In The News

India Mobilizes Against Cyclone Fani: BBC

May 2, 2019
About 10 percent of the world’s population lives directly in coastal areas and about 40 percent live within 100 kilometers. “Almost two-thirds of the world's cities with populations of over five million are located in areas at risk of sea level rise,” explains a UN factsheet. Even as populations prefer living in coastal areas, climate change brings rising seas and extreme weather events, and...

Trees and Climate Change: New York Times

Moises Velasquez-Manoff April 25, 2019
Trees, by absorbing carbon and providing shade, help protect the environment from climate change. Flooding, droughts, extreme temperatures, disease and insects are taking their tolls on trees that can live a century or more as climate changes more rapidly than trees can adjust. “Most trees can migrate only as fast as their seeds disperse – and if current warming trends hold, the climate this...

World Bank Can Be Sued: NPR

Tim McDonnell March 7, 2019
The US Supreme Court, in a 7-1 ruling, ruled that international organizations can be sued when overseas development projects bring harm to local communities. A group of farmers and fishermen in Gujarat, India, filed the lawsuit in 2015 after a coal-fired power plant came on line and contaminated local water sources despite promises of environmental protections. The decision in Jam v....

US Cities Burn Recyclables: Guardian

Oliver Milman February 22, 2019
China stopped accepting 12 forms of imported recyclables for processing and set stringent conditions on contamination as of January 2018. Developed nations do not have adequate domestic markets for handling the waste and did not prepare citizens, packaging firms or cities for the change. So recyclables pile up, with most landfilled and incinerated rather than processed for reuse. “The dilemma...

Phys.org: Human Diet Damages Planet

Marlowe Hood January 17, 2019
The diet of more than 7.5 billion humans could cause “catastrophic” damage to the planet, reports research published in Lancet. People should consume half as much sugar and red meat and twice as many vegetables, fruit and nuts, suggests a commission of more than 30 researchers. Almost a billion people go hungry and more than 2 billion eat too muchof some foods that contribute to obesity, heart...

Book Review: The Sustainable State

Susan Froetschel January 8, 2019
Survival of the world’s livable habitat depends on 6 billion people living in developing nations to resist the lifestyles practiced by 1 billion people living in the world’s wealthiest nations. Reckless consumerism has become more threat than comfort, wasting limited resources and poisoning water and air, and government intervention is required. The only solution, author Chandran Nair concludes,...

National Geographic: AI and Wildlife Research

Anne Casselman November 23, 2018
Numerous wildlife species are in rapid decline. New software, photography, remote-sensing and other technologies like Wildbook assist biologists to document the decline, allowing calculation of individual species counts, locations and population assessments in a few days rather than months. Wildbook is free and open source. “AI is well on the road to completing tasks typically done manually by...