planet pioneers

MOSELEY'S LOVE FOR caves began on a family camping trip to Cheddar, Somerset, when she was 12 years old. When an opportunity came up to take a guided tour of some local caves, she made her first foray into the dim, labyrinthine underbelly of the earth’s crust. Crawling about in the muck, she was instantly hooked: she started saving the money from her paper round so that on future holidays to Somerset she could disappear into those caves once more. “I just absolutely loved it,” Moseley says. “Other people might get the…

Concrete: upon this rock-like composite we have built our church – and our houses, roads, bridges, skyscrapers, and factories. As a species we consume more than 4.1 billion tonnes of the stuff every year, more than any other material except water. (You’re almost certainly sitting or standing on it right now.) That’s a problem, because concrete – and in particular cement, concrete’s key ingredient – is catastrophic for the environment. The cement industry alone generates 2.8bn tonnes of CO2 every year, more than any…

The large marsh grasshopper was once ever-present across Eastern England’s wetlands. But after decades of habitat destruction, these handsome insects are now fragmented and locally extinct, holding out in the wettest fens, valleys, and peat bogs of the New Forest and Dorset.Now, London-based Citizen Zoo is trying to bring them back—and it’s planning to do it by turning regular people into zookeepers. Reintroducing the grasshoppers to restored wetland sites across their historic range can bring huge benefits to ecosystems…

It’s a sweltering summer in Australia, and the corals on the Great Barrier Reef are showing early signs of stress. The authority that manages the largest coral reef system in the world is expecting another bleaching event in the coming weeks—if that happens, it will be the sixth time since 1998 that spikes in water temperatures wipe out swathes of corals that are home to countless marine animals. Three of these bleaching events, which make corals more susceptible to disease and death, have happened in the last six years…

In 2020, EVTEC installed five charging stations outside Islington Town Hall in London, and the company will launch another trial with Swiss car-sharing provider Mobility later this year using 50 Honda electric cars. Since the cars are reserved or used via a booking system, the software developers can clearly define and control when a charging station taps the surplus electricity and when not.It has already been proven that bidirectional chargers can save users money. A consortium including energy company OVO Energy and…

London had a problem. In 2016, more than 2 million of the city’s residents—roughly a quarter of its population—lived in areas with illegal levels of air pollution; areas that also contained nearly 500 of the city’s schools. That same air pollution was prematurely killing as many as 36,000 people a year. Much of it was coming from transport: a quarter of the city’s carbon emissions were from moving people and goods, with three-quarters of that emitted by road traffic.But in the years since, carbon emissions have fallen.…

Powered by solar energy, these bores have had just as much effect as the original breaching of the bund, but they’re not subject to the same climatic vicissitudes. As a result, the saltwater wetlands are flourishing.“Before the bores, the wetlands were more than half-infested in weeds,” says Kennedy from BirdLife Australia. Now, tens of thousands of native blue water lilies bloom, and bird life is flourishing. Latham’s snipe and the sharp-tailed sandpiper—both species under threat—are thriving in the swamp. One of the…

Europe is slowly catching up, both in terms of battery production and recycling, with car manufacturers leading the charge to reclaim the valuable materials.The IEA forecasts that recycling could meet up to 12 percent of the EV industry’s demand for lithium, nickel, copper and cobalt by 2040.The Volkswagen Group—which includes Audi, Porsche and other brands—is recycling up to 3,600 batteries a year during a pilot phase at its new plant in Salzgitter, northern Germany. Mineral processors are also showing interest in…

As a carbon sink, seagrass has other advantages too. It’s unlikely to catch fire and release large quantities of carbon back into the atmosphere at once, for example. But it is vulnerable to other threats. Increased coastal erosion can muddy the waters, making it more difficult for Posidonia to photosynthesize. Cruise ships dropping anchor can cause untold damage. And, of course, bottom-trawlers can ravage thousand-year-old meadows in a matter of minutes. Drag-net trawling causes most damage to the plant itself, says José…

There is an insidious irony to climate change: as it gets hotter, more and more people are cranking up their air conditioners, which in turn contributes to global warming. Air conditioner (AC) sales are booming worldwide, especially in emerging economies such as China, India and Indonesia where rising incomes make them more affordable and a warmer, more humid climate a necessity. The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts that around two thirds of the world’s households could have an AC by 2050, and the demand for…