By David McKenzie and Ingrid Formanek 31 August 2016 Linyanti Swamp, Botswana (CNN) – Scanning Botswana’s remote Linyanti swamp from the low flying chopper, elephant ecologist Mike Chase can’t hide the anxiety and dread as he sees what he has seen too many times before. “I don’t think anybody in the world has seen the number […]
25 August 2016 (350) – The seas of dead coral are a crime scene. This year, the world witnessed the most devastating mass coral bleaching event ever recorded which left behind dead reefs in at least 38 countries. Many of these reefs will never recover. The immediate cause is clear: the ongoing rise in global […]
By Jeremy Hance16 August 2016 (mongabay.com) – The Paris Agreement marked the biggest political milestone to combat climate change since scientists first introduced us in the late 1980s to perhaps humanity’s greatest existential crisis. Last December, 178 nations pledged to do their part to keep global average temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius […]
By Lindsay Fendt11 August 2016 (mongabay.com) – On a Tuesday in March, indigenous activist Nelson García was shot in the face in northwest Honduras. The next day, in Guatemala, unknown attackers found environmentalist Walter Méndez outside his home and filled his chest with bullets. Two weeks earlier gunmen killed Berta Cáceres, an internationally renowned environmental […]
By John Vidal21 April 2016 (Guardian) – A documentary about the murder of a rainforest activist has been viewed tens of thousands of times online after being banned by the Cambodian government. The film, I Am Chut Wutty, was due to be shown this week in a Phnom Penh cinema to coincide with the fourth […]
By Anuradha Nagaraj18 August 2016 CHENNAI, India (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – More than a quarter of India’s land is turning to desert and the rate of degradation of agricultural areas is increasing, according to new analysis of satellite images. A report [pdf] from the Indian Space Research Organization says land degradation – broadly defined as […]
By Aaron Sidder22 July 2016 (National Geographic) – Vultures rest in the tree’s upper branches, their black bodies in stark contrast to the blanched wood beneath their feet. Below them, caimans and capybaras crawl in sucking mud through the Agropil lagoon, seeking water that is unlikely to arrive for many months. The river has dried […]
By Arthur Neslen 11 August 2016 Ljubljana, the Upper Kolpa valley, and Zagreb (Guardian) – The death toll of animals killed by a razor wire fence designed to stop migrants crossing into Europe is mounting, amid warnings that bears, lynx, and wolves could become locally extinct if the barrier is completed and consolidated. The rising […]
By Robert Ferris19 Aug 2016 (CNBC) – Arctic sea ice is melting at a rate far faster than anyone thought, and it is already wildly, and perhaps permanently, changing the region, and the planet. Historically, sea ice forms every winter across the top of the planet, and covers much of the Arctic Ocean. Every summer, […]
[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 […]