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Showing posts from September, 2020

Skilling up for the clean energy transition: View from Skills Work on EnergyREV

"Green Jobs not Job Cuts" by John Englart (Takver) is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 A couple of weeks ago I attended the “Skilling Up for the Clean Energy Transition: Creating a Net Zero Workforce” IPPR discussion. Given that we had 1.5 hours to get input from 5 presenters and about 20 participants, it was not really possible to put many thoughts across. Hence, this blog. Using some of the questions set out at the IPPR discussion, I started to put together some answers based on our work from the EnergyREV Skills work group (so far). Seeing that there is quite a lot to say, I will focus here on only 3 questions set out at the IPPR meeting: Question 1:  What are the main challenges and opportunities we face in the transition to net-zero? Today an average person on Earth consumes 1.5 planets [1]. In other words, we need 1.5 planets worth of forests, seas, land, and other resources to produce what an average person consumes and be able to absorb the emissions and negative impacts o...

Powering the economy through the engine of Smart Local Energy Systems

How can the Government best retain key skills and re-skill and up-skill the UK workforce to support the recovery and sustainable growth? This summer the UK’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) requested submission of inputs on Post-Pandemic Economic Growth. The below thoughts were submitted to the BEIS inquiry as part of input under the EnergyREV project . However, there are points raised here that, in the editing and summing up process of the submission, were cut out, hence, this blog on how the UK could power economic recovery through Smart Local Energy Systems (SLES). 1. Introduction: Factors, principles, and implications In order to transition to a sustainable and flourishing economy from our (post-)COVID reality, we must acknowledge and address the factors that shape the current economic conditions. I suggest to state the impact of such factors through a set of driving principles for the UK’s post-COVID strategy. These factors are briefly explained belo...

In the Amazon, forest degradation is outpacing full deforestation

CIFOR / flickr , CC BY-NC Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has increased abruptly in the past two years, after having been on a downward trajectory for more than a decade. With the country’s president Jair Bolsonaro notoriously enthusiastic about expanding into the rainforest, new deforestation data regularly makes global headlines . But what fewer people realise is that even forests that have not been cleared, or fully “deforested”, are rarely untouched. Indeed, just 20% of the world’s tropical forests are classified as intact . The rest have been impacted by logging, mining, fires, or by the expansion of roads or other human activities. And all this can happen undetected by the satellites that monitor deforestation. These forests are known as “degraded”, and they make up an increasingly large fraction of the world’s remaining forest landscapes. Degradation is a major environmental and societal challenge. Disturbances associated with loggi...