UK turtle dove population down 88 percent since 1970

  By Michael McCarthy, Environment EditorWednesday, 21 July 2010 It is the emblematic bird of sexual fidelity – and just like sexual fidelity itself, it is rapidly on the wane. The turtle dove, famed in folklore and literature as the creature which is always constant to its mate, seems to be on the high road […]

More than one third of US counties face water shortages due to climate change

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Press contact: Eric Young, NRDC, 202-289-2373 or eyoung@nrdc.org WASHINGTON (July 20, 2010) — More than 1,100 U.S. counties — a full one-third of all counties in the lower 48 states — now face higher risks of water shortages by mid-century as the result of global warming, and more than 400 of these […]

Kabul faces severe water crisis

Report says Afghan city and region will need six times more water by 2050, as Oxfam warns of violence over scarce resource By John Vidal, environment editor, www.guardian.co.uk   Monday 19 July 2010 09.25 BST Kabul and its surrounding region are perilously short of water and may not be able to supply a fast-growing, more affluent […]

Graph of the Day: Aquatic Dead Zones, January 2008

The size and number of marine dead zones—areas where the deep water is so low in dissolved oxygen that sea creatures can’t survive—have grown explosively in the past half-century. Red circles on this map show the location and size of many of our planet’s dead zones. Black dots show where dead zones have been observed, […]

Massive fish kill caused by leak from China copper mine

By Wei Tian, Hu Meidong and Zhu Xingxin in Fujian, and He Na in Beijing (China Daily)Updated: 2010-07-16 07:57 Qiu Yonglu knew something was wrong when his fish refused to eat and kept circling their pool. Ten days later, they began dying. On July 12, almost a month later, he finally discovered what had poisoned […]

The Great Land Grab: A rush for food security and profits

Want to avoid the next food price crisis? Tired of unreliable rice and corn exporters? Why not buy up fertile land abroad and ship your own fresh, dependable supplies of foodstuffs and biofuels back home? That solution seems to make sense for more and more cash-rich, food-importing countries. Foreign land acquisitions and long-term lease-holdings, starting […]

UK kestrel population plunges by a third

By Emily Beament, Press AssociationMonday, 19 July 2010 One of the UK’s most familiar birds of prey, the kestrel, has drastically declined in numbers, a survey of British birds reveals today. The latest Breeding Birds Survey shows that the number of kestrels, which are often seen hovering over roads looking for small rodents, plunged by […]

A fifth of the world’s mangroves gone since 1980

By Jeremy Hance, www.mongabay.com July 18, 2010 A new report by the United Nation Environment Program (UNEP) and the Nature Conservancy has found that mangrove forests are being lost at staggering rates worldwide: since 1980 one fifth of the world’s mangroves have been felled. Mangroves, which grow in saline coastal habitats, are disappearing four times […]

Russia swelters in heatwave and worst drought in 130 years — Many crops destroyed

  By Dmitry Solovyov, Gleb Bryanski and Alexander Reshetnikov; Editing by Matthew Jones (Reuters) – Soaring temperatures across large swathes of Russia have destroyed nearly 10 million hectares of crops and prompted a state of emergency to be declared in 17 regions. On Friday the state-run Moscow region weather bureau said it expected the heatwave, […]

Thailand to release 250,000 wasps to fight South American invader

Thailand is to release a quarter of a million wasps to fight a South American insect wreaking havoc on the country’s cassava crops. The tiny parasitic wasps will be unleashed in Thailand’s  northeastern province of Khon Kaen on Sunday in an attempt to control the pest outbreak. The invader, the cassava mealybug, sucks sap from […]

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