1 . The endangered pandas in the Qinling Mountains might face a new threat: the loss of their food, bamboo, which makes up 99% of their meals.

Adult pandas spend most part of the day eating bamboo and have to take in at least 40 pounds a day to stay healthy. However, a new study published in Nature Climate Change warned that they may soon find their food gone because most of the bamboo in the Qinling Mountains might disappear by the end of the century as a result of rising temperature worldwide.

A team made up of researchers from Michigan State University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences has studied the effects of climate change on the bamboo in the Qinling Mountains. They have found that bamboo is very sensitive to climate changes. “80% to 100% of the bamboo would be gone if the average temperature rises 3.5 degrees worldwide by the end of the century,” said Liu Jianguo, one of the report’s authors.

He added, “This is how much the temperature would rise by 2100 even if all countries will keep their promises in the Paris Agreement. But you know what is happening all around the world.”

In recent years, China has been trying its best to protect the endangered pandas by setting up more and bigger natural reserves.

“But it is far from enough and the endangered pandas need cooperation from the rest of the world, because their future is not just in the hands of the Chinese,” said Shirley Martin from the World Wildlife Fund but not a member of the team.

The Qinling Mountains, in the southwest of China, are home to about 260 pandas. That is about 13% of China’s wild panda population. In addition, about 375 are living in research centers and zoos in China.

4 . Garbage sorting (分类) has become a hot topic around China, especially after Shanghai began carrying out a regulation (规章) on July 1.

Beijing has been expected to do the same. At present the regulation gives garbage sorting responsibilities to government departments, property management groups and other organizations. It also gives rules for companies, explaining how they’re responsible for waste collection, transportation and treatment. Citizens are free of responsibilities for the moment.

The long-awaited revision will soon change the situation. “Taking out the trash without sorting it properly will be illegal,” said Sun Xinjun, director of the Beijing Commission of Urban Management. In Shanghai, violators (违背者) are now fined up to 200 yuan for trash-sorting violations. “The maximum fine in Beijing will not be less than that,” he said.

The Beijing city government first promoted garbage sorting in 2009. Authorities have since called on citizens to sort their household waste into four types—recyclable waste, kitchen trash, dangerous waste and others , and leave it in a colored dustbin or trash can. Blue-colored dustbins are for recyclable items, green for kitchen trash, red for dangerous materials and grey for other waste.

To promote the awareness of garbage sorting and expand the base of participants, authorities have employed workers to help citizens. With intelligent devices, those who throw in recyclable waste at given places will be rewarded with bonus points, which can be used to buy daily goods. At some communities, there are no color-coded dustbins. Instead, a scheduled garbage collection service is offered to help improve the environment. In other communities, workers offer a door-to-door service to collect recyclable or kitchen waste.

Beijing Environmental Sanitation Engineering Group has been promoting new garbage sorting facilities such as recycling cabinets and smart kitchen waste trash cans since 2016, Xinhua News Agency reported.

6 . In my everyday life, I am on an ongoing journey to figure out different ways to reduce my carbon footprint on the planet. A carbon footprint is the measure of influence our activities have on the environment, in particular climate change. It is calculated by the amount of greenhouse gas we produce in our daily lives. Fortunately, nowadays it is much easier to make eco-friendly lifestyle choices than, let’s say, 20 years ago. But one question has been on my mind a lot lately: is it better to buy new eco-friendly products or used traditionally produced goods?

After doing some research, I have decided that some things are better new and others are better used. Let me try to explain.

A carbon footprint is made up of two parts, the primary footprint and the secondary footprint. The primary footprint is a measure of our direct emissions(排放)of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the burning of fuels, including household energy consumption and transportation. The secondary footprint is a measure of the indirect CO2 emissions from the whole life cycle of products we use-those related to their production and breakdown.

Based on this understanding, we have a good deal of control and responsibility over our carbon footprint. Things like dishes, clothes and furniture fall into the “secondary footprint” group, so less is more and we can focus on finding used goods to avoid the added production. However, for the car and the other appliances(设备) that we need we can go with new, energy-saving models. I heard somewhere that electronics and appliances give off 90% of their carbon footprint after they leave the factory. So it seems most reasonable to go for the energy-saving models. The main concern here is the amount of energy that goes into the making of new products and whether or not that extra carbon is worth the footprint the product will make once it gets to you.

7 . Natural disasters take many different forms and can happen without warning. Earthquakes, floods, vol-canoes, droughts, typhoons, and hurricanes are all natural disasters.

The earthquake of 26 December 2004 resulted in one of the worst natural disasters in living memory. It was a massive underwater quake and occurred in the Indian Ocean. This caused a huge tsunami (海啸) to cross the Indian Ocean. It destroyed coastlines and communities and brought death and destruction to many people. The survivors needed fresh water, food and shelter as well as medical help. People from all over the world gave money to help the people survive.

The surface of the Earth has not always looked as it does today; it is moving continuously (although very slowly) and has done so for billions of years. This is one cause of earthquakes, when one section of the Earth crashes with another. Scientists can predict where this might happen and the area between plates is called a fault line. However, earthquakes do not always happen on fault lines, which is why they are so dangerous and unpredictable.

All the disasters are very dangerous and continue to kill thousands of people each year,but they are nowhere near the most dangerous disaster to ever happen on earth. One type of event in the earth’s history has regularly killed millions of beings: asteroid (小行星) impacts (撞击). About once every million years the Earth is hit by a piece of rock and ice from space large enough to cause massive destruction (including earthquakes, volcanoes and ice ages) and sometimes to kill entire species. Sixty-five million years ago more than half the earth’s species were killed by such a disaster,including all the dinosaurs (恐龙). Disasters on the Earth may seem dangerous, but the biggest threat to humans is likely to come from space.

9 . Mr. Fang is now the owner of 36 greenhouses producing organic vegetables in the Gobi desert in Northwest China’s Gansu province. He is one of the beneficiaries of the Gobi Farming Program of Gansu province that is building rows of greenhouses in the desert to help transform local farming and alleviate poverty.

Grain production in Gansu is greatly affected by the climate and the output is unstable. Agricultural production there relies heavily on rivers, oases and groundwater irrigation. If traditional extensive agricultural production continued, it could gradually narrow the living space.

In 1995, a local entrepreneur ventured to use Israeli technologies to build greenhouses for vegetables growing in the desert. Such individual pilot projects encouraged the Gansu government to launch a provincial-level Gobi farming program in 2017 with a target to build up a controlled-environment agriculture of about 20,000 hectares by 2022. Some cities in the province, which include Fang’s village, have already been experimenting with Gobi farming for several years.

Despite the harsh environment, farming in the Gobi desert has its advantages: the extended amount of sunlight provides adequate energy for crops, a significant temperature difference between day and night helps crops accumulate nutrients and the Gobi’s hot and dry air means fewer pests and crop diseases. The Gobi greenhouses popping up in Gansu use drip and spray irrigation, which can cut water consumption by almost 50 percent compared to a normal farm. The greenhouses are also eco-friendly, as they use substrates for soilless cultivation recycled from rotten leaves, straw and cow and sheep feces.

With the greenhouses, Fang earns around 70,000 yuan annually. Data from Suzhou. district of Jiuquan showed the greenhouse program has helped bring an average revenue of about $ 72,300 per hectare to local farmers. Large scale greenhouse farming is an investment-intensive project and cannot be sustained only by government financial support. Therefore, the local government has been encouraging villagers such as Fang to take the lead to rent greenhouses or build their own.

It is not an easy task, and many villagers still want to wait and see. However, more and more are starting to join in, either to rum their own greenhouses or work as hired workers for greenhouse owners. Starting from managing four greenhouses in 2009, Fang now is also a partner of a greenhouse farming cooperative running 120 greenhouses.

The relatively low cost of large-scale land use in the Gobi desert have also encouraged large firms to start their Gobi farming pilot projects in Gansu. If the Gobi farming proves successful, it could provide experiences for countries in Central Asia linked with Gansu both by the ancient Silk Road as well as its modern version of the Belt and Road Initiative.

10 . They come in all shapes and sizes, in color of golden orange, pale white, and green. Painted, carved, or baked in a pie, pumpkins are cheerful symbols of autumn that are grown in every county of Washington.

U. S. farmers grow more than a billion pounds of pumpkins annually, and many growers use sheets of plastic preventing water loss to make sure that their plants grow well. Nationwide, farmers use about a billion pounds of plastic annually. Unfortunately, that plastic ends up in landfills (填埋场), and in some places, burned in the fields.

For several years, WSU gardener Carol Miles has studied a newer product, soil-biodegradable (可降解的) plastic cover that can be left in the ground after harvest, then broken down by microbes in the soil. “You don’t need to pull it out of the field and take it to the landfill every autumn, saving farmers’ time and money,” Miles said.

Miles wanted to see how pumpkin fruit performed over the plastic. She planted Cinnamon Girl, a type that sets its fruit near the heart of the plant. That brought a challenge: the soil-biodegradable cover stuck to the bottom of the fruit.

“We have a lot of dew (露水) in the morning, and we found that if we let the fruit dry after harvest, the cover would stick to the pumpkins,” Miles said. “Nobody wants plastic stuck to their pumpkin, even if it’s biodegradable. But if you clean the fruit before the dew dries, the plastic easily comes off.”

Farmers who grow pumpkins that don’t set fruit on cover won’t encounter this challenge. For those who do, it means an extra step that they’ll have to weigh against trade-offs for sustainability (持续).

M Challenges aside, working with this crop can bring on a happy outlook,” Tymon said. u Pumpkins are cheery. They’re this bright color, and really fun to work with.”