In the 16th century, when the Portuguese sailed to the Arabian shores, they were enamoured by the plentiful, fresh seafood available along Oman’s 3,000 km coastline. Today, the sultanate of Oman is looking to revive this historic industry to reduce its dependence on the declining oil sector. “Fish farming has an untapped potential due to Oman’s geographical location. Agriculture and Fisheries is the second largest industry, therefore, it is natural that the government considered investing in it to decrease the reliance on oil and gas”, says Rumaitha Al Busaidi, an Omani environmentalist. The idea is sound, but its implementation has so far been marred by the lack of advanced technological implementations in Omani fisheries. Farmers still rely on the indigenous Falaj irrigation system, developed in 500 AD and used till date, which carries water from the natural springs to the mountain villages for farming and aquaculture. While it might have worked in the past, today this is problematic.

“Our fish production quality suffers because the water used for fish production and farming gets mixed with the saline water from the ocean, dramatically decreasing our income”, complains Khalifa Al Sahabi, a fish farmer in Bidiyah town in the Sharqiyah region.

To address this issue, Al Busaidi has introduced the concept of integrated Recirculating Aquaculture Systems (RAS) in aquaculture farms. These use mechanical and biological filters to reuse the water in production and minimise water resources for organic aquatic farming. “RAS technology also protects the marine environment”, she explains, “by restricting the effluent that reaches the ocean.” The Oman government had implemented this technology initially for the production of Tiger prawns. Food lovers and industry experts laud their size and quality. RAS technology has helped in increasing the production rate of these prawns even as it has made intensive fish production compatible with environmental sustainability. In May 2021, Oman invested in the construction of a 8,000 hectare aquaculture farm: the second largest in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region.

A number of barriers had to be overcome for the RAS technology to be implemented. Costs of installing temperature controls in the desert kingdom are high and it has been tricky to persuade local farmers to choose this newer technology over their traditional aquaculture methods. It has taken extensive educational drives by the Omani government to finally develop 21 integrated tilapia farms, one shrimp farm, and one marine cage farm in the country. Today, the figures speak for themselves. The production of tilapia has leapt from three tonnes in 2013 and five in 2014 to 20 tonnes in 2015 and 77 tonnes in 2017.

“With the help of RAS, we have successfully enhanced the fish quality by 66 percent across the country in the last six years”, says Nasser Abdullah, Assistant Project Manager of the Al-Wusta fish farming project. Next on the cards: using RAS technology for salmon production. While energy intensive, this sustainable aquaculture model is ensuring safer fishing techniques and lowered food miles for fish consumers across the Middle East.

Author: Rahma Khan, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Oman banner image – Richard Bartz/ Wikimedia Commons, Muscat fish markets – StellarD and Khalifa Al Sahabi
(Wikimedia License – https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode)

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One of Australia’s great forests once grew hidden from sight off the east coast of Tasmania. Swathes of giant kelp, known as kelp forests, grew from the ocean floor, towering 30 to 40 metres into massive floating canopies across the surface of the sea. “They were charismatic, six to seven storey tall underwater jungles, basically,” says Cayne Layton, postdoctoral research fellow at Tasmania’s Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies. “It is said that some floating canopies were so thick that they were on navigation charts as a navigational hazard.”

Today, 95 percent of this globally significant forest of the world’s fastest-growing plant – giant kelp can grow up to 50 centimetres a day – has been wiped out by the inexorable shift of the warm East Australian Current – the ocean current made famous in the movie Finding Nemo – displacing the cold, nutrient-rich Southern Ocean waters. The remaining five percent now grow only in scattered patches. The decline of these forests, listed as Australia’s first endangered marine community, has been relentless since the 1940s, largely unnoticed and unremarked by the local community. But the fightback has begun, and the early results are promising.

In the spring of 2020, Layton and a team of scientists planted three restoration plots of kelp on rocky reefs along Tasmania’s east coast, having collected spores from surviving giant kelp plants identified as tolerant to the warmer seas.

The scientists planted tens of thousands of millimetre long juvenile kelp on the reefs. When they returned months later, at the end of summer, they were greeted by a beautiful sight.

“One of the sites had no survivors, but at the two other sites we had really good success,” Layton says. “At those two now, we have over 200 surviving giant kelp. The average size is about a metre, and the largest is over four metres tall, so they’re kind of like stringy teenagers at the moment.

“The really exciting thing for us is that in those first assessments after summer, the kelp looked really healthy. That was encouraging – that the increased thermal tolerance we found in the lab was translated to the field.”

The team will again plant giant kelp this winter, and hope to do so each year into the future.

The rehabilitation of these underwater forests has been touted as a tool in the quest to mitigate climate change – great forests that absorb great quantities of carbon – though Layton cautions that the science is still young when it comes to giant kelp’s carbon sequestration ability. Such efforts, along with regrowing seagrasses, are central to marine protection as the climate warms.

Their value to the planet and marine communities, however, is unquestionable. And moment by moment, these fast-growing marine marvels are now straining once more towards the sun and perhaps even a return one day to navigation charts.

“We’re very happy (with the planting), but it’s still early days,” Layton says. “We want these individuals to grow up and become mature and start producing their own babies. Restoration is never going to work if it’s reliant on me and my colleagues planting these kelp. We’ve got to kickstart the natural cycle, so those individuals that we plant start producing their own juveniles.

“They can reach reproductive age within a year, so we’re hoping that towards the end of this year the largest ones will start to become reproductive. That’ll be the next big exciting step for us.”

Author: Andrew Bain, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Cayne Layton, Masayuki Tatsumi

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Those familiar with the 2013 Oscar-winning film Gravity have some idea of how desperate a space debris crisis can be. It’s known as Kessler syndrome, the hypothetical event by which Earth’s orbital space becomes so crowded with junk that orbital impacts are inevitable. Such an event would mean nothing less than the end of space exploration and satellite coverage on Earth for thousands of years.

Debris can be formed of anything from whole derelict craft to millimetre-wide chips of paint. No matter its size, this waste orbits the Earth at hundreds of miles an hour. In 2020 alone, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Aeolus craft had to dodge a Starlink satellite after SpaceX declined to adjust its trajectory.

It’s no wonder policymakers are being pressured to impose tougher restrictions on space businesses to ensure de-orbit procedures (policies of bringing space technology back to Earth) and measures to rein in violations. Thankfully, innovative companies are also coming up with measures to mitigate the issue.

Founded in early 2018 and originally a Swiss state project, ClearSpace SA has developed Clearspace-1, a demonstration satellite which captures and de-orbits dead satellites using four spider-like robotic arms, which close like claws over derelict space technology. They plan to launch in 2025 with the help of the European Space Agency.

Astroscale, a Japanese company with branches in the UK and US, has a similar mission, though with a much smaller craft. Astroscale’s Jason Forshaw, Head of Future Business Europe explains: “the two-part mechanism is made up of the docking plate and the robotics which extend and engage a magnet to dock onto the associated plate and allow separation from it. After docking, the craft and its target can de-orbit, burning down into particulate in the Earth’s atmosphere.”

Astroscale’s demonstration, ELSA-d, is launching from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan in March 2021, on an Arianespace Soyuz, a Russian rocket. Smaller, smaller and therefore cheaper, de-orbiters like theirs could corner the market for orbital sustainability, if effective.

Though debris mitigation is smart, it requires advanced technology and a launch capability that’s not currently widely available. With sizable price tags and no regulation in the offing, cynics doubt space businesses will be willing to pay the bill to clean up after themselves.

With academics suggesting that nets, harpoons or even high-powered lasers could also offer results, the field of debris removal remains a lively concern in space science. It only remains for earthlings to take their conservation impetus to the final frontier.

Author: Laurence Russell, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: banner image of ClearSpace-1 – ClearSpaceSA, images 1,2,3 – ESA, images 4,5 – Astroscale

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Clean water is a fundamental human need, with polluted water leading to a host of diseases from cholera, to dysentery, hepatitis A, typhoid, and polio. 

Happily, global access to improved water has increased in recent decades, thanks to governmental and charitable funding, rising from 76 percent of the global population in 1990 to 91 percent in 2015, with even remote communities supplied with the manual hand pumps known as the Afrodev and India Mark 2, which are simple to install and draw clean water from boreholes drilled deep into the ground. But there’s a problem. With visits to rural locations being costly, water pump maintenance typically occurs only once or twice a year. This means that broken or degraded water pumps can stay broken for months, leaving communities with little option to return to dirty water sources.

A novel solution to this decades-old issue makes the most of a concert of recent technological breakthroughs: affordable cloud computing, the roll out of mobile telecommunications to the world’s remotest spots and the Internet of Things (IoT).

“We saw the technology was there to make cheap water point sensors a possibility, but we knew that there was a gap between big tech – who had the skills but no economic incentive to solve the problem – and charities that had the incentive but lacked the requisite tech skills” says Christoph Gorder of charity: water, the nonprofit behind the innovation. 

Charity: water developed two IoT sensor designs, the Afrodev and India Mark 2 sensors, with Michigan engineering firm Twisthink. They use the capacitive sensors commonly employed in smartphones to sense the position of a user’s finger on a touch screen which, in the water point sensors, measure the difference in electrical conductivity between the presence of water, and the presence of air, to sense the activity and efficiency of the water pumps. Microchips store the data and transmit it, via IoT carrier deals with local mobile phone companies, to charity: water’s New York head office, but also local charity and government partners such as NEWAH in Nepal, who use the data to coach locals to repair water sources in the field. The data can also be used to contract local companies to maintain sensors, with a clear picture of the work involved and its timings. It was important to Gorder and his team that the devices had a long battery life, as additional maintenance of sensors “would raise more issues that it resolved”.

Now installed at over 7,000 pumps in Ethiopia, Nepal, Ghana, Malawi and Uganda, the charity is currently producing its fourth generation sensor, which has an additional sensor to monitor pump handle strokes. Charity: water has made its sensor design open source, and is keen to help grassroots charities and governments across the world to roll out the technology anywhere it would be of benefit, although its application will be limited by local telecommunications reach.

Gorder says unexpected insights have come from the sensors’ data. Two months ago, the charity were field testing their fourth-generation pump in Uganda’s Apac district when they received data that the sensor was recording water flow 23 hours out of 24 (in other locations pumps tend to lie fallow from around 11pm to sunrise).

After much head-scratching and fears the device had a bug, it turned out that local brickmakers were making the most of a full moon to pump the many litres of water they need for their trade, with no one else about. “It was an aha moment,” says Gorder, “and it makes us wonder how much we don’t yet know about global water-pump use.”

Gorder hopes that insights such as these will bring the gift of reliable clean water to the three billion people across the world who rely on simple pumps for their water supply; a project that’s never been more pressing, as Covid shows the importance of sanitation to stave off disease.

Author: Sally Howard, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves

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