Even as the world prepares for the grand climate meet at Copenhagen this December, a large part of South India has gone under water. And while talks have already begun on coming up with an equitable deal and the very fear that there may be none, over 300 people have already lost their lives while millions are displaced and missing in this global warming related freak weather event, predicted well in advance by the IPCC in its Fourth Assessment Report in 2007.
The appeal of shortwave, geoengineering is in it’s purportedly rapid, remediation impact (although no global experiments have been conducted yet). However, the combined climate impact of GHG increases with a geoengineered reduction in shortwave radiation is not known, but, it is feared, could result in environmental “winners” and “losers”–meaning some regions of the planet could experience severe drought, and even increased conflict over water resources.
For the first time, Kenya Wildlife Service is introducing white rhino from Lake Nakuru National Park to Nairobi National Park.
Nairobi National Park will serve as a new home for ten white rhino, who are being translocated from drought-stricken Lake Nakuru National Park. The lack of water has depleted the grasses that make up the huge herbivores’ food source, and Lake Nakuru wildlife officials fear there is too much competition and not enough food for the grass-eating pachyderms.
Who knew frogs needed a certain ambiance to get them in the mood? Dr. Kirsten Parris, a Melbourne University ecologist, has discovered that noise from traffic and machinery may be a contributing factor in the decline of urban frogs in Melbourne.
Subsistence farmers in Bolivia have been given help to change their technology – moving away from pipe and sprinkle irrigation systems to an aeons-old technique of hand-built raised clay platforms that are surrounded by canals.
Drought is something we think of as being substantial and dramatic – months in which rain doesn’t fall, monsoons that never happen. But the truth about drought is that it is much more insidious – when average rainfall drops, crops fail even though rain happens and can appear plentiful.
A new study finds that there is a 50-50 chance all of the Colorado River reservoirs — in California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and Arizona — will run completely dry by the year 2057 if currents trends and practices continue.
A major infestation of the mountain pine beetle, a scourge stretching from New Mexico, in the U.S., to British Columbia, Canada, has been turning vast areas of formerly green pine forests to rust red, and slowly killing them.
The beetle infestation has been growing “exponentially” since 2006-07, according to the Forest Service management team in Laramie, Wyoming, and has so far claimed millions of acres of pine forest in Montana, Colorado, and Wyoming. North of the border, British Columbia has already lost over 33 million acres of lodgepole pine forest due to the ravages of this type of bark beetle. And more recently (in 2008), Alberta province is come under threat due to an aberrant wind storm that apparently lofted the beetles across the continental divide.
Due to climate change; one of the now dried up lakes in Australia is gradually turning into Sulphuric Acid. The Age is reporting that there are fears people living in towns around the lakes may suffer from acid dust, blowing off the bare lakes as rising acidity threatens to wipe out ecology in the lakes. The lake-bed soils turn into sulphuric acid when exposed to the air, and record low flows down the Murray are exposing the beds.
Slash-and-burn agriculture may be bad for the environment, but in southeast Asia, the cure may be worse than the disease. Endorsed by multiple governments, at both the local and national levels, as well as numerous business interests, everyone from individual farmers to massive corporations has been replacing the traditional slash-and-burn, more technically known as swidden, method of farming with rubber plantations managed with European techniques. In the last 20 years, over 1.2 million acres of land in China, Thailand, Vietnam, [...]
Editor’s note: This post was written by Emily Loose at the WILD Foundation. It follows up on Jake Richardson’s earlier post.
The future of a rare herd of desert elephants in Mali is under threat from one of the worst droughts in living memory, which has left a key water source at its lowest level in a quarter of a century.
The 350 to 450 elephants of Gourma, the northernmost herds still alive in Africa, are being forced to trek extreme distances across the fringes of the Sahara to find scarce water. Juveniles are likely the worst affected, as (unlike the bigger bulls) their trunks are not long enough to reach deep into wells - one of the only remaining water sources.
