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Jon Burke FRSA 🌍

Aug 8 • 14 tweets • 4 min read

1/ What if I told you - with the continent suffering another #heatwave and England in severe #drought conditions - that increasing forest cover in Europe by 20% would result in 8% more summer rain, with negligible effects on winter rain?

You might not believe me, but it's true.

2/ What if I told you that photographs over a 54-year period since the reintroduction of beavers to Alberta, Canada, showed they were associated with a 900% increase in open water and a "damatic influence" on mitigating extreme #drought?

You might not believe me, but it's true.

3/ What if I told you that if every household in the U.K had a water meter, we would reduce household water waste by a billion litres a day within three months and two billion litres a day within two years?

You might not believe me, but it's true.

4/ What if I told you that a Water Smart Meter trial in Cape Town, South Africa, saved one school more than three million liters of water in three months, and helped another more than halve its water consumption in just four months?

You might not believe me, but its true.

5/ What if I told you that a single, waterless public urinal saves between 75,000 and 170,000 litres of water a year?

You might not believe me, but it's true.

6/ What if I told you that provided rebound effects - such as farmers demanding increased acreage, resulting in increased water consumption - are avoided, 'drip irrigation' systems can reduce agricultural water consumption by up to 60%.

You might not believe me, but it's true.

7/ What if I told you that water utilities companies lose around 20% of mains water through leaks every day, and that halving these losses could save 1.4 billion litres of H₂O daily?

O.k, you probably would believe that, but it's still true!

8/ References!

Tweet 1/ - Meier, R., Schwaab, J., Seneviratne, S.I. et al. Empirical estimate of forestation-induced precipitation changes in Europe. Nat. Geosci. 14, 473–478 (2021).

9/

Tweet 2/ - Glynnis A. Hood, Suzanne E. Bayley,
Beaver (Castor canadensis) mitigate the effects of climate on the area of open water in boreal wetlands in western Canada, Biological Conservation, Volume 141, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 556-567, ISSN 0006-3207,

10/

Tweet 3/ - Ansink, E., Ornaghi, C., Tonin, M., Technology vs information to promote conservation: Evidence from water audits, Tinbergen Institute Discussion Paper 2021-014/VIII

11/

Tweet 4/ - Emma Reynolds, How smart meters saved water and money in drought-ravaged Cape Town, CNN, 23.09.19

12/

Tweet 5/ - Annette L. Stumpf, Waterless Urinals - A Technical Evaluation, US Army Corps of Engineers - Engineer Research and Development Center, June 2005

13/

Tweet 6/ - Shamshery P, Wang R-Q, Tran DV, Winter V AG (2017) Modeling the future of irrigation: A parametric description of pressure compensating drip irrigation emitter performance. PLoS ONE 12(4): e0175241.

14/

Tweet 7/ - Colin Fernandaz, Environment Correspondent, Fury as water companies make £2.8BILLION in profits amid scandal of dumping raw sewage in rivers, Daily Mail, 11.02.22

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More from @jonburkeUK

Jon Burke FRSA 🌍

@jonburkeUK

Jul 19

1/ I talk a lot about the cooling effects of street trees and green infrastructure during heatwaves, but one of the best ways of mitigating against high daytime temperatures is reducing high nighttime temperatures.

Let's talk about that.

2/ Concrete, tarmac, and other hard and synthetic materials - think the astroturf pitch (car tyre dump) or plastic play surfacing your Council recently installed - accumulate heat throughout the day and do not begin to release it until the external temperature begins to fall.

3/ Hard, man-made surfaces therefore turn cities into giant storage heaters, and this has a magnifying effect on the follow day's temperatures. Many studies have explained this effect, which can alter local nighttime temps by 17-25% (Ibsen et al, 2022).
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35306078/

Read 10 tweets

Jon Burke FRSA 🌍

@jonburkeUK

Jul 18

https://twitter.com/jonburkeUK/status/1548687603003789313

1/ I forgot to mention a secondary - and very important - reason to keep your houseplants well watered during a heatwave.

It's a little bit magical, but it *only works* if you have terracotta pots like this...👇

https://twitter.com/jonburkeUK/status/1548687603003789313

2/ So, you fill your watering can with tap/grey water - provided it's colder than the room temperature (which is very likely) then you go around the house and water your plants *with terracotta pots* until the soil is thoroughly wet.

That's when the magic happens.

3/ The water inside the plant pot is then absorbed by the naturally porous terracotta and drawn to the outer surface, evaporation at then not only releases the already cooled water in its gaseous state, but cools it further via the transition from liquid to gas.

Read 4 tweets

Jon Burke FRSA 🌍

@jonburkeUK

Jul 17

1/ Over the past decade I’ve gone through all the stages of mourning associated with the global warming-induced collapse of the environmental systems that make human civilisation possible, so here are my top tips for getting through periods of extreme ‘climate weirding’.

2/ As soon as you’ve finished reading this important public service announcement 😉, get off social media. It’s full of fatalistic people saying we can’t do anything about our dire environmental circumstances - we can - because they don’t have the imagination or guts to do so.

@bbcweather

3/ In fact, log off the internet altogether. Scrolling through @bbcweather or the @metoffice on ‘heatwave watch’ will make you feel worse. Guaranteed. If fear and anxiety could solve global warming, I’d have done the job years ago. At this stage, Monday is what it is.

Read 14 tweets

Jon Burke FRSA 🌍

@jonburkeUK

Oct 27, 2021

🧱 The built environment represents 40% of U.K emissions, but the #Treasury's approach to the decarbonisation of this sector is an object lesson in how a lack of joined-up thinking is taking us away from our legally-binding #netzero carbon commitments.

A #Budget2021 THREAD!

🔨It can take between 10 and 80 years for a new, energy-efficient building to offset the emissions created during the construction process.

💷 But the U.K tax system militates against low carbon retrofit and upgrades to existing buildings by levying 20% VAT on renovations, while zero-rating new build homes. This means it often makes more financial sense to demolish and rebuild, rather than preserve and upgrade.

Read 11 tweets

Jon Burke FRSA 🌍

@jonburkeUK

Oct 26, 2021

1/ What if I told you that the biggest and most urgent problem associated with our sewage system isn't the public health and environmental threat of discharges of human waste into bodies of water? You might not believe me, but it's true...

2/ As serious an environmental problem as sewage discharges are, it's the permanent loss of a very specific mineral carried in our sewage that poses the biggest threat of all.

Let's talk about phosphorous.

3/ Phosphorous is an essential component of the artificial fertilisers that have helped increase agricultural yields enormously since the Second World War. However, the Earth's phosphorous deposits are fixed, unevenly-distributed, and being depleted at an alarming rate.

Read 17 tweets