The ocean plays a major role in the global carbon cycle. The driving force comes from tiny plankton that produce organic carbon through photosynthesis, like plants on land.

The global COVID-19 quarantine has meant less air pollution in cities and clearer skies. Animals are strolling through public spaces, and sound pollution has diminished, allowing us to hear the birds sing.

The question of population is more complex that it may seem – in the context of climate change as well as other issues such as biodiversity loss and international development.

The numbers of people cycling and walking in public spaces during COVID-19 has skyrocketed.

Agriculture has long been framed in the global climate action discussion as a sector whose activities conflict with meeting greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction targets.

Politicians and business people are fond of making promises to plant thousands of trees to slow climate change. But who actually plants those trees, and who tends them as they grow?

As states contemplate how to restart the global economy after the pandemic, it’s important to remember that we’ve been here before.

Committed to a carbon-free future by 2050, the UK gas industry is to switch to green hydrogen and biogas.

‘We’re doomed’: a common refrain in casual conversation about climate change. It signals an awareness that we cannot, strictly speaking, avert climate change.

Every aspect of our lives has been affected by the coronavirus. The global economy has slowed, people have retreated to their homes and thousands have died or become seriously ill.

This isn’t a normal period of disruption, which is usually caused by failures in supply such as road accidents or industrial action. In this case it is the lack of demand that is the problem.

Science warns us that the 2020s will be humanity’s last opportunity to save itself from a climate catastrophe.

Even under the most conservative climate change scenarios, sea levels 30cm higher than at present seem all but certain on much of the UK’s coast by the end of this century.

Ambitious targets have been set by the UK and Scottish governments to become net-zero carbon economies by 2050 and 2045 respectively.

In 1896 Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius explored whether Earth’s temperatures were influenced by the presence of heat-absorbing gases in the atmosphere.