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Renewable energy projects, like a hybrid wind and diesel system on San Cristobal Island, are paving the way for the Galapagos Islands' clean energy future, according to this analysis. Elecgalapagos, a utility tasked with leading the islands' transition away from fossil fuels, has set a goal to source 70% of the Galapagos' electricity from renewables in the near future. San Cristobal is home to three turbines providing about 30% of its electricity needs.

Necker Island, a small Caribbean island owned by business icon Richard Branson, has signed a contract to slash its diesel fuel use by building a renewable energy-powered microgrid.

The Energy Information Agency emphasized the growing importance of offshore wind to the US energy landscape in its year-end summary, according to this piece. The summary also touted the significance of Deepwater Wind's Block Island wind farm off of Rhode Island -- the first of its kind in the US.

The Indonesian island Sumba is working to provide 100 percent renewable electricity to all 650,000 residents by 2025. 

he island's current water supply comes from local wells, supplemented by the desalination plant located at the SCE Pebbly Beach Generating Station. The existing desalination facility produces up to 200,000 gallons of water per day, and with this GE expansion, the overall future capacity will increase to up to 350,000 gallons of water per day.

Bonaire (pop. 14,500), a small island off the coast of Venezuela, is famous for its beautiful marine reefs, which are visited by 70,000 tourists every year. What many of the tourists don't realize is that the majority of the electricity powering their needs comes from renewable energy. Yet for the residents of Bonaire, the switch from fossil-fueled to renewable energy systems has made a world of difference.

Chile has created a vast marine park around the Desventuradas Islands, a few hundred miles off its coast, to protect many species that can be found nowhere else in the world. "For many years, Chile has been one of the most important fishing countries in the world," said campaigner Alex Munoz. With the marine park's creation, he added, "we're also becoming a leader in marine conservation." 

The White House last week outlined plans to get the US offshore wind industry off the ground. The White House has awarded Maine, Rhode Island, New York and Massachusetts each a grant of $600,000 to support offshore wind development. It has also established an interagency group in support of offshore wind. As part of that effort, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management plans to offer areas off the coasts of North Carolina and New Jersey. GovTech.com (10/2) 

A Haitian initiative supported by apparel company Timberland has given way to a more ambitious goal to farm sustainable cotton on the island

Cleantech company Nova Innovation has reportedly built the world's first fully operational, commercial, grid-connected array of underwater turbines that generate power from oceanic tides. The array is located northeast of Scotland in the Shetland Islands.

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.

Looks like Fox News and Congress are becoming ever more intellectually isolated from the American people, perched together on a sinking island of climate denialism.

President Barack Obama today announced a major expansion of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, rendering large areas of the central Pacific off-limits to fishing and energy exploration. The move will expand the marine sanctuary to more than 780,000 square miles.

Every year, the world produces more than two billion tons of waste - enough to fill a fleet of trash trucks to circle the world 24 times, according to sustainability project the World Counts. The World Bank estimates the yearly global cost of dealing with waste is more than $200 billion and predicts annual waste will exceed 11 million tons per day by 2100 if current trends continue.  But where does it all go? Whether it's an island built as a landfill or the outskirts of historic monuments, the world's waste is piling up with no end in sight. The following images offer an acute reminder of the seriousness of waste management and the desperate need to address it. It's simply not sustainable.

Deepwater Wind finally received federal permits, along with a lease from Rhode Island, officially authorizing the first U.S. offshore wind project.

At the University of Miami's Department of Atmospheric Sciences, Brian McNoldy and other researchers have been accumulating sea level data from Virginia Key (a small island just south of Miami Beach) since 1996. Over those nineteen years, sea levels around the Miami coast have already gone up 3.7 inches.

Lawmakers in New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Vermont aim to introduce carbon pricing legislation, including carbon taxes and market-based carbon cap-and-trade measures,

The Governors of California, New York, and Washington have formed the United States Climate Alliance-a bipartisan coalition of nine states committed to upholding the Paris Agreement despite President Trump's decision to end U.S. participation. The nine states - California, New York, Massachusetts, Washington, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, Oregon, and Hawaii - represent nearly a third of U.S. annual GDP.

A new study calculates that the island of Borneo lost nearly 150,000 orangutans in the period between 1999 and 2015, largely as a result of deforestation and killing. There were an estimated 104,700 of the critically endangered apes left as of 2012. The study also warns that another 45,000 orangutans are doomed by 2050 under the business-as-usual scenario, where forests are cleared for logging, palm oil, mining and pulpwood leases. Orangutans are also disappearing from intact forests, most likely being killed, the researchers say.

President Barack Obama made a forceful call for climate action Monday, calling out "the cynics and the deniers" who stand in the way of carbon regulations and warning that the failure to act would "condemn our children to a world they will no longer have the capacity to repair." Obama said the price of inaction was intolerably high, while the cost of action would be less than critics claim. "On this issue, of all issues, there is such a thing as being too late. That moment is almost upon us," he said