Growing Islands: el proyecto para salvar las Maldivas de hundirse en el mar

La aplicación móvil Bufeo, desarrollada por Faunagua, convirtió a pescadores amazónicos en científicos ciudadanos que monitorean al delfín rosado boliviano, logrando duplicar los avistamientos registrados (de 3 a 7 bufeos cada 10 km), generar más de 500 registros en 1,500 km de ríos, e impulsar la aprobaciónes de protección de la especie.

En Ahuachapán, un grupo de mujeres están liderando un espacio de ciencia comunitaria para proteger el medioambiente e informar a su comunidad cuando sembrar o proteger cultivos. Colocan pluviómetros, anotan datos cada mañana y, a través de grupos de WhatsApp, van informando a la comunidad sobre la cantidad de lluvia que ha caído; tambien envían los datos cada mañana al Ministerio de Medio Ambiente para que el gobierno sepa lo que pasa en el campo.

In coastal cities in India, floods have led to hundreds of deaths and millions of people being displaced. To address the issue, scientists had to address a variety of factors: hydrology of the upstream region; river, tidal, and storm surge modeling; and a high-resolution digital elevation map of the city. A group of scientists from 13 research institutes and government organizations looked at all those factors and came up with a real-time flood forecasting system. It generated 800 flood scenarios. When it rains the model predicts the most vulnerable sites.

The invasive European green crab was wreaking havoc on the soft-shell clam fishery in Nova Scotia. But fishers, researchers, and park officials worked together to remove as many of them as possible and find an alternative use for them. Their efforts were working: eelgrass meadows and clam populations were rebounding. Now, they’re testing how these crabs can be used in lobster bait, bioplastics, or even fertilizer for gardens.

Running Tide Technologies, a shellfish hatchery in Maine, is betting on kelp forests as a way to store carbon deep in the ocean and sell that carbon to corporations looking to combat climate change and offset their own emissions. The startup is growing mini-farms of kelp on biodegradable floats and after a few months, they sink to the seafloor. More research is needed to see if it works, but they already have about 1,600 floats adrift in the ocean and the e-commerce company Shopify is the first to buy carbon offsets from them.

Symbrosia, a clean-tech startup in Hawaii, is taking seaweed from the ocean and turning it into a powder that can be used to feed livestock to reduce the amount of methane they produce — a key contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. The company worked with an organic farm in Upstate New York to test the product and found that sheep given a high dosage of the supplement had up to 70 percent reduction in methane emission. Creating the powder takes weeks and a lot of steps, but the startup is hopeful the product can become a mass-produced commodity.

Environmental scientists are using modern computing software to correct, orient, and analyze satellite images from the Corona spy project, launched in the 1960s and ’70s to monitor the Soviet military. The images have revealed human environmental impacts, challenged long-held assumptions, and helped predict future challenges. Within the last two years alone, the images have contributed to new information about climate change including rock glacier movements in Central Asia, shoreline changes in Saudi Arabia, and ice loss in Peru, helping scientists fill in knowledge gaps.

Seaweed aquaculture is a growing field that scientists are investigating for a number of climate-related uses, from reducing methane emissions in livestock to replacing plastic in packaging. Governments, startups, and researchers around the world are getting into the algae business that is also helping to create new jobs. There are challenges with scaling many of these products, but recent research for many of these initiatives have shown signs of early success.

Are rocks the answer to decreasing the scale of carbon dioxide production across the world? These scientists think so - or at least that these rocks have the potential to play a part in this mission. Carbon mineralization, a process unique to peridotite rocks found primarily in Oman but also in California, Papua New Guinea, Albania and a few other locations, could help combat climate change if the acceleration and scaling processes can be determined.

After nearly back-to-back coral bleaching events made headlines internationally, there's been an increased awareness around the need to save what's left of the species. The newest strategy being implemented has to do with genetic technology that helps scientists determine via DNA markers which types of coral may be the most weak and the most resilient. “Scientists’ goal right now should be to take the steps necessary to optimize coral species so that each successive generation is more resilient,” explains marine biologist Ruth Gates. Although still early in its debut, this is the goal of genetic technology.