A Tunisian former environment minister has been sentenced to three years in prison for his role in the illegal import of 280 containers of waste from Italy, local media reported Wednesday.

Mustapha Aroui and several ministry officials had been sacked and arrested in December 2020 as public anger mounted and authorities investigated how the waste had been imported.

Germany used more renewable energy than ever in 2022 but again failed to reach its CO2-reduction goal as Russia's war in Ukraine prompted a return to more coal and oil use, a think tank reported Wednesday.

Europe's biggest economy emitted 761 million tonnes of greenhouse gases last year, just one tonne fewer than in 2021 and overshooting the target of 756 million tonnes, the energy think tank Agora Energiewende said in a statement.

Fish that have lost food due to mass coral bleaching are getting into more unnecessary fights, causing them to expend precious energy and potentially threatening their survival, new research said Wednesday.

With the future of the world's coral reefs threatened by climate change, a team of researchers studied how a mass bleaching event affected 38 species of butterflyfish.

Much of the Alps just don't look right for this time of year. Sparse snowfall and unseasonably warm winter weather in Europe's central mountains are allowing grass to blanket hillsides across the region, causing headaches for ski slope operators and aficionados of Alpine white.

Patches of grass, rock and dirt were visible Monday in some of Europe's skiing meccas — like Innsbruck in Austria, Villars-sur-Ollon and Crans-Montana in Switzerland, and Germany's Lenggries and far beyond. The dearth of snow has revived concerns about temperature upheaval linked to climate change.

President Joe Biden's administration has finalized regulations that protect hundreds of thousands of small streams, wetlands and other waterways, repealing a Trump-era rule that federal courts had thrown out and that environmentalists said left waterways vulnerable to pollution.

The rule defines which "waters of the United States" are protected by the Clean Water Act. For decades, the term has been a flashpoint between environmental groups that want to broaden limits on pollution entering the nation's waters and farmers, builders and industry groups that say extending regulations too far is onerous for business.

Kiara, a six-month-old black panther born in war-torn Ukraine and victim of exotic animal trafficking, has found a new home at a wildlife refuge in France.  

The world is getting warmer, winters included. The United States, however, has experienced severe winter storms in recent years, and experts are taking a closer look at the link between these extreme cold events and climate change.

Catastrophic floods, crop-wilting droughts and record heatwaves this year have shown that climate change warnings are increasingly becoming reality and this is "just the beginning," experts say, as international efforts to cut planet-heating emissions founder.

Kuwait, one of the hottest countries on Earth, has been hit by a rare hail storm that delighted children and their parents, with images of the winter white shared widely on social media Wednesday. 

Top officials at high-stakes U.N. biodiversity negotiations have said they were confident of securing a major deal to save the natural world from destruction.