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Archive for October, 2015
How Climate Change Threatens Zambia’s Already Fragile Nutrition Record
Posted by Inter Press Service: Friday Phiri on October 31st, 2015
Inter Press Service: It is slightly after 10 o'clock in the morning and 48-year-old Felix Muchimba of Siamuleya village in Pemba district has just finished having breakfast - a traditional drink called Chibwantu, made of maize meal and grit.
Nutritionally, the drink does not offer much except energy for the day's work. Normally, the next meal should be one o'clock, followed by the final meal of the day taken in the evening.
However, Muchimba and his six member family will be having their next and last meal of the...
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Mass gains of Antarctic Ice Sheet greater than losses
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on October 31st, 2015
ScienceDaily: A new NASA study says that an increase in Antarctic snow accumulation that began 10,000 years ago is currently adding enough ice to the continent to outweigh the increased losses from its thinning glaciers. The research challenges the conclusions of other studies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) 2013 report, which says that Antarctica is overall losing land ice. According to the new analysis of satellite data, the Antarctic ice sheet showed a net gain of 112 billion...
Congolese Activists Honored Fighting Oil Exploration Virunga National Park
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on October 30th, 2015
National Public Radio: Virunga National Park, home to roughly a quarter of the world's remaining 880 mountain gorillas, was featured in Dian Fossey's Gorillas in the Mist.
This week, the Alexander Soros Foundation gave its annual Extraordinary Achievement in Environmental and Human Rights award to two activists from the Democratic Republic of Congo who have resisted the efforts of SOCO International, a U.K.-based oil company, to prospect for oil from Virunga National Park. The park, which is classified as a World Heritage...
Brazil, land of water, goes thirsty
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on October 30th, 2015
Agence France-Presse: The sign -- "risk of drowning" -- outside one of Rio de Janeiro's freshwater reservoirs looks like a joke: there's no water here left to drown in.
Instead, the Saracuruna reservoir near Duque de Caxias, outside Rio, is an expanse of sand, mud and vegetation. Four stray dogs scamper and cattle come to drink from a stream still running through the middle.
"It's been a long time since there was any water here," said a security guard walking up the dry bed to order AFP journalists away on Friday....
Beverly Hills fined for not conserving enough water in drought
Posted by Reuters: Sharon Bernstein on October 30th, 2015
Reuters: Upscale Beverly Hills is among four California cities where water utilities have been fined for not forcing residents to conserve enough water during California's unrelenting four-year drought, officials said on Friday.
The wealthy Los Angeles area municipality was fined $61,000 on Thursday, making it the only community not located in a desert singled out for penalties, the California State Water Resources Board said.
"Some urban water suppliers simply have not met the requirements laid before...
How Protests Are Impacting Oil Sands Production in Canada
Posted by ThinkProgress: None Given on October 30th, 2015
ThinkProgress: All of those marches, rallies, arrests, and inflatable pipelines are working.
That`s the main finding of a report released this week by pro-clean energy group Oil Change International. According to the report, public opposition has been successful in stopping or delaying tar sands pipeline construction in North America. The existing pipelines carrying oil from Alberta`s tar sands region are 89 percent full, meaning that expansion of tar sands development depends heavily on new pipelines to get...
Impacted Landowners Demand EPA Revise Flawed Fracking Study
Posted by EcoWatch: None Given on October 30th, 2015
EcoWatch: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Scientific Advisory Board met this week to review the agency’s draft assessment of the impact of fracking on drinking water resources, but the largely academic exercise got a dose of reality from residents of Dimock, Pennsylvania; Pavillion, Wyoming; and Parker County, Texas who have fought for years to get U.S. EPA to act.
Inexplicably, their cases of contamination were excluded in the thousands of pages that make up the EPA’s assessment. Given only...
China moves residents out of drought-prone areas
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on October 30th, 2015
Associated Press: Village elder Yang Zhenjun isn’t ready to move out from the valley where his people have herded sheep and tended crops for generations amid arid, drought-prone mountains of China’s northwest. Still, he acknowledges that life as he has known it is all but over. The community’s 60 families have dwindled down to 11 in recent years. Others have left this area, which is almost completely dependent on often-scarce rainfall, and have headed north to plains with better infrastructure and more accessible...
Brazil’s Megaprojects, a Short-lived Dream
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on October 29th, 2015
Inter Press Service: Working as a musician in a military band is the dream of 21-year-old Jackson Coutinho, since hopes that a petrochemical complex would drive the industrialisation of this Brazilian city near Rio de Janeiro have gone up in smoke.
"I`ll try out for the navy, army and even the military police, but only to be a musician, not a police officer," said Coutinho, who plays the double bass in bands he has set up with friends in ItaboraÃ.
Until last year he was working for the QGIT consortium on the construction...
Water too warm for cod in US Gulf of Maine as stocks near collapse
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on October 29th, 2015
Guardian: A rapid warming of the Gulf of Maine off the eastern United States has made the water too warm for cod, pushing stocks towards collapse despite deep reductions in the number of fish caught, a US study has shown.
The Gulf of Maine had warmed faster than 99% of the rest of the world’s oceans in the past decade, influenced by shifts in the Atlantic Gulf Stream, changes in the Pacific Ocean and a wider trend of climate change, it said.
Scientists said the findings showed a need to take more account...