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TOPIC: climate crisis

Green

How Planting Trees Could Inject New Life Into Dry Soil

Dry soil, hardly any rain — this summer's drought is making life difficult for farmers. In one of the driest regions in Germany, environmentally friendly farmer Benedikt Bösel is turning his fields into a laboratory, experimenting with an exciting new approach.

ALT MADLITZ — In summer, Benedikt Bösel likes to set up his table out in the fields, with herds of cattle grazing nearby. The 38-year-old has an estate and a large farm in Brandenburg, the driest region in Germany. For many years now, he has been a leader in the world of environmentally friendly farming, using Instagram, a book and talk show appearances to spread the message about his mission to save the soil.

“Everywhere now, you can feel that water is becoming scarcer, and we don’t have any healthy soil left,” says Bösel, who runs a large farm with 1,000 hectares of arable land and 2,000 hectares of woodland in Alt Madlitz, in the Briesen region, about an hour from Berlin. He has turned his fields into a kind of laboratory. In a region with one of the lowest precipitation rates in all of Germany, and with very sandy soil, he is developing new ways of using the land, in response to the environmental crisis.

Agro-forestry systems play an important role in reducing the damage caused by drought and erosion. In simple terms, this means interspersing trees and bushes throughout arable fields. The trees are regularly spaced out in rows across the fields. Experts believe this helps the soil to retain moisture, meaning that extreme weather causes less damage. When tilling the land, most farmers prefer to “drive in long, straight lines,” says Bösel, who works in partnership with a number of research institutes and is supported by the German Ministry of Agriculture.

According to the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research’s records on droughts, there is a vast swathe of land, running from eastern Lower Saxony across Saxony-Anhalt to Berlin and Brandenburg, that has been consistently too dry for the past five years. As a result, farms in the east of Germany, which tend to be far larger than the national average, have suffered poor harvests.

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Why Summer Should Always Remind Us Of The Ozone

With the arrival of the heat, it can seem that air pollution has increased. But is this just our perception or reality?

-Analysis-

MADRID — In summer, days are longer and people are more eager to be outside, but does that also increase environmental pollution? In truth, it's not a matter of perception: the summer heat increases the levels of tropospheric ozone, one of the polluting gases with the highest impact in Spain and across the planet.

Ozone (O3) is a colorless, odorless gas that, depending on which layer of the atmosphere it is in, can have either positive or negative effects. Stratospheric ozone is the "good" ozone, found 10 to 50 kilometers above the earth's surface. There, it forms the so-called ozone layer, which protects living beings from the sun's ultraviolet radiation. When this layer degenerates, it creates ozone holes that can contribute to global warming, as well as increase the risk of skin cancer, eye cataracts and affect people's immune system.

However, when ozone is in the troposphere — the layer of the atmosphere closest to Earth — it becomes a byproduct pollutant produced by primary pollutants such as nitrogen oxides (NO and NO2) and volatile organic compounds.

Tropospheric ozone is hazardous to our health: it affects the respiratory system, causes throat, eye and mucous membrane irritation, can trigger coughing and can reduce lung function. It makes breathing more difficult, increases cases of asthma attacks, and can worsen other chronic lung diseases such as emphysema and bronchitis. In addition, it is associated with increased deaths due to cardiovascular failure.

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Environmental Damage Of Russia's War Is Massive — And Extends Far Beyond Ukraine

Warfare is not only traumatic for people and infrastructure but also has a large impact on the natural environment. The environmental damages of the Ukraine war will likely be be so great that even neighboring countries will suffer their effects.

WARSAW— The infrastructure used to store and transport oil is often a prime target during war, and the resulting spills and fires can contribute hugely to greenhouse gas emissions.

During the 1991 Gulf War, burning oil wells contributed to more than 2 percent of global CO2 emissions, which had long-term and wide-ranging consequences, including high levels of soot deposits and increased melting of icebergs. Carbon dioxide pouring into the atmosphere from burning forests, peat bogs and wetlands, set alight by shelling, also cause large environmental costs, as does the increased traffic of people and vehicles that come with refugees and humanitarian aid.

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The war in Ukraine is no exception. A new report by Climate Focus, “Climate Damage Caused by the War in Ukraine," shows that military and wartime activities have contributed as much as 100 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions — equal to the entire annual emissions of the Netherlands.

Rebuilding infrastructure, mainly housing, destroyed during the war is responsible for nearly half of these emissions. In some places, cleaning and rebuilding efforts began as soon as Russian occupiers left. Since last spring, for example, the city of Bucha has become unrecognizable. The city has been equipped with new sidewalks, repaired streets and new lighting fixtures. Projects to rebuild housing and highways are ongoing. The country has also built several new roads and bridges.

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A Breakdown Of Why The Fossil Fuel Industry Owes Trillions In Climate Reparations

The largest companies in the fossil fuel sector are responsible for financial costs valued at $209 billion annually from 2025 to 2050, according to a new study published in the scientific journal One Earth.

MADRID — We know the names of the companies responsible for environmental damage. We know what they spend and what they earn each year from fossil fuels. We even know how much other companies and banks invest in those very companies. What has not been quantified, until now, is what each of these companies must pay for future damages caused by their history of greenhouse gas emissions.

Saudi Aramco, ExxonMobil, Shell, BP: in total, the world's 21 largest fossil companies will be responsible for an estimated $5.4 trillion (almost €5 trillion) in economic damage due to climate change over the next 25 years, from 2025 to 2050. That's an average of some $209 billion every year, according to a paper by Marco Grasso, a professor of Political Geography at the University of Milan-Bicocca, and Richard Heede, Director of the Climate Accountability Institute (CAI), published in the scientific journal One Earth.

The researchers calculated the companies' obligations by analyzing their individual history of emissions collected in the Carbon Majors database between 1988, the year the IPCC was created, and 2022 — a period responsible for approximately half of global warming experienced so far.

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Green
Ricardo R. Santos

Scorcher! How The Heat Waves Of Climate Change Could Fuel Urban Violence

Another collateral effect of global warming could be that rising temperatures feed existing tensions in cities around the world. Starting from Lisbon, but investigating related studies around the world, Portuguese digital magazine Mensagem reports.

-Analysis-

LISBON — We've gotten used to saying that everything is changing. The weather is crazy. Habits have changed. Values are vanishing. Traditions are not what they used to be. Language itself, some say, has degenerated.

Preferences across all fields, from food to entertai be they gastronomic, cultural, literary, entertainment or sexual, have changed. For some, for the worse. For others, for the better.

This perception of change depends a lot on age: when you live to be 60 years old, you perceive, with greater subtlety, that things change, inevitably, and end up with a certain nostalgia for those old times.

But strictly (and scientifically) speaking, everything is indeed always changing. So if the world is constantly changing – even if it sometimes happens invisibly – why such widespread panic about climate change?

The short answer is because it's happening so quickly, so dramatically, and with such devastating, often irreversible effects.

Often, the news tells us that predictions are surpassed by observations. Last April, in Portugal, a new record for national maximum air temperature was reached, at 36.9ºC (98.42ºF) — the highest since 1945.

Climate forecasts, therefore, anticipate a scenario of continued, intensified, global warming that, unfortunately, is unstoppable, at least in the immediate future.

Heat waves will increase, not only in number but also in intensity and duration. More heat waves, for more days, with higher temperatures — in Lisbon, Beijing, São Paulo and in Berlin and everywhere in the world, cities will get hotter and hotter.

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Green
Charlotte Meyer

The World Is Not Ready For 1.2 Billion Climate Refugees

The number of climate refugees is predicted to hit 1.2 billion by 2050, yet states are still not taking enough action. The Global South will be the most affected, but the West will not be spared.

-Analysis-

PARIS — The number of people displaced by environmental disasters is expected to explode in coming years, but governments remain slow to respond.

However, the phenomenon is not new: "Environmental factors have had an impact on migration dynamics since the beginning of humanity," says Alice Baillat, policy coordinator at the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center (IDMC). "The world population has been distributed on the planet depending on the more or less fertile areas. This is why South Asia and the Bay of Bengal are now among the most populated areas in the world."

But climate change is making the situation far worse. According to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, since 2008, an average of 21.5 million people have been displaced each year because of natural disasters. The World Bank expects there to be 260 million climate displaced people by 2030, and up to 1.2 billion by 2050.

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Green
Ángela Sepúlveda

A Hot Day Melts It, But Global Warming Could Make Chocolate Vanish For Good

The devastating effects of rising temperatures include denying to people across the world their favorite staple sweet. While 2050 is the date cited for the risk of chocolate disappearing, there are efforts to reverse the effects of climate change on the production of cocoa.

MADRIDClimate change has devastating large-scale effects, including violent floods and intense heat waves, but it also has consequences for our mundane daily routines: that bar of chocolate you enjoy in the afternoon may become a luxury item by 2050. Experts predict we will see a drastic reduction in cocoa production as a result of an increasingly extreme climate.

Cocoa trees thrive under specific conditions: consistent temperatures, high humidity, abundant rainfall and protection from strong winds. These circumstances are only found in tropical rainforests, with the main producers in Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Ecuador and Indonesia.

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Geopolitics
Pierre Haski

Can Macron's "Creative" Diplomacy Fix The Rift Between The West And Global South?

French President Emmanuel Macron has called a unique summit that aims to reset relations between Western countries and the Global South. But the message from China and Russia will be not to trust such diplomatic maneuverings.

-Analysis-

PARIS“France has creative diplomacy.”

The admiration came from a European leader after last month's political community summit in Moldova that included Ukraine and a wide range of European countries — a gathering first proposed by Emmanuel Macron.

A different kind of summit is opening Thursday in Paris, bringing together 50 heads of state and government to form a new global financial pact. Some heavyweights present include Chinese Premier Li Qiang and Brazilian President Lula.

Readers who are not particularly impressed with this latest act of French diplomacy will be forgiven. To quote General Charles de Gaulle when he was criticizing the United Nations, "What are these 'things' for?"

The results of such high-level diplomatic events are not always glorious, or even entirely effective. The Paris Climate Agreement is one such example, but there are several others where words and displays of support have not been followed by any significant effects. And the current state of the world is not conducive to optimism.

But the stakes of each diplomatic event, given the current state of the world, are considerable. And rather than being ignored, they should be examined with the care with which one would treat someone seriously ill.

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Green
Carlo Petrini

Droughts To Floods, Italy As Poster Child Of Our Climate Emergency

Floods have hit northern Italy after the longest drought in two centuries. Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini explains how these increasingly frequent events are being exacerbated by human activity.

-Analysis-

FAENZA By now it is undeniable: on the Italian peninsula, the climate crisis is evident in very opposing extreme events (think drought and floods), which occur close together and with increasing frequency. Until just a few days ago, almost the entire country was gripped by the longest drought in two centuries.

Now, however, extreme rainfall has hit the state of Emilia Romagna in the north of the country causing casualties and displacing over 10,000 people.

In 18 hours, the amount of rain that falls on average in a month has fallen. This has caused all rivers to overflow, flooding lowland towns and cutting off hillside towns due to landslides on many roads. Fields have become lakes and orchards that were at a crucial stage of ripening have been severely damaged.

It would be a blessing if this dreadful situation were a sporadic and isolated phenomenon, but unfortunately this is not the case.

What will happen tomorrow is unknown, yet we know it will happen.

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Economy
Les Echos

France, Portrait Of A Nation In Denial — In Our World In Denial

The continuous increase of public debt and a tone-deaf president in France, the rise of authoritarian regimes elsewhere in the world, the blindness to global warming: realities that we do not want to see and that will end up destroying us if we do not act.

-Analysis-

PARIS — In France, the denial of reality seems to be the only thing that all of our public figures have in common: The president (who is right to say that it is his role to propose unpopular measures) refuses to see that other solutions than his own were possible and that institutions will not be sufficient in the long term to legitimize his solitary decisions.

The parliamentary opposition groups refuse to see that they do not constitute a political majority, since they would be incapable of governing together and that they have in common, for too many of them, on both sides of the political spectrum, left and right, only the hatred of money, the mistrust of success, and the contempt for excellence.

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Green
Paul Molga

How Climate Change May Be Triggering More Earthquakes — And Vice Versa

Researchers have identified a possible link between climate change and the frequency of earthquakes — and the quakes may also start a vicious circle of accelerating climate change.

PARIS — Between 1900 and 1950, the Earth recorded an average of 3.4 earthquakes per year with a magnitude greater than 6.5. That figured doubled to 6.7 a year until the early 1970s, and was almost five times that in the 2000s.

Their intensity would also have increased with more than 25 major earthquakes per year, double the previous periods. This is according to the EM-DAT emergency events database, which compiled the occurrence and effects of 22,000 mass disasters worldwide in the 20th century.

Can we conclude that there is a causal relationship with the rise of human activities, as some experts suggest? The idea was first suggested in 2011 by an Australian research team led by geology professor Giampiero Iaffaldano. At the time, it reported that it had found that the intensification of the monsoon in India had accelerated the movement of the Indian tectonic plate by 20% over the past 10 million years.

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Economy
Luíza Lanza and Daniel Tozzi Mendes

Cracking Food Prices, On The Front Line Of Brazil's Egg Rush

With the price of meat on the rise, Brazilians have turned to eggs. The country is now producing 55 billion eggs a year, presenting challenges for farmers and raising questions of animal welfare. And in Brazil's "Egg Capital", the climate crisis is complicating matters further.

CURITIBA — "After the 15th, it's almost impossible to eat meat," says salesperson Cristina Souza Brito, as she leaves a supermarket in Curitiba, capital of the state of Paraná in southern Brazil.

“Chicken or beef is only available when the salary comes at the beginning of the month," she adds. "Then we get by with omelettes, fried or boiled eggs."

Since the beginning of 2021, this has been the routine in the house where she lives with her daughter, a niece and two siblings. Brazilians might be replacing meat with eggs because of their budgets: meat has increased in price above inflation and, in April 2022, it cost 42.6% more than in early 2020, according to the Institute of Applied Economic Research.

The group Food for Justice pointed out that at the end of 2020, eggs had been the food that Brazilians had been consuming more of (+18.8%), and meat recorded the biggest drop (-44%), which reinforces the idea of substitution between the two foods.

Health and economic crisis aside, Brazilians have never eaten as many eggs as they do now. Egg consumption in the country has more than doubled in the last 15 years, rising from the annual mark of 120 eggs per capita in 2007 to 257 in 2021, according to figures from the Brazilian Animal Protein Association. The current level of eggs consumed by each Brazilian over the course of a year is higher than the world average, which is 227.

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