Fresh-water shortages and more droughts and floods will increase the likelihood that water will be used as a weapon between states or to further terrorist aims in key strategic areas, including the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa, a U.S. intelligence assessment released Thursday said.

Although “water-related state conflict” is unlikely in the next 10 years, the assessment said, continued shortages after that might begin to affect U.S. national security interests.

Some 32 social scientists and researchers from around the world, including a Senior Sustainability Scholar at Arizona State University, have concluded that fundamental reforms of global environmental governance are needed to avoid dangerous changes in the Earth system. The scientists argued in the March 16 edition of the journal Science that the time is now for a "constitutional moment" in world politics.

After 20 years dominated by inaction on climate change, the world is entering a “third era” when the impacts of climate change are unavoidable, says a London climate expert.

Even if countries instantly reduced carbon emissions to zero, the impacts of emissions already in the atmosphere are “inevitable and unavoidable for the next 20 or so years,” said Saleemul Huq, a climate expert at the London-based International Institute of Environment and Development and former executive director of the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies.

OECD report says pollution will become biggest cause of premature death, killing an estimated 3.6 million people a year by 2050

Urban air pollution is set to become the biggest environmental cause of premature death in the coming decades, overtaking even such mass killers as poor sanitation and a lack of clean drinking water, according to a new report.

 “PM2.5” seems an odd and wonky term for the blogosphere to take up, but that is precisely what has happened in China in recent weeks. It refers to the smallest solid particles in the atmosphere—those less than 2.5 microns across. Such dust can get deep into people’s lungs; far deeper than that rated as PM10. Yet until recently China’s authorities have revealed measurements only for PM10. When people realised this, an online revolt broke out. Such was the public pressure that authorities caved in, and PM2.5 data are now being published for Beijing and a handful of other cities.