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Global trade has made it easier to buy things. But our consumption habits often fuel threats to biodiversity - such as deforestation, overhunting and overfishing - thousands of miles away. Now, scientists have mapped how major consuming countries drive threats to endangered species elsewhere. Such maps could be useful for finding the most efficient ways to protect critical areas important for biodiversity, the researchers suggest in a new study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution. For example, the maps show that commodities used in the United States and the European Union exert several threats on marine species in Southeast Asia, mainly due to overfishing, pollution and aquaculture. The U.S. also exerts pressure on hotspots off the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica and Nicaragua, and at the mouth of the Orinoco around Trinidad and Tobago. European Union's impacts extend to the islands around Madagascar: Réunion, Mauritius and the Seychelles. The maps also revealed some unexpected linkages. For instance, the impact of U.S. consumption in Brazil appears to be much greater in southern Brazil (in the Brazilian Highlands where agriculture and grazing are extensive) than inside the Amazon basin, which receives a larger chunk of the attention. The U.S. also has high biodiversity footprint in southern Spain and Portugal, due to their impacts on threatened fish and bird species. These countries are rarely perceived as threat hotspots.

"Climate Take Back," as the new mission has been named, is the successor to Mission Zero, the name given to a vision articulated in 1997 that, for most outside the company, seemed audacious at the time: "To be the first company that, by its deeds, shows the entire industrial world what sustainability is in all its dimensions: People, process, product, place and profits - by 2020 - and in doing so we will become restorative through the power of influence."

Carbon Brief analysis shows the UK's CO2 emissions fell by 5.8% in 2016, after a record 52% drop in coal use.

Carbon emissions in the UK are down to 420 million tons annually, or about what the country emitted more than 120 years ago, according to a report from Carbon Brief. A 52% decrease in coal consumption during 2016 fueled an overall decline in carbon emissions of 5.8% for the year.

The euphoria over rise in world tiger population early this year may have been misplaced for India as the official data placed before Parliament shows that 98 tigers died in the country by November 16, 2016, a steep 25 per cent rise over last year when 78 deaths were reported. There are many anti-poaching measures initiated by NTCA which coordinate with state forest departments, but to little avail. In fact, poaching cases increased by more than 100 per cent this year. The figures attribute nearly 30 tiger deaths to poaching this year, which is more than double of last year's figure of 14. Top forest officials that Mail Today spoke with expressed helplessness in their fight against poachers and at times cited "political pressures'' leading to more frequent man-tiger conflict.

Corporations interested in sustainability have become a major driver in the renewable energy industry, said experts at the North American Energy Markets Association meeting in Florida last month. "There is about 15 GW of latent demand for renewables that wants to be built by 2020 in order to meet the targets of Fortune 500 companies that have committed to some degree of renewable energy in their supply portfolios," said Invenergy Vice President of Sales and Marketing Craig Gordon. 3M, Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft are among the companies seeking power purchase agreements with renewables in the US.

Air pollution contributed to a total of 80,665 premature deaths of adults over 30 years in Mumbai and Delhi in 2015, a two-fold jump from 1995, according to a new study at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. In economic terms, air pollution cost the two cities $10.66 billion (approximately Rs 70,000 crore) in 2015, or about 0.71% of the country's gross domestic product. The study has said the impact on health and productivity as a result of exposure to pollution and the consequent burden of respiratory ailments rose with every passing decade.

Las Vegas Sands (NYSE: LVS) has been ranked as one of the greenest large companies in the world in the 2016 Newsweek Green Rankings, released today. LVS holds the #39 spot on the U.S. 500 list and the #74 position on the Global 500 list, while the company's subsidiary in Macao, Sands China Ltd., has been listed #62. This accomplishment makes Las Vegas Sands and Sands China Ltd. the highest ranked hospitality companies in the U.S., as well as in the world.

South Korea's newly elected president, Moon Jae-in, has ordered the temporary closure of 10 coal power plants for the entire month of June to help reduce air pollution in the country. President Moon Jae-in reportedly stated that he plans to phase these coal plants out over his five-year term.

Logging emissions is an important step in securing the transparency that China needs to solve its pollution problems, Mr. Ma argues. Among the harmful pollutants are air particles known as PM2.5, which can enter deep into the lungs and even into the bloodstream. In an interview, he talked about the considerable progress he sees in the Chinese government's approach to air pollution, but also how concerns about social unrest continued to constrain discussion of pollution's damage to public health. Before 2013, levels of PM2.5 [the finest and deadliest particulate matter] were not monitored or made public in a single city. Now it's monitored and released in more than 400 cities. China has entered an era when air quality information is released. It's much more transparent. The 11th and 12th Five-Year Plans only referred to "emission reduction targets," so local governments could play games by claiming they had reduced emissions. Now, by saying by what year the PM2.5 must be below a certain amount, it's much harder to fake. The 13th Five-Year Plan is a progressive plan because it says that the public has the right to participate, to monitor, and that it's the public's right to know.

Currently, SCE customers lease or own more than 12,000 plug-in electric vehicles (PEV), which represent about 10 percent of national EV sales. Because California leads the nation in EV adoption, other utilities and stakeholders in the auto industry may find the information from the white paper useful.

Article from 2007 on Disney's Steamboat Ventures investing in a startup called EdgeCast which leased a facility in Seattle operated by Switch and Data (SDXC).

Masdar City, founded in 2008, is a dynamic new Middle-Eastern city being built in a desert environment. Its aim is to be the most sustainable city in the world and offers an exciting opportunity to provide unique insights into the application of different innovative technologies as 'new-build' within an urban environment. Birmingham is a well-established post-industrial city that has evolved over fourteen hundred years. It was one of the fastest growing cities in 19th century England (Popp and Wilson, 2009) [1].

Global investment in water management solutions is projected to reach nearly $3 billion in 2025-up from $2 billion in 2016, according to a Navigant Research report.

Palm oil shipments from Indonesia, the world's largest producer, climbed to the highest level in eight months in October as a decline in supplies of substitute oils in India and China spurred demand from the biggest buyers.

exceeded our Better Buildings, Better Plants goal within the first four years of joining - seven years ahead of schedule. We achieved a 32 percent reduction in energy intensity across 14 U.S. industrial, commercial and mixed-use sites. At our 100-year-old headquarters building in West Hartford, Conn., we were able to reduce our energy use intensity by 10 percent in just two years, leading to a $233,000 savings in 2013. And those savings will show up in every budget going forward, too.

The proposed Pebble Mine in southwestern Alaska is a project of almost unfathomable scale. The Pebble Limited Partnership intends to excavate a thick layer of ore - nearly a mile deep in places - containing an estimated 81 billion pounds of copper, 5.6 billion pounds of molybdenum, and 107 million ounces of gold. The mine would cover 28 square miles and require the construction of the world's largest earthen dam - 700 feet high and several miles long - to hold back a 10-square-mile containment pond filled with up to 2.5 billion tons of sulfide-laden mine waste. All this would be built not only in an active seismic region, but also in one of the most unspoiled and breathtaking places on the planet - the headwaters of Bristol Bay, home to the world's most productive salmon fishery. Composed of tundra plain, mountain ranges, hundreds of rivers, and thousands of lakes, the greater Bristol Bay region encompasses five national parks and wildlife refuges, and one of the largest state parks in the U.S.

China is building ecocities in droves. Dozens of these green-branded, new frontiers of urbanism are already in an advanced state of development, and upwards of 200 more are on the way. In fact, over 80 per cent of all prefecture level cities in the country (the administrative division below "province") have at least one ecocity project in the works. Over the coming decades, it has been estimated, 50 per cent of China's new urban developments will be stamped with labels such as "eco," "green," "low carbon," or "smart".

To avoid the worst impacts of climate change, the world needs to invest $44 trillion in clean energy by 2050 - an average of $1.2 trillion per year for the next 36 years. Yet global investment in clean energy was just $254 billion in 2013, down from $286 billion in 2012 and down from the record $318 billion in 2011. We have a long way to go to achieve the Clean Trillion goal. There are, however, several signs of progress.

Nearly every piece of plastic still exists on Earth, regardless of whether it's been recycled, broken down into microscopic bits or discarded in the ocean. And the world keeps producing more of the material -- creating 288 million metric tons of it in 2012. About 4.8 to 12.7 million metric tons of it end up in the oceans in 2010, according to a new estimate published in the journal Science.

The Lego Group has set a goal to source 100% of its electricity from renewables by 2020. In support of the goal, Lego's parent company Kirkbi has acquired a 32% stake in Dong Energy's Borkum Riffgrund 1 wind farm off the coast of Germany. Lego CEO Jorgen Vig Knudstorp said the company would continue to look for opportunities to invest in renewables. In addition, he said, it is working to boost recycling and cut down on packaging in an effort to be more sustainable