By Malia Wollan 18 July 2017 (The New York Times) — It was a freakishly warm evening last October when a maintenance worker first discovered the water — torrents of it, rushing into the entrance tunnel of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a storage facility dug some 400 feet into the side of a mountain […]
15 May 2017 (United Nations) – The destruction of forests in many Asian countries continues apace, threatening the realization of global sustainable development goals by the 2030 deadline, according to the United Nations agricultural agency.“While forests are critical to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), they continue to be degraded and lost at a rate […]
By Jonathan Watts 28 May 2017 Vila Bela da Santíssima Trindade (The Guardian) – To understand why the Brazilian government is deliberately losing the battle against deforestation, you need only retrace the bootmarks of the Edwardian explorer Percy Fawcett along the Amazonian border with Bolivia. During a failed attempt to cross a spectacular tabletop […]
WEST LAFAYETTE, Indiana, 17 May 2017 (Purdue University) – After analyzing extensive data collected on 86 tree species in the eastern United States, a research team led by Purdue University professor Songlin Fei found that over the past 30 years, most trees have been shifting westward or northward in response to climate change. “Trees are […]
By Damian Carrington19 May 2017 (The Guardian) – It was designed as an impregnable deep-freeze to protect the world’s most precious seeds from any global disaster and ensure humanity’s food supply forever. But the Global Seed Vault, buried in a mountain deep inside the Arctic circle, has been breached after global warming produced extraordinary temperatures […]
By Gretchen Vogel10 May 2017 (Science) – Entomologists call it the windshield phenomenon. “If you talk to people, they have a gut feeling. They remember how insects used to smash on your windscreen,” says Wolfgang Wägele, director of the Leibniz Institute for Animal Biodiversity in Bonn, Germany. Today, drivers spend less time scraping and scrubbing. […]
[Translation by Google.] By Victor Pires 12 April 2017 (ISA) – In a symbolic vote, at the end of the morning (12/4), in seven minutes, parliamentarians approved a report by Deputy José Reinaldo (PSB-MA) of Provisional Measure (MP) 758/2016, which reduces the protection of 510 thousand hectares [1.26 million acres] of protected areas in western […]
By Henry Belot7 March 2017 (ABC News) – The Government has no comprehensive national plan to protect Australia’s landscape to the year 2050, according to a report, which also warns of the potentially irreversible impact of climate change and the threats of coal mining, invasive species, rubbish, urban growth and habitat destruction. The State of […]
By Alex Dale15 February 2017 (BirdLife International) – A new study suggests that half of all threatened terrestrial mammals, and a quarter of threatened birds, are already being negatively impacted by climate change. Could it prove the tipping point? Scepticism of climate change may be on the rise in some political circles, but there’s no […]
10 February 2017 (Stockholm Resilience Centre) – A paper recently published in the journal The Anthropocene Review puts the current rate of change of Earth’s life support system in the context of the last 4-billion-year evolution of the biosphere. The paper, which is written by the centre’s Owen Gaffney and senior research fellow Will Steffen, […]
