Last week an obituary of the Great Barrier Reef went viral, but as scientists claim, this is premature. While the situation is critical, it is not completely hopeless.
Environment
I admit it is hard to keep your head cool when you read such news, and this despite having discovered the power of positive psychology. To a new study the world has lost ten percent of its wilderness in as little as 25 tiny years…
Vanishing wilderness: 10 percent of Nature gone in 25 years
For our Economics classes at Pinchot last year, I – with a few friends and classmates – worked on water in California. My part was focusing on the inefficiency and the leaks occuring in the State. The findings are quite unsettling.
Fighting the drought, water efficiency in California
I wrote as early as 2008 about plastic being a curse for our oceans. It seems the situation may completely out of control as according to the World Economic Forum plastic could outweigh fishes in our oceans by mid century.
The plastic curse lives on in our oceans
This is according to some study the amounts of trees that are on Planet Earth nowadays. The good news : this is much more than what we previously thought. The bad news : we are cutting them down fast, to a rate of 15 billion per year.
Earth has three trillion trees but we are cutting them ...
This is important as water scarcity may well concern half of Mankind by the middle of the century according to an MIT study. Here comes the shower of the future. Nebia uses 70 percent less water than the US standard.
Nebia, a shower that saves 70 percent of water
According to a new study, air pollution from coal kills 1.6 million people in China every single year. That makes one death every 21 seconds, almost three per minutes or 180 per hour, around 4,000 a day.
Coal kills 1.6 million Chinese people each year
For this new chapter of my life – studying for my MBA in Sustainable Business at Pinchot University – I am living next to a parking lot and I have been wondering if the owners could just plant a few trees to make it look better.
From parking lots to parks
Drones are all the rage these days. So why not use them to counter industrial scale deforestation with industrial scale reforestation ? (granted, we shouldn’t cut the trees in the first place…)
Using drones to plant millions of trees (video)
In the land of carnavals, I had read that some festivities had been cancelled because of the lack of water, so I knew something was wrong in Brazil. In fact, it is the worst drought in 84 years !
A massive drought strikes Brazil
2 So fast, in fact that scientists studying the phenomenon are making new scales to adapt. As the Guardian reported last week , ” NOAA (the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ) literally has to remake its graphs. “
Oceans are warming really fast
These are good news, according to Treehugger, tiger populations in India has been increasing by 58 percent since 2006. These are especially good news as the country is home to 70 percent of the world’s tiger populations.