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Carbon dioxide emissions must fall by the equivalent of a global lockdown roughly every two years for the next decade for the world to keep within safe limits of global heating, research has shown.Read more on E360 →

Australian mining companies will now be required to follow stricter rules governing the impacts of their projects on First Nations communities and the environment, according to new guidelines adopted by the Minerals Council of Australia, The Sydney Morning…

The regulatory agency in charge of managing the Delaware River and its tributaries voted last week to permanently ban natural gas drilling and fracking within the entire four-state watershed, which supplies the drinking water for more than 13 million people in…

A new study points to a stunning loss of topsoil in the Corn Belt — the result of farming practices that have depleted this once-fertile ground. Beyond diminished agricultural productivity and more carbon in the atmosphere, it is a catastrophic loss of an…

Since President Jair Bolsonaro took office in January 2019, Brazil has approved 57 pieces of legislation that weaken environmental laws, from relaxing forest protections to declassifying the toxicity of dozens of pesticides, according to a new analysis…

After years of false starts, offshore wind is poised to take off along the East Coast. Commitments by states to purchase renewable power, support from the Biden administration, and billions in new investment are all contributing to the emergence of this…

Anthropogenic noise pollution is plaguing our oceans and stressing marine fauna far more than previously understood, researchers concluded in a new analysis of more than 10,000 academic papers published in the journal Science. Human-generated noise disrupts…

More than a third of farmland in the U.S. Corn Belt — nearly 100 million acres — has completely lost its carbon-rich topsoil due to erosion, according to a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The loss of…

In the renewed debate over drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, one troubling impact of oil development has been overlooked: Disrupting the annual caribou migration will have a profound effect on the soil and release even more greenhouse gas into…

Thousands of saffron finches are being snatched out of South American forests and sold in Brazil for use in brutal, illegal fighting rings. Lax wildlife laws have made it difficult for authorities to crack down on the lucrative trade, leaving traffickers and…

Scientists have found that permafrost buried beneath the Arctic Ocean holds 60 billion tons of methane and 560 billion tons of organic carbon — making it a major source of greenhouse gases not currently included in climate projections that could have a…

Shell has set new carbon emissions goals to become a net zero carbon energy company by 2050, but will continue to grow its gas business by more than 20 percent in the next few years. Read more on E360 →

Roads in which waste plastic is melted down and mixed with paving materials are becoming more common around the world. Although for now they remain a niche technology, experts say the roads could become one of a diverse array of uses for discarded plastic.…

Scientists have long warned that the world’s major rivers and estuaries are hotspots for plastic waste, as trash and microparticles wash down tributaries and congregate before entering oceans. Now, new research has found that as this waste accumulates,…

An Australian project to help threatened marsupial species adapt to avoid predatory cats is among a host of ‘assisted evolution’ efforts based on the premise that it is no longer enough to protect species from change: Humans are going to have intervene to…

Denmark has approved a plan to build an artificial island 50 miles offshore in the North Sea to act as a clean energy hub that produces and stores wind energy , several news outlets reported. The island, equal in size to 18 football fields, will be linked to…

The start of California’s rainy season has been getting progressively later in recent decades, and now begins a month after it did just 60 years ago, shifting from November to December, according to a new study published in the journal Geophysical Research…

Tens of thousands of large dams across the globe are reaching the end of their expected lifespans, leading to a dramatic rise in failures and collapses, a new UN study finds. These deteriorating structures pose a serious threat to hundreds of millions of…

Three major European banks — Credit Suisse, ING, and BNP Paribas — have announced they will no longer finance the trade of oil extracted from the Amazon Sacred Headwaters region in Ecuador. The decision is seen as a major victory for environmental and…

The world has lost an estimated 28 trillion metric tons of ice since the mid-1990s as rising global temperatures have sped up the melting of sea ice, ice sheets, and glaciers, according to a new study published in the journal The Cryosphere. The annual melt…

An old industrial site in Philadelphia is being converted into a vast e-commerce distribution center, a trend being seen in other U.S. cities. But the developers of these brownfields must confront a legacy of toxic pollution and neglect of surrounding…

California’s Central Valley and the Colorado River Delta host tens of millions birds every year during the spring migration, according to a new study published in the journal Ornithological Applications. The findings highlight the regions as critical…

A group of the world’s top ecologists have issued a stark warning about the snowballing crisis caused by climate change, population growth, and unchecked development. Their assessment is grim, but big-picture societal changes on a global scale can still…

Scientists have developed a new technique for remotely surveying elephants and other wildlife that is quicker and has the same accuracy as human counts done on the ground or in low-flying airplanes. The system, which uses satellite images and deep learning,…

Joe Biden is set for a flurry of action to combat the climate crisis on his first day as U.S. president by immediately rejoining the Paris climate agreement and blocking the Keystone XL pipeline, although experts have warned lengthier, and harder,…

President Joe Biden has an ambitious public lands agenda, vowing to ban new oil and gas drilling on federal territory and restore protections for key areas. But because of rules changes and a conservative makeover of the courts, reversing the Trump legacy will…

The clean energy sector in the United States lost 429,000 jobs last year due to the economic impacts of Covid-19, with the industry hitting its lowest number of workers since 2015, according to a new analysis of federal unemployment filings. Based on the…

Scientists believe they have solved one of the biggest mysteries about desalination — exactly how reverse osmosis membranes work to remove salt and other chemicals from water — a breakthrough they say could help make the process more efficient and cheaper.…

With a landmark court ruling, the Naso people of Panama have won the rights to ancestral territory that includes two national reserves the tribe will now help manage. The victory comes as mounting evidence shows that Indigenous groups are often the best…

Although climate change is often blamed for coastal inundation in places like the Bay of Bengal, other factors such as dam building and urbanization play an important role. Scientists say that more sustainable development policies can help blunt the impacts of…