Human well-being will be severely jeopardized by negative trends in some types of environmental harm, such as a changing climate, deforestation, loss of access to fresh water, species extinctions and human population growth, scientists warn in today’s issue of BioScience, an international journal.

Trees in metropolitan areas have been growing faster than trees in rural areas worldwide since the 1960s. This has been confirmed for the first time by a study on the impact of the urban heat island effect on tree growth headed by the Technical University of Munich (TUM). The analysis conducted by the international research team also shows that the growth of urban trees has already been exposed to changing climatic conditions for a long period of time, which is only just beginning to happen for trees in rural areas.

A targeted expansion of climate observing systems could help scientists answer knotty questions about climate while delivering trillions of dollars in benefits, according to a new paper published today in the online journal Earth’s Future. Better observations would provide decision makers information they need to protect public health and the economy in the coming decades, the scientists say.

Venkatachalam Ramaswamy, director of NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, said that improving our ability to predict and plan for droughts, floods, extreme heat events, famine, sea level rise and changes in freshwater availability is likely to  yield significant savings  each year.

Whilst it is widely accepted that sea level is rising because of the melting of the massive sheets covering Greenland and Antarctica, a new paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, by scientists at Bangor University in collaboration with Harvard and Oregon State Universities in the US, and McGill University in Canada, shows that the impact of the melting of these ice sheets will go far beyond just changing water levels. It could have further reaching impacts on global climate.

New research published in Science shows that climate warming reduced the mass of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet by half in as little as 500 years, indicating the Greenland Ice Sheet could have a similar fate.

Of the approximately two dozen medical CT scanners scattered throughout Stanford’s main campus and medical centers, two can be found nestled in basement labs of the Green Earth Sciences Buildings.

North Atlantic right whales – a highly endangered species making modest population gains in the past decade – may be imperiled by warming waters and insufficient international protection, according to a new Cornell analysis published online in Global Change Biology, Oct. 30.

Worms and clams enhance the release of methane up to eight times more compared to sea bottoms without animals, shows a study by scientists at Stockholm University and Cardiff University.

Washington State University researchers say landslides on logged forests will be more widespread as the Northwest climate changes.

Stuck where they are, plants have to adapt to their environments, responding to stresses like drought or pests by changing how they grow.

On a broader scale, crop breeders need to be able to develop new varieties that are adapted to a new location or changing growing conditions in the same area.