Why some regions are winning the fight against groundwater depletion
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 20-Jun-2026 23:15 ET (21-Jun-2026 03:15 GMT/UTC)
A perspective published in Nature Water in February underscores how adaptation and mitigation measures to address urban flooding often exacerbate environmental injustices for society’s most vulnerable groups — not just in the US, but around the world. Led by Rebecca Hale of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center and co-authored by urban ecologist Elizabeth Cook of Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, the piece offers strategies for governments, organizations, and individuals involved in climate adaptation to break the cycle.
New research reveals that ‘foundation models’ trained on vast, general time‑series data may be able to forecast river flows accurately, even in regions with little or no local hydrological records. The approach could improve flood warnings, drought planning and water-resource management in parts of the world where monitoring data is limited.
Coral reef health is being threatened by climate change and human activity. A group of researchers recently developed an acoustic assay that tracks the number of photosynthetic oxygen bubbles created by a coral reef to help determine the photosynthetic rate and health of the ecosystem.
In a first of its kind breakthrough, University of Utah geophysicists used electromagnetic data from airborne surveys to characterize a newly discovered freshwater reservoir under the lake’s Farmington Bay.
The planet’s undisturbed old-growth boreal forests may be far more important in the fight against climate change than previously realized, according to a new study, which finds that primary forests in Sweden store over 70% more carbon than managed secondary forests. Boreal forests, the world’s largest forest biome, play a crucial role in absorbing roughly 30% of human-caused carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions. Yet they are increasingly exploited to supply timber and bioenergy. In European boreal forests, intensive management practices, such as clear-cutting, thinning, planting fast-growing trees, fertilization, drainage, and soil preparation, aim to maximize harvestable wood and timber quality, but their long-term impacts on carbon storage remain uncertain. Limited observations from undisturbed primary forests make it difficult to quantify how converting these forests into managed secondary forests affects carbon sequestration. With models projecting increased reliance on northern forests for bioenergy, understanding the effects of transforming primary boreal forests and their impact on carbon storage is essential.
Didac Pascual and colleagues combined data from the Swedish National Forest Inventory (NFI), the Swedish National Forest Soil Inventory, and targeted field surveys to estimate carbon storage in Sweden’s primary forests and to quantify how it differs from the region’s managed secondary forests. They measured carbon across multiple components, including vegetation, dead wood, soils, and harvested wood products, and applied multiple analytical methods to estimate total carbon storage. Pascual et al. found that primary forests stored about 72% more carbon than managed secondary forests when considering all carbon pools combined. Soils contained the largest carbon store and accounted for much of the difference between the forest types. Overall, across Sweden, primary forests store 9.9 kg carbon per square meter more than managed secondary forests – 2.7 to 8 times higher than earlier estimates. This sugegsts that the climate impact of converting primary boreal forests to managed forests may be much greater than previously thought.