News & Features

Researchers Matthew Salter, Ilona Riipinen and Christoph Humborg from the Department of Environmental Science are behind a successful infrastructure funding application to the Swedish Reseach Council (VR) on the development of a new atmospheric science laboratory at Askö, a marine research station located within the Stockholm archipelago. This funding is the latest milestone in the establishment of a multidisciplinary centre …

On a crisp morning in October 2019, some of Europe’s most prominent climate scientists gathered inside Geovetenskapens hus at Frescati Campus, Stockholm University, to attend the inaugural meeting about FORCeS (Constrained Aerosol Forcing for Improved Climate Projections), a pan-European research project with the ambitious goal to tackle the uncertainty of aerosol forcing on climate and one the first projects of …

Together with senior scientific advisers from around the world, Stockholm University has signed a statement to governments on climate change ahead of the COP26 climate summit. On October 31, the COP26 climate summit began in Glasgow, where countries from all over the world gathered to find ways to reduce climate-affecting emissions. Ahead of the climate summit, 38 senior scientific advisers …

Without wastewater treatment, diseases and infections would ravage our modern world. At the same time, wastewater treatment is something we often take for granted. What actually happens down the pipelines when the water we flush leaves the house? “Danger down the Drain” is the pilot episode in the podcast series  Insights to Science produced and hosted by PhD student Roxana Cremer at …

The air around us is filled with tiny, invisible particles called aerosols. These particles affect the radiative balance of our planet in a number of ways, both directly, by scattering and absorbing light, and indirectly, by influencing cloud properties. Traditional methods to study cloud formation involve artificially activating aerosol particles or short-term direct sampling of clouds. Now a new observation …

Persistent mobile (PM) substances are being recognized as serious threats to the safety of water resources. In many cases, drinking water supplies have to be purified using expensive technologies because of contamination by PM substances. As part of this effort, a five-year wide-reaching European Research project, Zero Pollution of Persistent, Mobile substances, ZeroPM, has been launched. Fifteen partners are involved …

Current rates of plastic emissions globally may trigger effects that we will not be able to reverse, argues a new study by researchers from Sweden, Norway and Germany published on July 2nd in Science. According to the authors, plastic pollution is a global threat, and actions to drastically reduce emissions of plastic to the environment are ”the rational policy response”. …

Researchers at the Department of Environmental Science and Department of Meteorology (MISU) at Stockholm University together with international colleagues have recently launched the new Horizon 2020 project CRiceS (Climate relevant interactions and feedbacks: the key role of sea ice and snow in the polar and global climate system). The CRiceS project aims to contribute knowledge for better understanding of the …

Professor Christina Rudén from the Department of Environmental Science has been elected member of the European Commission’s high-level expert group whose mission is to help implement the new EU’s chemicals strategy for Sustainability published on 14 October 2020. She is one of eight representatives from the international scientific community. The expert group, officially known as High Level Roundtable on the …

A new scientific study by researchers at the Department of Environmental Science and colleagues from Stockholm University shows that environmental contaminants have a greater impact on the Baltic Sea’s bottom community than previously thought. The researchers call for more attention to be paid to hazardous substances when using small crustaceans and other sediment-dwelling animals to assess the effects of eutrophication and oxygen deficiency across different …

 The 2021 edition of the QS World University Rankings by subject  ranks Stockholm University 23rd in the world in environmental science. Across all subjects included in the analysis, Stockholm University is among the top 50 in five subjects, and the best in Sweden in 14 subjects. The five subjects that place Stockholm University in the top 50 are: environmental science (23) …

High levels of methane is escaping from the thawing subsea permafrost but the source(s) of that methane has long remained elusive. Now, a new study shows, for the first time, that the methane originates largely from a thermogenic (natural gas) deposit that breaks through the subsea permafrost and release into the shallow water column and the overlying atmosphere. The study …