Growing up in Kenya, Lesein Mutunkei, together with his family, always celebrated significant     1     by planting trees, which motivated him to protect the environment. It’s what the now 18-year-old soccer player treasures, especially since Kenya has an ongoing problem with deforestation (滥伐森林).

Mutunkei follows in the footsteps of the late Kenyan Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai, who founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977. This initiative (倡仪)     2     the planting of over 51 million trees to date.

In 2018, Lesein decided to start a movement of his own. He     3     by planting one tree for every goal he scored during a football match. He called it Trees4Goals, and it has grown so much that he now plants 11 trees, one for each member of his team, every time he gets a goal. Through this, he wants to inspire young people,     4     his fellow athletes, to follow in his footsteps, take the     5     of nature seriously, and promise to plant trees every time they score. So, as a consequence, some of them have adapted this practice for their sports. “Seeing that they’re taking that responsibility     6     the project I started, for me, that is the biggest achievement,” he said.

The initiative has caught the attention of English football club Arsenal and Kenya’s Ministry of Environment and Forestry, which he now works with regularly and gets advice from.

Like Green Belt Movement, Trees4Goals, which has planted 5,500 trees so far, has made it. While Lesein has received some recognition for his initiative, he sets his sights on making it a worldwide phenomenon (现象). “Football is a universal game, and climate change is a universal problem,” he explains. “It has the power to unite, educate and inspire my generation     7     a safer and greener future.” This is     8     he wants to work with the world’s biggest football federation FIFA.

As for what others can do to fight deforestation or other environmental concerns, the teenager says it’s important to just get involved     9    , no matter how     10    .

3 . About 12% of the total global energy demand comes from heating and cooling homes and businesses. A new study suggests that using underground water to maintain comfortable temperatures could reduce consumption of natural gas and electricity in this section by 40% in the US. The approach is called ATES, short for aquifer thermal energy storage(含水层热能储存).

“We need storage to absorb energy from the sun and wind. It’s crucial to creating affordable, reliable, and deeply environmental-friendly electricity systems. Most people are interested in batteries and other kinds of electrical storage. But we were wondering whether there was any opportunity to use geothermal (地热的) energy storage,” said first author A. T. D Perera. “With ATES, energy can be stored for a long period of time, without adding an additional burden to the grid (输电网).”

ATES is a pleasantly simple concept that takes advantage of the heat-absorbing property of water and the natural geological features of the planet. You simply pull existing underground water up and heat it at the surface in the summer with environmental heat or energy. Then you send it back down. It stays fairly hot because the Earth is a good insulator (绝热体).

“Unlike above-ground tank-based water or ice storage systems, ATES will not need space. It’s also more efficient and can support larger communities in cooling or heating than traditional geothermal heat pump systems that rely on heat moving with the underground soil,” added coauthor Hong Tianzhen.

A major benefit of ATES is that it will become more efficient as weather becomes more extreme in the coming years due to climate change. The hotter summers and severer winters could increase the amount of free thermal energy that can be stored with ATES. “It’s very much a realistic thing to do and this work is really about showing its value,” said Perera. “This technology is ready to go, so to speak. We just need to do it.”

7 . Animal populations across the world have been reduced by 69% in less than 50 years, according to a new scientific report. The report’s authors are calling for urgent action to restore the natural world.

The Living Planet Report (LPR) is produced every two years by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and the Zoological Society of London. The most recent report, released on October 13, 2022, shows that almost 70% of the world’s monitored wildlife was lost between 1970 and 2018. The report is based on research from 195 countries around the world. Data was collected from almost 32,000 populations of 5,230 species.

Although the average global loss of wildlife is 69%, the rate is greater in the global south. Latin America and the Caribbean in particular have seen the sharpest fall, having lost 94% of their wildlife since 1970. Across the world, the biggest drop was in freshwater populations of wildlife — including almost 1,400 species of mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles — which have decreased by 83%.

The report identifies several causes for wildlife loss, including hunting, farming, the loss of forests, pollution and climate change. However, the report also promotes solutions, such as designing less destructive food production systems, urgently protecting the Amazon rainforest, limiting the use of fossil fuels, and creating new laws to protect our natural environment.

Commenting on the report, Marco Lambertini, director general of WWF International, called the figures “terrifying”, and said “we need to help nature recover and not simply halt its loss.” In December 2022, world leaders are meeting in Montreal for the 15th UN Biodiversity Conference, also known as COP 15. The authors of the LPR say that this is an opportunity for a global plan to deal with wildlife loss and restore nature. “Government leaders must step up at COP 15,” said Lambertini. “The world is watching.”