As Rhishja Cota prepared to leave for Geneva for this month's meeting of the Animals Committee of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), she spoke about her latest efforts to protect imperiled wildlife and what the world needs to do better to prevent these species from falling into extinction.
Coastal towns in Florida are bracing themselves against rising sea levels. A Miami-area startup provides sea level rise assessment reports and advice on individual property parcels in vulnerable cities in South Florida. On the Gulf of Mexico, the village of Yankeetown is protecting its surrounding marshland to use as a buffer against rising seas.
New research published in Nature has confirmed that some of the most destructive hurricanes to pummel the U.S. in the past decade were made worse by climate change. Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Maria were 5 to 10 percent wetter because of global warming, scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found.
In terms of natural disasters, 2018 was a really bad year. Communities in the United States and around the world were devastated by record-breaking wildfires, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods and other catastrophes.Lamentably, these weather and geophysical events caused 10,400 human deaths and $160 billion in estimated damages last year, reinsurance company Munich Re said on Tuesday.
Other studies have found a link between air pollution and damage to the brain. A study in May suggested that many heavy metals found in the air may make it into brain tissue, and those pollutants are activating genes that may lead to cancers or neurodegenerative disorders. Additionally, a China-based study published last month found that