year and the amount of carbon that must be cut by 2030 to stay within 1.5C.

The estimates were carried out by Jacqueline McGlade, the former chief scientist at the UN environment program and former executive director of the European Environment Agency. She found that storing more carbon in the top 30 centimeters of agricultural soils would be feasible in many regions where soils are currently degraded.

McGlade now leads a commercial organization that sells soil data to farmers. Downforce Technologies uses publicly available global data, satellite images, and lidar to assess in detail how much carbon is stored in soils, which can now be done down to the level of individual fields.

“Outside the farming sector, people do not understand how important soils are to the climate,” said McGlade. “Changing farming could make soils carbon negative, making them absorb carbon, and reducing the cost of farming.”

She said farmers could face a short-term cost while they changed their methods, away from the overuse of artificial fertilizer, but after a transition period of two to three years their yields would improve and their soils would be much healthier.

She estimated it would cost about $1 million to restore 40,000 hectares (99,000 acres) of what is currently badly degraded farmland in Kenya, an area that is home to about 300,000 people.

Downforce data could also allow farmers to sell carbon credits based on how much additional carbon dioxide their fields are absorbing. Soil has long been known to be one of Earth’s biggest stores of carbon, but until now it has not been possible to examine in detail how much carbon soils in particular areas are locking up and how much they are emitting. About 40 percent of the world’s farmland is now degraded, according to UN estimates.

Carbon dioxide removal, the name given to a suite of technologies and techniques that increase the uptake of carbon dioxide from the air and sequester the carbon in some form, is an increasing area of interest, as the world slips closer to the critical threshold of 1.5C of global heating above pre-industrial levels.

Arable farmers could sequester more carbon within their soils by changing their crop rotation, planting cover crops such as clover, or using direct drilling, which allows crops to be planted without the need for ploughing. Livestock farmers could improve their soils by growing more native grasses.

Hedgerows also help to sequester carbon in the soil, because they have large underground networks of mycorrhizal fungi and microbes that can extend meters into the field. Farmers have spent decades removing hedgerows to make intensive farming easier, but restoring them, and maintaining existing hedgerows, would improve biodiversity, reduce the erosion of topsoil, and help to stop harmful agricultural runoff, which is a key polluter of rivers.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Soil improvements could keep planet within 1.5C heating target, research shows on Jul 8, 2023.

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Amazon Deforestation Drops 33% in Lula’s First Six Months

From January to June of this year — the first six months of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s presidential term — deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon has fallen 33.6 percent, new government satellite data shows, as The Associated Press reported.

Lula’s stricter environmental rules led to 1,023 square miles of cleared rainforest during that time frame, compared with the same period in 2022 when 1,544 square miles were cleared under Jair Bolsonaro.

It was the lowest level of deforestation for the period in four years, reported Reuters.

“The effort of reversing the curve of growth has been reached. That is a fact: we reversed the curve; deforestation isn’t increasing,” said João Paulo Capobianco, the environment ministry’s executive secretary, during a presentation in Brasília, as The Associated Press reported.

The deforestation rate for June — the beginning of the dry season, a time when it tends to go up — was down 41 percent.

During his campaign, Lula promised to stop the destruction of the rainforest that had become a hallmark of Bolsonaro’s presidency.

The peak period for forest clearing and fires in the Amazon is from July to October.

“July tends to have an explosion in deforestation,” Capobianco said, as reported by Reuters.

According to the Rainforest Trust, the Amazon rainforest produces about one-fifth of the planet’s oxygen. It also stores a good portion of the world’s carbon. But when forests are cleared, that carbon is released into the atmosphere, contributing to climate change.

“Bottom line, we are prioritizing environmental law enforcement,” Jair Schmitt, head of environmental protection at Brazil’s federal environmental agency Ibama, told The Associated Press.

Schmitt said there has been a personnel shortage, as many Ibama agents retired during Bolsonaro’s term and weren’t replaced in an effort to remove environmental officials.

Though Lula has made a commitment to bring the number of agents back up, it is currently the lowest in 24 years, with only 150 available for service.

In some cases, the owner of a specific piece of land that has been deforested can be identified by comparing land records with satellite data, and sanctions can be imposed, Schmitt said.

One type of deterrent is for cattle that have been raised illegally to be seized in embargoed areas.

Ibama head Rodrigo Agostinho said the agency imposed embargoes on 2,086 areas in the first half of 2023, a 111 percent jump from the average of the previous four years.

June of this year saw the most fires in the Amazon rainforest since 2007, an increase Schmitt attributed to deforestation and forest clearing in the last six months of 2022.

“It’s very positive, but we continue to have very high levels of deforestation,” said Daniel Silva, an analyst at nonprofit WWF-Brasil, as Reuters reported.

The post Amazon Deforestation Drops 33% in Lula’s First Six Months appeared first on EcoWatch.

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UN sets ‘wishy-washy’ climate target for global shipping industry

The International Maritime Organization, or IMO — the United Nations body in charge of regulating the global shipping industry — wrapped up two weeks of negotiations on Friday with an agreement that the industry should reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions “around” 2050.

That’s an improvement over the IMO’s previous climate target for the sector — to merely halve emissions by midcentury — but it’s left many environmental advocates severely disappointed.

“There is no excuse for this wish-and-a-prayer agreement,” John Maggs, president of the Clean Shipping Coalition, said in a statement. Others called it a “historic failure” and a “wishy-washy compromise.”

Negotiators sealed the deal on Friday following 10 days of heated discussions meant to address the shipping industry’s outsize carbon footprint. Cargo ships, which carry goods and materials across oceans and are responsible for almost all international trade, account for about 3 percent of humanity’s overall carbon emissions — about as much as Germany

In order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) — the target countries agreed to in the 2015 Paris Agreement — experts have estimated that the shipping industry must cut emissions by 45 percent by 2030 before reaching near-zero emissions in 2040.

Those are the targets that a coalition of Pacific Island countries, plus a few allies including the United States and the U.K., were advocating for at the IMO summit. “Anything less than 36 percent by 2030 and 96 percent by 2040 will be detrimental” to reaching international climate goals, the Marshall Islands negotiator Albon Ishoda told journalists at the summit last week. 

Instead, the agreement set a decarbonization deadline for “by or around, i.e., close to 2050,” with the justification that this would provide greater flexibility for poorer developing countries. (Countries will be responsible for setting policies to achieve the emissions reductions.) The final agreement also included interim targets for 2030 and 2040, although they are far less ambitious than what scientists and many developing countries had been hoping for. The nonbinding agreement asks the shipping industry to reduce emissions by at least 20 percent by 2030 and 70 percent by 2040. It says the industry should continue “striving” for greater reductions of 30 percent and 80 percent.

A CMA CGM cargo ship docked.
A cargo ship in the port of Barcelona.
Lorena Sopena / Europa Press via Getty Images

“Nations failed to put the shipping industry on a credible, 1.5-degree C pathway,” said Madeline Rose, senior climate campaign director for the nonprofit Pacific Environment. She said the IMO’s agreed-upon strategy would exhaust the shipping industry’s carbon budget for limiting warming to 1.5 degrees by 2032, although individual governments and shipping companies could take more aggressive action to prevent that from happening.

Several groups said the only reason there were any interim targets at all was because of a handful of negotiators from small island states, including Vanuatu and the Marshall Islands. These negotiators, whose countries are particularly sensitive to sea-level rise and other climate impacts, eked out stronger targets in the face of heavy opposition from oil-exporting countries like Saudi Arabia, which stand to gain from continued reliance on a fossil fuel-powered shipping sector. 

Larger developing countries like Brazil and Argentina also argued that any reduction in climate pollution would cause them disproportionate economic harm — despite evidence to the contrary. A widely cited report published late last month found that existing solutions — some as simple as reducing ships’ speeds — could reduce global shipping emissions by up to 47 percent below 2008 levels by 2030, with minimal impacts to global trade.

Other solutions in the report, published by the consulting firm CE Delft, include adopting wind-assisted propulsion technologies and replacing 5 to 10 percent of ships’ heavy fuel oil with zero-emissions alternatives like green hydrogen and green methanol.

Maggs said countries baselessly refuted the report and others like it as if they were in a “Trumpian, post-truth alternative reality.” He said the shared desire to come to some kind of agreement gave the obstructionist countries outsize negotiating power. Delegates were “prepared to put up with a weak agreement,” he said, so long as they produced something by the end of the summit.

In addition to the emissions targets, the IMO’s agreement reached on Friday also includes a “basket of measures” to help them reach the new goals. One is an international fuel standard for greenhouse gases, similar to what the IMO has already adopted for sulfur oxide pollution. The other is a global levy on shipping emissions that could generate revenue to fund the shipping industry’s transition away from heavy fuel oil. Both measures are set to be designed in greater detail over the coming years, with implementation scheduled for no later than 2027.

A ship loaded with heavy trucks leaves a port
A cargo ship loaded with heavy trucks leaves the port of Yantai, Shandong Province, China.
CFOTO / Future Publishing via Getty Images

The levy in particular proved controversial, and many consider its inclusion in the agreement a major success. More than 70 developing and developed countries supported it, while Brazil, Argentina, and China, the world’s largest exporter, led a coalition to oppose it. In a diplomatic note delivered to developing countries last month, Beijing officials said the levy was “a disguised way by developed countries to improve their own market competitiveness.”

None of the IMO’s newly agreed-upon targets are mandatory, meaning the onus will now fall on member states for compliance and enforcement. Many environmental advocates are hopeful that national policies will nudge the shipping industry to decarbonize faster, although this will likely lead to a more confusing tangle of standards than if the IMO had unified countries around a single set of science-based targets. “It’s not ideal,” said Delaine McCullough, shipping emissions campaign manager for the nonprofit Ocean Conservancy. “But it needs to happen.”

In the U.S., for example, the recently introduced federal Clean Shipping Act would set emissions standards for shipping companies that dock at American ports, requiring them to align with a pathway toward net-zero by 2040. Other proposed laws like the International Maritime Pollution Accountability Act, which would place a pollution fee on large ships unloading cargo at U.S. ports, could serve as policy models on the international stage.

Individual cities and ports can implement similar regulations on their own, before federal policies are passed. Freight companies can take action too. The shipping giant Maersk, for example, is aiming for net-zero by 2040 and has committed not to buy new ships unless they can run on carbon-neutral fuel. It recently announced the world’s first effort to retrofit a fossil fuel-powered ship to run on green methanol.

“[T]he time to act is now,” Marie Cabbia Hubatova, global shipping director for the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, said in a statement. “This is our last chance to get shipping close to Paris Agreement alignment and set the standard for other hard-to-abate sectors.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline UN sets ‘wishy-washy’ climate target for global shipping industry on Jul 7, 2023.

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Seabird Die-Offs Linked to Marine Heat Waves

A new study, led by researchers at the University of Washington, has linked mass seabird die-offs to marine heat waves.

The study, published in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series, analyzed data collected from residents along coasts from Alaska to central California from 1993 to 2021. The researchers were looking to find if these marine heat wave events were affecting seabirds, which are near the top of the food chain for coastal regions.

The analysis of over 90,000 surveys of beached seabirds shows the marine heat waves do impact the seabirds over time. The study found die-offs occurred more frequently following heat waves. In one particular case, the researchers found a sequence of die-offs 1 to 6 months and 10 to 16 months in the California Current, a marine ecosystem, after three prolonged marine heat waves.

“We find a dramatic delayed effect,” Julia Parrish, co-author and a professor of aquatic and fishery sciences at the University of Washington and executive director of the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team (COASST), said in a news release. “A warmer ocean, and certainly a suddenly warmer ocean as happens during an El Niño or a marine heat wave, will result in the death of hundreds of thousands to millions of marine birds within one to 6 months of the temperature increase.”

The study authors have previously found links from warming ocean waters to die-offs in specific seabird species, such as common murres and Cassin’s auklets. The higher water temperatures cause changes to the availability of the birds’ prey, the previous studies found.

The most recent research takes a more general look at 106 different species around over 1,000 beaches. Seabirds started washing ashore usually a few months after a marine heat wave began, according to the data. Murres, puffins, auklets and shearwaters were among the most impacted species.

The die-offs happened for many reasons, such as algal blooms, diseases and starvation, all of which were linked to marine heat waves. Some of the worst massive die-offs, with more than 250,000 bird deaths, occurred about once per decade, except from 2014 to 2019, which had five massive mortality events.

“This is unprecedented,” lead author Timothy Jones, a University of Washington research scientist in aquatic and fishery sciences, said in a statement. “This type of massive die-off can be compared to a catastrophic storm that we would usually expect once per decade; they happen, causing massive damage, but usually there is enough time for areas to recover.” 

But in recent years, there’s less recovery time before another marine heat wave leads to massive damage. The study warns that with increasingly warming oceans, there could be more severe mortality events. Already this year, ocean surface temperatures reached a record high, and El Niño could bring more record-breaking temperatures.

The post Seabird Die-Offs Linked to Marine Heat Waves appeared first on EcoWatch.

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How air pollution and the housing crisis are connected

This story was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

As wildfire smoke from Canada plagued parts of the United States for the second time this summer, expanding into parts of the Midwest and East Coast, cities were caught unprepared. While a few put out alerts, outreach was limited. 

People walked through the smoke, often with little understanding of the health risks. Once the risks were clear, some people donned masks to prevent lung damage. But when the smoke — and the clear presence of danger — receded, they left the masks behind. 

That’s easy enough for people who have a place to call home. But for people who are homeless, either living in a shelter or on the sidewalk, they often have to navigate confusing rules and regulations to receive the type of help they need. 

Additionally, for unhoused people, dangerous air isn’t just a threat during an air quality crisis — it’s an everyday occurrence. People who are unsheltered are the most at risk, living under highway overpasses or closer to industrial areas, which means their exposure to air pollution is 24/7 and not just for a few days.

In Chicago, unhoused people living in a green space adjacent to a highway overpass were taken aback by the smoke from Canadian wildfires. One resident is worried about how the once-novel event might be the latest in a terrifying “new normal.”

“It was normal on the West Coast and now they have Canadian wildfires up here, now the Midwest is going to be, like, normalized with wildfire [smoke],” said Jared Wilson, 23. 

Wilson lives with asthma and has used an inhaler since he was a child. He describes Chicago’s air as being consistently polluted, even before the wildfire smoke rolled in. A recent Guardian analysis placed the city third overall for worst air quality in the U.S. mostly due to truck and car traffic on the city’s South and West sides. 

For Joe Muro, 44, a recent transplant also living close to the highway overpass, wildfires are nothing new. He did not expect the smoke to follow from Colorado, where he lived through the destructive Marshall Fire in the winter of 2021

According to Muro, volunteers came by to offer masks and water to folks living in tents in the area. But he does not recall the good samaritans as being affiliated with a city agency or partner. 

Everything about the air quality crisis was exacerbated by climate change, from the fires themselves to the weather pattern that blew the smoke directly down the East Coast, according to Kristie Ebi, a professor of global health at the University of Washington. 

Though the smoke has cleared again, the U.S. could see another repeat of it, as long as the fires continue to burn — and unhoused people will be the ones most affected, according to advocates. 

“With any natural disaster, we emphasize that people experiencing homelessness experience it first, they experience it worst, and they generally experience it longest,” said Katie League, a behavioral health manager at the National Healthcare for the Homeless Council. “Particularly those who are living outside all the time, they don’t have dependable resources.”

Highway overpasses or places adjacent to industrial areas can be safe havens for people experiencing homelessness, since they might provide freedom from displacement or harassment from police or other residents.  

But those places expose vulnerable people to dangerous air pollutants, and they have few provisions to help them address health issues that might arise. A 2022 study from the Cleveland Clinic found that in Visalia, California, more than 60 percent of unhoused people surveyed often spent time adjacent to roadways –– where their exposure to particulate matter and other air pollutants was constant. Researchers noted that existing equipment probably could not capture the full extent of the pollution people are exposed to when they reside next to a roadway. 

One of the main pollutants found in both wildfire smoke and car pollution is called fine particulate matter. PM 2.5, another name for fine particulate matter, is smaller in size than most other types of air pollution, which means that it can bypass your body’s defense system. It can burrow deep into your lungs and even get into your bloodstream, causing all sorts of short- and long-term health issues like asthma, COPD, and heart disease along the way. 

“There is emerging evidence that the particulate matter that comes from wildfires could be more toxic than the particulate matter that comes from, for example, exhaust [pipes],” said Ebi. 

Air pollutants from wildfire smoke can be more dangerous than regular contaminants because wildfires can burn beyond forests into residential and commercial areas. When those wildfires burn, they can clear almost anything in their path, including plastics, synthetic fibers, steel components, and other materials. Those substances eventually end up in the smoke along with wood particles from forests, creating a particularly toxic combination.

As the climate crisis intensifies, unhoused people could be exposed to even more dangerous conditions with long-term effects. In a 2020 study from the University of Utah, researchers found that nearly 90 percent of people in Salt Lake County experiencing homelessness sought out medical attention for a condition associated with air pollution. 

If homeless people do have access to shelter, they are often dependent on a wide array of systems that may or may not be responsive to their needs. Shelters might only be open certain hours, or have certain requirements. Additionally, families might need to separate to be allowed into certain shelters — putting parents in a difficult situation. 

Other cities expanded hours for shelters and handed out masks to try to help people through the crisis. In Philadelphia, the city opened a shelter in an area where none had existed before. In Baltimore, the city expanded the time that people could be in shelters, as well as coordinated outreach to unhoused people through a program from the mayor’s office.

“It is a coordinated response. And so we identify who was at greatest risk, either based on their living situation, because they were unsafely housed, as well as individuals who the city employs that have to work outdoors,” said Dr. Leticia Dzirasa, deputy mayor for equity, health, and human services in Baltimore. 

But part of the issue is a lack of resources to initiate a response when events like these happen, according to Dzirasa.

While air quality in the United States has markedly improved since the 1980s, not everyone gets the benefit. Communities of color are often disproportionately exposed to poor air quality because of decades of racist zoning policies that disadvantaged non-white and immigrant neighborhoods, often forcing them to live closer to industry. 

In a similar vein, homeless people often find safety from the elements in the high traffic, centrally-located areas under highway overpasses, which also provide a steady stream of air pollutants. These two issues are often affecting the same group of people, since Black and Latino people are more likely to experience homelessness than their white counterparts

Planning is key, said Ebi, who noted that any early warning system needs to include everyone, including the unhoused. 

Longer-term hazards, like vehicular or industrial pollution, also pose an ongoing threat to people’s health. Although there are numerous solutions to limit exposures, including opening up cooling centers, expanding shelter access, and paying hotels to rent out space for people.

There’s only one that is truly effective for Sean Read, vice president of regional programs at Friendship Place, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit focused on providing services for homeless people. 

 “The answer is: We need more housing,” said Read.

This story has been updated to include Sean Read’s correct job title.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How air pollution and the housing crisis are connected on Jul 7, 2023.

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Here are the chances your water supply is contaminated by PFAS

Nearly half of the United States’ water supply is contaminated with “forever chemicals” — per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances also known as PFAS. That’s according to a new study from the U.S. Geological Survey. 

Between 2016 and 2021, federal scientists tested tap water from public supply sites and private wells across the U.S., and in territories including Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Those tests revealed PFAS contamination in almost 45 percent of the faucets tested. 

PFAS cause a wide variety of health impacts, such as developmental delays in children, bone irregularities, behavioral changes, and interference with the body’s ability to produce hormones. They can also cause an increased risk of cancers. Research has shown that certain PFAS have been found in the blood streams of humans and animals and can remain in the body for years. 

A synthetic chemical used to resist grease, oil, water, and heat, PFAS were first introduced in the 1940s and are used in a wide range of products including clothing items, carpeting, cleaning products, paints, fire-fighting foams, cookware, and food packaging and processing equipment. Their widespread use has caused a lasting presence in air, water and soil, and because PFAS take over 1,000 years to degrade, they have earned the nickname “forever chemicals.”

The federal study found that urban areas are more at risk than rural areas for PFAS contamination, finding the substances in about 70 percent of urban areas compared to 8 percent of rural areas. It also found that PFAS may be more common in the Great Plains, Great Lakes, Eastern Seaboard, and Central and Southern California regions. 

Last month, chemical and manufacturing company 3M and a large coalition of U.S. cities and towns reached a $10.3 billion settlement over the company’s use of PFAS. The settlement occurred after thousands of plaintiffs sued 3M for allegedly contaminating municipal drinking water supplies with PFAS for decades, despite knowing as early as the 1970s that the chemicals were harmful to human and environmental health.

Federal regulators have proposed that companies report to consumers whether their products contain PFAS. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, estimates that compliance would cost the chemical and semiconductor industries about $1 billion annually, though the sectors generate about $500 billion per year. 

The EPA in March proposed the first federal drinking water limits on six forms of PFAS, but a final decision is not expected until later this year.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Here are the chances your water supply is contaminated by ‘forever chemicals’ on Jul 7, 2023.

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Offshore wind just got its biggest boost yet

The Biden administration has approved what will be the nation’s largest offshore wind farm, a sprawling 98-turbine complex that is sure to boost a burgeoning energy sector widely seen as essential to reaching the nation’s climate goals.

The new Ocean Wind 1 project, developed by the Danish energy company Ørsted, will be built about 15 miles off the coast of New Jersey and generate 1,100 megawatts of electricity — enough to power 380,000 homes. It is the third proposal of its kind approved by the Biden administration, following Vineyard Wind off the coast of Massachusetts and South Fork Wind east of Long Island, New York. 

“Since Day One, the Biden-Harris administration has worked to jump-start the offshore wind industry across the country,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in a press release announcing Wednesday’s decision. “Today’s approval for the Ocean Wind 1 project is another milestone in our efforts to create good-paying union jobs while combating climate change and powering our nation.”

The project advanced despite significant controversy over offshore wind development in the last year. Some Republican lawmakers argue the industry will harm tourism, and they blame it for a recent spate of whale deaths. But officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration say there is no evidence linking the fatalities to offshore turbines. The federal agency instead points to other, more likely causes, such as climate change and collisions with ships. 

Congressional Republicans and local nonprofits opposed to these projects have launched campaigns and lawsuits to halt their development — many of them backed by oil and gas companies. Fast Company traced funding for efforts to stop Vineyard Wind and other offshore wind projects to the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the Caesar Rodney Institute. Both receive money from the likes of ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Koch industries.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration calls offshore wind a key source of clean energy and jobs as the nation transitions off fossil fuels. President Biden has set a national goal of installing 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030, enough to power 10 million homes. The federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management hopes to review 16 projects by 2025. 

Department of Energy officials say expanding the sector will take advantage of the stronger, more consistent winds that blow over seas, where the rapidly maturing technology produces more electricity per turbine than onshore farms. While the U.S. only has two up and running, one near Rhode Island and the other off the coast of Virginia, the United Kingdom, China, Germany, and other nations heavily rely on them. 

The federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management estimates that during its development and three years of construction, Ocean Wind 1 will create more than 3,000 jobs. Along the Gulf coast, the offshore wind industry has already become an “economic lifeline” for workers displaced from the declining oil and gas sector. According to the Department of Energy, an offshore operation in the Gulf could create 4,500 jobs

Ocean Wind 1 is expected to become operational by late 2024 or early 2025. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Offshore wind just got its biggest boost yet on Jul 7, 2023.

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