Around The Web
Jellyfish surge in Mediterranean threatens environment – and tourists
Scientists across the Mediterranean say a surge in the number of jellyfish this year threatens not just the biodiversity of one of the world's most overfished seas but also the health of tens of thousands of summer tourists.
"I flew along a 300km stretch of coastline on 21 April and saw millions of jellyfish," said Professor Stefano Piraino of Salento University in southern Italy. Piraino is the head of a Mediterranean-wide project to track the rise in the number of jellyfish as global warming and overfishing clear the way for them to prosper.
Continue reading...'Canned hunting': the lions bred for slaughter
They are adorably cute, with grubby brown fur so soft it seems to slip through my fingers like flour. It is only when one of the nine-week-old cubs playfully grabs my arm with its teeth and squeezes with an agonising grip that I remember – this is a lion, a wild animal. These four cubs are not wild, however. They are kept in a small pen behind the Lion's Den, a pub on a ranch in desolate countryside 75 miles south of Johannesburg. Tourists stop to pet them but most visitors do not venture over the hill, where the ranch has pens holding nearly 50 juvenile and fully-grown lions, and two tigers.
Continue reading...Why Britain's barren uplands have farming subsidies to blame | George Monbiot
Even before you start reading the devastating State of Nature report, published today, you get an inkling of where the problem lies. It's illustrated in the opening pages with two dramatic photographs of upland Britain (p6). They are supposed to represent the natural glories we're losing. In neither of them (with the exception of some distant specks of scrub and leylandii in the second) is there a tree to be seen. The many square miles they cover contain nothing but grass and dead bracken. They could scarcely provide a better illustration of our uncanny ability to miss the big picture.
The majority of wildlife requires cover: places in which it can shelter from predators or ambush prey, places in which it can take refuge from extremes of heat and cold, or find the constant humidity that fragile roots and sensitive invertebrates require. Yet, in the very regions in which you might expect to find such cover (trees, scrub, other dense foliage) there is almost none. I'm talking about the infertile parts of Britain, in which farming is so unproductive that it survives only as a result of public money. Here, in the places commonly described as Britain's "wildernesses", almost nothing remains. And the "almost" has become radically smaller over the past 20 years.
Continue reading...Record Burmese python caught in Florida
Wildlife officials say a Burmese python nearly 19ft (5.8m) long has been captured in Florida.
Continue reading...DR Congo waits on funding for world's largest hydropower project
Complete set of Grand Inga dams on the Congo River would generate a massive 40,000MW of electricity
The dream of harnessing the mighty Congo with the world's largest set of dams has moved closer, with the World Bank and other financial institutions expected to offer finance and South Africa agreeing to buy half of the power generated.
In the past 60 years French, Belgian, Chinese, Brazilian and African engineers have all hoped to dam the river.
Continue reading...India acts to save Asiatic lion by moving it – but hard work has only just begun | Kavitha Rao
Wildlife is under threat in most of India, but there's one state that's clinging to its fauna, if rather too tightly. The state of Gujarat – whose Gir forest shelters the world's only Asiatic lion population – has lost a bitter battle over an ambitious translocation project.
For over 18 years, conservationists have been attempting to move a pride of Gir lions to the Kuno sanctuary in the state of Madhya Pradesh. But the Gujarat government stubbornly refused to let the lions go. Meanwhile, an impatient Madhya Pradesh government bizarrely suggested introducing African cheetahs, whose Asiatic cousin once roamed the area.
Continue reading...PR smokescreen cannot hide the holes in climate teaching proposals | Bob Ward
The Department for Education this month ended a consultation on its controversial proposals for the national curriculum amid protests about its plans to cut back on the teaching of climate change.
The education secretary, Michael Gove, launched his review of the curriculum in January 2011, but it has been beset by problems and delays, including complaints about of a lack of transparency and resignation threats from key advisers. It has also been hit by criticisms over suggestions that climate change would be omitted from a new slimmed-down version of the curriculum, which would be taught in English schools from September 2014.
Continue reading...The week in wildlife – in pictures
The dirty fossil fuel secret behind Burma's democratic fairytale | Nafeez Ahmed
New evidence has emerged that the systematic violence against ethnic Rohingya in Burma - "described as genocidal by some experts" - is being actively supported by state agencies. But the violence's links to the country's ambitions to rapidly expand fossil fuel production, at massive cost to local populations and to the environment, have been largely overlooked.
Over 125,000 ethnic Rohingya have been forcibly displaced since waves of violence swept across Burma's Arakan state last year, continuing until now, according to the New York-based Human Rights Watch's (HRW) latest sobering report. The "ethnic cleansing" campaign against Arakan's Muslim minority, although instigated largely by Buddhist monks rallying local mobs, has been the product of "extensive state involvement and planning", according to HRW's UK director David Mepham.
Continue reading...Inside a genetically modified salmon farm in Panama - video
Amazon v the Amazon: internet retailer in domain name battle
When you see the word "Amazon", what's the first thing that springs to mind – the world's biggest forest, the longest river or the largest internet retailer – and which do you consider most important?
These questions have risen to the fore in an arcane, but hugely important, debate about how to redraw the boundaries of the internet. Brazil and Peru have lodged objections to a bid made by the US e-commerce giant for a prime new piece of cyberspace: ".amazon".
Continue reading...GM salmon's global HQ – 1,500m high in the Panamanian rainforest
It is hard to think of a more unlikely setting for genetic experimentation or for raising salmon: a rundown shed at a secretive location in the Panamanian rainforest miles inland and 1,500m above sea level.
Continue reading...Chernobyl's ghost town - in pictures
Fukushima town revealed in Google Street View two years after tsunami
Two years after Fukushima's triple nuclear meltdown forced tens of thousands of residents to flee, it is possible to take a virtual journey deep into the exclusion zone to one of the towns they left behind.
Google Street View has published striking images of the devastation visited on Namie by the March 2011 tsunami and nuclear meltdown: abandoned homes, shops and restaurants, fields blanketed in grass and weeds.
Continue reading...Easter eggs rated by palm oil use
Lindt, Thorntons and Guylian have come bottom of a green ranking of Easter eggs based on their use of palm oil. Divine Chocolate came top, with the Co-operative and Sainsbury's close behind in the survey of more than 70 brands by Ethical Consumer magazine and charity Rainforest Foundation UK (RFUK).
The organisations are launching a campaign in response to the increasing threat that unsustainable palm oil is posing to the world's rainforests, their indigenous wildlife, and the people whose livelihoods depend on the forests. Having destroyed vast areas of forest in countries such as Indonesia, palm oil companies are now planning to expand in the rainforests of the Congo Basin in Africa.
Continue reading...Shark species facing extinction - in pictures
1.5C rise in temperature enough to start permafrost melt, scientists warn
A global temperature rise of 1.5C would be enough to start the melting of permafrost in Siberia, scientists warned on Thursday.
Any widespread thaw in Siberia's permanently frozen ground could have severe consequences for climate change. Permafrost covers about 24% of the land surface of the northern hemisphere, and widespread melting could eventually trigger the release of hundreds of gigatonnes of carbon dioxide and methane, which would have a massive warming effect.
Continue reading...Chinese environment official challenged to swim in polluted river
Widespread outrage against China's environmental issues that began when Beijing's air pollution hit record levels last month has spread to encompass another major public health threat: water pollution.
Last week, an eyeglass-retailer executive from Rui'an City, coastal Zhejiang province, offered the city's environmental protection chief Bao Zhenming more than £20,000 to take a 20-minute dip in a highly polluted local river. The entrepreneur, Jin Zengmin, posted the dare to his microblog beneath pictures showing the waterway overflowing with discarded aluminum cans, polystyrene boxes and paper lanterns. He blamed the river's industrial demise on dumping by a local rubber shoe factory.
Continue reading...After 30 years, is a GM food breakthrough finally here?
Scientists say they have seen the future of genetically modified foods and have concluded that it is orange or, more precisely, golden. Next year, golden rice – normal rice that has been genetically modified to provide vitamin A to counter blindness and other diseases in children in the developing world – could be given to farmers in the Philippines for planting in paddy fields.
Thirty years after scientists first revealed they had created the world's first GM crop, hopes that their potential to ease global malnutrition problems may be realised at last. Bangladesh and Indonesia have indicated they are ready to accept golden rice and other nations, including India, have also said that they are considering planting it.
Continue reading...Devastation on England's east coast after 1953's 'Big Flood' – in pictures
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