Climate Change

Planting trees is a vital strategy to combat both climate change and the biodiversity crisis. As forests grow, they sponge carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and provide renewed habitat for threatened animals, plants, fungi and countless unseen lifeforms. That ability of forests to help slow climate change has driven a…

The flowering times for many plant species have shifted due to climate change, with most of the change occurring in temperate zones. Researchers assumed the tropics, which are largely the same temperature year-round, would be insulated from such climate change-driven changes to flowering times. However, a new study challenges that…

Rising sea levels due to climate change may threaten tens of millions more people than previously thought, according to a new report. Writing in the journal Nature, researchers say that 90 percent of scientific studies use erroneous data when calculating the height of baseline coastal waters...Read More

Brazil bet big on a mega river dam using old data, but climate change is leaving its massive turbines high and dry...Read More

America’s national parks were conceived as sanctuaries from the forces remaking the rest of the continent. Climate change is now breaching that boundary. A recent assessment of park vulnerability suggests that many of these landscapes are not simply warming or drying in familiar ways. They are being pushed toward ecological…

This story is a partnership between  Grist  and  WBEZ,  a public radio station serving the Chicago metropolitan region. Under the warm light of a hanging lamp, Marty Landorf carefully crumbled the dried flower head of a black-eyed Susan between her fingers, teasing apart the chaff to uncover its puny black…

This coverage is made possible through a partnership between  Grist  and  BPR , a public radio station serving western North Carolina. Andy Hill keeps a wetsuit and snorkel in his car at all times. Sometimes, when he’s driving around Watauga County, North Carolina, he’ll see a particularly clear, swift stream,…

For over 75 years, the United States has been a global leader in climate change research. In the 1950s, scientists at the University of California showed that carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere were increasing and established the first long-term CO2 monitoring system, while Norman Phillips at the Institute for…

LOUISVILLE, Ky.—Nearly a foot of snow has melted. The deep freeze that sent temperatures across the region plummeting to below zero has warmed to a balmy 55 degrees on a sunny February day.  As Matt Thomas augers a three-foot-wide hole into the ground at a city park in the shadow…

The tropical forests of the Amazon and Andes are some of the most biodiverse places on the planet, but across both regions, changes in climate and landscape conditions are driving a shift in the number of tree species, recent research has found. Although the overall number of tree species across…