Anthropocene Magazine

1 week ago | anthropocenemagazine.org | Warren Cornwall

In Panama, the best protection for keeping rainforests from disappearing hasn’t been putting them inside protected refuges. It’s been putting them in the hands of the region’s Indigenous tribes. In the two decades starting in 2000, just 3% of the roughly 19,000 square kilometers of Indigenous forestland was deforested.

1 week ago | anthropocenemagazine.org | Sarah DeWeerdt

Getting people to think more about the future, especially their own and that of people they care about, is the most effective way to motivate climate action, according to a new study. The findings come from a head-to-head test of a 17 different strategies to inspire people to fight climate change, ranging from viewing information about carbon footprints to brainstorming the personal benefits of environmentally friendly actions.

2 weeks ago | anthropocenemagazine.org | Emma Bryce

Farms of the future face rising sea levels, flooding of fertile land, and increasingly saline soils that will undermine yields. But what if farmers could work with this changing landscape? A new perspective published in Ambio explores how growers in some landscapes could switch to seagrass in an increasingly marine future. Cultivated at scale, seagrass meadows could produce grain in quantities equivalent to 7% of global rice production, with potentially zero emissions, the new perspective says.

2 weeks ago | anthropocenemagazine.org | Sarah DeWeerdt |Emma Bryce

Boosting iron intake to fight weakness and increase energy is not just for humans, new research shows. A team of scientists and engineers have found that injecting iron and other minerals into wood makes it stronger without making it heavier. By making wood more competitive with steel and cement, the finding presented in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces offers a route to make modern construction more sustainable.

2 weeks ago | anthropocenemagazine.org | Warren Cornwall

These days, coral reefs need all the help they can get. Underwater heatwaves and pollution have taken a toll on coral, whose carbonate exoskeletons are the foundation of some of the richest ocean ecosystems. More than 80% of the world’s reefs are currently in the middle of the largest mass bleaching event ever recorded. Global warming is expected to make the problem worse in the coming decades, threatening the existence of most of the world’s reefs.