Economic and political forces are rapidly transforming the forests of the Amazon basin, precipitating one of the world’s greatest environmental crises. Through an inter-discplinary modeling project known as Amazon Scenarios, scientists at the Woods Hole Research Center, the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (Brazil), and the Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazônia (Brazil), with colleagues at several other institutions, are simulating future trends in deforestation, forest fire, rive
New World Wildlife Fund study links protecting wildlife and improving human welfare
Saving endangered species like pandas, gorillas and tigers helps reduce poverty and improve the lives of local communities, according to a new World Wildlife Fund report. Now as the eighth Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity opens today in Curitiba, Brazil, WWF urges the CBD and member governments to integrate species conservation work into efforts to alleviate pov
“The platform provided by the European Commission’s recently launched Strategy on the Sustainable Use of Natural Resources1 creates a welcome opportunity for business to contribute directly to the goals of EU environment policy”, says Dr. Kevin Bradley, Director-General of the Alliance for Beverage Cartons and the Environment (ACE).
Commenting ahead of an important EU conference on natural resources2 Dr. Bradley says: “ACE supports in particular the Strategy’s emphasis on the ro
A new Finnish innovation efficiently removes cigarette smoke and provides clean air directly to a workstation. The personal clean air system has been developed in Tekes Fine Technology Programme.
Oy Lifa Air Ltd. product development seeks to innovate effective ventilation and air purifying solutions for smoking areas. For example, in Sweden, where smoking in restaurants is prohibited by law, the new Lifa air conditioning systems have been installed in approximately 30 restaurants
Project E! 2408 on Arctic Tourism had the ambitious target of mapping the effects tourism has already had on Arctic areas and pointing the way to tourism development without threatening the delicate ecosystem. Four widely differing locations within the Nordic Arctic region showed traditional reliance on just a few economic activities, making them vulnerable to unemployment. Project results demonstrate that tourism can offer a new source of local jobs in the Arctic region, provided it is develope
A natural physical process has been identified that could play a key role in secure sub-seabed storage of carbon dioxide produced by fossil-fuelled power stations.
With EPSRC funding, a team at the Centre for Gas Hydrate Research, at Heriot-Watt University is investigating how, in some conditions, seawater and carbon dioxide could combine into ice-like compounds in which the water molecules form cavities that act as cages, trapping the carbon dioxide molecules.
In the
The Department of Physical Sciences at the University of Helsinki has acquired a state-of-the-art polarimetric weather radar. The new radar is reserved exclusively for research. Its most important meteorological research target is the physics of rain clouds, and scientists intend to focus on snow and sleet in particular. Snowfall and its polarimetric measurements have hardly been studied anywhere else in the world, although in the Finnish conditions, for instance, snowfall is one of the key weath
Scientists have confirmed that climate warming is changing how much water remains locked in the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, according to an article published in the Journal of Glaciology.
Using radar altimeter data from ESA’s ERS-1 and ERS-2, Jay Zwally, a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and his colleagues mapped the height of the ice sheets and found there was a net loss of ice from the combined sheets between 1992 and 2002 and a corresponding rise
Poaching has significantly reduced Borneo’s population of Sumatran rhinos
World Wildlife Fund today released the results of a field survey from the island of Borneo which found that poaching has significantly reduced Borneo’s population of Sumatran rhinos, but a small group continues to survive in the “Heart of Borneo,” a region covered with vast tracts of rain forest.
The survey found evidence of at least 13 rhinos in the interior of the Malaysian state of Sa
There is a great interest in biogas as an environmentally friendly alternative to oil and other fossil fuels. However, biogas has been criticized for releasing methane. As a greenhouse gas, methane is 20-25 times worse than carbon dioxide. But new calculations now show that biogas is nevertheless better than fossil fuels as long as the methane emissions are lower than 10-20 percent. It was previously believed that the cut-off point was about 5 percent.
“The margins are thus consi
NASA scientists have found that a major form of global air pollution involved in summertime “smog” has also played a significant role in warming the Arctic.
In a global assessment of the impact of ozone on climate warming, scientists at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), New York, evaluated how ozone in the lowest part of the atmosphere changed temperatures over the past 100 years. Using the best available estimates of global emissions of gases that produce
Behavior of Scandinavian Ice Sheet at the end of the last Ice Age may preview loss of Greenland Ice Sheet due to global warming
The retreat of a massive ice sheet that once covered much of northern Europe has been described for the first time, and researchers believe it may provide a sneak preview of how present-day ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica will act in the face of global warming.
The study, which appears in the current issue of the journal Science, was led
A new theory to explain global warming was revealed at a meeting at the University of Leicester (UK) and is being considered for publication in the journal “Science First Hand”. The controversial theory has nothing to do with burning fossil fuels and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. According to Vladimir Shaidurov of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the apparent rise in average global temperature recorded by scientists over the last hundred years or so could be due to atmospheric changes tha
Researchers from the University of Essex have discovered a deep-sea oasis with new microbial life forms that could have significant implications for biotechnology. The findings have been published this week in the journal Nature.
The researchers have found that microbial activity, biomass and diversity are greatly increased at the interface between seawater and a salt-saturated brine lake, 3.3 kilometres below the surface of the Mediterranean. These life forms could have signif
A new chemical process for removing unwanted minerals from coal could lead to reductions in carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power stations.
There is already a way of burning coal in a cleaner, more efficient fashion that would reduce carbon dioxide emissions: this is where the coal is turned into a gas and used to drive a turbine. However, problems with cleaning the coal before it is burnt have made generating electricity in this way very expensive. This new chemical p
The amount of data acquired by satellites is increasing at an exponential rate, and researchers are learning about the value of this data in fighting epidemic outbreaks as a result of the ESA’s Epidemio project.
“I was negative about the role satellites could play in addressing epidemics, but now I am positive,” Penelope Vernatsou of the Swiss Tropical Institute in Switzerland said. The ESA-funded Epidemio project was developed in January 2004 to illustrate the benefits of remo
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