MIT engineers poured concrete into a sewn fabric mold to build a beam using just one-third the amount of concrete and half as much steel as a conventional beam, a low-tech approach that could make low-carbon construction more accessible.

Sustainable polymers and natural rubber research from a France-Thailand symposium shows how self-healing materials and bio-based rubber could reshape greener manufacturing.

The U.S. was among countries voting against new international negotiations on rules for prosecuting environmental crime. The talks are set to take place anyway.

Rumors and conspiracies are spreading too fast for emergency managers to keep up. This information chaos is slowing disaster relief and putting lives at risk.

As natural disasters intensify, part of being prepared is knowing where to go for up to date information. Treat information as a resource, just line food, water, and medicine.

The Environmental Protection Agency late last week announced it would end a 20-plus-year effort to develop methods to monitor air pollution from factory farms, effectively shuttering the agency’s stop-and-start attempts to regulate the potentially pollutant-spewing facilities under the Clean Air Act.

The announcement came just days before the midterm elections and was characterized by the agency as a long-awaited reprieve for farmers, a historically important constituency for Trump and the Republican party.

When tens of thousands of animals are packed into one place, pollution from their waste is blown from ventilation fans or emanates from giant lagoons of liquid effluent. Livestock facilities emit fine particulate matter, ammonia, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide and volatile organic compounds, all contributing to a toxic mix. Research has shown that emissions from these operations are a major cause of air pollution, causing nearly 12,700 deaths in the United States a year.

A group of students from the Netherlands have developed a solar-powered medical vehicle meant to service remote populations.

An emerging body of researchers suggests that pollutants in the air are infiltrating our brains and altering our cognition.

Greenpeace drops nine large rocks to create a barrier to bottom-trawling fishing vessels.

Whenever it rains, Valeen Bhat puts on her waders and her signature hot pink raincoat to clear debris from storm drains in Brooklyn. This time of year, there’s a lot.

Fall is for foliage. But foliage falls. And in New York, leaves wreak havoc by clogging storm drains, which can produce devastating flooding. Ms. Bhat, the owner of Private Picassos in Clinton Hill, learned this the hard way a year ago. On a Thursday in October, a sudden downpour inundated her art studio for children, trapping teachers and students, until firefighters rescued them.

With global warming, rain is falling faster and harder, and overwhelming the city’s century-old sewers, most of which were not designed for the furious and swift storms now common in New York.

Since last fall’s deluge, which caused two deaths in the city, Ms. Bhat has been spreading the gospel of leaf clearance. The task is especially crucial in elevated spots, because drains that clog uphill lead to flooding downhill.

The ocean’s blue and green hues near the infamous zone of debris have gotten brighter over the past 20 years, satellite data show

So-called green fireworks may emit less smoke than conventional ones in controlled tests, but scientists and doctors are sceptical about the difference in real-world impact

It says over-foraging, particularly in protected areas, damages habitats and wildlife.

Voters in Athens, Ohio, chose to add about $1.80 a month to their utility bills to help fund local solar projects.

In 2018, residents of Athens, Ohio, did something unusual – they voted to raise their own utility bills.

The voters chose to adopt a carbon fee, a small bump in their electricity rate that goes to solar energy projects on city buildings and other public sites.

The fee is less than two dollars a month for the average household.

Mayor Steve Patterson says the idea passed with broad support.

Patterson: “Three-quarters of the citizens who voted during that election cycle said, ‘Yes, we are willing to pay an extra $1.80 per month to have more solar.’”

And residents who don’t want to pay can opt out.

But most have not. So the city now raises about $100,000 dollars each year from the carbon fee.

Mink farms are the perfect petri dishes for deadly flu strains to emerge. Yet officials appear to be protecting business interests over human lives, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot

The Environmental Protection Network urges Trump's EPA to restart Solar for All after court rulings against the termination of the program's grants, highlighting how the revival could help 1 million households cut electric bills by 25%.

For nearly twenty years, climate advocates have argued that fiduciary duty obligations require pension fund managers and other fiduciaries to account for climate risk. Legal scholars and investor advocates have advanced the theory in law journals, industry guidance, and conferences like The Sabin Center’s New Climate Fiduciaries Colloquium. It will now be tested in court. Two recent lawsuits – one in the U.S. and one in Canada – put the theory squarely before judges for the first time.

The Canadian case, Hirji v. Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, filed in October 2025 in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, was brought by four young pension fund contributors who allege that Canada’s national pension fund manager breached its statutory and fiduciary duties by mismanaging climate-related financial risk. In the U.S. case, Kvek v. Cushman & Wakefield U.S., Inc., filed in March 2026 in the Western District of Washington, a former employee alleges that Cushman breached its duties under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) by keeping a climate-exposed, underperforming fund as an investment option in its 401(k) menu.

Both cases start from the premise that climate risk is financial risk, and that a fiduciary who ignores climate risk is acting imprudently. But the cases take different approaches, and arise under different bodies of law: Kvek under a detailed U.S. federal statute, and Hirji under Canadian fiduciary jurisprudence that departs from U.S. interpretations in important ways. Each now faces substantive motions, either of which could produce the first meaningful judicial guidance as to whether, and how, fiduciary law requires investment managers to grapple with climate change.

“Everybody’s hair is on fire in the climate or meteorologist community”

Something “unprecedented” is happening in the atmosphere: the Arctic polar vortex, a spinning mass of air high above the North Pole, is collapsing. This disruption isn’t unusual, but it is happening at what may be the earliest point in the year on record, climate experts say.

Every winter the polar vortex strengthens in the stratosphere, a layer of the atmosphere that stretches from about 10 to 30 miles above Earth’s surface, explains Andrea Lopez Lang, an associate professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Like a fast-spinning top, the polar vortex’s tight rotation helps keep cold air trapped over the pole, says Judah Cohen, a climatologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But if the vortex is disrupted, it can push cold air down to other parts of the world, such as North America and Europe.

That disruption is happening far earlier than expected, the experts say.

A statewide survey has revealed the true scale of California's insect biodiversity.

A fossil fuel transition roadmap from COP30 host Brazil, released ahead of the next climate summit in Türkiye, "offers every country a menu of policies to build its own plan to move away from coal, oil, and gas, whether it's a major producer, a big consumer, or an economy that depends on imports."

With the next United Nations Climate Change Conference less than a week away, greenhouse gas levels soaring, and a temporary overshoot of the Paris Agreement's 1.5°C goal now inevitable, Brazil, the host of last year's COP30, on Tuesday published a pair of roadmaps for transitioning away from planet-heating fossil fuels and tackling deforestation.

"We don't need more negotiations. What we need is for governments to start taking action," André Aranha Corrêa do Lago, the Brazilian diplomat who served as the president of COP30, told Reuters. "We need to completely change the way governments deal with climate change. To implement this, we need finance, infrastructure, and transportation ministers at the table."

In his foreword for the transition report, Corrêa do Lago explained that at the closing plenary in Belém last November, "and in the context of the COP being held in the Amazon, I committed to developing... roadmaps for implementing two outcomes of the First Global Stocktake, agreed by consensus at COP28 just two years earlier: (i) transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems in a just, orderly, and equitable manner; and (ii) enhancing efforts toward halting and reversing deforestation and forest degradation by 2030. With their publication, that commitment is fulfilled."

Chemical manufacturer 3M will pay up to $7.35 billion to settle lawsuits by people who say they were sickened by groundwater contamination from compounds used in firefighting foam and other consumer products.

The St. Paul, Minnesota-based company announced the settlement Tuesday. It will pay the money over nine years to as many as 120,000 people who say they were harmed by exposure to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, known collectively as PFAS. The chemicals contaminated groundwater near military bases, airports and other locations where the foam was used to extinguish fires.
3M did not admit liability for the contamination under the agreement.

Called “forever chemicals” because they don’t degrade naturally in the environment, PFAS have been linked to health problems including liver and immune system damage and some cancers. The chemicals are also used in nonstick, water- and grease-resistant products, including clothing and cookware.

With massive heat waves and an intense El Niño reshaping the marine food web along the Central Coast of California, emaciated common murres are washing ashore in unprecedented numbers.

Local governments, schools, nonprofits and other tax-exempt entities received almost $2.5 billion in federal incentives for eligible energy projects in the first two years after the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) was passed. That’s according to new Internal Revenue Service (IRS) data recently released by Senate Finance Committee Democrats that highlights the impact of the IRA’s direct pay provision. Direct pay allows public and nonprofit entities without tax liability to access certain clean energy tax credits as a direct cash reimbursement.

About a dozen clean energy credits are eligible for direct pay, including key buildings-related tax incentives such as the Section 48E investment tax credit, which can be used for on-site solar or storage; the Section 48(a) credit for geothermal heat pumps; and the Section 30C credit for electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure. The new IRS data shows that more than 1,000 entities per year claimed direct pay, and communities increased their uptake by 50% between 2023 and 2024 as awareness grew.

Wildlife conservation filmmaking connects audiences with wild places and the people protecting them.

The ozone hole measured 10.5 million square miles on Sept. 18.

This year's ozone hole over the Antarctic was the largest in a decade, according to a new report by NOAA and NASA.

The 2026 ozone hole became the seventh largest in 48 years of monitoring, fueled by an unusually powerful polar vortex which prolonged ozone depletion in the Antarctic and allowed the hole to grow larger, researchers explained.

This is a stark contrast to 2025, when the ozone hole ranked as the fifth smallest since 1992.

"The polar vortex was unusually large this year in part because planetary-scale weather systems that typically well up from the lower atmosphere and break up the vortex were especially weak in August and September," said Amy Butler, a research scientist at NOAA's Chemical Sciences Laboratory.