The central city said the fund will be used to build a 1.5km concrete dike and embankment section in Duy Nghĩa Commune, which was damaged by historic floods and landslides last year, and another 2km on the popular Cửa Đại Beach in Hội An.
Mahouts in Buôn Đôn brave intense heat to care for captive elephants as their numbers dwindle and conservation efforts grow more urgent.
The Ministry of Agriculture and Environment has ordered thermal power plants nationwide to tighten pollution controls and boost equipment inspections while preventing any disruption to electricity supply during the dry-season peak.
Việt Nam is looking to unlock the vast potential of its nearly 8,000 reservoirs to drive sustainable aquaculture growth, boost rural livelihoods and strengthen the fisheries value chain.
In the contiguous United States, crop irrigation, municipal water supplies, and thermoelectric power generation use more than 224 billion gallons of fresh water every day. Conducting water research or making decisions about water use, until now, often required referencing datasets across various agencies. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Water Availability Assessment Data Companion (NWDC), announced this week, aims to streamline this process. In part, the tool is designed to help decisionmakers better understand the balance between how high demand and limited supply affect water availability in their communities.
“While the United States has abundant water nationally, regional imbalances between supply and demand may create water challenges affecting millions of Americans,” said lead scientist Shirley Leung in a USGS press release. “What once required significant resources and time can now be done in minutes, giving communities of all sizes the same foundation for water planning.”
The lower 48 states are home to about 80,000 sub-watersheds, from those in the arid southwest to the Great Lakes Basin, where about 84% of North America’s surface fresh water is located. According to the USGS, the NWDC is the first tool that integrates information about water availability in individual watersheds at a national scale.
The tool is designed to complement Water Data for the Nation (WDFN), another USGS product that consolidates observational data from the agency’s thousands of local monitoring stations gathering data on streams, lakes, reservoirs, precipitation, water quality, and groundwater. The new tool uses modeling to fill in spatial and temporal gaps between the observations made at these stations.
Water managers, researchers, agricultural experts, and others can use the NWDC to compare watershed conditions, identify seasonal patterns in water use, or to create data visualizations of statewide water use, for example. Though the tool currently covers only the contiguous United States, it will soon be extended to Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico, according to the USGS.
David Tarboton, a professor of civil engineering at the Utah Water Research Laboratory, said he was “intrigued” by the new tool, and is interested in examining the data its model produces.
While Tarboton was disappointed that the tool’s most recent available data are from 2020, “having a sort of integrated, wall-to-wall dataset that’s consistently produced is very valuable,” he said. He works, in part, in the areas of hydroinformatics and data sharing, and noted that the modern methods the agency is using to share the data could be useful in developing automated tools.
—Emily Gardner (@emfurd.bsky.social), Associate Editor
The spread of antibiotic resistance, a growing threat to global health that causes millions of deaths annually, is typically blamed on the overuse of drugs in hospitals and in the food industry. However, a new study published in Nature Microbiology suggests that normal geological processes could be accelerating the development of new resistances.
Soil microorganisms naturally produce antibiotics as a form of chemical warfare to compete with each other. When soils dry out, these natural compounds become more concentrated because there is less water to dilute them. Like a dosage increase, this concentration can create a harsher environment, killing sensitive microbes and sparing those with the capacity to resist. This phenomenon, in turn, is an evolutive driver that favors the appearance of new and more effective resistance genes.
“If you have more antibiotics in your environment, only the organisms that can withstand it…can resist it.”
To test whether this mechanism is having real genetic effects, Xiaoyu Shan, a microbial ecologist and postdoctoral researcher at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and colleagues looked at soil samples under controlled conditions as the samples transitioned from a wet state to a desiccated one. They found that as the soil dried, the presence of genes related to antibiotic production and resistance spiked, suggesting that drought leads to a rapid escalation in the subterranean biological arms race. Importantly, they did not look for pathogenic bacteria specifically, only for resistance genes, which can be present in a variety of microbes, whether those microbes are pathogenic or not.
“Drought leads to this elevation of antibiotic producers and bacteria that are resistant,” said team member Dianne Newman, a professor of biology and geobiology also at Caltech. “It’s a pretty simple idea: If you have more antibiotics in your environment, only the organisms that can withstand it…can resist it.”
However, there could be other potential explanations for the observed increase in antibiotic-producing and antibiotic resistance genes, according to Enrique Monte, a microbiologist at the Universidad de Salamanca in Spain who wasn’t involved with the new study. For instance, arid soils are naturally more diverse than humid soils, making it common to find a more diverse gene pool in the ground, Monte said. In addition, the mere presence of antibiotic genes might not result in an actual release to the environment, or a release could happen in dosages that are too small to cause noticeable effects. “There are antibiotics that are volatile; they escape into the air, so they never reach a therapeutic concentration to kill others,” Monte said.
The authors, however, took some precautions to show that the increase in antibiotic resistance genes was actually a biological response to environmental stress. For instance, they also tracked other genes that should remain unaffected or decline under desiccation. As expected, genes that are needed for basic survival remained stable, while genes responsible for bacterial movement declined in dry soil, where mobility is restricted. Even some species that were not favored by desiccation saw an increase in resistance-related genes, “which is even stronger evidence,” Shan said.
As the researchers combed through publicly available metagenomic data libraries, they had to select collections with strict control of all variables and in which the only changing factor was water content. That limited the analysis to five locations: two grasslands and a sorghum field in California; a forest in Valais, Switzerland; and a wetland in Nanchang, China.
The scarcity of locations might limit how extrapolable these results are, said Fiona Walsh, a microbiologist at Maynooth University in Ireland who was not involved with the work. “There are thousands of high-quality metagenomes available online with excellent metadata. I would really like to see a comparison where they apply their analysis to a broader map of global metagenomic data to see if they reach the same conclusions,” she said.
Drier regions consistently showed a higher number of resistant bacteria cases in hospitals, even after adjusting for confounding factors such as local income.
The study also suggests that dry soils might be a hidden driver of clinical cases of antibiotic resistance worldwide. The authors combined hospital data on the number of cases of resistant infections from 116 countries with the local aridity index, which measures temperature and precipitation, for each location. They found a strong correlation: Drier regions consistently showed a higher number of resistant bacteria cases in hospitals, even after adjusting for confounding factors such as local income.
However, the authors admitted that this is only a correlation effect and doesn’t prove causation. “It motivates follow-up research to see how environmental concentration weighs against human overuse and poor stewardship,” Newman said.
Even this correlation could be a stretch, according to microbiologist Sara Soto, head of the Global Viral and Bacterial Infections Programme at the Instituto de Salud Global de Barcelona. At the end of the day, she said, the authors have soil data from only five locations in three countries, and they are not tracking the specific bacterial varieties that make people sick, only resistance genes.
For the thesis to be solid, Soto said, the ideal approach would have been to contrast hospital strains from a specific area with soil data from that same region during the same drought episode. “Making such a vast inference—that what happens in the soil of one location affects what happens in a hospital elsewhere—is a big leap,” she said.
The authors, however, point out that resistance genes from soils can eventually make their way into human pathogens. Microbes have the capacity to share genetic material across species—a process known as horizontal gene transfer. In their analysis, the team identified specific resistance sequences that appeared to have been transferred between soil bacteria relatively recently, perhaps within the past decade. How they are reaching hospitals remains a matter for a future study, they said.
As droughts increase in numerous regions in the face of climate change, this selective pressure within soil ecosystems is expected to intensify. Though these findings do not show that drought directly puts drug-resistant pathogens in hospitals, they still suggest that a drying climate could set the scene for an increase in antibiotic resistance, the researchers report.
—Javier Barbuzano (@javibar.bsky.social), Science Writer
Fashion is a major sustainability challenge in the global economy, and for most of the last decade, it has faced little regulation. That is starting to change. In the past eighteen months, California passed the first U.S. law for extended producer responsibility (EPR) for textiles, France approved strict anti-fast-fashion laws, and the EU set a 2027 deadline for all member states to have a textile EPR program.
Every second, a garbage truck’s worth of clothing ends up in a landfill or is burned somewhere in the world. This isn’t just a figure of speech. The fashion industry produces about 92 million metric tons of waste each year, and if nothing changes, that number could reach 148 million metric tons by 2030.
Meanwhile, the resale market is growing about three times faster than traditional retail. The industry still has a long way to go, but for the first time, there are real systems in place to hold it accountable.
How big is fashion’s impact? It’s large, debated, and still growing. The fashion industry is responsible for 8 to 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the UN Environment Programme. While experts debate the exact numbers, everyone agrees the problem is getting worse.
The Apparel Impact Institute, a nonprofit supported by brands like H&M, Target, PVH, and Lululemon, reported that apparel sector emissions rose by 7.5 percent in 2023. This was the first yearly increase since 2019, and the group linked it to overproduction, ultra-fast fashion, and more use of virgin polyester, which now accounts for 57 percent of global fiber production.
No matter which numbers you believe, the trend is troubling. Each year, 80 to 100 billion new garments are made. Clothing production has doubled since 2000, and people now wear each item 36 percent fewer times before throwing it away. Synthetic fibers, mostly polyester made from fossil fuels, make up about 57 percent of global fiber production and are expected to increase.
The amount of water used in fashion is huge, even by industrial standards. Making one cotton T-shirt takes about 2,700 liters of water, which could provide drinking water for one person for 900 days. Producing a pair of jeans uses about 7,500 liters. Textile dyeing and treatment is the world’s second-largest source of water pollution, causing about 20 percent of industrial water pollution. ic clothing also sheds microplastics every time it’s washed. The IUCN has estimated that about 35 percent of primary microplastics in the ocean originate from synthetic textiles like polyester, nylon, and acrylic, though the total volume keeps rising as synthetic usage increases.
After technology manufacturing, garment production is still one of the industries most affected by modern slavery and child labor, according to International Labour Organization data. These problems are most common in the early stages of production, such as cotton farms, dye houses, and fabric mills, which are less visible than the brand-name factories.
In the last five years, a new category called ultra-fast fashion has emerged, making older models like Zara and H&M seem slow by comparison. Platforms such as Shein and Temu add thousands of new styles daily, produce items on demand in Chinese factories, and ship directly to customers around the world.
The environmental impact is severe. Shein’s own reports show its greenhouse gas emissions nearly doubled from 2022 to 2023, reaching 16.7 million metric tons of CO₂ equivalent. That’s almost as much as Inditex, Zara’s parent company, which is five times bigger by revenue. In 2024, Shein’s transportation emissions alone were over 8.5 million metric tons, more than three times Inditex’s. Temu hasn’t shared its emissions data, but third-party estimates put its yearly footprint between 4 and 6 million metric tons of CO₂e, mostly from shipping over a million air-freight parcels each day.
These business models not only pass environmental costs onto others, they rely on it. This is the main reason behind the push for new regulations.
For most of modern fashion history, sustainability promises have been voluntary, hard to verify, and mostly ineffective. That is finally starting to change. Three recent developments in the past eighteen months are especially important to watch..
California’s Responsible Textile Recovery Act (SB 707)
Governor Gavin Newsom signed SB 707 into law in September 2024, making California the first U.S. state with extended producer responsibility for textiles. The law shifts responsibility for end-of-use management of apparel, footwear, and household textiles from consumers and municipalities to the companies that put the products on the market. Producers with less than $1 million in annual global revenue are exempt; everyone else must join a state-approved Producer Responsibility Organization (PRO) that will finance collection, repair, reuse, sorting, and recycling.
Implementation is staged. On February 27, 2026, CalRecycle selected Landbell USA as California’s textile PRO. Producers must register with the PRO by July 1, 2026. A statewide needs assessment runs through 2027, final implementing regulations are due by July 2028, and full enforcement begins July 1, 2030, with fines of up to $50,000 per day for noncompliance.
France’s Anti–Fast Fashion Law
In June 2025, the French Senate passed the most aggressive anti-fast-fashion legislation in the world by a vote of 337 to 1. The law imposes a per-item eco-tax starting at €5 and rising to €10 by 2030 (capped at 50 percent of retail price), bans advertising and influencer marketing of ultra-fast-fashion brands, requires point-of-sale environmental disclosures including carbon footprint and durability data, and carries fines of up to €100,000 for violating the ad ban. Revenue is directed to French sustainable-fashion producers.
The law is clearly aimed at Shein and Temu. In November 2025, French authorities requested that Shein’s fast-fashion platform be suspended for three months over the sale of illicit products — days after Shein opened its first physical retail store in Paris. The European Commission issued a detailed opinion on the French law in September 2025; other EU member states are watching.
The EU Waste Framework Directive
Under revisions to the EU Waste Framework Directive, every member state was required to have separate textile waste collection in place by January 2025 and must have a fully operational textile EPR scheme by 2027. France’s EPR program, which has been operating since 2008, and the Netherlands (2023) are already live. Italy, Spain, and others have draft decrees in public consultation. Outside the EU, Switzerland, Australia, and Chile are developing national frameworks.
In the U.S., beyond California, New York’s Fashion Sustainability and Social Accountability Act (A4631) and Senate Bill S3217A both carried into the 2026 session. Washington State introduced HB 1420 in January 2025; as of March 2026, it remains in committee. None of these have passed.
While policymakers work on new rules, consumers are already changing their habits. ThredUp’s 2025 Resale Report says the U.S. secondhand clothing market grew by 14 percent in 2024, five times faster than traditional retail. It’s expected to reach $74 billion by 2029. Globally, the secondhand market could hit $367 billion by 2029, growing 2.7 times faster than the overall apparel market.
There is a clear generational divide. In 2024, 58 percent of U.S. consumers bought secondhand clothing. Among those aged 18 to 44, 48 percent now choose secondhand first when shopping for clothes. Thirty-nine percent of younger shoppers have bought secondhand items through social platforms like Instagram or TikTok Shop.
Resale alone won’t solve fashion’s environmental impact. Extending a garment’s life only helps if it replaces a new purchase. Still, this is the biggest shift in consumer behavior the industry has seen in a generation.
Sustainable fashion means having a supply chain that is responsible for both the environment and people at every stage. In practice, this includes using fibers that need less water, fewer chemicals, and create lower emissions; manufacturing with renewable energy; ensuring fair wages and safe working conditions; making products that last and can be repaired; and recycling materials into new clothes instead of turning them into insulation or sending them to landfills in places like Ghana or Chile.
It’s a long list, and no brand meets every standard. Still, more brands are making real progress. Patagonia, Eileen Fisher, and Pangaia share detailed impact reports that are checked by outside experts. Brands using leftover fabrics, made-to-order production, and closed-loop recycling are slowly growing. Certifications like Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS) for organic fibers, Fair Trade Certified for labor, and bluesign for chemical management are meaningful when you see them on a label.
Fashion is still the most greenwashed part of the consumer goods industry. Words like “conscious,” “eco,” and “sustainable” aren’t regulated in the U.S. What really matters are specific certifications, published supply-chain data, and third-party audits—not marketing slogans.
Individual choices won’t fix fashion’s big problems, but they do influence demand. That demand can drive companies and lawmakers to make changes. Here are some practical steps, ranked by impact:
Fashion is one of the most obvious ways the global economy affects our daily lives. Because it’s so visible, everyone is part of the problem—but it also means that when change happens, it’s easy to notice.
Editor’ Note: Originally written by Gemma Alexander on April 8, 2022, this article was substantially updated in April 2026.
The post A Stylish Investment: Making Fashion Sustainable appeared first on Earth911.
The built environment, particularly office buildings other urban facilities, are responsible for 39% of the global energy-related emissions, according to the World Green Building Council. About a third of that impact comes from the initial construction of a building and the other two-thirds is produced over the lifetime of a building by heating, cooling, and providing power to the occupants. Our guest today is leading a key battle to reduce the impact of the built environment. Tune in for a wide-ranging conversation with Rob Bernard, Chief Sustainability Officer at CBRE Group Inc., which manages more than $145 billion of commercial buildings, providing logistics, retail, and corporate office services across more than than 100 countries.
Rob cut his sustainability teeth at Microsoft, as its Chief Environmental Strategist for 11 years, as the company was developing its world-leading approach and collaborating with other tech giants to lobby for policy and funding to accelerate progress. He discusses CBRE’s Sustainability Solutions & Services for commercial building owners, as well as the accelerating progress for renewables, carbon tracking, and economic, health, and lifestyle benefits of living lightly on the planet. You can learn more about CBRE and its sustainability services at cbre.com
Take a few minutes to learn more about making construction and building operations more sustainable:
Editor’s Note: This podcast originally aired on April 15, 2024.
The post Best of Sustainability In Your Ear: Making Billions of Square Feet of Commercial Space Sustainable with CBRE’s Rob Bernard appeared first on Earth911.
The supply of magma from the Earth’s mantle is a primary source of heat to volcanic arc crust, where the heat is then dissipated through various processes. Much of this magmatic heat is dissipated as heated water, or aqueous fluid.
A new article in Reviews of Geophysics compares 11 different volcanic-arc segments where heat discharge via aqueous fluid has been well-inventoried to better understand the factors that influence this process. Here, we asked the authors to give an overview of heat discharge from volcanic arcs, how scientists measure it, and what questions remain.
Why is it important to study how heat is dissipated from volcanic arcs?
The heat from these magmas matters for geothermal energy, patterns of groundwater flow, and the patterns of volcanic activity at the surface.
Volcanic arcs are the chains of volcanoes on top of subduction zones. They can produce some of Earth’s most explosive and hazardous eruptions. But much of the magma beneath the surface never erupts. Nevertheless, the heat from these magmas—and the simple fact of their existence and abundance—still matters for geothermal energy, patterns of groundwater flow, and the patterns of volcanic activity at the surface.
What are the main modes in which heat is discharged from volcanic arcs?
Heat at volcanic arcs can be carried by magmas, transmitted through the crust conductively, and carried by water seeping slowly through the crust. At the base of the crust, magmas are probably most important, with conduction coming in second. But as magmas move upwards through the crust, some of them solidify and impart their heat to their surroundings where it is transferred by conduction. Within a few kilometers of the surface, fluids seeping through the crust begin to take up all that heat, and so if we can quantify the heat carried by those fluids, we can retrace it to its origins in magmas.
How do scientists measure these different forms of heat loss?
Scientists measure the heat carried by erupting magmas using satellites, or by adding up the erupted masses and making an estimate of how much energy was released by cooling from eruption temperatures to solid igneous rocks at Earth’s surface. Conductive heat flow is measured by drilling holes in the Earth’s crust to see how quickly it gets hotter with depth.
Measuring the heat carried by aqueous fluids in the crust is in some ways the trickiest. One approach is to find all the springs where hot or even slightly warm water is trickling out and measure the temperature and discharge to estimate how much extra heat that water is carrying.
What are the challenges and uncertainties in measuring hydrothermal heat discharge?
One challenge is that many springs are only slightly warmer than you’d expect. There is good data for many hot springs, but there are data tracking these ‘slightly warm’ springs for only a subset of arcs. Another challenge is that warm underground fluids can flow laterally, so you have to try to account for that. This is not an uncertainty in hydrothermal discharge, but one additional big uncertainty for our study, where we were trying to quantify the proportion of magmas that freeze underground versus erupting, is in the estimates of how much magma has actually erupted through time.
What are some of the factors that influence hydrothermal heat loss?
A major goal of our paper is to try to quantify these hidden magmas.
A main factor that influences hydrothermal heat loss is the magmas that solidify underground. This link is the key motivation for our study. A major goal of our paper is to try to quantify these hidden magmas—how much magma needs to intrude the crust beneath the surface to supply the hydrothermal heat fluxes that we observe? The composition of magmas influences how much heat they can release. The depth at which magmas are emplaced also matters, because magmas that intrude the shallow crust eventually cool to lower temperatures than magmas emplaced in the lower crust and therefore release more heat.
What are the remaining questions or knowledge gaps where additional research efforts are needed?
A big outstanding challenge is combining estimates from hydrothermal data of how much magma is coming into the crust – like ours – with other approaches to estimating the same thing. The magmatic systems beneath volcanoes span the crust. At the base of the crust, you have magma supply, sort of like the water main feeding your plumbing system. Despite how fundamental magma supply is, we know remarkably little about it. It’s exciting to think about how the rates of magma supply could vary through time and space and why. Applying a range of techniques—including geophysical imaging, hydrothermal budgets, gas and igneous geochemistry, and petrology—to understand these questions could really be a game changer.
—Benjamin A. Black (bblack@eps.rutgers.edu; 0000-0003-4585-6438), Rutgers University, United States; S. E. Ingebritsen (steve.ingebritsen@gmail.com; 0000-0001-6917-9369), Kyoto University, Japan; and Kazuki Sawayama (sawayama@bep.vgs.kyoto-u.ac.jp; 0000-0001-7988-3739), Kyoto University, Japan
Editor’s Note: It is the policy of AGU Publications to invite the authors of articles published in Reviews of Geophysics to write a summary for Eos Editors’ Vox.
The Đà Nẵng Homeschool Community has raised more than VNĐ8 million ($315) to support wildlife conservation and environmental education for underprivileged children at an Earth Day Market.
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