Category «Environmental Law»

Removing PFAS from public water systems will cost billions and take time

PFAS – perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances – are now either suspected or known to contribute to thyroid disease, elevated cholesterol, liver damage and cancer, among other health issues. Dr. Kyle Doudrick’s team at the University of Notre Dame works on solving problems involving contaminants in water systems, including PFAS. We explore new technologies to remove PFAS from drinking water and to handle the PFAS waste. Here’s a glimpse of the magnitude of the challenge and ways you can reduce PFAS in your own drinking water.

Subjects: Energy, Environmental Law, Government Resources, Healthcare

Climate change is shifting the zones where plants grow

With the arrival of spring in North America, many people are gravitating to the gardening and landscaping section of home improvement stores, where displays are overstocked with eye-catching seed packs and benches are filled with potted annuals and perennials. But some plants that once thrived in your yard may not flourish there now. To understand why, Dr. Matt Kasson looks to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s recent update of its plant hardiness zone map, which has long helped gardeners and growers figure out which plants are most likely to thrive in a given location.

Subjects: Climate Change, Environmental Law

AI in Banking and Finance, January 31, 2024

This semi-monthly column by Sabrina I. Pacifici highlights news, government documents, NGO/IGO papers, industry white papers, academic papers and speeches on the subject of AI’s fast paced impact on the banking and finance sectors. The chronological links provided are to the primary sources, and as available, indicate links to alternate free versions. Five highlights from this post: The Bloomberg Terminal Now Has AI-Generated Summaries of Earnings Calls; Call for papers on Artificial Intelligence in Finance: Next level of artificial intelligence is difficult for banks; Sustainable Banking: Charting The Future With AI And Data Analytics; More impactful than the internet’: How AI will reshape banking jobs; and The fight against greenwashing starts with AI. Here’s why.

Subjects: AI, AI in Banking and Finance, Climate Change, Economy, Environmental Law, Financial System

Bees can learn, remember, think and make decisions – here’s a look at how they navigate the world

Stephen Buchmann is a pollination ecologist specializing in bees, and an adjunct professor with the departments of Entomology and of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona. He draws on his experience studying bees for almost 50 years to explore how these creatures perceive the world and their amazing abilities to navigate, learn, communicate and remember. Here’s some of what I’ve learned.

Subjects: Climate Change, Environmental Law

El Niño is coming, and ocean temps are already at record highs – that can spell disaster for fish and corals

During El Niño, a swath of ocean stretching 6,000 miles (about 10,000 kilometers) westward off the coast of Ecuador warms for months on end, typically by 2 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit (about 1 to 2 degrees Celsius). A few degrees may not seem like much, but in that part of the world, it’s more than enough to completely reorganize wind, rainfall and temperature patterns all over the planet. White corals indicate bleaching from heat stress. Marine heat waves can trigger coral bleaching. Dillon Amaya is a climate scientist who studies the oceans. After three years of La Niña, he advises that it’s time to start preparing for what El Niño may have in store.

Subjects: Climate Change, Environmental Law

What’s going on with the Greenland ice sheet? It’s losing ice faster than forecast and now irreversibly committed to at least 10 inches of sea level rise

Alun Hubbard is a field glaciologist who has worked on ice sheets for more than 30 years. The past few years in particular have been unnerving for the sheer rate and magnitude of change underway. Current teachings that ice sheets respond over millennial time scales is definitely not what we’re seeing today. If every year were like 2012, when Greenland experienced a heat wave, that irreversible commitment to sea level rise would triple. That’s an ominous portent given that these are climate conditions we have already seen, not a hypothetical future scenario.

Subjects: Climate Change, Energy, Environmental Law

Light pollution is disrupting the seasonal rhythms of plants and trees, lengthening pollen season in US cities

City lights that blaze all night are profoundly disrupting urban plants’ phenology – shifting when their buds open in the spring and when their leaves change colors and drop in the fall. New research Yuyu Zhou coauthored shows how nighttime lights are lengthening the growing season in cities, which can affect everything from allergies to local economies. In the study, Zhous and his colleagues analyzed trees and shrubs at about 3,000 sites in U.S. cities to see how they responded under different lighting conditions over a five-year period. Plants use the natural day-night cycle as a signal of seasonal change along with temperature.

Subjects: Climate Change, Energy, Environmental Law, Healthcare

A new ratings industry is emerging to help homebuyers assess climate risks

Matthew E. Kahn studies environmental economics, and in his recent book, “Adapting to Climate Change: Markets and the Management of an Uncertain Future”, he explores how the rise of Big Data will help people, firms and local governments make better decisions in the face of climate risks. He sees the emergence of a climate risk analysis industry for real estate as a promising development, but believe the federal government should set standards to ensure that it provides reliable, accurate information.

Subjects: Big Data, Business Research, Economy, Environmental Law, Financial System, KM

4 strategies for energy and climate change breakthroughs at the UN summits

Morgan Bazilian and Dolf Gielen both with the Colorado School of Mines, have identified four strategic priorities that would help provide the foundations for success in both the energy and climate change domains.

Subjects: Economy, Energy, Environmental Law, Financial System

IPCC climate report: Profound changes are underway in Earth’s oceans and ice – a lead author explains what the warnings mean

Humans are unequivocally warming the planet, and that’s triggering rapid changes in the atmosphere, oceans and polar regions, and increasing extreme weather around the world, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns in a new report. The IPCC released the first part of its much anticipated Sixth Assessment Report on Aug. 9, 2021. In it, 234 scientists from around the globe summarized the current climate research on how the Earth is changing as temperatures rise and what those changes will mean for the future. This is a conversation with climate scientist Robert Kopp, a lead author of the chapter on Earth’s oceans, ice and sea level rise, about the profound changes underway.

Subjects: Environmental Law