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CONSEQUENCES BY NOOR PROJECT LAUNCH IN COPENHAGEN

PEP BONET l BLACKFIELD'S l POLAND'S COAL INDUSTRY

Poland is one of the largest producers of coal in Europe and not coincidentally, also one of the continent's most polluted countries. The Upper Silesian Coal Basin in Poland, where coal has been mined for more than 150 years, is thick with mines, steel mills, coke ovens and chemical plants. Waste from these industries fills hundreds of dumps across the region. Smoke from coal-fired plants pollutes the air. Runoff from the mines has contaminated the groundwater, streams and lakes. Underground e...

Kadir van Lohuizen | Brazil | Brazil's Range War...

Russian Legacy and Loss: Karabash and the Yamal ...

Karabash One of the most polluted cities in the world, Karabash in the Chelyabinskaya region of the southern Ural Mountains in Russia, is burdened with the dirty legacy of copper mining, chemical and heavy metal emissions and radiation leaks. The smokestack of the Karabash Copper Smelting Works has been spewing a thick soup of toxic fumes and metal particulates into the air for almost a century. Closed in 1987 when Soviet officials proclaimed it an "environmental disaster zone," the plant was ...

Francesco Zizola | Maldives | A Paradise in Peril

The island nation of Maldives is the lowest lying country in the world. As the oceans fill with water from melting glaciers, this tropical paradise will be the first country on the planet to slip below the waves. Experts predict that within the next 15 years, rising sea levels will force the island's 396,000 to migrate elsewhere. Other islands and coastal regions around the world face similar threats. Migrations forced by rising sea levels will disproportionately affect poor nations and the de...

The Fires Within: The Burning Coalfields of Jhar...

Under Jharia's crust, lies one of the largest coal deposits in India. But for the people who live above an inferno, Jharia is a condemned place. For almost a century, fires have burned uncontrolled in the mines beneath Jharia, polluting the air with poisonous fumes and splitting the ground with dangerous fissures. For the impoverished residents of Jharia, stealing coal to sell and picking through collapsed buildings for salvageable material is a dangerous way of life. And now, with the earth l...

Philip Blenkinsop | India | The Fires Within: Th...

Under Jharia's crust, lies one of the largest coal deposits in India. But for the people who live above an inferno, Jharia is a condemned place. For almost a century, fires have burned uncontrolled in the mines beneath Jharia, polluting the air with poisonous fumes and splitting the ground with dangerous fissures. For the impoverished residents of Jharia, stealing coal to sell and picking through collapsed buildings for salvageable material is a dangerous way of life. And now, with the earth l...

Jon Lowenstein | Canada | In the Oil Sands PORTF...

The oil sands of Alberta, Canada, represent the second largest source of crude oil in the world, behind Saudi Arabia. Beneath an area the size of Greece are an estimated 170.4 billion barrels of crude oil. Unlike conventional crude oil, which is pumped from deep within the earth, oil sands are a mixture of sand, clay, water and bitumen, found near the surface. Mining and refining the oil sands is an expensive process, but with the rise in the price per barrel of oil, it has become profitable?v...

Shadows of Change: GREENLAND

"This weather does not belong to us. It belongs to someone else. If we don't have ice, we are going to die." With this prediction, an Inuit hunter sums up the dire situation for the indigenous peoples who live in northern and eastern Greenland. Nowhere on Earth, perhaps, is the evidence of climate change more apparent. The ice that covers 80 percent of the world's largest island is disappearing at the rate of 7 percent a year, a rate that has accelerated substantially in recent years. In some ...