Photo gallery: Aerial views of of record flooding in NE China, 31 August 2013

The aerial photo taken on 31 August 2013 shows a flooded house in Bacha Township in Tongjiang City, northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province. The water level in a section of the Sino-Russia bordering Heilongjiang River has risen to a record high in the region’s worst flooding in more than a decade. Northeast China has been hit […]

Graph of the Day: Decline of butterfly populations in Europe and EU, 1990-2011

22 July 2013 (EEA) – The European Grassland Butterfly Indicator has been updated both for Europe and the EU. In this chapter both indicators are presented. Figure 4.1 shows the European Grassland Butterfly Indicator, as well as the indicator for the Member States of the EU alone. The indicator is based on the supranational species […]

Forest fires in Indonesia trigger haze fear in Singapore

By Elga Reyes  28 August 2013 (Eco-Business) – The province of Riau in Sumatra, Indonesia has been covered in smog since early this week when the number of fire hotspots spiked at 488, the highest level in two months following Southeast Asia’s worst haze pollution in 16 years. The smoke, mostly contained in the provincial […]

Amur flooding breaks records in China – Flood peak reaches Harbin – ‘This flood peak will last longer than that of the 1998 floods’

28 August 2013 (CCTV) – As the Heilongjiang river records its biggest flood in over a century, another major river in the region, the Songhuajiang, has seen its flood peak reach Harbin, the provincial capital of Heilongjiang province. As the flood peak passed through Harbin Tuesday morning, it recorded the highest water level on this […]

Kansas drought update: Some counties improve, others in emergency status

By BECCY TANNER27 August 2013 (The Wichita Eagle) – The good news is that some of us are no longer are in the direct throes of drought. The bad news is that many Kansas residents still are. Gov. Sam Brownback has updated the Drought Emergency, Warnings and Watches, placing 25 counties in drought watch, 20 […]

Graph of the Day: UK Farmland Bird Indicator, 1970-2011

The UK Farmland Bird Indicator, 1970-2011, showing differing trends for specialist and generalist species. Data are from the RSPB, BTO, JNCC, and Defra. The numbers in brackets refer to the number of species in each group. Specialist species have decline by over 60% in 40 years. Graphic: RSPB 22 May 2013 (RSPB) – Trends in […]

Record flooding affects more than 2 million in NE China – Heilong River sees worst floods in history

By Zhu Ningzhu27 August 2013 CHANGCHUN (Xinhua) – Floods and heavy rains have caused the death of at least 20 people and adversely affected more than 2.2 million in northeast China’s Jilin Province, local authorities said. Persistent rain has brought chaos to 56 county-level regions of the province, forcing 239,000 people to be evacuated, according […]

Sudan’s worst floods for 25 years leave 500,000 facing destruction and disease

By Mark Tran    23 August 2013 (The Guardian) – Forty-eight people have been killed and more than 500,000 affected by the worst floods in Sudan in quarter of a century. The region around the capital, Khartoum, was particularly badly hit, with at least 15,000 homes destroyed and thousands of others damaged. Across Sudan, at least […]

Graph of the Day: Sacramento River runoff, 1906-2011

8 August 2013 (CalEPA) – Since 1906, the fraction of annual unimpaired runoff into the Sacramento River that occurs from April through July (represented as a percentage of total water year runoff) from the accumulated winter precipitation in the Sierra Nevada, has decreased by about 9 percent.  The Sacramento River system is the sum of […]

The day the Earth ran out: The causes and consequences of Earth Overshoot Day

By Carter Roberts 20 August 2013 (Foreign Affairs) – Many readers will be familiar with the worrisome, white-knuckle wait that comes when you drain your checking account long before payday, the anxiety that builds until the coffers are replenished. That is what all of humanity has signed on for, effective today. Earth Overshoot Day marks […]

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