Warming climate has caused rivers used for transport to dry up, leaving children with little food, water or school access, says Unicef
Two years of severe drought in the Amazon rainforest have left nearly half a million children facing shortages of water and food or limited access to school, according to a UN report.
Scant rainfall and extreme heat driven by the climate crisis have caused rivers in what is usually the wettest region on Earth to retreat so much that they can no longer be traversed by boats, cutting off communities.
Continue reading...
Breaking Waves: Ocean News
11/07/2024 - 08:58
11/07/2024 - 08:00
Voters have never been swayed by ‘rational debate’. Only a genuine change in the way we do politics can prevent the march of the right
We were losing slowly. Now we are losing quickly. Democracy, accountability, human rights, social justice – all were rolling backwards as money swarmed our politics. Above all, our life-support systems – the Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, ecosystems, ice and snow – have been hammered and hammered, regardless of who is in power. Donald Trump might strike the killer blows, but he is not the cause of an ecocidal economic system. He is the embodiment of it.
Under Joe Biden, the US was missing its own climate goals, and those goals were insufficient to meet the global objective of limiting heating to 1.5C above preindustrial levels. That target in turn might not be tight enough to prevent a tipping of Earth systems. Already, at roughly 1.3C of heating, we see what looks alarmingly like climatic flickering: the ever wilder perturbations that tend to precede the collapse of a complex system.
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...
11/07/2024 - 06:00
Leading Colombian conservationists share their experiences working in the most dangerous country to fight for wildlife
Politicians, conservationists and business people from around the world met last week to discuss how to save nature at the Cop16 biodiversity conference in Cali, Colombia.
For those working on the ground, however, it is the most dangerous country in the world to fight for the environment. A third of the 196 environmental defenders killed last year were Colombian. Here, four conservationists give us a glimpse into their working lives and the dangers they face.
Continue reading...
11/07/2024 - 00:00
Conservation groups are asking for the decision to allow Hvalur to hunt to be put on hold until after election
A coalition of conservation and animal welfare groups are urging Iceland’s president to step in and stop any plans the prime minister has to issue a whaling licence to Europe’s last whaler before the Icelandic election at the end of the month.
Earlier this year, the country granted a one-year licence to Hvalur to kill more than 100 fin whales this hunting season, despite hopes the practice may have been stopped after concerns about cruelty led to a temporary suspension in 2023.
Continue reading...
11/07/2024 - 00:00
npj Ocean Sustainability, Published online: 07 November 2024; doi:10.1038/s44183-024-00094-2
Urbanizing river deltas are highly susceptible to sea level rise and extreme weather events such as floods and droughts. Water-related disasters are already happening more often due to climate change, rapid urbanization, unsustainable land use and aging infrastructure threatening a large fraction of human and natural environments in these low lying and sinking areas around the globe. As stress levels of climate change are accelerating, societal and physical transformations are essential for adapting our deltas to climate change. In the Netherlands, imagination and evidence by design in the form of a long-term spatial vision, played a pivotal role in the past century to set, share and accomplish a new direction to overcome flood disasters by altering the coastlines and riverbeds of the Rhine–Meuse–Scheldt delta. The unprecedented rainfall in July 2021 and the storm in December 2021 which hit Western Europe revealed the effectiveness of this new direction. We therefore plea for a prominent role of design in climate science and delta management to imagine, analyse and communicate future perspectives for climate adaptation in urbanizing deltas.
11/06/2024 - 22:22
Protest plan involves activists paddling out on kayaks and rafts to stop fossil fuel exports
Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates
Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast
Climate protesters have vowed to stick to their plan to blockade the Port of Newcastle, despite the New South Wales police winning a legal challenge in their attempt to stop it.
“The [protest] will go ahead,” Rising Tide’s organiser, Zach Schofield, told reporters on Thursday. “We do have a right to assemble on public land and water, and we will be exercising that right, because it is critical for democracy.”
Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email
Continue reading...
11/06/2024 - 20:02
Balls that washed ashore and closed string of famous beaches contained scores of different materials ‘consistent with contamination from sewage’
Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates
Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast
Thousands of mystery balls that washed up on Sydney beaches last month were gunk globules made of products such as motor oil, hair, food waste, animal matter and wastewater bacteria – but their source is yet to be traced.
A statement from the New South Wales Environment Protection Authority on Wednesday confirmed the balls comprised fatty acids, petroleum hydrocarbons and other organic and inorganic materials – and were not tar balls as previously theorised.
Continue reading...
11/06/2024 - 19:10
PM fully briefed on ‘potential outcomes’ of US election and says Australia is prepared for Trump’s policies on security, economic and other issues
Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates
Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast
Australia will advocate for free trade and climate action – despite Donald Trump’s agenda against both – and persist with the Aukus alliance including nuclear submarine acquisition, the Albanese government has indicated.
Under fire from conservative media about his comments in 2017 that Trump “scares the shit” out of him, the prime minster, Anthony Albanese, was asked if he owed an apology to the president-elect.
Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email
Continue reading...
11/06/2024 - 17:34
How damaging this presidency is to the planet depends very much on how other countries react. There’s no time to waste
US election 2024 live: latest news and updates
US election results 2024: live map and tracker
Donald Trump’s re-election to the White House is a major setback for climate action but ultimately it’s the US that could end up losing out, as the rest of the world will move forward without it.
The US is the world’s biggest economy and its second biggest emitter. Positive US engagement on climate has been crucial to landmark leaps forward, like getting the Paris agreement over the line, and just last year committing to transitioning away from fossil fuels.
The US missing in action in the latter half of this critical decade for climate action is nobody’s idea of a good outcome.
Continue reading...
11/06/2024 - 09:00
Overblown concerns about potential dangers of a common chemical threaten to undermine scientific evidence to the contrary
Because of his job as a dermatologist, Dr Deshan Sebaratnam frequently gets asked questions by friends, family and strangers about skin treatments. But lately, he says, he has been confronted by “a lot of myths around sunscreens”, especially on his social media feed.
Among the most frequent is “that sunscreen can actually cause skin cancer”, says Sebaratnam, a conjoint associate professor at the University of New South Wales.
Continue reading...
