Caring for the Environment Starts from Ourselves

A new United Nations climate report predicts Africa’s rare glaciers (冰川) will disappear in the next 20 years. The report, called State of the Climate in Africa,     1     (release) last Tuesday by the UN’s World Meteorologicale (气象的) Organization (WMO) and other agencies. It warns that climate change will be the cause of the     2     (disappear) glaciers in eastern Africa.

The report warns that     3     shrinking glaciers at Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Kenya’s Mount Kenya and the Rwenzori Mountains in Uganda are signs of widespread climate change to come. “    4     the current shrinking rate continues, it will lead to total disappearance by the 2040s,” the report says.

The report notes that last year was Africa’s third     5     (warm)on record. Data shows temperatures on the continent were 0.86 degrees Celsius higher than the average in the 30 years leading up to 2010. The WMO warns that Africa’s 1.3 billion people remain “    6     (extreme) vulnerable (脆弱的)” as the continent keeps getting warmer     7     a faster rate.

Petteri Taalas, Secretary-General of the WMO, said massive displacement, hunger and increasing climate events such as droughts and flooding are likely     8     (continue). He added there is a great need for investments in Africa to develop systems and technology     9     can help the continent deal with the effects of climate change. The money could be used to improve early warning systems and build     10     (equip) to better observe weather and water movements.

5 . When Barcelona’s citizens emerged from a six-week lockdown at the end of April last year, they found that while the city had lain inactive, nature had been busy transforming the streets and parks into a wilderness. “The parks were shut, so no gardening was carried out,” says Margarita Pares, who heads the city’s biodiversity programme. “It was spring and it rained a lot more than usual. The result was an explosion in plant growth. And there were many more butterflies, as they are a species that reacts very quickly to changes in the environment.”

Once the gardeners went back to work, the question was whether to return everything to its neat and tidy state, or let nature take its course？The answer is neither. Pares says the council spent the previous two years working on plans to “naturalise” or “rewild” the city—and was about to announce this change of policy when the pandemic struck. By the time the lockdown ended, it was a lot easier to sell rewilding to the public desiring fresh air and open space. When it comes to embracing nature in its cities, Spain falls behind many countries. But it is hoped that Barcelona’s new policy will go some way to correcting that.

“In a city like Barcelona, it’s a case of replacing what exists with green infrastructure(基础建设),” says Lorena Escuer who has worked in Barcelona on a pilot scheme called Alcorques Vivos, which plants wildflowers at the base of trees in the streets rather than surrounding them with pavement. “It’s not having a park surrounded by asphalt(沥青)but introducing nature into the city,” she says. “People need re-educating. Their idea of a clean space is where there’s no life and the ecosystem is dead. There’s this idea that nature is something outside and that what’s natural for the city is for there to be nothing.”

“Rewilding has made us look at how we live and how we want to live. There’s no going back from here. The lockdown gave us a glimpse of nature in the city and it surprised us,” says Margarita Pares.

6 . Nashville-based helicopter pilot Joel Boyers had just finished his job on Saturday morning and was heading home when he received a call for help from a woman in Pennsylvania. Her brother Johnson’s home in Waverly, Tennessee, was underwater and he was trapped on a roof with his daughters. Could Boyers help?“I thought how I would feel if I told her I was not even going to try?” he said in a Thursday interview. “She just so happened to call the right person,   because I’m the only person crazy enough to even try to do that.”

The weather was terrible and Boyers had to deal with hills and power lines on the way to Waverly, a small city about 60 miles west of Nashville. Just before reaching the town, he found the Internet was down, making it impossible to locate the house he was looking for. He flew on anyway.

“When I arrived, it was nothing but raging water below me,” he said. A few people were out in boats, rescuing the trapped. Boyers was alone in the sky. He started flying up and down the flooded area, grabbing anyone he could.

Boyers said he ended up rescuing 17 people that day. He was proud of that, but said he was the one who should be thanking them. “I literally prayed just days before this that I would be given some meaning in my life, and then I end up getting this call,” he said. He had flown over disasters before including floods, but “The police are usually there, and my hands are tied. This time there isn’t any,” he said.

To perform the rescues, Boyers had to carefully avoid power lines, balance his skids (打滑) on sloped rooftops, and fly over flood waters. It took all the skills learned over 16 years of flying, including for a television news station, for documentaries and for country music stars. “I don’t want to lie,” he said. “It was almost a little fun for me.”

9 . The 1930s and early 1940s were a good time to fish for sardines (沙丁鱼) off California. Centered on Monterey Bay, catches increased dramatically and supported the state’s economy. But the situation began to change in 1946, and sardine catches eventually fell from an average of 234,000 tons to just 24,000 tons. The industry went belly-up.

Scientists have guessed for decades about what caused this phenomenon, but they lacked data to test their theories. Now researchers have finally found one apparent cause: cycles of ocean upwelling, a defining feature of the West Coast sea environment in which deep, nutrient-rich water rises to the nutrient-poor surface and restores the food supply there. The key that unlocked this phenomenon turned out to be old seaweed specimens (标本) gathered around the U. S.

“Plants are just sitting there, recording data about the state of the ocean,” says Kyle Van Houtan, chief scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium and senior author of the new study. Van Houtan and others had suspected the impact of upwelling, but scientists only started measuring the process in Monterey Bay in 1946. Historic seaweed specimens, Van Houtan realized, might fill in the blanks for earlier years—similar to the way ice cores can help reconstruct CO₂ levels from times before researchers started collecting real-time measurements.

For the new study, the scientists relied on the fact that deeper water near Monterey typically hosts more of a particular nitrogen isotope (氮同位素). Looking at modern upwelling data and recently collected seaweed, they found that higher levels of this nitrogen in the plants’ cells corresponded with periods of more upwelling. Next they measured the isotope levels in 70 historic specimens of the red seaweed Gelidium, gathered from Monterey as far back as 1878. The results suggested a gradual increase in upwelling and then a dramatic decrease, which lined up with the sardine population’s growth and decline.

“This paper is an excellent example of the creative detective work of historical ecology,” says Loren McClenachan, a marine ecologist at Colby College, who was not involved in the research. “There are thousands and thousands of similar specimens in collections around the world, and applying similar methods could teach us a great deal about long-term ocean change.”