News Review (Editor's Choice) BBC - The World of Tomorrow

 

Communities, Travel, and our Natural Environment

An abundance of News from around the globe, staying abreast with current events and introducing The World of Tomorrow, a BBC Travel series that visits ingenious communities worldwide that are adapting to environmental change or finding new ways to live sustainably. 

A little sample of what you can expect to discover

The low-lying Maldives islands are threatened by rising ocean levels due to climate change (Credit: Matteo Colombo/Getty Images)

“A new island of hope rising from the Indian Ocean

     The modern island of Hulhumale is taking shape 8km off the north-east coast of Malé island in the Maldives in direct response to the threat posed by inexorably rising sea levels.

Scattered across the Arabian Sea, south-west of Sri Lanka and India, the Maldives present the face of a dreamy, tropical idyll to travellers from all over the world, who fly in to savour picture-perfect coral atolls fringed with white sand, luxurious resorts and world-class water sport.

The new, artificial island of Hulumale was built using millions of cubic metres of sand pumped from the seabed (Credit: Hassan Mohamed)

We are one of the most vulnerable countries on Earth

But perhaps no other nation faces an environmental threat quite like the Maldives. Its luxury beach resorts may be world-famous, but with more than 80% of its scattered 1,200 islands less than 1m above sea level, rising oceans threaten its very existence.”

Read more “This is a direct Citation” By Norman Miller (2020, September 10) BBC. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20200909-a-new-island-of-hope-rising-from-the-indian-ocean

"The Island with a key to our future

     Scientists are looking to a 19th-Century terraform experiment on Ascension Island for clues on how to reverse negative global trends like deforestation and bush fires.

Ascension Island is a volcanic outpost marooned in the tropical mid-Atlantic halfway between Brazil and Africa (Credit: Steve_is_on_holiday/Getty Images)

From the sea, volcanic Ascension Island looks as if it’s smouldering. Big mid-Atlantic swell rolling up from the Southern Ocean explodes onto the rugged cinder and sand shoreline, leaving sea spray hanging in the air like steam.

Inland, it’s all black lava and red rubble, a forbidding landscape that once earned the island the tourist-repelling descriptor of “hell with the fire put out".

Green Mountain is a man-made ecosystem, where introduced species and island plants have evolved together (Credit: Diane Selkirk) 

The mist that collects around the island’s highest peak completes the smoky illusion. Rising above a cataclysmic backdrop of dormant craters, pyroclastic deposits and lava domes, 859m-high Green Mountain is a leafy oddity on the charred island: its flourishing cloud forest is testament to both the ingenuity of humans and the resilience of nature.”

Read more “This is a direct Citation” By Diane Selkirk (2020, June 15) BBC. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20200614-ascension-island-the-island-with-a-key-to-our-future

Our environment is precious, in my opinion, worthy of reading alongside visiting many other exciting stories.