Indigenous communities in the Amazon region of Ecuador have been suffering from a lack of clean water after a massive oil spill– the biggest in the area since 2004– polluted their local rivers. With this, the tribes have filed a lawsuit against the government and…
Indonesian port city of Balikpapan, on the island of Borneo, declared a state of emergency after pipeline fracture caused devastating oil spill along the coast, killing five fishermen and bringing health problems to hundreds of locals after it ignited. The oil…
A fire at a sulfur mine and processing facility near Mosul, Iraq is emitting tremendous quantities of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere for the sixth day in a row. If this fire was a volcano, it would already be among the largest eruptions of 2016. NASA’s…
Two villages in China's Henan Province were covered in red mud containing toxic heavy metals after a waste pond dam collapsed on August 8, 2016, releasing 2 million cubic meters of aluminum production byproducts. The toxic waste pond was located in Dahegou…
Governor Rick Scott has declared a state of emergency in Florida's Martin and St. Lucie counties following the presence of algal blooms in local waterways. The executive order was signed Wednesday, June 29, 2016. It allows state and local governmental agencies…
Lake Baikal, the 25 million-year-old lake, and UNESCO's heritage site, is on the verge of environmental catastrophe, Russia's environmentalists warn. The proposed Mongolian hydro project could potentially disrupt the inflows and cause a tsunami of water in…
The Peruvian government has declared a 60-day state of emergency for 11 towns in Madre de Dios, a region in southeastern Peru’s Amazon Basin, after officials found alarmingly high levels of mercury. This highly toxic metal comes from illegal gold mines and…
Since early April 2016, at least 100 tons of dead fish have been washed ashore in an ongoing environmental disaster along the central coast of Vietnam, according to a government official. Fish, apparently killed by industrial effluents, washed ashore in Ha Tinh,…
The southern area of Los Lagos, Chile, has been affected by the unprecedented red algal bloom over the last month. The phenomenon has caused thousands of local fishermen to protest the government's "insufficient" effort to alleviate the economic…
26 workers have now been affected by the radioactive fumes leaking from the Hanford nuclear site in the US state of Washington since April 17, 2016. After several years of radioactive waste leaking, the amount grew dramatically that day when 13 000 liters (3 500…
