Índex per September 23, 2019 a TIME Magazine

AVOCETS, TERNS AND GULLS SWOOP DOWN ONTO WALLASEA Island on England’s eastern coast, searching for food between blades of grass ruffled by the summer sea breeze. Aside from the wind, and the odd chirp or squawk, it’s quiet—the kind of peaceful scene that seems like it’s been going on for centuries. Yet five years ago, these wetlands didn’t exist. The mud the birds have landed on once lay under the streets of central London. In 2015, as part of a railway project, a construction crew scooped more than 3 million metric tons of dirt out from beneath the capital, drove it 50 miles east and piled it onto farmland on the coastline of the county of Essex. In summer 2019, a crane hoisted old heavy machinery out of the water,…

AS YOU’VE LIKELY HEARD, the ocean’s health is in trouble. You’re probably aware of overfishing and the harmful practices of fisheries driving a third of the planet’s fish stocks toward extinction, and you surely know about the unconscionable amount of pollution, in particular plastic, that we dump in the ocean. But that’s not the worst of it. The ocean is steadily warming; its oxygen levels are falling; and it is becoming more acidic, making conditions for life below the waves ever harder. Planet-warming greenhouse gases are the common enemy in that trio of changes. And by now we all know who has been creating those gases. When you’re a grandfather like me, and you care more about the well-being of your grandchildren than about your own creature comforts, there’s…

HUMANS WERE NOT AROUND TO SEE ANTARCTICA in the good times, tens of millions of years ago, when it was home to palms and baobab trees, reptiles and marsupials. It had some of the same mountains it has today, some of the same valleys and inlets. But it didn’t have the same address. Long ago, Antarctica was located in the midlatitudes, once part of the supercontinent Gondwana, until it slowly broke away, leaving continental kin like Africa and South America behind. It then went its own way, carried off by continental drift at just 1 to 2 in. per year, until it wound up where it is today, banished by tectonics to the bottom of the world. There, the 5.4 million sq. mi. continent—larger than Australia’s 2.9 million and…

Behind the cover THREE DECADES AGO, TIME named earth “Planet of the Year” for 1988, featuring a cover by the artist Christo of the earth encased in plastic on a beach in Long Island in New York. For this week’s special-issue cover on climate change, TIME returned to sand—albeit this time on the shores east of Tokyo. Japanese sand sculptor Toshihiko Hosaka and his seven-person team spent 14 days creating the 98-ft.-by-65-ft. TIME cover on the site of the former playground at Iioka Junior High School in Iioka, Asahi. The school, walking distance from the Pacific, closed after the East Japan earthquake and tsunami in 2011. The challenges Hosaka would encounter flowed from the slower, but no less deadly, changes the cover warns about. “The biggest enemy of my…

SOURCE: U.S. NATIONAL OCEANIC AND ATMOSPHERIC ADMINISTRATION IT’S JUST AFTER 7 IN THE MORNING IN THE Pakistani city of Jacobabad, and donkey-cart driver Ahsan Khosoo is already drenched in sweat. For the past two hours, the 24-year-old laborer has been hauling jugs of drinking water to local residences. When the water invariably spills from the blue jerricans, it hits the pavement with an audible hiss and turns to steam. It’s hot, he agrees, but that’s not an excuse to stop. The heat will only increase as the day wears on, and what choice does he have? “Even if it were so hot as if the land were on fire, we would keep working.” He pauses to douse his head with a bucket of water. Jacobabad may well be the…

THE SEEDLINGS ARE READY. ONE HUNDRED and fifty thousand shoots of drought-resistant acacia, hardy baobab and Moringa spill out of their black plastic casings. The ground has been prepared with scores of kilometer-long furrows leading to a horizon studded with skeletal thorn trees. It’s early August, and in less than a week, 399 volunteers from 27 countries will arrive in this remote corner of northern Senegal to participate in one of the world’s most audacious efforts to combat the effects of climate change: an $8 billion plan to reforest 247 million acres of degraded land across the width of Africa, stretching from Dakar to Djibouti. The Great Green Wall project, spearheaded by the African Union and funded by the World Bank, the European Union and the United Nations, was launched…

ON THE SOUTHERN CREST OF THE UNSCATHED Amazon rain forest, a storm inundates a wooden shack just off a sodden mud road. Inside, Antonio Bertola sits clutching a $1 beer under a painting of the Virgin Mary, his face ruddy and his clothes tatty from a lifetime of work on the land. The frontier town of Realidade is a mere speck on a changing map. To the north stretch hundreds of billions of trees and more than 1 million species never charted by man. To the south the muddy trail of human conquest reaches back for centuries. In a bittersweet tone of voice, Bertola recounts how his family of migrants had hungered for prosperity, security and, most of all, land to call their own. Five decades ago Brazil incentivized millions…

The cathedral is burning. Absent flame or smoke,stained glass explodes in silence, fractal scalesof angel damsel rainbow parrot. Charred beamsof blackened coral lie in heaps on the sacred floor,white stones fallen from high places, spires collapsedcrushing sainted turtle and gargoyle octopus. Something there is in my kind that cannot lovea reef, a tundra, a plain stone breast of desert, everquite enough. A tree perhaps, once recomposedas splendid furniture. A forest after the whole of itis planed to posts and beams and raised to a heavenof earnest construction in the name of Our Lady. All Paris stood on the bridges to watch her burning,believing a thing this old, this large and beautifulmust be holy and cannot be lost. And coral templesolder than Charlemagne suffocate unattended,bleach and bleed from the eye, the…

LET’S IMAGINE FOR A MOMENT THAT WE’VE reached the middle of the century. It’s 2050, and we have a moment to reflect—the climate fight remains the consuming battle of our age, but its most intense phase may be in our rearview mirror. And so we can look back to see how we might have managed to dramatically change our society and economy. We had no other choice. There was a point after 2020 when we began to collectively realize a few basic things. One, we weren’t getting out of this unscathed. Climate change, even in its early stages, had begun to hurt: watching a California city literally called Paradise turn into hell inside of two hours made it clear that all Americans were at risk. When you breathe wildfire smoke…

CLIMATE CHANGE is a global challenge that demands global solutions. But we must acknowledge the fact that the most underresourced parts of the world are bearing the brunt of climate change, despite bearing the least responsibility for rising emissions. I have seen this with my own eyes in my native country of Mozambique. Earlier this year, Cyclones Idai and Kenneth wrought devastating havoc there and in neighboring Zimbabwe and Malawi. The city of Beira, one of the largest in Mozambique, was all but wiped from the face of the earth. Nationwide, more than 600 people were killed. The impact will be felt for years to come. But the authorities don’t just have to repair critical infrastructure. They also have to prepare for the future, potentially worse extreme weather as…

I’VE STOOD with Inuit elders by a great ice cliff in Greenland as water cascaded down and icebergs calved. It never used to melt, the elders told me. I’ve witnessed the shrinking of a Mount Kilimanjaro glacier. I’ve watched wildfires rage in Africa and in California. And I’ve seen the carcasses of animals who have died in droughts. As I travel around the globe, people tell me how the weather patterns have been disrupted and the worst kind of hurricanes, typhoons and cyclones are getting more destructive and more frequent. It is because we are polluting and destroying the environment by using natural resources in an unsustainable way. When I started my research in Gombe, Tanzania, in 1960, it was part of the forest belt that stretched across Africa.…

KAMALA HARRIS IS TRYING NOT TO STEP IN IT. AS THE CALIFORNIA Senator turned presidential candidate tours a beef-and-produce farm in south-central Iowa on Aug. 11, a crouching campaign aide carefully walks a few feet ahead, pointing out the cow droppings littering the grass. The farmer strolling next to Harris, a bespectacled 49-year-old named Matt Russell, wants to talk about climate change. “Farmers and rural Americans, that’s who’s going to solve this,” Russell says to Harris as the two stroll accompanied by a bevy of cameras in front of his red barn. “We have the land for renewable energy, and we have the farming systems to sequester carbon.” The trip to Russell’s 110-acre farm is becoming a habit for the Democratic candidates for President. Ohio Representative Tim Ryan visited before…

THE TECHNOLOGICAL SOPHISTICATION OF modern life masks a simple reality: we all need oxygen, water and food to survive. But the divide between those who have the resources they need to exist and those who don’t only continues to grow. And with the growing specter of climate change, people who live in vulnerable regions like Oceania—the countries and territories within the southwest Pacific Ocean—face the loss of their livelihoods, homes and future. Twenty-four million people globally are displaced within their countries each year on average because of climate- and disaster-related causes, and it’s only getting worse: the likelihood of any of us being displaced in this way is twice what it was in the 1970s. This comes on top of unprecedented levels of forced displacement worldwide because of conflict and…

RANDALL MUNROE IS A CARTOONIST, AUTHOR, ENGINEER, SCIENTIFIC THEORIST AND THE CREATOR OF THE web comic xkcd. Below are two tongue-in-cheek proposals for new ways to generate emissions-free energy—both are clearly not viable, but perhaps they’ll inspire someone to come up with something better. After all, we need all the ideas we can muster if we’re to reach zero emissions. Tectonic plates The ground exerts a force over a distance, and that equals energy. An inch of movement a year isn’t much, but it has a virtually infinite force. Could you harness it to generate electricity? In theory, yes! Suppose you built a pair of giant pistons on two sides of a fault line created by two areas of crust sliding past each other. As, say, southward- and northward-moving…