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This Scientist Thinks She Has the Key to Curb Climate Change: Super Plants

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.

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Dozens of Countries Have Been Working to Plant ‘Great Green Wall’ – and It’s Holding Back Poverty

           

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 . . . 

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How Climate Change Is Fuelling the U.S. Border Crisis

           

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.

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Does Unconscious Bias Affect Our Sustainable Lifestyle Choices?

            

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.”

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

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A Mysterious Infection, Spanning the Globe in the Climate of Secrecy

           

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.

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CLICK HERE - CDC - Candida auris

CLICK HERE - CDC - Candida auris - Fact Sheets

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

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A Map of the Future of Water

           

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 . . .

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Green Bank Design Summit

Norway's Plan for a Fleet of Electric Planes

           

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)

 

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'Yet another killer for children left starved by war': cholera grips Yemen

           

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.

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'Horror, fear, despair': Venezuela's oil capital shattered by 'tsunami' of violent looting

           

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)

 

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