As we wrote in a recent blog, global warming is less scary perhaps than the combination of environmental degradation and global warming.  The New York Times recently came out with an interesting article on how the combination of poor natural resources management and climate change are causing desertification in Spain (see Water Is a New [...]

A Guest Blog by  Mohammad A. Chakaki
Standing amidst Dubai’s tall buildings and immaculate landscaping or gazing out at the sandy desert beyond all the construction, one could be forgiven for not realizing that this emirate’s dominant ecology is coastal and marine. I certainly wasn’t looking there when I first got to Dubai, and I imagine this [...]

My favorite website - www.mongabay.com - has a terrific interview with Dr. Rodolfo Dirzo, an ecologist at Stanford University, on defaunation (the full interview is available here).  Defaunation is the removal of species from an ecosystem through different processes, including hunting, deforestation, wildlife trade, invasive species, and extinction (both local and global) through forest fragmentation [...]

A major meta-analysis study published in the May 15 edition of Nature that combined nearly 30,000 data sets on biological and physical changes around the world collected for at least 20 years between 1970 to 2004 with a detailed database of global temperature change found, not surprisingly, that the biological changes were strongly correlated with [...]

 The interactions between anthropogenic environmental degradation and climate are not new, nor are such interactions straightforward.  Like much of the evolution of life on this planet, such interactions depend on the constraints of history and the context of the present.Recent studies in the Amazon rainforest have suggested that atmospheric carbon dioxide coupled with other factors [...]

A New United Nations Environmental Program Report, In Dead Water, suggests that the combination of global climatic disruption, pollution, and over-harvesting will impact the world’s key fishing grounds. According to the report, at least three quarters of key fishing grounds globally will be harmed by changes in ocean circulation would be predicted to occur [...]