Environment

Fast fashion is wreaking havoc on the environment. That's why Jessi Arrington makes a point of (almost) never buying anything new. She explains how she builds a sustainable wardrobe that looks great.

(Image credit: Michael Brands/TED)

Millions of tons of plastic flow into the ocean each year. David Katz's Plastic Bank helps turn off the tap — and gives the poor an income source — creating a circular economy around plastic waste.

(Image credit: Russell Edwards/TED)

Oysters filter water, their shells form protective reefs and habitats, and regenerate into more oyster shells. Kate Orff uses oysters to revive depleted ecosystems — like those around New York City.

(Image credit: James Duncan Davidson/TED)

Our industrial food system is doing serious damage to our planet and food waste is a rampant problem. Tristram Stuart offers one strategy to combat food waste: cook scraps and feed them to livestock.

(Image credit: Dafydd Jones/TED)

We're often told that economic growth is good, but Kate Raworth says our addiction to growth is destroying the planet. To thrive in the 21st century, she says we need a new circular economic system.

(Image credit: Bret Hartman/TED)

If the snowpack keeps dwindling around northeastern maple trees, it's possible that by the end of the century, proper conditions for making maple syrup might no longer exist, a new study suggests.

(Image credit: Jonathan Lesage/Getty Images)

African swine fever has been spreading rapidly in China and has also travelled from Russia and Eastern Europe to Belgium. Experts fear it is only a matter of time before it reaches the US.

A global outbreak of African swine fever will reach the US within a year unless border protections are tightened and imports of high-risk pork products banned, warn biosecurity experts. It would cost the US economy $16.5bn (£12.9bn) in the first year alone, it has been estimated.

An ongoing epidemic of the virus, which is deadly for pigs but cannot yet be transmitted to humans, has prompted the US Department of Agriculture to review and strengthen its border protections. After outbreaks in Belgium and China this year, the USDA has increased the use of sniffer dogs at major ports, airports, land borders crossings, and has also built quarantine stations and increased passenger and cargo inspections on flights from China and Russia, the worst hit countries.

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Wisdom, a 68-year-old Laysan albatross, has laid another egg with her longtime lover at the Midway Atoll national wildlife refuge

In sea mariner lore, an albatross is considered a good omen, and for almost seven decades, one bird has spread generations of blessings across the Pacific Ocean.

Wisdom, a 68-year-old Laysan albatross believed to be the world’s oldest known wild bird, has returned to her home at the Midway Atoll national wildlife refuge for yet another winter – and laid yet another egg to add to the already impressive brood that she has built up over an impressive lifetime.

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Picture of monk seal with eel up its nose shared by Noaa was only latest episode to occur in the past two years, baffling researchers

The Hawaiian monk seal has become endangered due to a range of threats, from fishing net entanglements to disease. Now the beleaguered species is facing an unexpected new challenge – eels getting stuck up their noses.

Related: Axolotls in crisis: the fight to save the 'water monster' of Mexico City

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The Interior Department is moving forward on revisions to Obama-era conservation plans for the greater sage grouse. The changes would ease restrictions on energy development.

(Image credit: Tom Koerner/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)

The Trump administration wants to reverse a rule that would have required new coal plants to have expensive technology to capture their carbon dioxide emissions.

(Image credit: Branden Camp/AP)

EPA says change to require efficiency efforts instead of carbon capture will encourage ‘clean coal’ in the US and worldwide

The Trump administration is rolling back a climate change regulation that restricted new coal plants.

The change is mostly symbolic – but nevertheless sends a strong signal. Companies in the US are not building plants that burn coal because burning natural gas is cheaper and creates less pollution. Renewable power has also eaten into coal’s market share.

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Under the new plan, the sage grouse’s protected area would shrink by about 9m acres to span just 1.8m acres

The Trump administration has unveiled plans to weaken environmental protections for sprawling areas of the western US considered important habitat for the sage grouse, a chicken-like bird known for its flamboyant courtship displays.

The proposals, put forward by the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM), essentially dismantle much of a landmark 2015 compromise struck between states, oil drilling companies and environmentalists to create a network of protected areas for the sage grouse across 11 western states.

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Up to 96% of all marine species and more than two-thirds of terrestrial species perished 252m years ago

Rapid global warming caused the largest extinction event in the Earth’s history, which wiped out the vast majority of marine and terrestrial animals on the planet, scientists have found.

Related: Save millions of lives by tackling climate change, says WHO

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Single and small multi-family homes must include solar panels starting in 2020. Recent extreme weather events such as wildfires and drought make the need clear, a state official says.

(Image credit: Rich Pedroncelli/AP)

Southern states are not a uniform swath of white, populist, anti-science zealots. As climate is changing, so is the south – in this new column, Megan Mayhew Bergman goes back home to find out more

There’s a Welsh word – hiraeth – which refers to a “homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, or a home which maybe never was”.

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FOI documents show Josh Frydenberg rejected department advice that developing the area was ‘unacceptable’

Environment groups have called for an independent probe into the government’s assessment of an apartment and marina development on protected wetlands in Queensland.

It comes after revelations the former environment minister Josh Frydenberg rejected advice from the environment department that the development was “clearly unacceptable”.

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The fortuitous dip in emissions of the main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, during the past three years is over, as economies turn up. The trend in the near future looks grim, say climate scientists.

(Image credit: Christian Petersen-Clausen/Getty Images)

Government seeks to prioritise environment and end some of world’s worst traffic congestion

Luxembourg is set to become the first country in the world to make all its public transport free.

Fares on trains, trams and buses will be lifted next summer under the plans of the re-elected coalition government led by Xavier Bettel, who was sworn in for a second term as prime minister on Wednesday.

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We are losing the war against climate change; the use of fossil fuels is driving higher carbon emissions when they need to be coming down

Outside of the desperate and the deluded, everyone knows that the world is in the early stages of a truly catastrophic climate change. As Sir David Attenborough told the UN climate change conference in Poland, “the collapse of our civilisations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon”. We have even worked out, with scrupulous care, what we must do to avoid this or to mitigate the effects of climate change. We know what to do. We can see how to do it. There’s only one problem: we do almost nothing.

Figures released today by the University of East Anglia for the conference in Katowice show that global carbon emissions will be higher than ever before this year. In fact they will rise by nearly 3%, an astonishing and terrifying annual figure at a time when the need to diminish them has never been more urgent. The main driver of this growth has been the increased use of coal, which is rapidly approaching its previous peak level, from 2013. There is a particular irony in that this conference is being held in Poland, a country that still derives 80% of its electricity from coal, even if this is less grossly polluting than it was in the Communist era. In fact emissions there are down 30% from their peak in 1988. But far more must be done. To limit global warming to the Paris agreement goal of 1.5C, CO2 emissions would need to decline by 50% by 2030 and reach net zero by around 2050.

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