Repairing the Planet’s Lungs

In April, Executive Order 12898 established the White House Office of Environmental Justice to address persistent environmental injustices involving toxic pollution, underinvestment in infrastructure and services, and other harms due to a legacy of racial and economic discrimination. The new office is tasked with coordinating efforts among federal agencies to help implement innovative directives. It requires federal agencies to notify communities in the event of a release of toxic substances; directs agencies to facilitate meaningful public participation and just treatment in agency decision-making; directs agencies to identify and address information gaps related to environmental justice and make information on environmental and health concerns more publicly accessible; and implements a scorecard to evaluate federal agencies’ environmental justice efforts.

Colombia Protects Its Birds

Colombia has the most bird species in the world—1,966 registered species, or 20 percent of all birds worldwide— and has updated its strategy for protecting this rich avian life, affecting all birds that inhabit the country at some point in their annual life cycle. The goal is to conserve and sustainably manage bird diversity, habitats and ecosystems by the generation of knowledge, scientific research and its application, the active participation of different sectors, policy and planning. The strategy focuses on 11 different Colombian ecosystems from the high Andean forests to savannas, grasslands and coastal areas.

The oceans, sometimes called the lungs of the Earth, have absorbed 30 percent of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions since the Industrial Revolution and captured 90 percent of the related excess heat. Seawater stores about 150 times more CO2 than air. Unfortunately, absorbing all that greenhouse gas has damaged sea life.

Engineers from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) have developed a process to cleanse the seawater of CO2 so it can store greater amounts of greenhouse gases. The process sends an electric charge into seawater flowing through tanks on a barge. The charge sets off chemical reactions to trap the greenhouse gas into a solid mineral, which is then deposited on the ocean floor, completing the cleansing process.

The engineers expect to design larger facilities based on the data obtained from their test sites in Los Angeles and Singapore and have commercial sites removing millions of tons of CO2 per year by 2025. The UCLA scientists estimate that 1,800 facilities would be needed to capture 10 billion tons of atmospheric CO2 annually beginning in 2050, thereby limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

This exhaustive process in the renewal of Colombia’s avian protection strategy involved more than 30 workshops and 2,000 people from every region of the country. Input from indigenous peoples and others generated practical conservation actions in their territories, as well as ancestral knowledge and an appreciation for the special connections these communities have with birds in their daily lives, resulting in a strategy that prioritizes the relationships between people and birds.