Category: 9. Environment

When water levels dropped last year, waterways like the Mississippi River and Lake Mead became shallower than kiddie pools. Although the extreme drought from 2022 has eased in many places, 28 percent of the continental U.S. is still experiencing drier-than-average conditions. Both Lake Mead and the Mississippi River serve as freshwater sources for nearby communities. The threat of drought…

The Sepkoski Curve, representing marine diversity at the taxonomic level of families over the last 600 million years. The ‘Big Five’ mass extinctions are labeled at the troughs of the diversity curve, with the relative magnitude of the drop given in parentheses in upper left (from Raup & Sepkoski [1982], p. 1502, Fig. 2; with…

A new toll road in Indonesia’s East Kalimantan province is under construction to improve access to the interior of Borneo, including to the nation’s new capital city, Nusantara. Construction of the road, however, poses immediate environmental risks, as the route cuts through a forested area with high conservation value that connects the Sungai Wain protected…

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Headlines about California’s water situation are awash with numbers. Following the worst drought in 1,200 years, the Sierra Nevada snowpack, which provides 30% of the state’s water, is now among the biggest ones in 70 years. State reservoirs are at 73% capacity and more than half of CA is now officially…

Damber Bista is a Nepali conservation scientist studying the country’s population of red pandas, an endangered species. He says there needs to be much more work done to protect the species, given that 70% of their habitat falls outside of protected areas. In an interview with Mongabay, Bista talks about the added stress that habitat…

A recently published horizon scan on community-based conservation identified 15 topics that offer opportunities to yield positive change for people and the planet, as well as provide insights on avoiding pitfalls in achieving 2030 global policy targets. These resulted from work undertaken over the past two years by a group of 39 conservation practitioners from…

Indonesia’s main Indigenous alliance, AMAN, has won a 2023 Skoll Award for Social Innovation for its work in advocating for Indigenous rights. The group’s work includes mapping Indigenous territories and lobbying for legislation that supports and protects Indigenous rights to their lands. AMAN says the award fuels its spirit to work even harder, as there’s…

Schematic representation of interactions between ocean-atmosphere-biosphere system and rock reservoir with potential carbon capacitors/tipping elements. Here, benthic foraminifer δ13C and δ18O records are used as tracers of carbon cycling and climate, respectively (see text). Storage of carbon in the carbon capacitors/tipping elements occurs slowly over tens to hundreds of thousands of years (blue arrows), while…

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Sea levels along the U.S. Southeast and Gulf coasts have been rapidly accelerating, reaching record-breaking rates over the past 12 years, according to a new study led by scientists at Tulane University. In the study, published in Nature Communications, researchers said they had detected rates of sea-level rise of about a…