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China water contamination affects 2.4m after oil leak. 12 April 2014Last updated at 09:46 ET Queuing up to buy bottled water on Friday - shops are now reported to have sold out China's biggest oil company has been blamed for water contamination affecting over 2.4 million people in Lanzhou.
Australia’s beaches littered with 150m pieces of rubbish, says CSIRO. An estimated 150m pieces of rubbish are strewn upon Australia’s beaches, with many remote locations far less tidy than beaches close to cities, a CSIRO study has found.
The government science agency has been surveying more than 175 beaches around Australia’s coastline since 2011 to assess the extent of human-caused waste. The project, which concludes in June, has found that when population factors are accounted for, the more remote beaches contain a proportionally greater amount of rubbish than those next to large population centres. CSIRO said 80% of the estimated 150m pieces of rubbish on Australia’s beaches comes from land-based sources, such as plastic drinks bottles, with the rest made up of debris from the fishing industry. Border Village, a beach in South Australia near the border with Western Australia, was deemed to be the most rubbish-laden beach in Australia. 2013 in review: the year wildlife crime became an international security issue.
Arguably the biggest story of 2013 was wildlife crime, which escalated from a conservation issue to an international security threat.
Driven by rising demand for ivory from east Asia, it has doubled over the past five years into a global trade worth $10bn, threatening political and economic stability in central Africa. This month there were warnings that Africa could lose one-fifth of its elephants in the next decade if the continent's poaching crisis is not stopped. Pupils should stay indoors at lunch to avoid smog, says UK government adviser. Schools in areas affected by severe air pollution should keep pupils indoors at lunchtime to avoid them having asthma attacks and potentially lifelong lung damage, a key government adviser is urging.
Prof Frank Kelly said children should be stopped from using the playground during school hours to reduce their exposure to the smog that is affecting south-east England and is expected to spread to the Midlands and East Anglia. Kelly is the chair of the Department of Health's Committee on the Medical Effects of Air Pollution and a member of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs' Air Quality Expert Group. His advice comes after some schools in the capital decided to keep their pupils indoors on Wednesday as a precaution. Asked if that was sensible, Kelly told the Guardian: "As a general response this is a good approach as children tend to run around outside and therefore breathe deeper. The policy should apply to morning and afternoon breaks, as well as lunchtime, Kelly said.
Twitter ban in Turkey ahead of national elections triggers public outcry, international condemnation. Updated Sat 22 Mar 2014, 11:39am AEDT A Twitter ban in Turkey just days before national elections has triggered a public outcry and international condemnation.
Turkish courts blocked the social media platform a day after Turkish prime minister Tayyip Erdogan vowed to wipe it out. Ahead of bitterly contested national polls, Mr Erdogan has been battling claims of corruption, with alleged audio evidence of government wrongdoing being published on Twitter. News - Mysterious new man-made gases pose threat to ozone layer. 9 March 2014Last updated at 14:09 ET By Matt McGrath Environment correspondent, BBC News Dealing with the hole in the ozone layer has been one of the most successful international science projects.
Nasa-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'? A new study partly-sponsored by Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution.
Noting that warnings of 'collapse' are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that "the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history. " Cases of severe civilisational disruption due to "precipitous collapse - often lasting centuries - have been quite common. " The independent research project is based on a new cross-disciplinary 'Human And Nature DYnamical' (HANDY) model, led by applied mathematician Safa Motesharrei of the US National Science Foundation-supported National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, in association with a team of natural and social scientists.
Chilean Economist Manfred Max-Neef: US Is Becoming an "Underdeveloping Nation" Flights interactive: see the planes in the sky right now. Welcome to the Anthropocene. Trends are the problem. The carbon map: making sense of climate change responsibility and vulnerability.