Green World Views

Aerial shot of a flooded landscape with trees and farmland under a bright blue sky. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article . Author: Hannah Cloke , University of Reading After the UK’s hottest ever summer on record, when much of the country has experienced a fraction of its normal levels of rain, many regions continue to be in drought. This water crisis has led to parched reservoirs and widespread hosepipe bans. Yet early autumn heat has been making way for some serious downpours . While the country desperately needs rain to break the drought, we are also facing a future where warmer, wetter winters are putting millions more people, homes and infrastructure in the way of potentially damaging floods. Have we got too much, or too little water? Drought and flooding are not opposite emergencies. They are two consequences of an imperfect and misunderstood water system. By looking at four places where our lives d...

There are thousands of small-scale, community driven initiatives making a huge difference in people’s lives and contributing to efforts to curb global warming. In early April, 29 countries pledged more than $5 billion to the UN-backed Global Environment Facility ( GEF ). The Fund said this was “record support, providing a  major boost to international efforts to protect biodiversity and curb threats to climate change, plastics and toxic chemicals ”. But why such a major boost? Well, the GEF is a multilateral fund that serves as a financial mechanism for several environmental conventions including the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. It has its own  Small Grants Program  (SGP)  which grants of up to $50,000 directly to local communities including indigenous peoples, community-based organizations and other non-governmental groups investing in projects related to healing our planet. The initiative is implemented in...

Author: Grist A new United Nations report released Wednesday shows farming, mining, and logging has marred more than half of the planet. In a portrait of land degradation across the globe, the report describes entire forests razed for timber or pasture; sensitive grasslands and wetlands lost to sprawling cities; and over-exploited lands that have dried up into desert.  People have altered 70 percent of Earth’s lands from their natural state and degraded up to 40 percent. This threatens “many species on Earth, including our own,” the report warns. If these trends continue, experts expect growing disruptions to human health, food supplies, migration, and biodiversity loss driven by climate change, in what the authors calls a “confluence of unprecedented crises.”  “The human-environment relationship must drastically change to avoid catastrophic tipping points whereby the human power of exploitation is overwhelmed by the power of nature,” the report says, noting that half of hum...