Saturday, 17 November, 2018

WWF Report: Half of Global Wildlife Lost

Posted on Thursday, 2 October, 2014Sunday, 20 August, 2017 by Zheluo Cai

The 2014 Living Planet Report, World Wildlife Fund’s biennial flagship publication, was released this week. The warning bell is loud and clear, that between 1970 and 2010, populations of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish around the globe dropped 52 percent. This regrettable state of affairs is not new, when the chair of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services warned two years ago, that the world is loosing species at a rate that is 100 to 1,000 times faster than the natural extinction rate. This biodiversity loss occurs disproportionately in low-income countries, and correlates with the increasing resource use of high-income countries.

Read a summary of the Report here:

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/sep/29/earth-lost-50-wildlife-in-40-years-wwf

Download the full 2014 Living Planet Report here:

http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/all_publications/living_planet_report/

ENTRY ID: 283299

Catching Fish - 2012-11-05_175145_places.jpg

Dog days

Credits: National Geographic

The Ainu, in the historical Japanese texts the Ezo, are an indigenous people of Japan (Hokkaido, and formerly northeastern Honshu) and Russia (Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, and formerly the Kamchatka Peninsula). On June 6, 2008, the Japanese Diet passed a bipartisan, non-binding resolution calling upon the government to recognize the Ainu people as indigenous to Japan, and urging an end to discrimination against the group. Recent research suggests that the historical Ainu culture originated in a merger of the Okhotsk culture with the Satsumon, one of the ancient archaeological cultures that are considered to have derived from the Jōmon-period cultures of the Japanese archipelago. The Ainu economy was based on farming, as well as on hunting, fishing and gathering.

The Cosmic Web of the Tarantula Nebula.
Credit & Copyright: Marcelo Salemme. It is the largest and most complex star-forming region in the entire galactic neighbourhood located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy orbiting our Milky Way galaxy. The region's spidery appearance is responsible for its name, the Tarantula Nebula, about 1,000 light-years across and 1,500 light-years from Earth. The spindly arms of the Tarantula nebula surround NGC 2070, a star cluster that contains some of the brightest, most massive stars known, visible in blue on the right. Since massive stars live fast and die young, it is not so surprising that the cosmic Tarantula also lies near the site of the closest recent supernova.

The flag of the Netherlands is a horizontal tricolour of red, white, and blue. The tricolour flag is almost identical to that of Luxembourg, except that it is shorter and its red and blue stripes are a darker shade. It originates as a variant of the older orange-white-blue Prinsenvlag (Prince's Flag), introduced in the 17th century as the Statenvlag (States Flag), the naval flag of the States-General of the Dutch Republic. Its official status as the national flag of the Kingdom of the Netherlands was formalized in 1937.

The Last Judgment is a fresco by the Italian Renaissance painter Michelangelo, covering the whole altar wall of the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City. It is a depiction of the Second Coming of Christ and the final and eternal judgment by God of all humanity. There are over 300 figures, with nearly all the males and angels originally shown as nudes; many were later partly covered up by painted draperies. The work took over four years, between 1536 and 1541. Michelangelo began working on it twenty-five years after he finished the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and was nearly 67 at its completion. It was commissioned by Pope Clement VII but was completed under Pope Paul III.

Bible verses brought to you by bVerse Convert and BibleGateway.com