news 2021

Amazon rain forests could be at far higher risk of extreme drought than previously thought, according to new research. An international study led by the University warns that huge areas in the eastern part of the Amazon face severe drying by the end of the century if action is not taken to curb carbon emissions.

Lead levels in London's atmosphere have dropped drastically since lead additives in petrol were banned, and currently meet UK air quality targets - yet airborne particles in the capital are still highly lead-enriched compared to natural background levels, a new study reveals. And similar problems could exist in Birmingham and the West Midlands, as well as other conurbations across the country.

Although the emissions targets for aviation are in line with the overall goals of the Paris Agreement, there is a high likelihood that the climate impact of aviation will not meet these goals, according to a new study. Aviation is an important contributor to the global economy, but contributes to climate change by creating carbon dioxide (CO2) as well as non-CO2 effects such as forming nitrogen oxides, ozone and contrailcirrus clouds, which all contribute to global warming.

Researchers from the Henry Royce Institute at The University of Manchester's Sustainable Materials Innovation Hub (SMI Hub) in collaboration with Callaly are working together to find alternative sustainable materials for menstrual hygiene products to help combat the growing need for natural-renewable alternatives for plastics.

New research into one of the most volatile periods in Earth's geological history has narrowed down the precise age of a meteorite impact in the Ukraine around 65 million years ago, ruling out the chance that it contributed to the extinction of the dinosaurs but offering new insight into the planet's climate history.

An at-risk species of fish has established itself in lochs across Scotland with the help of conservation managers and by rapidly adapting to its new environment, resulting in changes to their DNA, their ecology, and body shape, according to a new study. In an urgent bid to conserve the freshwater powan species of fish, scientists introduced eggs and fish to new loch sites across Scotland over the past 30 years, with the aim of establishing new and robust populations.

An entire ecosystem of rare and endangered species along the streams and rivers of California is being threatened by the water management across the state, scientists have warned. In a new study published today, a team including researchers from Cardiff University has revealed the widespread and long-lasting damage that humans are inflicting by diverting water for their own needs.

Researchers have created a plant-based, sustainable, scalable material that could replace single-use plastics in many consumer products. It was a surprise to find our research could also address a big problem in sustainability: that of plastic pollution Tuomas Knowles The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, created a polymer film by mimicking the properties of spider silk, one of the strongest materials in nature.

The first double-blind experiment analysing the role of human decision-making in climate reconstructions has found that it can lead to substantially different results. Scientists aren't robots, and we don't want them to be, but it's important to learn where the decisions are made and how they affect the outcome Ulf Büntgen The experiment, designed and run by researchers from the University of Cambridge, had multiple research groups from around the world use the same raw tree-ring data to reconstruct temperature changes over the past 2,000 years.

Sea ice in the coastal regions of the Arctic may be thinning up to twice as fast as previously thought, according to a new modelling study led by UCL researchers. Sea ice thickness is inferred by measuring the height of the ice above the water, and this measurement is distorted by snow weighing the ice floe down.

Ancient El Niño-like weather patterns were the primary drivers of environmental change in sub-Saharan Africa when humans were evolving, according to research involving UCL. Scientists have shown that over the last 620,000 years these alternately wet and dry patterns had more profound impacts in sub-Saharan Africa than  the great ice age cycles, which until now have been more commonly linked to human evolution.

Noise complaints in London increased by nearly 50% during the first lockdown in Spring 2020 compared with the same period in 2019, finds a report by UCL researchers. Complaints about neighbourhood noise - mainly from residents - and construction increased the most, at 36% and 50% respectively. Areas with higher unemployment rates, more residents with no qualifications and lower house prices saw the biggest rise in complaints.

Plastic pollution and other ocean debris are a complex global environmental problem. Every year, ten million tonnes of plastic are estimated to be mismanaged, resulting in entry into the ocean, of which half will float initially. Yet, only 0.3 million tonnes of plastic can be found floating on the surface of the ocean.

A team of volcanologists who observed the colossal 2018 eruption of Kilauea, Hawai'i, have tracked how potentially toxic metals carried in its gas plumes were transported away from the volcano to be deposited on the landscape.

A group of citizen scientists is being recruited to help investigate the scale of microplastic air pollution inside people's homes. During the first phase of the study, researchers from the University of Leeds will work with 40 families from Bradford, in West Yorkshire, to measure the level of microplastics caught in sampling devices placed inside their houses.

New research shows concentrations of the toxic element mercury in rivers and fjords connected to the Greenland Ice Sheet are comparable to rivers in industrial China, an unexpected finding raising questions about the effects of glacial melting in an area that is a major exporter of seafood. "There are surprisingly high levels of mercury in the glacier meltwaters we sampled in southwest Greenland," said lead author Jon Hawkings, a postdoctoral fellow at Florida State University and the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences.

Heat-induced male infertility will see some species succumb to the effects of climate change earlier than thought, new research warns. A study of 43 fruit fly (Drosophila) species by a team including ecologists at the University of Leeds showed that in almost half of the species, males became sterile at lower than lethal temperatures.

Great tits living in cities are genetically different from great tits in the countryside. Researchers made the discovery after a unique study where they examined populations of great tits in nine large European cities, including Glasgow. The researchers compared the city bird genes with the genes of their relatives in the countryside.

Pollinators in the tropics are less likely to thrive in intensive croplands, finds a new study led by UCL researchers suggesting bees and butterflies are at risk of major losses. Across the globe, lower levels of land use intensity are good for pollinators, finds the new Nature Communications paper which shows the importance of sustainable land management in cities and agricultural regions.

Scientists studying the impact of record heat and drought on intact African tropical rainforests were surprised by how resilient they were to extreme conditions during the last major El Niño event. The Leeds-led international study, reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences today, found that intact rainforests across tropical Africa continued to remove carbon from the atmosphere before and during the 2015-2016 El Niño, despite the extreme heat and drought.