Category News

Big banks are pumping billions into new oil and gas production despite net zero pledges, campaigners have said. Banks including HSBC, Barclays and Deutsche Bank are still backing new oil and gas despite being part of a green banking group, ShareAction said. Investors should force banks to demand green plans from fossil fuel firms before funding them, it said. HSBC and Barclays said they were focused on achieving environmental goals.

“Net zero” means not adding to greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere by cutting and trying to balance out emissions.

If the Earth is to avoid damaging environmental effects, including more extreme weather, it needs to limit average global warming to below 1.5 degrees centigrade.

To achieve this, we need to get to net zero by 2050, experts have sa...

A new study has revealed that a 1.5°C increase in temperatures will result in virtually every single coral on the planet bleaching, scientists are warning. The research found that only a minuscule 0.2% of reefs would escape at the bleaching events.

The team of researchers from James Cook University, the University of Leeds and Texas Tech University used the latest climate modeling data to demonstrate the catastrophe facing our coral reefs as a result of the earth warming.

The study found that even areas that were perceived to be able to withstand the rising temperature would not be able to, and the corals would enter into bleaching events.

However, things may not be total doom, and there is a ray of hope.

The lead author of the study Adele Dixon, a Ph.D. candidate at the Univ...

Plastic pollution now plagues almost every species living in the oceans and, at the same time, sea surface temperatures once considered extreme have now become normal. Those are the findings of two separate studies published in February ahead of the ongoing One Ocean Summit, a conference organized by French President Emmanuel Macron to protect marine life from overfishing, climate change and pollution. Together, the research papers tell a story of an ecosystem vital to human survival that is increasingly under attack.

The first study, published in the journal Plos Climate, found heat that used to be considered rare had become normal for most of the world’s oceans...

A new study, published in the journal Marine and Coastal Fisheries, has found that the rising amount of ocean heatwaves, triggered by climate change, has a direct effect on the population numbers of the squid species Doryteuthis opalescens which primarily was known to inhabit the warmer waters off Baja California.

According to the study, the population numbers of the species have significantly increased between 1998 and 2019 along the Pacific coast, with Washington seeing a 39-fold increase in squid populations and Oregon recording a 25-fold increase.

By examining fisheries-independent survey data collected by the National Marine Fisheries Service, the researchers were able to develop a spatiotemporal model that shows squid density changes from central California to northern Washington fro...

Evidence is starting to build that fishing affects the way the ocean takes up carbon from the atmosphere, affecting climate change. The ocean is part of the global ‘carbon cycle’, which shifts carbon between reservoirs including plants, soil, water bodies, and the atmosphere. The ocean is largely a ‘sink’ of carbon, drawing it out of the atmosphere and reducing levels of carbon dioxide, which affect global warming.

However, there are many ways the ocean’s carbon sinking powers can be disrupted, and the possibility that fishing is causing significant impacts has recently been in the research spotlight.

Dr Emma Cavan, from the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial, and Dr Simeon Hill, from the British Antarctic Survey, have just published a new paper in Global Change Biolo...

The northern European country, an island in the North Atlantic, is one of few places to allow whale hunting. But demand for the mammals’ meat has decreased dramatically since Japan – Iceland’s main market – resumed commercial whaling in 2019. Iceland’s fisheries minister says whaling is no longer profitable. 

“Why should Iceland take the risk of keeping up whaling, which has not brought any economic gain, in order to sell a product for which there is hardly any demand?” Svandis Svavarsdottir wrote on Friday in the Morgunbladid newspaper. 

Iceland’s most recent annual quotas allow for the hunting of 209 fin whales, which are considered endangered, and 217 minke whales – one of the smallest species.

But Ms Svavarsdottir, a member of the Left-Green Movement, said the fact that only...

In 2015 and 2016, record ocean temperatures triggered coral bleaching events around the world — from Hawai‘i to the Caribbean to Australia — turning once-healthy polyps into ghostly skeletons. But some reefs managed to remain intact due to the cooling effects of upwelling and ocean currents. According to a new study, these special coral reefs, called “refugia,” could disappear in the very near future as human-induced climate change continues to heat up the world.

Presently, about 84% of the world’s shallow coral reefs are places of thermal refugia, defined in the paper as places that have 10 years to recover from heat stress. But when the world heats up to 1.5° Celsius (2...

Jordan is a country known for its ancient rock-cut city of Petra, and for the salt lake called Dead Sea that lies to its west. But over the past decade, it also became a forerunner in coral reef preservation through an ingenious idea. Coral reefs are scattered along the Gulf of Aqaba, a popular area for tourists – specifically scuba divers – who love to explore the area’s reefs and marine life. The region is home to 127 species of Aqaba’s delicate corals, some of which are 6,000 years old, according to an April 2018 report in the National Geographic.

But with growing urban development along the coast of the city, some changes had to be made. The nation wanted to meet tourist demand, but not at the cost of destroying the area’s marine life...

Coral reefs are one of the world’s most biologically diverse and productive ecosystems. They provide abundant ecological goods and services and are central to the socio-economic and cultural welfare of coastal and island communities – throughout tropical and subtropical ocean countries – by contributing billions of dollars to the local and global economies, when combined with tourism and recreation.

Coral reefs also play a vital role in the protection of shorelines, fisheries, biodiversity and unique ecosystems. Building magnificent reefs, tiny coral polyps have developed an incredible ability to calcify and are the most prolific mineralizers on the planet.

They form immense structures like the Great Barrier Reef, which is a world heritage site...

The Hurghada Environmental Protection and Conservation Association has been protecting the Red Sea’s coral reefs from destructive anchors by installing the largest mooring system in the world.

When you sail a yacht and need to stop somewhere, you drop an anchor, right? Everyone knows that. But what everybody might not be aware of is the damage these anchors can do to the environment. The popularity of the Red Sea’s rich coral reefs can also lead to their destruction, with every drop of the anchor immediately killing whatever coral happened to be underneath it. There had to be another way – and the Hurghada Environmental Protection and Conservation Association (HEPCA) found it with the creation of the world’s largest mooring system.

Mooring is another way of basically parking your sh...