World leaders attending the UN’s Rio+20 sustainability summit appear prepared to rubber-stamp an agreement that has been widely criticized by environmental groups and some government officials as ineffectual.

As Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, Russian President Vladimir Putin, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, (more…)

The European Environment Agency (EEA) and Microsoft last week introduced a network of online sites that map air, water, and noise pollution levels across the continent based on government data and information uploaded by users.

The Eye on Earth network — unveiled during the (more…)

An anonymous source has released a new cache of private emails from some of the world’s leading climate scientists, a leak apparently timed to disrupt international climate talks beginning next week in Durban, South Africa.

While it remains unclear who shared the 5,000 (more…)

A new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says that an increase in heat waves is “virtually certain” as a result of global warming and that extreme weather events — including hurricanes, floods, and droughts — will likely become more intense in the next century. (more…)

(Reuters) – Japan said it aims to propose an alternative to the Kyoto Protocol in coming months, after criticizing the international climate framework as neither using effective technology nor including major emitters.

Tokyo will come up with a set of proposals to fight global warming beyond 2012 (more…)

After one week of little progress at the UN climate talks in Cancun, Mexico, Chinese negotiators have offered a proposal that some analysts are calling a “game-changer.”

According to reports from Reuters, Xinhua News Agency and other media outlets, China is working to encourage developed (more…)

Google has unveiled an online technology that allows scientists and researchers to track and measure changes to the environment using 25 years worth of satellite data. Google Earth Engine, introduced during climate talks in Cancun, utilizes “trillions of scientific measurements” collected by NASA’s LANDSAT satellite, the company said. Google is already working (more…)

(Reuters) – Developing countries accused Japan on Wednesday of breaking a pledge to extend a U.N. pact for fighting global warming beyond 2012 and said that climate talks in Mexico would fail unless Tokyo backed down.

Japan, among almost 40 industrialized nations curbing greenhouse gas emissions (more…)

(Reuters) – Bolivia, among the strongest opponents of the Copenhagen climate accord last year, assailed rich nations at Cancun climate talks on Tuesday but stopped short of threatening to disrupt the two-week conference.

Pablo Solon, the Andean country’s ambassador to the United Nations, told (more…)

Chinese officials say international climate talks next week in Mexico will succeed only if wealthy countries are willing to share technologies and funds to help developing nations reduce greenhouse gas emissions. While Western nations had pledged at last year’s climate summit in Copenhagen to pay into a $30 billion fund to help developing countries deal with the effects (more…)