So, getting back to the topic again this is the outline slide we saw the water cycle, we saw the water problem in all its various dimensions and then we also started looking at some of the solutions in which we looked at rainwater harvesting and how that is useful and very important to do. The now we are going to also talk about something that is again equally important particularly for the rest of the water that we need. So, the rainwater harvesting was mainly in the context of providing adequate drinking water although rainwater should be harvested for more reasons than just drinking water. So, taking it further now how do we ensure that enough water is made available for all the other requirements and in that we need to connect back to the water cycle that we studied. In the water cycle we studied that you know there is evaporation that happens from the oceans and all many other surfaces as well it goes as water vapor which forms clouds and then there is precipitation and in India there is more rain than snow. So, it falls down as rain and then it flows over the surface in the form of streams and rivers and back to the ocean, but some of it percolates underground and then underground it follows a much slower pathway to reach the ocean again. So, the part of this entire hydrological cycle that is useful to human beings in which the water remains of direct use to human beings is from precipitation to the point that the water reaches the ocean. The rest of the part of the hydrological cycle is not directly accessible to us we cannot directly get water out of that. So, if at all we have to make any alterations modifications then we can only do it from the point of rainfall until the water flows to the sea. Now, I had made a passing mention before that in India we have a monsoon climate where roughly 80 percent of the rainfall happens between the monsoon months which are June to September the southern tip of India has another return monsoon sometime in November December, but for the most of the subcontinent this is the situation. So, if we manage so actually 80 percent of the rainfall in just a few months is actually very difficult for us to ensure adequate water supplies throughout the year. So, you have all the rain that simply flows over the surface and reaches the ocean and then the rest of the year you are left with none. So, there is a it is of great importance to ensure that the water actually remains available for the rest of the year. So, that can be done by what is known as watershed management. So, let us first try to understand what a watershed is and I am sure that many people might have studied this concepts in school, but again the reason I have put these things and I think somebody in the chat had left a message that this is relevant only to school children and not to engineering students. I do not subscribe to that idea because I have observed in many of my classes students have very little recollection of whatever they must have learnt in school. So, if I start off at assuming if I start off assuming that they already know this terminology and everything it does not work out. So, I invariably have to end up going to relatively basic concepts. So, I do not think there is any harm in doing that. If you feel that your class is actually at a much higher level then you can modify your approach accordingly, but I think it is more common for students to not remember all these things even if they have done it in school. So, let us start by understanding what a watershed is. The watershed is that region of the land where the water that falls on it as rainfall will all drain down to the same point be it the ocean or be it a lake or be it some other water body. So, the watershed contains various streams, it may contain rivers or rivulets which all converge to the same point. So, if you look at this diagram there is a maybe it is not very clear, but there is a dotted line over here. So, any rain that falls on the left of that dotted line that is on the other side of the ridge would be part of a different watershed. Any rain that falls on the right side of that dotted line would be part of this watershed. So, that is the idea of the watershed it is that trough like area where wherever you wherever you pour water it will all go and converge in the same place ok. So, now these watersheds smaller watersheds are part of larger watersheds. So, maybe the watershed of a small tributary is part of the watershed of the major river into which that tributary merges. So, you have these some of these watersheds which are very very large and they span across states and you have even cities that are included in that. Now, since there are cities and roads and everything that are included in the watershed, there are so many sources of pollution that are there within the watershed. And so, the water along as it flows carries maybe some soil eroded soil maybe some sediments and pollutants as well. Now, as I said if you have rain only in 3 or 4 months during the year and all that rain is going to fall on that land and it is going to drain right into the river within a few days it is going to reach the ocean. So, you can depending on which river is nearby you can calculate the distance from the ocean and you know assume some reasonable number for an average velocity of water and you can calculate how many days it is going to take for the water to reach the ocean. And typically in many places it would be a matter of days not much more than that for the water to just be lost. So, the water that goes back into the ocean is not usable for us. Whereas, if you if the water on the other hand if it percolates underground then the flow is much much slower and the water may take months years or several centuries to reach the ocean. So, if the ground water flow is much slower and during the entire time that it is flowing slowly underground you can always tap it by digging a well or a bore well. So, there is a benefit in ensuring more ground water recharge as opposed to surface runoff. This may sound very simple, but if we merely succeed in doing that I think our countries water problems would be a lot less severe. So, how do we ensure that that the water does not get lost within a matter of days after precipitation? So, good practices good management practices throughout the watershed can actually enable this to happen. In that I want to emphasize the role of plants and natural ecosystems. If you in your course you might be teaching topics on ecology and biodiversity. So, this is a good point where you can relate some of the things learnt over there the need for preservation of natural ecosystems. This is a direct reason why we should preserve these natural ecosystems. So, let us see how plants and natural ecosystems benefit the flow of the management of water in the watershed. So, if plants are not present the raindrops which fall from the sky you know as they are released from the clouds they are falling at a terminal velocity which depending on the droplet size may be between 7 to 30 kilometers per hour and that can be quite a significant impact on the soil. So, when you when that raindrop hits the soil directly an uncovered soil you see a kind of a miniature explosion that you that happens on the soil and soil particles can be ejected upward and horizontally to quite some distance. So, that impact actually causes lot of damage to the soil the soil loses its structure and it starts the process of erosion. On the other hand if the soil is vegetated if there is some vegetation on the soil be it grass or be trees if there are trees there will be some ground litter fallen leaves dead leaves. So, all this together there the trees will intercept the raindrops at the canopy the rain rain water will trickle down fall on the bed of leaves and it will trickle down further to the to the surface of the soil and the soil damage is prevented. So, then again you know if there is vegetation on the ground it the water that is flowing over the surface the surface runoff velocity also is controlled which again limits sheet erosion. The roots of the plants will hold the soil tightly and prevent further erosion and loss of soil. Now, when you have vegetated soil with roots inside the soil it is living soil. So, there are creatures that are present in the soil which are making burrows into the soil making sure that the soil remains porous and aerated. So, when you have these burrows in the soil it in and the porosity of the soil is high naturally it allows for more percolation of ground water underground. So, instead of having an impervious layer of hard soil over which most of the water is going to runoff now you have a sponge like soil which will absorb some water and encourage percolation. So, when water actually percolates underground it is following the slower path to the ocean in which it remains usable for a longer period. So, moreover the plant plants growing over that add humus to the soil which improves the soil fertility and its productivity and many plants even fix nitrogen. So, you have better productivity out of the soil. Now, so when you have less erosion and you have less damage to the soil the silt load is also reduced. One problem that many dams are facing today is that the dams silt due to erosion from the hill slopes. See when there is deforestation in the catchment of a dam the catchment is that part of the water shed which is above a dam upstream from the dam. So, in the catchment when there is a lot of deforestation trees are cut the hill slopes are burnt many people burn these hill slopes to clear the vegetation and to ensure that they get good grass in the following season. But that leads to lot of erosion right after the rains and all that soil that silt that comes along with the water goes and collects in the dam. So, the dams reservoir capacity reduces. The benefits that the dam was going to give during its lifespan also reduces its lifespan reduces. So, again you have to go for desiliting of dams which becomes expensive. So, that is an additional cost. So, in the in the lifetime of the dam the cost-benefit ratio is very adversely affected. So, if the soil is vegetated then the erosion is reduced and during and the soil also becomes quite productive. So, I have the all the points that we just now discussed I have summarized them in a table where we compare barren land versus vegetated land. So, you see that direct impact of raindrops on soil on barren land yes you have direct impact and on vegetated land you do not have direct impact. So, all these points like loss of soil structure and erosion in barren land you have it in vegetated land you do not this is just for some easy reference ok. Now, so the most important thing to do in a watershed is to ensure adequate vegetation natural habitats if they are preserved then naturally you have taken the first step towards ensuring good water supplies. If you have deforested hill slopes in the watershed then you have taken the first step wrong. So, then after that what follows is that the water that is then flowing downward in the watershed we must try to slow it down because as the water flows faster it has more kinetic energy it can lead to greater erosion. So, we have to slow it and we have to store as much as possible. So, this can be done by making surface tanks or we can make percolation tanks which are like small ponds, small bunds and things like that there are various structures which I am going to show you a nice video for. The extraction of ground water again has to be limited because if you over extract then it is going to deplete the aquifer and an aquifer is shared by a large number of people it is possible for one or two entities to over extract water and inconvenience a large population. For example, a large possibly a cement plant or a thermal power station can you know over extract resources and or some agricultural age area you know they can over extract water and they can deplete the aquifer which adversely affects everybody else. Now, instead of going through the various structures the engineering structures that are normally made or followed in watershed management. So, we are trying to make more water available for people. So, that is done by slowing down the flow of water after precipitation and trying to store it wherever possible. So, it all starts with protection of vegetation in the catchment. So, that is control of deforestation, control of over grazing and of fire. Then if there is a slope the water tends to flow and gather speed as it as it flows down. So, it is better to terrace the slopes so that the water kind of slows down over there and at the periphery of the terraces or along contours they normally dig trenches and they put the soil on the downward side. So, it forms kind of a bund and those bunds can be planted with some plants or some trees. So, these are planted bunds. So, there is a trench and a bund. So, the water that flows goes along the terrace slows down then accumulates in the trench and large amounts of the water tend to percolate underground and recharge the ground water rather than flowing on the surface. Then there are small tanks that are constructed, there are bunds that are made percolation tanks. There are in places in where there are streams they make check dams to reduce the velocity of water. So, large amount of the silt actually gets intercepted there itself rather than going to the larger bunds. So, there are various practices that they follow and this can make a lot more water available moreover in the watershed it is important to minimize the wastage of water. So, that includes choice of crops. So, if a certain region has got less average annual rainfall then insisting on planting a water hungry crop like bananas or sugarcane or coconuts is is not a good idea at all and in fact, it will end up depleting the ground water. So, the choice of crops is also very important and then the crops that are planted should be based on the seasonal availability of water. So, planting something in summer is probably again going to deplete the scarce ground water resources. So, when all these things are done then you will find that quite contrary to the situation of large dams where the people whose land gets submerged, they bear the costs, they do not get any benefits of the dam and people downstream in the command area of the dam they get benefits from canals and hydroelectric power and what not. So, in contrast over here in watersheds the prosperity that is associated with this project is distributed everywhere more or less evenly. So, because even in the in the upper reaches of the river system you have small dams and structures where people have it is at least adequate for people to do their agriculture and their basic meet their basic needs. One issue though is large dams produce a lot of hydroelectric power and these smaller smaller dams or medium sized dams they do not produce as much. But if the provision of energy in a watershed is looked at in a comprehensive manner then by integrating other renewable forms including wind turbines, solar and micro-heidel or mini-heidel projects all together it may not be such a bad deal compared to a large dam. So, there is another very important point is that these watershed management programs they will not succeed if there is no community involvement. So, there should be education of the community awareness creation for the community, there should be empowerment of the community. So, the community should run the project themselves it is not if you are expecting the government to do everything it will probably not happen in the best possible way and the funds might simply get wasted. But when the community takes ownership of it and they contribute their labour also and they ensure that it is done then it can actually be successful. There are really amazing success stories in this area and I am going to show you the video of this place called Hivare bazar where there was it was a village like many other villages where due to scarcity of water and rampant crime and alcohol problems and other gender related issues it was a probably a horrible place to live. But due to the initiative taken by the villagers over there it has now completely it is now a changed place and the village boasts of something like 52 millionaires in that village. So, that is so good to know. So, let us watch this nice video. So, I hope you like this video there are there are several such places in India several environmental heroes, social heroes in I mean they are around every corner we just do not happen to see them and I think you know I think media gives too much attention to the problems that we have maybe some attention is required even here to appreciate their efforts. What a wonderful work they have done and there are there are other examples at Radegan Siddhi also I have personally visited many many years ago and I was really impressed by what all has been achieved over there that that again is a similar place where rainfall is low and all these problems that they talked about pretty much used to be there until Anna Hazare came over there and did what he has done. So, I think it is important to identify local examples so that it impacts students in a bigger way, but at the same time showing some examples from across the country is also useful. I just I had made a mention of how for centuries people have been people have developed very nice methods of conserving water of storing water in various parts of the country. This kind of lists down some examples and this is not comprehensive at all. So, you can feel free to add more to this and do make it a point to discuss these things with your students so that we actually learn together. There is another activity that you could probably do with your students and that is to identify which watershed you belong. I am sure your city or village or town wherever wherever you are located is part of some watershed. So, it is a good idea to try to identify which watershed you belong to and then classify whether what type of a watershed it is and what are the major issues in that watershed. You can identify some government agencies to get this information or some non-governmental organizations and then when you know that there are some issues maybe you can contribute in some small way to towards the various efforts for restoration of the watershed by forming the citizens groups or even through your nature clubs. I think most colleges will certainly have nature clubs. So, once we have adequate water available how do we then maximize its benefit and how do we use it efficiently. So, that is the second part. So, in the first part we decide we we made sure that adequate water was made available and then in the second part we are going to see how to use it efficiently. So, let us look at why we need all that water. So, we need water for three major end use sectors that is agriculture, industry and domestic consumption and the numbers are roughly as seen on the slide is there agriculture is roughly 87 percent industry is about 8 percent and out of that 8 percent 7 percent is for thermoelectric generation. So, the 1 percent is for rest of the industry and domestic is mere 5 percent. So, I put in the reference over there so you can you can refer to that source. So, once we get an idea of where the water is actually required you know then we will know we can think better of how to use it more efficiently. So, if 87 percent of the water that we extract from all the various sources is going for agriculture then we right away we notice that water agriculture food and waste they are all inseparable they are very closely related and they should be considered together to evolve solutions. And again I am I am repeating what I have said before that more than 50 percent of the food comes from the irrigated land which is only 35 percent of the land and we have roughly 30 percent of degraded land. So, what can we do then we can actually we need to develop organic polycultures or agro ecosystems which are water efficient they are low input. So, agriculture requiring too many inputs be it in the form of irrigation or being it be it in the form of fertilizers and other agro chemicals is not going to work out in the long run because of the environmental impacts. And I am going to discuss a little more about that in the in the topic on food on Friday I believe. So, what can really revolutionize this area is low input organic polycultures by polycultures I mean different species of crop plants grown together which can which can provide high yields and at the same time not require so many inputs the more the inputs the agricultural system requires the greater are the environmental impacts. So, there are there are cases where the yields of rain fed lands can increase from between 15 percent to 150 percent in in these low input organic polycultures. Now, it does not mean that they will always over yield compared to the previous methods, but if designed well they can they can give very high yields. Now, inputs of organic carbon waste to the soil can improve not only the productivity, but it can also reduce water use because organic carbon in the soil makes the soil hold more water. So, it means the irrigation requirements are somewhat lesser. So, carbonaceous waste all the organic waste that comes out of our our kitchens or from from dairy animals and things like that can be composted and if the compost is added to the soil then the requirements of fertilizer also reduces and the solid waste also reduces in volume. I think depending on the place it would vary, but for the solid waste I think nearly 50 percent of it would probably be organic and compostable material and could be as I said you know depending on whether it is urban or rural and in various places it would change a bit, but it is I think in general maybe safe to assume that it is at least 50 percent in India. So, what do I mean by these polycultures? There is a I want to I am debating whether I should show you this video on Friday or today. So, this is a 300 year old agro ecosystem it is a food forest in Vietnam. So, it is a forest which looks very much like a forest, but it has all food plants and it has been around for about 300 years with a with a family. The beauty of this of this food forest is that it does not yield only in one layer. So, let us take the example of a rice field or a wheat field. You have the rice or the wheat that grows in a certain area and you know that is the only layer that is yielding, but in a food forest right from the underground layers which is tuber crops. You have tuber crops as well as vegetation that grows close to the ground, then you have the herbaceous layer, then you have the creepers and the vines, then you have the shrubs, the short trees, tall trees, some seven layers in in these food forests each layer giving some fruit or some useful product to us. So, it could be yielding either food medicine or fiber like like cotton for instance. So, it could be or maybe wood. So, there are these various outputs that come from these food forests and they these outputs are derived from various layers within the food forest. So, as a result these these food forests can be enormously more productive than our conventional systems. The beauty of such such arrangements is that these are perennial systems you do not. So, if they are perennial systems it means that every season you do not have to plow the soil. If you do not have to plow the soil and add fertilizer and add tremendous amounts of labor every season I mean that increases the costs. So, this is low input or almost zero input because the seeds fall and new plants again sprout up over there. So, this is a completely different way of thinking about agriculture. These are enormously productive. So, we are not taking a hit in productivity and again these are so resilient that they have this particular example that I am showing you is has been around for 300 years without any problem. So, I guess we will go ahead and watch this video. So, we are back I will discuss a little more about such systems and in the in the talk on food later. But I want you to appreciate one thing you know I would like to remember something I had told you in the topic on sustainable development where sustainability requires a coordination from different fields. So, this is something that you see over here there is it is a food forest, but it is also a gene bank. He mentioned about people coming to their food forest and asking for their genetic material because they are immensely productive agro ecosystems and that genetic material is extremely valuable. So, not only are they getting food in a very efficient manner, but they are also producing they are also maintaining a gene bank a living gene bank of these materials. Again all those things about water conservation since you have trees there is the canopy interception recharge of the ground water all those good things are happening. Then again the inputs are so less because it is well shaded there are trees which strike deep roots and because they have deep roots irrigation requirements are very little and of course, it is Vietnam. So, it rains quite a bit over there, but such systems if you have in an agro ecosystem if you have tree crops then generally they are the trees require less frequent irrigation. So, the inputs are very less and the output is very very high. So, as a result the if you put the inputs in the denominator and the output in the numerator you will find that the inputs shrink to a very small number and the output being very high these systems are highly efficient. So, these are if we develop systems like this and they do not all have to look like this I think people from Konkan or Kerala they might they might have seen similar systems there are there are farms which are which actually have things like that in I have seen personally places in Konkan as well as Kerala which are similar. So, they do not all have to look like this I mean the species of plants can be different if you live in a in drier parts then obviously the species would be different. I have also seen an example of a similar food forest somewhere near Israel I do not remember it properly, but somewhere in the Middle East. So, they the species that they have are different, but you can still have similar structures again highly efficient perennial systems. So, you are not afraid of them dying out recently because of the hail storms in North India farmers suffered such terrible losses. Can you imagine a food forest like this if there is a drought for a year or a few years maybe the herbaceous layer may suffer some losses, but nothing is going to happen to the large trees if there is a thunderstorm or some rainstorm maybe one or two trees may fall over, but it does not destroy the forest. So, these are these are highly resilient systems. So, we need resilience we need resilient systems like that. So, there are many things these that can be done in this and maybe a little more will be covered in the food forest, but basically the concept of getting maximum output with minimum possible inputs. By inputs I mean it in a somewhat of a general sense inputs of water, labor, energy, all the inputs that go into agriculture we need to minimize that and get the maximum output and these such perennial systems are very they score very well on those criteria. So, that is about something about something we can do about agriculture which consumes most of the water then about industry rather than rather than going in detail about industrial wastewater management which probably many textbooks already deal with. I am just going to take a very superficial, but general approach where what I am showing here is various items that we purchase some of them are food products some of them are like t-shirts shoes and things other products they are they are all manufactured or they are processed in some industry and they require they require water for processing them. So, there is what is known as embodied water it is the water associated with that product which is with the water which was consumed during its production its distribution and maybe its end of life its disposal. So, 100 grams of potato has 25 liters of associated water which is the embodied water a pair of shoes has 8000 liters. So, what this goes to say is that when you shop you are placing a demand for water and if you shop for unnecessary items it is going to it is going to prompt more and more extraction of resources. So, just as there is embodied water there is embodied energy and we have an energy crisis also. So, when you shop unnecessarily when you buy consumer products and most of these consumer products maybe are discarded the same day or maybe within a few days or within a few months. So, for all for such a small use that they provide to us they you actually have to extract such large quantities of water as well as spend so much energy. So, conscious consumption is very very important reducing unnecessary consumption reduces the energy and water crisis. So, for industrial water use specialized treatment is required and in fact, again what we this is one point that we had earlier discussed is that we tend to create problems first and then keep ourselves busy in trying to solve them. I do not think that is a very intelligent approach. The more intelligent approach is to design our processes and our products so that we do not create a problem. So, if green chemistry green production processes can reduce the environmental impacts. So, not only about water it is also about energy it is also about persistent pollutants heavy metal pollution all these factors included. So, industries should should gradually evolve towards recycling their water 100 percent as much as possible. So, closed-loop production if that can be done then it will really you know that is the direction in which industry needs to evolve that will raise the costs of many products that we use. But again if the environment is bearing the cost presently if the cost is externalized the what do you mean by externalizing costs the price of the product does not include all the costs associated with that product. In other words if in manufacturing a product if somebody's water gets polluted somebody's land gets polluted that is a cost, but that is not included in the price of the product. So, it means that that cost has been externalized. So, we find many products which are cheap because costs have been externalized somebody else is bearing the cost for giving that product cheaply to you. So, sustainability requires environmental protection and even social justice. So, externalizing costs like that is not consistent with social justice why should somebody else bear the cost for the products that we enjoy. So, internalizing costs is a positive step yes some products will have will definitely become more expensive, but our economy also has to go through a learning process I do not think anything is perfect neither is our economy. So, what is the harm in evolving? So, we already saw about industrial symbiosis I showed you in the chapter on sustainable development. So, sometimes making closed loop systems within one industry may not be possible or it may not be very profitable for the industry, but if there is a network of industries which are sharing their resources then it probably would work out better. Now, there are some industrial waste which do not contain very harmful toxic or persistent chemicals and in those circumstances there are low energy alternative ways of treatment such as you have planted filters, you have constructed wetlands, IIT Bombay has also developed a very nice technique, DEWATS is another thing. So, I have given several resources there are cases of industries which have actually closed the water loop. So, what do I mean by closing the water loop that they operate in a closed loop they do not they do not there are no net input of water they use the water they recycle the water entirely. So, there in that reference you could you could go there and just maybe read up on the various companies mentioned over there. So, we looked at conservation in agriculture, conservation in industry and now coming to domestic water use and I have something very interesting to share with you over here a nice video again. Water use domestic water use is only 5 percent, but if that 5 percent of water which ultimately gets converted into sewage if that goes into a water body it can spoil very large amounts of water. So, even a small let us say a glass full of highly polluted water poured in a barrel of clean water makes that entire barrel of clean water unfit to drink. So, just because it is 5 percent it does not mean that it is any less important it should be treated well. And yes there are there are interesting ways of treating domestic water there are some issues, but even the conventional effluent treatment plants have some issues. So, there is no running away from issues. But one thing is that this is again one thing that I told you to keep in mind is that degraded soils can benefit from organic inputs of organic carbon and our sewage domestic sewage contains large quantities of organic matter. So, can we kind of tie both ends you know at one end the soils are lacking organic matter and at the other end the water is polluted because it has organic matter. So, why do not we tie the two ends? So, is it is it possible to use sewage water after some treatment for growing plants for instance. And it is possible there are there are places where people have irrigated using have they have it is not a good idea to grow food crops with sewage water or even reclaimed water because of fear of contamination by pathogens. But there is no harm in growing tree crops for timber or things like that. So, there is another issue of I told you about flushing with good clean water that is that is not the best idea. In fact, recycled water or reclaimed water if available can be used to flush, but you can as I said in the sustainability topic you need to think out of the box. Is it necessary to flush that is also something that you could ask and it turns out that many people have thought of it that way. There are composting toilets and in the video on Auroville that we saw there was a composting toilet that does not look very suitable for an urban lifestyle. But I have actually seen very comfortable and very nice looking composting toilets and they look very clean.  So, there are composting toilets there are some available in India there are some brands which are very expensive, but I am sure we are very innovative lot and things can be made a lot cheaper. Now, there are alternative water treatment methods the conventional water treatment costs a lot of energy, but there are alternative methods and this is where I said you can click the hyperlink and watch videos. There are various methods that are listed over here they are really very interesting I request everybody to please in your notebook please note down this slide on alternative water treatment methods and go to each of those hyperlinks and check them out for yourself they are very interesting methods. I will just tell you what these constructed wetlands are you have some primary treatment may be settled down the solids and then you transfer the supernatant to a so, this is a horizontal flow kind of setup where you have some wetland plants that are planted in a in let us say like a trough of it is a tank which is like a trough and you have the water coming in and then the cleaned water going out. So, the microbial colonies that are associated around the roots of these plants they do the magic and you get reasonably clean water and you can you can obviously have serial arrangement or serial and parallel arrangement of such tank elements so, that you get water of the desired quality. So, there are again references and you can follow them there is one other method that I liked very much and I am just going to quickly explain to you this is what we normally do with our domestic sewage we have our domestic sewage we have an effluent treatment plant we pour in large quantities of electricity in it and we get reclaimed water but we also get some sludge and that sludge can pose a pollution problem it is it can be applied to land but then you know it can contain some pollutants. The problem is that this system although it yields reclaimed water it consumes large quantities of energy. So, there is I have cited the source over here this organization has developed a system where they have an open wetland with ducks and the domestic sewage comes into that open wetland and in the open wetland it is open to the sky. So, you have sunlight and when you have sunlight you have algae growing on it and then the ducks feed on that and as they feed they are paddling through the through the pond and because they are paddling through the pond it aerates the pond and more over with the beaks as they feed they are essentially they are atomizing the water because they want to get to the algae and they want to squeeze out all the water out of their beak. So, in the process it aerates the water. So, the the aeration costs are 0 the the flock of ducks is released they are put in a cage at night and in the morning they are released and they rush because they are hungry they rush to the to the pond and feed over it feed on it all all through the day come back to the cage and lay eggs. So, you get reclaimed water you get eggs all for for doing nothing just you just need to have those tanks and some the gentleman from this organization who had come to our institute he explained that a case study where the monthly electricity costs for that project were lakhs of rupees and they completely turned around the whole thing and it started yielding a few lakhs of rupees in profits by the selling of those eggs and getting the reclaimed water. Obviously, these these systems have got problems there are several problems one one problem would be what if there are persistent organic chemicals in the in the sewage. So, persistent organic chemicals are are not a good idea from a sustainability point of view anyway. So, they need to be eliminated if there are consumer products that are having such chemicals they need to be phased out these these products should not be on the market shelf if we want to talk about sustainability. It is not I mean it is a self-defeating approach you know to talk about sustainability and then allow such products to be on the shelf unless those things are done I mean none of the systems are going to work. I have just modified that and said that you can you could take some of the algae and you can that plant biomass can be converted into energy through either a biogas plant or a pyrolysis plant. So, you could you could add more and more elements, but it becomes a more complex system and then the infrastructure costs may be higher. So, you will have to strike a balance and that depends on the local conditions availability of things and. So, at at Amruta we have been working on similar systems and this shows how your solid waste the organic part of the solid waste the sewage and its treatment all can be integrated to yield multiple benefits. So, you can get treated water you can get vermicompost you can get biogas also and you can make some either food or fodder or wood as well as milk. So, you can get many outputs and you can tune which one you want more and which one you want less depending on the situation. We started some work we have a biogas plant and we are taking the effluent from the biogas plant treating it this is a constructed wetland it is an experimental setup for a constructed wetland and we take the effluent from the biogas plant and put it into this wetland and you have a three different treatments this is a simple sand filter and you have two units in series and this is a planted filter and this one has a different lower bed height. So, we are investigating I have a master's student from ETH Switzerland who is she is an exchange student who has come to Amruta to do her masters. So, this is part of her project and it is been going quite successfully we found a very significant BOD reduction as well as a significant reduction of ammonium, but rest of the results are not out yet. So, I would rather not comment on that. The last thing I have is a small video which is I showed you a success story and an environmental hero who did some work in villages, but you may say that we are not from villages and we live in cities. So, what can we do in cities? So, here is an example of what you can do in a city this gentleman in a busy city like Bangalore has used his roof to literally do wonders by recycling water. So, he again the same concept you know recycling water and producing food are not to be decoupled, but you can do all that in one system. So, he has done that and let us let us watch this nice video. So, we are almost at the end of this session. I have I have a list of things that we can do over here related to water there are several things that you as a person maybe as a family can do and I have listed down a few things over here, but I think your imagination is the limit and you could think of many more things to do and make some positive impacts on this issue. I think if you if you involve students in a constructive way, then this topic will become very very interesting for the students and I think it will give you also the satisfaction of having contributed in a in a significant way. So, I have I have some extra resources you could read upon. So, thank you very much have a good evening.


The National Drug Law Enforcement Agency has dismissed the position of the Undostated Governor, Rotimi Akeridolu, and some members of the National Assembly on the legalization of cannabis in the country. Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the NDLEA, retired Brigadier-General Buber Mara, stated this in Abu-Jawal unveiling activities to commemorate this year's International Day Against Drug Abuse and Drug Trafficking. All calling on all stakeholders to join the fight against drug trafficking. Mara says Nigeria is still ranked highest in the use of cannabis globally. Why will you be seen fire and step into it? Yes, the issue of the use of cannabis for medical, medicinal purposes is approved. In some countries, not in all. Not in all. And now we have to look at our own circumstances here. It's possible the time will come for us to rethink, but this is not the time. This is definitely not the time for Nigeria with the highest prevalence of use. Go to legal states. The drug use prevalence is 33% from that survey. Most of that is from cannabis and the Southwest itself. Bondu State is the greatest grower of this substance. And the NDLEA will continue to burn any farm that we find and arrest the perpetrators. This year's theme is share facts on drugs and save lives. It's critical to know the facts about drugs. There's a lot of myth, a lot of misinformation circulating. And it is critical, especially for you, ladies and gentlemen of the press, to know the facts of drugs on drugs. And to only share information from verified sources such as UNODC, NDLEA and other official sources.


Thank you all for joining us, and thanks, Tom, for the introduction. I agree trying to fill Alicia's shoes is nearly impossible. It's taking me and Tom. And I thought we would start with some quick introductions for each of the panelists so you understand where we're coming from and our different perspectives on this work. As Tom noted, and as the slide says, I work at the Steyr-Taylor Center at Stanford. My background is primarily in investments in capital markets. I joined Stanford a few years ago to work on climate finance risks. And this led me to the thrilling first thing in the morning topic of carbon accounting and carbon markets. So it's good that you're well caffeinated to listen to what I have to say about carbon accounting. Generally speaking, carbon accounting is very confusing. The way the marketplace does carbon accounting today was designed as a risk management system. It wasn't designed as a carbon accounting system. And over the past couple of decades, people have tried to adapt that system to be actual accounting. And that has led to a whole host of confusing problems around carbon accounting. And what our work does is tries to rethink how carbon accounting ought to work in support of carbon markets so that carbon removals and carbon as an asset can be traded. And we think that's a very important part of the journey to net zero. We also encounter this problem of no one knows what net zero means. And part of our research is to give extremely precise and clear definitions of what net zero means. And we'll get into some more of that topic. I will turn to Bob. Thank you, Mark, it's a pleasure to be here. And I think, Tom, you did a masterful job kind of giving us the big picture here, especially with no notice. My background is as an economist. I actually was an undergraduate here at Stanford in the inaugural class of the Human Biology program. One of the things that I learned in human biology is if you want to understand human behavior, you have to understand economics and incentives. And so I became a PhD in economics. I taught at MIT for a couple of years and then went to Wall Street, spent 30 years on Wall Street, became a partner at Goldman Sachs and head of risk management. And about 15 years ago, after I left Goldman, I started getting interested in carbon pricing. And it was kind of a rabbit hole that I fell into trying to understand the economic literature on the social cost of carbon. And actually wrote a paper on that. More recently have become involved in federal policy. I chaired the CFTC subcommittee on managing climate risk in the US financial system. And I'm now the premier member as the title of something called the CFRAC, which is the Climate Related Financial Risk Advisory Committee. And we advise the Climate Related Risk Committee, which is part of the Financial Stability Oversight Council. So what I would say is that the Treasury Department in particular has become very focused on climate risk in the financial system, has stood up these two committees and is now moving forward. My interest in pricing carbon led me about 10 years ago when I was working at an investment firm, Kepos Capital, to start researching where pricing was in different countries and across time. And we created something we call the carbon barometer. You can look it up online. And what it does is it's a comprehensive measure of the incentives that different countries have put in place to reduce emissions. It includes carbon taxes, of course, but it turns out carbon taxes are among the least important incentives globally. It also includes emissions trading systems, fossil fuel subsidies, as well as fossil fuel taxes. Turns out fossil fuel taxes are by far the most important incentive. And also things like reduced carbon fuel standards, feed-in tariffs, and so on. There's seven different policies that we look at around the world. The basic story of where we are in carbon pricing is nowhere, sadly. The global average price is about $18.5 a ton. The social cost of carbon, where it ought to be. When I started looking at this 15 years ago, I think mainstream economics thought it was maybe around $50 a ton. The UN, in one of its IPCC reports, said it's somewhere between $2 and $200 and no one really knows, and therefore it's not very helpful. Some work that I did with some colleagues. We came up with a model in which we couldn't get a number below $120. And now resources for the future, which is probably the think tank doing the most definitive work on this has estimated it's $180. I think the EPA has a tentative number of 190. So the numbers have clearly gone way up. And yet the global average is about $18.5 a ton. Second thing to know is that there's no harmonization. The incentives to reduce emissions are very strong in Europe. In the UK and in Spain, we estimate them at about $130 a ton. And that comes primarily from their emissions trading system, which applies to manufacturing, to aviation. And then they have high fossil fuel taxes on diesel and gasoline. And so when you add it all up and average it, it's well over $100 a ton, about $130 in the UK. In the US, in contrast, and in China and in India, which are the three big polluters today, you have incentives that are all less than the global average. It's kind of sad. In the US, 90% of it is from the gasoline tax. Then you have these small contributions from other policies, for instance, in California and in the Registrates. And then you have a number of countries around the world, Russia, Venezuela, countries in the Middle East, where there's basically fixed prices for gasoline below the market. And so you have implicit subsidies to pollution. In the UAE, which is going to be the sponsor of the next cop and the head of the oil company is the head of their delegation, they have incentives of about $70 negative per ton of carbon. Because they have the fixed prices on gasoline. So you don't have this common incentive. And what you see when you look historically is that countries that have strong incentives decarbonize their economies. In Europe, they're much more carbon efficient than we are in the US. And you also see another pattern, which is that countries that have significant fossil fuel reserves tend to be slower in terms of their transition to low carbon. So the Middle Eastern countries, Russia, Venezuela, they all have significant fossil fuel reserves. And then where we are in the US is we also have very significant fossil fuel reserves and states where there are strong reserves like Texas, Alaska, West Virginia, you see the politics there are much tougher on reducing emissions than in states that have less reserves. And so it's important to see where this transformation is coming, who's pushing it forward and where it's behind. And then finally, I'll just pick up on some of the discussion that Mark and Tom had, which is when you look at it from an economic perspective and you say, where should we be making progress the fastest? The cheapest way to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere or not continue to put it in is in nature based climate solutions. So not cutting down forests or regrowing trees or changing the way we manage forests. Now, what is true is that these nature based solutions are only a small part of the overall solution because there's just not enough space on the planet. But we need to start there because that's where the cheapest scalable solutions are. And then as the price goes up over time, we need to then move into the more expensive approaches. Eventually we will certainly get to engineered pulling of CO2 out of the atmosphere. Right now that's just very expensive. And so ultimately there's gonna be a much higher price on carbon. And how we get there is an interesting question. There's a number of potential pathways. Obviously you could just have a carbon price. That would be the easiest, most straightforward. It would require an act of Congress. And there's no one right now who expects that to happen anytime soon.  It's basically an attempt to put a tariff on imports from countries that don't have carbon prices. Of course, one of the problems there is that we don't have a carbon price in the US. Europe, which has moved first on this, they've already passed a carbon border adjustment mechanism which will apply to the US. The US is now negotiating. So it's unclear where we'll get to. There is a lot of support for this from both sides of the aisle. So it's a more politically palatable approach. And it may be that you can incorporate a carbon tax into a border carbon adjustment mechanism. There was, for instance, a fee on methane incorporated in the Inflation Reduction Act. So there's definitely a possibility there. And then the third approach that I would say is perhaps the most likely is that a global carbon market develops for these nature-based and other climate solutions. And that's something that is nascent right now. There's very difficult governance issues associated with nature-based climate solutions. Additionality and permanence are two of the end leakage are some of the important questions. And we can talk more about those. But what I would say is that where you have governments come in, for instance, in California or Australia, now in Washington state, where you have government oversight of these markets, they tend to work much better. And if the US were to come in and create oversight, and there's some push now for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to come in and provide oversight, that would certainly lead to a scaling of this market, I think, in the short run. So I'll pause there. Thank you so much for having me. My name is Peter Freed. I'm the head of Energy Strategy for Metta, also in Stanford undergraduate. Although I don't think Bob and I overlapped at all. I love coming back to campus to do stuff here. I think I even see some old professors in the room, which is always great. So unlike our first two panelists, I'm not an economist. I tend to think of myself as a practitioner in this space, as a company that is out there in the voluntary market, how and where we transact, how we can think about impact, is one of the central features of the team that I work on. Our Energy Strategy program is really focused around two things. First is the company's energy goals, which, going all the way back to 2011, we set one of the earliest corporate ambitions to be supported by 100% renewable energy. It took us nearly a decade to get there, but we did it in 2020. We continue to have that goal, even as our electrical loads grow meaningfully through time. Similarly, we've got a net zero target for the company. We've been net zero within scopes one and two. And I think we're probably going to get in a little bit to what some of that means in this conversation. I'm not bored by carbon accounting. I love this stuff. So we'll try and keep it interesting, or at least we'll be enthusiastic about it. We've been net zero across scopes one and scope two since 2020 and have recently set a 2030 target for net zero across our entire value chain, so incorporating scope three by 2030, no small feat. If you look at the inventory of a company like ours, a significant amount of it comes from electricity. And so while it is true that many of us think about electricity as a scope two issue, it is ultimately a scope two and a scope three issue. And I think that's going to be true for many companies around the world. So what are we thinking about? Ultimately, I think one of the things that we say at Meta is to focus on impact. That's been a core value of the company for a long time. And so that is what we spend our time doing. What is the impact that we want to have on decarbonization? How can we accelerate the decarbonization of the electricity sector while maintaining reliability? I mention that because I think it is a core feature of whatever a future decarbonized electricity system has to look like, is that it needs to be at least as reliable as our system is today. And so among the things that we are thinking about is the ways in which companies engage in this problem, particularly inside of the voluntary market. And what has historically been a focus on individual PPAs, power purchase agreements, forward renewable energy. And Meta has done quite a great number of those gigawatts of contracts through time. We are beginning to interrogate this question of, how might we think about where we want the system to go, a future decarbonized, reliable electricity system? And then how can we parcel out pieces of that to voluntary market participants to accelerate that change? So that's what we're spending a lot of our time doing. Significant parts of my team are commercially focused. So we are on the ground trying to transact some of the things which are concepts right now for a lot of people, a lot of the things that Mark was talking about. How do we actually write a contract on that? What are the features? Can we actually trade it? So those questions become really interesting when you start putting pen to paper, a lot of the devil in the details comes out there. So I'll leave you with that. Very excited to talk more about how we implement some of these things, how voluntary market participants can help move the needle forward and looking forward to the conversation. Excellent, that leaves me.  I'm Brandon Middall with Microsoft. In my role at Microsoft, I'm focused on financing and bringing to market the new climate solutions that will help us on our net zero journey to address scope one, two and three emissions. Microsoft has been on this journey first to carbon neutral and then toward carbon negative since 2012, which is when Microsoft put a carbon fee on all of our business activities and became carbon neutral across scopes one and two plus business travel, which is a small portion of scope three over 10 years ago. Where we've been since then is recognizing that to have a true carbon neutral and ultimately carbon negative plan, we need to set a net zero goal that encompasses all three scopes, one, two and three. And for those who aren't steeped in this day to day, scope one is the company's direct emissions, scope two, electricity from a company's operations and scope three supply chain and value chain, both upstream in terms of sourced materials and goods and services, as well as downstream, which in our cases, consumer use of our devices. For us, the key themes that are top of mind right now are number one, the meaning of net zero and Mark alluded to this in his opening comments, especially in a voluntary commitment context, it's important that everyone is speaking about the same thing when we talk about the net zero transition. And for us, it's really important to recognize that it's great to have scope one and two neutrality. However, for a tech company like ours as a baseline, scope one and two are really just a quarter of the total challenge. Scope three represents the other three quarters and that's different for every company, every industry that you look at. Once you can address your scope two emissions through the use of renewable procurement and carbon-free grids, some of the things that Peter was mentioning, then scope three really balloons to be 97% of the remaining challenge. And so scope three is critically important to the meaning of net zero and we can go into that in a bit more detail. The second thing is around measurement. Having a common nomenclature, a common protocol and framework for how we measure progress on these commitments is not just the execution and minutia of the matter, it is the matter because that's what incentivizes the behavior of all the major players in the system, corporates and other entities as well. And so on measurement, Microsoft is striving to take what we've learned from the last 10 years of our journey on carbon reduction and removals and offer that up in partnership with Climate Works Foundation and other corporates through something called the carbon call which seeks to create interoperable ledgers of measurement of carbon progress. The third piece is really market creation and this is where my day-to-day work comes in. Our objective is to first reduce over half of our total emissions footprint and then remove the rest so that by 2030 we will be carbon negative and by 2050 we will have removed all of the company's historic emissions since its founding. In order to do that though, there are new technologies that need to come to market, particularly in scope three categories such as sustainable chip production, sustainable consoles and sustainable embodied carbon, concrete, steel and the things that form the physical infrastructure that's behind the digital infrastructure of the cloud and all of the services that Microsoft and our peers offer consumers. So I will pause there very much looking forward to the conversation and happy to talk about this interplay between corporate carbon accounting on the one hand and on the other hand emerging climate solutions whether they're on the reduction side of the ledger or the removal side of the ledger which we've begun to recognize is in fact distinct from avoided emissions offsets and is an important part of that net zero journey on the other side of the ledger. Thanks, Brandon. So I thought there are so many different directions I could take this conversation but I think first what I wanna do is lay out a little bit more of the carbon accounting terminology and how our research at SFI is trying to slightly redirect what's going on. So Brandon gave you the quick explanation of this notion of scope one direct burning of fossil fuels. Scope two is the carbon emissions that result from purchased electricity and heat. Scope three sort of splits into two different big buckets. There's upstream emissions that are often described as like cradle to gate emissions for your supply chain upstream and then you have downstream activities. There has been a lot of discussion in the recent past about whether there should be mandatory reporting of the caliber of like financial accounting. Public disclosure of financial accounting for companies is very tightly regulated and it's a extraordinarily well established framework for financial accounting. The greenhouse gas protocol which is the original source of scope one, scope two, scope three emissions as I noted earlier sort of developed in a very different time, very early on in Tom's timeline of climate action and one of the challenges is that it was designed to say well if a carbon tax is right around the corner how's that gonna affect your business and how are you gonna deal with that? And so from the beginning scope one was obvious. It's a direct effect of a carbon tax. Scope two was reasonably close to direct and scope three in the original documents was actually described as sort of a nice to have thing but it was acknowledged that it's extraordinarily hard if not impossible to sort of aggregate scope three measures across the supply chain. But that does not mean that scope three isn't an important component for understanding pathways in energy systems transitions as Brandon and Peter described. What our work is doing is saying let's make this very clear what is going on and it sounds crazy but it was reasonably novel for us and others to start saying look only scope one emissions actually enter the atmosphere. Scope two is someone else's scope one. Scope three is lots of other people's scope one. And so that simple observation makes it very clear that using the greenhouse gas protocol scopes the way we use financial accounting is unlikely to be a successful approach. What our work does is simply says emitting CO2 emissions, greenhouse gas emissions are a liability. They're a liability for as long as they're in the atmosphere. And if you think about how accounting works if you have a liability, if you want to be solvent you need an asset to match it. So the question is what are the assets that can match it? And much of our work has been, thus far has been on if we can correctly describe the liabilities as an accounting exercise then we have to understand what is tradable and what is potentially available as an asset to match those liabilities. And this ties into very much into carbon pricing questions that Bob has looked at and forgive me Peter I don't think it does meta have an internal carbon price? No. And Brandon noted that Microsoft has an internal carbon price. And as Bob described, rationalizing pricing in carbon markets is extremely important but to some degree it's all ad hoc today. There are discussions about social cost of carbon. Do we need to increase the carbon taxes? Do we need to increase prices on carbon to approach the social cost of carbon? One of the things our work does is says we can get around that problem. If we're setting reasonably simple rules that say if you emit, if you create the emissions you have an immediate obligation to remove the emissions then in fact we don't need a price. We don't need a budget. We don't need a global carbon budget. We're simply saying if you impose this simple rule of if you emit it, you've got to remove it, you stop. I mean it sounds very simple. It's very hard in execution. It's extremely hard to understand what it is you need to buy. How do we describe what needs to be purchased? But it also makes very quite concrete what Meta and Microsoft are both doing which is saying they are leaders in their industry who are saying we actually need to do everything we can to halt current emissions and undo the damage we're doing from the emissions we can't halt. So I'd love Brandon if you could go into some of the more details about how Microsoft handles this internal price and how you're thinking about the dollars allocated in that process and how that's impacting decision making. Yeah, happy to take that up. So as I mentioned, we first put price on carbon internally in 2012. That's when we achieved the carbon neutrality at the time through the use of avoided offsets. And one of the ways that we paid for that for those offsets at the time which now we've subsequently replaced with a removals only program was through this carbon fee. It applies to all of the business group activities and is collected and administered internally. And now we're in the process of figuring out how to take that model and apply it to water and other things. But most of the thinking to date has been on carbon. And so each business unit pays into a central, on a counting and general ledger basis. Each business unit is charged a fee according to the operational activities that they've engaged in that fiscal year. And then the fee that is gathered is used to purchase what is needed on the removal side today to address any remaining liability in the terms that Mark shared. What we're doing in terms of those removals is identifying the things that are net negative from an emissions standpoint. So we do not count avoided emissions offsets and we are exclusively purchasing nature-based and engineered removals. Now as Bob said, the engineered removals are quite expensive. They're very nascent. The supply is vanishingly small to the point of being just tiny. And so what's needed there is a combination of a demand signal and early capital to bring all of those solutions to market, both the net negative nature-based carbon removal units as well as the engineered carbon removal units. At the same time, elsewhere in the business, we have centralized energy procurement to create the type of renewable purchasing constructs that will decarbonize the scope to emissions. And so really the vast majority of what's being charged is scope one and scope three, which has a different level of the fee compared to scope one and two. So we've tried to reflect the sort of differentiation of direct control and direct visibility and accuracy of these estimates in that tiered fee structure. And then we have sought to step up on a continued improvement basis, the quality of the pool of removal units that we are purchasing. All of this is done in a voluntary context. And so it's really important to us to have external standards that we can look to to understand the durability, the additionality of what we're removing on that negative side of the ledger. It's also important to us not to use those as some sort of get out of jail free card as a society because it's really important to first reduce and then remove because we know that the reductions, a reduction in absolute in-period emissions is the best way to address corporate emissions footprint. But there are some areas that are really hard to change, hard to find a substitute, hard to find an affordable substitute, and that's where the carbon removals come in. They're useful in addressing difficult to decarbonize sectors where there might not be a solution available for sale in the market at all. Or if it's there, take green steel for instance, it might be very small on a supply basis. The last thing I'll say is that we're moving now as much as possible towards a like for like creation of markets for these type of substitutes. Sustainable aviation fuel is a great example of this. We are in partnership with our airline partners like Alaska Airlines, purchasing sustainable aviation fuel for use on flights that are then applicable to our own scope three business travel emissions. And that's a model that we think can be replicable. It takes some of the tools of the renewable energy industry on the procurement side, in which you can pay for the wreck as opposed to what's called brown power and applies those same tools to other goods and commodities whether that's sustainable aviation fuel or in the future green steel. And Rocky Mountain Institute has done some great work on laying out that approach from a framework perspective for corporates to adopt. Thanks Brandon. Excuse me. Peter, your work if I understand it correctly is much more focused on power procurement and how to avoid the emissions in the first place. And in the theoretical world, that's a heck of a lot easier than it is in the real world where you're operating on grids that are subject to highly varied regulations and different environments depending on where you put a data center in the country. Could you give some insight into how, like what are the tools at your disposal when you're sort of captive to a potentially non-cooperative power provider or grid and how your decisions and transactions can try to make progress in light of, not much in the way of cooperation? Yeah, I'm happy to do that. And we're in a very interesting moment in time where I think the way we've thought about this for the last, call it, 15 years and the way we are beginning to think about it may be in a transitional period. When you look at corporate renewable energy procurement and there's quite a lot of it. So there's a RE 100 which is one of the sort of leadership programs for corporate renewables that's got I think north of 200 members now. There's something like 160 gigawatts of new renewable energy attributed to the voluntary market over the last 10 years. So it's meaningful amounts of production. Most of those transactions are happening under power purchase agreements and those power purchase agreements are happening in markets where there is some mechanism by which contracts can settle, can be financially settled. And we do this not because it's necessarily the best way to do it but it is one of the only ways that you can transact in this way. Meta in particular has spent a very long time working with regulated utilities particularly in the United States to look at alternative approaches. These tend to get called green tariffs. These are electric rates that incorporate renewable energy into the base rate structure and really as a partnership with the utility to figure out how to incorporate renewable energy into the mix for facilities. One of the things that, this is a question that I get a lot although these days I think more and more people are understanding the dynamic here. Hey, the sun isn't shining all the time, the wind isn't blowing all the time. What do you mean when you say you've got 100% renewable energy? And the standard by which we are all doing this is annual volumetric matching. So that means that on an annual basis we are procuring as much renewable energy from projects via these power purchase agreements or green tariffs to match the electric loads that we have at our facilities. In our case, it's mostly data centers. And if you look backwards in time, particularly 15 plus years ago, there was a very reasonable expectation that if you were bringing new renewable energy onto the grid that was having a meaningful emissions reduction impact. There wasn't as much renewable there. We needed a significant amount of additional renewables. And so I think what we have seen happen as time moves on is that we are seeing more and more renewables on the system, which is great. We all acknowledge that that's a really important thing. But we're also seeing that the development of renewable energy in certain markets is becoming more and more saturated. That's also not necessarily a bad thing. At the same time, we have more and more data available to us about how the grid is operating, particularly with respect to emissions. And so one of the things that we've been spending a lot of time on is the way you might begin to think about the emissions associated with renewable energy projects and with electricity use. We were a founding partner of something called the Emissions First Partnership, which has recently put out some interesting work related to thinking about emissions inside of the electricity sector. And basically what we're saying is let us look, if we can, at the best granularity from a data perspective possible, the emissions impact both of loads and of projects. And so to give you an example of this, if you put another wind project, say in Iowa, where there is already a huge amount of wind, you may have a very different emissions impact than putting a solar project in Kentucky, which is a grid which is heavily reliant on coal. And so we can begin to optimize our renewable energy procurement decisions around maximizing emissions reductions impacts. And we think that this is ultimately where we need to be going when we think about impact on the grid. We are still constrained by the tool sets we have available though, coming back to this, we're commercial practitioners, what can we actually buy and sell? So if you're going to buy energy from a renewable energy project, and by the way, maybe it's worth saying for a moment, facility like a data center or a large manufacturing facility, things like putting solar on the roof is great, but it's a tiny drop in the bucket relative to the overall energy needs of these facilities. So we need large scale renewable energy deployments, utility scale is kind of what we end up calling it in the industry. So if you're going to sign a contract with the utility scale renewable energy project, that power has to go somewhere. So you either need a market which already has a clearing mechanism or you need a utilities participation. So to Mark's point, we are still going to need to find transactional tools that allow us to bring energy into markets and drive revenue into those projects. So that is always the overlay that sort of constrains the ways in which we might consider transacting. But today is a very interesting time, more and more data is becoming available by the month really, which allows us to make emissions informed procurement decisions in ways that just weren't possible when we all started doing this 15 years ago. Thanks, Peter. So Bob, you have the nice perch at the top in various government roles of trying to figure out how to drive policy to some degree and whether that's, you know, we've had discussions about farm bill questions or commodities trading oversight. Some of these regulatory questions and concerns are essential to what Peter and Brandon are talking about in moving their companies in the right direction. They are leaders in their field doing this voluntarily. Maybe you could give an overview of the potential paths forward on the regulatory front, both from trying to drive companies to mandatory reporting, potential paths to accounting, but also capital markets oversight in carbon trading. Okay, that's a big set of topics. And let's cover that in 30 seconds. No, whatever part of that you think is most fruitful or interesting in the near term of where you think you're making progress? Sure, yeah. Well, first of all, I would say we have to focus on carbon management if we wanna think about it broadly speaking. And we don't have good handles on the movement of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into landscapes and then into permanent sequestration. And we need much better technology to measure that so that we can then manage that. And we are getting there. Today, for instance, we have satellites that can give us pretty good estimates of the amount of carbon at least above ground in landscapes around the world. And that's important because when we protect the particular area, let's say we don't cut down a forest over here, let's say the cause of that forest being cut down was toilet paper manufacturer in China, they're no longer gonna get the wood from there, they're gonna get the wood from somewhere else. They're not gonna stop making toilet paper. So that's what we sometimes call leakage. And if you don't have a global picture of the carbon content of your landscapes, how do you address that? Similarly, when we talk about the amount of carbon that's being pulled into a landscape, there's a concept that is called additionality in the voluntary carbon market. Now, when you talk to people about additionality, what they say is something that I guess would be very intuitive. They wanna know what's the impact of the financial incentive that was created to pull carbon into that landscape? What would have happened if we hadn't had that intervention? So it's a counterfactual measurement. And in fact, over time, you just can't, it's, you can't measure it. What would have gone into that landscape if you hadn't done what you did? Well, we don't know. So people try to come up with, we'll look at this similar landscape over here and this one over here and we'll compare the two or you can see where this gets to creating all kinds of bad incentives. And the toilet paper manufacturer stops buying your trees and he buys the trees over here and now you look that much better than there. So there have been all kinds of issues associated with, I won't call it fraud, but lack of integrity in this market. So you've got the, now the integrity council for the voluntary carbon market and the voluntary carbon market integrity initiative. Everyone understands that the reality is we have no idea how much carbon is actually coming out of the atmosphere into these landscapes. Now, some are better than others. Don't get me wrong. If you go to the CME, the Futures Exchange in Chicago and you can go along something called the NGO contract, which will promise to deliver you carbon offsets. Well, it turns out that any carbon offset that has been rated by one of the leading rating agencies Vera is deliverable. And for anyone who's operated in these futures markets, you know that what you get is what's called the cheapest to deliver that's acceptable for a contract. The cheapest deliver is the lowest quality. So you can go along a contract, take delivery and what you will get is the lowest quality carbon offset, which has no legal rights. You have no right to anything when you take delivery. You certainly can't sell it. There's no one, I'm sure Peter and Brandon would have no interest in buying those offsets. So this is a market that's simply not working. And by the way, you might see half a dozen contracts trade on a given day. There's no liquidity. There's no centralized functioning quality market here.  You have to try and find the best quality you can. This is really not a functioning market. So what we need to get a functioning market, we need good governance. We need good measurements of carbon flux out of the atmosphere into these landscapes. We need to address permanence as well.  It has an expected life of maybe decades. And this problem that we've created is gonna go on for hundreds of years. So we've got to address permanence. And there are ways to do this, but I'm just saying this is not a finished market by any means. And we could talk about scope three emissions too. But let's just say that what we care about is the total amount of emissions that go into the atmosphere or that are coming out of the atmosphere. And when you talk about the emissions going into the atmosphere, that's scope one across the economy. You just add up all the scope one emissions and that's what we care about. So we should stop worrying about other measures. We should start worrying about how do we actually offset the liability that's created by emissions? And that's essentially a permanent liability. So there's a lot of work that needs to go into this. The way to get this done is to create oversight over these markets so that there actually are standards. There's a lot of people working on this. I have hopes that we will get there. Again, if we can get the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to oversee these markets, set up the usual self-regulating organization. Mark, you've written a paper that talks about how we have other commodities like corn and wheat and silver and gold and all these. There are standards. There's no problem about getting acceptable delivery that meets those standards because there's oversight. And that's what we need in the carbon market. So I'll stop there. Okay, thanks, Bob. So we have a few minutes left for questions if there are questions from the audience. Please, anyone? Bueller? We have a question in the back. It's a question over here. Oh, and we... We have one here too. Let's start in the back. Hi, great panel discussion. I appreciate it. Two questions, maybe the first one is a quick one for Brandon talking about the nature-based carbon emissions removal places that you use. And it sounds like there's third-party certification of that. I wonder if you can talk about who the third-party certification groups are and where you're really coming out on specifically which nature-based removal techniques, I guess, Microsoft's using. Yeah, happy to speak about that. So when we're purchasing carbon removals, like I said, today the vast majority of those purchases are of nature-based carbon removals. We generally seek carbon removal purchases with third-party certification and verification and that typically happens through a handful or less than a handful, really, of third-party standards. Vera is one that has been mentioned earlier. That's one of the major ones. In Europe and elsewhere, Gold Standard is another common one. C-A-R, which I believe stands for Climate Action Reserve, Climate Action Reserve is the third. And there's really, depending on how you're measuring it, three to five of these standards bodies that the market is coalescing around. And so most of the developers are designing the projects in order to achieve certification from those three and a couple others. Where we see, a couple comments on that. Where we see the market needing to evolve to Bob's point, this is still early days and the existence of three to five standard bodies is not sufficient to create a robust market. We see certain areas in aforestation, reforestation, soil carbon and engineered solutions where the registries and the standard bodies don't always have a methodology approved. And in those cases, we have invested in doing independent due diligence in partnership with advisors like Carbon Direct and others and have invested in, in fact, building a team on this to evaluate carbon removal purchases. And so in addition to those mainstream standards bodies, we will purchase things that have been certified or really verified by independent engineering firms, DNV being an example there. Now that is really just a stepping stone to getting to third party verification measures. The other thing we've done in the Climate Innovation Fund is invest in technologies that will help scale up the certification stuff. So we've invested in a spin out from gold standard called SustainCert, which is trying to be the turbo tax of carbon project certification. And there's some other examples there. And then on the MRV, monitoring, reporting and verification side that Bob mentioned being a huge gap in the market, we're investing there and you can see that across both forest carbon solutions as well as soil carbon solutions. We've invested in a company called Perennial that does some of the geospatial analysis to bring verification tools at scale to soil carbon and agroforestry type of projects. And so I think right now it's a combination of a base of NGOs that have coalesced around a handful or less than a handful of standard bodies, but then you also have the private sector trying to bring to bear digital technologies. Eventually I expect we will see more AI and machine learning applied to this space to try to drive down the transaction cost of verification and drive up the quality in terms of additionality and durability in particular. Thanks, I think we're gonna squeeze in one more question if that's okay. Thank you for this very insightful discussion. I have a question on Scope 3, whether it incorporates emissions from mining industry and also the end of life of products, for example, electronic waste, so on, so forth. The economists want to speak to that. Sure, I'll take that one. The idea of Scope 3 emissions is that in fact, it does incorporate everything sort of starting from the ground. So if you're a car company, in theory, your Scope 3 emissions are starting at the point where diesel fuel is being burned to extract iron ore from the ground in Australia and put it on a barge and move it to a smelter. So it truly, Scope 3 covers that initial starting point and in theory goes all the way out to, when you throw organic matter into a landfill and it causes methane emissions. The problem is there's so much overlap and the way the Scope 3 protocol, the protocol works, it allows Scope 3 for people to estimate those numbers, which is extremely hard. And what we do and what our research is focused on is how to actually structure carbon accounting in a way that everyone isn't trying to look in every direction around them, all the way to the horizon to understand and frankly estimate their Scope 3 emissions. What we're focused on is saying carbon emissions can just pass from company to company in a supply chain just like the product passes with an invoice that says how much did the product cost? The invoice is also gonna say we just transferred this much carbon liability to you. It becomes a reasonably simple and straightforward cost accounting like exercise. However, what we also say is that you can only worry about things in an accounting sense, in a true accounting sense that are actually under your control. If we're gonna hold people liable for their emissions, then it has to be the things that they're, from cradle to gate. It's very hard to say I'm going to hold someone legally accountable for their carbon emissions after it leaves their facility. So I have a couple of funny examples I use for this, but for example if I'm a car company and someone says bring your Scope 3 emissions down, this is actually really easy if I simply say okay my car, the spark plugs are gonna die after 10,000 miles and you violated the warranty if you change the spark plugs. There, my car now only has 10,000 miles of drivable in a Scope 3 emissions. So this notion of trying to impose some sort of strict liability on downstream activities is terribly fraught. It's very good for discussing and talking about plans. It's not good for accountability and I'm being told I'm totally out of time. So I wanna thank the panelists. And I thank you for listening to us.


Hello everyone, this is Shila Ratna Bansode from Walchand Institute of Technology, Solarpur. Today we are going to see the topic introduction to nuclear power plants. As we all know, the major portion of the electricity being supplied in India is from thermal power plant, that is cold based thermal power plant. Then comes the hydro power plant. But the demand for electricity cannot be met by merely these two plants. That's why we need to go for the third type of power plant or the third type of generation of electricity that is based on nuclear fuel, which is called as nuclear power plant. Learning objectives. At the end of this session, students will be able to explain the construction and working of nuclear power plant. Now, before starting any of a nuclear power plant of any capacity, what are the basic requirements that are to be considered? That is, the site selection criteria that needs to be considered before starting any nuclear power plant. First, there should be availability of water. Ample quantity of water should be available for steam generation required in nuclear power plant. Second, the location away from the populated area. As nuclear fuel is being involved in the generation of electricity, the area in and around the power plant gets radioactive. So, for safer conditions, it should be away from highly populated areas. Facilities for the disposal of radioactive products. After the fusion process, there is generation of radioactive waste, which needs to be disposed perfectly or easily. So, there should be enough facility to dispose the radioactive products. For the operation of these kinds of plants, there should be skilled and trained labor so that there should not be any kind of dangerous events take place because of the unskilled labor. The working of nuclear power plant is based on the process of nuclear fusion. In this, uranium-235 nuclei is used on which a neutron is bombarded Because of the bombarding of the neutron on the uranium-235, which is the most unstable nuclear fuel, barium and krypton are formed as byproducts along with emission of three neutrons. So, when a neutron is bombarded on an unstable uranium nuclei, it gets split into three neutrons and into barium and krypton as byproducts. These three neutrons in turn get bombarded with another three uranium nuclei by generating three neutrons each. And this process goes on and on and during this process or due to the splitting of the uranium nuclei, there is large amount of energy generated which can be used for generation of steam. As this reaction goes on and on till the uranium nuclei gets totally exhausted, this reaction is called as chain reaction or as the splitting of uranium-235 nuclei takes place, it is also called as fission process. And this is the reaction that is responsible for generation of steam in nuclear power plants. Now, let's have a look on how a nuclear power plant works. As far as nuclear power plants are concerned, there are two types of power plants. First, the boiling water reactor type and the second, pressurized water reactor type. Let us have a look at the boiling water reactor. Let us see the elements. This is the reactor core fuel elements. These are the control rods filled with water, turbine, generator, condenser and cooling system. As you can see, when a neutron is bombarded on the uranium fuel, the chain reaction starts and because of this, large amount of energy is released. Because of this energy, the water surrounding the uranium fuel starts getting heated and steam is generated. This steam is allowed to pass over the turbine which rotates the turbine at the desired rpm. This turbine rotates the generator generating electricity. The steam that passes over the turbine is allowed to flow into the condenser where it is cooled and it is again passed to the reactor core. Because of the heat exchange between the steam that is coming out of the turbine and the condensate or the cooling water, the cooling water temperature increases whereas the steam gets converted into water. This water is fed back to the reactor whereas the hot water because of the cooling effect or due to the heat exchange effect is sent back to the cooling tower and this cycle is repeated. This is how any nuclear reactor works or a boiling water reactor works. As the water inside the reactor core boils, it is called as boiling water reactor. There is no additional circuit provided in this. This is the direct circuit where water is directly converted into steam. The disadvantage of this type of boiling water reactor or a nuclear reactor is that the water that directly comes in contact with the nuclear fuel is allowed to get converted into steam and this comes in contact with the turbine. If and so, if there is any maintenance purpose, the plant is shut down and maintenance of turbine is to be carried out, the turbine also gets radioactivity affected. Thus, insulation needs to be provided on this side from the reactor core to the turbine for safety purpose which adds to the additional cost. So, the elements that comes in contact with this steam gets radioactively affected. This is how your boiling water reactor works. Now, let us see how a pressurized water reactor works. This is a reactor uranium fuel, control rods. This is the heat exchanger, the circuit, turbine generator, condenser and cooling. You can see the names, the control rods, the nuclear reactor. This is the additional thing that comes into picture that is steam generator. This is the thing which supplies steam to the turbine, the generator. This is the condenser. This is the feed pump which supplies cooling water. And this is the pump which supplies the hot condenser to be cooled to the cooling tower. Here, when it is bombarded with a nuclear neutron of uranium-235 bombarded by the neutron, chain reaction takes place which allows to generate steam as we have seen in thermal porbulant. But in pressurized water reactor, in the reactor core, high pressure is maintained so this water does not get converted into steam rather its temperature is increased. This high temperature water is allowed to flow into the steam generator. Due to the bombardment of neutrons on the uranium fuel, this water gets heated but it does not get converted into steam rather this hot water is used to generate steam in the steam generator. This is because high pressure is maintained in the reactor core. When the hot water enters into the steam reactor or steam generator, from this circuit water is supplied. There is heat exchange between the hot water and the cold water being supplied where this cold water or water in the secondary circuits gets heated and gets converted into steam. So, this water in the primary circuit does not get converted into steam rather it is helpful for generation of steam. The water in the secondary circuit gets converted into steam. Because of heat exchange, this water's temperature decreases and it is again fed to the reactor core whereas the water in the secondary circuit comes in contact with this hot water and it gets converted into steam. This steam is allowed to flow over the turbine which in turn rotates and generates electricity by rotating the generator. The steam that flows over the turbine is allowed to flow into the condenser. In the condenser, heat exchange between this hot steam and cold water takes place and the temperature of this steam is reduced by converting it into water. This cold water is again fed back to the steam generator. Because of the heat exchange, the water in the condenser is heated up and it needs to be cooled for further cooling process and it is allowed to flow to the cooling tower. This is how a pressurized water reactor works. The benefit of this over boiling water reactor is that the water that comes in contact with the uranium fuel is not allowed to flow into the turbine or it is not directly converted into steam. Rather, another water is used to generate steam. So, this part of the nuclear plant does not get affected by radioactivity. So, maintenance of this part can be easily done without any external coating needed. Plus, as high pressure is maintained in the core reactor, the thickness of these walls is more as compared to boiling water reactor. So, this is how a pressurized water reactor works. Now, let us see what are the advantages of nuclear power plant. Response to changing load is good. It easily responds to the high and low load demand as and when required throughout the day. Easy start and stop facility by just controlling the nuclear fusion process. Problem of smoke and ash is not present as burning of coal or any other fossil fuel is not involved. No requirement of fuel or rather no requirement of fossil fuels. Thank you.


An improved UNEP model was used to accurately identify glacier in satellite images of the Pama Plateau, with high accuracy compared to previous models, and fine-tuning with a conditional random-field model further reduced background misidentification. This article was authored by Su Xingtian, Yuzhendong, Rui Feng, and others.