Climate Change

Plastics have much to offer as a modern convenience, but lack of responsible plastic waste management habits can lead to potentially harmful environmental effects. Past environmental initiatives revealed a lack of understanding about youth attitudes towards pro‐environmental issues. Plastic, an online public environmental promotional campaign, encouraged youth to recognize the importance of, adopt positive attitudes towards and subsequently adopt the practice of responsible plastic management. We propose the Temporal Incentives Model of Social Influence to guide social campaign design. A pre‐post quantitative research design showed that the pre‐contemplation, contemplation and preparation stages progressed significantly after the campaign. The findings suggest that stimuli incorporating specialized information and small action steps allow migration to successive stages. With the strong presence of internet culture among youth, the online medium was found effective in altering the attitudes of the campaign target audience, while exposure to the campaign messages proved useful in encouraging environmental learning among youth.

People who deny that humans are wreaking havoc on the planet’s life-support systems astound me. When confronted with the obvious damage we’re doing to the biosphere—from climate change to water and air pollution to swirling plastic patches in the oceans—some dismiss the reality or employ logical fallacies to discredit the messengers. More…

Plastic Bags and climate change are linked in a variety of ways. From air quality to ocean toxicity, plastic bags contribute to eco-system disruption.

Habitat destruction, fossil fuel emissions, and plastic pollution are some of the ways that plastic bags and climate change cannot be separated. More…

Delhi in India is one of the most polluted cities in the world. The widespread use of festival fireworks, the burning of rubbish by the city’s poor, plus farm waste from around the city, vehicular emissions and construction dust, all contribute to the city’s thick fogs.

A team of researchers from the US, India and Singapore will be attempting some time next year to clean up the air around a coal-fired plant in Delhi. More…

Do you know that having plants around your home can help remove airborne contaminants like VOCs (volatile organic compounds), as well as reduce the chances of headaches, common cold, high blood pressure and allergies.

Here’s a list of plants with proven air quality improvement properties. More…

By 2050 Africa’s fast-growing cities like Lagos and Kinshasa will have populations of over 30 million. The World Health Organisation estimates air quality to be responsible for more than 500,000 deaths a year in Africa from both indoor and outdoor air pollution. More…

Increases in greenhouse gases have led to unprecedented regional warmth in the Arctic. A 2013 article published in Geophysical Research Letters has shown that temperatures in the region haven’t been as high as they currently are since at least 44,000 years ago and perhaps as long as 120,000 years ago. The period of 1995-2005 was the warmest decade in the Arctic since at least the 17th century, with temperatures 2 °C (3.6 °F) above the 1951-1990 average. More…

In its recently released Climate Change and Environmental Risk Atlas for 2015, global risk analytics company Maplecroft identifies 32 countries where the impacts of climate change and food insecurity could lead to increased civil unrest and violence. The Atlas provides comparable risk data across 26 separate issues, including climate change vulnerability and food security, as well as emissions, ecosystem services, natural disasters and regulation. More…