EcoWatch

Brazil and Colombia have blown up 19 illegal gold mining operations in the Amazon rainforest. Colombia’s armed forces said the mines were producing about $1.5 million worth of the rare metal every month and polluting the rainforest’s rivers with mercury, reported the BBC and Reuters. By Cristen Hemingway Jaynes The unlawful…

The largest iceberg in the world — A23a, nearly 1,500 square miles, about three times as big as New York City — has broken free of its anchor on the floor of the Weddell Sea and begun to drift toward the Southern…

The U.S. Coast Guard is searching off the Louisiana coast for the source of a leak in a 67-mile-long pipeline that has spilled over 1 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. By Paige Bennett When the…

Earlier this week, the U.S. Global Change Research Program released the United States’ Fifth National Climate Assessment, an overview of the effects climate change is having on the country. By: Cristen Hemingway Jaynes The main message of the assessment is clear: Every part…

New York State Attorney General Letitia James sued PepsiCo on Wednesday, claiming the corporation had endangered the environment and misled the public regarding its plans to get rid of single-use plastic packaging. By Cristen Hemingway Jaynes The attorney general’s office found that the food…

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) is forecasting that in 2024, electricity from solar energy will exceed the amount of energy coming from hydropower sources by about 14%. The prediction has been published in EIA’s Short-Term Energy Outlook report. EIA…

In Indonesia, which is the top producer and exporter of palm oil globally, about 200,000 hectares (494,210 acres) of oil palm plantations are to be replaced with forests, the government announced Tuesday. By Paige Bennett The move will convert oil…

Rapidly intensifying hurricanes are some of the most frightening and destructive types of extreme weather. Predicting them has been notoriously difficult for forecasters who have been unable to fully understand why some tropical storms or tropical depressions that seem commonplace can suddenly turn…

According to a new report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the planet’s hydrological cycle is “spinning out of balance” due to human activity and climate change. Extreme rainfall and droughts, seemingly two opposites on a spectrum of extreme weather, are bringing unprecedented and frequent damage…

The United Nations Climate Ambition Summit in New York today brings together what UN Secretary-General António Guterres called the “first movers and doers” of the climate crisis with the goal of speeding up action on climate change by governments, local authorities, business and finance…