Renewable Energy: Sustainability and the Need for Biomonitoring Initiatives

Renewable Energy:

“The cities, power plants and factories we build in the next seven years will shape our climate in mid-century. We have to act now to price carbon and create incentives to change the way we use energy and spread technology – and thereby avert nothing less than an existential threat to civilization” – P.K. Pachauri, Head IPCC the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Control.

Fossil fuel combustion, especially that based on oil, natural gas and coal, is the major contributor to increasing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the driving force for global warming and concomitant climate change. Climate change is considered one of the most serious environmental threats throughout the world because of its potential impact on food production and processes vital to a productive environment. Reflecting the consensus of hundred of scientists around the world, IPCC’s 4th Assessment Report: Climate Change 2007 (http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/assessments-reports.htm) estimates that greenhouse gas emissions are placing the Earth on a trajectory to warm more than 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit by mid-century. Exceeding that threshold will trigger a series of phenomena: arable land will turn into desert, higher sea levels will flood coastal areas and changes in the convection of the oceans will alter currents that determine regional weather patterns. These concerns are discouraging widespread dependence on fossil fuel use and encouraging the development and use of renewable energy.

Renewable energy technologies that have the potential to provide future energy supplies include: biomass systems, hydroelectric systems, hydrogen fuel, wind power, photovoltaics, solar thermal systems, and passive and active heating and cooling systems. Although current levels and types of pollution associated with our present energy uses will decline, implementation of renewable energy technologies will introduce new environmental conflicts which at present are only partly understood or defined. Therefore a strategy is needed to address the uncertainty of these new activities while attempting to protect natural ecological processes and to sustain biological resources. The solution will be to identify as early as possible those significant pollution problems that potentiate deleterious consequences and initiate corrective measures before irreversible harm to both humans and the environment occurs. A successful strategy will improve the quality of life.

Sustainability:

Economic, environmental and social concerns of the 21st Century are forcing governments and businesses world-wide to seriously consider policies and practices that advance sustainability. Two factors are driving the change to sustainability. One is the loss of Natural Resources. Availability is finite and depletion, as a result of past and current economic and societal practices, is accelerating. The other is the rapid deterioration of the Environment caused in no small part by the lack of strict regulatory policies. The reality that these two factors are negatively affecting civilization as we know it poses a serious challenge for business and government to act in new and innovative ways.

There is a resistance to sustainability that is grounded in the concern that governmental regulation to enhance environmental benefits will restrict economic growth. Currently, this resistance is tempered by the realities of resource scarcity, cost for energy and commodities as well as the emerging opportunities for green business practices.

Environmental Biomonitoring:

Because of the dynamics and spatial interdependence between human activities and natural ecosystems a major challenge arises - how to operate an energy renewable economy within the ecological constraints of the biosphere. Renewable energy utilizes bio-based energy technology and other renewable sources as a substitute for fossil fuel-based energy. Although current levels and types of pollution associated with our present energy uses will decline, renewable energy technologies will introduce new environmental conflicts which at present are only partly understood or defined. Therefore a strategy is needed to address the uncertainty of these new activities while attempting to protect natural ecological processes and to sustain biological resources. The solution will be to identify as early as possible those significant pollution problems that potentiate deleterious consequences and initiate corrective measures before irreversible harm to both humans and the environment occurs. A successful strategy will improve the quality of life.

Biomonitoring is an integral component of any strategy to secure environmental stability because it creates a cost-effective perspective on which decisions can be made. Biomonitoring bridges the gap between human and environmental health issues. Since it incorporates the use of organisms to monitor contaminants, sources of toxicants to humans can be identified. Furthermore, base on the principals of comparative biochemistry and our extensive knowledge about the molecular and cellular mechanisms of toxicity, risk at higher levels of biological organization can be assessed.

Procedures and protocols are important components of any plan to assess the health of the environment. Biomonitoring relies heavily on the application of the Biomarker Approach which is grounded in the use of numerous sophisticated analytical methodologies and techniques. The Biomarker Approach has been employed to identify the presence of significant pollutants and to act as an early warning system for imminent effects. An important aspect in the design of a Biomonitoring Program is its flexibility as it can be tailored to the environmental concerns at hand.

Methods and Procedures Applicable to Biomonitoring:

Adaptive Management. The goal of an environmental monitoring program is to provide stake-holders information that they can used to evaluate the effectiveness of their policies and practices to maintain sustainability of natural resources. In this regard, Adaptive Management is a useful resource management technique best described as an iterative and deliberate process of applying principles of scientific investigation to design and implementation in order to better understand the environment under study and reduce the key uncertainties. As a basis for continuously refining the program/project design and operation, it assists management to take action in the face of uncertainty regarding future conditions, relationships among stake-holders, user response to management, management objectives, and even abundance of the resource itself. The most challenging problems in applying adaptive management are not scientific, but rather in the social/political arena. The Greater Everglades Ecosystem Restoration Project (http://conference.ifas.ufl.edu/GEER2008) uses this approach.

Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program. All useful data generated by an environmental monitoring program including results from biomonitoring initiatives need to be processes efficiently to enable status and trend assessments with a known statistical confidence. This is the necessary first step in the overall strategy for environmental protection and restoration. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program (http://www.epa.gov/emap/) is a long-term research effort to develop the tools necessary to monitor and assess the status and trends of ecological resources. EMAP's goal is to develop the scientific understanding for translating environmental monitoring data from multiple spatial and temporal scales into assessments of current ecological condition and forecasts of future risks to the nation’s natural resources. Measurements data used by EMAP are generated by following either field measurement methods or a combination of field collection and laboratory measurement methods. Each method documents how sample collecting and/or analysis activities are to be performed.

Conclusions:

In 2009 the world is expected to burn through some 31 x 109 barrels of oil, 6 x 109 tons of coal and 100 x 1012 cubic feet of natural gas. Combustion will yield around 30 x 109 tons of carbon dioxide. This magnitude of fossil fuel consumption contributes significantly to the degradation and pollution of our environment and is estimated to cost the Chinese economy the equivalent of 10% of its Gross Domestic Income annually (Harvard Business Review, June 2007, page 89) due to the loss of industrial output, health impacts and the spread of desert regions.

Governments are moving towards regulation and other policies to reduce risks to the public and the economy, while businesses adopt practices to reduce risks to their profitability. A sustainable environment based in part on an energy renewable economy is a mutually acceptable goal but will require the immediate attention to critical issues like energy use, greenhouse gas reductions and ecosystem protection. A major challenge will be to operate an energy renewable economy within the ecological constraints of the biosphere.

Regardless of the regulations, policies or practices implemented to create a sustainable economy that protects the environment, feedback is required to evaluate the effectiveness of these actions and make adjustments as required. An environmental monitoring program that is established on sound management techniques and that incorporates a monitoring program that focuses on the status and trends of ecological resources will satisfy this requirement. Since the environment represents a dynamic relationship between abiotic and biotic components biomonitoring is an integral part of any environmental monitoring program.