What the West sees as the Chinese government’s top-down decision making around ecological migration is actually a more complex process.

Many “green” countries depend on imports from more polluting countries. A new index takes this into account and could shake up rankings on global environmental report cards.

OpenStreetMap has had impressive growth in coverage and detail in the decade since its launch, and is increasingly being seen as an authoritative data source, much as Wikipedia has rivaled traditional encyclopedias for content and currency.

Journalist Cheryl Philips described using publicly accessible records of infrastructure assessments done by the Department of Transportation in Washington State to map the most vulnerable bridges and to tell the story behind a bridge that collapsed, killing several people. John Bohannon of Science Magazine used iPython coding to send a fake journal article to close to 200 open access journals in a sting operation to uncover the lack of peer review of a clearly flawed article.

Many resettlers are economically better off, but the dislocations remain significant, especially for older resettlers, who have a harder time getting work in the newly developed industrial sector. Although the plight of some resettlers has been quite difficult (one older man competed fiercely to serve as a porter for us for the royal sum of $6), and there are stories of suicide in some resettler communities, it is hard to separate the problems they face from the larger dislocations that are so prevalent in 21st century China.

The first independent analysis of China environmental data at the sub-national level by an international team aims to help guide the development of policies addressing environmental challenges created by China’s rapid growth.

Over the past 40 years, coastal and inland water ecosystems experienced the greatest levels of net in-migration, vs. mountain, forest, cultivated, and dryland ecosystems, which experienced the greatest levels of net out-migration, says a new report.

Urbanization poses both challenges and opportunities for sustainable development and environmental management. Improved data on patterns of human settlement and trends in population can help researchers and policy makers better understand differences between urban and rural areas in terms of their impacts on the environment and vulnerability to environmental variability and change. The newly released… read more

For years, activists have sought to “save the rainforest.” Now, it looks like there could be a mechanism to do just that. It was announced yesterday that negotiators have reached a nearly final agreement on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation, or REDD, in which polluters in the north will pay rainforest countries to keep from cutting forests. Many forest-rich countries would like to benefit from […]