Marine protected areas around the world are failing to protect most of the evolutionary diversity of the world's coral and fish, a new study has found.

The study into marine parks was conducted by an international team of researchers and found marine protected areas were not adequately protecting the evolutionary history of corals and fish, which stretches back 7,160 million years and 3,586 million years respectively.

One earthquake is recorded on average each day in a western Canadian region where companies extract oil by fracking, according to statistics published by the Canadian province's energy regulatory agency.

The Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) said Friday that in the last year alone, there were 363 tremors in and around Fox Creek, a small town of 2,000 inhabitants located 260 kilometers (160 miles) northwest of Edmonton.

Human-driven climate change may have put the next ice age off by about 50,000 years, said scientists Thursday, highlighting our species' ever-more dominant influence on Earth's natural cycles.

Carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations in the atmosphere could override other influences to make this the longest inter-ice age period in Earth history, they wrote in the journal Nature.

Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions increased in 2014-15, a report released with obscure timing by the Australian government has shown.

The December 2015 quarterly update of carbon emissions, which covers the period to the end of June 2015, was released with no fanfare on Christmas Eve. The quarterly update forms part of Australia’s international reporting of its emissions

Cities around the world have only one generation to meet the twin challenges of climate change and a rapidly growing urban population, the head of a global engineering firm has warned.

Gregory Hodkinson, chairman of the Arup group, said that with more than half the world’s population already living in cities, and the proportion set to rise to 70% by 2050, city leaders need to take urgent action.

Around $27bn (£18bn) was paid out by insurers for natural disaster claims last year, with weather causing 94% of incidents, according to data from reinsurer Munich Re.

While the climate phenomenon known as El Niño reduced the development of hurricanes in the north Atlantic, storms and floods still caused billions of dollars worth of damage in Europe and North America, the world’s largest reinsurer said in an annual review.

Sen. Ted Cruz, who has questioned the existence of global warming, said Tuesday that if he were elected president, he would withdraw the United States from the landmark climate agreement reached in Paris earlier this month.

"Barack Obama seems to think the SUV parked in your driveway is a bigger threat to national security than radical Islamic terrorists who want to kill us. That’s just nutty," Cruz told reporters in a high school classroom here. "These are ideologues, they don’t focus on the facts, they won’t address the facts, and what they’re interested [in] instead is more and more government power."

Dramatic cost declines in solar power tenders in India have shaken up expectations on pricing for the renewable fuel and have triggered warnings that the country's need for thermal coal imports will be much lower than some are banking on.

Huge solar power contracts awarded by Indian states to global players in November and December have been priced at levels more than 20 per cent below 12 months ago and point to solar power rapidly overtaking thermal coal imports in competitiveness for power generation.

The current El Nino is the strongest on record and is likely to continue until around May, but with its fallout - especially in South-east Asia - expected to be felt until the end of the year.

Dozens have died and millions of dollars have been lost due to El Nino-related weather, from storms and floods in the Americas to drought in South-east Asia. El Nino causes warm waters that normally pile up in the Western Pacific to flow east, triggering heavier rain along the west coast of the Americas and drier conditions in Australasia and South-east Asia.

Zero emission cars accounted for 17.1 percent of new car registrations last year in Norway, the industry said on Wednesday, the highest market share for clean vehicles anywhere in the world.

"Never has the market share of electric cars been as high as in 2015," Christina Bu of the Norwegian Association for Electric Cars said.