29 September 2009 | News – Press Release One fifth of Mediterranean dragonflies and damselflies are threatened with extinction at the regional level as a result of increasing freshwater scarcity, according to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species™. Climate change and habitat degradation, due to the way land is managed, are also affecting the […]
New Delhi (AFP) Sept 23, 2009 – India’s monsoon was about 20 percent below strength just over a week before the official end of the rainy reason, putting the country on course for its worst drought since 1972, weather data showed Wednesday. “Until September 21, for the country as a whole, the rain deficiency was […]
Picturesque views of the snow-covered Alps may soon be relegated to picture books due to increasing climate change, a new European environmental report says. And it’s not just skiers and tourism officials who are getting nervous about the fate of the continent’s famous mountains. Temperatures in the Alps are increasing at a rate more […]
Posted by Nate Hagens at The Oil Drum …The liquid tailings, a by product of the oil sands mining process, contain naphthenic acids, unrecovered hydrocarbons and trace metals, making it toxic to aquatic organisms21 and mammals22. Operators are required to store tailings waste on site in large containment dykes because the water is too toxic […]
ScienceDaily (Sep. 21, 2009) — A new study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder indicates most of the world’s low-lying river deltas are sinking from human activity, making them increasingly vulnerable to flooding from rivers and ocean storms and putting tens of millions of people at risk. While the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel […]
Khuria, Bangladesh (AFP) Sept 18, 2009 – At the end of every year, after the monsoon rains, Noor Hossain dismantles his houseboat on the Bangladeshi delta and heads to the mainland. This time he will not be coming back. Hossain is one of about 800,000 river gypsies, known locally as bedey, who for generations have […]
By CHARLES DUHIGG, Published: September 17, 2009 MORRISON, Wis. — All it took was an early thaw for the drinking water here to become unsafe. There are 41,000 dairy cows in Brown County, which includes Morrison, and they produce more than 260 million gallons of manure each year, much of which is spread on nearby […]
Kuala Lumpur (AFP) Sept 16, 2009 – Malaysian police said Wednesday they had dismantled blockades constructed in the Borneo jungles by Penan tribespeople protesting against logging and plantations on their ancestral land. In a separate move police also arrested 17 people, including Penan and other indigenous groups, for mounting a demonstration against a proposed dam […]
Groundwater-quality data from a sampling of 1,329 wells in 19 states were analyzed. Chloride concentrations were greater than the secondary maximum contaminant level established by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency of 250 milligrams per liter in 2.5 percent of samples from 797 shallow monitoring wells and in 1.7 percent of samples from 532 drinking-water supply […]
By Jeremy Hance Kenya was once considered one of Sub-Saharan Africa’s success stories: the country possessed a relatively stable government, a good economy, a thriving tourist industry due to a beautiful landscape and abundant wildlife. But violent protests following a disputed election in 2007 hurt the country’s reputation, and then—even worse—drought and famine struck the […]
