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The Sustainable Development Goals are 17 targets set by the United Nations including ending poverty, reducing inequality and tackling climate change. The goals are all interlinked because we are one globalised species living on one planet. Climate change is expected to have its greatest impacts on the poorest and most vulnerable communities, so is closely linked to reducing inequality and tackling poverty.

Climate change is a global problem that does not respect national borders. We need to work together as a global community. The Sustainable Development Goals are an internationally binding agreement by the 194 United Nations member states. While the goals are not legally binding, they are being implemented in national-level policies, and many businesses and communities are responding positively to them. The outcomes will be assessed in 2030.

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How does Climate Change relate to the Sustainable Development Goals?

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How does Climate Change relate to the Sustainable Development Goals?

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Climate change doesn’t just threaten the Earth System, it could also undermine the Sustainable Development Goals. Rising sea levels will flood cities and result in migration. Global warming increases the threat of invasive pest species to agriculture and the spread of disease. Ocean acidification threatens the health of coral reefs and may compromise the fisheries that depend on them.

Climate change is already impacting public health, food and water security, migration, peace and security. Climate change, left unchecked, will roll back the development gains we have made over the last decades and will make further gains impossible.

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In this course, we will look more closely at four of the Sustainable Development Goals:

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In this course, we will look more closely at four of the Sustainable Development Goals:

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13 – Climate action

14 – Life below water

15 – Life on land

11 – Sustainable cities and communities
https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/

© University of Exeter

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Climate Change Science: A quick background

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Climate Change Science: A quick background

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To be able to identify viable solutions to global environmental threats, we first need to understand the nature of those threats. If you are familiar with the basic science of Climate Change, please feel free to skip this step.

Earth is surrounded by a thin layer of gases - the atmosphere - that stops some of Earth’s heat energy radiating out to space and sends it back down to the surface. Therefore the atmosphere acts like a blanket by trapping heat energy in. So-called ‘greenhouse gases’, such as carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane (CH₄) and water vapour play a key role in maintaining this blanket. Without it, Earth would be about -18˚C! The problem is that human activity is producing greenhouse gases. Much of our everyday life involves burning fossil fuels, which released carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, making the blanket thicker. This results in global warming.

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Climate change is more than just global warming. About one-third of our carbon dioxide emissions are absorbed by the oceans, where they react with seawater to form a weak acid. This results in ocean acidification, a lowering of the ocean’s pH. Furthermore, the oceans are becoming warmer as they absorb much of the extra heat energy being trapped by the atmosphere. This extra heat initially goes into the surface ocean, where for example it can supply more energy to hurricanes, making these storms more ferocious. The acidity and extra heat is also slowly being mixed down into the deep ocean, with worrying implications for ecosystems and habitats that we know very little about, such as deep sea coral reefs.

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climate change is starting to change precipitation

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climate change is starting to change precipitation

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Back on land, climate change is starting to change precipitation (rain or snowfall) patterns. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, and extreme precipitation events are getting more frequent in some regions. Also, the melting of sea-ice surrounding Greenland means more moisture can be picked up and transported to the centre of the Greenland ice sheet and deposited as snowfall there. However, other land regions are getting drier thanks to warming and changes in atmospheric circulation. For example, severe droughts have hit the Amazon rainforest - in 2005, 2010 and again in 2015/6. The Mediterranean is also suffering worsening droughts.

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We can look back at the Earth’s history to know that what we’re seeing today is unprecedented. The rock record allows us to reconstruct the Earth’s climate history - nearly all 4.5 billion years of it. For the last 800,000 years, ice cores record changes in the climate and the composition of the atmosphere. Tree rings and pollen records help identify natural variability in recent millennia. By comparing what we know about normal variability in the climate system to what we’ve observed over the last century we can establish that the climate change we’re seeing today is a) occurring at an unprecedented rate and b) caused by human activity.

All parts of the world will be affected in some way by climate change. The Arctic is one of the fastest warming places and sea-ice cover is declining year on year. Glaciers of the Greenland ice sheet and Antarctic peninsula are accelerating and retreating at rates never before seen. Desert expansion is affecting agricultural land in Africa. By the end of this century, sea-level rise will threaten hundreds of millions of people in low-lying cities and countries, including Bangladesh, Bangkok and New York. If you think it won’t happen any time soon, remember the events of Hurricane Sandy, when much of Manhattan was flooded by this extreme event.

This course is here to present some of the solutions to the impacts of climate change. One thing is clear though - human greenhouse gas emissions need to be rapidly reduced and stopped by mid-century to avoid some of the most dangerous impacts that climate change could throw at us.

© University of Exeter

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Our capacity to respond to climate change varies depending on where we live, our income, national politics and other factors. There’s no right or wrong way to respond, but in this step we’ll introduce you to the three main ways.

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https://www.drawdown.org/solutions

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Now you’ve learnt about the key responses to climate change (mitigation, adaptation and geoengineering), take a look at some case studies where each has been applied.

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There are many ways to keep greenhouse gas emissions below a level that prevents dangerous climate change. China - the world’s largest polluter - pledged in the 2015 Paris accord that by 2030, they would peak their carbon dioxide emissions, and reduce carbon dioxide intensity by 60-65% from the 2005 level. They also agreed to increase forest stocks to strengthen their carbon sink. To achieve this, they have outlined a number of mitigation strategies:

Introduce a cap-and-trade programme for carbon emissions. This builds upon similar systems in the US and EU.

Increase the use of renewable energy with investment in many options across the sector, including hydropower, solar and wind.

Ban the burning of coal in some provinces and, across the nation, reduce the reliance on coal as an energy source. China have also introduced a cap on the amount of coal use after 2020.

Introducing new building codes and electrical appliance regulations to ensure maximum energy efficiency.

This highlights that no single policy can be employed when introducing a national mitigation strategy. The combination of all of these policies will help China reach its commitments from the 2015 Paris accord.

Global change in forest area 1990 - 2015 shows China’s enthusiasm towards afforestation schemes recently. Source: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2015, Global Forest Resources Assessment, FAO, Rome. Reproduced with permission.

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The Mekong Delta in Vietnam is low-lying and vulnerable to the effects of sea-level rise. Over 17 million people live in the Mekong Delta and may be impacted by future change. Vietnamese governments and local residents are facing a choice: accept that the Mekong delta will flood or hard engineer to protect low-lying land. Hard engineering can preserve the delta, and is currently being used in the form of dykes and sluice gates to manage salinity changes in the river. But if hard engineering solutions fail, then the knock-on impacts will be even more devastating as locals wouldn’t have had the time to prepare. Hard engineering solutions are also expensive, intrusive and difficult to construct across such a large area.

Instead, the Vietnamese government has been focusing on different ways to prepare in the form of social adaptation.

Buying seeds from local farmers to ensure they can maintain an income and livelihood, even if their crops are destroyed by flooding

Using water more sustainably and efficiently. Next week, we’ll introduce you to how using resources more efficiently in agriculture can help improve food security

Committing to community outreach work, to increase the awareness of the problems and how individuals can help themselves

Diversifying incomes and jobs. Move the region away from one that relies solely on agriculture and training locals in new skills so they are not hit economically by sea-level rise

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Whilst you might think that geoengineering is a long way off, the technology to store carbon dioxide underground is already well established. The Sleipner carbon dioxide storage project has been going since 1996. It has the capacity to store around 1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year into deep geological stores around 200km off the coast of Norway. It was built to reduce the CO₂ content of natural gas that was being extracted in the area to meet EU regulations. The carbon dioxide is injected via wells into a sandstone reservoir below the sea floor, at a depth of 800-1,100m below sea-level. Over its lifetime, it has prevented the release of 16.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

Currently under construction, the Alberta Carbon Trunk Line, USA, will be the largest carbon capture and storage facility in the world, with the capacity to store 14.6 million tonnes of CO₂ each year. But instead of injecting the gas into deep rock, it will be injected into oil reservoirs underground to enhance the recovery of oil, which will then be used. This means the whole process includes some greenhouse gas emissions.

To achieve a true geoengineering solution to climate change these proven carbon capture and storage technologies need to be linked to a process that removes CO₂ from the atmosphere.

© University of Exeter

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The effects of global environmental problems are often felt at the local scale. Scale is an important concept in understanding both the problem and the potential solutions. In this activity, we’d like you to consider responses to climate change at a local scale - near you.

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Over the next series of articles, we’ll present arguments for and against three approaches to meeting energy demands. Firstly, we’ll start with nuclear energy. This remains a controversial choice of sustainable energy generation, but which side will you agree with at the end?

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Introducing the debatePower generated from nuclear fission (fusion is still currently not viable), can generate electricity 24/7 without producing harmful greenhouse gas emissions – unlike fossil fuel burning. The chimneys you’ll see at a nuclear plant are only releasing water vapour. That’s not to say it is completely clean energy, as small amounts of nuclear waste are produced that can take hundreds of thousands of years to decay. Safety is also a concern for residents nearby nuclear plants, given the catastrophic nature of accidents (in the extremely unlikely event they do occur). This website provides a nice (balanced) introduction to nuclear energy. Interestingly, public perception of nuclear energy remains divided. In Britain, a survey found that:“concern about climate change and energy security will only increase acceptance of nuclear power under limited circumstances—specifically once other (preferred) options have been exhausted.” Corner et al, 2011

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Introducing the debatePower generated from nuclear fission (fusion is still currently not viable), can generate electricity 24/7 without producing harmful greenhouse gas emissions – unlike fossil fuel burning. The chimneys you’ll see at a nuclear plant are only releasing water vapour. That’s not to say it is completely clean energy, as small amounts of nuclear waste are produced that can take hundreds of thousands of years to decay. Safety is also a concern for residents nearby nuclear plants, given the catastrophic nature of accidents (in the extremely unlikely event they do occur). This website provides a nice (balanced) introduction to nuclear energy. Interestingly, public perception of nuclear energy remains divided. In Britain, a survey found that:“concern about climate change and energy security will only increase acceptance of nuclear power under limited circumstances—specifically once other (preferred) options have been exhausted.” Corner et al, 2011

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The Sun is a nuclear fusion reactor, which means that we all depend on nuclear energy in a profound way. In order to move away from fossil fuels, there must be a viable alternative for producing ‘base load’ electricity. This is the minimum continuous supply of an electricity grid. When modelling zero-carbon energy generation this century, we typically assume that nuclear power is an essential part of the energy mix. In some scenarios, nuclear power is responsible for up to half of energy production. There is enough natural nuclear energy in the world to meet this demand and it could be built fast enough with international co-operation. This requires a global effort, as well as acceptance from individuals and changing societal perceptions. But, in theory, according to enthusiast Barry Brook, ‘there are no technical, economic or fuel-related limitations‘ for nuclear fission.

Nuclear power plants produce no greenhouse gases (aside from what is required for their construction) and provide a constant, stable supply of electricity. This contrasts with renewables such as wind and solar that depend on variable weather patterns to generate electricity. For the quantity of energy they produce, the financial costs associated with nuclear power plants are decreasing.

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Despite the rigorous safety mechanisms that nuclear power plants must employ, they are not immune to natural disasters, as the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that struck the Fukushima plant in Japan showed. Less obvious, but more insidious, is a historical tie between civil nuclear energy generation and military nuclear capability. For some, a completely nuclear free world is the safest path to reducing future political confrontations.

Nuclear energy can only contribute ‘base load’ electricity – it cannot respond to peaks in demand. This base load can be provided by alternatives, such as fossil fuel power stations equipped with carbon capture and storage technology. There are a number of other concerns about nuclear energy. This includes the high environmental cost of searching for, extracting and transporting uranium, ‘lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions‘, rising costs, and safety issues. There are also issues around the disposal of environmental waste and the high relative costs of construction and operation of nuclear plants.

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Hydraulic fracturing (fracking) has been around since the 1950s and is used across North America to extract natural gas.

The process of fracking involves drilling deep into shale rock to reach untapped reserves of natural gas in very small cracks. Drills can move horizontally so natural gas can be extracted many miles away from a fracking site. Water, sand and other materials are pumped into the hole to open the cracks in the rock, allowing the natural gas to flow out and be used.

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Proponents of fracking argue that it has helped to secure a reliable source of natural gas in North America, and this technology could be applied to areas such as the UK, South Africa and New Zealand. The US and Canada benefit from around 100 years of gas security because of fracking. For the consumer, a plentiful supply of gas drives down prices, as well as creating jobs.

The horizontal drilling mechanism can allow areas of natural beauty such as National Parks to be protected, by extracting the gas beneath them with no visible effects on the surface. Difficult-to-reach areas such as beneath the sea could also be reached from land with this technology. Furthermore, the burning of the gas itself produces roughly half the carbon dioxide emissions of coal burning.

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Despite the reduced carbon dioxide emissions, there are significant pollutants involved elsewhere in the fracking process. The natural gas itself, which is mostly methane, has been found to leak in the production process, and as a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, is more important to keep control of. The enormous volume of water, and the infrastructure used to pump it below ground, requires transporting and maintaining at the expense of further carbon dioxide emissions.

There are also legitimate concerns surrounding the leakage of contaminated water into conventional groundwater supplies that are often used as drinking water. This is usually dealt with by sealing the pipe with concrete in the upper portion, but leaks could still occur. Furthermore, public health concerns have been raised about some of the chemicals pumped to keep the cracks open - the details of which are not always fully disclosed.

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Are you for fracking or against it? What if large shale gas deposits were found beneath your home, would you then be for or against fracking them? With all proposed energy solutions it is worth considering whether you would be a NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard!) or a YIMBY (Yes in My Back Yard!).

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Fracking can release untapped natural gas reserves, providing a relatively cheap and easy to transport source of energy, with less carbon dioxide emissions than coal burning. But, when suggestions of methane release are taken into account, it’s role as part of a zero carbon economy could be questioned.https://bg.copernicus.org/articles/16/3033/2019/#section3

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On the 7th June 2017, renewables – for the first time ever – briefly generated more than 50% of the UK’s electricity. This is nothing new for some countries, with Paraguay, Iceland and Norway producing more than 98% of electricity with renewables. So are they the future?

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There are a vast array of renewable energy sources – hydropower, wind energy, solar energy and biofuels to name a few. They’re decreasing in cost and increasing in popularity, but not every country is able to exploit their full potential. Some, such as Brazil, are able to capitalize on their natural resources very well, while others don’t have such luck. For some renewable technologies, their use remains controversial and ‘green status’ somewhat questionable.

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River damming is the reason why some countries are able to generate close to 100% of their electricity capacity with renewables. A single hydropower plant can generate more electricity than 1000 wind turbines. With the exception of the energy used to build the dam and power station, the technology is free of greenhouse gas emissions. But, the land required to produce a reservoir big enough can be hundreds, if not thousands of square kilometers. In Brazil, the Belo Monte dam will flood virgin Amazonian forest. In China, the Three Gorges Dam resulted in the displacement of a million people. Flooded vegetation and soil at the bottom of the reservoir can decompose to release methane gas – each molecule of which traps 25 times more heat energy than carbon dioxide.

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The decreasing cost of solar panels means that it is becoming an increasingly viable alternative to fossil fuels. The panels are becoming more efficient and sophisticated, with tracking mechanisms to follow the sun to improve their output. Solar farms can be built on less productive land, such as Solar Star farm – built in the Californian desert. But when there’s no sun, they stop working. At night, when electricity demand can peak, solar power cannot help - unless it has been stored from the day using batteries or some other form of storage technology (e.g. pumping water uphill which is later released to generate hydropower). For private homeowners looking to put solar panels on their roofs, the upfront cost can be very high – although in the long-run there’s a big financial saving

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Wind farms are also becoming more popular as the price of the turbines decreases. Growth is largely in off-shore wind farms, partly because of a strong NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard!) reaction to onshore wind farms. Wind turbines produce electricity whenever sufficient wind is blowing, unlike solar, but are unable to respond to peaks in demand or at times of low wind. Onshore wind farms typically make good use of land and offshore wind farms can also often be situated close to large cities, thus reducing the cost and inefficiency of transmission. The London Array is the largest offshore wind farm in the world and is under 100km from London. However, expansion was stopped due to the impact on migratory birds that can be killed by the turbines.

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ou’ve now had the chance to explore three potential solutions to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions associated with energy generation: Nuclear Power, Fracking and Renewables. In this step, we’d like you to share your thoughts on what you think is the best option (or could it be a mix of all three, or something we haven’t mentioned?)

In considering a solution to making energy more sustainable, think about:

Its economic viability,

The political ramifications,

Where / when can the energy be produced?

Post your thoughts in the comments below, or you can expand your answer in a blog post. Don’t forget to ‘like’ comments and reply to create some discussion about the solutions - but remember everybody will have different viewpoints - and energy can come from a diversity of sources.

© University of Exeter

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How did you find the first week? We’ve looked at what the key responses are to climate change and how the sustainable development goals relate to climate action. Finally, we applied this to the energy sector to look for an alternative to fossil fuels.

Let’s relate this back to the Sustainable Development Goal we’re focusing on. The United Nations say that the key targets of ‘Climate Action’ are:

Strengthen resilience and adaptive capacity to climate-related hazards and natural disasters in all countries,

Integrate climate change measures into national policies,

Improve education and awareness-raising,

$100 billion annual commitment until 2020 for developing countries to create meaningful mitigation actions.

Next week, we’ll relate ‘Climate Action’ to ‘Life on Land’ - how agricultural systems can be made more sustainable and how we can help our forests do the hard work for us.

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We hope you’ve enjoyed Week 1 of Climate Change: Solutions! In this step, we’ll run through some of the common questions and queries from the theme of ‘Climate Action’.

Let us know your feedback in the comment section, or ask any follow up questions here. If you are blogging along with the course, post a link to your blog post below too.

© University of Exeter

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How did you find the first week? We’ve looked at what the key responses are to climate change and how the sustainable development goals relate to climate action. Finally, we applied this to the energy sector to look for an alternative to fossil fuels.

Let’s relate this back to the Sustainable Development Goal we’re focusing on. The United Nations say that the key targets of ‘Climate Action’ are:

Strengthen resilience and adaptive capacity to climate-related hazards and natural disasters in all countries,

Integrate climate change measures into national policies,

Improve education and awareness-raising,

$100 billion annual commitment until 2020 for developing countries to create meaningful mitigation actions.

Next week, we’ll relate ‘Climate Action’ to ‘Life on Land’ - how agricultural systems can be made more sustainable and how we can help our forests do the hard work for us.

© University of Exeter

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Welcome to Week 2! This week we’ll explore another Sustainable Development Goal - Life on Land - and how it relates to climate change solutions.

In this video, Dr Tom Powell introduces you to some local ways to improving food security. This is important because climate change is a big threat to food security and global agriculture, but we can make important local contributions that have far reaching effects.

Once you’ve watched the video, let us know in the comments what solutions we’ve missed! What action can be taken at a local scale to improve global food security in the wake of climate change? What works in your locality?

© University of Exeter

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In 2016, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation reported that almost 800 million people were suffering from chronic undernourishment. Of these, 98.2% live in developing countries and areas that are likely to be hit hard by climate change. With growing population and changing diets, we need to double global food production by 2050.

What does a global solution look like?

Global solutions to food security first and foremost need to be sustainable. They need to be properly funded and ensure that the aid reaches the right people. Mitigating against climate change alongside on-the-ground aid will help ensure bigger problems such as desertification (the expansion of deserts) don’t take over. In this article, consider how each solution could be applied to different areas of the world to help provide global food security at all scales.

Reduce meat intake

Currently, we grow food that is then used to feed livestock and cattle that we then consume. Each stage in the food chain results in a massive loss of food energy. If we grew food on the same area of land to be consumed by humans, instead of animals, we could feed another 4 billion people. This is an enormous dietary lever, and a very simple way of improving food security. But, there are important cultural and political reasons why reducing meat intake may not be favorable across the world.
Reducing meat intake doesn’t need to mean going completely vegetarian. You could start by having meat-free Mondays and swapping red meats for chicken or tofu. Small positive changes all make a difference

Use water and fertilisers more efficiently

Around 60% of Nitrogen and 48% of Phosphorus that is added to crops to help them grow is in excess. This leads to pollution for nearby ecosystems, and nitrous oxide and methane emissions (which contribute to global warming). Growing rice and wheat consumes around 59% of all global irrigation too. There is significant regional variation in these statistics though, with China, India and the US the most ‘wasteful’ with fertilisers and water. Better farm management is an important way to improve global food security.

Reduce food waste

Globally, 30-50% of food is wasted. This varies hugely by region. In India approximately 3 calories per person per day is wasted, while the US wastes around 290 calories per person per day. If China, USA and India cut their food waste, over 400 million people could be fed. Some countries and supermarkets are beginning to introduce ‘wonky fruit and veg’ - consumables that are perfectly fine to eat, but may look less attractive. Look out for these the next time you shop to help cut food waste, and try not to buy more than you can eat.

Improving yield on existing land

Current yields from agricultural land are globally around 50% below their potential. Again this varies between regions, with the greatest potential for gains in Africa. But, climate change will change the potential to improve yields on existing land. This is why climate change and food security are so intrinsically linked - because a sustainable solution to food security has to work in a future climate when we’ll have 2 billion more mouths to feed.

Statistics in this article from West et al, 2014, Science.
https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/hunger/

© University of Exeter

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We’ve looked at some global solutions to food security in the face of climate change, but what can you do to help? In this step, we’d like you to research and present an idea for how you can help at a local scale. What action could you take to reduce the climate impact of your food?

When proposing and defending your solution, consider:

How easy is this to implement?

Are people likely to resist the change?

Is your idea applicable to somebody in a different country?

Use this as an opportunity to bring in material from outside of what we’ve presented so far too - perhaps you’d use genetically modified crops, for example. Once you’ve posted your idea, have a look through the comment section and begin a discussion with other learners about the feasibility of their solutions. Remember, the action you’re proposing to take should be at a local level and something that anybody could do.

© University of Exeter

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0:05Skip to 0 minutes and 5 secondsTom, thanks for welcoming me into your garden. You’ve outlined the great challenges of food security this century. But let’s talk a bit about the solutions and whether we can line up the solutions for climate change and for food production. Where can we start with that, especially as consumers? Yeah, so it sounds quite daunting, but the nice thing is that we’re all involved in the global food production system. We all eat food. And we actually have a huge amount of power as consumers to affect the impacts of the system. So we should start by eating less meat, for example. That would make a big dent, I guess, in demand. Absolutely.

0:45Skip to 0 minutes and 45 secondsWhen we eat products from animals, we only gain about 10% of the food energy that we originally fed to them. So cutting our consumption of animal products can have a hugely beneficial impact. And that’s good for those greenhouse gas emissions, as well as the land use footprint and the like. Yes. So a great survey last year found that a diet without any animal products in it had about half the carbon footprint of the average European meat-eaters’ diet. And even if you want to be less extreme than that, just eating no meat for one day a week could save the same carbon emissions as you would create by flying from London to Paris and back. Excellent. Meat-free Mondays.

1:29Skip to 1 minute and 29 secondsMeat-free Mondays for a year. And so that’s the choices we make as consumers. Other choices we’re making, though, we waste a lot of food in our homes, I guess, in this rich developing world that we enjoy. I mean, we can make a difference on that front, I guess. Yeah, we waste staggering amounts of food in the developed world. Globally, about a third or a half of all food that’s grown is ultimately thrown away. And here in our privileged society, most of that is down to us as consumers throwing it away at the end of a meal or throwing away food out of the fridge. Right.

2:05Skip to 2 minutes and 5 secondsSo we need to understand the difference between “best before” and “use by” on some of these products. And what do have we got here in terms of doing something creative with food waste? That’s something I’m also interested in is seeing some food waste streams are, of course, inevitable. But I’d like to see them more as resources than as things to throw away. So what we’re doing here is growing shiitake mushrooms, which are a gourmet mushroom, on coffee grounds, which are collected from cafes in Exeter. Though they look coffee-colored, they’re not going taste like a coffee. No, they’re absolutely delicious. I’ll look forward to some of those later. Yeah. So what about if we turn to the developing world?

2:43Skip to 2 minutes and 43 secondsWaste is happening in different parts of the food system there. Yeah, the problems there are quite different. Of course, in the developing world, people value food much more highly. And they’re not going to be throwing it away. But the lack of infrastructure and poor road networks and lack of refrigeration means that food is often spoiled on its way to market or in market. It’s very difficult to store food while– so a lot of it ultimately rots and is thrown away. Blimey. So if we start to try to add the numbers up on this globally, what sort of numbers are we talking about in units of carbon?

3:13Skip to 3 minutes and 13 secondsUnits of carbon, so we can compare them with fossil fuel emissions, about getting on for half a billion tonnes of carbon and food waste are thrown away every year. And then all those other kinds of waste, like the bits of the maise plants that you talked about and– Yeah, straw and those kinds of things. If we add in all of that, it’s getting on for 2 or 3 billion tonnes. Wow! That’s phenomenal. So something– you know, we can do things with what we currently treat as waste. I guess some of that food waste would be nice to be able to feed it back to pigs and make a more circular food economy.

3:44Skip to 3 minutes and 44 secondsOf course, that’s a traditional role in animals like pigs or chickens that we have over there in the food economy. There are some other more novel innovative solutions like raising these food waste streams as energy sources. You could ferment them in a fermenter or do something that we call pyrolysis where it’s actually turned into charcoal. And doing that generates energy, but it also fixes the carbon content. A-ha! And when we’re talking about 3 and 1/2 billion tonnes of carbon, that’s like a third of all our emissions, at least, at the moment. Could be very powerful. So we could really lock up and solve, if you like, a significant fraction of our emissions problem. Yeah. Fantastic.

4:21Skip to 4 minutes and 21 secondsThank you for having me because I think I take away from that we can benefit life on land and trying to attain that sustainable development goal whilst managing to act on climate change as well. So is this about co-benefits then? Exactly, yes. So these kind of solutions, not only relieve the pressure on life on Earth, but they also reduce climate change. Brilliant. Thanks for showing us around the garden. Nice to have you. In the next activity, we’ll have a look at what we can do individually to act on these issues. And then later in the week, we’ll look in more depth at that possibility of strengthening the land carbon sync. So see you then.

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Humans evolved over 100,000 years ago and we’ve been impacting the environment around us ever since. Societies are intrinsically linked to the climate, and we’ve been changing ourselves, and the land around us, for thousands of years.

During the last ice age, the use of fire by human hunters began to alter landscapes by reducing tree cover. Then at the start of the Holocene (around 10,000 years ago) - which marked the transition from the ice age to a warm and stable ‘interglacial’ period - the dawn of agriculture caused a major shift in land use. Agriculture started independently in several parts of the world, with different societies domesticating different plants and animals and developing their own ways to work the land. In the West, maize and potatoes became staple foods. In the East, millets and rice dominated agriculture.

Populations began to rise as agriculture developed, and where food surpluses could be generated this supported the development of more complex societies. This was only possible due to the change in the climate. But, the two are more deeply linked. Early agriculture used a lot of land and that led to widespread deforestation, adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Early rice production also added methane to the atmosphere. Then in the 14th century plague struck most of Europe and led to a major crash in populations. Afterwards, because less land had to be cultivated for food, European forests began to recover and this has been linked to a drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.

The Green Revolution

In the middle of the twentieth century, a ‘green revolution’ was quietly began. This intensification of agriculture ultimately led to a tripling of the world’s food availability with only a 30% increase in land area under cultivation. Without the green revolution, food prices would have been 35-65% higher and calorific availability 11-13% lower. The green revolution came about as a result of solutions to dramatically increase the yield of staple crops – wheat, rice, maize etc.

Selective breeding and genetic improvements produced high-yield crop varieties. Significant investment in research, infrastructure and market development combined with improvements in technology. Fertilisers, irrigation and pesticides were used to increase yields, while sparing thousands of hectares of land from changing to agricultural use.

Asian farms benefited significantly from the green revolution. Millions of people were saved from hunger and it allowed Asian economies to develop. But the innovations were inappropriate at the time for African farmers who had land in abundance, little need to intensify and little capacity to participate in the green revolution. Female farmers also gained less than males, with few measures to address societal inequalities alongside environmental degradation.

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Sustainable agriculture practices ensure we can meet the requirements of food production today, without compromising the environment or ability for future generations to meet their own food needs. Let’s have a look at some of the solutions to implementing sustainable agriculture.

Introduction

The yield gap is the difference between the amount of food a farm could produce and the amount of food a farm is producing. Given we’re already using the best quality land for farming, any new land that is changed to agricultural is likely to be of lower quality. A sustainable solution needs to bridge the yield gap, but also needs to recognize the ecosystem services that land provides - such as water filtration or flood protection (where the alternative is to build a filtration plant or engineer defences). For the solutions presented below, identify the economic benefits that each offers. Sustainability is about more than just the environment, and it’s likely that solutions will only be implemented if they offer long-term economic viability.

Selective Breeding

What if we could choose the best, most resilient, tastiest and beautiful crops only? This is exactly what’s been happening for thousands of years - the seeds of the best crops are grown again to pass on their traits. This can increase the yield potential of land by selecting crops that best match the land its grown on, and can help make a farm more resilient to the effects of climate change. For example, if an area is likely to experience more droughts over time, selectively breeding crops that are most water-efficient will help farmers to be more resilient to climate change.

Be more efficient with nutrients!

Only around 30-50% of nitrogen, and 45% of phosphorus, that is added to a crop is actually taken up by the plants. The diminishing returns from fertilising the land is perversely leading some farmers to add even more nutrients to the detriment of the surrounding environment. Selective breeding plants that use nutrients most efficiently is one solution. Another is to use new remote sensing technology to only apply fertilizer where and when it is most needed. Farmers should also work to reduce the loss of nutrients from soils. Which brings us on to…

Improving soils

Hedgerows and sediment ponds have been used around the world to ‘catch’ farmland runoff during heavy rain events. This means that it doesn’t leave the farm and can simply be scattered back over the crops once the rain stops. Reducing tillage (the ploughing of fields before a crop is planted) allows natural structures to form within the soil that improve water and nutrient retention. For a similar reason, adding organic matter such as manure to soils improves the soil quality and allows the tight binding of nutrients and water. Given human activity increases the rate of soil erosion by at least a factor of 10, it’s vital that we manage this as part of a sustainable agriculture scheme.

Natural organic matter is important to maintaining high quality soils.

Diversify crops and don’t rely on monocultures

Monoculture fields only grow one crop at one time, and usually repeatedly. This makes them susceptible to attack from pests, as they can destroy entire crops incredibly quickly. With climate change, pest species are moving to new environments, and farmers need to prepare for this. Growing multiple crops together improves resilience. Similarly, growing different crops after each other improves soil quality and local biodiversity that can help make a farm more sustainable. It creates a variety of microorganisms in the soil, ensuring the soil remains healthy.

Sustainable ruminant farming

For food security reasons, reducing our meat intake is an important way to live more sustainably - 1kg of meat requires 3-10kg of grain. Animal farming can be made more sustainable with simple changes. Closing the nutrient cycle is important to keeping soils healthy, so using animal manure in nearby crop fields ensures nutrients are recycled back into the ecosystem. Allowing animals to roam freely reduces the risk of pathogens, as well as making the animals healthier. Diseases spread very quickly when animals are cooped up together. A British outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in the early 2000s lead to the slaughter of 1.2 million animals.

How do we implement the changes?

Providing incentives has been a common method for encouraging farmers to make changes towards a more sustainable system. “Green payments” are subsidies that champion sustainable practices. The European Union has even introduced funding restrictions to farmers that do not employ basic sustainable farming practices, such as diversifying cropland. We can also place the incentives and choice in the hands of the consumer. Better education about where our food comes from and proper labelling of food will empower people to change their diets and change where their food comes from.

© University of Exeter

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Life on Land can be affected by geoengineering methods of Climate Action that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Two such methods are using Biochar (making charcoal from plant matter that is subsequently buried in soils) and BECCS (Biomass Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage). Both methods use plants to take carbon out of the atmosphere and then convert that carbon in plant matter into longer-lived forms. In this article, we’ll explore them in more depth.

Biochar

Biochar is produced from the slow burning of vegetation at around 700˚C in low oxygen environments in a process known as pyrolysis. The end result of this is a porous charcoal that helps soils retain their water, carbon and nutrients. Although biochar is considered a ‘geoengineering’ method, it is an entirely natural product often found after forest fires. The geoengineering aspect would be to deliberately create biochar outside of natural environments and subsequently bury it to act as a soil enhancer.

As it acts to hold nutrients and water within the soils due to its porosity, using biochar will also reduce the use of fertilisers and make agriculture more water efficient. From what we’ve learned already this week, you’ll know this could have a side-effect of improving global food security too. Experiments have shown that plots with biochar in have greater plant growth as a result of the enhanced nutrient and water availability.

Biochar stores carbon that has come from the atmosphere (via plants), locking it away in a substance that is slow to degrade. By enhancing plant growth it also accelerates the further uptake of carbon from the atmosphere into plants and soils.

While biochar is, in theory, a great way to make soils healthier and store more carbon at the same time, the effectiveness varies from region to region. Less fertile soils will benefit the most from the added nutrients and water that biochar can bring, while other techniques such as biomass energy production are more effective at offsetting coal consumption in fertile soils. If used globally, biochar has the potential to offset around 12% of annual anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

But biochar as a technique requires proper enforcement and management. The author of a landmark scientific review into the feasibility of biochar concluded by saying:

“Biochar production and use must be guided by well-founded and well-enforced sustainability protocols if its potential for mitigating climate change is to be realized”

BECCS (Biomass Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage)

BECCS is a key ingredient in most scenarios to limit global warming to less than 2 degrees. Future emissions projections suggest that reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations below 400ppm would require BECCS on a large scale, and that it is one of the best value methods for reducing atmospheric CO₂.

The key principle of BECCS relies on coupling a few existing technologies together. First, biomass energy crops (fast growing plants) are grown. Then they are used as a bioenergy fuel in power stations to generate electricity. But rather than release the carbon dioxide generated back to the atmosphere it is captured and subsequently stored in rock formations deep underground. The process is carbon negative because the carbon that is being stored beneath the rock came from the plant, which came from the atmosphere originally.

http://www.ccsassociation.org/what-is-ccs/

This isn’t a futuristic dream - CCS is being used in combination with coal power plants across the world at the moment and bioenergy power stations exist too. But, if the technique is going to have a globally substantial impact, huge areas of land will be required to grow the bioenergy crops on. Given expanding populations, it’s important that this technique doesn’t come at the expense of food production, or of natural ecosystems. Very careful management will be needed to ensure that the impacts from land-use change are regulated and the entirety of the technique remains sustainable.

What are your thoughts on Biochar and BECCS? Should they be used in combination with one another, or do you have a favourite? Perhaps neither are appropriate - can you suggest an alternative?

© University of Exeter

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0:04Skip to 0 minutes and 4 secondsMy name is Iain Hartley. What I’d like to talk to you about today is about the terrestrial carbon sink, and the role it plays helping us in the fight against climate change. First of all, I want to talk about our emissions, and where they actually end up. So each year, we release about 9 billion tonnes of carbon in the form of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere, and that’s through the process of burning fossil fuels. In addition, land use change, such as the deforestation, releases a further one billion tonnes. But it’s what happens to that carbon that’s quite important.

0:34Skip to 0 minutes and 34 secondsSo although it’s all literally released into the atmosphere, less than half, maybe 40% or 45% actually stays in the atmosphere. About a quarter is taken up by the oceans, which sounds really beneficial, but it causes negative impacts, such as acidification, and that’s a really serious issue that you’ll hear about more next week. The remaining third is taken up by the terrestrial biosphere, and in this context, forests are particularly important. So in places like the tropics, understory forests take up a lot of carbon, and that roughly balances out the deforestation taking place in those regions. And then in temperate regions, we have a net carbon uptake by the forests. So this is because they’re recovering from past disturbance.

1:14Skip to 1 minute and 14 secondsAnd the key question is whether this past disturbance and this recovery could actually be enhanced to allow the forest to take up even more carbon in the future. The terrestrial biosphere is taking up a really important amount of our emissions. The question, therefore, becomes why has this carbon been taken up, and could we increase it in the future to help with the fight against climate change? Well, one of the main reasons, or one of the key reasons why the carbon has been taken up is actually, some of these forests are recovering from past disturbance.

1:42Skip to 1 minute and 42 secondsSo in temperate regions, where we had huge clearance, historically, for agricultural land, now that the land is now being used more intensively, we actually need slightly less ag land fall our agricultural needs. And that’s allowing us to abandon some agricultural land, which then goes through the process of ecological succession. And that means that we go back to the vegetation we would have otherwise had there naturally. So the shrub lands and forests. And as we go through that process, carbon storage tends to increase. So plant biomass increases substantially. In addition, some of the land that’s been abandoned has been actively afforested. So we now have more managed forest than we did in the past.

2:21Skip to 2 minutes and 21 secondsNow, we haven’t, though, increased our harvest rate proportionally, and therefore, we now have a greater amount of our forests that are in a relatively old state. So the average age of the trees in our manage forests is greater than it was in the 20th century, and that means those forests also store more carbon. So although there are lots of reasons why the ecosystems are currently taking up carbon, this recovery from past disturbance, and greater age of our managed forests is potentially a key reason. And the question then becomes can we maintain this carbon uptake, or even increase it in these temperate regions. In the temperate regions, we have net carbon uptake.

2:57Skip to 2 minutes and 57 secondsSo the key is either maintaining that, or enhancing that. In the tropics, we’re roughly carbon neutral because deforestation is balancing out the carbon that’s been taken up by the entire forests. So the key probably becomes to reduce deforestation rates, and government initiatives or initiatives like the United Nations Framework on Climate Change Red Programme, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation programme, may help us in that regard. So making payments to countries to maintain their forest to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. And there are examples of success stories, such as in China, where there was, a few decades ago, net carbon release, but through afforestation, the biosphere in China is now taking up carbon.

3:39Skip to 3 minutes and 39 secondsWhether that can be repeated more globally depends on how much we need our land for agriculture, for biofuels, and for other pursuits. So can we actually put more land back into forests? The final thing I want to emphasise is it’s not as simple as just planting trees anywhere if we want to maximise carbon storage in the terrestrial biosphere. Even in this type of forest, with really huge trees like the one behind me, there’s more organic matter, and more carbon below my feet in the soils than there is in the trees above my head. So we have to also manage the carbon stocks in the soils as well as in the trees.

4:14Skip to 4 minutes and 14 secondsSo if you afforest a really degraded area where the soils are low in carbon, you can increase carbon storage in the soils, and also gain in terms of greater plant biomass. Whereas if we look at schemes in the past, for example, where the UK uplands have been afforested, those wet, organic, rich soils that the trees been planted on first have to be drained with large amounts of carbon being released to the atmosphere. Then we end up having to wait for decades for that carbon to be regained, and in some cases, the carbon is never regained. So ultimately, carbon becomes lost in these situations. So it’s not as simple as just planting trees anywhere.

4:51Skip to 4 minutes and 51 secondsWe have to think carefully about where those trees get planted. In a temperate region, we have net carbon uptake, and maintaining or enhancing that is our challenge. The tropics remain about carbon neutral, but if we could reduce rates of deforestation, these areas would also become a carbon sink. But there are lots of different demands on land, in particular, for agriculture to feed the now 7 and 1/2 billion people on the planet, and maybe also for biofuels as well. So whether we can maximise carbon storage in the terrestrial biosphere could be a big challenge as we move through the course of the 21st century.

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So far this week, we’ve looked at sustainable agriculture and improving food security in the wake of climate change. Over the next three steps we’ll learn about how to mitigate climate change by strengthening the terrestrial biosphere.

The terrestrial biosphere encompasses all land vegetation, including the world’s forests. It is important to strengthen the terrestrial biosphere because photosynthesis results in an exchange of atmospheric carbon dioxide for oxygen. This means it is a natural way to sequester anthropogenic carbon emissions.

In 2015, the Paris agreement pledged to keep carbon emissions within the capability of the terrestrial biosphere’s natural sequestration potential. This means we shouldn’t be putting more carbon into the atmosphere than the biosphere can remove. Another key part was a pledge to increase forest stocks across the world and do everything possible to strengthen natural carbon sinks.

In this video, Dr Iain Hartley explores the terrestrial biosphere sink further and the puzzle of the ‘missing carbon sink’.

© University of Exeter

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Land-use change accounts for around one fifth of total carbon dioxide emissions from human activity. So what can we do about it?

Reducing deforestation and degradation

Perhaps one of the easiest ways to reduce emissions from land-use change is to stop changing the land! Reducing deforestation and forest degradation can make a major contribution to strengthening the land carbon sink. But it requires major societal shifts, including changing consumer choices in far away places, and changing incentives for local people to protect forests. Hence we need to think about all of the sustainable development goals when considering how to reduce deforestation. In Indonesia and Brazil, deforestation continues to be a problem largely because people’s livelihoods depend on it. If you want to solve an environmental problem, then you need to tackle the societal and economic problems underlying it.

The United Nations REDD+ program provides incentives for developing countries to reduce deforestation and maintain their forest stocks by creating a financial value for the forest stock. If a country maintains or expands their forests, then they are rewarded with payments proportional to the extent of their action. This helps tackle both environment and development issues in a sustainable approach. REDD+ also increases biodiversity, protects vulnerable and threatened species and allows countries development opportunities.

Planting and Rehabilitation

Perhaps the best way to combat land-use change is to reverse it! Afforestation and forest regeneration schemes are one of the easiest and cheapest ways to strengthen the land carbon sink. This is increasingly important on abandoned agricultural land and is even being extended to our cities. In China, the ‘Great Green Wall’ (officially known as the Three-North Shelter Forest Program) is a 4,500km long wall of trees that are being planted and due to be finished by 2050. This is designed to hold back the expansion of the Gobi desert and has contributed to China’s astonishing turn around in carbon sequestration.

Planting schemes on this scale are few and far between. But there are numerous local activities. Consider what’s happening around you. On the Streatham campus at the University of Exeter, our grounds team maintain over 10,000 trees to reduce the carbon footprint of the University. For every tree that needs to be removed, more are replaced in other parts of the campus. In the picture below, you can see a small woodland area running through the heart of the University. This was likely planted in the 1930s and continues to be maintained and expanded.

Sustainable Management of existing forests

Sustainably managing forests involves some form of protection, policy or legislation that is legally binding and maintains or improves forests. Deforestation cannot take place in protected forests and sustainable management can ensure they are more resilient to pressures such as climate change. For example, maintaining forest biodiversity and good quality soils means that they are better protected against extreme events such as droughts.

In the UK, the Forestry Commission have outlined three objectives to protect these ecosystems – in priority order:

protecting the nation’s trees, woodlands and forests from increasing threats such as pests, diseases and climate change

improving their resilience to these threats and their contribution to economic growth, people’s lives and nature

expanding them to further increase their value

Part of this involves education, and managed woodlands in the UK are often used as educational tools. This is a very easy way to help the public better understand forests and the need to protect them. Increasing public awareness helps people think and act more sustainably. In effect, the Forestry commission are asking the local community to do their bit in preserving their environment. This makes sense in the UK where the recreational value of forests and woodlands to people typically exceeds the value of the timber in the trees.

© University of Exeter

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So far this week, we’ve looked at some global challenges and solutions, but action needs to be taken at a local scale too. In this discussion, think about what you could do in your community to contribute to a global solution.

You might wish to start by searching for any tree planting events near you – you might be surprised at what you’ll find! This is taking action by strengthening the terrestrial biosphere.

Next, investigate how your everyday life might be contributing to land-use change around the world. Are you buying any products that contain palm oil, for example? This is one of the biggest causes of deforestation in Indonesia.

Share your findings in the comment section. Have a look through other comments too and find other ways to take action!

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How did you find this week? We’ve covered a lot about Life on Land - from the interactions between climate change and food security, to finding solutions to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by strengthening the terrestrial biosphere.

Let’s relate this back to the Sustainable Development Goal we’re focusing on. The United Nations connect ‘Life on Land’ to ‘Climate Action’ through the following objectives:

Implement sustainable management of all types of forest, halt deforestation, restore degraded forests and substantially increase afforestation and reforestation globally,

Combat desertification, restore degraded land and soil, including land affected by desertification, drought and floods, and strive to achieve a land degradation-neutral world,

Mobilise significant resources to finance sustainable forest management and provide adequate incentives to developing countries to advance such management, including for conservation and reforestation.

The biosphere is our life support system so protecting and enhancing it is essential to human well-being.

Next week, we’ll move to the oceans and look at Life below water.

© University of Exeter

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What are the big threats facing our oceans?

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What are the big threats facing our oceans?

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Let’s begin this week by looking at some of the big threats facing our oceans. There are many to choose from, each with varying degrees of urgency and importance.

In the comment section below, describe three threats that you think are facing the world’s oceans. Which do you think is the most important and why? What are some of the challenges getting in the way of taking action to solve the problem?

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Carbon dioxide emissions don’t just affect the Earth’s atmosphere – climate change has an ‘evil twin’ – ocean acidification. This has been called ‘the other carbon dioxide problem’. It is caused by atmospheric carbon dioxide dissolving into the surface ocean.

Since the Industrial Revolution, the ocean has dropped around 0.1 pH unit (a scale used to measure the acidity or alkalinity of a solution). This compromises the ability for some marine organisms such as corals to calcify and produce carbonate structures. This can impact the whole marine biosphere because of the intricate links between organisms in the oceans. But it’s not easy to find solutions to ocean acidification because of the way circulation systems continue to mix water around the world. This means a global solution is imperative.

Mitigation

The best solution is mitigating the causes of ocean acidification by reducing carbon dioxide emissions - which also tackles the most important cause of climate change.

Policy

Despite this inherent link between tackling climate change and ocean acidification, there is a failure to acknowledge the importance of the ocean acidification threat at an international level. In the 32-page document that lays out the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) 2015 Paris Agreement, ‘ocean’ only appears once – and not in relation to acidification. Hence some researchers are calling for a multilateral environmental agreement that specifically relates to impacts on the oceans, because of their unique importance. In the meantime practical actions can be taken to build the adaptive capacity of ocean ecosystems.

Marine Protected Areas

Designating and enforcing protected areas of marine environments that cannot be fished from should help ecological communities adapt to ocean acidification by removing another stress factor. Like other adaptation measures, this involves accepting the changes that are likely to occur in the future and building the capacity to cope with them. Marine protected areas allow a greater biodiversity of organisms to flourish. This includes shallow plants that photosynthesise to lower CO₂ levels locally, which can provide refuge to calcifying organisms. Fish populations that help to cycle carbon can regenerate as overfishing is banned.

Marine Protected Areas create healthy communities and ecosystems that have greater resilience to the impacts that climate change can bring, including acidification. This means that a single event or impact may not lead to the demise of the entire ecosystem, but the area can rebound and recover once again. These are areas away from human pressures, allowing a precious chance for recovery.

Mangrove Restoration

Mangrove forests are one ecosystem that naturally increase the alkalinity (decreasing acidity) of the waters around them. In a similar way to how shallow plants in marine protected areas photosynthesise to take carbon dioxide out of the water, mangroves are highly productive ecosystems that are able to convert this carbon into peat and biomass very quickly. For tropical reef systems, this may allow corals an opportunity to flourish and co-exist with these ecosystems.

In the past, mangroves were often considered as bogs with little value that spread disease as they were often a breeding ground for mosquitoes. As a result, they were often destroyed for timber or to make space for new development. At the peak of decline, 2% of the world’s mangroves were being lost each year. Restoration projects are beginning to take shape to restore the ecosystem, now that the full extent of the ecosystem services that are gained from mangroves are known. Indeed, they could be a great adaption mechanism to combat localized ocean acidification.

© University of Exeter

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Can geoengineering buffer ocean acidification?

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Can geoengineering buffer ocean acidification?

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We’ve looked a lot at mitigation and adaptation responses to climate change – but could geoengineering help reverse ocean acidification?

Which type of geoengineering?

Of the two geoengineering approaches mentioned in the first week, only carbon dioxide removal methods can tackle ocean acidification. Solar radiation management schemes to cool the planet leave CO₂ levels rising, which will continue to result in ocean acidification. Furthermore, cooling the planet actually increases the amount of CO₂ that dissolves in the ocean. Viable geoengineering approaches to tackle ocean acidification involve adding alkalinity to the ocean in different ways.

Adding Limestone Powder

Let’s remind ourselves of some key equations in ocean acidification:

1. CO₂ + H₂O –> H₂CO3

2. H₂CO₃ –> H⁺ + HCO₃-

3. CO₃ ²⁻ + H⁺ –> HCO₃-

Carbonate ions (CO₃ ²⁻) act as a natural buffer to acidification in reaction three - which is great, but their supply cannot keep up with the addition of hydrogen ions from dissolving carbon dioxide (reactions one and two). If we add limestone powder (CaCO₃) to the oceans, then it’ll dissolve and improve the strength of the ocean’s natural buffer to acidification.

Ships would be used to add the limestone powder a few times a year across the oceans. There will be an energy cost in mining the limestone and grinding it down to a very small particle size - but this could be achieved using renewable energy to avoid creating a CO₂ source.

The process won’t harm life in the oceans because carbonate weathering happens naturally anyway - it will just be speeded up. The total cost has been estimated at $40-45bn a year, and the process needs to be continued for over 100 years to be truly effective (requiring international co-operation and major investment).

Dissolving Olivine

In a similar principle to adding limestone powder, dissolving olivine (Mg₂SiO₄) could enhance the sequestration of carbon dioxide. For every gram of olivine dissolved, 0.28g of carbon is sequestered. This is equivalent to the natural process of silicate rock weathering. It would help buffer ocean acidification by supplying alkalinity to the ocean (the Mg²⁺ ions ultimately combine with CO₂ to produce MgCO₃).

It would take around 100 dedicated ships to distribute olivine over an ocean surface area large enough to make a difference. Alternatively, olivine particles could be added to coastlines where the natural action of the waves would enhance their dissolution.

Enhanced Weathering strategies

Rather than adding carbonate or silicate rock powder to the ocean with ships, it could be added to the land instead, where it will dissolve and be washed to the ocean. This approach simply accelerates normal, slow processes of weathering that lead to carbon dioxide being locked up in carbonate rocks on the ocean floor. It works because small rock particles dissolve much faster than natural larger ones.

If we can enhance the weathering across one-third of the world’s tropical regions, then we could ameliorate ocean acidification by 2100. This approach will enable calcifying organisms (such as corals) to continue calcifying and keep ecosystems such as coral reefs from dying out completely under acidification.

Up to 1 PgC could be sequestered per year via this mechanism - around 10% of anthropogenic emissions. But grinding rocks to tiny particles and distributing them across the land costs energy and carries health risks as the particles are breathable. Proposers of the technique suggest it could cost anywhere between $60-600 trillion, noting:

Enhanced weathering is a sobering indication of actions that may be required if fossil fuel emissions are not phased down rapidly.

Enhanced weathering techniques do have an advantage over traditional carbon capture and storage solutions in that carbon dioxide isn’t being stored under pressure as a liquid, but as a rock. This makes it much more stable and unlikely to be leaked again.

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Everyone on the planet bears the responsibility to help clean up the oceans. In this article, we’ll share quick and easy ways for you to reduce the amount of plastic waste you generate.

Re-use your cups, cutlery and bags!

We live in a world where plastic is used far too frequently and without consideration. Think about your day-to-day life. Did you use a plastic bag the last time you went shopping? Did you buy a bottle of water or refill one? Using plastic containers more than once will immediately reduce the amount we’re consuming. And don’t forget to take a ‘bag for life’ when you go shopping!

Recycle

There are many different types of plastic you can encounter and some might not be recyclable. But many are and it is worth making the effort to find out what you can and can’t recycle in your local area. In the UK, did you know that most recycling points can take your plastic bottles, food containers and plastic bags? Search online now for your local waste disposal scheme and find out what they can recycle for you.

Reduce your consumption – think ahead

This can involve simple changes to your shopping habits to reduce the amount of plastic you might unintentionally be buying. For example, instead of buying 10 yoghurts that are individually portioned, why not go for one big pot? Consider the amount of packaging per product. Also, buying second hand rather than new plastic products reduces the amount of waste you generate.

Out of sight, out of mind?

The actions in your home have consequences that can be far reaching. Don’t put anything down your drains that shouldn’t be there – cooking oils, baby wipes, food waste, anti-freeze, motor oil, cleaning products etc should not be put in the sink or toilet. Dispose of it properly so that it doesn’t pollute rivers that will end up in the ocean.

Clean up your beaches!

If you see plastic or waste at a beach or in a river, pick it up. You may have just saved a marine organism’s life! You could even take part in an organized beach clean-up event to remove waste before it enters the ocean system. They are family friendly events and a great way to get out and about making a difference to your community. Find your nearest by searching online.

Educate!

Share what you’ve learned about using plastics more sustainably with your family, friends, neighbours and community! Action starts with just one person, but needs to filter out to become meaningful. Improving education and knowing what is right / wrong is important to ensuring our oceans are cleaned as best as possible. If top-down action (government led initiatives) isn’t happening, then bottom-up action (from everyday citizens) can be just as effective.

How does this relate to climate change?

You might be wondering why we appear to have strayed from the topic of climate change. Reducing pollution impacts on the oceans is important in creating resilience and adaptive capacity for marine species. We need clean habitats for the climate-driven mass-migration that is about to occur in our oceans. There is also new research suggesting that the consumption of microscopic plastic debris by tiny animals in the ocean could weaken the ocean carbon sink.

We’ve introduced you to only a few of the many ways you can act to help clean up the oceans. Share in the comment section any more that might be of interest to you.

© University of Exeter
https://www.futurelearn.com/links/l/mj8xs9oo77sh7kk03ffw340dyo282z6

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In the previous step, you discussed the big threats facing our oceans. Did you include pollution and plastics? The ocean is gradually filling with our waste and this kills marine animals. Around 100,000 marine mammals and 1 million sea birds die each year from ingesting plastic.

Plastic in the ocean isn’t always visible. Microplastics - pieces of plastic that are less than 5mm in length - are prevalent throughout the ocean. They enter the ocean as a result of larger pieces of plastic breaking down or directly in the form of small plastics (e.g. microbeads). Plastic microbeads are found in many cosmetics, although their use has recently been banned in the UK.

How much plastic do you eat?

Professor Tamara Galloway from the University of Exeter joined the team behind Blue Planet 2 to explore how much plastic is in the food we eat, as a result of microplastics in the ocean entering the food system.
https://youtu.be/veMdowmPSbw
https://www.futurelearn.com/links/l/f1v2opf5twh7vc0jic0423r9cvigt5e

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www.marinelittersolutions.com
www.plasticsoupfoundation.org

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Apinya is a tour guide operator in the Phi Phi Islands in South Thailand. She takes tourists each day to the coral reefs around Koh Phi Phi island and relies on this for an income. But, in 2017 the corals bleached and she is worried about the future of the environment with ocean acidification.

Ocean acidification is just one stress that might tip the balance of the corals. What action can Apinya take to reduce the impact of ocean acidification on the corals at Koh Phi Phi island? Remember – think global, act local. Apinya can’t eliminate the potential for ocean acidification by herself, so you’ll need to think of adaptation strategies.

Consider what the other stresses on the oceans might be in a tourist resort, and how Apinya can act locally to reduce these stresses. Also consider how the ecosystem can be made more resilient.

© University of Exeter

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Around the world, fish populations are in decline and we are consuming fish at an unsustainable rate. In this video, Professor Steve Simpson introduces the ideas behind sustainable fisheries and how we can continue to feed an expanding population.

© University of Exeter
0:04Skip to 0 minutes and 4 secondsMy name is Dr. Steve Simpson from the University of Exeter. I’m an Associate Professor of Marine Biology and Global Change. I’m here in Exmouth today to talk a little bit about sustainable fisheries, and the way that we can improve practises to make our fisheries more sustainable. Fisheries throughout the world are increasingly threatened by human activities. Atmospheric carbon dioxide dissolves in seawater which causes ocean acidification. But global warming is warming the seas and this change in temperature is causing some of the fish stocks to move towards the poles as they seek the cool water that they thrive in. It’s changing some of the habitats, for example, coral bleaching is what it is modifying and degrading coral reef habitat.

0:53Skip to 0 minutes and 53 secondsBut what we often see first is the shift in the plankton communities. These underpin the food webs that the fish feed from, so warming and ocean acidification are really modifying global fisheries. Fishing communities are particularly vulnerable to climate change. In the developing world, many fishing communities depend on the fish resources for their livelihoods. Over half a billion people throughout the world fish as their main source of income and over a billion people on the planet depend on fish as the primary source of protein in their diet. So food security and climate change are strongly interlinked. Sustainable fishing means not taking more fish than the population can replenish and yet many activities can be inherently destructive.

1:42Skip to 1 minute and 42 secondsFor example, Demircili trawling nets across sensitive habitats or using dynamite or cyanide to collect fish. One way to think about a fish population is there’s a bank account. The bigger the account, the more interest you can draw with that population replenishing. So you can see with overfishing is the account gets smaller, the stock of fish gets smaller, the amount that we can harvest gets less and less. So let’s think about some of the ways that we can improve the sustainability of fisheries particularly when we know that climate change is modifying those fish stocks. One way to improve the sustainability of fisheries is to think about the origin of the fish that we’re eating.

2:25Skip to 2 minutes and 25 secondsAnd increasingly, there are accreditation agencies that are helping us to do that. So one example is the Marine Stewardship Council. So you can see here on a tin of mackerel, we’ve got a blue tick, and this mark represents the fact that the agency have assessed the fishery, and they’ve looked at whether the stock is being fished at a sustainable level. The gear that is being used the way that the fish is being processed and also the welfare of the fishermen involved in the fishery to ensure that this is a product which is going to contribute to sustainable fisheries.

3:03Skip to 3 minutes and 3 secondsAnother way to improve the sustainability of the fish that we eat is really to think about as the environment changes which fish will be the mainstay of the fishery. So at the moment in the UK, we eat cod and haddock. That’s the great British fish dinner. But the cod and haddock increasingly are moving northwards out of our waters towards countries like Iceland, and the Faroe Islands, and Norway, which means we have to import about 70% of the cod that we eat. In turn, all the fishermen in the south coast now are catching fish that you might eat on holiday in your paella. Things like red mullet, grey gurnard, John Dory, cuttlefish.

3:39Skip to 3 minutes and 39 secondsAnd so by understanding how climate change affects fish distributions, we can think to the future about which species we should be eating in the Great British diet. Here in Excelsior, we’re trying to predict which fish are likely to be important for the fishery as we think into the 21st century. So by taking European-wide databases and coupling all of that information with the best climate change models that we have from the Met Office. We can look back over the last 30 years, see which fish species have been responding to warming in different ways– either they’ve been declining because it gets too warm, or they’ve been moving into our waters as it gets warmer.

4:20Skip to 4 minutes and 20 secondsAnd we can use those lessons to then make predictions because we anticipate another two to four degrees of warming in the seas around the UK over the next century. As we started to think more about sustainable fisheries and particularly how climate change was affecting fisheries, we decided to bring together a group of experts to see whether we could develop a positive vision for sustainable, lucrative, and productive fisheries by 2050. And to do this we brought together government scientists, lawyers, politicians, climate change experts, and consumer representatives. And over two days, started to identify what the current challenges are and try to envisage solutions.

5:10Skip to 5 minutes and 10 secondsOne of the issues we really considered was the fact that at the moment industrial fisheries are very much treated in the same way as the local scale small dayboats– the under 10-metre boats that go out. And fish often using very different methods in more sustainable ways, so these tend not to drag the nets across the seabed for example. But the fishermen that catch fish from these small boats have to land in the same markets as the industrial fleet which drives the price of their fish down very low. So to try to address this, we’ve set up an initiative called the Soul of Discretion.

5:49Skip to 5 minutes and 49 secondsWhether local dayboats can land their fish independently of the fish markets, and we can process those fish with packaging. So here’s an example that gives the name of the fish species, the fishermen, the date it was caught, and it allows the consumer, who might take more of an interest in the fish and the provenance of that fish, to make conscious decisions. We can then provide information about why certain fish species are appearing earlier or later in the year. Why some fish species are off the menu for a while while we allow the stocks to recover. And it allows the consumer to consciously choose fresh, healthy, very tasty fish that they know is coming from a sustainable stock.

6:36Skip to 6 minutes and 36 secondsThrough Soul of Discretion, our students are now able to go out to sea with the fishermen and this helps us really to tap into the knowledge that these fishers have about their local stocks. But at the same time allow our students to build the evidence to demonstrate that the fishery is more sustainable. So we can look at the age of the fish that are being caught to ensure that these fish are being given a chance to mature. We can look at the amount of bycatch from the fishery compared to the fishery where fish where nets are being dragged across the seabed in a very indiscriminate manner.

7:13Skip to 7 minutes and 13 secondsSo we can really give the evidence to the consumer about why the fish that they’re catching are more sustainable.

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Coastal environments around the world are eroded by the action of waves on the land. This is a perfectly normal process, but it is bad for coastal settlements as erosion can lead to flooding or subsidence. Sea level rise due to global warming is making matters worse. We put in place a number of measures to protect our coasts – rock armour, groynes, sea walls etc, but because these are unnatural they don’t respect the biological needs of coastal species.

Artecology is a project in the UK that aims to bring biodiversity to the built environment by building new habitats on the coastal defences for species to survive in. The technology is transferable to all parts of the built environment, including rooftops and buildings. This is known as urban rewilding and is a form of climate change adaptation. It increases adaptive capacity and resilience for the ecosystems that are being defended.

Protecting our coastal ecosystems

Coastal species are being ‘squeezed’ between rising sea-levels and increased storm frequency and intensity from one side and a physical barrier (the sea-wall / groyne / rock armour) from the other side. The amount of space for them to live in is diminishing. So, artecology increases the resilience of these species by providing habitats and a space for them to live in.
https://www.futurelearn.com/links/l/1duawk0o6asgxnrjkquwnzgrjui03ct

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Even if you live hundreds of miles from the ocean, you affect them every day through the decisions you make. Reflect on some of the solutions we’ve explored this week and consider what you might do to help protect the oceans.

1. What’s the easiest change that people in your community could make to reduce their impact on the oceans?

2. Are there any solutions that we’ve missed? What else could be done to help protect these vital ecosystems?

Remember you can ‘like’ comments if you agree with what’s been said or if you have found something particularly interesting, or you can ‘reply’ to comments to initiate a conversation. You can find replies to your comments by clicking the notification icon at the top of each page.

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How did you find this week? We’ve looked at how Life below Water is threatened by plastic pollution, climate change and ocean acidification and solutions ranging from mitigating carbon dioxide emissions, adaptation to the threats of sea-level rise, or geoengineering to counteract acidification.

Let’s relate this back to the Sustainable Development Goal we’re focusing on. The United Nations say that ‘Life below water’ can be enhanced through actions to:

Prevent and significantly reduce marine pollution of all kinds,

Minimise and address the impacts of ocean acidification, including through enhanced scientific cooperation at all levels,

Sustainably manage and protect marine and coastal ecosystems to avoid significant adverse impacts, including by strengthening their resilience, and take action for their restoration in order to achieve healthy and productive oceans.

The marine biosphere is under multiple stresses including global climate change, but a range of solutions are available to take the pressure off this essential part of our life support system.

Next week, we’ll turn to human systems and look at how we can create Sustainable Cities and Communities.

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Human health and the built environment

Climate change has the potential to change the way we live. How will climate change affect human activity in our built environment? Dr. Tristan Kershaw looks at how climate change can impact on our familiar urban landscapes. How might the severity of urban heat islands increase to constitute a significant threat to human health during heat wave events?

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Dr Tristan Kershaw is back to talk about solutions to sustainable buildings. Montgomery Primary School in Exeter is an example of a Passivhaus building.

Passivhaus Building - An industry standard of building design that encompasses low energy design, energy efficiency and have a low environmental impact on the surrounding area. They require very little energy to heat or cool.

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In Tristan’s video, he introduced a range of techniques for making buildings more resilient to a changing climate. Let’s explore some more ways in which the built environment can be adapted, first with new builds and then by upgrading the existing building stock.

Construction

Good building design starts at the construction phase. To mitigate climate change and reduce the environmental impact of construction, many companies are sourcing their materials more responsibly, reducing transportation costs and planting trees alongside new built environments. But buildings need to be resilient to changes occurring around them - including beneath them.

As precipitation and temperature patterns start to vary, the ground beneath a building can change its water content. Following a heatwave in 2002, insurance claims for building subsidence in the UK rose by 68% over the next year. This can happen if there is too much water in the ground too, leading to the ground swelling. Older buildings are more at risk as building regulations for building foundations have only recently been introduced. As a result, there is a clear need to produce buildings that can withstand these changes.

Adaptation is also about knowing where it is and isn’t sensible to build. Sloped areas have been traditionally okay to build on, but we may need to become smarter about building on areas that could destabilize with repeated over-wetting and over-drying on a seasonal, cyclical basis. This is proving tricky though with population increases and expanding cities. In the UK, we’re running out of good quality land to build on.

Comfortable, sustainable buildings

But assuming a building has been built and isn’t likely to subside any time soon, there is now the challenge of designing them to be as comfortable as possible with hotter summers. Glass is a popular building material – it lets in natural light and makes buildings look nicer. It also has the effect of warming the building naturally as it traps the sun’s heat in, like a greenhouse. But what seems like a great thing should be carefully designed.

If heatwaves become more prevalent, the last place you’d want to be is in a greenhouse! Buildings should be designed to be comfortable in all weathers, including the likely possibility of heatwaves. Providing areas of shading beneath glassed areas allows for a good temperature to be maintained. Similarly, innovation with ventilation and air-tight design can make a building ‘breathe’ to maintain temperature, rather than use heating and air conditioning.

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Now that you have an awareness of how buildings can be designed to adapt to climate change, observe how many of these features are in existence near to where you live.

Step 1. Photograph (or find on a street view software such as Google Maps) a building or part of an urban landscape that indicates a design that is adapted to a changing climate (in the UK this means wetter winters, higher summer temperatures and more extreme weather). If you can’t find anything, show a building or part of an urban landscape that is clearly NOT adapted.

For privacy reasons, please do not choose your home as the building you are discussing and geo-locating!

Step 2. Share your findings on our interactive map. Click ‘Participate’ and geo-tag the location.

Please note that any external links in this step will take you to third party websites which may ask you for personal details. Please read this part of our Privacy Policy for more information.

Step 3. Write a small description about the building to let us know how the building is, or isn’t, adapted to climate change. Click ‘Submit’ and return to FutureLearn.

Alternatively, let us know your findings in the comment section below this step.

Please note, by clicking 'Launch' you will be taken to a page containing content provided by a third party website.

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What does a 'Sustainable City' look like?

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What does a 'Sustainable City' look like?

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Over the next few steps, we’ll be looking at how we can design our cities to be more sustainable. Some cities are already making great progress to reduce their environmental impact.

In London, a congestion charge means that polluting vehicles are heavily taxed to enter the city. With major improvements to the bus, tube and tram network across London, many residents and commuters have swapped from personal vehicles to public transport.

Copenhagen has also encouraged the move away from using cars, by developing a fantastic city-wide cycle network. 36% of people now cycle as their method of commuting. This massively reduces the greenhouse gas emissions from transport, as well as promoting healthy living and exercise, resulting in an all-round more sustainable population.

These are just two examples where cities have changed their public transport networks to reduce their emissions, but what about other cities and other aspects of a city? Housing? Business? Airports? Waste management? Electricity?

What does the ideal sustainable city look like to you? Are there any cities around the world that are currently employing these techniques? Remember to apply your thinking to all countries - can a sustainable city work in both the developing and developed world?

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Not all action against climate change has to be at a national or international level. Cities are beginning to take the future in their own hands to become resilient to the effects of climate change.

In 2017, US President Trump repealed the nation’s commitment to the 2015 Paris climate agreement. Despite this, over 300 US city mayors (as part of the Mayors National Climate Action Agenda) agreed to commit to the guidelines of the agreement voluntarily. This is because cities will suffer the effects of climate change if action isn’t taken.

100 Resilient Cities is a project designed to create a network of more resilient cities with greater adaptive capacity. This will enable them to cope with, and meet the demands of, 21st century threats - including, but not limited to, climate change. Each of the 100 member cities has produced its own resilience plan which identified the key threats and how best for them to cope with these threats.

For the remainder of this article, we’ll look at how two of the 100 Resilient Cities (New York, USA and Bristol, UK) have pledged to combat sea-level rise and increased storm intensity.

New York

In 2012, New York City was struck by Hurricane Sandy - the second costliest hurricane in US history. It caused flooding across the city and a shutdown of key services including the transport network. For New York, climate change will lead to sea-level rise and more frequent and intense storms, which could come with even worse impacts than Hurricane Sandy. It is therefore imperative for the city to come up with a plan to become more resilient to these threats.

New York is planning to both mitigate and adapt to increase its resilience. It will lead the way for US cities to reduce their environmental impact by cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050 and becoming “zero-waste” by 2030. In addition, the city is moving away from the fossil fuels that led to its development in favour of renewable energy. To adapt to the specific threats of flooding, New York is upgrading its coastal defences and improving building design. This hard engineering approach to improve infrastructure should ensure that key systems - such as the subway network - don’t get shut down for days following floods.

Bristol

In Bristol, the city faces similar threats. The city has faced a wave of recent flood events - in 2012 from prolonged rainfall, in 2014 from a storm surge and in 2016 from freak thunderstorms. As a result, the city needs to improve its resilience in order to future-proof themselves against these threats.

Like New York, Bristol is also aiming to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase the use of renewables to become carbon neutral by 2066. In order to create resilience and adaptive capacity, Bristol will empower individuals and strengthen communities. This creates a sustainable citizen network who have the adaptive capacity to help themselves rather than relying on top-down management and aid in times of crisis. It’ll also bring together individuals, business and departments to make Bristol future-proof, collaborate on ideas and share areas of best practice to ensure the impacts of flooding are limited.

Find a Resilient City near you!

The 100 Resilient Cities project reaches every corner of the world. Using this link, find the nearest “resilient city” to you and have a look at some of the solutions to the ‘big threats’ they are facing. Share your findings in the comment section below.

If you’re feeling adventurous, take a look at some other cities to see how resilience practices vary in different regions of the world. Are their differences in the way developing countries are responding to 21st century threats compared to developed countries?

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https://resilientcitiesnetwork.org/

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Professor Stewart Barr and Dr Ewan Woodley introduce the issues surrounding creating more sustainable communities.

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Responses to Climate Change in developing world communities

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Responses to Climate Change in developing world communities

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So far, much of what we’ve discussed has focused on the developed world. In this article, we’ll share some of the responses to climate change in developing world communities and learn how sustainable communities can be created in all parts of the world.

The impacts of climate change are predicted to be felt most severely in the developing world. This could amplify existing vulnerabilities and threaten the ability of communities to develop sustainably. The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) suggest that developing countries will suffer the most from climate change as a result of the economic importance they place on climate sensitive sectors.

Adaptation

The primary challenge in any developing world community is to improve their resilience and adaptive capacity to be able to cope with the impacts of climate change. The Sustainable Development Goals recognize that, to achieve this, any adaptation measures need to be consistent with achieving other goals. A community cannot improve its resilience while in poverty, without access to education or without addressing gender inequalities to ensure nobody gets left behind.

In rural African communities, access to water is going to become an increasing challenge as drought becomes more prevalent. One of the ways in which communities can adapt is to reduce the demand at the very start of the process by using resources more efficiently. But droughts can dry supplies of drinking water and good infrastructure is needed to be able to provide help. This will enable governments and NGOs to properly access rural communities in need. You can help with this by contributing to The Missing Maps project.

How to develop sustainably

During the negotiations of the 2015 Paris agreement, India was initially resistant to reduce its reliance on coal. From a purely economic perspective, this makes sense – much of the economic growth of India is based on cheap coal and it is pivotal to ensuring the development of the country. However, India is moving towards renewable energy, recently pledging that renewables will account for 40% of energy generation by 2030. This highlights a number of moral dilemmas. How do developing countries progress economically, while at the same time replacing the fuel for their economic growth? Is it right that developed countries which expanded using ‘dirty’ fuels, deny developing countries the same privilege? Do developed countries have a moral obligation to help and support developing countries because of this?

It all comes back to the sustainable development goals. By improving the quality of life for individuals in a developing country by alleviating hunger and poverty, this allows them to take action into their own hands. The IPCC hit the nail on the head in their 2007 publication:

On the one hand, climate change influences key natural and human living conditions and thereby also the basis for social and economic development, while on the other hand, society’s priorities on sustainable development influence both the GHG emissions that are causing climate change and the vulnerability. IPCC, 2007, Working Group III: Mitigation of Climate Change, 2.1.3.

As a result, climate change may become the biggest barrier to sustainable development. But the 2015 Paris agreement included pledges to help developing countries create an adaptation framework whereby the worlds most vulnerable are helped and supported. The agreement also decides that…

financial resources provided to developing countries should enhance the implementation of their policies, strategies, regulations and action plans and their climate change actions with respect to both mitigation and adaptation to contribute to the achievement of the purpose of the Agreement.

Demographic Transition

A strong correlation exists between areas of the world with large population growth and areas that are susceptible to the effects of climate change. Improving family planning and access to sexual healthcare can help contribute to mitigation against climate change, as well as improve the adaptive capacity of a community. Fewer people reduces the pressure on resources and allows individuals the opportunity to flourish. But this can only happen by bringing down the birth rate of a country, which involves better access to education (Sustainable Development Goal 4) and better access to healthcare (Sustainable Development Goal 3)

Share your stories

If you’re learning with us from a developing country, we’d love to hear from you! Share your story of how you and your community are responding to climate change in the discussion section. For learners from a more developed country, look through the comments and identify the differences between the ways people are responding in the developing world and the developed world.

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We hope you’ve enjoyed this course and have learned many ways that you can take action in your own lives and communities. Use this discussion as an opportunity to share what action you’re going to take to reduce your carbon footprint (the amount of carbon dioxide you emit from your personal actions).

Then, consider what else needs to be done. This can either be at a local scale of individuals taking action, a national scale of policy implementation or a global scale of tacking the problem together.

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Case Study: how has Crediton created a resilient community?

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Case Study: how has Crediton created a resilient community?

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Professor Stewart Barr and Dr Ewan Woodley are back to talk us through a case study of how one English town - Crediton - is responding to the risks of flooding and extreme weather events that will occur increasingly with climate change.

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Sustainable Cities and Communities - Summary

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Sustainable Cities and Communities - Summary

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Finally, to wrap up this week, let’s look at how the Sustainable Development Goals are setting targets to help create ‘Sustainable Cities and Communities’:

Reduce the adverse per capita environmental impact of cities, including by paying special attention to air quality and municipal and other waste management.

Substantially increase the number of cities and human settlements adopting and implementing integrated policies and plans towards inclusion, resource efficiency, mitigation and adaptation to climate change.

Provide access to safe, affordable, accessible and sustainable transport systems for all.

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