You will save the Earth by sharing and/or tweeting (corny right?)
Photographer Prashanth Vishwanathan captured a network of community dairies helping off-grid farmers in Maharashtra keep milk fresh as temperatures rise. All pictures are from Climate Visuals and Ashden
As global temperatures climb, a lack of refrigeration makes a big impact on people trying to make a living from farming. Especially dairy farms.
There are more than 75 million smallholder dairy farmers in India. Most are in off-grid areas without refrigeration, or reliant on expensive and polluting diesel generators. This locks people out of national supply chains, and farmers have to spend hours transporting milk to markets, or sell at a lower price to middlemen. In Maharashtra, western India, a network of community dairies has been set up, using sustainable refrigeration technology, where people can bring their milk to be tested, chilled, and sold on.
Continue reading...For the past five years, Sadiq’s bold climate agenda has made a real difference. Why throw that away by electing Shaun Bailey?
With the crucial Cop26 summit in Glasgow taking place in November, we are in a vital year of the decisive decade for the climate emergency. And deciding next month who runs England’s capital city will also be a defining question in whether we can win the fight against the accelerating climate crisis.
For the sake of the climate agenda alone, we need Sadiq Khan to be re-elected for a second term. Sadiq has been a true climate leader as mayor right from day one. He’s pushed ahead with the boldest and most ambitious plans of any major city in the world to tackle air pollution, which have already helped cut toxic air by nearly half in central London. He’s delivered a fivefold increase in protected cycle lanes. He’s launched the first stage of his green new deal for London with £10m invested in projects to secure more than 1,000 green jobs, targeted at those who need them the most. And he was the first mayor of any comparable city in the world to commit to becoming zero-carbon by 2030.
Related: Shaun Bailey accused of 'prehistoric' views on lack of female MPs
Related: Covid-19 has shown humanity how close we are to the edge | Toby Ord
Ed Miliband is the Labour MP for Doncaster North and shadow business, energy and industry secretary
Continue reading...Gates has been buying land like it’s going out of style. He now owns more farmland than my entire Native American nation
Bill Gates has never been a farmer. So why did the Land Report dub him “Farmer Bill” this year? The third richest man on the planet doesn’t have a green thumb. Nor does he put in the back-breaking labor humble people do to grow our food and who get far less praise for it. That kind of hard work isn’t what made him rich. Gates’ achievement, according to the report, is that he’s largest private owner of farmland in the US. A 2018 purchase of 14,500 acres of prime eastern Washington farmland – which is traditional Yakama territory – for $171m helped him get that title.
In total, Gates owns approximately 242,000 acres of farmland with assets totaling more than $690m. To put that into perspective, that’s nearly the size of Hong Kong and twice the acreage of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe, where I’m an enrolled member. A white man owns more farmland than my entire Native nation!
Related: In a pandemic, billionaires are richer than ever. Why aren't they giving more? | Chuck Collins
The land we all live on should not be the sole property of a few
Nick Estes is a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. He is an assistant professor in the American studies department at the University of New Mexico. In 2014, he co-founded The Red Nation, an Indigenous resistance organization. He is the author of the book Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (Verso, 2019)
Continue reading...Group aims to highlight financial sector’s role in climate crisis through escalation in tactics this week
Extinction Rebellion is planning to step up its campaign against the banking system with a series of direct action protests and debt strikes in the coming weeks aimed at highlighting the financial sector’s role in the escalating climate crisis.
Last week the group targeted Barclays Bank’s headquarters in London and the Bank of England as well as high street branches across the UK as part of its Money Rebellion protest.
Continue reading...Buildings covered in plants do more than just make the cityscape attractive – they contribute to human wellbeing and action on climate change
Our cities are dominated by glass-faced edifices that overheat like greenhouses then guzzle energy to cool down. Instead, we could have buildings that are intimately connected to the living systems that have evolved with us, that celebrate the human-nature connection that is central to our wellbeing.
As more of us in Australia live in urban areas and our cities grow, bringing nature into our cities is a key part of establishing and rebuilding that connection. As well as bringing beauty into urban environments, we know that people are healthier when they are connected to nature. Research also shows that crime rates decrease in areas with street trees and that property values increase.
Related: 'We want to be included': First Nations demand a say on climate change
Related: For some areas hit by NSW flood crisis, it's the fourth disaster in a year
Continue reading...Extreme E is a new, sustainable racing series which aims to showcase the performance of electric vehicles with events in countries affected by climate change. The first event, the Desert X Prix, took place in Saudi Arabia this weekend
Continue reading...Barton meditates on Springsteen, sad songs and the heady age of 17. Plus, a compelling podcast that treats the climate crisis as a whodunnit
Laura Barton’s Notes on Music (Radio 4) | BBC Sounds The Crisis (Vice Audio)
On Tuesday last week, the third and final part of Laura Barton’s Notes on Music was broadcast on Radio 4. Entitled Laura Barton’s One True Love, it was about Bruce Springsteen. Or “Broohss”, as Barton had it, in her beautiful, intimate speaking voice. The way she said it, it sounded like a kiss.
Continue reading...The ‘embodied carbon’ in the building of glass and steel blocks makes them anything but green
Hanging plants smother the walls of a new office block proposed for Salford, giving it the look of something from an abandoned post-Covid city, reclaimed by nature. The ivy-covered tower, designed by Make Architects, has been trumpeted as “fossil-fuel free”, set to run on 100% renewable energy and reach net zero operational carbon, with tenants enjoying the “biophilic” benefits of dangling foliage. But not everyone is convinced.“It’s strange to see something described as ‘fossil-fuel free’ when it is made of concrete, steel and glass,” says Joe Giddings, coordinator of the Architects Climate Action Network (Acan) campaign group. “The production of these materials entails burning a huge amount of fossil fuel.
“The climate emergency is not a game and we can’t just spin our way through it. We need to think about where our materials come from, how they’re made and interrogate the whole supply chain – from construction to demolition and reuse.”In the race to reach net zero carbon by 2050, a commitment to which the UK is legally bound, Acan sees the biggest unchallenged obstacle as the energy consumed by construction. Much is made of the proposed energy efficiency of buildings once they are occupied, but so far very little attention has been paid to the carbon emitted in getting them built, and eventually dismantled – from extracting raw materials and manufacturing components, to the toxic byproducts of demolition leaking out in landfill.
'Triple-glazed windows might reduce heating requirements, but their embodied carbon is vast'
Related: Eco-homes become hot property in UK's zero-carbon ‘paradigm shift’
Continue reading...Unusually warm weather accelerated bloom cycle of mall’s 3,800 cherry trees
Spring has sprung in America’s capital, bringing with it a resplendent bloom of white and pink cherry blossoms that is one of the city’s grandest annual traditions.
But this year, as Washington DC’s residents embrace a relative return to normal after a tumultuous year marked by the coronavirus and civil unrest, the earlier-than-anticipated bloom may point to yet another looming crisis: climate change.
Continue reading...Experts say extreme weather including droughts will become more common as planet heats
Recent sandstorms that shrouded Beijing in a post-apocalyptic orange haze and intensive droughts in other parts of the country are bringing into stark relief the challenges China faces from rising temperatures induced by the climate crisis.
The widespread sandstorms that pelted the capital and spread as far as central China for several days in mid-March and again at the end of the month were brought on by lower than average snow cover and precipitation, as well as higher than normal temperatures and winds across Mongolia and northern China.
Continue reading...Now everyone can fight climate change. Together our small changes will have a huge impact. Join our community today and get free updates on how you can fight climate change everyday!
Empowering you to fight climate change! Our focus is on helping people understand how climate change is being caused and encouraging them to take action everyday.
This site is powered by renewable energy | 2020 What's Your Impact, a registered non-profit organization.
Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.