For the last couple of weeks I have been travelling around Australia and Tasmania....
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Hello and happy 2023!
As you may have noticed I took a reflective break , in part because with other life and work commitments I just couldn’t keep up the weekly writing and in part because I felt demoralised about sustainability. I still feel like for every step done in the right direction there are steps done backwards , or to put it in better words , even steps that seem to go in the right direction conceal some less than good reasons moved by ‘the economy’. This said I am also not so happy with sitting around doing nothing about it, saying nothing about it, and just letting it fly by... I am back!
Life has been a little hectic these days and that's why I have decided to not post anything last week. It may be the case that I won't get to post weekly all the times.. Especially now Not just because of the extra activities I have taken on board But also, and maybe more, because there are many times when things feel like they are going more in the wrong than in the right direction. We are in political turmoil, and the country (Italy) has voted for a government that want to bring back antiquated ideologies that threaten freedom, and completely disregards issues such as climate change and environmental and social justice. Not that in other parts of the world people are making better judgements in voting and political landscapes are clear (see the UK...). And we can't really forget about the war with all of its implications. How can we think that our little actions can have an impact? The next COP is coming up in november, and needles to say, it feels like a very useless meeting, since no countries have really adjusted their numbers and budgets.. is it going to be yet another pointless meeting? I am not even suffering from climate anxiety anymore, I think I am just becoming more and more cynic.. We can't think that we can get by by planting some trees. Plus, There is more and more evidence that these compensation measures are not as compensatory as some want us to believe.. But, instead of only being cynic and looking only at the things that are wrong (and there are a lot!) let's look at some positive news for the month. You can find them all here , from rare flower blooming in Chile national park, to beavers becoming protected species, and the savings in co2 emissions from the use of renewables.. Go read (and scroll down to the past months if you need some more uplifting..) Another storm, another set of dramatic pictures and then an interesting title on the NYtimes guest essay : ' to save America's coasts don't always rebuild them'
One more conference is over.
This time - all about aquaculture Of course, working primarily with shellfish, even if I consider myself an ecologist, I end up touching some topics that can be interesting for aquaculture.. one of those is carbon sink potential of shellfish farms Back in 2019 I wrote that more often than not when describing a target audience for scientific output there is a dichotomy between ‘academic’ and ‘the general public’. This still happens and more often than ever projects proposals include an aspect of this 'citizen science'
Last week I was yet at another conference (much more local this time) and the last plenary speaker, Professor Roberto Danovaro, was definitely a thoughts provoker.
We are back to in person conferences .
Ecsa59 A breath of fresh air , after being behind computer screens. Yes, it was a lot of people travelling - but the energy in the room was definitely worth all of the air miles . Because science is not made by individuals but is made in a group , and connections are as important as papers if not more . Remember the last conference I went to ? was all about ‘sustainable development goals’ , this year was all about restoration (well, we are in the decade of restoration). Other topics were touched upon but in the minority. Or maybe as tools to aid in restoration practices . And best, we all acknowledge that while scientific output is important and some ‘competition’ can be healthy , is much more important to be collaborative and share and combine efforts. So here we are , conference is over , notebook is full of new ideas just in time for back to school; and you will be forgiving for this short post (if I promise that I will expand on some topics in the next weeks), given that I am a bit brain overloaded and in need of a lot of sleep (self care is also important ;) ) Salagadoola mechicka boola
Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo Put them together and what have you got Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo… You recognise this right ? Yes That’s the magic song that got Cinderella ready for her big night with the prince… What’s that got to do with anything ? Well..... Holidays are over , days are getting shorter (not really cooler yet) and I am back in the office trying to get some papers finished off and sent out. One of them is a modelling - based work looking at thermal stress of heatwaves on mollusks in the Venice lagoon . We took the tolerance landscape approach (where stress is determined by both duration and intensity of the stressor, in this case temperature) and are forcing it with temperature scenarios for the next century.
A common way to do this is use a ‘plausible’ scenario (e.g. the RCP 4.5) and then the ‘worst case’ , also called the ‘business as usual’ RCP 8.5 (you can read more on the IPCC reports). This has been the case since my early days in climate change research , when I was working with ocean acidification studies. |
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