3 . Sometimes a camera’s eye in the sky can cast new light on the world we live in—highlighting changes or celebrating beauty we might be unaware of on ground level. And that’s what you’ll see in the winners from the 2023 Drone (无人机) Photo Awards.

The photography competition, now in its sixth year, received nearly 14, 000 images from amateur and professional photographers from 104 countries for the nine categories of the competition. All photos were taken from above using a drone.

Here’s a look at some of those award-winning photos and honorable mentions from around the world.

“In Baja California Sur in Mexico, gray whales come to interact with people—as if they were friends(in Spanish’Amigos’),” says the photographer.

Rice mill workers start their day at the break of dawn. Some of them boil the paddy rice. Others carry it and spread it outside the rice mill to dry in the sun. To make sure that it dries properly, they rake (耙) it out, then sweep it back.

The Pallikaranai wetland is one of the few remaining wetlands in India. Every day, the photographer says that 3,500 tons of garbage are dumped on some 300 acres of this nearly 20,000-acre wetland.

Naming it The strawberry show is about to begin, the photographer says that the strawberry field from above looks like the opening of a theater curtain before a big show.

4 . Edward Davis was a professor who worked on ocean research. However, bored with writing death records of ocean species, he quit his job in 2007. Rather than spend any more of his life recording the dying. Edward decided to try to protect the living creatures in the few remaining areas of the ocean.

These areas are the last wild places of the sea still undamaged by overfishing, pollution and climate change. “It is necessary for us to go to places that still look like the ocean as it was 500 years ago.” Edward says. “These areas, like Palau, are the examples of sustainable (可持续的) development. Maybe we can’t bring all of the ocean back to this state, but these places show us what the potential is.” Beneath the surface of a stormy sea off Palau in the western Pacific live various lively corals. The tiny island nation has protected 80 percent of its waters as a no-fishing area—the largest percentage of protected ocean area in the world. The remaining 20 percent can be fished only by Palauans.

To protect these places, Edward and his team started a project on ocean protection in 2008. Over the past years, the project has helped create 22 ocean reserves. These make up two-thirds of the world’s fully protected ocean areas. Now Edward and his team have set an even bigger goal—to protect more than a third of the world’s oceans for the purpose of keeping biological diversity.

For Edward, one of the most satisfying aspects of his job is working with local communities in the places he and his team are seeking to protect. The team worked closely with about 50 local people on the island. “We showed them an underwater world they had never seen,” Edward recalls. “Huge schools of fish will surely swim in some of the clearest waters ever measured in the Pacific.”

The 14th Meeting of the Conference of the Contracting Parties to the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands (RAMSAR COP14) took place in Wuhan, Hubei Province in November. It was the first time that China    1    (host) this international event.    2    (know) as the kidneys (肾脏)of the Earth, wetlands are among the world’s three major ecosystems together with forests and oceans. China’s wetlands arc vast. diverse and widely distributed (分布),    3    (range) from the cold temperate zone to the hot zone. In recent years. China has been strengthening the protection and restoration of wetlands.    4    is remarkable is that more than 600 wetland nature reserves and 1.600 wetland parks have been established. China’s first law on    5    (specific) protecting wetlands took effect on June 1 this year.

Wuhan, the host city of RAMSAR COP 14. has 162,400 hectares (公顷) of wetlands, accounting    6    18. 9 per cent of its total area. In June,Wuhan    7    (award) Wetland City Accreditation by the Ramsar Convention,    8    international honor for the protection of urban wetland ecology.

Nature provides the basic conditions for human    9    (survive) and development. With a comprehensive approach to the conservation of ecosystems in place. China aims to boost their biodiversity, stability and sustainability. Wetland conservation is a crucial part of the country’s efforts to achieve    10    (it) green development goals.

6 . The essence (本质) of fast fashion is to make clothes inexpensively and quickly, to get new trends and styles into stores and online as soon as possible, and it comes at a high social and environmental cost. Keeping production costs low means they can make their clothes cheap, using cheap labour in unsafe working conditions, and in countries with bad environmental regulations.

Throw-away culture is deeply rooted in our society; three in five of our clothing pieces are thrown out within a year. Fast fashion brands keep the consumers hungry and feeling like they need more by attracting them with newness and convincing the consumers that they need what they’re selling. This only results in increasing textile waste as people no longer want but throw it away.

Criticisms of the fast fashion industry include its negative environmental impact: water pollution, the use of toxic (有毒的) chemicals and increasing levels of textile waste. Textile dyeing is the second largest polluter of clean water globally, after agriculture. Fast fashion companies rely on their products being made cheaply and quickly, so they avoid talking when it comes to being aware of their impact on the environment. Greenpeace’s recent Detox Campaign showed that many brands use toxic and dangerous chemicals in their supply chains, and many of the chemicals are either banned or strictly controlled in lots of countries.

In conclusion, the fast fashion industry has a bad effect on our environment through fast fashion brands’ ecological practices and only continues to make the problem last for a long time in the future through extreme consumerist culture. In order for change to happen, the common people need to open their eyes and take measures to prevent the fast fashion from growing.

7 . In a paper published in Nature Communications, a team led by scientists from the University of California, using climate models and satellite data, reveal for the first time how protecting tropical forests can yield climate benefits that enhance carbon storage in nearby areas.

Many climate scientists use computer simulations (模拟) to mimic the planet's climate as it exists today and how it may exist in the future as humanity keeps emitting greenhouse gases. Such models rely on accurate measurements of all the moving parts of the climate system, from how much sunlight hits and warms the climate, to the response of forest biomass (生物量) to changes in temperature, rainfall and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.

Jim Randerson, UCI professor of Earth system science, said, “This paper shows that avoiding deforestation yields carbon benefits in nearby regions as a consequence of climate feedbacks.”

He explained that for a new patch of deforestation in the Amazon, the regional climate changes that happen as a result led to an additional 5.1 percent more loss of total biomass in the entire Amazon basin. In the Congo, the additional biomass loss from the climate effects of deforestation is about 3.8 percent. Tropical forests store about 200 petagrams of carbon in their aboveground biomass. Since 2010, deforestation has been removing about 1 petagram of that carbon every year. (One petagram is equal to 1 trillion kilograms.)

Until now, climate modelers have, for lack of data, not considered tree mortality (死亡率) in their climate simulations. But by combining satellite data with climate variables, they obtained information about how sensitive carbon stored in vegetation is to climatic changes that result from tree mortality and fire.

Over and over at the UN climate summit in Glasgow, world leaders have stressed the need     1     (limit) global warming to 1. 5 degrees Celsius. Experts have said crossing the 1. 5 ℃threshold(界限）risks     2     （release) far more severe climate change effects on people, wildlife and ecosystems. Preventing it     3     (require) almost halving global CO₂ emissions(排放) by 2030 from 2010 levels and cutting them to net-zero by 2050.

Already, the world has heated to around 1. 1℃ above pre-industrial levels. Each of the last four decades was     4     (hot) than any decade since 1850. “We never had such a global warming in only a few decades,” said climate     5     (science) Daniela Jacob at the Climate Service Center Germany.

More warming to 1. 5 ℃ and beyond will     6     (worse) such impacts. For example, heatwaves would become both more frequent and more severe. A warmer atmosphere can also hold more moisture(水分), resulting in more extreme rainfall     7     raises flood risks. It also increases evaporation, leading to more intense droughts.

“At 1. 5 ℃, there’s     8     good chance that we can keep most of the Greenland and west Antarctic ice sheet     9     collapsing,” said climate expert Michael Mann at Pennsylvania State University. That would help limit sea level rise to a few     10     (foot) by the end of the century.

9 . Humankind’s growing need for food is in conflict with thousands of other species’ need for space. By 2050, humans may need to clear an additional 3.35 million square kilometers of land for agriculture. Changing the largely natural habitat would remove more than 17,000 species from the land, researchers report in Nature Sustainability.

“But changing how, where and what food is grown can reduce the effect,” says scientist David Williams of the University of Leeds. “We can feed the planet without making it too bad.”

To figure out how, Williams and his colleagues first identified habitat most likely to be cleared for cropland. The team then calculated how much food 152 countries would need to feed their growing population and mapped where crops would likely be grown in each, based on past land use changes. By 2050, the world’s 13 million square kilometers of cropland would need to increase by 26 percent, the team found. That growth is largely concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia.

The researchers then put these estimates (估计) on distribution (分布) maps of nearly 20,000 species. While almost all of these species would lose some habitat, the team estimated 1,280 species would lose at least 25 percent of their range and that 96 species would lose at least 75 percent.

“Changing the global food system could cut these losses,” the team says. Among the changes are improving crop output and increasing food imports for food-poor countries. Adopting these measures would actually reduce the world’s cropland area by 3.4 million square kilometers by 2050 and result in just 33 species losing more than a quarter of their natural range, the team found. “Achieving that may be difficult and needs governments’ effort,” Williams says, “but emptying our plates at the family dinner tables could still have big effects.” “The world needs to feed a growing population, but it can be done more sustainably (可持续地),” he says.