Climate change plans can bring broader benefits to cities, while helping avert disaster.
Places such as Berri were affected by Millennium Drought, caused by low cool-season rain. New materials and techniques are now being used to observe drought causes and water patterns in Australia’s history to help the future.
Gary Sauer-Thompson/flickr
Australia has always suffered heat and flood, but a detailed seasonal rainfall reconstruction of the last 800 years shows the extremes are intensifying.
Rose’s mountain toadlets mate in small puddles. Here is a male with a string of eggs in the water.
Francois Becker
Scientists have long thought most nitrogen in Earth’s ecosystems comes from the air, but new research shows it also is released as rocks weather. This could boost plant growth and help sequester carbon – but not fast enough to avert climate change, as some pundits have claimed.
Before the outsiders arrived in Wurundjeri country this billabong enjoyed a vital ecological connection with other waterways.
Author provided
At 14, writer Tony Birch had rarely travelled two miles out of the centre of Melbourne. Encountering a billabong on the Birrarung River was the first time that country spoke to him.
Climate change is transforming the Arctic, with impacts on the rest of the planet. A geographer explains why he once doubted that human actions were causing such shifts, and what changed his mind.
While some argue globalization has been bad for the environment, the move towards deglobalization could spell serious trouble for climate. This photo from 2014 shows smoke streams from the chimneys of a coal-fired power station in Germany.
(AP Photo/Martin Meissner, File)
Some experts argue globalization has been bad for the environment. But moving away from globalization could have other consequences that could be even more devastating for the environment.
We looked at ten countries in East Africa and found poverty and politics were much more important drivers of conflict and displacement than climate change.
Rising seas, harsher weather, rainier days. The impacts of climate change make it harder for Caribbean countries to plan their transition toward renewable energy sources.
Ricardo Rojas/Reuters
Masaō Ashtine, University of the West Indies, Mona Campus
The 2017 hurricane season showed that Caribbean nations urgently need more resilient power grids. But the effects of climate change – including more severe storms – complicate the shift to renewables.
Sustained ocean warming could greatly reduce catches of fish like these herring photographed off Norway.
Jacob Botter
Fish are a key food source for millions of people worldwide. But a recent study finds long-term warming over the next 200 years could starve tiny plankton, with impacts that would ripple up food chains.
Is the long journey towards a bipartisan emissions policy nearing its end?
Wongm/Wikimedia Commons
State energy ministers meet this week to discuss the National Energy Guarantee. While the policy has been criticised as too modest, it would put us light years ahead of the previous climate policy paralysis.
Other countries have carbon budgets. Why not Canada?
(Shutterstock)
The maritime pollution that drifts to dry land, causes an estimated 400,000 premature deaths and 14 million cases of childhood asthma each year.
‘Soft fall’ surfaces are widely used in play areas where children might fall, but can also get very hot in the sun, which undermines this safety benefit.
Brisbane City Council/Flickr
Commonly used surfaces in play areas, such as “soft fall” materials and Astroturf, can heat up to 80-100°C in the sun. This makes them a hazardous design choice, especially as the climate gets hotter.
Plant remains, preserved in lake sediments like in the Republic of Congo help give accurate deforestation information.
Carla Staver
The March for Science on April 14 and Earth Day on April 22 are likely to generate big crowds demonstrating against Trump administration policies. Here are some issues they’ll be marching about.
Customers line up to buy gasoline in San Jose, California, on March 15, 1974, during an Arab oil embargo. The crisis spurred enactment of the first U.S. vehicle fuel economy standards.
AP
Since the federal government started setting fuel economy standards, US-built cars have doubled their fuel efficiency, saving money for consumers and reducing pollution.
Staffers listen to EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt discuss this policy reversal.
AP Photo/Andrew Harnik
Manufacturers always have to make trade-offs when they design new cars, balancing the need to protect public health and the environment with their urge to wow customers.
When present in the lowest atmospheric layer – the troposphere, 8-14 kilometers above earth – ozone becomes a concern for human and plant health.
Wikimedia