Equilibrium/Sustainability — Presented by The American Petroleum Institute — Livestock auctions speed up in dry year reminiscent of Dust Bowl

Livestock auctions speed up in dry year reminiscent of Dust Bowl

 

Today is Thursday.  Welcome to Equilibrium, a newsletter that tracks the growing global battle over the future of sustainability. Subscribe here: digital-staging.thehill.com/newsletter-signup. 

Auctions at a livestock hotspot in North Dakota’s Logan County have doubled from once every two weeks to once a week, boosting sales much earlier in the season than usual, according to local CBS affiliate KX News. 

Farmers have decided to cull their heifer, horse and bull herds amid “one of the driest years on record,” KX News reported. Arid conditions drove many ranchers to sell off their older cows this summer instead of newly weaned calves in the fall — meaning, there will be fewer heifers available to deliver new calves for them next year.

North Dakota has experienced one of its driest “water years” — October through September — on record, with conditions in Bismarck “only behind some of the years in the Dust Bowl era,” KFYR TV reported. But North Dakota is by no means the only part of the country grappling with the ongoing consequences of drought.

While about 85 percent of Californians rely on groundwater for some portion of their water supply, a new University of California Riverside study has shown that groundwater takes an average of three years to recover from drought — if it recovers at all, Phys.org reported.

Today we’ll look at some innovative ways entrepreneurs, like the farmers above, are adapting to the climate crisis. First, we’ll turn to a United Nations development initiative that’s fostering collaboration among like-minded grassroots innovators around the world. Then we’ll move on to a sustainable apparel company trying to drag the tree planting industry into the digital age. 

For Equilibrium, we are Saul Elbein and Sharon Udasin. Please send tips or comments to Saul at selbein@digital-staging.thehill.com or Sharon at sudasin@digital-staging.thehill.com. Follow us on Twitter: @saul_elbein and @sharonudasin.  

Let’s get to it.

UN accelerator labs spark solar-powered auto-rickshaws, other sustainable vehicles

Local governments around the world looking to incorporate sustainable transportation options should tap into a network of accelerator labs that have produced solar-powered auto-rickshaws and bamboo micro-trucks, according to a top United Nations development official.

“With limited resources, limited access to other means, they are in some way being resilient to their current problems,” said Paola Constantino, head of solutions mapping for the U.N. Development Program’s (UNDP) Accelerator Lab in Guatemala. 

Grassroots solutions for sustainable development: Constantino spoke with Equilibrium on Wednesday on the first anniversary of the “for Tomorrow” project, a joint initiative between the UNDP and Hyundai Motor Company. Over the past year, the project has amassed a network of 72 grassroots-led solutions in 44 countries that are receiving support from local UNDP Accelerator Labs, where they are brainstorming and developing their unique sustainable initiatives in a collaborative environment, a news release about the project said.

In total, the UNDP has 91 such Accelerator Labs in 115 countries — a number that has grown from an initial 60 labs launched in collaboration with governments of Germany and Qatar two years ago. 

How are the labs supporting these projects? Not through funding, but by building a network that fosters a “cross pollination of knowledge,” Constantino explained. The innovators can exchange ideas and learn from entrepreneurs with similar aims. 

While the platform is “open to anyone,” Constantino said that each solution should contribute toward creating sustainable cities. Ideally, projects should focus on the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goal 11 (SDG 11), which calls for the creation of inclusive, safe and resilient communities. 

So what are some of the projects? A “Solar Tuk Tuk” initiative has transformed a motor taxi into a solar-powered electric vehicle in Guatemala City. The red moto-taxi sports a flatbed of photovoltaic panels on its roof — a cleaner alternative to a vehicle that generates 4 tons of carbon dioxide across Guatemala each year, according to the project.

While tuk-tuks (auto rickshaws)  may have originated in Southeast Asia, Constantino stressed that they have become useful elsewhere, such as Central America. Despite being inexpensive upfront — about $10,000 each — tuk-tuks require frequent maintenance. 

Alfredo Maul and his team are aiming to develop an electric vehicle conversion kit that could be sold at an affordable price by means of a “green loan” offered by a cooperative financial institution.

A MESSAGE FROM API

 

The Environmental Partnership recently released its annual report highlighting its new flare management program that reported a 50 percent reduction in flare volumes from 2019 to 2020. Read more.

 

AN ECOSYSTEM OF HUMBLE ENTREPRENEURSHIP, IDEA EXCHANGE

Comparing notes: Through “for Tomorrow,” the Guatemalan innovators were able to compare notes with an entrepreneur based in Sierra Leone who built the country’s first locally manufactured solar powered vehicle  called “Imagination Solar Car.”

Woven together with bamboo sticks and equipped with a photovoltaic canopy, the micro-truck sports the colors of the flag of Sierra Leone and can travel about 9 miles per hour, according to the project. The vehicle is the brainchild of a self-taught 24-year-old inventor, Emmanuel Mansaray, who wants to reduce community exposure to hazardous fuel emissions. 

A few other examples: Some other inventions include “Solar e-Cycles,” cargo tricycles in Kenya that serve those with mobility needs; “African Water Cities,” which focuses on designing floating buildings; and “Low Cost Recycled Plastic Shelter Solutions” in India.

What about intellectual property? Constantino expressed confidence that the various entrepreneurs would only continue to benefit from each other’s expertise. 

“What we see in this ecosystem is that people are very humble, but they are very honest, because things have been hard for them,” she said. 

What’s next for a successful prototype? As far as the tuk-tuk is concerned, Constantino said that Maul is looking to build at least three more vehicles soon. His team is knocking on doors to acquire donations that could take their grassroots solution to the next level, according to Constantino. 

“It’s not our intention to make them massive solutions, but instead to improve the solutions — to replicate within the country and hopefully in other countries, or to have this knowledge exchange,” she added.

To read the full story, please click here.

 

A digital-age solution to tracking newly planted trees  

The head of an innovative tree planting platform says that there’s a concern at the heart of the tree planting and carbon offset industry that’s keeping the serious money out: accountability.   

As co-founder of apparel company tentree, Derrick Emsleyh has struggled with the question of how to verify that the forest restoration efforts his company funds have actually happened. 

Tentree guarantees 10 trees planted for every item purchased – with over 65 million trees planted so far. 

First steps: That’s why his company developed Veritree, a blockchain-based management system they developed for their own tree tracking. 

What is blockchain again? It’s an umbrella term for a kind of shared digital ledger used to track the ownership and trades of digital assets in the absence of a centralized authority — like, say, the digital currencies of bitcoin or ethereum.

Veritree uses the ledger technology from the low-carbon digital currency cardano to track individual trees so that companies can manage the trees they’ve planted as they would any other inventory, Emsley said.

What’s so hard about tracking trees? There are two issues: physical and reputational. Since forests are so different and tend to exist in areas with minimal internet infrastructure, it has always been a challenge for groups that physically plant trees (such as villagers in tentree-backed projects in Haiti or Madagascar)  to provide rigorous records that large corporations are accustomed to dealing with. 

On the management side, companies like tentree have to figure out how to turn an array of “fragmented” forest parcels into a set of meaningful data, Emsley said.

And if companies get it wrong, they can end up with serious “egg on their face,” which hurts not only them but the entire tree planting sector, he added. Compared to “rolling out solar panels,” he continued, it’s far easier for a tree planting miscalculation to “come back and bite you in the butt.”

And with “a lot of people stepping into that space, and more visibility around it,” if planting is “not done correctly, it could have significant ramifications for the broader conversation,” Emsley added. 

The lack of such rigor doomed his first tree planting business. During high school in Saskatchewan, Canada, in the early 2000s, Emsley said that he and his brother decided to start a tree planting company to sell carbon offsets.  

“We planted 150,000 poplar trees on 640 acres of land just outside my hometown, and partnered with different groups across my home province to support them in the future of what was expected to be cap and trade,” he said.

They anticipated they would soon be selling the carbon in those trees to companies they assumed would soon need to cut their carbon emissions or buy credits from companies like theirs.

But that never happened, in part, because the expected international agreements to establish such markets never happened, causing serious long-term consequences. The early carbon market “was too fragmented, and it wasn’t enough uptake, and it never had enough impact,” while the price of carbon was too low to pay for serious restoration.

How they would do it differently now: “At the time, we were a couple kids who didn’t know much about sustainability,” Emsley said. “We said, ‘What takes carbon out of the air? Trees seem like a reasonable choice.’ But we didn’t think about biodiversity or creating a true ecosystem.”

“But as we’ve started to grow and understand what makes a sustainable restoration project, we’ve realized it’s not so much the tree planting as biodiversity. You have to create an ecosystem that is able to thrive without human intervention down the line, and is resilient against disease, climate or weather conditions.”

Takeaway: In the full story on The Hill’s website, read more about Emsley’s efforts to bring a new accounting rigor to the tree planting industry — and why he thinks that’s a big business opportunity.

Thursday Threats

In which we explore some unexpected potential casualties of sustainable development. 

Iron may pose threat to lithium as cheaper battery alternative 

• SB Energy Corp., a U.S.-based renewable energy arm of Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp., has purchased a record number of battery units that rely on “iron-flow chemistry” instead of lithium, Bloomberg Green reported.
• The batteries, developed by ESS Inc, are made of iron salt and water and are much cheaper to manufacture, according to SB Energy CEO Rich Hossfeld. 
• Each battery has two electrodes between which charged particles shuffle, an electrolyte that enables particles to flow smoothly and a separator that ensures the two electrodes don’t form a short circuit, Bloomberg Green reported. 
• One of the main disadvantages of iron flow batteries, however, is their large size, the report said.

Out-of-time for global supply chains?

• Benetton is just one fashion brand that is moving away from its global supply chain, with its dependence on far away Asian factories, Reuters reported.
• It’s a dramatic and potentially far reaching move away from the “just-in-time” manufacturing model that achieved dominance over the past 30 years, in which tightly synchronized supply chains delivered goods precisely when they were needed.
• But in an age of bottlenecks and supply chain disruption, that model is being supplanted by a more sustainable one focused on making things closer to home.
• “Today, a shipping container that used to cost $1,200-1,500 can cost $10,000-15,000, with no certainty of a delivery date,” Benetton CEO Massimo Renon told Reuters. 

Vaccine mandates could slow the revival of fracking industry

• The oil-field service companies that hire the contractors who drill, frack and monitor shale gas wells fear that proposed vaccine mandates will worsen an already severe employment shortage, The Wall Street Journal reported.
• While the mandate allows those opposed to vaccines to submit to regular testing, the companies worry that workers in an industry where 85 percent remain unvaccinated won’t put up with that.
• “It places all of us in leadership positions in tremendously complex situations,” Ann Fox, chief executive of Nine Energy Services Inc., told the Journal.

A MESSAGE FROM API

 

 

The Environmental Partnership recently released its annual report highlighting its new flare management program that reported a 50 percent reduction in flare volumes from 2019 to 2020. Read more.

 

Please visit The Hill’s sustainability section online for the web version of this newsletter and more stories. We’ll see you on Friday.