My Climate Change News

Sponsored: Empowering employees to champion sustainability initiatives requires a culture where sustainability is ingrained in everyday operations.

A warm embrace between two Sodexo colleagues. Image courtesy of Sodexo.

This article is sponsored by Sodexo.

Employees form the backbone of most organizations - and what they do or don’t do affects progress toward sustainability milestones. Engaging employees on sustainability is an opportunity that organizations must embrace if they hope to succeed with sustainability goals and climate-conscious initiatives.

Organizations of all sizes can bridge the gap between corporate goals and individual actions by recognizing the power employees hold and providing them with the tools and motivation to drive sustainability initiatives forward.

At Sodexo, we have seen this firsthand - that the everyday actions of our frontline employees have accelerated our success and ability to meet sustainability targets. From ...

New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, who was recently a staunch critic of Donald Trump, changed his tune on the former president as he backed his 2024 campaign in an interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos on Sunday.

“No other president in American history has contributed to an insurrection so please explain, given the fact that you believe he contributed to an insurrection, how you can say we should have him back in the Oval Office,” Stephanopoulos asked on ABC News’ “This Week.”

“Because for me it’s not about him as much as it is having a Republican administration ...,” said Sununu, who predicted that Trump wouldn’t be the 2024 GOP presidential nominee but didn’t rule out voting for him.

The GOP governor, who described himself as a “Trump guy through and through” in 2019, has repeatedly bashed the former president following the Jan. 6, 2021 attack.

He’s referred to Trump as “crazy,” “not a real Republican,” “worried about jail time,” called on GOP ...

To protect Australia’s iconic animals, scientists are experimenting with vaccine implants, probiotics, tree-planting drones and solar-powered tracking tags.

A veterinary nurse treats a koala infected with chlamydia at Currumbin Wildlife Hospital in Currumbin, Australia.Credit...

Photographs and Video by Chang W. Lee

It was spring in Queensland, Australia, a season when many wild animals find themselves in trouble, and the Currumbin Wildlife Hospital was a blur of fur and feathers.

A groggy black swan emerged from the X-ray room, head swaying on its long neck. A flying fox wore a tiny anesthetic mask. An injured rainbow lorikeet squawked in its cage. (“Very angry,” a sign warned.)

“We see everything,” Dr. Michael Pyne, the hospital’s senior veterinarian. Also on the schedule for the day: three eagles, two carpet pythons, a blue-faced honeyeater, a short-eared brushtail possum and, Dr. Pyne said, “a whole heap of koalas.”

More than a dozen ...

Temperatures in Japan's northern city of Sapporo - famous for skiing - on Monday passed 25 degrees Celsius at the earliest point of any year on record, a weather agency official said.

Sapporo, the main city on the island of Hokkaido, hosted the 1972 Winter Olympics and each February holds a snow festival where massive ice sculptures draw tens of thousands of visitors.

"The temperature in Sapporo hit 26 degrees... and is still rising," Shuichi Yoshida, an official at the regional headquarters of the Japan Meteorological Agency, told AFP in the early afternoon.

It is the earliest that temperatures in the city have passed 25 degrees Celsius (77 Fahrenheit), which the JMA classifies as a "summer's day", since records began there in 1877.

Over 30 degrees is classed as "mid-summer" while over 35 is "extremely hot", according to the JMA's system.

"We can't rule out the possibility that climate change has played a role in the high temperature," Yoshida said.

Even as the world suffers a plastics glut, petrochemical companies are prolonging the 'plasticene era.'

The Gulf Coast petrochemical industry, one of the most polluting industry complexes on Earth, has expanded in response to low natural gas prices. Source: Roschetzky Photography via Shutterstock

The Gulf Coast petrochemical industry has big expansion plans for plastics production that threaten to undermine corporate efforts to reduce plastics use and waste as well as the international negotiations for the Global Global Plastics Treaty that will continue this month in Ottawa.

The looming plastics boom raises questions for sustainability professionals navigating plastics reduction targets about the efficacy of their own efforts as well as how they can respond to help end the world's "plasticene era."

Ten new plastics production plants and 17 expansion projects are planned over the next five years at Gulf Coast refineries, according to a new ...

Switzerland, known for pristine countryside and snow-capped peaks, is facing scrutiny of its environmental policies after becoming the first country faulted by an international court for failing to do enough against climate change.

The European Court of Human Rights's ruling last week highlighted a number of failings in Swiss policies, but experts stressed that the wealthy Alpine country was not necessarily doing much worse than its peers.

"The judgment made it really clear that there are critical gaps in the Swiss domestic regulatory framework," said Tiffanie Chan, a policy analyst at the London School of Economics and Political Science specializing in climate change laws.

"But it's definitely not a Switzerland-only case," she told AFP.

Corina Heri, a postdoctoral researcher with the Climate Rights and Remedies Project at Zurich University, agreed.

"This doesn't mean in any way that ... only Switzerland has a problem," she told AFP.

The ...

The comprehensive findings from Colorado State University were highlighted in Nature Communications Earth & Environment in a first-of-its-kind study. The work from the Walter Scott, Jr. College of Engineering explores the potential economic tradeoffs of switching to green infrastructure and technology solutions that go beyond existing gray-water treatment practices.

Built off data collected at over 22,000 facilities, the report provides comprehensive baseline metrics and explores the relationship among emissions, costs and treatment capabilities for utility operators and decision-makers.

Braden Limb is the first author on the paper and a Ph.D. student in the Department of Systems Engineering. He also serves as a research associate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. He said the findings are a key initial step to categorize and understand potential green solutions for wastewater.

"These findings draw a line in the sand that shows what the potential ...

Fruit eating birds such as the Red-Legged Honeycreeper, Palm Tanager, or the Rufous-Bellied Thrush play a vital role in forest ecosystems by consuming, excreting, and spreading seeds as they move throughout a forested landscape.

Between 70% to 90% of the tree species in tropical forests are dependent on animal seed dispersal. This initial process is essential for allowing forests to grow and function. While earlier studies have established that birds are important for forest biodiversity, researchers at the Crowther Lab now have a quantitative understanding of how they contribute to forest restoration.

The new study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change provides evidence of the important contribution of wild birds (frugivores) in forest regeneration. Researchers compared the carbon storage potential that could be recovered in landscapes with limited fragmentation, with that of highly fragmented landscapes. Their data shows that highly fragmented ...

The June general election in Mexico could mark a turning point in ensuring that the country’s climate policies better reflect the desire of its citizens to address the climate crisis, with both leading presidential candidates expressing support for renewable energy.

Mexico is the 10th-most populated country with the 15th-largest economy and is also the 11th-most climate-polluting country in the world.

In international surveys conducted in 2022 and 2023, Mexico had one of the highest percentages of citizens worried about human-caused climate change at 92%, compared to just 63% of Americans.* And 88% of Mexican respondents reported that they consider climate change an important issue that their country should address as a priority, compared to just 58% of Americans. This concern may reflect that Mexico is highly vulnerable to droughts, heat waves, hurricanes, flooding, and food and water insecurity worsened by climate change.

But the Mexican ...

Our story of the week is about adults in the room setting terms and conditions of good behavior. Here it's not parents telling children what to do but instead the widely adopted, mutually agreed system of coercive behavior modification we call "rule of law." Legislators providing courts of justice with laws to apply are how we formalize overcoming widely harmful selfish actions— or negligent inactions. These are our proxy adults telling us what we can't do or must do— our aspirations for better nature given teeth. We could wish that we were all so perfect as to never need grownup guidance of a kind leading to fines or imprisonment, but if anything can serve to illustrate how this isn't realistic it's our failure to confront accountability for fossil fuels and what happens when nobody is willing to say "no."

Belatedly, in step our appointed adults— in this case the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). Three articles we shared this week covered an ...

Forest restoration is fundamental to overcoming biodiversity crises and climate change. In tropical forests, animals can improve forest recovery as they disperse >70% of tree species. However, representing animals in restoration and climate change policies remains challenging because a quantitative assessment of their contribution to forest and carbon recovery is lacking. Here we used individual-based models to assess frugivore-mediated seed rain in open areas along a fragmentation gradient. Movements of large birds were limited in landscapes with <40% forest cover, although small birds continued to disperse seeds. Large birds disperse seeds of late-successional species with higher carbon storage potential. Their restricted movement therefore reduced potential biomass in future forests by 38%. Maintaining forest cover >40% is essential to optimizing animals’ contribution to restoration success. Active restoration (for example, planting trees) is required in more ...

In an article published in Nature, my colleagues and I show that illicit, often out-of-control road building is imperiling forests in Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea. The roads we're studying do not appear on legitimate maps. We call them "ghost roads."

What's so bad about a road? A road means access. Once roads are bulldozed into rainforests, illegal loggers, miners, poachers and landgrabbers arrive. Once they get access, they can destroy forests, harm native ecosystems and even drive out or kill indigenous peoples. This looting of the natural world robs cash-strapped nations of valuable natural resources. Indonesia, for instance, loses around A$1.5 billion each year solely to timber theft.

All nations have some unmapped or unofficial roads, but the situation is especially bad in biodiversity-rich developing nations, where roads are proliferating at the fastest pace in human history.

Mapping ghost roads

For this study, my Ph.D. student Jayden ...

Coastal communities need to prepare for simultaneous extreme weather events as heat waves increasingly overlap with surges in sea levels due to climate change, a study published on Thursday warned.

Extreme heat and sea levels are typically monitored and studied individually but researchers from Hong Kong Polytechnic University found they were occurring simultaneously - a phenomenon that could multiply fivefold by mid-century.

The study's lead author, Mo Zhao, told AFP these events pose "very dangerous" risks, from deadly heat to floods, that may "exceed the coping capacity" of communities to respond.

"We don't have sufficient resources or sufficient human resources to handle these two extremes," she said.

Previous studies have shown that heat contributes to storm systems like tropical cyclones that bring surging sea levels, said Shuo Wang, co-author and assistant professor of hydroclimatic extremes.

But the study published in the journal ...

The highly efficient devices are the darlings of the environmental movement. Here’s why.

Heat pumps, which both warm and cool buildings and are powered by electricity, have been touted as the answer to curbing greenhouse gas emissions produced by homes, businesses and office buildings, which are responsible for about one-third of the emissions in New York State.

But how do they work? How much do they cost? Is New York ready for them? And can they really help solve the climate crisis? Here are some heat pump basics.

Currently, we mostly burn fossil fuels to produce heat. This causes pollution. Heat pumps are all-electric.

Even though most electricity still comes from combustion, the United States is slowly transitioning to renewable power like hydro, wind and solar. As this shift occurs, heat pumps will help eliminate greenhouse gases.

A heat pump moves heat.

It consists of a boxy component outside and a sleek-looking blower inside. A ...

Trump voters who reported experiencing an extreme weather event were more likely to vote in favor of a clean energy referendum than Trump voters who had not experienced such events.

"Despite people's beliefs about climate change being human-caused, despite people's political affiliation—both of which we know have really strong impacts on how people think about climate change—we find that when people have experienced extreme events, they are more likely to support climate mitigation policy, even if it costs more money," says study co-author Rachelle Gould of University of Vermont (UVM).

For the study, researchers from UVM and University of Colorado examined survey data from nearly 6,000 residents of the U.S. northeast, southeast and West about their experiences of extreme climate events in the past five years. Respondents were asked if they would support a clean energy policy and if they would pay a utility bill increase—a random number between $5 ...

WASHINGTON - A loose line of people snaked from a doorway in the side of a cargo truck. One young boy wandered over to examine several bales of hay stacked nearby while others waiting craned their necks to get a peek inside. A small sign in the shape of a barn stuck over the open door read, “Petting Zoo.”

But the queuing visitors weren’t there to meet pigs, goats or sheep. What they wanted was hands-on experience with a different kind of beast: heat pumps.

“We have heat pump everything,” said Vanessa Bertelli, head of the nonprofit Electrify DC, as she walked through the D.C. Armory, an indoor arena, on a recent Saturday.

To her right, a showcase of two brands of heat pump water heaters. In another exhibit, a heat pump dryer. Inside the “petting zoo,” a converted truck designed to look like the interior of a home, heat pumps protruded from the walls.

At this fair, instead of pony rides, games of chance and fried food, visitors took electric bicycles and ...

Oil companies drilling on public lands must post larger bonds and pay higher royalties under a rule finalized Friday by the Biden administration.

The bonding requirements for development increased to $150,000 from $10,000, a level set in 1960 that no longer covers potential cleanup costs, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) said in a press release.

In another shift, the Department of the Interior lifted royalty rates for leases to 16.67 percent from the previous level of 12.5 percent.

The changes were described by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland as the most significant reform to the leasing program "in decades" but were criticized by petroleum interests.

They come as President Biden emphasizes the environment in his reelection campaign against former president Donald Trump, who has mocked climate change as an issue.

Friday's action finalizes the department's preliminary step taken in July 2023 that the Biden administration described as part of a ...

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (AP) - A large sawfish that showed signs of distress was rescued by wildlife officials in the Florida Keys, where more than three dozen of the ancient and endangered fish have died for unexplained reasons in recent months.

The 11-foot (3.3-meter) smalltooth sawfish was seen swimming in circles near Cudjoe Key and reported by a member of the public to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, officials said Friday. It was loaded onto a specially designed transport trailer and taken to Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, where it is being rehabilitated.

The unprecedented rescue of an animal like this is part of an “emergency response” led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Florida wildlife officials to address an unprecedented die-off of sawfish, a species related to sharks and rays that has lived virtually unchanged for millions of years.

“It’s important to note that active rescue and rehabilitation are ...