2 . From beehives (蜂箱) on rooftops to mini-forests, creative ideas are bringing nature into cities, all around the world. Here are some examples.

Liverpool, England

A living wall is how Liverpool has made room for nature in its busy city center. Built in 2020, Liverpool’s living wall has been planted with 14,000 evergreens to help trap some of the pollution produced by the city’s nearby bus station. In 2021, another measure was taken. Two rooftop beehives were fixed for 40,000 bees to live in. There has been a great increase in the bee population and improvement of the community’s ecology (生态) in the following years.

Singapore, Southeast Asia

Singapore is determined to be “a city in nature”. In February 2021 the city-state announced its “Green Plan 2030” — to make the city as continual and nature-inclusive as possible. Singapore already has over 400 parks and four nature reserves and by 2026 this will increase to 300 hectares (公顷). They promise by 2030 no family should be more than a ten-minute walk from a green space.

Seoul, South Korea and Izmir, Turkey

In South Korea, Seoul has planted a forest to lower city temperatures by 3 to 7℃. The Turkish city of Izmir is hoping to reduce pollution with the Mavisehir Peynircioglu Stream Ecological Corridor (河流生态走廊),

Curitiba, Brazil

Curitiba, Brazil, has been working towards an eco-friendly model since the 1970s and city planners made the well-being of people their main concern. In the face of an increasing population, adding natural relaxation spaces and encouraging recycling practices has become a key part of city planning. The government’s forestation plan has seen the planting of many trees in public areas. Ten “mini-forests” have also been established, making use of smaller areas where larger plantations are impossible.

6 . Most of us have heard of the 3Rs: reduce, reuse and recycle. It is the core principle of a sustainable (可持续的) life, but few of us can apply it in our own lives. Now, there’s a “lab” you can explore and discover a way toward living sustainably.

3R Lab is located in Xuhui district, Shanghai. It offers exhibitions, activities and goods that showcase the 3R principle. The key to a sustainable life, according to Vincent T. M. Fong, the 32-year-old from Hong Kong who created the lab, is to make it a long-term promise. “A sustainable life should be sustainable itself in the first place. You can’t lead a sustainable life on a whim. Small and comfortable changes are exactly what you need,” Fong said.

The lab regularly hosts ugly fruit markets, offering these strange fruits which are often thrown away by traditional markets and consumers at a quite attractive price. “They’re thrown away simply because of their appearance. Buying fruit regardless of how they look reduces food waste significantly in our daily life,” Fong commented.

A water tank with two types of straws is another equipment in the lab. “One type is made from normal plastics widely used in our daily life while the other is from PHA, a new replacement for plastics, and the water is sourced from the Suzhou River,” explained Ni Li, an employee of the lab. Visitors can see how the PHA straws degrade (降解) into a thin layer in just one month, while the others remain unchanged.

“Leading a sustainable life does not necessarily mean sacrifice,” said Fong. Consuming ugly fruit and using degradable plastics are small changes that are good for the environment and easy to stick to. Only in this way can the 3R principle become part of our lives, he added.

After working there for six months, Ni, who wasn’t mindful of the 3R principle before arriving at the lab, now uses her cup every time she buys a coffee. “The job has reshaped my life,” Ni said.

7 . Time is running out for coral reefs as the climate gets hotter. So scientists are searching the globe for corals that are better at enduring heat, Now, new research shows how those “super corals” can survive: less roommate drama.

Reefs depend on a crucial partnership between the corals and the algae (海藻) that live in the corals’ tissue, The algae make food for the corals using sunlight and in exchange, get a nice spot to live. But when oceans heat up, that relationship goes bad, and the corals kick the algae out, Without their roommates, corals can die, turning a ghostly white, bleached (白化) color.

Still, some corals seem to resist bleaching better than others, A new study shows that those corals depend on algae that are better at tolerating heat. Researchers hope that pinpointing these abilities will help develop new conservation tools to preserve the world’s reefs as temperatures rise. About 1/4 of all marine life rely on coral reefs in some way, along with half 1 billion people around the world also depend on reefs for their food and livelihoods.

“Heat stress can kill a lot of corals really fast,” says Kate Quigley, a research scientist at James Cook University and the Minderoo Foundation in Australia. “I hope that nature does have some mechanisms to get us through the next few years while we get our act together.”

While the hope is that those algae could also aid in reef conservation in the future, researcher Patrick Buerger says it’s likely that it wouldn’t help all coral species. And even the toughest corals can only endure so much. Currently, the world is on track for just under 3degrees Celsius of warming by 2100, a level that would wipe out nearly all coral reefs.

“The action has to be on climate change,” he says. “This is a short-term solution that might buy some time for corals to adapt. But the main focus has to be on climate. There’s not a silver bullet to the problem.”

8 . A flood can develop slowly, over time or rapidly, as in the case of flash floods which can develop in just a few minutes and without signs of rain.

    1     This is the first thing that a person should do. It is unwise to just depend on history to decide whether your area is at risk of flooding.

Create an evacuation plan in case you have to evacuate your home. Pay attention to the safe areas you can go to. Prepare food kits for natural disasters that you can easily take with you if you have to leave your house.     2    

If there is a possibility of a flash flood, leave your home and move to higher ground at once. Do not wait for instructions to move. Evacuation may also cause a shortage in the food supply.     3     To survive, one must depend on food storage.

While evacuating, avoid walking through moving water. Even six inches of moving water can make you fall. If you have to walk in water, walk where the water is not moving.     4    

Do not drive into flooded areas. If floodwaters rise around your car, abandon (舍弃) the car and move to higher ground, when water is not moving or not more than a few inches deep.     5     If your car is trapped in rapidly moving water, stay in the car. If the water is rising inside the car, move on to the roof (顶部).

9 . The sound of leaves underfoot is usually associated with autumn. But this year, it was the soundtrack to summer walks across Europe, as maximum temperature records fell and the continent suffered its worst drought in 500 years.

The drought had been building for months after a dry winter and spring, but it was worse by a series of fierce heatwaves over the summer, says Sim on Parry at the UK Centre for Ecology &Hydrology. In France, nuclear power plants were forced to reduce their output as low river flows meant there wasn’t enough water to cool their reactors. Water levels on the Rhine river dropped so far that ships loaded with goods in Germany and the Netherlands, including coal and petrol, were unable to travel. Besides, farmers saw crops wither(枯萎). Harvests of soya-beans and sunflower seeds were predicted to fall by between12 and 16 percent.

This was a crisis caused in large part by climate change, says Richard Allan, who is also at the University of Reading. “Warming due to human-caused climate change made this event much more extreme,” he says. Studies suggest that the drought was made at least 20 times more likely by global warming.

However, that missing rainfall ends up somewhere, says Peter Gleick at the Pacific Institute in California. This year’s disastrous floods in countries including Australia and Pakistan are the “flip side” of the droughts, he says. “The droughts and the extreme floods that we are seeing are tied together, and are part and parcel of the broader challenge of climate change,” says Gleick.

In the wake of a drought, it is critical that nature gets time to recover. But for Europe, this was the second severe drought in four years. “My grass has already recovered from this summer... but if I had a tree that survived it, that would take 10 years or more to get back to a normal state,” says Niko Wanders at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.