By Viva Sarah Press, NoCamels
March 11, 2021 7 minutes
Environment News
A clump of tar on a beach in Israel following the February 2021 oil spill. Photo: Rachel Pardo
Environmental groups in Israel are warning that a massive oil spill last month is a trailer of what’s to come if government plans for an oil pipeline deal set for the Red Sea port of Eilat materialize. The spill has continued to wash up clumps of tar along over 90 percent of the country’s 195-kilometer Mediterranean coastline, devastating beaches, killing wildlife, and reaching as far up as neighboring Lebanon.
“This is one of the worst ecological disasters we have ever experienced,” Maya Jacobs, CEO of Zalul environmental NGO that is dedicated to the protection of the seas and rivers of Israel, tells NoCamels. “And this is like a promo. This is nothing compared to what could happen to us. We have nature calling us, saying wake up, look what you’re doing.”
Businesses, governments, NGOs, and private sector individuals continue to voluntarily seek ways to offset their carbon emissions by purchasing carbon credits for a more climate secure world. But figuring out how best to calculate the amount of carbon pulled out of the atmosphere and how to make CO2 removal scalable are two pain points looking to technology for solutions.
A team of Israeli entrepreneurs and scientists says their mix of AI, remote sensing, and image processing offers a hardware-free way to monitor the carbon dioxide removed by plants and soil.
Jacques Amselem, co-founder and CTO at Albo Systems explains that carbon sequestration is a process to capture and store atmospheric carbon dioxide as one way to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere and, using photosynthesis, converted to organic carbon.