A new study lays out a road map for protecting and restoring 50% of Earth’s surface, targeted to preserve biodiversity and maximize natural removal of carbon from the atmosphere.
Source: To solve climate change and biodiversity loss, we need a Global Deal for Nature : the Conversation
Earth’s cornucopia of life has evolved over 550 million years. Along the way, five mass extinction events have caused serious setbacks to life on our planet. The fifth, which was caused by a gargantuan meteorite impact along Mexico’s Yucatan coast, changed Earth’s climate, took out the dinosaurs and altered the course of biological evolution.
Today nature is suffering accelerating losses so great that many scientists say a sixth mass extinction is underway. Unlike past mass extinctions, this event is driven by human actions that are dismantling and disrupting natural ecosystems and changing Earth’s climate.
My research focuses on ecosystems and climate change from regional to global scales. In a new study titled “A Global Deal for Nature,” led by conservation biologist and strategist Eric Dinerstein, 17 colleagues and I lay out a road map for simultaneously averting a sixth mass extinction and reducing climate change.
We chart a course for immediately protecting at least 30% of Earth’s surface to put the brakes on rapid biodiversity loss, and then add another 20% comprising ecosystems that can suck disproportionately large amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere. In our view, biodiversity loss and climate change must be addressed as one interconnected problem with linked solutions.
Source: To solve climate change and biodiversity loss, we need a Global Deal for Nature : The Conversation
Scientists and officials around the US have told the Guardian that the Trump administration has withdrawn funding for a large, successful conservation program – in direct contradiction of instructions from Congress.
Unique in scale and ambition, the program comprises 22 research centers that tackle big-picture issues affecting huge swaths of the US, such as climate change, flooding and species extinction. They are known as Landscape Conservation Cooperatives – or were, because 16 of them are now on indefinite hiatus or have dissolved.
“I just haven’t seen anything like this in my almost 30 years of working with the federal government,” said a scientist at the Fish and Wildlife Service who worked for one of the LCCs and wished to remain anonymous, because federal employees were instructed not to speak with the Guardian for this story. “There is this lack of accountability.”
Forty French fishing boats attack five British boats in the Channel. Stones and smoke bombs are thrown. Rude words are exchanged in two languages. The British retreat.
Similar incidents have been happening for 15 years – or arguably for the last 900 years. The rights and wrong are complicated. Yesterday evening the French boats were undoubtedly the aggressors. They put to sea not in order to fish, but to harass the English and Scottish boats that had entered “their waters”.
It was foolhardy of the French fishermen, but they do have reasons to be exasperated. The latest outbreak of the Baie de la Seine scallop war should be seen in the context of Brexit and the deep uncertainties and exaggerated expectations encouraged by simplistic and vague UK plans to reclaim “our seas” and “our fish”.
Ironies abound. In the this dispute, British boats are asserting their right to fish in French waters even when they are closed to French trawlers. This right depends on EU rules, but pre-dates the EU fishing policy.
In any case, the row is not just about France v Britain. It is also about Big Boats v Small Boats, and the ecological damage caused by modern methods of industrial-scale fishing.
First, some facts. The clashes took place in “French waters” – that is to say about 15 miles from the French coast at a point where the Channel is about 100 miles wide, well beyond any possible legal definition of British waters. There were 40 French boats and five British – but the French boats were tiny and the British boats were large.
The spectacular dunes system picked by Donald Trump for his golf resort in Aberdeenshire has been “partially destroyed” as a result of the course’s construction, documents released under the Freedom of Information Act have revealed.
Scottish Natural Heritage, which has been under pressure for years to speak out on the issue, now acknowledges that serious damage has been done to the site of special scientific interest (SSSI) at Foveran Links on the Menie estate, north of Aberdeen, since the course opened in 2012, the documents show.
As a result, Foveran’s SSSI status – given because of its unusual shifting sands and diverse plant life – now hangs in the balance.
“Construction of the new golf course involved earthworks, planting of trees, greens and fairways, drainage, irrigation and grass planting,” states one of the reports released by Scottish Natural Heritage inspectors. “This has affected the natural morphology of the dunes and interfered with natural processes. Most of its important geomorphological features have been lost or reduced to fragments. Nearby marine terraces have also been reduced to fragments.”
“These documents show that considerable damage has been done to Foveran Links, and that it is very unlikely that it will retain its SSSI status,” said Bob Ward, the policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, who obtained the reports under FoI. Ward has also asked the Scottish government to investigate whether proper environmental monitoring has been carried out at the site since 2012.
Source: Donald Trump’s golf resort wrecked special nature site, reports reveal | US news | The Guardian
The whale shark is the largest fish in the world, but much of its lifecycle remains shrouded in mystery. These gentle giants gather in just a handful of places around the globe – something which has long baffled scientists – but our new research has started to explain why. Better understanding of whale shark movements could help prevent further population loss in a species that has already experienced a 63% population decline over the past 75 years.
When swimming solo, the whale shark, which can grow up to 18.8 metres in length and 34 tons in weight, travels all over the world. Recently, a group of scientists tracked the remarkable journey of one whale shark across the Pacific from Panama to the Philippines. At more than 12,000 miles it proved to be one of the longest migrations ever recorded.
Yet whale sharks are known to come together at just a few specific locations around the world. Anything from ten to 500 whale sharks may gather at any one time in areas off the coasts of Australia, Belize, the Maldives, Mexico and more.
Source: Whale sharks gather at a few specific locations around the world – now we know why
Orang-utans are kind gentle creatures. They are harmless. The last place they have now is Borneo. Yet since 1990 100,000 of these poor gentle creatures have been mindlessly killed – over 50% of them are gone.
Source: Borneo – the ongoing massacre of Orang-utans. : Opher’s World
Some have a strain that is almost identical to one that infected humans in the middle ages.
Source: British red squirrels are suffering from an outbreak of medieval leprosy
Original post from Salon
‘…………..By LINDSAY ABRAMS
Filmmaker Anthony Baxter on how elitist billionaires are destroying the environment in the name of golf
Here in the United States, Donald Trump gets a lot of flak for the many, many things you can hardly believe he said: claiming that a cold day disproves the reality of global warming, for example, or, more recently, declaring that most Mexican immigrants are “rapists.”
Trump’s no less loathed in Scotland. There, however, the problem is less about what Trump says, and more about what he’s actually done — run roughshod over protected dunes to build an elite golf course, attack an offshore wind energy project because it “ruined” his view, cajole politicians into supporting his every whim. He’s also run into trouble for the promises he’s failed to keep — when the deal ultimately went sour, he flew off in his private jet, leaving behind none of the economic prosperity he’d sworn the project would create. His fate as one of the country’s top villains was sealed with Anthony Baxter’s 2011 documentary, “You’ve Been Trumped,” which documented a saga so egregious it inspired a folk song, and made such waves that Trump finally agreed to sit down with Baxter on camera.
That interview could be read as the climax of Baxter’s newest documentary, “A Dangerous Game,” which picks up where the last left off. But Trump knows how to hold his own against angry activists — or, at least, he knows how to deflect their questions. With no evidence to back himself up, he explains at one point that he himself is a “great environmentalist.” The film’s more alarming revelation is that it’s not just Trump: elitist billionaires, in Baxter’s telling, have co-opted golf, creating vast artificial environments for play that strain local resources and shut out all but the wealthy, and which all too often subvert democracy. This plays out as tragedy in Dubrovnik, Croatia — a World Heritage Site — where residents’ efforts to keep out a golf resort result in the passing of a local referendum with an 84 percent majority, only to see the project green-lighted anyway.
Salon spoke with Baxter about the golf industry’s need to embrace a more sustainable model, and about his continued pursuit of America’s would-be 45th president. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
To start, it would be great to hear about how you went from this one local Donald Trump story, and then branched out into this larger problem of elite golf courses.
It was through taking it to communities that really led me to make this film, because people kept saying to me at screenings around the world that they were having the same type of thing happening to them in their communities. It’s not always Donald Trump, but it’s people like him. That was really the journey I set out on.
I also wanted to focus in on the ludicrous situation of these golf courses being built in places like the California desert, for example, which has experienced the worst drought in history. And when you consider that the average golf course uses 312,000 gallons of water per day, and the average American family of four uses 400 gallons/day, it really is shocking, the scale of this stuff. I wanted to explore how our planet cannot afford these gated, super-luxury resorts for very wealthy people like Donald Trump, yet they keep being built in places that are so unsustainable.
Donald Trump recently announced plans to build a new golf course designed by Tiger Woods in Dubai, and it’s just crazy. I don’t think anybody could make a case as to why, environmentally, that is a sound idea. They’re so vulnerable as well to an economic downturn, as we’ve seen: the first golf course of Tiger Woods’ design of the desert in Dubai has now been reclaimed by the desert because the whole plan went belly up.
So yes, it was a case of wanting to explore that, but also to continue to tell the story of what was happening in Scotland, because, despite having had the first film on the BBC, where there is a real backlash against Donald Trump, his organization, and the way they had treated those local people, I was so shocked to find that that treatment was continuing, even after that. So 90 year-old Molly Forbes still didn’t have a proper working water supply several years after Donald Trump’s work was cut off while building the golf course, and there were still mounds of earth being built next to the residents’ homes and Donald Trump was telling the media that he was treating them well. I think that those things were really the powerful driver to want to continue to follow the story.
You really have a clear-cut villain in this one of Trump. I keep thinking back to that image of Molly carrying the water up from her well to wash her dishes …
Yes, I think the problem with Donald Trump, and the reason these late-night chat shows have so much fun with him, are the inflammatory things he says. Just take his comments about Mexico sending rapists and drugs dealers and crime into the U.S., and his big idea to build a Berlin Wall-style barrier between the two countries. That, of course, allows people to have a laugh about those ridiculous ideas, but the point is, as we show in the film, that it’s not just what he says that is bad and dangerous, but it’s what he does.
In Scotland, he claimed that he was going to be creating 6,000 jobs, and he invested one and a half billion dollars into what he claimed was going to be the greatest golf course in the world. Now, that was 10 years ago, and to date we have one golf course built, we have less than 200 jobs created, we have tens of millions of dollars having been invested, and not the $1.5 billion — which was such a stupid number under any scrutiny. But the Scottish government believed his promises, and that’s also part of the problem with this whole thing, because we look to our governments to protect us from these kinds of developments, and the Scottish government completely failed in this case to protect a site of special scientific interest, which was supposed to be protected for future generations to enjoy, and that’s now been lost because of the golf course built there.
Donald Trump has now stabilized the dunes, he’s nailed them down, so that they don’t move and shift as nature intended. He’s built a golf course, which is for wealthy people to play, and he had plans to build another one, which he pulled the plug on after the Scottish government won the battle against him over the wind farm which he took great umbrage over.
The things that he does that we document in the film are simply dangerous and worrying, and I hope as many people as possible in the United States can see the film. Even seeing those polling numbers Tuesday, where he’s polling No. 2 in New Hampshire, you have to ask yourself: Do people really know what he does? They enjoy his entertainment value, maybe, but take a look at this film and you’ll see what he actually does.
About those ridiculous things he says: As somebody who’s confronted Donald Trump a few times, and then being finally able to sit and talk with him, did you get the impression that he kind of plays dumb as part of a strategy he uses for getting away with things?
Yes, well, he’s used to inviting people up to the boardroom in Trump Towers for interviews, and the first question I’ll ask is about his hair, which he obviously loves. But the point is, it’s that kind of deflection that’s the real problem. He’ll make points to journalists that they’ll just repeat as facts, and that’s what’s so concerning.
In the Scottish case, for example, he said he was going to be investing $1.5 billion and clearly wasn’t. The thing is, he’s such an expert at manipulating the media, and he also has access to the airwaves and the lawyers that ordinary people don’t have; he just needs to jump onto Fox and Friends for anything he wants to say, and it’ll just be believed. It’s a very, very worrying situation. Yes, it’s entertaining, but it’s concerning that a man who thinks he stands a chance of becoming the next president of the United States could be making such ludicrous claims and saying such inflammatory things on prime-time television.
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