【推荐1】Houston-based Dream Harvest Farming Co. is a vertical (垂直的) indoor farming company producing leafy-greens and herbs and delivering them locally to grocery stores in Texas and nearby states.

Zain Shauk, co-founder and CEO of Dream Harvest Farming Co., says on this week’s show of the Houston Innovators Podcast, “Thirty-five percent of the produce grown is thrown away before you even have a chance to eat it. Almost more shocking than that is that 80 percent of our water use as a nation is agricultural.” Constant water shortage is limiting outdoor farming in Texas State. So the city Huston relies on California for leafy-greens. But on account of the fact that it takes produce seven to ten days to travel from the West Coast to Texas, it’s not an ideal process in any way. Dream Harvest can change that, which was why the idea for the project was brought forward.

“The climate is changing now. We always talk about Earth Day and the importance of realizing our impact on the planet, but we are already there,” Shauk says on the show. The future of produce depends on making more environmentally friendly changes to the supply chain, and new technologies are enabling vertical indoor farming to bring these changes in some part.

Dream Harvest recently received a $50 million financial support from Orion Energy Partners to open a 100,000-square-foot indoor farming facility in Houston to increase production. Shauk says he’s also using the funding to support research and development to extend to other types of produce, but he has a lot to consider—affordability of the produce, maintaining sustainability, and more. “It’s going to take a lot of work and a lot of research. When we started, we weren’t growing in a way that makes financial sense with the amount of money we have to spend growing the product—and now we do,” Shauk says.

【推荐2】Two of the world’s most common species of reef-building corals seem surprisingly able to survive and even cope well with climate change, according to a new study—at least so long as global warming is kept below 2 degrees Celsius, the target set by the Paris Agreement.

The world has so far warmed by 1.1°C. The Great Barrier Reef, the world’s largest reef system, is currently in “crisis,” a recently published UN report said. That report warned that some coral reef ecosystems could face irreversible damage if the world warms more than 1.5°C. A 2018 report by the IPCC concluded that at 2ºC or more, 99 percent of all reef-building corals could be lost.

But that’s not what McLachlan and her colleagues observed when they subjected Hawaiian corals to a simulated (模拟) 2ºC world for nearly two years. They found that two common coral species were especially resilient (能复原的) : Two-thirds of those corals survived the simulated future.

To learn more about how both warming and acidification might threat reefs in the future, they collected samples of three common coral species and placed them in tanks where they would be exposed to the same weather as a reef just offshore. They filled a total of 40 tanks with sand, rubble, reef fish, plankton, and other reef features. The idea was to simulate ocean conditions as realistically as possible.

For 22 months, the researchers subjected some corals to 2ºC of warming, some to acidified water, and some to both changes. Overall, of the corals exposed to both conditions, 46 percent of rice coral, 56 percent of lobe coral, and 71 percent of finger coral survived. Many of the corals were even thriving.

“The paper supports what has been observed in Hawaii.” says Ku’ulei Rodgers, a coral expert at the University of Hawaii at Manōa. “However, although it is hopeful that some species will survive this century, unless significant reductions in emissions occur, corals will eventually lose their fight for survival.”