With summer officially here, it’s a great time to explore the outdoors! As people go hiking, camping, wildlife viewing and engage in other recreation activities, there can be associated impacts on the natural environment.

A new study from the University of Waterloo has found that Ontario could save millions by implementing simple measures to help prevent vehicle accidents involving wildlife.

As hurricane season commences on the East Coast and the West Coast heads into fire season, there’s no time like the present to consider the short- and long-term effects of responses to disasters being shaped by the climate of a warming Earth. Are we doing enough to ensure our future well-being in the face of climate change, or are we too distracted by intense but relatively infrequent disasters such as fire and flood to contemplate the big-picture changes we need to make?

Climate change, pesticides and land use changes alone cannot fully explain the decline in insect populations in Germany. Scientists from the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB) have now discovered that regions that have experienced a sharp decline in flying insects also have high levels of light pollution. Many studies already suggest that artificial light at night has negative impacts on insects, and scientists should pay greater attention to this factor when exploring the causes of insect population declines in the future.

Air pollution has smothered China’s cities in recent decades. In response, the Chinese government has implemented measures to clean up its skies. But are those policies effective? Now an innovative study co-authored by an MIT scholar shows that one of China’s key antipollution laws is indeed working — but unevenly, with one particular set of polluters most readily adapting to it.

The next 10 years will be critical for the future of Antarctica, and choices made will have long-lasting consequences, says an international group of award-winning Antarctic research scientists in a paper released today. It lays out two different plausible future scenarios for the continent and its Southern Ocean over the next 50 years.

Milk in parts of Ukraine has radioactivity levels up to five times over the country’s official safe limit, new research shows.

When General Motors CEO Mary Barra recently affirmed a commitment to “a world with zero crashes, zero emissions, and zero congestion,” she echoed similar statements from the company’s executives over the years. Back in 1972, GM Vice President Elliott Estes had declared that “the automobile will be essentially removed from the air pollution problem in the United States” within another decade or so. That didn’t happen, yet two decades later President Bill Clinton played along with this fantasy. Bowing to the power of GM and its then-Big Three partners, Ford and Chrysler, Clinton broke a campaign pledge to raise Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards and instead underwrote industry research on super-clean future cars. Meanwhile, fuel economy fell while CO2 emissions continued to rise.

The amount of mercury extracted from the sea by industrial fishing has grown steadily since the 1950s, potentially increasing mercury exposure among the populations of several coastal and island nations to levels that are unsafe for fetal development.

Traditional insecticides are killers: they not only kill pests, they also endanger bees and other beneficial insects, as well as affecting biodiversity in soils, lakes, rivers and seas. A team from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has now developed an alternative: A biodegradable agent that keeps pests at bay without poisoning them.