Aquaculture, the farming of fresh or saltwater plants or animals, is a rapidly expanding industry, currently accounting for more than a quarter of global fish and seafood production.

The EarthTrends searchable database currently includes a limited number of population and demographic indicators that forecast data up to 2050 (see below). These data are produced by the United Nations Population Division.

EarthTrends has recently updated a number of indicators in the searchable database, including those relating to income inequality, the number of threatened species, and agricultural production and trade. Click 'read more' for a complete listing. If you have any questions, please contact us.

Congratulations to Layne Nakagawa, Rohit Jindal, and Briony MacPhee - the three winners of the EarthTrends essay competition! We are pleased to announce that their entries (listed below) are now available on EarthTrends as "feature articles." Thank you to all of the students who entered and made this competition a success.

Earlier this month (11-14 June), the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) hosted a major international conference called "Building Opportunity for the Majority." The "majority" refers to the base of the economic pyramid (BOP), a socio-demographic designation describing both the development needs and the market potential of about 4 billion people worldwide who live in near-poverty or poverty conditions.

Nine new feature articles ("features") have just been added to the EarthTrends website. The features, including their associated graphics, have been taken directly from The Wealth of the Poor: Managing Ecosystems to Fight Poverty, the 2005 edition of the World Resources publication series. This report discusses the particular importance of natural resources to the 1.1 billion people currently living in extreme poverty and provides detailed analysis of how the sustainable use of ecosystem goods and services can aid and empower poor communities.

EarthTrends has recently updated a number of indicators in the searchable database, including aquaculture and capture production, forest extent, and poverty data sets. Click 'read more' for a complete listing. If you have any questions, please contact us.

An Inconvenient Truth opens today in select theaters.

In this new documentary film, former United States Vice-President Al Gore presents an extremely accessible overview of human-induced climate change, highlighting the current impacts and future implications of global warming, and discussing many of the same facts and analyses that are currently available here on EarthTrends.

The World Bank has recently released the 2006 edition of World Development Indicators (WDI). This annual publication features national statistics for more than 900 environmental, economic, and social development variables. Data for selected series and years are available free of charge at http://devdata.worldbank.org/data-query/.

Renewable forms of energy, or renewables, constitute a suite of energy production alternatives to nuclear power and the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas). Sources of renewable power generation include wind power, solar energy, geothermal heat, hydroelectricity, and biofuels (e.g., ethanol).

Here at the World Resources Institute (WRI) there are several projects that provide information about renewable energy: