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Credit: Will Parson/Chesapeake Bay Program
Urban areas are on the rise and changing rapidly in form and function, with spillover effects on virtually all areas of the Earth. The UN estimates that by 2050, 68% of the world s population will reside in urban areas. In the inaugural issue of
npj Urban Sustainability, a new Nature Partner Journal out today, a team of leading urban ecologists outlines a practical checklist to guide interventions, strategies, and research that better position urban systems to meet urgent sustainability goals.
Co-author Steward Pickett of Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies explains, Urban areas shape demographics, socio-economic processes, urban form, technologies, and the environment - both near and far. As the world becomes more urbanized, what we do in cities will be key to achieving global sustainability goals.There is great potential, but achieving it will require integrating knowledge, methods, and expertise from different disciplines
Today’s post celebrates some of the highlights from TNOC writing in 2020. These contributions originating around the world were one or more of widely read, offering novel points of view, and/or somehow disruptive in a useful way. All 1000+ TNOC essays and roundtables are worthwhile reads, of course, but what follows will give you a taste of 2020’s key and diverse content. Which is not entirely about Covid, although it could have been.
Check out highlights from previous years: 2019, 2018,2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012.2020 was difficult. Heartbreaking. I am sure everyone reading this has been battered by COVID. We all have lost people. So much of what we love about cities performing arts, restaurants, diverse communities, employment…life has been gutted. I hear us talk about nature coming back, and the value of parks, and yet…and yet there has been so much human devastation. Now that we have seen how our cities around the world truly function at their most vulnera
Choose moderation and unburden the earth December 21, 2020, 7:52 PM IST
By Narayani Ganesh
A new year never fails to inspire us to get on those weighing scales and make a solemn, earnest resolution to shed the extra kilos. Walk regularly, eat right, exercise, are all on the to-do list at least for a couple of weeks until it all gets forgotten in the hurly burly of life. But what of the weight, the burden, we’ve been heaping on Planet Earth? Do we have any thoughts on shedding those extra kilos before we paint ourselves into a corner?
According to scientists researching human impact on Earth, the mass of all human-created things including built-up infrastructure, vehicles and all manner of manufactured goods, now “exceeds the weight of all living things on the planet.” Not only that, using a combination of computational and experimental synthetic biology tools and satellite imagery, systems biologist Ron Milo of the Weizmann Institute of Science and his tea