High-stakes UN biodiversity talks open in Montreal Wednesday, in what is being billed as the "last best chance" to save the planet's species and ecosystems from irreversible human destruction.. Delegates from across the world gathered for the December 7-19 meeting to try to hammer out a new deal for nature: a 10-year framework aimed at saving the planet's forests, oceans and species before it's too late.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Tuesday slammed multinational corporations for turning the world's ecosystems into "playthings of profit" and warned failure to correct course would lead to catastrophic results.. "We are treating nature like a toilet," Guterres said bluntly.
Negotiators are meeting in Geneva this week to thrash out a pandemic treaty aimed at ensuring the flaws that turned Covid-19 into a global crisis could never happen again.. "A treaty could break with the greed and inequality that has plagued the global response to Covid-19, HIV/AIDS and other pandemics.
Hawaii has activated its National Guard to support the response to the first eruption of the world's biggest volcano in almost 40 years, with lava threatening a key highway.. Twenty National Guard members were deployed "to assist Hawaii County with traffic control and other roles in the Mauna Loa eruption," the Pacific island state's emergency management agency announced in a tweet Monday.
The European Union reached an agreement Tuesday to ban the import of products including coffee, cocoa and soy in cases where they are deemed to contribute to deforestation.. The scope encompasses palm oil, cattle, soy, coffee, cocoa, timber and rubber as well as derived products such as beef, furniture and chocolate.
The energy crisis is fuelling an acceleration of the rollout of renewable power, raising hopes for efforts to meet ambitious targets against global warming, the International Energy Agency said Tuesday.. This would help "keep alive the possibility of limiting global warming to 1.5 (degrees Celsius)", the IEA said, referring to the preferrable target set in the 2015 Paris Agreement to prevent a climate catastrophe.
Restoring islands devastated by invasive species and helping coastal "connectors" like seabirds boosts nature on land and at sea -- and may be a new way to increase resilience to climate change, researchers said Monday. . This approach could also boost climate change resilience in the Galapagos, where increasingly intense El Nino events cause warm waters to replace cold nutrient-rich waters -- starving species like penguins, marine iguanas and seabirds and causing corals to bleach.
US and European Union officials met for trade and technology talks Monday, but hanging in the balance are heightened tensions over American subsidies for its green industry that Europe considers anti-competitive.. - 'More solid response' - "Clearly they are trying to set out our concerns in a non-confrontational manner," a European official involved in the talks told reporters Monday.
NASA's Orion spaceship made a close pass of the Moon and used a gravity assist to whip itself back towards Earth on Monday, marking the start of the return journey for the Artemis-1 mission.. Earlier in the mission, Orion spent about six days in "distant retrograde orbit" around the Moon, meaning at high altitude and traveling opposite the direction the Moon revolves around Earth.
Rescuers evacuated more people Monday from nearby villages after the eruption of Indonesia's Mount Semeru, with officials warning of danger from cooling lava despite less activity from the volcano.. Muhari said visual observation of Semeru on Monday morning indicated less intense volcanic activity but he warned of potential danger from lava flows that had cooled after heavy rain.
