When cows eat, they burp. And what they exhale generates almost a third of global methane emissions – a greenhouse gas 80 times more potent in warming the climate than CO2. So tracking this short-lived climate gas is crucial.  

Six miles from Bakersfield, California, at the Bear 5 cow feedlot, this work is starting to happen. High-resolution satellites are being used for the first time at the feedlot to track methane emissions from cow burps. Measuring cow belches from space is bringing critical attention to the brewing climate issues from cows. After all, the methane produced by these gassy animals in one year at Bear 5 cow feedlot alone could power more than 15,000 homes in California.  

Zhang Jian, a rural Chinese citizen living in the greater Kunming municipal region, readied himself for resettlement. After the state zoned his village for conservation, the next step for him and his rural comrades appeared to be resettlement into an urban high-rise apartment. Ecological migration is the official term used by the Chinese government for state-led processes of resettlement in the name of environmental protection. Journalists and researchers have predominantly focused on such resettlement programs in China’s west, particularly those related to grazing and anti-desertification campaigns. Less attention has been given to the ecological migrations occurring in China’s municipal regions, which are precipitating the movement of millions of rural landholders into, mainly, high-rise apartments.

Dazzling skyscrapers, kung-fu movies, and live seafood restaurants are what people think of when they contemplate small and densely populated Hong Kong. So, it is a shame that we rarely talk about Hong Kong’s “wilder” side—such as the approximately 40 percent of our land area that is designated as country parks, or the more than 200 offshore islands that include sites of the Hong Kong UNESCO Global Geopark.  

“Save your kitchen scraps to feed the hens,” urged a poster for the victory gardens created on the home front in the Second World War. Feeding food scraps to backyard chickens and pigs turned this waste into a delicious source of human food. Pigs were especially prized in this effort as they would eat what most other animals considered inedible.

China is Brazil’s main trading partner and accounts for over a quarter of all Brazilian exports. Yet two of the largest products in this trading relationship—beef and soybeans—are also crops that drive deforestation in the Amazon. Brazil’s deforestation rates declined substantially between 2004 and 2012, but forest clearage needed to raise cattle reversed the trend: The Amazon lost 10,476 square kilometers of rainforest in 2021, the highest total in the decade.  

In recent years, a new narrative has appeared on Chinese social media: that a warmer and wetter climate in Northwest China will herald a return to the “golden age” of the Tang dynasty (618–907 AD). 

Climate change will bring benefits, so the story goes, as historically China has flourished during warmer and wetter periods – conditions becoming common once more in the Northwest, a region extending from the province of Shaanxi to Xinjiang in the far west.

Soil degradation affects one-third of the Earth’s surface, triggering dust storms, floods, and landslides. It is also a global threat to our food supply, and diminishes the soil’s ability to sequester carbon to mitigate climate change. China has only 0.21 hectares of agricultural land per person, which is well below the global average. Worse yet, over 40 percent of that land is already degraded.  

When Kevin Chen began his agricultural research 20 years ago, most dairy farms in China were small and family-owned. People of his generation did not grow up with milk deliveries or ice cream. Today, however, these farms have been replaced by massive agri-businesses raising tens of thousands of dairy cows, and dairy is a regular part of many people’s diets in China, thanks to rising incomes and years of governmental promotion of cheese, yogurt, and milk.