Imagine a future with nearly silent air taxis flying above traffic jams and navigating between skyscrapers and suburban droneports. Transportation arrives at the touch of your smartphone and with minimal environmental impact. This isn’t just science fiction. United Airlines has plans for these futuristic electric air taxis in Chicago and New York. The U.S. military is already experimenting with them. And one company has a contract to launch an air taxi service in Dubai as early as 2025. Another company hopes to defy expectations and fly participants at the 2024 Paris Olympics. Backed by billio ..read more

PacifiCorp's Hunter coal-fired power plant in Utah is scheduled to shut down by 2032. George Frey/Getty Images Electric power generation in the U.S. is shifting rapidly away from fossil fuels toward cleaner and lower-carbon sources. State clean energy targets and dramatic declines in the cost of renewable electricity are the most important reasons. But fossil fuel plants still generate 60% of the U.S. electricity supply, producing air, water and land pollutants and greenhouse gases in the process. To reduce these impacts, the Environmental Protection Agency announced a suite of rules on April ..read more

The UN's Sustainable Development Goals were designed to address extreme poverty, social inequality, the climate crisis and the loss of biodiversity. (Shutterstock) Gross domestic product (GDP) has long been the main indicator of economic growth used almost everywhere in the world. However, the measurement does not take into account other factors essential to a country’s growth and development, such as social inequalities, the environment and the well-being of citizens. In the last ten years, the climate deadlock and the limits of the current economic model based on the infinite growth of capit ..read more

Shutterstock Current concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in Earth’s atmosphere are unprecedented in human history. But CO₂ levels today, and those that might occur in coming decades, did occur millions of years ago. Wouldn’t it be useful to go back in time and see what Australia looked like during those periods in the distant past? Well, scientists – including us – have done just that. These studies, which largely involve examining sediments and fossils, reveal a radically different Australia to the one we inhabit. The continent was warmer and wetter, and filled with unfamiliar plant and a ..read more

The recent release of the Department of National Defence’s policy update, Our North, Strong and Free, outlines the progress being made by the federal government on two major security issues facing Canada: the warming Arctic and cyber warfare. A major focal point of the policy update is the need to develop cutting-edge, quantum-based defence technology that will help Canada address these two threats. Quantum technology uses the sensitivity of sub-atomic particles to create increasingly precise measurements of an environment. This provides Canada the ability to better track environmental changes ..read more

There is no doubt about it: the world is in the grips of a climate crisis. The headlines are full of reports about extreme weather events and the negative effects of the fossil fuel industry. This reality means that anyone entering the worlds of business or management today needs to understand climate change. They need the right skills and attitudes to build sustainable enterprises, and to contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts. I am a lecturer in management with a particular interest in sustainability and climate change education. Recently I conducted a study at two hi ..read more

A sunflower miner bee, a species considered vulnerable in Ontario. (Shutterstock) Canada is home to more than 800 species of wild bees — few may have noticed the diversity of native bees buzzing around, but bees play a significant role in the survival of native plant populations. With changes in climate, habitat loss, pesticide use and pathogen spillover, some of our native bees are in decline. Our research takes place along a section of the Niagara Escarpment, which features a huge diversity of native plants, many microclimates, and lots of natural land that makes ideal habitats for wild bees ..read more

Julien Cooper The hyper-arid desert of Eastern Sudan, the Atbai Desert, seems like an unlikely place to find evidence of ancient cattle herders. But in this dry environment, my new research has found rock art over 4,000 years old that depicts cattle. In 2018 and 2019, I led a team of archaeologists on the Atbai Survey Project. We discovered 16 new rock art sites east of the Sudanese city of Wadi Halfa, in one of the most desolate parts of the Sahara. This area receives almost no yearly rainfall. Almost all of these rock art sites had one feature in common: the depiction of cattle, either as a ..read more

A reckless experiment in Earth’s atmosphere caused a desert metropolis to flood. That was the story last week when more than a year’s worth of rain fell in a day on the Arabian Peninsula, one of the world’s driest regions. Desert cities like Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) suffered floods that submerged motorways and airport runways. Across UAE and Oman, 21 people lost their lives. The heavy rain of Tuesday April 16 was initially blamed on “cloud seeding”: a method of stimulating precipitation by injecting clouds with tiny particles that moisture can attach to – those droplets then mer ..read more

The Scottish government’s decision to row back on its 2030 climate pledge illustrates the crux of any target: it’s easy to set one with a big political flourish, but harder to follow through with a careful plan to achieve it. Does that mean that targets for reducing the emissions of greenhouse gas driving climate change are worthless? Not necessarily. There are two types of climate target: the empty promise and the calculated ambition. Only one of these works. Empty promises abound in climate policy. Such targets deflect criticism – look, they say, we take climate change seriously, we have a s ..read more