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]]>Why do farmers find it necessary to take the risk of chemical overexposure? The “growing” pressure to produce, to up yields in the face of deteriorating environmental conditions, must keep farmers in a constant state of worry these days. At least, in the Global North, that is likely the state of mind. In the Global South, however, facing more crises with less may explain the rate of suicides in farm communities. In India, in particular, farmer suicide has been described as a national crisis.
We call this look at Agriculture Science in the 21st Century – Part 2, the Hopeful. Why? Because unlike the reactive technologies that have ugly consequences, the innovations from scientific discoveries and technology described here represent sustainable solutions produced through scientific discovery and innovation.
What are these hope-producing innovations? Super seeds and genetically engineered microbes. So, let’s begin.
Super seeds are designed to survive drought, extreme heat, intense rainfall and flooding, plant diseases, and natural disasters. In India, breeding of climate-resilient staple crop seeds is big business. Rice is high on the list. Four different rice varieties have been developed to provide quality grain and high yields. One variety, Swarna-Sub1, can survive flooding for two weeks. Two other rice varieties, MTU-1010 and MTU-1140, are resilient in a range of extreme weather conditions.
Super seeds combine selective breeding with advanced genetic engineering. The latter uses gene-editing tools like CRISPR-Cas9. Genomic tools help predict the potential of different seeds and their performance in real-world conditions.
Selective breeding and genetic engineering in field trials are speeding up super-seed development and bringing the technology to farmers faster amid increasingly unpredictable climate conditions.
Among the leading agrochemical companies working on super seeds is Bayer. In Part 1, we talked about Bayer and glyphosate and glyphosate-tolerant crops. Bayer is developing super seeds for rice, corn, soybeans, cotton and wheat.
Companies other than Bayer working on super seed development include:
The downside to this innovation: improved seeds are more expensive, a barrier to entry for farmers in the Global South. Climate-resilient seed subsidies are increasingly being offered by a number of governments in Africa and South Asia.
India’s Beej Gram Yojana is a government program organizing groups of small farm holders in rural villages by providing subsidies, training, and seeds to improve crop varieties and yields. The program covers 50% of cereal-seed distribution costs, and 60% of the cost for pulses, oilseeds, and green-manure crops.
Super seeds alone will not solve the farming challenge of maintaining higher crop yields in the face of climate change. That’s where genetically-engineered microbes come in.
Enter Switch Bioworks, a 2022 business startup from California that has been engineering “symbiotic microbes” to create “living fertilizers.” These Switch microbes are aptly named. That’s because they have an “on switch” once established in soil and root systems that turns the microbes on to scale exponentially. If successful, the microbes can replace fossil-fuel-based fertilizers.
Nitrogen fertilizers have raised farm yields across the planet, with more than 1 billion people dependent on importing them. These fertilizers are produced from fossil fuels, with more than 700 million people importing natural gas feedstocks to make them. This type of fertilizer production produces 5% of current global carbon emissions.
When introduced into soil, the Switch microbes establish themselves around the root systems of plants before activating their genetically engineered on-switch to begin converting atmospheric nitrogen into a soluble form that they and the plants feed on.
When deployed, the microbes not only can help to lower atmospheric carbon emissions for the agricultural sector, but they also mean:
Switch estimates, when deployed globally, its microbes can replace 25% to 50% of farm nitrogen fertilizer requirements within five years.
To that end, the company has recently started field trials in six U.S. states with the immediate objective to:
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]]>The post Agricultural Science in the 21st Century – Part 1: The Ugly – Killer Chemicals appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>Besides trying to farm in increasingly unpredictable weather and climate conditions, farmers face other challenges. As climates change, so do farm environments. Crops that used to grow well suddenly don’t. New external threats arise that were formerly not present under previous climate conditions. For farming, farmers, farm workers and families, the consequential changes are significant.
Farmers face two very different pressures: climate change and food demand. Climate change means the land they till is getting stress-tested by the environment. Global population growth means farms need to produce more on the same real estate.
Global warming also comes with more than just negative weather-altering conditions. It creates new opportunities for crop-destroying opportunistic insects, other pests, fungi, and weeds to expand their ranges and flourish. If the invaders come with no natural predators following, their impact on farms can be devastating. That’s why farmers are using weapons from the chemical industry for relief. The result: routinely dosing crops with herbicides, fungicides, and pesticides. Pesticides can poison more than pests.
UAPP is Unintentional Acute Pesticide Poisoning. A September 1, 2026 article in Frontiers in Public Health describes a growing problem from pesticide use that, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), is driving widespread poisoning of farmers.
From worldwide farming data provided by the WHO, of an estimated 934 million people doing farming, most are subjected to pesticide spraying in fields annually, sometimes with several applications. The WHO states the net result is 385 million (46% of the total population) cases of UAPP annually and 20,000 deaths.
The article describes UAPP as an “ongoing major global public health challenge.” It is particularly true for Global South farmers and farm workers, where the highest percentage of UAPP gets reported. A good example is Burkina Faso, where 84% of farmers and farm workers are poisoned every year.
Growing exposure to farm pesticides has been linked to several diseases. One of them is Parkinson’s, on the rise in farm communities everywhere. An August 2026 article appearing in The Guardian described Parkinson’s as a farmer’s disease.
Probably the most controversial pesticide known by name is Roundup, developed by Monsanto and marketed beginning in 1974. Monsanto has been a magnet for environmental activists because of its aggressive marketing of the chemicals and agricultural products the company has produced. A word search on this site will yield interesting articles about Monsanto, genetically engineered crops, and the mythos that has arisen in opposition to the company.
In 1996, based on the successful market penetration of Roundup, Monsanto launched a line of Roundup Ready genetically engineered crops. Farmers could buy Monsanto-engineered seeds that would be unaffected by numerous applications of Roundup and produce maximum yields. The engineered seeds stimulated global sales for the herbicide. Today, Bayer owns Monsanto, having acquired the company in 2018. Bayer has assumed the burden of the discontent and Monsanto’s legacy reputation and notoriety associated wth glyphosate, the chemical weed killer in Roundup.
Claims have been linked to glyphosate and occurrences of non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and other cancers, rising cases of autism in the general population, increasing diagnoses of ADHD, Celiac Disease, Alzheimer’s, Type 2 Diabetes, immune diseases, depression and other neuropsychiatric conditions. Claims need scientific proof. All that the claimers can point to are flawed studies. Yet, even after independent, rigorous science and medical reviews show that glyphosate exposure doesn’t cause what has been claimed, the mythos remains.
Here is the reality. Overexposure to Roundup causes UAPP and, in some cases, can cause death, not cancer, not ADHD, not autism, etc. Hard data collected by Malaysia and Sri Lanka, tracking 4,548 and 601 UAPP cases associated with the use of Roundup, indicated 0.1% fatality rates in the former country and 3.2% in the latter. The data also noted that in many cases the victims died from intentional overdose exposure. In other words, suicide.
Probably the most popular type of farm insecticides are pyrethroids. They are widely used and liberally applied by farmers on vegetable and staple crops. They represent 17% of global agricultural pesticide sales. Widely used, it isn’t surprising to see pyrethroids show up in blood and urine samples taken from farm populations.
When a non-native invasive armyworm species from South America arrived in Africa in 2017, it marched across the continent unopposed. Armyworms are caterpillars that eat their way through corn, grain, rice, soybean and even pasture fodder crops like buzzsaws.
Pyrethroids have proven to be a chemical weapon capable of combating armyworms. Emergency spraying campaigns were used to target fields once visible damage could be spotted. Often that meant it was already too late. The alternative method to combat armyworms was to spot the moths during egg-laying and handpick them off the plants before they could hatch. Otherwise, the worms would rapidly advance across whole fields of crops, consuming everything in their path.
With the widespread use of pyrethroid spraying, there are many UAPP cases, but few are fatal. In the section above, we provided glyphosate overexposure deaths. A comparison with pyrethroids based on a Sri Lankan dataset showed that in 1,046 UAPP cases, fatality rates were 0.1%, significantly smaller numbers than with glyphosate overexposure.
No doubt, new environmental conditions will require new toolsets for farmers that will include chemical weapons. It is hard to imagine that a chemical created to selectively kill will not, from time to time, kill us as well.
In Part 2 of agricultural science in the 21st century, we will discuss the advent of super seeds and engineered microbes that could come to the rescue as climate change threatens food security.
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]]>The post Reinsurance Industry Points to Growing Environmental Costs in Not Addressing Climate Change appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>Of these, Munich Re stands near the top of its industry. What this reinsurer says about what’s happening globally requires our attention. On September 6, 2026, the company published its latest report noting that insured losses for “non-peak perils,” usually a smaller chunk of their business, surpassed US$ 104 billion in 2025, the sixth consecutive year over $100 billion. These insured losses didn’t represent total client losses. That number, which includes uninsurable losses, was more than double.
The definition of non-peak perils covers ecological events falling short of the most severe natural disasters. These include weather-event disasters like crop- and property-damaging hailstorms, excessive rainfall events leading to floods, tornadoes, severe thunderstorms, seasonal flooding, wildfires, prolonged heatwaves, droughts, etc.
Although these sound perilous to readers, Munich Re puts them in the “medium-sized loss event” category. The report notes:
“Whilst non-peak perils were long regarded as events involving comparatively low losses overall, they have now begun to add up to loss levels that were previously associated primarily with major events. This trend is progressively becoming the new normal.”
What is happening from the ecological changes happening here on Earth is a shift where non-peak perils are causing greater economic consequences. In 2025, Munich Re noted that non-peak perils represented 97% of its payouts for insured losses. The remaining 3% covered peak geophysical events like earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis.
How come only 3% when damages from an earthquake and tsunamis can be overwhelming to communities and victims? Geographic locale explains. For example, the earthquake in Myanmar in 2025 didn’t involve reinsurers because very few of the victims owned insurance. A lower country GDP equates with fewer of its citizens purchasing insurance. That’s why total reinsurance payouts amounted to between $3 and $4 billion despite the much higher numbers for real economic and human damages.
Insurers and reinsurers face a growing number of categories beyond the natural risks. For example, the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) globally is imposing increasing cyber risks and insurance claim payouts.
The cost of cyber risk for insurers has been growing. This was before AI. Now, cybercriminals are incorporating AI into their criminal toolkits for fraud and ransomware. The Munich Re report notes “that 89% of companies say they do not feel adequately protected against this.” To provide better coverage to clients, the industry expects insurance premiums to double in the next half-decade.
COVID-19 revealed another risk: global pandemics facilitated by climate change. Insect-borne or vector-based diseases are spreading from the equator poleward because of a warming atmosphere. Although not defined as a pandemic, the threat to individuals and businesses from vector-borne disease spread is growing. Many insurers are not necessarily prepared to provide coverage. Instead, the industry is defaulting to governments to provide a disease backstop fund to cover work losses for individuals and businesses.
There was no insurance coverage during the COVID-19 pandemic. Governments performed the backstop, with payouts leading to record annual government budgetary deficits across the globe. To date, no countries have fully recovered from these pandemic-inflicted debts.
Having covered AI, cybercrime and pandemic and vector-borne disease spread, what’s left in our bag of global risks? The latest World Economic Forum annual global risks report provides several categories, many beyond the capacity of insurers and reinsurers. What are we talking about?
For insurers and reinsurers, most of these risks are beyond the means to provide coverage. Where the industry sees itself is largely in the ecological orbit.
What does ecological risk mean for insurers and reinsurers as well as their clients? Catastrophic non-peak and peak climate events place risks on property.
For the insurers, it means increasing numbers of claims, inflated reconstruction costs, and more expensive payouts. For the reinsurers, it is the last line item on the insurers’ list that is a concern.
For insurance purchasers seeking property damage and loss coverage in the face of more frequent and costly ecological risk, insurers are asking that several environmental pre-conditions be met, including:
For policy purchasers, it means:
Another consequence of increased climate risk is already apparent. Fewer insurance companies are offering ecological coverage policies to homeowners and businesses. Fewer insurers means less competitive choice for consumers, higher premiums, and more uninsured or underinsured properties.
The relationship between reinsurers and insurers is changing to the disadvantage of the latter. They are being asked to assume more risk, accept more coverage restrictions, and pay more for what they can get.
Reinsurers have invested heavily in climate change research. They are modelling global climate, as the implications of a warming ocean and atmosphere can be incorporated into Earth Digital Twin models for long-term forecasting.
These tools are helping the reinsurance industry to determine future probabilities based on real science that can help quantify the risks associated with:
What has saved the reinsurance industry to date is a substantial war chest from premiums accumulated over the last decade in anticipation of the accelerated payouts that are here, with more coming.
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]]>The post Could Life Have Originated Twice on Earth or Are We Successors to a Single Cell? appeared first on Techso Mogro.
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Our origins represented in religion proved a useful tool for the emerging science of the Enlightenment with the image of a tree, sometimes with roots, and other times, a trunk and numerous branches. This became the linear model for the theory of how life came to be on Earth, starting with the first cell and branching out into the representational tree. The assumption is a single seed, cell, and point of origin.
Why do we look at origins when it comes to life in such a linear way?
A recently published article in Scientific American asks the question “How did life begin?” It describes the research of a team led by evolutionary biologist Bill Martin, from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf in Germany. They argue that evidence shows that life began twice on Earth.
The question of where life began is discussed in the article, pointing to hydrothermal vents as the most likely source of “genesis,” the name that inspired the field of genetics and derived from the Greek γένεσις, meaning “origin.”
Hydrothermal vents, Martin argues, are likely where our universal common ancestor emerged. Called the ur-organism, it was a bacterium-like cell from which all life on Earth descends. Was it alive? Not necessarily. It may have been more like a self-contained, membrane-sheathed droplet filled with chemical ingredients that were the precursors of life, including some form of genetic encoding.
The article talks about a half-alive ancestor that responded to the energy and mineral output of the hydrothermal vent environment that introduced prebiotic elements, the second origin factor, to the mix. The ur-organism’s absorption of the prebiotic element, when combined with its encoding capability, allowed, during replication, the passing along of genetic traits to create the first functioning cell. Martin calls it “one origin of the genetic code but two origins of life.”
As interesting as the Martin team hypothesis is, others point to a multiple origins hypothesis.
Why would life emerge from a “singularity” when so much of what we observe on Earth today doesn’t reflect single origins?
For example, look at the emergence of human language. Today, humans communicate using over 7,000 spoken languages. Of these, a little more than half are written. Characterizing language has produced incredible discontinuities. Look at Egyptian hieroglyphics versus Greek. They bear no resemblance to each other even though their origins are in reasonable geographic proximity. When hieroglyphics became lost to history, it took a Rosetta Stone for us to decipher the former because of the accompanying Greek translation.
At a restaurant a few days ago, one wall was covered in Thai script. When I did some research, I found that the Thai written language originates from South India. Like hieroglyphics, it bears no resemblance to the written languages to which we are more familiar. The same can be said about Chinese, 3,300 years ago, or Mesoamerican scripts from Central Mexico and the Yucatán, 2,700 years ago.
What supports a single origin and the subsequent tree is the one thing we find common to all living things here on Earth: DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid).
Most scientists see DNA’s emergence as the genesis moment. Could other molecules have existed here on Earth to produce life based on a different set of rules? What if life in the Universe could have entirely different molecular origins, each begetting its own Tree of Life?
Today’s biology begins with the tree supporting multiple branches coming from common ancestors. And those representations show a trunk often supported by a bundle of roots; none of the latter represent an alternate molecular derivation.
The theory of alternative biochemistries with different molecules leading to life is called abiogenesis. Here on Earth, DNA triumphed, but what was here before that victory?
Self-replicating RNA (ribonucleic acid), the simpler nucleic cousin of DNA, may have ruled before it took the former’s architecture and bound it to sugars.
Return missions from asteroids have brought back samples containing the nucleic and amino acid components common to DNA and RNA: adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine and uracil. These samples have also been infused with sugars and thousands of other life-friendly chemicals.
In a pre-RNA and DNA world, we could have seen TNA (threose nucleic acid), PNA (peptide nucleic acid) and GNA (glycol nucleic acid) self-replicating molecules.
DNA’s eventual triumph over the three others mentioned above, other competitors, and RNA may have resulted because it was chemically more complex, which gave it greater flexibility. DNA proved to be more stable during replication than RNA, with lower mutation rates. Then DNA developed a collegial relationship with RNA, an effective partnership that other complex molecules may not have been able to duplicate. It proved to be a winning combination based on what we see here on Earth today.
Is DNA the only molecule in the Universe capable of producing life? In laboratories, experiments have produced synthetic alternatives to DNA. Would DNA likely produce cellular life elsewhere? Changes to Earth’s environment, such as much hotter or colder temperatures, higher radiation exposure, and highly acidic or alkaline water, would have made DNA less likely as the originator of life on Earth.
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]]>The post A Climate Change Wakeup Call – Part 2: The Problem We Created is Now Ours to Fix appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>Who has known about how we humans were changing the planet’s climate?
Scientists knew about the greenhouse gas (GHG) effect since the 19th century at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
Industrialists could witness the evidence for themselves every day as their foundries and factories spewed GHGs.
Utilities knew when they chose to burn fossil fuels to generate electricity, even with the knowledge of cleaner alternatives.
Of course, the fossil fuel industry knew, with their laboratory results showing the link between their industry and climate change since the 1950s.
Governments knew. Doctors and the healthcare community knew. Consumers even had an inkling.
All that knowing, and no one was doing anything to stop it.
The annual climate change rite of passage is called COP. COP stands for Conference of the Parties. This annual United Nations summit began in 1992 and has been going strong ever since. Nations around the world gather to talk about climate change, propose solutions, sign agreements, and then… nothing.
You may disagree with the last part, but look at a measure of the results to date. CO₂ concentrations in the atmosphere in 1992 were 356.5 parts per million. With 2026 not yet at an end, the latest July data show CO₂ concentrations at ~429 ppm. If you plot the trend based on observations from 1960 to the present, the graph looks like this:
Does the upward-bending curve demonstrate that we collectively don’t know what we are doing about CO₂, the prime GHG associated with global atmospheric and ocean warming?
In 2015, a COP meeting produced the Paris Climate Agreement, with 195 countries agreeing to voluntarily tackle climate change by targeting GHG emissions. Since then, the number has dropped twice when the United States withdrew during both presidential terms of Donald Trump.
The Paris Agreement committed humanity to global behaviour modification. We were to limit global warming to 2°C (3.6°F) and ideally make best efforts to limit it to no more than a 1.5°C (2.7°F) rise above pre-Industrial Revolution atmospheric temperatures. To do this, countries were going to faithfully measure carbon outputs, called national stocktaking. They agreed to regularly report on progress to reduce carbon outputs.
Subsequent annual COP meetings have shown that using collective behaviour modification doesn’t work. The results indicate mitigation efforts have done little to slow down rising CO₂ levels and temperature rise.
Even the commitment by Global North and other rich countries to create an adaptation and mitigation fund to help Global South countries combat climate change has fallen well short of its financial target of US$ 100 billion annually beginning in 2020.
Why hasn’t behaviour modification worked? A sampling of national commitments and actions that appear to have failed or stalled includes:
Climatologists express concern that the upward-bending curve seen above will eventually lead to long-term climate disaster.
With behaviour modification’s failure as a collective strategy, we now appear to be falling back on technology rather than the natural options of ocean, forest, seagrass, peat bog, soil, and permafrost carbon sinks. Apparently, they can no longer cut the mustard.
Why? Natural carbon sinks appear to be nearing their maximum capacity to sequester CO₂. Oceans can only suck up so much before becoming warmer and more acidic. Planting more forests doesn’t appear to be offsetting forest loss from human exploitation and wildfires. Droughts are making peat bogs and soil untenable. Meanwhile, the Arctic is witnessing unprecedented permafrost melt, turning it into a net carbon emitter.
Technological wizardry is now our answer to failing to keep CO₂ in the bottle. Often talked about, carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) has become the rage. We have technologies that can suck CO₂ from chimney stacks and from ambient air. The problem is getting CO₂ polluters to pay to implement these technologies.
We are talking about fossil fuel and utility companies who for years have pumped out oil and natural gas, or burned these fuels and coal to generate electricity. They have put profits before social and environmental good.
Governments, meanwhile, have wanted the fossil fuel companies to pay for CCS and direct-air carbon (DAC) capture. The companies, which have benefited from fueling and feeding oil demand, making tens of billions of dollars, want the public to pay the lion’s share. Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry and utilities show little remorse for dumping climate-change-causing pollutants into the commons: the air we all collectively breathe.
One such project represents a good example of the challenges we face. It is Canada’s Pathways Alliance. First announced in 2021, it involves a consortium of six fossil fuel producers constructing over 2,000 kilometres (1,240 miles) of pipeline to transport CO₂ from oil sands production sites to a location where the gas would be pumped underground.
Five years later, it is 2026. The Pathways project has yet to lay a kilometre of pipe. The companies aren’t even sure it will work. Who pays remains unresolved.
That we have reached this point, requiring tens of billions of dollars to begin to remove climate-changing pollutants, seems inexplicable. Yet, that is one of the nuclear options being touted to resolve the growing climate change crisis.
If we know excess CO₂ is the prime driver of climate change, we should be able to produce less of it. But our thirst for energy in the 21st century keeps throwing a monkey wrench into the works whenever we talk about learning to do with less.
Less would mean a rapid transition to 100% electrification. The electricity would come from renewable, nuclear and other low-to-net-zero sources.
Less would mean no more diesel- and gasoline-fuelled transportation, no more ships burning bunker fuel, and air transportation would replace jet fuel with hydrogen and batteries.
Needless to say, we aren’t even close to achieving any of the above at present.
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]]>The post A Climate Change Wakeup Call – Part 1: The Latest Reports appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>CLIMATE CHANGE!!
At the same time, two reports added to the climate change cannon fodder. The first was the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) global update on climate. The second is the Canadian Comprehensive Climate Report (CCCR2026) published yesterday. The first stated: a 91% likelihood that the planet’s mean temperature will exceed 1.5°C (2.7°F) in one of the next three years. The second stated that Canada was warming twice as fast and the Canadian North three times as fast as the rest of the planet.
In this posting, Part 1 of 2, we summarize the findings of the two reports. In Part 2, we point fingers and restate the long-put-off actions needed to remedy our planet.
The map seen at the beginning of this article appears to be largely covered by red.
It points to the planet running a fever and comes from the WMO report, which estimates a 75% likelihood that between 2026 and 2030 the atmospheric mean temperature will exceed 1.5°C (2.7°F) above the period that began with the Industrial Revolution in the mid-19th century.
Over these next five years, the WMO forecasts a mean global atmospheric temperature of between 1.3°C (2.3°F) and 1.9°C (3.4°F), with the poles outpacing these levels of rise.
I have provided a link to both a summary and the full report if you wish to dig into the details.
Speaking of details and closer to home, Canada’s second comprehensive report on climate change, CCCR2026, showed up on September 3, 2026, with no fanfare, no panel of scientists for the press to pump, and very little media coverage. Downplaying the report probably has a lot to do with the current U.S.-launched trade war against Canada, which has sucked all the air from this important report.
CCCR2026 tells a tale: a summation on the current state of climate change across Canada. In a nutshell, it points to rising atmospheric temperatures as a consequence of increasing global levels of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions caused by human activity.
What does the report state? Here are some of its observations:
The planet is in trouble. Humanity is in trouble. Future generations are in trouble. The consequences of ignoring the root causes of climate change are coming home to roost.
In Part 2, the finger-pointing will be very direct, as will the discussion about the players and actions needed to benefit the planet, and here, in our corner of it, Canada.
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]]>The post The Military and Climate Change “Threat Multiplier” appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>A recent article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists looks at how the U.S. military is addressing climate change. Its author, Neta C. Crawford, describes Pentagon studies on greenhouse gas emissions going back to the mid-1950s. These studies have hatched projects like the U.S. Navy implementing anti-flood measures on its bases in home waters and around the world.
In 2014, when I first started researching the subject of climate change and its potential impact on the military, I read the Pentagon’s climate change adaptation roadmap, which included the following statement:
“Climate change will have serious implications for the Department’s ability to maintain both its built and natural infrastructure, and to ensure military readiness in the future.”
Among the issues of concern facing military readiness were the following projections:
In 2014, the Pentagon called climate change a “threat multiplier.”
Why?
The NATO countries that include the U.S., Canada, and Europe have been studying climate change threats to military readiness. The 32 countries have incorporated climate change into their collective strategies and defence planning, reflecting resilience, readiness and risk management.
NATO’s core security priorities include integrating climate risk and resilience, involving:
Despite the noble aspirations of military planners to draw down carbon emissions, wars, when started, become big producers of greenhouse gas emissions. That’s because militaries consume more oil and other fossil fuels than anybody and anything else on the planet. Tanks, fighter jets, and ships are big emitters, larger than most civilian sources. Add activities like shelling and bombing leading to fires, and even more CO₂ is emitted.
Use the Russia-Ukraine conflict as an example. Its contributions to climate change over these last four-plus years have produced lots of carbon emissions, including:
The net result of the Russia-Ukraine conflict is emission amounts of CO₂ equal to what France produces annually.
Note that when wars contribute to carbon emissions, the numbers don’t get counted in country contributions published by the United Nations and discussed at annual COP meetings.
In other words, the consequences of war on climate change are ignored when determining mitigation and adaptation strategies.
Rising geopolitical conflicts are causing countries to spend more on military hardware.
What part of that increasing spend comes from climate change?
For Russia and Ukraine, not so much. Elsewhere, however, climate change is impacting military spending.
Our destabilizing global climate may partially explain the continuing conflicts and unrest in the African Sahel, Congo and Horn of Africa.
In a recent article posted to the Techso Mogro, I listed 21 ongoing conflicts. Not included in this batch was the latest Strait of Hormuz tiff. Each of these aforementioned wars, I noted, was adding to the social disruption of the combatant nations and to climate change as well.
So, what is the spending trend? From 2016 to 2025, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute has documented a 41% increase in global military spending. During that time:
With all this spending, military emissions continue to rise even when not fighting in a war. So much for mitigation and adaptation.
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]]>The post Implications of a 3D-Printed House That Can Be Ready in a Day appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>The mOne I read about recently, on the tinyhousetalk.com website, is 37 square metres (400-square feet). It is as large as some studio apartments found in cities like Paris and New York. The finishes and features, however, put those city studios to shame.
All models are factory-manufactured using 3D printing and can be delivered to a site for setup in a single day.
The internal features and walls are 3D-printed. The furniture, including a couch that becomes a Murphy bed, along with shelves and cupboards are also 3D-printed. The flexibility of the unit’s internal space produces an open floor plan, giving the mOne a feel of spaciousness.
Comfortable living features include a drop-down cinema-sized projection system for large-scale home entertainment. The fully enclosed hotel-quality bathroom includes a shower, toilet and sink. Meanwhile, a kitchen with oven, microwave, coffee maker, refrigerator, LED-lit cabinetry and shelves, and a stainless steel sink lie hidden behind closet doors so that the kitchen can disappear when not in use. Both the bathroom and kitchen share a common wall.
Haus.me describes the mOne as suitable for sleeping up to 5, although I think that refers to the largest model. The unit featured on tinyhousetalk.com is likely best suited for a solo act, or for two at most.
When I recently researched an article that appeared on this site describing the current ability to 3D-print entire communities, I came across the mOne. Unlike the on-site 3D-printed homes I described in that article, this tiny house is factory-manufactured.
Its material is 3D-printed composite polymer, featuring transparent sections that offer floor-to-ceiling panoramic views. It is manufactured in one piece with no wall framing required.
That means everything is prebuilt, including light fixtures, plumbing, and venting. Kitchen appliances and bathroom fixtures are added.
Power to the home comes from rooftop solar panels with battery backup. Water for internal use is collected by a built-in atmospheric condenser. A HEPA filter keeps the internal air fresh. Wastewater gets fully recycled, meaning no need for a septic tank. All environmental and energy issues are managed by built-in Smart Home software.
mOne claims it’s autonomous from Day One, requiring no pre-built external infrastructure. As a result, it can be up and running within a day of delivery.
mOne pricing starts at US$ 89,990 for the smallest model. The price of the configuration featured on the tinyhomes website was $499,990. The largest model costs over a million. A YouTube video provides a guided tour of a 37-square-metre model.
If you can drop a standalone 3D-printed home on a lot ready to go in a day, think of other solutions these types of factory builds can deliver.
When 3D printing started, it was seen as a technology for hobbyists and prototyping. Today it is being used to print objects as small as medical devices and as large as wind-turbine blades.
Now, imagine using the Haus.me technology to build other types of structural shells that can become classrooms, shops, pavilions, field hospitals, medical clinics, military barracks, disaster-relief shelters, bridges, depots and storage tanks, flood control structures, and more.
Designs can be endless, software-created, factory-built, and fully equipped. Haus.me is opening a door to an as-yet untapped goldmine where 3D-printing can take us.
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]]>There are many reasons to use this method to build homes. Here are a few:
The 3D printer you may have purchased for the home most often uses plastic filament spools that get extruded through the printer nozzle to build projects.
On the other hand, the 3D printers that build houses use cement. It isn’t the normal Portland cement that often contains coarse gravel that would jam up hoses and nozzles. Coarse gravel mixed into cement makes sense when using it to build roads, sidewalks, foundations and other traditional construction.
With fluidity the primary requirement for 3D printers to lay down walls, sand, finely crushed pre-used concrete, brick powder, waste glass, microfibres, limestone powder, fly ash, and silica are used instead. These are combined with geopolymer binders and accelerators, the latter introduced at the printer nozzle to allow for quick setting as the walls get poured layer on layer. Common brands for printing 3D homes include Lavacrete, Sikacrete 3D, evoBuild 3D, Quikrete, CyBe Mortar, and Ultimatecrete. Even modified Portland cement can be used sans the gravel.
A 3D printer cannot print an entire house. The material components making up the plumbing, wiring, roofing, fixtures and finishes cannot be printed by current 3D-printer technology. Instead, these get added after the walls are printed using traditional construction methods.
Some 3D-printing contractors can install electrical outlet boxes and sleeves for cables and HVAC, while the walls are drying. This minimizes cutting, nails and staples.
This is not a complete list by any means. I am sure I have missed several sites. But the narrative shows how large-scale 3D printing technology is establishing itself in home and building construction.
If any company can be described as the pioneer in 3D-printed housing, it is WinSun. This Chinese-based company designed and built its first project in 2014: 10 single-storey homes in the Shanghai area. A second project in 2015 followed: the tallest 3D-printed building in the world, a five-storey apartment block.
In both projects, WinSun constructed the exterior and interior walls in a factory using the world’s largest continuous 3D house printer. Then it shipped the walls to their respective locations for building assembly. Plumbing, electrical insulation, windows, doors, roofing and structural reinforcement were added afterwards. It used a mixture of recycled construction waste, glass fibre, cement, and additives for its “ink.”
Using its factory-based 3D printing model, WinSun claimed considerable savings. It estimated savings of between 30 and 60% on building materials, shortened production times by 50 to 70%, and decreased labour costs from 50 to 80%.
Since these first two projects, WinSun has gone on to make 3D-printed large-scale structures a standard. In 2017, it built a 3D-printed 432-metre flood defence wall near Shanghai as well as several riverbank restoration projects.
In 2017, it signed an agreement with Saudi Arabia to build and deliver 100 3D printers for a project to 3D print 1.5 million homes. The work has yet to begin.
During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, WinSun was contracted by the Chinese government to build a four-storey emergency building to quarantine patients infected with the virus. That same year, WinSun signed an agreement with Dallas-based AECOM, an engineering consulting firm. The agreement was to partner on building 3D-printed commercial buildings and engineering projects. Nothing has come of it so far.
In 2024, WinSun reached out to another U.S.-based company, Gaudi Tech, with a project to build seven 3D-printed homes in Hesperia, California. As of today, nothing has been built.
WinSun has been called the pioneer of large-format, prefabricated concrete buildings. Since its inception, however, the WinSun factory-based model has been supplanted by smaller 3D printers that build on-site.
Some of these and their projects are described below.
A 3D-printed community housing project, the first outside of China, was announced in 2019. Its location was Nacajuca, Tabasco, Mexico. The project was to build 50 to 100 3D-printed homes for poor families, replacing those destroyed by floods and earthquakes.
An ICON Vulcan II printer created each home’s exterior and interior walls within 24 hours. Prior to the printing, each house foundation was laid. Then the printer did its job. Several more days were needed to install roofing, utilities, windows and interior finishes.
This was the first large-scale 3D-printed homes-in-situ project of its kind. Although the initial plan called for 50 homes, in the end, only 10 were 3D-printed. Later, the project added 90 units built using conventional cinder block construction. I sought an explanation for the change from the original 3D-printed building plans, but none was available at the time of writing.
The image seen at the top of this article is from a community called Wolf Ranch, located near Austin, Texas. It is a 100-home, 3D-printed subdivision that has been constructed using ICON’s large-scale 3D printers.
In addition to the 3D-printed components, construction has involved pouring foundations on site before beginning the print build. Roofing, windows, doors, plumbing, electrical, HVAC, solar panels and interior finishes were done using conventional construction techniques after the walls were laid. Completion occurred in 2025.
A 106 3D-printed home community in Salida, Colorado, is being built using RIC Robotics 3D printers. Seven homes have been completed and sold as of this month. Salida is a planned subdivision project incorporating community-scale infrastructure including wastewater, water and energy.
The RIC 3D printer follows a pre-programmed digital custom design for each home as it prints the walls and structural shell.
The site has provided challenges because of its variable mountainous terrain and environment. The community deals with extremes of heat and cold, heavy rains, prolonged droughts, and wildfire risks. The walls are being built to provide greater resistance to such environmental hazards.
A new housing project in 2025, a two-storey family home located in Tapping near Perth, Australia, had its exterior walls printed in under 18 hours. The construction used a CyBE 3D printer built in the Netherlands.
The concrete mixture used included materials described as three times stronger than standard brickwork, cyclone-rated, fire- and water-resistant, and termite-proof. Unlike previous 3D-printed home builds, this one is the first in-situ multi-storey construction.
ITACA is a 3D-printed building designed to be self-sufficient and environmentally sustainable. The home is located near Imola in northern Italy.
Built using the Italian-designed Crane WASP 3D printer, the house was completed in February 2026. During construction, the builders used a web app to upload files and control the printer’s operations. Modifications could be made on the fly, impacting printing speeds and material flow.
The ink was lime-based. A previous WASP project built a 3D-printed structure using raw earth and water as building material. In ITACA, however, the purpose of the build was to meet Italian certification standards. Raw earth was not deemed acceptable even though it worked.
The 3D Crane WASP printer is very different from those previously described here. It features four arms working in tandem. This allows a coordinated multi-nozzle material delivery and eliminates the need to move the printer at any time during the building of the home’s 710-layered walls.
ITACA uses a unique design. The walls contain reinforcing hollow columns. When dry and cured, the hollows are filled with rice husks sourced from agricultural waste. The rice acts to insulate and thermally regulate the home, minimizing the need for heating or cooling. In addition, the wall design provides enhanced structural integrity in a region that often experiences earthquakes. Other features include a green roof, rainwater collection basins and solar panels.
The result: ITACA is a passive energy 3D-printed home that achieves a negative CO₂ emissions balance and is state-of-the-art for the construction industry.
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]]>The post Climate Change and AI – How They Interact and What Are the Potential Outcomes? appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>Others argue that the widespread adoption of AI globally will help humanity adapt to climate change and even mitigate its causes.
So, will AI exacerbate climate change, or will it be our saviour?
The growing demand for data centres containing thousands of energy-hungry computers is at the crux of this debate. Data centres need energy to run and to stay cool. Where do they get the power? If it comes from coal and natural-gas-fired power plants, then AI in data centres represents a significant carbon emission contributor. Even if the energy comes from renewables, data centres still contribute carbon emissions, just not in the same volume. That’s because generative AI, Large Language Models, AI training, and AI use by big companies and people like me who ask AI questions and receive answers require lots of computing power.
AI developers, when calculating energy requirements, count the number of GPUs, TPUs and CPUs needed to do the job. What are these?
The International Energy Agency (IEA), in quantifying the current environmental carbon footprint for data centres, estimates a present-day contribution of about 0.5% to total carbon emissions from the energy they use today. It sees that number rising to 1.4% by 2030.
With more AI, does that mean faster climate change, or can more AI help mitigate global warming? Can we use its artificial brain power to design solutions to climate change while allowing us to energize it?
Some AI enthusiasts in Silicon Valley think that the technology is our answer to climate change. They see AI data centre operations producing insights that humans cannot discern. For example:
AI can discern patterns in its own usage to forecast energy requirements from wind, solar and other renewable sources, and balance supply and demand.
AI can look at the energy grid and help us improve grid transmission performance.
Where AI can prove useful in mitigating or adapting to climate change is by focusing on important economic sectors such as agriculture, energy, healthcare, mining, transportation, manufacturing and service industries. AI can help to optimize food production, improve land use, address wildfire threats to global forests, identify new carbon sinks, improve weather forecasting and more.
AI as a technology accelerator can help us make how we produce the energy it and we need less negatively impactful on the environment. It can help us find new types of battery materials or invent new emission reduction technologies.
Widespread deployment of AI, through technological innovations, could reduce worldwide carbon emissions in 2035 by up to 1.4 gigatons states the IEA. The caveat for this prediction is that added data centres are powered only by renewable or net-zero energy sources.
Data centres generating AI could be a force for mitigating climate change. Yet currently, AI contributes to climate change through a proliferation of data centres and growing demand.
AI data centres can help save us from ourselves. As a technology accelerator that focuses on climate change challenges, AI operating from data centres can generate novel mitigation and adaptation solutions. Even though it may be obvious to AI, the one solution it cannot be programmed to consider is getting rid of us.
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