GOODNESS

How UNICEF sends lifesaving supplies anywhere within 48 hours.

When the earthquake hit Nepal in 2015, a phone rang in a nondescript warehouse on the outskirts of Copenhagen. That’s where UNICEF’s largest supply hub sits filled with enough medicine, food, water, and material on hand to cover the immediate needs of at least 200,000 people, along with a robot-assisted skeleton crew of warehouse workers waiting to load them up and ship them out when the need arises.

“We can’t be the reason they go extinct”: Behati Prinsloo is the new face of rhino conservation.

At the beginning of the 20th century, there were around 500,000 rhinos living on our planet. Today there are an estimated 28,000, and some species have only a handful left in the entire world. Very few rhinos liveoutside national parks and reserves due to poaching and habitat loss.

It’s a startling display of how quickly humans can wipe a species off the planet: In South Africa alone, an average of two rhinos a day were killed in 2018. Its neighbor, Namibia, faces a similar issue, as the country’s black rhino population, one of the largest in the world, is under threat. The country loses around 50 rhinos a year to poachers, who hunt rhinos, cut off their horns, and leave the animals to bleed to death. The horns are then sold on the black market to customers primarily in the Asian market, where, according to WWF, they are used as “a party drug, a health supplement, and a hangover cure” and where they are believed to cure cancer.

How to help the Amazon rainforest: 9 things you can do during the fires and beyond.

Global warming’s catastrophic effects are on full display as Siberia, Alaska, and Brazil’s Amazon rainforest burn. The Amazon wildfires are particularly alarming as scientists have said that trees are the planet’s first line of defense against global warming. Due to deforestation, scientists estimate that we are near the tipping point where the Amazon can no longer function as a carbon sink. Brazil’s Amazon is the largest rainforest in the world and a vital carbon store. Cutting down trees in the rainforest produces 8% of net global emissions, more than the entire European Union.

How to help the Amazon rainforest: 9 things you can do during the fires and beyond.

Global warming’s catastrophic effects are on full display as Siberia, Alaska, and Brazil’s Amazon rainforest burn. The Amazon wildfires are particularly alarming as scientists have said that trees are the planet’s first line of defense against global warming. Due to deforestation, scientists estimate that we are near the tipping point where the Amazon can no longer function as a carbon sink. Brazil’s Amazon is the largest rainforest in the world and a vital carbon store. Cutting down trees in the rainforest produces 8% of net global emissions, more than the entire European Union.

How Hamilton, The Tonight Show, and the arts are helping Puerto Rico bring in tourists

In January of this year, Lin-Manuel Miranda returned to Puerto Rico, where his parents grew up, and brought the entire stage production of Hamilton with him. The idea was to use the Broadway smash as a fundraiser to help the island and its struggling arts scene to rebuild in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. To sweeten the deal, Miranda would return to the role he created, playing Alexander Hamilton for a three-week-long fundraiser in San Juan. The ploy worked: Hamilton fans jumped at the chance to see Miranda reprise the role and were willing to fork over up to $5,000 for tickets.