By Carolyn Fortuna, Clean Technica, 27 June 2017 Environmental justice calls for fair treatment of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, and it necessarily includes the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies. Environmental justice also requires meaningful involvement of underrepresented groups in power structures in society. According to the EPA, we will achieve this …
Wait! What jobs will be safe from robots?
An excerpt from The Guardian, June 2017 Ford, the futurist, classifies resilient jobs in three areas. The first is jobs that involve “genuine creativity, such as being an artist, being a scientist, developing a new business strategy”. Ford notes: “For now, humans are still best at creativity but there’s a caveat there. I can’t guarantee you that in 20 years …
Freshwater & renewable energy storage for drought striken regions? Areas for integrated pumped hydro reverse osmosis (IPHRO) system identified
Combined energy and water system could provide for millions: Analysis shows system could economically bring fresh water and renewable energy storage to drought-stricken coastal regions worldwide. Introduction by Kelley Travers | MIT Energy Initiative, 18 April 2017. Full copy of the article is available at the link and below the overview. The team’s analysis determined that in Southern California, all power …
Saving coffee from climate change
While Washington debates whether climate change is a hoax or an imminent threat, the world coffee industry is not waiting for the American government to take action to protect its business. By Marvin G Perez and Fabiana Batista on Bloomberg, 28 April 2017 Coffee crops are under siege from deforestation, abnormally high temperatures, a lack of precipitation, and disease. The global …
Significant increase in hospital admissions for mental illnesses seen during periods of heatwaves, especially during longer periods of heat exposure
A mental hospital-based study in Hanoi, Vietnam looked at if there is a relationship between heat exposure and mental health problems. The results showed significant increase in hospital admissions for mental illnesses during periods of heatwaves, especially during longer periods of heat exposure. This is according to a doctoral thesis from Umeå University. The study, which looked at admissions data …
Health and wellbeing, economy and society, infrastructure and ecosystems, affordability of transport, amount of green space add up to resilience in 156 questions
By Nick Van Mead, Originally posted in The Guardian The Rockefeller Foundation launched the City Resilience Index (CRI) today, by engineering consultancy Arup. For example, “Concepción had done all the things you’d expect an earthquake-prone city to do in terms of building codes and emergency management, but the weakness that emerged [from the CRI assessment] was that their telecommunications systems were all …