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Archive for March, 2011
Greener corporate accounts urged to aid nature
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 29th, 2011
Reuters: Companies should do more to report their impact on nature to help curb damage that drains trillions of dollars a year from the world economy, a leading U.N. expert said on Monday. Pavan Sukhdev, head of the U.N. Environment Programme's Green Economy Initiative, said it could take five to 10 years to develop rules that would enable comparisons about which firms were best or worst in protecting the natural world. The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) is helping study...
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Japan: Long game
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 29th, 2011
BBC: We are now in a long game at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan.
Two-and-a-half weeks on from the colossal Tohoku quake and its associated tsunami, engineers are working tirelessly to regain full control of the facility.
The past week has seen major gains in getting on top of the crisis, but difficulties and frustrations continue to hamper progress.
The major concern right now would appear to be the second reactor unit at the six-unit plant.
High levels of radiation...
Mexico makes major raid on exotic animal traffickers
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 29th, 2011
Reuters: Hundreds of police raided illicit markets to crack down on the lucrative trade in wild animals and rare flowers, arresting 15 traffickers across Mexico this weekend in one of the biggest swoops of its kind.
Rich in flora and fauna, Mexico is a major hub for animal trafficking where locals buy lizards, macaws and tropical fish in city markets and smugglers move endangered species across the country's border with the United States.
In three days of raids, authorities netted 4,725 wild plants...
Zimbabwe farmers struggling with worsening droughts
Posted by AlertNet: Lucia Makamure on March 29th, 2011
AlertNet: Esnath Murambasvina fondly remembers helping her parents grow crops such as maize, millet and groundnuts on their small piece of land in Masvingo province.
"My parents were farmers all their lives but I remember never lacking anything as I was growing up,' recalls the 55-year-old, whose parents were able to send her to nearby private mission schools on the proceeds from their farm.
Today she finds it very hard to accept that the soil that fed and sent her to school now cannot even produce enough...
Billion-plus people to lack water in 2050: study
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 28th, 2011
Independent: More than one billion urban residents will face serious water shortages by 2050 as climate change worsens effects of urbanization, with Indian cities among the worst hit, a study said Monday.
The shortage threatens sanitation in some of the world's fastest-growing cities but also poses risks for wildlife if cities pump in water from outside, said the article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The study found that under current urbanization trends, by mid-century some 993...
Amazon still neglected by researchers
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 28th, 2011
Mongabay: Terra Incognito? Venezuela's Amazon rainforest (a portion of which is viewed here by Google Earth) has been almost wholly ignored by researchers.
Andean forests even less represented in research than the Amazon.
Although the Amazon is the world's largest tropical forest, it is not the most well known. Given the difficulty of access along with the fear of disease, dangerous species, indigenous groups, among other perceived perils, this great treasure chest of biology and ecology was practically...
Dark side of spring? Pollution in our melting snow
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 28th, 2011
ScienceDaily: With birds chirping and temperatures warming , spring is finally in the air. But for University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC) environmental chemist Torsten Meyer, springtime has a dark side.
"During the winter months, contaminants accumulate in the snow," says Meyer, an expert on snow-bound organic contaminants and a post-doctoral fellow at UTSC. "When the snow melts, these chemicals are released into the environment at high concentrations."
In a specially designed, temperature-controlled laboratory...
What’s behind the 85% decline of mammals in West Africa’s parks?
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 28th, 2011
Mongabay: What's behind the 85% decline of mammals in West Africa's parks?
A recent, well-covered study found that African mammals populations are in steep decline in the continent's protected areas. Large mammal populations over forty years have dropped by 59% on average in Africa [read an interview on the study here] and by 85% in west and central Africa, according to the study headed by Ian Craigie, which links the decline to continuing habitat degradation as well as hunting and human-wildlife conflict....
Leaf harvesting impacts Amazon palm
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 28th, 2011
Mongabay: Overexploitation of wildlife doesn't just threaten animals such as bluefin tuna, pangolins, and parrots, but plants as well. Leaves from the carana or puy palm (Lepidocaryum tenue) are used for thatching buildings in the northwestern Amazon, however a recent study in mongabay.com's open access journal Tropical Conservation Science finds that the overharvesting could imperil a palm's ability to survive.
Studying the palms in the Colombian Amazon, researchers harvested leaves to see how well the...
Billion-plus people to lack water in 2050: study
Posted by Agence France-Presse: Shaun Tandon on March 28th, 2011
Agence France-Presse: More than one billion urban residents will face serious water shortages by 2050 as climate change worsens effects of urbanization, with Indian cities among the worst hit, a study said Monday.
The shortage threatens sanitation in some of the world's fastest-growing cities but also poses risks for wildlife if cities pump in water from outside, said the article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The study found that under current urbanization trends, by mid-century some 993...