World’s largest sawdust dump is on fire ‘and will burn for years’

25 July 2016 (Siberian Times) – The mountain of sawdust is the size of more than 800 Olympic swimming pools at a site in the Ust-Kutsky district of Irkutsk region. A council spokesman said: ‘It is now impossible to extinguish dump with such an amount of sawdust. ‘Obviously, it will keep burning for a few […]

Amazon rainforest degradation up 185 percent over last year

[Translation by Bing Translator.] By Antônio Fonseca, Marcelo Justino, Carlos Souza Jr., and Adalberto Veríssimo22 August 2016 (Imazon) – In July 2016, SAD detected 539 square kilometers of deforestation in the Amazon, with a cloud cover of 7% of the territory. This represented a decrease of 1% compared to July 2015 when deforestation totaled 542 […]

Zombie carbon emissions haunt the planet – ‘We’re losing the ability to really solve the climate crisis’

By Amrith Ramkumar28 July 2016 (Bloomberg) – Deforestation in the Amazon region dropped by 30 percent  from 2005 to 2010, sparing trees that soak up carbon dioxide. A big win in the fight against climate change, right? Maybe not big enough to save the planet, or the species on it. After trees are cut down, […]

Clean energy won’t save us – only a new economic system can

By Jason Hickel15 July 2016 (Guardian) – Earlier this year, media outlets around the world announced that February had broken global temperature records by a shocking amount. March broke all the records too. In June, our screens were covered with surreal images of flooding in Paris, the Seine bursting its banks and flowing into the […]

June deforestation in Brazilian Amazon doubled over same period in 2015

[Translation by Bing Translator.] 22 July 2016 (Imazon) – In June 2016, SAD detected 972 square kilometers of deforestation (the total destruction of forest for other alternative uses of the soil) in the Amazon, with a cloud coverage of 16% of the territory. This represented an increase of 97% over June 2015 when deforestation amounted […]

Video: An eye-opening flight over California’s dying forests

  By Kurtis Alexander6 August 2016 McCLELLAN PARK, Sacramento County (San Francisco Chronicle) – Even before the plane left the runway, it was clear the crew of researchers examining the fallout from California’s historic drought would not return with good news. A column of gray smoke from a smoldering brush fire was visible from McClellan […]

15 fire-linked firms escape prosecution in Indonesia’s Riau – ‘The clearing of land for oil palm plantations is still ongoing to this day’

By Philip Jacobson28 July 2016 (mongabay.com) – On July 23 the local police headquarters in the Sumatran province of Riau released SP3 notices related to 15 companies that the Ministry of Environment and Forestry had listed in connection with last year’s fires. A SP3 is an official police document that confirms a case has been […]

Whale sharks, winghead sharks, Bornean orangutans, and addax antelopes slide towards extinction – ‘We are witnessing in real time the extinction of iconic and once-plentiful species’

8 July 2016 (IUCN) – New IUCN Red List assessments reveal that growing human pressures on whale sharks, winghead sharks and Bornean orangutans are putting these species at an increasing risk of extinction. Whale sharks and winghead sharks are now listed as Endangered and Bornean orangutans as Critically Endangered – only one step from going […]

Drought stalls tree growth and shuts down Amazon carbon sink

6 July 2016 (University of Exeter) – A recent drought completely shut down the Amazon Basin’s carbon sink, by killing trees and slowing their growth, a ground-breaking study led by researchers at the Universities of Exeter and Leeds has found. Previous research has suggested that the Amazon – the most extensive tropical forest on Earth […]

Kelp forests in the Great Southern Reef wiped out by marine heatwave – ‘When we went up to the northern regions and saw that everything was gone, it was devastating’

8 July 2016 (University of Western Australia) – A team of marine scientists led by The University of Western Australia have uncovered the extinction of a kelp forest ecosystem along 100 kilometres of Western Australia’s coastline, following a heatwave that occurred in 2011. Kelp forests in Western Australia have not experienced a heatwave of this […]

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