Archive for May 2024

Journalist Marcel Gomes has traced beef in supermarkets and fast food restaurants in the U.S. and Europe to Brazilian ranches on illegally cleared land. In an e360 interview, he talks about the challenges of documenting the supply chains and getting companies to clean them up.

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Addressing climate change means getting fossil fuels out of about 115 million U.S. homes — ASAP. But right now, that shift is happening at a snail’s pace; by one expert’s estimate , it would take about 200 years to electrify all homes at the current rate. Entrepreneur Grant Gunnison sees a way to speed things along…

California spent the last decade building up a massive fleet of batteries to help clean up its electrical grid. This spring, those storage plants passed a major threshold, and now are visibly reshaping the state’s power grid — just as clean energy advocates said they would. Governor Gavin Newsom announced in late…

“April is the cruelest month,” wrote T.S. Eliot in the poem The Waste Land. For the 30 million residents of India’s southern state of Kerala, this April was particularly cruel, with the India Meteorological Department (IMD) declaring the first ever recorded heatwave in the state. The heatwave also came at a time when Kerala, along […]

JAKARTA — Indonesia’s largest deforesting company has continued to clear peatland despite an order by the government for the firm to stop clearing rainforests. The company in question is pulpwood producer PT Mayawana Persada. Since 2016, the company has cleared more than 35,000 hectares (86,500 acres) of forests to establish monoculture pulpwood plantations — an […]

Torrential rains have unleashed widespread and destructive flooding in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil’s southernmost state.

Climeworks has officially switched on the world’s largest “direct air capture” plant, which sits on a lava plateau in southern Iceland. On Wednesday, the Swiss company said it started operations at its Mammoth facility , marking an important milestone in the world’s emerging efforts to remove planet-warming carbon…

Carlos Moreno, the scientist behind the concept, wrote a new book to introduce the 15-minute city to a wider audience.

Civil society groups in Southeast Asia are calling for greater public participation and transparency in the drafting process of a regional declaration on environmental rights, as well as stronger levels of commitment from states within the final agreement. First tabled in 2021 by the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the bloc’s declaration on […]

The Pan Amazon is a significant source of several key industrial commodities. Global markets are not overly dependent on the region; nonetheless, production from Amazonian mines is not insignificant. Development of mineral resources is a decades-long process and, if the extractive sector were to abandon the region, as proposed by some environmental advocates, the global […]