Environment

Coal Atlas (Korean)

Coal Atlas 석탄 아틀라스

Atlas
The coal boom has negative consequences for humans and nature that outweigh its economic benefits. Coal does not just kill the climate. In coal mines, terrible working conditions are rife. Accidents are commonplace. The environmental and health costs linked to the use of coal to generate electricity are enormous. The atlas provides insights on how turning away from fossil (and nuclear) fuels towards renewable energy can offer huge economic and social opportunities. 
pdf
Vegan Meet Beer Brat Sausages - Tony Webster

Food for Good: Genetic Technologies Boost Output and Options

Article
The world is never short of food supply issues. They become headlines on economic and political pages, as when the US food price index surged 3.1-4.2% in 2021, and China urged its people to stock up on food ahead of winter. Scientists have resorted to plant-based meat, cultured meat and genetically engineered plants to mitigate food shortages. The author believes that some emergent food technologies are promising in terms of addressing the problems of feeding the poor, biodiversity, and climate change, yet there are also new challenges to be resolved.
By Isaac Lam
ETC infographic 2 crop

Tech, Farming, Biodiversity

Digitalization, genomics, climate geoengineering: A range of new and emerging technologies impact upon farming, food production and biodiversity. Many of them promise productivity growth and better sustainability, and even to address climate change by means of mitigation or increased resilience to it. However, small-scale farming communities often have neither access to – nor a say in the application of – these new technologies, some of which are high-risk, threatening potentially irreversible change to our planet. In a series of essays and commentaries undertaken on the occasion of the Biodiversity Convention COP 2021-22 in Kunming, the ETC Group and others authors from the hbs network in Asia discuss technologies, the imagined futures that underpin them, and their actual and potential impacts on food production, farming communities and biodiversity, with a particular focus on the Asia-Pacific region.

Risks from digitalisation trends in the Asia-Pacific food system

Article
Corporations are now using digital tools to push methods that dominate industrial food systems, such as artificial fertilisers, mechanisation, monocultures and toxic pesticides, onto remaining small-scale farming and fishing operations. Current trends in digitalisation threaten biodiversity, the wider environment and human health, yet there are few challenges to the tech industry’s hype about a ‘fourth industrial revolution’.
By ETC Group

© Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung e.V.
Schumannstraße 8
10117 Berlin
T +49 (30) 285 34-0
F +49 (30) 285 34-109
www.boell.de
info@boell.de