A list of news and blog items we stumbled upon in the past week…
- This Atlantic article (“The Island Nation that Bought a Backup Property”) points out that reefs may rise with the seas and that waves will continue to erode reefs and create new land. There is a link to a journal article (Historical area and shoreline change of reef islands around Tarawa Atoll, Kiribati, Sustainability Science) that shares evidence of a net increase in the area of atolls in the Central Pacific over the last several decades in spite of rising seas.
- This data source (UN-IGRAC) has a wide range of transboundary groundwater information and summarizes many different sources of information.
- Poisoning of small animals in China may increase flood risks (AAAS Science).
- DeepMind seeks to build artificial intelligence software that can learn when faced with almost any problem – to address the world’s most intractable problems. (Google’s Intelligence Designer, MIT Technology Review).
- World Food Supplies Recover From Drought and Reach 15-Year High (Circle of Blue).
- Forecasts of natural gas may overestimate future production (Natural Gas: the Fracking Fallacy, Nature).
- Artifacts, values and assumptions at the core of understanding the culture of an organization. (How to Tell if Your Company Has a Creative Culture, Harvard Business Review).
- Survey by Munich Re America finds that most Americans believe that the climate is changing, 60% believe it is due to human causes and 63% are concerned about changes and frequency in natural disasters like flood, drought, hurricanes and tornadoes (Poll: 83% of Americans say climate is changing, USA Today).
Contributed by Agustin Botteron, Margaret Garcia, Shafik Islam, Jory Hecht and Kyle Monahan.
