The Yara Birkeland, the world’s first net-zero, battery-powered autonomous container ship, was delivered to Norwegian fertilizer company Yara Norge AS in November 2020. It’s currently in the Norwegian port of Horten, where it’s undergoing further preparations for autonomous operation and a late 2021 launch. Electric, autonomous container ship The open-top Yara Birkeland was ordered by Yara in 2017, designed by Marin Teknikk, and fitted at Vard Brattvåg in Norway. Norway’s…

For centuries, the Danube was an untamed natural space. The river and its banks obeyed the dynamics of water and the changing seasons, occasionally flooding several times a year. This did not change until the 19th century when the Habsburg Monarchy set itself the task of taming the river and thus opening up a huge economic and cultural area. In 1857, the Imperial-Royal State Ministry began this by publishing a…

A panel of experts give their solutions From education to legal reform, at the close of the Guardian’s Pacific Plunder series, leading Pacific thinkers offer solutions Over the last month, the Guardian has run a major investigative series examining the extractives industries – mining, logging, fishing and the nascent industry of deep-sea mining – in the Pacific. Among the stories of environmental devastation and social harm are also stories of…

Eight Pacific countries created a revolutionary system that brings in $500m a year and prevents the overfishing that blights other regions It has been described as “the most remarkable achievement of the Pacific island countries in the last 50 years”. In 1982, eight, mostly minuscule Pacific island countries in whose waters much of the world’s skipjack tuna was caught got together and decided to do something to get a share…

Over the centuries, the banks of the Danube formed a large settlement area. Towns and markets, monasteries and churches, castles and palaces along the Danube all bear witness to bourgeois industriousness, noble representation and ecclesiastical triumphs. But the fortresses and many memorials also tell of war and hardship, of brutal persecution of Protestants, of the expulsion and murder of Jews, Roma and Sinti, of poverty and persecution, of war and…

Renewable energy company Statkraft has started commercial operations at the first unit of its floating solar power plant in Albania in cooperation with Norwegian supplier Ocean Sun. The two companies have implemented an innovative solution for floating solar projects. Floating solar project is located at the Banja reservoir in Albania, where Statkraft is operating its 72 MW Banja hydropower plant. The first unit has an installed capacity of 500 kW.…