Posted December 16th, 2020 for Purdue University Deforestation of the Amazon rainforest, often for agricultural purposes, creates conditions that are conducive for fires. Researchers at Purdue University, the University of Lleida and the Forest Sciences Centre of Catalonia in Spain used remote sensing technology to show that 85% of the Amazon rainforest fires of 2019 were in areas that had been deforested just the year before. (Photo courtesy of André Dib.) WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. In 2019, unprecedented wildfires destroyed thousands of square miles of Amazon rainforest, roughly the size of New Jersey. The loss of biodiversity and invaluable habitats, release of carbon from the fires, and other socioeconomic and environmental consequences have concerned scientists around the world.
Credit: Georgina Smith / International Center for Tropical Agriculture
People in industrialized regions like the United States of America or Europe are generally urged to eat less meat and animal-source foods as part of a healthier and lower-emissions diet. But such recommendations are not universal solutions in low- or middle-income countries, where livestock are critical to incomes and diets, argue scientists in recently published research in
Environmental Research Letters. Conclusions drawn in widely publicized reports argue that a main solution to the climate and human health crisis globally is to eat no or little meat but they are biased towards industrialized, Western systems, said Birthe Paul, the lead author and environmental scientist at the Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT).
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Washington, DC Developing nations have an opportunity to avoid long-term dependence on fossil fuel-burning infrastructure as they move toward economic stability, even if they are slow to cut carbon emissions, say the authors of a new paper in
Environmental Research Letters.
Countries with low per capita incomes can keep their contributions to global warming to 0.3 degrees Celsius with careful foresight and planning, urge Carnegie s Lei Duan and Ken Caldeira with Juan Moreno-Cruz of the University of Waterloo. However, fueling economic development with coal, oil, or gas risks locking societies into a fossil-fuel burning infrastructure in the long-term, the authors caution.
The Big Thaw: How Russia Could Dominate a Warming World ProPublica 12/16/2020 by Abrahm Lustgarten, photography by Sergey Ponomarev
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This article, the third in a series on global migration caused by climate change, is a result of a partnership between ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, with support from the Pulitzer Center.
IT WAS ONLY November, but the chill already cut to the bone in the small village of Dimitrovo, which sits just 35 miles north of the Chinese border in a remote part of eastern Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Region. Behind a row of sagging cabins and decades-old farm equipment, flat fields ran into the brambly branches of a leafless forest before fading into the oblivion of a dreary squall. Several villagers walked the single-lane dirt road, their shoulders rounded against the cold, their ghostly
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Source: National Observer Canada can make a big climate impact by helping developing nations avoid getting stuck with fossil fuel infrastructure embedded in their societies, a new study has found. Such efforts would go a lot further in cutting global carbon pollution over the long term than initiatives meant to help countries shave their own emissions each year, according to scientists from the University of Waterloo and the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C. That’s because there will only be a “relatively modest impact” on global temperature rise, the scientists found, if less developed countries don’t cut their emissions for now compared to much greater consequences if developed countries delay their own decarbonization.