By Adriana Brasileiro29 November 2014 RIO DE JANEIRO (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – São Paulo, Brazil’s drought-hit megacity of 20 million, has about two months of guaranteed water supply remaining as it taps into the second of three emergency reserves, officials say. The city began using its second so-called “technical reserve” 10 days ago to prevent […]
(UNDP) – Over the years there has been much debate about what sustainability means and about what measures can track sustainable progress— or the lack of it. In 2012 the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio took a broad view that sustainable progress must cover all three dimensions that affect people’s life chances—social, […]
WASHINGTON, 2 December 2014 (AP) – In the more than two decades since world leaders first got together to try to solve global warming, life on Earth has changed, not just the climate. It’s gotten hotter, more polluted with heat-trapping gases, more crowded and just downright wilder. The numbers are stark. Carbon dioxide emissions: up […]
By Rhett Butler 26 November 2014 (mongabay.com) – Preliminary data released by the Brazilian government suggests that deforestation in Earth’s largest rainforest slowed 18 percent over the past year. Figures published Wednesday by Brazil’s National Space Research Institute (INPE) show that 4,848 square kilometers (1,871 square miles) of forest — an area about the size […]
By DEBORAH SONTAG and ROBERT GEBELOFF 22 November 2014 Williston, North Dakota (The New York Times) — In early August 2013, Arlene Skurupey of Blacksburg, Va., got an animated call from the normally taciturn farmer who rents her family land in Billings County, N.D. There had been an accident at the Skurupey 1-9H oil well. […]
By Ben Guarino 26 November 2014 (The Dodo) – The bodies of more than 1,000 rare sea turtles, collectively weighing nearly 3,000 pounds, were recently seized by Vietnamese officials in a warehouse raid. Conservationists have fingered Vietnam as a hotbed of illegal wildlife trade — a 2006 National Geographic article labeled the country Asia’s illegal […]
By Lauren Walker28 November 2014 (Newsweek) – While the fact that 95.5 million Americans said they would shop on Black Friday is good news for retailers, it is a far less positive figure for the environment. Cheap electronics are one of the biggest draws for shoppers on the day (and indeed the rest of the […]
By Craig Welch, Seattle Times environment reporter29 November 2014 (Seattle Times) – The shellfish pathogen that hit California’s Channel Islands in the 1980s began to quickly kill one of the tideland’s most important animals — black abalone. But what unnerved scientists was what they learned next: Whenever ocean waters grew warmer, the deadly infection known […]
(UNDP) – Since 1990 the Human Development Index (HDI) has been an important measure of progress—a composite index of life expectancy, years of schooling and income. This year’s Report presents HDI values for 187 countries. The global HDI is now 0.702, and most developing countries are continuing to advance, though the pace of progress remains […]
By William G. Gilroy5 November 2014 (Notre Dame News) – Norway is the best prepared country for climate change, and has been so for almost 20 years, according to data released Wednesday (Nov. 5) by the University of Notre Dame Global Adaptation Index (ND-GAIN). ND-GAIN is the world’s leading annual index that ranks more than […]
