7 December 2016 (UN) – The United Nations and its partner non-governmental organizations today launched an appeal for $2.66 billion to provide emergency assistance across eight countries in the Sahel region, where “millions of people still live in conditions of deplorable human suffering.” “The Sahel faces considerable challenges and will remain the site of […]
By Stephanie Smail12 December 2016 (ABC) – Global methane gas emissions are growing at the fastest rate in decades and food production could be to blame, new analysis has revealed. Nearly 100 scientists from around the world have compiled data for the Global Methane Budget, which shows the biggest spike in methane concentrations in the […]
By Alister Doyle; editing by Mark Heinrich8 December 2016 OSLO, Norway (Reuters) – Giraffe numbers have declined by as much as 40 percent since the 1980s in a “silent extinction” driven by illegal hunting and an expansion of farmland in Africa, the Red List of endangered species reported on Thursday. Populations of the world’s tallest […]
OAKLAND, California, 26 October 2016 (Global Footprint Network) – The overexploitation of ecological resources by humanity is directly contributing to the 67 percent plunge in wild vertebrate populations scientists forecast for the 50-year period ending in 2020, according to WWF’s Living Planet Report 2016. The top threats to species identified in the report are directly […]
By Peter Lykke Lind 25 November 2016 (Antananarivo) – The severe drought afflicting southern Madagascar has left 330,000 people on the brink of famine, a senior UN official has warned. Three successive years of failed rains have left the island nation wrestling with crop failure and a chronic lack of food and clean drinking water, […]
By Janne Hansen23 November 2016 (PhysOrg) – Three independent methods of modelling climate change impact on yield display the same bleak tendency: When global temperature increases, wheat yield will decline. This is demonstrated in a study carried out by an international group scientists, including Professor Joergen E. Olesen and Postdoc Mohamed Jabloun from the Department […]
ABSTRACT: Debate about how sustainable intensification and multifunctionality might be implemented continues, but there remains little understanding as to what extent they are achievable in arable landscapes. Policies that influence agronomic decisions are rarely made with an appreciation of the trade-offs that exist between food production, biodiversity conservation, and ecosystem service provision. We present an […]
By Mike Gaworecki20 October 2016 (mongabay.com) – Cultivation of coca, the plant from which the drug cocaine is extracted, has long been considered a “deforestation multiplier” in the Andean Amazon rainforests of Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru. For instance, a 2001 report by the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy stated: “Coca cultivation and processing […]
By Josh Haner, Edward Wong, Derek Watkins, and Jeremy White24 October 2014 In the Tengger Desert, China (The New York Times) – This desert, called the Tengger, lies on the southern edge of the massive Gobi Desert, not far from major cities like Beijing. The Tengger is growing. For years, China’s deserts spread at an […]
31 October 2016 (AP) – Six months into a deepening drought, the weather is killing crops, threatening cattle and sinking lakes to their lowest levels in years across much of the South. The very worst conditions — what forecasters call “exceptional drought” — are in the mountains of northeast Alabama and northwest Georgia, a region […]
