Author: Ranveer Kumar

The demise of the Aral Sea is a tragic tale often told. Less known is the peril facing Central Asia’s largest remaining lake, Balkhash in eastern Kazakhstan, a key source of drinking water in an arid region. Rapid development and expanding rice cultivation upstream in China pose a grave threat to the Balkhash basin, a new paper says, and Beijing is dodging the problem. The lake’s fate has quietly bedevilled Kazakhstan for decades. Just how bad it will get depends both on Chinese farming and the magnitude of climate change, which is all but certain to dispatch the last of the glaciers…

With a million species at risk of extinction, Sir David Attenborough explores how this crisis of biodiversity has consequences for us all, threatening food and water security, undermining our ability to control our climate and even putting us at greater risk of pandemic diseases. Extinction is now happening up to 100 times faster than the natural evolutionary rate, but the issue is about more than the loss of individual species. Everything in the natural world is connected in networks that support the whole of life on earth, including us, and we are losing many of the benefits that nature provides…

A new paper documents significant illegal trafficking of Javan leopards and Sunda clouded leopards in Indonesia. The research uncovered 41 seizure records, amounting to approximately 83 individual animals, from between 2011 to 2019. The authors say that these numbers likely represent only a fraction of the true trade. With both species facing significant population declines, any level of poaching and trading could tip the scales toward extinction. This is the story of how Indonesia is losing its spots. In a recent paper published in Nature Conservation, researchers found that the archipelagic nation has a significant illegal trade in two regional leopard species: the…

Julio Berdegué is the assistant director-general and regional representative for Latin America and the Caribbean for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. The covid-19 pandemic has pummeled the globe, harming the health of the planet and its peoples. In Latin America, the economic blows have fallen with particular force. Across the region, resources that might once have been used to protect forests — which are among Latin America’s biggest contributions to fighting climate change — have been channeled into shoring up the economy and battling the disease. This means that Indigenous communities in these forests often are confronting not only…

Canada’s health agency announced Wednesday restrictions on the use of neonicotinoid pesticides in agriculture to protect aquatic insects, backtracking on a proposed outright ban prompted by a massive bee die-off. Health Canada had proposed in 2018 prohibiting the use of clothianidin and thiamethoxam, two of three neonicotinoid pesticides widely applied to crops in this country. But after a re-evaluation of scientific data including new water monitoring data, and 47,000 public submissions, the agency said in a statement it found “some uses do not pose a risk to aquatic insects, while other uses do pose risks of concern.” Pesticides makers will have two years…

The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work. The big idea Giant kelp, the world’s largest species of marine algae, is an attractive source for making biofuels. In a recent study, we tested a novel strategy for growing kelp that could make it possible to produce it continuously on a large scale. The key idea is moving kelp stocks daily up to near-surface waters for sunlight and down to darker waters for nutrients. Unlike today’s energy crops, such as corn and soybeans, growing kelp doesn’t require land, fresh water or fertilizer. And giant kelp can grow over a foot per day under…

Colorado health officials responsible for controlling air pollution in the state this month ordered staff to relax their measuring of pollutants, including potentially harmful sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and particulates, according to a whistleblower complaint filed Tuesday. Officials in the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s Air Pollution Control Division on March 15 ordered employees who conduct required modeling used to estimate emission levels to stop their work on these pollutants at scores of facilities that receive permits from the state, the complaint filed by the Maryland-based Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility on behalf of three air pollution division employees contends. These pollutants…

WASHINGTON — In 2017, as Donald J. Trump was announcing the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, the largest global effort to attack planetary warming, he declared, “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.” On Wednesday, President Biden traveled to Pittsburgh to try to make the opposite case: that the workers Mr. Trump was appealing to have more to gain from combating climate change than to lose. It is going to be a tough bet. To Mr. Biden, a $2 trillion infrastructure plan is about creating union jobs, hundreds of thousands of them, in wind and solar…

HONOLULU, Hawaii (HawaiiNewsNow) – In his outdoor laboratory, University of Hawaii at Manoa associate professor Camilo Mora smiles as he scoops up a handful of seeds he collected from native trees. “This one here is the koa seeds. We have about 150,000 seeds of this guy. Look at this! To me, this is like gold,” he said. The seeds will eventually go into the ground as part of Mora’s mission to plant one million trees a year in his battle against climate change. “That is what drives me,” he said. “We can make Hawaii go into the history books as…

Investigative reporter Sharon Lerner explains how 270,000 pounds of the chemical ethylene oxide vanished from the public record. THE ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION Agency under the Trump administration invited companies to retroactively amend emissions records of a deadly carcinogenic chemical. This week on Intercepted: Investigative reporter Sharon Lerner explains how 270,000 pounds of the chemical ethylene oxide vanished from the public record right after the EPA determined that it was more toxic than previously known. Ethylene oxide is a colorless and odorless gas used to produce many consumer goods and used extensively as an agent in the sterilization of medical equipment. Despite the EPA’s transition to…