With recent announcements of potential impending water shortages, everyone is being urged to do their bit to avert further draconian measures. Yet, according to OFWAT, the government’s water industry regulator, less than 30 percent of households in the UK have metered water supply. The other seventy percent can use as much water as they want, with few limits in a normal year and not that many at the moment given the current drought. So is it time for universal water metering? Dr Jonathan Chenow

Over the past five years, the Central African Republic has embarked upon managing 90% of its forestry concessions. This is the result of an original incentive scheme involving the authorities and logging firms, headed by CIRAD.

In Gabon, Cameroon and the Republic of Congo, industrialists are obliged by law to fund management schemes for their forestry concessions. In the Central African Republic, it is up to the State to draw up such schemes, which are then implemented by priva

ESA has announced the shortlist of new Earth Explorer mission proposals within its Living Planet Programme. This is part of the selection procedure that will eventually lead to the launch of the fourth Earth Explorer Core mission during the first half of the next decade.

The six missions cover a range of environmental issues with the aim of furthering our understanding of the Earth system and changing climate: BIOMASS – to take global measurements of forest biomass.

Giving a mix of farm animals a controlled ’right to roam’ will help to improve biodiversity and solve a vole conservation dilemma in upland Britain, according to new research published today in the Journal of Applied Ecology.

As numbers of hill farmers and grazing animals dwindle, field voles are thriving in undisturbed upland and forest areas. This is great news for protected birds of prey such as hen harriers that use voles as a source of food, but not so good for Br

Bacteria that can munch through confectionery could be a valuable source of non-polluting energy in the years ahead, new research has shown.

In a feasibility study funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, bioscientists at the University of Birmingham have demonstrated that these bacteria give off hydrogen gas as they consume high-sugar waste produced by the confectionery industry.

The hydrogen has been used to generate clean electricity via a fu

Economic expansion in China is threatening the country’s scarce water resources, according to a new study by the University of Leeds. Uneven development of trade across the country means that water-intensive or polluting industries are expanding in areas where water is in shortest supply.

Dr Klaus Hubacek and Mr Dabo Guan from the University’s Sustainability Research Institute assessed how much water different industries consume or pollute. Using these figures, they compared the ‘virtual

Wood is the main energy source in the Sahel. In order to plan for changes in stocks, it is essential to be able to produce a common estimate of the productivity of savannahs in all the countries concerned. This is the aim of the Savafor network, which was founded recently.

Wood and charcoal cover a substantial part of domestic energy requirements in Sahel countries: from 47% of requirements in Senegal to 96% in Chad, according to a 1986 FAO study. Wooded formations, primarily dry s

In findings that could influence our understanding of climate change, a Princeton research team has learned that tropical forests return to the atmosphere up to half the nitrogen they receive each year, thanks to a particular type of bacteria that lives in those forests.

The bacteria, referred to as “denitrifiers,” exist in forest soil, where they live by converting the nitrates fed upon by tree roots back into nitrogen gas, which is lost to the atmosphere. The researchers who

Work in an MIT lab may help energy companies withdraw millions of additional barrels of oil from beneath the sea floor. Typically, companies recover only 30 percent to 40 percent of the oil in a given reservoir. Since a single reservoir may contain a billion barrels total, increasing that “recovery efficiency” by even a single percentage point would mean a lot of additional oil. Toward that end, Assistant Professor David Mohrig of earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences

When sea ice freezes, its salt separates out, and heavy salty water sinks to the bottom. However, it turns out that this process take place more slowly than we thought, which may have implications for our climate models.

Lars Henrik Smedsrud of the Bjerknes Centre at the University of Bergen and Ragnheid Skogseth of the University Course on Svalbard have been studying what happens when new ice and brash ice form at sea – a subject which they have been remarkably alone in study

A team of European scientists reports that climate change estimates for the next century may have substantially underestimated the potential magnitude of global warming. They say that actual warming due to human fossil fuel emissions may be 15-to-78 percent higher than warming estimates that do not take into account the feedback mechanism involving carbon dioxide and Earth’s temperature.

In a paper to be published on 26 May in Geophysical Research Letters, Marten Scheffer of Wagening

145 million years ago Scandinavia was hit by a tsunami, probably more intense than the one that hit Southeastern Asia in December 2004. Traces of this ancient tsunami are still left and these have been discovered by the geologists Vivi Vajda and Jane Wigforss-Lange at Lund University. The scientific results will soon be published in the journal Progress in Natural Science.

The site is located at Eriksdal, in the southernmost province of Sweden, Skåne. Scandinavia and the Baltic formed

Rainforests and savannas contain 70% of the world’s plants and are critical to the health of our planet. A new £1.6m international project involving researchers from the Leeds Earth and Biosphere Institute is looking at the impact of global warming on these sensitive areas.

The researchers think we may be at the start of a vicious cycle, where global warming causes the rainforests to shrink, so increasing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, raising the earth’s temperature and

From May 22-30, Harbor Branch scientists, along with colleagues from the University of Miami, will use the Harbor Branch Johnson-Sea-Link II submersible to explore for the first time newly discovered deep-sea reefs between Florida and the Bahamas. The reefs were discovered in 2,000 to 2,900 feet of water last December by a University of Miami team using advanced sonar techniques. A primary goal of the upcoming expedition, which is funded largely by the State of Florida’s “Florida Oceans Ini

Ecologists have at last got a view of sperm whales’ behaviour during their long, deep dives, thanks to the use of recently developed electronic “dtags”. According to new research published in the British Ecological Society’s Journal of Animal Ecology, sperm whales – like bats – use echolocation consistently to track down their prey at depth.

Working in the Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico and the Ligurian Sea, scientists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Universit

If Earth’s past cycles of warming and cooling are any indication, temperatures by the end of the century will be even hotter than current climate models predict, according to a report by researchers in Berkeley, California. The scientists studied Antarctic ice cores containing a 360,000-year record of global temperature and levels of carbon dioxide and methane–two of the major greenhouse gases implicated in global warming. They found that during periods of warming, greenhouse