Plants Thrive In A Complex World By Communicating, Sharing Resources And Transforming Their Environments

As a species, humans are wired to collaborate. That’s why lockdowns and remote work have felt difficult for many of us during the COVID-19 pandemic.

It is really hard to know how a species is doing by just looking out from your local coast, or dipping underwater on scuba

Climate-labeling clearly affects consumers—both those people who are keen to be aware of the climate impact, as well as those who actively seek to ignore this sort of knowledge

We’re all going to die. This is the repeated warning about climate change in some media: if we don’t change our ways we face an existential threat. So why haven’t we got a policy solution in place?

Globally, only one in 50 new cars were fully electric in 2020, and one in 14 in the UK. Sounds impressive, but even if all new cars were electric now, it would still take 15-20 years to replace the world’s fossil fuel car fleet.

Hundreds of companies, including major emitters like United Airlines, BP and Shell, have pledged to reduce their impact on climate change and reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

The destruction of tropical forest is a major contributor to biodiversity loss and the climate crisis. In response, conservationists and scientists like us are debating how to best catalyse recovery of these forests. How do you take a patch of earth littered with tree stumps, or even a grassy pasture or palm oil plantation, and turn it back into a thriving forest filled with its original species?

Almost everyone agrees that policies tackling inequality have to be at the core of a sustainable post-pandemic recovery.

The planet had already warmed by around 1.2℃ since pre-industrial times when the World Health Organization officially declared a pandemic on March 11 2020.

Marine ecosystems are under threat from deep-sea mining projects, oil rigs and offshore windfarms. When these facilities are built and maintained, they tend to damage the rich ecological networks around them.

Ocean pollution is widespread and poses a clear and present danger to human health and wellbeing. But the extent of this danger has not been widely comprehended – until now.

Another year, another climate record broken. Globally, 2020 tied with 2016 as the warmest year ever recorded. This was all the more remarkable given that cool conditions in the Pacific Ocean – known as La Niña – began to emerge in the second half of the year.

Wood is an ancient material humans have been using for millions of years, for the construction of housing, ships and as a source of fuel for burning. It’s also a renewable source, and one way to capture excess carbon dioxide from the Earth’s atmosphere.

As the climate changes, floods and extreme rainfall events will become more intense. In many cases, the most disadvantaged people are at highest risk from floods and least able to bounce back when their homes and businesses are inundated.

Ask people to name the world’s largest river, and most will probably guess that it’s the Amazon, the Nile or the Mississippi. In fact, some of Earth’s largest rivers are in the sky – and they can produce powerful storms, like the one now soaking California.

Population growth plays a role in environmental damage and climate change. But addressing climate change through either reducing or reversing growth in population raises difficult moral questions that most people would prefer to avoid having to answer.

How the U.S. manages the economic recovery from COVID-19, the financial risks from climate change and inequality together will determine the chances of American prosperity over the coming decades.

It took evolution 3 or 4 billion years to produce Homo sapiens. If the climate had completely failed just once in that time then evolution would have come to a crashing halt and we would not be here now.

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The amount of carbon dioxide that we can still emit while limiting global warming to a given target is called the “remaining carbon budget,” and it has become a powerful tool to inform climate policy goals and track progress towards net-zero emissions targets.

Anyone with even a passing interest in the global environment knows all is not well. But just how bad is the situation? Our new paper shows the outlook for life on Earth is more dire than is generally understood.

The end of the last ice age, around 12,000 years ago, was characterised by a final cold phase called the Younger Dryas. Scandinavia was still mostly covered in ice, and across Europe the mountains had many more, and larger, glaciers than today.

The catastrophic fires in Australia in early 2020 were actually a holdover from 2019, but they were soon followed by flooding in Indonesia, a super-cyclone hitting the coast of India and Bangladesh and then more flooding, this time in Kenya and wide swaths of Central and West Africa.

The bleak history of whaling pushed many species to the brink of extinction, even in the remote waters of the north and south poles. Over 1.3 million whales were killed in just 70 years around Antarctica alone.