Environment

Water levels are creeping upward on shorelines across the world, and decision-making systems are not keeping up. One barrier to including sea level rise projections in adaptation plans is limited information on the full range of possible outcomes.... Read more

Seawalls and other unyielding structures meant to keep rising waters at bay and to protect against storm surges can cause other significant harm to the coast, often by disrupting natural processes and accelerating erosion. The gap between protection and preservation might be bridged with a softer, nature-inspired solution, according to... Read more

For Jude Kastens, who grew up on a farm in northwest Kansas, rainfall was always serious business. Although flooding wasn't as big a problem in his hometown as in central and eastern Kansas, it was "always memorable" when heavy rain caused local streams to swell from their banks into surrounding... Read more

PFAS—short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances—are currently the subject of numerous discussions and legislative proposals. Many of these so-called "forever chemicals" are harmful to human health and the environment. Since they can potentially remain in the environment for centuries and accumulate in humans and animals, it is important to restrict... Read more

In a Perspective, the authors suggest that the social and humanitarian impacts of overshooting the Paris Agreement's aspirational goal of a 1.5 degrees Celsius rise in global mean temperature remain largely unknown, despite robust knowledge of physical climate impacts.... Read more

Few diplomatic organizations punch above their weight quite like the Alliance of Small Island States (Aosis). With no fixed budget, no permanent secretariat and no formal charter, it has still managed to shape some of the most important climate agreements of the past few decades—including the 1.5°C target that underpins... Read more

At the U.N. climate talks in Brazil, artificial intelligence is being cast as both a hero worthy of praise and a villain that needs policing.... Read more

COP30 hosts Brazil on Tuesday produced a first draft of an agreement between nations at the UN climate talks after negotiations on the sticking points stretched late into the night.... Read more

In light of the ongoing fifteen-year megadrought in Chile, an international team of researchers, including Francesca Pellicciotti from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), addressed a bold future scenario. Their findings: by the end of the century, the considerably worn-out glaciers will not be able to buffer a... Read more

Researchers at the University of California, Irvine and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory have identified stormlike circulation patterns beneath the Antarctic ice shelves that are causing aggressive melting, with major implications for global sea level rise projections.... Read more

The weather patterns that produced some of Europe's most extreme heat waves over the past three decades could prove far more lethal if they strike in today's hotter climate, pushing weekly deaths toward levels seen during the COVID pandemic, according to a study in Nature Climate Change.... Read more

Global efforts to curb emissions of the potent but short-lived heat-trapping gas methane are doing about as poorly as the more prevalent carbon dioxide, but there's hope for the next five years, U.N. officials said Monday.... Read more

The world is rapidly losing its water supply, according to the World Bank's Global Water Monitoring Report. This global report, titled Continental Drying, highlights the water crisis using unprecedentedly detailed data. Researchers from the University of Twente made a key contribution to the section that reveals how much water we... Read more

An international team of scientists, including a senior researcher at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, has uncovered new evidence of ancient wildfires that reshapes our understanding of Earth's turbulent Early Triassic epoch, about 250 million years ago.... Read more

The first-ever audited account of the actual amounts of CO2 stored underground by CCS projects globally has been released. It was created by a new international consortium of scientists and industrial partners, including NTNU.... Read more