Here’s Why Climate Change Gets The Spotlight But Biodiversity Doesn’t
Forbes, 01 Feb 2023
Global conferences focus public attention on pressing challenges with the hope that countries will be motivated to collectively address them. Last year, two major global conferences, the Conference of Parties (COP) meetings, took place, focusing on climate change and biodiversity. The climate COP was held in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt while the biodiversity COP was in Montreal, Canada. Yet, the response to the two COPs differed in important ways.
Planting more trees in cities could cut deaths from summer heat, says study
The Guardian, 01 Feb 2023
Planting more trees could mean fewer people die from increasingly high summer temperatures in cities, a study suggests. Increasing the level of tree cover from the European average of 14.9% to 30% can lower the temperature in cities by 0.4C, which could reduce heat-related deaths by 39.5%, according to first-of-its-kind modelling of 93 European cities by an international team of researchers.
Green projects are boosting UK growth – CBI report
BBC, 31 Jan 2023
The transition to a greener economy is worth £71bn and has brought jobs and investment to parts of the UK experiencing industrial decline. Those are the key findings of a new report written by the Confederation of British Industry (CBI). The drive to reach net zero emissions involves more than 20,000 businesses, it calculates. Some 840,000 jobs are linked to sectors ranging from renewable energy to waste management, it adds.
Biden restores protections to Alaska’s Tongass National Forest
BBC, 31 Jan 2023
Joel Jackson, the president of the Organized Village of Kake, a tribal community, has lived within the Tongass National Forest in Alaska his entire life. His community relies on the land for hunting deer and fishing salmon that swim in streams kept cold by the old-growth forest. But the 66-year-old worried about damage to that land – the largest national forest in the US – after former President Donald Trump rescinded a measure blocking logging and road-building on nine million acres of land in the Tongass in 2020.
Earth is on track to exceed 1.5C warming in the next decade, study using AI finds
The Guardian, 30 Jan 2023
The world is on the brink of breaching a critical climate threshold, according to a new study published on Monday, signifying time is running exceedingly short to spare the world the most catastrophic effects of global heating. Using artificial intelligence to predict warming timelines, researchers at Stanford University and Colorado State University found that 1.5C of warming over industrial levels will probably be crossed in the next decade.
