Eye-Catching Designs Made from Recycled Plastic Bottles
The company sells a range of eco-friendly items like leggings, rash guards, and board shorts that are made using recycled post-consumer plastic bottles. There are currently 16 causes represented by distinct marine-life patterns, from whale shark research and invasive lionfish removal to sockeye salmon monitoring and abalone restoration.
One such organization is Get Inspired, a nonprofit that specializes in ocean restoration and environmental education. Get Inspired founder, marine biologist Nancy Caruso, says supporting on-the-ground efforts is one thing that sets Waterlust apart, like their apparel line that supports Get Inspired abalone restoration programs.
"All of us [conservation partners] are doing something," Caruso said. "We're not putting up exhibits and talking about it — although that is important — we're in the field."
Waterlust not only helps its conservation partners financially so they can continue their important work. It also helps them get the word out about what they're doing, whether that's through social media spotlights, photo and video projects, or the informative note card that comes with each piece of apparel.
"They're doing their part for sure, pushing the information out across all of their channels, and I think that's what makes them so interesting," Caruso said.
And then there are the clothes, which speak for themselves.
Advocate Apparel to Start Conversations About Conservation
Waterlust's concept of "advocate apparel" encourages people to see getting dressed every day as an opportunity to not only express their individuality and style, but also to advance the conversation around marine science. By infusing science into clothing, people can visually represent species and ecosystems in need of advocacy — something that, more often than not, leads to a teaching moment.
"When people wear Waterlust gear, it's just a matter of time before somebody asks them about the bright, funky designs," said Waterlust's CEO, Patrick Rynne. "That moment is incredibly special, because it creates an intimate opportunity for the wearer to share what they've learned with another."
The idea for the company came to Rynne when he was a Ph.D. student in marine science.
"I was surrounded by incredible people that were discovering fascinating things but noticed that often their work wasn't reaching the general public in creative and engaging ways," he said. "That seemed like a missed opportunity with big implications."
Waterlust initially focused on conventional media, like film and photography, to promote ocean science, but the team quickly realized engagement on social media didn't translate to action or even knowledge sharing offscreen.
Rynne also saw the "in one ear, out the other" issue in the classroom — if students didn't repeatedly engage with the topics they learned, they'd quickly forget them.
"We decided that if we truly wanted to achieve our goal of bringing science into people's lives and have it stick, it would need to be through a process that is frequently repeated, fun, and functional," Rynne said. "That's when we thought about clothing."
Support Marine Research and Sustainability in Style
To date, Waterlust has sold tens of thousands of pieces of apparel in over 100 countries, and the interactions its products have sparked have had clear implications for furthering science communication.
For Caruso alone, it's led to opportunities to share her abalone restoration methods with communities far and wide.
"It moves my small little world of what I'm doing here in Orange County, California, across the entire globe," she said. "That's one of the beautiful things about our partnership."
Check out all of the different eco-conscious apparel options available from Waterlust to help promote ocean conservation.
Melissa Smith is an avid writer, scuba diver, backpacker, and all-around outdoor enthusiast. She graduated from the University of Florida with degrees in journalism and sustainable studies. Before joining EcoWatch, Melissa worked as the managing editor of Scuba Diving magazine and the communications manager of The Ocean Agency, a non-profit that's featured in the Emmy award-winning documentary Chasing Coral.
Adopting such solutions would set world leaders on track to meet their target of keeping the planet from heating by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels this century, according to the World Energy Transitions Outlook report. The UN had warned in November that pledges to meet this goal were so far "woefully inadequate."
"The window of opportunity to achieve the 1.5 C Paris Agreement goal is closing fast," said Francesco La Camera, the director-general of IRENA. "The gap between where we are and where we should be is not decreasing, but widening. We are heading in the wrong direction."
Instead, IRENA — an intergovernmental organization based in Abu Dhabi made up of 162 countries and the European Union — calls for a change in direction and a dramatic acceleration of the energy transition as countries walk the "narrow tightrope" toward the 1.5 C target.
Global Turnaround Through Green Power
To meet the growing need for electricity in heating and transport and to make green hydrogen, the report projects that global electricity demand will triple by 2050.
That would make it the main energy source in the world, powering more than 80% of all vehicles. Heating would mainly be provided by heat pumps, whose number is set to rise 20-fold by 2050 to around 400 million.
To stay in line with climate targets, coal-fired power plants would have to be shut down and no new ones built. Ninety percent of electricity would have to come from renewable sources, mainly sun and wind, with a global installed capacity of photovoltaics almost 30 times greater than in 2018. There would have to be 14 times the wind power, and hydropower would have to double.
Fossil gas and nuclear energy, meanwhile, would make up 4% and 6% of electricity generated, respectively.
But, even with such an expansion of renewables and a drop in fossil fuels, the report relies on removing CO2 from the atmosphere to meet climate goals. This includes reforesting areas in which trees have been hacked down or burned, taking CO2 out of the atmosphere by growing plants, and capturing it from industrial sites and injecting it underground. The technology to capture carbon and store it is expensive, and exists only at a small scale.
Major Challenge, But Possible
To meet climate goals, the report assumed a globally available budget of 500 billion tons of CO2 for the current scenario. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), if no more than this amount is released into the atmosphere, the world has a half-chance of warming 1.5 C and missing the target.
But, for a two-thirds chance of avoiding that level of warming, even more CO2 would have to be kept out of the atmosphere. According to the IPCC, total emissions would have to be limited to about 285 billion tons. Around 42 billion tons of CO2 are emitted by the energy and agricultural sectors every single year.
"A scenario like the one presented by IRENA is conceivable," said Christian Breyer, a professor of solar economics at LUT University in Finland, who was not involved in the study. Breyer criticized the report for its high CO2 budget and reliance on technologies to remove emissions rather than stop them in the first place.
In addition, he said, the benefits "of extremely low-cost solar electricity have not yet been fully incorporated into the scenario, but very expensive system solutions such as nuclear power and biomass with CO2 capture."
Economic Stimulus to Bring Jobs
That turnaround has already begun.
Global oil consumption will continue to fall in the coming years, and fossil gas is set to join it in 2025. "Financial markets are already reflecting this change by shifting capital away from fossil fuels and toward sustainable assets like renewables," La Camera said.
Echoing warnings from the UN last year, IRENA said that stimulus packages in the wake of the pandemic must be used strategically to meet the 1.5 C target. Doing so would also help employment. The report projects that investing in the energy transition will create close to three times more jobs than fossil fuels for every million dollars spent.
"While the pathway is daunting, several favorable elements can make it achievable," La Camera said. "Major economies accounting for over half of global CO2 emissions are turning carbon-neutral. Global capital is moving, too."
Reposted with permission from Deutsche Welle.
While most have increased their individual climate efforts, only two of the worst emitters, including the UK and the EU, have stepped up their goals considerably. And the member states' plans to tackle the climate crisis "are very far from putting us on a pathway that will meet our Paris Agreement goals," said Patricia Espinosa, executive secretary of UN Climate Change.
The individual contributions submitted to date would only cut about 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions — a far cry from the 45% cut needed by 2030 to meet the 1.5 degree goal, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
In 2015, 195 countries and the European Union had agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and limit global heating way below an increase of 2 degrees Celsius.
UN Chief Guterres urged major emitters to "step up with much more ambitious emissions reductions targets for 2030" well before the next UN Climate Conference, slated for Glasgow in November.
The interim report also stressed that poor countries were banking on the funds pledged under the Paris agreement to protect forests and other ecosystems, to carry out climate measures.
Nations Need to Improve Their Targets
The UN's interim report, which looked at the NDCs available as of December, provides a snapshot ahead of the COP 26 climate conference in November. The remaining 122 signatory countries have yet to define their updated contributions, including the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases: China and the U.S.
The Paris agreement is a voluntary process and leaves it up to national governments to decide how they want to achieve their self-imposed targets. There is no provision for sanctions or punitive mechanisms against countries that fail to meet their climate targets.
Will the U.S. Take the Lead on Climate Change?
Many hope that the U.S. rejoining the Paris agreement will provide a much-needed boost to international climate ambitions. U.S. special envoy for climate John Kerry has already announced that the U.S. will present "very aggressive, strong NDCs" ahead of the special climate summit in Washington on April 22.
The U.S. under the Biden administration also wants to expand its climate diplomacy to include China in particular, currently the largest emitter. China has already announced plans to increase its national targets this year.
Other major emitters, such as Russia and Brazil, have so far shown little ambition to commit to more. Former head of the UN Climate Secretariat, Christiana Figueres, was optimistic nonetheless that "many large emitters such as the U.S., China, Japan and others" would submit ambitious plans, because it was "in their own competitive interests to reach 50% emissions reductions by 2030."
Together with Canada, the U.S. is also considering slapping higher import duties on countries that are not doing enough to save the climate. However, it is unclear whether such sanctions are compatible with the rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO).
Climate Change Existential Threat to Humanity
UN Climate Change Chief Patricia Espinosa pointed out that the last 10 years had been the hottest decade in human history. The record rise in temperatures, for example in the Arctic winter and northern Siberia, and dramatic winter weather slamming the traditionally mild southern U.S., were being amplified by the now measurably slowing Gulf Stream in the Atlantic — something that could be irreversible.
"It's time for all remaining Parties to step up, fulfill what they promised to do under the Paris Agreement and submit their NDCs as soon as possible," Espinosa said, adding "if this task was urgent before, it's crucial now."
And with the world focused largely on the coronavirus crisis, Espinosa stressed that any economic measures to offset the pandemic needed to take the climate crisis into account.
According to Espinosa, this is precisely why it is so important to tackle the global crises — such as COVID-19, the climate crisis, and the dramatic loss of biodiversity — as a whole.
"As we rebuild, we cannot revert to the old normal. The NDCs must reflect this reality and major emitters, especially G20 nations, must lead the way," she said.
The expanded final report, which will include all national climate contributions, will be released shortly before the UN climate conference in November. COP 26 President Alok Sharma urged all member states to "recognize that the window for action to safeguard our planet is closing fast."
Reposted with permission from DW.
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To ensure that the Paris climate targets are met, the building and construction industry needs to become a climate leader by moving towards net-zero construction. Its CO2 emissions need to be cut in half by 2030 for building stock to be carbon-free by 2050, according to a recent report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
In response, a raft of new net-zero building initiatives are focused on curbing emissions across the whole building lifecycle.
DW looks at five key points in understanding the push to carbon-free construction.
1. Urbanization Is Skyrocketing, and That's a Problem
A rapidly urbanizing world is compounding the massive impact of buildings and infrastructure on the climate crisis. According to urban climate-action initiative C40 Cities, 2.5 billion more people will flood cities (mostly in Asia and Africa) in the next three decades, while 60% of buildings required by 2050 still have to be built.
With the equivalent of a city of around 1.5 million people being constructed each week, carbon-heavy construction is skyrocketing, meaning the sector must rapidly decarbonize if global heating is to remain within the IPCC's limit of 1.5- to well below 2 degrees Celsius above 1990 levels.
This will not be easy.
A European Union directive to achieve nearly Zero-Energy Buildings (nZEBs) in all new structures by the end of 2020 was on track to achieve an 80% CO2 reduction, according to Lukas Kranzl, a senior scientist at the Vienna-based Energy Economics Group that is monitoring the nZEBs. Kranzl says this won't be enough to meet the Paris targets.
"We will need [almost] complete decarbonization in the building sector before 2050," he told DW, meaning that 95-100% emission cuts will be required.
2. Independent Initiatives Might Have the Solution
While Kranzl fears that some EU member states are not on the path to building and construction decarbonization, new independent initiatives are bringing together cities, companies and organizations to achieve net-zero building across the whole lifecycle.
The World Green Building Council's (WorldGBC) Net Zero Carbon Buildings Commitment is one such global initiative in which diverse stakeholders pledge to reach net-zero emissions for all new buildings by 2030, and all buildings by 2050.
Created in partnership with C40, the target was upgraded in September 2019 to include embodied carbon, which is to say emissions generated, not only during operational life but "during the manufacturing, transportation, construction and end of life phases of all built assets." Embodied carbon itself contributes around 11% of all global carbon emissions.
According to Victoria Burrows, director of Advancing Net Zero at the World Green Building Council, this shift reflects a "wholesized approach to carbon emissions in the building and construction sector."
While net-zero buildings were previously focused on operational performance, especially in terms of energy efficiency via solar power or passive design, embodied emissions include the significant "upfront" emissions created during the extraction and manufacture of building materials. The whole lifecycle measure includes "use stage" and "end of life" carbon generated through building maintenance and final deconstruction.
3. Cement Causes More Pollution Than You Would Think
When addressing embodied emissions, the construction phase that generates around 25% of greenhouse emissions is fundamental to the net-zero building revolution.
Reducing reliance on carbon-intensive cement, the most widely used building material on earth that alone accounts for around 8% of global CO2 emissions, will be key.
Designers of carbon-neutral building are replacing cement framing in larger buildings with new sustainable cross-laminated timber, for example. Achieving a 20% reduction in building weight is matched by a similar reduction in "embodied energy." The end result is a 26.5% reduction in the "global warming potential" of the building.
A new five-story apartment building in Boston's Roxbury district is leading the way. Its designers are using the revolutionary timber framing to significantly reduce emissions from steel and concrete and achieve a net-zero standard.
4. Scandinavia Is Becoming a Net-Zero Pioneer
A report released by C40 in October 2019 showed that the construction industry alone could cut emissions from buildings and infrastructure by 44% by 2050. Oslo, Copenhagen and Stockholm have since committed to take a leadership role in creating a global market for low-emission construction materials and zero-emission machinery.
Oslo, for instance, aims to make all city-owned construction machinery and construction sites operate with zero emissions by 2025. Meanwhile, Copenhagen's bold plan to be climate-neutral by 2025 will draw heavily on its commitment to zero-carbon construction. This will be achieved in part through "fossils- or emission-free construction machinery in construction projects," said Frank Jensen, mayor of Copenhagen.
With Stockholm also part of a cross-border tender for sustainable procurement of mobile construction machinery, such unified demand is designed to send a signal to the market, according to Victoria Burrows. The end result will be to "create a ripple effect" that will help kickstart the net-zero building transition.
5. Diverse Sectors Embracing Carbon-Free Construction
The success of the net-zero carbon buildings commitment hinges on involving stakeholders across the whole building supply chain, says Burrows. With building and construction able to "cut across many other sectors" in the fight against climate change, she notes that cement and engineering firms, cultural institutions like the Sydney Opera House, universities and city governments are committing to net-zero building.
So, too, are real-estate companies that might once have prioritized profits over reducing emissions. British global property giant Grosvenor Group and Canada's Avison Young, another international real-estate powerhouse, are among many others implementing a net-zero building roadmap — with or without government targets.
In December, Grosvenor Europe committed to reducing its carbon impact by 50% by 2030. It will partly achieve this by cutting energy use in its buildings by one-third, and the embodied carbon intensity of its developments by one half.
Reposted with permission from DW.
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