Geoff Childs, Washington University in St. Louis

Dorje Dundul recently had his foot gnawed by a brown bear – a member of the species Ursus thibetanus, to be precise.

It wasn’t his first such encounter. Recounting the first of three such violent experiences over the past five years, Dorje told our research team: “My wife came home one evening and reported that a bear had eaten a lot of corn from the maize field behind our house. So, we decided to shoo it away. While my wife was setting up camp, I went to see how much the bear had eaten. The bear was just sitting there; it attacked me.”

Dorje dropped to the ground, but the bear ripped open his shirt and tore at his shoulder. “I started shouting and the bear ran away. My wife came, thinking I was messing with her, but when she saw the wounds, she knew what had happened.”

Researchers Dolma Choekyi Lama, Tsering Tinley and I spoke with Dorje – a 71-year-old resident of Nubri, a Buddhist enclave in the Nepalese highlands – as part of a three-year study of aging and migration.

Now, you may be forgiven for asking what a bear attack on a septuagenarian has to do with demographic change in Nepal. The answer, however, is everything.

In recent years, people across Nepal have witnessed an increase in bear attacks, a phenomenon recorded in news reports and academic studies.

Inhabitants of Nubri are at the forefront of this trend – and one of the main reasons is outmigration. People, especially young people, are leaving for education and employment opportunities elsewhere. It is depleting household labor forces, so much so that over 75% of those who were born in the valley and are now ages 5 to 19 have left and now live outside of Nubri.

It means that many older people, like Dorje and his wife, Tsewang, are left alone in their homes. Two of their daughters live abroad and one is in the capital, Kathmandu. Their only son runs a trekking lodge in another village.

Scarcity of ‘scarebears’

Until recently, when the corn was ripening, parents dispatched young people to the fields to light bonfires and bang pots all night to ward off bears. The lack of young people acting as deterrents, alongside the abandonment of outlying fields, is tempting bears to forage closer to human residences.

Outmigration in Nubri and similar villages is due in large part to a lack of educational and employment opportunities. The problems caused by the removal of younger people have been exacerbated by two other factors driving a rapidly aging population: People are living longer due to improvements in health care and sanitation; and fertility has declined since the early 2000s, from more than six to less than three births per woman.

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These demographic forces have been accelerating population aging for some time, as illustrated by the population pyramid constructed from our 2012 household surveys in Nubri and neighboring Tsum.

A not-so-big surprise, anymore

Nepal is not alone in this phenomenon; similar dynamics are at play elsewhere in Asia. The New York Times reported in November 2025 that bear attacks are on the rise in Japan, too, partly driven by demographic trends. Farms there used to serve as a buffer zone, shielding urban residents from ursine intruders. However, rural depopulation is allowing bears to encroach on more densely populated areas, bringing safety concerns in conflict with conservation efforts.

Dorje can attest to those concerns. When we met him in 2023 he showed us deep claw marks running down his shoulder and arm, and he vowed to refrain from chasing away bears at night.

So in October 2025, Dorje and Tsewang harvested a field before marauding bears could get to it and hauled the corn to their courtyard for safekeeping. The courtyard is surrounded by stone walls piled high with firewood – not a fail-safe barrier but at least a deterrent. They covered the corn with a plastic tarp, and for extra measure Dorje decided to sleep on the veranda.

He described what happened next:

“I woke to a noise that sounded like ‘sharak, sharak.’ I thought it must be a bear rummaging under the plastic. Before I could do anything, the bear came up the stairs. When I shouted, it got frightened, roared and yanked at my mattress. Suddenly my foot was being pulled and I felt pain.”

Dorje suffered deep lacerations to his foot. Trained in traditional Tibetan medicine, he staunched the bleeding using, ironically, a tonic that contained bear liver.

Yet his life was still in danger due to the risk of infection. It took three days and an enormous expense by village standards – equivalent to roughly US$2,000 – before they could charter a helicopter to Kathmandu for further medical attention.

And Dorje is not the only victim. An elderly woman from another village bumped into a bear during a nocturnal excursion to her outhouse. It left her with a horrific slash from forehead to chin – and her son scrambling to find funds for her evacuation and treatment.

So how should Nepal’s highlanders respond to the increase in bear attacks?

Dorje explained that in the past they set lethal traps when bear encroachments became too dangerous. That option vanished with the creation of Manaslu Conservation Area Project, or MCAP, in the 1990s, a federal initiative to manage natural resources that strictly prohibits the killing of wild animals.

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Learning to grin and bear it?

Dorje reasons that if MCAP temporarily relaxed the regulation, villagers could band together to cull the more hostile bears. He informed us that MCAP officials will hear nothing of that option, yet their solutions, such as solar-powered electric fencing, haven’t worked.

Dorje is reflective about the options he faces as young people leave the village, leaving older folk to battle the bears alone.

“At first, I felt that we should kill the bear. But the other side of my heart says, perhaps I did bad deeds in my past life, which is why the bear bit me. The bear came to eat corn, not to attack me. Killing it would just be another sinful act, creating a new cycle of cause and effect. So, why get angry about it?”

It remains to be seen how Nubri’s residents will respond to the mounting threats bears pose to their lives and livelihoods. But one thing is clear: For those who remain behind, the outmigration of younger residents is making the perils more imminent and the solutions more challenging.

Dolma Choekyi Lama and Tsering Tinley made significant contributions to this article. Both are research team members on the author’s project on population in an age of migration.

Geoff Childs, Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology, Washington University in St. Louis

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Brian P. McCullough, University of Michigan and Edward Carrington, University of Michigan

If you go to a pro sports event today, there’s a good chance the stadium or arena will be powered at least in part by renewable energy. The team likely takes steps to reduce energy and waste. Some even claim to have net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, meaning any emissions they still do produce they offset by paying for projects, such as tree-planting, that reduce greenhouse gases elsewhere.

The venue upgrades have been impressive – Seattle’s hockey and basketball arena runs on 100% renewable energy, makes its rink ice from captured rainwater, and offers free public transit for ticket holders.

But how much of the teams’ offset purchases are actually doing the good that they claim?

It’s an important question, in part because fans may ultimately pay for those offsets.

The cost of carbon offsetting in sports varies by organization, with no industry standard for who pays. Some teams and leagues absorb costs through their operational budgets, treating carbon neutrality as a core responsibility. Others pass costs to consumers: Some teams add sustainability fees to ticket prices to offset each attendee’s carbon footprint. The payment model ultimately reflects whether an organization views offsetting as an institutional obligation or a shared responsibility with fans.

Carbon offsets in sports are also in the news, with scandals erupting around them in connection with sports from FIFA’s 2022 World Cup to basketball’s LA Clippers.

As sport management researchers, we have been following offset agreements and other sustainability commitments that teams and sports leagues such as FIFA have been making to see whether they translate into measurable environmental outcomes. We see lots of good intentions but also a disturbing amount of failures and outright fraud.

Where sports teams’ emissions come from

The vast majority of a sports team’s climate footprint comes from team’s and fans’ travel, which they have little control over. Leagues can reduce teams’ travel somewhat with creative scheduling, but unlike other industries, sports teams have few ways to reduce the bulk of their emissions.

What many of them do instead is offset those travel emissions by buying carbon credits.

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Carbon credits are generated by projects that reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere or prevent greenhouse gas emissions. Many of those projects involve planting trees to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere; others expand clean energy to reduce fossil fuel use. Each carbon credit is supposed to represent the reduction or prevention of one metric ton of carbon dioxide.

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However, carbon offset projects have come under scrutiny in recent years. Tree-planting projects, the most common type, take time to meet their promise as the trees grow, and wildfires and logging can wipe out the benefit. Studies have found that companies tend to buy cheap, low-quality carbon credits, which run a risk of exaggerating their carbon reduction claims or providing results that would have happened anyway, leaving no real climate benefit.

Unfortunately, several teams, perhaps unknowingly, have been purchasing fraudulent or low-quality credits.

Reputations at risk

FIFA brought the sports world’s carbon offset problem into the spotlight during the 2022 Qatar World Cup.

FIFA claimed the event would be carbon neutral, but that claim relied on creative accounting that understated the event’s construction and travel emissions. Organizers also used low-quality offsets. Many of those offsets were renewable energy projects with a high likelihood of being built anyway.

A year after the tournament, FIFA had completed offset purchases for less than a third of the World Cup’s estimated emissions, the nonprofit Carbon Market Watch found. And Switzerland’s advertising regulator ordered FIFA to stop claiming the World Cup had been “carbon neutral.”

The Clippers and baseball’s Boston Red Sox ran into problems when they publicly partnered with Aspiration, a now-bankrupt finance technology company and carbon credit broker, to meet their “carbon neutral” claims.

The Clippers had a US$300 million partnership with Aspiration that included paying the company at least $56 million for carbon credits in mid-2022, The New York Times reported. Both teams also had plans with Aspiration to offer fans a way to buy carbon credits to cover their own travel when purchasing tickets.

However, Aspiration officials claimed to have supported millions more tree-plantings than what had actually happened, a ProPublica investigation found. Aspiration co-founder Joe Sanberg pleaded guilty in 2025 to wire fraud involving false statements about financing to secure loans and attract investors, who lost at least $248 million.

The Aspiration partnership is also under investigation by the NBA over an endorsement deal the company made with Clippers all-star Kawhi Leonard at about the same time and questions about whether it was used to violate the league’s salary cap. Team owner Steve Ballmer, who personally invested at least $50 million in Aspiration, told ESPN he and the team did nothing wrong. “They conned me,” he said.

While the scandal focused on financial fraud and the salary cap, it also raised questions about the team’s sustainability claim.

Without verification, who knows?

In some cases, the value of offset projects is difficult to verify, even when trees are being planted nearby.

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The Seattle Sounders FC declared itself the first carbon-neutral professional soccer team in North America in 2019 by cutting its waste, water and energy use and offsetting its remaining emissions through the nonprofit organization Forterra, which plants trees in the Puget Sound region.

While the effort positioned the club as a sustainability leader, the offsets lacked what’s known as third-party verification. Similar to how organic food must be certified by reputable agencies, third-party validation of carbon credits ensures credits truly represent the removal of carbon from the atmosphere or avoided emissions.

Without verification, it’s unclear whether claimed emission reductions are permanent, accurately tracked and transparently reported.

Potential legal consequences

Even the most prominent venues are susceptible to issues with unreliable credits.

Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle has been celebrated as the world’s first “zero-carbon” certified arena, with electric Zambonis, recycled materials, renewable energy and free public transit. It represents one of the most ambitious pushes to develop sustainable sport infrastructure globally.

To offset unavoidable construction emissions, the arena’s owner relied on carbon credits tied to projects meant to reduce rainforest loss in Colombia. However, an analysis by the carbon rating company Calyx Global found that while the arena’s credits may prevent some deforestation, the numbers likely overstate the benefits.

A 2023 report suggested that over 90% of rainforest carbon credits from the leading certifier of offsets lack evidence that they reduced deforestation. The certifier disputed that conclusion but is working to revise its review process.

When credits fail to offset real emissions, that erodes public trust and can expose organizations to potential legal consequences.

Delta Air Lines, for example, is facing a lawsuit over its carbon neutrality claim. The suit alleges that Delta misled passengers by describing itself as a “carbon-neutral airline” while relying on carbon offset projects that were ineffective or “junk.”

Time for some strategic reassessment

These and other failures in the carbon credit market suggest the industry needs to fundamentally reassess how sports teams achieve their climate goals.

To provide meaningful sustainability commitments, sports organizations and facilities can start at home by lowering their fossil fuel use and increasing their energy efficiency. Many arenas do this.

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Leagues can design game schedules to reduce team and fan travel. Many of the Paris Olympics venues in 2022, for example, were connected by subway or bus. The 2026 FIFA World Cup, in contrast, has venues hundreds of miles apart across North America, meaning potentially higher emissions from fan travel.

Where offsets will still play a role, teams can ensure that they partner with verified carbon credit providers that deliver measurable, transparent carbon reductions.

In a field where public trust and reputation matter as much as performance, the sports industry cannot afford foul play on climate. We believe a shift toward strategies that cut emissions first, and then use only the most credible offsets, will be the difference between striking out and leading the sustainability game.

Brian P. McCullough, Associate Professor of Sport Management, University of Michigan and Edward Carrington, Assistant in Research in Sports Management, University of Michigan

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Last Updated on December 11, 2025 by Daily News Staff

🇯🇵 Japan Earthquake Update — What You Need to Know (December 2025)

On December 8, 2025, a powerful earthquake — measured at magnitude 7.5 (7.6 by the U.S. Geological Survey) — struck offshore of Aomori Prefecture in northern Japan around 11:15 p.m. JST. The quake was deep enough (about 44 km) to be felt over a wide area, with intense shaking registering across northern Honshu and parts of Hokkaido. 

🌊 Immediate Impact — Tsunami & Injuries

Tsunami Warnings were promptly issued along the Pacific coasts of Hokkaido, Aomori and Iwate. Authorities initially feared waves up to ~3 meters high, prompting evacuations.  In the end, only small tsunami waves — up to about 70 cm — were observed, and all warnings were lifted by early Tuesday morning.  At least 50 plus people have been injured, mostly lightly, due to falling objects and minor structural impacts from the shaking. 

Across the affected prefectures, emergency crews continue damage assessments and are checking roads, buildings, utilities and other infrastructure for safety concerns. Some power outages and transport disruptions (train suspensions) were reported in the aftermath. 

🧠 Rare “Megaquake Advisory” Issued

Japan’s meteorological authority, the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA), has issued a megaquake advisory following the M 7.5 quake — a rare alert indicating elevated seismic risk. This advisory:

Does not predict when (or if) a larger earthquake will occur. Signals that the probability of a more powerful quake (M 8.0+) has increased temporarily for the next several days or week. Specifically, a formerly tiny ~0.1% weekly chance has risen to roughly ~1 %.  Applies along a long stretch of Japan’s Pacific coast — from Chiba Prefecture in the south up through Hokkaido in the north — where the Pacific tectonic plate is actively subducting beneath Japan. 

Officials emphasize that this is an advisory, not a prediction, and it’s issued to encourage preparedness: securing furniture, reviewing evacuation plans, and keeping emergency kits ready. 

🌏 Aftershocks and Continued Seismic Activity

Even after the main quake, strong aftershocks have been recorded in the region — including quakes in the magnitude 5–6 range. This ongoing activity is consistent with a typical aftershock sequence but reinforces the public safety message to stay alert. 

Later smaller tremors — including a reported M 6.0 event — have been felt near Aomori and Hokkaido, though none have triggered additional tsunami warnings. 

🛡 Government Response & Public Safety

The Japanese government has mobilized an emergency task force to:

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Assess damage and coordinate response efforts across affected regions.  Monitor infrastructure — including roads, utilities, and nuclear facilities — for any damage or safety issues.  Keep the public informed and ready for possible aftershocks or other quakes. 

Schools, businesses and local municipalities continue to evaluate safety conditions and may adjust operations accordingly.

📌 What This Means for Residents & Visitors

✔ Immediate tsunami danger has passed, but vigilance is still needed due to aftershocks. 

✔ Preparedness is crucial, especially in coastal and northern regions that felt the quake strongest. 

✔ If you’re in Japan or planning travel, follow JMA updates and local government advisories for current regional guidance. 

🧭 In Summary

Japan is dealing with the impacts of a major offshore earthquake that shook the northern Pacific coast and prompted widespread alerts. Although immediate tsunami threats were limited and damage appears relatively light so far, a rare megaquake advisory remains in effect — not as a definitive forecast, but as a cautionary alert to stay prepared in the coming days.

Despite this elevated alert level, experts stress that while seismic risk is higher than normal, a massive quake is not imminent and the advisory’s purpose is to keep people ready rather than alarmed. 

STM Daily News is a vibrant news blog dedicated to sharing the brighter side of human experiences. Emphasizing positive, uplifting stories, the site focuses on delivering inspiring, informative, and well-researched content. With a commitment to accurate, fair, and responsible journalism, STM Daily News aims to foster a community of readers passionate about positive change and engaged in meaningful conversations. Join the movement and explore stories that celebrate the positive impacts shaping our world.

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