Issues & Trends

Food production will have to increase by 70% over the next 40 years to feed the world's growing population, the United Nations food agency predicts. The Food and Agricultural Organisation says if more land is not used for food production now, 370 million people could be facing famine by 2050.

World Will Miss 2010 Target To Stem Biodiversity Loss, Experts Say; As losses accelerate, missed target is "certain;" Growing water needs, mismanagement leading to "catastrophic decline" in freshwater biodiversity; Biodiversity science evolving from sounding alarms to finding solutions; New systems being created to monitor biodiversity,

Beware of the blob—this time, it's for real.

In inaugural ceremonies webcast around the world, Saudi Arabia inaugurated the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) on Sept. 23. Those facilities include Shaheen, the region's fastest supercomputer, as well as what is being billed as the world's most advanced facilities for scientific visualization.

“In early 2008, Saudi Arabia announced that, after being self-sufficient in wheat for over 20 years, the non-replenishable aquifer it had been pumping for irrigation was largely depleted,” writes Lester R. Brown in his new book, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (W.W. Norton & Company).

By Gerard Wynn Gerard Wynn – Tue Sep 29, 3:14 pm ET OXFORD, England (Reuters) – A rise of at least two meters in the world's sea levels is now almost unstoppable, experts told a climate conference at Oxford University on Tuesday.

Climate researchers now predict the planet will warm by 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century even if the world's leaders fulfill their most ambitious climate pledges, a much faster and broader scale of change than forecast just two years ago, according to a report released Thursday by

The most optimistic view about Greenland and Antarctica ice melt is now off the table, and the worst case scenario about accelerating, self-perpetuating ice melt is front and center in climate science, according to science experts, reacting to news about fresh NASA-funded research being published in Nature this week.

KAUST, the Kingdom's new tech university, bets big on data display.

The scientific name is the Holocene Age, but climatologists like to call our current climatic phase the Long Summer. The history of Earth's climate has rarely been smooth.