For the first time, United Nations members have agreed on a unified treaty to protect biodiversity in the high seas - representing a turning point for vast stretches of the planet where conservation has previously been hampered by a confusing patchwork of laws.

The U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea came into force in 1994, before marine biodiversity was a well-established concept. The treaty agreement concluded two weeks of talks in New York.

Tremendous rains and snowfall since late last year have freed half of California from drought, but low groundwater levels remain a persistent problem, U.S. Drought Monitor data showed Thursday.

The latest survey found that moderate or severe drought covers about 49% of the state, nearly 17% of the state is free of drought or a condition described as abnormally dry. The remainder is still abnormally dry.

Residents of low-income communities in New Jersey that would get a second gas-fired power plant nearby are urging the governor to halt the project, which they said flies in the face of an environmental justice law he signed with great fanfare over two years ago — but which has yet to take full effect.

Competitive Power Ventures wants to build the second plant beside one it already operates in the Keasbey section of Woodbridge, about 22 miles (35 kilometers) south of Newark. The company says the expansion is needed because of growing demand for energy, pitching it as a reliable backup source for solar and wind energy when those types of power are not available.

An ongoing row between the European Union and coastal Indian Ocean nations over sustainable tuna fishing continues to simmer after a resolution in early February temporarily banned the use of destructive driftnets despite opposition from the European bloc.

Civil society organizations sent a petition Wednesday to the EU's oceans and environment commissioner, Virginijus Sinkevičius, accusing fisheries lobbies of exerting undue pressure on Brussels to object to the ban which applies to fisheries devices used by some corporations in the bloc.

Communities around the world emitted more carbon dioxide in 2022 than in any other year on records dating to 1900, a result of air travel rebounding from the pandemic and more cities turning to coal as a low-cost source of power.

Emissions of the climate-warming gas that were caused by energy production grew 0.9% to reach 36.8 gigatons in 2022, the International Energy Agency reported Thursday. (The mass of one gigaton is equivalent to about 10,000 fully loaded aircraft carriers, according to NASA.)

A summit on how to protect the world's largest forests underway in Gabon is set to be dominated by the issue of who pays for the protection and reforesting of lands that are home to some of the world's most diverse species and contribute to limiting planet-warming emissions.

French president Emmanuel Macron and officials and environment ministers from around the world are attending the One Forest Summit this week in the capital Brazzaville to discuss maintaining the world's major rainforests.

Residents of Vanuatu were hunkering down Wednesday as a cyclone barreled through the Pacific island nation.

Authorities said that there were power outages in some areas and many fallen trees and branches, but it was too early to assess the extent of the damage with Cyclone Judy still raging. They said there were no initial reports of major destruction or deaths.

Parts of the Northeast are gearing up for what could be very heavy snow Tuesday, after tornadoes and other powerful winds swept through parts of the Southern Plains and the Midwest, killing at least one person in Oklahoma, and some Michigan residents faced a sixth consecutive day without power following last week's ice storm.

In California, the National Weather Service said winter storms will continue moving into the state through Wednesday.

Ever bigger cars pose a growing problem for the environment because they produce more greenhouse gas emissions and need larger batteries than their smaller cousins, according to the International Energy Agency.

The Paris-based body suggested Monday that it's time for the car industry to downsize its vehicles, citing data that showed the world's 330 million sports utility vehicles, or SUVs, pumped out almost 1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2022.

What used to be a rare one-two punch of consecutive hurricanes hitting about the same place in the United States weeks apart seems to be happening more often, and a new study says climate change will make back-to-back storms more frequent and nastier in the future.

Using computer simulations, scientists at Princeton University calculate that the deadly storm duet that used to happen once every few decades could happen every two or three years as the world warms from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, according to a study in Monday's Nature Climate Change.