Cabot Institute for the Environment blog

The RRS James Clark Ross docked in the Falkland Islands Blinking blurry eyes, I crack open the curtains and gaze out into the bright light of a new day. A hulking white and blue iceberg gazes back at me. Even after a broken night’s sleep being shunted from one side of my bunk to the other as the ship bounces through swell, that still makes a rewarding start to each day. Through an unexpected turn of events, I’ve found myself on the British Antarctic Survey’s RRS James Clark Ross, on a seven-week long research cruise helping researchers from the University of Exeter take samples and measure CFCs in the Weddell Sea. Having just handed in my PhD thesis – after four years of studying and researching Antarctic climate and hearing the question “do you get to go to Antarctica?” countless times – the opportunity to help out on this cruise was too good an opportunity to pass up. Life on a ship gives you plenty of time to think (and write), but I promise to keep these musings brief in three...

Socio-ecological tensions, farming and habitat conservation in Guantiva-La Rusia Highlighting the Cabot Institute´s commitment to growing the evidence base for water-based decision making, Dr Maria Paula Escobar-Tello (Co-Investigator) and Dr Susan Conlon (Post Doctoral Research Assistant) introduce the social science component of an exciting three-year project called PARAGUAS , an interdisciplinary collaboration between UK and Colombian researchers to investigate how plants and people influence the water storage capacity of the Colombian Páramos… In June 2018, the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) jointly awarded funding to five UK projects under the Newton-Caldas funded Colombia-Bio programme. The Colombian Department of Science, Technology and Innovation (Colciencias) subsequently awarded funding to 24 smaller Colombian projects under the same programme. PARAGUAS – How do the Páramos store water? The role of plants ...

Record breaking temperatures in 2018 led to drought in many European countries. Image credit Wikimedia Domain Mimikry11 . World Water Day draws attention to the global water crisis and addresses why so many people are being left behind when it comes to having access to safe water. The UN estimates that globally 80% of people who have to use unsafe and unprotected water sources live in rural areas . This can leave households, schools, workplaces and farms struggling to survive. On farms water is vital for the production of food and is used in a huge range of processes, including irrigation and watering livestock. In this blogpost I will lightly review the current issues around water in agriculture and highlight some exciting research projects that may offer potential solutions. What is the water crisis? The UN Sustainable Development Goal 6 is to ensure that all people have access to sustainable, safe water by 2030. Unfortunately, we’re a long way off achieving this goal as a r...

© Sage Brice, 2018. The WIDER-SOMA project was a cross-disciplinary and multi-institution research collaborative project headed by Dr Katerina Michaelides at the University of Bristol, investigating the effect of warfare on dryland environments in Somalia. I was excited to be invited to join the project in its later stages as artist in residence, supported by a small grant from the Cabot Innovation Fund. As an artist-geographer, my work explores the potential of drawing as a research methodology . I am interested in the unexpected things that happen in cross-disciplinary encounters, and the hazy zones where categories and definitions begin to break down. The brief was to produce an artwork responding to the range of research specialisms involved in the project, to celebrate the ‘liveliness’ both of the collaborative research processes, and of the Somali Drylands themselves. We wanted to push back against the idea of drylands as ‘dead spaces’, drawing on the knowledge of people ...

‘Noise’ is the Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions which have resulted from fossil-fuel-powered economic growth which is measured as GDP for particular territories. In Figure 1, ‘noise’ is the area below the green line to the left of the vertical dotted line (historical) and below the blue line to the right of the vertical dotted line (projected). ‘Silence’ is the reduction of fossil-fuel use and the mitigation of carbon emissions. In Figure 1, ‘silence’ is the green shaded area above the blue line and below the dotted blue line to the right of the vertical dotted line. Figure 1  To ensure that we maintain atmospheric GHG emission concentrations conducive to human habitation and the ecosystems that support us, we need to assign less value to ‘noise’ (burning fossil fuels) and more value to ‘silence’ (GHG emission mitigations). Creating a system which assigns value to ‘silences’ by turning them into investable resources requires an effort sharing mechanism to establish demand and or...

Developments in geophysical methods used to monitor surface and subsurface changes prior to landslides can lead to improved prediction and early warning. Drone photo from the Hollin Hill Landslide Observatory in North Yorkshire, UK, taken in August 2018. This landslide exhibits progressive “slip-stick” failure, which is linked to increases in subsurface moisture-content caused by prolonged and extreme precipitation. This backscarp feature, located in Lias Group mudrocks (Whitby Mudstone Formation), has developed slowly since first appearing in April 2016. Prior to this, there were few clues at the ground surface indicating the impending failure. Credit: British Geological Survey Every year, landslides cause fatalities and destruction in locations worldwide. Nevertheless, what triggers them and when they occur can often be difficult to predict. A recent  article  in  Reviews of Geophysics  examined developments in landslide monitoring using insights and methods f...

Image credit: Amanda Woodman-Hardy. Copyright. Did you know women are more likely than men to be affected by climate change? UN figures indicate that 80% of people displaced by climate change are women . And in light of the recent strikes by children across the world , it is clear that it is the most pressing issue for a lot of children around the world. So then, what role do mothers play in guiding and supporting our children in a changing climate? And what is it like to know the dangers of climate change and bring up a child in an uncertain world? The guilt You only have to visit forums like Mumsnet to see that climate change is being discussed quite frequently and with anxiety (for those who care) around how it will affect their children’s futures. As highlighted on the Victoria Derbyshire programme, young women across the world are contemplating whether to have kids at all for fear of how climate change will degrade their children’s lives. In fact a new group called BirthSt...