Fighting wildfires with robots and artificial intelligence

The latest “Living Planet” report by the World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London finds that the populations of vertebrate species across the globe have decreased in size by 73% on average over the past 50 years. Factors contributing to this decline include habitat loss, overexploitation, and climate change.

The U.S. has nearly half a million school buses, and for most of them, school districts are struggling with record diesel prices. As of this fall, however, 10 new buses in East New York are plugging into chargers instead of filling up their fuel tanks.

More than 200 rivers and streams in Alaska have exhibited bright orange plumes in the water. Since 2019, researchers have found that the water was even more acidic and metallic than the water that leaches from metal mines. Many of these rivers and streams are within national parks and preserves, so these are pristine watersheds, not places where mining activities took place.

Japan is mountainous and densely populated and has little land available for large solar farms. As a result, solar developers are building solar arrays on disused golf courses.

Geothermal energy has historically tapped into natural volcanic reservoirs of heat. Such places are a source of continuous energy that can be used to generate electricity or provide heat. The problem is that these places are few and far between.

Lake Powell is the second-largest man-made reservoir in the United States. It stretches 186 miles along the Colorado River, straddling the border of southeastern Utah and northeastern Arizona. It was formed behind Glen Canyon Dam, which was built in the 1960s.

A flesh-eating fly that was once eradicated from the United States is moving north again, raising concerns for livestock, wildlife, pets, and in rare cases people.

Beaches form when waves and currents deposit loose sediment like sand, gravel, and shell fragments along a shoreline. They erode when strong wave action or rising water strips that material away. Beaches erode; it’s what they do. For them not to disappear entirely, there needs to be a continuing supply of sediment. Rivers carry sediment and sand from inland areas down to the coast. Ocean waves contribute by breaking down offshore reefs and coastal cliffs into small particles.

Extreme wildfire activity has more than doubled worldwide. Fires are becoming more frequent, more intense, and larger. Rising global temperatures, warmer nighttime lows, and prolonged droughts are driving the trend, and it is only getting stronger.

Meeting ambitious clean energy goals almost certainly requires the widespread adoption of battery energy storage to provide power on demand when sources like solar and wind power are not producing enough. California’s battery energy storage capacity now exceeds 21 GW, most of which has been installed in the past 7 years. By comparison, New York has only 80 MW of battery storage.