Climate change is likely to exact enormous costs on U.S. regional economies in the form of lost property, reduced industrial output and more deaths, according to a report backed by a trio of men with vast business experience.

The report, released Tuesday, is designed to convince businesses to factor in the cost of climate change in their long-term decisions and to push for reductions in emissions blamed for heating the planet.

An Arizona company said Tuesday it has successfully completed the first small-scale test flight of a high-altitude balloon and capsule being developed to let tourists float 20 miles (32 kilometers) above the earth.

World View Enterprises of Tucson said it launched the flight last week from Roswell, New Mexico.

The North American monarch butterfly uses the Sun as well as Earth's magnetic field as navigational tools for its famous long-distance migration, scientists said Tuesday.

The insects with their characteristic orange-and-black wings flutter thousands of kilometers each year from the United States and southern Canada to the Michoacan mountains in central Mexico, where they overwinter.

If Europe adopted a style of farming that abstains from plowing after a harvest, local temperatures could drop as much as two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), researchers said Monday.

The reason lies in the color of the soil: untilled land is lighter and reflects sunlight, making the area cooler than it is when dark surfaces are present, according to scientists.

Neurotoxic pesticides blamed for the world's bee collapse are also harming butterflies, worms, fish and birds, said a scientific review that called Tuesday for tighter regulation to curb their use.

Analysing two decades of reports on the topic, an international panel of 29 scientists found there was "clear evidence of harm" from use of two pesticide types, neonicotinoids and fipronil.

The world's oceans need saving from pollution and overfishing, and an independent panel warned Tuesday that urgent action was needed within five years.

The Global Ocean Commission said cutting down on single-use plastics products, restricting fishing on the high seas, and establishing binding regulations for offshore oil and gas exploration are key parts of the rescue plan.

The United Nations on Monday launched a week-long global environment conference aimed at tackling challenges from poaching to marine pollution and boosting the "green economy".

The meeting in Nairobi, the first ever United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA), comes amid tight security in the Kenyan capital, after a series of warnings of the threat of attack by Somalia's al-Qaida-linked Shebab.

Last month was so hot it set a new record for the planet, marking the warmest May over land and water since record-keeping began in 1880, US authorities said Monday.

The combined average temperature across the globe was 59.93°F (15.54°C), or 1.33°F (0.74°C) above the 20th century average, said the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear plant on Sunday restarted its trouble-plagued water decontamination system for the first time in three months, the utility said.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) has been forced to repeatedly switch off its Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS), which purifies radiation-tainted water, due to a series of glitches plaguing the system since trial operations began last year.

Physicists on Sunday said they had learned more about the identity of the Higgs Boson, the elusive particle whose ground-breaking discovery was announced nearly two years ago.

Work at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) -- the particle smasher on the French-Swiss border where the breakthrough was made -- has answered long-standing questions about how the Higgs behaves, they said.