news

Zoning and environmental stewardship can go hand in hand, but that’s a slow process. Stewardship was a big part of the latest update to the Eagle County Board of Commissioners about rewriting Eagle County land use regulations. Todd Messenger, an attorney with Fairfield and Woods, is working on that rewrite. Messenger and Assistant County Attorney Beth Oliver provided that update, which focused in part on how land use policy can affect stewardship. That work, and draft regulations, have already brought comments, particularly about potential effects on the county’s riparian areas. The draft includes language regarding changes to the county’s current 75-foot setback requirement along streams. A letter from Rick Lofaro and Heather Lewin of the Roaring Fork Conservancy urges keeping the current setback, which “preserves Eagle County’s long-term economic development potential by retaining riparian features beneficial to both private...

Protecting and restoring forests is one of the cheapest and most effective options for mitigating the carbon emissions heating Earth. Since the third UN climate change summit, held in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan, different mechanisms have been trialed to raise money and help countries reduce deforestation and restore degraded forests. First there was Koyoto’s clean development mechanism, then the UN-REDD program initiated at COP13 in Bali in 2008. Voluntary carbon market schemes came into effect after COP21 in Paris in 2015, but all met with limited success. In some cases, these schemes interfered with communities that have tended and nurtured forests for generations, restricting their access to the forest for fuel, grazing, and food. Meanwhile, deforestation has proceeded under the aegis of global markets hungry for beef, palm oil, and other commodities. The world is far off track to reduce deforestation to zero by 2030, or me...

The most potent El Niño event in almost a decade is about to exert its peak influence on North American weather. Many parts of the world are affected by El Niño, a periodic one- to two-year warming of the eastern tropical Pacific. In fact, El Niño is the biggest single shaper of Earth’s year-to-year weather variations atop human-induced climate change. And North America is one of the places where El Niño’s influence is most pronounced. Think of El Niño as the boisterous guest around which people gather, or scatter, during the course of a holiday party. For a few months to a year or longer, unusually warm water spreads across a vast area centered on the equator, extending from South America westward. In Spanish, the phenomenon’s name refers to “the Christ child” (literally, the male infant). The name arose because of timing: Anchovy fishers had long noticed that the waters off Peru sometimes warmed,...

Identifying common bird species through their song has never been easier, with numerous phone apps and software available to both ecologists and the public. But what if the identification software has never heard a particular bird before, or only has a small sample of recordings to reference? This is a problem facing ecologists and conservationists monitoring some of the world’s rarest birds. To overcome this problem, researchers at the University of Moncton, Canada, have developed ECOGEN, a first of its kind deep learning AI tool, that can generate lifelike bird sounds to enhance the samples of underrepresented species. These can then be used to train audio identification tools used in ecological monitoring, which often have disproportionately more information on common species. The researchers found that adding artificial birdsong samples generated by ECOGEN to a birdsong identifier improved the bird song classification accuracy by 12% on average. The...

The global climate summit is well into overtime late Tuesday night in Dubai, with no deal on the meeting’s final agreement, and countries are bitterly divided over whether to call time on fossil fuels. Negotiators are scrambling last-ditch meetings to salvage more ambitious language to address the cause of the climate crisis. The latest draft of the COP28 summit’s centerpiece agreement published Monday dropped previous references to phasing out fossil fuels, stoking anger and frustration among some nations and advocates. More than 100 countries support a phase-out of fossil fuels in some form. Instead, the watered-down draft offers a list of actions that countries “could” take to reduce their planet-heating emissions, one of which is reducing the consumption and production of oil, coal and gas. An ambitious deadline set by COP28 President Sultan Al Jaber to strike a deal on a package of agreements expir...