How to avoid a 'sand crisis' - and other environment stories you need to read this week

Hundreds of households in the historic New Mexico city of Las Vegas were told to evacuate on 3 May as fierce winds and drought pushed the largest active wildfire in the United States closer to town. The blaze has scorched more than 121,000 acres (49,000 hectares), or more than half the area of New York City, tearing through centuries-old settlements and vacation homes in forested mountains 30 miles (48 kilometres) northeast of Santa Fe.

Close to 2 million children are at risk of starving to death as the Horn of Africa faces one of its worst droughts in decades, United Nations (UN) aid chief Martin Griffiths said on 26 April. Parts of Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia are suffering their driest conditions in more than 40 years and aid agencies are seeking to avoid the repeat of a famine a decade ago that killed hundreds of thousands of people.

A UN report has called for urgent action to avert a "sand crisis", including a ban on beach extraction as demand surges to 50 billion tonnes a year amid population growth and urbanization. Sand is the most exploited natural resource in the world after water, but its use is largely ungoverned, meaning we are consuming it faster than it can be replaced by geological processes that take hundreds of thousands of years, the UN Environment Programme report says.

The Biden administration will allocate more than $3 billion in infrastructure funding to finance electric vehicle (EV) battery manufacturing, US officials said on 2 May. The funds will be allocated by the Department of Energy from the $1 trillion infrastructure bill President Joe Biden signed last year. Among the initiatives will be processing of minerals for use in large-capacity batteries and recycling those batteries, the agency said in a statement.

It comes as data shows there is enough nickel and lithium to produce up to 14 million EVs globally in 2023, so Europe should secure more raw materials to shift away from oil faster, campaign group Transport and Environment said on 3 May.

The global capacity of power plants fired by coal, the fossil fuel that emits the most carbon dioxide when burned, rose nearly 1% last year as the world recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a research report by a US environmental group.

India's focus on decarbonizing its steel sector and developing offshore wind power will help it become carbon neutral ahead of its promised goal of 2070, the director-general of the International Renewable Energy Agency said on 26 April.

Meanwhile, South Africa's efforts to wean itself off coal and focus on renewables, battery storage, EVs and setting up a green hydrogen economy would require funding of over a trillion rand ($63.70 billion) by 2030, a top government official said on 26 April.

The US solar industry is warning of a big slowdown in project installations this year as global supply chain disruptions and the threat of new US tariffs on panel imports from Southeast Asia hit home. American power company Southern Co on 28 April said nearly a gigawatt of its planned solar energy projects would be delayed by a year, the latest in a string of warnings from companies and industry representatives citing the two issues.

Climate change could see 4% of global annual economic output lost by 2050 and hit many poorer parts of the world disproportionately hard, a new study of 135 countries has estimated. Ratings firm S&P Global, which gives countries credit scores based on the health of their economies, published a report on 26 April looking at the likely impact of rising sea levels, and more regular heat waves, droughts and storms.

Decades of deforestation, mining and industrial pollution have taken a toll on the planet, leaving as much as 40% of its land degraded and putting economies at risk, a UN report says.

Nearly half of the world's land area is now taken up by agriculture, which has seen swathes of forest cleared for livestock rangeland and crop fields.

If trends continue, another 11% of the world's land surface - about the size of South America - could be degraded by 2050, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) said on 27 April in its global land outlook.

The world is demanding more food to feed a growing population, while efforts to fight climate change involve leaving forests intact and expanding land-based projects such as solar panel arrays and wind farms.

"These are competing demands," said Barron Orr, chief scientist of the UNCCD. "There's not a lot (of land) left to work with."

India's electricity demand touched a record high in April as its northern states reeled under the hottest pre-summer months in decades, with a surge in the use of air conditioning triggering the worst power crisis in more than six years.

Power demand grew 13.2% to 135.4 billion kilowatt hours (kWh), as the electricity requirement in the north grew between 16% and 75%, a Reuters analysis of government data showed.

Electricity use is expected to grow as India's weather office has forecast above normal maximum temperatures over most parts of the west central, northwest, north and northeast.

India and neighbouring Pakistan have been suffering from extreme heat this year and more than a billion people are at risk from the heat, scientists have warned, linking the early onset of an intense summer to climate change.

The unprecedented electricity use resulted in widespread power cuts in April, as utilities scrambled to manage demand as coal supplies dwindled. Power supply fell short of demand by 2.41 billion units, or 1.8%, the worst since October 2015.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi warned last week that India is getting too hot too early, raising the risk of fires.

"Temperatures are rising rapidly in the country, and rising much earlier than usual," Modi told heads of India's state governments in an online conference on 27 April.

March was the hottest on record since the India Meteorological Department began keeping records 122 years ago.