What happens to research findings once the researchers have gone away? A web site run from the University of Stuttgart in Germany offers scientists an opportunity to bring their own data from completed research project on environmental and health risks and contribute to an Integrated Environmental Health Impact Assessment System, dubbed IEHIAS .

Making decisions related to forest conservation is no mean feat. Particularly, when a cost/benefit analysis is combined with integrating social and institutional impact at local and national scale.

News of increased desertification has made headlines. Yet this process is not well understood.

Multiple disasters can have a cumulative impact leading to great human and financial loss. The awareness of all possible risks is of fundamental importance.

Currently, the ocean takes up about 25% of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activities. But this uptake rate is governed by a number of factors, including global warming, which are not yet entirely understood.

Water is one of humanity’s most pressing issues. Do we have enough of it for drinking, for farming or for industry? Too much, in the shape of flooding? Or too little, in the form of drought? The WATCH project, funded by the EU, was designed to give us better answers to questions of water management .

Flash floods are very localised weather events. They are mostly triggered by heavy rainfall. Typically, over a period of less than 12 hours. They occur very infrequently at any one place.

The Black Sea is known for its severe environmental degradation. Some signs of recovery have been observed in the last years, albeit on a small scale . Scientists believe that it is still possible to limit the negative environmental impact.

Coastal areas offer great challenges when balancing the need to protect natural habitats, with the requirement of human and economic activities . Dikes, for example, may not constitute the solutions of the future.

Climate change and socio-economic factors are interdependent . If agriculture intensifies in a particular region, that would have an impact on water sector, resulting from the irrigation use.

Tim O’Higgins is a marine biologist in Scotland who has focused on those vital ecostystem services provided by estuarine and coastal waters.

Lars-Otto Reiersen is a marine biologist by training, now working as an environmental scientist in Norway. He has led the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) for over two decades.

The European Commission, on 29 th April 2013, slapped a two-year ban on insecticides suspected of killing off bee colonies. This follows the European Food Safety Authority finding that they pose a high acute risk to honey bees.

Many African regions are prone to droughts. Advances in forecasting and early warning for these phenomena are now becoming available to help mitigate their consequences on vulnerable societies.

Our data on the natural world is uncertain. And so are the models we use to make sense of it. The Uncertweb project, funded by the EU, aims to clarify both of these sources of doubt.

We are used to the idea of vulnerable environments and species. We are also familiar with cultural vulnerability. For example when traditional peoples meet seductive modern ways of life.

Guy Weets, a telecommunications engineer and consultant for the research centre AMRA (Analysis and Monitoring of Environmental Risk) in Naples, is the scientific coordinator of the CLUVA project, funded by the EU.

But by the time it began in May 2009, the original extreme urgency of the HighNoon project had ‘melted’ so to speak.

People living in Arctic areas can be more sensitive to pollutants due to their genetics , says researcher Arja Rautio at the Centre for Arctic Medicine in the University of Oulu , Finland.

Ari Asmi talks to youris.com about the link between aerosols and global warming. His expertise stems from his previous role as coordinator in an EU funded project called EUCAARI .