Best of our wild blogs: 3 Dec 18

Beting Bemban Besar South
Offshore Singapore

8-9 Dec: Kids' art workhop and film screening
Celebrating Singapore Shores!

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Why some see Chile's plastic bag ban as a rubbish proposal

Paige Sutherland BBC 2 Dec 18;

"They are just everywhere and they are polluting our oceans, our fields, our cities," says Guillermo González of the 3.4 billion disposable plastic bags used in Chile every year.

Mr González heads the recycling department at Chile's environment ministry and is only too aware of the problems caused by the huge amount of plastic bags used by his compatriots.

It takes up to 400 years for a single plastic bag to degrade and very few get recycled, he says. "It is a very visible kind of waste and one that people are very concerned about."

In August, Chile became the first country in Latin America to ban stores from handing out free plastic bags to shoppers. Under the new rules, anyone who goes to a store will either have to buy a re-usable bag or bring their own.

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Act now or risk disaster, nations told at UN climate summit

Patrick GALEY,AFP Yahoo News 3 Dec 18;

Katowice (Poland) (AFP) - After the starkest warnings yet of the catastrophic threat posed by climate change, nations gathered in Poland on Sunday to chart a way for mankind to avert runaway global warming.

The COP24 climate summit comes at a crucial juncture in the battle to rein in the effects of our heating planet.

The smaller, poorer nations that will bare the devastating brunt of climate change are pushing for richer states to make good on the promises they made in the 2015 Paris agreement.

Three years ago countries committed to limit global temperature rises to well below two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), and to the safer cap of 1.5C if at all possible.

But with only a single degree Celsius of warming so far, the world has already seen a crescendo of deadly wildfires, heatwaves and hurricanes made more destructive by rising seas.

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