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The year in climate news

Welcome to the latest edition of Climate Fwd: for 2021! Despite this year’s awkward uncertainty (our friends at the Styles desk described), a lot has happened this year on climate change and the environment. we rounded up Here are the highlights of our coverage.

It may seem hard to believe that the year started with the presidential transition, the riots in the Capitol, and the power outage in Texas—but that was really this year. Before summer began, drought, heat and fires had already swept the West. In the United States, it has been a year filled with challenges for a new administration’s home country climate agenda. And then autumn brought the United Nations international climate conference in Glasgow. (Next year’s event is scheduled for November in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.)

These are just some big news. This year, we researched, explained and disproved. Take a look at our summary for anything you might have missed. Think we missed something? let us know.

Thank you for reading. See you in 2022.

Chile rewrites its constitution with mining and climate at the center

Chile. Democratic Republic of Congo. Bolivia. United States. These far-flung regions have one thing in common: they are home to natural resources that are at the center of the competition for electric car resources that will shape the 21st century.

For the latest article in The Times Race to the Future seriesSomini Sengupta, a one-year project from all the newsroom colleagues, went to the salt flats in Chile, the world’s second largest lithium producer. (Lithium is a key ingredient in batteries.)

As demand rises and prices rise, Chilean mining companies and politicians who view mining as crucial to national welfare are eager to increase production. But some Chileans argue that the country’s multi-economic model, based on the extraction of natural resources, is causing too high an environmental damage and has failed to spread the benefits to all citizens, including Indigenous people.

In the midst of this explosion, a group of Chileans were elected to the Constitutional Convention to write a new constitution as they declared a “climate and ecological emergency.”

Convention members will decide many things, including: How should mining be regulated and how much say should local communities have over mining? Should Chile maintain its presidential system? Should nature have rights? What about future generations?

To read see full article the competing forces they face.

quotation: “Someone buys an electric car and it feels so good that they’re saving the planet,” said microbiologist Cristina Dorador Ortiz, who was present at the Constitutional Convention. “At the same time, an entire ecosystem is being damaged. This is a great paradox.”

We know how to protect people and buildings against tornadoes. So why don’t we?

Even by the standards of an already terrible year, the toll of hurricanes tore the South and Midwest this month was shocking: more than 90 people Kentucky and four other states were killed and many more left homeless.

But that toll reflected the consequences of human decisions as well as the strength of hurricanes. as me Wrote Recently, engineers know how to protect people and buildings against hurricanes: Emergency officials say safe rooms provide “absolute protection,” while advances in structural design can prevent buildings from falling apart in all weather but the strongest winds.

Yet efforts to incorporate these advances into building code have been repeatedly stalled or curtailed by the construction industry, which experts say stems from a concern about higher construction costs. This concern persists despite evidence that hurricane-proof design raises the price of building a home by several thousand dollars.

In this sense, the failure to incorporate scientific advances into building code may be cause for hope: If the final destruction was made worse by human decisions, then different decisions could make future disasters less deadly.

quotation: “It really turns into money,” said Jason Thompson, vice president of engineering at the National Concrete Masonry Association and one of the advocates for harder codes. “There are just different groups that want to keep the cost of construction as low as possible.”

Also important this week:

Farewell to two champions of saving the pristine places of the world

Two outstanding scientists who helped shape our understanding of the planet and especially the animals we share it with died this week: Edward O Wilson, 92 and Thomas Lovejoy, 80.

Insect expert Dr. By examining the evolution of behavior, Wilson explored how natural selection and other forces could produce something as extraordinarily complex as an ant colony. He later advocated this type of research as a way to make sense of all behavior, including ours.

In 2016, Dr. Wilson published “Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Struggle for Life.” His 32nd book and a personal recommendation for conserving biodiversity. The book offers an unlikely recipe for the environment: Dr. Wilson suggests that humans have set aside roughly 50 percent of the planet as some kind of permanent conservation area, undisturbed by humans. (This interview explores her lifelong pursuit in her own words.)

Dr. Lovejoy’s field research in the Amazon has been at the center of a broad career devoted to ecology. He invented “debt to nature” swaps that allowed countries to donate some of their foreign debt for investments in conservation. He published an early estimate of extinction rates, was the creator of the public television series “Nature,” and popularized the term “biodiversity”, later shortened to biodiversity.

Read more biodiversity news from 2021:

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