Can you guess what the second most consumed natural resource is?⏳

and more than 1,000 evacuated in Panama.

Dear eco-nnecters,

This time we wanted to make you aware of the big issue of organized crime mining sand from rivers and coasts, the most mined resource worldwide.

Learn more about this below!

🗞️ In Climate News

• 🇮🇩 Bali’s rapid coastal erosion threatens island’s ecosystems and communities

• 🇹🇿 Forced evictions suppress Maasai spirituality and sacred spaces in Tanzania

• 🇿🇲 Zambian forest reserve rebounds

• 🇳🇬 Nigerian community helpless against rising seas

• 🇸🇦 Extreme heat kills hundreds of Muslim pilgrims

• 🇵🇦 More than 1,000 people evacuated to mainland Panama, the first community along the country’s coast to do so because of climate change

• 🏭 Fossil fuel use and emissions hit record highs as world struggles with deadly heat, storms and fires

• 🇬🇧 Thousands to march in London calling for urgent action to restore nature

• 🇧🇮 Floods continue in the border between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Burundi

• 🇮🇹 Offshore drilling is putting Italy’s biggest delta at risk of sinking

📈 Cool Trends

• 💻 Using AI to help create near-limitless clean energy

• ☕️ Banning single-use coffee cups

♾️ eco-stories

⏳ Inside the Crime Rings Trafficking Sand

Originally written by David A. Taylor for Scientificamerican.com

Very few people are looking closely at the illegal sand system or calling for changes, however, because sand is a mundane resource. Yet sand mining is the world's largest extraction industry because sand is a main ingredient in concrete, and the global construction industry has been soaring for decades. Every year the world uses up to 50 billion metric tons of sand, according to a United Nations Environment Program report. The only natural resource more widely consumed is water. A 2022 study by researchers at the University of Amsterdam concluded that we are dredging river sand at rates that far outstrip nature's ability to replace it, so much so that the world could run out of construction-grade sand by 2050. The U.N. report confirms that sand mining at current rates is unsustainable.

🌏 The Culture Column

📺 What we’re watching: Le Loup d'Or de Balolé

📸 Profile of the week: @lhr_sa - Lawyers for Human Rights - South Africa

lhr_sa

A post shared by @lhr_sa

📖 What we’re reading: The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization, by Vince Beiser
🤯 Shocking fact we learnt this week: Sand is the single most mined commodity, eclipsing minerals and metals by a colossal margin, and it is largely unregulated