24 news posts in Environmental impact

Commercial pesticides: Not as safe as they seem

Lack of testing on adjuvants in commercial pesticide formulations ignores the potential risk of these on people and the environment: Frontiers in Public Health

Modern man vs. giant animals

Extinct herbivorous megafauna — like woolly rhinos, giant sloths and mammoths — were displaced by humans who partly took their place in the ecosystem: Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution

Seabed mining could destroy deep sea ecosystems

The first global overview of seabed mining highlights potential environmental impacts, knowledge gaps and areas for future research: Frontiers in Marine Science

Sustainability

07 Nov 2017

Wild grape yeast could be more effective than pesticides in preventing grape molds

A wild yeast described in Frontiers in Microbiology could be an eco-friendly alternative to chemical pesticides.

Life sciences

06 Oct 2017

House sparrow decline linked to air pollution and poor diet

City sparrows have higher levels of free-radical damage than their country cousins, especially during breeding season, finds a study in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.

Climate action

17 Jul 2017

Does the European public understand the impacts of climate change on the ocean?

First in-depth study, published in Frontiers in Marine Science, looking at public engagement with marine climate change issues across 10 European countries.

Life sciences

15 Feb 2017

Are drones disturbing marine mammals?

Is noise pollution by drones interfering with marine wildlife research?

Health

31 Oct 2016

How your diet can influence your environmental impact

By Hedwig Ens, Frontiers The impact of our dietary choices on the global phosphorus footprint shouldn’t be neglected, recent research in Frontiers in Nutrition shows. A shift towards a plant-based diet may be an undervalued solution toward decreasing our environmental impact and attaining phosphorus sustainability. Phosphorus is an element essential for all living beings and is thus critical in food production. Mined phosphate rock is a non-renewable global resource that is nowadays becoming increasingly scarce which poses a severe problem to the farming industry: it needs phosphorus in the form of fertilizers to sustain crop productivity. Crops have two entries into the human food chain: direct consumption or indirect consumption by rearing animals which can be converted to human food. Different food types therefore require different amounts of phosphorus in their production. One kg of phosphorus can for example be used to either produce 3333 kg of starch roots (e.g. potatoes) or 16 kg of beef. The loss of phosphorus to waterways, whether from agricultural fields through runoff or urban sewage through human excreta, can cause severe water quality degradation. This leads to eutrophication, harmful algal blooms, and impairment of our drinking water, recreational areas, and fisheries. As the […]

Sustainability

12 Sep 2016

Don’t fear GM crops, they could help solve the sustainability crisis

by Emily Barker, Frontiersin.org Modified crops are nothing to be scared of and could be essential in solving the global sustainability crisis, explained Dr. James Lloyd, Deputy Field Chief Editor for Plant Biotechnology in the open-access journal Frontiers in Planet Science. Much of southern Africa is currently suffering consecutive seasons of drought, and farmers in Eastern Kenya have lost more than 80% of their crops due to lack of rain. These droughts, caused by climate change, could potentially leave 36m people across Africa facing hunger. However, there is hope in drought resistant crops. Over a five-year period, a total of 2.9 million farmers in 13 African countries saw their yields increase by 20% to 30% after sowing a variety of drought-tolerant hybrids. “I think that using this type of technology has huge potential to increase crop yields and I would be optimistic that we can increase food production as we need to in the next years or so,” he added. Making modified starch more ecofriendly Dr. Lloyd and his team, who are based in South Africa, have currently been working on increasing the amount of phosphate that’s bound to starch by manipulating plant genes. Modified starch is used by the paper […]