Overnight News Digest: US fossil fuel investments incompatible with avoiding catastrophic warming

[…] The National Climate Assessment, compiled by numerous federal agencies and published every few years at the direction of Congress, paints a picture of a nation whose economy, environment and public health face deepening threats as the world grows hotter. These days, weather-driven disasters happen far more frequently and cost the country about $150 billion each year, on average, according to the report.

But as the dangers become ever more evident, so does proof that many governments and communities are responding, the report says, even as the United States and other developed nations remain woefully far from hitting their long-term climate goals. […]

Risks from climate change, the report says, are becoming only more visible, whether it’s rapidly intensifying hurricanes in the Southeast, drought in the Midwest, ferocious fires and diminishing water supplies in the West or torrential rainstorms in the Northeast.

Climate-heating gases reach record highs, UN reports

The Guardian

The abundance of climate-heating gases in the atmosphere reached record highs in 2022, the UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has reported.

The WMO said “there is no end in sight to the rising trend”, which is largely driven by the burning of fossil fuels.

The concentration of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, is now 50% higher than before the start of the Industrial Revolution.

The Earth has not experienced similar levels of CO2 for 3-5 million years, when the global temperature was 2-3C warmer and sea level was 10-20 metres higher than today, the WMO said.

The concentrations of the two other key greenhouse gases, methane and nitrous oxide, also grew, according to the report, published ahead of the UN’s Cop28 climate summit, which begins on 30 November.

Global emissions set to fall only 2% by 2030 - UN report

Reuters

Governments are making insufficient progress in slashing greenhouse gas emissions to avert the worst impacts of global warming, according to a United Nations report released Tuesday. […]

Under current national climate plans, known as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), emissions can be expected to rise 9% above 2010 levels by the end of this decade even if NDCs are fully implemented, the report found.

Greenhouse gas emissions would fall to 2% below 2019 levels by 2030, the report added, indicating the world will see emissions peak this decade.

That's still far short of the 43% reduction against 2019 levels that the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says is needed to stay within the 1.5 degrees Celsius target envisioned by the Paris Agreement.

World behind on almost every policy required to cut carbon emissions, research finds

The Guardian

Coal must be phased out seven times faster than is now happening, deforestation must be reduced four times faster, and public transport around the world built out six times faster than at present, if the world is to avoid the worst impacts of climate breakdown, new research has found.

Countries are falling behind on almost every policy required to cut greenhouse gas emissions, despite progress on renewable energy and the uptake of electric vehicles.

This failure makes the prospect of holding global temperatures to 1.5C above preindustrial levels even more remote, according to the State of Climate Action 2023 report. The authors advise that world needs to:

• Retire about 240 average-sized coal-fired power plants a year, every year between now and 2030.

• Construct the equivalent of three New Yorks’ worth of public transport systems in cities around the world each year this decade.

• Halt deforestation, which is happening to an area the size of 15 football pitches every minute, this decade.

• Increase the rate of growth of solar and wind power from its current high of 14% a year to 24% a year.

• Cut meat consumption from ruminants such as cows and sheep to about two servings a week in the US, Europe and other high-consuming countries by 2030.

US Regions Will Suffer a Stunning Variety of Climate-Caused Disasters, Report Finds

Inside Climate News

If there is one overarching message from the nation’s latest climate assessment, it is that nowhere will be spared.

Hotter temperatures are coming to every corner of the country, as are weather extremes. Many regions are experiencing more frequent, heavier rains, while others are seeing worsening drought. Some are getting both. Everywhere, these changes are translating into greater stresses on Americans’ health through worsening heatwaves, wildfires, hurricanes, floods and the psychological toll of mounting disasters.

“There is not a part of the U.S. that gets a pass on climate impacts,” one Biden administration official said during a briefing for reporters on the Fifth National Climate Assessment, or NCA. The sprawling, peer-reviewed federal report, released Tuesday, is mandated by Congress and provides the most comprehensive look at the state of climate change across the country.

How those impacts show themselves will vary greatly, with each region suffering its own particular plagues. For extreme precipitation and the floods it unleashes, the official said, the Northeast has some of the worst. In the Southeast, where hotter temperatures marry with stifling humidity, residents and those working outside are struggling with some of the nation’s worst extreme heat. Out West, wildfires and drought are poisoning the air and parching fields and taps. Across the Midwest, floods, droughts and extreme heat are disrupting farmers’ livelihoods and traditions. Along the coasts, high-tide flooding is worsening almost universally as rising seas inundate neighborhoods.

The Willow effect: Are even more Arctic oil projects on the way?

Grist

The massive Willow oil project on Alaska’s North Slope is all but certain to be built now that a federal judge has ruled against environmental groups hoping to halt the development. While it’s set to be Alaska’s biggest new oil field in decades, it very well may not be the last: Willow could give ConocoPhillips and other oil companies cheaper access to vast, untapped reserves beneath the tundra.

U.S. District Judge Sharon Gleason denied a challenge last week to the $7.5 billion project — a large expansion of ConocoPhillips’ sprawling network of oil rigs, roads, and pipelines — which the Biden administration controversially approved in March. The federal government estimates burning all the oil that Conoco hopes to extract from Willow would emit about 240 million metric tons of carbon dioxide.

The judge’s ruling paves the way for Conoco to drill through permafrost and slurp up 600 million barrels of oil in the northeastern corner of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, an Indiana-sized swath of mostly undeveloped tundra in the western Arctic. But that’s not all. As the company moves ahead with construction of the new oil field, it’s looking to gain access to millions, perhaps billions, more barrels farther west and southwest in the reserve beneath the wild tussocks, sloughs, and lakes where caribou and migratory birds abound.

Fossil Fuel Firms 'Building Bridge to Climate Chaos'

Common Dreams

More than a thousand fossil fuel companies around the world are currently planning to build new liquefied natural gas terminals, pipelines, or gas-fired power plants even as scientists warn that fossil fuel expansion is incompatible with efforts to prevent catastrophic warming.

That's according to an updated database released Wednesday by Urgewald and dozens of partner groups. Described as the most comprehensive public database on the fossil fuel industry, the Global Oil & Gas Exit List (GOGEL) covers 1,623 companies that are operating in the upstream, midstream, or gas-fired power sector and collectively account for 95% of global oil and gas production.

The updated database shows that 1,023 are plotting expansions of fossil fuel infrastructure, threatening to lock in years of planet-warming emissions as extreme weather fueled by the climate crisis wreaks havoc worldwide. The World Meteorological Organization said Wednesday that global greenhouse gas concentrations reached a new high once again last year.

"The magnitude of the industry's expansion plans is truly frightening," said Nils Bartsch, Urgewald's head of oil and gas research. "To keep 1.5°C alive, a speedy, managed decline in both oil and gas production is vital. Instead, oil and gas companies are building a bridge to climate chaos."

The Amazon’s record-setting drought: how bad will it be?

Nature

Last month, a portion of the Negro River in the Amazon rainforest near Manaus, Brazil, shrank to a depth of just 12.7 metres — its lowest level in 120 years, when measurements began. In Lake Tefé, about 500 kilometres west, more than 150 river dolphins were found dead, not because of low water levels, but probably because the lake had reached temperatures close to 40 °C.

These are symptoms of the unprecedented drought gripping the Amazon rainforest this year. Climate change is involved. But researchers who study the rainforest say other factors have come together to exacerbate this crisis, which has cut river communities off from supplies including food, and has forced Indigenous residents to use dirty, contaminated water, resulting in gastrointestinal and other illnesses.

The drought is the sum of three things, says Luciana Gatti, a climate-change researcher at Brazil's National Institute for Space Research (Inpe) in São José dos Campos. The first is deforestation, “which is killing the rainforest’s resilience and turning it into a drier, hotter place”, she says.

Brazil's heatwave sends Rio de Janeiro soaring to record-breaking temperatures

AFP via Gulf News

A heat wave that has settled over large parts of Brazil sent temperatures on Tuesday soaring in Rio de Janeiro to levels more akin to an oven.

Thermometers read 39 degrees Celsius (102 degrees Fahrenheit) but that didn't convey the intensity of the heat, authorities said. In Rio, it felt like 58.5 degrees C (137.3 degrees F).

That was the "feels like" temperature, a measurement of how hot or cold it feels like on the skin, depending on humidity, temperature and wind speed.

It marked "the highest thermal sensation since the beginning of records" in 2014, surpassing highs of last February of 58 degrees C, according to the Rio Alerta system. […]

Unseasonably high temperatures, around 5 degrees C above seasonal normal, have been punishing Brazilians especially since last weekend and will remain until Friday, Inmet estimated in a bulletin issued on Monday.

Scientists who study Earth’s ice say we could be committed to disastrous sea level rise

NBC News

Top scientists say the world’s ice sheets are melting more rapidly than expected and that world leaders must ramp up their climate ambitions to avoid a catastrophic rise in sea levels.

A report released Thursday from the International Cryosphere Climate Initiative, a network of policy experts and researchers, pleads with world leaders to heed their warnings as they gather for the United Nations’ COP28 climate conference later this month. The report says if global average temperatures settle at 2 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial baseline, the planet could be committed to more than 40 feet of sea-level rise — a melt that would take centuries and reshape societies across the globe.

The collapse of ice sheets and ice shelves has been a major point of uncertainty within the climate science community. But a flurry of new research suggests that dangerous tipping points are nearer than once thought and that there is likely less room in Earth’s carbon budget than expected.

Carbon-free fuels could have a dark side

Science

As climate-friendly fuels, hydrogen (H2) and ammonia (NH3) are enticing. Because they lack carbon, they can be burned to produce nothing but environmentally benign water and nitrogen (N2). But if producers do not take care to prevent leaks or incomplete combustion, researchers are now warning, the fuels could generate pollutants that could harm human health and shrink or reverse the climate benefits.

For example, one analysis finds that, under a worst case scenario, using ammonia as a fuel could have a greenhouse gas footprint as bad as burning an equivalent amount of coal. “We can’t just be hoping these things work,” says Amilcare Porporato, an environmental engineer at Princeton University and a co-author of the study, which was published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “We need to do due diligence.”

These potential side effects are too often overlooked, says Paul Wolfram, a researcher at the Joint Global Change Research Institute. “The focus is almost solely on [carbon dioxide] emissions,” he says.

Clouds are filled with microplastics, perplexing and concerning scientists

USA Today

Microplastic pollution is in our oceans and mountains, our food, and even our bodies. And now, according to a new study published Wednesday, microplastics have been discovered in clouds — and they might be affecting our weather.

Researchers in China conducted the study, which appeared the journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters, a publication of the American Chemical Society.

The study shows that "plastics are a pervasive pollutant ... everywhere we look, we find them," said Christopher Reddy, an environmental chemist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who was not involved in the research. "This is a good study, I'm very impressed with the quality of the work, which is careful and meticulous," he said.

"It's not good news, but it's good science," Reddy added.

How much water do Iowa data centers use?

KDSM — Des Moines (Fox / Sinclair)

To the unknowing eye, the large, unassuming buildings on the northwest side of Altoona look like regular warehouses. 

But the monolithic structures, known as data centers, take in hundreds of thousands of gallons of water a day to cool the servers they contain. That surprised some Iowans when we asked them to guess how much water is used.

The massive amount of water is causing some to look more closely at the top water users in a state experiencing another year of drought.

Daniel Scott, utility director for Altoona, says it’s “definitely a concern.” He told us the Meta data centers in Altoona can use up to a million gallons of water a day, one fifth of what the city can produce on its own. That’s moving him to consider new sources of water.

“We’re looking at bringing on a new water plant, a deep Jordan well, hopefully by 2026. And then that will give us an additional two million gallons of water a day that will address our future needs,” Scott said.

The Everglades is dying… the struggle to save it — and the costs of failure

WLRN (Miami - NPR)

In 2000, the U.S. set out on one of the most ambitious environmental projects ever attempted: to wind back the clock and make the Everglades function like it once did — in 1900. The plan could have given Florida a 20-year head start on climate change, but that didn't happen. […]

The Everglades is the natural system that underlies much of what makes South Florida possible. It provides fresh water, flood control, and a buffer against rising seas for about 9 million people. But with only 20% of the wetland wilderness untouched, and much of the rest carved into infrastructure, it’s losing its ability to function — not only for people, but for the wildlife in the swamp and the shallow sea along the coastal fringe.

For the past 23 years, the federal government has partnered with Florida on one of the largest environmental restoration projects in world history. But the compromises that made the project possible are threatening to undo it.

Through the decades, the original plan has sputtered and languished. Even as the price tag grew, our ambitions for restoration shrank. Climate change has now made it more urgent than ever.

Truck bloat is killing us, new crash data reveals

The Verge

American car buyers can’t get enough big, tall SUVs and trucks — but new data suggests that the downsides of this trend are growing increasingly deadly.

Crashes involving vehicles with hood heights that are 40 inches or higher are 45 percent more likely to result in a fatality as compared to vehicles with hood heights that are 30 inches or less with a sloping profile, according to a new report analyzing federal crash statistics by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS).

The data comes amid an ongoing pedestrian safety crisis in the US in which fatalities are at a 40-year high and the number of pedestrians killed has increased by 80 percent since hitting a low in 2009. […]

“It’s clear that the increasing size of the vehicles in the U.S. fleet is costing pedestrians their lives,” [IIHS president David] Harkey said. 

US military is a bigger polluter than as many as 140 countries – shrinking this war machine is a must

The Conversation

The US military’s carbon bootprint is enormous. Like corporate supply chains, it relies upon an extensive global network of container ships, trucks and cargo planes to supply its operations with everything from bombs to humanitarian aid and hydrocarbon fuels. Our new study calculated the contribution of this vast infrastructure to climate change.

Greenhouse gas emission accounting usually focuses on how much energy and fuel civilians use. But recent work, including our own, shows that the US military is one of the largest polluters in history, consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more climate-changing gases than most medium-sized countries. If the US military were a country, its fuel usage alone would make it the 47th largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, sitting between Peru and Portugal.

In 2017, the US military bought about 269,230 barrels of oil a day and emitted more than 25,000 kilotonnes of carbon dioxide by burning those fuels. The US Air Force purchased US$4.9 billion worth of fuel, and the navy US$2.8 billion, followed by the army at US$947m and the Marines at US$36m.

The promise and risks of deep-sea mining

Reuters

[…] Decades of research has shown that deep sea mining could harm marine life or ecosystems. For example, sediment plumes kicked up by the robotic vacuum could disrupt animal migrations, according to one study published in February in Nature Ocean Sustainability.

The full importance of the nodules within the ocean ecosystem is unclear, and nodule regrowth could take millions of years. The nodules provide homes for anemones, barnacles, corals and other life forms, while bacteria and other invertebrates thrive on the ocean floor.

“These nodules are essential ecosystem architects. If you remove the nodules, you will remove the architecture supporting the entire oceanic ecosystem,” said Beth Orcutt, an oceanographer at Maine's Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences who participated in the ISA standards debate.

Only 51 of these U.S. whales remain. Little has been done to prevent their extinction

NPR News

Even before they saw one of the rarest mammals in the Gulf of Mexico, the two amateur fishermen were already feeling lucky… 

Back on shore, experts reviewed the video and agreed: It was almost certainly a Rice's whale, one of the most endangered whales in the world. Authorities estimate only around 51 of the animals remain – and they don't live anywhere but the Gulf. To avoid extinction, the U.S. government has estimated that no more than one can be killed or seriously injured by human activity every 15 years.

Which activities threaten the whales the most is not a mystery. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, has cited more than 20 risks, including energy exploration in the Gulf, vessel strikes and underwater noise. But although the agency has produced helpful science about the whales, NOAA has repeatedly delayed following rules and adopting measures that could help the whales survive those man-made threats. […] 

On April 20, 2010, about 40 miles offshore from Louisiana, the BP drilling rig Deepwater Horizon caught fire. Within two days, 11 workers had died and the rig had sunk. The well that was left behind would gush more than 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico over the next three months. It was the largest marine oil spill in history.

Rice's whales were some of the animals most harmed by the disaster. About one in five died after the oil slick engulfed their habitat, and those that survived became more likely to get sick or lose pregnancies. Their numbers dropped to fewer than 100.

Court orders Interior to hold lease sale in whale habitat

E&E News — Greenwire

A federal appeals court ordered the Interior Department to hold a hotly contested lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico before the end of the year — without additional protections for the critically endangered Rice’s whale.

In an opinion issued Tuesday, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that environmental groups lacked standing to challenge an order that blocked Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management from excluding 6 million acres from the congressionally mandated lease sale to protect the recently discovered whale species.

Efforts by the Biden administration to protect the Rice’s whale have garnered close scrutiny from congressional Republicans, who say protections for the mammal are an effort to block fossil fuels. The whale has made its way into the Republicans’ 2024 presidential campaign with big-money conservative backing. […]

“This disappointing and unjustified ruling could be the death knell for the nearly extinct Rice’s whale,” Earthjustice attorney George Torgun said in an emailed statement.

The court disagreed.

How the climate crisis is affecting breeding birds

The Guardian

How is the climate crisis affecting communities of breeding birds? A recent study, by researchers at the University of Helsinki, discovered that birds that live inside protected areas – mostly nature reserves – are becoming more like those in non-protected areas outside their boundaries.

Whether birds breed in a protected area or not, species with a more southerly range are increasing in numbers more rapidly than those that typically live farther north.

The study was carried out between 1997 and 2019 in Canada, where the northerly latitude means that average temperatures are rising more quickly than elsewhere, shattering many weather records during the past few summers.

The researchers discovered that protected areas were essential in helping northerly species, slowing their decline. For the Lapland longspur (also known as Lapland bunting), which breeds across Canada, Scandinavia and Siberia, protected habitats may make the difference between survival and decline, and perhaps even eventual extinction.

Nothing, without bugs

Do the Math via Resilience

…  the economic value of arthropods (e.g., insects) is something like $10,000 per kilogram. […]

A look at Figure 1 in a 2018 paper by Bar-On at al. (reproduced above) shows that Planet Earth hosts 2.4 Gt (giga-tons) of animals, in terms of dry carbon mass. The largest block within the animal kingdom is arthropods (includes insects, spiders, centipedes, and crustaceans), at 1 Gt. Fish are nearly as big, at 0.7 Gt. By contrast, wild mammals are only 0.007 Gt, and wild birds are a comparatively tiny 0.002 Gt.

The trends are falling fast: insect, bird, mammal, amphibian, and fish populations are losing ground to the tune of 1–2% per year, amounting to halving populations over a handful of decades. Inevitably, then, extinctions are up a thousand-fold, and increasing. This is decidedly not good, and perhaps the most glaring sign that modernity is a literal dead-end path.

The approach here is to assume that Earth’s ecology would crash without any arthropods. The same might be said for fish, or birds, or any major group. Bugs (an informal catch-all substitute for arthropods here) are particularly attractive to me for this exercise because they are so crucial in terms of food for others, soil conditioning, pollination—and other services—that it is hard to believe other phyla could carry on without them. Evolution produces a complex interconnected web that cannot be expected to maintain its overall integrity if surgically plucked apart in this way—much as an organism cannot be expected to survive if completely removing any one of many key organs.

Therefore, no bugs, no humans. No them, no us. The same argument could probably be made for other phyla, producing slightly different quantitative results than what follows, but the same in spirit.

Insecticides Help Drive Down Men's Sperm Counts, New Review Suggests

Gizmodo

New research this week suggests that humanity’s war against insectkind has had some unintended consequences: declining sperm counts. The study, a review of the existing data, found a clear association between increased exposure to insecticides and lower sperm concentrations in adult men. The authors say that the evidence is strong enough to warrant new regulations that would reduce people’s exposure to these chemicals.

Several studies indicated that men’s average sperm count has steadily declined over the past half-century, particularly since the early 2000s. Scientists speculated on many possible reasons for this worldwide drop, such as increased rates of obesity or greater exposure to environmental toxins, insecticides included. Researchers at George Washington University, George Mason University, and Italy’s Ramazzini Institute wanted to get a better sense of the data linking insecticides to sperm quantity so they decided to perform a systematic review of relevant studies around the world.

Forever chemicals: New report claims PFAS are sprayed onto fields and food in pesticides

Euronews

A new report exposes the ‘urgent’ threat of forever chemicals in pesticides, as it calls for tighter EU regulation. Dozens of substances used in pesticides in Europe are ‘forever chemicals’, a new investigation reveals. […]

The EU is set to restrict [PFAS - man-made per- or poly-fluorinated alkyl substances, which persist in the environment for an incredibly long time,] use and phase them out with a review of its REACH regulation that governs chemicals. It is part of a promised ‘great detox’ on dangerous substances.

But this won’t apply to pesticides - and that’s a big problem, according to the NGOs Générations Futures and Pesticide Action Network (PAN) Europe.

“It is shocking to find that PFAS, with their long-lasting environmental impacts, are intentionally sprayed on fields and food,” says Angeliki Lysimachou, head of science and policy at PAN Europe. “Given all the identified risks, their use should stop immediately.”

How Much Can Trees Fight Climate Change? Massively, but Not Alone, Study Finds.

The New York Times

Restoring global forests where they occur naturally could potentially capture an additional 226 gigatons of planet-warming carbon, equivalent to about a third of the amount that humans have released since the beginning of the Industrial Era, according to a new study published on Monday in the journal Nature.

The research, with input from more than 200 authors, leveraged vast troves of data collected by satellites and on the ground and was partly an effort to address the controversy surrounding an earlier paper. That study, in 2019, helped to spur the Trillion Trees movement but also caused a scientific uproar.

The new conclusions were similar to those in a separate study published last year. Mainly, the extra storage capacity would come from allowing existing forests to recover to maturity.

But major caveats remain: If we protect all current forests, where will people get timber, rubber and palm oil? Would forests be able to store carbon quickly enough? And how much forest carbon would be lost to fire, drought and pests as climate change intensifies?

Dominica set to open world’s first reserve centered around sperm whales

Mongabay

The world’s first marine reserve for sperm whales is set to open in the waters off the coast of Dominica, a tiny island nation in the eastern Caribbean Sea. The reserve’s establishment is aimed at safeguarding a local population of a few hundred endangered sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus) that are threatened by fishing gear entanglements, pollution, ship strikes, and even tourism.

The reserve, which was announced on Nov. 13, will span 788 square kilometers (304 square miles), an area about half the size of London. It will be situated along the west coast of Dominica, encompassing a critical feeding and nursing area for the whales. […]

“The 200 or so sperm whales that call our sea home are prized citizens of Dominica,” Roosevelt Skerrit, Dominica’s prime minister, said in a statement. “Their ancestors likely inhabited Dominica before humans arrived. We want to ensure these majestic and highly intelligent animals are safe from harm and continue keeping our waters and our climate healthy.”

Why botanizing can make our lives better

The Conversation via Rewilding

[…] Botanizing is spending time alongside plants in order to observe and appreciate them as living organisms – like birding, but with subjects that stay in place. When you botanize, a simple walk in the woods becomes an immersive experience shared with many species. Getting to know your nonhuman neighbours is a way to engage with a changing planet. 

Botanizing has a deep and checkered history. Humans have been analyzing and classifying plants for thousands of years, often to figure out what they can safely eat or cultivate.

When Europeans began exploring and colonizing other parts of the world, they were interested in finding plants that were useful as food, as medicine or for other purposes…

Today, however, many botanic gardens and arboreta– gardens that focus on trees and shrubs – have shifted their mission to public education, scientific research and biodiversity conservation. They can be good resources for learning to botanize.

US and China Pledge to Work Together to Tackle Climate Crisis

The Guardian via Mother Jones

China and the US have pledged to work together more closely to fight global heating, declaring the climate crisis “one of the greatest challenges of our time,” hours before a key meeting in San Francisco between Joe Biden and Xi Jinping.

The announcement further fuels hopes that the two nations can mend relations after years of turmoil over issues including trade, human rights and the future of Taiwan.

In a joint statement after climate talks in the US, they pledged to make a success of a crucial UN climate summit starting at the end of this month in Dubai and recommitted to the 2015 Paris Climate Accord goals of holding global heating to “well below” 2 C, while pursuing efforts to limit the increase to 1.5 C.

“The United States and China recognize that the climate crisis has increasingly affected countries around the world,” the statement said. “They will work together…to rise up to one of the greatest challenges of our time for present and future generations of humankind.”