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Tag: decarbonising

Plans announced for 30MW green hydrogen hub in Pembrokeshire

Posted on by dishanth
Plans announced for 30MW green hydrogen hub in Pembrokeshire

Norwegian energy developer Statkraft has announced plans to develop a major green hydrogen production hub at the site of disused rail storage in Pembrokeshire.

The company is looking to transform the site of the former Royal Navy Armaments Depot into a green hydrogen production capacity of around 30GW. The hydrogen generated there, using electrolysis, would be used to serve the transport, manufacturing and industrial sectors.

Renewable electricity to serve the Trecwn Green Energy Hub will be generated from three onshore wind turbines and a ground-mounted solar array under Statkraft’s plans.

 

 

Statkraft told edie that it is hoping to submit the plans by the end of 2023. If the planning process runs smoothly, the site could be operational by the end of 2026. Around 5,000 homes and businesses in the local area will be contacted by Statkraft in the coming weeks asking if they would like to participate in consultations.

Statkraft UK’s head of RES eFuels and European wind and solar, Matt Kelly, said the project “presents an exciting opportunity to produce homegrown green energy for local use and has the potential to act a catalyst for the redevelopment of Trecwn Valley.”

The UK Government has committed to growing national low-carbon hydrogen production capacity to 10GW by 2030. At least half of this will need to be green. Hydrogen is considered necessary to the net-zero transition, for decarbonising hard-to-abate sectors such as heavy transport and heavy industry. It produces no greenhouse gases at the point of combustion. However, most global production is currently fossil-fuelled, meaning that it is not a low-carbon solution across the lifecycle.

 

Funds and accelerators

In related news, Hy24 Partners – a joint venture from investment firms FiveT Hydrogen and Ardian – has closed what it claims is the world’s largest infrastructure fund for the low-carbon hydrogen sector to date.

The €2bn fund will be used to invest across the hydrogen value chain. As well as production, storage and distribution will be supported.

Among the investors in the fund are TotalEnergies, Air Liquide, Airbus, AXA and Allianz. In total, it attracted more than 50 investors from 13 countries.

Hy24Partners estimates that the fund will enable the deployment of up to €20bn of investment within a six-year period.

Elsewhere, the Carbon Trust has announced a new clean hydrogen accelerator with backing from the UK Government’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS).

Modelled on the Trust’s offshore wind accelerator, the aim of the project is to help achieve economies of scale for clean hydrogen, so that it becomes cost-competitive with the grey (fossil) hydrogen that dominates global markets today.

The accelerator will convene players across the British hydrogen value chain for innovation programmes. It will cover all production methods which can comply with BEIS’s Low-Carbon Hydrogen Standard.

“This new clean hydrogen accelerator fills a gap in the current innovation landscape by focusing on stimulating the supply chain,” said the Carbon Trust’s chair Baroness Brown.

At this point, the Carbon Trust is calling for new industry participants to join the accelerator. Its first step will be to shape a plan for innovation programmes.

 

 

Source edie

Data-driven platform aims to clear up fog of palm oil traceability

Posted on by dishanth
Data-driven platform aims to clear up fog of palm oil traceability

A new web monitoring platform aims to achieve full traceability in palm oil supply chains and help companies to meet their zero-deforestation commitments — a goal that continues to elude the industry due to numerous challenges.

Palm oil is a major driver of deforestation in the two countries that produce nearly 90 per cent of the global supply, Indonesia and Malaysia, and whose forests are home to key biodiversity areas.

A 2019 study shows that land clearing for oil palm plantations was the single largest driver of deforestation in Indonesia between 2001 and 2016, accounting for 23 per cent of total deforestation.

One of the keys in stopping oil palm-driven deforestation is the ability to trace the palm oil product back to its origin, making sure that it’s legally sourced and produced from an environmental and social conflict-free area. Known as full traceability, this is a degree of transparency that the industry still hasn’t been able to achieve, despite the efforts of bodies like the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO).

“The goal is to make Palmoil.io a self-sustaining and reliable resource for palm oil professionals to identify and mitigate risks in their supply chain,” Leo Bottrill, CEO and founder of MapHubs, told Mongabay.

Monitoring palm oil supply chains has long been challenging due to their complexity. A ton of palm oil derivative like stearic acid, for instance, used widely in detergents and cosmetics, is likely to consist of palm oil from hundreds of mills that, in turn, process palm fruit grown by thousands of plantations.

These webs of plantations and mills make it difficult for companies to fully know where they source from, right down to the plantation level, and thus to provide evidence of compliance. This also makes companies interdependent on each other for ensuring transparency.

So even if efforts have been made to monitor palm oil supply chains, they remain fragmented, expensive, and uneven, according to Bottrill. And without full traceability, a buying company can’t truly know if its palm oil is deforestation-free or not, even if it has made efforts to establish this, such as by publishing a list of the mills it buys from.

“Just because you publish a mill list, purchase RSPO-certified palm oil, and maintain a grievance tracker, doesn’t automatically mean you get a good rating,” Bottrill said. “There is still work to be done.”

Palmoil.io aims to rectify this by being the first monitoring system that reflect the reality of shared supply chains in the industry. To do that, the platform collects various data, including mapping data such as concession boundaries and mill locations, supply chain information from public mill lists, land classification maps, reliable and free forest alert technology, and widely available satellite imagery.

Palmoil.io analyses more than 2,000 palm mills, 480 refineries and crushers, and 400 high-risk plantations. It also screens all major palm oil traders, buyers and suppliers.

By analysing such a large number of mills and identifying forest loss within a 25-kilometer (16-mile) radius of mills, Palmoil.io is able to identify not only whether deforestation has occurred or not, but also what and who caused it.

 

“We rate each mill on both the amount of recent deforestation as well as historical deforestation and future risk,” Bottrill said.

Besides deforestation, Palmoil.io also tracks mills and suppliers associated with human rights and labor violations, by building a common grievance database featuring more than 1,400 grievances that are updated monthly. Having this database means individual companies don’t have to maintain their own grievance trackers.

With all this data, Palmoil.io can identify high-risk mills and inform subscribers to the platform not only about their exposure to the mills, but also about other companies that buy from the same mills. As a result, companies that share the same exposure to high-risk mills can work together to address the issues — essentially, buyers putting pressure on their common vendors.

“Palmoil.io shows where you need to improve, and perhaps most importantly, allows you to compare your performance with your peers,” Bottrill said. “Peer pressure might be the most powerful tool we have to achieve this zero-deforestation goal.”

Since its launch earlier this year, Palmoil.io has been used by major traders and buyers like Golden Agri Resources (GAR), Pacific Interlink, Olam and BASF.

In April, Palmoil.io notified major traders and buyers that subscribe to the platform that they’re exposed to deforestation as they’re buying from high-risk mills in Peninsular Malaysia, before the deforestation risks had been widely reported.

Bottrill said the Palmoil.io team would continue updating and improving the platform by adding more mills into the database. An upcoming feature will be plantation ratings.

“Similar to mills, this will be a list of concessions that will be rated for recent, historical and future deforestation risk,” Bottrill said. “We will also identify buyers and the grievances associated with that concession and group owner.”

MapHubs is also developing an experimental approach to analysing deforestation risk from smallholders, since very few of them have been mapped despite accounting for 40 per cent of all palm oil production.

“Despite the many challenges, I’m optimistic palm oil could be the first major deforestation-causing commodity to move definitively towards a deforestation-free mode of production,” Bottrill said. “Palmoil.io’s job is to help accelerate the ‘could.’”

But for palm oil to be truly deforestation free, he added, it’s important for all stakeholders to be involved.

“This is not about delivering a sustainable supply chain for one particular company or market. This is about everyone,” Bottrill said. “There can’t be a sustainable market and a leakage market — there can only be one market. So whether you are selling Snickers bars to Slovenians or cooking oil to Indians, sustainability must become an industry standard, not some voluntary luxury. We want Palmoil.io to play an important role towards achieving this.”

This story was published with permission from Mongabay.com.

 

 

Source Eco Business

‘Green infrastructure’ shift for sustainable cities

Posted on by dishanth
‘Green infrastructure’ shift for sustainable cities

Climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution are just some of the issues facing the world’s rapidly growing cities as urban populations swell.

Now, with 70 percent of carbon dioxide emissions emanating from cities, a new initiative promoting integrated approaches to urban development aims to reduce their ecological footprint. And pioneers of the project hope to see it adopted by cities worldwide.

UrbanShift, led by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), will support 23 cities to develop a range of strategies, such as green infrastructure, low-carbon transport systems and schemes to reduce or recycle waste. The initiative is being run in partnership with the Global Environment Facility (GEF), World Resources Institute (WRI), World Bank, Asian Development Bank, C40 Cities and others.

 

You don’t solve just a transport problem and then an urban planning problem and then an energy problem; you find solutions that actually help you do all these things together.”

Aniruddha Dasgupta, president and CEO, World Resources Institute

 

The programme is being rolled out in Argentina, Brazil, China, Costa Rica, India, Indonesia, Morocco, Rwanda and Sierra Leone, with the hope that it will create conversations about sustainable cities across the world.

“The noise around what these cities are accomplishing can very much lead to other cities adopting it on their own – and that’s obviously what we want, shifting that global discourse and actions towards a more sustainable future,” said Inger Andersen, executive director at UNEP, speaking at an event to launch UrbanShift in late September.

“We will advocate for sustainable investments to ensure that the cities we build in the future […] are aligned not only with key sustainable infrastructure but also with critical investments in nature-based solutions and ecosystem restoration.”

 

Population explosion

The proportion of people living in urban areas worldwide is predicted to increase from 55 percent in 2018 to 68 percent by 2050, according to UN figures, with close to 90 percent of the growth forecast to occur in Asia and Africa.

Speaking at the launch event, Carlos Manuel Rodríguez, chief executive and chair of the GEF, said rapid rural to urban migration in recent years meant environmental policies had often not been geared towards sustainability in cities. “In just a matter of a decade and a half, many of the countries in the global South have gone from these rural-based economies into an urban life,” he said.

As a city leader now, it is necessary to solve multiple problems at the same time, said Aniruddha Dasgupta, president and chief executive of WRI — for example, creating jobs in the wake of the pandemic while also protecting nature and decarbonising practices.

“You don’t solve just a transport problem and then an urban planning problem and then an energy problem; you find solutions that actually help you do all these things together,” he said.

Among its aims, UrbanShift will seek to avoid more than 130 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions and restore 1 million hectares of land, while impacting the lives of over 58 million people in the target cities.

 

Building momentum

Speaking to SciDev.Net, Tobias Kühner, an international consultant and researcher in urban planning at the University of Brasilia in Brazil, said UrbanShift recognised the need to solve the challenges facing cities. However, he questioned whether it seemed different enough from previous initiatives to have a much broader impact.

“Most [urban initiatives] are developed in the global North, which I think is a big disadvantage,” said Kühner. It would be interesting, he said, to see initiatives driven by South-South collaborations and in smaller-sized cities that often get less attention.

Sheela Patel, founder and director of the India-based Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centers, raised concerns that informal settlements were cited in UrbanShift’s brochure as a specific focus area in only one country — Rwanda — and often remain outside the focus of investments. “All these organisations champion adaptation and resilience-building, but a social justice lens is not obvious as a critical central element of this process,” she added.

The brochure does, however, highlight that 25 percent of city dwellers live in informal settlements, most of whom are women.

Luan Santos, a professor and researcher in sustainable finance and investment at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, believes the project could be helpful in stimulating dialogue and resources for dealing with environmental impacts. “The environmental and climate agenda in Brazil has not been prioritised in the current government, which is why the issue of financing becomes even more critical,” he said.

This piece was produced by SciDev.Net’s Global desk.

 

 

Source SciDev.Net

The March Budget 2021 and the Thunberg/Attenborough Effect: the myth of building back better rather than decarbonising

Posted on by dishanth
The March Budget 2021 and the Thunberg/Attenborough Effect: the myth of building back better rather than decarbonising

 

“The primary challenge facing humanity is climate change. UK government policy must acknowledge that the primary challenge is not about ‘building back’ focusing on developing a revised economy that will be ‘better’ in some general way, but on decarbonising lifestyles. This process of decarbonising lifestyles will destroy jobs and firms but will create new opportunities. Our lifestyles must change including major alterations in the ways in which we consume.”

 

John R. Bryson, Professor of Enterprise and Economic Geography, University of Birmingham,

There is no question that climate change is the most important challenge facing this planet. On 3 March 2021, Rishi Sunak, the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, will present the 2021 budget. This will be an extraordinary budget for extraordinary times. The pre-budget media discussions commenced late last year, but there have been silent voices including those of Greta Thunberg and Sir David Attenborough. Next week, when you reflect on the budget, I would encourage you to consider how Thunberg and Attenborough would have used this political moment to shape a new national trajectory towards a decarbonised future.

All nation-states continue to grapple with the COVID-19 pandemic. The focus continues to be on reducing cases and transmission, vaccination and protecting the most vulnerable, health services and social care, education, childcare and protecting the economy. Over the medium term, a primary policy objective is to keep COVID-19 case numbers as low as possible once the current outbreak has been suppressed.

The March budget needs to set the tone for this government’s approach to balancing policy interventions intended to temper the impacts of COVID-19 on liveability and livelihoods with fiscal sustainability combined with addressing major global societal challenges including decarbonization. The UK economy will not return to as it was prior to the pandemic. There have been permanent changes in the labour market that reflect alterations in the ways in which goods and services are produced, traded, and consumed. These alterations will impact on everyone and transform national finances.

COVID-19 has destroyed jobs, firms, and lives, but the destructive impact of this pandemic will be nothing compared to climate change. Climate change will destroy cities, countries, businesses, and there will be increases in mortality and morbidity rates. One of the COVID-19 recovery mantras is based around the expression ‘build back better’. This approach was developed in 2015 by the United Nations as a crisis response strategy focussing on “integrating disaster risk reduction measures into the restoration of physical infrastructure and societal systems” (United Nations, 2017: 6). The emphasis was on recovery, rehabilitation, and reconstruction.

This three ‘B’ approach is dangerous as it is too general. Everyone will define ‘better’ in their own terms. Thus, the UK Build Back Better Campaign defines ‘better’ in terms of protecting public services, tackling inequalities in communities, provide well-paid jobs and creating a shockproof economy which can fight the climate crisis. This is all very well, but the primary challenge facing humanity is climate change. UK government policy must acknowledge that the primary challenge is not about ‘building back’ focusing on developing a revised economy that will be ‘better’ in some general way, but on decarbonising lifestyles. This process of decarbonising lifestyles will destroy jobs and firms but will create new opportunities. Our lifestyles must change including major alterations in the ways in which we consume.

New approaches must be developed based on taxation innovation driving alterations in lifestyles and business behaviour. For example, there are taxation solutions to the demise of high street retailing. These include replacing a property tax (business rates) with a sales tax and developing a taxation approach to forcing owners of retail properties to adopt turnover-based rents.

The key question is to consider the implications for Rishi Sunak as his team prepares for the 3 March 2021 Budget. There are three points to consider.

First, the UK government needs to raise revenue, and this will be a continuing challenge for this government and the next. Any increase must be staggered; a crisis is not the time to raise taxes. Over the short-term this will include increases in the corporation tax rate from its current 19%. Over the medium-term it will include increases in VAT and in personal taxation, but ideally these increases must be targeted at carbon-intensive activities, including lifestyles.

Second, the chancellor must continue to support companies and households as they experience the direct impacts of COVID-19. There will be an extension to current government COVID-19 support measures including the furlough scheme, the VAT cut for the hospitality and tourism sectors, the business rates holiday, and the temporary uplift to Universal Credit. The impact of the pandemic on government finances suggests that spending on these support measures will need to taper as the economy begins to recover.

Third, there is a danger that the COVID-19 support measures may be encouraging firms to continue to maintain current business models, products, and services. There needs to be a rapid shift towards products and services that support decarbonised lifestyles and that respond to some of the permanent alterations in labour markets and lifestyles that have emerged with COVID-19. Government policy, including taxation, must be developed that forces companies to innovate to support decarbonisation and to discourage carbon-intensive lifestyles.

The March 2021 budget must focus on the current crisis, but now is the time not to build back better, but to develop an effective cross-party approach to decarbonising our futures. This will require disruptive innovation and radical changes to everyday living.

One can only hope that the March budget places climate change at the centre of the political agenda. The danger is that talk about addressing climate change displaces action. Developing a climate change informed approach to taxation is an excellent starting point. The key question is: how far the March 2021 budget goes towards achieving this?

 

 

Source Eco News AU