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.

The extreme cold weather hitting North America in the run-up to Christmas holidays is due to a phenomenon called a "bomb cyclone."

For thousands of years, predictions of apocalypse have come and gone. But with dangers rising from nuclear war and climate change, does the planet need to at least begin contemplating the worst?

When the world rang in 2022, few would have expected the year to feature the U.S. president speaking of the risk of doomsday, following Russia's threats to go nuclear in its invasion of Ukraine.