ENVIRONMENT & CLIMATE

The World’s Primates at Risk of Extinction Due to Global Commodities Trade and Consumption

ENVIRONMENT & CLIMATE According to a peer-reviewed journal, the economic benefits of commodity export for primate habitat countries has been limited relative to the extreme environmental costs of pollution, habitat degradation, loss of biodiversity, continued food insecurity, and the threat of emerging disease. This recent study was published in the Journal PeerJ - the Journal of Life and Environmental Science.

World Record 633 Divers Clean Ocean Floor

Another of the estimated 50,000 Guinness World Records has been broken and it happened this month when 633 scuba divers scooped up trash from the ocean floor near the Deerfield Beach International Fishing Pier.

52-Million-Year-Old Tree is First of Its Kind in Southern Hemisphere

Millions of years ago, a volcano erupted in what's now the Patagonia region of southern Argentina, leaving behind a huge caldera. Water accumulated in the crater, and eventually it became a lake teeming with countless plants, insects, and other life-forms. Over time, these creatures fossilized deep within the lake's layers of mud and ash, creating a kind of geological jackpot for today's paleontologists.

New Findings Show Pesticide DDT Persists in Remote Lakes at Concerning Levels

Pesticide use can result in persistent and permanent changes in aquatic ecosystems The pesticide DDT persists in remote lakes at concerning levels half a century it was banned, affecting critical marine species and potentially entire lake food webs, according to new findings of a multi-university research team published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Science & Technology of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society.

Pollinators: What’s All the Buzz About?

Our food production depends heavily on pollinators. The majority of flowering plants are pollinated by insects and other animals. It has been estimated that the proportion of animal-pollinated wild plant species rises from an average of 78 percent in temperate-zone communities to 94 percent in tropical communities.

Ocean Habitats Are On a Steep Decline

A crisis for biodiversity also risks becoming a major humanitarian challenge. Billions of people worldwide - especially the world's poorest- rely on healthy oceans to provide livelihoods, jobs and food and the range of goods and services that flow from coastal and marine environments.

The Impacts of Land Degradation

Preventing degradation is much cheaper in the long run than permitting it. Land degradation is the persistent reduction of the capacity of the land to support both biodiversity and human needs.

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