Hong Kong’s first blog for SDG education news and announcements
Image by: Stefan Schweihofer from Pixabay A great example of one of the biggest impediments to making progress on sustainability issues was played out in the UK Guardian media group last week. On 3 June the Guardian published a piece by well-known actor Rowan Atkinson entitled I love electric vehicles – and was an early adopter. But increasingly I feel duped. His argument was that the current environmental cost of batteries is very high and that there may be more to be gained from using cars with ICEs to the end of their natural lives. On 7 June, the same outlet published an article by Ben Lane, The die is cast: petrol and diesel engines are dying. The electric age is inevitable directly contradicting Atkinson’s thoughts. Then on 8 June they published Fact check: why Rowan Atkinson is wrong about electric vehicles by Simon Evans. Lane is co-founder and CTO at Zapmap, a UK-wide map of electric car charging points. Evans is the deputy editor and senior policy edit . . .
The ITS Foundation is pleased to announce the launch of its 2023 Youth Ambassador Asia-Pacific Programme, co-run with UNITAR. This year the theme will be “Young Changemakers: Unleashing the Power of Social Entrepreneurship for the SDGs.” A core emphasis this year will be on youth aligning themselves with projects that can help accelerate progress towards the SDGs after the slowdown caused by covid (which put the breaks on efforts which were already slipping behind). This will take momentum from the second SDG Summit to be held 18-19 Sept in New York by the United Nations which itself will be reacting to the latest SDG Progress Report from the Secretary General. Seven of the 2022 graduates (pictured) are taking their graduating ideas into reality and some of them have already launched events and initiatives and started having impact. We are thoroughly looking forward to seeing another fantastic cohort go even further. . . .
Image by: Stefan Kellar from Pixabay Greenhouse gas emissions are at an all-time high and Earth is warming faster than ever (The Conversation) How understanding plant body clocks could help transform how food is grown (The Conversation) How much plastic is in our oceans? (Aljazeera) Fungi stores a third of carbon from fossil fuel emissions and could be essential to reaching net zero, new study reveals (ScienceDaily) Uber says green rides will enable customers to track CO2 savings (Reuters) Real estate is facing a climate crisis, but there might be a way through (TechCrunch) “Green” funds destroy Indonesia’s forests (Climate Weekly) 10 Trends Shaping Eco Travel: Exploration Meets Ethics (greenqueen) Put Asia’s children at centre of climate action: UNICEF (Eco-business) Amendment to India's electricity rules seen to bring green energy to more small consumers (Eco-business) . . .
Image by: Kamiel Choi from Pixabay A great article in The Conversation by Katharina Richeter outlining “degrowth” as an alternative set og goals for economic planning and policy. GDP has stubbornly hung around as a default measure, driven by uninformed media and possibly those with an ideological/political reason to support it. But for over 50 years, prominent politicians and economists have been calling for the end of this poor tool which only considers output, not impact. A simple example would be to ask just how helpful is it for a country to increase its GDP by producing lots of bombs? Degrowth essentially asks us to start prioritizing the things that actually matter to us and properly reflect whether our economies are working for us. And it is egalitarian, democratic and fits with environmental sustainability targets. Perhaps it’s time we all started taking the lead from Bhutan and its Gross National Happiness index. . . .
Image by: UNEP A new UN Environment Programme (UNEP) report, called ‘Turning off the Tap: How the World Can End Plastic Pollution and Create a Circular Economy,’ argues that plastic pollution could be reduced by 80% by 2040 if countries and companies adopt concrete practices, market shifts, and policies that can inform government thinking and business action. It makes interesting reading as it highlights the complexities of shifting away from plastic which is so integrated into modern ways of behaving and producing and is of course linked into the powerful oil lobby. The report emphasizes the need to reuse, recycle, and reorient and diversify and to eliminate unnecessary plastic uses, as well as deal with plastics already in the environment that cannot be eliminated, reused, recycled, or replaced. Alongside this are the various social impacts for example in those places where plastic waste has become part of the informal economy. It should also be read alongsid . . .
Image by: congerdesign from Pixabay UNDP appoints new head for sustainable innovation hub in Singapore (Eco-business) Reusable packaging revolution is close (ScienceDaily) Three climate technologies every investor should have in their portfolio (TechCrunch) UN advises against offsets for carbon removal technologies (CHN) New Report Details Food R&D Strategy for Tackling Global Methane Emissions (greenqueen) Cop28 president’s team accused of Wikipedia ‘greenwashing’ (The Guardian) Rock ‘flour’ from Greenland can capture significant CO2, study shows (The Guardian) Explainer: Why fast fashion brands destroy unsold clothes (Eco-business) . . .
Image by: Myriams-Fotos from Pixabay A report in nature ecology & evolution has found that the pace of climate change is likely to far outstrip the ability of many species to adapt whether physiologically (biological evolution just doesn’t go very fast) or geographically through migration within ideal climate bands as they shift. This is called the problem of thermal thresholds and while species impact will be less than 15% up to 1.5 degrees of change, a further one degree of heating would probably double the impact to 30% of all species. This could have catastrophic knock-on effects for food webs and ultimately jeopardize the human food supply. The study used data from over 36000 species and related impacts from climate data from the mid-19th century thus giving significant weight to their projections for 2100. . . .
Image by: meineresterampe from Pixabay Greenpeace has recently warned that recycling plastic can make it more toxic and can lead to the release of more microplastic into the environment. Among others, they referenced a recent report in the Journal of Hazardous Materials Advances which found between 6 to 13 percent of the plastic processed could end up being released into water or the air as microplastics. They also pointed out that much plastic sent for recycling ends up getting burned and releasing poisonous gases into the atmosphere. In addition to environmental pollution, a lot of plastic waste is moved from wealthier to poorer nations where it is dealt with by very low paid workers, thus shifting the main impact onto the most vulnerable in the world. Alongside all this as well of course is the fact that we do not fully understand the impact plastic packaging has on the foods it contains and thus how much we ingest and in what form. There are fears that recycled plastic . . .
