Perhaps you missed the news that the price of hummus has spiked in Great Britain. The cause, as the New York Times reported on February 8: drought in India, resulting in a poor harvest of chickpeas. Far beyond making dips for pita bread, chickpeas are a legume of life-and-death importance—especially in India, Pakistan, and Ethiopia where 1 in 5 of the world’s people depend on them as their primary source of protein.

The first large-scale analysis of corporate practices for sourcing sustainable materials shows that many companies address sustainability at some level, but most deal with only one or a subset of materials within a small portion of their supply chain.

Carleton University students are consulting with small-scale farmers in Peru as part of a partnership with the international development organization Cuso International.

Students in the Bachelor of Global and International Studies program (BGInS) at Carleton University are gaining hands-on experience while improving food security in Peru thanks to an innovative partnership with Cuso International. The partnership, which began in January, is the first of what Cuso International hopes will be a new wave of e-volunteering opportunities for students at Carleton and across Canada.

If you install solar panels on your roof and avoid dousing your lawn with chemicals and pesticides, your online peers may consider you to be environmentally friendly. But this street cred can all be erased if you let your cat roam around outdoors.

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CU Boulder engineers have received a $2.45 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to develop a scalable, cost-effective greenhouse material that splits sunlight into photosynthetically efficient light and repurposes inefficient infrared light to aid in water purification.

The four-year research program could yield next-gen technology capable of solving food, energy and water security challenges posed by global population growth and climate change.

Shale gas is one of least sustainable options for producing electricity, according to new research from The University of Manchester.

The major study, which is the first of its kind, considered environmental, economic and social sustainability of shale gas in the UK and compared it to other electricity generating options. These were coal, nuclear, natural gas, liquefied natural gas (LNG), solar photovoltaics (PV), wind, hydro and biomass.

When grocery stores tout sustainable products, consumers may take their claims at face value. Yet few studies have analyzed whether or not companies who claim to improve the sustainability of their products are actually changing practices in their supply chains.

It’s simple math, says a University of Alberta conservation biologist. More roads equals fewer grizzly bears.

In a recent study examining a non-invasive DNA (hair collection) dataset of grizzly bear activity in British Columbia, Clayton Lamb and his colleagues determined what scientists have long suspected: higher road density leads to lower grizzly bear density—a critical problem for a species still rebounding from a long period of human persecution.

Cultural evolution has made humans enormously potent ecosystem engineers and has enabled us to survive and flourish under a variety environmental conditions.