Ya Ya the giant panda landed Thursday afternoon in Shanghai after departing from the Memphis Zoo in Tennessee, where she spent the past 20 years on loan.

The popular panda's trip was closely followed online.

The ongoing drought in Eastern Africa has been made worse by human-induced climate change, which also made it much likelier to occur in the first place, an international team of climate scientists concluded.

The report Wednesday came from World Weather Attribution, a group that seeks to quickly determine whether certain extreme weather events were influenced by climate change. Nineteen scientists from seven nations assessed how climate change affected rainfall in the region.

Trees are long-term investments that often outlive the people who plant them. And with the world's climate changing fast, we now need to consider whether the trees we plant today will be able to withstand the changing conditions in our gardens over the next 30, 50 or even 100 years.

"Things are changing faster than the lifespan of trees," said Daniel Herms, an entomologist specializing in the resiliency of trees at the research branch of the Davey Tree Expert Co., a landscaping firm based in Kent, Ohio.

New rules requiring airlines to use more sustainable fuels across the European Union have been agreed by negotiators from member countries and the EU Parliament in a bid to help decarbonize the sector.

The European Commission, the bloc's executive arm, said Wednesday that the deal reached by member states and the European Parliament demands that suppliers blend sustainable aviation fuels with kerosene in growing amounts from 2025.

Italy's largest river is already as low as it was last summer, with the winter snow fields that normally save it from drying up over the warmer months having receded by 75%, according to the Bolzano climate and environment agency.

It's already causing some reliant on the Po to course correct.

Charred, drained or swamped, built up, dug out or taken apart, blue or green or turned to dust: this is the Earth as seen from above.

As the world commemorated Earth Day on Saturday, the footprints of human activity are visible across the planet's surface. The relationship between people and the natural world will have consequences for years to come.

When Alessandra Korap was born in the mid-1980s, her Indigenous village nestled in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil was a haven of seclusion. But as she grew up, the nearby city of Itaituba, with its bustling streets and commercial activity, crept closer and closer.

It wasn't just her village feeling the encroachment of non-Indigenous outsiders. Two major federal highways paved the way for tens of thousands of settlers, illegal gold miners and loggers into the region's vast Indigenous territories, which cover a forested area roughly the size of Belgium.

Looking back at 2022's weather with months of analysis, the World Meteorological Organization said last year really was as bad as it seemed when people were muddling through it.

And about as bad as it gets — until more warming kicks in.

Lebanon is becoming increasingly engaged in augmenting investment in clean and renewable energy. Such an endeavor presents a range of high-impact co-benefits. Socially, it will grant the Lebanese population access to reliable energy; economically, it will drive new commerce and create new job opportunities, reduce prices in the case of exceeding supply hence boosting growth; while environmentally, it will improve air quality and reduce emissions. Countries from the MENA region, such as Syria and Iraq also face similar challenges as power outages prompt the population and institutions to search for clean and renewable energy solutions to cover their electricity needs, thus creating promising business prospects in this sector. 

As demand has weighed heavily on Lebanon, due to its budget deficit, the country seeks to have 30% of its electricity mix generated from renewable energy sources by 2030. However, this ambitious objective is faced with a number of obstacles such as the country's power sector which suffers from a significant supply-demand imbalance, simply depicted as high generation costs and a substantial lack of financial sustainability. Electricité du Liban's (EDL) available installed capacity is 1,616 MW, which contrasts with a peak demand of up to 3,000 MW compensated by high private generator subscriptions, the deterioration of buying power, and the skyrocketing fuel prices. 

A Dutch salvage company has reached agreement with the United Nations to pump oil from a rusting tanker off the coast of war-ravaged Yemen in a move hailed as a "critical milestone" in moves to avert a possible environmental disaster, its parent company announced Thursday.

Boskalis said that its Smit Salvage subsidiary has reached agreement with the U.N. Development Program to transfer more than one million barrels of oil from the decaying tanker FSO Safer. A specialist support ship, the Ndeavor, is setting sail Friday to the east African nation of Djibouti to prepare for the mission, the company said.