The Lancet countdown on health and climate change. (Video)

Fires scorching Bolivia’s Chiquitano forest

Science magazine

Wildfires in the Amazon rainforests of Bolivia.

Photo by List Top 10.

The Chiquitano Dry Forest - endemic to Bolivia, highly biodiverse, and considered the world’s best-preserved tropical dry forest - has lost a staggering 1.4 million hectares to fires since July. Story here.

Thirteen years after the pesticide Lorsban sickened a Manitoba family, Health Canada is proposing it be severely restricted in Canada. The European Union will ban it in the new year. by Larry Powell

In the fall of 2006, Loyd Burghart told his story to "Planet in Peril." Burghart, a livestock farmer in the Swan Valley of western Manitoba, said he, his wife, Donna and their four children inhaled fumes from the chemical, Lorsban (chlorpyrifos) which a neighbour had been sparing on a nearby crop. (Many farmers in that part of the province had done the same that year, in an effort to control a severe infestation of  Bertha Army worms.) 

Some time after the incident, Burghart, his wife 
and one of their children, pose by a mother sow and 
piglets in their yard. A PinP photo.

The spray had left Burghart's entire family with severe symptoms. He says he, himself, was left writhing with severe pain in his eyes. 

It's not immediately known how many other Canadians have suffered in similar incidents. But it's hard to believe this was the only case. (Burghart was also worried how the chemical might impact the health of his animals and their feed.)

Health Canada announced recently it will propose that Lorsban be banned for "almost all agricultural uses." It will still be allowed for things like mosquito control. The pesticide has been linked to developmental problems in humans. 

And, it has just been announced that the European Union will ban it next year, as well. 

Lorsban is described as a "broad spectrum insecticide," used to control bugs in cereals, oilseeds, grains, fruits and vegetables.

Nitrogen crisis threatens Dutch environment—and economy

Science Magazine

Public domain - by Sachiho 

They're protesting a Dutch high court decision in May that suspended construction projects that pollute the atmosphere with nitrogen compounds and harm nature reserves. The freeze has stalled the expansion of dairy, pig, and poultry farms—major sources of nitrogen in the form of ammonia from animal waste. Also blocked are plans for new homes, roads, and airport runways, because construction machinery emits nitrogen oxides. All told, the shutdown puts some €14 billion worth of projects in jeopardy, according to ABN AMRO Bank. “It has really paralyzed the country,” says a political scientist Details here.

Marine life, fisheries increasingly threatened as the ocean loses oxygen – IUCN report

International Union for the Conservation of Nature

The Daggernose shark, one of several larger species
considered especially vulnerable. A NOAA rendering.

The loss of oxygen from the world’s ocean is increasingly threatening fish species and disrupting ecosystems, a new IUCN report warns. Ocean oxygen loss, driven by climate change and nutrient pollution, is a growing menace to fisheries and species such as tuna, marlin and sharks, according to the report released today at the UN Climate Change conference in Madrid.

Without drastic and immediate action, climate change will spell less food for the vast majority of Earth's population by century's end. Study. by Larry Powell

A disastrous 2019 growing season in Manitoba included drought,
rain and snow at the wrong times. Both seeding and harvesting
of food crops like canola (above) were disrupted,
yield and quality reduced. A PinP photo.

There are few bright spots in this body of research. 

If developed countries don't reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to a changing climate "promptly," it warns, a "perfect storm" will result. Food such as soy, corn, wheat and rice produced by the agriculture sector and seafood by marine fisheries, will go down for about 90 percent of Earth's population - more than seven billion, by 2100. Most of those affected already live in the most sensitive and least developed countries.

As overwhelming as the impacts would be, they wouldn't be universal. A scant three percent of the population would actually experience a food production increase over the same period.

And, if countries actually make those emissions cutbacks (a "best-case scenario"), "Most countries would experience net gains in both agriculture and fisheries production."

Even without concerted efforts, consequences for those living in high latitudes in North America and Europe may still not likely be as severe.  Canada and Russia, for example, "will experience losses of lower magnitude or even gains in some cases." That's because residents of those countries do not depend on food from farming and fishing as much as others do.

The authors, part of an international team of scientists, call the effects these changes will have on vulnerable human societies, "One of the grand challenges of our time."

Their findings were published recently in "Science Advances."