Category Archives: Environment

Botswana says it has solved mystery of mass elephant die-off

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Elephants may have ingested toxins produced by bacteria found in waterholes

Hundreds of elephants died in Botswana earlier this year from ingesting toxins produced by cyanobacteria, according to government officials who say they will be testing waterholes for algal blooms next rainy season to reduce the risk of another mass die-off.

The mysterious death of 350 elephants in the Okavango delta between May and June baffled conservationists, with leading theories suggesting they were killed by a rodent virus known as EMC (encephalomyocarditis) or toxins from algal blooms.

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Meet the doomers: why some young US voters have given up hope on climate

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Politically active young people are often championed as the Earth’s great hope to reverse the climate crisis – but many believe we’ve already passed the tipping point

When Siddharth Namachivayam casts a ballot in Colorado this fall, he’ll forego Democratic nominee Joe Biden, whom he sees as just a “Band-Aid,” and instead support the longshot Green party candidate focused on climate action.

“I guess, yeah, it’d be marginally better if Biden was president, but I don’t think Biden being president is more important than the Green party growing in the next couple of years,” Namachivayam says.

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I lived the climate crisis every day of my childhood. This November, I’ll vote on it | Jessica Díaz Vázquez

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Chemical headaches, plant sirens – these were the constant background to my home and school life. My community is on the climate frontline

My teacher first taught me about global warming in the third grade. She explained how an increase in greenhouse gases increased the amount of heat that could be trapped in our atmosphere. We discussed how climate change is melting the ice caps polar bears call home, leading to their extinction. We didn’t discuss how the climate crisis was already at our homes.

I grew up with the smell of freshly made salsa from chiles picked from our backyard garden, the bright colors of fruit gifted to us by neighbors, and the sound of off-key singing to Joan Sebastian and Selena Quintanilla. At school, my friends and I slipped between English and Spanish, moving between the topics of our English essay to la quinceañera de nuestra mejor amiga with ease. But looming over my vibrant community was, and is, the fossil fuel industry.

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Children urged to strike against lack of action on climate emergency

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Schoolchildren to protest on Friday in first such action since coronavirus pandemic struck

Schoolchildren around the world are being urged to go on strike to protest against a lack of action on the climate crisis.

Children and their supporters are invited to take to the streets on Friday, if it is safe to do so, or to go online with their protests “in whatever way suits you best”, according to the organisers.

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Robots gear up to march to the fields and harvest cauliflowers

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Prototype technology could help alleviate growing shortage of human crop pickers

The job of harvesting cauliflowers could one day be in the mechanical hands of robots thanks to a collaboration between scientists and the French canned vegetable producer Bonduelle.

Fieldwork Robotics, the team behind the world’s first raspberry-picking robot, is designing a machine in a three-year collaboration launched on Monday.

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World’s richest 1% cause double CO2 emissions of poorest 50%, says Oxfam

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Charity says world’s fast-shrinking carbon budget should be used to improve lot of poorest

The wealthiest 1% of the world’s population were responsible for the emission of more than twice as much carbon dioxide as the poorer half of the world from 1990 to 2015, according to new research.

Carbon dioxide emissions rose by 60% over the 25-year period, but the increase in emissions from the richest 1% was three times greater than the increase in emissions from the poorest half.

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My country may be swept away by the climate crisis if the rest of the world fails to uphold its promises | President David Kabua

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Now is a time for courage. It will take sacrifices from everyone for us all to survive, the president of the Marshall Islands writes

My country joined the United Nations nearly 30 years ago, in September 1991. But unless my fellow member states take action, we may also be forced from it: the first country to see our land swept away by climate change.

As the UN general assembly meets in New York, celebrating the 75th anniversary of its formation, we must ask: how many of the 193 nations that it brings together will survive to reach its centenary?

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Wild plants of Barbados illustrated on plantation ledgers – in pictures

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Artist Annalee Davis was walking in fields once used for sugarcane in her Barbados homeland when she spotted unfamiliar plants. “I was taught to see them as weeds but now I understand their value offering biodiversity to exhausted land and their historical use in bush medicine.” Davis started pressing and using specially mixed Victorian paint to draw these plants on old plantation ledger pages. Colonialism wiped out Barbados’s biodiversity in the 17th century by replacing local vegetation with the monoculture of intensively farmed fields of sugarcane, but wild plants are proliferating again. The series is now on show at Haarlem Artspace, Derbyshire, until 11 October as part of re:rural. “I want to use the plants to learn to listen to the land in another way and acknowledge its trauma,” she says.


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‘Shocking’: wilderness the size of Mexico lost worldwide in just 13 years, study finds

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Researchers say loss of 1.9m square kilometres of intact ecosystems will have ‘profound implications’ for biodiversity

Wilderness across the planet is disappearing on a huge scale, according to a new study that found human activities had converted an area the size of Mexico from virtually intact natural landscapes to heavily modified ones in just 13 years.

The loss of 1.9m square kilometres (735,000 sq miles) of intact ecosystems would have “profound implications” for the planet’s biodiversity, the study’s authors said.

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Berejiklian warns Nationals against further public posturing over koala protection policy

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NSW premier implores John Barilaro to stick to agreement after he refused to rule out further threats to dismantle the Coalition

The New South Wales premier, Gladys Berejiklian, has made it clear she will not tolerate any further public posturing by the Nationals over koala habitat protections or new threats by the junior partner to leave the Coalition.

Berejiklian on Thursday also implored her Liberal colleagues to move on and refocus on their jobs following last week’s near split in the government, brought on by the Nationals leader, John Barilaro, threatening to move to the crossbenches with his MPs.

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Device to curb microplastic emissions wins James Dyson award

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Tyre attachment designed by four students aims to reduce road transport pollution

A device that captures microplastic particles from tyres as they are emitted – and could help reduce the devastating pollution they cause – has won its designers a James Dyson award.

The Tyre Collective, a group of masters students from Imperial College London and the Royal College of Art, scooped the UK prize of the international competition with their solution for the growing environmental scourge of tyre wear caused by road transport.

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Malaysian prisoners may face ‘forced labour’ on palm oil plantations

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Shortage of foreign workers behind plan by producers to employ inmates as a stopgap measure

Prisoners are expected to be put to work on Malaysia’s giant palm oil plantations to make up for an acute labour shortage heightened by the coronavirus pandemic.

But workers’ rights experts have warned that the proposal by the country’s palm oil producers may constitute “institutionalised forced labour” in an industry already accused of widespread abuse and exploitation of workers.

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World fails to meet a single target to stop destruction of nature – UN report

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‘Humanity at a crossroads’ after a decade in which all of the 2010 Aichi goals to protect wildlife and ecosystems have been missed

The world has failed to meet a single target to stem the destruction of wildlife and life-sustaining ecosystems in the last decade, according to a devastating new report from the UN on the state of nature.

From tackling pollution to protecting coral reefs, the international community did not fully achieve any of the 20 Aichi biodiversity targets agreed in Japan in 2010 to slow the loss of the natural world. It is the second consecutive decade that governments have failed to meet targets.

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Dolphin numbers up in Hong Kong after Covid crisis halts ferries

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Revival prompts calls to divert boats to help protect native Indo-Pacific humpbacks

Large numbers of dolphins returned to Hong Kong waters within weeks of the Covid-19 crisis shutting down high-speed ferries, and researchers are now calling for protections before the ferries resume.

Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins, also known as Chinese white dolphins and pink dolphins, are native to the Pearl River estuary, but typically avoided the waters between Hong Kong and Macau because of the high volume of high-speed boats.

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First funeral held using ‘living coffin’ made of mushroom fibre

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Netherlands-based startup company behind eco-friendly fungi mycelium casket

After months of testing, the first funeral has taken place in the Netherlands using a fast-composting “living coffin” made of mycelium, the mat of fibres that forms the underground part of fungi.

“I didn’t actually go, but I talked to a relative beforehand – it was a moving moment, we discussed the cycle of life,” Bob Hendrikx, the founder of Loop, the startup producing the Living Cocoon, told the Metro newspaper.

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‘I don’t think science knows’: Trump denies climate change link to wildfires – video

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The US president is urged to recognise the changing climate and what it means to forests, during a briefing on the wildfires in California on Monday. Trump interrupts an official, Wade Crowfoot, the secretary of California’s Natural Resources Agency, to argue the climate 'will start getting cooler, you just watch'. Crowfoot responds: 'I wish science agreed with you.' To which Trump retorts: 'I don’t think science knows actually'

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Biden condemns Trump as ‘climate arsonist’ as wildfires burn – live

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Trump has landed in California, where he will receive a briefing on the west coast wildfires, which have already claimed at least 35 lives.

“There has to be good, strong forest management, which I’ve been talking about for three years with the states, so hopefully they’ll start doing that,” Trump said.

Trump is in California mispronouncing "Oregon" and insisting that wildfires are caused be poor forest management pic.twitter.com/zydXDoe3DT

Joe Biden closed his climate speech by noting he continues to pray for Americans on the west coast who have been affected by the wildfires.

“We see the light through the dark smoke. We never give up. Always,” Biden said.

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Northern hemisphere breaks record for hottest ever summer

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  • Past three months were 1.17C above 20th-century average
  • 2020 on track to be one of five warmest years, Noaa finds

This summer was the hottest ever recorded in the northern hemisphere, according to US government scientists.

Related: Bigger than London, bigger than New York City: visualizing the size of fires in the US

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‘Lost decade for nature’ as UK fails on 17 of 20 UN biodiversity targets

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UK government said it failed on two-thirds of targets, but RSPB analysis is bleaker – and suggests UK is moving backwards in some areas

The UK has failed to reach 17 out of 20 UN biodiversity targets agreed on 10 years ago, according to an analysis from conservation charity RSPB that says the gap between rhetoric and reality has resulted in a “lost decade for nature”.

The UK government’s self-assessment said it failed on two-thirds of targets (14 out of 20) agreed at the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in Nagoya, Japan, in 2010, but the RSPB analysis suggests the reality is worse. On six of the 20 targets the UK has actually gone backwards. The government’s assessment published last year said it was not regressing on any target.

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