By Emily Atkin 14 September 2017 (New Republic) – In the days and hours before Hurricane Irma slammed into Florida, its residents were treated to copious media speculation about nightmare scenarios. This monster storm, journalists said, could bring a 15-foot storm surge, blow roofs off of buildings, and cause tens of billions of dollars in […]
By Madhura Chakraborty and Amol Lalzare 15 September 2017(Video Volunteers) – “They don’t touch us because our hands and feet are dirty. They say we stink. They yell at us, hit us, ask us to go away.” Nana Kale recounts how he is treated after working at his job: cleaning the sewers of Mumbai, before […]
By Tracie White 21 September 2017(Stanford Medicine) – In 2008, Jay Lemery, MD, an emergency physician in Colorado, read a commentary about the effects of global climate change on human health. The author was Paul Auerbach, MD, professor of emergency medicine at Stanford and one of the world’s leading authorities on wilderness medicine.Published in the […]
By John Flesher 4 September 2017 (Associated Press) – Harvey’s filthy floodwaters pose significant dangers to human safety and the environment even after water levels drop far enough that Southeast Texas residents no longer fear for their lives, according to experts.Houston already was notorious for sewer overflows following rainstorms. Now the system, with 40 wastewater […]
18 August 2017 (UN) – Warning about escalating suffering in Yemen’s man-made catastrophe, senior United Nations officials today addressed the Security Council, calling on the international community to push for a political solution to the more than two-year-old conflict. “Death looms for Yemenis by air, land and sea,” Special Envoy of the Secretary-General to Yemen, […]
By Chris Mooney 29 April 2017 (The Washington Post) – The northernmost village in Greenland sits just shy of 78 degrees north latitude — deep in the Arctic — yet during the summer, meltwater is everywhere. It flows in small rivulets and larger streams, past multicolored houses built against a sloping hill and down to […]
By Amitav Ghosh and Aaron Savio Lobo31 January 2017 (The Guardian) – The Bay of Bengal’s basin contains some of the most populous regions of the earth. No less than a quarter of the world’s population is concentrated in the eight countries that border the bay1. Approximately 200 million people live along the Bay of […]
By Olga Gertcyk20 December 2016 (The Siberian Times) – In just two years, since the sponge was last surveyed, it has entirely vanished in the area around popular tourist resort Listvyanka and Cape Tolsty, in Irkutsk region, and over a wide area in the north of the crescent-shaped lake which contains around 20% of the […]
21 September 2016 (Climate Central) – Record rainstorms across the U.S. in the past year have continued to make national news, causing billions of dollars of flood damage and killing dozens. But what has barely made headlines are that these floods often cause massive overflows of untreated sewage into streams, rivers, bays, canals, and even […]
By Ivan Nagelkerken, Sean Connell, and Tullio Rossi19 September 2016 (Australian Geographic) – Despite appearances, the oceans are far from silent places. If you dunk your head underwater you’ll hear a cacophony of sounds from wildlife great and small, crashing waves, and even rain. And it’s louder still for creatures attuned to these sounds. However, […]
