1 . Imagine being able to pop to your local park and pick some tomatoes, potatoes or even bananas to take home for dinner. Sounds too good to be true, right? For residents of Andernach, German, it’s not just a dream—it’s their reality.

In 2010, Andernach began its edible(可食用的)city project, planting 101 varieties of tomatoes in public green spaces around the city centre. Its 30,000 residents are free to help themselves to whatever grows, as are any other visitors.   The town’s motto of sorts is “Picking is encouraged—help yourself!” Every year a new type of plant is highlighted. In 2011, 100 types of beans were planted, while 2012saw the introduction of 20 onion varieties.

It’s a community effort, as local citizens are encouraged to help plant and maintain the gardens. This offers an opportunity to socialise as well as to learn about planting, cultivating and harvesting food.

An Andernach resident spoke to DW,“I often drop by to pick some herbs that I’m missing at home. Everything is easily accessible. There aren’t any fences. You just take what you need. The only thing is that you have to be quick once the fruits are ripe or they’ll all be gone!”

Andernach may have been the first in German, but it isn’t the only edible city. It’s part of the Edible Cities Network, a project funded by European Union to connect green urban foot initiatives around the world. Other cities include Carthage in Tunisia, Havana in Cuba and Sempeter-Vrtojba in Slovenia. In February 2022, the first Edible Cities Network Conference took place. Dr Ina Saumel, principal investigator of the Edible Cities Network, called it “a unique opportunity to invite researchers of edible city solutions and practitioners to the same table.”

Ultimately, the Edible Cities Network aims to give people “greener, more edible and, above all, more livable cities.” It is a response to the pressures of global climate change, and a significant cause full of hope.

3 . Dormice (睡鼠), which prefer to sleep in the holes of old trees, are losing their tree holes. Centuries of wood harvesting have exterminated many of dormice from countries such as Poland, Belarus, Latvia, and Lithuania. But one temporary solution is helping.

“We have to keep this connection between dormice and the forest,” says Tadas Bujanauskas, senior ecologist at Lithuania’s Neris Regional Park, “because if we let this go, it’s hard to get back.” Neris Regional Park’s dormouse nest box and conservation program began in 2005 as part of a sustainable forestry certification with the Forest Stewardship Council, based in Bonn, Germany. So far, park staff have installed 250 nest boxes throughout the park’s dense, old-growth oak forests.

A dormouse nest box resembles a standard birdhouse tied to a tree trunk. There’s enough space between the trunk and the entrance hole for the rodents, such as rabbits, to move in and out of their artificial lairs (巢穴), but so little that it’s difficult for predators such as owls to attack.

Best of all, nest boxes bring the previously mysterious creatures within reach for scientists. By placing cameras in nest boxes, researchers can check in on the animal whenever they want. As a result, they’ve logged all kinds of ecological data, such as sex, weight, birth rates, and diet of the houses’ inhabitants.

In addition to monitoring nest boxes, Bujanauskas and his colleagues seek out and protect individual trees that could provide habitat for dormice and other species in the future.

The U.K. has placed more than 26,000 nest boxes over 30 years to boost their hazel dormice population, which has fallen by 51 percent since 2000, according to Ian White, the dormouse training officer for the nonprofit People’s Trust For Endangered Species.

“Dormice are cute and they’re a nice animal to work with,” White says, “if we get the habitat right for them, it can actually benefit a broad range of other species.”

Already famous at home, now China’s wandering elephants are becoming international stars. Major global media are recording     1     group more than yearlong, 500-kilometer walk from their home in a wildlife reserve in mountainous southwest Yunnan province to the outskirts of the provincial capital of Kunming.

The fifteen elephants     2     (catch) at night trotting(疾走) down urban streets by security cameras over the past months, followed by those     3     (seek)to minimize damage and keep both elephants and people out of harm’s way.     4     no animals or people have been hurt, reports put damage to crops at more than $1 million.

    5     exactly motivated them to make the epic journey remains a mystery, although they appear to be especially attracted to corn, tropical fruit and other crops, tasty and     6    (plenty) and easy to obtain in the lush tropical region. Others have speculated their leader may be simply lost.

Asian elephants, the continent’s largest land animal, are     7     decline overall. Habitat loss and resulting human-wildlife conflict     8     (be) their biggest threats. Elephants are given the top level of protection in China, allowing their numbers to       9     (steady) increase even as their natural habitat shrinks, and requiring farmers and others     10    (exercise) maximum restraint when encountering them.

6 . In the far North, fire season usually doesn’t start until June, when snow has melted away and summer lightning storms sweep into the region. So scientist Sander Veraverbeke was confused when in May of 2016 he saw little patches of fire on some satellite images from Alaska and the Northwest Territories.

“I was like, what the hell is going on?” says Veraverbeke, an Earth scientist at the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

What he saw on the satellite images were “zombie fires,” remains of burns from the previous year that somehow stayed alive, smoldering underground, through the long, cold winter.

Zombie fires aren’t an entirely new phenomenon in the Arctic; fire managers have noted occasional flare-ups in past decades. But Veraverbeke’s team found that their occurrences are tightly linked to climate change, happening more often after hot, long summers with lots of fire and suggesting that these still-rare events could become more frequent.

“The sheer fact that this is happening is evidence for how quickly the region is changing,” he says.

Like all forests, the wooded stretches of the Arctic sometimes catch on fire. But unlike many forests in the mid-latitudes, which thrive on or even require fire to preserve their health, Arctic forests have evolved to burn only infrequently.

Climate change is reshaping that mode. In the first decade of the new millennium, fires burned 50 percent more acreage each year in the Arctic, on average, than any decade in the 1900s. Between 2010 and 2020, burned acreage continued to creep up, particularly in Alaska, which had its second worst fire year ever in 2015 and another bad one in 2019. Scientists have found that fire frequency today is higher than at any time since the formation of boreal (北极的) forests some 3,000 years ago, and potentially higher than at any point in the last 10,000 years.

8 . When the monthly electricity bill came home, parents always couldn’t believe their eyes, as the amount was much more than needed.     1     Here are some tips for parents to educate their children on how to save energy.

Switch off the lights. Assign one day in a week for a “turn off” practice, for a few hours. Tell the kids the significance of using less electricity and how it impacts the environment.     2    

Use energy-efficient transportation. When parents and their children are out on vacation, have a cycling outing. When the whole family rides bicycles together, it not only serves as a great bonding exercise, but it also teaches the children about eco-friendly transportation options.     3    

Play a game.     4     Engage them in a game instead. Ask the little ones to walk around the house with pen and paper, and make a note of all the equipment that consumes energy. Let them suggest what measures can be taken within the home to reduce consumption of electricity and go green. Parents can stick small notes near these appliances to give them interesting information on conservation.

    5     Create a theatre-like experience at home on a Sunday and gather everyone in the family, especially the kids, to watch an informative film about environmental issues or climate change. If parents have slightly older children, they can discuss the film and ask them what they think.

9 . As climate change becomes severe summer after summer, millions of people are finding themselves covered in wildfire smoke, including those in North America just this past month. It is bad for our health. It is also really disturbing, but we don’t talk about that as much.

We often use the terms “atmosphere” or climate” to refer to the mood of a situation. We use metaphors (比喻) to describe affective states, such as “feeling under the weather” or “on cloud nine”. Such language suggests that we understand that human emotions are intimately related to the atmospheric phenomena. Yet rarely do we pay attention to the ways we feel climate change.

But wildfire smoke shows how affective climate change can be. For example, wildfire smoke is often referred to using emotional phrases such as “air of dread”. Through living with the smoke and the panic it generates, we can think more carefully about the ways we experience climate change, and crucially, why and how we need to respond to it.

We often think of climate change impacts as far away, separate from our bodies, because science typically uses global representations and statistical information. But wildfire smoke spreads and pollutes our bodies, and indeed, crosses many other boundaries; it drifts from rural areas into big cities; and it crosses state and national borders with ease. Of course, some borders are more permeable (渗透的), and some bodies more sensitive to the smoke.

Through its ability to pass through and become part of our very being, wildfire smoke is closer in nature to the air pollution we normally think of as one of the causes of climate change. Wildfire smoke is both an impact and a cause of climate change. It explains the nature of climate change impacts and the self-reinforcing (自我强化) feedback circles that can, and may, lead to the planet warming itself independent of human actions.