Tag: University of Bristol

Systems thinking: 5 ways to be a more sustainable university

Posted on by janet.crompton
As part of Green Great Britain Week, supported by BEIS, we are posting a series of blogs throughout the week highlighting what work is going on at the University of Bristol’s Cabot Institute for the Environment to help provide up to date climate science, technology and solutions for government and industry.  We will also be highlighting some of the big sustainability actions happening across the University and local community in order to do our part to mitigate the negative effects of global warming. Today our blog will look at ‘Considering the actions businesses can take on climate change’.

Our University is justly famous for the breadth and depth of its work on Sustainability. This ranges from research on the effect of micro plastics on the oceans, through food and farming, to the effect of resource-driven migration. We are also tackling arguably the biggest problem of all: developing the tools and techniques that will help us to fight climate change.

Our Sustainability Policy is clear that we need to walk the talk and demonstrate that we are supporting a sustainable world in our operations and strategies.

The University of Bristol’s Sustainability team co-ordinates sustainability activity across the organisation, continually innovating to find ways of reducing our environmental impact against a backdrop of growing staff and student numbers, increasingly bespoke teaching and ever more complex research requirements. The team has particular responsibility for waste resource management, energy, water and transport, and engages with staff and students in many different ways through community engagement, biodiversity activities, sustainable food and sustainable procurement.

1. A changing landscape

The team is led by Martin Wiles, who has been with the University since 2001. “Innovation is at the heart of what we do,” says Martin. “Everyone in the sector knows that the fundamentals are changing, and that change is accelerating. It’s difficult to see what the pedagogical, economic or political landscape is going to be even a year ahead. So, we see our activities as being guided by three principles: how do we support excellence in teaching, research and the staff and student experience? How do we reduce resource use whilst saving money? How do we ensure that we are compliant with increasingly complex environmental legislation? We also feel that we have a role in distilling our findings and disseminating good practice to the wider sector.”

2. Sustainable Laboratories

A good example of how this thinking is applied in practice is the Sustainable Labs Initiative, which focuses on improving the safety, sustainability and success of our laboratories. Energy manager Chris Jones says, “We had known for a long time that our highly-serviced labs represent only 5% of our floor area but use 40% of our energy. In recent years, controls for air handling have improved immensely and we have started to roll out best practice, starting with our Synthetic Chemistry building. We have been able to reduce electricity consumption by 30% there whilst still delivering the same level of service.” The project has been implemented by Chris, working with Anna Lewis, the Team’s Sustainable Labs officer.  A former Research Technician herself, Anna works closely with academic and research staff to minimise resource use by better management. “Staff understand the issues,” says Anna, “and they are very happy to help. We can usually achieve better environmental performance and better safety through relatively small changes to our way of working.”

3. Closing the loop on waste

This sentiment is echoed by Rose Rooney, the Environmental Management System (EMS) and Circular Economy Manager. “If we treat everything in isolation, the task of compliance becomes unnecessarily expensive and intrusive in people’s work. Adhering to the EMS processes saves time and aids compliance. A good example is waste. If we are informed early and fully that a consignment of waste needs to be removed, we can deal with it cheaply and easily, often finding a route for it to be reused or recycled. We are moving away from the idea of waste to becoming a circular economy, where the output from one process becomes the input for another.”  She cites the University’s popular and successful Re-store programme, which allows furniture and equipment from one group to be used by another, and The Bristol Big Give, where students’ unwanted items that would normally go to waste at the end of term are collected and sent to be sold for charities. Many tonnes of items are now being reused that might otherwise have gone to landfill.

4. Be The Change

Bristol Big Give is just one example of a number of behaviour change initiatives delivered by the team to encourage the sustainable behaviours as part of work, study and home life. Maev Moran, Communications and Campaigns Assistant, oversees the delivery of these initiatives: “We have found that audiences respond more positively and proactively to messages of empowerment than to negative messages.  Be The Change, a scheme we launched in June, has quickly become the most popular ongoing initiative among University staff. It covers all areas of sustainability while making rewarding everyday actions, creating a step-by-step guide towards reducing our environmental impact both at home and in the workplace. The breadth of the scheme also means we can factor wellbeing in to our ability to have a positive impact, particularly as part of a wider community.”

5. Travel and transport

Amy Heritage is responsible for Transport at the University, including managing the University’s travel plan, facilities for people who walk or cycle to work or study, the University’s bus services (Bristol Unibus), including the new U2 bus service to Langford and initiatives/incentives to encourage behaviour change on all other modes of travel. “Our Staff and students are great at making sustainable travel choices. Our job is to make this as easy as possible.” She says that our travel plan is a key part in ensuring we are acknowledged as a good corporate citizen, and her team is looking at ways of improving the management of University vehicles and making it more attractive to replace meetings that would otherwise have required flights with video conferences.

Future plans

The team are starting the new academic year with plans for plans for efficiency savings on heating, laboratory ventilation and lighting, making sure we are compliant with new legislation, and collaborative work with Computer Science staff on how the operation of building services translates to staff and student wellbeing. There are plans for more renewable energy generation, smart controls for buildings, and adding to our electric vehicle fleet. “Once more, it’s a project about reducing our environmental impact while freeing up resources for excellent teaching and research, and staff and student wellbeing,” says Martin Wiles, “and that’s what we’re here to do.”

—————————–
This blog is written by John Brenton, Sustainability Manager in the University of Bristol’s Sustainability Team.

Read other blogs in this Green Great Britain Week series:
1. Just the tip of the iceberg: Climate research at the Bristol Glaciology Centre
2. Monitoring greenhouse gas emissions: Now more important than ever?
3. Digital future of renewable energy
4. The new carbon economy – transforming waste into a resource
5. Systems thinking: 5 ways to be a more sustainable university
6. Local students + local communities = action on the local environment

Digital future of renewable energy

Posted on by janet.crompton

As part of Green Great Britain Week, supported by BEIS, we are posting a series of blogs throughout the week highlighting what work is going on at the University of Bristol’s Cabot Institute for the Environment to help provide up to date climate science, technology and solutions for government and industry.  We will also be highlighting some of the big sustainability actions happening across the University and local community in order to do our part to mitigate the negative effects of global warming. Today our blog will look at ‘Technologies of the future: clean growth and innovation’.

1. Background

Today over 94% of the energy market in the UK is dominated by the Major Power Producers (MPP) who generate electricity and feed it to households and businesses over the grid [1].

Historically, to cut down on the fuel transportation costs, the major generation plants had to be located close to the fuel sources, i.e., where coal and oil were mined. The generated electricity would then be transmitted through power lines and distribution stations down to the households and businesses who would use the electricity up.

This structure of the industry was based on several constraints:

  • Electricity generation locations are constrained by the location of fossil sources (as it is cheaper and easier to transmit the generated electricity than to move fuel around);
  • Electricity generation requires large investments into large plants (due to economies of scale of the generation technology);
  • Electricity end users are only interested in consumption, and do not want to know much else about electricity itself.

Yet, technological advances as well as the societal understanding of the implications of the fossil fuel use have dramatically changed the framework within which the energy system operates:

  • Renewable generation technologies (such as solar panels, wind turbines, small hydro turbines) are now widely available for individual household and small community use.
  • As (most) renewable generation resources (e.g., solar or wind) are available where consumers are, it is technologically possible and economically affordable to generate and consume electricity locally, without centralised generation and transmission;
  • End users are increasingly interested in the environmental and social impact of the generated electricity, not only in consumption.

All the above, combined with the governmental subsidies for renewables installations (e.g., feed-in-tariffs) have led to a recent growth of micro-generation in the UK (i.e., individuals or organisations with small-scale energy generation, such as domestic wind or solar PV units). Such micro-generators consume their own generated energy and sell any excess back to the grid. Such generation offers the potential for a distributed model of energy generation and consumption that is not reliant on MPPs.

Challenge

Though presently, there is a successful renewables-based ecosystem in the UK, it has been largely driven by governmental subsidies. However, these subsides are now set to be withdrawn. As of March 2019 no new installations will be eligible to feed-in-tariffs. Will this result in fall of the renewables sector, as already experienced by solar PV sector in Spain [2] when their solar PV subsidies were removed? Or can UK micro-generators find another way of ensuring viability of renewable installations?

Opportunities

Research at the University of Bristol suggests that a subsidy-free localised renewables-based energy sector is not only possible but is also the best solution to the energy security and affordability dilemma. Our proposed model for the new, modernised UK energy sector is based around localised, but globally interconnected peer-to-peer energy markets underpinned by digital technology. This is illustrated in Figure 1 below:

Figure 1: Peninsula peer-to-peer energy market (from [6])

 

2. Peer-to-Peer energy market underpinned by digital platform

In a peer-to-peer energy market any two individuals/households can directly buy  from and sell to each other, without intermediating third parties. These households can be both prosumers (i.e., producing and consuming own renewables-based electricity, as well as selling the excess to others), on simply consumers (if they have not own generation). Yet, unlike most microgrids, this is not an islanded model – which would require complete internal balance of supply and demand –  but rather a “peninsula”. Where the locality experiences shortage or excess generation, the demand/supply are imbalance is resolved through trade with the other localities or the grid at large. The key advantages here are in providing avenues for:

  • Additional income streams to households with microgeneration – where the feed in tariff is no longer pays for the extra generation, the peers who use the energy do. Moreover, the price of the locally generated/consumed energy is more competitive than that of the grid supply as it does not need to pay the same full transmission, distribution, and utilities services charges. (Though I must underline that, as each locality remains interconnected with the gird, the energy costs will still include grid connection and maintenance changes. This is because the intermittency of the renewables generation must be insured against, and grid provides such an insurance and balancing services.)
  • Increasing value proposition of microgeneration and energy storage – the microgenerators are not only getting return to their generation investment, but are also supporting local communities’ energy needs, contributing to the decarbonisation and energy security efforts.
  • Increased control over source of supply – consumers are now able to express their preferences on energy purchase: do they wish to buy solar or wind, from the closest geographically located producer or from the cheapest supplier; do producers wish to donate their excess generation to the local school or to their extended family members, or to sell it to the highest bidder? All these options become viable when peers directly buy and sell from each other.

Such an energy system, however, cannot exist without a reliable and trusted digital platform which will both remove the 3rd party intermediation, and advertise the sale and purchase orders between the trading parties, undertake the users’ preferences-based matching of these orders, ensure security of the transitions, transparency of the trades, and accountability of the transaction participants.

To operate in such market:

  1. the consumers and prosumers would join the platform and publish their preferences (e.g., sell to the highest bidder, or buy solar energy only, etc.);
  2. the participants will they use their smart meter data to periodically (e.g., for every 15 min or half an hour) publish their sale and purchase orders on a digital platform;
  3. for each trading period (e.g., 15 min.) the platform will match best fitting sale and purchase orders, and settle transaction accounts.

Note, (as illustrated in Fig 2) while in the current intermediated market the utilities act as  the contracting parties between the prosumers, consumers and the energy market (see Fig. 2.a), in this peer-to-peer market each prosumer/consumer is the immediate contracting party itself (see Fig. 2.b).

Figure 2: Energy Market Dis-intermediation (from [6])

To realise these demanding requirements, we advocate use of  distributed ledger technology for the energy trading platform [3, 4, 7]. Distributed ledgers (which incorporate blockchain and block-free technologies) are decentralised, distributed databases in which all transactions are immutably recorded. In other words, these are databases which are not controlled by any single company or individual, but are run and maintained by their participating membership. Data in these ledgers is redundantly stored in many locations, and cryptographically secured. As a result, once recorded, the data in the ledger cannot be changed and falsified [1].

The details on how to engineer this platform in such a way that engenders trust and participation is a topic of the HoSEM research project [5] and will be detailed in another blog post. For now, let’s assume that this platform is in successful operation. What are the implication of it on the UK energy market?

3. Implications on energy market

Move to a peer-to-peer energy trading over a distributed ledger will lead to several major changes in the UK’s energy system, to name a few:

  1. First and foremost, it changes the structure of the energy system itself – from centralised fossil-based generation to decentralised, distributed, local renewables–based generation and consumption set up;
  2. The digital technology-based market disintermediation (see section 2) deprecates the role of a trusted 3rd party (utilities in this case), reducing both the cost of transactions (i.e., energy) to the end users and allowing for the best possible preferences match to each participant. Now the suppliers are switched every trading period (e.g., every 15 min.), without any effort or cost to the market participants.
  3. This structure also radically changes the role of the energy user – from the passive consumer to an active prosumer. The end user now matters, as every unit of produced and consumed energy is different. It is different because it is produced in the users’ local area, or is originated from solar/wined/gas sources, or is bought from a friend… Then the price of each energy unit is also different and that difference is decided on basis of the participants preferences.

Clearly, many issues remain to be resolved before this shift to a digitally enabled peer to peer market becomes a reality. These include issues of regulation and licensing (presently households are not allowed to act as suppliers in the UK), grid safety (e.g., current frequency assurance), geographical and population density (e.g., rural areas have more renewable per-person than cities), fairness and pricing (more affluent individuals can afford more generation installations), to name a few. Yet, it is encouraging to see that technologically and economically this future can be here already today.

Footnote

[1] Theoretically it is possible, but practically it is improbable, as record falsification is designed to be prohibitively costly [3].

References

[1] Dep. of Energy and Climate Change Updated energy and emissions projections 2015 Tech. Rep., URL: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/updated-energy-and-emissions-projections-2015

[2] The rise and fall of solar energy in Spain, URL: http://www.abacoadvisers.com/spain-explained/life-in-spain/news/rise-and-fall-solar-energy-in-spain

[3] R. Chitchyan, J. Murkin, Review of Blockchain Technology and its Expectations: Case of the Energy Sector, URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03567

[4] J. Murkin, R. Chitchyan, D. Ferguson, Goal-Based Automation of Peer-to-Peer Electricity Trading, URL: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-65687-8_13

[5] Household-Supplier Energy Market, URL: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=EP%2FP031838%2F1

[6] Used from J. Murkin, R. Chitchyan, D. Ferguson, Towards peer-to-peer electricity trading in the UK, Presented at All Energy 2018, URL: https://reedexpo.app.box.com/s/plwhcfaqp6pnhxc8mcjznh7jtkevg9h1/file/292636529562

[7] J.Murkin, Automation of peer-to-peer electricity trading, blog post at https://www.edfenergy.com/about/energy-innovation/innovation-blog/research-development-peer-to-peer-trading

———————————-
This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Ruzanna Chitchyan from the University of Bristol Faculty of Engineering and has been reposted from Refactoring Energy Systems blog.

Ruzanna Chitchyan

Read other blogs in this Green Great Britain Week series:
1. Just the tip of the iceberg: Climate research at the Bristol Glaciology Centre
2. Monitoring greenhouse gas emissions: Now more important than ever?
3. Digital future of renewable energy
4. The new carbon economy – transforming waste into a resource
5. Systems thinking: 5 ways to be a more sustainable university
6. Local students + local communities = action on the local environment

The new carbon economy – transforming waste into a resource

Posted on by janet.crompton

As part of Green Great Britain Week, supported by BEIS, we are posting a series of blogs throughout the week highlighting what work is going on at the University of Bristol’s Cabot Institute for the Environment to help provide up to date climate science, technology and solutions for government and industry.  We will also be highlighting some of the big sustainability actions happening across the University and local community in order to do our part to mitigate the negative effects of global warming. Today our blog will look at ‘Technologies of the future: clean growth and innovation’.

On Monday 8 October 2018, the IPCC released a special report which calls upon world governments to enact policies which will limit global warming to 1.5°C compared with pre-industrial levels, failure to do so will drastically increase the probability of ecosystem collapses, extreme weather events and complete melting of Arctic sea ice. Success will require “rapid and far-reaching” actions in the way we live, move, produce and consume.

So, what comes to mind when you hear carbon dioxide – a greenhouse gas? A waste product? You’re not wrong to think that given the predicament that our planet faces, but this article is going to tell the other side of the story which you already know but is often forgotten.

For over a billion years, carbon dioxide has been trapped and transformed, almost miraculously, into an innumerable, rich and complex family of organic molecules and materials by photosynthetic organisms. Without this process, life as we know simply would not have evolved. Look around you, – I dare say that the story of carbon dioxide is weaved, one way or another into all the objects you see around you in this moment. Whether it’s the carbon atoms within the material itself – or that old fossilised sourced of carbon was used to smelt, melt or fabricate it.

The great growth and development of the last two centuries has been defined by humanity’s use of fossilised carbon which drove the first and second industrial revolutions. But now – the limitations of those very revolutions are staring us in the face and a new revolution is already underway, albeit it quietly.

An industrial revolution is said to occur when there is a step change in three forms of technology, Information, Transport and Energy. The step change that I will discuss here is the use of carbon dioxide coupled with renewable energy systems to deliver a circular carbon economy that aims to be sustainable, carbon neutral at worst and carbon negative at best. This burgeoning field comes under the name carbon capture and utilisation (CCU). CCU, represents a broad range of chemical processes that will most directly impact energy storage and generation and the production of chemical commodities including plastics and building aggregates such as limestone.

In our research we are developing catalysts made of metal nanoparticles to activate and react CO2 to form chemicals such as carbon monoxide (CO), formic acid, methanol and acetate. They be simple molecules – but they have significant industrial relevance, are made on vast scales, are energy intensive to produce, and all originate in some way from coal. The methods that we are investigating while being more technically challenging, consume just three inputs – CO2, water and an electrical current. We use a device called an electrolyser, it uses electricity to break chemical bonds and form new ones. The catalyst sits on the electrodes. At the anode, water is broken into positively charged hydrogen ions called protons and oxygen, while at the opposite electrode, the cathode, CO2 reacts with the protons, H+, to form new molecules. It sounds simple but encouraging CO2 to react is not easy, compared to most molecules, CO2 is a stubborn reactant. It needs the right environment and some energy such as heat, electricity or light to activate it to form products of higher energy content. The chemicals that can be produced by this process are industrially significant, they are used in chemical synthesis, as solvents, reactants and many other things. CO for example can be built up to form cleaner burning petroleum/diesel-like fuels, oils, lubricants and other products derived by the petrochemical industry.

Formic acid and methanol may be used to generate energy, they can be oxidised back to CO2 and H2O using a device called a fuel cell to deliver electricity efficiently without combustion. One day we could see electrically driven cars not powered by batteries or compressed hydrogen but by methanol which has a higher volumetric energy density than both batteries and hydrogen. Batteries are heavy, too short-lived and use high quantities of low abundance metals such as lithium and cobalt – meaning their supply chains could suffer critical issues in the future. While the compression of hydrogen is an energy intensive process which poses greater safety challenges.

However, there are still many hurdles to overcome. I recently went to the Joint European Summer School on Fuel Cell, Electrolyser and Battery Technologies. There I learned about the technical and economic challenges from an academic and industrial perspective. In an introductory lecture, Jens Oluf Jensen was asked “When will we run out of fossil fuels?”, his answer “Not soon enough!”. An obvious answer but there is something I wish to unpick. The task for scientists is not just to make technologies like CO2 capture, CO2 conversion and fuel cells practical – which I would argue is already the case for some renewable technological processes. The greatest challenge is to make them cost competitive with their oil-based equivalents. A gamechanger in this field will be the day that politicians enact policies which incorporate the cost to the environment in the price of energy and materials derived from fossil fuels, and even go so far as to subsidise the cost of energy and materials-based on their ability to avoid or trap carbon dioxide.

Even without such political input there is still hope as we’ve seen the cost of solar and wind drop dramatically, lower than some fossil fuel-based power sources and only with limited government support. Already there are companies springing up in the CCU sector. Companies like Climeworks and Carbon Engineering are demonstrating technology that can trap CO2 using a process known as Direct Air Capture (DAC). Carbon Engineering is going even further and developing a technology they call Air to Fuels™. They use CO2 from the air, hydrogen split from water and clean electricity to generate synthetic transportation fuels such as gasoline, diesel or jet fuel. You may question why we should need these fuels given the rise of battery powered vehicles but a better solution for fuelling heavy goods vehicles, cargo ships and long-haul flights is at the very least a decade way.

In 1975, Primo Levi wrote a story about a carbon dioxide molecule and he said in relation to photosynthesis “dear colleagues, when we learn to do likewise we will be sicut Deus [like God], and we will have also solved the problem of hunger in the world.”. The circular carbon economy may still be in its infancy, but the seeds have sprouted. Unlike the first and second industrial revolution, the 3rd industrial revolution will not be dependent on one single energy source but will be a highly interdependent network of technologies that support and complement each other in the aim of sustainability, just like nature itself.

——————————————
This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Gaël Gobaille-Shaw, University of Bristol School of Chemistry. He is currently designing new electrocatalysts for the conversion of CO2 to liquid fuels.
For updates on this work, follow @CatalysisCDT @Gael_Gobaille and @UoB_Electrochem on Twitter.  Follow #GreenGB for updates on the Green Great Britain Week.

Gael Gobaille-Shaw

Read other blogs in this Green Great Britain Week series:
1. Just the tip of the iceberg: Climate research at the Bristol Glaciology Centre
2. Monitoring greenhouse gas emissions: Now more important than ever?
3. Digital future of renewable energy
4. The new carbon economy – transforming waste into a resource
5. Systems thinking: 5 ways to be a more sustainable university
6. Local students + local communities = action on the local environment

 

Monitoring greenhouse gas emissions: Now more important than ever?

Posted on by janet.crompton

As part of Green Great Britain Week, supported by BEIS, we are posting a series of blogs throughout the week highlighting what work is going on at the University of Bristol’s Cabot Institute for the Environment to help provide up to date climate science, technology and solutions for government and industry.  We will also be highlighting some of the big sustainability actions happening across the University and local community in order to do our part to mitigate the negative effects of global warming. Today our blog will look at ‘Explaining the latest science on climate change’.

The IPCC report

On 8 October 2018 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) [1] published their special report on Global Warming of 1.5 ˚C. As little as 24 hours after the report had been published, the results of the report were already receiving extensive global coverage in the media, with BBC News describing the report as the “final call”. The BBC News article also explicitly mentions that this is “the most extensive warning yet on the risks of rising global temperatures. Their dramatic report on keeping that rise under 1.5 ˚C states that the world is now completely off track, heading instead towards 3 ˚C. Staying below 1.5 ˚C will require ‘rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society’ [2].”

Reading the report has quite honestly been somewhat overwhelming but also necessary to understand exactly what we are in for. And as much as I understand the difficulty one might face either with the technical terms of the report or even the volume of information, I would really encourage you to give it a read. This special report covers a wide range of subjects from oceans, ice and flooding to crops, health and economy. However, if you do find that the chapters themselves are too lengthy or difficult, there is an amazing interactive, and very easy way that will help you explore the impacts of a 1.5 ˚C, 2 ˚C and beyond on Carbon Brief’s website.

There are two distinct parts in the IPCC special report. The full technical report that consists of 5 chapters and a short summary for policy makers (SPM). The SPM clearly states that “Estimated anthropogenic global warming matches the level of observed warming to within ±20 %” which translates into ‘almost 100 % of the warming is the result of human activity’ [3] [4].

We know for a fact that human activity is warming the planet

One outcome of this “human activity” that we often discuss is the emission of greenhouse gases (GHGs). Through various types of activities, whether that is agriculture, deforestation or burning fossil fuels, GHGs are emitted to the atmosphere. Without going too much into the chemistry and physics, what these GHGs do is change the mixing ratios within the atmosphere, resulting in greater absorbance of infrared radiation. And it is this change in the composition of our atmosphere that we refer to as the manmade greenhouse gas effect which also leads to the warming described in the IPCC report. But far more than the warming effect itself, global warming has all sorts of impacts most of which you can explore through the interactive link above.

Greenhouse gases and a long history of monitoring

Some of the ‘usual suspects’ in the discussion of GHG emissions are carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) (often described as the ‘major’ greenhouse gases [5]). However, an often-overlooked set of halogenated greenhouse gases are playing an increasingly large role in anthropogenic driven climate change. Gases like perfluorocarbons (PFCs) and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) are compounds that are emitted through some form of human activity. In the case of PFCs for example, the GHGs CF4 and C2F6 are two of the most volatile and long-lived gases monitored under the Kyoto protocol [6] and they are both primarily emitted through or during industrial processes. In contrast, HFCs are used widely as coolants in refrigerators and air-conditioning units, as blowing agents in foam manufacture and propellants in aerosols. They were originally introduced to replace ozone-depleting gases such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), but like their predecessors, are potent greenhouse gases. Given the long lifetime of many of these halogenated gases, current emissions will influence the climate system for decades to come.

In order to monitor the accumulation of these gases in atmosphere, high-precision measurements are required. Through projects such as the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment (AGAGE) [7] (figure 1 [8]) that has been measuring the composition of the global atmosphere continuously since 1978 and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Earth System Research Laboratory Global Monitoring Division, scientists have tracked the atmospheric concentrations of climate forcing gases from as far back as 1950s [9].

Figure 1: The AGAGE network

The Atmospheric Chemistry Research Group (ACRG) Chemistry Department, University of Bristol

The ACRG carries out research in the UK and worldwide in collaboration with other atmospheric chemistry research centres, universities and third parties. In the UK, the ACRG runs the UK Deriving Emissions linked to Climate Change network (DECC) [10], funded by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) to measure atmospheric GHG and ozone depleting substances over the UK. These measurements are used in elaborate mathematical models to create top-down emission estimates for the UK and verify the UK GHG inventories submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC) as part of the Kyoto protocol. Worldwide, the group is involved in the AGAGE network, monitoring global background levels of a wide range of GHGs. The ACRG runs 2 of the 9 global background stations under the AGAGE programme. One of these is the Mace Head station (Figure 2) on the west coast of Ireland, which is ideally placed for resolving northern hemispheric baseline air amongst European pollution events. The other AGAGE research station managed by the ACRG is the site at Ragged Point, Barbados. This site just north of the tropics, sits on the eastern edge of the island of Barbados and is directly exposed to the Atlantic. The researchers in ACRG study a variety of GHGs and a very large range of topics from maintaining instrument suites to ensuring the quality of the resulting data so that it can be used in modelling studies.

Figure 2: The Mace Head Station (Credit: Dr Kieran Stanley)

Why are measuring stations and networks like AGAGE so valuable and more important than ever?

The answer to this question is straightforward. Without measurement stations and their underlying networks, we would have very few means [11] by which to measure the accumulation of GHGs in the global atmosphere, and consequently no way of evaluating their emissions without relying on statistics from the industries that emit them. The current IPCC report is underpinned by such measurements, which allow scientists to estimate the impact of anthropogenic activity on past, present and future climates.

From Mauna Loa and its 60 -year record of atmospheric CO2 [12], to unexpected growth in emissions of banned substances such as CFC – 11 [13] and monitoring the accumulation of extremely long-lived greenhouse gases in the global atmosphere, atmospheric measurements stations have been our inside man when it comes to keeping track of what is happening in our atmosphere and to what extent human activities are altering its composition.

Perhaps now more than ever, in the light of the IPCC report, we can appreciate the importance of the data that have been collected over decades but also, the efforts of those who have been directly or indirectly involved in this kind of work.  Continuing and expanding the measurement networks for these gases is and will be even more vital for a continued understanding of global and regional GHG emission trends.

References

[1] http://www.ipcc.ch/
[2]  https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-45775309
[3]  http://report.ipcc.ch/sr15/pdf/sr15_spm_final.pdf
[4]  https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-why-scientists-think-100-of-global-warming-is-due-to-humans
[5]  https://www.c2es.org/content/main-greenhouse-gases/
[6]  https://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/10/5145/2010/acp-10-5145-2010.pdf
[7]  https://agage.mit.edu/
[8]  https://agage.mit.edu/
[9]  https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/about/aboutgmd.html
[10]  http://www.bristol.ac.uk/chemistry/research/acrg/current/decc.html
[11]  https://www.co2.earth/co2-ice-core-data
[12]  https://www.co2.earth/daily-co2
[13]  https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/16/mysterious-rise-in-banned-ozone-destroying-chemical-shocks-scientists

—————————-
This blog is written by Cabot Institute members Eleni Michalopoulou, Dr Dan Say, Dr Kieran Stanley and Professor Simon O’Doherty from the University of Bristol’s School of Chemistry.

Dan Say
Eleni Michalopoulou

 

Read other blogs in this Green Great Britain Week series:
1. Just the tip of the iceberg: Climate research at the Bristol Glaciology Centre
2. Monitoring greenhouse gas emissions: Now more important than ever?
3. Digital future of renewable energy
4. The new carbon economy – transforming waste into a resource
5. Systems thinking: 5 ways to be a more sustainable university
6. Local students + local communities = action on the local environment

Just the tip of the iceberg: Climate research at the Bristol Glaciology Centre

Posted on by janet.crompton

As part of Green Great Britain Week, supported by BEIS, we are posting a series of blogs throughout the week highlighting what work is going on at the University of Bristol’s Cabot Institute for the Environment to help provide up to date climate science, technology and solutions for government and industry.  We will also be highlighting some of the big sustainability actions happening across the University and local community in order to do our part to mitigate the negative effects of global warming. Today our blog will look at ‘Explaining the latest science on climate change’.

Last week the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its special report on the impact of global warming of 1.5˚C. Professor Tony Payne – Head of the University of Bristol’s School of Geographical Sciences and Bristol Glaciology Centre (BGC) member – is one of the lead authors on the report, which highlights the increased threats of a 2˚C versus 1.5˚C warmer world. The report also lays out the mitigation pathways that must be taken if we are to meet the challenge of keeping global warming to 1.5˚C above pre-industrial levels.

The core of the report is a synthesis of over 6000 scientific papers detailing our current understanding of the climate system, and here at the BGC our research is focused on the role of the cryosphere in that system. The cryosphere, which refers to all the snow, ice and permafrost on the planet, is changing rapidly under global warming, and understanding how it will continue to evolve is critical for predicting our future climate. This is primarily due to the positive feedback loops in which it is involved, whereby a small change in conditions sets off a sequence of processes that reinforce and amplify the initial change. Despite the name, in the context of our current climate these positive feedback loops are almost always bad news and are responsible for some of the “tipping points” that could lead to runaway changes in the climate system.

I hope this post will give you a quick tour of just some of the research being carried out by scientists at the BGC, studying the way in which mountain glaciers, sea ice and the two great ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland are responding to and influencing our changing climate.

Ice sheets

My own research examines ice flow at the margins of Antarctica. The Antarctic ice sheet is fringed by floating ice shelves, fed by large glaciers and ice streams that flow from the heart of the ice sheet towards the coast (see Figure 1). These ice shelves can provide forces that resist the glaciers that flow into them, reducing their speed and the amount of ice that enters the ocean. Crucially, once ice flows off the land and begins to float it causes the sea level to rise. My work is in modelling the interaction between ice shelves and the rest of the ice sheet to better quantify the role that ice shelves have in restraining ice loss from the continent. This will help to reduce the uncertainty in our predictions of future sea level rise, as the thinning and collapse of Antarctic ice shelves that we have seen in recent decades looks set to continue.

Figure 1: Schematic of the Antarctic ice sheet grounding line. Image credit: Bethan Davies, www.AntarcticGlaciers.org

To model ice flow in Antarctica with any success it is crucial to know the exact location of the point at which the ice sheet begins to float, called the ‘grounding line’. Research on this within the BGC is being done by Dr Geoffrey Dawson and Professor Jonathan Bamber, using data from the European Space Agency’s CryoSat-2 satellite. Their method determines the location of the grounding line by measuring the rise and fall of the floating ice shelves under the influence of ocean tides. Recently published work from this project has improved our knowledge of the grounding line location near the Echelmeyer ice stream in West Antarctica and this method is currently being rolled out across the rest of the ice sheet [1].

In the Northern Hemisphere, the Black and Bloom project led by Professor Martyn Tranter is studying ice algae on the second largest ice mass on Earth, the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS). The large, dark regions that appear on the GrIS in the summer are, in part, down to blooms of algae growing in the presence of meltwater on the ice sheet (see Figure 2). This bloom is darker than the surrounding ice surface and so reduces the albedo (a measure, between 0 and 1, of a surface’s reflectivity). A reduced ice sheet albedo means more of the sun’s energy is absorbed and the surface becomes warmer, which produces more meltwater, and more algae, leading to more energy absorption in a classic example of a positive feedback loop. The aim of the project, a partnership between biologists and glaciologists within the BGC, is to take measurements of algal growth and to incorporate their effect on albedo into climate models. A recent paper from the group, led by Dr Chris Williamson, revealed the abundance and species of microbial life that are growing on the GrIS [2], and this summer the team returned to the field to extend their work to more northerly regions of the ice sheet.

Figure 2: Bags of surface ice collected on the Greenland Ice Sheet showing the change in albedo with (from left to right) low, medium and high amounts of algae present.

Sea ice

Moving from land-based ice and into the ocean, Arctic sea ice is also being studied within the BGC. Regions of the Arctic have warmed at over 3 times the global average during the last century and there has consequently been a dramatic decline in the amount of sea ice that survives the summer melt season. The minimum, summer Arctic sea ice extent is currently declining at 13.2% per decade. Predicting the future of Arctic sea ice is critical for understanding global climate change due to the presence of another positive feedback loop: reduced summer sea ice replaces the white, high albedo ice surface with the darker, low albedo, ocean surface. This means that more solar energy is absorbed, raising surface temperatures and increasing ice melt, leading to more exposed ocean and further warming.

Dr Jack Landy has used remote sensing data from satellites, including CryoSat-2 and ICESat, to measure the roughness of Arctic sea ice and to model the impact that changing roughness has on albedo (see Figure 3). The roughness of the sea ice controls the size of the meltwater ponds that can form on the surface. With less sea ice lasting through multiple summer melt seasons, the trend is for Arctic sea ice to become smoother, allowing larger and larger ponds to form which, again, have a lower albedo than the ice surface they sit on, creating yet another positive feedback loop [3].

Figure 3: Panels a and b are predictions for summer (June to August) Arctic sea ice albedo based upon ice roughness observations made in March of 2005 and 2007 respectively. Panels c and d show the actual, observed summer albedo in those years. Image credit: Dr Jack Landy [3].

Mountain glaciers

A third element of the cryosphere studied at the BGC are glaciers in high mountain regions such as the Andes and the Himalayas. Led by Professor Jemma Wadham, the new Director of the Cabot Institute, this work focuses on the biology and chemistry of the meltwater produced from these glaciers. This summer a team of postgraduate researchers from the BGC – Rory Burford, Sarah Tingey and Guillaume Lamarche-Gagnon – travelled to the Himalayas in partnership with Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, to collect meltwater samples from the streams emanating from the Chhota Shigri glacier. These streams eventually flow into the Indus river, a vital water source for agriculture and industry in Pakistan. It is therefore crucial to understand how the quality of this water source might change in a warmer climate. Mercury, for example, is precipitated out of the atmosphere by snowfall and can collect and become concentrated within these high mountain glaciers. In the shorter term, if these glaciers continue to melt more rapidly, larger amounts of mercury will be released into the environment and will impact the quality of water that supports millions of people. On longer time scales, the retreat and reduction in volume of the Himalayan glaciers will reduce the amount of water supplied to communities downstream, with huge implications for water security in the region.

Figure 4: Photo from Himalayan fieldwork. Image credit: Guillaume Lamarche-Gagnon

Outlook

This is just the tip of the BGC research iceberg, with field data from this summer currently being pored over and new questions being developed. This work will hopefully inform the upcoming IPCC special report on the oceans and cryosphere (due in 2019), which is set to be another significant chance to assess and share our understanding of the ice on our planet and what it means for the challenges we have set for ourselves in tackling climate change.

References

[1] Dawson, G. J., & Bamber, J. L. (2017). Antarctic grounding line mapping from CryoSat‐2 radar altimetry. Geophysical Research Letters, 44, 11,886–11,893. https://doi.org/10.1002/2017GL075589

[2] Williamson, C. J., Anesio, A. M., Cook, J., Tedstone, A., Poniecka, E., Holland, A., Fagan, D., Tranter, M., & Yallop, M. L. (2018). ‘Ice algal bloom development on the surface of the Greenland Ice Sheet’. FEMS Microbiology Ecology, 94,3. https://doi.org/10.1093/femsec/fiy025

[3] Landy, J. C., J. K. Ehn, and D. G. Barber (2015). Albedo feedback enhanced by smoother Arctic sea ice. Geophysical Research Letters, 42, 10,714–10,720. https://doi.org/10.1002/2015GL066712

——————————–
This blog was written by Cabot Institute member Tom Mitcham. He is a PhD student in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol and is studying the ice dynamics of Antarctic ice shelves and their tributary glaciers.

Tom Mitcham

Read other blogs in this Green Great Britain Week series:
1. Just the tip of the iceberg: Climate research at the Bristol Glaciology Centre
2. Monitoring greenhouse gas emissions: Now more important than ever?
3. Digital future of renewable energy
4. The new carbon economy – transforming waste into a resource
5. Systems thinking: 5 ways to be a more sustainable university
6. Local students + local communities = action on the local environment

Micro Hydro manufacturing in Nepal: A visit to Nepal Yantra Shala Energy

Posted on by janet.crompton
Topaz Maitland with a micro hydro turbine

For nine months I am working at an NGO called People, Energy and Environment Development Association (PEEDA), in Kathmandu, Nepal. PEEDA is an NGO dedicated to improving the livelihoods of communities, particularly the poor, by collective utilization of renewable energy resources, while ensuring due care for the environment.

My primary project is the design of a micro hydro Turgo Turbine, a small turbine which is not commonly used in Nepal. The project aims to investigate this turbine, and its potential for us in Nepal.

Nepal Yantrashala Energy (NYSE) is one of the partners on this project. NYSE is a manufacturing company specialising in micro hydro systems and I went to visit their workshop to learn about how they operate.

Micro Hydro and NYSE

At NYSE, they manufacture Pelton, Crossflow and Propeller turbines. If a client comes to them with the required head (height over which the water will drop) and flow rate, NYSE can manufacture an appropriate turbine. Every turbine is unique to the site it will be installed into.

Rough cast of a  Pelton runner cup, alongside finished cups

 

A Pelton turbine runner

 

Crossflow runners are made using strips of pipe as blades and machined runner plates to hold the blades
A Crossflow turbine runner

The aim of this project is to develop a design for a Turgo turbine (an example turgo turbine system pictured below), so that NYSE might be able to manufacture one for any given head and flow. This means that engineers such as myself need to understand how our new optimised design will operate over a range of flows and heads.

Micro Hydro in Nepal

Nepal is second only to Brazil in term of hydropower potential (1). Despite this, crippling underdevelopment and a mixture of geographical, political and economical factors leave the country lacking the resources to exploit and develop this potential (1).

Dr. Suman Pradhan, Project Coordinator at NYSE, told us that the first ever Crossflow Turbine was installed in Nepal in 1961. His father was actually one of those involved in the project. Ironically, today Nepal has to import or buy the designs for such Crossflow turbines from abroad.

Universities in Nepal do have turbine testing facilities, but funding for PhDs and other hydropower research is still heavily dependent upon foreign investment. A key area of opportunity for Nepal is the development of such research facilities. With so much hydropower potential, good work could be done to improve the performance of hydropower to suit demand and manufacturers within Nepal.

Dr. Suman hopes that this new Turgo Turbine design, alongside other designs he is trying to obtain, may widen the hydropower options available and manufacturable in Nepal.

References

1) Sovacool, B. K., Dhakal, S., Gippner, O. & Bambawale, M. J., 2013. Peeling the Energy Pickle: Expert Perceptions on Overcoming Nepal’s Energy Crisis. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies.

———————
This blog was written by Topaz Maitland, a University of Bristol Engineering Design Student on 3rd year industry placement.

Participating and coaching at a risk communication ‘pressure cooker’ event

Posted on by janet.crompton

Anna Hicks (British Geological Survey) and BUFI Student (University of Bristol) Jim Whiteley reflect on their experiences as a coach and participant of a NERC-supported risk communication ‘pressure cooker’, held in Mexico City in May.

Jim’s experience….

When the email came around advertising “the Interdisciplinary Pressure Cooker on Risk Communication that will take place during the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR; World Bank) Understanding Risk Forum in May 2018, Mexico City, Mexico” my thoughts went straight to the less studious aspects of the description:

‘Mexico City in May?’ Sounds great!
‘Interdisciplinary risk communication?’ Very à la mode! 
‘The World Bank?’ How prestigious! 
‘Pressure Cooker?’ Curious. Ah well, I thought, I’ll worry about that one later…

As a PhD student using geophysics to monitor landslides at risk of failure, communicating that risk to non-scientists isn’t something I am forced to think about too often. This is paradoxical, as the risk posed by these devastating natural hazards is the raison d’être for my research. As a geologist and geophysicist, I collect numerical data from soil and rocks, and try to work out what this tells us about how, or when, a landslide might move. Making sense of those numbers is difficult enough as it is (three and a half years’ worth of difficult to be precise) but the idea of having to take responsibility for, and explain how my research might actually benefit real people in the real world? Now that’s a daunting prospect to confront.

However, confront that prospect is exactly what I found myself doing at the Interdisciplinary Pressure Cooker on Risk Communication in May this year. The forty-odd group of attendees to the pressure cooker were divided in to teams; our team was made up of people working or studying in a staggeringly wide range of areas: overseas development in Africa, government policy in the US, town and city planning in Mexico and Argentina, disaster risk reduction (DRR) in Colombia, and of course, yours truly, the geophysicist looking at landslides in Yorkshire.

Interdisciplinary? Check.

One hour before the 4am deadline.

The possible issues to be discussed were as broad as overfishing, seasonal storms, population relocation and flooding. My fears were alleviated slightly, when I found that our team was going to be looking at hazards related to ground subsidence and cracking. Easy! I thought smugly. Rocks and cracks, the geologists’ proverbial bread and butter! We’ll have this wrapped up by lunchtime! But what was the task? Develop a risk communication strategy, and devise an effective approach to implementing this strategy, which should be aimed at a vulnerable target group living in the district of Iztapalapa in Mexico City, a district of 1.8 million people. Right.

Risk communication? Check.

It was around this time I realised that I glossed over the most imperative part of the email that had been sent around so many months before: ‘Pressure Cooker’. It meant exactly what it said on the tin; a high-pressure environment in which something, in this case a ‘risk communication strategy’ needed to be cooked-up quickly. Twenty-four hours quickly in fact. There would be a brief break circa 4am when our reports would be submitted, and then presentations were to be made to the judges at 9am the following morning. I checked the time. Ten past nine in the morning. The clock was ticking.

Pressure cooker? Very much check.

Anna’s experience….

What Jim failed to mention up front is it was a BIG DEAL to win a place in this event. 440 people from all over the world applied for one of 35 places. So, great job Jim! I was also really grateful to be invited to be a coach for one of the groups, having only just ‘graduated’ out of the age bracket to be a participant myself! And like Jim, I too had some early thoughts pre-pressure cooker, but mine were a mixture of excitement and apprehension in equal measures:

‘Mexico City in May?’ Here’s yet another opportunity to show up my lack of Spanish-speaking skills…
‘Interdisciplinary risk communication?’ I know how hard this is to do well…
‘The World Bank?’ This isn’t going to be your normal academic conference! 
‘Pressure Cooker?’ How on earth am I going to stay awake, let alone maintain good ‘coaching skills’?!

As an interdisciplinary researcher working mainly in risk communication and disaster risk reduction, I was extremely conscious of the challenges of generating risk communication products – and doing it in 24 hours? Whoa. There is a significant lack of evidence-based research about ‘what works’ in risk communication for DRR, and I knew from my own research that it was important to include the intended audience in the process of generating risk communication ‘products’. I need not have worried though. We had support from in-country experts that knew every inch of the context, so we felt confident we could make our process and product relevant and salient for the intended audience. This in part was also down to the good relationships we quickly formed in our team, crafted from patience, desire and ability to listen to each other, and for an unwavering enthusiasm for the task!

The morning after the night before.

So we worked through the day and night on our ‘product’ – a community based risk communication strategy aimed at women in Iztapalapa with the aim of fostering a community of practice through ‘train the trainer’ workshops and the integration of art and science to identify and monitor ground cracking in the area.

The following morning, after only a few hours’ sleep, the team delivered their presentation to fellow pressure-cooker participants, conference attendees, and importantly, representatives of the community groups and emergency management teams in the geographical areas in which our task was focused. The team did so well and presented their work with confidence, clarity and – bags of the one thing that got us through the whole pressure cooker – good humour.

It was such a pleasure to be part of this fantastic event and meet such inspiring people, but the icing on the cake was being awarded ‘Best Interdisciplinary Team’ at the awards ceremony that evening. ‘Ding’! Dinner served.

—————
This blog has been reposted with kind permission from James Whiteley.  View the original blog on BGS Geoblogy.   This blog was written by James Whiteley, a geophysicist and geologist at University of Bristol, hosted by British Geological Survey and Anna Hicks from the British Geologial Survey.

Africa looking to strategic partnerships to rein in food and nutrition insecurity

Posted on by janet.crompton
A child feeds on orange fleshed sweet potato in Central Uganda – Image credit ‘Winnie Nanteza/NARO-Uganda’

World hunger continued to rise for the third consecutive year according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)’s latest report. The data identifies climate variability as one of the major contributing factors to this worrying statistic. The intricate relationship between climate change and food security culminates in a major challenge that has rattled individuals, organisations and governments alike for decades. In the coming decades, Africa—which faces the biggest food security challenge in present times—will need more strategic partnerships to unlock its food security potential.Nearly one in every nine people—a significant proportion of whom live in Sub-Saharan Africa—go to bed hungry every night. So significant is this challenge that the United nations lists ending hunger, achieving food and nutrition security and promoting sustainable agriculture by 2030 second of its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

It is a daunting challenge made worse by an exploding global population set to hit 9 billion by 2050. Nonetheless, governments and other stakeholders worldwide are drawing inspiration from the fact that, despite the increases of the past three years, hunger overall has reduced by almost half in the past two decades. This has been made possible through deliberate efforts to increase agricultural production with minimal environmental impact.

Contemporary Agricultural Science Technology and Innovations (STIs) are pivotal to increasing agricultural production, food security, and promoting economic growth in Africa. However, realizing these aspirations greatly depends on leveraging the synergistic capabilities of the diverse actors within the sector towards building stronger partnerships and increased accountability for greater impact.

The nature of Agricultural Research for Development (AR4D) paradigms around the world is rapidly evolving, with new technologies constantly emerging and making the agricultural sector more knowledge intensive and innovations driven. In addition, the role of the private sector in agricultural R&D is increasingly more prominent, with Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) being touted as an ideal model for accelerating technology transfer, commercialization, and delivery of research outputs to end-users for optimal research impact. Innovative partnerships between the public and private sectors are especially important for attracting investments and financing innovative solutions for agriculture in developing nations.

To drive this innovative and responsive research agenda, scientists globally are increasingly coming together in collaborative partnerships to share resources towards ensuring that the world will be able to feed nine billion people by 2050.

Among these is the Community Network for African Vector-Borne Plant Viruses (CONNECTED)—a Vector-borne Disease Network awarded to the University of Bristol—which held its Africa Launch Conference  in May 2018. The network—which is closely involved with the Cabot Institute—aims inter alia to build a sustainable network of multi-disciplinary international scientists, to deliver solutions to devastating crop diseases.
 

Participants at the CONNECTED Network Africa Launch, May 2018

Three months on, and the Network is already making good on its promise. Following the first CONNECTED pump prime funding call soon after the Network’s Africa launch, research funding grants have been awarded to Network members working in African and European research institutions in classic triangular collaborations to achieve the ideals of the Network.

In August 2018, global science leaders congregated in Durban, South Africa for the inaugural Bio Africa convention. The conference provided opportunities to build capacity and drum up support for increased investment in, and support for Africa’s growing biotech industry. It is hoped that networks built there will enrich the implementation of past and existing Africa-led initiatives for growth and sustainable development, especially in the bio-economy sector.

While food is an easy topic to get people involved with, rising concerns about some aspects of agricultural technology bring unique dynamics to this area. A July 25 ruling by the European Court of Justice imposed exacting regulatory restrictions on the use of gene editing in crop improvement. This adds to existing regulatory stalemates—mostly in Europe and Africa—blocking the use of products of modern agricultural technologies such as genetic engineering and gene editing to deliver important crop varieties to the world’s most vulnerable people.

In Uganda for instance, genetically modified biofortified and bacterial wilt resistant bananas, and blight resistant potatoes remain locked up in confined field trials due to the absence of an enabling regulatory environment for commercialisation. Research is on-going—using genetic engineering—on virus resistant cassava, insect resistant and drought tolerant maize, and nitrogen use efficient rice among other key food security crops.

The ebb and flow of global politics and science remains a determinant factor in whether or not agricultural STIs can contribute to ending hunger by 2030 per the SDGs. Cognizant of the constraints new breeding technologies are facing to deliver impact, initiatives like Uganda Biosciences Information Center (UBIC) have been established to support the stewardship process to ensure that key agricultural technologies reach the people that need them most.

This is achieved through creating and raising awareness of modern agricultural biosciences and biosafety, to facilitate balanced, fact-based and objective discourse on modern biosciences in Uganda and beyond. Elsewhere, the Open Forum on Agricultural Biotechnology (OFAB), International Service for Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA) and Cornell Alliance for Science to mention but a few, are championing the same cause at regional and global levels.

In many ways gentle calls to action, such initiatives complement the millions of voices highlighting the global food challenge and imploring all humanity to spring to action to ensure that everyone has a seat at the (dining) table.

Policy coherence and coordination among different actors to end hunger remains key to delivering much needed solutions to global food and nutrition security. To end hunger, targeted steps must be taken to help people access the tools they need to create agricultural prosperity and progress. But we can’t just hope and pray, we have to take action—and Africa seems to be beginning to do just that!

——————————————–

This blog was written by Joshua Raymond Muhumuza, CONNECTED Network member and Outreach Officer at the Uganda Biosciences Information Center (UBIC).

The Battle for Middle Earth: Storytelling and disciplinarities

Posted on by janet.crompton
The hand of Sauron. Wikimedia Commons.

** The following blog might contain some light gaming language**

When the fellowship of The Ring left Rivendell, I suppose we all thought that that was a group very well equipped to deal with Sauron. They had Legolas’ bow, Gimli’s axe, Aragorn’s sword, a wizard and four hobbitses after all. Of course, they also had Boromir but at that time they had not really sold the whole mount Doom idea to him.

In principle, and to some extent in practise, what the Fellowship formed was an interdisciplinary group. Every member of the group had quite a specific expertise and that was each fellow’s contribution to the cause. At this point I will invite you to consider every weapon offered as a different discipline.

The challenge they were facing was quite straight forward. They had to throw the One Ring in Mount Doom and destroy Sauron.

I suppose, in terms of environmental challenges, Sauron was the kind of challenge we were facing 30 or 20 years ago. A straightforward, however big, important or urgent of course, problem that had quite a (seemingly at least) straightforward solution. Perhaps a good example of this was the quite well-known phrase of dealing with greenhouse gases, the “dilution is the solution to pollution”, that is until we realized it really really wasn’t. Another good example could be plastic and recycling until of course we realized microplastics were pretty much everywhere.

I believe that our own Battle for Middle Earth is somewhat different than that of the original Fellowship’s, and we are facing a rather different enemy. So, let’s take for instance climate change.
Climate change is not Sauron. Climate change is Sauron’s older, angrier, evil(er) brother; on steroids. For the sake of this blog I will be calling him The Beast because it is sufficiently dramatic. I think the biggest problem we have with The Beast is that it has so many heads and faces; it is a much more complex problem that requires a more complex solution (or approach?).

So, let us consider something slightly different than a group of elves, humans and hobbitses.
If you are or have ever been a gamer, especially a gamer of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGS) like World of Warcraft (please do not start WoW if you are in the middle of your studies, trust me) you know that the storylines begin very much the same way.

You appear in a place by yourself, you do things in order to gain experience, learn the game and become stronger but after some levels the game becomes so difficult and complex that you need to start forming groups in order to get anything at all done and gain the required experience to reach higher levels. At this point we are still in a traditionally interdisciplinary environment which invites experts from different disciplines to form a coherent and consistent group.

When I started playing WoW and after of course, not reading the guidelines like at all, I decided I wanted to level up as a holy paladin; a healer of sorts. Naturally that was impossible. The function of the healer is to heal other members in the groups they join (called raids) so of course a healer is not equipped to do enough damage in order to gain experience and level up. I therefore had to change my function and become a retribution paladin; basically, a paladin that can do a lot of damage.  So, what I had to do was change my discipline in order to address the challenge of advancing in the game.

Furthermore, if you have ever been addicted to gaming (never have I ever) then I am sure you have probably tried playing with other characters, more than just your main one. And it was those players were the absolutely stellar players. The ones that had faced the challenges and the boss fights from more than one perspective and viewpoint. That is when you really had everything you needed, you knew every trick and every strategy; every angle. That is when you were playing from a holistic perspective.

I think that what our Battle for Middle Earth requires is a Gimli with a bow, an Aragorn with an axe and a Legolas with a sword. I suppose some would describe this as crossdisciplinary approach, but in all honesty, I prefer to imagine a Gimli with a bow. And as much as I can imagine Gimli’s face if he were ever told he had to be trained to be ‘elf-savy’ even he would have to admit that this would have come in handy in several occasions!

What is very interesting is that is the challenge that must define the approach. We cannot pre-decide on an approach and tell ourselves that this is it, this is how we are doing things from now on because that is how your entire raid group gets wiped in a boss fight that required a screwdriver and you kept poking at with a hammer.

Whether an approach should be cross, trans, intra, multi, inter – disciplinary it will be decided by the challenge. And my feeling, both as a scientist but also as a gamer is that in order to defeat our very own Beast we are going to need an even greater flexibility in the approaches we take. We are going to need that deep understanding of someone who has played the game from several roles and pathways, who is equally competent in several of them and who can throw down their bow and pick up an axe in an instance.

So yes, Gimlis with bows, Wonder Women with Xena’s weapons and Captain Jack Sparrows with…well nothing, he was perfect really.

And let the games against The Beast begin!

If you are interested (or as confused as I am) about the different disciplinarities this is a good article I have found.

———————-
This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Eleni Michalopoulou, a Doctor of Philosophy student in the School of Chemistry at the University of Bristol.
Eleni Michalopoulou

 

Like this blog? Why not read more about our research that is related to Middle Earth:

Scientists simulate the climate of Tolkien’s Middle Earth (includes research papers written in Elvish and Dwarvish)Watch the talk by Professor Dan Lunt on Past, future, and fantasy climate change – from the mid-Cretaceous to Middle Earth

My work experience: Designing a renewable energy turbine in Nepal

Posted on by janet.crompton

PEEDA is an NGO aiming to help off-grid communities in Nepal develop sustainably, primarily by introducing renewable energy sources that are owned and managed by the community.

Projects vary widely, and all funding comes from grants – that’s why there’s only six full-time staff at the office in Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital. Over the years various projects have been in partnership with the University of Bristol: that’s how I ended up working at PEEDA for my assessed year in industry. As part of the Engineering Design Degree, all students undertake a year of work experience in their third year.

Project work

My primary project for the first few months concerns the design of a pico-hydro Turgo Turbine, a small turbine which is not commonly used in Nepal despite its potential. Currently, one turbine has been imported from China and one turbine is being developed at the University of Bristol. These will be compared in the testing lab at Kathmandu University, and the final design will be manufactured in Nepal and introduced to a pilot site.

Pico-hydro Turgo Turbine

I will have the opportunity to assist with all stages of the design, working closely with the University of Bristol, the Turbine Testing Lab, and the manufacturers.

Most excitingly, I will be able to go on site visits for the project and for other projects which will involve haphazard bus journeys on winding roads to remote, beautiful areas of Nepal.

What is Kathmandu like?

The walk to work is always interesting. I may see as many as three wandering cows which are considered sacred by Hindu culture. My walk takes me past a large Hindu temple where there is always music playing and ladies in colorful saris sell flowers and fruit outside its gates.

It’s monsoon season, and after the daily downpour the mountains are visible in every direction just beyond the city.

It’s a busy, lively, polluted capital city but the people are extremely friendly and welcoming.

On my first day, my boss came to pick me up but couldn’t find the way (there are no street signs or house numbers, only vague area names). I handed the phone to the lady in the closest shop so that she could explain to him in Nepali. Every day when I walk past her little shop, she always waves hello to me.

I have been here for almost two weeks now and I have not spotted a single, functioning traffic light. My work colleagues tell me they can count all the working traffic lights in the Kathmandu Valley on two hands.

Overall, it’s mad and wonderful.
——————————-
This blog was written by Topaz Maitland, a University of Bristol Engineering Design Student on 3rd year industry placement.

Sign up to our weekly newsletter for all the latest news, events and opportunities at https://bristol.ac.uk/cabot/news/subscribe. Find out more about our unique Master's by Research in Global Environmental Challenges at https://bristol.ac.uk/cabot-masters.