Biodiversità

The text was finalized in the Ocean Literacy World Conference organized by the Prada Group in collaboration with the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (COI) of UNESCO

Only by knowing the sea is it possible to protect it.For this reason, on 7 June, in Venice, the United Nations delegates will meet together with sector experts in the Ocean Literacy World Conference with the aim of bringing ocean education into the school curricula of member countries.A fundamental step in a journey that began over ten years ago, as oceanographer Francesca Santoro, responsible for ocean education activities for the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) of UNESCO, explains to Open

While overall in the world the surface area of ​​forests continues to progressively reduce, in Italy it has been growing without interruption since the end of the Second World War.It did so by even recording an expansion of 28% in the thirty years between 1985 and 2015, in which it went from 8.7 to 11.1 million hectares.Italy is thus the second European country - preceded only by Spain - in terms of forest cover.Furthermore, the hectares of sustainably managed forests in Italy rose to 980 thousand in 2023, with an increase of +5.9% compared to the previous year. As demonstrated by the statistics of FAO-UNEP, currently the surface area of ​​forests in the world amounts to a total of 41 billion hectares, representing 31% of the emerged lands and counting around 60 thousand species of trees.54.1% of it is located in the United States, Canada, Brazil, Russia and China.However, over the last 35 years, forest cover has increased across the globe a drop of more than 4%...

On Friday 1 March, a group of scientists led by the New England Aquarium spotted a gray whale off the coast of Massachusetts, a species believed to be extinct in the Atlantic Ocean for over 200 years.The sighting was greeted with great amazement by the team of researchers, who immediately after the discovery, skeptical of what they had seen, continued to monitor the area to make sure they had not made a mistake.There gray whale it is in fact a typical species of the Pacific Ocean, which has stopped inhabiting the waters of the Atlantic in the 18th century.The discovery, however, far from being good news, made the team of scientists initially enthusiastic about the discovery think that there may be a change in migratory routes due to the climate change. The whale was spotted about 30 miles (the equivalent of 48 kilometers) south of the Nantucket coast, while a team of scientists from the Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life, a New England aquarium research center, was leading an aerial...

In Kenya, in the Nile basin, farmers in the village of Sitati are developing agroforestry projects to replace the more widespread sugarcane monocultures.The goal is to revitalize the land, diversify diets and incomes and increase the water levels on which many animals depend.This creates "food forests", which attract a series of wild animals - such as the Nubian shell turtle in danger of extinction - and redevelop wetlands and river systems.The technique, in particular, changes the way the community manages agriculture and the environment, predicting the intercropping between different food crops – such as cereals, orchards, vegetables, tubers – and non-productive grasses and trees.For example, a mix of crops such as banana, sweet potato, hibiscus, papaya, avocado, chilli pepper that grow among native wild trees such as the silver oak is common.The result is a bushy-looking vegetable garden that attracts and protects various species of wild animals an ecosystem th...