"In a paper published Thursday in Science, demographers from several universities and the United Nations Population Division conclude that instead of leveling off in the second half of the 21st century, as the UN predicted less than a decade ago, the world's population will continue to grow beyond 2100. (Read "Population Seven Billion" in National Geographic magazine.)"
"Muli coalfield is illegally gobbling up a nature reserve, blasting away alpine meadows and destroying the ecosystem of the country's second largest river, Greenpeace investigation shows"
"In a village 2500m high in the Indian Himalayas, life is changing. Many of the younger generation seek to chart a new course, different from those of their parents. This is one man's story of juggling responsibilities and fighting for dreams, both for himself and for his community."
This is so COOL .
The National Library of Scotland's (NLS) Map Department has recently completed a huge georeferencing exercise, taking a set of Six-Inch-To-Mile (1:10560) maps for the whole of England and Wales, scanning them in to create high-quality images, and lining them up with Google Maps and OpenStreetMap modern maps. The maps were drawn between 1888-1913 and so represent a complete picture of the countries a hundred years ago.
They have developed a side-by-side tool to allow for easy comparison between the old and new maps.
"Indonesia lost 840,000 hectares of forest in 2012 compared to 460,000 hectares in Brazil, despite its forest being a quarter the size of the Amazon rainforest"
"As Brazil comes under the World Cup spotlight, life goes on as usual for millions of Brazilians working to make a living in the shanty towns - or favelas. The largest favela in Rio de Janeiro is Rocinha, where homes are packed together in a sprawling maze of streets and alleys."
"IN HER parents' bare brick-built shack in southern Beijing, Li Xue sifts through piles of court verdicts, petitions and other papers that record her family's struggle for most of the 20 years of her life to secure a simple document: a household registration certificate, the basic building block of official identity in China. Because she was born in violation of China's one-child-per-couple policy, local officials will not give her one. As a result she could not go to school. She now cannot get a job, nor get married, nor even buy a train or plane ticket. Despite recent moves to relax family-planning rules, the ordeal for Ms Li (pictured) is still far from over."
"Explore new estimates of migration flows between and within regions for five-year periods, 1990 to 2010. Click on a region to discover flows country-by-country."
"You'd need a car park a little bigger than Wales. If you'd like to know how much stuff is in the world's cars, or how much they emit in a year, watch this great little video from Carbon Visuals."
"y 2210, the global population is expected to grow from just more than 7bn to 11.3bn, with 87 per cent of the population living in urban areas, according to a new working paper by researchers from New York University's Marron Institute."