Green Heart is just one project in one city, but it represents a new way of thinking about the role of conservation in solving human problems. It is part of an emerging model for cross-sector collaboration that aims to create a world ready for the sustainability challenges ahead.

Is this world possible? Here, we present a new science-based view that says “Yes” — but it will require new forms of collaboration across traditionally disconnected sectors, and on a near unprecedented scale.

Many assume that economic interests and environmental interests are in conflict. But new research makes the case that this perception of development vs. conservation is not just unnecessary but actively counterproductive to both ends. Achieving a sustainable future will be dependent on our ability to secure both thriving human communities and abundant and healthy natural ecosystems.

The Nature Conservancy partnered with the University of Minnesota, CIRES at the University of Colorado Boulder, and 11 other organizations to ask whether it is possible to achieve a future where the needs of both people and nature are advanced. Can we actually meet people’s needs for food, water and energy while doing more to protect nature?

A False Choice

To answer this question, we compared what the world will look like in 2050 if economic and human development progress in a “business-as-usual” fashion and what it would look like if instead we join forces to implement a “sustainable” path with a series of fair-minded and technologically viable solutions to the challenges that lie ahead.

In both options, we used leading projections of population growth and gross domestic product to estimate how demand for food, energy and water will evolve between 2010 and 2050. Under business-as-usual, we played out existing expectations and trends in how those changes will impact land use, water use, air quality, climate, protected habitat areas and ocean fisheries. In the more sustainable scenario, we proposed changes to how and where food and energy are produced, asking if these adjustments could result in better outcomes for the same elements of human well-being and nature. Our full findings are described in a peer-reviewed paper — “An Attainable Global Vision for Conservation and Human Well-Being” — published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

These scenarios let us ask, can we do better? Can we design a future that meets people’s needs without further degrading nature in the process?

Our answer is “yes,” but it comes with several big “ifs.” There is a path to get there, but matters are urgent — if we want to accomplish these goals by mid-century, we’ll have to dramatically ramp up our efforts now. The next decade is critical.

Furthermore, changing course in the next ten years will require global collaboration on a scale not seen perhaps since World War II. The widely held impression that economic and environmental goals are mutually exclusive has contributed to a lack of connection among key societal constituencies best equipped to solve interconnected problems — namely, the public health, development, financial and conservation communities. This has to change.

The good news is that protecting nature and providing water, food and energy to a growing world do not have to be either-or propositions. Our view, instead, calls for smart energy, water, air, health and ecosystem initiatives that balance the needs of economic growth and resource conservation equally. Rather than a zero-sum game, these elements are balanced sides of an equation, revealing the path to a future where people and nature thrive together.

Two Paths to 2050

This vision is not a wholesale departure from what others have offered. A number of prominent scientists and organizations have put forward important and thoughtful views for a sustainable future; but often such plans consider the needs of people and nature in isolation from one another, use analyses confined to limited sectors or geographies, or assume that some hard tradeoffs must be made, such as slowing global population growth, taking a reduction in GDP growth or shifting diets off of meat. Our new research considers global economic development and conservation needs together, more holistically, in order to find a sustainable path forward.

What could a different future look like? We’ve used as our standard the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a set of 17 measures for “a world where all people are fed, healthy, employed, educated, empowered and thriving, but not at the expense of other life on Earth.” Our analysis directly aligns with ten of those goals. Using the SDGs as our guideposts, we imagine a world in 2050 that looks very different than the one today — and drastically different from the one we will face if we continue in business-as-usual fashion.

To create our assessment of business-as-usual versus a more sustainable path, we looked at 14 measurements including temperature change, carbon dioxide levels, air pollution, water consumption, food and energy footprints, and protected areas.

Over the next 30 years, we know we’ll face rapid population growth and greater pressures on our natural resources. The statistics are sobering — with 9.7 billion people on the planet by 2050, we can expect a 54 percent increase in global food demand and 56 percent increase in energy demand. While meetings these growing demands and achieving sustainability is possible, it is helpful to scrutinize where the status quo will get us.

The World Health Organization, World Economic Forum and other leading global development organizations now say that air pollution and water scarcity — environmental challenges — are among the biggest dangers to human health and prosperity. And our business-as-usual analysis makes clear what many already fear: that human development based on the same practices we use today will not prepare us for a world with nearly 10 billion people.

To put it simply, if we stay on today’s current path, we risk being trapped in an intensifying cycle of scarcity — our growth opportunities severely capped and our natural landscapes severely degraded. Under this business-as-usual scenario, we can expect global temperature to increase 3.2°C; worsened air pollution affecting 4.9 billion more people; overfishing of 84 percent of fish stocks; and greater water stress affecting 2.75 billion people. Habitat loss continues, leaving less than 50 percent of native grasslands and several types of forests intact.

However, if we make changes in where and how we meet food, water and energy demands for the same growing global population and wealth, the picture can look markedly different by mid-century. This “sustainability” path includes global temperature increase limited to 1.6°C — meeting Paris Climate Accord goals — zero overfishing with greater fisheries yields, a 90 percent drop in exposure to dangerous air pollution, and fewer water-stressed people, rivers and agricultural fields. These goals can be met while natural habitats extend both inside and outside protected areas. All signatory countries to the Aichi Targets meet habitat protection goals, and more than 50 percent of all ecoregions’ extents remain unconverted, except temperate grasslands (of which over 50 percent are already converted today).

What’s Possible

Achieving this sustainable future for people and nature is possible with existing and expected technology and consumption, but only with major shifts in production patterns. Making these shifts will require overcoming substantial economic, social and political challenges. In short, it is not likely that the biophysical limits of the planet will determine our future, but rather our willingness to think and act differently by putting economic development and the environment on equal footing as central parts of the same equation.

The Ross Ice Shelf is Antarctica’s largest ice shelf, a Texas-sized plate of glacial ice fed from the icy continent’s interior that floats atop the Southern Ocean. The ice shelf buttresses adjacent ice sheets on Antarctica’s mainland, impeding ice flow from land into water, like a cork in a bottle.

When ice shelves collapse, ice can flow faster from land into the sea, which can raise sea levels. Ice shelves all over Antarctica have been thinning, and in some cases breaking up or retreating, due to rising ocean and air temperatures. Prior observations have shown that Antarctic ice shelves can collapse suddenly and without obvious warning signs, which happened when the Larsen B ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula abruptly collapsed in 2002.

To better understand the physical properties of the Ross Ice Shelf, researchers buried 34 extremely sensitive seismic sensors under its snowy surface. The sensors allowed the researchers to monitor the ice shelf’s vibrations and study its structure and movements for over two years, from late 2014 to early 2017.

Ice shelves are covered in thick blankets of snow, often several meters deep, that are topped with massive snow dunes, like sand dunes in a desert. This snow layer acts like a fur coat for the underlying ice, insulating the ice below from heating and even melting when temperatures rise.

When the researchers started analyzing seismic data on the Ross Ice Shelf, they noticed something odd: Its fur coat was almost constantly vibrating.

When they looked closer at the data, they discovered winds whipping across the massive snow dunes caused the ice sheet’s snow covering to rumble, like the pounding of a colossal drum. Listen to the ice sheet’s “song” here.

They also noticed the pitch of this seismic hum changed when weather conditions altered the snow layer’s surface. They found the ice vibrated at different frequencies when strong storms rearranged the snow dunes or when the air temperatures at the surface went up or down, which changed how fast seismic waves traveled through the snow.

“It’s kind of like you’re blowing a flute, constantly, on the ice shelf,” said Julien Chaput, a geophysicist and mathematician at Colorado State University in Fort Collins and lead author of the new study published today in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

Just like musicians can change the pitch of a note on a flute by altering which holes air flows through or how fast it flows, weather conditions on the ice shelf can change the frequency of its vibration by altering its dune-like topography, according to Chaput.

“Either you change the velocity of the snow by heating or cooling it, or you change where you blow on the flute, by adding or destroying dunes,” he said. “And that’s essentially the two forcing effects we can observe.”

The hum is too low in frequency to be audible to human ears, but the new findings suggest scientists could use seismic stations to continuously monitor the conditions on ice shelves in near real-time. Studying the vibrations of an ice shelf’s insulating snow jacket could give scientists a sense of how it is responding to changing climate conditions, according to Douglas MacAyeal, a glaciologist at the University of Chicago who was not connected to the new study but wrote a commentary about the findings also published today in Geophysical Research Letters.

Changes to the ice shelf’s seismic hum could indicate whether melt ponds or cracks in the ice are forming that might indicate whether the ice shelf is susceptible to breaking up.

“The response of the ice shelf tells us that we can track extremely sensitive details about it,” Chaput said. “Basically, what we have on our hands is a tool to monitor the environment, really. And its impact on the ice shelf.”

Now, researchers from Brown University have developed a new alloy catalyst that both reduces platinum use and holds up well in fuel cell testing. The catalyst, made from alloying platinum with cobalt in nanoparticles, was shown to beat U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) targets for the year 2020 in both reactivity and durability, according to tests described in the journal Joule.

“The durability of alloy catalysts is a big issue in the field,” said Junrui Li, a graduate student in chemistry at Brown and the study’s lead author. “It’s been shown that alloys perform better than pure platinum initially, but in the conditions, inside a fuel cell the non-precious metal part of the catalyst gets oxidized and leached away very quickly.”

To address this leaching problem, Li and his colleagues developed alloy nanoparticles with a specialized structure. The particles have a pure platinum outer shell surrounding a core made from alternating layers of platinum and cobalt atoms. That layered core structure is key to the catalyst’s reactivity and durability, says Shouheng Sun, professor of chemistry at Brown and senior author of the research.

“The layered arrangement of atoms in the core helps to smooth and tighten platinum lattice in the outer shell,” Sun said. “That increases the reactivity of the platinum and at the same time protects the cobalt atoms from being eaten away during a reaction. That’s why these particles perform so much better than alloy particles with random arrangements of metal atoms.”

The details of how the ordered structure enhances the catalyst’s activity are described briefly in the Joule paper, but more specifically in a separate computer modeling paper published in the Journal of Chemical Physics. The modeling work was led by Andrew Peterson, an associate professor in Brown’s School of Engineering, who was also a coauthor on the Joule paper.

For the experimental work, the researchers tested the ability of the catalyst to perform the oxygen reduction reaction, which is critical to the fuel cell performance and durability. On one side of a proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cell, electrons stripped away from hydrogen fuel create a current that drives an electric motor. On the other side of the cell, oxygen atoms take up those electrons to complete the circuit. That’s done through the oxygen reduction reaction.

Initial testing showed that the catalyst performed well in the laboratory setting, outperforming a more traditional platinum alloy catalyst. The new catalyst maintained its activity after 30,000 voltage cycles, whereas the performance of the traditional catalyst dropped off significantly.

But while lab tests are important for assessing the properties of a catalyst, the researchers say, they don’t necessarily show how well the catalyst will perform in an actual fuel cell. The fuel cell environment is much hotter and differs in acidity compared to laboratory testing environments, which can accelerate catalyst degradation. To find out how well the catalyst would hold up in that environment, the researchers sent the catalyst to the Los Alamos National Lab for testing in an actual fuel cell.

The testing showed that the catalyst beats targets set by the Department of Energy (DOE) for both initial activity and longer-term durability. DOE has challenged researchers to develop catalyst with an initial activity of 0.44 amps per milligram of platinum by 2020, and an activity of at least 0.26 amps per milligram after 30,000 voltage cycles (roughly equivalent to five years of use in a fuel cell vehicle). Testing of the new catalyst showed that it had an initial activity of 0.56 amps per milligram and an activity after 30,000 cycles of 0.45 amps.

“Even after 30,000 cycles, our catalyst still exceeded the DOE target for initial activity,” Sun said. “That kind of performance in a real-world fuel cell environment is really promising.”

The researchers have applied for a provisional patent on the catalyst, and they hope to continue to develop and refine it.

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