The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), in coordination with the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST), launched today an initiative to develop an advanced global early warning and response system to help humanitarian actors prepare and plan for emergencies.

The new system, which uses the latest AI technology combined with Earth observation data, will help humanitarian actors, local authorities, and local communities to reinforce their preparedness and response by detecting and evaluating risks of events that might trigger forced displacement, and delivering timely alerts ahead of an emergency.

In an interdisciplinary research project coordinated by the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), researchers have discovered meter-high chimneys on the floor of the Dead Sea. These are formed by the spontaneous crystallization of minerals from groundwater with an extremely high salt content flowing up out of the lake floor, they report in journal Science of the Total Environment. Discovered for the first time, these vents are an important early warning indicator for sinkholes. These subsidence craters form in the area surrounding the Dead Sea and pose a significant hazard to the population.

New England is warming faster than any other part of the United States due to climate change. Part of the havoc a warming world wreaks is on the “water budget”—the frequency, timing and amount of precipitation, where that moisture goes once it lands, how it interacts with trees and plants, how much evaporates and how it eventually seeps into the ground and flows as subsurface water. Thanks to a $498,999 grant from the United States Geological Survey (USGS), David Boutt, professor in the Department of Earth, Geographic and Climate Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, will spend the next three years building advanced integrated hydrologic models that will allow New England to predict with spatial precision how the region’s water budget will change in the coming years.

The analyses of the largest study on ochre extraction in Africa also show the spread of ochre to nearby areas / publication in ‘Nature Communications’