By Jason DowlingAugust 16, 2010 MELBOURNE’S water storages are having their best winter run-off since 1995, swelling above 38 per cent full and adding more than 220 billion litres to last year’s historically low levels. More good news is expected in coming weeks, with big inflows expected from the winter/spring filling season. But this exceptional […]
By PAUL QUINLAN of GreenwireAugust 20, 2010 Montana regulators acknowledged this week that homebuilders are using permit-exempt wells to bypass laws intended to protect water supplies in arid areas, but they nonetheless rejected a bid to close what critics call a loophole to undermine ranchers’ water rights. While the state environmental agency pledged to revisit […]
US precipitation has increased an average of about 5 percent over the past 50 years. Projections of future precipitation generally indicate that northern areas will become wetter, and southern areas, particularly in the West, will become drier. While precipitation over the United States as a whole has increased, there have been important regional and seasonal […]
SAN FRANCISCO, California, August 20, 2010 (ENS) – An attempt by irrigation districts to strip federal protected status from wild steelhead trout in California’s Central Valley was rejected in a ruling today from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. This Endangered Species Act case is a challenge to the decision of the National Marine Fisheries […]
By Steve Cole, NASA Headquarters, WashingtonAug. 19, 2010 WASHINGTON — Global plant productivity that once was on the rise with warming temperatures and a lengthened growing season is now on the decline because of regional drought according to a new study of NASA satellite data. Plant productivity is a measure of the rate of the […]
By Staff WritersAug 19, 2010 Jerusalem, Israel (SPX) Aug 19, 2010 – How toxic, blue-green algae out-compete other organisms through a form of selfish “enslavement” – and by so doing proliferate dangerously in freshwater bodies – has been described by a researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In general, the increasing occurrence of […]
By Diana Gregor6 August 2010 Climate change is provoking mass human migration. According to scientists, 50 million people worldwide will be displaced this year because of rising sea levels, desertification, dried up aquifers, weather-induced flooding, and other severe environmental changes. A joint study by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and […]
By Wanjiru MachariaPosted Tuesday, July 20 2010 at 21:00 Settlers evicted from South Western Mau are still in makeshift camps one year later even as the government plans to move to the next phase of evictions. While some left the camps after realising that nothing was forthcoming, more than 1,000 families are still languishing at […]
By BEN CUBBY, ENVIRONMENT EDITORAugust 4, 2010 CONTAMINATED water from a coalmine is flowing into the Georges River, south of Sydney, at levels that are toxic to aquatic life, an independent water quality report has shown. A plume of saline water stretched along the river for 15 kilometres from the discharge point of an underground […]
BBC31 July 2010 A UN panel has added Florida’s Everglades National Park and Madagascar’s tropical rainforest to a list of world heritage sites at risk. Unesco’s World Heritage Committee said development in the Everglades had caused water flow to fall 60% in the wetland, a major wildlife sanctuary. The pollution level there was so […]
