Earth & Environmental Science

rss
IJA goes Open Access

As 2023 ends and a new year begins, the International Journal of Astrobiology is preparing to begin a new journey. Beginning in 2024, all articles in IJA will be available under Gold Open Access.

Read more

Getting smart with water security

Dragan Savic, Editor-in-Chief of Cambridge Prisms: Water, explains how technology, combined with the right management philosophy, can help solve global water challenges “Water security is a multi-dimensional and enduring human goal,” states Professor Dragan Savic.…

Read more

Water – the new oil

Richard Fenner, Editor-in-Chief of Cambridge Prisms: Water, explains why a multi-disciplinary approach is crucial to meet human needs and maintain healthy ecosystems Ensuring water security, which is threatened by the twin threats of climate change and a growing population, is one of the biggest challenges of our time.…

Read more

“We need action absolutely right now”

Cambridge Prisms: Extinction Co-Editors-in-Chief John Alroy and Barry Brook explain why swift and decisive action is required from governments, policy-makers and the public Public understanding of the main drivers of extinction – habitat loss, climate change, over-exploitation, invasive species, and pollution – is crucial if we are to stop biodiversity loss and maintain the ecosystems that sustain human populations.…

Read more

Embracing a sea change

Emeritus Professor Tom Spencer, Editor-in-Chief of Cambridge Prisms: Coastal Futures, reflects on the influence of ‘wonderful’ teachers and the need to understand a plethora of viewpoints in relation to our coastlines The window for meaningful action relating to the world’s coastlines is closing fast, but Tom Spencer remains ‘guardedly optimistic’ that there is still time for societies and communities to come up with sustainable strategies for those that live and work at the coast. …

Read more

Depending on the Planting Design, More Crop Diversity Means More Productivity – No Matter How You Estimate the Yields

As an ecologist, I am interested in conserving forgotten crop landraces and vanishing cropping systems of indigenous agrarian societies. Indigenous food production systems are always polycrop systems, growing diverse food and non-food crops on marginal lands, depending no external materials (e.g. agrochemicals, machiney, fossil fuel). Dozens of experimental studies proved the superior productive efficacy of multiple cropping systems, growing mostly 2 or 3 crops), over monocultures promoted by modern, industrial agriculture.

Read more

Environmental Data Science Communities – we are better together!

We are pleased to be collaborating with Guest Editors at NOAA, the Met Office, the German Aerospace Center, the Climate Research Centre in Singapore and Oxford University on a Call for Papers on the topic of Environmental Informatics (deadline for submission 12 November) for Environmental Data Science, a new open access journal published by Cambridge University Press.…

Read more

The importance of soft-bodied organisms in ancient food webs

Past extinction events are key to understanding how modern life will respond to climate change. For ecologists who study communities of interacting organisms, the fossil record holds a wealth of information about how different species react to environmental perturbations, but with a major drawback — it only captures species with bones and shells.

Read more

World Ocean Day

We celebrate World Ocean Day to remind us of how important the marine habitat is today and its need for better environmental stewardship tomorrow.…

Read more

A new moment for climate governance: Can President Biden save the world from climate change?

Within hours of assuming office, President Joe Biden began taking steps to reverse his predecessor’s devastating policies on climate change. He returned the United States to the Paris Agreement, declared that his administration would cooperate with other countries to tackle the problem, and pledged that Americans would substantially cut their greenhouse gas pollution.…

Read more

Announcing the launch of Environmental Data Science

Environmental Data Science: a new open access venue for the transformative potential of AI and data science in addressing environmental challenges It’s my pleasure to announce the launch of Environmental Data Science, a new peer-reviewed, open access journal dedicated to the potential of artificial intelligence and data science to enhance our understanding of the environment and to address climate change. …

Read more

Framing the Future of Environmental Conservation

The paper ‘Framing conservation: ‘biodiversity’ and the values embedded in scientific language, published in Environmental Conservation, has been chosen as the latest addition to the Editor’s Choice Collection We all know that political groups are very thoughtful about how they frame the issues that matter to them.…

Read more

Q&A with Dr. Jennifer Beseres Pollack, Environmental Science Chief Editor for Experimental Results

This is the latest of an ongoing series of interviews with people involved with our new Open Access journal, Experimental Results – a forum for short research papers from experimental disciplines across Science, Technology and Medicine, providing authors with an outlet for rapid publication of small chunks of research findings with maximum visibility.…

Read more

Large-scale battery storage: Challenges and opportunities for technology and policy

Could a large-enough battery cushion the swings in wind and solar power? And can renewable energy be trusted, or are we just seeing technical challenges to implementation? In a recent review article published in MRS Energy & Sustainability, energy experts weigh in on these questions and consider the challenges and opportunities for technology and policy in relation to large-scale battery storage. The article also addresses a fascinating case study from South Australia, which currently houses the world's biggest battery.

Read more

Energy storage in the Midwest and beyond: A timely analysis

As the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) released an update to last year’s order on energy storage, MRS Energy & Sustainability publishes a timely collection of papers that unpack the issue of energy storage in the Midwest and beyond. Last February, FERC unanimously approved a landmark order in the fast-developing field of energy storage. FERC Order 841 directed grid operators across the US to develop market rules for energy storage to participate in the wholesale energy, capacity and ancillary services markets by treating storage as a generation resource.

Read more

Planning for Disasters in a Changing Environment

In October 2018 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a special report (SR15) warning of the impacts of a global rise in temperature above 1.5 C average, explaining that only 12 years remained before irreversible changes and disasters were ‘baked’ into the global system.…

Read more

New wallaby-sized dinosaur from the ancient Australian-Antarctic rift valley

Upper jaws of a new dinosaur from Victoria, Australia, give fresh insight into the diversity of small herbivorous dinosaurs that once inhabited the ancient Australian-Antarctic rift valley 125 million years ago A new, wallaby-sized herbivorous dinosaur has been identified from five fossilized upper jaws in 125 million year old rocks from the Cretaceous period of Victoria, southeastern Australia.…

Read more

Thank the oceans for softening the blow of climate change

Climate change is the greatest challenge facing humanity. It’s an almighty catastrophe that will only become worse with time. We’ll be seeing more powerful storms, increasingly devastating wildfires, longer droughts and recurring floods, to name but a few of the impacts of climate change that are quickly becoming commonplace globally.…

Read more

Clean energy transitions in a global economy

Addressing climate change effectively requires making low-carbon technologies competitive against existing fossil-fuel based energy technologies. Bargaining over policies to promote clean energy is often as a domestic issue, pitting interest groups against each another as they vie to shape national polices.…

Read more

Tornadoes, Fire and Ice

Listening to tornadoes to increase warning times and save lives, studying the effect of ice on the combustion of oil spills, and investigating how sea ice affects our climate – discover the latest research in Fluid Dynamics.…

Read more

CO2 beneath our feet

Climate change is currently one of the biggest threats to human existence. Carbon sequestration – the storage of CO2 underground – is one innovative method that could help to reduce the amount of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere and ultimately save the human species.…

Read more

We think we’re the first advanced earthlings—but how do we really know?

Imagine if, many millions of years ago, dinosaurs drove cars through cities of mile-high buildings. A preposterous idea, right? Over the course of tens of millions of years, however, all of the direct evidence of a civilization—its artifacts and remains—gets ground to dust. How do we really know, then, that there weren’t previous industrial civilizations on Earth that rose and fell long before human beings appeared? It’s a compelling thought experiment, and one that Adam Frank, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester, and Gavin Schmidt, the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, take up in a paper published in the International Journal of Astrobiology.

Read more