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By Byamba-Ochir Byambasuren with Khaliun Bayartsogt in Ulaanbaatar More than two million animals have died in Mongolia so far this winter, a government official said Monday, as the country endures extreme cold and snow. The landlocked country is no stranger to severe weather from December to March, when temperatures plummet as low as minus 50 degrees Celsius (minus 58 Fahrenheit) in some areas. But this winter has been more severe than usual, with lower than […]
By Ryland JAMES WELLINGTON, Feb 23, 2024 (AFP) – New Zealand on Friday opened its first hospital exclusively treating kiwi birds, and vets have already nursed the first patient back to health — a chick nicknamed “Splash” that tumbled into a swimming pool. Rising numbers of the once-threatened national bird have led to the construction of a purpose-built facility in Kerikeri, a three-hour drive north of Auckland. The Department of Conservation told AFP the new […]
By Marion THIBAUT MONTREAL, Feb 23, 2024 (AFP) – Beneath the ground in Western Canada, dozens of so-called “zombie fires” that started last year are still burning. And even though it’s the dead of winter, the lack of snow this year is compounding ongoing drought conditions, leaving Canadians already bracing for another brutal forest fire season. “We are having an exceptional winter after an exceptional summer,” laments Josee St-Onge, a spokesperson for Alberta firefighters. It’s […]
By Salam FARAJ BAGHDAD, Feb 21, 2024 (AFP) – Stricken by drought and depleted by upstream dams, Iraq’s once mighty rivers the Tigris and Euphrates are suffocating under pollutants from sewage to medical waste. In a country where half the population lacks access to safe drinking water, according to UN figures, state institutions are to blame for a man-made disaster which is turning rivers into waste dumps. “What is strange about water pollution in Iraq […]
Cambodia hopes to import four tigers from India this year under an agreement signed with New Delhi aimed at reviving the population of big cats in the kingdom, an environmental official said Monday. Cambodia’s dry forests were once home to scores of Indochinese tigers but conservationists say intensive poaching of both tigers and their prey has devastated their numbers. The last sighting of a tiger in the Southeast Asian kingdom was from a camera trap […]
BANGKOK, Feb 15, 2024 (AFP) – Bangkok city employees have been told to work from home to avoid harmful air pollution, as a layer of noxious haze blanketed the Thai capital on Thursday. City authorities asked for cooperation from employers to help workers in the city of some 11 million people avoid the pollution, which is expected to last into Friday. The air monitoring website IQAir ranked Bangkok among the 10 most polluted cities in […]
By Kelly MACNAMARA The Amazon rainforest is facing a barrage of pressures that might tip it into large-scale ecosystem collapse as soon as 2050, according to new research Wednesday warning of dire consequences for the region and the world. The Amazon, which holds more than 10 percent of the world’s biodiversity, helps stabilise the global climate by storing the equivalent of around two decades of emissions of planet-warming carbon dioxide. But stress from deforestation, drought, […]
By Juan RESTREPO, Juan BARRETO In freezing Antarctic waters, amid bobbing chunks of floating ice, the hums, pitches and echoes of life in the deep are helping scientists understand the behavior and movements of marine mammals. “There are species which make impressive sounds, literally like Star Wars, they sound like spaceships,” said Colombian scientist Andrea Bonilla, who is carrying out research with underwater microphones off Antarctica’s coast. The biologist from Cornell University in New York […]
MANILA, Feb 14, 2024 (AFP) – The Philippine government said Wednesday it will file criminal charges against the owners of an oil tanker that sank off a central island nearly a year ago, causing severe marine pollution. More than half of the vessel’s 800,000-litre (211,000-gallon) oil cargo spilled into the sea over hundreds of kilometres off Mindoro island, famed for having some of the world’s most diverse marine life. A justice department statement said it […]
Massive wildfires exposing millions to toxic smoke, drought shrivelling crops and key waterways, destructive storms supercharged by record ocean temperatures — in the last year the world has had a taste of what to expect with warming of 1.5C. For the first time on record, Earth has endured 12 consecutive months of temperatures 1.5 degrees Celsius hotter than the pre-industrial era, Europe’s climate monitor said Thursday. That does not signal a breach of the more […]
By Emmanuel PEUCHOT KYIV, Ukraine, Feb 12, 2024 (AFP) – Ahead of the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainian army is increasingly on the defensive against more numerous and better armed Russian forces, but hoping that a recent military leadership change can make a difference. After last year’s failed counter-offensive, President Volodymyr Zelensky last week named Oleksandr Syrsky as the new military commander-in-chief with the task of setting out a “realistic and […]
Melting ice roads cut off Indigenous communities in Canada’s far north as unseasonably warm weather on Friday also saw its largest city, Toronto, break a winter heat record. Communities in Ontario and neighboring Manitoba provinces declared a state of emergency as the warm spell made the network of ice roads — which across Canada spans more than 8,000 kilometers (5,000 miles) between dispersed populations — unpassable. Many remote communities in Canada’s north depend on ice […]
