The continent is highly vulnerable to climate change - but it's starting to fight back.

Shutting down power plants that burn fossil fuels can almost immediately reduce the risk of premature birth in pregnant women living nearby, according to research published Tuesday. Researchers scrutinized records of more than 57,000 births by mothers who lived close to eight coal- and oil-fired plants across California in the year before the facilities were shut down, and in the year after, when the air was cleaner.

The Environmental Protection Agency is barring The Associated Press, CNN and the environmental-focused news organization E&E from a national summit on harmful water contaminants.

Groundbreaking assessment of all life on Earth reveals humanity’s surprisingly tiny part in it as well as our disproportionate impact

Arctic and Antarctic sea ice cover remains small

The U.S. recycling industry is breaking down as prices for scrap paper and plastic have collapsed.

Lava erupts from a fissure east of the Leilani Estates subdivision during ongoing eruptions of the Kilauea Volcano in Hawaii.

A sharp and mysterious rise in emissions of a key ozone-destroying chemical has been detected by scientists, despite its production being banned around the world. Unless the culprit is found and stopped, the recovery of the ozone layer, which protects life on Earth from damaging UV radiation, could be delayed by a decade. The source of the new emissions has been tracked to east Asia, but finding a more precise location requires further investigation.

Planet or Plastic? : Even one of the most remote places on Earth couldn't hide from the scourge of plastic trash.

Around 90 percent of the plastic polluting our oceans comes from just ten rivers, a new study has shown. Eight of those rivers are in Asia, with the remaining two — the Nile and the Niger — in Africa. The report, conducted by the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany, was based on dozens of reports, as well as the debris collected at 79 sampling sites along 57 rivers.

Firms who package goods in unrecyclable plastic will be hit with massive costs under plans to drive its use “out of existence”, The Independent can reveal. Whitehall insiders believe the proposal – effectively a tax on non-reusable plastic – will have a greater impact on the government’s drive to abolish all plastic waste by 2042 than any other measure. A source close to the proposal told The Independent it would make the cost of using unrecyclable plastics “so exorbitantly high” that companies would simply conclude they are no longer worth it.

Humans, 410 parts per million, nice job! I’m not even that environmentally conscious, but look it, we live immersed in digital and unassuming of our collective karma. We don’t easily take responsibility, it’s a diffusion of responsibility on epic proportions, oh-oh, this does not sound good. So here’s the bad news for us and our descendants...

Majorities of Americans say the federal government is doing too little to protect key aspects of the environment including water (69%) and air quality (64%). And two-thirds of Americans (67%) say the government is doing too little to reduce the effects of climate change. These findings come after a year of change in climate and energy regulatory policies under the Trump administration.

Carbon dioxide — the gas scientists say is most responsible for global warming — reached its highest level in recorded history last month, at 410 parts per million.

Chimpanzees have much cleaner beds - with fewer bodily bacteria - than humans do, scientists have found. A study comparing swabs taken from chimp nests with those from human beds found that people's sheets and mattresses harboured far more bacteria from their bodies than the animals' beds did from theirs. The researchers say their findings suggest that our attempts to create clean environments for ourselves may actually make our surroundings “less ideal”.

What angers me are the legislative and regulatory mandates that force us to buy gasoline that is 10 percent ethanol—even though it gets lower mileage than 100 percent gasoline, brings none of the proclaimed benefits (environmental or otherwise), drives up food prices, and damages small engines. In fact, in most areas, it’s almost impossible to find E-zero gasoline, and that problem will get worse as mandates increase.

A Scottish entrepreneur has developed a new eco-friendly bottle that could help combat the growing mountain of plastic litter entering the world’s oceans. Edinburgh-based chemistry graduate James Longcroft launched a not-for-profit bottled water firm two years ago, with the aim of ploughing all profits into a charity focused on providing clean drinking water to remote communities in Africa.

SoHo remains a super-trendy neighborhood in New York City, but a new high-rise in the neighborhood just might make the area smell a little sweeter. 570 Broome, designed by Turkish architect Tahir Demircioglu’s hot boutique architecture firm Builtd, is using a unique combination of two emerging technologies to constantly clean the air around the building — an attractive and welcome feature for a building that is located adjacent to the Holland Tunnel.

There seems to be little about the scrappy energy company in central England that would appeal to Royal Dutch Shell, the button-down oil giant. The little company, First Utility, is an upstart challenger. It offers friendly customer service, and low prices on electricity and natural gas. But it doesn’t own any power plants or gas pipelines; First Utility is a virtual energy company — the product of technological advancement and deregulation.

The world’s most widely used insecticides will be banned from all fields within six months, to protect both wild and honeybees that are vital to crop pollination

Researchers are sounding the alarm after an analysis showed that buying a new smartphone consumes as much energy as using an existing phone for an entire decade.

A 9,000 mile migration? It was no problem for these remarkable birds – until humans got in the way.

Asia is growing. Literally. From Malaysia to Dubai, luxury developments are rising on artificial islands and coastlines. Everybody wins – except the local sea life and the fishermen who depend on it

Global warming is on track to cause a major wipeout of insects, compounding already severe losses, according to a new analysis. Insects are vital to most ecosystems and a widespread collapse would cause extremely far-reaching disruption to life on Earth, the scientists warn. Their research shows that, even with all the carbon cuts already pledged by nations so far, climate change would make almost half of insect habitat unsuitable by the end of the century, with pollinators like bees particularly affected.

Nearly 9000 square-miles of ocean along the Gulf Coast is uninhabitable by marine life. Loaded with agricultural toxins and devoid of oxygen, it’s the largest “dead zone” in US history, and last summer it got even bigger. We’ve known the cause of the ecological “dead zone” for decades — fertilizer run-off from Big Agriculture via the Mississippi River — but a new investigative report identifies the number one polluter by name, Tyson Foods.

LIVERMORE, Calif. — Jet fuel, pantyhose, and plastic soda bottles are all products currently derived from petroleum. Scientists have demonstrated a new technology based on bio-engineered bacteria that could make it economically feasible to produce all three from renewable plant sources.

Results from a long-running field experiment suggest that a major group of plants could thrive as the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases.

The global wind turbine industry has transformed from a collection of small companies in Denmark to corporations pulling off enormous feats of engineering.

This week, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources gave the go-ahead to Taiwanese tech manufacturer Foxconn to siphon off 26.5ML of water per day...

Federal officials plan to back the destruction of almost 2000 hectares of pristine Queensland forest in a move that threatens the Great Barrier Reef and undermines a $500 million Turnbull government rescue package for the natural wonder.

Scientists in developing nations plan to step up research into dimming sunshine to curb climate change, hoping to judge if a man-made chemical sunshade would be less risky than a harmful rise in global temperatures.

Portugal grid averages 103% renewable electricity over month of March; government suspends power supply subsidies in April.

A wildfire in the summer of 2017 deposited heat-absorbing black carbon on the imperiled ice sheet  

Scientists have accidentally developed a plastic-eating enzyme that may be used to combat one of the world's worst pollution problems.

More than 95% of the world's population is breathing unhealthy air and the poorest nations are the hardest hit, a new report has found.