HORIZON INTERNATIONAL SOLUTIONS SITE

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) launched State of the Coast, a new Web site that provides coastal managers, planners and officials at all levels of government a snapshot of statistics, facts and graphics about America’s 95,000-miles of coastline.

The first global assessment of mangroves in over a decade reveals that rare and critically important mangrove forests continue to be lost at a rate three to four times higher than land-based global forests, despite positive restoration efforts by some countries.

At the world’s first Clean Energy Ministerial, U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu today announced that the United States is helping launch more than 10 international clean energy initiatives.

President Obama signed an Executive Order establishing a National Policy for the Stewardship of the Ocean, Coasts, and Great Lakes on July 19, 2010. That Executive Order adopts the Final Recommendations of the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force and directs Federal agencies to take the appropriate steps to implement them.

U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu will host the first-ever Clean Energy Ministerial in Washington, DC, bringing together ministers and stakeholders from more than 20 countries to launch or join new initiatives that will accelerate the world’s transition to clean energy technologies.

It has been a basic principle of evolution for more than a century that plants and animals can adapt genetically in ways that help them better survive and reproduce. Now, in a paper published in the journal Science, University of Rochester biologist John Jaenike and colleagues document a clear example of a new mechanism for evolution.

For almost three decades, oceanographers have been puzzled by the ability of microscopic algae ("microalgae") to grow in open-ocean areas where there is very little nitrate, an essential nutrient for the algae.

New conservation plans for the Siberian Crane covering its entire range and migration routes that span continents have now been endorsed to save the species from extinction.

History was made on June 11, 2010, in the southern, South Korean port city of Busan, when Governments gave the green light to an Intergovernmental Science Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).