“It's not going in the right direction yet,” Pierre Friedlingstein tells Mongabay of the effort to meet the Paris Agreement goals; a member of the IPCC and a climate professor, he says he’s mildly optimistic about the trend in global emissions.
The world needs to ramp up action to address climate change, according to a major report from the United Nations released Sept. 8. Meeting agreed-upon climate goals requires “phasing out…
Andres Peña Castro and his team didn’t set out to track sea ice. Their original plan was to quantify the interactions between ocean, earth and atmosphere to be able to…
Rapidly transitioning the world’s vehicle fleet to fully electric could significantly cut greenhouse gas emissions from transportation, but also dramatically increase demand for critical battery metals like lithium, nickel and…
JAKARTA — Environmental policy experts are calling on the presidential hopefuls in Indonesia’s election next year to lay out their strategies for moving the country away from fossil fuels and…
The world’s linear economy, critically labeled as “take-make-waste,” is blamed for many global environmental problems, including climate change. The circular economy — focused on conserving resources and material reuse — is a proposed alternative.
More carbon is stored in the soil than in all plants, animals and the atmosphere combined, making it among the most critical conservation frontiers as we face the climate crisis.…
Plants and fungi struck a deal way back when. More than 400 million years ago, plants began trading sugar made from sunlight (a.k.a. carbon) for some of the soil nutrients…
It's easy to miss the mosses, the ubiquitous green, silver and brown carpets that drape across nature's surfaces, from forest to fen. It’s also easy to underestimate just how big…
Algae biofuels were initially hailed as a holy grail to sustainably power the transportation sector. Now after more than a decade of boom and bust, the industry says it’s on the verge of globally scalable, climate-friendly jet, ship and truck fuels.
The effects of rising global temperatures are becoming increasingly apparent. Heat waves, droughts, torrential rains and flooding are becoming more frequent. In the first three months of 2023, Latin America…
New research finds that a record Arctic sea ice melt season in 2007 initiated a “regime shift” to thinner, more transient ice that may be “irreversible”; another study shows that atmospheric rivers from the south are warming the Arctic in winter.
Humans must make “deep, rapid, and sustained” cuts to greenhouse gas emissions to avoid the worst effects of climate change, according to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change…
Analysis of 40 years of climate temperature data shows a connection between Amazon tree loss and Tibetan snow decrease via a 20,000-kilometer oceanic and atmospheric pathway. West Antarctica is also impacted.
Brazilian scientist Antonio Donato Nobre has long been a student of the Amazon Rainforest. An agronomist with a master's degree in tropical biology and a Ph.D. in Earth science, Nobre…
Last July, as the Ukraine war raged, the EU barred all Russian woody biomass imports; even as South Korea took in Russia’s supply. Illicit woody biomass may also still be flowing to the EU from Turkey, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.
Wild canids around the world are at risk, though some reintroductions are seeing good results. Conserving canids is not only good for ecosystem health, it can even potentially help curb climate change.
A Mongabay story featuring a whistleblower who debunked the green claims of Enviva — the world’s largest wood pellet maker — has prompted the Dutch to ban subsidies to biomass firms who make false sustainability claims.
An existing regulation designating the burning of forests to make energy as being renewable has been reversed in Australia. That decision seems unlikely to alter the EU’s heavy commitment to biomass burning.
Policymakers could finalize revisions to the EU’s Renewable Energy Directive by year end, even as forest activists offer new evidence denouncing wood pellets as an energy source, and calling for an end to subsidies.
A biomass industry insider tells Mongabay in exclusive interviews that Enviva, the world’s largest maker of wood pellets for energy, is disingenuous in its green, eco-friendly claims to the public and stockholders.
As the thorny question of climate responsibility and funding for damages takes center stage at the COP27 summit in Egypt, one aspect of climate finance remains understudied: climate research funding.…
A new map finds that roughly a third of U.S. mature forests are on federal lands, which President Biden appears eager to protect to store carbon. But much mature forest is also privately held, especially in the Southeast, and is at risk.
Sea ice extent didn’t reach record lows this summer, but air temps over Greenland and ocean temps in some Arctic seas were extraordinarily high. Polar warming also likely continues influencing global extreme weather events, scientists say.
Unstudied at sea until recently, this huge, fast-moving ocean current may hold a key to resolving climate change uncertainties. But doing remote research in southern oceans poses financial, data gathering, and unexpected challenges.
While forest advocates had high hopes, the EU parliament voted this week not to declassify woody biomass as a renewable energy source, paving the way for more EU, U.S., and Canadian forests to be turned into wood pellets and burned.
When it comes to climate solutions, trees are in vogue right now. From the Trillion Tree Campaign to the stream of vigorous — if somewhat vague — promises made at…
A new study conveys a dire warning for the future: multiple tipping points could be triggered if global warming exceeds the critical threshold of 1.5°C. Published this week in Science,…
DHAKA – On July 30 this year, Moza Mia took his two buffalo out to graze in the field near his home in Bangladesh’s northern Lalmonirhat district. Soon after, lightning…
“Should I have kids?” is an age-old question, but the urgent context we find ourselves in today isn’t, as we climb rapidly toward 1.5° Celsius (2.7° Fahrenheit) of warming above…
