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We’re excited to share that CCDB recently took part in the “Agricultural Technology Fair-2024” organized by the Porsha Upazila Directorate of Agriculture.

The fair was inaugurated by Mr. Sadhan Chandra Majumder, the Honorable Minister of Food of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh. During his tour of the exhibition, the Minister visited CCDB’s stall, where he learned about our ongoing initiatives addressing climate change.

Our Upazila Coordinator had the opportunity to brief the Minister about CCDB’s “Climate Center” and extended an invitation for him to visit. The Minister showed keen interest and provided guidance for necessary steps to be taken.

We’re pleased to report that the Honorable Minister expressed satisfaction with CCDB’s activities. This recognition motivates us to continue our work towards sustainable development and climate resilience.

The world has passed a clean energy milestone, as a boom in wind and solar meant a record-breaking 30% of the world’s electricity was produced by renewables last year, new data shows.

The planet is reaching “a crucial turning point” toward clean energy, according to the Global Electricity Review published Wednesday by climate think tank Ember. It predicts global fossil fuel generation will fall slightly in 2024, before experiencing much bigger declines in subsequent years.

It’s a significant step toward the world reaching 60% renewable electricity by 2030, which is critical to meeting global climate goals, said Dave Jones, global insights director at Ember.

“The renewables future has arrived,” Jones said. “Solar in particular is accelerating faster than anyone thought possible.”

A look at the data reveals just how much the global power sector is changing.

Record-breaking renewables

In 2000, renewables made up less than 19% of the global energy mix. Now they make up more than 30%. Taking nuclear energy into account, the world generated almost 40% of its electricity from low-carbon sources last year.

Although global levels of planet-heating pollution reached a record high in 2023, the boom in renewables has pushed the electricity sector’s carbon intensity — the amount of carbon pollution produced per unit of electricity — to a record low in 2023, 12% less than its 2007 peak.

Renewable sources accounted for 30% of global electricity generation in 2023

Greater use of renewable energy sources pushed the carbon intensity of global power generation to a new record low in 2023 — 12% less than its 2007 peak.

The rise of renewables is also pushing fossil fuels into decline, slowing their growth by almost two-thirds over the past decade, the report found. Already, more than half of countries are five years past their peak in fossil fuel-generated electricity.

Fossil fuels’ share in the overall electricity mix has fallen from 64.7% in 2000 to 60.6% in 2023. Ember predicts this number will drop significantly in 2024, to 57.6%, as the rapid increase in solar starts to be felt.

“We’re going to get that boom in renewables, which will really change the picture very quickly,” Jones told CNN.

Booming solar

Solar was the fastest-growing source of electricity in 2023 for the 19th consecutive year, according to the report. It made up nearly twice as much new electricity generation as coal last year.

The surge of solar installations happened at the end of 2023, so the full effect is yet to be felt, said Jones. “I think that 2024 will bring a bit of a shock when you start seeing those numbers,” he said, especially among those who assume the demand for fossil fuels such as gas is going to just keep rising.

Solar energy is the fastest-growing electricity source

The expansion of renewables in the global electricity mix has been driven by significant increases in solar and wind generation. Their growth far outpaces that of hydropower, which is the largest source of clean power.

China is the largest producer of solar electricity globally

It contributed to more than one-third of global solar generation and produced more than twice as much solar electricity as the United States in 2023. But the share of solar power in both countries’ domestic electricity mix is equally low at around 6% .

Top 10 solar electricity producers, 2023

China is far and away the leader on solar, accounting for nearly 36% of global generation last year.

But it’s a different story when looking at how big a role it plays in China’s national electricity mix — just 6%, far below many other major solar-producing nations.

Solar makes up more than 10% of annual electricity generation in 33 countries, according to the report, including Chile (30%), Australia (17%) and the Netherlands (17%) — and California, the world’s fifth-largest economy, generates 28% of its electricity from solar.

Electricity demand set to soar

Global electricity demand increased to a record high in 2023 — adding the equivalent of Canada’s entire electricity demand — but the rate of growth slowed compared to the average over the past decade.

China was the main driver of demand, while the United States and the European Union saw sharp falls amid milder weather and — particularly for the EU — a temporary slump in industrial activity.

Starting next year, Patagonia’s wetsuits won’t just be recycled — they’ll be reincarnated.

At the company’s “Wetsuit Forge” repair and design centre, located a few blocks from the beach in Ventura, California, a first-of-its-kind wetsuit is draped over a table. The suit looks and feels like any other, but it’s made in part from used Patagonia wetsuits broken down at a molecular level. It too will be melted down at the end of its life and reborn into a new, lower-carbon wetsuit.

The prototype is the product of a years-long initiative by Patagonia to eliminate much of the waste that accumulates when a surfer buys a new wetsuit. While the outdoor apparel retailer guarantees a lifetime of repairs for wear and tear, eventually the day comes when the racks of old wetsuits awaiting mending in Ventura can no longer be stitched back together. Some are recycled into yoga mats or tote bags, but inevitably, they all end up buried in landfills.

Just how many old Patagonia wetsuits end up as part of $500 reincarnated versions depends on the volume of discarded wetsuits the company collects. But the strategy is ushering in a potentially repeating cycle that would yield the ultimate, immortal wetsuit.

“Essentially, a wetsuit becomes endlessly reusable,” says Mackenzie Warner, a Patagonia material developer.

The $2 billion wetsuit market is the antithesis of fast fashion, the cheap disposable clothes largely responsible for the apparel industry’s growing carbon footprint. Surfers tend not to be slaves to style, at least when it comes to wetsuits, often only buying an expensive new one when their old one wears out. Roughly 7 million wetsuits are sold annually and the global market is forecast to grow to $3.5 billion by 2033.

Patagonia in particular has built eco-consciousness into a billion-dollar brand by making clothes for hiking, climbing and surfing out of pricey but sustainable materials, then urging its customers to wear the gear until it frays before returning it for repair or resale. The company sells about 100,000 wetsuits a year.

“Durability and reparability affect environmental impact,” says Veronica Bates Kassatly, a London-based fashion industry analyst focused on sustainability. She cites the example of wearing a shirt 500 times. If a cheaply made shirt is replaced after being worn 10 times, 50 shirts will need to be produced and discarded. But if one better-made and easily mended shirt can be worn 500 times, the environmental cost is significantly lower, even if making the garment uses more water and energy upfront.

Despite surfing’s one-with-nature vibe, most wetsuits are the sartorial equivalent of an oil spill. They’re made from neoprene, a petroleum-based synthetic rubber. (Many wetsuits sold in California even carry a state warning that they can expose you to chemicals known to cause cancer.) Patagonia is collecting end-of-life wetsuits for a partner that vaporises them to reclaim what’s known as carbon black, a key ingredient in neoprene and in the natural rubber Patagonia uses. It’s the petroleum-derived element that gives wetsuits their strength and jet-black colour.

Whether carbon black can be infinitely recovered remains to be scientifically validated, but reusing it keeps old wetsuits out of landfills. The reclaimed material also avoids carbon dioxide emissions from the production of virgin carbon black, a ubiquitous ingredient in tyres, plastics, inks and electronics. The material’s $19.3 billion market, which is expected to grow 66% by 2032, emits as much as 79 million metric tons of CO2 annually from the combustion of tar oil and other petroleum feedstocks, according to a January paper published in the Journal of Cleaner Production.

“Circularity is always the good approach,” says Fabian Rosner, lead author of the paper and an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California at Los Angeles. “If you can reclaim that carbon black, you reduce the amount of resources that you need in the first place.”

About a decade ago, Patagonia began to replace neoprene with Yulex, the brand name for a natural rubber produced by drought-resistant Hevea trees and Guayule plants grown on non-arable land. The company’s latest wetsuit line, released in September, is 85% Yulex, and rival surf brands have also started to add Yulex and other sustainable materials to their wetsuits. Some have also launched recycling initiatives.

But even Yulex wetsuits are made with carbon black. That led an entrepreneur named Tony Wibbeler to show up at Patagonia’s door in 2017 with a pitch for a sustainable solution to both the carbon black conundrum and the recycling challenge.

The startup Wibbeler founded, Boulder, Colorado-based Bolder Industries, developed an industrial process to reclaim carbon black from old tires, which it sells as BolderBlack. He told Patagonia executives he could create a proprietary formula to do the same for their wetsuits. Wibbeler says Bolder’s method is 85% more sustainable than traditional carbon black production.

Rosner says the CO2 savings from reclaimed carbon black depend on the energy efficiency of the reclamation process. But the environmental impact could be substantial: Carbon black accounts for about 20% of Patagonia wetsuits’ rubber foam and is also used to dye the wetsuits’ recycled nylon lining, according to Hub Hubbard, the company’s product line manager for surf and wetsuits.

At the Wetsuit Forge, Warner points to a container full of inky granules of BolderBlack. “It was kind of a no-brainer for us to switch to BolderBlack as it has a pretty wide impact on the overall wetsuit,” she says.

Bolder isn’t the only company producing reclaimed carbon black for wetsuits. Taiwan-based Sheico, which manufactures wetsuits for Patagonia and other major surf brands, has started using its own reclaimed carbon black from old tires. Patagonia is the first, though, to source the reclaimed material from used wetsuits. The company will collect end-of-life wetsuits, remove the zippers and ship them to Bolder to extract the carbon black. The reclaimed material will then be sent to Patagonia’s manufacturer.

“It’s a circular solution, not just a sustainably sourced or a bio-based material,” says Wibbeler, who is also Bolder’s CEO. “The cool part about this is that it’s wetsuits to wetsuits.”

The first BolderBlack Patagonia wetsuits are set to go on sale in 2025. Bolder will mix old wetsuits with tires so enough BolderBlack is produced for each reincarnated suit.

In the meantime, the company continues to improve its wetsuits’ durability and repairability. The Wetsuit Forge opened in 2020 as the Covid-19 pandemic inspired a new wave of sustainably minded surfers to take up the sport after gyms shuttered. As supply chain snarls led to a shortage in new wetsuits, a tsunami of used ones arrived in Ventura for repair — some 6,000 over the past three years. The pandemic also closed down recycling programmes, spurring an effort to prolong the lives of wetsuits and close the loop on reuse.

“When we get all these suits that come through the door, we’re really able to pinpoint where the failure was on the suit and track those data points for each generation of suit,” says Patagonia wetsuit engineer Buddy Pendergast. “We started drawing those hard correlations between repeat failures that we wanted to address.”

To illustrate his point, Pendergast walks over to a table and picks up a wetsuit to show how a seam has been replaced with one that’s more durable and quicker to repair. When the data indicated that ankle cuffs were commonly failing, the team redesigned that part of the wetsuit, too. A rack of surfboards stands along one wall of the Forge so engineers can test design tweaks at C Street, a legendary surf break nearby. All of the engineers’ learnings and upgrades have been incorporated into the reincarnated wetsuit.

“We lab tested it, we field tested it and made sure that it would pass all of our quality standards,” Warner says.

The fast-fashion dynamic has made it so that people often find it “cheaper and easier to buy a new item than to repair an existing item,” says Kassatly, the fashion analyst. Patagonia has already flipped that calculation. Pendergast says the company has a 90% repair rate; for just the cost of shipping most times, a surfer gets an improved wetsuit without buying a new one. But the success of the BolderBlack initiative will depend on getting surfers to send their beyond-repair wetsuits back to Patagonia a final time — at least in their current life — rather than letting them moulder in the garage.

“Our hope is that once this gets out, people are going to start digging out all their old wetsuits to send to us,” says Hubbard.

A pair of climate-solution firms have just turned on the largest CO2 vacuum in the world, capable of sucking thousands of tons of carbon out of the atmosphere.

In 2021, GNN reported on the operation of the Orca facility in Iceland, run by the firm CarbFix in partnership with the Swiss company Climeworks. The company said it can pull 4,000 tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere every year, the equivalent of taking 870 cars off the road.

Now though, they’ve outdone Orca’s output 10 times with the Mammoth plant in Hellisheiði Iceland.

Sucking 36,000 tons of carbon out of the air every year with Climeworks’ modular, stackable intake fans, CarbFix’s unique technology deposits the carbon deep underground where it will mineralize and not emerge for hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of years.

The whole thing will be powered by geothermal energy, making it carbon-negative.

Mammoth and Orca are projects known as Direct Air Capture (DAC), which many criticize as being unproven or too expensive.

But scientists have begun predicting that carbon will have to be removed from the atmosphere to prevent the worst effects associated with a 2°C increase in average global temperatures, in addition to simply scaling back how much carbon is emitted.

Several other large operations are in the process of being planned or built, including a massive one in Wyoming that aims to capture 5,000,000 tons annually.

Climeworks didn’t give an exact price of the carbon credit, but said it would be closer to $1,000 than $100, the number that many feel needs to be reached for DAC plants to run sustainably.

In September 2022, just months after Orca first came online, Climeworks announced plans to scale up in the United States.

The company outlined its intent to engage in several large-scale DAC projects over the next few years, with the potential to create thousands of direct U.S. jobs in the process.

In the quiet stillness that follows, we mourn the loss of a true beacon of hope. Dr. Saleemul Huq, a tireless champion for our fragile planet and a eminent climate expert, has left us, leaving a void that can never be filled. His dedication to the cause of preserving our environment and the right of climate vulnerable communities were a shining example to us all.

As we reflect on Dr. Saleemul Huq’s legacy, we are reminded of the countless lives he touched, the battles he fought, and the passion he brought to every endeavor. His words ignited flames of awareness, their actions inspired change, and their unwavering belief in a better, more sustainable world gave us all reason to press on.

It is a cruel irony that a soul so committed to healing the Earth should be absent from it. We are left with aching hearts and a profound sense of loss as we lost a mentor in Bangladesh’s fight against Climate Change.

In our collective grief, the Christian Commission for Development in Bangladesh (CCDB) honors Dr Saleemul Huq’s memory by carrying his torch forward. CCDB acknowledges and is grateful for the role played by Dr Saleemul Huq as a friend and a member of the advisory body of the CCDB Climate Centre.

May Dr. Saleemul Huq’s soul find solace in the knowledge that his life’s work touched the hearts of many and that his indomitable spirit will forever guide us towards a greener, more sustainable future.

Our deepest condolences to the family of the departed.

With Regards,

Juliate Keya Malakar

Executive Director, CCDB