Land, Water, & Air

 How Asia's 5,000-year-old rice terraces are inspiring modern flood control.   Parks, roofs and riverbanks mimicking the long-used agricultural form are helping Asian cities absorb, hold and purify rainwater.  BBC  Xiaoying You  August 2024  One of Kotchakorn Voraakhom's most memorable moments growing up in Bangkok in the 1980s was playing in floodwaters in a small boat built by her father in front of her home. "I was so happy that I didn't need to go to school because we didn't know how to get to it," recalls Voraakhom, a landscape architect based in the Thai capital. But nearly 30 years later, flooding turned from a fun childhood recollection to a devastating experience. In 2011, Voraakhom and her family – along with millions of others in Bangkok – found themselves "displaced and homeless" when floods ploughed through swathes of Thailand and poured into the metropolis. They were the country's worst floods in decades, a nationwide disaster which lasted more than three months and killed more than 800 people. Scientists later linked the flooding to increased rainfall triggered by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. The disaster deeply shook Voraakhom, who believed it was time to use her expertise to do something for her hometown. She founded her own landscape architecture firm, Landprocess, which over the past decade has designed parks, rooftop gardens and public spaces in and around the low-lying city to help its people increase their resilience to flooding. 

The banks collapsed in 2008 – and our food system is about to do the same. George Monbiot. Guardian  Thu 19 May 2022   Massive food producers hold too much power – and the regulators scarcely understand what is happening. Sound familiar? For the past few years, scientists have been frantically sounding an alarm that governments refuse to hear: the global food system is beginning to look like the global financial system in the run-up to 2008. While financial collapse would have been devastating to human welfare, food system collapse doesn’t bear thinking about. Yet the evidence that something is going badly wrong has been escalating rapidly. The current surge in food prices looks like the latest sign of systemic instability.Many people assume that the food crisis was caused by a combination of the pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine. While these are important factors, they aggravate an underlying problem. For years, it looked as if hunger was heading for extinction. The number of undernourished people fell from 811 million in 2005 to 607 million in 2014. But in 2015, the trend began to turn. Hunger has been rising ever since: to 650 million in 2019, and back to 811 million in 2020. This year is likely to be much worse. Now brace yourself for the really bad news: this has happened at a time of great abundance. Global food production has been rising steadily for more than half a century, comfortably beating population growth. Last year, the global wheat harvest was bigger than ever. Astoundingly, the number of undernourished people began to rise just as world food prices began to fall. In 2014, when fewer people were hungry than at any time since, the global food price index stood at 115 points. In 2015, it fell to 93, and remained below 100 until 2021. Only in the past two years has it surged. The rise in food prices is now a major driver of inflation, which reached 9% in the UK last month. Food is becoming unaffordable even to many people in rich nations. The impact in poorer countries is much worse......

Devastation as world’s biggest wetland burns: ‘those that cannot run don’t stand a chance’. Blackened trees, dead animals and scorched earth – early wildfires have already devastated Brazil’s Pantanal and local people worry they may lose the battle to save them. Guardian Harriet Barber in Corumbá Tue 9 Jul 2024  Perched atop blackened trees, howler monkeys survey the ashes around them. A flock of rheas treads, disoriented, in search of water. The skeletons of alligators lie lifeless and charred. [Caused by burning fossil fuels,] the Pantanal, the world’s largest wetland and one of the most biodiverse places on Earth, is on fire. Huge stretches of land resemble the aftermath of a battle, with thick green shrubbery now a carpet of white ash, and chunks of debris falling from the sky. More than 760,000 hectares(1.8m acres) have already burned across the Brazilian Pantanal in 2024, as fires surge to the highest levels since 2020, the worst year on record. From January to July, blazes increased by 1,500% compared with the same period last year, according to the country’s Institute for Space Research. “The impact is devastating. Animals are dying, wildfires are vanishing huge areas,” says Gustavo Figueirôa, a biologist at SOS Pantanal, a non-governmental organisation. “We expect it is only going to get worse.” Stretching across Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay, the Pantanal covers 16.9m hectares (42m acres) and harbours rich biodiversity. It is one of the world’s main refuges for jaguars and houses a host of vulnerable and endangered species, including giant river otters, giant armadillos and hyacinth macaws. Its ecosystem is also unique. Every year its “flood pulse” sees it swell with water during the rainy season and empty throughout the dry months.                       

Canadian Pacific was building what would eventually become the Chateau Lake Louise that people know today: first as a cabin sleeping two, then a chalet sleeping 15. Swiss Guides became part of the experience, leading novice and skilled climbers on excursions.In 1922, the guides and the CPR undertook the construction of a stone hut shelter.Along the way, climbers left their mark, a record of their trips jotted into a register in a stone-built refuge known as Abbot Hut.These drawings, songs and scribbles are personal — proof that thousands of people made it to the same slice of the Rockies. But these entries provide more than just cultural and historical value. They’ve helped complete a picture of how the mountains surrounding Lake Louise are transforming in a warming climate.

New research from the University of Calgary examined the two most common approaches to Abbot Pass, and how a warming climate has changed access and safety. The paper relies on data from Environment and Climate Change Canada’s weather station at Banff and is complemented by 100 years of summit register entries.  Mountaineers documented their trips and choices on the Swiss Guide route, more commonly known today as the “Death Trap” and Lake O’Hara Gully.  The result is a unique piece of research that centres the local experience in climate science. Kate Hanly is a PhD candidate in the U of C’s department of geography and the lead author of the research paper. She says the trend, reflected in the climate data and the summit registers of generations of climbers, is clear: “We’re seeing less glaciers, less snow, faster melting snow. “Climbers are climbing increasingly on rock or on loose scree, the material that was underlying the ice, and they're seeing more rockfall.” But these historical notes logged over time also have another story to tell: one of adaptation to the climate reality that mountaineers are facing. "It just reminds us of what we have to lose,” Hanly said. “It's so much more than a hike, Hanly spent only one night in Abbot Hut. In 2012, she made the journey with her father, guided by Albi Sole, a well-known mountaineer who taught at the University of Calgary’s Outdoor Centre. The view and the experience left an impression. +It was the first glacier we walked on together and the first kind of bigger hike for [my dad] and he was so proud of himself, as he should be,” Hanly said.  At that time, Hanly was just beginning to spend more time in the mountains — and the more she visited the landscape, the more she thought about how it was changing. For those who live in the Bow Valley west of Calgary, this is a universal experience and part of daily conversations. Locals wonder if the experiences that drew them to live in the Bow Valley are in danger of becoming extinct, a loss for the next generation.......read on- stunning photos and also videos https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/features/old-notes-penned-at-bygone-alpine-hut-provide-glimpse-of-changing-peaks-beyond-that-famous-lake-louise-view