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 Paul Greenberg and Boris Worm8 MAY 2015 (The New York Times) – On Friday we humans observed V-E Day, the end to one part of a global catastrophe that cost the planet at least 60 million lives. But if we were fish, we would have marked the day differently — as the beginning of […]
By R. Quentin Grafton, John Williams, Qiang Jiang8 March 2015 (Food Security) – This graph shows a set of projections of surplus or deficit in food production (billions kcalories) for eight scenarios for dryland and irrigated cropping based on 19 countries. In all scenarios we adopted an irrigation regime of 200 mm of water. In […]
By Lucy Westcott 11 May 2015 (Newsweek) – Afghanistan has the equivalent of 400,000 football fields of opium fields, despite significant efforts and money spent by the United States on curbing the development of the country’s drug supply. The country’s enormous drug reserve is one of several issues holding back the U.S.’s Afghanistan reconstruction efforts, […]
By Thomas Erdbrink5 May 2015 TEHRAN (The New York Times) – Every day, when I walk to our supermarket in the western part of Tehran to buy the groceries my wife tells me to get, I pass a long row of plane trees, neatly planted decades ago according to the design of ambitious city planners. […]
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 […]
February 2015 (McKinsey Global Institute) – A new McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) report, Debt and (not much) deleveraging [pdf], examines the evolution of debt across 47 countries—22 advanced and 25 developing—and assesses the implications of higher leverage in the global economy and in specific sectors and countries. The analysis, which follows our July 2011 report […]
By Adam Voiland18 April 2015 (NASA) – In a reminder of the interconnectedenss of our atmosphere, smoke that originated in Siberia had reached the West Coast of North America when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) captured this image on April 18, 2015. The smoke likely came from wildfires burning in the steppe of southern […]
By Scott Sistek 19 Apr 2015 (KOMO News) – The scenes have almost felt like they’re out of Hollywood imagination — brilliant red sunrises and sunsets the last couple of days around Western Washington. Why so red? It’s a byproduct of the massive wildfires that recently burned a large area in Siberia. The atmospheric winds […]
By Alexa Lewis17 April 2015 (AccuWeather.com) – The Dead Sea is disappearing at an alarming rate, leaving behind thousands of sinkholes that are chipping away at the coastline’s vibrant and touristy atmosphere. The Dead Sea – which is actually a lake – is known for being almost 10 times as salty as the ocean and […]
