As many as 153 million premature deaths linked to air pollution could be avoided worldwide this century if governments speed up their timetable for reducing fossil fuel emissions, a new Duke University-led study finds.

The Colonial Pipeline, which carries fuel from Texas to New York, ruptured last fall, dumping a quarter-million gallon of gas in rural Alabama. By the time the leak was detected during routine inspection, vapors from released gasoline were so strong they prevented pipeline repair for days. Now, scientists are developing technology that would alert pipeline managers about leaks as soon as failure begins, avoiding the environmental disasters and fuel distribution disruptions resulting from pipeline leaks.

Environmental policy guided by science saves lives, money, and ecosystems. So, reports a team of eleven senior researchers in Environmental Science & Policy. Using air pollution in the United States as a case study, they highlight the success of cleanup strategies backed by long-term environmental monitoring.  

They might seem like unlikely allies, but ranchers and prairie conservationists have a future working together.

More than a decade after beekeepers first raised the alarm about a dangerously low global bee population, much progress has been made in understanding the mystery of colony collapse.

The impacts of global warming are felt especially in mountainous regions, where the rise in temperatures is above average, affecting both glacierized landscapes and water resources. The repercussions of these changes are manifold and varied, from retreating glaciers to an increase in the frequency and intensity of snow avalanches. A team of researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, has employed dendrochronology– the reconstruction of past disasters as recorded in growth series of trees– to disentangle the role of global warming in the triggering avalanches. The results of this study are published in the Proceedings of the National Academic of Science – PNAS.

A new study by scientists from WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society) and other groups predicts that the effects of climate change will severely impact the Albertine Rift, one of Africa’s most biodiverse regions and a place not normally associated with global warming.

Mejorar el desempeño en Medio Ambiente, Salud y Seguridad (EHS) debería ser simple, ¿no? Establecer algunos objetivos, definir los procesos para cumplirlos e implementar los sistemas de mejora continua, pero todos sabemos que, es un poco más complicado que eso. El eslabón perdido es a menudo la dimensión de las personas, creo que muchos estamos de acuerdo en que las principales barreras para la mejora del rendimiento de EHS se relacionan con las personas y los problemas de organización, y los enfoques que puede tomar para superarlos cambiando la cultura de la organización.

NASA and the nonprofit Conservation International are partnering to use global Earth observations from space to improve regional efforts that assess natural resources for conservation and sustainable management.

New research from The Australian National University (ANU) and ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science suggests natural rainfall variation is so great that it could take a human lifetime for significant climate signals to appear in regional or global rainfall measures.