The world is failing in efforts to control an international biotechnology trade ranging from genetically modified crops to the building blocks of biological weapons, a UN University study said on Tuesday. The study said a lack of controls was "a potentially contributing factor to the spread of bioterrorism" -- the deliberate release of naturally-occurring or human-modified bacteria, viruses, toxins or other biological agents.

A tract of tropical forest in the Congo Basin mapped with the help of local pygmies has become the largest in the world certified under a system meant to ensure responsible logging, partners in the project said on Tuesday. The 7,500 sq km (2,896 sq mile) concession area, almost the size of Cyprus or Puerto Rico, is operated by Congolaise Industrielle des Bois (CIB), a unit of Danish hardwood specialist DLH Group.

Caribbean islands will create new protected areas for fish and coral reefs under a $70 million plan announced on Tuesday that will help safeguard tourism-backed economies. "This is a trust fund for the future benefit of society," Bahamas Minister of Works and Transport Earl Deveaux told Reuters of the project. "Our economy is based on tourism and our greatest natural resource is our environment."

Norway could become "Europe's battery" by developing huge sea-based wind parks costing up to $44 billion by 2025, Norway's Oil and Energy Minister said on Monday. Norway's Energy Council, comprising business leaders and officials, said green exports could help the European Union reach a goal of getting 20 percent of its electricity by 2020 from renewable sources such as wind, solar, hydro or wave power.

Rising amounts of nitrogen entering the oceans from human activities are less beneficial than previously thought as a fertiliser for tiny marine plants that help slow global warming, scientists said on Thursday. "As much as a third of the nitrogen entering the world's oceans from the atmosphere is man-made," according to a team of 30 scientists writing in the journal Science. "It's not as good a thing as some people would like it to be," said Peter Liss, of the University of East Anglia in England which led the study with Texas A&M University.

Greenhouse gases are at higher levels in the atmosphere than at any time in at least 800,000 years, according to a study of Antarctic ice on Wednesday that extends evidence that mankind is disrupting the climate. Carbon dioxide and methane trapped in tiny bubbles of air in ancient ice down to 3,200 metres (10,500 ft) below the surface of Antarctica add 150,000 years of data to climate records stretching back 650,000 years from shallower ice drilling.

Norway's emissions of greenhouse gases rose almost 3 percent in 2007 to a record high, boosted by the opening of a liquefied natural gas plant by state-controlled StatoilHydro, Statistics Norway said on Tuesday. Emissions by the world's number five oil exporter climbed to the equivalent of 55.0 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2007 from 53.5 million in 2006 and were 11 percent above 1990 levels, the benchmark for the UN's Kyoto Protocol on global warming.

A campaign to plant trees worldwide set a goal on Tuesday of seven billion by late 2009, just over one for each person on the planet, to help protect the environment and slow climate change. The UN Environment Programme (UNEP), an organiser of the tree planting drive begun in late 2006 with an initial goal of a billion by the end of 2007, said governments, companies and individuals had already pushed the total above 2 billion.

Turn greenhouse gases to stone? Transform them into a treacle-like liquid deep under the seabed? The ideas may sound like far-fetched schemes from an alchemist's notebook but scientists are pursuing them as many countries prepare to bury captured greenhouse gases in coming years as part of the fight against global warming. Analysts say the search for a suitable technology could become a $150 billion-plus market. But a big worry is that gases may leak from badly chosen underground sites, perhaps jolted open by an earthquake.

Greenpeace and more than 100 other environmental groups denounced projects for burying industrial greenhouse gases on Monday, exposing splits in the green movement about whether such schemes can slow global warming. Many governments and some environmental organisations such as the WWF want companies to capture heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the exhausts of power plants and factories and then entomb them in porous rocks as one way to curb climate change. But Greenpeace issued a 44-page report about the technology entitled "False Hope".