Caption by Aries Keck8 August 2012 Deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest takes on many different patterns. In Rondônia, a state in Western Brazil, deforestation took on the fishbone pattern revealed in these Landsat images from 1975 and 2012. Access to this remote region began with the building of a major road stretching from north to […]
By Matthew Huelsenbeck20 July 2012 The age of fossil fuels has changed the oceans dramatically. What many might not know is that the oceans absorb about one-third of all human-caused carbon dioxide emissions. And while this has saved us from even more rapid climate change, few people realize the true effect this has had on […]
By George Monbiot, www.guardian.co.uk 25 June 2012 It is, perhaps, the greatest failure of collective leadership since the first world war. The Earth’s living systems are collapsing, and the leaders of some of the most powerful nations – the United States, the UK, Germany, Russia – could not even be bothered to turn up and […]
[Not a surprise to Desdemona readers.] By Erin Hale, www.guardian.co.uk15 May 2012 Twenty years on from the Rio Earth summit, the environment of the planet is getting worse not better, according to a report from WWF. Swelling population, mass migration to cities, increasing energy use and soaring carbon dioxide emissions mean humanity is putting a […]
By SIMON ROMERO3 May 2012 RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazil is deploying more than 8,500 troops to the far reaches of the Amazon rain forest this month in an operation aimed at cracking down on drug smuggling, gold mining and illegal deforestation, officials said. The troop mobilization sends a clear message ahead of the United […]
9 April 2012 (NAU) – Global warming may initially make the grass greener, but not for long, according to new research conducted at Northern Arizona University. The study, published this week in Nature Climate Change, shows that plants may thrive in the early stages of a warming environment but begin to deteriorate quickly. “We were […]
29 March 2012 (AFP) – Leading scientists on Thursday called on the upcoming Rio Summit to grapple with environmental ills that they said pointed to “a humanitarian emergency on a global scale.” In a “State of the Planet” declaration issued after a four-day conference, the scientists said Earth was now facing unprecedented challenges, from water […]
By Tom Arup 17 March 2012 URBAN air pollution will become the top cause of environment-related deaths globally by mid-century unless action is taken, one of the world’s peak economic groups says. In a study of the global environmental outlook to 2050, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) warns there may be 3.6 […]
By DAVID JOLLY4 March 2012 There might just be something to the idea of marine reserves, a recent survey of the Mediterranean Sea suggests. Scientists led by Enric Sala, a National Geographic explorer-in-residence and a marine ecologist with the Center for Advanced Studies of Blanes in Spain, studied rocky reefs around Mediterranean shores, comparing places […]
The 2012 Environmental Performance Index (EPI) and Pilot Trend EPI (Trend EPI) rank 132 countries on 22 performance indicators in ten policy categories and two overarching objectives that reflect facets of Environmental Health and Ecosystem Vitality. These indicators provide a gauge of how close countries are to environmental policy goals. The EPI’s proximity-to-target methodology facilitates […]
