Category Archives: Environment

Toxic smog forces Bangkok to close hundreds of schools

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Thai capital has been shrouded in murky haze for weeks, forcing residents to don masks and sparking criticism of government

Toxic smog forced Bangkok authorities to issue an unprecedented order to shut nearly 450 schools on Wednesday as authorities struggled to manage a pollution crisis that has stirred widespread concern.

The Thai capital has been shrouded in murky haze for weeks, forcing residents to don masks and sparking social media criticism of the uneven response by the government.

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‘The river is dying’: the vast ecological cost of Brazil’s mining disasters

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Water resources are tapped with often reckless abandon and poor regulation. And it looks set to go on under new president

The Brazilian government has been urged to step up punishments for environmental crimes after the deadliest mining disaster in decades.

The torrent of mud and iron ore tailings that engulfed the community of Brumadinho on Friday continues to inflict a toll on residents, river systems and freshwater species.

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Joshua Tree national park ‘may take 300 years to recover’ from shutdown

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National park saw ‘irreparable’ damage including vandalism, ruined trails and trees cut down, says former superintendent

The former superintendent of Joshua Tree national park has said it could take hundreds of years to recover from damage caused by visitors during the longest-ever government shutdown.

“What’s happened to our park in the last 34 days is irreparable for the next 200 to 300 years,” Curt Sauer said at a rally over the weekend, according to a report from the Desert Sun. Sauer retired in 2010 after running the park for seven years.

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Murray Darling Basin Plan breaches Water Act, royal commission to find

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Commissioner to find $13bn plan to restore river took into account factors other than the environment’s needs when it set the amount of water needed to be bought back from irrigators

The Murray Darling Basin Plan is likely in breach of the commonwealth act that underpins it – the Water Act 2007, the South Australian royal commission into the plan is expected to find.

The report of the royal commission into the Murray Darling Basin Plan is being handed to the state governor on Tuesday but it is up to the SA government when it is released.

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Brazil dam collapse: bodies pulled from toxic mud as hope fades for survivors

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Minas Gerais locals recall another dam collapse involving mining firm Vale as hunt continues for 292 people still missing

The dirt road which once led to the Nova Estância guesthouse and a handful of nearby farms now ends in a slew of sticky, acrid sludge that stretches as far as the eye can see, a deep red gash across the green of the rolling Brazilian countryside.

The road, a small bridge it once crossed, the guesthouse and hundreds of people were all swallowed by mud when a tailings dam at the Córrego de Feijão mine collapsed on Friday, unleashing a torrent of liquid waste.

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Bear in mind: lost boy’s tale of ursine guardian ‘likely to be fantasy’

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Three-year-old Casey Hathaway said a bear helped him survive two nights in the woods but animal experts say it would be a first

The story of a three-year-old boy who said he survived two nights alone in the woods due to the assistance of a friendly bear should not encourage people to seek out their own relationships with bears, a leading ursine expert has warned.

Related: Three-year-old boy missing in woods for two days says friendly bear kept him safe

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Mugged by macaques: the urban monkey gangs of Kuala Lumpur

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The next 15 megacities #10: As Malaysia’s ever-expanding capital swallows up their rainforest habitat, the macaques are turning to guerrilla warfare

The gang stop and stare, attention spiked by our car doors slamming. Ten pairs of eyes flit between our backpacks and our faces. Is it worth mugging us? Do our bags contain bananas or useless, inedible wallets and cameras? The monkeys of Kuala Lumpur’s Ampang district decide against it and head further down the road in the hunt for victims. The morning joggers here run with sticks.

“Twenty years ago this was jungle,” says Viswa Hattan, an accountant jogging in the area. Gated high-rises loom ahead of us, the roads leading to them flanked by forest too dense to enter without machetes. Four macaques, babies clinging to their chests, loiter on a metal road barrier uphill from a construction site. “This was their area,” says Hattan as a nearby male macaque begins vigorously masturbating. “We’ve taken it from them.”

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Country diary: visions of Wales’s tumultuous geological past

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Comins Coch, Aberystwyth: Remnants of ancient volcanoes still dominate the skyline, though much less sharply than in La Palma’s younger landscape

The path up to the old quarry was wet and bordered by clumps of coarse grass, droplets of dew still hanging on to each blade. Beyond the line of trees that marks the edge of the field, dark and skeletal in their winter stasis, the sky was mottled with cloud that looked distinctly untrustworthy, with the stillness to the air that often presages showers.

Exposed on the steep back wall, grey and tarnished with flecks of iron, the ancient mudstones are too soft and easily fractured for fine building work, but the quarry served as a useful source of stone for local roads. Now abandoned, it has been out of use for long enough that mature oak trees have grown from the rounded heaps of spoil, banks of gorse – already in flower – adding bright yellow highlights.

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Doomsday clock stays at two minutes to midnight as crisis now ‘new abnormal’

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Warning that ‘We are like passengers on the Titanic, ignoring the iceberg ahead’ in face of nuclear arms and climate change threats

The risk to global civilisation from nuclear weapons and climate change remains at an all-time high, according to a group of prominent US scientists and former officials, who said the world’s predicament had become the “new abnormal”.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that its symbolic “doomsday clock”, unveiled every year, was stuck at two minutes to midnight, the same as last January. The only other time the Bulletin has judged the world as being this close to catastrophe was 1953, in the early volatile stages of the cold war.

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Military buildup in Arctic as melting ice reopens northern borders

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As ice melts and shipping lanes open up, geopolitical tensions are growing and old cold war bases are being reopened

The climate crisis is intensifying a new military buildup in the Arctic, diplomats and analysts said this week, as regional powers attempt to secure northern borders that were until recently reinforced by a continental-sized division of ice.

That so-called unpaid sentry is now literally melting away, opening up shipping lanes and geo-security challenges, said delegates at the Arctic Frontiers conference, the polar circle’s biggest talking shop, who debated a series of recent escalations.

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Zombie clunkers: has your local bus been resurrected in Guatemala?

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Phased out vehicles often end up back in use in developing countries – a form of dumping with serious environmental consequences

In a sparsely furnished office overlooking dozens of buses at the Zone 21 depot in Guatemala City, Jorge Castro flips through photographs on his mobile phone. He settles on one.

“There’s the bus when I bought it in Maryland,” he says proudly. It is a blue and white bus emblazoned with the words “Ride On”, the name of Montgomery County’s public transit system.

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Tiger poachers arrested by Thai police were part of Vietnamese gang

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Police investigating discovery of animal’s remains warn of organised crime threat to Thailand’s tiger population

Thai authorities investigating the discovery of the remains of a wild tiger in a taxi have warned that organised crime gangs are behind the capture and slaughter of Thailand’s endangered tiger population.

Police, acting on a tip-off from a cab driver, arrested two men suspected of being members of a Vietnam-based syndicate involved in the trafficking of animal parts. The tiger was found in their luggage along with mobile phones containing photographs of the animal being killed.

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Sydney’s desalination plant likely to start up to ease water shortages

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Low dam levels and the drought lead New South Wales government to act

Sydney’s desalination plant was likely to be switched on this weekend because of falling dam levels and the drought, the New South Wales resources minister said.

The plant is turned on when water storages drop below 60%.

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Water crisis: western NSW mayors travel to Sydney to demand help

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Five mayors warn their towns could run out of water within weeks and call for their needs to be prioritised over irrigators

The mayors of several western New South Wales councils have warned their townships face major water crises within weeks and have urged the state government to impose a one-month embargo on irrigators pumping from the upper part of the Darling River system.

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Inside China’s leading ‘sponge city’: Wuhan’s war with water

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The next 15 megacities #9: Known as ‘the city of a hundred lakes’ until most got paved over, Wuhan has a flooding problem. Can permeable pavements and artificial wetlands soak it up?

Take a stroll down the central Chinese city’s Fan Lake Road or Fruit Lake Street and despite their names you won’t see any large bodies of water – unless it has been raining very hard, that is.

Wuhan was once known as “the city of a hundred lakes”. It had 127 lakes in its central area alone in the 1980s, but decades of rapid urbanisation mean only around 30 survive.

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UK has biggest fossil fuel subsidies in the EU, finds commission

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Subsidies for coal, oil and gas are not falling despite EU pledges to tackle climate change

The UK leads the European Union in giving subsidies to fossil fuels, according to a report from the European commission. It found €12bn (£10.5bn) a year in support for fossil fuels in the UK, significantly more than the €8.3bn spent on renewable energy.

The commission report warned that the total subsidies for coal, oil and gas across the EU remained at the same level as 2008. This is despite both the EU and G20 having long pledged to phase out the subsidies, which hamper the rapid transition to clean energy needed to fight climate change.

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‘When to Ambae?’ Volcano-hit islanders long for home – in pictures

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The violent Manaro Voui volcano forced the people of Vanuatu’s Ambae island to flee their home numerous times over the last year. After living in makeshift camps on surrounding islands, the displaced residents are now anxious to return to their ash-covered homes, even if the danger has not yet passed

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Record private jet flights into Davos as leaders arrive for climate talk

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Experts predict up to 1,500 individual private flights in and out of airfields serving Swiss ski resort for World Economic Forum

David Attenborough might have urged world leaders at Davos to take urgent action on climate change, but it appears no one was listening. As he spoke, experts predicted up to 1,500 individual private jets will fly to and from airfields serving the Swiss ski resort this week.

Political and business leaders and lobbyists are opting for bigger, more expensive aircrafts, according to analysis by the Air Charter Service, which found the number of private jet flights grew by 11% last year.

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