"In the end, the better question to ask is not whether humanity should collect deep-sea metals, but rather how. Before claiming that the cost of collecting nodules from the ocean floor is too high, researchers, activists, regulators, and companies should explore the degree to which operators can reduce impacts and define what obligations to hold industry accountable to. As such, calling for immediate moratoriums on deep-sea mining is not only premature, but a circumvention of constructive dialogue and negotiation."

"Temperatures are rising and rainfall patterns shifting across South America, central Africa and South-East Asia, where most of the world’s coffee is grown. By the end of the century between 35% and 75% of the coffee-growing land in Brazil, the world’s biggest producer, could be unusable, according to a recent paper published in Science of the Total Environment by Cássia Gabriele Dias, an agricultural engineer at the Federal University of Itajubá, in Brazil."

"If the reefs collapsed completely, it would be disastrous for the Florida Keys. According to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, the reefs in Southeast Florida are valued at $8.5 billion and sustain 70,000 full- and part-time jobs. The barrier reef also protects the Keys from hurricanes and major storms by soaking up wave action."

"'Masdar City is dismissed because the tech side didn’t work. It's seen as an eccentric experiment of an oil-rich state,' says Sarah Moser, an assistant professor at McGill University in Canada who studies new cities. 'But what's simple and radical about it is that there’s almost no direct sunlight that reaches the pedestrian level.'"

"A crew without much technical knowledge can manufacture and assemble the structures’ eight panels and the interior bamboo beams that support them on-site. Lari designed them so that homeowners can easily make repairsand even additions...If a flood is coming, homeowners can dismantle the structure’s bamboo skeleton from its permanent foundation and move it to higher ground. Bigger buildings, such as community centers, stand on stilts several feet high."

"Insect start-ups hope large facilities will help them get their foot in the door with big buyers in the market for fish and livestock feed, pet food and fertilizer. 'If you are just [producing] a few tons or tens of tons you don’t exist,' said Antoine Hubert, co-founder of Ynsect,a French start-up that specializes in mealworms. 'This is why we have to design something pretty massive, because you need thousands of tons if not tens of thousands of tons to exist for a single buyer.'"

"Restoring global forests where they occur naturally could potentially capture an additional 226 gigatons of planet-warming carbon, equivalent to about a third of the amount that humans have released since the beginning of the Industrial Era, according to a new study published on Monday in the journal Nature."