Extreme weather, locust invasions and violence have forced people to flee their homes
Millions of people were uprooted from their homes by conflict, violence and natural disasters in the first six months of this year, research has found.
Nearly 15m new internal displacements were recorded in more than 120 countries between January and June by the Swiss-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC).
Continue reading...The climate crisis and Covid-19 are crying out for international cooperation, writes the prime minister of Bangladesh
One-third of my country was underwater last month. The heaviest rains in almost a decade began and have still not abated. More than 1.5 million Bangladeshis are displaced; tens of thousands of hectares of paddy fields have been washed away. Millions of my compatriots will need food aid this year.
Calamities, alas, never strike alone. The floods, which come in the wake of widespread destruction caused by Cyclone Amphan in May, are making it more difficult to contain the coronavirus. More than 2.4 million people had already been moved from the destructive path of the storm without delivering them into the even greater danger of Covid-19. Yet while the infection and death rates have been contained, concerns remain until a foolproof safeguard is acquired. Economic lockdowns have hit our textile industry and exports and forced hundreds of thousands of our international migrant workers to return home, with the vast majority remaining unemployed.
Continue reading...Facebook blames mistake in system for restrictions on groups including Greenpeace USA
Facebook has suspended the accounts of several environmental organizations less than a week after launching an initiative it said would counter a tide of misinformation over climate science on the platform.
Groups such as Greenpeace USA, Climate Hawks Vote and Rainforest Action Network were among those blocked from posting or sending messages on Facebook over the weekend. Activists say hundreds of other individual accounts linked to indigenous, climate and social justice groups were also suspended for an alleged “intellectual property rights violation”.
Continue reading...Prince of Wales says threat posed by global heating will ‘dwarf the impact of the coronavirus pandemic’
Prince Charles has called for the world to put itself on a “warlike footing” to tackle the “comprehensive catastrophe” caused by the climate crisis and the loss of nature.
The threat posed by global heating and the degradation of biodiversity will “dwarf the impact of the coronavirus pandemic”, the Prince of Wales said.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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?
Continue reading...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.
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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...‘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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...Covid has got experts thinking urgently about the risk of diseases passing from farmed animals to humans. We examine the major outbreaks of the past two centuries
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