By Eugene Declercq, Ruby Barnard-Mayers, Laurie Zephyrin, and Kay Johnson 14 December 2022 (Commonwealth Fund) – In anticipation of a U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, a number of states passed “trigger laws” that would ban all, or nearly all, abortions once national abortion protections ended. In the months since the Court’s ruling in Dobbs […]
By Angbeen Sohail 13 December 2022 (IFRC) – It’s been almost six months since flash floods battered parts of Pakistan, and hundreds of thousands of people are still reeling from the floods’ effects. Homes, livelihoods, and farmlands were destroyed and many parts of the country remain underwater. An estimated 33 million people have been affected, […]
By Marisa Coulton 17 December 2022 (Financial Post) – The UN biodiversity conference in Montreal might go down in history as the moment that business engaged in the fight to preserve nature, but the presence of a thousand corporate representatives is making some the environmentalists who have been attending these meetings for years uneasy. Some […]
By Patrick Whittle 10 December 2022 (AP) – Populations of a vulnerable species of marine mammal, numerous species of abalone and a type of Caribbean coral are now threatened with extinction, an international conservation organization said Friday. The International Union for Conservation of Nature announced the update during the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, or COP15, […]
By Daniel Cole 30 October 2022 SAINTES-MARIE DE LA MER, France (AP) – In a makeshift arena in the French coastal village Aigues-Mortes, young men in dazzling collared shirts come face-to-face with a raging bull. Surrounded by the city’s medieval walls, the men dodge and duck the animal’s charges while spectators let out collective gasps. […]
By Gloria Dickie 10 December 2022 MONTREAL (Reuters) – Hundreds of people on Saturday braved sub-zero temperatures to march the streets of Montreal, the host city of this year’s U.N. biodiversity summit, demanding a strong new deal to protect nature worldwide. Wearing costumes to look like birds, trees, and caribou, activists said the COP15 summit could fail […]
By Monica Machicao 25 November 2022 TIHUANACU, Bolivia (Reuters) – High in the mountains of the Bolivian Andes, farmer Alberto Quispe has one thing on his mind: rain. In the rural area of Tihuanacu, around 100 kilometers (62 miles) south-west of highland city La Paz, locals say there has been little rain this season during […]
By David Henning 9 December 2022 Lake Kariba, the world’s largest artificial lake, has recorded low dam levels during the drought, currently standing at 4.6%, according to the Zambezi River Authority (ZRA). The ZRA limited the generation of Kariba’s hydroelectric power stations to 300 megawatts owing to the reduced water levels, and Zimbabweans are having to endure […]
By Julia Janicki, Gloria Dickie, Simon Scarr and Jitesh Chowdhury 6 December 2022 (Reuters) – As a boy in the 1960s, David Wagner would run around his family’s Missouri farm with a glass jar clutched in his hand, scooping flickering fireflies out of the sky. “We could fill it up and put it by our […]
By George Monbiot 9 December 2022 (The Guardian) – There are two extraordinary facts about the convention on biological diversity, whose members are meeting in Montreal now to discuss the global ecological crisis. The first is that, of the world’s 198 states, 196 are party to it. The second is the identity of those that aren’t. Take a […]
