Two of the world's largest environmental programs in China are generally successful, although key reforms could transform them into a model for the rest of the world, according to new research published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Swedish Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Enterprise and Energy Maud Olofsson is in the US to talk about Swedish energy and environmental policies.

For countries without their own environmental monitoring systems, the Environmental Performance Index (EPI) can be useful for working out where there is a need for action in environmental policy making. However, within the European Union there are more suitable instruments for this.

Climate change will have a huge impact on human health and bold environmental policy decisions are needed now to protect the world’s population, according to the author of an article published in the BMJ today.

Tradable permits are all the rage in environmental policy. They are already used internationally to reduce carbon emissions and improve air quality. A group of economists and ecologists from the UK, the Netherlands and Germany, are working together to find out whether such schemes could work for wildlife too.

Desertification, exacerbated by climate change, represents “the greatest environmental challenge of our times” and governments must overhaul policy approaches to the issue or face mass migrations of people driven from degraded homelands within a single generation, warns a new analysis from the United Nations University.

We monitor the stock market, the weather, our blood pressure. Yet environmental monitoring is often criticized as being unscientific, expensive, and wasteful. Scientists argue that environmental monitoring is a crucial part of science in the review, "Who needs environmental monitoring"" Gary Lovett (Institute of Ecosystem Studies) and colleagues from several universities and US government offices contributed to the review.

IBM today announced that it processed over 100 million pounds of used and obsolete computer gear, as part of its computer renewal and recycling efforts worldwide in 2006, returning less than 1% of non-hazardous material to landfills.