In a vital effort to address our planet’s most profound and urgent challenges through a distinctive lens, Clark University has announced the establishment of the School of Climate, Environment, and Society, to open in Fall 2025.

The school elevates Clark’s historic academic strengths and leading-edge research to embolden an urgently needed response to climate change and related ecological and social crises. To address these challenges, society needs a better way of understanding our world. Clark programs will advance critical systems thinking that integrates learning from across traditional disciplines like economics, political and social sciences, natural sciences, data sciences, the humanities, and business — empowering students and faculty to pursue innovative and human-focused approaches to global problems on a local, regional, and planetary scale.

Researchers at the University of Southampton have proposed that some wild plant species possess certain attributes which make them more suitable for human cultivation than others.

Life on the Great Barrier Reef is undergoing big changes in the face of climate change and other human-caused pressures, a new study reveals.  

From food security to controlling seaweed and even making sand for beaches, reef fish are a hugely important part of marine ecosystems providing a range of benefits to humans and coral reef ecosystems.

New research from an international team of marine scientists from the UK and Australia and led by researchers at Lancaster University, published today in the journal Nature Communications, reveals significant transformations in fish communities on the Great Barrier Reef, the World’s largest coral reef ecosystem.

Bats depend on open bodies of water such as small ponds and lakes for foraging and drinking. Access to water is particularly important for survival in the increasingly hot and dry summers caused by climate change, the time when female bats are pregnant and rear their young. A scientific team from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) has now shown that access to drinking sites is hampered by wind turbines in agricultural landscapes: Many bat species avoid the turbines and water bodies located close to the turbines for several kilometres. These results have been published in the scientific journal “Biological Conservation”.

Scientists from the University of Oregon and their partners have mapped the amount of water stored beneath volcanic rocks at the crest of the central Oregon Cascades and found an aquifer many times larger than previously estimated — at least 81 cubic kilometers. 

The finding has implications for the way scientists and policymakers think about water in the region — an increasingly urgent issue across the Western United States as climate change reduces snowpack, intensifies drought and strains limited resources. 

A research team led by Professor Ming Cai from Florida State University, in collaboration with researchers from Sun Yat-sen University, Peking University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, recently published a groundbreaking paper in National Science Review. Titled “Principles-Based Adept Predictions of Global Warming from Climate Mean States”, the study introduces a novel framework that accurately predicts the magnitude and spatial pattern of global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions, without relying on complex climate models or statistical analysis. For the first time, this study confirms that observed global warming is driven by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, independently of these conventional approaches.