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NEW DELHI, India (AFP) — Each year around November, the Indian capital’s air quality reaches hazardous levels as cooler air traps pollutants close to the ground and farmers burn their fields across large swathes of north India. https://youtu.be/SEbDGZGuynI
by Patrick GALEY Agence France Presse PARIS, France (AFP) — More than 70 percent of Earth’s last untouched wilderness lies in the territories of just five countries, scientists said Wednesday — mostly nations that alarm environmentalists with their lukewarm response to climate change. True wild spaces — land and sea areas mostly unaffected by mankind’s explosive expansion and insatiable appetite for food and natural resources — now cover just a quarter of the planet. They […]
BRUSSELS, Belgium (AFP) — EU countries on Wednesday backed the outlawing of certain single-use plastics, bringing the bloc a step closer to an outright ban on the products which account for huge quantities of waste in the world’s oceans. The approval by the 28 member states follows an overwhelming vote in the European Parliament last week to ban single-use plastic items such as straws, cutlery, cotton buds and balloon sticks. Work will begin next […]
BARDIA, Nepal (AFP) — Thousands of camera traps help conservationists track Nepal’s wild tiger population, which has nearly doubled in recent years as the big cats claw back from the verge of extinction. On the front-line of the painstaking survey are trained locals in western Nepal’s Bardia National Park where tiger numbers have grown nearly five-fold.
GENEVA, Switzerland (AFP) — Exposure to toxic air both indoors and out kills some 600,000 children under the age of 15 each year, the World Health Organization warned Monday. Data from the UN health body shows that every day, 93 percent of children under the age of 15 — a full 1.8 billion youngsters, including 630 million under the age of five — breath dangerously polluted air. This has tragic consequences: In 2016 alone, some […]
BRUSSELS, Belgium (AFP) — Air pollution is slowly easing in EU countries but still causes nearly half a million early deaths each year, the European Environment Agency (EEA) said in its annual report published Monday. Although pollution levels dropped slightly in 2015, they remain far higher than standards set by both the European Union and the World Health Organization, the report said. The findings come just weeks after an EU watchdog said most member states […]
by Kerry SHERIDAN Agence France Presse TAMPA, United States (AFP) — Humpback whales are famous for their eerie, underwater songs. But researchers in Japan said Wednesday these massive marine creatures stop singing, at least temporarily, when human-driven ships are nearby. Researchers focused on the remote Ogasawara Islands in Japan, some 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) south of Tokyo, where a single passenger-cargo liner passed through the area once per day. Male humpback whales sing as a […]
by Marlowe HOOD Agence France Presse PARIS, France (AFP) — Bits of plastic have been detected in the faeces of people in Europe, Russia and Japan, according to research claiming to show for the first time the widespread presence of plastics in the human food chain. All eight volunteers in a small pilot study were found to have passed several types of plastic, with an average of 20 micro-particles per 10 grams of stool, researchers […]
PARIS, France (AFP) — Global use of raw materials is expected to double by 2060, “placing twice the pressure on the environment” than at present, according to an OECD study released on Monday. The study “sees global materials use rising to 167 gigatonnes in 2060 from 90 gigatonnes today,” the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of advanced economies, said. It gave increases in population, economic activity and living standards around the world […]
THESSALONIKI, Greece (AFP) — Lake Vistonida in northern Greece has become an arachnophobe’s worst nightmare after it was cloaked recently by massive webs spun by hundreds of thousands of small spiders. Biologists say the recent phenomenon, though rare, is not unheard of and is caused by unseasonally warm weather prompting an increase in the local population of mosquitoes and gnats. “It’s caused by an overpopulation of spiders…there is an abundance of food available,” local […]
SEOUL, South Korea (AFP) — The last polar bear kept in South Korea has died of old age only weeks before his planned departure to better living conditions in Britain, zoo officials said Thursday. Tongki — a 23-year-old male named after a Japanese cartoon character of the 1980s — lived in a 330-square-metre (3,500-square-foot) concrete enclosure at the Everland theme park outside Seoul. The zoo had planned to move him to the Yorkshire Wildlife Park […]
MEXICO CITY (AFP) — The near-extinct vaquita marina, the world’s smallest porpoise, has not yet disappeared from its habitat off the coast of Mexico, a research team said Wednesday after spotting six of them. The vaquita has been nearly wiped out by illegal fishing in its native habitat, the Gulf of California, and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) warned in May that it could go extinct this year. But “all hope is not lost” for […]
