For millions of years, rangelands and humans have evolved together. Today, we are both judges and actors in climate change. Through the FAO, the United Nations has declared 2026 the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists. with the aim of focusing attention on this vast biome on which two billion people directly depend. Rangelands are…
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Climate summits. Dialogue and consensus matter
We’re going in the right direction, but at the wrong speed. Once per year, the environmental clocks of practically every country on earth stop to sync at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP): an international summit whose purpose is to define, specify, and assess execution of efforts to protect the climate. Global commons, limited…
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Responsible Consumption
Thanks to the technological, economic, and social progress of recent decades, we are surrounded by comforts that would have been unthinkable at other points in history. Yet this welfare society is accompanied by consumption patterns that reveal an unsustainable system with great regional differences, raw materials that run out, waste that is difficult to reuse,…
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Nature and Health
“In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.” (John Muir) We Are Nature Nature improves our health. Contact with the environment benefits us in many different ways, both directly and indirectly. On the one hand, biophilia, as an evolutionary response, explains why we seek to ‘return to our origins’ and perceive…
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Heat Islands
When we think of the cities of the future, we think of friendly spaces, with people at the heart of their design and activity. However, many urban hubs today are not very inhabitable. Especially during the summer, they are both the victim and the cause of the heat island effect. Despite this, the solutions lie…
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Living Soils
Soil is much more than mere dirt. We refer to soil as the surface of the earth or the foundation for other activities, but it is so much more. It is where everything begins. Soil plays an essential role in planetary balance. Plants and animals (including ourselves), agriculture, and even the climate depend on it…
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Let’s Save Our Glaciers
Glaciers speak to us. Are we listening? These long-lasting ice and snow masses very slowly slide along the ground they sit on. We can find glaciers both in mountainous terrain and in large flat zones, on every continent all around the planet. In Aragón’s Pyrenees, in the La Maladeta range, we have one of the southernmost glaciers…
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More Purified Water
More Purified Water Thanks to technological innovation, wastewater treatment is evolving to successfully handle application of European regulations, which are increasingly stringent. Tertiary treatment or regeneration of wastewater in wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) is an additional process to purification, aimed at providing the treated water with quality so that it can be used for new…
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Clean Energies on Water
Renewable energies are energies that come from natural sources and have a faster replacement rate than their consumption rate. In other words, they are virtually inexhaustible. This concept, coined by the United Nations, came into use in the 1970s, a result of the oil crisis that revealed the finite nature of fossil fuel reserves. Fifty years later,…
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Groundwater. Invisible, Yet Essential
“Fui sobre agua edificada, mis muros de fuego son, esta es mi insignia y blasón (I was built upon water, my walls are fire, this is my insignia and blazon).” This motto for Madrid, engraved on the shields of Alfonso VIII of Castile’s militias, bore witness to the importance of the water beneath the city. The…
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