By Morgan Erickson-Davis22 April 2016 (mongabay.com) – The quest for gold has been stripping rainforest from around rivers in the Amazon Basin, with not even protected areas immune from mining. The situation has gotten so out of hand that the Peruvian government launched an intervention in January, destroying a slew of mining equipment and more […]
By Jonathan Vit 22 April 2016 (mongabay.com) – Asia Pulp & Paper’s (APP) plans to operate a giant mill in South Sumatra later this year have raised some uncomfortable questions about the veracity of the conglomerate’s lauded no-deforestation commitment and the potential environmental impact on one of Indonesia’s most-fire prone provinces. The new mill, which […]
By Alistair Hobday, Eric Oliver, Jan McDonald, and Michael Grose19 April 2016 (The Conversation) – Drought, fires, floods, marine heatwaves – Tasmania has had a tough time this summer. These events damaged its natural environment, including world heritage forests and alpine areas, and affected homes, businesses and energy security. In past decades, climate-related […]
By Michael Slezak21 April 2016 (The Guardian) – The global coral bleaching event devastating the Great Barrier Reef has spread to reefs in Western Australia, where the federal government halted the implementation of marine parks, which would help the reefs recover. In light of worsening bleaching, the Greens have called on the government to urgently […]
By Chris Mooney 20 April 2016 (Washington Post) – The conclusions are in from a series of scientific surveys of the Great Barrier Reef bleaching event — an environmental assault on the largest coral ecosystem on Earth — and scientists aren’t holding back about how devastating they find them. Australia’s National Coral Bleaching Task Force […]
[cf. Scientists say climate change could cause a ‘massive’ tree die-off in the U.S. Southwest and Drought-induced tree mortality accelerating in forests] By Diana Madson18 April 2016 (Yale Climate Connections) – New research predicts that nearly all coniferous forests in the American Southwest could be lost to climate change by the end of the century. […]
14 Apr 2016 (ReliefWeb) – [Download PDF] Highlights As Mongolia transitions to spring, 20 per cent of the country still has snow cover with 23 districts (soums) in six provinces (aimags) experiencing white dzud or nearly white dzud conditions. Conditions remain unseasonably cold and there are concerns of an iron dzud emerging in some parts. […]
By Lynn Jenner11 April 2016 As of 11 April 2016, as many as 1.3 million hectares (over 3.7 million acres) of forest cover in Nepal has been destroyed by wild fires the last two weeks. Two persons have been killed and there have been huge losses to property across the country. Historically April and May […]
By Nikolaj Skydsgaard16 April 2016 COPENHAGEN (Reuters) – A sculpture of an impaled polar bear went on display on Friday in front of the Danish parliament to highlight the impact of global warming. The seven-meter high metal sculpture named Unbearable depicts a graph of carbon dioxide accumulation in the atmosphere sky-rocketing into the belly of […]
By Daniel Cressey13 April 2016 (Nature) – Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is undergoing the most severe bleaching event in its history, as corals along the reef expel the symbiotic algae that provide them both with their rich colours and food. Terry Hughes, director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James […]
