Deforested areas of the Amazon Basin have a limited ability to recover because of recent changes in climate, a study shows.

Traditional toxicity testing underestimates the risk that pharmaceutical and personal care product pollution poses to freshwater ecosystems. Criteria that account for ecological disruption – not just organism death – are needed to protect surface waters, which are under pressure from a growing population and escalating synthetic chemical use. So reports a new study published this week in Elementa.

The presence of artificial sweeteners in rural groundwater shows evidence for contamination by local septic system wastewater, researchers from the University of Waterloo have found.

Pesticides significantly reduce the number of pollen grains a bumblebee is able to collect, a new University of Stirling study has found.

Fossil leaves from Africa have resolved a prehistoric climate puzzle — and also confirm the link between carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and global warming.

We need to pay more attention to the health of the planet to save lives, and improve global health, now and in the future, Dr Samuel Myers said at The 2017 Academy of Medical Sciences & The Lancet International Health Lecture

We’re all familiar with tipping points, when crossing what might seem a minor threshold can lead to drastically different outcomes—the Super Bowl favorite that falls to last place with injury to a single lineman, a tomato seedling that surges skyward the moment it tops the shadowy confines of its clay pot.

As the city of Houston continues to recover and rebuild following the historic flooding unleashed by Hurricane Harvey, the region will also have to prepare for a future in which storms of Harvey’s magnitude are more likely to occur.

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.

By the end of 2017, global emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels and industry are projected to rise by about 2% compared with the preceding year, with an uncertainty range between 0.8% and 3%. The news follows three years of emissions staying relatively flat.