Worldwatch Institute Research Articles

Economic and Environmental Outcomes of Plastic Bags Ban: A Case Study of Sonipat City

Plastic bag is one of the various miracles but a controversial invention of the 20th Century. Worldwatch Institute (2017) estimated that 4-5 trillion plastic bags are consumed annually across the world, appreciated for contributing to the medical field, hygienic food packaging and reducing packing costs in many industries. But during the 21st Century, disposal of waste created by plastic bags posed a complicated problem as only 1 per cent of bags are recycled. Research revealed that the waste created by poly bags deposited in the oceans, urban drainage, and agricultural soil damages our ecosystem. Accumulation of plastic on soil, water and air for a long time works as the entry point for carcinogenic toxins in the food chain and harms flora and fauna rigorously. Whereas some policies devised to ban plastic bags ended up adversely impacting customers and businesses. India, with the use of 14 million plastic annually, faces the problem of plastic pollution due to the lack of an organised plastic recycling system. To combat this problem, the Indian Government came up with Plastic Waste Management Rule 2016. It passed a resolution to ban single-use plastic manufacturing, trade, and utilisation from July 2022. The present study is an attempt to analyse and evaluate the pros and cons of the plastic ban policy in the context of environmental and economic outcomes in Sonipat city. Quantitative and qualitative techniques are applied to the primary data collected from the field survey. Based on the study’s findings, suggestions have been given to face the challenge of banning plastic bags in Sonipat city.

SÜRDÜRÜLEBİLİR TÜKETİM KAVRAMI ÜZERİNE BİBLİYOMETRİK BİR ÇALIŞMA

Sürdürülebilirlik, insanların kendi gereksinimlerini giderirken çevrenin korunmasını sağlayabilmeleri ve sonraki kuşaklara ihtiyaçlarını giderebilmeleri adına doğal kaynakları aktarabilmelerini ifade etmektedir (Collin, 2004: 265). Amerikalılar’a atfen söylenen cümlede ki gibi: “Dünyayı atalarımızdan miras almadık, çocuklarımızdan emanet aldık” sözü sorumluluğun ciddiyetini anlatmak için oldukça önemlidir (Worldwatch Enstitüsü, 2014: 6). ). Sürdürülebilirlik konusunun günümüze bakan önemli bir boyutu sürdürülebilir tüketimdir. Sürdürülebilir tüketim kişilerin gereksinimlerini, adaleti, hayat kalitesini, tüketicilerin sağlığını kapsayan bir düşünceyi ifade etmektedir (Mont ve Plepys, 2008: 532).
 Bu çalışmada sürdürülebilir tüketim konusunda son beş yıl içerisinde ele alınan çalışmaların bibliyometrik analiz çerçevesinde incelenmesi amaçlanmıştır. Bu amaç doğrultusunda öncelikle literatür çalışması yapılarak konu hakkında literatüre geçen önemli bilgiler sunulmuştur. Literatür taramasının ardından analiz kısmına geçildiğinde öncelikle, Scopus veri tabanından 2017-2022 (2022 yılı ocak ve şubat) yılları arasında ilgili konuya yönelik yapılan çalışmalar taratılarak veriler elde edilmiştir. Elde edilen verilerin, R programı (Biblioshiny) ile analizi sağlanmıştır. Scopus veri tabanından toplamda 1341 veri elde edilmiştir. Bu verilerin analizi sonucu elde edilen bilgilere göre; sürdürülebilir tüketim konusunda yapılan çalışmaların kararketiristiklerine yönelik genel bir bilgilendirme yapılmıştır.

What’s the Weather?

What’s the Weather? Kyle Bladow (bio) We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast Jonathan Safran Foer Farrar, Straus and Giroux https://us.macmillan.com 288 pages; Cloth, $25.00 We Are the Weather is a book cleverly aware of the fact that facing the compounding and accelerating challenges of climate change requires nuanced approaches, and that conventional styles of argumentation are often not enough to motivate behavioral changes that would decrease greenhouse gas emissions. As studies and publications demonstrate with increasing frequency, the “problem” of climate change is as much psychological, philosophical, even spiritual as it is economic or political. Although Foer embeds in the book a proposal as clean, pragmatic, and reasoned as any you’ll find — stop consuming animal products — he does not fail to attend to the psychological complexities of effectively advocating for such a position. Environmentalist discourse has advanced enough that most people can now recognize the folly in the old refrain, “If people just knew the science, they’d change their behavior.” This misconception that knowledge alone changes action is longstanding, and especially frustrating in the face of the climate crisis. We Are the Weather revises that refrain from knowing to believing, as Foer probes his own conscience, wrestling with resignation and astonished at his own inability to believe with conviction. The result is a quasi-jeremiad that manages to be more compelling for its honesty. Foer attends to the difficulties of addressing climate change as much stylistically as he does narratively: short sections rapidly change topics, matching the frenzied shifts in attention to which the internet has acculturated its users, yet these different topics harmonize throughout the book in ways that ultimately reveal a precise architecture crafted to arrest and to stir emotional resonance in readers. Foer carefully arranges and deploys data from his research within the book; he demonstrated his skill at exploiting the sublimity of scale in his earlier book Eating Animals (2009), to which We Are the Weather seems a successor or an update. Akin to looking at the artwork of Edward Burtynsky or Chris Jordan, Foer’s nonfiction immerses readers in staggering figures and artful comparisons. He correctly points out the recurrent omission or underestimation of animal agriculture’s role in climate change, including an appendix detailing two significantly different findings of the percentage of total greenhouse gas emissions for which animal agriculture is responsible, one published by the Food and Agriculture Organization (14.5%), the other by the Worldwatch Institute (51%). Foer argues for the higher end of this range, and his findings align with more recent estimates (e.g. Nicholas Carter’s 2019 thesis, Animal Agriculture’s Contributions to Climate Change, which also reviewed the FAO and Worldwatch figures and arrives at an estimate of 37%). Foer condenses his evidence for the necessity of ending current systems of animal agriculture into a series of bulleted lists in Part II, “How to Prevent the Greatest Dying.” No stranger to formal experimentation with textual arrangements, Foer here uses negative page space alongside concise statements to further invest the striking statistics he presents with a sense of rational, straightforward urgency: if information alone were enough to change behavior, this is how it might be best presented. Part II’s form also calls to mind such inventions of digital journalism as the listicle or the abbreviated bullet points increasingly posted above news stories to accommodate this distracted era of tl;dr. One of the points that stand out from this presentation of data (culled from a bibliography of over three hundred sources) is the calculation that eating vegan for two out of three meals has a smaller carbon footprint than the average full-time vegetarian (from the article “Country-specific Dietary Shifts to Mitigate Climate and Water Crises” by Brent F. Kim and colleagues, which echoes Mark Bittman’s dietary recommendation to be “vegan before 6:00”). The book invokes many of the historical moments commonly compared to the present climate crisis, especially World War II. Yet the most compelling instances of such moments that Foer includes are not those hortative examples of human bravery, sacrifice, or even ingenuity (e.g...

Looking for a Nutritive and Sustainable Source of Protein? (P03-004-19)

ObjectivesMeat analogs are processed foods designed to mimic meat products, proposed by World Watch Institute as viable lower carbon footprint alternatives to the processed meats. Their popularity is increasing among people seeking protein foods that are both nutritious and sustainable. Nevertheless, there is limited data about the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with their production. Thus, we measured the GHG emissions associated with the production of plant-based meat analogs, and their nutritional composition. MethodsWe performed life cycle analyses of 56 meat analogs, in different formats and ingredient compositions, from ingredient production to the final commercial product. Their nutritional value was analyzed based on their ingredients. Results were reported per 100 g, serving size, protein content and 100 kcal. ResultsMean GHG emissions from meat analogs was moderately low (0.22 kg CO2e/100 g) and independent of their main source of protein (soy or gluten). However, the CO2e/100 g for non-vegan products (0.27) is significantly larger than vegan products (0.20). Per 100 g of product, the protein content varied from 18–32 g, iron 2.2–5.4 mg, zinc 0.8–2.9 mg and fiber 1.6–6.3 g. The analogs contained less than 1 g of saturated fat, less than 140 kcal, and less than 205 mg sodium per serving size. Most of them were vitamin B12 fortified. Compared to a meat burger, their environmental impact is several times lower, and the analogs have 58% less energy, 96% less saturated fat, 33% less sodium, no cholesterol, and double the amount of fiber. ConclusionsAltogether, plant-based meat analogs can form part of a nutritive and environmentally sustainable diet. Funding SourcesThis research was funded by the McLean Fund for Nutrition Research.

Family planning as a contributor to environmental sustainability: weighing the evidence.

To highlight recent evidence that family planning, readily accessible to all who seek it and exercised as a human right, can contribute to environmental sustainability. As global concern increases about the health of our planet, better understanding of the role family planning programs play in maintaining a sustainable environment could bolster public and policymaker support for access to family planning. A recent Worldwatch Institute review of scientific literature (FPESA) exploring this relationship covered two potential cause-effect pathways: one demographic, one personal. Although nonconfirmatory, a decade of reviewed studies overwhelmingly supported the hypothesis that family planning benefits environmental sustainability. A complementary review by the Evidence Project of population, health and environment projects over a similar time period strongly suggests that transdisciplinary efforts including family planning can yield multiple benefits - health, empowerment, economic and environmental. Cumulative research generally supports but cannot confirm the thesis that family planning contributes to efforts to achieve environmental sustainability. This does not equate to no relationship but rather a lack of adequate methodologies. For research on complex relationships like this, novel research designs may prove more effective.

The Urban Agriculture Revival

First paragraph:Some critics of urban agriculture see its growing popularity as a superficial response to public concerns about urban food deserts. However, urban agriculture could evolve instead to become an important part of the U.S. food system, as it already is in much of the rest of the world. The United Nations estimates that more than 800 mil­lion people worldwide cultivate fruits and vege­tables or grow livestock in cities (Food and Agri­culture Organization of the United Nations [FAO], n.d.). The World Watch Institute estimates that urban agriculture produces 15 to 20 percent of the world’s food (n.d.). The U.S. Department of Agriculture doesn’t yet collect data on urban agri­culture, but urban gardens are becoming an increas­ingly important source of fresh vegetables and fruits in some cities. This is particularly true in the inner-city communities of old post-industrial cities such as Detroit, Philadelphia, and Camden, New Jersey (Royte, 2015).

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This article is based on two assumptions which have already been evidenced in the literature of environmental discourse analysis. The first is that the normal congruent active material process clause (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004), if the empathy hierarchy (Langacker 1991) is imposed upon it, tends to represent humans as acting in a unidirectional way upon a passive environment (Goatly 2002, 2007). The second is that much pro-environmental discourse, such as the Worldwatch Institute’s reports, for the most part adopts this grammar and thereby undervalues the power of nature as a force independent of humans but with power over them (Goatly and Hiradhar 2016). This article builds on work already done in Goatly (2000, 2007) and Goatly and Hiradhar (2016) on non-congruent grammar, co-ordination, along with personification and other forms of metaphor, to represent the human-nature relationship in ways which are more in keeping with modern science, and more helpful from an ecological viewpoint. The poetic texts discussed are taken from Wordsworth’s The Prelude , Edward Thomas’ Collected Poems and Alice Oswald’s Woods etc. Besides the use of grammatical co-ordination and metaphor/literalisation to blur the human nature boundary, they illustrate the use of nominalisations, ergative verbs, the activation of tokens and existents, the emphasis on nature as sayer and experiencer, rather than goal, which is a grammar (and use of metaphor) quite different from the patterns in so-called environmental and news discourse.

Worldwatch Institute: can a city be sustainable?

Worldwatch Institute: can a city be sustainable?

La Soberanía alimentaria para la cohesión social

El hambre en el mundo sigue siendo un problema grave. En 2010 el número de personas desnutridas, según el informe de la FAO, alcanzó la cifra de 925 millones. En este artículo quiero presentar, primero, la necesidad de cambiar el sistema mundial dominante de alimentación, basado en la agricultura intensiva, semillas de alto rendimiento, y uso de fertilizantes. Después de 50 años de implantación ha fracasado social y ambientalmente. Los mercados globales han creado mayores desigualdades y una pobreza más profunda. Por ello, la sostenibilidad es un objetivo humanitario fundamental y un asunto de justicia. Segundo, sostengo que la agricultura ecológica es un sistema que favorece a la gente, practicado por comunidades locales en África y en otros continentes. Voy a presentar algunos ejemplos del Informe del Worldwatch Institute, State of the World 2011. En tercer lugar, voy a relacionar el sistema agrícola industrial con el calentamiento global. La agricultura intensiva es dependiente del petróleo en su producción, extracción, transporte y uso de energía. Podría ser un sector renovable si el sistema de producción alimentaria cambiase a pequeña escala, y para beneficio principal de las poblaciones locales y regionales. La reducción de emisiones sería visible. Otro ámbito de atención, es la agricultura urbana, donde la población de las ciudades podría estar bien nutrida mediante la aplicación de los principios ecológicos.

Land: The New Gold [Guest Editorial

First paragraphs: In his thoughtful column for this issue, Running Out of Land for Food, John Ikerd says, challenge of preserving enough farmland for food production will be a defining challenge for the 21st century. I couldn't agree more. Thus it is both timely and important that JAFSCD is addressing this critical issue. I was fortunate enough to get to meet Lester Brown, founder of the Worldwatch Institute, in 2012 when he gave a keynote address at an American Farmland Trust (AFT) board meeting. He said something then that has stuck with me since: Food is the new oil and land is the new gold. As such we must step up efforts to protect the quality and quantity of these most essential and precious resources. AFT works to save the land that sustains us by protecting farmland, promoting sound farming practices and keeping farmers on the land. Much of our current focus is to protect and conserve enough farmland to ensure food security today and for future generations. As for me, I have spent my career balancing these two interests — saving farmland on one hand and supporting sustainable food and farming systems on the other....

Running Out of Land for Food

First paragraph: The challenge of preserving enough farmland for food production will be a defining challenge for 21st century. Lester Brown, icon of Worldwatch Institute, identifies food scarcity as the weak link of modern society (Brown, 2012). He points to growing global demand for food and fuel, eroding soils, declining aquifers, and global climate change as major challenges to future of human civilization. All of these challenges could be met, but not without a fundamental transformation in current ways of thinking about both land and food. A market economy will neither provide food for hungry of current generations nor preserve enough farmland to provide food for generations of future. Any society that allows markets to determine how much and what kind of land is used for food is not sustainable. This could be defining challenge of 21st century....

State of the World 2011: Innovations that Nourish the Planet, by Worldwatch Institute

State of the World 2011: Innovations that Nourish the Planet, by Worldwatch Institute

Sustainability and Planetary Thresholds Are Focus of New Worldwatch Report

Sustainability versus “sustainababble” was one of the key themes in State of the World 2013: Is Sustainability Still Possible?, published by the nonprofit Worldwatch Institute in Washington, D. C. The report, released 19 April, also discussed passing or approaching planetary “boundaries” for some critical biophysical processes in the Earth's system and how to prepare for a much different world due to climate change and other environmental concerns.

Effects of the neurotoxic thionophosphate pesticide chlorpyrifos on differentiating alternative models

Studies by researchers worldwide have revealed that, even in industrialised nations, people, infants and the aged in particular, are even more exposed to neurotoxic drugs as a consequence of the increased quantity of pesticide residues in food. This phenomenon, as underlined by The Worldwatch Institute (2006), is linked to the exponential increase in the use of these toxic compounds over the last 40years, up from 0.49kg per hectare in 1961 to 2kg in 2004, with the result that these substances are found in the daily diet.Many studies have demonstrated how the assumption of pesticides in the neonatal period and early infancy can alter the development and function of the nervous, immune, endocrine and reproductive apparatuses. Moreover, the unequivocal relationship between brain tumours, infant leukemia and pesticides are well recognised.On the basis of the above information, the effects of the neurotoxic thionophosphate pesticide chlorpyrifos (CPF) have been tested, considering biomarkers of toxicity and toxicity endpoint, on the biological models Dictyostelium discoideum, Paracentrotus lividus, and NTera2 Cells, as they are compatible with the 3Rs strategy (Reduction, Replacement, and Refinement in animal experiments). Our results have revealed that developing organisms are particularly sensitive to the toxic effects of CPF.

Climate Change: Global growth of carbon dioxide emissions continues

After declining 1.5% in 2009, global carbon dioxide emissions rose 5.8% in 2010, the largest yearly jump in two decades, according to a Worldwatch Institute report released on April 28. Worldwatch is a Washington, D.C.-based, environmental think tank. Report author Xing Fu-Bertaux says economic recovery is the primary reason for the increase. In addition, the report finds little progress in reducing global greenhouse gas emissions, noting that CO2 levels are now 45% higher than they were in 1990, a reference year for efforts to cut emissions. The report focuses on CO2 emissions because among greenhouse gases CO2 resides longest in the atmosphere and is the most abundant, making up 70% of all anthropogenic greenhouse gases. Growth of atmospheric CO2 levels has been accompanied by significant global temperature increases in the past decade, the report notes. The global average surface temperature in 2011 was the ninth warmest since 1880, according to ...

Quantifying the Invisible: Getting a Handle on Methane's Climate Impact

Earlier this year, a Cornell University professor made quite a splash publishing a paper asserting that emissions from shale gas rivaled those from coal. A July 2011 study issued by the Post Carbon Institute underscored this conclusion. Not so, say five separate recent reports—from Carnegie Mellon University, IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA), the US National Energy Technology Lab-oratory (NETL), Argonne Laboratory, and Deutsche Bank Climate Change Advisors (coauthored by individuals from Worldwatch Institute and ICF International). At heart are issues related to measuring and quantifying emissions of an odorless, colorless gas—methane (CH4)—considered the second-most prevalent long-lived greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide (CO2). The conventional wisdom is that natural gas is “cleaner” than coal. This is indisputable when considering its combustion. For an equivalent amount of heat, natural gas combustion produces about 30% less CO2 than petroleum combustion and about 45% less CO2 than coal combustion. However, the contention these studies wrestle with is that the release of methane during the life cycle associated with natural gas extraction—including drilling, hydraulic fracturing, completions, production, processing, and transport—could be great enough to outweigh this benefit. Why Atmospheric Methane Matters According to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), issued in 2007, “over the last 650,000 years, ice core records indicate that the abundance of CH4 in the Earth’s atmosphere has varied from lows of about 400 ppb during glacial periods to highs of about 700 ppb during interglacials.” In 2005, the report states, the global average abundance of CH4, measured at a network of 40 surface air flask sampling sites in both hemispheres, was 1,774.62 ±1.22 ppb. It would thus appear that present atmospheric levels of CH4 are unprecedented in at least the last 650,000 years. According to figures released by the US National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, CH4 is responsible for 18% of global warming since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, while CO2 is responsible for 64%. According to Martin Heimann in Enigma of the Recent Methane Budget, published in the 11 August 2011 issue of Nature, “About 60% of global methane stems from human activities. This includes emissions associated with energy production and usage—such as coal mining, incomplete combustion of fossil fuels, and gas leaks. These fossil-fuel-derived emissions, together with methane from landfills, organic waste, cattle raising, rice agriculture, and bio-mass burning, were probably the main cause of the increasing concentrations after pre-industrial times.”

Right to the City, Desire for the Suburb?

The 2000s have been a lively decade for cities. The Worldwatch Institute estimated that 2007 was the first year in human history that more people worldwide lived in cities than the countryside. Globalisation and new digital media technologies have generated the seemingly paradoxical outcome that spatial location came to be more rather than less important, as combinations of firms, industries, cultural activities and creative talents have increasingly clustered around a select node of what have been termed “creative cities,” that are in turn highly networked into global circuits of economic capital, political power and entertainment media. Intellectually, the period has seen what the UCLA geographer Ed Soja refers to as the spatial turn in social theory, where “whatever your interests may be, they can be significantly advanced by adopting a critical spatial perspective”. This is related to the dynamic properties of socially constructed space itself, or what Soja terms “the powerful forces that arise from socially produced spaces such as urban agglomerations and cohesive regional economies,” with the result that “what can be called the stimulus of socio-spatial agglomeration is today being assertively described as the primary cause of economic development, technological innovation, and cultural creativity”

African Land, Up for Grabs

Sheikh Saudi and Ethiopia, Arabia, Mohammed where spends Hussein he his was time born Ali shuttling Al in a Amoudi, village between 64 a years citizen Riyadh ago. of Sheikh Saudi A abia, spends his time shuttlin between Ri adh d Ethiopia, where he was born i a village 64 ye rs ago. The son of a Yemeni father and Ethiopian mother, Al Amoudi boasts an estimated net worth of $10 billion. He is the richest Ethiopian and, according to Forbes, the 64th richest man in the world. Fortyfive years ago, he emigrated to Saudi Arabia and built his fortune in oil refineries and the booming construction industry. But Al Amoudi never lost touch with his homeland. In fact, Ethiopian real-estate has become a key part of his burgeoning portfolio. In 2009, Al Amoudi's company, Saudi Star Agricultural Development, signed long-term leases for nearly 25,000 acres in the country's northeastern regional state, Gambella, to produce

Editorial - TiO?2-Based Materials for Heterogeneous Photocatalytic Applications

From the data of the Worldwatch Institute, a foundation annualy publish a report “The Condition of Earth”. Each year the country members of the European Economic Community, produce about 2200 millions metric tons of residues (close to 18 Kg. by person, daily). From this quantity, 150 millions metric tons are listed as industrial residues. In addition, from these between 20 and 30 millions metric tons are residues catalogued as toxics and dangerous. According to the data of the Environment Protection Agency (EPA), in the United States of America, the quantity of toxics and dangerous remainders has increased upto 275 millions metric tons each year. These residues cause a great problem because most of them are directly casting out to public river beds through industry residual waters, with the concomitant contamination of such waters. Other part of the residues goes to weirs, which, is the storage problem. Different methodologies have been employed for the treatment of polluted water and air, such as biodegradation,chloration, ozone with UV-activation, and several combinations of these with activated carbon and other kinds of adsorbents and filters. However, in addition to some operative problems, all these methodologies have very important limitations, principally the type of pollutant and its concentration in the water or gaseous phases, and therefore, all them separately show relatively moderate efficiency. Therefore, it is very important to develop appopriate systems for the control and depuration of the great diversity of compounds in polluted waters and air. This problem has been satisfactory resolved by one of the most remarkable applications of the materials sciences, Heterogeneous Photocatalysis, particularly by using photoactive semiconductors as TiO2 because it has been shown, up to now, the best photoactivity under UV-irradiation in the photodegradation reactions of organic pollutants, mainly aromatics molecules with cancerous a and mutagenic characteristics. This is the main objective of this special issue, to show some approaches of TiO2-based materials in heterogeneous photocatalytic applications regarding water and air pollution.

Worldwatch Institute Biofuels for Transport: Global Potential and Implications for Sustainable Energy and Agriculture

Worldwatch Institute <i>Biofuels for Transport: Global Potential and Implications for Sustainable Energy and Agriculture</i>