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The article highlights how agribusiness lobbying undermines European Union's Green Deal, leading to policies favoring growth over environmental concerns, risking sustainability goals.

The article focuses on concerns that the surge of far-right parties in recent European Parliament elections could potentially impact the European Union's science funding and green policies, despite pro-European groups maintaining a majority.

The article focuses on the substantial shortfall in global progress toward achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and Aichi Biodiversity Targets by 2030, with climate anomalies threatening to surpass the 1.5 Celsius warming target set in the Paris Climate Agreement.

The article examines how states organize themselves internally to address climate change. Topics covered include the definitional categories for climate institutions, the ways that states address three core climate governance challenges, including through coordination, building consensus, and strategy development, and the ways that institutions and national political contexts influence and shape each other.

Although a new Bush Administration initiative to clean up U.S. power plants has its critics, even some environmentalists laud the plan for targeting several pollutants at once and using a [...]

Growing scientific awareness, strong regulations, and effective management have begun to fulfill the promise of recovery in the ocean. However, many efforts toward ocean recovery remain unsuccessful, in part because marine ecosystems and the human societies that depend upon them are constantly changing. Furthermore, recovery efforts are embedded in marine social-ecological systems where large-scale dynamics can inhibit recovery. We argue that the ways forward are to (i) rethink an inclusive definition of recovery that embraces a diversity of stakeholder perspectives about acceptable recovery goals and ecosystem outcomes; (ii) encourage research that enables anticipation of feasible recovery states and identifies pathways toward resilient ecosystems; and (iii) adopt policies that are sufficiently nimble to keep pace with rapid change and governance that works seamlessly from local to regional scales. Application of these principles can facilitate successful recoveries in a world where environmental conditions and social imperatives are constantly shifting.

Protected areas are intended to safeguard biodiversity in perpetuity, yet evidence suggests that widespread legal changes undermine protected area durability and efficacy. We documented these legal changes—protected area downgrading, downsizing, and degazettement (PADDD) events—in the United States and Amazonian countries and compiled available data globally. Governments of the United States and Amazonian countries enacted 269 and 440 PADDD events, respectively. Between 1892 and 2018, 73 countries enacted 3749 PADDD events, removing 519,857 square kilometers from protection and tempering regulations in an additional 1,659,972 square kilometers; 78% of events were enacted since 2000. Most PADDD events (62%) are associated with industrial-scale resource extraction and development, suggesting that PADDD may compromise biodiversity conservation objectives. Strategic policy responses are needed to address PADDD and sustain effective protected areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

POTOMAC, MARYLAND--To get a handle on one of the world's biggest environmental headaches, think about dinner. Say that tonight you eat 100-gram helpings of both rice and chicken. Producing those [...]

BUCHAREST--In 1983, dictator Nicolae Ceausescu decreed that the Romanian Danube delta, one of Europe's largest wetlands, be diked for growing rice and maize. The edict came despite evidence that the [...]

The article reports that a new approach to negotiations in curbing emissions has raised hopes that the United Nations climate change conference in Paris, France in November 2015 will agree to meaningful climate steps. It says that negotiators hope that the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) approach will prevail where the Kyoto strategy failed. It mentions that with the INDC approach, nations pledged to limit their emissions.

Surrounded by palms and tropical plants, President Clinton met with reporters in the U.S. Botanical Garden on Earth Day (21 April) to give a big boost to 'green' technologies--technologies meant [...]

Early environmental policy depended on science, with mixed results. Newer approaches continue to rely on science to identify problems and solve them, but use other mechanisms to set standards and legal obligations. Given the important role that science continues to play, however, several cautionary tales are in order concerning "scientific management," "good science," the lure of money, and the tension between objectivity and involvement in important issues of our time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United States is all alone on climate change. The agreement on carbon emissions targets miraculously reached in Bonn on 23 July 2001 left the United States fight where President [...]

To the surprise of many, representatives of 178 countries agreed early Monday morning on how to begin fighting global warming. Seventeen hundred diplomats established a complex method of accounting for [...]

IN HIS ARTICLE 'USGS BRACES FOR SEVERE budget cuts' Erik Stokstad does a good job of explaining the impacts of cuts to the Water Resources Division's Toxic Substances Hydrology Program [...]

As the Bush Administration dithers over what it might do to address global warming, 17 national academies of science decided to cut to the chase in an editorial in this [...]

When the Bush Administration decided last week to withdraw new standards that require lower arsenic levels in U.S. drinking water, it brandished scientific uncertainty as a shield against environmental protesters. [...]

Every once in a while, one misfortune begets another. That happened a couple of weeks ago, when President Bush decided that his campaign commitment to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from [...]

A 2000-kilometer-long necklace of remote, coral-fringed Pacific islands has become the United States' largest ever protected area. President Bill Clinton last week signed an executive order creating the Northwestern Hawaiian [...]

New Zealand's Minister of the Environment Simon Upton discussed strategies for managing environmental risks when he addressed the incoming class of AAAS Science and Engineering Fellows on 2 September. Upton's [...]

Vice President Al Gore last week presented Congress with a Herculean challenge: To restore a more natural water flow to the Everglades, the vast wetland in southern Florida, while safeguarding [...]