NPR
January 26, 2020
NPR's Michel Martin speaks with journalist Dave Zirin about how climate change is impacting sports around the globe, including the poor air quality at the Australian Open.
The Times of India - Editorial
January 25, 2020
Our planet has suffered five mass extinctions, the last of which occurred about 66 million years ago, when a giant asteroid believed to have landed near the Yucatan Peninsula set off a chain reaction that wiped out the dinosaurs and roughly three-quarters of the other species on earth. A few years ago, in a book called The Sixth Extinction, the writer Elizabeth Kolbert warned of a devastating sequel, with plant and animal species on land and sea already disappearing at a ferocious clip, their habitats destroyed by human activities.
The Washington Post - Editorial
January 25, 2020
If we handled climate risk the way that businesses manage risk every day, we would have tackled climate change a long, long time ago. But that’s not how we as a society are responding — even though the potential consequences are a lot worse than most business risks.
National Geographic
January 24, 2020
Business as usual isn’t working for the planet. Human-driven activities, such as deforestation and overfishing, have put one million species at risk of extinction, according to a ground-breaking 2019 United Nations report. The report is a thunderous wake-up call for the world on the need to make protecting nature job No. 1.
Eco-Business
January 24, 2020
Cosmetics firms can look at reducing palm oil use, while wineries can cut chemicals to help animal pollinators. Companies should examine ways to make production chains more friendly to biodiversity, said eminent scientist Sandra Diaz.
Mongabay
January 23, 2020
One of the most important questions Amazon scientists are asking today is, how much deforestation and global climate change can this tropical biome tolerate before rainfall is drastically reduced — forcing a rainforest-to-savanna conversion, and releasing huge amounts of stored forest carbon into the atmosphere in the process?
A recent study tried to answer that question. The findings: the Amazon basin could be less than 30 years from a catastrophic collapse that would turn it into a dry savanna, according to a study published in the journal One Earth.
Mongabay
January 23, 2020
Indigenous people currently manage or have tenure on 40% of the world’s protected areas and remaining intact ecosystems. The deep connection to land and water that characterizes Indigenous cultures around the world suggests a natural alliance with conservationists working to protect those places.
But, as the authors of a recent paper in Biological Conservation argue, realizing this potential requires rethinking past approaches to conservation and ensuring that Indigenous people have substantive decision-making roles regarding their territories.
NPR
January 23, 2020
Two years after moving the metaphorical minute hand of its Doomsday Clock to within two minutes of midnight — a figurative two-minute warning for all humanity — the science and security board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists revealed Thursday that it has moved that minute hand another 20 seconds closer to the midnight hour.
The New York Times
January 23, 2020
Business titans who for decades brushed off warnings about climate change arrived at the annual World Economic Forum this week ready to show their newfound enthusiasm for the cause.
Having previously played down the need for the reform that scientists had urged, finance leaders and company chiefs conspicuously rallied around a consensus that accelerating global temperatures pose a significant risk to society — and to business.
NOAA Research News
January 23, 2020
A new NOAA-funded study has documented for the first time that ocean acidification along the US Pacific Northwest coast is impacting the shells and sensory organs of some young Dungeness crab, a prized crustacean that supports the most valuable fishery on the West Coast.
Today
January 21, 2020
The world is using up more than 100 billion tonnes of natural resources per year for the first time ever while global recycling of raw materials has fallen, according to a report released Tuesday (Jan 21).
The share of minerals, fossil fuels, metals and biomass feeding into the global economy that is reused declined in two years from an already paltry 9.1 per cent to 8.6 today, the Circularity Gap Report 2020 found.
ZAWYA
January 21, 2020
Sharjah, UAE: Organised by Sharjah’s Environment and Protected Areas Authority (EPAA), the 21st Sharjah International Conservation Forum for Arabian Biodiversity (SICFAB), which begins on February 3rd, will address several important topics over a period of four days at the Desert Park. SICFAB will include an introduction to marine and coastal management covering coral, turtles, sharks, marine mammals, mangroves and seaweed.
Business Wire
January 21, 2020
In an encouraging move with the potential to create transformative market change, China recently amended its Forest Law to include a nationwide ban on buying, transporting, and/or processing illegally sourced timber, as well as an added focus on traceability.
CNN
January 20, 2020
Refugees fleeing the effects of the climate crisis cannot be forced to return home by their adoptive countries, a United Nations panel has ruled, in a landmark decision that could open the door to a flood of legal claims by displaced people around the world.
The UN's Human Rights Committee was making a judgment on the case of Ioane Teitiota, who applied for protection from New Zealand after claiming his life was at risk in his home country of Kiribati. The Pacific island is at risk of becoming the first country to disappear under rising sea levels.
Yahoo Finance
January 20, 2020
Business leaders attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this week are supporting a new science-based approach to tackling their companies' impacts on both climate change and all the Earth's natural systems.
The fight against climate change cannot be won without both decarbonizing our economies and restoring balance to the "global commons": land, oceans, freshwater and biodiversity, alongside climate.