Agriculture board approves regulations, including ban on moving infested soil between islands, to thwart pests
Hawaii is doubling down in its fight against invasive coconut rhinoceros beetles, with state authorities greenlighting rules to prevent the damaging insects from spreading across the Pacific archipelago.
The Hawaii agriculture board on Tuesday approved regulations, including a ban on moving infested soil and compost between islands and an increase of insect inspections, to thwart an influx in pests, according to Honolulu Civil Beat.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
10/24/2024 - 14:48
10/24/2024 - 10:35
Leaders are eager to fill us with positivity, but research shows people in distress are more likely to take collective action
If despair is the most unforgivable sin, then hope is surely the most abused virtue. That observation feels particularly apposite as we enter the Cop season, that time of United Nations megaconferences at the end of every year, when national leaders feel obliged to convince us the future will be better, despite growing evidence to the contrary.
Climate instability and nature extinction are making the Earth an uglier, riskier and more uncertain place, desiccating water supplies, driving up the price of food, displacing humans and non-humans, battering cities and ecosystems with ever fiercer storms, floods, heatwaves, droughts and forest fires. Still worse could be in store as we approach or pass a series of dangerous tipping points for Amazon rainforest dieback, ocean circulation breakdown, ice-cap collapse and other unimaginably horrible, but ever more possible, catastrophes.
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10/24/2024 - 09:50
Citizen power forced Germany’s greenest city-state into a binding agreement balancing housing and nature
When Fritz Schumacher laid out his vision for Hamburg a century ago, the sketch looked more like a fern than a town plan. Fronds of urban development radiated from the centre to tickle the countryside, bristling with dense rows of housing. The white spaces in between were to be filled with parks and playgrounds.
Schumacher was Hamburg’s chief building officer in the early 20th century, and a pioneer of green cities with widespread access to nature. “Building sites emerge even if you don’t invest in them,” he warned in 1932. “Public spaces disappear if you don’t invest in them.”
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10/24/2024 - 09:00
Expert reminds owners ‘freeze it, don’t squeeze it’ when it comes to a tick, ideally with a tick-freezing spray from a chemist
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Dog owners have been warned about a tick boom unfolding along Australia’s east coast, with some experts predicting an unusually bad season for furry friends.
Veterinary scientist and parasitologist Peter Irwin, an emeritus professor at Murdoch University, said the severity of a tick season was largely determined by the preceding weather, and last summer had been very hot and wet along the east coast”.
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10/24/2024 - 09:00
Means to stop catastrophic global heating exist, says UN chief, but political courage is needed to end world’s fossil fuel addiction
The huge cuts in carbon emissions now needed to end the climate crisis mean it is “crunch time for real”, according to the UN’s environment chief.
An unprecedented global mobilisation of renewable energy, forest protection and other measures is needed to steer the world off the current path towards a catastrophic temperature rise of 3.1C, a report from the UN environment programme (Unep) has found. Extreme heatwaves, storms, droughts and floods are already ravaging communities with less than 1.5C of global heating to date.
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10/24/2024 - 06:50
More than 30m homes are thought to contain lead paint, including nearly 4m where children under age of six live
Two weeks after setting a nationwide deadline for removal of lead pipes, the Biden administration is imposing strict new limits on dust from lead-based paint in older homes and childcare facilities.
A final rule announced on Thursday by the Environmental Protection Agency sets limits on lead dust on floors and window sills in pre-1978 residences and childcare facilities to levels so low they cannot be detected.
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10/24/2024 - 05:00
Pace of growth helps maintain renewable energy when weather conditions interfere with wind and solar
Faced with worsening climate-driven disasters and an electricity grid increasingly supplied by intermittent renewables, the US is rapidly installing huge batteries that are already starting to help prevent power blackouts.
From barely anything just a few years ago, the US is now adding utility-scale batteries at a dizzying pace, having installed more than 20 gigawatts of battery capacity to the electric grid, with 5GW of this occurring just in the first seven months of this year, according to the federal Energy Information Administration (EIA).
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10/24/2024 - 02:39
Move is designed to combat environmental damage from single-use vapes and their widespread use by children
Disposable vapes will be banned from sale in England next summer, the government has confirmed.
From June 2025 it will be illegal to sell single-use vapes, in a move designed to combat environmental damage and their widespread use by children.
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10/24/2024 - 02:02
Government agencies and departmental officials spend full day scrutinising Peter Dutton’s controversial plan to build seven nuclear power plants
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A senior government nuclear safety official says the sites of coal-fired power plants “might not be adequate” to house the opposition’s proposed taxpayer-funded nuclear reactors.
Government agencies and departmental officials were grilled in parliament on Wednesday at a government-backed inquiry into nuclear energy. The inquiry was tasked with scrutinising the Coalition’s controversial plan to lift Australia’s ban on nuclear power and build taxpayer-funded reactors at seven sites.
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10/24/2024 - 00:00
Just designating key areas will not meet 30x30 target on nature loss, study says, pointing to oil drilling in parks
Biodiversity is declining more quickly within key protected areas than outside them, according to research that scientists say is a “wake-up call” to global leaders discussing how to stop nature loss at the UN’s Cop16 talks in Colombia.
Protecting 30% of land and water for nature by 2030 was one of the key targets settled on by world leaders in a landmark 2022 agreement to save nature – and this month leaders are gathering again at a summit in the Colombian city of Cali to measure progress and negotiate new agreements to stop biodiversity loss.
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