Video: Sea Shepherd did to a swimming pool what humans do to the oceans

28 April 2016 (Sea Shepherd Global) – Plastic pollution is recognized as a massive, global environmental issue, responsible for the deaths of over a million marine animals each year. It is a danger to all marine life including birds, sharks, turtles, and marine mammals, causing injury and death through drowning, entanglement, or starvation following ingestion. […]

Six years later, we’re still learning how badly the BP oil spill damaged the Gulf of Mexico – ‘The significant die-off of whales and dolphins that began in 2010 continues today’

By Brady Dennis 26 April 2016 (Washington Post) – Six years on, scientists are continuing to tally the ecological harms caused by the deadly 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The latest glimpse at the ongoing environmental effects of the disaster came in a new report [pdf] by the conservation and […]

UN relief chief: ‘Worst case scenarios’ could become reality without more funding for El Niño response – $2.2 billion funding gap ‘alarming’

26 April 2016 (UN) – With 60 million people across the world affected by droughts, floods and other extreme weather events triggered by El Niño, the top United Nations relief official today called on the international community to act now to address urgent humanitarian needs and support building communities’ resilience to future shocks. “I am […]

Elephant poachers kill three rangers and wound two in Garamba National Park, DRC

By Sara Malm25 April 2016 (Daily Mail) – A Swedish park manager was among five rangers shot by elephant poachers during a fatal firefight which claimed three lives in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Garamba wildlife park. Poachers entered the UNESCO world heritage site on Saturday, killing one ranger at the scene and injuring four, […]

Gold mining ramps up, pushes deeper into Peruvian Amazon rainforest

By Morgan Erickson-Davis22 April 2016 (mongabay.com) – The quest for gold has been stripping rainforest from around rivers in the Amazon Basin, with not even protected areas immune from mining. The situation has gotten so out of hand that the Peruvian government launched an intervention in January, destroying a slew of mining equipment and more […]

We’re running out of water, and the world’s powers are very worried – UN and World Bank chiefs announce joint high-level panel on water

By Nathan Halverson11 April 2016  (Reveal) – Secret conversations between American diplomats show how a growing water crisis in the Middle East destabilized the region, helping spark civil wars in Syria and Yemen, and how those water shortages are spreading to the United States. Classified U.S. cables reviewed by Reveal from The Center for Investigative […]

Scientists now have a platform for grading climate journalism

By Daniel Nethery 26 April 2016 (The Guardian) – The internet represents an extraordinary opportunity for democracy. Never before has it been possible for people from all over the world to access the latest information and collectively seek solutions to the challenges which face our planet, and not a moment too soon: the year 2015 […]

In Chernobyl, an arch caps 30 years of work to contain radioactive pollution

By Nathan Hodge25 April 2016 CHERNOBYL, Ukraine (The New York Times) – Enter the Chernobyl zone, and you might expect the worst: Security guards at a checkpoint 19 miles away from the site of the world’s worst nuclear accident scan departing vehicles for signs of radiation, as wolfish strays linger around the checkpoint. But pass […]

World heading for catastrophe over natural disasters, risk expert warns – ‘We’ll see many more examples of cascading crises, where one event triggers another event, which triggers another event’

By Sam Jones24 April 2016 (The Guardian) – The world’s failure to prepare for natural disasters will have “inconceivably bad” consequences as climate change fuels a huge increase in catastrophic droughts and floods and the humanitarian crises that follow, the UN’s head of disaster planning has warned. Last year, earthquakes, floods, heatwaves and landslides left […]

Test finds Chernobyl residue in Belarus milk 10 times higher than food safety limits – ‘There is no protection of the population from radiation exposure’

By Yuras Karmanau25 April 2016 GUBAREVICHI, Belarus (AP) – On the edge of Belarus’ Chernobyl exclusion zone, down the road from the signs warning “Stop! Radiation,” a dairy farmer offers his visitors a glass of freshly drawn milk. Associated Press reporters politely decline the drink but pass on a bottled sample to a laboratory, which […]

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