By Maria Sanchez Diez12 June 2015 (Quartz) – As China, long notorious for its appetite for elephant ivory, moves toward halting the domestic processing and sale of the ornamental material, some international wildlife organizations are pointing the finger at another country that shares responsibility for the slaughter of tens of thousands of elephants a year […]
By Jon Queally11 June 2015 (Common Dreams) – As ten days of UN-sponsored climate talks came to end in Bonn, Germany on Thursday morning, global campaigners demanding far-reaching solutions to the crisis of a warming planet expressed dissatisfaction on multiple levels, charging that the continued foot-dragging of governments is sentencing future generations to unparalleled catastrophe […]
By PATRICK BOEHLER and SERGIO PEÇANHA 8 June 2015 (The New York Times) – Eleven million people were uprooted by violence last year, most were propelled by conflict in Syria, Iraq, Ukraine, and Afghanistan. Conflict and extreme poverty have also pushed tens of thousands out of parts of sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. Here’s a […]
23 May 2015 (Sea Shepherd Global) – Military and police have boarded the last two Interpol-wanted toothfish poaching vessels, Songhua and Yongding, in Cabo Verde, an archipelago state off the northwest coast of Africa. The action took place thanks to intelligence provided to international law enforcement by Sea Shepherd, which had been gathered two days […]
By Laurie Goering; editing by Megan Rowling15 May 2015 LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – The world’s chances of achieving new international development goals will be slim without more ambitious action to curb climate change, researchers said. Pakistan, for example, is unlikely to be able to end poverty by 2030 if accelerating climate change brings worse […]
By Lynne Rossetto Kasper9 May 2015 (Splendid Table) – Three years ago, I interviewed Eric Prince, a research fisheries biologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Southeast Fisheries Science Center. He and his colleagues had found that a huge dead zone, an area of the ocean with very little oxygen, had developed in the […]
20 March 2015 (UNESCO) – Any consideration of the quality and quantity of available water supplies in the region must examine groundwater, which is critical to several economic sectors. Experts estimate that groundwater irrigation contributes US$10 to US$12 billion per year to the Asian economy. When also including earnings from groundwater sales for irrigation, that […]
By Fred Barbash and Justin Wm. Moyer4 May 2015 (Washington Post) – They never ate anybody — but now, some of planet Earth’s innocent vegetarians face end times. Large herbivores — elephants, hippos, rhinos and gorillas among them — are vanishing from the globe at a startling rate, with some 60 percent threatened with extinction, […]
By Michael Werz and Max Hoffman 21 April 2015 (Reuters) – The migrant crisis in the Mediterranean is symptomatic of deep dislocation in the Sahel region and sub-Saharan Africa — dislocation exacerbated by climate change. Climate change is affecting such basic environmental conditions as rainfall patterns and temperatures and is contributing to more frequent natural […]
OL PEJETA CONSERVANCY, Kenya, 16 April 2015 (Cox Media Group) – After 50 million years, the northern white rhino is one death away from extinction. The last living male of the species is now under armed guard 24/7 at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya. His name is Sudan. There is hope that Sudan, elderly […]