In Hanjie the rules are simple. In this game of logic and creativity, the players, often working on medium-sized grids of 225 squares, use numbers on the rows and columns as clues to determine which boxes to shade. At first, the prospect of seeing a beautiful picture seems almost unfathomable. However, through patience and collaboration from every corner of the page, these small seemingly random squares gradually come together to reveal a masterpiece—one square at a time.
In a sense the efforts of Duke’s Climate Commitment are no different. The issue of climate change has proven to be a multifaceted one. One in which many parties play a role. However, with initiatives such as Duke’s Forever Learning Institute, the probability of tackling these issues becomes much clearer.
The logo of Duke’s Forever Learning Institute retrieved from their website.
Recently Duke’s Forever Learning Institute, an interdisciplinary educational program for Duke alumni, hosted Professors Norbert Wilson and Maiken Mikkelson for a compelling session on the impact of climate change on food and agriculture. Wilson, an agricultural economist and the Director of the World Food Policy Center at Duke, specializes in addressing critical issues related to food access, nutrition, and food security. Mikkelsen, a distinguished expert in physics, electrical, and computer engineering, explores the potential of nanomaterials to revolutionize agricultural processes, paving the way for innovative solutions in the field. Together, they explained how advancements in nanomaterials can improve food security and sustainability.
Throughout the session, Wilson emphasized the concept of food security. He began by clarifying the difference between “food loss” and “food waste.” Food loss occurs at the agricultural level. It refers to food that is produced but never reaches consumers, often due to challenges such as poor harvesting seasons, labor shortages for harvesting, or other natural factors. He describes the ways in which loss occurs across the board but disproportionately affects less developed countries. Wilson also explained how food waste occurs at the consumer level. He details how it goes beyond the waste of a product but is also a waste of the resources used to create that product.
Wilson illustrated the significance of these issues by drawing out the larger issue of food insecurity. Food insecurity describes an inability to access food or concerns about accessing food. In the United States 13.5 percent of citizens struggle with accessing food. This can lead to a number of negative health outcomes such as cardiovascular issues and diabetes. Food insecurity can also lead to behavioral and performance issues, particularly in young children.
Infographic about food insecurity retrieved from ECOMERGE.
This is where Mikkelson comes in. She described a term known as Precision Agriculture. In this, researchers observe and measure agriculture fields and extra data to see what resources such as water, and fertilizer is needed at each part. In this, they hope to retrieve good information through wavelengths as a means of getting a spectral fingerprint that supplies information about the crops. Mikkelsen describes her interest in leveraging nanomaterials to create lightweight, cost-effective hyperspectral cameras capable of capturing detailed spectral fingerprints of crops. She hopes that these materials can be employed around the world, and low resource settings to increase crop yields. The greatest roadblock in this would be the price and issues with widespread application. However, once applied it would hold the ability to detect key characteristics such as nutrient deficiencies, water stress, or disease presence.
Our world is wildly affected by climate change. Climate change and agricultural production hold a very dependent relationship and fixing one side holds the ability to correct the other. This is what makes the work and research of those such as Wilson and Mikelson all the more important. Their efforts show how we can utilize technology to not only enact social change but also reverse our climate issues. Their research highlights not only the urgency of addressing food security and agricultural sustainability but also the transformative potential of interdisciplinary approaches.
Just as the game of Hanjie reveals its masterpiece one square at a time, tackling climate change requires collective effort and patience. Each initiative, whether through advanced nanotechnology or policy-driven solutions, brings us closer to a sustainable future. Duke’s Forever Learning Institute serves as a platform to connect these ideas, inspiring action and innovation that can shape a better tomorrow—one step at a time.
Amid the constant drumbeat of campus events, much of the conversation turned toward the challenges we face in energy policy, security and transitions during Duke’s annual Energy Week, held Nov. 11-15.
On the second day, the Innovation Showcase featured not only startups making their pitches for clean energy and sustainable tech products, but students doing so as well.
Currently in its second year, Duke Design Climate is a new initiative between the Pratt School of Engineering and the Nicholas School of the Environment. It functions as a two-course sequence, in which students form groups to prototype and promote climate solutions after conducting market research.
As I made my rounds to the teams, I met a mix of graduate students and undergraduates with academic backgrounds ranging from engineering to economics to environmental science. The ideas they have aren’t purely theoretical: all are looking for sponsors or partners to help implement their solutions into real-world use. Here were some of the highlights:
Team ReefCycle is building from plants: Our first stop is named after the company whose product they intend to scale up. Initially, Mary Lempres founded ReefCycle to develop sustainable material for artificial reefs. Regular industrial production for cement requires intensive heating– burning of fossil fuels–releasing tons of carbon dioxide. ReefCycle sought to reduce this climate impact with a different method: their cement is plant-based and enzymatic, meaning its essentially grown using enzymes from beans. Testing in the New York Harbor yielded some promise: the cement appeared to resist corrosion, while becoming home for some oysters. The Design Climate team is now trying to bring it to more widespread use on land, while targeting up to a 90% reduction in carbon emissions across all scopes.
Team Enfield is uplifting a local community: Design Climate, evidently, is by no means limited to science. Instead, these team members intend to address an environmental justice issue close to home: energy inequality. Around 30-35% of Enfield residents live below the poverty line, and yet suffer from some of the highest energy bills in the larger area. Located a ninety minute drive east of Durham, this rural town is one of the poorest in North Carolina. Historic redlining and unfavorable urban planning are responsible for its lack of development, but now this team aims to bring back commerce to the area through microfinance. Once enough funding is gathered from investors and grants, the team hopes to provide microloans and financial literacy to spur and empower businesses.
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Team Methamatic promotes a pragmatic e-methane solution: This team is harnessing the power of sunlight to drive fuel production. Synthetic methane, commonly referred to as e-methane, is produced by reacting green hydrogen and carbon dioxide. “Currently, the power-to-gas process can be carbon neutral,” said team member Eesha Yaqub, a senior. “Sourcing the recycled carbon dioxide from a carbon capture facility essentially cancels out the emissions from burning methane.” However, this power-to-gas (P2G) process is an intensive one requiring high heat, energy, and pressure–hoops that might not have to be jumped through if an alternative process could break through the market. Professor Jie Liu and the Department of Chemistry have been working on developing a reactor that would conduct this same reaction without those obstacles. “[Utilizing] the energy from ultraviolet light, which is absorbed by a catalyst …makes the process less energy intensive,” Yaqub said.
Right now, the team has a small prototype, but one used for commercial generation would appear much larger and cost between $15,000 to $20,000. Their intended customers? Oil and gas companies under pressure to shift away from fossil fuels. If successfully scaled up, they predict this process would produce e-methane at a price of $5 per kilogram.
The size of the prototypeThe size needed
Analyzing living shorelines through Team Coastal Connect: If “Coastal Connect” sounds more like an app than a project name, that’s because it is one. This group is designing what one member dubbed a “fitbit for shorelines”: a monitoring system that brings data from ocean buoys to the phones of local landowners. While measurements in salinity and water level aren’t always telling for the average person, the app would contextualize these into more useful phrases. Is it currently safe to swim? It’ll let you know.
Moreover, it would also allow for the long-term monitoring of living shorelines. While we know this nature-based solution offers resilience to natural disasters and presents erosion, short-term fixes like seawalls are often built instead to continue allowing development up to the edge of beaches. The team hopes that ideally, providing concrete data on living shorelines would allow us to demonstrate their benefits and promote their implementation.
Through three compelling anecdotes, Emanuel showed us how environmental science and environmental justice can be viewed as a bidirectional relationship.
Ryan Emanuel (photo by Duke University)
Story one: After earning his degree in hydrology from Duke in the 90s, Emanuel pursued advanced studies in evaporation and carbon cycling. With an education, Emanuel began fieldwork — conducting studies and climbing tall towers (all the fun sciencey stuff). However, as a person from North Carolina’s Lumbee Tribe, he noticed the disconnect between his work and his community. He was acutely aware of a cultural emphasis on education –the expectation that you will use your education to give back to your community. He didn’t feel his work in hydrology was serving the Lumbee tribe’s interest, so he decided to change that.
Sean Jones from the Lumbee Tribe (photo by News & Record Final)
During his talk, Emanuel emphasized the significance of “accountability” and “motivation.”
“Examining our motivation can allow us to better understand who we are accountable to in our work… We are all accountable somehow, and we can be accountable in different ways to different groups.”
Understanding that his work had to be accountable for the Lumbee tribe, Emanuel became an ambassador for STEM in higher education. This new path enabled him to mentor youth with tribal backgrounds, prepare them for higher education, and even form strong relationships with them.
Story two:
The EPA says environmental justice is “fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people in environmental decision-making.”
Emanuel recognized that governments should be accountable for including the voices and opinions of marginalized groups — ‘all people’ — within their environmental decision-making. But Emanuel said there was a dissonance between these promises and reality. One example is the placement of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) where livestock are raised in confinement for agricultural purposes.
CAFOs in North Carolina are disproportionately located in communities of minority groups. Many issues arise from this, such as the pollution produced from CAFOs (air and water).
I was shocked to see the many ways that smaller, marginalized communities are affected. These issues are often relatively hidden — not surprising given that mainstream media usually focuses on large (easily observable) community-based discrimination.
Map of locations of CAFOs in North Carolina (photo by Jiyoung Son)
Emanuel began to look at the interplay between environmental science (observation, analysis, testing) and environmental justice (lived experience, regulations, fairness). He let go of the previous idea that environmental science only seeks to provide data and support to drive change in environmental justice. He began to ask, “How can environmental justice improve environmental science?”
Story 3: Combining his accountability for the Lumbee tribe with his hypothesis about the bidirectional relationship of environmental science and environmental justice, Ryan Emanuel began looking into the observably negative impacts of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP). Spanning over 600 miles, this gas pipeline will provide many benefits for North Carolina communities, such as lower costs, new jobs, and less pollution, according to Duke Energy.
Emanuel saw that the pipeline route went right through Lumbee territory, which could mean devastating effects for the community, such as health impacts and declining property values.
Proposed Atlantic Coast Pipeline route (photo by SAS Blogs)
The crux of the issue lay in the negligence of project developers who failed to connect with the marginalized communities the pipeline would run through (such as the Lumbee). Tribal voices and input were completely ignored.
Emanuel helped prepare tribal leaders for meetings with corporate representatives and wrote a commentary on the need for the federal government to collaborate with the tribes they would be affecting.
Eventually, after years of lawsuits, the companies in charge of the project abandoned the ACP project. When I searched “Why was the Atlantic Coast Pipeline project canceled?” Duke Energy claimed the cancellation was because of “ongoing delays and increasing cost uncertainty, which threaten(ed) the economic viability of the project.” Other sources provide details on the legal challenges and criticism the project faced.
After the companies dropped the plan, they were quick to purchase forest land near the Lumbee tribe and begin the development of natural gas infrastructures that would allow for the storage of gas when the demand was low and the ability to release the gas when prices went up.
I found it quite impressive that Ryan was able to attend many meetings between the Lumbee Tribe and the company, without saying a word. The tribal council had asked him to only observe and not speak. During one meeting, a representative from the company that purchased the forest land said that they wanted to clarify that “pipelines are not disproportionately located in marginalized communities — they are everywhere.”
Emanuel began testing this hypothesis, eventually gathering enough evidence to statistically prove that there is a “spatial correlation between social vulnerability and pipeline density.” His findings gathered significant media attention and have even been expanded on to show the need for change and increased safety within pipeline communities.
Emanuel concluded by explaining that the principles of environmental justice can show us what questions we should be asking, who we should be asking them of, and who we should be keeping in mind when conducting research.
The statement Emanuel made that stuck with me the most was, “If we value examining problems from all angles, we have to pay attention to which perspectives are missing.”
Ryan Emanuel’s book (photo by The Magazine of the Sierra Club)
After Emanuel’s talk, I was surprised that I had never been introduced to this way of thinking before. It seems like common knowledge that focusing on justice and equity can improve how we investigate problems scientifically. However, it is not completely surprising that this information is not common sense, given the systematic issues within our country.
Emanuel’s book, “On the Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice,” dives deeper into these concepts about the relationship between environmental justice and environmental science. I believe this book would bring nuance to our world today, where there is a clear need for change and the uplifting of voices that have been quieted for so long.
In an increasingly polarizing world, the discussion surrounding human rights remains at the forefront of all that we do as a society. People are becoming more aware, as, these days, violations are displayed right before our eyes. With a click of a button or a swipe of the thumb, people are able to see travesties occurring throughout all parts of the world. Developments in technology help us remain knowledgeable about such issues, but what about the offenses that we don’t see—the silent killers that we chalk up to poor fate, to chance? What about the violations in which we ourselves play a major role? These are urgent questions that researchers at the Duke School of Medicine are working to answer, with a specific focus on the deadly impacts of climate change.
In times of crisis, the most disadvantaged communities bear the greatest burden. The researchers recognize that climate change is no different and have strategized ways to reverse these effects. They presented their research in a recent talk, titled Climate Change and Human Health: Creating a Strategic Plan for Duke’s School of Medicine. Associate Professor and lung disease expert Dr. Robert Tighe led the conversation.
A photo of Dr. Robert Tighe. Courtesy of Duke’s Department of Medicine Website.
While presenting his research, Tighe identified a major shift in sea surface temperature trends, noting that the trend has deviated greatly from the statistical norm. Although the reasons behind this shift are not fully understood, it is believed to have serious implications, as excess heat poses risks to human health. According to the Centers for Disease Control, increasing temperatures and carbon dioxide have the potential to impact water quality, air pollution, allergens, and severe weather conditions. These conditions, in turn, bring forth respiratory allergies, cholera, malnutrition, and cardiovascular disease, to name a few. Tighe’s research goes beyond the general effects of these issues; it delves into how they disproportionately impact the most vulnerable members of society: children, the elderly, low-income communities, and communities of color.
A chart containing information about the most vulnerable parts of population to the effects of climate change. Courtesy of Biological Science.
On a local scale, Tighe highlights that many in these vulnerable positions often lack access to the healthcare necessary to mitigate these impacts. For instance, low-income citizens are often unable to afford the costs associated with repairing the physical damage climate change inflicts on their homes, leaving them exposed to pollutants and the effects of environmental toxins. The elderly also find themselves in similarly precarious scenarios, as many of these situations require evacuation—something not always feasible for those in fragile health. Consequently, they too are left exposed to pollutants and dietary challenges exacerbated by climate change.
On a global scale, these issues heavily impact countries in vulnerable positions. The United States, China, India, the European Union, and Russia are among the largest contributors to carbon emissions. However, the consequences of this burden fall disproportionately on countries like Bangladesh, Haiti, Mozambique, small island nations, and others. Due to their geographic locations, climate change brings far more than just hotter days—it brings devastating hurricanes, tsunamis, cyclones, and widespread malnutrition. The limited financial resources in these nations make rebuilding and mitigating these impacts extraordinarily challenging, especially as many climate effects are recurring. This disparity is particularly frustrating, as these countries contribute only a fraction of the world’s carbon emissions.
A map of the global climate risks. Courtesy of the New York Times.
This is precisely what Tighe’s work aims to address. He is working to connect the science on climate change effects, researched by those in the School of Medicine, with that of the Nicholas School of the Environment. Referring to this as an interdisciplinary issue, Tighe believes that the place to begin is within the community. He emphasizes the importance of starting with the people of Durham: What do they need? How can we best help them? How does this affect our own backyard? He stresses the importance of outreach, educating the community on how climate has long-term impacts on their health. Tighe also underscores the need to view this as an opportunity to combine diverse strengths to address the crisis from every angle.
In the face of a climate crisis that goes beyond borders and affects the most vulnerable among us, Tighe’s and his fellow researchers’ work is a call to action. By fostering collaboration between scientific fields and engaging directly with local communities, he develops an approach that is both comprehensive and compassionate. His work reminds us that addressing climate change isn’t just a scientific or political issue—it’s a deeply human one, demanding a united effort for the wellbeing of all under the sun.
A few blocks from Duke’s East Campus, there is a small building whose past lives include a dentist office, a real estate office, and a daycare. Now it is a museum.
A mural on the back wall of the museum, showing animals like the elephant bird at full size. Photo courtesy of Matt Borths, Ph.D.
Glass cases in the front room are lined with ancient fossils and more recent specimens less than 10,000 years old. Take Lagonomico, a creature that lived some 12-15 million years ago and whose name means “pancake,” in reference to the smashed shape of its remains. Or the tiny skull of a modern-day cotton-top tamarin. Even the enormous egg of an elephant bird, a ten-foot-tall bird that lived in Madagascar until it went extinct sometime in the last 1000 years.
A back room holds fossil discoveries still encased in rock. Special tools and scanning technology will reveal the creatures inside, relics of a very different world that can still yield revelations millions of years after their deaths.
These fossils are still partly encased in rock. Special technology like CT scans can reveal which part of a rock contains a fossil. The marks on the paper indicate where a fossil is located.
Matt Borths, Ph.D., curator of the Duke Lemur Center’s fossils, explained that while many fossil collections focus on a particular location, this one has a different theme: the story of primate evolution.
Lemurs, Borths said, are our most distant primate relatives. About 60 million years ago, soon after the extinction of the dinosaurs, the “lemur line and monkey-ape-human line split.” Studying both modern lemurs and their ancestors can give us a “glimpse of a distant past.”
An ancient lemur ancestor from Wyoming. Primates went extinct in North America over 30 million years ago.
Primates are a group of mammals that include humans and other apes, monkeys, lemurs, lorises, bushbabies, and tarsiers. Many primates today live in Africa and South America, but they did not originate on either continent. Primates are believed to have evolved further north and migrated into Africa about 50 million years ago. As the global climate grew cooler and dryer, equatorial Africa remained warm and wet enough for primates. Over time, apes, monkeys, and lemurs diverged from their shared primate ancestors, but not all of them stayed in Africa.
Africa is currently home to bushbabies and lorises, which are both lemur relatives, but most of lemur evolution and diversification took place in Madagascar, the island nation where all of the world’s 100 species of lemurs live today. “New World monkeys,” meanwhile, are found in South America. How did lemurs and monkeys get from Africa—which was at the time completely surrounded by water—to where they live today? Both groups are believed to have crossed open ocean on rafts of plant material.
Scientists have direct evidence of modern animals rafting across bodies of water, and they believe that ancient lemur and monkey ancestors reached new land masses that way, too. Mangrove systems, adapted to ever-changing coastal conditions, are particularly prone to forming rafts that break away during storms. Animals that are on the plants when that happens can end up far from home. Not all of them survive, but those that do can shape the history of life on earth.
“Given enough time and enough unfortunate primates,” Borths said, “eventually you get one of these rafts that goes across the Mozambique Channel” and reaches Madagascar. Madagascar has been isolated since the time of the dinosaurs, and most of its species are endemic, meaning they are found nowhere else on earth. When lemur ancestors reached the island, they diversified into dozens of species filling different ecological niches. A similar process led to the evolution of New World monkeys in South America.
Some of the species in this case went extinct within the past few centuries.
The history of primate evolution is still a work in progress. The Duke Lemur Center Museum of Natural History seeks to fill in some of the gaps in our knowledge through research on both living lemurs and primate fossils. This museum, Borths said, “brings basically all of primate evolution together in one building.” Meanwhile, living lemurs at the Lemur Center can help researchers understand how primate diets relate to teeth morphology, for example.
Paleontology is the study of fossils, but what exactly is a fossil? The word “fossil,” Borths said, originally referred to anything found in the ground. Over time, it came to mean something organic that turns to stone. Some ancient organisms are not fully fossilized. They can still preserve bone tissue and even proteins, evidence that they have not yet transformed completely into stone. The current definition of a fossil, according to Borths, is “anything from a living organism that is older than 10,000 years old.” Specimens younger than that are called subfossils.
Fossil Preparator Karie Whitman in the Duke Lemur Center Museum of Natural History. The grooves in the stones are made by air scribe tools, which are used to separate fossils from surrounding rock.
The Lemur Center does important research on fossils, but that is not the only component of its mission. Education Programs Manager Megan McGrath said that the Lemur Center weaves together research, conservation, and education in an “incredibly unique cocktail” that “all forms a feedback loop.” McGrath and Borths also co-host a Duke Lemur Center podcast.
Conservation is a crucial component of the study of lemurs. Lemurs are the most endangered mammals on the planet, and some are already gone.
Human and wildlife survival are interlinked in complex ways, and conservation solutions must account for the wellbeing of both. Subsistence agriculture and other direct human activities can decimate ecosystems, but extinctions are also caused by broader issues like climate change, which threatens species on a global scale. Humanity’s impact on Madagascar’s wildlife over the last several thousand years is a “really complicated puzzle to tease apart,” McGrath said.
A display case in the museum, including an egg from the extinct elephant bird and a seed from a mousetrap tree. The mousetrap tree relies on large animals to disperse its seeds. That role was once filled by now-extinct species like the elephant bird. Now humans and cattle disperse the seeds instead.
Some of the museum’s specimens are truly ancient, but others are from modern animals or species that went extinct only recently. Giant elephant birds roamed Madagascar as recently as a thousand years ago. The sloth lemur may have survived until 400 years ago. Borths puts the timescale of recent extinctions into perspective. At a time when modern species like the white-tailed deer were already roaming North America, Madagascar was still home to creatures like sloth lemurs and ten-foot elephant birds.
A model of a sloth lemur skeleton (center, hanging from branch). Sloth lemurs lived in Madagascar until they went extinct about 400 years ago.
A model of a sloth lemur hangs in the museum, but no one alive has ever seen one breathing. No one will ever see or hear one again. But a ghost of it may exist in Malagasy stories about the tretretre, a monster that was said to have long fingers and a short tail. The word tretretre is thought to be an onomatopoeia of the call of a sloth lemur, an animal whose own voice is gone forever.
Learn about these and other stories of our evolutionary cousins at the museum’s next open house on Saturday, November 23, from 1-4 PM.
In a world shaped by our destructive actions, art emerges as a voice, warning us of the consequences that lie ahead.
We live in a constantly evolving world. Looking at the geologic time scale, we can see the Earth’s changes that have marked new eras all the way from the Archean epoch, 2.5 billion years ago, to today, the Holocene epoch. But how do we know when we are transitioning into a new epoch? And what kinds of changes in our world would lead to this geologic time-scale transition? The exhibition Second Nature: Photography in the Age of the Anthropocene at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University offers us answers to these questions with its four thematic sections, “Reconfiguring Nature,” “Toxic Sublime,” “Inhumane Geographies,” and “Envisioning Tomorrow.’
Ray Troll’s geological time scale
As we begin the exhibition tour, our well-spoken gallery guide, Ruth Caccavale, asks if any of us has ever heard the word “Anthropocene” before. After a short silence, she tells us the literal translation for Anthropocene is “the human epoch,” an appropriate word to describe the geological era we are in right now. Ruth continues to explain that, though not agreed upon when the Anthropocene epoch began (the main arguments being since the Industrial Revolution and since nuclear warfare), people believe the Earth is in a new era, one established by the fact that human impact is the greatest factor in determining the way the world is.
When the Anthropocene epoch was brought to the attention of the geological society, and after more than a decade of debate, they eventually declared that we were not in a new age, keeping us in the Holocene epoch. However, many still accept the term “Anthropocene” and explore what it means to be living in it. Among those exploring the implications of the Anthropocene epoch are the forty-five artists from around the world featured in Second Nature, who, through their photography-based art, expose the complex relationship of beauty and horror in our evolving world and show us how our world is truly controlled by our human impact.
Walking into the exhibit, I first notice the dismal yet meditative music playing quietly overhead. Ruth guides us through the galleries and stops us a considerable distance away from a black-and-white print. “What do you see when you look at this photograph?” she asks. “I see a mountain,” says someone in the crowd. “It looks overwhelming,” I add, noticing the heaviness of the mountain juxtaposed with the brittle buildings in front of it.
Travelers among Mountains and Streams from afar
Ruth then asks us to come closer to the photograph, and we all quickly notice that the mountain is not a mountain but instead a structure composed of skyscrapers and architecture.
Travelers among Mountains and Streams up close
Based on Fan Kuan’s famous painting from the Song Dynasty, Yang Yongliang, an alumnus of the China Academy of Art, created Travelers Among Mountains and Streams as a warning of what our world could look like if our need to urbanize and develop continued without governing. Yongliang is known for his dystopian recreations of traditional Chinese art, leaving his audience feeling both eerie and in awe. For me, the symbolism of having to step closer to the art to see the true meaning spoke to how it’s easier for people in power to overlook the environmental dangers of development, whereas once we stepped closer and could see each building in detail, we were put in the shoes of those living in urban areas who suffer the most from pollution and overcrowding.
We then made our way through the second section, “Toxic Sublime,” a collection of pieces that show how sometimes the most hazardous areas in the world can be the most beautiful. On the wall is a photo of the remains of a Russian church, buildings next to a nuclear testing site, and a crater from nuclear bomb testing made green to show residual radioactivity.
Danila Tkachenko’s Radioactive City, Contaminated Church, and Crater Formed after Nuclear Bomb Test
Next to it, is the photo of colorful ponds near a lithium mine in Chile. While the composition and colors scream “toxic,” I can’t help but admire the lure of it as well–an invitation to debate the ethics of turning tragedy into something tasteful.
Edward Burtynsky’s Lithium Mines #1, Salt Flats, Atacama Desert, Chile
Upon entering the third section, “Inhumane Geographies” (the theme I personally found most captivating), we are greeted by a somewhat overstimulating gallery of an orange and red island scene, with a singular purple and blue photo plastered in front of them. Sanne De Wilde’s Island of the Colorblind, told the story of a Micronesian community, who in the 18th century were devastated by a typhoon, leaving only 20 people alive. Among those left was the King, who began repopulating the Pingelap community. The King, however, carried the gene for color blindness, causing more than 10% of the Pingelap population today to be colorblind. Island of the Colorblind not only shows me how our environment and climate can truly change who we are, but it also gives voice to the Pingelap’s unique perspective on how color for them means something truly different–thus why Wilde chose to edit the photo in a way where chlorophyll (what makes trees green) creates a pink color in the photo.
Island of the Colorblind
As Ruth brings us to the final section, “Envisioning Tomorrow,” I am immediately drawn in by Aïda Muluneh’s collection of four photographs depicting women dressed in lavish blue and red clothing against the arid landscape behind them. As part of Afrofuturism, a form of science fiction art that explores the history and future of Africa and its people, Muluneh’s pieces challenge the stereotypes surrounding women gathering water in Africa. The pieces bring attention to the implications of women’s role in getting water, as it requires an immense amount of time and makes them vulnerable to sexual violence. Ruth also informs us that the artist grew up in Ethiopia and uses her art to emphasize the issue of water scarcity there. As my peers and I look at Muluneh’s colorfully piercing and empowering art, we can’t help but be speechless.
Aïda Muluneh’s collection
Regardless of whether or not the geological society accepts the Anthropocene as an epoch, we as humans need to open our eyes and understand that our actions have consequences, even if they may not affect us personally. We are changing the world… a lot. But if we can break it apart, we can also build it back up. Leaving the exhibit, I feel heartbroken for the ways we have torn apart our world, unsettled in the ways our destruction can still be beautiful, curious in how my environment has shaped me, and yet hopeful that we as humans can come together, acknowledge the wrong we have done, and begin to undo the damage. For those who may not understand how dire our situation is, studying the work of the 45 artists featured in Second Nature might be a good start.
In a society where it seems like the power to create meaningful change on climate concerns is concentrated in the hands of few, witnessing the youth attempt to counter this dynamic is always inspiring.
Last week, members of Duke University’s Climate and Sustainability Office convened with students for a town hall meeting to discuss current progress, areas for improvement, and aspirations for the future. During this meeting, great emphasis was placed on the opinions and perspectives of students, as the leaders of the Duke climate commitment recognized the importance of their voices within this process.
The meeting began with two thought-provoking questions by Toddi Steelman, Vice President and Vice Provost for Climate and Sustainability, and Tavey Capps, Executive Director of Climate and Sustainability and Sustainable Duke: “What is one word to describe your feelings towards climate change, and what energizes you about climate change?”
These two questions immediately brought the room to life as students began to express their climate anxiety, fears, and frustrations, alongside the ways in which they hoped to one day see change. This passionate discussion set the stage for a deep dive into the objectives and goals of Duke’s Climate Commitment.
L to R: Toddi Steelman and Tavey Capps
The Climate Commitment is a university-wide effort aimed at creating initiatives to correct our current climate crisis by creating a sustainable environment for all.
Within the commitment, there are five areas of focus: Research, Education, External Engagement, Operations, and Community Connections. The research sector is focused on connecting Duke’s schools across the board for interdisciplinary research. Education is geared towards ensuring learning occurs in and beyond the classroom. External Engagement focuses on informing policy and decision makers alongside engaging community members within this mission. Operations studies the food, water, waste, energy, and carbon supply chain on campus. Lastly, Community Connections asks: how do we authentically engage with the community and partners alike?
This commitment serves as a broad scale invitation for everyone to get involved, and Duke students did not hesitate to take advantage of this invitation. The town hall was organized through breakout rooms for the students to collectively share ideas.
The first breakout room was focused on the idea of communication. In this, students discussed the ways that they felt the commitment could best reach their peers on campus. Some proposed utilizing the popular social media platform, TikTok by creating short eye-catching videos. Others discussed using professors, posters, and BC Plaza to ensure engagement. Most agreed that email listservs and newsletters also held some merit in getting their classmate’s attention.
Above all, students came to the consensus that informing the student body would be one of the most important missions of the Climate Commitment.
Following the communication session, I attended the research breakout room led by Blake Tedder from the Office of Sustainability and formerly the Director of Engagement at the Duke Forest. He asked again about the most pressing climate issue. From this, many students delved into issues surrounding biodiversity financing, carbon offsetting, access to clean water, and the ways climate change disproportionately affects marginalized communities.
Blake Tedder leading the Research Breakout Room.
Conversation about these concerns quickly bled into issues surrounding the larger prospect of interdisciplinary studies. Many students felt that this was best done through Duke’s RESILE initiative (Risk Science for Climate Resilience), Bass Connections, and even greater connection between Duke’s main campus and its Kunshan Campus.
The final room I attended was geared towards making the fight against climate change one that is inclusive and diverse. This talk was coordinated by Jason Elliot from Sustainable Duke.
The question that guided the discussion was: “How can we ensure our goals do not come at the expense of the community?” To this, students proposed a range of ideas. Chief among these were becoming more in tune with the needs of the community and finding ways to actively attend local farms, and other places in need.
Jason Elliot leading the Justice, Diversity, and Equity Inclusion Breakout Room.
In addition, many suggested diversifying speakers to ensure representation and voices from all parts of the community. Some students even narrowed in on engagement within our own campus, suggesting greater collaboration among groups such as the Climate Coalition, Keep Durham Beautiful, and Alpha Phi Omega to achieve these goals.
This town hall was simply one of many future engagements expected from Duke’s Climate Commitment in the coming years. While there is still much more work to be done, the diligent efforts of students and faculty alike make the future look promising in the fight against Climate Change.
For some people, the word “rainforest” conjures up vague notions of teeming jungles. But Camille DeSisto sees something more specific: a complex interdependent web.
For the past few years, the Duke graduate student has been part of a community-driven study exploring the relationships between people, plants and lemurs in a rainforest in northern Madagascar, where the health of one species depends on the health of others.
Many lemurs, for example, eat the fruits of forest trees and deposit their seeds far and wide in their droppings, thus helping the plants spread. People, in turn, depend on the plants for things like food, shelter and medicines.
But increasingly, deforestation and other disturbances are throwing these interactions out of whack.
DeSisto and her colleagues have been working in a 750,000-acre forest corridor in northeast Madagascar known as the COMATSA that connects two national parks.
The area supports over 200 tree species and nine species of lemurs, and is home to numerous communities of people.
A red-bellied lemur (Eulemur rubriventer) in a rainforest in northeast Madagascar. Photo by Martin Braun.
“People live together with nature in this landscape,” said DeSisto, who is working toward her Ph.D. in ecology at the Nicholas School of the Environment.
But logging, hunting and other stressors such as poverty and food insecurity have taken their toll.
Over the last quarter century, the area has lost 14% of its forests, mostly to make way for vanilla and rice.
This loss of wild habitats risks setting off a series of changes. Fewer trees also means fewer fruit-eating lemurs, which could create a feedback loop in which the trees that remain have fewer opportunities to replace themselves and sprout up elsewhere — a critical ability if trees are going to track climate change.
DeSisto and her colleagues are trying to better understand this web of connections as part of a larger effort to maximize forest resilience into an uncertain future.
The research requires dozens of students and researchers from universities in Madagascar and the U.S., not to mention local botanists and lemur experts, the local forest management association, and consultants and guides from nearby national parks, all working together across time zones, cultures and languages.
Forest field team members at camp (not everyone present). Photo credit: Jane Slentz-Kesler.
Together, they’ve found that scientific approaches such as fecal sampling or transect surveys can only identify so much of nature’s interconnected web.
Many lemurs are small, and only active at night or during certain times of year, which can make them hard to spot — especially for researchers who may only be on the ground for a limited time.
To fill the gaps, they’re also conducting interviews with local community members who have accumulated knowledge from a lifetime of living on the land, such as which lemurs like to munch on certain plants, what parts they prefer, and whether people rely on them for food or other uses.
By integrating different kinds of skills and expertise, the team has been able to map hidden connections between species that more traditional scientific methods miss.
For example, learning from the expertise of local community members helped them understand that forest patches that are regenerating after clear-cutting attract nocturnal lemurs that may — depending on which fruits they like to eat — promote the forest’s regrowth.
Camille DeSisto after a successful morning collecting lemur fecal samples.
Research collaborations aren’t unusual in science. But DeSisto says that building collaborations with colleagues more than 9,000 miles away from where she lives poses unique challenges.
Just getting to her field site involves four flights, several bumpy car rides, climbing steep trails and crossing slippery logs.
“Language barriers are definitely a challenge too,” DeSisto said.
She’s been studying Malagasy for seven years, but the language’s 18 dialects can make it hard to follow every joke her colleagues tell around the campfire.
To keep her language skills sharp she goes to weekly tutoring sessions when she’s back in the U.S., and she even helped start the first formal class on the language for Duke students.
“I like to think of it as language opportunities, not just language barriers,” DeSisto said.”
“Certain topics I can talk about with much more ease than others,” she added. “But I think making efforts to learn the language is really important.”
When they can’t have face-to-face meetings the team checks in remotely, using videoconferencing and instant messaging to agree on each step of the research pipeline, from coming up with goals and questions and collecting data to publishing their findings.
“That’s hard to navigate when we’re so far away,” DeSisto said. But, she adds, the teamwork and knowledge sharing make it worth it. “It’s the best part of research.”
This research was supported by Duke Bass Connections (“Biocultural Sustainability in Madagascar,” co-led by James Herrera), Duke Global, The Explorers Club, Primate Conservation, Inc., Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, and the Garden Club of America.
Jonny Behrens looks for aquatic macroinvertebrates with Duke Forest Research Tour participants.
“Who would be surprised if I told you that rivers fart?”
Nick Marzolf, Ph.D., went on to explain that streams release greenhouse gases from decaying matter and gas-producing bacteria. This revelation was one of several new facts I learned at the annual Duke Forest Research Tour in December.
“First and foremost,” says Duke Forest Senior Program Coordinator Maggie Heraty, “the Duke Forest is a teaching and research laboratory.” The Office of the Duke Forest hosts an annual Research Tour to showcase research activities and connect to the wider community. “Connecting people to science and nature, and demystifying scientific research, is a key part of our goals here,” Heraty says.
Duke Forest, which consists of over 7,000 acres in Durham, Orange, and Alamance Counties, lies within the Cape Fear and Neuse river basins, two of seventeen river basins in North Carolina. What exactly is a river basin? Heraty quoted a poetic definition from North Carolina Environmental Education:
“A river basin encompasses all the land surface drained by many finger-like streams and creeks flowing downhill into one another and eventually into one river, which forms its artery and backbone. As a bathtub catches all the water that falls within its sides and directs the water out its drain, a river basin sends all the water falling within its surrounding ridges into its system of creeks and streams to gurgle and splash downhill into its river and out to an estuary or the ocean.”
Located within the Cape Fear River Basin, the headwaters of New Hope Creek, which passes through the Korstian Division of Duke Forest, are fed by roughly 33,000 acres of land, over 5,000 of which are in the Duke Forest. Land outside of the Forest is of vital importance, too. Duke Forest is working in partnership with other local conservation organizations through the Triangle Connectivity Collaboration, an initiative to connect natural areas, create wildlife corridors, reduce habitat fragmentation, and protect biodiversity in the Triangle region.
New Hope Creek in the Korstian Division of the Duke Forest.
Dwarf waterdogs
We walked down a short trail by the creek, and the tour split into two groups. Our group walked farther along the stream to meet two herpetologists studying the elusive dwarf waterdog.
Bryan Stuart, Ph.D., Research Curator of Herpetology at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, and Ron Grunwald, Ph.D., Duke University Senior Lecturer Emeritus, are involved in a study looking for dwarf waterdog salamanders (Necturus punctatus) in New Hope Creek. Dwarf waterdogs are paedomorphic, Stuart said, meaning they retain larval characteristics like external gills and a flat tail throughout their lives. In fact, the genus name Necturus means “tail swimmer” in reference to the species’s flat tail.
According to Stuart, on October 3, 1954, Duke professor and herpetologist Joe Bailey collected a dwarf waterdog in New Hope Creek. It was the first record of the species in Orange County.
The Duke Forest is in the westernmost part of the species’ Piedmont range, though it extends farther west in parts of the sandhills. “To have a dwarf waterdog record in Orange County—that’s almost as interesting as it gets,” Stuart said.
Ron Grunwald and Bryan Stuart discuss dwarf waterdog research at New Hope Creek. Photo provided by The Office of the Duke Forest.
In the late 1960s, Michael A. Fedak, Bailey’s graduate student, did a thesis on dwarf waterdogs in the area. His specimens are still stored in the collections of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.
No one had studied this population since—until now.
Dwarf waterdogs are very sensitive to pollution and habitat disturbance, Stuart said, on top of the fact that New Hope Creek is already at the edge of the species’s habitat. When Fedak studied them several decades ago, the salamanders were abundant. Are they still?
Stuart, Grunwald, and other researchers want to find out. “The challenge of salamander biology,” Grunwald said, “is that it always happens when it’s freezing.” Surveying salamander populations, he explains, isn’t like watching birds or counting trees. It requires you to go where the salamanders are, and for dwarf waterdog research, that means dark, cold streams on nights when the water temperature is below 55 degrees Fahrenheit.
Researchers bait funnel traps with chicken liver or cat food and set them underwater overnight. Sometimes they catch crayfish. Sometimes they catch nothing. And sometimes they catch exactly what they’re hoping to find: the elusive dwarf waterdog. After all this time, these slippery, nocturnal, chicken-liver-loving salamanders are still here.
Two dwarf waterdogs in a funnel trap before being released back into New Hope Creek.
Though the traps have been successful at capturing some individuals, they will never catch them all, so researchers calculate the recapture rate to estimate the total population. Imagine a bag of rice, Grunwald said. You could count each individual grain, but that would be challenging and time-consuming. Alternatively, you could pull out one grain of rice, color it, and put it back in the bag, then estimate the total number by calculating the probability of pulling out the same colored grain of rice again. In a very small bag, you might draw the same rice grain several times. But the more rice you have, the less likely you are to draw the same grain twice.
To figure out if any of the dwarf waterdogs they catch are recaptures, the researchers mark each individual with a visual implant elastomer, which is “just a fancy way of saying rubber that we can see,” Grunwald said. The material is injected under a salamander’s “armpit” with a small syringe, creating a pattern visible under ultraviolet light. With two colors (fluorescent yellow and red) and four possible injection locations (one behind each leg), there are plenty of distinct combinations. Grunwald showed us a waterdog that had already been marked. Under a UV flashlight, a spot just below its right foreleg glowed yellow.
Captured dwarf waterdogs are injected with a special rubber material that glows under a UV light. Each salamander is marked with a distinct pattern so researchers can recognize it if it’s ever recaptured.
Establishing a recapture rate is essential to predicting the total population in the area. The current recapture rate? Zero. The sample size so far is small—about a dozen individuals—and none of them have been caught twice. That’s an obstacle to statistical analysis of the population, but it’s good news for the salamanders. Every new individual is one more dwarf waterdog survivor in New Hope Creek.
Ron Grunwald with Research Tour participants looking at dwarf waterdogs in bags. Photo provided by The Office of the Duke Forest.
Stream health
Next, at a different spot along the stream, we met Nick Marzolf, Ph.D., a postdoctoral scholar, and Jonny Behrens, a Ph.D. student, to learn more about New Hope Creek itself. Marzolf and Behrens have both been involved with aquaterrestrial biogeochemistry research in the lab of Emily Bernhardt, Ph.D., at Duke University.
Nick Marzolf (right) and Jonny Behrens discuss stream health. Photo provided by The Office of the Duke Forest.
Protecting New Hope Creek requires understanding individual organisms—like dwarf waterdogs—but also temperature, precipitation, oxygen levels, pesticide runoff, and biodiversity overall. When humans get stressed, Behrens said, different organs have different physiological reactions. Similarly, different organisms in a stream play different roles and respond to stress in different ways.
Jonny Behrens and Research Tour participants look at aquatic macroinvertebrate samples. Photo provided by The Office of the Duke Forest.
Behrens passed around vials containing aquatic macroinvertebrates—specimens big enough to see with the naked eye—such as the larvae of mayflies, crane flies, stoneflies, and dragonflies. They are known for being good indicators of stream health because there are many species of macroinvertebrates, and they have different tolerances to stressors like pollution or changes in water temperature.
Aquatic macroinvertebrates can indicate the health of a stream through their species diversity and abundance. Photo provided by The Office of the Duke Forest.
The water downstream of a nearby wastewater treatment plant is much warmer in winter than other waterways in the area, so researchers see more emergent adult midges and caddisflies there than they do here. Aside from temperature, organisms need to adapt to other changing conditions like oxygen levels and storms.
“Rain is really fun to watch in streams,” Behrens said. The water level rises, pulling up organic matter, and sand bars change. You can tell how high the water got in the last storm by looking for accumulated debris on trees along river banks.
Farting rivers and the peanut butter cracker hypothesis
Marzolf studies hydrology, or “how water moves through not only the landscape but also the river itself.”
Nick Marzolf demonstrates a technique to measure gasses in streams using a syringe.
Part of his research involves measuring gases in water. Streams, like cars and cows and people, release greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide and methane. In fact, Marzolf and colleagues hypothesize that New Hope Creek contributes more CO2 to the atmosphere per unit area than anywhere else in the Duke Forest.
Decaying matter produces CO2, but that isn’t the only source of greenhouse gasses in the creek. Microscopic organisms, like methane-producing bacteria, produce gases as well.
The “peanut butter cracker hypothesis,” Marzolf said, compares organic matter such as leaves to a cracker, while the “peanut butter,” which makes the cracker more palatable, is the microbes. Scrumptious.
Disturbing the sediment at the bottom of New Hope Creek causes bubbles to rise to the surface due to the metabolic activities of gas-producing bacteria.
Marzolf turned to Behrens. “Do you want to walk around and see if you can stir up some methane bubbles?” Behrens waded into the stream, freeing bubbles from the pressure of the overlying water keeping them in leaf mats. We watched the bubbles rise to the surface, evidence of the activities of organisms too small to see.
Behrens walks around in New Hope Creek to stir up gas bubbles from aquatic bacteria.
Restoring a stream to protect its pigtoe
Finally, Sara Childs, Executive Director of the Duke Forest, discussed stream restoration projects. Though structures in the Duke Forest like remnants of old mills and dams can alter and damage ecosystems, they can also have historical and cultural significance. Duke Forest prioritizes restoration projects that have meaningful ecological, teaching, and research benefits while honoring the history of the land.
For instance, the Patterson Mill Dam was built in the late 1700s and probably remained in use for about 100 years. The stream has already adapted to the structure’s presence, and there isn’t necessarily ongoing degradation because of it. Duke Forest restoration projects, Childs said, don’t revolve around very old structures like the Patterson Mill Dam. Instead, they are planning to remove two more recent structures that are actively eroding banks, threatening wildlife habitat, and creating impounded, oxygen-poor areas in the stream.
One of the structures they are hoping to remove is a concrete bridge that’s endangering a threatened freshwater mussel species called the Atlantic pigtoe (Fusconaia masoni). Freshwater mussels, according to Childs, require a fish species to host the developing mussel larvae on their gills, and the Atlantic pigtoe favors the creek chub (Semotilus atromaculatus). The concrete bridge forms a barrier between the pigtoe and the chub, but removing it could reunite them.
Before starting construction, they will relocate as many mussels as possible to keep them out of harm’s way.
New Hope Creek, home to waterdogs and pigtoe and farting microbes, is precious to humans as well. Heraty describes it as “a really spectacular and beautiful waterway that we are lucky to have right in our backyards here in Durham.”
Mining foreman R. Thornburg shows a small cage with a canary used for testing carbon monoxide gas in 1928. Credit: George McCaa, U.S. Bureau of Mines
Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, canaries were used in coal mines to assess the risk of toxic gasses. If the birds became ill or passed away, their fate served as a warning for miners to vacate the premises.
Similarly to how a canary detects unseen risks, the insurance industry is responsible for matching assets to liabilities based upon risks, according to Francis Bouchard, the managing director for climate at the insurance company Marsh McLennan. Bouchard spoke at Duke University on November 10 to discuss the insurance sector’s responsibility to tackle risks as a result of climate change.
During a one-year residency that begins in January, Bouchard will explore ways in which the insurance sector can incentivize and support advances in management of climate risks by helping Duke to build new research partnerships and networks with the insurance and other affected sectors.
Historically, the insurance industry has served as a catalyst to influence safety regulations for the welfare of citizens, as opposed to a canary that withers under risks. Take, for instance, the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. It was the first time in history “anyone would deploy electricity on a large level,” Bouchard said. Therefore, an insurance company sent an engineer to examine the security of the electricity and determine the hazards for attendees. Consequently, the brightest minds of this sector banded together to create the Underwriters Laboratories, which is now the largest testing laboratory in the United States.
But more recently, the insurance sector has not acted as a catalyst in its role to address climate risk. Several policies and systems “distort the purity of the risk signals insurance companies send.” Firstly, its inability to combat systemic level risks as they are providing individual incentives. The industry is highly effective in “handling individual risk and incentivizing immediate actions to address an immediate risk,” Bouchard said, but this method cannot translate on a systemic level.
Secondly, the insurance sector provides a “temporal mismatch” as they sell 12 months of risk, but the lasting impacts of climate change will not occur within a year. Therefore, their “ability to capture in a 12 month policy, decades worth of climate change risk is impossible.”
Thirdly, the regulations for insurance differ between states. In most states, the insurance commissioner dictates the price of insurance based upon the company’s risk assessment because when “risk goes up, price of risk also goes up.” When citizens cannot afford insurance, commissioners are more likely to side with the experts of the insurance companies as opposed to their disadvantaged constituents.
Finally, their climate model is not advanced enough to estimate how specific cities will change within a few decades due to climate change. Therefore, it cannot entirely predict its risks either.
You can watch Bouchard’s talk, with slides, on YouTube
The insurance industry has been successful in its asset-liability matching “in committing some of its capital to advancing climate technology or green technology.” However, this sector receives “publicity around insurance companies withdrawing capital from wildfire or climate exposed jurisdiction.”
This system is explained by the TCFD Filing, which was created by the Bank of International Settlements to discover insurance companies exposure to climate transition issues, physical risks from climate change, and their strategy to aid clients. Essentially, most insurance companies are not “concerned about physical risks” as they would simply reprice their 12-month insurance policy if there is a heightened threat to physical risk. According to Bouchard, the “insurance industry has already signaled through its TCFD filings precisely what their strategy is: ‘we’re gonna play this game as long as we can and then we’re going to withdraw.’” Therefore, an insurance company would continue to increase their cost until a person can no longer afford its price or actually endures physical damage to which they would cease providing insurance. “These last resort-type mechanisms are when the government steps in,” Bouchard said. He even estimates that the government will control 30% of this $1 trillion industry ($2 trillion globally) within ten years. This is dangerous as the government is already enduring fiscal dilemmas and will not be equipped to manage the complexity of the sector.
Bouchard, with 30 years of experience in this industry, said he “truly, truly believes in the social role that the industry plays. I’m petrified that we’re not going to be there to help society cope with climate with the technical knowledge we have, the expertise we have, the mechanisms we have, and the money.” If the sector continues upon this path, they will dissolve under the risks, similarly to a canary in a mine.
Francis Bouchard’s work in combating climate battles with insurance is of the utmost necessity. Continued global warming will force citizens to rely on this industry for aid against climate disasters. The most recent Conference of Parties, created by the United Nations for climate change discussions, recognized the insurance industry as a “key finance player in climate transition alongside private industry and government because the world is recognizing that we have a key part to play.”
based and enzymatic, meaning its essentially grown using enzymes from beans. Testing in the New York Harbor yielded some promise: the cement appeared to resist corrosion, while becoming home for some oysters. The Design Climate team is now trying to bring it to more widespread use on land, while targeting up to a 90% reduction in carbon emissions 
