Climate change is increasing the risk of wildfires in many regions of the world. This is due partly to specific weather conditions – known as fire weather – that facilitate the spread of wildfires. Researchers from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) and Australian colleagues have found that fire weather seasons are increasingly overlapping between eastern Australia and western North America. The research team examined the causes of this shift and its implications for cross-border cooperation between fire services in Canada, the US, and Australia. The research was published in Earth’s Future.

New Haven, Conn. — Normally, throwing rocks at a problem isn’t the best idea.

But in the multi-faceted fight to combat climate change, scientists are finding that crushed rocks judiciously applied to farmers’ fields may be a powerful force in removing heat-trapping carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere and storing it safely for thousands of years.

How powerful is this idea? Powerful enough to win the four-year, $100 million XPRIZE Carbon Removal competition.

On Earth Day, April 22, XPRIZE officials announced that Mati Carbon, a non-profit based in part on the research of Yale geochemist Noah Planavsky, won the competition’s grand prize of $50 million. More than 1,300 groups from 88 countries took part in the competition, which required teams to create and demonstrate a system for pulling CO2 directly from the atmosphere or oceans and durably sequester it. (Another $50 million in prize money will be distributed to other winners.)

Local authorities must do more to prepare communities in British Columbia for the dangers of extreme heat, according to a new research paper from Simon Fraser University. 

Four years after the infamous 2021 heat dome, which killed more than 600 people in B.C. alone, the ground-breaking study found significant differences in how municipalities within the Metro Vancouver and Fraser Valley regional districts are preparing for heat events.