Environment

• Indigenous peoples in Cambodia have traditionally stewarded — and relied on — millions of hectares of forestland for their sustenance.

• Now, these communities are concerned about the long-term viability of their cultures and forest stewardship traditions since Cambodia’s parliament adopted a Code on Environment and Natural Resources, which excludes Indigenous peoples’ input and fails to recognize their rights in forest and natural resource management.

• “Without their voices and needs being considered, Indigenous peoples will continue to be victimized on their own land as their rights to access to nontimber forest products and traditional forests and land management have been excluded in the code. If these rights aren’t protected, Indigenous cultures and customs are at risk of disappearing, as their daily livelihoods and cultural practices are strongly intertwined with forests and natural resources,” the author argues.

• This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily of Mongabay or his employer.

Zoos aren't good places

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cross-posted from: https://lazysoci.al/post/30970436

Seasons are more than just divisions of time – they are our connection with nature.

The drought in the Southwestern US is likely to last for the rest of the 21st century and potentially beyond as global warming shifts the distribution of heat in the Pacific Ocean, according to a study published last week led by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin.

Using sediment cores collected in the Rocky Mountains, paleoclimatology records and climate models, the researchers found warming driven by greenhouse gas emissions can alter patterns of atmospheric and marine heat in the North Pacific Ocean in a way resembling what’s known as the negative phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), fluctuations in sea surface temperatures that result in decreased winter precipitation in the American Southwest. But in this case, the phenomenon can last far longer than the usual 30-year cycle of the PDO.

“If the sea surface temperature patterns in the North Pacific were just the result of processes related to stochastic [random] variability in the past decade or two, we would have just been extremely unlucky, like a really bad roll of the dice,” said Victoria Todd, the lead author of the study and a PhD student in geosciences at University of Texas at Austin. “But if, as we hypothesize, this is a forced change in the sea surface temperatures in the North Pacific, this will be sustained into the future, and we need to start looking at this as a shift, instead of just the result of bad luck.”

It's funny to me that I've been in Austin long enough that someone from UT talking about the Colorado River inherently means the one that flows through town. Not sure why we have two of these, really.

Clear-cutting forests doesn’t just raise flood risk — it can supercharge it. UBC researchers found that in certain watersheds, floods became up to 18 times more frequent and over twice as severe after clear-cutting, with these effects lasting more than four decades. The surprise? Terrain details like which direction a slope faces played a huge role in flood behavior. Conventional models miss these dynamics, which could mean we've been underestimating the danger for decades — especially as climate change accelerates extreme weather.

When the government of Sri Lanka published the National Red List of threatened plants in 2020, my eyebrows shot up. We’ve all become accustomed, after all, to the grim news these reports periodically bring us. But here it was, in black and white: 128 species, not having been recorded in surveys conducted during the past century, were assessed as “possibly extinct,” while a further two each were assessed as “extinct” and “extinct in the wild.” This was good news indeed.

Just eight years earlier, the 2012 National Red List had assessed fully 177 species as possibly extinct, together with five extinct and two others extinct in the wild. Had 49 extinct species — species no one had recorded in more than a century — really been rediscovered since 2012? Clearly, someone had blundered. Not stopping to put the book down, I called up Siril Wijesundara at the National Institute of Fundamental Studies (NIFS) in Kandy and the chairman of the committee of experts who conducted the assessment.

“Siril,” I said, “there’s a mistake in the number of extinct flowering plants in the new Red List.”

He laughed. “I thought that would get your attention,” he said. “But there’s no mistake. Himesh has rediscovered three of the officially extinct ones as well.”

“What’s Himesh?” I asked, thinking it to be the acronym of the institution that had magically rediscovered these species, which, after all, all previous surveys had missed.

“Himesh is an amazing guy,” Wijesundara said. “He spends his life searching for plants.”

To date, [Himesh] Jayasinghe has rediscovered more than 100 of the 177 possibly extinct species as well as three of the five extinct species and both species previously considered extinct in the wild. And the good news doesn’t stop there. He has up to now found some 210 species that have never been reported from Sri Lanka. About 50 of these were already known from India, while a further 20, though named in the historical literature, can now be added to the national floral inventory because they are supported by hard evidence: newly collected specimens as well as photographs.

And then there are the 150 species that appear to be entirely new to science. All these records are supported by specimens Jayasinghe has deposited in the National Herbarium, as well as thousands of photographs. Returning to an interesting plant again and again until he finds it in flush, in fruit and in flower, he has accumulated a photo library representing some 2,600 of the 2,850 species of flowering plants then known from Sri Lanka, and that’s omitting the grasses and bamboos, which he hasn’t begun working on yet. The 210 new records will now get added to those tallies.

“Back then, the river was embarrassing. It was a conveyor belt of trash,” said Miller as he handed me a photograph showing a tributary choked with broken appliances, tires, plastic kiddie pools and even a rusted blue car.

Chief among the junk: tires. Each year, the United States discards nearly 300m tires. While most are reused or recycled, millions slip through the cracks.

When Miller paddled past a tree where a tire had speared itself “like an olive on a toothpick”, he realized that tire would be there forever, unless someone did something.

So, he did. That fall, Miller gathered hundreds of tires then recruited friends to corral them downstream. Lacking boats, he devised a way to fill old tires with empty milk jugs to make them buoyant.

Plans have been revealed to grow fruit and vegetables using "cleaned" carbon dioxide in greenhouses above a landfill in what it is claimed will be a "world first".

The landfill in Wiltshire is run by Crapper & Sons Ltd, which is currently waiting to get planning permission for the project.

The company already captures methane coming off the waste to power its operations and send energy to the national grid, as well as producing CO2.

Having now started a community interest company called Sustain Wiltshire, it has said it wants to use the site to grow food for the local area all year round.

Assembly President Philemon Yang said the storms "are fast becoming one of the most overlooked yet far-reaching global challenges of our time."

"They are driven by climate change, land degradation and unsustainable practices," he said.

Warmer water at the seaside might sound appealing for your holiday dip, but a recent ocean heatwave in the Mediterranean Sea has been so intense scientists fear potentially devastating consequences for marine life.

The temperature of the sea surface regularly passed 30C off the coast of Majorca and elsewhere in late June and early July, in places six or seven degrees above usual.

That's probably warmer than your local leisure centre swimming pool.

It has been the western Med's most extreme marine heatwave ever recorded for the time of year, affecting large areas of the sea for weeks on end.

archived (Wayback Machine)

• Air pollution — especially from transboundary dust and sulfate particles — is intensifying lightning activity in Bangladesh, particularly during the pre-monsoon season. Studies show that these pollutants, mostly coming in from northern and western India, alter cloud dynamics and increase lightning frequency.
• Bangladesh records the highest lightning-related death density in South Asia, with over 4,000 deaths since 2010. Vulnerable rural populations with limited infrastructure and outdoor labor during harvest seasons are victims of these fatalities.
• Experts urge Bangladesh to strengthen early warning systems, improve air quality monitoring, and reduce both domestic and cross-border pollution through coordinated policies targeting traffic emissions, industrial sources and open burning.

We're all aware of the microplastics problem. Here's the new hotness.

Marine plastic litter tends to grab headlines, with images of suffocating seabirds or bottles washing up along coastlines. Increasingly, researchers have been finding tiny microplastic fragments across all environments, from the most densely populated cities to pristine mountaintops, as well as in human tissue including the brain and placenta. A study published today reveals yet another hidden source of this deadly waste: nanometre-scale particles are literally everywhere, says co-author Dušan Materić, an environmental analytical chemist at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig, Germany.

Materić and his colleagues sampled water at three depths representative of different environments in the North Atlantic Ocean. Throughout the water column, they found three types of nanoplastic: polyethylene terephthalate (PET), polystyrene (PS) and polyvinylchloride (PVC). These were present at average concentrations of 18 milligrams per metre cubed, which translates to 27 million tonnes of nanoplastics spread across just the top layer of the temperate to subtropical North Atlantic. “Nanoplastics make up the dominant fraction of marine plastic pollution,” Materić says. In the entire world’s oceans, it is estimated that there are around 3 million tonnes of floating plastic pollution — excluding nanoplastics.

I think they misspelled "grift," but that's neither here nor there.

Last week, President Donald Trump signed what is likely the most regressive U.S. tax-and-spending bill in U.S. history, giving the top one percent of families more than $1 trillion in tax cuts while slashing Medicaid health coverage and food assistance for the poor. It is also one of the worst environmental bills in U.S. history.

Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” provides billions of dollars in giveaways to the fossil fuel industry and its wealthiest executives while taking a machete to our national effort to confront the climate crisis and build healthier, more sustainable, and more just communities.

“The Big Ugly Bill is a direct attack on our communities and our climate,” says Irene Burga of GreenLatinos. “This bill puts profit over people, and it will worsen the heat, pollution, and injustice we are already fighting to survive.”

The new law compounds the already $17 billion in direct federal subsidies U.S. taxpayers pay to oil, gas, and coal companies every year. It cuts hundreds of billions of dollars in tax incentives for renewable energy, despite it being cheaper, healthier, more efficient, and more reliable than fossil fuels. As a result, the law threatens nearly a million U.S. jobs and will result in higher electricity and transportation costs for people living in every state in the continental U.S.

Fifty-six residents of an Indigenous Oaxaca community face 200 trumped-up charges for resisting mining in their rivers.

In one of its many changes, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, enacted on July 4, 2025, eliminated civil penalties for noncompliance with federal fuel economy standards. Specifically, Section 40006 of the Act amends the language of the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) statute to reset the maximum civil penalty to $0.00. Although the statute and its implementing regulations otherwise remain in place, this amendment removes any civil penalties for producing passenger cars and light trucks that do not meet fuel economy requirements.

First established in 1975 in response to the gas crisis of the early 1970s, the CAFE statute empowers the Department of Transportation to set average fuel economy standards for vehicle fleets. Acting by delegation, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has periodically promulgated rules that set CAFE standards for vehicle model years. Recent rulemakings have attracted considerable attention, including debates over whether standards may account for the production of electric vehicles, based on those vehicles’ petroleum-equivalent fuel economy values calculated by the Department of Energy.

NHTSA finalized its most recent standard-setting rulemaking in 2024, covering passenger cars and certain types of trucks and vans for upcoming model years. The standard set in that rulemaking culminated in requiring model year 2031 passenger cars to achieve an average fuel economy of about 50.4 miles per gallon.