Resource management

• Sun Streams 4 is Longroad's largest solar and storage project to date, and is the company's third project in its Sun Streams complex based in Maricopa County, AZ.
• "Longroad continues to make significant strides with our flagship Sun Streams portfolio in the important Arizona market," said Paul Gaynor, CEO of Longroad Energy.
• The project is part of the Sun Streams portfolio that Longroad acquired from First Solar in early 2021.
• Sun Stream 4's 300 MWac / 1200 MWh battery energy storage system (BESS) will be provided by U.S.-based energy storage platform provider Powin.

• The newly released index, produced by brand-led business transformation company FutureBrand , focuses on 100 companies with the largest global market capitalisation, as determined by PwC.
• The index is based on research around brand perception and includes an in-depth survey of business professionals in 15 countries.
• AI investment polishes brand halo: Actively investing in emerging technologies such as AI is an essential factor driving a company's brand perceptions success.
• The FutureBrand Index is a global perception study based on PwC's Global Top 100 Companies by Market Capitalization list.

• Earth scientists and technical staff are in scope for potential job losses at New Zealand universities as part of a wider cost-cutting exercise.
• We need geoscientists more than ever, and here are three big reasons why.

Construction demand

• We are either building new houses and infrastructure or rebuilding damaged houses and infrastructure following natural hazard events.
• Read more:
  Slow train coming: only a genuine shift to rail will put NZ on track to reduce emissions

  A prerequisite for any new construction is a ground investigation to understand the subsurface.

Geohazards and climate

• New Zealand straddles a convergent plate boundary and is surrounded by mid-latitude oceans creating a humid climate.
• When a construction site, house, road, rail line or water pipeline is affected by natural hazards, we need geologists to respond.
• Demand is high and rising for earth science and civil engineering graduates to deal with these large-scale environmental management issues.

Critical minerals

• In New Zealand, we tend to conveniently ignore the minerals that facilitate our everyday existence.
• Take the 14 different minerals (at least) used in a typical smartphone.
• Read more:
  Critical minerals are vital for renewable energy.
• The extraction of some of our own minerals with targeted precision mining is surely more appropriate, especially given the uncertainty of global supply chains.

Environmental management legislation

• An additional demand for geoscience graduates will emerge with the reform of the Resource Management Act 1991 (RMA), the main law that determines how people interact with New Zealand’s natural resources.
• It sets out the rules about air, soil, freshwater and coastal and marine areas, as well as regulating land use and the allocation of scarce resources.
• The Natural and Built Environment Bill and the Spatial Planning Bill have both passed their third readings in parliament this month.
• Much of the above creates domestic demands for geoscience graduates in environmental management and geotechnical sectors.

• Although risk assessment and management procedures try to account for hazards in a systematic way, they often overlook risks arising from incremental and seemingly insignificant environmental changes.
• But over time, or when aggregated, incremental changes can lead to significant impacts on human health and wellbeing.
• Incremental changes in our environments can evade regulation if their effects are slow-burning, uncertain, or there is a time lag between cause and effect.
• However, given the requirement for significant change, it is hard to see how these provisions could be used proactively to manage incremental changes.

Respirable mineral dust

• They can gradually accumulate in the lungs, causing diseases such as pleural changes, silicosis and asbestosis, even cancer.
• However, the causes of frequent but low-level exposures to mineral dust have often escaped regulation.

Cumulative effects of incremental loss of green space

• Our built environment of impermeable surfaces is slowly encroaching on urban green spaces and gardens.
• Instead, consent applications are assessed on their individual impacts and there are few mechanisms to sufficiently assess and manage aggregate and cumulative effects.

What needs to happen

• If we continue to only consider the immediate and local effects from individual actions, we are not able to protect people from future cumulative consequences.
• Marc Tadaki receives funding from Te Apārangi Royal Society of New Zealand and the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment.
• Martin Brook receives funding from Royal Society Te Apārangi, Toka Tū Ake EQC, and Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment.
• He is a chartered geologist (CGeol) with the Geological Society of London, and a member of Engineering New Zealand (MEngNZ).