Environment

After nearly two decades holding back the chainsaws, Brazil’s Soy Moratorium has ended. More than 32 million acres of native Amazon vegetation are now exposed, and European buyers are threatening to shut the door on Amazon soy.

A high-precision engineering operation using LiDAR and bathymetry is mapping the Tucuruí reservoir in Pará to recalculate its true water storage capacity.

Scientists call it the hypertropical climate: droughts more severe than any record of the past millions of years, tree mortality up to 55 percent higher, and a rainfall service worth 104 billion reais a year that is starting to fail.

Nearly 6.5 million people in Somalia face severe hunger as worsening drought, conflict and aid cuts deepen the crisis, the federal government and UN agencies warned. The report estimates 1.84 million children will face acute malnutrition in 2026.

Hot, dry, windy fire days are increasingly striking many regions of the world at once. A new UC Merced and University of East Anglia study, published in Science Advances, finds that synchronized extreme fire weather has more than doubled in most regions since 1979, straining the international cooperation that firefighting depends on.

A Cardiff University study in Nature Communications finds that the most ambitious climate pathway would avoid 1.32 million deaths a year by 2040, and that developing nations depend most on emissions cuts made beyond their own borders.

A Weizmann Institute study shows evapotranspiration saturates at around 480 mm per year. The finding leaves wet regions more exposed to floods and pushes dry ones closer to their ecological limit.

A Nature study reviewing 385 scientific papers concludes that sea level rise was underestimated by about 30 centimeters on average. In Southeast Asia and the Pacific, the gap reaches 1.5 meters.

A study using five climate models warns that land-based carbon removal plans can eat into key wildlife areas. The answer is not to do less, but to choose where more carefully.