Dear reader,
It is well known that in addition to the obvious global crises – most recently it was Corona, now it is Putin’s war in Ukraine – several ecological threats are continuously escalating in the background.
But one tends to suppress that occasionally.
The news this week had the effect of a wake-up call in the agglomeration:
On Wednesday, the United Nations released a new report, the Global Land Outlook, on the state of the world's soils.
It says: 20 to 40 percent of the global land areas are already damaged - scientifically this is called "land degradation", the soil system is losing its function.
In concrete terms, this often means: forests become steppes, meadows become deserts.
On Tuesday, authorities in southern California declared a water shortage emergency and imposed a water-use restriction for the first time ever.
The reason is the extreme drought.
A study on the state of the world's reptiles was published in Nature magazine on Wednesday.
Data from the Red List of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) were evaluated.
21 percent of the 10,196 reptile species recorded are threatened with extinction.
In Asia, more than a billion people are currently affected by extreme heat, with temperatures in India and Pakistan sometimes reaching close to the 50-degree mark.
India is a "hotspot of global climate change," Adrian Leyser from the German Weather Service told SPIEGEL on Wednesday.
On Thursday, the University of Maryland and the organization Global Forest Watch released a breakdown of the forest area lost to fire in 2021.
By far the largest forest area burned last year in Russia, more than 53,600 square kilometers - an area larger than Lower Saxony.
"Russia experienced its worst fire season ever," researcher Elizabeth Goldman told the Washington Post.
While the world is spellbound on Ukraine, nature is returning, so it reads. The simultaneous occurrence of the crises is not a coincidence, however, writes my colleague Viola Kiel in an overview of the state of the planet: somehow everything is connected to everything else together.
It is all the more important that the acute war crisis does not completely push the permanent ecological crisis out of the spotlight - or even lead to decisions that worsen the latter.
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The topics of the week
Species extinction, extreme heat, water scarcity: The parallelism of crises
As the world stares at war, the climate crisis is now revealing its devastating proportions: Species are disappearing, soils are withering, and the heat is becoming deadly in some places.
It's no coincidence that all of this is happening at the same time.
Temperatures around 50 degrees Celsius: Extreme heat haunts India
India and Pakistan are expecting a massive heat wave in the coming days.
It is favored by climate change - and will probably end fatally for many people.
Controversial foundation of the prime minister: has Manuela Schwesig deceived the parliament?
New statements show how the alleged climate foundation was primarily about the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
The Prime Minister of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania faces a dilemma.
Tesla and its luxury cars: ego instead of eco
No company sells electric cars more successfully than Tesla.
And yet Elon Musk's company is increasingly moving away from its former visions.
What remains of the goals of sustainable mobility?
Subsidy programs, raw materials, skilled workers: How Habeck wants to nurture the domestic green electricity industry
After a decade of decline, the federal government wants to rebuild production facilities for wind and solar systems in Germany.
But almost everything is still missing.
"Climate Report" podcast: How lobbyists are slowing down environmental protection
The government uses taxpayer money to support environmentally harmful projects, and climate protection should be a key traffic light project.
How can that be – and what role does the economy play in this?
stay confident
Yours, Kurt Stukenberg