The food we eat, the clothes we wear, the air we breathe, the water we drink – it’s all underpinned by healthy and productive soils. Since Europeans arrived in Australia, the continent’s soil has steadily been degraded. Yet, until now, we’ve lacked an integrated national approach to managing this valuable and finite resource.
That changed in last night’s federal budget, when Treasurer Josh Frydenberg announced almost A$200 million for a National Soils Strategy. The 20-year plan recognises the vital role of soils for environmental and human health, the economy, food security, biodiversity and climate resilience.
Our soils face a range of threats, including the loss of prime agricultural land, erosion, acidification, salt accumulation, contamination and carbon loss. Climate change also puts pressure on our soils through through droughts, storms, bushfires and floods.
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Open Academy s non-credit Solar Energy Basics course on the Coursera platform recently hit a milestone of 50,000-plus enrollments since it launched back in 2019. It puts that course in the top 10 enrollments of SUNY courses on the Coursera platform, out of approximately 60 courses.
The course was developed by Dr. Neal Abrams, Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry with instructional design and technical support from the Open Academy.
The course has a global reach, and has been subtitled into eight languages in addition to English. It s one of three courses on solar energy for Coursera developed by Abrams to provide learners with a foundation for designing photovoltaic systems. The second course, Solar Energy System Design, launched in the summer of 2020 and a third will launch this summer. Abrams has also been using these courses as part of a credit-bearing course this semester as part of the online Sustainability Management program, SUS 496- Solar Power:
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Today, the New York State Center for Sustainable Materials Management (NYS Center for SMM), based at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF), launched a first-of-its-kind statewide recycling website to address residential recycling confusion and contamination across the State. Visitors to
RecycleRightNY.org will learn about the value of everyday materials and why it is important to recycle correctly.
The
Recycle Right NY campaign was originally launched by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) after a series of recycling stakeholder meetings in 2018 to jump start discussion aimed at addressing challenges facing New York s recycling system. Campaign management was transitioned to the Syracuse University Center for Sustainable Community Solutions (SU-CSCS), a core partner with the NYS Center for SMM. The SU-CSCS team worked with more than 100 New York state recycling professionals to further build out this important reso