Due to climate change and pollution, entire neighborhoods and cities on the continent are destined to vanish. A new vision of African urbanism is needed to replace the illusion of the “city without limits.”
Tag: pollution
Locals in the coastal Argentine district of Trelew say a fish processing plant has turned a nearby lake into a cesspit that left its waters pink this past summer, and now the situation has grown darker.
Fishing nets, industry and other human-caused dumping are poisoning Russia’s Lake Baikal, the world’s largest, deepest (and oldest) lake. Bigger than all the North American Great Lakes combined, it’s at risk after 25 million years of life.
Welcome to Friday, where evacuation flights resume at Kabul airport after yesterday’s deadly attack, dozens of kidnapped Nigerian students are freed, and female hummingbirds evolve so that males get off their feathers. We also boldly explore the surprising crossroads between science fiction and real-life military strategy.
Plastic pollution has contaminated our oceans to the point where a new ecological niche of anthropic origin has been coined: the ‘plastisphere’. The bacteria that proliferate there could lead to the next health crisis.
In normal times, we might be writing this month about the annual momentum gathering for the Plastic Free July challenge. Launched in 2011 by the Australia-based Plastic Free Foundation, the idea is simple: refusing single-use plastics, from bags to packaging, for 31 days. But in 2020, that simple desire to go fully plastic-free for at […]
There are plenty of reasons for pessimism. But we also need to keep trying — and hoping — for ways to cooperate across continents.
Skylines evolve over time, but that doesn’t mean cities like Bremen, Germany should let developers erect whatever kind of tower block they want.
In the Balkans, developers are rushing to install hydroelectric plants on Europe’s last untapped river systems. Activists — including an unlikely group of Bosnian villagers — are fighting back.
Researchers are sending remote-controlled aircraft into residential neighborhoods to figure out just who’s burning what in their stoves or fireplaces.
Going all out on the autobahn may be part of the German way of life, but speed limits are necessary to limit road accidents and lower CO2 emissions.
Outside of Naples, researchers have turned land polluted by illegally-dumped chemicals into a living laboratory.
KATOWICE — As a member of Germany’s federal government, Gerd Müller knows what UN climate change conferences cost. The Minister of Economic Cooperation and Development spearheaded the organization of last year’s edition in Bonn. At that time, the COP23, which Germany hosted to help the financially troubled Fiji Islands, cost around 60 million euros. And […]
PARIS — Suspected of hacking a dissident into pieces in its consulate in Istanbul, the Saudi regime has become the target of public outrage — until the story dies down, at least. Which raises an important question: should French museums, opera houses and festivals accept funding from the kingdom? It’s a sensitive issue, as Saudi […]
The project ‘The Ocean Cleanup’ wants to use its system to rid the oceans from plastic waste. The founder thinks big about the planet and beyond. And he’s not a jerk.
Since June 23, the Indian state of Maharashtra has been verbalizing distributors and users of non-reusable plastic. In Mumbai, more than two hundred inspectors are on the hunt.
Located in one of southern Italy’s poorest regions, once thriving Crotone has the worst youth unemployment rate for women in the entire country: 90%.
BOGOTA — “Our grandparents knew our territory well, its sacred and productive places, but also the risks we assumed if we did not use resources appropriately….” These are the words of José Zafiama, a teacher of the Uitoto indigenous people and member of the Azicatch Indigenous organization, which brings together peoples in the Predio Putumayo […]
The shift toward electric cars is picking up pace, but the road ahead has plenty of obstacles still.
In northern Italy, the city of Pavia has higher-than-average cancer rates and widespread cases of illegal garbage burning. Are these two facts just a coincidence?
In Argentina, one of the world’s biggest citrus producers is recycling its farming waste as fuel and fertilizers.
PARIS — Ever heard of the Fermi paradox? In 1950, in Los Alamos, New Mexico, Enrico Fermi, the famed Italian physicist and father of the first nuclear reactor, estimated the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way, based on the number of stars in our galaxy with a planetary system gravitating […]
Ground has been broken on the signature domestic project of the Chinese leader’s next term. It is meant to be a massive model city of innovation, forever linked to Xi’s Chinese Dream.
BENGALURU — In vintage crime novels, there is often someone murdered by slow poisoning, and arsenic has been a common weapon of choice. It works the same way in your body — slowly killing you — if it is present in the water you drink beyond a certain threshold. This is why it’s disturbing that, according to a new study, the groundwater along the densely populated Indus river basin in Pakistan is severely contaminated with arsenic, putting the health of over 50 million people at risk. Arsenic occurs naturally in Earth’s crust. It is used by humans in some alloys […]
OGONI REGION — Stanley, 40, once considered becoming a fighter. He says he already has a small stash of Kalashnikov assault rifles hidden somewhere. He’s not boasting. That’s just how things are in the creeks of the Niger Delta. The youth have easier access to weapons than to schools and jobs. But instead of becoming […]
Colombia may have massive shale oil and gas reserves that could cover the decline in its crude output, but environmentalists are raising alarms.
Massive use of antibiotics in animal farming and for the treatment of common ailments is helping create incurable infections.
-Analysis- WARSAW — For the Polish government, coal is nothing to worry about. Sixteen Polish cities exceeded the annual limit of days with smog in the first two months of this year alone. And still, the government hasn’t taken any steps to restrict poisonous coal dust or remove the fossil fuel from the market. Coal […]
As officials plan a cleanup of the foul Matanza-Riachuelo River Basin, in Buenos Aires scientists are awed by the handful of creatures that manage to survive there.
Categories
Toxic Air And 300 Million Kids
You’d want to be just about anywhere but the Indian capital of New Delhi today. Smog choked the city and triggered warnings that even healthy people were at risk of respiratory problems. Air pollution typically peaks in Delhi at this time of the year, driven in part by firecrackers burned to celebrate Diwali, the Hindu […]
Droughts, demographics, industrialization, pollution, climate change … The need for more clean and accessible water is growing urgent in many places around the world. But beyond praying to the rain gods, what real-life responses are out there? Innovation is key both to help preserve clean water sources, as well as finding new ways to purify […]
Categories
One Week Before The Olympics
Correio Braziliense, July 29th Friday’s edition of the Correio Braziliense daily features images of final preparations for the Rio de Janeiro Summer Olympics, which are now just one week away. As the Games near, concerns about security and logistics are rising. The country is still reeling from a series of political and economic crises, and […]
COLÓN ISLAND — As the world continues to bury itself in plastic bottles, a few pioneers are coming up with clever ways to put all that refuse to good use. One of those people is Canadian innovator Robert Bezeau, who decided after a visit to Panama to build an entire plastic-bottle village — presumably the […]
GENEVA — Alain Thébault is working on making a small bubble-shaped electric catamaran that can “fly” over water. And perhaps be remotely controlled. This vehicle may sound like something that belongs to the realm of science fiction except for the fact that Thébault is a successful inventor. He created the Hydroptère, one of the fastest […]
SPOTLIGHT: GOOD AND BAD NEWS FOR THE PLANET Breathe in … Last year, an estimated 147 gigawatts was added to the world’s renewable power capacity — the largest such global rise ever recorded, making it an “extraordinary” year for renewable energies. According to the Renewables 2016 Global Status Report, investment in green energies around the […]
FUWWAH — Stepping off a small boat as it docks along the Nile, Ahmed Khaled, a 22-year-old fisherman, looks dissatisfied. For the fifth time in just three weeks, he had carefully prepared the lures and rigs of his fishing equipment and set out in his sick father’s sailboat — only to come back empty-handed. “The […]
The legacy of our time will not be our literary or architectural monuments, but all the plastic trash we leave to poison the seas and choke our future. Fortunately, change is in the air.
One of Mao’s most grandiose ideas — an aqueduct stretching 3,500 kilometers — is becoming reality decades after his death. The project promises relief for China’s thirsty north, but has already displaced thousands of people in its path
BOGOTÁ — Colombians can add pollution caused by millions of cigarette butts to an already varied list of environmental calamities that include deforestation, forest fires and the pesticides and mercury dumped into their rivers. It’s the huge number of discarded cigarette butts that add gravity to what might seem an insignificant problem. In Bogotá alone, […]