Tag: Environment

Israeli firm in Gaza extracts drinking water from air

by Guillaume Lavallee Agence France-Presse GAZA CITY, Palestinian Territories (AFP) — The densely populated Gaza Strip has long lacked sufficient drinking water, but a new project helps ease the shortage with a solar-powered process to extract potable water straight from the air. Unusually, the project operating in the Islamist-run Palestinian enclave, which has been blockaded by Israel since 2007, is the brainchild of a Russian-Israeli billionaire, Michael Mirilashvili. The company he heads, Watergen, has developed […]

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Two smuggled Indonesian orangutans fly home from Thailand

BANGKOK, Thailand (AFP) — Eating fruit and drinking from plastic bottles, two Sumatran orangutans stared from their cages at Bangkok airport on Thursday before flying home to Indonesia, years after being smuggled into Thailand. Poachers in Southeast Asia frequently capture the critically endangered orangutans to sell as pets, and police said four-year-olds Ung Aing and Natalee were supposed to be sold to a tourism business. Wildlife traffickers tried to smuggle the two in via Malaysia […]

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Norway okays giant North Sea carbon storage project

OSLO, Norway (AFP) — Norway gave approval Tuesday to a giant project to capture and store CO2 below the North Sea, a technology that could help efforts to reduce carbon emissions. The Northern Lights project aims to inject CO2 captured from Norwegian industrial firms into geological formations 2,600 metres (8,530 feet) below the seabed where it should be trapped permanently. Initially the project aims to capture and store 1.5 million tonnes of CO2 per year […]

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Indonesia’s female forest guardians fight for the environment

by Alfath Asmunda Agence France-Presse INDONESIA (AFP) — Sumini gets up at dawn to do her household chores — then leads a team of women into the jungles of Indonesia’s Sumatra island, on a mission to battle rampant deforestation and wildlife poaching. The 45-year-old mother of five heads a unique team of female rangers taking on illegal loggers and hunters threatening Sumatran tigers, pangolins and other at-risk wildlife. The culprits are mostly men, including neighbours […]

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India’s Modi lays foundations for renewable energy megapark

AHMEDABAD, India (AFP) — Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid the foundations Tuesday for what he said would be the world’s largest renewable energy park, set to produce a massive 30 gigawatts of electricity. The vast project in the Kutch region of western Gujarat state spread over an area of 72,600 hectares (180,000 acres) — the size of Singapore — will contain solar panels, solar energy storage units and windmills. “The hybrid renewable energy park […]

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Australia’s Byron Bay beach shrinks as sand disappears

BYRON BAY, Australia (AFP) — Australia’s Byron Bay usually conjures images of bathers lounging on sunkissed shores, or blissed-out longboarders cruising along cyan-blue waves — but coastal erosion and lashing storms have reduced its seashore to a debris-strewn slither. The tourist hotspot’s main beach has been reduced to a thin strip by a sand-shifting phenomenon known as “headland bypassing”. Recent wild storms have then eroded it further. For more than six months, residents have watched […]

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Accounting for carbon footprint changes view of human progress: UN agency

UNITED NATIONS, United States (AFP) — Dependence on fossil fuels has an impact on the assessment of human progress, according to a report published Tuesday by the United Nations Development Programme that takes carbon footprints into account for the first time. The report presents world leaders with a choice: take “bold steps to reduce the immense pressure that is being exerted on the environment and the natural world,” or risk stalling humanity’s progress, said a […]

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Solar eclipse plunges southern Chile, Argentina into darkness

by Alberto PEÑA PUCON, Chile (AFP) — Thousands of people turned their heads to the sky to watch a solar eclipse that lasted around two minutes on Monday as southern Chile and Argentina were plunged into darkness. Heavy rain had threatened to prevent star gazers in Chile from seeing the eclipse but at the last moment the clouds parted just enough for the phenomenon to be partially visible. “It was beautiful, unique. The truth is […]

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Storms help Australia contain UNESCO heritage island fire

BRISBANE, Australia (AFP) — Australian firefighters have managed to control a bushfire that burned more than half of the UNESCO world heritage-listed Fraser Island, around two months after a suspected illegal campfire sparked the blaze. The fire on the world’s largest sand island, off Australia’s east coast, destroyed large swathes of the isle’s forests before heavy downpours arrived over the weekend. “With the help of welcome rainfall and a massive response from crews, the fire […]

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Emissions fell record 7 percent in 2020: study

by Patrick GALEY PARIS, France (AFP) — Carbon emissions fell a record seven percent in 2020 as countries imposed lockdowns and restrictions on movement during the Covid-19 pandemic, the Global Carbon Project said Friday in its annual assessment. The fall of an estimated 2.4 billion tonnes is considerably larger than previous annual record declines, such as 0.9 billion tonnes at the end of World War II or 0.5 billion tonnes in 2009 at the height […]

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Trash tracking satellites help Indonesia tackle marine waste

by Lucie GODEAU Agence France-Presse JAKARTA, Indonesia (AFP) — Every year, pounding rains wash away mountains of plastic waste from the streets of Jakarta, with some of it ending up as far away as Bali’s beaches. So scientists are turning to satellites to trace the rubbish and figure out how to tackle the problem. Indonesia allows more waste to enter the ocean than any other country apart from China. The archipelago of nearly 270 million […]

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Climate change biggest threat to natural World Heritage sites

by Nina LARSON Agence France-Presse GENEVA, Switzerland (AFP) — Climate change has become the biggest threat to UN-listed natural world heritage sites like glaciers and wetlands, and has pushed Australia’s Great Barrier Reef into “critical” condition, conservationists said Wednesday. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) revealed in a new report that shifts due to the changing climate now imperil a full third of the 252 UNESCO-listed natural sites around the globe. Overall, 94 […]

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