News
New UN high-level body on environment opens inaugural session in Nairobi
A United Nations body that focuses on the environment and has representatives from all 193 UN Member States is meeting for the first time today in Nairobi, to discuss issues such as illegal wildlife trade, chemical waste and air pollution, and new universal development goals.
The UN Environment Assembly (UNEA) “places environmental concerns on the same footing with those of peace, security, finance, health and trade for the first time,” the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) said in a news release from its headquarters in Kenya. “For many, the creation of UNEA is the coming of age of the environment as a world issue.”
Researchers connect earlier spring to climate change
Every spring, as the weather warms, trees up and down the East Coast explode in a display of bright green life as leaves fill their branches, and every fall, the same leaves provide one of nature's great color displays of vivid yellow, orange, and red.
Thanks to climate change, the timing of those events has shifted over the last two decades, Harvard scientists say.
How Earth avoided global warming, last time around
Geochemists have calculated a huge rise in atmospheric CO2 was only avoided by the formation of a vast mountain range in the middle of the ancient supercontinent, Pangea. This work is being presented to the Goldschmidt geochemistry conference in Sacramento, California.
Around 300 million years ago, plate tectonics caused the continents to aggregate into a giant supercontinent, known as "Pangea".
Paris climate talks to draw up to 50,000
As many as 50,000 people are likely to attend the December 2015 talks in Paris aimed at forging a UN pact on climate change, host France said on Tuesday.
"Between 40,000 and 50,000 people from 195 countries are expected," Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told reporters at the site in Le Bourget, just north of the French capital, where the talks will be held.
Ecologists suggest 'ecological energetics' for conservation
Ecological energetics integrates information about species’ physiological limits, such as metabolic cost of thermoregulation, digestion, growth, locomotion or reproduction, with biotic and abiotic ecological constraints of the environment in which it lives.
A research group led by the University of Western Australia and Kings Park and Botanic Gardens is championing 'ecological energetics' as an essential tool for ecologists in understanding rapidly changing ecosystems.
