Extreme heat in Kases last month killed so many cattle that carcases were dumped in landfills or buried in unlined graves, Reuters reports. Normally processed as pet food or fertilizer, the 2,117 cows that died from heat exhaustion the weekend of June 11 overwhelmed standard operating procedures. Burying cattle in unlined pits is a risky option and last resort because of the potential for waste to seep into groundwater.
In New Zealand, sheep and cattle outnumber people. All that livestock passes gas, which means emitting more methane into the atmosphere. As such, the country has proposed to tax farmers for their livestock’s emissions. New Zealand’s agriculture makes up almost half of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. According to the BBC, there are about 5 […]
Around 6,000 years ago, more than two-thirds of Europe was covered in forest, a 2018 study found. But because of land clearing for agriculture and the use of wood for fuel, that number has more than halved, and today only around one third of Europe is woodland. In some countries like the UK and the […]
What does your grocery cart typically look like? Maybe you load it up with avocados, nutritious quinoa and bananas each week. Perhaps coffee always makes its way onto your grocery list, as does a bottle of wine for the weekend. Unfortunately, with current unsustainable methods of farming and worsening climate change, many of the staples […]
Footprints in the soil aren’t something you might normally associate with having a big impact on the environment, but soils are delicate ecosystems made up of circulating air and water that nourish organisms and plant roots, scientists from Lancaster University reported in The Conversation. Too much soil compaction can reduce plant growth, leading to less […]
Toxic per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances, known as PFAS or “forever chemicals,” are a family of more than 9,000 synthetic, human-made chemicals that barely break down in the natural environment, according to CHEM Trust. PFAS are used to make products water-, heat- or stain-resistant, The Guardian reported. Very low amounts of these forever chemicals in […]
Climatologist and agronomist Dr. Cynthia Rosenzweig, who is a senior research scientist and head of the Climate Impacts Group at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has been awarded the 2022 World Food Prize from the World Food Prize Foundation. Conceived of as the “Nobel Prize for Food and Agriculture,” according to the World Food […]
Human activity has degraded as much as 40 percent of the world’s land, impacting half of the people on Earth and putting about half of global gross domestic product at risk. That’s the stark finding of the Global Land Outlook 2, a new report from the UN’s Council to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). With more than […]
In a balanced ecosystem, every living thing plays an important role. Take away one — trees, for instance — and things start to collapse. Trees provide habitat and food for insects, birds, mammals like koalas, reptiles and other animals, as well as shade and nutrients for the soil from fallen leaves and rotting bark, not […]
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