sustainability

Drones that fly packages straight to people’s doors could be an environmentally friendly alternative to conventional modes of transportation. A study comparing the environmental impact of various ‘last-mile’ delivery methods — which take a package on the final leg of its journey — finds that greenhouse-gas emissions per parcel were 84% lower for drones than for diesel trucks. Drones also consumed up to 94% less energy per parcel than did the trucks. The research, published on 5 August in the journal Patterns, indicates…

Jim Lovelock (never ‘James’) is remembered as the father of the Gaia hypoth-esis: the idea that Earth is a self-regulating living organism. Few accepted his argument that this should be elevated to the status of a theory, even though it generated predictions about environ-mental changes that were borne out by subsequent observations. As a heuristic model, however, Gaia profoundly influenced thinking about the environment and how we interact with it, giving rise to the field of Earth-system studies. Lovelock was primarily…

Discarded electronics are piling up fast, pushing researchers to explore creative ways to reduce the resulting trash, known as e-waste. Now one team has crafted a water-activated disposable battery made of paper and other sustainable materials. The wires, screens and batteries that make up our devices—not to mention the plastic, metal and other materials that encase them—are filling up landfills with hazardous debris. Some e-waste is relatively large: old flip phones, air conditioners and radios, to name just a few…

In the U.S., people eat more protein than they need to. And though it might not be bad for human health, this excess does pose a problem for the country’s waterways. The nation’s wastewater is laden with the leftovers from protein digestion: nitrogen compounds that can feed toxic algal blooms and pollute the air and drinking water. This source of nitrogen pollution even rivals that from fertilizers washed off of fields growing food crops, new research suggests. When we overconsume protein—whether it comes from lentils,…

As England, Spain and huge swaths of the U.S. deal with record-shattering high temperatures, the time has come to stop looking at heat and heat waves as temporary inconveniences. As the climate warms, heat waves have become longer, more frequent and more deadly, at their worst killing thousands of people. With warnings that people are unsafe in houses without cooling systems, or that train tracks will buckle, and power and water systems will be compromised, we need to examine how well our infrastructures—the systems we’ve…

More than nine in 10 Singapore businesses believe it is important to integrate sustainability objectives into their overall business strategy, but 56% do not have well-defined sustainability goals in place. Some 49% cite aligning these with their business goals as the main challenge, while 47% point to a lack of expertise. Just 14% were in the advanced stage of rolling out sustainability strategies, according to a study released Tuesday by NTUC LearningHub, which polled 200 business leaders in Singapore. The local…

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Heat waves are becoming supercharged as the climate changes – lasting longer, becoming more frequent and getting just plain hotter. One question a lot of people are asking is: “When will it get too hot for normal daily activity as we know it, even for young, healthy adults?” The answer goes beyond the temperature you see on the thermometer. It’s also about humidity. Our research shows the…

Are you looking for your next developer role? Well, you might want to consider a gig at a company aiming to make the world a better place.  Research commissioned by Ordnance Survey revealed that sustainability projects are an increasing area of focus for software developers. That’s because they offer job satisfaction, higher pay, and unique problem-solving opportunities.  The research surveyed 500 developers who have worked on projects in sustainable development, energy, natural resources,…

The most recent reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change experts have made two things clear: One, any hope of avoiding catastrophic climate change requires dramatically reducing the use of fossil fuels. And two, doing this is a political challenge, not a scientific one. Technologies that can reduce emissions exist now; what is absent is the political will to do so. The deep political opposition to reducing fossil-fuel reliance is the direct result of decades of efforts by the fuel industry to sow climate…

For millennia, many animals and plants have coped with occasional climate changes by moving into new areas. But humans’ relatively recent burning of fossil fuels is pushing global temperatures upward at an exceptionally rapid rate, placing many species on what a new book by science journalist Benjamin von Brackel notes has been called an “escalator to extinction”—and raising the question of whether migration can save them this time. It is estimated that land-dwelling animals are now moving toward the poles at a rate of an…