Disasters News

Rainforest in Thailand Thailand's King Bhumibol Adulyadej urged the Thai government to punish officials who allowed illegal logging which he blamed for worsening floods last year that left more than…

"History does not crawl, it jumps."- Nassim Nicholas Taleb "This is an opportunity for greatness which has never been offered to any civilization… in human history before - to act…

A hesitant response by the international community likely led to thousands of unnecessary deaths in last year's famine in East Africa finds a new report released by Oxfam and Save…

Wind turbine in Morris, Minnesota. Photo by: Jeremy Hance. Global media reporting on climate change issues was down again last year, according to a new analysis from The Daily Climate.…

Victories won by activists around the world tops our list of the big environmental stories of the year. In this photo: a young woman is placed in handcuffs and arrested…

Before and after satellite images of flooding in Ayutthaya Province, Thailand. Photo by: NASA. The year 2011 has presented the world with a shocking increase in irregular weather and disasters…

As the Philippines begins to bury more than a 1,000 disaster victims in mass graves, Philippine President Benigno Aquino has ordered an investigation into last weekend's flash flood and landslide,…

Self-organizing networks and open-source ventures in the age of global disruption "The American Empire, and the global political economy it has spawned, is unraveling—not because of some far-flung external danger,…

Not known for alarmism and sometimes criticized for being too optimistic, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has warned that without bold action in the next five years the world will…

The thylacine, the dodo, the great auk, the passenger pigeon, the golden toad: these species have become symbols of extinction. But they are only the tip of the recent extinction…

Unprecedented flooding in Thailand, torrential rains pummeling El Salvador, long-term and beyond-extreme drought in Texas, killer snowstorm in the eastern US—and that's just the last month or so. Extreme weather…

The Turkana tribe of northern Kenya are buffeted by constant drought and food insecurity, which recent research says may be worsening due to climate change. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler.…

Image of Russia and nearby areas from August 4th, 2010 by NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer. Especially intense fires are outlined in red. Smoke from peat and forest fires lead…

White capped albatross killed by oil. This species is listed as Near Threatened by the IUCN Red List. Photo ©: Forest & Bird. According to the New Zealand government an…

View Larger Map A marks the location of Papamoa Beach in the Bay of Plenty. An oil spill from a grounded container ship in New Zealand's Bay of Plenty is…

As East Africa reels from a devastating famine, which is hitting Somalia the hardest, there are new fears that another African nation could soon slip into a similar situation. On…

Oil pollution doesn't have to kill fish to have a long-term impact, according to a recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Researchers found that…

World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse clearly describes in terms of national and social security how the looming current threat to our collective global future…

Famine victims in Kenya. Children are the most vulnerable during a famine. At the beginning of August the US estimated that 29,000 children under five had perished from the famine…

Nature study finds Wars twice as likely during hot, dry years Armed men on the island of New Guinea, which has seen its fair share of civil conflict. Photo by:…

Disaster management is a global policy problem with a critical land-use change component related to settlement patterns, deforestation, and agriculture development. This is further exacerbated by climate change. For example,…

Forest fragments under research in the Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project. Photo by: Richard Bierregaard. For over 30 years, hundreds of scientists have scoured eleven forest fragments in the…

Approximate site of preliminarily approved drilling by Shell. Pink outline is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Image made with Google Earth. Less than a year and a half after…

Fifty years of oil spills in Nigeria's now infamous Ogoniland region will take up to three decades and over a billion dollars ($1 billion for just the first five years)…

As the UN announces that famine has spread in Somalia to three additional regions (making five in total now), the US has put the first number to the amount of…

As the US media is focused like a laser on theatric debt talks and the UK media is agog at the heinous Rupert Murdoch scandal, millions of people are undergoing…

After being found guilty in February of environmental harm and ordered to pay $8.6 billion in an Ecuador court of law, Chevron this week faced another trial: this time by…

Illegally felled rainforest tree in Gunung Palang National Park in Indonesian Borneo. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. Following Japan's devastating earthquake and tsunami, it needs to rebuild and do so…

When historians look back at the fight to combat climate change—not to mention the struggle to overcome our global addiction to fossil fuels—will 2011 be considered a watershed moment? Maybe.…