It is a problem that has so far stumped even Google’s brainy engineers – how to generate cheap solar electricity using a small-scale array of mirrors to concentrate the sun’s energy.

Now a team at a South African university – led by a former Intel strategic planner – believes they have cracked it.

Once they have completed a prototype system in October they have big plans for rolling out the technology.

The idea behind the design – so-called Concentrated Solar Power or CSP – is simple. A field of mirrors on the ground tracks the sun and concentrates its rays on to a central point which heats up. That heat is converted into electricity.

There are a handful of large-scale examples of such solar plants around the world generating electricity, and there are predictions that the technology could generate a quarter of the world’s energy by 2050. But the plants are expensive and it has proved difficult to make them work at smaller scale.

Called heliostats, the shaped mirrors are usually large with a huge central base set in concrete. With current technology they are expensive to produce, have to be connected through pricey wiring and need to be installed by highly skilled and large construction crews. This is the main factor that makes CSP more expensive than traditional photovoltaic panels, which have fallen in price by 75% since 2009.

Cheap and quick to install

Paul Gauché is the South African founding director of the Solar Thermal Research Group at Stellenbosch University that is testing a new approach. “I have managed technology teams from around the world and this is the best team I have managed”, he says proudly, looking around the busy workshop floor.

His team’s aim is to produce CSP technology that will be cheap and quick to install. “We are developing plonkable heliostats. Plonkable means that from factory to installation you can just drop them down on to the ground and they work.” So no costly cement, no highly-trained workforce, no wires, just two workers to lay out the steel frames on the ground and a streetlight-style central tower.

Their work has already attracted the interest of well-known foreign companies, including a German consortium and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology solar company.

Sitting in a control room made from stacked shipping containers, Gauché looks out over the heliostats sprouting like flowers in the field. “Every part in it is manufacturable and installable by two sets of hands, or one rugby player as we found out”, he laughs.

Helio100 is a pilot project with over 100 heliostats of 2.2 sq meters each, generating 150 Kilowatts (kW) of power in total – enough to power about 10 households. According to Gauché, the array is already cheaper than using diesel, the go-to fuel for most companies and businesses during regular power outages in the country.

Google’s RE<C initiative, which developed pioneering new renewable energy technology, attempted to build systems like this but they abandoned their research after reporting that they could not do it cheaply enough.

Mass production the key to further price falls

What Gauché’s team has done differently is to reduce the cost of creating heliostats. Around the world CSP is in decline after an initial growth spurt because it currently costs about three times more than using a hybrid system of PV panels together with wind power to generate electricity, explains Prof Tobias Bischoff-Neimz, manager for energy at South Africa’s Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research:

“The future for CSP rests with creating power at changing rates, not like a base load power station that runs at full power all the time, but a system that makes the grid more flexible.” He says Gauché’s work to reduce the cost of the technology is vital if CSP is to reach its potential.

Gauché’s team uses smaller mirrors that focus the sun’s rays on to a small surface at the top of the tower. The mirrors track the sun all day – like people watching a tennis ball during a match – and then reset for morning. They focus the sun’s rays into a beam so intense it that can melt the collector in less than five seconds if its cooling water stops flowing. The heating element is like a car’s radiator in reverse; the heat is transferred to moving water that can either create electricity or be used for other work.

Athi Ntisana is a technologist from South Africa’s Eastern Cape province who has been working since the start of the project conceptualising, prototyping and building the finished systems. He is convinced the technology is right for the country:

“It requires labour, components can be manufactured here in the country and we have land here where sunlight is abundant – and that’s also where there is not much employment. It solves all these problems.”

The team wants their system fully functional by the end of October 2015 but Gauché predicts that once they refine the technology, then economies of scale will follow. Referring to Henry Ford’s famous mass-market breakthrough he says:

“We are not yet at the model T in CSP. The moment you start to get high volumes, industrialisation, get more scientists, more of everything, then the costs will come down radically.”

Jeffrey Barbee is a journalist and photographer who has been reporting breaking news stories for the world’s media for over 20 years. He is also Director of Alliance Earth, an independent not for profit environmental and scientific reporting initiative, and Director of the acclaimed story about the worldwide fracking industry: The High Cost Of Cheap Gas.

Watch Barbee’s Television Episodes with LinkTV, where he presents the series Earth Focus.

This article was originally published on Guardian Environment and is republished here by kind permission via the Guardian Environment Network. Allianceearth.org paid for Barbee’s transport and accommodation.

New South Wales (NSW) is the latest Australian state to hear calls for sharks to be culled, in response to a spate of fatal and non-fatal incidents.

NSW Premier Mike Baird has implemented a new surveillance program, while resisting calls for a cull on the basis that it doesn’t work.

Put simply, there is no scientific support for the concept that culling sharks in a particular area will lead to a decrease in shark attacks and increase ocean safety.

Western Australia (WA) tried culling sharks with baited drum lines last year. The tactic did not improve the safety of swimmers, surfers or divers – one of the reasons why scientists actively opposed the cull. A similar long-standing policy in Queensland has shown little evidence of effectiveness.

Born survivors

Sharks have inhabited this planet for more than 400 million years, and have survived five mass extinctions. Earth is now entering its sixth – this time caused by humans – and sharks are at the pointy end, with 90% of the species already considered threatened.

It is not just an issue on NSW’s surf breaks. Humanity’s growing demand for protein has put substantial pressure on oceanic systems, and industrial fishing techniques have have reduced predatory fish populations to less than 10% of their historic numbers. Sharks are especially vulnerable because of their low reproductive rates, slow growth and delayed rates of maturity.

The Indo-Australasian region is recognised as a hot-spot for global shark biodiversity, and in in this region Australia trumps all, with more than 36% of all known shark species living in Australian waters.

What’s more, sharks play a pivotal role within the ecosystems they inhabit. As apex predators, they maintain community structure and biodiversity by regulating predator and prey abundance. Even light fishing pressure such as species-target line fisheries can cause dramatic declines in populations of large coastal sharks.

Meanwhile, indirect fishing via shark meshing programs can catch a range of targeted and non-targeted species of sharks.

What would a cull do to sharks and ecosystems?

Shark culling is best thought of as an indiscriminate method of removing sharks from our coastal ecosystems. The WA and Queensland culls have led to the capture and death of many non-targeted sharks.

We also know that many shark species do not cope with capture well. A recent Australian study found that 100% of hammerheads caught by line fishing will die of stress within an hour of capture. Similarly, spinner and dusky sharks have very low survival rates within the first few hours of being hooked, and sharks that are hooked and subsequently released do not necessarily survive.

Hooking in the gut is very common. New South Wales’ flagship threatened aquatic species, the greynurse shark, will most probably die over time if hooked in the gut and then released. Stainless steel hooks do not rust out but become encapsulated in the tissue over time, causing starvation, wasting of the body (known as cachexia), and eventual death.

If we remove sharks as top predators from the ecosystem, the effects will filter down to animals lower down the food chain and cause unexpected changes to ecosystems. We are already seeing such changes in areas where sharks are overfished.

Declines in the number of blacktip sharks in North Carolina in the late 1970s and 1980s caused an increase in the relative abundance of cownose rays and a corresponding decrease in scallops over the ensuing decades.

Healthy aquatic ecosystems are typified by a complexity of players in the food chain, and removing such macropredators will result in decreasing ecosystem resilience.

What can we do instead of culling?

Indiscriminately culling sharks is dangerous to marine ecosystems, not to mention expensive and futile. We would be far better off allocating resources to achieving a greater understanding of the ecology and behaviour of these large predators.

We can increase knowledge of why and where sharks are likely to attack humans by tagging sharks and following their movements over time, or through genetic studies that can assess effective population sizes.

Current aerial surveys are unlikely to be a successful strategy, however. Scientific analysis has already discredited aerial programs in NSW. Aerial surveys have only a 12.5% success rate in spotting a coastal shark from a fixed-wing aircraft, and a 17.1% success rate in helicopters. As surveys are only done for a few hours per week, and pass over a particular beach in minutes, these patrols can give the public a false sense of security.

Other non-invasive methods of mitigation are currently being developed, including the use of erratic walls of bubbles to deter sharks, and the development of wetsuits and surfboards that sharks are less likely to mistake as prey.

But ultimately, we also need to take personal responsibility, and reduce the likelihood of an attack by not swimming at dawn and dusk, not entering the water at the mouth of estuaries with poor visibility, or in areas of baitfish. After all, even sharks can make mistakes.

Jane Williamson is Associate Professor in Marine Ecology at Macquarie University and Deputy Chair of the NSW Fisheries Scientific Committee.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Around fifteen years ago the actress Joanna Lumley had a vision. She imagined a bridge across the Thames with trees sprouting from it into the sky.

All of us with creative minds and who think about the places around is have had fun thoughts about where we spend our lives.

But luckily for Joanna an old family friend she had known since he was four was now Mayor of London. Boris Johnson, never one to miss a good photo opportunity and moment of frivolity, grabbed her vision and vowed to bring it to life. And he knew the man to do it.

Thomas Heatherwick was the current darling of design after his triumph with the Olympic Cauldron. So despite lingering issues with projects like B of the Bang in Manchester which was removed due to falling javelin-like spikes, and the overpriced, overheating new Routemaster bus for London, he got to work at creating this Garden Bridge.

There were some problems along the way. Because of European rules there had to be competition to procure a project architect. Two other firms alongside Heatherwick were asked to submit designs: Marks Barfield and Wilkinson Eyre, both established designers of world famous infrastructure and bridges.

But neither of them won the competiton and it was Heatherwick, with his pre-designed project already loved by Lumley and the Mayor, who was the victor – though there is now an investigation into the whole process.

There was also a small issue with the costs. Originally a totally privately funded venture the predicted budget began to rise. So it was decided that it should receive £30m from Transport for London and a further £30m from the national purse, and later added to with an underwriting of the annual £3.5m maintenance bill from public funds.

But this is all perfectly fine because we are promised a new park for the city. A relaxing and peaceful space to dwell and reimagine nature and the city. It will be a bucolic landscape of trees and grasses in which we can get lost and find ourselves at one with wildlife in the heart of a metropolis.

It will be great for the environment and provide a valuable and much needed transport link promoting pedestrianism and an ecological way of living.

But will it?

That is, at least, if you believe the spin and marketing half-truths from the Garden Bridge Trust who are behind the project. The reality is very different.

Another way of reading it is thus: A private development using £60m of public money which will not offer a legal public right of way may be built in the heart of London, blocking free and historic views from the South Bank towards Somerset House and St. Paul’s Cathedral as well as the world famous panorama east from Waterloo Bridge.

It will have a capacity of 2,500 people, so that relaxed romantic wandering may be less peaceful than implied. There’s also a queuing platform for a further 2,500 which suggests it may not be great for commuting.

A few minute’s walk along the South Bank is Waterloo Bridge which functions perfectly and connects the two banks of the river, so any claim that it offers critical transport infrastructure – the reason for that £30m from Transport for London – is arrant nonsense.

What of the ecological and environmental claims? The RSPB put out an outspoken press release (now replaced with a much weaker one), in which they stated:

“Water capture and storage as part of a wider drainage initiative would have been a bonus. Better still, it could link existing wildlife spots north and south of the river, but that’s not currently part of the plans. Londoners will not be gaining a new, wildlife rich habitat and, consequently, the bridge will not gain RSPB backing. 

“As supporters of green infrastructure in London, the RSPB can suggest much easier and cheaper ways to make life more pleasant for Londoners and urban wildlife.

“£175 million could do a lot to boost the way we manage water and waste or generate energy in the capital in ways that would clean our environment and better support some of the 60% of species currently vanishing around us. Indeed, Londoners can collectively add to the capital’s habitats and support much more wildlife than this £175 million bridge ever could.”

Natalie Bennett, leader of the Green Party, has also written about the “terrible greenwash of the Garden Bridge. The £60m of public funding dedicated to this folly could be used to create green spaces all over the city. Instead they are planning to fell trees and ruin open spaces on both sides of the river to create a private park with no transport value at all.”

The financial and environmental expense

It is fundamentally a private development with the pretence of greening the city while being quite the opposite – a few trees and plants will never repay the amount of carbon wrapped up in such a huge amount of concrete poured into the Thames.

The Garden Bridge Trust suggest the project will inspire people to consider the environment, and will engage people with the wonder of nature. But wouldn’t it be infinitely better if these goals were reached in a project which wasn’t at the same time damaging the world it wishes us to consider?

The cost is also questionable on reaching these aims, especially at a time when Kew is having its budget hugely cut and park keepers in Lambeth, where the Bridge lands on the river’s south side, are being laid off. At £175m, the Garden Bridge comes in at £76,000 per square metre – and that without any grass to sit on like, you know, a park has.

The other aim of the project, they say, is to “improve walkability” and they suggest that the bridge may be responsible for preventing 0.37 to 0.7 deaths a year due to improving health.

But given the proximity to existing bridges this idea that it would attract ‘new’ pedestrians is laughable, and any tiny benefit to an improved walking environment must be balanced against increased congestion along the South Bank after an extra 3m tourists have descended onto an already busy footpath.

Private space built over public space

That very same riverside footpath has an existing grassed area and thirty mature trees, a genuinely public and free space. It will be sacrificed should the Garden Bridge get built,replaced by commercial units, a platform for a 2,500 person queuing system and, when the bridge is not in public mode, a corporate entertainment space.

Instead of removing existent grassed areas and mature trees I suggest the £60m of public money (and £115m of private investment, should the sponsors still want to invest in it without the bling to hang their name off) could be far better spent improving the existing public realm across the whole of the city, and in the process improving and greening the parts of the city which can have an immediate effect upon the communities within London.

The Garden Bridge Trust also repeatedly claim that the project will improve pollination in another desperate attempt to paint the project as having a strong ecological footing. Sure, some trees and plants will help here, but at £650,000 per tree it’s an extremely expensive pollination project. All over London there are pocket parks, usually set up and managed by the local community.

I wrote about one such street where I live, Van Gogh Walk, in an article on my website, but they are all over – a recent Londonist series highlights just a few of them. These immediately benefit the community, they create a social space for activity, give local pride, can transform derelict spaces and stitch together main. And they genuinely improve walkability and pollination.

London doesn’t need monuments to egos offering no benefit to the very people who are paying for it and are most affected by it. That such a project is cloaked in false claims of environmentalism, localism and improvement in transport infrastructure makes it not only misleading but nearing fraudulent.

The greening of London and stitching together of communities can only happen from the bottom up, through public involvement, community and sincere environmental intent. This top-down private monolith of a Garden Bridge which imposes itself into one of the most admired parts of the city would be a disaster.

Compete: A Folly For London is a free-to-enter competition for satirical designs for the Thames South Bank public space which would be sacrificed to the private Garden Bridge. Deadline for entries is 28th August. See also on Facebook or Tweet @follyforlondon .

Campaign: Four ways to stop the Garden Bridge.

Will Jennings is a visual artist who used to work in architecture. His work has concerns in the politics, aesthetics and understand of the landscapes we build around us. Web: willjennings.info.

The Coca-Cola company is planning to announce that it is close to replenishing all the water it uses “back to communities and nature” by the end of 2015, well ahead of schedule.

As campaigners that have closely scrutinized Coca-Cola’s operations in India for over a decade, we find the company’s assertions on balancing water use to be misleading.

The company’s track record of managing water resources in and around its bottling operations is dismal, and the announcement is a public relations exercise designed to manufacture an image of a company that uses water sustainably – far removed from the reality on the ground.

The impetus for Coca-Cola to embark upon its ambitious water conservation programs globally stems from its experience in India, where the company has been the target of communities across the country holding it accountable for creating water shortages and pollution.

The company has faced crisis in India due to their mismanagement of water resources, including

• the forced closure of their bottling plant by government authorities in Kerala in 2005,
• the closure of its 15 year old plant in Varanasi last year,
• the refusal by government authorities to allow a fully-built expansion plant to operate in Varanasi in August 2014,
• a proposed plant in Uttarakhand cancelled in April 2014,
• and the withdrawal of the land allocated for a new bottling plant by the government in Tamil Nadu due to large scale community protests in April 2015.

Coca-Cola’s operations in Jaipur in India are also now used as a case study in colleges and universities on the company’s profound impact on water resources.

The myth of ‘water neutrality’

The suggestion that the world’s largest beverage company can become “water neutral”, as Coca-Cola has suggested, is impossible and deceptive, as the India Resource Center has pointed out in the past. It is not possible for a company whose primary raw material is water, to have ‘neutral’ impact on water resources.

Such a disingenuous suggestion by the world’s largest beverage company is a disservice to the public, and without admission of the massive impact the company has on water resources, there can be no genuine discourse with Coca-Cola on water management.

The company’s claims of having ‘neutral’ impact on water resources are misleading for two principal reasons.

First, water issues are local in their impact unlike, for example, climate change. When Coca-Cola extracts water from a depleted aquifer in Varanasi or Jaipur, the impacts are borne by the local communities and farmers that depend upon it to meet their water needs.

Replenishing an aquifer hundreds of miles away from the point of extraction, as Coca-Cola has often done to ‘balance’ their water use, has no bearing on the health of the local aquifer which Coca-Cola depletes through its bottling operations, nor the privations suffered by those who depend upon it.

Second, the amount of water used to make Coca-Cola products, referred to as the ‘water footprint’, is much more than the water used in the bottling plants. Cane sugar is a major component of Coca-Cola products in India, and as one of the largest procurers of sugar in India, Coca-Cola is well shy of achieving any balance with the water used the production of its sugar sweetened beverages.

The Water Foot Print Network has estimated that it takes 442 liters of water to make one liter of Coca-Cola using cane sugar, and 618 liters of water to make one liter of Coca-Cola product using High Fructose Corn Syrup.

These astounding numbers are not factored into the water replenishment announcement, and Coca-Cola’s claims fall flat if they were to be included – as they ought to be. The numbers used for their announcement are about 200 times less than the actual water footprint of Coca-Cola products.

No more pumping of depleted aquifers!

One of the continuing challenges being faced by communities across India is that the Coca-Cola company has continued to operate its bottling plants in severely water-stressed areas, as well as propose new plants in water-stressed areas where the communities have very limited access to potable water – a fundamental human right.

Any company that wants to establish itself as a responsible user of water would begin by not operating in water stressed areas, a demand that has been made of Coca-Cola but which the company seems to ignore because it will deprive it of profits and access to markets.

Coca-Cola is in the habit of making tall claims and generating false opinions favorable to its own cause, whether it is on water use or public health, and this announcement on water replenishment is just that. Just last week, the company was exposed for setting up a front group, Global Energy Balance Network, to confuse the science around obesity.

Attempting to confuse and mislead regulators and scientific opinion is not new to Coca-Cola. In 2006, one of Coca-Cola’s lobbyists in India admitted that his job “was to ensure, among other things, that every government or private study accusing the company of environmental harm was challenged by another study.”

If Coca-Cola truly wishes to rebuild its reputation in India and mitigate the massive environmental damage caused by its operations, it must stop the greenwashing, stop exploiting depleted aquifers, and engage seriously with its critics and impacted communities.

Amit Srivastava is director of India Resource Center, an international campaigning organization.

It is a problem that has so far stumped even Google’s brainy engineers – how to generate cheap solar electricity using a small-scale array of mirrors to concentrate the sun’s energy.

Now a team at a South African university – led by a former Intel strategic planner – believes they have cracked it.

Once they have completed a prototype system in October they have big plans for rolling out the technology.

The idea behind the design – so-called Concentrated Solar Power or CSP – is simple. A field of mirrors on the ground tracks the sun and concentrates its rays on to a central point which heats up. That heat is converted into electricity.

There are a handful of large-scale examples of such solar plants around the world generating electricity, and there are predictions that the technology could generate a quarter of the world’s energy by 2050. But the plants are expensive and it has proved difficult to make them work at smaller scale.

Called heliostats, the shaped mirrors are usually large with a huge central base set in concrete. With current technology they are expensive to produce, have to be connected through pricey wiring and need to be installed by highly skilled and large construction crews. This is the main factor that makes CSP more expensive than traditional photovoltaic panels, which have fallen in price by 75% since 2009.

Cheap and quick to install

Paul Gauché is the South African founding director of the Solar Thermal Research Group at Stellenbosch University that is testing a new approach. “I have managed technology teams from around the world and this is the best team I have managed”, he says proudly, looking around the busy workshop floor.

His team’s aim is to produce CSP technology that will be cheap and quick to install. “We are developing plonkable heliostats. Plonkable means that from factory to installation you can just drop them down on to the ground and they work.” So no costly cement, no highly-trained workforce, no wires, just two workers to lay out the steel frames on the ground and a streetlight-style central tower.

Their work has already attracted the interest of well-known foreign companies, including a German consortium and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology solar company.

Sitting in a control room made from stacked shipping containers, Gauché looks out over the heliostats sprouting like flowers in the field. “Every part in it is manufacturable and installable by two sets of hands, or one rugby player as we found out”, he laughs.

Helio100 is a pilot project with over 100 heliostats of 2.2 sq meters each, generating 150 Kilowatts (kW) of power in total – enough to power about 10 households. According to Gauché, the array is already cheaper than using diesel, the go-to fuel for most companies and businesses during regular power outages in the country.

Google’s RE<C initiative, which developed pioneering new renewable energy technology, attempted to build systems like this but they abandoned their research after reporting that they could not do it cheaply enough.

Mass production the key to further price falls

What Gauché’s team has done differently is to reduce the cost of creating heliostats. Around the world CSP is in decline after an initial growth spurt because it currently costs about three times more than using a hybrid system of PV panels together with wind power to generate electricity, explains Prof Tobias Bischoff-Neimz, manager for energy at South Africa’s Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research:

“The future for CSP rests with creating power at changing rates, not like a base load power station that runs at full power all the time, but a system that makes the grid more flexible.” He says Gauché’s work to reduce the cost of the technology is vital if CSP is to reach its potential.

Gauché’s team uses smaller mirrors that focus the sun’s rays on to a small surface at the top of the tower. The mirrors track the sun all day – like people watching a tennis ball during a match – and then reset for morning. They focus the sun’s rays into a beam so intense it that can melt the collector in less than five seconds if its cooling water stops flowing. The heating element is like a car’s radiator in reverse; the heat is transferred to moving water that can either create electricity or be used for other work.

Athi Ntisana is a technologist from South Africa’s Eastern Cape province who has been working since the start of the project conceptualising, prototyping and building the finished systems. He is convinced the technology is right for the country:

“It requires labour, components can be manufactured here in the country and we have land here where sunlight is abundant – and that’s also where there is not much employment. It solves all these problems.”

The team wants their system fully functional by the end of October 2015 but Gauché predicts that once they refine the technology, then economies of scale will follow. Referring to Henry Ford’s famous mass-market breakthrough he says:

“We are not yet at the model T in CSP. The moment you start to get high volumes, industrialisation, get more scientists, more of everything, then the costs will come down radically.”

Jeffrey Barbee is a journalist and photographer who has been reporting breaking news stories for the world’s media for over 20 years. He is also Director of Alliance Earth, an independent not for profit environmental and scientific reporting initiative, and Director of the acclaimed story about the worldwide fracking industry: The High Cost Of Cheap Gas.

Watch Barbee’s Television Episodes with LinkTV, where he presents the series Earth Focus.

This article was originally published on Guardian Environment and is republished here by kind permission via the Guardian Environment Network. Allianceearth.org paid for Barbee’s transport and accommodation.

New South Wales (NSW) is the latest Australian state to hear calls for sharks to be culled, in response to a spate of fatal and non-fatal incidents.

NSW Premier Mike Baird has implemented a new surveillance program, while resisting calls for a cull on the basis that it doesn’t work.

Put simply, there is no scientific support for the concept that culling sharks in a particular area will lead to a decrease in shark attacks and increase ocean safety.

Western Australia (WA) tried culling sharks with baited drum lines last year. The tactic did not improve the safety of swimmers, surfers or divers – one of the reasons why scientists actively opposed the cull. A similar long-standing policy in Queensland has shown little evidence of effectiveness.

Born survivors

Sharks have inhabited this planet for more than 400 million years, and have survived five mass extinctions. Earth is now entering its sixth – this time caused by humans – and sharks are at the pointy end, with 90% of the species already considered threatened.

It is not just an issue on NSW’s surf breaks. Humanity’s growing demand for protein has put substantial pressure on oceanic systems, and industrial fishing techniques have have reduced predatory fish populations to less than 10% of their historic numbers. Sharks are especially vulnerable because of their low reproductive rates, slow growth and delayed rates of maturity.

The Indo-Australasian region is recognised as a hot-spot for global shark biodiversity, and in in this region Australia trumps all, with more than 36% of all known shark species living in Australian waters.

What’s more, sharks play a pivotal role within the ecosystems they inhabit. As apex predators, they maintain community structure and biodiversity by regulating predator and prey abundance. Even light fishing pressure such as species-target line fisheries can cause dramatic declines in populations of large coastal sharks.

Meanwhile, indirect fishing via shark meshing programs can catch a range of targeted and non-targeted species of sharks.

What would a cull do to sharks and ecosystems?

Shark culling is best thought of as an indiscriminate method of removing sharks from our coastal ecosystems. The WA and Queensland culls have led to the capture and death of many non-targeted sharks.

We also know that many shark species do not cope with capture well. A recent Australian study found that 100% of hammerheads caught by line fishing will die of stress within an hour of capture. Similarly, spinner and dusky sharks have very low survival rates within the first few hours of being hooked, and sharks that are hooked and subsequently released do not necessarily survive.

Hooking in the gut is very common. New South Wales’ flagship threatened aquatic species, the greynurse shark, will most probably die over time if hooked in the gut and then released. Stainless steel hooks do not rust out but become encapsulated in the tissue over time, causing starvation, wasting of the body (known as cachexia), and eventual death.

If we remove sharks as top predators from the ecosystem, the effects will filter down to animals lower down the food chain and cause unexpected changes to ecosystems. We are already seeing such changes in areas where sharks are overfished.

Declines in the number of blacktip sharks in North Carolina in the late 1970s and 1980s caused an increase in the relative abundance of cownose rays and a corresponding decrease in scallops over the ensuing decades.

Healthy aquatic ecosystems are typified by a complexity of players in the food chain, and removing such macropredators will result in decreasing ecosystem resilience.

What can we do instead of culling?

Indiscriminately culling sharks is dangerous to marine ecosystems, not to mention expensive and futile. We would be far better off allocating resources to achieving a greater understanding of the ecology and behaviour of these large predators.

We can increase knowledge of why and where sharks are likely to attack humans by tagging sharks and following their movements over time, or through genetic studies that can assess effective population sizes.

Current aerial surveys are unlikely to be a successful strategy, however. Scientific analysis has already discredited aerial programs in NSW. Aerial surveys have only a 12.5% success rate in spotting a coastal shark from a fixed-wing aircraft, and a 17.1% success rate in helicopters. As surveys are only done for a few hours per week, and pass over a particular beach in minutes, these patrols can give the public a false sense of security.

Other non-invasive methods of mitigation are currently being developed, including the use of erratic walls of bubbles to deter sharks, and the development of wetsuits and surfboards that sharks are less likely to mistake as prey.

But ultimately, we also need to take personal responsibility, and reduce the likelihood of an attack by not swimming at dawn and dusk, not entering the water at the mouth of estuaries with poor visibility, or in areas of baitfish. After all, even sharks can make mistakes.

Jane Williamson is Associate Professor in Marine Ecology at Macquarie University and Deputy Chair of the NSW Fisheries Scientific Committee.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Around fifteen years ago the actress Joanna Lumley had a vision. She imagined a bridge across the Thames with trees sprouting from it into the sky.

All of us with creative minds and who think about the places around is have had fun thoughts about where we spend our lives.

But luckily for Joanna an old family friend she had known since he was four was now Mayor of London. Boris Johnson, never one to miss a good photo opportunity and moment of frivolity, grabbed her vision and vowed to bring it to life. And he knew the man to do it.

Thomas Heatherwick was the current darling of design after his triumph with the Olympic Cauldron. So despite lingering issues with projects like B of the Bang in Manchester which was removed due to falling javelin-like spikes, and the overpriced, overheating new Routemaster bus for London, he got to work at creating this Garden Bridge.

There were some problems along the way. Because of European rules there had to be competition to procure a project architect. Two other firms alongside Heatherwick were asked to submit designs: Marks Barfield and Wilkinson Eyre, both established designers of world famous infrastructure and bridges.

But neither of them won the competiton and it was Heatherwick, with his pre-designed project already loved by Lumley and the Mayor, who was the victor – though there is now an investigation into the whole process.

There was also a small issue with the costs. Originally a totally privately funded venture the predicted budget began to rise. So it was decided that it should receive £30m from Transport for London and a further £30m from the national purse, and later added to with an underwriting of the annual £3.5m maintenance bill from public funds.

But this is all perfectly fine because we are promised a new park for the city. A relaxing and peaceful space to dwell and reimagine nature and the city. It will be a bucolic landscape of trees and grasses in which we can get lost and find ourselves at one with wildlife in the heart of a metropolis.

It will be great for the environment and provide a valuable and much needed transport link promoting pedestrianism and an ecological way of living.

But will it?

That is, at least, if you believe the spin and marketing half-truths from the Garden Bridge Trust who are behind the project. The reality is very different.

Another way of reading it is thus: A private development using £60m of public money which will not offer a legal public right of way may be built in the heart of London, blocking free and historic views from the South Bank towards Somerset House and St. Paul’s Cathedral as well as the world famous panorama east from Waterloo Bridge.

It will have a capacity of 2,500 people, so that relaxed romantic wandering may be less peaceful than implied. There’s also a queuing platform for a further 2,500 which suggests it may not be great for commuting.

A few minute’s walk along the South Bank is Waterloo Bridge which functions perfectly and connects the two banks of the river, so any claim that it offers critical transport infrastructure – the reason for that £30m from Transport for London – is arrant nonsense.

What of the ecological and environmental claims? The RSPB put out an outspoken press release (now replaced with a much weaker one), in which they stated:

“Water capture and storage as part of a wider drainage initiative would have been a bonus. Better still, it could link existing wildlife spots north and south of the river, but that’s not currently part of the plans. Londoners will not be gaining a new, wildlife rich habitat and, consequently, the bridge will not gain RSPB backing. 

“As supporters of green infrastructure in London, the RSPB can suggest much easier and cheaper ways to make life more pleasant for Londoners and urban wildlife.

“£175 million could do a lot to boost the way we manage water and waste or generate energy in the capital in ways that would clean our environment and better support some of the 60% of species currently vanishing around us. Indeed, Londoners can collectively add to the capital’s habitats and support much more wildlife than this £175 million bridge ever could.”

Natalie Bennett, leader of the Green Party, has also written about the “terrible greenwash of the Garden Bridge. The £60m of public funding dedicated to this folly could be used to create green spaces all over the city. Instead they are planning to fell trees and ruin open spaces on both sides of the river to create a private park with no transport value at all.”

The financial and environmental expense

It is fundamentally a private development with the pretence of greening the city while being quite the opposite – a few trees and plants will never repay the amount of carbon wrapped up in such a huge amount of concrete poured into the Thames.

The Garden Bridge Trust suggest the project will inspire people to consider the environment, and will engage people with the wonder of nature. But wouldn’t it be infinitely better if these goals were reached in a project which wasn’t at the same time damaging the world it wishes us to consider?

The cost is also questionable on reaching these aims, especially at a time when Kew is having its budget hugely cut and park keepers in Lambeth, where the Bridge lands on the river’s south side, are being laid off. At £175m, the Garden Bridge comes in at £76,000 per square metre – and that without any grass to sit on like, you know, a park has.

The other aim of the project, they say, is to “improve walkability” and they suggest that the bridge may be responsible for preventing 0.37 to 0.7 deaths a year due to improving health.

But given the proximity to existing bridges this idea that it would attract ‘new’ pedestrians is laughable, and any tiny benefit to an improved walking environment must be balanced against increased congestion along the South Bank after an extra 3m tourists have descended onto an already busy footpath.

Private space built over public space

That very same riverside footpath has an existing grassed area and thirty mature trees, a genuinely public and free space. It will be sacrificed should the Garden Bridge get built,replaced by commercial units, a platform for a 2,500 person queuing system and, when the bridge is not in public mode, a corporate entertainment space.

Instead of removing existent grassed areas and mature trees I suggest the £60m of public money (and £115m of private investment, should the sponsors still want to invest in it without the bling to hang their name off) could be far better spent improving the existing public realm across the whole of the city, and in the process improving and greening the parts of the city which can have an immediate effect upon the communities within London.

The Garden Bridge Trust also repeatedly claim that the project will improve pollination in another desperate attempt to paint the project as having a strong ecological footing. Sure, some trees and plants will help here, but at £650,000 per tree it’s an extremely expensive pollination project. All over London there are pocket parks, usually set up and managed by the local community.

I wrote about one such street where I live, Van Gogh Walk, in an article on my website, but they are all over – a recent Londonist series highlights just a few of them. These immediately benefit the community, they create a social space for activity, give local pride, can transform derelict spaces and stitch together main. And they genuinely improve walkability and pollination.

London doesn’t need monuments to egos offering no benefit to the very people who are paying for it and are most affected by it. That such a project is cloaked in false claims of environmentalism, localism and improvement in transport infrastructure makes it not only misleading but nearing fraudulent.

The greening of London and stitching together of communities can only happen from the bottom up, through public involvement, community and sincere environmental intent. This top-down private monolith of a Garden Bridge which imposes itself into one of the most admired parts of the city would be a disaster.

Compete: A Folly For London is a free-to-enter competition for satirical designs for the Thames South Bank public space which would be sacrificed to the private Garden Bridge. Deadline for entries is 28th August. See also on Facebook or Tweet @follyforlondon .

Campaign: Four ways to stop the Garden Bridge.

Will Jennings is a visual artist who used to work in architecture. His work has concerns in the politics, aesthetics and understand of the landscapes we build around us. Web: willjennings.info.

The Coca-Cola company is planning to announce that it is close to replenishing all the water it uses “back to communities and nature” by the end of 2015, well ahead of schedule.

As campaigners that have closely scrutinized Coca-Cola’s operations in India for over a decade, we find the company’s assertions on balancing water use to be misleading.

The company’s track record of managing water resources in and around its bottling operations is dismal, and the announcement is a public relations exercise designed to manufacture an image of a company that uses water sustainably – far removed from the reality on the ground.

The impetus for Coca-Cola to embark upon its ambitious water conservation programs globally stems from its experience in India, where the company has been the target of communities across the country holding it accountable for creating water shortages and pollution.

The company has faced crisis in India due to their mismanagement of water resources, including

• the forced closure of their bottling plant by government authorities in Kerala in 2005,
• the closure of its 15 year old plant in Varanasi last year,
• the refusal by government authorities to allow a fully-built expansion plant to operate in Varanasi in August 2014,
• a proposed plant in Uttarakhand cancelled in April 2014,
• and the withdrawal of the land allocated for a new bottling plant by the government in Tamil Nadu due to large scale community protests in April 2015.

Coca-Cola’s operations in Jaipur in India are also now used as a case study in colleges and universities on the company’s profound impact on water resources.

The myth of ‘water neutrality’

The suggestion that the world’s largest beverage company can become “water neutral”, as Coca-Cola has suggested, is impossible and deceptive, as the India Resource Center has pointed out in the past. It is not possible for a company whose primary raw material is water, to have ‘neutral’ impact on water resources.

Such a disingenuous suggestion by the world’s largest beverage company is a disservice to the public, and without admission of the massive impact the company has on water resources, there can be no genuine discourse with Coca-Cola on water management.

The company’s claims of having ‘neutral’ impact on water resources are misleading for two principal reasons.

First, water issues are local in their impact unlike, for example, climate change. When Coca-Cola extracts water from a depleted aquifer in Varanasi or Jaipur, the impacts are borne by the local communities and farmers that depend upon it to meet their water needs.

Replenishing an aquifer hundreds of miles away from the point of extraction, as Coca-Cola has often done to ‘balance’ their water use, has no bearing on the health of the local aquifer which Coca-Cola depletes through its bottling operations, nor the privations suffered by those who depend upon it.

Second, the amount of water used to make Coca-Cola products, referred to as the ‘water footprint’, is much more than the water used in the bottling plants. Cane sugar is a major component of Coca-Cola products in India, and as one of the largest procurers of sugar in India, Coca-Cola is well shy of achieving any balance with the water used the production of its sugar sweetened beverages.

The Water Foot Print Network has estimated that it takes 442 liters of water to make one liter of Coca-Cola using cane sugar, and 618 liters of water to make one liter of Coca-Cola product using High Fructose Corn Syrup.

These astounding numbers are not factored into the water replenishment announcement, and Coca-Cola’s claims fall flat if they were to be included – as they ought to be. The numbers used for their announcement are about 200 times less than the actual water footprint of Coca-Cola products.

No more pumping of depleted aquifers!

One of the continuing challenges being faced by communities across India is that the Coca-Cola company has continued to operate its bottling plants in severely water-stressed areas, as well as propose new plants in water-stressed areas where the communities have very limited access to potable water – a fundamental human right.

Any company that wants to establish itself as a responsible user of water would begin by not operating in water stressed areas, a demand that has been made of Coca-Cola but which the company seems to ignore because it will deprive it of profits and access to markets.

Coca-Cola is in the habit of making tall claims and generating false opinions favorable to its own cause, whether it is on water use or public health, and this announcement on water replenishment is just that. Just last week, the company was exposed for setting up a front group, Global Energy Balance Network, to confuse the science around obesity.

Attempting to confuse and mislead regulators and scientific opinion is not new to Coca-Cola. In 2006, one of Coca-Cola’s lobbyists in India admitted that his job “was to ensure, among other things, that every government or private study accusing the company of environmental harm was challenged by another study.”

If Coca-Cola truly wishes to rebuild its reputation in India and mitigate the massive environmental damage caused by its operations, it must stop the greenwashing, stop exploiting depleted aquifers, and engage seriously with its critics and impacted communities.

Amit Srivastava is director of India Resource Center, an international campaigning organization.

It is a problem that has so far stumped even Google’s brainy engineers – how to generate cheap solar electricity using a small-scale array of mirrors to concentrate the sun’s energy.

Now a team at a South African university – led by a former Intel strategic planner – believes they have cracked it.

Once they have completed a prototype system in October they have big plans for rolling out the technology.

The idea behind the design – so-called Concentrated Solar Power or CSP – is simple. A field of mirrors on the ground tracks the sun and concentrates its rays on to a central point which heats up. That heat is converted into electricity.

There are a handful of large-scale examples of such solar plants around the world generating electricity, and there are predictions that the technology could generate a quarter of the world’s energy by 2050. But the plants are expensive and it has proved difficult to make them work at smaller scale.

Called heliostats, the shaped mirrors are usually large with a huge central base set in concrete. With current technology they are expensive to produce, have to be connected through pricey wiring and need to be installed by highly skilled and large construction crews. This is the main factor that makes CSP more expensive than traditional photovoltaic panels, which have fallen in price by 75% since 2009.

Cheap and quick to install

Paul Gauché is the South African founding director of the Solar Thermal Research Group at Stellenbosch University that is testing a new approach. “I have managed technology teams from around the world and this is the best team I have managed”, he says proudly, looking around the busy workshop floor.

His team’s aim is to produce CSP technology that will be cheap and quick to install. “We are developing plonkable heliostats. Plonkable means that from factory to installation you can just drop them down on to the ground and they work.” So no costly cement, no highly-trained workforce, no wires, just two workers to lay out the steel frames on the ground and a streetlight-style central tower.

Their work has already attracted the interest of well-known foreign companies, including a German consortium and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology solar company.

Sitting in a control room made from stacked shipping containers, Gauché looks out over the heliostats sprouting like flowers in the field. “Every part in it is manufacturable and installable by two sets of hands, or one rugby player as we found out”, he laughs.

Helio100 is a pilot project with over 100 heliostats of 2.2 sq meters each, generating 150 Kilowatts (kW) of power in total – enough to power about 10 households. According to Gauché, the array is already cheaper than using diesel, the go-to fuel for most companies and businesses during regular power outages in the country.

Google’s RE<C initiative, which developed pioneering new renewable energy technology, attempted to build systems like this but they abandoned their research after reporting that they could not do it cheaply enough.

Mass production the key to further price falls

What Gauché’s team has done differently is to reduce the cost of creating heliostats. Around the world CSP is in decline after an initial growth spurt because it currently costs about three times more than using a hybrid system of PV panels together with wind power to generate electricity, explains Prof Tobias Bischoff-Neimz, manager for energy at South Africa’s Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research:

“The future for CSP rests with creating power at changing rates, not like a base load power station that runs at full power all the time, but a system that makes the grid more flexible.” He says Gauché’s work to reduce the cost of the technology is vital if CSP is to reach its potential.

Gauché’s team uses smaller mirrors that focus the sun’s rays on to a small surface at the top of the tower. The mirrors track the sun all day – like people watching a tennis ball during a match – and then reset for morning. They focus the sun’s rays into a beam so intense it that can melt the collector in less than five seconds if its cooling water stops flowing. The heating element is like a car’s radiator in reverse; the heat is transferred to moving water that can either create electricity or be used for other work.

Athi Ntisana is a technologist from South Africa’s Eastern Cape province who has been working since the start of the project conceptualising, prototyping and building the finished systems. He is convinced the technology is right for the country:

“It requires labour, components can be manufactured here in the country and we have land here where sunlight is abundant – and that’s also where there is not much employment. It solves all these problems.”

The team wants their system fully functional by the end of October 2015 but Gauché predicts that once they refine the technology, then economies of scale will follow. Referring to Henry Ford’s famous mass-market breakthrough he says:

“We are not yet at the model T in CSP. The moment you start to get high volumes, industrialisation, get more scientists, more of everything, then the costs will come down radically.”

Jeffrey Barbee is a journalist and photographer who has been reporting breaking news stories for the world’s media for over 20 years. He is also Director of Alliance Earth, an independent not for profit environmental and scientific reporting initiative, and Director of the acclaimed story about the worldwide fracking industry: The High Cost Of Cheap Gas.

Watch Barbee’s Television Episodes with LinkTV, where he presents the series Earth Focus.

This article was originally published on Guardian Environment and is republished here by kind permission via the Guardian Environment Network. Allianceearth.org paid for Barbee’s transport and accommodation.

New South Wales (NSW) is the latest Australian state to hear calls for sharks to be culled, in response to a spate of fatal and non-fatal incidents.

NSW Premier Mike Baird has implemented a new surveillance program, while resisting calls for a cull on the basis that it doesn’t work.

Put simply, there is no scientific support for the concept that culling sharks in a particular area will lead to a decrease in shark attacks and increase ocean safety.

Western Australia (WA) tried culling sharks with baited drum lines last year. The tactic did not improve the safety of swimmers, surfers or divers – one of the reasons why scientists actively opposed the cull. A similar long-standing policy in Queensland has shown little evidence of effectiveness.

Born survivors

Sharks have inhabited this planet for more than 400 million years, and have survived five mass extinctions. Earth is now entering its sixth – this time caused by humans – and sharks are at the pointy end, with 90% of the species already considered threatened.

It is not just an issue on NSW’s surf breaks. Humanity’s growing demand for protein has put substantial pressure on oceanic systems, and industrial fishing techniques have have reduced predatory fish populations to less than 10% of their historic numbers. Sharks are especially vulnerable because of their low reproductive rates, slow growth and delayed rates of maturity.

The Indo-Australasian region is recognised as a hot-spot for global shark biodiversity, and in in this region Australia trumps all, with more than 36% of all known shark species living in Australian waters.

What’s more, sharks play a pivotal role within the ecosystems they inhabit. As apex predators, they maintain community structure and biodiversity by regulating predator and prey abundance. Even light fishing pressure such as species-target line fisheries can cause dramatic declines in populations of large coastal sharks.

Meanwhile, indirect fishing via shark meshing programs can catch a range of targeted and non-targeted species of sharks.

What would a cull do to sharks and ecosystems?

Shark culling is best thought of as an indiscriminate method of removing sharks from our coastal ecosystems. The WA and Queensland culls have led to the capture and death of many non-targeted sharks.

We also know that many shark species do not cope with capture well. A recent Australian study found that 100% of hammerheads caught by line fishing will die of stress within an hour of capture. Similarly, spinner and dusky sharks have very low survival rates within the first few hours of being hooked, and sharks that are hooked and subsequently released do not necessarily survive.

Hooking in the gut is very common. New South Wales’ flagship threatened aquatic species, the greynurse shark, will most probably die over time if hooked in the gut and then released. Stainless steel hooks do not rust out but become encapsulated in the tissue over time, causing starvation, wasting of the body (known as cachexia), and eventual death.

If we remove sharks as top predators from the ecosystem, the effects will filter down to animals lower down the food chain and cause unexpected changes to ecosystems. We are already seeing such changes in areas where sharks are overfished.

Declines in the number of blacktip sharks in North Carolina in the late 1970s and 1980s caused an increase in the relative abundance of cownose rays and a corresponding decrease in scallops over the ensuing decades.

Healthy aquatic ecosystems are typified by a complexity of players in the food chain, and removing such macropredators will result in decreasing ecosystem resilience.

What can we do instead of culling?

Indiscriminately culling sharks is dangerous to marine ecosystems, not to mention expensive and futile. We would be far better off allocating resources to achieving a greater understanding of the ecology and behaviour of these large predators.

We can increase knowledge of why and where sharks are likely to attack humans by tagging sharks and following their movements over time, or through genetic studies that can assess effective population sizes.

Current aerial surveys are unlikely to be a successful strategy, however. Scientific analysis has already discredited aerial programs in NSW. Aerial surveys have only a 12.5% success rate in spotting a coastal shark from a fixed-wing aircraft, and a 17.1% success rate in helicopters. As surveys are only done for a few hours per week, and pass over a particular beach in minutes, these patrols can give the public a false sense of security.

Other non-invasive methods of mitigation are currently being developed, including the use of erratic walls of bubbles to deter sharks, and the development of wetsuits and surfboards that sharks are less likely to mistake as prey.

But ultimately, we also need to take personal responsibility, and reduce the likelihood of an attack by not swimming at dawn and dusk, not entering the water at the mouth of estuaries with poor visibility, or in areas of baitfish. After all, even sharks can make mistakes.

Jane Williamson is Associate Professor in Marine Ecology at Macquarie University and Deputy Chair of the NSW Fisheries Scientific Committee.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.