Edron Academy Environmental Systems and Societies: 2014

Saturday, October 4, 2014

The Greendex Report

National Geographic has released the Greendex report for 2014. It is a measure of sustainable behaviour by the population of each country.

Among the findings were:

Environmental concern has increased since 2012: Sixty-one percent of consumers globally now say they are very concerned about environmental problems compared with 56 percent in 2012.

Compared to the study’s 2008 baseline, sustainable consumer behaviour has increased in nearly every country tracked since the first survey, suggesting consumer behaviour across the world is improving, albeit slowly.

Environmentally friendly behaviour has increased in nine of the 17 countries that were surveyed in 2012: Argentina, Australia, Hungary, India, Mexico, Russia, Sweden, South Korea and Great Britain. However, sustainable behaviour decreased since 2012 among consumers in five countries: Canada, China, Germany, Japan and the United States.

Top-scoring consumers of the 2014 Greendex study are in the developing economies of India and China, followed by consumers in South Korea, Brazil and Argentina. Indian and Chinese consumers also scored highest in 2012.

U.S. consumers’ behaviour still ranks as the least sustainable of all countries surveyed since the inception of the Greendex study in 2008.

More and more consumers are embracing local and organic foods and lightening their environmental footprint in the food category. Nearly all consumers believe that we need to change the way we produce and consume food in order to feed a growing population, and many say it is very important to know how and where their food is produced. Yet, relatively few people report that they do.

Consumers are anxious about climate change: Fifty-one percent across the 18 countries surveyed in 2014 believe that global warming will negatively affect their own lives, up in seven surveyed countries from 2012 and down in none. Furthermore, 65 percent of consumers overall believe that most scientists are convinced that human activity causes climate change.

2014 Greendex Reports (PDFs)

Monday, May 26, 2014

This article has been doing the rounds on Facebook this week. It is a plan to replace roads in the US with plates of tempered glass containing solar panels. Its a great idea in principle, but is still in the (late) developmental stage and would require huge investment.

Solar Freakin’ Roadways

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Combating Global Warming

I'm a regular listener to the podcast 'The Skeptics Guide to the Universe' and I'd highly recommend it for all scientific and critical thinkers.

In this clip a panel of scientists is discussing possible future efforts by humans to combat global warming (in other words to artificially create a negative feedback loop). They conclude that such efforts are possibly doomed to failure, and at worst might even exacerbate the situation: