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The ability of Europe's aging forests to absorb carbon dioxide is heading towards saturation point, threatening one of the continent's main defenses against global warming, a study showed on Sunday.

Currently, around one-fourth of human generated carbon dioxide emissions are absorbed by oceans, making them the world's largest carbon sink. But researchers from Newcastle, Heriot-Watt and Exeter Universities found that surfactants, invisible biological particles on the ocean's surface, can reduce the exchange of gases between the ocean and the air by up to 50 percent.

The growing acidity of the oceans as they absorb ever more carbon dioxide, a factor exacerbated in the winter, raises concerns for the most basic marine life. An Antarctic study of the bottom of the ocean's food chain involves a mooring as tall as the Empire State Building submerged at 1,600 feet and equipped with sensors recording temperature, dissolved carbon dioxide, salinity and pH.

Recent studies have shown, for example that the loss of important predators - from wolves in boreal forests to sharks in seagrass meadows - can lead to growing populations of terrestrial and marine herbivores, whose widespread grazing reduces the ability of ecosystems to absorb carbon.

Ocean acidification is set to cost us $1 trillion by 2100 as it eats away at our tropical coral reefs. The world's oceans have seen a 26 per cent increase in acidity - a result of the oceans absorbing about a quarter of our carbon dioxide emissions.

As a punishing drought continues to grip California and other areas, scientists are exploring hardy succulents as a pathway to genetically engineer plants to use less water. Agave and other succulents such as the prickly pear, pineapple and vanilla have evolved to perform a different kind of photosynthesis that enable their survival in semiarid environments. These species absorb most of their carbon dioxide at night rather than during the day, as most plants do, meaning less water evaporates off the leaves through transpiration. 

The Urban Algae Folly gazebo at Expo 2015 in Milan, Italy, is covered in algae-filled ethylene tetrafluoroethylene plastic that may herald the future of green building. The spirulina in the plastic membranes absorbs carbon dioxide and produces oxygen while expanding more as sunlight intensifies to provide shade. 

The oceans near Antarctica that absorb carbon and protect our planet from climate change have been working robustly in the past decade, finds a new study published yesterday in Science.

Canada's CarbonCure Technologies uses carbon dioxide produced during the cement-making process to fill tiny voids in concrete blocks. As a result, the block absorbs less water, is 20% stronger and more sustainable, according to this article. Builders can use the product to help set them apart from competitors and can "reduce the cost of their production by harnessing the material benefits of CO2, such as high early strength, lower water absorption, and other secondary benefits," says Robert Niven, the company's founder

Adding relatively small amounts of compost to ranchland can have a dramatic and lasting impact on the soil's ability to absorb carbon, according to research from bio-geochemist Whendee Silver. Spreading compost over just 5% of California's pastures would effectively cancel out a year's worth of statewide emissions from the farm and forestry industries, Silver found. "It's inexpensive, it's low technology, it's good land use, it solves multiple problems," she says.

The main reason soaring greenhouse gas emissions have not caused air temperatures to rise more rapidly is that oceans have soaked up much of the heat. But new evidence suggests the oceans' heat-buffering ability may be weakening.

On Tuesday at COP21, the MIT Climate CoLab announced the launch of a series of online contests to help strengthen the resilience of vulnerable countries to respond to climate-related hazards. The suite of contests are part of the UN Secretary-General's Climate Resilience Initiative: Anticipate, Absorb, Reshape (A2R), a global, multi-stakeholder initiative aimed at accelerating action on the ground to enhance climate resilience of the most vulnerable countries and people by 2020. 

"Tropical forests used to absorb carbon. Now they emit as much as all US transit" - a standout headline as a new study published by Science magazine caused a bit of a media stir. Once considered an all important carbon sink, the study is suggesting that tropical forests have reached a significant turning point.

Researchers at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia have developed solar paint containing a moisture-absorbing compound that also is able to split water into oxygen and hydrogen. If water vapor is in the air, then any surface painted with this product can produce hydrogen fuel, researchers said, regardless of the location or climate.

The world's oceans are rising in temperature faster than previously believed as they absorb most of the world's growing climate-changing emissions, scientists said Thursday.

The iPhone maker's master plan features extensive green space, aggressive water conservation and one of the largest corporate solar arrays in the world.

After trepidation about adding transportation fuels to the cap-and-trade mix, analysts say the latest carbon auction by California and Quebec could have ripple effects for companies and the economy.