2 . A pond in Hawaii has turned so pink that it could be from the Barbie movie-but it’s no cause for a dance party. Drought may be reason for the strange color, scientists say, and they’re warning against entering the water or drinking it.

Workers at the Kealia Pond National Wildlife Refuge (遇难所) on the island of Maui have been watching the situation of the pink water since October 30, 2023, after getting a phone call from somebody who was walking on the beach.

“I just got a report from somebody who was walking on the beach, and they called me up like ‘There’s something weird going on over here’,” said Bret Wolfe, the refuge manager.

Wolfe was concerned the bright pink could be a sign of an event called an algae bloom (绿藻泛地), but lab tests found such algae was not causing the color. Instead, an organism (微生物) called halobacteria might be the cause.

Halobacteria are a type of organism that lives in bodies of water with high levels of salt. The salinity (盐度) inside the Kealia Pond outlet area is now greater than 70 parts per thousand, which is twice the salinity of seawater. Wolfe said they will need to study the DNA to confirm the organism.

Maui’s drought is likely leading to the situation. Normally Waikapu Stream feeds into Kealia Pond and raises water levels there, but Wolfe said that hasn’t happened in a long time.

When it rains, the stream will flow into Kealia’s main pond and then into the outlet area that’s now pink. This will reduce the salinity and potentially change the water’s color.

The refuge has seen an increase in visitors after photos of the pink pond were posted on social media. Wolfe said he would love to have visitors come to learn about local aims to protect nature.

But officials have announced a special warning for people not to enter the water or eat any fish caught there.

4 . It’s a historic moment for artificial intelligence (AI). Everyone is starting to see the business value of AI. It is being added to more and more things every year, and it is getting smarter and smarter—accelerating human innovation. Moreover, it also has the capability to save our planet from pollution and global warming.

AI in the future can be applied to thousands of issues affecting the environment. For example, using AI and data, researchers are able to identify patterns and monitor changes of land surfaces, such as decreasing sea area and ice caps, which can be used to determine future risks. AI can also be used to monitor pollution and other contributions to climate change.

AI is improving agriculture by collecting data and images alongside knowledge of crop diseases. Farmers hope to increase crop yields(产量) and reduce water requirements and pesticide usage.

AI can be used to protect oceans from illegal overfishing. Satellite data and data of ship movement are used in a machine learning algorithm (算法) called Global Fishing Watch which can be used to identify boats that are fishing illegally. This is protecting marine life and protecting over fished areas.

In the future, AI methods may create a digital dashboard (仪表板) for the planet, allowing us to monitor, model, foresee and manage environmental systems at a global scale. AI can be involved in everything from monitoring deforestation (毁林), CO2 levels, sea levels, wildlife movement, illegal activity, pollution, to predicting natural disasters better.

This approach needs to start now, because time is too short and resources are becoming too thin on a global scale. To achieve environmental gains AI and data are necessary. To achieve this, a global cooperation among research institutes, companies, industries, governments and charities must start for the best interest of our planet and future quality of life.

The possibilities are endless, Data, AI and humans can work together to create informative networks to protect the planet and bring it back from the edge of global warming.

7 . The world is about to get a lot greener over the next 10 years. The United Nations has begun 2021-30 the Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, and many countries, with help from donors, have started ambitious programs to restore forests. But little is known about how best to achieve that.

Between 2000 and 2020, the amount of forest increased by 3 million square kilometers, an area larger than Peru, according to the World Resources Institute, with China and India leading the way. But about 45% of those new forests are less beneficial for biodiversity (生物多样性) and long-term carbon storage than natural forests.

Many reforestation (新造林) projects focus on the number of trees planted, with less attention to how well they survive, how various the resulting forests are, or how much carbon they store. “We still know relatively little about what is working well or not, where, and why.” says Laura Duncanson of the University of Maryland, College Park, who studies carbon storage in forests.

Lindsay Banin, a forest ecologist at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, and her colleagues examined data on how well newly planted trees survived at 176 reforested sites that differed in soil and environmental conditions as well as in what was planted. In some places, fewer than one in five saplings (幼树) survived, and on average only 44% lasted more than 5 years.

There is encouraging information: When saplings were planted near adult trees, an average of 64% survived, possibly because those spots were not as degraded. Other research has shown that some animals enjoy eating saplings which seem delicious. So measures such as fencing out cattle and improving soil conditions can be taken to increase saplings’ chances of survival as well, but they can be costly

Many other issues need attention as well, says Marshall, also a co-editor of the theme issue.

8 . The garment (服装) industry is one of the largest carbon polluters on planet Earth, and one of the greatest producers of waste. Three out of five of the 100 billion garments made in 2018 ended up in landfill within a year. Toxic chemicals land in the environment and worker communities, and the production of cotton uses up vast amounts of water.

The business model of fast fashion has led to an enormous increase in the amounts of clothes that are produced, sold, and thrown. According to McKinsey, clothing production doubled from 2000 to 2014, and the average consumer buys 60% more garments each year. At the same time, these clothes are kept only half as long as they were a mere fifteen years ago.

About 100 billion items of clothing are produced each year; that’s nearly 14 items for every human being on the planet. Some of those never even reach the consumers; it caused a minor anger when in 2018 a luxury brand admitted to burning clothes just to protect the brand.

Yet, with clothes being so cheap, people do not wear at least 50 percent of their wardrobes, according to this study. The clothing and footwear industries together account for more than 8 percent of global climate influence, greater than all international airline flights and oceanic shipping trips combined. Water usage for growing cotton has led to huge lack of water, and coloring and treatment of garments make up 17%—20% of all industrial water pollution.

An industry that makes billions on the use of the planet does not suddenly become more sustainable (可持续的) when they start using organic cotton, or start burning their unsold goods (remember—people worked really hard for very little money on those clothes!) as a green fuel…

9 . It is a tough time to be a tree. Earth has lost a third of its forests over the past 10, 000 years — half of that just since 1900. We logged them for wood. We cut them to make way for farms and cattle. We cleared land to build homes and roads. Although deforestation has decreased globally from its peak in the 1980s, trends vary by region. In Indonesia, which had been cutting down forests for oil palm plantations (棕榈种植园), primary forest loss has declined since 2016. From August 2020 to July 2021, the Brazilian Amazon lost 5,000 square miles of rainforest, a 22 percent increase over the previous year. Since 1990, we’ve cut down more forest globally than there is forest in the United States.

Trees are growing faster as they absorb extra CO₂. That “greening” of the planet has so far helped slow climate change. But climate change is killing trees. And what has made forest scientists increasingly uneasy is the quickening pace of extreme events — fire, more powerful storms, and, most notably, severe heat and drought, which can worsen the effects of all the rest, shifting forests that have been around since the last ice age to entirely new states.

Climate change still poses less of a threat to forests than logging and land clearing, but the threat is growing fast. Satellite data show that Earth’s tree-covered area actually expanded from 1982 to 2016 by 7 percent, an area larger than Mexico. But that doesn’t mean forests are doing fine. The data don’t distinguish between natural forests and industrial tree farms, such as the millions of palm, eucalyptus (桉树), and pine trees planted as crops while rainforest is cleared. Also, the data don’t show which forests were lost to chain saws and which were killed by climate-related events.