ENN
Environmental News Network -- Know Your Environment
The unpredictable annual flow of the Nile River is legendary, as evidenced by the story of Joseph and the Pharaoh, whose dream foretold seven years of abundance followed by seven years of famine in a land whose agriculture was, and still is, utterly dependent on that flow. Now, researchers at MIT have found that climate change may drastically increase the variability in Nile’s annual output.
Con una simple orden ejecutiva emitida a finales de marzo, la administración Trump lanzó un sólido esfuerzo para revertir las políticas climáticas de la era Obama diseñadas para reducir las emisiones de dióxido de carbono (CO2) en los Estados Unidos. La principal de estas políticas es el Plan de Energía Limpia, que se dirige a las centrales eléctricas de carbón y gas natural que representan alrededor del 40 por ciento de las emisiones de CO2 del país.
Consumer goods companies often rely on life-cycle assessments (LCA) to figure out the potential consequences of how they design products and source ingredients. This kind of assessment, while sophisticated, often lacks detail about how the products affect natural resources such as land, water and biodiversity.
A team of researchers from Stanford University and the University of Minnesota, in a partnership called the Natural Capital Project, along with researchers from Unilever’s Safety and Environmental Assurance Centre, developed a new kind of assessment to integrate these impacts in a more detailed way. They call it Land Use Change Improved Life Cycle Assessment, or LUCI-LCA. It’s designed to help researchers or companies more accurately predict impacts of new designs and sourcing.
In the first ecosystem-wide study of changing sea depths at five large coral reef tracts in Florida, the Caribbean and Hawai’i, U.S. Geological Survey researchers found the sea floor is eroding in all five places, and the reefs cannot keep pace with sea level rise. As a result, coastal communities protected by the reefs are facing increased risks from storms, waves and erosion.
Humans began measurably and negatively impacting water quality in the Chesapeake Bay in the first half of the 19th century, according to a study of eastern oysters by researchers at The University of Alabama.
The work, published in Scientific Reports, show pollution’s effect appears a bit earlier than previously thought, but it generally confirms increasing deforestation and industrialization around the Bay led to water quality issues before the Civil War, which has been shown by other studies with different testing methods.
A trace gas present in the atmosphere in miniscule amounts is helping scientists answer one of the biggest questions out there: Has plant growth increased alongside rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?
