Starving the Mekong – Reuters

Mekong Basin (by Shannon1, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons).

Lives are remade as dams built by China upstream deprive the Mekong River Delta of precious sediment

Standing on the bank of the Mekong River, Tran Van Cung can see his rice farm wash away before his very eyes. The paddy’s edge is crumbling into the delta.

Just 15 years ago, Southeast Asia’s longest river carried some 143 million tonnes of sediment – as heavy as about 430 Empire State Buildings – through to the Mekong River Delta every year, dumping nutrients along riverbanks essential to keeping tens of thousands of farms like Cung’s intact and productive…

Clamshells Face the Acid Test – Hakai Magazine

Clam Shells (by Lindsey B. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr).

As acidification threatens shellfish along North America’s Pacific Coast, Indigenous sea gardens offer solutions.   

It’s low tide in Bodega Bay, north of San Francisco, California, and Hannah Hensel is squishing through thick mud, on the hunt for clams. The hinged mollusks are everywhere, burrowed into the sediment, filtering seawater to feed on plankton. But Hensel isn’t looking for living bivalves—she’s searching the mudflat for the shells of dead clams…

From Climate Exhortation to Climate Execution – the New Yorker

Installing panels (by Oregon Dept of Transportation CC BY 2.0 via Flickr).

The Inflation Reduction Act finally offers a chance for widespread change…

So far, the climate debate has gone on mostly in people’s heads and hearts. It took thirty years to get elected leaders to take it seriously: first, to just get them to say that the planet was warming, and then to allow that humans were causing it. But this year Congress finally passed serious legislation—the Inflation Reduction Act—that allocates hundreds of billions of dollars to the task of transforming the nation so that it burns far less fossil fuel. So now the battle moves from hearts and heads to houses…

How Long Until Alaska’s Next Oil Disaster? – the Atlantic

Cook Inlet from Homer (by Dave Bezaire CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr).

More than 30 years after the devastating Exxon Valdez oil spill, many Alaskans are still haunted by the possibility of another such disaster. Some felt that those fears were about to be realized in 2020, when the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) began preparing to auction off development rights to a million acres of Cook Inlet, a proposal known as Lease Sale 258…

Where Walruses Go When Sea Ice Is Gone – the New Yorker

Walrus at Poolepynten, Svalbard, Arctic (by Gary Bembridge CC BY 2.0 via Flickr)

The short documentary “Haulout” follows a scientist on a remote Arctic beach who witnesses the chaotic effects of climate change on Pacific walruses – film by Evgenia Arbugaeva and Maxim Arbugaev…

In 2018, in the Siberian Arctic, the filmmakers Evgenia Arbugaeva and Maxim Arbugaev, who are sister and brother, arrived on a strange beach. “The sand was of dark colour, full of bones, and smelled terrible…”

In Alaska, a Mystery Over Disappearing Whales – Undark

Beluga or white whale, Delphinapterus leucas. courtship (by Brian Gratwicke CC BY 2.0 via Flickr).

In the 1980s, Kotzebue Sound’s beluga population began to dwindle…Although some stocks are healthy, beluga numbers have fallen off in around a half-dozen regions over the last 50 years…Now, even after hunting has ceased in some places, stresses such as climate change, increased ship traffic, and chemical pollutants are a gathering storm that threatens to finish the job…