24 April 2018 (USFWS) – The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today released a five-year status review and Species Status Assessment [pdf] outlining the latest science and data supporting its recommendation for no change in the red wolf’s overall status as endangered under the Endangered Species Act. The status review is required every five years […]
By Justin Rowlatt and Sanjay Ganguly. 4 May 2018 (BBC News) – Twelve Rohingya people in the refugee camp in Bangladesh have been killed by wild elephants in recent months. The camp has swollen in size since 700,000 members of the Muslim community fled religious persecution in their homeland of Myanmar in August last year. […]
By Jeremy Berke 25 April 2018 (Business Insider) – President Donald Trump announced the reduction of two national monuments in Utah in December 2017. Bears Ears was reduced by 85 percent in the months that followed, in the largest acreage reduction of a national monument to date. Trump also cut Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in […]
By John W. Fitzpatrick and Nathan R. Senner 27 April 2018 (The New York Times) – A worldwide catastrophe is underway among an extraordinary group of birds — the marathon migrants we know as shorebirds. Numbers of some species are falling so quickly that many biologists fear an imminent planet-wide wave of extinctions. These declines […]
By Quirin Schiermeier 18 April 2018 (Nature) – Extreme heat in 2016 damaged Australia’s Great Barrier Reef much more substantially than initial surveys indicated, according to ongoing studies that have tracked the health of the coral treasure. The heatwave caused massive bleaching of the corals that captured worldwide attention.In a paper published on 18 April […]
12 September 2017 (UNCCD) – There is broad evidence to suggest that direct human alteration of terrestrial ecosystems by hunting, foraging, land clearing, agriculture, and other activities started about 12,000 years ago. Sometimes referred to as the “Neolithic Revolution,” agriculture slowly began to transform societies and the way in which people lived; traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyles […]
By Kate Lamb 27 February 2018 (The Guardian) – Dramatically carved into the landscape of a Sumatran oil palm plantation that borders one of the world’s most unique rainforests are three ominous letters: SOS. The message stretches half a kilometre alongside a snaking river; a bird’s-eye view gives the eerie sense the land has been […]
23 March 2018 (IPBES) – Biodiversity – the essential variety of life forms on Earth – continues to decline in every region of the world, significantly reducing nature’s capacity to contribute to people’s well-being. This alarming trend endangers economies, livelihoods, food security and the quality of life of people everywhere, according to four landmark science […]
By David Koenig 6 March 2018 HOUSTON (AP) – Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke says his agency should be a partner with oil and gas companies that seek to drill on public land and that long regulatory reviews with an uncertain outcome are “un-American.” Speaking Tuesday to a major energy-industry conference, Zinke described the Trump administration’s […]
By Morgan Erickson-Davis 2 February 2018 (Mongabay) – A new study finds small-scale deforestation in the Amazon rainforest has been increasing over the past decade, with new hotspots emerging in Bolivia and Peru. The news somewhat dampens Brazil’s touted successes at combatting deforestation, with researchers saying the country’s forest monitoring system is not capable of […]
