Eco Report – March 26, 2020

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According to a new report from the environmental and indigenous rights group Amazon Watch, five of the world’s largest banks are funding crude oil extraction in the western Amazon rainforest.

After immense conservation efforts, the numbers of critically endangered black rhinoceroses is slowly ticking up, according to the latest figures released by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, as the BBC’s Science Focus reported

Earlier this year, a one-trillion-tree campaign was big news at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Salesforce founder Businessman Marc Benioff announced at the meeting that his company will support and mobilize the conservation and restoration of one hundred million trees over the next decade.

Greenland experienced an unusually warm summer in 2019, which caused the world’s largest island to lose 600 billion tons of ice and raised sea levels by 0.2 of an inch, according to a NASA study released last week. That amount of ice loss more than doubled Greenland’s annual average.

A new study published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology found that bisphenol [BISS-fi-nawl] A, better known as BPA, is crossing the placenta and accumulating in the fetus.

Elephants are in big trouble: in recent years their population has plummeted by thirty percent. One reason is that foreign trophy hunters shoot elephants by the hundreds each year.

Five years ago, after lead entered the tap water in Flint, Michigan, Mona Hanna-Attisha, M.D., exposed the crisis and documented it with some colleagues. Dr. Hanna-Attisha, a pediatrician, has studied exposed Flint children since then and found that 14,000 children under the age of six might have been exposed to lead in the water.

Another wet spring, and floods are on the way, says the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Fortunately, the agency predicted that this year’s flooding would not be nearly as bad as last year’s, which inundated the Midwest and devastated crops.

Eli Lilly CEO David Ricks told CNBC on Friday that his company aims to start testing a treatment for the globally spreading coronavirus in the coming months.

 In Richmond, Indiana, plans for what would be the city’s largest solar park yet has won final approval, clearing the way for thousands of panels to be installed..

A pair of Indiana University experts were among those who testified in Indianapolis to the Indiana arm of the US Commission on Civil Rights about the status of lead exposure in the state.

Mayflies are undergoing a sharp decline where they have been historically abundant, in the Northern Mississippi River Basin.