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Major oil spill disasters hit the global environment especially hard in 2021 and the year is not over: In October, an oil spill happened off the coast of California when a dragged anchor ruptured a pipeline. In July, a Japanese cargo ship became grounded and broke up off the coast of Mauritius, sending tons of oil into waters that are home to fragile coral reefs. A few weeks earlier, the Singapore-registered cargo ship, X-Press Pearl, caught fire and sank near Sri Lanka, spilling oil and nitric acid into Sri Lankan waters in what will prove to be a major environmental disaster with long-term consequences. According to a special report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), some spills are far worse than others. In the case of the Sri Lankan oil and chemical spill, small plastic pellets that take thousands of years to degrade were spilled in addition to over eighty containers of hazardous chemicals. The plastic pellets, called nurdles, have already flooded beaches and been found in fish stomachs. Once oil reaches a shoreline or spreads widely at sea, the cleanup becomes far more costly and difficult. Even in the best scenarios, UNEP reports that “only 40% of oil from a spill can be cleaned up by mechanical means.” Considering this reality, the UNEP report emphasizes that ways must be explored to enhance nature’s inherent ability to recover from man-made oil spills. The takeaway from the UNEP report is clear. As the Sri Lanka case clearly demonstrates, governments and oil industry stakeholders must have better preparedness plans in place to deal with the increased risks involved with a growing container shipping trade and the hazardous products it onboards.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of the US Commerce Department and its global partners have released the most comprehensive analysis of coral reef health “ever undertaken,” The Status of Coral Reefs of the World: 2020. Its findings? “Rising ocean temperatures resulted in a 14% loss of global corals.” On the brighter side, the partnership found indications of “coral resilience in some locations,” indicating that coral reef recovery is possible “if immediate steps are taken to curb future ocean warming.” “People around the world depend on healthy coral reefs and the services they provide for food, income, recreation, and protection from storms,” stated Jennifer Koss, director of NOAA’s Coral Reef Conservation Program. “It is possible to turn the tide on the losses we are seeing, but doing so relies on us as a global community making more environmentally conscious decisions in our everyday lives.” The unprecedented report analyzed data from about two million observations, which were produced by more than 300 scientists and collected from more than 12,000 sites in 73 countries over a period of 40 years (1978-2019). According to the report, coral reefs grow in over 100 countries and territories, supporting at least 25% of marine species, and are foundational to coastal ecosystem resilience as well as the food and economic security of hundreds of millions of global citizens. Goods and services provided by coral reefs are estimated at US$2.7 trillion per year. The report declares coral reefs to be “among the most vulnerable ecosystems on the planet to anthropogenic pressures,” citing climate change, ocean acidification, marine pollution, certain fishing practices, and local land-based pollution such as inputs from agriculture as detrimental influences.

On October 17, 2021, the Royal Foundation of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge announced the winners of the first annual Earthshot Prize given to those whose work has “a positive effect on environmental change.” The Royal Foundation, led by Prince William and Duchess Kate, developed the prize to “have a positive effect on environmental change and improve living standards globally, particularly for communities who are most at risk from climate change.” It will be awarded annually until 2030. The Earthshot Prize takes its name and inspiration from US President John F. Kennedy’s “moonshot” ambitions to land a human on Earth’s moon, calling each of its environmental targets an “earthshot.” Each Earthshot Prize, valued at £1 million, can be awarded to “a wide range of individuals, teams or collaborations—scientists, activists, economists, community projects, leaders, governments, banks, businesses, cities, and countries—anyone whose workable solutions make a substantial contribution to achieving the Earthshots.” As announced by the Foundation, the 2021 Earthshot Prize Winners for the five categories are: Protect and Restore Nature: the Republic of Costa Rica, for successfully doubling the size of their forests through programs that paid local citizens to restore natural ecosystems. Clean our Air: Takachar in India, for engineering a cheap and portable technology that captures agricultural waste from the field to turn into fuel, thus also reducing CO2 emissions from waste burning. Revive our Oceans: Coral Vita in the Bahamas, for developing an innovative approach to coral farming that can help restore the world’s dying coral reefs faster than any traditional method. Build a Waste-free World: City of Milan Food Waste Hubs in Italy, for a city-wide initiative that has dramatically cut food waste from supermarkets and cafeterias while tackling hunger. Fix our Climate: AEM Electrolyser in Thailand, Germany, and Italy, for their green hydrogen technology that creates zero-emissions energy for all sectors.

A hundred degrees Fahrenheit (or 38°C) is pretty warm for much of the planet in summer, but for the Arctic, it was unthinkable—until now. On December 14, 2021, the UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) officially announced that a temperature of 38°C had been measured on June 20, 2020, in the Siberian town of Verkhoyansk. According to the WMO, last summer’s temperatures in Arctic Siberia ranged as much as 10 degrees C higher than normal for much of the summer. The consequences were fires and sea ice loss on a “massive” scale. “This new Arctic record is one of a series of observations reported to the WMO Archive of Weather and Climate Extremes that sound the alarm bells about our changing climate. In 2020, there was also a new temperature record (18.3°C) for the Antarctic continent,” said WMO Secretary-General Prof. Petteri Taalas. Expect more records to fall. “WMO investigators are currently seeking to verify temperature readings of 54.4°C recorded in both 2020 and 2021 in the world’s hottest place, Death Valley in California, and to validate a new reported European temperature record of 48.8°C in the Italian island of Sicily this summer. The WMO Archive of Weather and Climate Extremes has never had so many ongoing simultaneous investigations,” said Prof. Taalas. The WMO lists the Arctic as one of the “fastest warming regions in the world,” heating at “more than twice the global average.” The warming trend has led a WMO panel of experts to create a new climate category for record-keeping, “highest recorded temperature at or north of 66.5⁰, the Arctic Circle.”

Food freezing and preservation may be headed for a “green” revolution. Scientists from the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the University of California Berkeley (UCB) have teamed up to develop a new way to preserve food that offers energy-saving, carbon-reducing and quality advantages over conventional freezer technologies. The researchers’ innovation is to shift from conventional (isobaric) freezing to isochoric (constant-volume) freezing. Conventional freezing exposes food to air and freezes it solid at temperatures below 32 degrees F whereas the new method, isochoric freezing, preserves food at cold temperatures without freezing it solid. The researchers had observed the fundamental relationship between temperature and pressure in liquids. Exposed to low temperatures, liquids tend to expand. Confining water in “constrained-volume contexts”—rigid, sealed containers that don’t allow liquids to expand as the temperature drops and pressure builds—can limit ice formation while recent experiments have shown that “macroscopic (visible to the naked eye) confinement” restrains ice growth and alters kinetic (movement-related) behavior. These discoveries laid the foundation for the new, breakthrough system. The research team’s isochoric freezing method seals food in a rigid plastic or metal container that is completely filled with water or other liquids, allowing only a fraction of the liquid to freeze while the rest remains under high pressure—isochoric freezing requires that the volume of the liquid remains constant in a tightly closed system. According to the ARS, isochoric freezing thus avoids the biggest threat to food quality in conventional freezing: ice crystallization that leaves food dry and damaged. This makes isochoric freezing beneficial for preserving all kinds of foods, especially certain fresh produce, such as potatoes, cherries, and tomatoes, that don’t fare well with conventional freezing. There are energy benefits too. "A complete changeover to this new method of food freezing worldwide could cut energy use by as much as 6.5 billion kilowatt-hours each year while reducing the carbon emissions that go along with generating that power by 4.6 billion kg, the equivalent of removing roughly one million cars from roads," said ARS food technologist Cristina Bilbao-Sainz, who works at the USDA’s Healthy Processed Foods Research Unit, a division of ARS's Western Regional Research Center (WRRC) in Albany, California. Bilbao-Sainz goes on to say that freezing food solid, and maintaining it in that state, takes a tremendous amount of energy compared with isochoric freezing. Their new method also avoids energy-intensive quick-freezing methods that are used to avoid the formation of ice crystals. Moreover, the technology may not be as disruptive as it sounds. Bilbao-Sainz thinks their technology, if adopted as conceived, can be employed without “any significant changes” to already established frozen food manufacturing equipment and infrastructure. Health and food-safety benefits are achieved with the new method as well. According to the study, which appeared in the journal, Renewable and Sustainable Study Reviews, isochoric freezing kills harmful microbes during processing. The benefits of the new method are such that adaptation could lead to “the next revolution in freezing foods." Considering the broad array of benefits associated with isochoric freezing, it is easy to see why the developers are looking for opportunities to advance its acceptance and adaptation. WRRC center director and co-leader of the study, Tara McHugh, said in a February 2022 ARS bulletin, "The entire food production chain could use isochoric freezing.” That includes growers, food processors, product producers, wholesalers and retailers. In other words, this revolutionary form of freezing could be part of every step on the way from farm to table. McHugh says their method can actually be used in a home freezer without requiring a significant investment in new equipment. She believes the benefits of the method are such that adaptation could lead to “the next revolution in freezing foods.” ARS credits Boris Rubinsky, a UCB biomedical engineer, for developing the team’s isochoric supercooling model, which was initially created to preserve tissues and organs for transplantation. Hence, the technology has great biomedical application potential for preserving tissues and organs that are short-lived outside of the human body and typically preserved for one or two days using expensive cryopreservation techniques. Isochoric preservation has the potential to extend tissue preservation for many days without structural damage to the tissue and without needing the use of expensive cryoprotectants—substances that inhibit damage from freezing—such as dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) or glycerol. Matthew Powell-Palm, one of the UCB engineers on the team and a lead author of the study, thinks the new method could even be useful to the space industry. It isn’t hard to imagine its potential for food and bio-preservation on long space voyages. One of the next projects for the developers is to expand on the new technology’s applications and scale them up for manufacturing and industry. The team—ARS and UCB—has already applied for a joint patent for applying their new method to food preservation, a wise decision considering estimates, according to their study, that “the global frozen food market will reach $404.8 billion by 2027.” As the world’s population continues to grow, finding better ways to preserve food is essential for achieving global food quality, nutrition and security, as well as energy-efficiency. If the researchers’ concept is successfully tested, scaled up and adopted, it could be a game-changer for global food preservation. *The Earth & I Editorial Team