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NewSecurityBeat

The blog of the Wilson Center's Environmental Change and Security Program
Showing posts from category conservation.
  • Can Singapore’s NEWater Spark a Wastewater Revolution in China?

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    China Environment Forum  //  March 12, 2020  //  By Ailing J. Bressman
    NEWater Visitor Center1

    China is one of the “thirstiest” countries in the world with a per capita water availability a quarter of the United States. With population, pollution, and water shortages growing unabatedly, reclaimed water (e.g., treating wastewater to drinking water standards) could be the answer to China’s water insecurity. In China, extensive research in the 1980s into water reclamation and urban investments supporting infrastructure in the 2000s sparked production capacity in the country to rise from 63 billion gallons a day to 236 billion gallons per day between 2009 to 2015. Today, however, reclaimed water is a mere drop in the bucket meeting less than 1 percent of total urban water use. China could look to the tiny Southeast Asian city-state of Singapore to learn how it tapped reclaimed water to turn its water-scarce tiny island into a high-tech hydrohub. 

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  • To Fight for a Living Planet, Restore its Biology

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    Guest Contributor  //  Uncharted Territory  //  February 25, 2020  //  By Thomas E. Lovejoy

    We face the greatest environmental challenges ever relating to climate change, biodiversity, land use, and more. Humans are driving 1 million species to extinction, according to a report by the UN-backed Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Some $44 trillion of annual global economic product that depend on nature are in jeopardy. Fires have ravaged large swathes of the Amazon—Brazil and Bolivia in particular—and Australia.

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  • Advancing One Health: Protecting People, Gorillas, and the Land on Which They Live

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    Guest Contributor  //  Uncharted Territory  //  February 19, 2020  //  By Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka

    A group photo of VHCTs after  a training at the Gorilla Health and Community Conservation CenterIn 2003, a scabies skin disease outbreak affecting mountain gorillas in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park was traced to people living around the national park—people with limited access to basic health and social services. To protect the people and wildlife of this special park, we launched Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH), an NGO that promotes biodiversity conservation by enabling people, gorillas, and other wildlife to coexist harmoniously through improved health and wellbeing.

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  • To Envision a More Sustainable Future Tell the Story of Conservation Technology

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    Guest Contributor  //  Uncharted Territory  //  February 12, 2020  //  By Lisa Palmer

    shutterstock_1098811376-645x363Last summer, I stood on a cliff 100 feet above the Madre De Dios River, in Southern Peru near the Bolivian border, to watch the rosy gift of an Amazon sunset. It was quiet, in a tropical rainforest way, with the light clamor of parrots, macaws, and cicadas. Then, a peke-peke motorized canoe broke through the soft din. It arrived from the east, carrying a new supply of diesel fuel for the gold miners who were prepping the generator that would operate a suction-pump and dredge for gold across the river and around the bend. Before nightfall, the fuel ignited the baritone of a diesel generator. It moaned all night and all day, barely stopping. In subsequent days, instead of a light clamor of birds and primates, the thrum of a gold mining operation seemed like all I could hear.

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  • To Reduce Future Conflicts over Water, Reconceptualize “Shared Waters”

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    Guest Contributor  //  Uncharted Territory  //  February 3, 2020  //  By Aaron Wolf & Mckenna Coffey

    Wolf-645x430In the years ahead, climate change and the proliferation of new technologies and information availability will require us to reshape our vision of shared waters. Because these megatrends are experienced in concert, the opportunities, challenges, and uncertainties for shared water management will continue to compound over time.

    While it is impossible to know precisely how shared water will look in the future, we should already be working to expand how we conceptualize shared waters, address inequities embedded within water management, and develop criteria and processes that successfully identify and include non-traditional shared water actors in decision-making. These shifts will strengthen our ability to generate creative and sustainable management strategies and help us avoid water-related conflicts.

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  • Our Ocean and Cryosphere Under Threat

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    Guest Contributor  //  Uncharted Territory  //  January 29, 2020  //  By David Balton

    Balton-645x416Evidence of the effects of climate change continues to mount. We see it in extreme weather events, including droughts and intense hurricanes and cyclones, in biodiversity loss, and in erratic weather patterns around the globe. While many of these impacts rightfully make it into front-page news, climate change is also profoundly affecting parts of our planet that we do not understand well—the ocean and the cryosphere.

    In September 2019, the International Panel on Climate Change issued a Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (SROCC). The report provides a new and sobering analysis of current conditions, as well as projections into the future. Produced by more than 100 authors from 36 countries, the SROCC painstakingly reviews the latest scientific literature, referencing some 7,000 scientific publications in all.

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  • Intense 2019 Amazon Fire Season May Become Dangerous Template for 2020

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    Guest Contributor  //  January 23, 2020  //  By Benjamin Dills
    20190812-amazon

    The Amazon endured the most intense fire season in almost a decade in August 2019. On August 19, smoke from the faraway fires blackened the skies over Sao Paulo. By the next day, the hashtag “#PrayforAmazonia” was sweeping across Twitter. The social media outcry brought world attention to the already dire scientific warnings, and world leaders offered aid and pressured Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro to take action.

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  • To Help Save the Planet, Stop Environmental Crime

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    Guest Contributor  //  Uncharted Territory  //  January 6, 2020  //  By Sharon Guynup

    ZakoumaAP_180517_014764-e1578317177856Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, humans have so vastly altered Earth’s systems that we’re now in the midst of what many are calling the Anthropocene Epoch. Human activity has become the dominant influence on climate and the environment, inflicting changes that may persist for millennia.

    We are razing the planet’s last intact wild lands, degrading, deforesting, carving up, and destroying huge swathes of habitat. We’re overfishing and poisoning our rivers and oceans. We continue to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, raising CO2 levels and hastening climatic changes that are already affecting all life on Earth.

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