As of Thursday, there are more than 165,000 fires burning in the Amazon rainforest. The Amazon spans more than 5.5 million square kilometres, is home to roughly 40,000 plant species, 1,300 bird species and 2.5 million species of insects. And it is in crisis, experts...
Australia’s membership of the Pacific Islands Forum should be “urgently reviewed” for possible sanctions or suspension over the Morrison government’s pro-coal stance, says Anote Tong, a former president of Kiribati.
A Washington Post analysis of more than a century of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration temperature data across the Lower 48 states and 3,107 counties has found that major areas are nearing or have already crossed the 2-degree Celsius mark.
A tireless advocate for conservation and one of the world’s most prominent primatologists, Jane Goodall travels 300 days a year, explaining why it’s important to protect our environment and wildlife.
For his experimental short A Year along the Geostationary Orbit, the German filmmaker Felix Dierich used Japanese weather satellite Himawari-8 data to craft a timelapse that condenses one year into 16 stunning minutes.
Record temperatures across much of the world over the past two weeks could make July the hottest month ever measured on Earth, according to climate scientists.
Political anthropologist Paula Sabloff of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico compares the roles and political clout of royal women in eight premodern societies spanning five continents and more than 4,000 years.
Planting billions of trees across the world is by far the biggest and cheapest way to tackle the climate crisis, according to scientists, who have made the first calculation of how many more trees could be planted without encroaching on crop land or urban...
Work by Stockholm-based NGO Trase reveals the extent to which the international demand for beef is driving deforestation, with thousands of hectares of Amazon being felled every year to provide meat for world markets.
Nowhere on the planet is heating faster than Svalbard. This was the message of a report commissioned by the Norwegian Environment Agency, unveiled in February to a stunned audience in Longyearbyen, the archipelago’s de facto capital.
From Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s claims that Canada needs the Trans Mountain Pipeline to reach new oil markets in Asia (they’re mythical!) to his statement that there will be “shovels in the ground” this summer (the pipeline route isn’t approved!), here are the...
Flanked by a fleet of cabinet ministers, Justin Trudeau has announced that his government is proceeding with a $9.3-billion pipeline project to triple shipments of diluted bitumen from Alberta to the Lower Mainland.
Greenhouse gas emissions in the UK will be cut to almost zero by 2050, under the terms of a new government plan to tackle climate change. Prime Minister Theresa May said there was a “moral duty to leave this world in a better condition than what we...
Scottish Power is to undertake the most ambitious battery power project in Europe in an attempt to unlock the potential of the UK’s wind and solar farms. The company will connect an industrial-scale battery, the size of half a football pitch, to the Whitelee onshore...
We have about 12 years to avoid the worst effects of climate change and prevent a mass extinction event. We should certainly work on the long-term population trend, but that doesn’t let us off the hook for reducing consumption.
Is the collapse of a civilisation necessarily calamitous? The failure of the Egyptian Old Kingdom towards the end of the 2nd millennium BCE was accompanied by riots, tomb-raids and even cannibalism. ‘The whole of Upper Egypt died of hunger and each individual had...
Nature itself will be shaped by processes redesigned and ‘improved’ by geneticists and engineers. We should call this transition the beginning of a ‘synthetic age’, a time in which background constants are increasingly replaced by artificial and ‘improved’ versions of...
When researchers at Emory University in Atlanta trained mice to fear the smell of almonds (by pairing it with electric shocks), they found, to their consternation, that both the children and grandchildren of these mice were spontaneously afraid of the same smell. That...
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