Read the full story at e360.
Canada announced that in order for businesses to receive Covid-19 economic aid, they will be required to disclose their climate impacts and commit to making environmentally sustainable decisions, E&E News reported. The condition is part of the country’s new Large Employer Emergency Financing Facility, which has been created to provide bridge loans to Canada’s largest employers struggling during the pandemic.
Read the full story at e360.
New research finds that marshes in the Mississippi River Delta have hit a tipping point and will likely drown this century due to sea level rise. The study, which examined 8,500 years of marsh paleorecords, contradicts other research that suggests Louisiana’s remaining 5,800 square miles of marshes could survive climate change.
Read the full story in the Chicago Tribune.
When a pandemic hands you old beer, you don’t make lemonade. You make Malort.
In this case, the old beer was 160 kegs of Revolution Brewing’s flagship Anti-Hero IPA that were about to fall out of code while most bars and restaurants remain closed to prevent the spread of the new coronavirus.
Rather than dump the beer, Revolution teamed up with Chicago’s CH Distillery to create a first: Malort made from beer.
The product, which goes on sale Friday at Revolution, CH Distillery and Binny’s, pairs two modern Chicago icons: the city’s top-selling craft beer and the city’s most iconic spirit, an intensely bitter liqueur that doubles as a civic badge of pride.
Read the full story from the Society of Environmental Journalists.
On Jan. 9, 2020, the Trump White House proposed an overhaul of the CEQ reg on NEPA. Here’s the text of the proposal and White House fact sheet, with analyses on the regulatory rollbacks (may require subscription) and the effect on climate policy (may require subscription).
Read the full story at World-Grain.com.
Barring a resurgence in the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the US ethanol industry may have seen the worst of the impact from stay-at-home orders and a reduction in gasoline usage, said Todd Hubbs, a professor at the University of Illinois.
Read the full story at Massive Science.
Honey bees have been celebrated by humans since they were first domesticated for pollination and honey production in the earliest days of human civilization. But honey bees are expendable — we can purchase them from other countries, ship them overseas, and raise them in a non-native land to pollinate our crops. If all of the honey bees in the U.S. died today, we’d buy more tomorrow. This World Bee Day, we should focus our celebration on the lesser-known species of amazing native bees that fill our environment.
Read the full story in Forbes.
The European Commission today proposed a plan to transform the European Union’s agricultural system, to make it more sustainable and safer from a health perspective.
The plan includes a target of reducing the use of pesticides by 50% in the next decade. The plan would also reduce sales of antimicrobials for farmed animals by 50%, and the use of fertilizers by 20%, by 2030. The share of organic farming would also be increased by 25% by 2030 – up from the current 8%.
May 28, 2020 1 pm
Register here.
What does it take to close a deal and acquire the best land for your stormwater management or conservation project?
Please join us for a webinar hosted by Delta Institute, the Alliance for the Great Lakes, and Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant on the recently completed Land Acquisition Strategy (LAS). Registration is required.
The presentation will highlight the contents of the document including a method for prioritizing land for acquisition, modeling green infrastructure performance and ROI using the Tipping Point Planner and L-THIA Tool, and strategies for navigating the land acquisition process.
The strategy was developed for municipal partners in Michigan City, Indiana to facilitate the acquisition of land for sustainable stormwater management and natural area conservation. Municipalities, land trusts, watershed groups, and more may find the strategies and tools described in this webinar and available in the LAS useful for their immediate and long-term land acquisition initiatives.
Read the full story from the University of Illinois.
The microbes that inhabit our bodies are influenced by what we eat, drink, breathe and absorb through our skin, and most of us are chronically exposed to natural and human-made environmental contaminants. In a new paper, scientists from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign review the research linking dozens of environmental chemicals to changes in the gut microbiome and associated health challenges.
Read the full story from the University of Cambridge.
Scientists have created the first ever large-scale map of microscopic algae as they bloomed across the surface of snow along the Antarctic Peninsula coast. Results indicate that this ‘green snow’ is likely to spread as global temperatures increase.
