Mass Factory Shutdown - Breath That Fresh (ish) Air

An announcement from China earlier this week may mark the first of many steps which need to be taken to help improve the mess we’ve made of this planet. A crackdown by Chinese officials has led to the temporarily closure of more than 80,000 factors. These factories and some of their managing directors have also been charged with criminal offences for breaches in emissions over the last year which effect air quality. This is all part of China’s Communist party attempting to hit it’s 2017 pollution target, and so with that in mind they have shut forty percent of their factories.

There are currently two significant environmental targets China is hoping to reach within set time frames which are related to air quality. The first of which being to reduce the concentration of hazardous fine particulate matter such as soot, smoke and liquid droplets produced from industry to 35 micrograms per cubic meter by 2035. Whilst the other target is to reduce their overall emissions from manufacturing by 30% as of the end of 2017, a target which was announced in 2013.

China is yet hit their target of the 30% reduction by the end of 2017 and so may have been a contributing factor for these mass closures of factories, and although they have left it till almost the very end of 2017 it is a good sign that they have started to take action.

These closures have clearly had effects on companies as they have been forced to stop production and can’t complete orders, and people are having their jobs affected. However it is believe by the masses to be a good thing. This is because air pollution in China is believed to be attributing to somewhere between 700,000 -2.2million deaths a year, so increased air quality will have a significant effect of life expectancy of the Chinese people, especially in urban areas.  In places such as Beijing the PM2.5 scale which is used to measure the concentration of hazardous fine particulate matter reached as high as 976 micrograms in early October. This occurs when weather conditions result in static air so without the aid of wind dispersal the particulates build up rapidly. This is a concern as the World Health Organization puts the maximum healthy exposure at 25 micrograms.

Annual median concentration of PM2.5

China unfortunately is not the only country known for having extremely poor air quality within its urban areas but it is not on its own. Other cities, mainly across the developing world have similarly poor air quality. A 2016 study claimed that 80% of cities have air quality which did not fall within the World Health Organizations guidelines. This included cities such as Delhi (India) at 122 micrograms, Al Jubail (Saudi Arabia) 152 micrograms, and Zabol (Iran) 217 micrograms.

So hopefully this is the first of many steps for China to manage to improve their air quality, and once these temporary closures are sorted the overall outcome is a more positive one.

Thanks for reading!

Check out this link which gives real time global air quality

https://waqi.info/

Check out this video from

Need To Find Some Explosives - Are Rats The Answer

So as a species I’m sure that most of you will consider what I’ll be writing about today a pest or vermin which spread disease. The reason I’m going to be discussing this species today is actually because of a program I was watching on Netflix the other day.

Rats are an amazing group and there are actually 51 different species within the group Rattus, some of which are endemic to certain areas such as the Polynesian rat whilst others have been transported across the world mainly through human activities such as the brown rat. The brown rat has a range which covers nearly the entire world and this is due to them stowing away on ships during the age of expansion.

There is however a certain species I was planning on writing about today and that is African giant muroid rodents. This species as the name suggests can originally be found across Africa and is currently causing all sorts of problems as an invasive species in the Florida Keys were a private breeder allowed several to escape and are believe to be the source of the 2003 monkeypox outbreak in the area. Usually however they are found in colonies made up of around twenty individuals in forests or thickets. They feed on vegetables, insects, crabs and invertebrate and use their pouches to carry large amount of food back to their burrows.  They have rather poor eyes sight and so usually depend on an excellent sense of smell.

pouched rat, which isn’t actually a true rat but are from a branch of

It is in fact its sense of smell which has brought them to my attention.

What does a dog; bee and pouched rat have in common? 

There are all used as search animals to smell things which have been hidden such as money, drugs and in the case of the pouched rat explosives. That’s right pouched rats are being used in different areas of the world to sniff out landmines. For instance in Cambodia there are teams of them attempting to clear the millions of lost mines due to years of conflict. This is important work as in 2013 there were 3,308 casualties worldwide from landmines and most of these casualties were made up of children or farms.

Rats are an ideal animal for this jobs as they are highly intelligent as well as being light enough to be able to walk over the mines without setting them of by accident. An individual is able to search over 200 square meters in 20 minutes. This is achieved by the rat being on two ropes to guide it in a grid like pattern to efficiently search the area.

Since 1997 APOPO (the Belgium non-profit organisation) has helped clear 13,200 mines in Tanzania, Mozambique, Angola and Cambodia (2015), which has opened up a vast area of land which was previously too dangerous to enter.

Not only are the pouched rats able to smell explosives they can also be trained to sniff out tuberculosis which has a how other load of benefits for humans. So although rats can spread disease (not as much as you might think though) there are some out there working to help humanity correct its mistakes.

Thanks for reading!

Check out this link from BBC Earth

A Second Failed breeding Season - Adelie Penguins

For the second time in three years the Adelie penguin colony found in the east of the Antarctic has failed to successfully raise a single chick from an estimated 36,000 chicks. This is a tragic event.

The Adelie penguin is the known for being one of the most southerly breeding bird in the world and can be found along the Antarctic coast from October to February. They are easily identifiable as their entire heads are covered in black plumage with the adult penguins also having a thin circle of white around each of their eyes. Currently the Adelie penguin is marked as least concern on the IUCN red list as of a 2016 survey by BirdLife International.  This assessment is actually an improvement compared to the 2012 study where as a species they were defined as near threatened but with the recent failed breeding season the jury is out their current classification. Luckily as the Adelie penguin has a lifespan unto 16 years so as long as the adults survive a failed breeding season can easily be overcome but if their frequency increase that’s when populations can fall.

So it is mainly believed that the failure of this breeding season was down to reduced number krill which Adelie penguin’s primary food source is making up to 98% of their food during certain times of the year. The penguins have been seen to feed at depths of 150m under the surface.  Currently the WWF is calling for a ban on krill fishing in the area around the colony which would at least help to relieve this particular pressure on the Adelie penguins. Ideally there would be the creation of a new marine protected area where no or at least very limited fishing would take place and so benefit not only the Adelie penguins but other species in the area.

Thanks for reading!

Check out this video from the BBC

Help The Planet - From Your Sofa!

So I actually found out about this while sitting in my lounge on youtube. It was one of those thirty second adverts which you can skip after five seconds, however unlike almost all the other adverts I watched it to completion for once.

The product which was being advertised was a new search engine called Ecosia. It functions exactly the same as google except the advertising revenue which it generates as you use the search engine is put towards planting trees across the world.  A cool feature of it is that the is a real time counter of how many trees they have managed to fund as a collective but also a personal count of how many searches you have undertaken in the top right. According to Ecosia it takes on average 45 searches for you to create enough funds to plant a tree.

So a few facts about Ecosia as a search engine, they claim to currently process 56 searches a second with over 5.5 million active users. Which are some big numbers and at the current time of writing this they have planted 14,606,959 trees which is amazing. Now as a search engine it is never going to replace Google in most people eyes as they currently have 1.17 billion users with 40,000 searches a second but is they could achieve even a 1/20 of these numbers it would create something massive. 

So if everyone was to use this search engine in conjunction with Google it would start to make a real difference.

So go check it out and get planting those trees (through proxy)

https://www.ecosia.org/

Thanks for reading!

Check out this video from Ecosia