While residents in California are still dealing with damage from last month’s floods—after years of devastating droughts—UBC Okanagan engineers are looking at better ways to manage the delivery of safe drinking water to homes.

A study led by a North Carolina State University researcher found that under more severe climate warming scenarios, the inventory of trees used for timber in the continental United States could decline by as much as 23% by 2100. 

The early pandemic years overlapped with some of California’s worst wildfires on record, creating haunting, orange-tinted skies and wide swathes of burned landscape.

At a time when climate change is making many areas of the planet hotter and drier, it’s sobering to think that deserts are relatively new biomes that have grown considerably over the past 30 million years.

More than three times as many houses and other structures burned in Western wildfires in 2010-2020 than in the previous decade, and that wasn’t only because more acreage burned, a new analysis has found.

A new conceptual framework for incorporating the way plants use carbon and water, or plant dynamics, into fine-scale computer models of wildland fire provides a critical first step toward improved global fire forecasting.

Recent studies reveal that tiny pieces of plastic are constantly lofted into the atmosphere.

A new study conducted with data from 93 European cities estimates that one third of deaths attributable to heat islands could be avoided if trees covered 30% of urban space.

New UC Riverside research suggests nitrogen released by gas-powered machines causes dry soil to let go of carbon and release it back into the atmosphere, where it can contribute to climate change. 

The islands’ sea turtles are recovering from over-harvesting – but climate change is causing habitat loss, an increasingly female population (the sex of turtle hatchlings is determined by temperature) and has the potential to reduce egg-hatching success.