As deforestation rates in Brazil rise, it’s worth asking whether the country can repeat the successes of the last decade. Current trends don’t bode well.
Cars sit submerged in water from Hurricane Dorian in Freeport, Bahamas.
AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa
The usual way we calculate the economic damage of natural disasters underestimates their true toll – which is key to understanding the costs of climate change.
Buttongrass survives and rapidly regrows after a fire. Tasmania, Australia.
Tim Rudman/Flickr
The boreal forest is being reshaped by wildfire. As climate change intensifies wildfire activity, the boreal forest will likely become a carbon source.
Don’t blame climate change for the 39,000 forest fires now incinerating huge tracts of the Brazilian Amazon. This environmental catastrophe is human-made and highly political.
Huge fires are raging across multiple regions of the Amazon Basin.
Guaira Maia/ISA
A researcher based in Fairbanks, Alaska, links 2019’s record-breaking wildfires in far northern regions of the world to climate change, and describes what it’s like as zones near her city burn.
Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources fire rangers wade through floodwaters as they deploy pumps in Pembroke, Ont., in May 2019. Too many authorities involved in fighting flood risks can often paralyze flood management efforts.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang
Canadian history and international relations theory gives us perspective on why co-ordinating flood management has proven so difficult in Canada and what can be done about it.
The PSA star, deployed in the wild.
Joseph Sohm/Shutterstock.com
Wendy Melillo, American University School of Communication
The iconic advertising campaign originated as a way to protect the nation from its WWII enemies. Today, critics are asking if it’s causing harm as well as good.
A wildfire rips through the forest near Fort McMurray on Highway 63 in May 2016.
(THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jonathan Hayward)
As unlikely as it may sound, a new approach for fighting the destruction of wildfires in Canada’s boreal region may lie in wetlands packed with soaking layers of peat and topped with living moss.
A smokey haze from wildfires burning in the region blankets Vancouver, B.C.
Shutterstock
Laws and policies that marginalize Indigenous people and communities make these same people vulnerable to disaster.
Muddy water from debris flows like those in the Macalister catchment (West Gippsland, February 2007) can disrupt a region’s drinking water supply for years.
Photo: Adrian Murphy (Melbourne Water)
Decades of wildfire suppression have allowed flammable fuels to pile up in US forests. Scientists and managers say careful use of planned fires can reduce risks of large, out-of-control burns.
About 100 homes in Angus, Ont. were damaged by a tornado in June 2014. Ten lost their roofs and had to be demolished.
Gregory Alan Kopp, Western University
Weather-related catastrophic events have cost Canadians more than $17 billion in the past decade. That only stands to grow, unless building codes change to make homes more resilient.
Firefighters tackle a large blaze on Saddleworth Moor near Manchester, England, February 2019.
West Yorkshire Fire Service
Wildfires broke out across the British Isles during a recent heatwave. But the burning question of the link to climate change does not have an easy answer.
Professor of Civil, Environmental & Ecological Engineering, Director of the Healthy Plumbing Consortium and Center for Plumbing Safety, Purdue University
Wildfire Specialist at the University of California Cooperative Extension; Adjunct Professor Bren School of Environmental Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara