Satellite images taken one month apart, on 25 December 2019 and 26 January 2020, show a big recent jump in clearing activity (indicated by yellow circles) in the Bosawás Biosphere Reserve around the indigenous community of Alal, Nicaragua. Source: Sentinel-2 and Landsat 8, accessed through Global Forest Watch. Graphic: Mongabay

Massacre in Nicaragua: Four indigenous community members killed for their land

By Taran Volckhausen 14 February 2020 (Mongabay) – An illegal armed group connected to land grabbers killed four members of the indigenous Mayangna people, left two injured and burned 16 houses in northern Nicaragua on 29 January 2020, according to the UN Human Rights Office. The UN Human Rights Office condemned the Nicaraguan government for allowing […]

A swarm of locusts descends on Enziu, Kenya, on 24 January 2020. Video: Agencia EFE / TIME

Hundreds of billions of locusts, fueled by conflict and climate change, are swarming East Africa – 400-fold increase in their numbers by June 2020 projected

By Madeleine Stone 14 February 2020 (National Geographic) – East Africa is in the midst of a crisis that sounds like something out of the Book of Exodus: A plague of locusts is spreading across the region, threatening the food supply of tens of millions. City-sized swarms of the dreaded pests are wreaking havoc as […]

Total world fertility rates and median age by region, 1955-2030. Data: UN population projections. Graphic: Alan Smith / Financial Times

Europe’s demographic time-bomb – While global population is ageing, continent presents extreme example of this trend

By Valentina Romei 13 January 2020 LONDON (Financial Times) – With its low birth rate and fast-ageing population, Europe is facing a demographic crisis, one that economists fear could hit growth and public finances.  While the global population overall is getting older, Europe is an extreme example of this trend, particularly in the continent’s south and […]

Climate activist Greta Thunberg speaks at the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP25 in Madrid, Spain on 11 December 2019. Photo: Cristina Quicler

Five reasons the COP25 climate talks failed – “The world is screaming out for climate action but this summit has responded with a whisper”

25 December 2019 (AFP) – The climate summit in Madrid earlier this month did not collapse — but by almost any measure it certainly failed. Five years after the fragile UN process yielded the world’s first universal climate treaty, COP25 was billed as a mopping-up session to finish guidelines for carbon markets, thus completing the […]

The geographic breakdown of each percentile of the global distribution of income evolved, 1990-2016. In 1990, 33 percent of the population of the world’s top 0.001 percent income group were residents of the United States and Canada. In 2016, 5 percent of the population of the world’s top 0.001 percent income group were residents of the Russian Federation. Data: Alvaredo, et al., 2018, based on data from the World Inequality Database http://WID.world. Graphic: UNDP

2019 Human Development Report says unchecked inequality growth may trigger a “new great divergence” in society not seen since the Industrial Revolution – “This is the new face of inequality”

BOGOTÁ, 9 December 2019 – The demonstrations sweeping across the world today signal that, despite unprecedented progress against poverty, hunger, and disease, many societies are not working as they should. The connecting thread, argues a new report from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), is inequality. “Different triggers are bringing people onto the streets — […]

Extinction Rebellion activists wear nooses around their necks in protest outside of the COP25 climate talks congress in Madrid, Spain, Saturday, 14 December 2019. The marathon international climate talks ended with no agreement on carbon markets. Photo: Manu Fernandez / AP Photo

Longest UN climate talks end with no deal on carbon markets – “Regressive governments put profit over the planetary crisis and the future of generations to come”

By Frank Jordans and Aritz Parra 15 December 2019 MADRID (AP) – Marathon international climate talks ended Sunday with major polluters resisting calls to ramp up efforts to keep global warming at bay and negotiators postponing the regulation of global carbon markets until next year. Those failures came even after organizers added two more days […]

A woman looks at a World globe at the COP25 climate talks congress in Madrid, Spain, Friday, 13 December 2019. Officials from almost 200 countries scrambled to reach an agreement at a United Nations climate meeting amid growing concerns that key issues may be postponed for another year. Photo: Paul White / AP Photo

UN climate talks in limbo as rifts among countries remain – “I’ve been attending these climate negotiations since they first started in 1991, but never have I seen the almost total disconnection we’ve seen here”

By Frank Jordans 14 December 2019 MADRID (AP) – Chilean officials presiding over this year’s U.N. climate talks said Saturday they plan to propose a compromise to bridge yawning differences among countries that have been deadlocked on key issues for the past two weeks. With the meeting already into extra time, draft documents presented overnight […]

Climate activist Greta Thunberg photographed on the shore in Lisbon, Portugal, 4 December 2019. She was named TIME magazine’s 2019 Person of the Year on 11 December 2019. Photo: Evgenia Arbugaeva / TIME

Climate activist Greta Thunberg named TIME magazine’s 2019 Person of the Year

By Charlotte Alter, Suyin Haynes, and Justin Worland 11 December 2019 (TIME) – Greta Thunberg sits in silence in the cabin of the boat that will take her across the Atlantic Ocean. Inside, there’s a cow skull hanging on the wall, a faded globe, a child’s yellow raincoat. Outside, it’s a tempest: rain pelts the boat, ice […]

Global pattern in the cumulative development of coastal hypoxia in the periods before 1969, 1970-1989, and 1990-2015. Each red dot represents a documented case related to human activities. Green dots are sites that have improved. Since the 1960s, the global number of hypoxic systems has about doubled every ten years up to 2000. Data: Based on Diaz and Rosenberg (2008), Diaz, et al. (2010), and Conley et al. (2011). Graphic: Laffoley and Baxter, 2019 / IUCN

Oceans losing oxygen at unprecedented rate, experts warn

By Fiona Harvey 7 December 2019 MADRID (The Guardian) – Oxygen in the oceans is being lost at an unprecedented rate, with “dead zones” proliferating and hundreds more areas showing oxygen dangerously depleted, as a result of the climate emergency and intensive farming, experts have warned. Sharks, tuna, marlin and other large fish species were […]

Extinction Rebellion protesters in Madrid during the COP25 climate summit in December 2019 hold a banner that reads, “Oceans are rising. So are we.” Photo: Javier Barbancho / Reuters

UN climate talks failing to address urgency of crisis, says top scientist – “There is a risk of disappointment in the UN process because of the inability to recognise that there is an emergency”

By Fiona Harvey 8 December 2019 MADRID (The Guardian) – Urgent UN talks on tackling the climate emergency are still not addressing the true scale of the crisis, one of the world’s leading climate scientists has warned, as high-ranking ministers from governments around the world began to arrive in Madrid for the final days of negotiations. […]

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