SONAM RAINA

Two students have taken upon themselves to restore and protect the wetlands of Louisana. Franziska Trautmann and Max Steitz, the founders of Glass Half full have come up with a simple but effective idea to prevent soil erosion in the Louisana wetlandws. The conversation started with the two wondering about the fate of a wine bottle they were sharing. The simple but great idea was to crush bottles into sand instead of having discarded bottles sit listlessly in a landfill. Sand is vital in the context of the wetlands because the new recycled sand will replace eroded soil. The wetlands are important because they absorb some energy of storms. If you were wondering about the choice of glass as a material then you should know that sand and glass come from the same material called silica.Nearly 20 ton of glass has been used with burlap bags and vegetation to stop the erosion along the Louisana coastline. The project has performed well so far and the results have been encouraging as marsh grasses are growing around the restoration structures.

Aleph Farms has secured regulatory approval to sell its cultivated beef steaks in Singapore, with a launch planned for the first half of 2027. Cultivated meat is real animal meat grown directly from animal cells in a facility, rather than from raising and slaughtering livestock. A small sample of cells is taken from an animal once, then multiplied and grown into muscle and fat outside the animal's body. The process goes like this: Cells are placed in large steel tanks called bioreactors, warm, nutrient-rich vats that mimic conditions inside a living body, and left to multiply. Aleph recently streamlined this, instead of growing cells in one tank and moving them to another to take shape, it now triggers the cells to start turning into muscle and fat within the same tank, then combines them with a plant-protein base to build the final cut. Fewer steps, lower costs, the company says. On scaling, Aleph is not building its own factories. It's partnering with contract manufacturer Cell Agritech, starting in Singapore and expanding through Cell Agritech's larger Penang, Malaysia site as demand grows, with a similar setup underway in Switzerland. The environmental picture is genuinely mixed. One widely-cited study found cultured meat could involve 78 to 96% lower greenhouse gas emissions and 99% lower land use than conventional meat. But a 2026 review found results vary hugely across studies, with the energy needed to run bioreactors often exceeding poultry or pork's footprint unless the electricity is low-carbon. A separate UC Davis preprint went further, suggesting current production methods could leave cultivated meat's climate footprint higher than retail beef's. The potential is real, but it hinges on how the power is sourced.

Did you know about the Ice Stupas of Ladakh, India? Ice Stupas are artificial glaciers built on the indigenous knowledge of Ladakhis. Naturally, ice forms in flat, horizontal sheets that melt quickly under the sun. Sonam Wangchuk, a mechanical engineer and teacher, noticed that ice stalagmites - vertical, cone-shaped ice - lasted much longer into spring than horizontal ice, since their shape exposes less surface area to sunlight. Building on this insight, he engineered a way to freeze glacial stream water vertically, piping it down through gravity-fed pipes so that pressure created towering vertical ice formations. These were aptly named Ice Stupas, as stupas are conical Buddhist shrines, Buddhism being the majoritarian religion of Ladakh. The idea grew out of SECMOL, the education reform organisation Wangchuk founded in 1988. The first pilot rose in 2013, and by 2014 a full-scale version stood above Phyang village, storing winter meltwater that farmers could use to irrigate crops through the dry spring months. It was a modern engineering twist on an old Ladakhi practice - fittingly, the crowdfunding campaign that funded it was even called a "digital hala," after the traditional system of community labour used to build stupas. The design has since travelled beyond Ladakh - Swiss architect Conradin Clavuot brought it to Switzerland through the MortAlive project, resulting in two ice stupas built there. Wangchuk's innovation has won several awards, including the Rolex Award for Enterprise in 2016.

France just landed EU approval for a €63 billion offshore wind program - one of Europe's biggest clean energy bets yet. The European Commission cleared funding for 11 offshore wind farms across the North Sea, Atlantic, and Mediterranean, running over the next 25 years. The scale: up to 11.1 GW combined capacity, generating up to 47.8 TWh of renewable electricity a year - which is about 10.6% of France's total annual power consumption. Funding will flow through competitive bidding, structured as a two-way contract for difference tied to market prices. For a nuclear-heavy nation, this is a real pivot - offshore wind is becoming central. Big move for Europe's energy transition.

Ethiopia recently unveiled a locally developed probiotic starter culture called Etittuu, designed to ferment milk more efficiently and reduce reliance on imported dairy processing inputs. Researchers say the culture can ferment pasteurised milk in as little as four hours, improving processing efficiency while helping the country 'save foreign exchange previously spent on imported starter cultures'. Dairy is an important part of Ethiopian diets and livelihoods. The country has Africa's largest cattle population, millions of smallholder farmers depend on dairy production, and rising urban demand is increasing the need for reliable and affordable dairy products. Etittuu, if it can be adopted at scale, it could improve product consistency, strengthen local dairy processing, reduce import dependence, support rural incomes, and contribute to greater food self-reliance. Many countries have developed food innovations to reduce dependance on imports - • Singapore: Urban farming and alternative protein technologies under the 30 by 30 strategy to reduce food import dependence. • Saudi Arabia: Controlled-environment agriculture and greenhouse technologies to boost domestic food production. • Nigeria: Investments in local dairy processing and milk production to reduce reliance on imported milk powder. • Rwanda: Expansion of domestic food processing and value-addition industries to strengthen food security. • United Arab Emirates: Vertical farming and desert agriculture technologies aimed at producing more food locally. • Brazil: Tropical agriculture innovations developed through Embrapa that helped reduce dependence on imported agricultural technologies and improved domestic productivity. Do you know of similar examples of food innovation in your country or other countries where a locally developed food innovation helped (or will help) a country reduce dependence on imported agricultural inputs or food products?

The UAE generates an estimated 220,000 tonnes of textile waste every year.. think of it as a 70-storey waste skyscraper that rises every year. Last week, the country launched Naseej — the National Initiative for Textile Circularity. Naseej is officially framed as aligning policy, industry, and consumer behaviour under one national framework — the point at which these efforts usually break down. Lets look at three international comparisons. France introduced mandatory Extended Producer Responsibility for textiles in 2007, requiring brands to pay fees to the eco-organisation Refashion based on the volume and environmental impact of what they put on the market - the most mature model in the world, though it still hasn't reached its government-set 50% collection target after 17 years. The Netherlands introduced its own mandatory Textile EPR Decree in July 2023, with legally binding recycling and reuse targets rising to 75% and 25% respectively by 2030. Australia's Seamless scheme, operational since July 2024, takes a different approach - voluntary, industry-led, funded by a 4-cent-per-garment levy, with brands responsible for the full garment lifecycle from design to disposal. Naseej, built on memoranda of understanding with brands, manufacturers, and recyclers rather than statutory obligations, sits structurally closer to Australia's Seamless than to the European mandatory models. Voluntary frameworks depend on sustained brand participation and government follow-through on the regulatory pillar. Whether the UAE translates the policy and regulations pillar into enforceable rules will likely determine how far Naseej moves beyond a coordination platform. The upstream question is: how do you reduce the volume of clothing entering the waste stream, not just improve what happens to it afterwards? What do you think creates more durable change - mandatory producer levies, voluntary stewardship, or intervention at the design stage?

Startups working at the intersection of climate and health, developing technology solutions for children, would be happy to know that the UNICEF Venture Fund is inviting such startups to apply for its Climate Ventures cohort. Selected applicants will be eligible to receive up to US $100,000 in equity-free funding for early-stage and deployment-ready technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and blockchain. To be considered, companies must be registered in one of UNICEF's programme countries, must possess working prototypes, and must demonstrate a firm commitment to open-source licensing and practices. Applications from women-led startups and young founders are strongly encouraged.

This will be a long technical read but worth everyone's time. Last night, I was reading about how the near-total shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz (it hasn't gotten back to normalcy) has sent shockwaves through global fertilizer markets. About a third of global seaborne fertilizer trade typically passes through the Strait. Urea prices have already jumped nearly 30% since the war began, and global fertilizer prices are projected to average 15–20% higher through the first half of 2026. Unlike oil, there are no internationally coordinated strategic fertilizer reserves to cushion the blow. The UN has warned this disruption could push 45 million more people into hunger. Yes, 45 million! For India specifically, urea import prices have nearly doubled ahead of the sowing season. While researching fertilizer prices, I came across this study published by India-based ICRISAT (International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics) on sorghum. The researchers tested nearly 200 diverse sorghum varieties under three nitrogen conditions - zero fertilizer, half the recommended dose, and the full amount, across two growing seasons. Grain yields under half the recommended dose of nitrogen were comparable to those under full application! Same harvest, half the input, but the real breakthrough was going beyond the field into the genetics to identify genomic regions associated with nitrogen use efficiency and key candidate genes that regulate how sorghum absorbs, transports, and utilizes nitrogen. I know this was a complex sentence. Think of it as finding the efficiency dial hardwired into the plant and figuring out exactly how it works. And here's the baseline problem this solves - crops typically use only 30–40% of the nitrogen fertilizer applied, the rest is lost to the environment, degrading soil and water! The findings don't stop at sorghum as the researchers believe the insights can be applied to major cereals like rice, wheat, and maize.