The world’s biggest fossil producers were selling assets to meet their climate goals but letting their emissions rise, a study said fossils owed $209 billion per year in reparations, and New Jersey turned to anti-mobster laws to prosecute fossil companies. Climate risk to species around the world was rising abruptly, researchers introduced the world’s first Global Primate Roadkill Database, and orcas began teaching each other to attack small boats, possibly as revenge for past injuries.
Climate change intensified Asia’s April heat wave by 2°C, and outdoor labourers in India were particularly vulnerable to high heat. Torrential rains on top of the country’s worst drought in four decades forced 250,000 people from their homes in Somalia, South Africa braced for more frequent blackouts this winter, and climate change was on track to force 113 million Africans to migrate by 2050. Climate change was bringing big changes to farming for rice, a basic foodstuff that half the world depends on, and hotter nights were making it harder to sleep.
Calgary earned praise for its downtown revitalization plan but faced some of the world’s worst air quality due to a rash of early wildfires that could drag on all summer. The Calgary Stampeders delayed their first pre-season game as a result. Much of the west faced similar smoky conditions, and 16 evacuation orders had 10,872 Albertans out of their homes. Alberta took fire of a different sort for cutting one of the world’s best wildfire management programs by nearly $15 million, while wildland fires more than doubled since the 1970s. Alberta Indigenous communities faced the emotional roller coaster of wildfire risk, a fire was still burning near the Kátł’odeeche First Nation and Hay River, NWT, beekeepers and conservationists fretted about the fires’ impact on pollinators, an out-of-control fire in Kootenay National Park was still growing, a new fire in British Columbia’s Cariboo Region had the Blueberry River First Nations and the Doig First Nation under evacuation alert, crews were fighting to contain a fire in Wood Buffalo National Park, and a father-and-son team in Saskatchewan saved their cabin with nothing more than shovels, gasoline and their combined 64 years of wildfire experience.
So many more links to follow! Here's the rest of this week's Rundown.