Indonesian President Joko Widodo has signed a moratorium on new licenses for oil palm plantations. The presidential instruction, signed on Sept. 19, will remain in place for no more than three years, according to the policy document, seen by Mongabay. Environmentalists previously called on Jokowi to impose no limit on the duration of the moratorium, arguing it should remain in place until it achieves its goals.

Southern California went 87 days without a clean air day, the longest stretch of consecutive ozone pollution violations in at least 20 years. Regulators blame the persistence in pollution on hot, stagnant weather and are studying whether climate change is driving it.

A trial is underway to restore damaged coral on the Great Barrier Reef using electricity. The reef has been severely assaulted in recent years by cyclones and back-to-back heatwaves. Nathan Cook at conservation group Reef Ecologic and his colleagues are attempting to regrow surviving coral fragments on steel frames. The frames are placed on damaged parts of the reef and stimulated with electricity to accelerate the coral’s growth (see video).

Protected forests in Brazil and Peru hold some of the world’s last remote indigenous groups, increasingly threatened by resource-hungry outsiders.

It’s a green beer for a good cause.

Two leading scientists have issued a call for massive swathes of the planet’s land and sea to be protected from human interference in order to avert mass extinction. Current levels of protection “do not even come close to required levels”, they said, urging world leaders to come to a new arrangement by which at least 30 per cent of the planet’s surface is formally protected by 2030. Chief scientist of the National Geographic Society Jonathan Baillie and Chinese Academy of Sciences biologist Ya-Ping Zhang made their views clear in an editorial published in the journal Science.

Fossil fuel interest groups will continue debating the reality of human-caused climate change until the seas swallow us all, but among scientists the matter is settled. Last week, the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) put out a position statement affirming as much and telling the naysayers to piss off.

If we want to avoid mass extinctions and preserve the ecosystems all plants and animals depend on, governments should protect a third of the oceans and land by 2030 and half by 2050, with a focus on areas of high biodiversity. So say leading biologists in an editorial in the journal Science this week.

Parks are doing what they can to keep the nation’s natural treasures safe for future generations — and out of your car's trunk.

New study: Ingesting even a single piece of plastic exposes sea turtles to a 20% chance of death.

Mosquito larvae that grow up in water contaminated with plastic accumulate the litter in their bodies – and some of it remains there even after the larvae emerge as adult flies. The mosquitoes may exacerbate the problem of plastic contamination when they are eaten by animals living on land.

One day in 1961, an American economist named Daniel Ellsberg stumbled across a piece of paper with apocalyptic implications. Ellsberg, who was advising the US government on its secret nuclear war plans, had discovered a document that contained an official estimate of the death toll in a preemptive “first strike” on China and the Soviet Union: 300 million in those countries, and double that globally.

Most of the extinctions were caused by deforestation in South America, a new study of endangered birds shows

The communications industry could use 20% of all the world’s electricity by 2025, hampering attempts to meet climate change targets and straining grids as demand by power-hungry server farms storing digital data from billions of smartphones, tablets and internet-connected devices grows exponentially. The industry has long argued that it can considerably reduce carbon emissions by increasing efficiency and reducing waste, but academics are challenging industry assumptions.

On August 23, 2018 the identification and distribution of aerosols in the Earth's atmosphere is shown in this dramatic, planet-wide visualization. Produced in real time, the Goddard Earth Observing System Forward Processing (GEOS FP) model relies on a combination of Earth-observing satellite and ground-based data to calculate the presence of types of aerosols, tiny solid particles and liquid droplets, as they circulate above the entire planet. This August 23rd model shows black carbon particles in red from combustion processes, like smoke from the fires in the United States and Canada, spreading across large stretches of North America.

The results of our sand scavenger hunt are in!

Whales shot with modern explosive devices often take several minutes to die, and can take as long as 25 minutes, according to official Norwegian data. Figures submitted by Norway to the International Whaling Commission ahead of its meeting in Brazil show around a fifth of the whales shot with their harpoons take a prolonged time to die.

Cigarette butts have long been the single most collected item on the world’s beaches, with a total of more than 60 million collected over 32 years.

Inspired by indigenous views of nature, a movement to grant a form of legal “personhood” to rivers is gaining some ground — a key step, advocates say, in reversing centuries of damage inflicted upon the world’s waterways.

Since 2015, we've been following the story of Boyan Slat, a young inventor who set out to fight against the world's plastic pollution problem. At only 20 years old, he developed an invention aimed at tackling the world's largest patch of garbage, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This vortex of trash, located between California and Hawaii, covers 600,000 square miles of ocean and is responsible for countless animal deaths.

Strong action to combat climate change could cumulatively add at least $26 trillion to the world economy by 2030, according to a study on Wednesday which seeks to dispel fears that a shift from fossil fuels will undermine growth.

Tens of thousands of people took part in marches and other events across the US on Saturday, calling for a swift transition to renewable energy in order to stave off the various perils of climate change. The Rise for Climate protests was spearheaded by what organizers called the largest ever climate march on the US west coast. The march, which snaked through the heart of San Francisco, came ahead of a climate change summit in the city next week that will gather mayors and business leaders from around the world.

The World Meteorological Organisation says there's a 70% chance of a weak El Niño event by the end of this year.

The Trump administration, taking its third major step this year to roll back federal efforts to fight climate change, is preparing to make it significantly easier for energy companies to release methane into the atmosphere. Methane, which is among the most powerful greenhouse gases, routinely leaks from oil and gas wells, and energy companies have long said that the rules requiring them to test for emissions were costly and burdensome.

“There will always be drinking water here. It’s just a question of how much you want to pay for it.”

Wild dolphins have learned how to walk on water by copying tricks developed by captive animals, a 30-year study found. Scientists in Australia observed that dolphins in Adelaide learned tail-walking – when the animal rises vertically out of the water and moves forward or backwards across it – from a dolphin called Billie which had spent time in a dolphinarium. Dolphins rarely do this in the wild but it is a standard part of the routine in almost all dolphinaria.

The unusually hot summer of 2018 has proved challenging for farmers across the UK. Among other things, the scorching weather and lack of rain has damaged crops, and the grass used to feed farm animals too. Unfortunately the unusual may become more usual as the effects of climate change are felt more frequently across the world. The high ambient temperatures and humidity seen this year, as well as extreme weather conditions such as flooding, are a significant challenge to the future of farming.

Pregnant women with high levels of DDT in their blood are more likely to have children who develop autism, according to NIEHS grantees.

German police began to remove protesters on Thursday who have been living in tree houses for the past six years in the ancient Hambach Forest, located in the western part of the country. German utility company RWE is seeking to expand mining operations in the 12,000-year-old forest, and protesters have been camping out in an effort to save what is left. “This year’s clearing measures are necessary to maintain opencast mining operations and coal extraction over the next two years,” RWE said in a statement, noting that no agreement was reached with the protesters following negotiations that took place on Monday.

By releasing specially bred mosquitoes that can't transmit viruses, scientists have been able to virtually eradicate dengue fever from the city of Townsville, Queensland, in north-eastern Australia – and they say the same methods could be scaled up

With frequent floods, sinking markets and engulfed homes, by 2050 parts of Jakarta will be underwater.

Primate habitats overlap with the best regions for new palm oil plantations.

Stella Bowles was 11 years old when she first donned her rubber boots to test for water contamination in the LaHave River, which runs beside her home on the South Shore of Nova Scotia, Canada. “I wanted to swim in the water, and Mom’s always said no,” Bowles told CityLab. But in 2015, after hearing her mom, Andrea Conrad, say that their neighbors were using illegal straight pipes, Bowles asked her what a straight pipe was. “She explained it’s a pipe from a home’s toilet into a waterway, with no filtration whatsoever,” Bowles recalled. “I had so many questions.”

Scientists have created a mutant enzyme that breaks down plastic drinks bottles – by accident. The breakthrough could help solve the global plastic pollution crisis by enabling for the first time the full recycling of bottles. The new research was spurred by the discovery in 2016 of the first bacterium that had naturally evolved to eat plastic, at a waste dump in Japan. Scientists have now revealed the detailed structure of the crucial enzyme produced by the bug.

Spain’s pigs outnumber the human population for the first time, according to figures released by the country’s environment ministry, which reveal there are now 50 million pigs, 3.5 -million more than humans. The figures show an increase of about 9 million animals since 2013 and there are growing concerns about the environmental impact of an industry that produced more than 4m tonnes of pork products and generated €6bn (£5.4bn) last year.