Search Results for: floods

Ecosia Tree Update

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Ecosia is the search engine that plants trees.

Their latest tree update comes from one of Ecosia’s first grown forests in Borneo, Indonesia, where their searches are helping restore the habitat of endangered wildlife species like the orangutan. Ecosia started planting trees in Indonesia only two and a half years ago. Today, the forest is slowly coming back, which is creating economic value for the local farmers whose livelihood depends on forest goods like nuts, fruits and medicinal herbs.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, and after the first nine months of collaboration with Eden Reforestation Projects in Haiti, they have planted 230,000 trees. These trees will protect watersheds from erosion and, as they grow over the years, their roots will absorb rainwater, halting floods that damage people’s houses and farming lands.

Their tree-planting partners in Burkina Faso are now also working in Mali. Hommes et Terre is applying the same techniques in this neighbouring country who shares their climatic conditions. Half-moon shaped holes have been dug up in the planting sites and in the following months Ecosia-financed seeds will be planted in them, waiting for the next rainy season to start growing and re-greening the desert.

Ecosia is the search engine that plants trees. Every month they invest at least 80% of their surplus in tree planting projects all over the world.

Cumulative Exposure to Climate Change for RCP 8.5 (Business as Usual)

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The broad threat to humanity from ongoing greenhouse gas emissions
Summary: Ongoing greenhouse gas emissions are simultaneously shifting many elements of Earth’s climate beyond thresholds that can impact humanity. By affecting the balance between incoming solar radiation and outgoing infrared radiation, man-made greenhouse gases are increasing the Earth’s energy budget ultimately leading to warming . Given interconnected physics, warming can affect other aspects of the Earth’s climate system. For instance, by enhancing water evaporation and increasing the air’s capacity to hold moisture, warming can lead to i) extreme precipitation, also increasing risk of floods, in commonly wet places or ii) drought in commonly dry places, also increasing risk of wildfires, and heatwaves when heat transfer from water evaporation ceases. In the oceans, CO2 interacts with water to produce carbonic acid leading to ocean acidification whereas warming of water molecules increases the volume they occupy adding to the sea-level rise from melting land ice. Ocean warming can also supply moisture increasing the strength of storms. In an extensive literature review, we found traceable evidence for 467 pathways in which human health, water, food, economy, infrastructure and security have been recently impacted by climate hazards such as warming, heatwaves, precipitation, drought, floods, fires, storms, sea level rise, and changes in natural land cover and ocean chemistry. By 2100, on average, the world’s population will be exposed concurrently to the equivalent of the largest magnitude in one of these hazards if greenhouse gasses are aggressively reduced or three if they are not; some tropical coastal areas will be exposed to the largest changes in up to six hazards concurrently. These findings highlight that greenhouse gas emissions pose a broad threat to humanity by simultaneously intensifying many hazards, which humanity is vulnerable to.

Map description: This web app shows the cumulative index of 11 climate hazards: warming, drought, heatwaves, fires, precipitation, floods, storms, water scarcity, sea level rise, and changes in natural land cover and ocean chemistry. All climate hazards were scaled between zero and the 95th percentile change projected in the given hazard globally by 2095 under RCP 8.5 (worst case scenario); In other words, a pixel with a value of zero in a given hazards suggests that that hazard will not change in that pixel. In turn, a pixel with a value of 1 suggests that the most extreme increase of that hazard anywhere in the world will occur in that pixel. This standardization allowed for the summation of changes in all hazards at a given pixel to generate a cumulative index of climate change shown in this web app globally under three alternative scenarios.

Journal: Nature Climate Change

Authors: Camilo Mora, Daniele Spirandelli, Erik Franklin, Michael Kantar, John Lynham, Wendy Miles, Charlotte Smith, Kelle Freel, Jade Moy, Leo Louis, Evan Barba, Keith Bettinger, Abby Frazier, John Colburn IX, Naota Hanasaki, Ed Hawkins, Yukiko Hirabayashi, Wolfgang Knorr, Christopher Little, Kerry Emanuel, Justin Sheffield, Jonathan Patz, Cynthia Hunter.