‘As the world returns to normal, we can’t go back to business as usual.’

The organisers of Earth Day 2021 are calling on people to work together to ‘Restore Our Earth’ and fight against the coming dangers of climate change and environmental destruction. 

A leaf through the digital archive of magazine issues preserved on the Exact Editions platform has uncovered four thought-provoking articles, focusing on the emerging green technologies, and innovative thinking that has the potential to restore the world’s ecosystems.

Geographical ‘Engineering the Climate’ (August 2020)

The August 2020 issue of Geographical explores geoengineering, the deliberate and large-scale intervention in the Earth’s climate system that could quickly cool the atmosphere.

Katie Burton reports that the science is regarded as controversial due to the irreversible impact even testing the interventions would have on the global climate.

“The difficulty of researching these approaches lies in the fact that you can’t just give geoengineering a go. By definition it involves altering the global climate. The potential consequences are so huge and far-reaching that to test it would be pure Dr Strangelove madness.”

Read the full article here.

New Internationalist ‘The Case for Nature’ (January/ February 2021)

The January/ February 2021 issue of the New Internationalist focuses on conservation, which aims to protect species, their habitats and ecosystems from extinction. 

Dinyar Godrej warns against the impact of the top-down vision of conservation, dubbed ‘fortress conversation’, on the indigenous people who live upon the land enclosed in the name of protecting biodiversity.

“It its no wonder the organisations campaigning for the rights of indigenous people view current plans as proposed by the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) to reserve a third of our planet for nature with alarm if it were to be in the usual exclusionary way, warning it could be ‘the biggest land grab in history’.”

Read the full article here.

Positive News ‘Farms of the Future’ (Issue 101, April — June 2020)

Inside Issue 101 of Positive News, we take a look at how six farms are employing innovative farming methods to reduce food miles and manage out emissions.

Below the streets of South-West London one farm uses hydroponic technology to grow plants in water sysems instead of soil. The co-founder, Richard Ballard, has said the goal of this underground farm was to reduce the carbon emissions typically associated with food chains.

“The three biggest contributors to emissions are buildings and energy to power them; agriculture; and transport.”

Read the full article here.

The Biologist ‘Divide and Conquer’ (February/ March 2020)

Climate change and mass bleaching have had an adverse global effect on coral colonies. The February/ March 2020 issue of The Biologist examines how a technique called ‘microfragmentation’ is a breakthrough for coral reef restoration. 

Zac Forsman, part of the Research Faculty at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, explains how this technique has been proven to help slow-growing coral grow up to 40 times faster.

“If small fragments are placed in array they can fuse together and form a large colony in a few months. This means that starting with a baseball-sized piece of coral you can grow a basketball-sized piece in about four to six months.”

Read the full article here. 

Access to the digital mazagine issues included in this post will be active until the 30th of June 2021.

If you’d like to explore any of these titles’ archives for yourself, head over to the Exact Editions online shop and purchase a subscription, which offers fully-searchable access to a rich wealth of content.