WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Saving biodiversity – the vast variety of animal and plant life on Earth – will be expensive: an estimated $300 billion a year for the next eight years, according to the new chief of the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity.

But Brazilian Braulio Ferreira de Souza Dias said that failing to protect the essential diversity in the natural world would cost more, creating global repercussions of disease, hunger, poverty and diminished resilience to climate change.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The world’s oceans are turning acidic at what could be the fastest pace of any time in the past 300 million years, even more rapidly than during a monster emission of planet-warming carbon 56 million years ago, scientists said on Thursday.

Looking back at this bygone warm period in Earth’s history could offer help in forecasting the impact of human-spurred climate change, researchers said.

WASHINGTON, Feb 22 (Reuters) – One year after a deadly
tornado season in the United States caused nearly $30 billion in
damage, an above-normal number of twisters could be in store for
2012.

While there is no way to predict that there will be a repeat
of 2011′s calamitous series of tornadoes, private weather
forecaster Accuweather.com said this week there are likely to be
more tornadoes than normal across the United States.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The elusive, endangered snow leopard is apparently thriving in a park in Bhutan, as seen in camera trap images released on Tuesday by the government of Bhutan and World Wildlife Fund.

Over 10,000 pictures of the snow leopards were captured last October and November by four cameras placed in Wangchuck Centennial Park as part of a survey conducted by Bhutan and WWF.

WASHINGTON, Feb 7 (Reuters) – Three U.S. consumer
groups petitioned the Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday to
subject a new genetically engineered salmon to a more rigorous
review process than is now in place before the fish can be
approved as safe to eat.

The fish at issue, AquaBounty Technologies’ (ABTX.L: Quote, Profile, Research)
AquAdvantage salmon, is currently classified as a new animal
drug for the purposes of FDA review.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

But weather forecasters, many of whom see climate change as a natural, cyclical phenomenon, are split over whether they have a responsibility to educate their viewers on the link between human activity and the change in the Earth’s climates.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Not long before his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama ventured to a place he’d never been in three well-traveled years as president: the Environmental Protection Agency.

For a Democrat who won the White House with strong green credentials, Obama has kept his environmental policies well below the radar for much of his presidency.

By Deborah Zabarenko and Nina Chestney

(Reuters) – Representatives from around the world gather in Rio in June to try to hammer out goals for sustainable development at a U.N. conference designed to avoid being tripped up by the intractable issue of climate change.

But there is concern in the lead-up to the conference, known as Rio+20 or the Earth Summit, that it risks ending up as all talk and little action.

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – Institutional investors with a collective $26 trillion under management opened a new front on Thursday in the fight against climate change, urging the private sector to mobilize, follow the money and find new technologies to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Putting a price on climate-warming carbon emissions, which has been instituted in parts of Europe and elsewhere with limited success, would be “nice to have” but not essential, said Kevin Parker, global head of Deutsche Asset Management.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Obama administration is set to ban new uranium mining claims around the Grand Canyon for the next 20 years, a move hailed by conservation groups as a key to the president’s environmental legacy.

The decision, expected to be announced by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on Monday, would put some one million acres of public lands outside Grand Canyon National Park off limits to all hard-rock mining for two decades, the longest moratorium allowed by law. Existing mining operations would continue.