Ecuador signs permits for oil drilling in Amazon’s Yasuní national park – Companies could start extracting oil underneath key biodiversity reserve by 2016

By Adam Vaughan    23 May 2014   (theguardian.com) – Drilling for oil in a part of the Amazon rainforest considered one of the most biodiverse hotspots on the planet is to go ahead less than a year after Ecuador’s president lifted a moratorium on oil drilling there. Last August, Rafeal Correa scrapped a pioneering scheme, […]

Ivory’s curse: The militarization and professionalization of poaching in Africa – 35,000 to 50,000 elephants slaughtered each year

21 April 2014 (Born Free USA) – It has been a quarter century since Parties to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) placed all African elephants on Appendix I, thus eliminating commercial trade in elephant ivory. This uniform global prohibition on ivory commercialization demonstrably reduced elephant poaching, helped elephant populations to stabilize, […]

London nitrogen dioxide pollution worse than Beijing – ‘It’s a public-health catastrophe’

By Per Liljas 28 May 2014 (TIME) – An E.U.-mandated shift to diesel cars has sent London’s NO2 emissions through the roof. “It’s a public-health catastrophe,” says one prominent campaigner British tabloids may lash out at Chinese smog all they want, but when it comes to one important pollution indicator, the U.K. capital actually outpollutes […]

Image of the Day: Satellite view of dust storm in China, 23 April 2014

By Holli Riebeek25 April 2014 (NASA) – A wall of dust was barreling across northern China on 23 April 2014, when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) acquired these images from NASA’s Aqua and Terra satellites. The top image was taken at 12:35 p.m. local time, and the lower image is from 2:20 p.m. Turn […]

Video: Trailer for 6 – Documenting the sixth mass extinction

25 April 2014 (Oceanic Preservation Society) – Utilizing state-of-the-art equipment, Oscar®-winner Louie Psihoyos (The Cove) assembles a team of artists and activists intent on showing the world never-before-seen images that expose issues of endangered species and mass extinction. Whether infiltrating notorious black markets with guerilla-style tactics or exploring the scientific causes affecting changes to the […]

China takes on pollution with biggest changes in 25 years – ‘It’s good news for just about everyone except U.S. coal mining companies’

By Feifei Shen and Ehren Goossens; editing by Reed Landberg and Randall Hackley24 April 2014 BEIJING (Bloomberg News) – China’s legislature passed the biggest changes to its environmental protection laws in 25 years, punishing polluters more severely as the government works to limit smog and contaminated water and soil linked to three decades of economic […]

Land grabs threaten last elephant bastions

By Richard Lardner20 April 2014 WASHINGTON (AP) – Political and military elites are seizing protected areas in one of Africa’s last bastions for elephants, putting broad swaths of Zimbabwe at risk of becoming fronts for ivory poaching, according to a non-profit research group’s report that examines government collusion in wildlife trafficking. Zimbabwe has maintained robust […]

Oxygen stations set up across China to provide relief from air pollution

By Suzannah Hills 30 March 2014 (Daily Mail) – It is one of the most polluted countries on earth. So it may come as little surprise that the latest fad in China is literally offering its city dwellers a breath of fresh air. Numerous fresh air stations have been set up in some of China’s […]

WMO: Global warming not stopped, will go on for centuries – ‘The laws of physics are non-negotiable’

By Robert Evans; Editing by Robin Pomeroy24 March 2014 GENEVA (Reuters) – There has been no reverse in the trend of global warming and there is still consistent evidence for man-made climate change, the head of the U.N. World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said on Monday. A slow-down in the average pace of warming at the […]

Image of the Day: Satellite view of slash-and-burn forest fires in Southeast Asia

By Holli Riebeek18 March 2014 (NASA) – Fire and smoke dominate the landscape in this image of Southeast Asia taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite on 18 March 2014. Marked in red, the fires burn largely in the subtropical forests common in northern Indochina. Most fires in this region […]

Social media & sharing icons powered by UltimatelySocial