In an interview with Yale Environment 360, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says the next U.S. administration must play a leading role in global climate change policy and cautions that China and the developing world must not follow the same path of industrialization as the United States and western Europe.

In the discussion of the global food emergency, one underlying factor is barely mentioned: The world is running out of water. A British science writer, who authored a major book on water resources, here explores the nexus between water overconsumption and current food shortages.

The burgeoning amount of carbon dioxide in oceans is affecting a lot more than coral reefs. It is also damaging marine life and, most ominously, threatening the future survival of marine populations.

New evidence suggests that we have already passed a dangerous threshold for the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and that the time for taking strong action is slipping away.

By taking bits of a single gene, scientists are using DNA barcoding to
identify new species. If a portable hand-held scanning device can be
developed, one ecologist says, it could “do for biodiversity what the
printing press did for literacy.”