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Olszynski, Martin, Environmental Monitoring and Ecosystem Management in the Oil Sands: Spaceship Earth or Escort Tugboat? (June 22, 2015). McGill International Journal of Sustainable Development Law & Policy, Vol. 10, No. 1, 2014. Available for download at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2621795 “Spurred on by mounting international concern about the environmental impacts of the oil sands and determined to …
Adapting To Climate Change in Coastal Parks: Estimating the Exposure of Park Assets to 1 m of Sea-Level Rise Natural Resource Technical Report NPS/NRSS/GRD/NRR—2015/916: “In advance of the two-year anniversary of President Obama’s Climate Action Plan, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell today released a report revealing that national park infrastructure and historic and cultural resources totalling more than …
Quantifying renewable groundwater stress with Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) – accepted manuscript online: 16 June 2015, Full publication history “Groundwater is an increasingly important water supply source globally. Understanding the amount of groundwater used versus the volume available is crucial to evaluate future water availability. We present a groundwater stress assessment to quantify the relationship between groundwater …
Brooks, Thom, How Not to Save the Planet (June 19, 2015). Brooks, Thom “How Not to Save the Planet,” Ethics, Policy & Environment (target article) (Forthcoming). Available for download at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2620647 “Climate change presents us with perhaps the most pressing challenge today. But is it a problem we can solve? This article argues that …
“About 8 million tons of plastic enters the ocean each year (Jambeck et al., 2015). Part of this accumulates in 5 areas where currents converge: the gyres. At least 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic are currently in the oceans (Eriksen et al., 2014), a third of which is concentrated in the infamous Great Pacific Garbage …
Arctic Planning: DOD Expects to Play a Supporting Role to Other Federal Agencies and Has Efforts Under Way to Address Capability Needs and Update Plans, GAO-15-566: Published: Jun 19, 2015. Publicly Released: Jun 19, 2015. Farm Program Modernization: Farm Service Agency Needs to Demonstrate the Capacity to Manage IT Initiatives, GAO-15-506: Published: Jun 18, 2015. …
Via The Guardian – This is an extract from Pope Francis’s encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si – “The pope’s encyclical on climate change – on Thursday June 18, 2015 the Vatican published Pope Francis’s long-awaited encyclical on the environment, which warns of ‘serious consequences’ if the world does not act on climate change.”: “The …
“New research by NOAA, University of Alaska, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the journal Oceanography shows that surface waters of the Chukchi and Beaufort seas could reach levels of acidity that threaten the ability of animals to build and maintain their shells by 2030, with the Bering Sea reaching this level of acidity by 2044. “Our research shows …
Invasive Species: Issues in Brief – M. Lynne Corn, Specialist in Natural Resources Policy; Renée Johnson, Specialist in Agricultural Policy. May 22, 2015. “For the first few centuries after the arrival of Europeans in North America, plants and animals of many species were sent between the two continents. The transfer of non-natives consisted not only …
“The Florida Everglades is a large and diverse aquatic ecosystem that has been greatly altered over the past century by an extensive water control infrastructure designed to increase agricultural and urban economic productivity. The Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP), launched in 2000, is a joint effort led by the state and federal government to reverse …
Via onEarth: “Forget your weather app with its five- or even ten-day forecasts—a supercomputer at NASA has just provided us with high-resolution climate projections through the end of the century. The massive new 11-terabyte data set combines historical daily temperatures and precipitation measurements with climate simulations under two greenhouse gas emissions scenarios. The project spans …
Via Wired: “The international black market in wildlife—alive or dead—is notoriously difficult to track. Hunters and smugglers don’t report their take for the same reasons that drug dealers don’t report profits to the IRS. But if you could actually track those networks, maybe you could do something about them. That’s what sent Nikkita Patel, a …
