For young Americans, living with their parents is now the norm, in a ‘postponement of, if not retreat from, marriage’

By Aimee Picchi24 May 2016 (CBS News) – The kids may not be alright, at least when it comes to one traditional mark of growing up: moving out of their childhood homes. More young adults are now living with their parents than with a spouse or partner, marking a tipping point for the first time […]

World Bank: Cities ‘woefully unprepared’ for rising disaster risk

By Laurie Goering16 May 2016 LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Cities around the world are failing to plan for fast-increasing risks from extreme weather and other hazards, particularly as population growth and surging migration put more people in the path of those threats, the World Bank said on Monday. By 2050, 1.3 billion people and […]

World Bank: Water scarcity poses a greater risk of turmoil under climate change – Global water shortages to deliver ‘severe hit’ to economies

By Pola Lem4 May 2016 (ClimateWire) – Water scarcity is expected to increase globally as populations boom and climate change sharpens uncertainty around the resource’s availability, according to a report by the World Bank. The conclusion adds to a growing body of research, and it comes days before this year’s Climate Action 2016 summit in […]

U.K. parliamentary group warns that global fossil fuels could peak in less than 10 years

[cf. MIT researchers predict ‘global economic collapse’ by 2030 – ‘We are not on a sustainable trajectory’ and The Limits to Growth at forty: Is collapse now inevitable?] By Nafeez Ahmed19 April 2016 (Insurge Intelligence) – A report commissioned on behalf of a cross-party group of British MPs authored by a former UK government advisor, […]

Populations of early human settlers grew like an invasive species, Stanford researchers find – ‘Unchecked growth is not a universal hallmark of our history, but a very recent development’

By Rob Jordan5 April 2016 (Stanford Report) – Bustling cities, sprawling suburbs and blossoming agricultural regions might seem strong evidence that people have always dominated the environment. A Stanford study of South America’s colonization shows that human populations did not always grow unchecked, but were at one time limited by local resources – just like […]

Graph of the Day: Global biocapacity per capita, 1961-2012

By Jim Galasyn27 March 2016 (Desdemona Despair) – The Global Footprint Network has published their latest ecological footprint analysis for the world and for individual nations. Not surprisingly, the ecological footprint of human civilization continues to rise at a steady rate of about 235 million global hectares per year. Over the period from 1961 to […]

Study: World unlikely to hold global temperature below 2°C goal – ‘The numbers you start dealing with become so large that they are difficult to comprehend’

GALVESTON, 23 March 2016 (Texas A&M Today) – Last December, officials representing more than 190 countries met in Paris to participate in the United Nations Climate Change Conference. The historic outcome from that conference was the “Paris Agreement” in which each country agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in order to limit global warming to […]

Carbon emissions make up 60 percent of world’s ecological footprint

8 March 2016 (Global Footprint Network) – Global Footprint Network launches its 2016 edition of the National Footprint Accounts today, featuring a refined carbon Footprint calculation. The updated calculation has revealed that the global carbon Footprint is 16 percent higher than previously calculated, with a consequent 8 percent increase in the global Ecological Footprint. The […]

The world has a problem: Too many young people

By Somini Sengupta5 March 2016 (The New York Times) – At no point in recorded history has our world been so demographically lopsided, with old people concentrated in rich countries and the young in not-so-rich countries. Much has been made of the challenges of aging societies. But it’s the youth bulge that stands to put […]

Thanks to humans, the Great Salt Lake is drying up

By Laura Bliss2 March 2016 (CityLab) – The Great Salt Lake is drying up, thanks to 150 years of human diversions from the rivers that feed it. That’s the takeaway of a white paper released by a team of Utah biologists and engineers. And if those diversions continue ramping up, as a bill working its […]

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