As well as causing significant harm to human health, air pollution also stunts the growth of trees, one of the very elements that can attenuate this typically urban environmental problem.

Researchers at the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil have shown that atmospheric pollutants restrict tree growth and the ecosystem services provided by trees, such as filtering pollution by absorbing airborne metals in their bark, assimilating CO2, reducing the heat island effect by attenuating solar radiation, mitigating stormwater runoff, and controlling humidity.

The study was supported by FAPESP. The results have been published in the journal Science of the Total Environment.

“We found that in years when levels of particulate matter in the atmosphere were higher, for example, the trees grew less. As a result, they started later in their lives to provide ecosystem services that play an important role in reducing urban pollution and mitigating or adapting the city to climate change,” said Giuliano Maselli Locosselli, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of São Paulo’s Bioscience Institute (IB-USP) with a scholarship from FAPESP and first author of the study.

Read more at São Paulo Research Foundation

Charcoal may be the solution to reducing ammonia pollution and lowering greenhouse gas emissions from fertilizer for crop plants, according to a groundbreaking study by a University of Guelph soil scientist.

The Cocos Keeling Islands, a remote archipelago in the Indian Ocean, are covered with an estimated 414 million pieces of plastic pollution, weighing 238 tons, according to a new study published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Dr. Laurie Chan and his team from the University of Ottawa are pleased to announce that the first phase of the Yellowknife Health Effects Monitoring Program (YKHEMP) is complete.

This week USGS scientists, with support from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, installed technologically advanced monitoring systems to study water-quality conditions and harmful algal blooms—known as HABs—in Owasco and Seneca lakes.

New analysis by the UK Trade Policy Observatory is warning that what should have been the technical formality of transferring EU powers into national law when the UK leaves the European Union, could instead open the gates for the widespread use of outlawed carcinogenic pesticides that have been shown to alter human reproductive, neurological, and immune systems.

The price tag for cutting global emissions may seem expensive, until the human toll of deaths from air pollution and climate change are factored in, new research says.

Earth’s oceans have a remarkable natural ability to pull carbon from the atmosphere and store it deep within the ocean waters, exerting an important control on the global climate.

The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hit 415.39 parts per million (ppm) over the weekend — the highest level seen in some 3 million years, before humans existed, according to scientists at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii.

A University of Oklahoma-led interdisciplinary global study expands the understanding of activated sludge microbiomes for next-generation wastewater treatment and reuse systems enhanced by microbiome engineering.