CLICK HERE - EU Overshoot Day - Living Beyond Nature’s Limits - May 10, 2019 (19 page .PDF report)

reuters.com - by Jan Strupczewski - May 8, 2019

The European Union’s 28 countries consume the Earth’s resources much faster than they can be renewed, and none of them has sustainable consumption policies, a report released on Thursday said, as EU leaders meet to discuss priorities for the next five years.

“All EU countries are living beyond the means of our planet.

The EU and its citizens are currently using twice more than the EU ecosystems can renew,” the report by the World Wide Fund (WWF) and Global Footprint Network said.

CLICK HERE - Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) - ipbes.net

nationalgeographic.com - by Stephen Leahy - May 6, 2019

The bonds that hold nature together may be at risk of unraveling from deforestation, overfishing, development, and other human activities, a landmark United Nations report warns. Thanks to human pressures, one million species may be pushed to extinction in the next few years, with serious consequences for human beings as well as the rest of life on Earth.

“The evidence is crystal clear: Nature is in trouble. Therefore we are in trouble" . . .

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CLICK HERE - UN Report: Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’

                                  An expanding list of news and information resources on Tropical Cyclone Fani . . .

CLICK HERE - reliefweb - Tropical Cyclone Fani - April 2019

CLICK HERE - GDACS - Overall Red alert Tropical Cyclone for FANI-19 in India

CLICK HERE - Humanity Road - Cyclone Fani - India

CLICK HERE - The Times of India - Live Updates - Cyclone Fani

CLICK HERE - The Hindu - Cyclone Fani | Live updates: Aerial survey shows extensive damage around Puri

Greenhouse gases, which have been frozen below the soil for centuries, have already begun to escape. Photograph: John Mcconnico/AP

CLICK HERE - STUDY - Climate policy implications of nonlinear decline of Arctic land permafrost and other cryosphere elements

Study shows how destabilised natural systems will worsen man-made problem

theguardian.com - by Jonathan Watts - April 23, 2019

The release of methane and carbon dioxide from thawing permafrost will accelerate global warming and add up to $70tn (£54tn) to the world’s climate bill, according to the most advanced study yet of the economic consequences of a melting Arctic.

If countries fail to improve on their Paris agreement commitments, this feedback mechanism, combined with a loss of heat-deflecting white ice, will cause a near 5% amplification of global warming and its associated costs, says the paper, which was published on Tuesday in Nature Communications.

CLICK HERE - STUDY - PNAS - Forty-six years of Greenland Ice Sheet mass balance from 1972 to 2018

cnn.com - by Jen Christensen - April 23, 2019

Climate change is eliminating giant chunks of ice from Greenland at such a speed that the melt has already made a significant contribution to sea level rise, according to a new study. With global warming, the island will lose much more, threatening coastal cities around the world.

Forty percent to 50% of the planet's population is in cities that are vulnerable to sea rise, and the study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is bad news for places like New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Tokyo and Mumbai.

(CLICK HERE - READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

CLICK HERE - NASA - GRACE-FO - Greenland Ice Loss 2002-2016

cnn.com - April 21, 2019

What we're covering here

What’s happening: The death toll from a wave of bombings across Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday increased to 290 on Monday as authorities arrested 24 people in connection with the attacks.

Who carried out the attacks: No group has yet claimed responsibility and the police investigation is ongoing. A government minister described the coordinated bombings as a "brand new type of terrorism," after a decade of relative calm in Sri Lanka.

Warning over other attacks: Late Sunday, authorities disposed of a six-foot pipe bomb near Bandarayanake International Airport in Colombo. On Monday, Sri Lankan authorities found 87 detonators at a private terminal of the Central Bus Stand-in Colombo. Separately, the US State Department is warning that “terrorist groups continue plotting possible attacks in Sri Lanka.”

CLICK HERE - CNN - LIVE Updates: Sri Lanka Bombings

Professor Joanne Chory at the Salk Institute, where she leads her Ideal Plant project. Photograph: John Francis Peters

Dr Joanne Chory hopes that genetic modifications to enhance plants’ natural carbon-fixing traits could play a key role – but knows that time is short, for her and the planet

theguardian.com - by Adam Popescu - April 16, 2019

If this were a film about humanity’s last hope before climate change wiped us out, Hollywood would be accused of flagrant typecasting. That’s because Dr Joanne Chory is too perfect for the role to be believable.

The esteemed scientist – who has long banged the climate drum and now leads a project that could lower the Earth’s temperature – is perhaps the world’s leading botanist and is on the cusp of something so big that it could truly change our planet.

She’s also a woman in her 60s who is fighting a disease sapping her very life.

CLICK HERE - The Great Green Wall for the Sahara and the Sahel Initiative as an opportunity to enhance resilience in Sahelian landscapes and livelihoods

goodnewsnetwork.org - by McKinley Corbley - Mar 31, 2019

More than 20 African countries have joined together in an international mission to plant a massive wall of trees running across the continent – and after a little over a decade of work, it has reaped great success.

The tree-planting project, which has been dubbed The Great Green Wall of Africa, stretches across roughly 6,000 miles (8,000 kilometers) of terrain at the southern edge of the Sahara desert, a region known as the Sahel.

The region was once a lush oasis of greenery and foliage back in the 1970s, but the combined forces of population growth, unsustainable land management, and climate change turned the area into a barren and degraded swath of land . . . 

Outside the small village of Chicua, in the western highlands, in an area affected by extreme-weather events, Ilda Gonzales looks after her daughter.

newyorker.com - by Jonathan Blitzer - Photography by Mauricio Lima - April 3, 2019

. . . In most of the western highlands, the question is no longer whether someone will emigrate but when. “Extreme poverty may be the primary reason people leave,” Edwin Castellanos, a climate scientist at the Universidad del Valle, told me. “But climate change is intensifying all the existing factors” . . . Farming, Castellanos has said, is “a trial-and-error exercise for the modification of the conditions of sowing and harvesting times in the face of a variable environment.” Climate change is outpacing the ability of growers to adapt.

(CLICK HERE - READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

Credit: Getty Images

CLICK HERE - RESEARCH - Is Eco-Friendly Unmanly? The Green-Feminine Stereotype and Its Effect on Sustainable Consumption 

forbes.com - by Carolyn Centeno Milton - April 3, 2019

. . . Brough co-authored a paper with professors from four other universities to understand how gender norms affect sustainable decision making. They report data from seven experiments that included over 2,000 participants from the US and China. What they found was remarkable.

They found that both men and women associated doing something good for the environment with being “more feminine.” This unearths a deeply held unconscious bias that Brough and team call the “Green-Feminine Stereotype.”

(CLICK HERE - READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

ALSO SEE RELATED ARTICLE HERE - Men Resist Green Behavior as Unmanly

nytimes.com - by Matt Richtel and Andrew Jacobs - April 6, 2019

A deadly, drug-resistant fungus is infecting patients in hospitals and nursing homes around the world. The fungus seems to have emerged in several locations at once, not from a single source . . .

. . . Individual institutions and national, state and local governments have been reluctant to publicize outbreaks of resistant infections, arguing there is no point in scaring patients — or prospective ones.

(CLICK HERE - READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

CLICK HERE - CDC - Candida auris

CLICK HERE - CDC - Candida auris - Fact Sheets

CLICK HERE - CDC - Tracking Candida auris - U.S. Map

Figure 1: Trends in TWS (in centimetres per year) obtained on the basis of GRACE observations from April 2002 to March 2016. The cause of the trend in each outlined study region is briefly explained and colour-coded by category. The trend map was smoothed with a 150-km-radius Gaussian filter for the purpose of visualization; however, all calculations were performed at the native 3° resolution of the data product.

CLICK HERE - STUDY - Emerging trends in global freshwater availability

trend.pewtrusts.org - by Jay Famiglietti - March 13, 2019

Global changes are altering where and how we get fresh water, sparking the need for worldwide cooperation.

The availability of fresh water is rapidly changing all over the world, creating a tenuous future that requires attention from policymakers and the public . . .

Zunum Aero plans a range of aircraft, including a 100-seat airliner by around 2020 (Credit: Zunum Aero)

bbc.com - by Stephen Dowling - August 22, 2018

. . . Battery-powered aircraft have made the leap from fantasy to drawing board to production. But it’s just the start . . .

. . . By 2040, Norway intends all short-haul flights leaving its airports to be on aircraft powered by electricity.

It’s one of the most far-reaching promises yet to cut down on aviation’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions.

(CLICK HERE - READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

Yemenis at a cholera treatment centre in the capital, Sana’a. Photograph: Mohammed Huwais/AFP/Getty Images

CLICK HERE - reliefweb - 1,000 children infected every day as Yemen cholera outbreak spikes

theguardian.com - by Karen McVeigh - March 26, 2019

Yemen is seeing a sharp spike in the number of suspected cholera cases this year, with 1,000 children a day infected in the last two weeks alone, agencies said.

More than 120,000 cases have been reported, with 234 deaths in the country, which has been at war for four years this month. Almost a third of the 124,493 cases documented between 1 January and 22 March were children under fifteen. Increasing rates of malnutrition among Yemen’s children have left them more prone to contracting and dying from the disease.

(CLICK HERE - READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

A smashed window is seen in one of the stores inside a shopping mall after looting in Maracaibo. Photograph: Isaac Urrutia/Reuters

theguardian.com - by Tom Phillips - March 26, 2019

. . . Maracaibo’s “madness” began on the night of 10 March – three days after a catastrophic blackout plunged almost the entire nation into darkness. But it had been long in the making thanks to years of economic and political neglect.

The 1.6 million residents of Maracaibo – an oil capital once celebrated as Latin America’s answer to Houston – complained of shortages of water, electricity and fuel and a worsening public transport system even before Venezuela’s crisis began to accelerate in 2016, with the onset of hyperinflation.

(CLICK HERE - READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)