#Infrastructure development for clean water

[greenthestral]

Achieving Goal 6: Clean Water and Sanitation for a Sustainable Future

Clean water and sanitation are fundamental human rights and essential for the well-being and prosperity of communities worldwide. Access to clean water is crucial for drinking, hygiene, agriculture, and industry. Sanitation facilities ensure the proper disposal of waste and prevent the spread of diseases. Recognizing the importance of water and sanitation, the United Nations has set Goal 6 as part of its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In this article, we will explore the significance of Goal 6, its targets, and the actions needed to achieve clean water and sanitation for all.

The Importance of Goal 6: Clean Water and Sanitation

Access to clean water and sanitation is not only a pressing global issue but also a matter of basic human rights. Shockingly, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF, a staggering 2.2 billion people worldwide lack access to safely managed drinking water, while an overwhelming 4.2 billion people do not have access to safely managed sanitation services. These numbers highlight the scale of the problem and the urgent need for action.

The consequences of inadequate water and sanitation are far-reaching and severe. One of the most significant impacts is the spread of waterborne diseases. Contaminated water sources and poor sanitation facilities create a breeding ground for diseases like cholera, typhoid, and dysentery. These illnesses disproportionately affect vulnerable populations, including children and the elderly, leading to increased morbidity and mortality rates. Lack of access to clean water and sanitation perpetuates a cycle of poverty and ill-health, as communities struggle to break free from the burden of preventable diseases.

Child mortality is also closely linked to the absence of clean water and sanitation. Unsafe drinking water and inadequate sanitation facilities contribute to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children each year. Diarrheal diseases, in particular, claim the lives of many young children, as their weakened immune systems make them more susceptible to the harmful effects of contaminated water. Furthermore, the time spent collecting water from distant sources and the lack of proper sanitation facilities affect children's education and overall development, perpetuating a cycle of disadvantage and limited opportunities.

In addition to the human toll, inadequate access to clean water and sanitation hinders economic development. Communities that lack reliable access to clean water face numerous challenges. For instance, the burden of water collection falls primarily on women and girls, who often spend hours each day walking long distances to fetch water. This time-consuming task takes away from opportunities for education, income generation, and other productive activities, reinforcing gender inequalities and limiting economic empowerment.

Moreover, industries and businesses also suffer when water and sanitation are compromised. Lack of clean water can impede agricultural production, affecting crop yields and food security. Industries that rely on water, such as manufacturing and tourism, face operational challenges and increased costs when they must rely on alternative, often expensive, water sources. Inadequate sanitation can lead to environmental pollution, further exacerbating health risks and harming ecosystems, which are essential for the well-being of communities and biodiversity.

The gravity of the water and sanitation crisis necessitates urgent action and a comprehensive approach. Goal 6 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) recognizes the importance of clean water and sanitation for all and sets targets to address these challenges. Governments, organizations, and individuals must prioritize investment in infrastructure development, education and awareness programs, sustainable practices, and innovative solutions.

By investing in infrastructure, such as water treatment plants, pipelines, and sanitation facilities, governments can improve access to clean water and proper waste management. Concurrently, education and awareness programs can promote proper hygiene practices, behavioral change, and the sustainable use of water resources. It is crucial to empower communities with knowledge and tools to protect their water sources and ensure sustainable practices are adopted at the individual and community levels.

Sustainable agriculture practices also play a significant role in achieving clean water and sanitation goals. Implementing water-efficient irrigation techniques, promoting organic farming, and reducing the use of harmful pesticides and fertilizers can help conserve water resources and prevent pollution. By embracing technology and innovation, such as water purification systems, smart water management systems, and affordable sanitation technologies, we can bridge the gap in access to clean water and sanitation, particularly in remote and underserved areas.

Collaboration and partnerships among governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), businesses, and communities are crucial for progress. By joining forces, sharing expertise, and pooling resources, we can overcome financial constraints, leverage innovative solutions, and achieve more significant impact. International cooperation, aid, and support can also play a pivotal role in assisting countries with limited resources to improve their water and sanitation infrastructure and practices.

The lack of access to clean water and sanitation remains a global crisis with far-reaching consequences. The numbers are staggering, and the impacts on health, child mortality, and economic development are severe. Achieving Goal 6 of the SDGs requires concerted efforts, investment in infrastructure, education, sustainable practices, and innovative solutions. It is only through collaboration and a commitment to this fundamental human right that we can ensure a sustainable future where every individual has access to clean water and sanitation, leading to improved health, reduced poverty, and enhanced opportunities for all.

Targets for Goal 6

Goal 6 encompasses multiple targets that aim to address the water and sanitation challenges. These targets include:

Achieving universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all.

Ensuring access to adequate and equitable sanitation and hygiene for all.

Improving water quality by reducing pollution and increasing water treatment.

Increasing water-use efficiency and ensuring sustainable water withdrawals.

Implementing integrated water resources management at all levels.

Protecting and restoring water-related ecosystems, including mountains, forests, wetlands, rivers, and lakes.

Actions to Achieve Goal 6

To achieve Goal 6 and ensure clean water and sanitation for all, various actions need to be undertaken at local, national, and global levels. Here are some key actions:

Infrastructure Development: Governments and organizations should invest in infrastructure development to improve water and sanitation systems. This includes building water treatment plants, pipelines, and sanitation facilities to ensure access to clean water and proper waste management.

Education and Awareness: Raising awareness about the importance of clean water and sanitation is crucial. Education programs can help communities understand the benefits of proper hygiene practices and promote behavior change to prevent water pollution and ensure the sustainable use of water resources.

Sustainable Agriculture: Promoting sustainable agriculture practices can reduce water pollution from pesticides and fertilizers. Implementing efficient irrigation techniques, such as drip irrigation, can also conserve water resources.

Collaboration and Partnerships: Addressing the water and sanitation challenges requires collaboration between governments, NGOs, businesses, and communities. Partnerships can bring together expertise, resources, and innovative solutions to overcome the barriers to clean water and sanitation.

Technology and Innovation: Embracing technological advancements can greatly contribute to achieving Goal 6. Innovative solutions, such as water purification systems, smart water management systems, and affordable sanitation technologies, can improve access to clean water and sanitation in remote areas.

Water Conservation: Encouraging water conservation practices at the individual and community levels is essential. Simple measures like fixing leaks, using water-efficient appliances, and harvesting rainwater can go a long way in reducing water wastage and ensuring the availability of clean water.

Success Stories and Best Practices

Several success stories demonstrate that progress can be made in achieving Goal 6. For instance, in Rwanda, the government's commitment to improving water and sanitation services has resulted in significant improvements in access to clean water, particularly in rural areas. The introduction of community-led total sanitation programs in Bangladesh has successfully improved sanitation practices and reduced open defecation.

Challenges and the Way Forward

Despite the progress made, significant challenges remain in achieving Goal 6. Limited financial resources, inadequate infrastructure, climate change impacts, and conflicts are some of the obstacles that need to be overcome. However, there are opportunities to address these challenges. By increasing investments in water and sanitation, promoting sustainable practices, and strengthening partnerships, we can create a future where clean water and sanitation are accessible to all.

Conclusion

Goal 6: Clean Water and Sanitation is a critical component of the Sustainable Development Goals, highlighting the significance of access to clean water and sanitation for all. Achieving this goal requires concerted efforts from governments, organizations, communities, and individuals. By implementing the targets and taking necessary actions, we can ensure a sustainable future with clean water and sanitation, improving health, reducing poverty, and fostering economic development worldwide. Let us work together to make Goal 6 a reality and create a world where no one is deprived of this basic human right.

[townpostin]

Moharda Drinking Water Project Phase-2 Gets Green Light

Rs 8 crore plan to benefit 500 families; new tanks and treatment plant approved A high-level meeting chaired by MLA Saryu Roy approved the Moharda Drinking Water Project Phase-2, estimated at Rs 8 crore. JAMSHEDPUR – Officials approved the Rs 8 crore Moharda Drinking Water Project Phase-2, aimed at providing clean water to 500 families in Birsanagar. The project includes constructing two water…

[captaingimpy]

Exploring the Themes of Atlas and the Role of Technology in Society

The Netflix film Atlas, starring Jennifer Lopez as the titular character, centers around her lifelong vendetta to decommission Harlan, an artificial intelligence created by her mother, portrayed by Simu Liu. Despite what critics tend to think of this movie, there are several things I appreciate that it made me think about. One thing I appreciate about the nakedness of new Hollywood is that, for…

[batboyblog]

Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week #25

June 28-July 5 2024

The Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Is putting forward the first ever federal safety regulation to protect worker's from excessive heat in the workplace. As climate change has caused extreme heat events to become more common work place deaths have risen from an average of 32 heat related deaths between 1992 and 2019 to 43 in 2022. The rules if finalized would require employers to provide drinking water and cool break areas at 80 degrees and at 90 degrees have mandatory 15-minute breaks every two hours and be monitored for signs of heat illness. This would effect an estimated 36 million workers.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency announced $1 Billion for 656 projects across the country aimed at helping local communities combat climate change fueled disasters like flooding and extreme heat. Some of the projects include $50 Million to Philadelphia for a stormwater pump station and combating flooding, and a grant to build Shaded bus shelters in Washington, D.C.

The Department of Transportation announced thanks to efforts by the Biden Administration flight cancellations at the lowest they've been in a decade. At just 1.4% for the year so far. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg credited the Department's new rules requiring automatic refunds for any cancellations or undue delays as driving the good numbers as well as the investment of $25 billion in airport infrastructure that was in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

The Department of Transportation announced $600 million in the 3rd round of funding to reconnect communities. Many communities have been divided by highways and other Infrastructure projects over the years. Most often effecting racial minority and poor areas. The Biden Administration is dedicated to addressing these injustices and helping reconnect communities split for decades. This funding round will see Atlanta’s Southside Communities reconnected as well as a redesign for Birmingham’s Black Main Street, reconnecting a community split by Interstate 65 in the 1960s. 

The Biden Administration approved its 9th offshore wind power project. About 9 miles off the coast of New Jersey the planned wind farm will generated 2,800 megawatts of electricity, enough to power almost a million homes with totally clear power. This will bring the total amount of clean wind power generated by projects approved by the Biden Administration to 13 gigawatts. The Administration's climate goal is to generate 30 gigawatts from wind.

The Biden Administration announced funding for 12 new Regional Technology and Innovation Hubs. The $504 million dollars will go to supporting tech hubs in, Colorado, Montana, Indiana, Illinois, Nevada, New York, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin. These tech hubs together with 31 already announced and funded will support high tech manufacturing jobs, as well as training for 21st century jobs for millions of American workers.

HHS announced over $200 million to support improved care for older Americans, particularly those with Alzheimer’s and related dementias. The money is focused on training primary care physicians, nurse practitioners, and other health care clinicians in best practices in elder and dementia care, as well as seeking to  integrate geriatric training into primary care. It also will support ways that families and other non-medical care givers can be educated to give support to aging people.

HHS announced $176 million to help support the development of a mRNA-based pandemic influenza vaccine. As part of the government's efforts to be ready before the next major pandemic it funds and supports new vaccine's to try to predict the next major pandemic. Moderna is working on an mRNA vaccine, much like the Covid-19, vaccine focused on the H5 and H7 avian influenza viruses, which experts fear could spread to humans and cause a Covid like event.

[reasonsforhope]

Scientists have developed a new solar-powered system to convert saltwater into fresh drinking water which they say could help reduce dangerous the risk of waterborne diseases like cholera.

Via tests in rural communities, they showed that the process is more than 20% cheaper than traditional methods and can be deployed in rural locations around the globe.

Building on existing processes that convert saline groundwater to freshwater, the researchers from King’s College London, in collaboration with MIT and the Helmholtz Institute for Renewable Energy Systems, created a new system that produced consistent levels of water using solar power, and reported it in a paper published recently in Nature Water.

It works through a process called electrodialysis which separates the salt using a set of specialized membranes that channel salt ions into a stream of brine, leaving the water fresh and drinkable. By flexibly adjusting the voltage and the rate at which salt water flowed through the system, the researchers developed a system that adjusts to variable sunshine while not compromising on the amount of fresh drinking water produced.

Using data first gathered in the village of Chelleru near Hyderabad in India, and then recreating these conditions of the village in New Mexico, the team successfully converted up to 10 cubic meters, or several bathtubs worth of fresh drinking water. This was enough for 3,000 people a day with the process continuing to run regardless of variable solar power caused by cloud coverage and rain.

[Note: Not sure what metric they're using to calculate daily water needs here. Presumably this is drinking water only.]

Dr. Wei He from the Department of Engineering at King’s College London believes the new technology could bring massive benefits to rural communities, not only increasing the supply of drinking water but also bringing health benefits.

“By offering a cheap, eco-friendly alternative that can be operated off the grid, our technology enables communities to tap into alternative water sources (such as deep aquifers or saline water) to address water scarcity and contamination in traditional water supplies,” said He.

“This technology can expand water sources available to communities beyond traditional ones and by providing water from uncontaminated saline sources, may help combat water scarcity or unexpected emergencies when conventional water supplies are disrupted, for example like the recent cholera outbreaks in Zambia.”

In the global rural population, 1.6 billion people face water scarcity, many of whom are reliant on stressed reserves of groundwater lying beneath the Earth’s surface.

However, worldwide 56% of groundwater is saline and unsuitable for consumption. This issue is particularly prevalent in India, where 60% of the land harbors undrinkable saline water. Consequently, there is a pressing need for efficient desalination methods to create fresh drinking water cheaply, and at scale.

Traditional desalination technology has relied either on costly batteries in off-grid systems or a grid system to supply the energy necessary to remove salt from the water. In developing countries’ rural areas, however, grid infrastructure can be unreliable and is largely reliant on fossil fuels...

“By removing the need for a grid system entirely and cutting reliance on battery tech by 92%, our system can provide reliable access to safe drinking water, entirely emission-free, onsite, and at a discount of roughly 22% to the people who need it compared to traditional methods,” He said.

The system also has the potential to be used outside of developing areas, particularly in agriculture where climate change is leading to unstable reserves of fresh water for irrigation.

The team plans to scale up the availability of the technology across India through collaboration with local partners. Beyond this, a team from MIT also plans to create a start-up to commercialize and fund the technology.

“While the US and UK have more stable, diversified grids than most countries, they still rely on fossil fuels. By removing fossil fuels from the equation for energy-hungry sectors like agriculture, we can help accelerate the transition to Net Zero,” He said.

-via Good News Network, April 2, 2024

[fatehbaz]

Why should low-carbon projects be permitted to destroy legendary Native American sacred sites? Yakama elders witnessed the construction of The Dalles Dam that flooded and silenced Celilo Falls on the Columbia River. Since time immemorial, Celilo Falls was one of history’s great marketplaces. Multiple tribes had permanent villages near the falls. Thousands of people gathered annually to trade, feast, and participate in games and religious ceremonies over millennia. During spring, this natural monument surged up to 10 times the amount of water that passes over Niagara Falls today.

What must Indigenous people continue to sacrifice for energy development? The Seattle Times editorial board recently announced support for the Goldendale pumped-storage hydroelectric project to benefit the state’s clean-energy portfolio [“Goldendale energy project can help meet state’s clean-energy needs,” Sept. 2, Opinion]. The board constructed an alternate reality where tribal nations could find common ground with the developer and resolve objections to project construction. The board wrote, “A compromise that would allow the project to go forward while respecting tribal concerns would be a benefit for all.” The board ignores the realities of Native American history and the history of this project, which the Confederated Tribes and Bands of Yakama Nation (Yakama Nation) have objected to from the initial development proposal at this site.

The project site is situated on Pushpum — a sacred site to the Yakama Nation, a place where there is an abundance of traditional foods and medicines. The developer’s footprint proposes excavation and trenching over identified Indigenous Traditional Cultural Properties, historic and archaeological resources and access to exercise ceremonial practices and treaty-gathering rights.

Notably, the project site covers the ancestral village site of the Willa-witz-pum Band and the Yakama fishing site called As’num, where Yakama tribal fishermen continue to practice their treaty-fishing rights.

Yakama Nation opposes the development. The developer proposes two, approximately 60-acre reservoirs and associated energy infrastructure within the Columbia Hills near the John Day Dam and an existing wind turbine complex. The majority of the nearly 700 acre site is undeveloped; the lower reservoir would be located on a portion of the former Columbia Gorge Aluminum smelter site. The tribe’s treaty-reserved right to exercise gathering, fishing, ceremony and passing of traditions in the area of the proposed project has existed since time immemorial. The tribe studied mitigation; it is impossible at this site.

Columbia Riverkeeper, and more than a dozen other nonprofits, stand in solidarity with Yakama Nation and oppose the development: The climate crisis does not absolve our moral and ethical responsibilities. Both tribal nations and environmental organizations have worked tirelessly to stop fossil fuel developments and secure monumental climate legislation in the Pacific Northwest. But we refuse to support a sacrifice zone to destroy Native American cultural and sacred sites in the name of combating climate change.

Environmental justice is on the line with the pumped-storage development. Seventeen tribal leaders sent a letter to Gov. Jay Inslee, urging him to reject development permits. The leaders explained, “Our ancestors signed Treaties with the United States, often under threat of violence and death, in exchange for our ancestral lands and sacred places. Through these treaties, we retain the rights to practice and live in our traditional ways in these places. Yet, the promises made by the government have been broken time and time again.”

Earlier this year, the Washington State Office of Equity, located within the governor’s office, released the state’s inaugural five-year Washington State Pro-Equity Anti-Racism Plan & Playbook. Gov. Inslee stated, “We will no longer replicate and reinforce systems, processes and behaviors that lead to inequities and disparities among various communities.” Now is the time to apply the playbook to climate change and energy siting.

There is no room for compromise. The choice is stark: Continue to advance our nation’s and state’s history of sacrificing Indigenous resources through broken promises, or work with tribes committed to tackling the climate crisis while, at the same time, protecting the last remaining sacred sites.

---

Text by: Jeremy Takala and Lauren Goldberg. “Stop sacrificing Indigenous sacred sites in the name of climate change.” The Seattle Times. 25 September 2022.

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Writing Notes: Health

Health - a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity (WHO, 2019).

This definition has been subject to controversy, as it may have limited value for implementation.

Generally, the context in which we live our lives is critical for our health and quality of life.

It is increasingly recognized that health is maintained and improved not only through the advancement and application of health science, but also through intelligent lifestyle choices and efforts of the individual, as well as larger society.

Main Determinants of Health According to WHO

Social environment

Economic environment

Physical environment

Individual characteristics and behavior

Global Indicators of Health

Health indicators - quantifiable characteristics of a population which researchers use for describing the health of a population.

Adopting a standard system with reliable measures for defining health is important for global monitoring of changes in health.

Researchers using data collected from around the world look for patterns in identifying, preventing, and treating disease.

There are 3 common global health indicators identified by The World Health Organization (WHO) that directly and indirectly measure and monitor global health:

Life expectancy

Infant mortality

Subjective well-being

These 3 indicators serve as standard measures to assist health professionals working in both developed and developing countries. 

LIFE EXPECTANCY

A statistical measure of the average time an organism (in our case human) is expected to live, based on the year of its birth, its current age and other demographic factors including gender.

There are great variations in life expectancy between different parts of the world, mostly caused by differences in public health, medical care, and diet.

Comparing life expectancies from birth across countries can be problematic.

There are differing definitions of live birth versus stillbirth even among more developed countries, and less developed countries often have poor reporting.

INFANT MORTALITY

Refers to the the death of young children under the age of 1.

Infant mortality rate (IMR) - the number of deaths of children under one year of age per 1000 live births.

IMR - is used to standardize infant deaths for global comparisons (WHO, 2019).

Premature birth is the largest contributor to the IMR.

Other leading causes of infant mortality are birth asphyxia, pneumonia, congenital malformations, diseases and malnutrition.

Many factors contribute to infant mortality, such as the mother’s level of education, environmental conditions, and political and medical infrastructure.

Improving sanitation, access to clean drinking water, immunization against infectious diseases, and other public health measures can help reduce high rates of infant mortality.

SUBJECTIVE WELL-BEING

Is the scientific term for happiness and life satisfaction—thinking and feeling that your life is going well, rather than badly.

Levels of subjective well-being are influenced by both internal factors, such as personality and outlook, and external factors, such as the society in which they live.

Some of the major determinants of SWB are:

A person’s inborn temperament, the quality of their social relationships, the societies they live in, and their ability to meet their basic needs.

Sources: 1 2 3 4

[marcusagrippa]

agrippa's wildest kinks are....

he jerks it to publicly accessible clean water and well-thought-out urban infrastructure developments

[magz]

Ending Water Apartheid In Palestine.

Article Date: April 8, 2024.

Article Excerpt:

According to Euro-Med Monitor, those in the Gaza Strip have access to just 1.5 liters of water per person per day for all needs, including drinking, cooking, and personal hygiene. The established international emergency water threshold is 15 liters per person per day—ten times what Gazans have now. At least 20 people have already died of dehydration and malnutrition, a number that will continue to rise as diarrheal disease spreads due to lack of clean water, leaving many unable to retain what few calories they ingest.Despite significant investment in water and wastewater infrastructure in Palestine from institutions like the World Bank and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Palestinian per capita water consumption continues to fall. While the water crisis in Gaza is now catastrophic, the Palestinian struggle to access water long predates the current onslaught and is an issue in the West Bank, too.

[...]

The root cause of Palestine’s water crisis is not a lack of investment but the political reality that Israel, as an occupying power, manages water in a way that denies Palestinians fair access. Experts and rights groups call this “water apartheid.” They say that recent Israeli tactics in Gaza, such as cutting off water to the enclave, are just the latest examples of its weaponization of the vital resource.

“Water apartheid describes a form of segregation that results in unequal access to water, where policies and practices ensure that water resources are disproportionately allocated to privileged groups while marginalized communities face scarcity and denial of access,” explains Saker El Nour, a sociologist and co-founder of Water Justice for Gaza, a collective of researchers and activists that publishes a newsletter on water in Palestine.

[...]

In Gaza, as early as 2017, UNICEF estimated that 96% of the water from the enclave’s sole aquifer was unfit for consumption due to untreated wastewater and seawater pollution. Still, before Israel’s October 2023 invasion, the aquifer provided over 80% of Gaza’s water, with three desalination stations and three pipes from Israeli company Mekorot providing the remainder.

[...]

“There is a segregationist thing of investing in water infrastructure for the settler population, allowing them to dig deeper wells to pull out more water, and constraining the Palestinian population, not letting them invest in improvements in their water infrastructure,” explains Michael Mason, director of the Middle East Center at the London School of Economics.

[...]

“Development aid is just a band-aid put on to make things look good, but it does not necessarily offer a sustainable solution,” she says. “The United Nations or USAID, for example, could spend a hundred million pounds to build a big water treatment plant, but then it gets bombed and that’s it—nothing is protected.”What is needed instead, Zaqout says, is an end to Israel’s control over Palestinian resources and its attacks on infrastructure and autonomy for Palestinian decision-makers to “think about their water needs, design their own infrastructure, and manage and decide on how they want to allocate funds.”

Mason says that the political pressure needed to push governments like those of the United States and the United Kingdom toward withholding support for Israel’s occupation could come from international courts and rights groups. Many of these are already spotlighting Israel’s weaponization of water.

[materialsscienceandengineering]

Clean energy plans, including the U.S. Infrastructure Investment Act's "Clean Hydrogen Road Map," are counting on hydrogen as a fuel of the future. But current hydrogen separation technology is still falling short of efficiency and sustainability goals. As part of ongoing efforts to develop materials that could enable alternative energy sources, researchers in Drexel University's College of Engineering have produced a titanium oxide nanofilament material that can harness sunlight to unlock the ubiquitous molecule's potential as a fuel source. The discovery offers an alternative to current methods that generate greenhouse gas and require a great deal of energy. Photocatalysis, a process that can split hydrogen from water using only sunlight, has been explored for several decades, but has remained a more distant consideration because the catalyst materials enabling the process can only survive it for a day or two, which limits its long-term efficiency and, as a result, its commercial viability. Drexel's group, led by College of Engineering researchers Michel Barsoum, PhD, and Hussein O. Badr, PhD, in collaboration with scientists from the National Institute of Materials Physics in Bucharest, Romania, recently reported its discovery of photocatalytic titanium oxide-based, one-dimensional nanofilament material that can help sunlight glean hydrogen from water for months at a time. Their article "Photo-stable, 1D-nanofilaments TiO2-based lepidocrocite for photocatalytic hydrogen production in water-methanol mixtures," published in the journal Matter, presents a sustainable and affordable path for creating hydrogen fuel, according to the authors.

Read more.

[theculturedmarxist]

SHANGHAI — Over the past generation, China’s most important relationships were with the more developed world, the one that used to be called the “first world.” Mao Zedong proclaimed China to be the leader of a “third” (non-aligned) world back in the 1970s, and the term later came to be a byword for deprivation. The notion of China as a developing country continues to this day, even as it has become a superpower; as the tech analyst Dan Wang has joked, China will always remain developing — once you’re developed, you’re done. 

Fueled by exports to the first world, China became something different — something not of any of the three worlds. We’re still trying to figure out what that new China is and how it now relates to the world of deprivation — what is now called the Global South, where the majority of human beings alive today reside. But amid that uncertainty, Chinese exports to the Global South now exceed those to the Global North considerably — and they’re growing. 

The International Monetary Fund expects Asian countries to account for 70% of growth globally this year. China must “shape a new international system that is conducive to hedging against the negative impacts of the West’s decoupling,” the scholar and former People’s Liberation Army theorist Cheng Yawen wrote recently. That plan starts with Southeast Asia and extends throughout the Global South, a terrain that many Chinese intellectuals see as being on their side in the widening divide between the West and the rest. 

“The idea is that what China is today, fast-growing countries from Bangladesh to Brazil could be tomorrow.”

China isn’t exporting plastic trinkets to these places but rather the infrastructure for telecommunications, transportation and digitally driven “smart cities.” In other words, China is selling the developmental model that raised its people out of obscurity and poverty to developed global superpower status in a few short decades to countries with people who have decided that they want that too. 

The world China is reorienting itself to is a world that, in many respects, looks like China did a generation ago. On offer are the basics of development — education, health care, clean drinking water, housing. But also more than that — technology, communication and transportation.

Back in April, on the eve of a trip to China, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva sat down for an interview with Reuters. “I am going to invite Xi Jinping to come to Brazil,” he said, “to get to know Brazil, to show him the projects that we have of interest for Chinese investment. … What we want is for the Chinese to make investments to generate new jobs and generate new productive assets in Brazil.” After Lula and Xi had met, the Brazilian finance minister proclaimed that “President Lula wants a policy of reindustrialization. This visit starts a new challenge for Brazil: bringing direct investments from China.” Three months later, the battery and electric vehicle giant BYD announced a $624 million investment to build a factory in Brazil, its first outside Asia.

Across the Global South, fast-growing countries from Bangladesh to Brazil can send raw materials to China and get technological devices in exchange. The idea is that what China is today, they could be tomorrow.

At The Kunming Institute of Botany

In April, I went to Kunming to visit one of China’s most important environmental conservation outfits — the Kunming Institute of Botany. Like the British Museum’s antiquities collected from everywhere that the empire once extended, the seed bank here (China’s largest) aspires to acquire thousands of samples of various plant species and become a regional hub for future biotech research. 

From the Kunming train station, you can travel by Chinese high-speed rail to Vientiane; if all goes according to plan, the line will soon be extended to Bangkok. At Yunnan University across town, the economics department researches “frontier economics” with an eye to Southeast Asian neighboring states, while the international relations department focuses on trade pacts within the region and a community of anthropologists tries to figure out what it all means. 

Kunming is a bland, air-conditioned provincial capital in a province of startling ethnic and geographic diversity. In this respect, it is a template for Chinese development around Southeast Asia. Perhaps in the future, Dhaka, Naypyidaw and Phnom Penh will provide the reassuring boredom of a Kunming afternoon. 

Imagine you work at the consulate of Bangladesh in Kunming. Why are you in Kunming? What does Kunming have that you want?

The Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore lyrically described Asia’s communities as organic and spiritual in contrast with the materialism of the West. As Tagore spoke of the liberatory powers of art, his Chinese listeners scoffed. The Chinese poet Wen Yiduo, who moved to Kunming during World War II and is commemorated with a statue at Yunnan Normal University in Kunming, wrote that Tagore’s work had no form: “The greatest fault in Tagore’s art is that he has no grasp of reality. Literature is an expression of life and even metaphysical poetry cannot be an exception. Everyday life is the basic stuff of literature, and the experiences of life are universal things.” 

“Xi Jinping famously said that China doesn’t export revolution. But what else do you call train lines, 5G connectivity and scientific research centers appearing in places that previously had none of these things?”

If Tagore’s Bengali modernism championed a spiritual lens for life rather than the materiality of Western colonialists, Chinese modernists decided that only by being more materialist than Westerners could they regain sovereignty. Mao had said rural deprivation was “一穷二白” — poor and empty; Wen accused Tagore’s poetry of being formless. Hegel sneered that Asia had no history, since the same phenomena simply repeated themselves again and again — the cycle of planting and harvest in agricultural societies. 

For modernists, such societies were devoid of historical meaning in addition to being poor and readily exploited. The amorphous realm of the spirit was for losers, the Chinese May 4th generation decided. Railroads, shipyards and electrification offered salvation.

Today, as Chinese roads, telecoms and entrepreneurs transform Bangladesh and its peers in the developing world, you could say that the argument has been won by the Chinese. Chinese infrastructure creates a new sort of blank generic urban template, one seen first in Shenzhen, then in Kunming and lately in Vientiane, Dhaka or Indonesian mining towns. 

The sleepy backwaters of Southeast Asia have seen previous waves of Chinese pollinators. Low Lan Pak, a tin miner from Guangdong, established a revolutionary state in Indonesia in the 18th century. Li Mi, a Kuomintang general, set up an independent republic in what is now northern Myanmar after World War II. 

New sorts of communities might walk on the new roads and make calls on the new telecom networks and find work in the new factories that have been built with Chinese technology and funded by Chinese money across Southeast Asia. One Bangladeshi investor told me that his government prefers direct investment to aid — aid organizations are incentivized to portray Bangladesh as eternally poor, while Huawei and Chinese investors play up the country’s development prospects and bright future. In the latter, Bangladeshis tend to agree.

“Is China a place, or is it a recipe for social structure that can be implemented generically anywhere?”

The majority of human beings alive today live in a world of not enough: not enough food; not enough security; not enough housing, education, health care; not enough rights for women; not enough potable water. They are desperate to get out of there, as China has. They might or might not like Chinese government policies or the transactional attitudes of Chinese entrepreneurs, but such concerns are usually of little importance to countries struggling to bootstrap their way out of poverty.

The first world tends to see the third as a rebuke and a threat. Most Southeast Asian countries have historically borne abuse in relationship to these American fears. Most American companies don’t tend to see Pakistan or Bangladesh or Sumatra as places they’d like invest money in. But opportunity beckons for Chinese companies seeking markets outside their nation’s borders and finding countries with rapidly growing populations and GDPs. Imagine a Huawei engineer in a rural Bangladeshi village, eating a bad lunch with the mayor, surrounded by rice paddies — he might remember the Hunan of his childhood.  

Xi Jinping famously said that China doesn’t export revolution. But what else do you call train lines, 5G connectivity and scientific research centers appearing in places that previously had none of these things? 

Across the vastness of a world that most first-worlders would not wish to visit, Chinese entrepreneurs are setting up electric vehicle and battery companies, installing broadband and building trains. The world that is looming into view on Huawei’s 2022 business report is one in which Asia is the center of the global economy and China sits at its core, the hub from which sophisticated and carbon-neutral technologies are distributed. Down the spokes the other way come soybeans, jute and nickel. Lenin’s term for this kind of political economy was imperialism. 

If the Chinese economy is the set of processes that created and create China, then its exports today are China — technologies, knowledge, communication networks, forms of organization. But is China a place, or is it a recipe for social structure that can be implemented generically anywhere?

Huawei Station

Huawei’s connections to the Chinese Communist Party remain unclear, but there is certainly a case of elective affinities. Huawei’s descriptions of selfless, nameless engineers working to bring telecoms to the countryside of Bangladesh is reminiscent of Party propaganda and “socialist realist” art. As a young man, Ren Zhengfei, Huawei’s CEO, spent time in the Chongqing of Mao’s “third front,” where resources were redistributed to develop new urban centers; the logic of starting in rural areas and working your way to the center, using infrastructure to rappel your way up, is embedded within the Maoist ideas that he studied at the time. Today, it underpins Huawei’s business development throughout the Global South. 

I stopped by the Huawei Analyst Summit in April to see if I could connect the company’s history to today. The Bildungsroman of Huawei’s corporate development includes battles against entrenched state-owned monopolies in the more developed parts of the country. The story goes that Huawei couldn’t make inroads in established markets against state-owned competitors, so got started in benighted rural areas where the original leaders had to brainstorm what to do if rats ate the cables or rainstorms swept power stations away; this story is mobilized today to explain their work overseas. 

Perhaps at one point, Huawei could have been just another boring corporation selling plastic objects to consumers across the developed world, but that time ended definitively with Western sanctions in 2019, effectively banning the company from doing business in the U.S. The sanctions didn’t kill Huawei, obviously, and they may have made it stronger. They certainly made it weirder, more militant and more focused on the markets largely scorned by the Ericssons and Nokias of the world. Huawei retrenched to its core strength: providing rural and remote areas with access to connectivity across difficult terrain with the intention that these networks will fuel telehealth and digital education and rapidly scale the heights of development.

Huawei used to do this with dial-up modems in China, but now it is building 5G networks across the Global South. The Chinese government is supportive of these efforts; Huawei’s HQ has a subway station named for the company, and in 2022 the government offered the company massive subsidies.

“For many countries in the Global South, the model of development exemplified by Shenzhen seems plausible and attainable.”

For years, the notion of an ideological struggle between the U.S. and China was dismissed; China is capitalist, they said. Just look at the Louis Vuitton bags. This misses a central truth of the economy of the 21st century. The means of production now are internet servers, which are used for digital communication, for data farms and blockchain, for AI and telehealth. Capitalists control the means of production in the United States, but the state controls the means of production in China. In the U.S. and countries that implicitly accept its tech dominance, private businesspeople dictate the rules of the internet, often to the displeasure of elected politicians who accuse them of rigging elections, fueling inequality or colluding with communists. The difference with China, in which the state has maintained clear regulatory control over the internet since the early days, couldn’t be clearer. 

The capitalist system pursues frontier technologies and profits, but companies like Huawei pursue scalability to the forgotten people of the world. For better or worse, it’s San Francisco or Shenzhen. For many countries in the Global South, the model of development exemplified by Shenzhen seems more plausible and attainable. Nobody thinks they can replicate Silicon Valley, but many seem to think they can replicate Chinese infrastructure-driven middle-class consumerism.

As Deng Xiaoping said, it doesn’t matter if it is a black cat or a white cat, just get a cat that catches mice. Today, leaders of Global South countries complain about the ideological components of American aid; they just want a cat that can catch their mice. Chinese investment is blank — no ideological strings attached. But this begs the question: If China builds the future of Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan and Laos, then is their future Chinese?

Telecommunications and 5G is at the heart of this because connectivity can enable rapid upgrades in health and education via digital technology such as telehealth, whereby people in remote villages are able to consult with doctors and hospitals in more developed regions. For example, Huawei has retrofitted Thailand’s biggest and oldest hospital with 5G to communicate with villages in Thailand’s poor interior — the sort of places a new Chinese high-speed train line could potentially provide links with the outside world — offering Thai villagers without the ability to travel into town the opportunity to get medical treatments and consultations remotely. 

The IMF has proposed that Asia’s developing belt “should prioritize reforms that boost innovation and digitalization while accelerating the green energy transition,” but there is little detail about who exactly ought to be doing all of that building and connecting. In many cases and places, it’s Chinese infrastructure and companies like Huawei that are enabling Thai villagers to live as they do in Guizhou.

Chinese Style Modernization?

The People’s Republic of China is “infinitely stronger than the Soviet Union ever was,” the U.S. ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns, told Politico in April. This prowess “is based on the extraordinary strength of the Chinese economy — its science and technology research base, its innovative capacity and its ambitions in the Indo-Pacific to be the dominant power in the future.” This increasingly feels more like the official position of the U.S. government than a random comment.

Ten years ago, Xi Jinping proposed the notion of a “maritime Silk Road” to the Indonesian Parliament. Today, Indonesia is building an entirely new capital — Nusantara — for which China is providing “smart city” technologies. Indonesia has a complex history with ethnic Chinese merchants, who played an intermediary role between Indigenous people and Western colonists in the 19th century and have been seen as CCP proxies for the past half century or so. But the country is nevertheless moving decisively towards China’s pole, adopting Chinese developmental rhythms and using Chinese technology and infrastructure to unlock the door to the future. “The internet, roads, ports, logistics — most of these were built by Chinese companies,” observed a local scholar. 

The months since the 20th Communist Party Congress have seen the introduction of what Chinese diplomats call “Chinese-style modernization,” a clunky slogan that can evoke the worst and most boring agitprop of the Soviet era. But the concept just means exporting Chinese bones to other social bodies around the world. 

If every apartment decorated with IKEA furniture looks the same, prepare for every city in booming Asia to start looking like Shenzhen. If you like clean streets, bullet trains, public safety and fast Wi-Fi, this may not be a bad thing. 

Chinese trade with Southeast Asia is roughly double that between China and the U.S., and Chinese technology infrastructure is spreading out from places like the “Huawei University” at Indonesia’s Bandung Institute of Technology, which plans to train 100,000 telecom engineers in the next five years. We’re about to see a generation of “barefoot doctors” throughout Southeast Asia traveling by moped across landscapes of underdevelopment connected to hubs of medical data built by Chinese companies with Chinese technology. 

In 1955, the year of the Bandung Conference in Indonesia, the non-aligned world was almost entirely poor, cut off from the means of production in a world where nearly 50% of GDP globally was in the U.S. Today, the logic of that landmark conference is alive today in Chinese informal networks across the Global South, with the key difference that China can now offer these countries the possibility of building their own future without talking to anyone from the Global North. 

Welcome to the Sinosphere, where the tides of Chinese development lap over its borders into the remote forests of tropical Asia, and beyond.

[rjzimmerman]

Climate Migration Will Be the Global Challenge of a Generation. (Sierra Club)

Extreme weather events in South America are driving more families to abandon their homes and undertake a risky, sometimes dangerous journey toward the US border. Changing precipitation patterns mean that once arable land is increasingly barren due to drought, while other areas, like southern Brazil are increasingly prone to cataclysmic flooding.

“Climate change acts as a multiplier for other factors,” said Michael Nash, a filmmaker and researcher who spent two years traveling the world talking to climate migrants as part of a film on the subject. “As regions around the world increasingly suffer from its effects, economies and infrastructure are also damaged as well. People fleeing these situations are often referred to as economic migrants, but the truth is much more complicated.”

“There is no process currently to deal with someone who is coming to the US due to crop failure or natural disaster,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council. “This is an ongoing challenge [for all nations] in the modern era, something we critically need to develop.”

The number of refugees who have been forcibly displaced globally has dramatically increased in the last decade, nearly doubling in size, and migration overall is increasing as well. The principal drivers are economic or related to conflict, but climate change increasingly plays a role, according to data from the United Nations International Office on Migration (IOM). 

Most of those who have been displaced migrate internally—to another region within their birth country—but the number of those choosing to cross borders in search of a better life is increasing as well. The IOM has cited estimates of as many as 1 billion climate migrants in the next 30 years. Other projections point to 1.2 billion by 2050, and 1.4 billion by 2060. Those migrants will largely flee equatorial zones, which will be the hardest hit by global warming, though they will not be the only regions affected.

Some regions, particularly in the Global South, are projected to experience significant changes in temperature, precipitation patterns, sea level rise, and other climate-related factors. Less than 1 percent of the world is currently considered borderline inhabitable. By 2070, that number is expected to rise to 19 percent.

Precipitation patterns are shifting, temperatures are rising, and some areas are experiencing changes in the frequency and severity of weather extremes. The impacts range from melting Andean glaciers to devastating floods, to collapsing forest ecosystems to region-wide droughts. Honduras and Guatemala are already seeing crop failures on previously fertile land. Mexico City and Bogotá both currently suffer severe water shortages that have led to rationing. Brazil in May suffered the worst floods in the country’s history; studies on precipitation patterns suggest floods in the future are twice as likely due to the burning of fossil fuels. Venezuela this year saw the last remaining glacier in the country downgraded in status to an ice patch. Guajira, an Indigenous region that stretches across the borders of Colombia and Venezuela, has experienced desertification due to long-term droughts that have left residents without potable water, and made growing crops impossible.

Climate change also affects basic infrastructure that produces and transports clean water, food, and electricity. Due to droughts in Colombia, which relies overwhelmingly on hydroelectric power, the country this year temporarily reduced the sale of electricity to Ecuador, exacerbating drought-induced power shortages there.

[townpostin]

Jharkhand CM Pushes for Clean Water Access

Champai Soren Reviews Progress of Jal Jeevan Mission The Jharkhand government intensifies efforts to ensure potable water availability across the state, with a focus on rural areas and quality infrastructure. RANCHI – Jharkhand Chief Minister Champai Soren conducted a comprehensive review of the state’s drinking water and sanitation initiatives, emphasizing the timely completion of Jal Jeevan…

[mariacallous]

Humans have long sullied the Arctic with industrial development—mining operations, oil and gas exploration, military bases. That’s contaminated the landscape with a bevy of toxicants, including radiological material, heavy metals, insecticides, and fuels. That nastiness was often intentionally buried in frozen ground known as permafrost. In theory, as long as that ground remained frozen, the pollutants would stay locked away.

No longer. An alarming new paper in the journal Nature Communications estimates that between 13,000 and 20,000 contaminated sites are splayed across Arctic permafrost regions, with 3,500 to 5,200 in areas that’ll be affected by thawing soils before the end of the century. The region is already warming rapidly, more than four times faster than the rest of the planet. And that estimated number of sites is likely low, the scientists warn, because thaw might dramatically accelerate in some places. 

As permafrost degrades, it collapses, releasing buried contaminants that flow out in the melted ice. The ground sinks—often spectacularly and rapidly—dragging down aboveground infrastructure like fuel tanks and pipelines. Indeed, that was the suspected cause of a 2020 environmental disaster in Norilsk, Russia, in which 17,000 tons of oil leaked from a collapsed tank.

“The assumption is that permafrost is a hydrological barrier, and it will remain there forever,” says permafrost researcher Moritz Langer, of the Alfred Wegener Institute and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, lead author of the new paper. “That was the assumption for all of these very old sites—especially from the ‘70s, ‘80s, up until the ‘90s—when climate warming and the problem of permafrost thaw was not really on the radar of most people.”

Langer and his colleagues found that 70 percent of these sites are in Russia, with others across Alaska, Canada, and Greenland. Some facilities are abandoned and difficult to access and clean up. Others are still operational, and producing yet more toxicants to leak into the environment. (The new paper doesn’t distinguish, though, exactly which sites are which.) As the Arctic warms, expect industrial and military development to creep farther north, adding more contaminants while putting more people in contact with them. And the mushier the soil gets, the harder it will be to use heavy equipment to clean up the messes.

“This idea that somehow we have, functionally, a number of potential Superfund sites that were completely unknown until this paper, but could be mobilizing into the Arctic and potentially international environment, is pretty terrifying,” says Kimberley R. Miner, a climate scientist who studies permafrost contamination at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory but wasn’t involved in the new paper. “To see them take that idea and apply it to actual maps and get actual sites, with permafrost disturbance underneath, was so mind-blowing to me.”

Existing sites are already plagued by a slew of environmental troubles. Oil leaks come from both wells and from pipelines. Radioactive material is buried around military bases. Pesticides like DDT are packed in barrels, then buried. Mining operations are notorious for emitting heavy metals like mercury; other sites are full of arsenic, lead, and other highly toxic elements and compounds. Trucks and heavy machinery carry liquid fuels like diesel, which are prone to spill. 

Once the ground is no longer frozen enough to form a barrier, those contaminants will seep into rivers and ponds, corrupting highly sensitive ecosystems. “This, we think, could also be a dangerous situation for people living up in the high north,” says Langer, as the contaminants mix with drinking water.

That water will eventually empty into the ocean and ride elsewhere on currents. Toxicants can also get airborne: Indeed, the Arctic is already dusted with lead from burning leaded gasoline. Mercury, too, could escape mining operations by taking to water and air. “Mercury that came from the burning of coal and fossil fuels from a century or two centuries ago is still cycling through our biosphere,” says Kevin Schaefer, a climate scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who studies permafrost contaminants but wasn’t involved in the new paper.

Human activity in the Arctic only exacerbates the thaw. Dark-colored roads absorb the sun’s energy, heating the soil. Digging up dirt and tossing it on top of snow darkens the whiteness that would normally bounce light off the landscape. Vehicle tires chew up the soil. “You already have rapidly changing environmental conditions,” says George Washington University climate scientist Dmitry Streletskiy, who studies permafrost but wasn’t involved in the new paper. “But then, of course, on top of those rapid changes, you have concentrated human presence—you have industry and infrastructure. So those are really focal points, where you in many ways amplify those changes associated with climate."

Oh, and the giant new Willow drilling project in Alaska that the Biden administration just approved? That’ll be on permafrost too. “Think about what it takes to establish a pipeline,” says Miner. “You're going to need a road. You're going to have people walking in and out, trampling the permafrost. All of that is going to lead to increased thaw and increased potential for contamination and disturbances to the very fragile tundra landscape. So it's just impacts upon impacts upon impacts.”

This new paper only considered gradual permafrost thaw. But permafrost can collapse much more rapidly, digging holes known as thermokarst. As ice becomes liquid water, it loses volume, forming a crater in which microbes produce the highly potent greenhouse gas methane. This further warms the atmosphere and accelerates permafrost thaw—a gnarly climatic feedback loop.

Adding yet more peril is that as the Arctic warms, wildfires are proliferating. If one sweeps through a contaminated site, it’ll send up plumes of toxicant-laden smoke. That will in turn exacerbate the thaw: Scientists have previously calculated that in north Alaska, thermokarst formation has accelerated by 60 percent since 1950, thanks to wildfires.

In other words, Langer says, their paper’s projection is “pretty conservative.” Some of the sites might thaw even earlier.

Permafrost is already deforming communities in the far north. Airport runways are sinking, roads are wrinkling, and buildings are crumbling. “It's no longer some ambiguous thing that might happen in the future—it's happening today, even as we speak,” says Schaefer. “If this infrastructure becomes damaged because of thawing permafrost, it's extremely expensive and extremely difficult to resolve. These areas are very remote. You can only do things in certain times of the year, mainly the summer.” 

If thermokarst opens a hole in your runway, for instance, it might cut off surrounding communities that rely on supplies brought in by plane. And if you can’t fly, you can’t get out of many places around the Arctic. “It's not like the Lower 48—if I don't make it to Denver, I'll fly to Colorado Springs,” says Schaefer. “These are all really key infrastructure, and it's really difficult to build and maintain.”

But this new paper is at least a step toward localizing the problem, directing governments to where cleanup might be required. Early scientific sleuthing like this is a start, but a fix will take putting a lot of boots on increasingly soggy ground. “In order to manage something, you have to measure it,” says Miner. The next step would take a massive push—one like the US Environmental Protection Agency began in the 1980s to clean up Superfund sites. But with such a patchwork of nations and corporations responsible for the mess, it’s not clear when—or if—that work would start.

[beardedmrbean]

Scientists have developed a new solar-powered system to convert saltwater into fresh drinking water which they say could help reduce dangerous the risk of waterborne diseases like cholera.

Via tests in rural communities, they showed that the process is more than 20% cheaper than traditional methods and can be deployed in rural locations around the globe.

Building on existing processes that convert saline groundwater to freshwater, the researchers from King’s College London, in collaboration with MIT and the Helmholtz Institute for Renewable Energy Systems, created a new system that produced consistent levels of water using solar power, and reported it in a paper published recently in Nature Water

It works through a process called electrodialysis which separates the salt using a set of specialized membranes that channel salt ions into a stream of brine, leaving the water fresh and drinkable. By flexibly adjusting the voltage and the rate at which salt water flowed through the system, the researchers developed a system that adjusts to variable sunshine while not compromising on the amount of fresh drinking water produced.

Using data first gathered in the village of Chelleru near Hyderabad in India, and then recreating these conditions of the village in New Mexico, the team successfully converted up to 10 cubic meters, or several bathtubs worth of fresh drinking water. This was enough for 3,000 people a day with the process continuing to run regardless of variable solar power caused by cloud coverage and rain.

Dr. Wei He from the Department of Engineering at King’s College London believes the new technology could bring massive benefits to rural communities, not only increasing the supply of drinking water but also bringing health benefits.

“By offering a cheap, eco-friendly alternative that can be operated off the grid, our technology enables communities to tap into alternative water sources (such as deep aquifers or saline water) to address water scarcity and contamination in traditional water supplies,” said He.

“This technology can expand water sources available to communities beyond traditional ones and by providing water from uncontaminated saline sources, may help combat water scarcity or unexpected emergencies when conventional water supplies are disrupted, for example like the recent cholera outbreaks in Zambia.”

In the global rural population, 1.6 billion people face water scarcity, many of whom are reliant on stressed reserves of groundwater lying beneath the Earth’s surface.

However, worldwide 56% of groundwater is saline and unsuitable for consumption. This issue is particularly prevalent in India, where 60% of the land harbors undrinkable saline water. Consequently, there is a pressing need for efficient desalination methods to create fresh drinking water cheaply, and at scale.

Traditional desalination technology has relied either on costly batteries in off-grid systems or a grid system to supply the energy necessary to remove salt from the water. In developing countries’ rural areas, however, grid infrastructure can be unreliable and is largely reliant on fossil fuels.

Creating a low-cost ‘battery-like’ desalination technology removes the reliance on battery technology for using intermittent solar energy in off-grid applications, enabling affordability to rural communities in developing countries like India.

“By removing the need for a grid system entirely and cutting reliance on battery tech by 92%, our system can provide reliable access to safe drinking water, entirely emission-free, onsite, and at a discount of roughly 22% to the people who need it compared to traditional methods,” He said.

The system also has the potential to be used outside of developing areas, particularly in agriculture where climate change is leading to unstable reserves of fresh water for irrigation.

The team plans to scale up the availability of the technology across India through collaboration with local partners. Beyond this, a team from MIT also plans to create a start-up to commercialize and fund the technology.

“While the US and UK have more stable, diversified grids than most countries, they still rely on fossil fuels. By removing fossil fuels from the equation for energy-hungry sectors like agriculture, we can help accelerate the transition to Net Zero,” He said.

“The next step for us is to apply this low-cost technology to other sectors, including wastewater treatment, and producing alkaline to make the ocean more alkaline to help it absorb more CO2 from the atmosphere. By taking this approach not only can we decarbonize agriculture, but wider environmental and climate benefits as well.”

[reasonsforhope]

"Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park in Brazzaville, Republic of Congo has a lot to celebrate.

The park, which celebrated its 30th anniversary on December 31 of 2023, also shared an exciting conservation milestone: 2023 was the first year without any elephant poaching detected.

“We didn’t detect any elephants killed in the Park this year, a first for the Park since [we] began collecting data. This success comes after nearly a decade of concerted efforts to protect forest elephants from armed poaching in the Park,” Ben Evans, the Park’s management unit director, said in a press release.

Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park was developed by the government of Congo in 1993 to maintain biodiversity conservation in the region, and since 2014, has been cared for through a public-private partnership between Congo’s Ministry of Forest Economy and the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Pictured: Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park. Photo courtesy of Scott Ramsay/Wildlife Conservation Society

Evans credits the ongoing collaboration with this milestone, as the MEF and WCS have helped address escalating threats to wildlife in the region. 

This specifically includes investments in the ranger force, which has increased training and self-defense capabilities, making the force more effective in upholding the law — and the rights of humans and animals.

“Thanks to the strengthening of our anti-poaching teams and new communication technologies, we have been able to reduce poaching considerably,” Max Mviri, a park warden for the Congolese government, said in a video for the Park’s anniversary. 

“Today, we have more than 90 eco-guards, all of whom have received extensive training and undergo refresher courses,” Mviri continued. “What makes a difference is that 90% of our eco-guards come from villages close to the Park. This gives them extra motivation, as they are protecting their forest.”

As other threats such as logging and road infrastructure development impact the area’s wildlife, the Park’s partnerships with local communities and Indigenous populations in the neighboring villages of Bomassa and Makao are increasingly vital.

“We’ve seen great changes, great progress. We’ve seen the abundance of elephants, large mammals in the village,” Gabriel Mobolambi, chief of Bomassa village, said in the same video. “And also on our side, we benefit from conservation.”

Coinciding with the Park’s anniversary is the roll-out of a tourism-focused website, aiming to generate 15% of its revenue from visitors, which contributes significantly to the local economy...

Nouabalé-Ndoki also recently became the world’s first certified Gorilla Friendly National Park, ensuring best practices are in place for all gorilla-related operations, from tourism to research.

But gorillas and elephants — of which there are over 2,000 and 3,000, respectively — aren’t the only species visitors can admire in the 4,334-square-kilometer protected area.

The Park is also home to large populations of mammals such as chimpanzees and bongos, as well as a diverse range of reptiles, birds, and insects. For the flora fans, Nouabalé-Ndoki also boasts a century-old mahogany tree, and a massive forest of large-diameter trees.

Beyond the beauty of the Park, these tourism opportunities pave the way for major developments for local communities.

“The Park has created long-term jobs, which are rare in the region, and has brought substantial benefits to neighboring communities. Tourism is also emerging as a promising avenue for economic growth,” Mobolambi, the chief of Bomassa village, said in a press release.

The Park and its partners also work to provide education, health centers, agricultural opportunities, and access to clean water, as well, helping to create a safe environment for the people who share the land with these protected animals. 

In fact, the Makao and Bomassa health centers receive up to 250 patients a month, and Nouabalé-Ndoki provides continuous access to primary education for nearly 300 students in neighboring villages. 

It is this intersectional approach that maintains a mutual respect between humans and wildlife and encourages the investment in conservation programs, which lead to successes like 2023’s poaching-free milestone...

Evans, of the Park’s management, added in the anniversary video: “Thanks to the trust that has been built up between all those involved in conservation, we know that Nouabalé-Ndoki will remain a crucial refuge for wildlife for the generations to come.”"

-via Good Good Good, February 15, 2024