By Hannah Beech 29 June 2019 BUNGA TANJUNG, Indonesia (The New York Times) – The men came at Hope and her baby with spears and guns. But she would not leave. There was no place for her to go. When the air-gun pellets pierced Hope’s eyes, blinding her, she felt her way up the tree […]
By Damian Carrington 24 June 2019 (The Guardian) – G20 countries have almost tripled the subsidies they give to coal-fired power plants in recent years, despite the urgent need to cut the carbon emissions driving the climate crisis. The bloc of major economies pledged a decade ago to phase out all fossil fuel subsidies. The figures, published […]
By Joseph Albanese 8 May 2019 (Princeton Environmental Institute) – As the planet continues to warm, multi-day heat waves are projected to increase in frequency, length and intensity. The additive effects of these extreme heat events overwhelm emergency service providers and hospital staff with heat-related maladies, disrupt the electrical grid and can even cause delays […]
18 April 2019 (Gallup) – Gallup’s Positive and Negative Experience Indexes measure life’s intangibles — feelings and emotions — that traditional economic indicators such as GDP were never intended to capture. Each index provides a real-time snapshot of people’s daily experiences, offering leaders insights into the health of their societies that they cannot gather from […]
By James Temple1 May 2019 (Technology Review) – Climate change is clearly making some regions wetter and others drier. But it’s been difficult for scientists to detect a clear, consistent human role in increasing the frequency and severity of global droughts given natural climate variability, regional differences, and limited data. A new report in Nature adds evidence […]
By Naveena Sadasivam 17 April 2019 (Grist) – For more than a decade, indigenous communities in Alaska have been fighting to prevent the mining of copper and gold at Pebble Mine in Bristol Bay, home to the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery and a crucial source of sustenance. The proposed mine, blocked under the Obama […]
By Merrit Kennedy 29 April 2019 (NPR) – Indonesia has announced plans to build a new capital city as its current capital, Jakarta, struggles with pollution, traffic gridlock — and the fact that the city is sinking. After a Cabinet meeting on Monday, planning minister Bambang Brodjonegoro said President Joko Widodo has decided to move […]
By Mikaela Weisse and Liz Goldman 25 April 2019 (Global Forest Watch) – The tropics lost 12 million hectares of tree cover in 2018, the fourth-highest annual loss since record-keeping began in 2001. Of greatest concern is the disappearance of 3.6 million hectares of primary rainforest, an area the size of Belgium. The figures come […]
By Kendall Teare 4 March 2019 (Yale News) – As humans continue to expand our use of land across the planet, we leave other species little ground to stand on. By 2070, increased human land-use is expected to put 1,700 species of amphibians, birds, and mammals at greater extinction risk by shrinking their natural habitats, […]
By Beth Gardiner 26 March 2019 Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia (National Geographic) – Coal is everywhere in Mongolia’s frigid capital. It sits beneath the towering smokestacks of power plants in piles as big as football fields. Drivers haul it through town in the open beds of pickup trucks. Vendors stack yellow bags of the stuff along roadsides, […]
