Picture this: A parade of yaks carrying insulated boxes containing meter-long ice core samples from Tibetan glaciers. “Yaks are like cats,” elite glacier scientist Lonnie Thompson explained in a 2023 Wilson Center webinar. They like to wander off — and it takes experienced Tibetan yak herders to keep them moving in the same direction. 

Yet these yak-schlepped ice cores are essential to climate science, added Ellen Mosely Thompson. They store thousands of years of atmospheric dust and gasses in distinct layers and serve as a record of our changing climate.

As a potent greenhouse gas, methane puts food production in jeopardy though its impacts on planetary warming, reduction of crop yields via tropospheric ozone, and drops in livestock productivity. Cattle, sheep, and goats emit methane as a natural part of their digestive process as ruminants (technically known as “enteric fermentation”) as they turn the fibrous plants of their diet into milk and meat.

When cows eat, they burp. And what they exhale generates almost a third of global methane emissions – a greenhouse gas 80 times more potent in warming the climate than CO2. So tracking this short-lived climate gas is crucial.  

Six miles from Bakersfield, California, at the Bear 5 cow feedlot, this work is starting to happen. High-resolution satellites are being used for the first time at the feedlot to track methane emissions from cow burps. Measuring cow belches from space is bringing critical attention to the brewing climate issues from cows. After all, the methane produced by these gassy animals in one year at Bear 5 cow feedlot alone could power more than 15,000 homes in California.  

Zhang Jian, a rural Chinese citizen living in the greater Kunming municipal region, readied himself for resettlement. After the state zoned his village for conservation, the next step for him and his rural comrades appeared to be resettlement into an urban high-rise apartment. Ecological migration is the official term used by the Chinese government for state-led processes of resettlement in the name of environmental protection. Journalists and researchers have predominantly focused on such resettlement programs in China’s west, particularly those related to grazing and anti-desertification campaigns. Less attention has been given to the ecological migrations occurring in China’s municipal regions, which are precipitating the movement of millions of rural landholders into, mainly, high-rise apartments.

Dazzling skyscrapers, kung-fu movies, and live seafood restaurants are what people think of when they contemplate small and densely populated Hong Kong. So, it is a shame that we rarely talk about Hong Kong’s “wilder” side—such as the approximately 40 percent of our land area that is designated as country parks, or the more than 200 offshore islands that include sites of the Hong Kong UNESCO Global Geopark.  

“Save your kitchen scraps to feed the hens,” urged a poster for the victory gardens created on the home front in the Second World War. Feeding food scraps to backyard chickens and pigs turned this waste into a delicious source of human food. Pigs were especially prized in this effort as they would eat what most other animals considered inedible.

China is Brazil’s main trading partner and accounts for over a quarter of all Brazilian exports. Yet two of the largest products in this trading relationship—beef and soybeans—are also crops that drive deforestation in the Amazon. Brazil’s deforestation rates declined substantially between 2004 and 2012, but forest clearage needed to raise cattle reversed the trend: The Amazon lost 10,476 square kilometers of rainforest in 2021, the highest total in the decade.