SciDevNet: Plans to protect ecosystems and help people adapt to climate change ? also known as ecosystem-based adaptation (EBA) ? must involve vulnerable groups, including women and communities greatly hit by global warming if they are to succeed, according to scientists who met in Tanzania last month (21-23 March). Scientists and policymakers at the UN-ledinternational workshop on EBA in Dar-es-Salaam, also said that more needed to be done to monitor and evaluate the cost-effectiveness of such adaptation,...

Press Association: A worldwide appeal has been launched to find a mate for the last remaining males of a tropical fish on the brink of extinction. The Mangarahara cichlid, from Madagascar, is believed to have vanished from the wild as a result of the building of dams, which has dried up its habitat on the Mangarahara river. Two of the last-known individuals from the species are in London zoo's aquarium, but both are male, the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) said. Another male is known to be in Berlin zoo...

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: I've often given our fisheries minister, Richard Benyon, a hard time in my Fish Fight programmes. And what I've found – and what most other people confirm – is that he is a Very Nice Guy. He stayed charming at Billingsgate market where I tested his knowledge of our most common commercial fish species, and remained polite and courteous while I hassled him in his constituency office for more ambitious marine protection around the coast of the UK. And I believe that, unlike some politicians, his charm...

Associated Press: About 6,000 people who live on the remote Marshall Islands in the Pacific are facing an acute shortage of fresh water as a severe drought worsens. A state of disaster was declared in the north. Australia announced it would provide AU$100,000 (£65,335) for emergency desalination units. The US has also donated several reverse-osmosis machines, which convert salt water into fresh water. There is no end in sight to the drought, with fine weather forecast for at least the next 10 days. The drought...

Guardian: The two companies exploring for shale gas in the UK have confirmed that they intend to flare methane gas from their wells in a move that has been condemned by environmentalists. It is likely to be the most visible sign of the fracking revolution that many in business and government would like to bring to the UK. Flaring excess gas is widely regarded as environmentally damaging, as burning the methane results in greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change. In the US, where fracking...

ScienceDaily: Analyses of the longest continental sediment core ever collected in the Arctic, recently completed by an international team led by Julie Brigham-Grette of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, provide "absolutely new knowledge" of Arctic climate from 2.2 to 3.6 million years ago. "While existing geologic records from the Arctic contain important hints about this time period, what we are presenting is the most continuous archive of information about past climate change from the entire Arctic...

ScienceDaily: Coral reefs are in decline, but their collapse can still be avoided with local and global action. That's according to findings reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on May 9 based on an analysis that combines the latest science on reef dynamics with the latest climate models. "People benefit by reefs' having a complex structure -- a little like a Manhattan skyline, but underwater," said Peter Mumby of The University of Queensland and University of Exeter. "Structurally complex reefs...

National Public Radio: Royal Dutch Shell is pushing ahead with plans for the world's deepest offshore oil and gas production facility. It will be nearly two miles beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of Louisiana. It is testing the bounds of the oil and gas industry's capability to drill ever deeper.

Reuters: Minister Tony de Brum of the Republic of the Marshall Islands describes the clear and present danger posed by climate change to his nation, and urges the world to act against this threat. My country needs a precious gift from the world's people -- the vision to take bold, urgent action on climate change, and the will to follow it through. Only concerted action can protect us from the rising seas and lack of fresh water that now threaten my nation's very existence. I am from the Republic of...

ClimateWire: The Lois Lane trail meanders along the high dunes that protect this little beach town. It makes it easy for walkers along the sand and gravel path to forget just how close to the ocean they really are -- were it not for the swooshing sound of waves washing ashore or the salty breeze blowing in their faces. You go through a shaded tunnel created by the cedars, wild cherries, holly trees and shrubs that help reinforce the dune before the trail opens onto rows of newer, grass-covered dunes. Farther...

Climate Desk: Back in 2006, scientists in Greenland made an alarming observation: Glaciers were crumbling into the ocean twice as fast. And not in little cocktail-sized cubes, either: Glaciologist Jason Box accurately predicted the spot where a hunk four times the size of Manhattan would later shear off into the sea. At the same time, the inland top of the ice sheet was thawing at record levels; last summer, for the first time in 150 years, its entire surface was melting. By summer`s end, this water alone raised...

LiveScience: With many of the world's ecosystems threatened or endangered by human activities like logging and urbanization, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) published its criteria for a new "Red List" of endangered ecosystems today (May 8) in the journal PLOS ONE. The list, which measures an ecosystem's risk of collapse, will be similar to the group's authoritative Red List of Endangered Species, which created internationally accepted criteria for assessing extinction risk. "The...

Climate Central: The flow of Greenland's glaciers toward the sea may have increased significantly in the past decade, but a new report in Nature finds that rate of increase is unlikely to continue. "The loss of ice has doubled in the past 10 years, but it's not going to double again,' said lead author Faezeh Nick, a glaciologist at the University Centre in Svalbard, in Longyearbyen, Norway, in an interview. That conclusion, based on a new, sophisticated computer model, makes the worst-case scenario of sea level...

Environment News Service: The Department of the Interior is releasing $475.25 million in emergency Hurricane Sandy disaster relief appropriations to 234 projects that will repair and rebuild parks, refuges and other Interior assets damaged by the storm. Sandy struck the U.S. Atlantic coast on October 29, 2012, and affected 24 states, including the entire eastern seaboard from Florida to Maine and west across the Appalachian Mountains to Michigan and Wisconsin, with severe damage in New Jersey and New York. In New York...

VietnamNet: Viet Nam is urgently seeking ways of sustaining its marine economy as climate change warms and raises sea levels - and, together with massive pollution, continues to destroy the nation's 110,000 hectares of coral reefs. Ly Son island. The marine economy now contributes about 48 per cent of the nation's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and there are plans to raise this to 53-55 per cent by 2020. It includes industries related to trade and investment in seafood products, ship and boat building, water...

Associated Press: The old coastal road in this fishing village at the eastern edge of Grenada sits under a couple of feet of murky saltwater, which regularly surges past a hastily-erected breakwater of truck tires and bundles of driftwood intended to hold back the Atlantic Ocean. For Desmond Augustin and other fishermen living along the shorelines of the southern Caribbean island, there's nothing theoretical about the threat of rising sea levels. "The sea will take this whole place down," Augustin said as he...

Reuters: Fish piracy - seafood caught illegally, not reported to authorities or outside environmental and catch regulations - represents as much as $10 billion to $23 billion in global losses each year, a non-profit conservation group estimated Wednesday. Because pirated fish is sold on black markets, specifics of the economic impact are tough to decipher. But Oceana, a Washington-based organization, looked at the records of fish catches by country as reported to the United Nations, then compared those...

Xinhua: Global warming might be killing off many species of coral as the world's oceans acidify, but the future for biodiversity in coral reefs might not be as bleak as previously forecast, according to a study by New Zealand and Australian scientists. "It has been predicted that many reefs will end up being dominated by algae rather than corals, which will have negative effects on biodiversity and ultimately on the ability of humans to derive protein from reefs," marine biologist Dr James Bell, of New...

Macleans: As far as the government scientist was concerned, it was a bit of fluff: an early morning interview about great white sharks last summer with Canada AM, the kind of innocuous and totally apolitical media commentary the man used to deliver 30 times or more each year as the resident shark expert in the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO). So he sent an email off to Ottawa notifying department flaks about the request, and when no response had been received by the next morning, just went...

Associated Press: In less than a year, many of the towering cargo ships loading and unloading goods at California ports won't just tie up at dock — they'll also plug in. In January, the state will become the first government body in the world to require container fleets docking at its major ports to shut off their diesel engines and use electricity for 50 percent of their visits — or face crippling fines. The requirements also include slashing fleet emissions by half, and those requirements rise to 80 percent in...