Environment

Extreme heat kills more people in the U.S. each year than hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes combined. But how can we address a seemingly natural force? Heat can often seem solely weather-related, with policies trying to find a solution through temperature metrics, cooling technologies, and alerts. However, a new report from... Read more

It's a well-established fact that forests and water are deeply connected. For decades, paired-watershed experiments—a scientific method for evaluating land-use impacts on water quantity or quality—have shown that when we lose forests, the total amount of water flowing through our rivers tends to rise.... Read more

Imagine a dump truck dropping 13 tons of dirt into the waters of Brush Creek, a waterway that feeds northwest Arkansas' primary drinking water source, Beaver Lake. That's how much soil and sediment researchers measured going into the stream as runoff due to a single large storm event.... Read more

Mangrove forests are natural wonders that protect coastal areas, particularly in tropical and subtropical regions. They are able to dissipate wave energy and limit flooding, which can even mitigate tsunamis and coastal inundations during tropical cyclones. For this reason, mangroves are attracting attention as Nature-based Solutions, or NbS: natural infrastructure... Read more

Every winter, storms wipe out swaths of the picturesque Spanish coast, undoing summer reconstruction work and threatening the foundations of the country's vital tourism industry.... Read more

After hours spent in the thick pollution-choking parts of northern Thailand, Pon Doikam gets home and blows her burning nose to find blood clots spattered across the tissue.... Read more

A United Nations-backed framework for protecting tropical forests could allow governments to collect income from carbon credits without advancing forest conservation. The weakness lies in how the program calculates baselines, which is the expected rate of deforestation without intervention. There is no evidence that enrolled jurisdictions—countries, states, and provinces—have acted... Read more

Researchers have created the first map of a network of subglacial lakes in the Canadian Arctic showing 33 bodies of water under glaciers. Using a decade of ArcticDEM satellite data of Earth's surface height, a team of researchers including the University of Waterloo has developed a method that allowed them... Read more

The Environmental Protection Agency proposed Thursday to include microplastics and pharmaceuticals on a list of contaminants in drinking water for the first time, a step that could lead to new limits on those substances for water utilities.... Read more

Some newly published findings from an Idaho State University professor and his colleagues point out how changes to currents an ocean away can impact climates on the other side of the globe. The new paper published in Nature Communications explains how Bruce Finney, professor in the departments of biological sciences... Read more

Researchers at the Institute of Water and Environmental Engineering (IIAMA) at the Universitat Politècnica de València have developed an advanced system for seasonal forecasting of meteorological droughts that enables these events to be predicted up to six months in advance, providing a key tool for water management and early warning... Read more

The Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) agreement—often known as the High Seas Treaty—came into force in January 2026 following almost two decades of negotiations. Its key objectives are the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity in areas that lie outside any single country's jurisdiction, remote areas that make... Read more

Ocean Discovery League (ODL) has launched the Global Deep Sea Exploration Goals, an ambitious international effort to visually explore 10,000 strategically selected locations across the deep seafloor. When completed, this initiative will nearly double the number of unique seafloor locations ever visually observed and produce the first globally representative visual... Read more

The Pacific Northwest has seen below-normal snow this season—and new research from Portland State University suggests that the region's snowmelt-dependent water resources could face growing challenges in the years ahead as forest fires and winter rainstorms become more frequent.... Read more

In the aftermath of the latest bout of extreme rainfall across New Zealand's upper North Island, there were some familiar scenes.... Read more