Breaking Waves: Ocean News

A decades-old neighborhood project in Tucson provides food to residents as well as shade to cool streets in the third-fastest warming city in the US Near downtown Tucson, Arizona, is Dunbar Spring, a neighborhood unlike any other in the city. The unpaved sidewalks are lined with native, food-bearing trees and shrubs fed by rainwater diverted from city streets. One single block has over 100 plant species, including native goji berries, desert ironwood with edamame-like seeds and chuparosa bushes with cucumber-flavored flowers. This urban food forest – which began almost 30 years ago – provides food for residents and roughage for livestock, and the tree canopy also provides relief to residents in the third-fastest warming city in the nation. It has made Dunbar Spring a model for other areas grappling with increased heat, drought and food insecurity caused by the climate crisis. Continue reading...

Avian flu has decimated the marine creatures on the country’s Pacific coastline and scientists fear it could be jumping from mammal to mammal At first, it appears to be dead. Its head lies in the sand, and a small tide pool has formed around it. Its shoulder blades jut out and its coffee and beige pelt hangs loosely on protruding vertebrae that taper down to its long tail flippers. But the young male sea lion is still alive. Its round wet eyes blink and occasionally it tries to move, rolling over or lifting its head, as the flooding tide inches it up the beach in Chepeconde, about 75 miles south of Peru’s coastal capital, Lima. Continue reading...

Head of seabed authority accused of abandoning neutrality at critical point with first commercial application imminent Michael Lodge, a British lawyer and the head of the UN-affiliated body responsible for governing mining in the high seas, has been criticised by diplomats who claim he has been pushing them to accelerate the start of deep-sea mining. A German diplomat said Lodge – the secretary-general of the International Seabed Authority (ISA) – has a duty of neutrality and has overstepped his role in resisting measures put forward by some council members that could slow down approval of the first mining proposals, according to the New York Times. Continue reading...

Members of the Menindee community are trying to come to terms with how another mass fish kill incident has occurred in the Darling-Baaka River. 'This is an Australian disaster and it should be treated as such: like a bushfire, like a flood. Fish kills and unhealthy river systems have got to be taken seriously," says Barkandji woman Denise O’Donnell ► Subscribe to Guardian Australia on YouTube ‘All this here will kill this river’: traditional owners grieve for the Darling-Baaka after mass fish death Flood and heat: why millions of fish are dying in western NSW Continue reading...