NASA’s satellite imagery and model forecasts play an important role in monitoring the performance of crops worldwide and preparing for food shortages. NASA’s view from space helps government agencies forecast food insecurity, like during the drought in Southern Africa in 2018.
Music credit: Anticipating Outcomes by Simon Begg [PRS] Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Kathryn Mersmann (USRA): Lead Producer Maria-Jose Vinas Garcia (Telophase): Lead Writer Ellen T. Gray (ADNET): Producer Trent L. Schindler (USRA): Lead Visualizer Christa Peters-Lidard (NASA/GSFC): Scientist John D. Bolten (NASA/GSFC): Scientist Amy McNally (SAIC): Scientist
Vince (22 September 2012 – 5 March 2017) was a Southern white rhinoceros who was killed by poachers inside a zoo in Thoiry near Paris, France.
Rhinoceros horns are among the world’s most valuable black market goods. [Online until: June 13, 2019] Rhino horns are more expensive than gold or cocaine and fetch as much as 30,000 Euros per kilogram. The illegal trade in the coveted raw material is firmly in the grip of the Mafia.
On April 7, 2017, a rhino was shot dead in the Thoiry Zoo near Paris and one of its horns sawn off. It was the first time that a rhinoceros living in Europe had become a victim of poachers, but in Africa it has become an everyday business: a rhino is killed there every eight hours. Although the trade in rhino horns has been banned for forty years, the precious raw material continues to fetch huge profits on the black market. In Asia, rhinoceroses are said to have an aphrodisiac or cancer-inhibiting effects and consumption and possession are regarded as status symbols. Well-organized crime syndicates that are also involved in global arms and drug trafficking are behind the trade in the horns. “Rhino Dollars” documents one of the least known and yet most profitable smuggling rackets in the world. Corruption, violence, and power games: not just innocent animals that are often facing extinction but also many people fall victim to their criminal operations.
In places around the world, supplies of groundwater are rapidly vanishing. As aquifers decline and wells begin to go dry, people are being forced to confront a growing crisis.
Much of the planet relies on groundwater. And in places around the world – from the United States to Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America – so much water is pumped from the ground that aquifers are being rapidly depleted and wells are going dry.
Groundwater is disappearing beneath cornfields in Kansas, rice paddies in India, asparagus farms in Peru and orange groves in Morocco. As these critical water reserves are pumped beyond their limits, the threats are mounting for people who depend on aquifers to supply agriculture, sustain economies and provide drinking water. In some areas, fields have already turned to dust and farmers are struggling.
Climate change is projected to increase the stresses on water supplies, and heated disputes are erupting in places where those with deep wells can keep pumping and leave others with dry wells. Even as satellite measurements have revealed the problem’s severity on a global scale, many regions have failed to adequately address the problem. Aquifers largely remain unmanaged and unregulated, and water that seeped underground over tens of thousands of years is being gradually used up.
In this documentary, USA TODAY and The Desert Sun investigate the consequences of this emerging crisis in several of the world’s hotspots of groundwater depletion. These are stories about people on four continents confronting questions of how to safeguard their aquifers for the future – and in some cases, how to cope as the water runs out.
