Mumbai has emerged as the second-most liveable city in the world, according to an Ericsson ConsumerLab survey. The liveability factor has been tied to connectivity. Stockholm topped the list.

India's business capital has in the survey outranked cities such as New York, London and Los Angeles.

The 30-minute online survey (with 1,500 participants per city) was carried out in Cairo, Johannesburg, Mumbai, Stockholm, Beijing, Moscow, Sao Paulo, Tokyo, Seoul, London, Los Angeles, New York and Hong Kong.

Science as a contact sport; inside the battle to save Earth's climate by Stephen Schneider is an illuminating book by a world renowned climate scientist and professor at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. In 2007, Schneider received the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the International Panel for Climate Change (IPCC), along with Al Gore. His book is a recounting of his efforts over three decades to get the US government and the rest of the world to pay attention to climate change science.

Some of the main proposals in a draft text for negotiation at a U.N. sustainable development conference next month are being watered down at informal talks in New York, observers said on Tuesday, heightening fears the summit will fail to deliver.

The Rio+20 summit in Brazil from June 20-22 is expected to draw more than 50,000 participants from governments, companies and environmental and lobby groups.

It will try to hammer out sustainable development goals across seven core themes including food security, water and energy but is not expected to produce mandatory targets.

New York City is about to update its zoning regulations to catch up with the Bloomberg administration’s environmental image and to make it easier for buildings to insulate exterior walls, install solar panels and put gardens on rooftops.

With buildings accounting for 75 percent of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions, city planners say, the hope is that owners will take steps to increase their structures’ energy efficiency, produce their own renewable energy, put storm water to good use and, in some cases, even grow food.

The owners of residential buildings would have to adopt smoking policies and disclose them to prospective apartment buyers and tenants, under a law proposed Wednesday by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who has made curbing smoking a cornerstone of his public health policy.

The bill would require buildings with three or more apartments — whether rental, condominium or cooperative units — to disclose whether smoking is allowed in all indoor and outdoor locations, including inside apartments, on balconies and rooftops and in courtyards.

Electric vehicles in general are a great step in reducing emissions that cause global warming. The emissions from a gasoline-powered car are always greater than the emissions created to charge an electric vehicle. However, a new analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) suggests that the "greenness" of electric vehicles is not uniform across the country. They break down the country into regions that are good, better, and best for electric vehicles. Note there is no "bad" region in the country because electric vehicles outperform gasoline vehicles everywhere.

Wildfires scorched Tennessee on Wednesday as blazes in New Jersey and on New York's Long Island were largely brought under control and some were investigated as possible arson.

In the foothills of the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee, a wildfire raged on Wednesday, having already destroyed four buildings with 48 vacation condominiums since it began on Tuesday morning.

The fires follow an unusually dry winter and what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said was the warmest March in the contiguous United States since records began in 1895.

Wildfires scorched Tennessee on Wednesday as blazes in New Jersey and on New York's Long Island were largely brought under control and some were investigated as possible arson.

In the foothills of the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee, a wildfire raged on Wednesday, having already destroyed four buildings with 48 vacation condominiums since it began on Tuesday morning.

The fires follow an unusually dry winter and what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said was the warmest March in the contiguous United States since records began in 1895.

About 3.7 million Americans live within a few feet of high tide and risk being hit by more frequent coastal flooding in coming decades because of the sea level rise caused by global warming, according to new research.

If the pace of the rise accelerates as much as expected, researchers found, coastal flooding at levels that were once exceedingly rare could become an every-few-years occurrence by the middle of this century.

Some energy companies, state regulators, academics and environmentalists are reaching consensus that natural-gas drilling has led to several incidents of water pollution—but not because of fracking.

The energy officials and some environmentalists agree that poorly built wells are to blame for some cases of water contamination. In those cases, they say, wells weren't properly sealed with subterranean cement, which allowed contaminants to travel up the well bore from deep underground into shallow aquifers that provide drinking water.