One species’ trash is another’s treasure. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch in the Pacific Ocean is now home to dozens of species, and the floating plastic island emphasizes how human civilization can influence even the most remote areas. More species in the open ocean can also facilitate the spread of invasive types.

Moving in

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is located within the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a “huge rotating current system between California and Hawaii” where “floating objects tend to get trapped instead of drifting away,” said Earth.com. The gyre has essentially created an island of tens of thousands of tons of plastic trash, approximately 80% of which originated on land. The size and shape of the patch is constantly changing.

Plastic is not the only thing present at the patch. Over time, much of the plastic has gained living inhabitants, according to a 2023 study published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. Scientists found 484 animals from 46 species on plastic debris from the gyre. Inhabitants were not “merely riding the debris to a new location” because “brooding females, rich with eggs and young” were found, as well as “animals at all life stages, including juveniles and adults,” said IFL Science. This range of life indicates that the organisms are there for the long haul and not just temporarily.

Many of the species living and thriving in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch “were able to reproduce asexually, essentially cloning themselves,” said Earth.com. “Their larvae also did not need to spend much time drifting freely in the water,” therefore “young animals could grow right on the same surface as the adults.” The reproductive cycle “fits well with a small, isolated raft of plastic that slowly circles within the gyre.”

House hunting

The discovered organisms largely made up two categories: coastal and pelagic, meaning species found in open water. “Barnacles, sea anemones, hydroids, amphipods, crabs and bryozoans are all represented, and most appear to come originally from the western Pacific, including the coasts of Japan.” said Econews. The mix of coastal and ocean life is called a “neopelagic community,” which is a “human-made ecosystem that exists only because of long-lived plastic floating far from land.”

Plastic may be the key for certain populations to expand into the open ocean. “Unlike natural floating substrates such as driftwood or pumice, plastic can persist for decades, thereby providing a continuous surface for attachment,” said The Economic Times. The plastic allows “coastal species that once would have died long before reaching remote islands” to “travel for years on these rafts,” said Econews.

The sampling of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch done by the study “likely doesn’t capture the biodiverse richness floating in the Pacific’s most polluted area,” said IFL Science. “Some animal groups, such as molluscs, were unexpectedly absent from the Patch, whereas others, such as sea anemones, were more common than in tsunami debris.” Unfortunately, open water travel “comes with serious risks,” especially introducing new invasive species, said Econews. Foreign species can use plastic to reach new areas where they “could compete with native corals, algae and invertebrates on reefs that are already stressed by warming, pollution and overfishing.”

Even though there is life on the Patch, it “does not diminish the urgency of reducing plastic production and improving waste management,” said The Economic Times. Instead, it “underscores the complexity of ocean systems and the long-lasting consequences of synthetic debris.”

The invasion of the golden oyster mushroom is posing a threat to native species. And with temperatures warming, further expansion could lead to dire ecological consequences.

Yellow flag

The golden oyster mushroom was brought to the U.S. from Asia during the 2000s mostly because it “can grow quickly, which was a boon, as it’s considered one of the most delicious mushrooms a forager can find,” said Vice. What was once deemed a benefit turned out to be a threat. The bright yellow mushroom’s ability to reproduce quickly has caused it to spread across the continent, making it notoriously invasive. The species has already been found in 25 states.

The fungus is “invisible for most of the year, living as mycelium, fungal strands within the wood,” said the BBC. In the spring, it “sends out its fruiting body,” which is “what we would recognize as the mushroom itself.” The “huge yellow clusters cascade out of logs and trees, each mushroom itself producing millions of microscopic airborne spores.” Though the golden oyster mushroom “isn’t yet posing a significant risk to Western forests, it is taking hold in the Northeast and Midwest,” said The Cool Down.

When the mushroom is present in a forest, the “fungal community composition significantly changes, and fungal species richness significantly decreases,” said a 2025 study published in the journal Current Biology. Trees colonized by the fungus have “about half the fungal biodiversity as trees without the golden oyster,” Aishwarya Veerabahu, a mycologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and lead author of the study, said to the BBC. “That was a huge indicator that they are likely outcompeting the native fungi that were there.”

Settling the spore

The golden oyster mushroom “mainly grows on dead or dying hardwood trees, breaking down the tough wood fibers,” said the BBC. The fungi are gilled mushrooms, which have the ability to “release up to billions of spores.” These oyster mushrooms also “happen to be one of the few carnivorous mushrooms” and mainly prey on nematode worms.

Dead wood is a “crucial habitat for small animals and tree seedlings in the forest,” said Veerabahu. The spread of the mushroom could pose a risk to a variety of species. The golden oyster “grows and ‘chews’ through woods so rapidly,” and it could spell bad news for the “rate of decay of wood and for the carbon emissions that come from that.” Not only this fungus but all invasive fungi are “especially dangerous because so little is known about them,” said Oregon Live.

Human trade brought the mushroom west. “It’s a problem created by the way we use, grow and transport fungi,” said the BBC.

And warmer temperatures due to climate change are creating conditions increasingly suitable for its spread. The mushroom’s “proclivity for expansion means it could soon become a problem in new territories,” including urban areas, said The Cool Down.

To prevent the fungus from overtaking forests everywhere, “continued research, management efforts anchored in social theory and collaborative conversations about microbial endemism” will be necessary, said the study. “The cultivation of local species or development of sporeless mushroom strains could also mitigate risks.”

Below the Antarctic ice lies a treasure trove of minerals, including copper, iron, gold, silver, platinum and cobalt. Warming temperatures due to climate change could unearth these minerals and, in turn, fuel future geopolitical conflict, potentially leading to a reversal of the current Antarctic drilling ban. If the ban is lifted, there may also be an increase in emissions. Those emissions would raise temperatures even more.

Iced out

Though under 0.6% of Antarctica is estimated to be free of ice cover today, scientists predict there will be up to a 550% increase during the next 30 years, according to a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change. And this climate-driven melting will lead to a “likely rise in the economic viability of Antarctic mineral resources over the coming centuries.” New accessible resources could pose problems in the future when it comes to determining whether these minerals can be mined and by whom.

A country’s interest in Antarctic mineral resource development may be “linked to whether it holds a territorial claim, the economic value of mineral resources within that claimed territory and the extent of land emergence,” said the study. The largest land emergence in Antarctica is “likely to occur over territories claimed by Argentina, Chile and the United Kingdom,” said Eos. But “all territorial claims on Antarctica were suspended by the 1959 Antarctic Treaty and are not recognized by other nations,” said The New York Times

Global copper demand is “currently at 28 million metric tons and is expected to jump to 42 million metric tons by 2040 as demand for electricity grows,” said the Times. Access to resources is going to become more important than ever. Changes to Antarctic ice cover could “put pressure on the region’s legal framework surrounding mineral resource activities,” said Eos. And interest may come from “states without territorial claims or non-state actors,” said the study.

Melting the ice

The Antarctic Treaty was signed in 1959 as a response to World War II and global interest in keeping Antarctica unmilitarized. The agreement stipulated that Antarctica should be “used for peaceful purposes only” and that “no acts or activities taking place while the present treaty is in force shall constitute a basis for asserting, supporting or denying a claim to territorial sovereignty,” said the treaty. It also bans any mining or drilling activities for commercial purposes.

These provisions may change in the future. Nations, beginning in 2048, will be able to request adjustments to the Antarctic Treaty. Along with Argentina, Chile and the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, France and Norway also made formal land claims to Antarctica before the treaty. “Major powers like the United States and Russia, though not formal claimants, retain strategic interests and could play a key role if rules around resource extraction change,” said Money Control.

Drilling in Antarctica can have significant negative environmental impacts, including the release of trapped greenhouse gases. Increased greenhouse gases would lead to worsening climate change, which would cause additional ice melt. In the future, “environmental impacts of mineral resource extraction activities will be weighed against societal pressure for sustainable resource development,” said the study.

Nonetheless, the ice melt is ”unlikely to trigger a major change to Antarctic governance on its own,” Tim Stephens, a professor of international law at The University of Sydney Law School, said to Eos. “The continent will still remain a very challenging environment for mineral resource extraction.”

The deep, blue sea is becoming deeper — in color, that is. Climate change, along with human development, has reduced how much light can filter through the water. Reduced light can significantly disrupt the marine food chain as well as lead to the large-scale worsening of climate change.

Zoning issues

Ocean darkening occurs when “changes in the optical properties of the oceans reduce the depth to which sufficient light penetrates to facilitate biological processes guided by sunlight and moonlight,” said a 2025 study published in the journal Global Change Biology. The color shift can make the water look more opaque. The part of the ocean that sunlight is able to penetrate is called the photic zone and it is “home to 90% of marine species,” said the World Economic Forum. Organisms like phytoplankton also “convert sunlight and CO2 into energy, producing nearly half the planet’s oxygen and absorbing vast amounts of carbon emissions” in the photic zone.

Rather than just some patches of darkening, the phenomenon has affected “large, connected regions,” Tim Smyth, a marine scientist at Plymouth Marine Laboratory and co-author of the study, said to New Scientist. “Roughly one‑fifth of the world’s oceans have darkened in some way.” Already, the depth of the photic zone has reduced by more than 10% “across 9% of the global ocean,” said the study.

In coastal areas, darkening is “closely linked to changes in the rivers that flow into the sea,” Smyth said. “Shifts in land use affect what becomes dissolved or suspended in the water, which, in turn, alters the optical quality of the water entering the ocean.” In addition, “fertilizers used in industrial agriculture are washed into rivers, stimulating phytoplankton growth,” which reduces “how deeply light can penetrate the water column.”

However, darkening is not limited to the coast. The open ocean has also increased in opacity, which “may be linked to shifts in phytoplankton blooms driven by climate change.” There have been “rising ocean temperatures, more frequent marine heatwaves and changes in salinity in some regions.” Such changes “influence large‑scale ocean circulation patterns.”

Light direction

Dark oceans are bad news and the consequences have already begun to appear. As the photic zone shrinks, “many marine species are forced to move closer to the surface in order to survive,” said Diario AS. This “pushes large numbers of organisms into a much smaller space, increasing competition for food, raising biological stress and leaving them far more exposed to predators, including human fishing vessels.”

Along with disrupting the marine food chain, ocean darkening hinders the ocean’s ability to perform photosynthesis, weakening the “ocean’s role as a carbon sink, its natural capacity to capture and store the carbon dioxide that warms the planet.” If the ocean isn’t helping to sequester carbon from the atmosphere, climate change will worsen at a faster rate.

Some of the main culprits of ocean darkening are “sediment runoff from agriculture, deforestation and development,” especially in coastal regions, said the World Economic Forum. Improved land management can play a large role in reducing the level of darkening. This includes reducing fertilizer use as well as encouraging conservation efforts. In the open ocean, the problem is much more difficult to tackle as “even if global emissions dropped to net zero tomorrow, the ocean would take decades, if not centuries, to respond,” said Smyth. The good news is that the ocean “still has a remarkable capacity to heal itself. Give marine ecosystems a little room to recover and they often respond with surprising speed.”

An estimated $500 billion worth of lithium lies below the Salton Sea, a large lake in Imperial County, California, east of San Diego, and many people are eager to tap into this “white gold mine.” But the sea is located in a region of the Golden State where there are already numerous environmental concerns, and some residents worry that plundering for lithium could exacerbate the problem.

‘Saudi Arabia of lithium’

There has been a renewed push to extract the Salton Sea’s lithium, as the mineral is crucially important for rechargeable electric batteries. The lithium in question could likely “power our smartphones, electric cars and electricity grids,” said Soumya Karlamangla at The New York Times, and a modern gold rush “could bring jobs, tax dollars and economic revitalization to one of the most impoverished places in the nation.” In 2022, the area was called the “Saudi Arabia of lithium” by California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), a reference to that country’s abundant natural resources.

Pressure to extract this lithium is also coming from the artificial intelligence industry, as AI is “driving a surge in energy demand as tech companies scramble to build more data centers,” said Kori Suzuki at KPBS San Diego. There is “just a massive demand for power,” Rod Colwell, the CEO of Controlled Thermal Resources, said to KPBS. The company is planning to build a lithium extraction project in the region, and there has never “been a change of focus.”

‘Not everyone is eagerly welcoming’

Residents of Imperial County, on the other hand, are concerned that the ongoing lithium push could create even more environmental hazards, and “not everyone is eagerly welcoming” the industry, Karlamangla said at the Times. The Salton Sea has been rapidly shrinking, and “as it does, it spews plumes of pesticide-laden dust throughout Imperial County.” Lithium extraction requires a lot of fresh water, and locals “worry the process will deplete the region’s scarce water resources.”

Ecological groups have launched lawsuits, arguing that environmental hazards outweigh the benefits of extracting the lithium. The proposed project from Controlled Thermal Resources “would create a high-water demand in an arid desert environment where the drying out of the Salton Sea worsens severe air pollution impacts,” said a legal brief from the nonprofits Comite Civico del Valle and Earthworks. The lawsuits “only serve to delay progress on clean energy projects that are essential to the community, California and the nation,” Lauren Rose, a spokesperson for Controlled Thermal Resources, told CalMatters.

Others are not buying this argument. The project “must be corrected to meet the standards that protect our community and our environment,” Luis Olmedo, the executive director of Comite Civico del Valle, said to CalMatters. Imperial County is “no stranger to 21st century plans that arrive with great promise but do little to benefit locals,” Aaron Cantú said at Capital & Main. The lithium mining is “just another way the community will be sacrificed for private gain,” Anahi Araiza, a policy researcher at Imperial Valley Equity & Justice, told Capital & Main. Residents “want a slow and methodical process to ensure that things are done well.”

Rather than blood in the water, sharks are finding drugs in the water. The aquatic predators have tested positive for both legal and illegal drugs in parts of the Bahamas. These substances have the potential to cause behavioral changes in the sharks and indicate that humans have a stronger hand in ecosystem changes than expected, even in isolated places.

Drugged and dangerous

Scientists found cocaine, caffeine and painkillers in sharks around Eleuthera Island in the Bahamas, according to a study published in the journal Environmental Pollution. The blood of 85 sharks in the region was tested for several drugs. Twenty-eight of those sharks from “three species had caffeine, anti-inflammatory painkillers or other drugs in their blood,” and some even tested positive for multiple, said Science News. “Caffeine was the most common, followed by acetaminophen and diclofenac,” the active ingredients in Tylenol and Voltaren, respectively.

This is not the first time cocaine has been found in sharks. A study from 2024 found the drug in Brazilian sharpnose sharks in waters near Rio de Janeiro. But this is the “first report of caffeine and acetaminophen detected in any shark species worldwide and the first report of diclofenac and cocaine in sharks from the Bahamas,” said the study. “We are talking about a very remote island,” said Natascha Wosnick, the 2024 lead study author and a biologist at the Federal University of Paraná, to Science News.

While the Brazil study found sharks’ exposure to cocaine, the scientists only “tested the liver and muscle tissue of sharks,” said Smithsonian Magazine. In the 2026 study, the researchers tested blood, which “reflects more recent exposure to drugs.” The sharks were captured in popular areas for diving and cruising. The exposure is “mostly because people are going there, peeing in the water and dumping their sewage,” said Wosnick.

Fins of the future

While cocaine sharks are concerning, the “widespread presence of caffeine and pharmaceuticals in the blood of many analyzed sharks is equally alarming,” said Wosnick to CBS News. “These are legal substances, routinely consumed and often overlooked, yet their environmental footprint is clearly detectable.”

The Bahamas sharks’ blood also had “changes in some biological markers, which can point to how tissues are functioning,” said Smithsonian Magazine. These markers “might be leading to higher stress and higher energy use as the aquatic predators’ bodies work to detoxify their systems,” said Science Alert.

The study findings are a “reminder that coastal infrastructure, tourism and marine food webs are tightly connected,” said Tracy Fanara, an oceanographer who helped produce the documentary “Cocaine Sharks,” to Science News. Researchers are still unsure about how detrimental the blood changes could be to the sharks’ health.

“Our primary concern is not an increase in aggression toward humans but rather the potential implications for the health and stability of shark populations," said Wosnick. “Chronic exposure to these anthropogenic compounds, many of which have no natural analogue in marine systems, may lead to negative effects that are still poorly understood.” These effects could be the subject of research in the future.

The concrete cap of a tomb encasing radioactive fallout now has cracks, and what’s beneath can rise from the dead. The U.S. military, in 1958, conducted a nuclear test on Runit Island in the Marshall Islands with an 18-kiloton bomb called Cactus. The resulting blast left behind an almost 33-foot deep crater, which later became a dumping ground for the debris from a myriad of nuclear tests from the 1940s to 50s. In 1977, the Runit Dome was created to contain that radioactive waste. But the dome’s deterioration could contaminate the ocean and displace hundreds of people.

Nuclear consequences

The Runit Dome contains more than 120,000 tons of contaminated material from nuclear testing, including lethal quantities of plutonium. The isotope plutonium-239 is a “radioactive element used in nuclear weapons that remains dangerous for more than 24,000 years,” said the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

Merely coming into contact with the radioactive element can kill you. Concrete, unfortunately, does not endure that long. “There are already cracks in it in less than 50 years,” Arjun Makhijani, a nuclear engineer and president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, said to the ABC.

Since the concrete tomb was built, “groundwater has penetrated the otherwise-unlined crater, beneath which there lies a bed of porous coral sediment,” said Science Alert. The leaked water in the dome is “soaking the radioactive waste with the daily rise and fall of the tide,” said ZME Science. The tomb’s outer shell also contains cracks, “allowing contaminated waste to wash into the surrounding lagoon,” said the ABC. Runit Dome is approximately 20 miles from a human population that regularly uses the lagoon. Continued radioactive waste would lead to its displacement.

While these are the current problems, there are also “concerns that layers of the dome intended to sit above sea level are not going to stay above water much longer,” said Science Alert. “Sea levels are rising and there’s indications that storms are intensifying,” Ivana Nikolic Hughes, a senior lecturer in chemistry at Columbia University and president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, said to the ABC. “We worry the integrity of the dome could be in jeopardy.” Higher water levels could bring radioactive contaminants further into the Pacific Ocean.

Radioactive risks

Despite experts’ concerns about the Runit Dome, the U.S. Department of Energy has claimed that the “dome was not in imminent danger of collapse,” the “cracks were consistent with aging concrete” and the “lagoon already contained large amounts of radioactive material from past tests,” said the ABC. The U.S. conducted 67 nuclear tests across the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958, some of which were bigger than Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Over 300 Marshallese people were removed from the area in 1946 before the U.S. began nuclear testing.

The ocean has been “steadily encroaching on the dome over the years,” and “residents fear nuclear contamination if the site were to collapse,” said The Cool Down. The problem is expected to worsen over time without climate change mitigation. “Legacies of nuclear testing and military land requisitions by a foreign power have displaced hundreds of Marshallese for generations,” Paula Gaviria Betancur, the UN Special Rapporteur, said in 2024, and the “adverse effects of climate change threaten to displace thousands more.”

What happened

The Trump administration on Monday agreed to pay France’s TotalEnergies nearly $1 billion to forgo its leases to build two wind farms off the coasts of New York and North Carolina. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said the federal government would reimburse TotalEnergies as the company invested in natural gas and oil projects in the U.S. Under the “innovative agreement,” the Interior Department said in a press release, TotalEnergies also “pledged not to develop any new offshore wind projects in the United States.”

Who said what

The deal to abandon the two wind projects, which would have powered more than 1.3 million homes and businesses, “is an extraordinary transfer of taxpayer dollars to a foreign company for the purposes of boosting the production of fossil fuels” and “throttling” clean energy, The New York Times said. President Donald Trump has “personally reviled” windmills for years, CNN said.

Burgum argued that offshore wind was “unreliable, unaffordable and unsecured” because the wind doesn’t always blow. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) said Trump’s “pay-not-to-play scheme” was “an outrageous abuse of taxpayer dollars.” North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein (D) said it was “ludicrous and wasteful” to “pay off a company to stop it from investing private dollars to create the clean energy we need.” TotalEnergies made the “pragmatic” business decision now that developing “offshore wind projects is not in the country’s interest,” CEO Patrick Pouyanné said in a statement.

What next?

One of the five East Coast wind farms Trump tried and failed to stop last year, Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, “started delivering power to the grid for Virginia” on Monday, The Associated Press said. And as Trump is “boosting oil, gas and coal” in the U.S., “globally the offshore wind market is growing, with China leading the world in new installations.”

What is glyphosate?

It’s the world’s most used herbicide, best known in the U.S. as Roundup. American farmers alone spray about 300 million pounds of it on fields annually. Such chemical herbicides have long been opposed by environmental groups and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAGA-aligned Make America Healthy Again movement, which claims glyphosate causes cancer and other health problems. Bayer, the German chemicals giant that makes Roundup, last month proposed a $7.25 billion settlement to resolve tens of thousands of lawsuits from people who allege the glyphosate-based weed killer is to blame for their non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a cancer of the immune system. (Bayer insists glyphosate is safe and has not admitted liability, but in 2023 began phasing the chemical out of Roundup sold for residential use.) So MAHA activists were stunned when President Trump issued an executive order a day after the settlement was announced to boost glyphosate production, calling it “central to American economic and national security.” Zen Honeycutt, founder of the MAHA-linked Moms Across America group, said she felt “sick to my stomach” when she read the executive order, calling it, “a love letter to glyphosate.”

Is glyphosate safe?

The evidence is mixed. The International Agency for Research on Cancer, an affiliate of the World Health Organization, designated the herbicide in 2015 as “probably carcinogenic to humans.” Bayer points out that the IARC puts drinking hot beverages and eating red meat at the same hazard level as glyphosate, and that other public health bodies—including the EPA and the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization—disagree with this assessment. But Lianne Sheppard, a University of Washington professor who served on the EPA panel that reviewed glyphosate in 2016, notes that scientific evidence for the herbicide’s effects on human health has recently “strengthened for cancer and other end points.”

What is that evidence?

A meta-study she co-authored found that people with high exposures—such as agricultural workers or people who live near farms—have a 41% increased risk of developing non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Meanwhile, laboratory studies using human cells and animals suggest glyphosate can damage DNA and harm the liver and kidneys. Critics caution that animal and cell studies typically use far higher exposure levels than most people would encounter. “There’s just no compelling evidence that glyphosate causes cancer,” said Robert Tarone, a 28-year veteran of the National Cancer Institute. But other scientists argue that there’s a lack of hard evidence showing glyphosate to be safe, especially following the retraction in November of a landmark study cited by many regulators as proof that the herbicide is not carcinogenic.

Why was the study pulled?

Because lawsuits against Monsanto—the former owner of Roundup, which Bayer acquired for $63 billion in 2018—revealed emails that show the company’s scientists secretly helped conceive and write the supposedly independent study. In messages sent in 2000, one Monsanto employee complimented her colleagues’ “hard work” on the paper and said the “plan is now to utilize it both in the defense of Roundup and Roundup Ready crops worldwide.” In withdrawing the study, the Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology journal cited “serious ethical concerns” over the “independence and accountability of the authors,” who may have been paid by Monsanto for their work. The study’s retraction doesn’t mean its findings were incorrect, but it adds to the haze of uncertainty around glyphosate. “We absolutely must study it, given it is the most commonly used herbicide in the world,” said Brenda Eskenazi, a public health expert at the University of California, Berkeley. “Even a small, tiny effect, if it’s real, can have a huge public health impact because so many people would be exposed.”

How many people are exposed to the herbicide?

A 2024 CDC study found glyphosate traces in the urine of about 70% to 80% of Americans, but researchers say that the presence of the chemical does not mean it is causing harm. While running for president in 2024, Kennedy vowed to curb Americans’ exposure to glyphosate, which he called “one of the likely culprits in America’s chronic disease epidemic.” And as an environmental lawyer in 2018, Kennedy won a nearly $290 million lawsuit against Monsanto, in which he argued Roundup caused his school groundskeeper-client to develop cancer. But since joining the agribusiness-friendly Trump administration, Kennedy has quietened his criticisms.

What has he said about glyphosate?

The first report from the White House’s Kennedy-led MAHA Commission in May mentioned glyphosate once in 72 pages, saying studies have “noted a range of possible health effects.” A second 20-page report in September made no mention of it. That led to rumblings of discontent in the MAHA movement, which became thunderous after Trump’s executive order. In a statement, Kennedy said herbicides “are toxic by design” but that he backed the president’s order as a necessary step “to bring agricultural chemical production back to the United States.” Many MAHA supporters—a group that includes 62% of parents who identify as Republican—called that about-face a betrayal. So-called MAHA moms “feel like they were lied to,” said conservative wellness influencer Alex Clark. “How am I supposed to rally these women to vote red in the midterms?” Kelly Ryerson, a MAHA advocate who goes by Glyphosate Girl online, said the order feels “very, very much like the breaking point. People can’t continue to make excuses for the administration.”

While it is widely known that rising carbon dioxide emissions have significantly impacted the climate and our ecosystems, scientists recently found a less expected outcome. Increased CO2 levels have altered the chemical balance of human blood, which may have negative long-term health ramifications. The rate at which emissions are increasing also does not allow time for the human body to adapt.

A bloody problem

Increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere have correlated to an increase in bicarbonate (HCO3-) levels and a decrease in calcium (Ca) and phosphorus (P) levels in human blood, according to a study published in the journal Air Quality, Atmosphere & Health. If these trends continue, “blood bicarbonate values could be at the limit of the accepted healthy range in half a century, and Ca and P will be at the limit of their healthy ranges by the end of this century.”

In human blood, CO2 is converted into bicarbonate, which at normal concentrations has an important role in maintaining healthy pH levels. However, the concentration of bicarbonate increased by about 7%, or 0.34% per year, between 1999 and 2020. Calcium and phosphorus levels dropped by 2% and 7%, respectively. This is because when carbon dioxide dissolves in the bloodstream, it “alters the body's acid-base balance,” said Science Alert. In order to keep the blood pH within its healthy range, the “kidneys conserve bicarbonate, a buffering molecule that helps neutralize excess acidity.” Bones “can also buffer acid by exchanging minerals such as calcium and phosphorus.”

Code red

Elevated CO2 can lead to a range of adverse health effects. Even “moderate increases in carbon dioxide indoors can affect thinking and focus,” said Earth.com. Certain levels “have been linked to slower decision-making and changes in brain activity in some groups.” It can also “increase stress hormones and cause oxidative stress, which can damage cells.” As far as the changes in our blood, “chronic CO2 retention can lead to metabolic acidosis, which may cause the calcification of kidneys and arteries as the body attempts to manage pH levels,” said Down to Earth. Calcium and phosphorus are also extremely important for our health.

There is a "delicate balance between how much CO2 is in the air, our blood pH, our breathing rate and bicarbonate levels in the blood,” Phil Bierwirth, a retired environmental geoscientist and one of the authors of the study, said in a release. “CO2 in the air is now higher than humans have ever experienced,” and we may “never adapt.” Because of this, many experts believe it is important to take action against climate change to reduce emissions and limit the levels of atmospheric carbon.

Rising CO2 levels are “especially relevant for children and adolescents, whose developing bodies will experience the longest cumulative exposure,” said the release. “We’re not saying people are suddenly going to become unwell when we cross a certain threshold,” Alexander Larcombe, a respiratory physiologist and author of the study, said in the release. “But this suggests there may be gradual physiological changes occurring at a population level, and that's something we should be monitoring as part of future climate change policy.”

What if plastic waste could be turned into something useful? That dream may soon become a reality, as scientists have found a way to turn plastic into acetic acid using sunlight. Plastics and microplastics have been found everywhere from waterways to remote ecosystems to the bodies of humans and animals. Worldwide plastic usage has also continued to increase over the past 60 years. But this new method would mark a uniquely environmentally friendly way of dealing with plastic pollution.

Sunny solutions

Scientists have created a “sustainable, highly efficient” method to “upcycle plastics to value-added acetic acid,” which is the main component of vinegar, said a study published in the journal Advanced Energy Materials. The process is a “bio-inspired cascade photocatalysis using iron atoms embedded in carbon nitride,” said a release about the study. It is similar to “how certain types of fungi break down organic matter using enzymes.”

“Our goal was to solve the plastic pollution challenge by converting microplastic waste into high-value products using sunlight,” said Dr. Yimin Wu, a professor of mechanical and mechatronics engineering at the University of Waterloo who guided the study, in the release. When the photocatalyst is exposed to sunlight, it triggers two back-to-back chemical reactions. The first one “breaks plastic down into smaller molecules,” and the second “converts those molecules into acetic acid,” said Earth.com. The reaction also takes place in water, “making it particularly relevant for addressing plastic pollution in aquatic environments,” said the release.

The other benefit is that the system works on a variety of plastic types. Acetic acid could be produced from “common plastic wastes, including PVC, PP, PE and PET,” and remained “effective across mixed plastic compositions,” said the release. This makes it a valuable tool for real-world waste streams where different plastics are all mixed together.

Acidic answers

Global plastic use has grown from 20 megatons (Mt) in 1966 to 460 Mt in 2019, according to the Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan. It is expected to reach 1,231 Mt by 2060. Unfortunately, there is no great way to deal with plastic waste. The majority of it ends up in landfills, where it stays for thousands of years. It can also get stuck in the ecosystem or in waterways. Some can be incinerated, but that releases chemicals and smoke into the atmosphere. Recycling is another option, but not all types of plastic can be recycled, and many current processes require the use of fossil fuels.

This newly discovered alternative “allows abundant and free solar energy to break down plastic pollution without adding extra carbon dioxide to the atmosphere,” Wu said. In addition, while acetic acid is used to make vinegar, it also has several other uses and a “global annual demand of approximately 18 million tons,” said The Engineer. The material is “widely used across the chemicals sector and also has some energy applications.” The study’s findings also “point to new possibilities for addressing microplastics directly,” as the “process degrades plastics at the chemical level,” which “could help prevent the accumulation of microplastics in water systems,” said the release. The technology is still in the laboratory phase.

Oil spills have a new whirlwind solution. Disasters like Exxon Valdez in 1989 and Deepwater Horizon in 2010 are difficult to clean up after and can cause catastrophic ecological damage — and there are thousands of them each year. The options to deal with the crude oil are either burn it and produce high levels of smoke and pollution in the process, or leave it to destroy habitats and kill wildlife. Now, scientists may have found a new way to burn the oil without releasing excessive emissions: by creating raging fire tornadoes.

A blazing idea

The most common method of removing oil from bodies of water is through on-site burning. This technique can “rapidly remove up to 95% of spilled oil from the water surface, reducing the risk of oil penetrating sediments or drifting to contaminate adjacent habitats,” said a study published in the journal Fuel. However, it also “produces a visible smoke plume containing soot and other combustion products, raising concerns about air pollution and potential health risks.” It also tends to leave a layer of black sludge on the surface of the water.

Fire tornadoes or fire whirls offer the “potential for cleaner, more efficient burns with reduced emissions in environmental applications like oil spill remediation,” said the study. These flames spread upward rather than outward, acting like a “natural turbocharger, sucking in oxygen and creating a flame that burns hotter, faster and far more efficiently than fire pools,” said a release about the study. The blazing tornado can also produce 40% less soot and consume up to 95% of the fuel.

Scientists tested this method in a controlled experiment during which they “built 316-foot walls and a rough triangle and generated a controlled fire whirl that reached 17 feet high,” said Vice. The tornado burned through the oil 40% faster than the on-site method and was able to “destroy the particles that form thick smoke plumes,” reducing the amount of emissions, said the release. This can cut the “environmental cost of emergency burning while vaporizing nearly all the oil before it can become a toxic tar mat on the ocean’s surface.”

Not so slick

As promising as fire tornadoes are, these “inferno giants are sensitive,” said the release. “Too much wind, and the column can collapse or destabilize. Too little control over airflow, and it behaves like a fire pool.” The thickness of the oil layer can also affect the whirl’s efficiency. However, “this is the first time anyone has conceived using fire whirls for oil spill remediation, and it’s really just the beginning,” said Elaine Oran, a professor of aerospace engineering at Texas A&M who led the study, in the release. “Our goal is to harness the chaotic nature of fire whirls as a powerful, precise restoration tool, to protect coastlines, marine ecosystems and the environment as a whole.”

There is still a lot of work to be done before widespread use becomes possible. For now, the method to create the whirls using three walls is “not directly applicable to open ocean environments where large oil spills typically occur,” said the study. More research should be done to “explore applicable methods for inducing fire whirls in open water conditions,” like using “mobile or deployable structures” or “leveraging natural atmospheric conditions.”

This research could also be applied to other uses, like to “help engineers design high-efficiency combustion systems” or to “better predict and control wildfire behavior on land,” said Earth.com. “By understanding the physical laws that govern fire whirls, we can harness their power beyond oil spill remediation,” said Oran.

Our planet may be heading to a point of no return. Scientists predict that a domino effect of damage is on the horizon if there is no intervention, including “hothouse” level warming. Climate change is likely to worsen, especially with relaxed emissions regulations, which will lead to irreparable harm to the ecosystem and human health.

What’s ‘hothouse’ warming?

Earth’s climate is “departing from the stable conditions that supported human civilization for millennia” and barreling toward several tipping points, which “could commit the planet to a hothouse trajectory,” said an analysis published in the journal One Earth. “Most tipping interactions are destabilizing in nature,” and if “one element tips, it can trigger a cascade effect, pushing other systems past their thresholds.” This tipping may “already be underway or could occur soon for the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, boreal permafrost, mountain glaciers and parts of the Amazon rainforest.” The shift could “raise global temperatures, accelerate sea-level rise, release vast stores of carbon and destabilize ecosystems.”

In the hothouse trajectory, “global temperature stays significantly above the 4°C rise of current worst-case climate scenarios for thousands of years, driving a huge rise in sea level that drowns coastal cities,” said The Guardian. Unfortunately, global temperatures are likely already as “warm as, or warmer than, at any point in the last 125,000 years,” and the progress is “advancing faster than many scientists predicted,” said Christopher Wolf, a scientist at Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Associates and one of the authors of the analysis, to The Guardian. “Policymakers and the public remain largely unaware of the risks posed by what would effectively be a point-of-no-return transition.”

What does the future hold?

Despite the warning, there is still a lot of uncertainty. Scientists “do not yet know the exact thresholds for many tipping elements, how feedback will interact with climate sensitivity, or how quickly tipping cascades might unfold,” said the analysis. Regardless, we “may be approaching a perilous threshold, with rapidly dwindling opportunities to prevent dangerous and unmanageable climate outcomes.” The risks are higher as the Trump administration is working to roll back caps on carbon dioxide emissions. The “added pollution could lead to as many as 58,000 premature deaths and an increase of 37 million asthma attacks between now and 2055,” said The New York Times.

The U.S. is “currently the world’s second-largest climate polluter (after China) but is the nation that has pumped the most greenhouse gases into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution,” said the Times. Time is of the essence now as the “boulder is going off over the edge of the cliff,” said Jillian Gregg, a study co-author and the CEO of Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Associates, to KLCC. “We are on this trajectory, and we don’t have recourse in how to get back.” However, even with evidence to show the dangers of climate change, we may be living in a “post-truth era in which too many people prefer pleasant lies over unpleasant truths,” said Reinhard Steurer, a professor of climate policy and governance at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna, to Inside Climate News.

What happened

Eight people were killed in an avalanche near Lake Tahoe on Tuesday and one person is missing and presumed dead, California authorities said Wednesday. The other six people on the three-day backcountry skiing trek in the Sierra Nevada mountains were rescued alive, including one of the four guides. The avalanche, near Castle Peak, was the deadliest in modern California history and the worst in the U.S. since 11 climbers were killed on Washington’s Mount Rainier in 1981.

Who said what

The backcountry expedition set out Sunday morning, shortly after the Sierra Avalanche Center issued an avalanche watch for the area, indicating that large avalanches were likely in the following 24 to 48 hours. The skiers were heading back to the trailhead after two nights at the remote Frog Lake huts when “someone saw the avalanche, yelled ‘Avalanche!’ and it overtook them rather quickly,” Capt. Russell Greene of the Nevada County Sheriff’s Office said at a news conference Wednesday.

After the avalanche hit, the “six survivors were able to use a combination of emergency beacons and iPhone SOS functions to contact rescuers, who braved treacherous conditions to reach them,” said The New York Times. The “dangerous, hourslong rescue effort” was “hampered by whiteout conditions and strong winds from the winter storm roaring through” the Donner Summit area, said CNN. Rescuers reached the survivors just before sunset. They were unable to remove the bodies of the eight dead skiers due to the “really horrific conditions,” said Nevada County Sheriff Shannan Moon.

An average of 27 people a year have died in U.S. avalanches in the past decade, according to the Colorado Avalanche Information Center. Tuesday’s tragedy was the second fatal avalanche near Castle Peak this year, after a snowmobiler was killed about a mile away in January.

What next?

“As families grieve and crews come up with a plan to remove the bodies from the mountain when it’s safe,” USA Today said, the company that led the expedition, Blackbird Mountain Guides, “is facing a tough question: Given the known dangers, why did they still go?” It is “unclear if the guides would have known” that the avalanche watch was elevated to a more imminent warning Tuesday morning, said The Associated Press, but Moon “said investigators would look into the decision to proceed with the trip on Sunday despite the forecast.”

Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro and other GLP-1s have been touted as miracle drugs with a myriad of health benefits. However, they come at a high environmental cost. The manufacturing of these weight-loss medications can produce toxic byproducts that end up in waterways and increase plastic waste. Scientists are working to clean up the process.

How do GLP-1s affect the environment?

GLP-1s are peptide drugs that produce “unsustainable volumes of toxic waste and non-degradable solid supports,” said a study published in the journal Nature Sustainability. Peptide manufacturing uses a method called solid phase peptide synthesis, which “anchors the first amino acid building block to a synthetic resin, such as polystyrene beads,” said Futurism. Then, toxic solvents, “including dimethylformamide, a component of paint strippers,” are “used to add each amino acid one by one, which can then leak into the water supply.” Peptide drugs are also “cold chain dependent,” which means “every unit must be refrigerated from factory to pharmacy shelf, multiplying emissions across the supply chain,” said IDR Medical.

Along with the manufacturing process, the use of the drugs creates its own waste. Patients who take GLP-1 injectables self-inject once per week. Because of this, “every month, there are four disposable auto-injectors that they have to throw out,” that are “made of solid plastic material that can persist in landfills for decades to centuries,” said Thanigavelan Jambulingam, a business professor at Saint Joseph’s University, in an interview with the school. Millions of people are producing this waste, which could “end up in the water systems” or it could be in “other areas where it causes harm.”

Could it be cleaner?

The increased usage of GLP-1s may help the environment in some ways, however. By treating diabetes and obesity, they “could reduce the incidence of cardiovascular disease, kidney failure and other conditions, each of which carries a heavy environmental cost through surgeries, hospitalizations and long-term drug use,” said IDR Medical.

The drugs are also changing people’s diet. “People taking these drugs are eating less beef, choosing more vegetables and turning away from processed snacks,” said Anne Jomard, a scientist and nutritionist from Zurich, at Food Facts. This “could meaningfully reduce the environmental damage caused by industrial food production.”

Even so, unless “manufacturing and delivery evolve, the environmental gains from healthier populations could be offset by the waste created to get there,” said IDR Medical. Luckily, a better way to produce peptide drugs may be on the horizon in the form of water-based synthesis.

The method pairs amino acids with specific salts, making them water-soluble. This replaces “conventional non-degradable supports” and enables “clean, efficient peptide synthesis entirely in water, without the unwanted side reactions,” said John Wade, a chemistry professor at the University of Melbourne and lead author of the study, in a university publication about the research.

GLP-1s are not the only products that require peptide synthesis. Certain cancer treatments, as well as crop treatments, veterinary drugs and cosmetic ingredients, also require it. “Why are we still making life-saving medicines using chemical processes that produce mountains of toxic waste?” asked Wade. “Could water, the cleanest and most familiar solvent of all, offer a way out?”

A group of engineers and scientists are planning to build a 50-mile underwater barrier around the melting “Doomsday glacier” in a bid to stop it collapsing into the ocean, triggering a disastrous rise in sea levels.

They can’t stop the glacier melting but they hope to “slow the rate of ice loss, buying time as global emissions reductions take effect”, said Euronews.

‘Almost certainty’ of collapse

Thwaites Glacier, on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, covers a vast area roughly the size of Great Britain and has earned its “Doomsday” nickname because it is so big and melting so fast. Its ice loss already accounts for about 4% of the annual rise in sea levels globally. “The glacier holds enough ice to raise global sea levels by around 65cm if it collapses completely,” said Interesting Engineering. To put that in context, “each centimetre of sea level rise exposes an estimated six million people worldwide to coastal flooding”.

Scientists aren’t agreed about how long it would take for Thwaites to collapse entirely – or indeed if it actually would any time soon. In a 2023 study published in The Cryosphere, glaciologists concluded that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet glaciers had yet to enter the phase of “irreversible retreat” that leads to total collapse. But it seems more and more likely that this will one day happen: we have gone from a stage of “we don’t know” to “an almost certainty” that it will, study co-author Hilmar Gudmundsson, of Northumbria University, told The New York Times.

Other scientists believe there is still time to “protect the glacier from oblivion”, if we can succeed in “cutting the carbon emissions that are driving climate change”, said the paper. But, with fossil-fuel emissions soaring to record levels in 2025, “nations are not exactly on track to make this happen”. Enter the Seabed Anchored Curtain Project.

‘Major technical challenges’

The project involves the construction of a flexible underwater barrier, anchored into the seabed. It would be 152m tall and stretch roughly 50 miles across key parts of the seabed in front of Thwaites Glacier. The aim is to block warmer ocean currents from reaching under the glacier’s fringing shelves, and causing the ice to melt.

But there are “major technical challenges”, said Interesting Engineering. The barrier would “need to survive extreme Antarctic conditions, deep water pressure, moving ice, and long-term ocean exposure”. And it could take many years “before any full-scale deployment is possible”.

The multinational project team – from Cambridge University, the University of Chicago, New York University, Dartmouth College, Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute, Norway’s NIVA research institute, UK engineering firm Aker Solutions and the University of Lapland’s Arctic Centre – have worked out a roadmap that includes three years of research to choose and design materials, and test the technology.

The curtain project used to be a “fringe idea”, confined to academic articles, said The Atlantic. This kind of “geoengineering” project to “address the symptoms of climate change”, rather than its causes, “was a bête noire in the glaciology community”. But now more and more scientists are realising that such “targeted interventions” are “inevitable”.

People do need to “get over” the notion that “there’s a clean exit on climate change”, said David Holland, a climate scientist working on the project. What needs to be decided now is “what is the least brutal outcome for the world”.

“You would be forgiven for thinking the rain this year has been relentless – because in some parts of the UK, it actually has been,” said BBC weather presenter Ben Rich.

There have been more than 280 flood warnings and alerts in place across southwest and central England, Scotland and Wales. So far, 26 weather stations have reported monthly rainfall records, and the heavy rainfall has brought strain to homes, businesses and the environment across the UK.

The constant rain feels like “some sort of biblical punishment”, said The Independent. Few corners of the country have been spared entirely, with the southwest of England and Scotland “bearing the brunt”. And there is still “more to come”.

What did the commentators say?

“We have, then, reached the apotheosis of British climate: unchangeably changeable weather,” said The Times. The weather is “stuck”, and the “setting it has been stuck on is ‘miserable’”.

The “main architect” of our current weather pattern has been the fixed jet stream heading in from the Atlantic, said the Met Office. Caused by significant “cold plunges” across North America, this “powerful ribbon of air” is positioned further south than expected at this time of year. Acting as a “conveyor belt”, it funnels low-pressure systems towards northern Europe, which in turn increases the “frequency and intensity of rain-bearing weather fronts”.

At the same time, high-pressure zones in mainland Europe stop the jet stream in its tracks, “blocking” the system from passing through. As a result, we are left with “increasingly saturated ground, travel disruption, and a general sense that winter has been stuck on repeat”.

“Spare a thought” for the “saturated souls” of North Wyke in Devon, Cardinham in Cornwall and Astwood Bank in Worcestershire, said The Independent. They have experienced downpours every day from 31 December to 8 February, with more expected. But perhaps the “bleakest” fate has been Aberdeen’s: as of 10 February the city hadn’t “seen a single minute of sunshine for two weeks and counting”. That’s the “longest period for the area” since records began in 1957.

Britons have been “dodging deluges or showers” for 40 consecutive days in the worst-affected areas, said The Guardian. The “persistent” wet weather is impacting “farmers, builders, sports, wildlife – and damaging roads and homes”. Hundreds of people have faced “misery” after the flooding of businesses and homes. Wild swimmers have been hit by “sewage problems on beaches and inland”, caused by the heavy rainfall.

There is the “occasional bright spot” amid the grey-skied gloom. A “month of mud” festival has been organised in Somerset’s Quantock Hills, and on Studland beach in Dorset the extreme weather has caused a “historic shipwreck” to emerge, “thought to be the remains of a Dutch merchant ship that sank in 1631”.

What next?

This week “looks as grey and damp as the week before and the week before that”, but there is “evidence of a change”, based on Met Office data, said The Times. There could be a “brief window” where a lingering system breaks down, bringing fleeting sunlight to Scotland in particular.

However, “although this Valentine’s Day we expect to glimpse the sun, it would be wrong to call it light at the end of the tunnel”. In fact, it is “more a skylight, in the middle of a long, bleak and damp tunnel, to which we are all about to return.”

But “change is on the horizon”, said BBC weather presenter Chris Fawkes. In the last week of February the Atlantic jet stream is returning to the far northwest of Scotland, and there is a possibility that high pressure may bring “more settled weather conditions” by the end of the month. “It’s a long way off, but it’s the least we deserve given just how wet and dull it’s been over recent weeks.”

Climate change has led to a marked decrease in salaries across the country, including in places that haven’t experienced significant temperature changes. The problem is likely not limited to the U.S. and is expected to worsen without intervention.

Heating costs

Global warming has cut incomes in the U.S. by 12% since 2000, according to a study published in the journal PNAS. “A lot of the real cost comes from how temperature changes across the whole country ripple through prices and trade,” Derek Lemoine, an economics professor at the University of Arizona and a lead author of the study, said in a statement.

Climate change has a substantial effect on the economy. Heat “reduces productivity, lowers crop yields and changes how people spend money,” said ZME Science. These events “feed into the price of goods and shipping across state lines.” And temperatures in “California or Iowa can influence income in Arizona,” said Lemoine.

Temperature was used as the metric of measurement because it can be “tracked everywhere and provides a consistent way to link climate change to economic activity,” said the statement. Nonetheless, there are “uncertainties,” said the BBC. The “true income hit could plausibly sit anywhere from 2% to 22%, according to the study’s confidence interval.” The study also excluded losses from “specific extreme weather events, such as hurricanes or wildfires.”

It only tracked temperatures in the U.S. and not the global impact, but similar trends are likely present in other countries. “What does not change, though, is that climate change has caused losses of at least several percent,” Lemoine said to the BBC. “These losses are driven by how it altered weather elsewhere in the country, not by how it altered a county’s local weather.”

Domino effect

While temperature can affect national trade routes, it also “affects workers’ productivity, agricultural yields and how people spend their time,” said the BBC. All could “affect income directly and could affect the prices of traded goods.” In addition, the shift can influence the supply of natural resources, which directly correlates to prices. “Recognizing economic losses that have already occurred illustrates the importance of resilience planning for businesses,” said Lemoine.

Understanding how climate change has impacted the economy can help determine what actions can be taken. “If you want to decide where to direct adaptation resources, you have to know what’s already happening on the ground,” said Lemoine. “Measuring the current economic effects of climate change helps businesses and policymakers understand where risks are emerging right now.” And the risks are only expected to increase. The global economy could also be significantly altered and likely already has.

A similar type of risk analysis should continue. Agencies could “update estimates like this regularly, making climate damage a standard economic indicator reported alongside employment or inflation,” said ZME Science. Climate change is “pervasive,” said Lemoine. “Climate adaptation must mean more than just protection against local weather.”

The planet has incurred a watery debt. Society is using far more water than is ecologically sustainable, leading us to what's called water bankruptcy. The problem is only going to worsen with climate change, population growth and technological expansion that continuously increase water demand. And while some water sources can still be protected, many places may have already reached a point of no return.

What's water bankruptcy?

We are using up water sources faster than they can be replenished, essentially putting us in water debt. In “many basins and aquifers, long-term water use has exceeded renewable inflows and safe depletion limits,” said a report by the United Nations. Other water sources, including rivers, lakes, wetlands, soils and glaciers, have been “damaged beyond realistic prospects of full recovery.”

Like financial bankruptcy, water bankruptcy happens gradually. We “pull a little more groundwater during dry years. We use bigger pumps and deeper wells. We transfer water from one basin to another. We drain wetlands and straighten rivers to make space for farms and cities,” said Kaveh Madani, the director of the UN University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health and author of the report, at The Conversation. After that, the costs begin to pile up. “Lakes shrink year after year. Wells need to go deeper. Rivers that once flowed year-round turn seasonal. Salty water creeps into aquifers near the coast. The ground itself starts to sink.” More cities are experiencing Day Zero events in which their municipal water systems are unable to provide for the whole population.

Before using the word “bankruptcy,” scientists used “water stress” or “water crisis,” both of which imply the possibility of recovery. “If you keep calling this situation a crisis, you’re implying that it’s temporary. It’s a shock. We can mitigate it,” said Madani to CNN. Though steps can still be taken, in acknowledging water bankruptcy, “you also need to adapt to a new reality,” and to “new conditions that are more restrictive than before.”

What does the future look like?

More than two billion people worldwide don’t have access to safe drinking water today, and roughly half of the world’s population is experiencing severe water scarcity for at least part of the year, according to the UN. Agriculture is one of the biggest drivers of global water usage. “Increasing agricultural water efficiency has been shown to only increase water use, since drip or sprinkler irrigation allows water to be gradually absorbed by plants,” said New Scientist, whereas the “flooding of fields results in more water running back into the river.” In addition, “population growth, urbanization and economic expansion have increased water demand for agriculture, industry, energy and cities,” said the report.

Climate change is only exacerbating the problem by “reducing precipitation in many areas of the world,” said Madani. Global warming “increases the water demand of crops and the need for electricity to pump more water” and also “melts glaciers that store fresh water.” The Middle East, North Africa, South Asia and the U.S. Southwest are especially struggling with climate vulnerability and high levels of water stress.

Even in places that do receive adequate rainfall, “more water is being sucked up by data centers or polluted by industry, sewage, fertilizers or manure,” said New Scientist. The expansion of AI is a particular risk to water sources, as data centers can “consume up to 5 million gallons per day, equivalent to the water use of a town populated by 10,000 to 50,000 people,” said the Environmental and Energy Study Institute.

Despite these challenges, water bankruptcy may be a “powerful bridge to promote cooperation to address some of the most critical security, peace, justice, development and sustainability challenges of our time,” said the UN report. Water is an “effective medium to fulfill the global environmental agenda.”

The 2011 Fukushima meltdown was a nightmare that all but shut down Japan’s nuclear power industry. But things change, and the country has now restarted the world’s largest nuclear power plant over the objections of neighbors who fear another calamity.

Restarting reactor No. 6 at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant northwest of Tokyo is a “milestone in Japan’s slow return to nuclear energy,” said The Guardian. Japan’s government wants to reduce the country’s carbon emissions and increase its energy security without relying on fossil fuels. But many of the 420,000 people living near the plant say the restart is “fraught with danger.” That makes the move a “human rights issue,” said resident Ryusuke Yoshida. Authorities refused calls to hold a referendum on the plant’s future, said The Guardian, but polls show “clear opposition to putting the reactor back online."

Japan shut down all 54 of the country’s reactors following the Fukushima incident, and has since restarted 14 of the 33 that remain operable, said CNN. The Kashiwazaki-Kariwa restart, though, is seen as a “watershed moment in the country’s return to nuclear energy,” said Reuters. Tokyo Electric Power Co., which also operated the Fukushima plant, said it has a host of new safety measures. The company has learned the lessons of the earlier disaster, officials say. “We remain firmly committed to never repeating such an accident,” a TEPCO spokesperson said.

What did the commentators say?

"Japan’s big nuclear restart is an economic inevitability,” said Yuriy Humber at Nikkei Asia. Restarting reactors can “help lower electricity bills” in a country still experiencing high inflation. A dormant nuclear plant, meanwhile, “still costs tens of millions of dollars a year to maintain,” while an operating plant can bring hundreds of millions in profit. Shifting dependence to liquid natural gas and coal would be “neither cheap nor sustainable.” All of this has long been true, but the trauma of Fukushima forced officials to take a path that is “slow, deliberate and shaped as much by psychology as by policy.”

The nuclear power industry in Japan “cannot simply be switched on again,” said Tadahiro Katsuta at Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Reactors once supplied 29% of the country’s electricity, but that number has dipped to 5% in the years since Fukushima. Renewable energy has started to fill the gap, and is expected to fulfill 40% or more of Japan’s energy needs by 2040. The bottom line, though, is that the Fukushima incident demonstrated the “claimed inherent safety of nuclear power is a myth.”

What next?

The return of Kashiwazaki-Kariwa’s reactor was delayed by a day. The restart was “originally scheduled to resume” on Jan. 20, said Bloomberg, but was put on hold “following an issue with an alarm.” The issue was not serious, a company spokesperson said to The Japan Times, but safety demands that TEPCO “respond sincerely whenever issues are identified.” The reactor went online on the morning of Jan. 21.

Many people in the UK are taking advantage of private schemes to reduce their energy bills, buying “zero-bills homes” not only to reduce their energy bills, but remove them entirely.

It comes as the government today launched its £15 billion “Warm Homes plan” in a bid to “upgrade the nation’s homes, help families cut their energy bills, and tackle fuel poverty”.

This will include providing zero-interest loans to homeowners to fund heat pumps, with a “Netflix-style” subscription for solar panel installation under consideration, said The Times.

What are they?

Zero-bills homes are fitted with solar panels, heat pumps and batteries, which generate more electricity than the resident uses. Any excess electricity is then sold back to the national grid, meaning the consumer’s monthly bills come to a grand total of £0. However, the scheme does not currently include electric vehicle charging, and is limited to a fixed time contract.

The main spearhead of the scheme is Octopus Energy, which became the UK’s largest energy supplier in 2024, said The Independent. The company works alongside developers – such as Barratt Redrow, the “country’s largest housebuilder” – to build homes which come fitted with “bill-busting” upgrades like solar panels, heat pumps and battery storage.

Under its tariff arrangements, Octopus “guarantees” that each property will “pay nothing for energy, even if it uses more than it generates”, for a fixed period of between five and 10 years, said This Is Money. The company makes enough revenue via “exporting excess energy” to the grid to make the scheme commercially viable.

Octopus’ reputation is rising in the industry, with the government recently taking a £25 million stake in Kraken – the company’s tech platform that automates and manages energy supply chains – to try to “persuade the business to choose London for a future stock exchange listing”, said the Financial Times. Kraken also manages Octopus Energy’s customer service, and smart grid operations using AI and data, and last month was valued at $8.65 billion (£6.4 billion).

What are the benefits?

“If done well, upgrading homes is an effective way to slash bills and reduce damp”, said Sky News. “Campaigners and industry have broadly welcomed the idea.” Octopus estimates that an average two- to three-bedroom house could save nearly £1,800 per year, based on current Ofgem price cap rates.

Switching would not only make sense financially, but have environmental benefits too, said The i Paper. Zero-bills homes, built from scratch, can contain “cutting-edge” ventilation systems, which bring “fresh air inside while capturing and reusing the heat from stale, outgoing air”.

On a broader scale, as more people shift away from gas, we should see a reduction in the UK’s gas imports, said Sky News. For the government, there could even be a “geopolitical value in weaning the country off gas”, and opting instead for clean power harnessed at home, rather than relying on purchases from abroad.

The switch to a zero-bills home “doesn’t necessarily come cheap, though”, said This is Money. Depending on the size of the houses, and if any of the accessories are pre-installed, the average cost of technology and installation can range from £5,000 to £20,000.

What are the next steps?

Octopus intends to “roll out” 100,000 homes on the zero-bills tariff by 2030, recently investing “£100 million to fund the initiative”, said The Independent. To date, 5,000 properties have been approved, with sizable developments taking place in Northampton and West Sussex.

Domestic installations of solar panels are “booming”, but “solar could also become a victim of its own success,” said David Strahan in The Telegraph. There is a “growing risk” that too much electricity will be exported into the grid in the middle of the day, when demand is low, which could lead to the industry being “penalised, as it has been in Spain, Australia and parts of China”.

However, if electricity tariffs continue to rise, what may appear to be “ostensibly bad news” for many, could make the prospect of zero bills “even more attractive”, said the outlet. Furthermore, if alternative energy sources falter, such as the government’s recent “troubles with the latest auction for offshore wind farms”, cheap solar energy could “become yet more valuable”.

Lizards, crocodiles and turtles have some rocky times ahead. Warming temperatures have the potential to drastically alter the reproductive ability of reptiles, affecting their genetic breakdown as well as their evolution. With worsening climate change plus habitat degradation, pollution and other human influences, maintaining populations is likely going to be an uphill battle.

Sexual seesaw

Temperature can have a significant effect on reptiles’ diversity. Their sex genetics tend to “differ from typical vertebrates in that their sex is not determined by their genes,” said Scientific American. Rather, the “temperature of their nest pushes them toward becoming male or female.” This is called Temperature-Dependent Sex Determination (TSD). A world of increased heat from climate change means that “entire generations of sexually reproducing reptiles will be dramatically skewed male or female.” This shifts the entire balance of species. Some scientists have predicted there could be only one sex of alligators by the year 2100.

Unfortunately, this development may lead to a “sexpocalypse” that spells the end of some species. “Mating opportunities will decline; populations might become inbred,” said Scientific American. In addition, “surviving members of a species that’s already dwindling from other pressures might not be able to find a partner with whom to make babies.” As a result, “these ancient creatures — who have survived since the era of the dinosaurs — simply won’t be able to find mates to sustain the next generation,” said NBC.

Along with the sex breakdown of reptile species, temperatures can also impact their genetic diversity, according to a study published in the journal PLOS Genetics. The study found that extreme temperatures can “alter the genetic recombination” of the Guibé’s ground gecko (Paroedura guibeae), a “small reptile living in the warm ecosystems of Madagascar,” said a release about the study. Genetic recombination is a process where DNA is exchanged between chromosomes, and it “generates genetic diversity, which increases the probability of a species adapting to climate changes.” It also “influences evolution by determining which genetic combinations are passed on to descendants.”

Downward slide

The survival of reptiles is highly dependent on their ability to adapt. Reptiles are some of the oldest animals on Earth and have outlasted “dramatic climate shifts, living through ice ages and intense heat,” said Scientific American. Reptiles at risk “might be able to keep their eggs cool and their sex ratios steady by nesting earlier in the year or in shadier places or by digging deeper in the ground.” However, this would “depend on the animals perceiving the temperature shift” and having the “capacity to do things differently.”

Many reptiles also face additional dangers, giving them even worse odds of survival. “For reptiles that already face habitat loss and pollution, this genetic sensitivity adds a quiet risk,” said Earth.com. The good news is that by “knowing the genetic makeup of males and females, scientists can predict how changes in temperature might affect sex ratios in the wild.” Global warming “not only affects the climate, but also influences the adaptation mechanisms of animals to survive,” said Laura González Rodelas, a co-author of the study, in a statement.

Excessive fertilizer use can be expensive and bad for the environment, but plants require nutrients to grow. To combat this problem, scientists have been attempting to use genetic engineering to help crops control their own fertilization, making them cooperate with nitrogen-fixing bacteria. The new method could fight food insecurity and save waterways.

Cropping fertilizer use

The U.S. used almost 20.1 million metric tons of fertilizer for agriculture in 2023, with nitrogen fertilizer being the most used at 11.6 million metric tons, according to Statista. Plants need nitrogen to grow, and most crops require fertilizer to obtain it. However, a “small group of plants, including peas, clover and beans, can grow without added nitrogen” by “forming a partnership with specific bacteria that turn nitrogen from the air into a form the plant can absorb,” said a release by Aarhus University about a study published in the journal Nature.

Taking a page from those plants’ books, researchers have been working on developing self-fertilizing crops, and major strides have already been made. In August 2025, scientists were able to use the gene editing tool CRISPR to make wheat crops produce their own fertilizer, according to a study published in Plant Biotechnology Journal. The edits enabled the wheat to “assist specific soil bacteria in nitrogen fixation,” which meant the “plants can absorb necessary nutrients without the reliance on synthetic fertilizers,” said Sustainability Times. The same could potentially be done to other crops as well. Scientists found a “molecular switch that lets plants partner with nitrogen-fixing bacteria instead of fighting them,” and “successfully engineered this change in the plant Lotus japonicus,” then “tested the concept in barley and found that the mechanism worked there as well,” said the release.

New growth

Overuse of fertilizers can have a plethora of ecological consequences. Plants only absorb about 30 to 50% of the nitrogen in fertilizer, and what is not taken up “flows into waterways, which can create ‘dead zones’ that lack oxygen, suffocating fish and other aquatic life,” said a news release from the University of California, Davis, about the Plant Biotechnology Journal study. “Some excess nitrogen in the soil produces nitrous oxide, a potent climate-warming gas.”

In addition, gene-editing crops can also be a “potential boon for food security in developing regions where access to fertilizers is limited,” said Sustainability Times. “In Africa, people don't use fertilizers because they don’t have money, and farms are small, not larger than six to eight acres,” Eduardo Blumwald, the lead author of the Plant Biotechnology Journal study, said in the release. “Imagine, you are planting crops that stimulate bacteria in the soil to create the fertilizer that the crops need, naturally. Wow! That’s a big difference!”

Self-fertilizing crops are a “fundamental redesign of how modern agriculture works,” Steve Cubbage, a precision agriculture consultant and farmer, said in a piece for The Scoop. “Reduced fertilizer dependence means lower exposure to global supply disruptions, energy price shocks and geopolitical risk,” as well as a “resilience strategy that should be taken as seriously.”

One of the oldest icebergs that has ever been tracked is feeling the blues. The megaberg A23a is most likely on its last legs, and has been captured turning blue because of meltwater. The iceberg was once the largest in the world, though it has been drastically shrinking and is now just a fraction of its former size. Given these changes, experts believe it won’t be around for much longer.

Blue period

Iceberg A23a is “sopping with blue meltwater and on the verge of complete disintegration,” said a NASA news release. The space agency’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) captured an image of the blue waterlogged iceberg at the end of December, then just a day later, an astronaut on the International Space Station took a “photograph showing a closer view of the iceberg” that had an “even more extensive melt pool.”

In parts of the iceberg, the “ponded water appears a deep, vivid blue, suggesting depths of several meters,” said New Scientist. The water volume “probably runs into billions of liters,” which is “enough to fill thousands of Olympic‑sized swimming pools.” The “weight of the water” is “sitting inside cracks in the ice and forcing them open," Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder, said in the NASA release. The images also showed a “thin white line around the outer edge of the iceberg seemingly holding in blue meltwater,” in a “‘rampart-moat’ pattern caused by an upward bending of the iceberg plate as its edges melt at the waterline.”

A23a broke off from Antarctica’s Filchner Ice Shelf in 1986, and it was over 1,500 square miles in size. Today, it is just about 456 square miles, which is a little bigger than New York City. In July, August and September of 2025, the iceberg “saw some sizable breakups as it moved into the Southern Hemisphere’s relatively warm summer conditions,” said Popular Science. It is currently drifting in the South Atlantic between the eastern tip of South America and South Georgia Island.

End of an era

The megaberg will likely not last through the austral summer, or the summer months in the Southern hemisphere. All signs indicate that A23a is “just days or weeks from totally disintegrating as it rides currents that are pushing it toward even warmer waters,” said CBS News. “Warmer air temperatures during this season could also speed up A23a’s demise in an area that ice experts have dubbed a ‘graveyard’ for icebergs.” Climate change will probably lead other icebergs to a similar fate.

Iceberg A23a has been on scientists’ radar for a while. After not moving for a long time, it began to drift in 2020. It got caught in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, where it was stuck spinning in 2024. When it began moving again, it was on course to crash into an island in 2025, though it didn’t end up making contact. Turning blue is just the next chapter in the megaberg’s long saga.

“I’m incredibly grateful that we’ve had the satellite resources in place that have allowed us to track it and document its evolution so closely,” Chris Shuman, a retired scientist from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, said in the NASA release. “A23a faces the same fate as other Antarctic bergs, but its path has been remarkably long and eventful. It’s hard to believe it won’t be with us much longer.”

The peregrine falcon faced near-extinction in the UK in the 1950s before it was rescued by the banning of the pesticide DDT and stronger legal reinforcements.

Today, following booming interest from buyers in the Middle East, modern falconry has taken a darker turn, being “fed by a shadow industry of the smuggling and illegal capture of wild birds”, said The Guardian.

‘Booming appetite’

A “troubling pattern” is emerging in the UK, said The Guardian. Peregrine falcon chicks are “vanishing” from their British cliff-edge nests, which are only accessible to people with “specialist climbing gear”, and turning up in the Middle East with “fabricated” documents.

The UK is a lucrative breeding ground for the raptors. The colder climate produces “tough, fast birds”, and those from “established lines carry additional prestige”. Under the Wildlife and Countryside Act, birds cannot be taken from the wild and only falcons bred in captivity can be traded.

UK exports of falcons are “soaring”, as are nest raids, though experts are keen to point out that the two aren’t necessarily linked. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds recorded 126 nests raids between 2014 and 2023, and “all are believed to be linked to the peregrine falcon trade”. In 2024, 4,000 peregrines and hybrids were exported from the UK, with the number rising to 5,000 last year, according to UK police, with nearly 90% of them heading to the United Arab Emirates.

The gyr peregrine, which has a peregrine falcon mother and a gyr falcon father, is the “most valuable falcon for export”. Many buyers chase its desirable balance between “speed and strength”, but the gyr peregrine’s female offspring are infertile, which means female peregrine falcons are in high demand to “feed a booming appetite for hybrid falcons and legally exportable, captive-bred birds”.

The “cruelly exploitative crime” of nest theft is becoming “more prevalent”, said the Daily Mail. Falcons can reach diving speeds of up to 200mph, and “the only thing faster, seemingly, is the rise in popularity of racing them”. Wild Scottish falcons in particular are “especially prized in the Middle East”, as they are considered “stronger, fiercer and faster”, and “tend to be genetically larger than Mediterranean examples”.

The gamekeepers, as well as the poachers, are to blame. Unlike the birds themselves, legislators “move slowly”, which means there is a “dark shadow hovering over Scotland’s surviving wild peregrines”.

‘Spectacle of wealth and prestige’

Traditional falconry “is more popular than ever”, said The Telegraph. The “universal reverence” for peregrines has ballooned into a “highly lucrative business”, and there are “few greater status symbols” in the Middle East than owning one. As of 2021, the President’s Cup falcon competition in the UAE “offers prizes of up to $9 million”, with other competitors winning “fleets of cars”.

The Bedouin practice has morphed into a “spectacle of wealth and prestige to meet the tastes of the modern Gulf elite”, said The Guardian. Despite the most “prestigious” birds travelling in “Range Rovers and Bentleys fitted out with a perch between the front seats”, many rarely have the chance to fly. Many kept in captivity are “treated like battery chickens” and “fed supplements to produce up to 14 eggs a season”, an expert told the paper.

The Middle East’s “appetite for wild falcons risks killing the sport they love”, said The Economist. Buyers and sellers in the Middle East have always “found ways around the rules” and bans, which has already led to the endangered status of the saker falcon – a “favoured local species in the Gulf”. Attempts to curb the market in the region often have the opposite effect, causing “prices to spike”, with the finest birds costing “more per gram than gold”.

Arctic marine life is notoriously difficult to study because of its remoteness. But drones have enabled whales to be monitored and diagnosed while being minimally invasive, according to a new study.

Arctic air

By having drones collect samples of whale breath or “blow” from humpback, sperm and fin whales in the northeast Atlantic to screen for pathogens, researchers have “confirmed for the first time that a potentially deadly whale virus” is “circulating above the Arctic Circle,” said a news release about the study published in the journal BMC Veterinary Research. Cetacean morbillivirus can cause “immunosuppression and severe disease in cetaceans,” said NPR. The disease has previously caused “several mass die-offs” of whales, dolphins and porpoises.

When whales come to the surface of the ocean to breathe, they “release a plume of air mixed with microscopic droplets from their blowholes,” said Discover. The droplets “carry traces of cells, microbes and viruses from the animals’ respiratory systems.”

To collect them, researchers “hovered the drone over a whale that looked like it was about to blow” and then “captured the exhales on petri dishes” attached to it, said NPR. The droplets were screened to find pathogens similar to how diseases are identified in humans.

Virus vigilance

Species in these regions are difficult to monitor. Usually, collecting samples from wild whales requires “getting close to them in a boat and then shooting a dart gun to snag a small skin sample,” said NPR. And most collected samples are from dead whales.

“Drone blow sampling is a game changer,” Terry Dawson, a professor at King’s College in London and a co-author of the study, said in the release. It “allows us to monitor pathogens in live whales without stress or harm, providing critical insights into diseases in rapidly changing Arctic ecosystems.”

“Dense winter feeding aggregations, where whales, seabirds and humans interact closely, could increase the risk of viral transmission,” said Oceanographic. Drone surveillance can also identify deadly threats to other marine life before they spread.

The “priority is to continue using these methods for long-term surveillance, so we can understand how multiple emerging stressors will shape whale health in the coming years,” Helena Costa, the lead author of the study, said in the release. While there “aren’t protocols to treat a sick whale,” the animals can still be helped by “reducing their stress during illness by, for example, temporarily altering shipping lanes to avoid them,” said NPR. Or if a whale is “carrying a disease that can spread to humans, governments can limit whale-people interactions.”

Climate change is warming the seas, and Arctic marine life is facing other threats too, including “shifting prey," said Discover. "Expanding shipping routes and growing human presence are altering habitats that many species rely on for feeding and migration.” And infectious disease can “compound those pressures, particularly when animals are stressed or concentrated in smaller areas.”

Polar bears are leaping through their evolution in real time as rising temperatures threaten their habitat. A population of bears was found in a climate warmer than one in which they usually exist, showing genetic differences from their colder-weather counterparts. Those differences could be key to the survival of the species, and may prove how other animals and humans could evolve in the future.

Hot and cold

An isolated colony of polar bears found in southeast Greenland “inhabits a warmer climate zone, akin to the predicted future environments of polar bears with vastly reduced sea ice habitats,” said a study published in the journal Mobile DNA. The subpopulation is particularly interesting as it may have had a “200-year start on developing advantageous genetic changes for survival in this shifting landscape,” said Popular Mechanics.

Researchers analyzed blood samples from polar bears located in northeastern and southeastern Greenland. The results showed that “some genes linked to heat-stress, aging and metabolism” were “behaving differently” in the southern bears compared to the northern ones, Alice Godden, a co-author of the study, said in an article for The Conversation.

This difference can be attributed to “jumping genes,” or transposons, which are “mobile pieces of a gene that can move around to influence how other genes work,” said Popular Mechanics. “By comparing these bears’ active genes to local climate data, we found that rising temperatures appear to be driving a dramatic increase in the activity of jumping genes within the southeastern Greenland bears’ DNA,” Godden said in a statement.

Jumping genes are like “puzzle pieces that can rearrange themselves, sometimes helping animals adapt to new environments,” said Godden. In this case, researchers “found active jumping genes in parts of the genome that are involved in areas tied to fat processing,” which is “important when food is scarce.” This could mean that the southern polar bears are “slowly adapting to eating the rougher plant-based diets that can be found in the warmer regions,” while the “northern populations of bears eat mainly fatty seals.” The polar bear genome comprises approximately 38.1% jumping genes, compared to 45% in humans.

Up and down

Because of climate change, more than two-thirds of polar bears are predicted to be extinct by 2050, and total extinction is expected by 2100. Arctic Ocean temperatures are also “continuing to rise, reducing vital sea ice platforms that the bears use to hunt seals, leading to isolation and food scarcity,” said the statement. Scientists believe this is the “first documented case of rising temperatures driving genetic change in a mammal,” said NBC News.

While the genetic changes “provide a genetic blueprint for how polar bears might be able to adapt quickly to climate change,” it “does not mean that polar bears are at any less risk of extinction,” Godden said. It is still required that we “do more to mitigate our carbon emissions to help provide and extend this window of opportunity to help save this wonderful, vital species.” Since humans also have transposons in their genome, our DNA sequence also has the potential to change and evolve, “but environmental stress, such as warmer climates, can accelerate this process,” said the statement.

The outgoing year was a mixed one in the fight against global warming. While some countries, including the UK, continued to make positive steps towards net zero, the return of Donald Trump to the White House exacerbated an already fraying international climate consensus. But a series of scientific breakthroughs in 2025 holds out some hope for a greener future. Here are seven of the most promising:

Carbon dioxide satellite tracking

A novel satellite-based method to track fossil fuel CO2 emissions with greater precision than ever before marks a “significant advancement for climate monitoring”, said Open Access Government. “Traditional methods” such as “ground-based measurements and bottom-up inventories, are often resource-intensive and prone to inaccuracies”.

Researchers at Tsinghua University used nitrogen dioxide – which has a shorter atmospheric lifetime and enhanced detectability – as a “proxy” for CO₂, to successfully trial a “more reliable and scalable solution for monitoring emissions”.

Automated food waste upcycling

AI-powered food waste management uses real-time data and predictive analytics to monitor, categorise, and reduce food waste. Food scraps can effectively be upcycled into resources for “composting and biogas systems”, said The Sweaty Penguin environmental podcast.

One of the 10 environmental tech breakthroughs for 2025 compiled by the World Economic Forum and published in science journal Frontiers, this technology can also support “nutrient cycling” by enabling food waste to be returned to soil systems. Automated waste sorting can also “separate food waste from plastic waste, reducing plastics and organics going into landfills, producing quality compost for agriculture, while helping slash methane, CO2 and nitrous oxide emissions”.

Gene variant protects rice from rising temperatures

After more than 10 years, Chinese researchers led by plant geneticist Yibo Li of Huazhong Agricultural University have discovered a naturally occurring gene variant that can preserve both the yield and quality of rice from excessive heat. Rising temperatures are a “major and growing threat to rice production”, said Science, citing a 2004 study that found yields fell by 10% for every degree Celsius average night-time air temperature rose.

The impact of this “major breakthrough” could “ultimately be even broader than rice” as the same gene variant can be found in other cereals, such as wheat and corn, that are at a similar risk from heat, said Argelia Lorence, a plant biochemist at Arkansas State University.

Sodium batteries make electric flight possible

The sodium-air fuel cell – designed by a team led by Yet-Ming Chiang, a professor of materials science and engineering at MIT – works by combining liquid sodium with oxygen drawn from the air in a continuous reaction. The device is “based on well-established electrochemical principles”, said The Times, but “unlike conventional batteries, which must be recharged, it is designed to be refuelled, with its energy-rich material being replaced as it is consumed”.

While still in the experimental stage, sodium batteries could eventually lead to electric-powered flight which is more sustainable and much cheaper even than non-petroleum aviation fuel. In laboratory tests, the MIT sodium-air fuel cell prototype delivered more than five times as much energy per kilogram as the lithium-ion batteries currently used in electric cars. It also produces sodium hydroxide as a by-product which could be used to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere or turned into sodium bicarbonate which could help de-acidify the ocean, a problem caused by carbon emissions. It is an “essentially free” by-product, “producing environmental benefits at no cost”, said Chiang.

Microplastic referencing

The dangers of microplastics to the environment and human health are well documented, but tracking microplastic pollution remains complicated. Now, in a world first, the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre has developed reference material to measure polyethylene terephthalate (PET) particles, commonly found in packaging and textiles, in water.

Already being used to update key EU regulations such as the revised EU Drinking Water Directive, the JRC’s reference material “lays the groundwork for coordinated global action” on microplastics, said Open Access Government.

Clean energy from toxic waste

Bio-tar – the thick liquid by-product produced when heating biomass and organic matter – has long been viewed as toxic to the environment and an unavoidable cost of renewable energy production. But new research by scientists at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences has found that instead of being treated as waste, bio-tar can be converted into “bio-carbon”, a “novel material with applications ranging from water purification to clean energy storage”, said Science Daily.

“Turning bio-tar into bio-carbon not only solves a technical problem for the bio-energy industry, but also opens the door to producing advanced carbon materials with high economic value,” said senior author Dr Zonglu Yao.

Green concrete

Manufacturing Portland cement, the key binding ingredient in concrete, currently contributes around 8% of global CO2 emissions. The development of “novel cement-free green concrete technologies” offer an “alternative by eliminating Portland cement altogether and instead using binders derived from industrial byproducts or construction and demolition waste”, according to a World Economic Forum report.

This process “not only eliminates emissions from traditional cement production but also creates a permanent storage route for captured CO₂”. Together, these advances “cut demand for extracted raw materials and ease pressure on planetary boundaries related to climate change, land-system change, and biogeochemical flows”.

The top of the mountain is coming down. Five different U.S. mountains, including Mount Rainier, are experiencing ice loss at their peaks, bringing down their highest elevations. And the problem is likely to worsen.

A new low

Mount Rainier, along with four other ice-capped mountains in the contiguous U.S., has shrunk since about 1980, said a study published in the journal Arctic, Antarctic and Alpine Research. Four of the five melted by “at least 6 meters (20 feet) due to loss of snow and ice.” The top of Columbia Crest, which is recognized as Mount Rainier’s summit, “no longer stands 14,410 feet above sea level, having lost nearly 21 feet of ice,” said National Parks Traveler.

This loss is largely attributed to climate change. The “average air temperature on these summits is significantly higher than it was in the 1950s — almost 5.5 F,” Eric Gilbertson, an associate teaching professor at Seattle University and coauthor of the study, said in a statement. Because of this, there are “more and more days that reach above freezing, and we are seeing ice melt even at the highest elevations.” Along with melting ice, there has been “more precipitation falling as rain rather than snow,” which is also contributing to the shrinking peaks, said ABC News.

Mount Rainier is the “most glaciated peak in the contiguous United States,” said ABC News. These glaciers play a pivotal role for both humans and the ecosystem as a whole, including providing “essential water for rivers, supplying drinking water downstream, maintaining cold-water habitats for salmon, and supporting hydropower generation in the region.”

Melting glaciers are a climate tipping point and an indicator of catastrophic change. “We talk a lot about glaciers losing mass, but those are often at lower elevations,” said Scott Hotaling, an associate professor at Utah State University who worked on the study. This is an “obvious and visceral sign of how climate change is impacting these well-known and once-pristine places.”

Coming round the mountain

Acquiring the data for the study was a “grueling task,” said the statement. The researchers “measured the mountains during late summer, when there’s the least snow and the true height of each summit is exposed,” said SF Gate. They “hiked to the tops with high-precision GPS equipment, taking hourlong readings on both the ice and any nearby rock outcrops to see which was higher” and then “backed up those measurements with laser-mapping data and by comparing old and new photos to see how the peaks’ shapes have changed over time.” The findings were submitted to the National Park Service.

Despite the Park Service acknowledging the findings, it “does not independently set summit elevations,” Scott Beason, a Park Service geologist at Mount Rainier National Park, said to National Parks Traveler. That responsibility falls on the U.S. Geological Survey, and currently “no official change has been made to the published elevation of 14,410 feet.”

Studying the true impacts of mountaintop ice loss is challenging because there are currently no “comprehensive databases, historical or contemporary, that track ice-capped summits,” said ABC News. However, we have certainly “entered a new era for the western U.S. cryosphere,” said the study. “Where there’s perennial ice, it’s likely melting.”

Humanity’s energy needs could be revolutionised by a source created during the very formation of the planet.

Geothermal power plants use energy stored in the form of heat beneath the Earth’s surface. They are built where there are underground reservoirs of water around fault lines in the Earth’s tectonic plates and use the power of the planet’s natural heat to generate electricity.

Pro: environmentally friendly

Geothermal energy has a low carbon footprint because it produces minimal greenhouse gases when compared to fossil fuels.

Once a plant is up and running, there’s effectively no emissions produced and ground source heat pumps for the home, which use heat from water underground, require very little maintenance, with the capacity to heat properties for more than 80 years.

Con: greenhouse gases 

But drilling into the ground to build geothermal power plants can mean that greenhouse gases are released from underground. Although these gases are also released into the atmosphere naturally, the process is accelerated near geothermal plants.

That said, the amount of gas released “pales in comparison with the number of pollutants pumped into the atmosphere when we burn fossil fuels”, said The Eco Experts.

Pro: renewable

Geothermal energy is a source of renewable energy that “will not run out”, said the BBC, because the hot reservoirs within the planet are “naturally refilled, making it both renewable and sustainable”.

It is widely regarded as a reliable, constant power source with the potential to help stabilise grids and it’s seen as a viable alternative to fossil fuels. It is also not dependent on weather conditions.

Con: location-specific 

These sorts of power plants “can’t be built everywhere”, said the BBC. It’s easiest to set them up near fault lines, but they “become more expensive and difficult to set up the further down you have to drill to reach hot water”.

There’s a high concentration of these plants in western US states, such as California, due to their location along the Pacific Ring of Fire. Iceland is a world leader due to its location on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

Pro: job creation 

Geothermal plants have operational lifespans of up to 80 years, so they can offer stable jobs for a long time. They bring employment to rural areas where opportunities otherwise may be particularly scarce.

The energy the plants produce is the renewable energy that generates the most employment per unit of installed capacity, according to a report by the World Bank in 2023, said Enel.

Con: expensive

The typical cost of building a small one-megawatt (MW) power plant is between £1.7 million and £6.1 million, said The Eco Experts. A 500 MW power plant would cost around £2.5 billion to get started.

The initial cost of building these plants in the UK would be high because the pipes might have to reach hundreds of metres or more underground to reach sources of hot water.

What happened

More than 1,000 people have died and hundreds remain missing after catastrophic floods and landslides from tropical storms struck Southeast Asia, according to the latest death tolls. Sri Lanka reported 355 deaths from mudslides and flooding triggered by Cyclone Ditwah. A separate cyclone, Senyar, caused at least 502 deaths in Indonesia, 170 in Thailand and three in Malaysia.

Who said what

Much of the Indonesian island of Sumatra remains “cut off due to blocked roads, while damage to telecommunications infrastructure has hampered communication,” Reuters said. Hat Yai, the biggest city in Thailand’s hard-hit Songkhla province, recorded 13 inches of rain on Friday, “its highest single-day tally in 300 years, amid days of heavy downpours.” Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake Sunday declared a state of emergency to manage what he called the “largest and most challenging natural disaster in our history,” and the first to strike the entire country.

“Persistent bouts of the La Niña climate pattern are at least partially to blame for the flooding across the region,” as unusually warm oceans increase the moisture in the air, The Washington Post said. But “rising global temperatures have also made the atmosphere more waterlogged, fueling wetter and more dangerous storms.” Southeast Asia is “one of the areas most vulnerable to climate change,” said CNN.

What next?

As emergency response crews work to clear roads and get aid to people stuck without food or shelter, a “separate tropical storm, Koto, is expected to hit western Vietnam,” the latest in the “near-continuous string of storms” that have lashed Southeast Asia since mid-September, the Post said.

Blotting out the sun might not fix climate change, but it could pause the warming process. The idea of using planes to “geoengineer” the climate by spreading sunlight-reflecting aerosols throughout the earth’s atmosphere is controversial. It is also becoming closer to reality.

Stardust Solutions, an Israel-based company, wants to “do nothing less than dim the sun” with a plan “modeled on volcanoes,” said The New Yorker. Average global temperatures dropped in the aftermath of the Mount Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines in 1991. Stardust wants to “market eruptions of its own” using “highly reflective particles” sprayed across the stratosphere.

The plan comes with likely tradeoffs, with possible side effects including “shifts in regional weather patterns” that people depend on for crops. But continued warming may force a radical solution. The planet’s “climate and nature are already passing tipping points,” researchers said in a recent report.

Can geoengineering work?

Maybe. Until now, the idea of geoengineering the climate has been the province of “research papers, backyard debates and science fiction novels,” said Politico. Stardust’s pitch now means the idea is “effectively for sale.” The company has raised more than $60 million from investors, “far larger than any previous investment in solar geoengineering.” Scientists who warn of potential “environmental and geopolitical turmoil” from attempts to alter the earth’s climate are unsettled.

Using aerosols to dim the sun would be a “painkiller, not cure, for the climate crisis,” said Lara Williams at Bloomberg. Blanketing the stratosphere “masks the impact of greenhouse gas concentrations” instead of reversing them. There are concerns the technology could “cause acid rain, bring on asthma attacks” and “damage the ozone layer.”

But the temptation for a quick fix may win. Two-thirds of climate scientists said in a recent poll they expect “large-scale” geoengineering efforts by 2100, and more than half believe it will be the result of a “private company, billionaire or nation state going it alone.” Some say it is time for governments to get involved because Stardust “won’t be the last” company to offer a solution.

Why is geoengineering controversial?

“The political opposition in the U.S. is growing” just as geoengineering looks to become reality, said Alexander C. Kaufman at The Atlantic. The left side of the debate argues the “world should be talking only about mitigating emissions” and curbing fossil fuel use, while some on the right are using the prospect to play into “conspiracy theories about government manipulation of the atmosphere.” Florida and Tennessee have passed laws to block Stardust-style efforts. “The real fight over geoengineering is beginning.”

But if the U.S. does not act, other countries might. “Other powers may forge ahead” with geoengineering and other climate mitigation efforts, said the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The European Union is taking a close look at the “social, engineering and climatological challenges” posed by such technologies. EU scientists, however, are “pessimistic about its potential” to pause climate change without adverse effects. Despite that, geoengineering could proceed, and America “could end up watching from the sidelines.”

Protesters in Delhi wore oxygen masks and carried gas cylinders as they took to the streets to highlight the authorities’ failure to tackle the city’s ever-worsening air pollution.

There’s a “dystopian” environment in the Indian capital as a particularly “persistent toxic haze” shrouds the city, with slow winds and cooling temperatures preventing pollutants from dispersing, said The Independent.

‘Gasping for breath’

India’s “winter air pollution season” arrived “with a vengeance” this year, “blanketing New Delhi in a sickly-looking, toxic yellowish haze”, said the Financial Times. The mix of “smoke from winter stubble burnt by farmers” and “fumes from cars, factories and power plants” makes everyday life a struggle; “even a few minutes outdoors leaves you feeling ill and gasping for breath.”

Over recent weeks, Delhi’s Air Quality Index, which measures the level of fine particulate matter in the air that can clog lungs, has been “hovering” between 300 and 400, nearly 20 times the acceptable limit, said the BBC. On Friday, it reached 455 – “equivalent to smoking nearly 11 cigarettes a day”, said The Indian Express.

The situation is so severe that the Supreme Court has asked health authorities to cancel all outdoor sports activities in schools until the haze lifts. The court ruled that allowing children to take part in such activities during November and December, when pollution levels are at their peak, is like “putting them in a ‘gas chamber’”, said the news site.

‘No panacea’

Authorities carried out an unsuccessful trial of cloud seeding, “firing small particles” into clouds to produce rain. The process is used around the world, but experts say it is “no panacea”, said The Guardian. Although it is meant to “produce more frequent and heavier rain than the clouds would otherwise release”, in practice the impact is “often small”. Two professors told the newspaper that the plan to use it in Delhi was a “gimmick”.

As for Delhi residents, their options depend on their economic status. During the “miasma”, the rich “retreat to their houses, where air purifiers offer some respite”, said the Financial Times, and others “decamp for the cleaner climes of Himalayan hill stations”. But “the poor have to put up with the poison air”.

According to recent polling, almost four out of five households in the Delhi metropolitan area “have had at least one member fall ill due to toxic air in the past month”, said the Hindustan Times. One doctor at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences said hospital wards “are overflowing with people suffering from wheezing, breathlessness, burning eyes, and fast-deteriorating COPD”.

In March, the World Meteorological Organisation reported that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere had reached its highest level in the past 800,000 years – and continues to build.

The world has already warmed approximately 1.1-1.3°C above pre-industrial levels (i.e. from 1850 to 1900), and is on track for around 2.5-3°C of warming by 2100. Given that we don’t know what level of future emissions the world will produce, predicting future effects is very difficult.

What do we know about how Britain’s climate will change?

Subject to the uncertainties above, the Met Office’s latest projections show the UK getting substantially warmer and wetter overall, but with stark seasonal contrasts – wetter winters and significantly drier summers – and more extreme weather events.

Under a “medium emissions” scenario, Britain will warm by a couple of degrees by the end of the century against 1990 temperatures. The changes are regionally variable. London’s annual average temperature is likely to increase by 2-3°C. In summer, very hot days (30-35°C) will occur more often, and extreme days (35-40°C) will become increasingly commonplace. There will be an increase in average winter rainfall, and summers will be drier, but punctuated by intense storms.

What effects will this have?

In its 2025 report, the Climate Change Committee (CCC) lists five key risk areas for the UK. First, the threat from extreme weather to food production and nature (i.e. biodiversity and the ability of land, such as peat bogs, to sequester carbon). Second, the risk of infrastructure disruption: drought putting pressure on water supplies, extreme heat buckling railway lines, and so on. Third, the risk to properties from flooding and overheating. Fourth, the risk of heat-related deaths. Finally, the risk to economic prosperity from climate change. The CCC predicts that economic output could be reduced by up to 7% by 2050 (the Office for Budget Responsibility recently put this figure even higher).

Will food production be affected?

The effects are already being seen. In 2024, flooding followed by very dry weather damaged crops and drove up the price of animal feed. This year’s very low rainfall also affected yields. A study this year found that 86% of farmers had experienced extreme rainfall in the past five years, while drought had affected 78%.

Warming won’t be altogether negative: warmer weather will extend the growing season, and make some crops – chickpeas, oranges, grapes – viable. But dry summers will reduce yields of many staple crops, and of grass-fed livestock. Farmers may need to invest more in irrigation systems. Pollinators may be wiped out. Higher temperatures will allow pests and diseases to thrive. There are also the threats posed by flooding.

What effects will flooding have?

Since 1900, global sea levels have risen by around 16.5cm. Depending on emissions levels, the Met Office anticipates a sea level rise of between 0.3m and 1.15m by 2100, relative to 1990 levels, though around 0.5m is more probable. Rising sea levels cause coastal erosion, destroying homes and habitats, and increasing the likelihood of coastal flooding, which is a particular risk on the east coast. The Environment Agency assesses that 13% of agricultural land is already at risk of river or coastal flooding. The Government thinks more than half of the UK’s prime “Grade 1” agricultural land is at risk. According to the think-tank Climate Central, one-third of Lincolnshire – one of Britain’s most productive agricultural regions – is at risk of being below the annual flood level by 2050.

How will floods affect property?

The Environment Agency estimates that 6.3 million properties across England are now at risk from flooding from rivers, seas and surface water, and that this could rise to eight million by 2050 – one out of every four properties. One concern is that some areas will become uninsurable and thus uninhabitable; a government-backed scheme to provide insurance to vulnerable properties ends in 2039. In Tenbury Wells in Worcestershire, hit by floods in 2019, 2020, 2023 and 2024, some properties are already uninsurable.

How will public health be affected?

As summers heat up, the CCC estimates heat-related deaths could exceed 10,000 a year by 2050 (the long-term average for England and Wales is 634, but the hot summer of 2022 caused more than 4,500 heat-related deaths). A warming climate will also change disease patterns, creating a welcoming environment for food-borne bacterial infections such as salmonella and campylobacter, and for insect-borne diseases such as malaria and Lyme’s.

How can Britain adapt?

For the period to 2030, Labour has allocated more than £59 billion to achieving net-zero emissions. It spends far less on adaptation, though significant pledges have been made. Nine new industrial-scale reservoirs will be built by 2050 to address water shortages; and a £2.7 billion boost given to the £1 billion spent on flood defences annually. In 2022, the government identified 56 climate risks, from loss of native species to political instability abroad, and 12 opportunities (notably, the potential benefits of higher winter temperatures, and the growth of tourism). More than half of the risks were judged as needing “more action” in the near term.

As he arrived in Belém, Brazil, this month for Cop30, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband sought to downplay the impression of a fraying international consensus on climate action. The “action and the atmosphere” at the summit “in my view, already demonstrates that the doubters are wrong”, he said.

Although the outcome of the summit remains unclear, with delegates divided on whether to commit to a "road map" for phasing out fossil fuels, Miliband has doubled down on Britain’s commitment to tackling global warming. But the actions behind the government’s words paint a more complicated picture.

What did the commentators say?

Keir Starmer arrived in Brazil “armed with undeniable climate credentials”, said Politico’s Charlie Cooper. His government remains committed to achieving net zero by 2050, opening up clear water with the Conservatives who recently joined Reform in calling for the target to be scrapped. It can point to successes in reducing carbon emissions and promoting renewables, with a target of clean power meeting 95% of Britain’s energy demand by 2030, as well as the promise of hundreds of thousands of new green energy jobs.

At the same time, international aid spending which supports the UK’s global climate objectives has been slashed, ministers are exploring watering down a pledge to ban new licences for oil and gas exploration in the North Sea, and the Treasury is looking at easing the tax burden for fossil fuel companies. These contrasting policy positions “neatly capture the Starmer approach to climate action”, said Cooper. “If it suits the domestic economic and political agenda, great. If not, then there is no guarantee of No. 10 and Treasury support.”

The reality is that “far from leading the world on the path of righteousness, the UK is an example of how not to do energy and climate policy”, said Dieter Helm, professor of economic policy at the University of Oxford, in The Times. While UK territorial carbon emissions have been coming down, this “reflects more the transformation of the British economy, and not in a good way”. “Britain is a leader in deindustrialisation in Europe”, and much of its green energy industry relies on imports from China, who burn half the world’s coal.

Rather than inspiring the world to follow Britain’s example on climate, Starmer is “setting an example in nothing except how to ruin your economy and impoverish your people”, said The Sun.

What next?

Reform UK has launched an all-out war on what its deputy leader, Richard Tice, has called “net stupid zero”, pledging to tax solar farms and rip up green energy contracts if it wins power. The “challenge” for Miliband and his allies “will be to show that his mission is a net benefit, not a net cost”, said James Heale in The Spectator. As the economy becomes “less of a dividing line in British politics” energy policy “might take its place”.

The UK’s net-zero consensus has “broken down”, said Helm in The Times. Miliband and Starmer should “stop boasting of world leadership, stop claiming to be creating a ‘clean energy superpower’” and “face up to the facts”. The current net-zero agenda is not convincing the public or mitigating global warming: Miliband must “stop digging an ever-deeper energy policy hole”. What we need is “honesty” that meaningful decarbonisation “really costs”.

Grey squirrels, muntjac and ring-necked parakeets are among the invasive species who have made a home on British shores. Wallabies are among the latest exotic arrivals to thrive in the UK’s increasingly mild climate.

A long-standing wallaby population on the Isle of Man has risen to more than 1,200, leading to debates over a potential cull, as well as strategies to prevent the Australian marsupials establishing a foothold in the rest of the UK.

‘Commonplace’ sighting

Wallabies are not new to the UK but they have never been as prolific as they are now, said the BBC.

They likely descend from wallabies brought to the UK in the 19th century for zoos and private collections. Over time, some of the animals either escaped or were deliberately released, possibly during the two world wars, when some owners “were unable to look after them”. A famous group of wallabies settled in the Peak District, though it is thought they have since died out following a harsh winter in 2010.

Britain could be “on the verge of a wallaby boom”, said The Times. There is certainly a pattern emerging, and Britain ticks many of the boxes for wallabies to thrive: “conditions are mild, space abundant and predators scarce”.

Free to roam, “these cute creatures have a habit of multiplying when no one is watching”. With known clusters in the Chiltern Hills, Cornwall and Wiltshire, as well as sightings across Cumbria, Yorkshire and Northumberland, experts say that, in many areas, locals “have stopped bothering to report sightings” as the marsupials are so “commonplace”.

‘Unthinkable’ cull now a possibility

On the Isle of Man, the wallaby boom is already a fact. The first marsupials arrived in 1965 as inmates of a wildlife park. The enclosures, however, “proved less than secure” and the escapees and their descendants have since “colonised” a “significant portion” of the northern part of the island.

Their effect on the environment has led to a debate over measures to contain their numbers. “A cull, once unthinkable, now seems a possibility,” said The Times. Once an invasive species becomes “established”, it is “extremely expensive and extremely difficult, if not impossible, to exert any meaningful control”, said ecologist Anthony Caravaggi.

“Though cute, the ‘mob’ (as wallabies are collectively known)” has wreaked havoc on the Isle of Man’s sensitive ecology, said The Economist. The animals “disrupt local wildlife” by nibbling native vegetation, destroying reforestation attempts and disturbing ground-nesting birds.

Studies conducted on the island show that some wallabies spread the parasite toxoplasmosis in their droppings, which could pass to local livestock. Farmers are also concerned as they “damage fences as they roam”, which can allow livestock to escape.

There is agreement that something needs to be done, but “no one wants to use the word ‘cull’” on the Isle of Man, said the BBC’s Discover Wildlife. Wallabies are not only a “tourist attraction”, they have become “embedded within Manx national identity”.

The Brazilian government has created 10 new Indigenous territories as the end of Cop30 approaches in Belém. The new legislation enshrines the protection of the environment and culture of Indigenous people living in these areas.

Opening the summit last week, Brazil’s president, Lula da Silva, said Cop30 would be “inspired by Indigenous peoples and traditional communities”, and this year’s edition welcomed the largest Indigenous delegation in the summit’s history. But talks have also been disrupted by Indigenous-led protesters who say much more needs to be done.

What did the commentators say?

The summit in Belém, which is situated at the mouth of the Amazon River system, marks an “unprecedented effort to elevate Indigenous voices”, said Danilo Urzedo, Oliver Tester and Stephen van Leeuwen on The Conversation. Around 1,000 Indigenous representatives were invited to take part in the summit, with a further 2,000 able to access spaces for activists and the public. It represents a recognition of the “unique knowledge” cultivated by Amazonian communities, those most vulnerable to the “direct consequences of climate change”.

But on Tuesday, Indigenous-led protesters clashed with security guards as they attempted to enter the conference venue, “highlighting tensions” around the Brazilian government’s claim that the summit was “open to Indigenous voices”, said Al Jazeera. Three days later, a peaceful protest prevented delegates from entering the venue for several hours.

Of particular concern is Cop30’s “emphasis on climate finance” rather than a total ban on disruptive activities like mining, logging and oil drilling in the Amazon basin. “We can’t eat money,” said one community leader.

Under the “rallying cry ‘Our land is not for sale’”, the demonstrations “brought global attention to injustices that climate politics have long tried to contain”, said The Conversation. With “unresolved land-tenure conflicts” compounded by the “rising violence faced by Indigenous communities on the frontline of climate impacts”, Cop30 and political shifts “reveal that effective environmental actions depend on dismantling power inequalities” in climate decisions.

Despite the palpable discontent, the fact that protests could even take place could be seen as a positive, said Politico. They show that “democratic” Brazil is different to previous “autocratic” hosts – Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Azerbaijan – who have “little tolerance for demonstrations”.

What next?

Last year, President Lula’s government “recognised Indigenous possession of 11 territories”, said the BBC. As well as the 10 new territories, his administration also marked an “institutional milestone” by establishing a Ministry of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil, headed by Sônia Guajajara, who “is widely recognised for her leadership and activism in defending Indigenous rights”, said EuroNews.

Officially recognising Indigenous lands, which is known as demarcation, continues to be an “arduous” process, said The New York Times. The process is “filled with logistical and bureaucratic hurdles”, and before Monday’s announcement about the 10 new territories, there were “107 Indigenous land demarcation processes awaiting a final government decision”.

The worldwide effort to mitigate climate change is not going well. Fossil fuels are still burning, temperatures are rising and effects ranging from historic droughts to super-powered hurricanes are becoming the norm. Authorities are now thinking more about how to adapt.

Climate adaptation efforts are “climbing up the agenda” as the world deals with “record-breaking hot years and extreme weather disasters,” said the Financial Times. World leaders gathering this week for the COP30 climate summit in Brazil have an eye on “shoring up economies against climate change. There is a tension between those who believe “governments and businesses are being too slow” to adapt and those who worry adaptation will “distract and divert finances from efforts to reduce” greenhouse gas emissions. Mitigating climate change is necessary, but near-term adaptation is the “first half of our survival,” said COP30 President André Aranha Corrêa do Lago.

The big question is cost. Adaptation efforts would include everything from “funding air conditioners and fans” to “AI mapping of soil conditions to improve crop yields,” said Reuters. A new United Nations report says developing countries will need $310 billion a year to buy those and other tools, but “where that money will come from is unclear.”

What did the commentators say?

The world must “stop burning fossil fuels,” University College London’s Susannah Fisher said at The Conversation. That is the first step to “stop further damage and make it possible to adapt.” In the meantime, nations must also prepare for the “future we are currently heading toward.” That means making big shifts in how people live, work and eat in order to “create new futures where they can thrive” even as the world warms. For now, though, adaptation efforts do “not go far enough to manage these effects of climate change.”

Participants at COP30 “must get serious” about financing adaptation efforts, said Demet Intepe at the World Economic Forum. Many countries are already “deeply affected by floods, heatwaves and wildfires,” which makes adaptation efforts an “essential lifeline for communities threatened by climate-related disasters.” It is unlikely the money will come from the private sector. Adaptation efforts like “coastal flood protection” are expensive but create “minimal opportunities for financial returns.” Without the opportunity to create new profits, there will be no substitute for the “scale and reliability of public finance.”

What next?

Any solutions negotiated at COP30 will happen without the help of the United States, which is still one of the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitters. America is “not sending any top officials” to the summit, said The New York Times. In President Donald Trump’s second term, his administration has “abandoned” the country’s promise to “curb the burning of fossil fuels at home.”

Other countries are trying to keep up with their own goals and fill the gap left by the U.S. Germany and Spain have pledged $100 million to climate adaptation efforts, said Bloomberg. But more than $300 billion will be needed to help developing countries adapt, and that is a “figure that’s far higher than amounts currently being made available” from richer countries.

Decades of mismanagement and environmental exploitation, and an unprecedented drought have left Iran teetering on the edge of a water crisis.

The reservoirs are nearly empty following record-low rainfall, and officials are “pleading with citizens to conserve water”, said the BBC. The 10 million inhabitants of Tehran are “facing the real possibility of their taps running dry”. Authorities warned this week that the five main dams supplying the capital were at “critical levels”.

With no rain on the horizon, the president has warned that citizens might have to start rationing water. “If rationing doesn’t work,” said Masoud Pezeshkian, “we may have to evacuate Tehran.”

A crisis ‘decades in the making’

The crisis has been “decades in the making”, said the BBC. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader, has “repeatedly acknowledged the looming threat”. “Yet little has changed.”

Water scarcity is “a major issue throughout Iran”, said Al Jazeera. Authorities blame shortages on “mismanagement and overexploitation of underground resources”, exacerbated by the climate crisis. The situation reached its current breaking point after the worst drought in decades. Tehran has had no significant rain since May, a situation one official said was “nearly without precedent for a century”. A heatwave also drove temperatures above 40C in the Iranian capital, and above 50C in some parts of the country, causing widespread power cuts.

Authorities warned citizens over the summer to “cut back on water and energy consumption”, said Agence France-Presse. But by October, 19 major dams – about 10% of Iran’s reservoir supply – had effectively run dry.

The crisis is also fuelling conspiracy theories: some Iranians are claiming on social media that neighboring countries are “stealing” their rain clouds, said Forbes. Authorities have made similar claims, accusing Turkey, the UAE and Saudi Arabia of “diverting clouds away from Iran to their own skies”. Iran’s Meteorological Organisation, and other entities, have had to clarify that “stealing clouds and snow” isn’t possible.

Cloud seeding, cloud stealing

The energy minister, Abbas Ali Abadi, has blamed water leakage caused by Tehran’s century-old water infrastructure, and has also cited the 12-day war with Israel in June as a factor. Strikes on northern Tehran are believed to have led to heavy flooding.

But over-extraction of groundwater in Tehran has left the city sinking, said researcher Sanam Mahoozi on The Conversation. Across the country, more than 90% of Iran’s water is extracted for agricultural use. “Many of Iran’s iconic lakes have turned into a bed of salt.”

Studies also point to “decades of mismanagement, including excessive dam construction, illegal well drilling and unsustainable agriculture”, said The New York Times. The Ministry of Energy recently announced the practice of “cloud seeding”, which involves “dispersing particles like silver iodide into existing clouds to encourage rainfall”. But clouds need to contain at least 50% moisture for it to work. “With no relief in sight, some officials have called on the population to pray for rain.”

The world has failed to limit rising temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels – the goal set in the 2015 Paris climate agreement, the UN secretary general has said.

Speaking ahead of the Cop30 climate conference in Brazil, António Guterres acknowledged it is now “inevitable” that humanity will overshoot the cap, with “devastating consequences” that include “tipping points” in the Amazon, Greenland, western Antarctica and the coral reefs.

What has happened since Paris?

The Paris Agreement, signed by almost 200 countries, is “at the heart of the international commitment to tackle rising global temperatures”, said the BBC.

Signatories committed to “pursue efforts” to limit global temperature rises to 1.5C, and to keep them “well below” 2C above those recorded in pre-industrial times, generally considered to mean the late 19th century. It also aimed to achieve balance between the amount of greenhouse gases added to the atmosphere and those that are removed – known as net zero – by the second half of the century.

Progress has undoubtedly been made over the past decade, said Christiana Figueres, the former executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, in The Economist.

Global carbon dioxide emissions that were rising by almost 2% per year in 2015, have since slowed to 0.3%, while fossil-fuel demand has “plateaued and is falling in several large economies, including China”. The world was on course to warm by as much as 4C by 2100. Today, projections hover near 2.6C “still dangerously high, but a profound course correction that must now deepen, and fast”.

The “unprecedented economic transformation” towards a greener global economy, is “now unmistakably under way, despite a global pandemic, war, Brexit and two Trump presidencies”.

Yet despite this, 2024 marked the first year global average temperatures exceeded the 1.5C threshold.

Can humanity do more?

While one year alone of over-shooting the 1.5C target “doesn’t mean that threshold has been irreversibly breached”, said Time, research published by the Yale School of the Environment suggests that it likely means the world will exceed the target over the next 20 years. A separate study found there was a 90% likelihood emissions will peak in 2045, two decades after they were meant to.

Guterres has, however, refused to give up on the target set in Paris. “It is absolutely indispensable to change course in order to make sure that the overshoot is as short as possible and as low in intensity as possible”, he told The Guardian, saying it may still be possible to bring temperatures down in time to return to 1.5C by the end of the century.

With the planet’s past 10 years among the hottest on record, this requires countries to meet or exceed their individual climate action plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs).

Up to now, “while they helped some nations make progress in emissions reduction, it hasn’t been enough to offset high economic growth,” Adrian Raftery, a University of Washington professor emeritus of statistics and sociology, told Time.

Failure to stick to the 1.5C threshold will “challenge fundamental aspects of nationhood and identity”, said the Chatham House think tank. It will also “reshape systems that underpin modern society, including finance”.

The stakes heading into COP30 could not be higher.

The government aims to quadruple nuclear capacity by 2050, taking it to 24 gigawatts (GW), about a quarter of projected UK annual electricity demand. This year, No. 10 has made a flurry of announcements to show that it is serious about meeting this pledge.

In June, it announced £14.2 billion in funding for the new Sizewell C nuclear plant on the Suffolk coast – in addition to the £3.6 billion committed by the Treasury in the past two years. A month later, investment was finalised, with the government as the largest shareholder. (Meanwhile, Hinkley Point C nuclear power station in Somerset is set to come into service around 2031.) Another £2.5 billion has been allocated to help the development of small modular reactors. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband claims that Britain is about to enter a “golden age” of nuclear power.

Why the urgency now?

Energy use is set to soar, thanks partly to electric vehicles and AI, perhaps doubling by 2050. At present, Britain’s energy costs are some of the highest in Europe, particularly for industry, which is a major drag on the economy. This is partly caused by our dependence on gas, which provides about a third of electricity; ministers want to reduce gas to less than 5% of it by 2030.

Crucially, the government also sees low-carbon nuclear as a way of meeting its target of net-zero emissions by 2050. Wind and solar power are of course intermittent; nuclear power can provide vast amounts of constant “baseload” capacity. Hinkley Point C alone will provide 3.2GW, enough for six million homes, or 7% of current demand.

The trouble is that Britain is running out of time. In 1997, there were 16 nuclear power stations in operation, which together provided 27% of the UK’s electricity; today, only five of our ageing nuclear power stations are still in operation, providing 15% – and four of them are scheduled to close by 2030.

Why has progress halted?

Britain was once a global leader in nuclear power. In 1956, the world’s first commercial nuclear power plant, Calder Hall, opened at Sellafield in Cumbria. Two more opened in 1962. By 1988, the UK had 18 reactors. But most were designed with a maximum lifespan of about 40 years; and the impetus to renew them was lost during Britain’s “dash for gas” in the 1990s.

Meanwhile, high-profile disasters heightened concern over the safety of nuclear energy. And the costs of reactors kept rising: the International Energy Agency has found that nuclear plants built in the US and Europe since 2000 have been on average eight years late, and two-and-a-half times over their original budget; Hinkley Point C’s has ballooned from £18 billion to £46 billion. Britain’s newest reactors now cost four times South Korea’s.

Why are they so expensive?

The UK has struggled to deliver large infrastructure projects within budget for decades now, and nuclear projects are particularly large and complex. They require long-term investment, and both capital and building materials have risen sharply in price. Before Hinkley Point C, no plant had been built since 1995, so skills and supply chains had been lost.

The UK’s planning and regulatory regime is also particularly onerous: at Hinkley Point, 7,000 design changes had to be made to meet regulatory requirements, with the result, its management claims, that the plant will use 25% more steel and 35% more concrete than planned. Plants are required to meet very stringent safety standards; that “there is no safe level of radiation” is an iron rule of the industry. Hinkley Point’s environmental impact assessment ran to 31,401 pages: developers will install underwater loudspeakers (dubbed the “fish disco”) to deter salmon from being poached in the reactor cooling intake.

How do ministers plan to fix this?

Through a combination of planning reforms, regulatory streamlining, investment and the promotion of new technologies. The government has unveiled plans to block campaigners from “excessive” legal challenges to major infrastructure projects, such as nuclear power stations.

It also wants to expand the current list of just eight favoured sites for large nuclear schemes. The expiry date on nuclear planning rules is to be removed, so new projects are no longer “timed out”. And a new Nuclear Regulatory Taskforce is to be set up to improve the regulations. No. 10 hopes these reforms will “clear a path” to allow small modular reactors (SMRs) to be built in locations across the UK.

What are SMRs?

They’re “mini” nuclear power stations, about the size of two football pitches. Their capacity will be about 0.5GW, compared with about 3.2GW for Hinkley Point C. And unlike conventional plants, which are built in situ over years or even decades, they will be built in factories, and then assembled on site.

Rolls-Royce has been chosen by the government to produce the first SMR, by the mid-2030s. It hopes to establish an efficient and relatively cheap production line, allowing power stations to be built in just four years, producing power at about a third of the price of reactors such as Sizewell.

Will all this actually happen?

It will certainly be difficult. Nuclear power’s high upfront costs, poor track record on delivery and spiralling budgets mean that many are sceptical. The planning process will be difficult, and communities affected are likely to resist vociferously. The issue of how to dispose of nuclear waste remains unresolved.

But reliable low-carbon power is needed; and reactors such as Sizewell, though expensive to build, will run for 60 years with relatively low fuel costs. In theory, SMRs could bring prices down – and provide the UK with a significant industry. At any rate, this government is clearly committed to expanding nuclear power. The first SMR site will be announced later this year.

How safe is nuclear power?

A series of high-profile accidents over the years have undermined nuclear power’s safety credentials. In 1957, a reactor caught fire at the Windscale nuclear plant, now known as Sellafield, releasing radioactive material across the UK. In 1979, a reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania went into partial meltdown following a cooling malfunction. In the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, a reactor exploded at a plant in Soviet Ukraine. And in 2011, a 9.0-magnitude earthquake triggered a meltdown at the Fukushima power plant in Japan; it will take up to 40 years to decontaminate the area.

Nevertheless, the weight of scientific opinion holds that nuclear power is a safe form of power generation. There were no confirmed deaths from Windscale or Three Mile Island, and only one from Fukushima (though all may have caused cancer deaths in the long term). Chernobyl caused perhaps 4,000 deaths, in total. As Tim Gregory, a nuclear chemist at the UK’s National Nuclear Laboratory, notes in his book “Going Nuclear”, nuclear energy accounts for about 0.03 deaths per terawatt hour of generation – equivalent to wind and solar, and far lower than gas or coal. Likewise, “deep geological disposal” is now thought to be a safe solution to the problem of radioactive waste.

Humans burp after a big meal. Heat from climate change might be released by the Southern Ocean into the atmosphere sometime in the future. This heat would cause comparable heating to anthropogenic climate change. The longer humans continue to release emissions, the more heat will be trapped in the ocean.

Bring up the heat

Heat trapped in the Southern Ocean could be “burped” up into the atmosphere and cause climate change-like effects, even after humans stop greenhouse gas emissions, according to a study published in the journal AGU Advances. This burp “originates from heat that has previously accumulated under global warming in the deep Southern Ocean, and emerges to the ocean surface via deep convection,” said the study. As a result, there could be a “renewed pulse of warming from the maritime zone, without any new CO2 entering the atmosphere,” said Daily Galaxy.

The study showed that this release would occur “after several centuries of net negative emissions levels and gradual global cooling,” and could lead to a “decadal- to centennial-scale period of warming,” said Eos. This warming would be “comparable to average historical anthropogenic warming rates.” The released heat will not be distributed evenly around the world; the effects would be “greatest and longest-lasting in the Southern Hemisphere, suggesting a greater impact on today's more vulnerable countries of the global south,” said the study. However, “while some CO2 is released, the primary impact is thermal, not chemical,” said Daily Galaxy.

Ocean on hold

Oceans act as a carbon sink, meaning they are capable of holding atmospheric carbon. The ocean will likely continue to “absorb heat well after atmospheric CO2 peaks and net-negative emissions are reached, because surface atmospheric temperatures also take their time to fall,” said Science Alert. The future Southern Ocean also has a “greatly increased capacity to absorb shortwave solar radiation, since much of the sea ice that historically reflected the heat has melted.”

The burp is attributed to two processes. These are warmer surface waters mixing with cooler layers and ventilating heat into the depths, plus the “ocean’s natural heat release pathways” are becoming less active, said Daily Galaxy. These “combined effects trap heat where it cannot easily escape, setting the stage for a delayed warming rebound.”

The potential for this “burp” “assumes a rosy climate future,” said Popular Mechanics. Unfortunately, we are a long way from being carbon negative or reaching net-zero. This is especially true as the Trump administration “openly encourages other countries (along with the U.S.) to keep burning fossil fuels.”

The study shows that “burning fossil fuels with reckless abandon for centuries will have lasting impacts long after the green revolution finally takes hold,” said Popular Mechanics. But the “sooner we can achieve this technological dream, the better our chances are for preserving a future.”

Half of the world’s remaining uncontacted indigenous groups face extinction within a decade due to growing contact with missionaries, miners, drug traffickers and social media influencers, a new report released by Survival International ahead of Cop30 in Brazil has warned.

The indigenous rights organisation, which has spent years compiling a comprehensive record of some of the world’s most isolated people, has identified 196 “uncontacted” communities around the world who are living “at the edge of survival”.

“These are what I would call silent genocides – there are no TV crews, no journalists. But they are happening, and they’re happening now,” said Fiona Watson, Survival’s research and advocacy director.

Who and where are they?

Uncontacted peoples are those who “reject contact with outsiders, as an active and ongoing choice”, said the charity. Some are “entire peoples who are uncontacted”, while others are “sub-groups of bigger tribes with whom they share a language and often a territory”.

“All are aware of the outside world, and reject it. They are self-sufficient and resilient. They live independently in forests, sometimes on islands. They resist intrusion, and thrive when their rights are respected.”

The Amazon basin accounts for the vast majority of these communities, with the rest living in the Asia-Pacific, including India and Indonesia.

Some romanticise them as “lost tribes” frozen in time, said Watson, but the reality is that they are contemporary societies which deliberately avoid outsiders after generations of violence, slavery and disease.

Why are they under threat?

Resource extraction is by far the biggest threat to uncontacted peoples, many of whom live on land ripe for mining, logging and agribusiness. Deforestation and infrastructure projects like roads and railways often leave food and water sources destroyed and polluted, bringing starvation.

Drug-trafficking gangs also posed an existential danger to indigenous communities, said Survival, while missionaries who are “bankrolled by multi-million-dollar evangelical organisations” to track and convert people to Christianity threaten about one in six.

A new but growing threat is the rise of “adventure-seeking tourists” and social media influencers who expose uncontacted groups to deadly diseases.

A British YouTuber known as “Lord Miles” recently boasted on social media of “his detailed plans” to illegally visit India’s North Sentinel island, home to the most isolated indigenous people in the world. US influencer Mykhailo Viktorovych Polyakov is currently on bail facing the possibility of a prison sentence after landing on the island in March and allegedly offering the indigenous Sentinelese a can of Diet Coke and a coconut.

“Indigenous people have become this spectacle. They’re here to be consumed by global audiences,” Michael Rivera, an anthropologist at the University of Hong Kong, told NBC News. “This is reproducing a sort of racial hierarchy that is positioning influencers, who tend not to be indigenous people”, at the top.

What can be done?

In 1987 Brazil, which is home to most of these groups, adopted a policy to protect isolated peoples and demarcate their land. This has “allowed many populations to grow”, said The Guardian, but in recent decades, the agency set up to protect them has been “deliberately weakened”, by successive governments. “Chronically underfunded and understaffed”, its field infrastructure is today “in tatters”.

Critics say this is because these groups do not vote and live on resource-rich land, meaning they are either ignored by their government or, worse, deliberately targeted.

Survival International has called for a global no-contact policy and urged private companies to ensure their supply chains are free of material sourced from land inhabited by indigenous groups.

But protecting uncontacted peoples will require not only “stronger laws” but also a “shift in how the world views them – not as relics of the past, but as citizens of the planet whose survival affects everyone’s future”, said The Independent.

Stone is “making a comeback” in the building industry after years of being “forgotten”, said the BBC. With clear benefits to the environment, such as a lower carbon footprint than other traditional materials, the substance’s popularity is growing as a more sustainable, and nostalgic, alternative.

In warmer climates, stone is valued for its cooling properties, but the benefits of stone in the UK could be much more varied.

‘Tangible link’ to the past

The rise in demand seems to be particularly welcome north of the border. Scotland’s identity is “closely linked to its stone-built heritage”, said Historic Environment Scotland. Stone infrastructure is not only a “tangible link” to the country’s past, but it also stimulates financial opportunities. Millions of tourists see stonework, and the traditional aesthetic of stone walls and buildings as a “huge draw”, and their arrival provides a “vital source of income” for local economies.

In rural areas, stone walling and stone building have long histories, dating as far back as 5,000 years, said Jennie Rothenberg Gritz in Smithsonian. Stonewalling uses stones, “carefully fitted together in such a way that the wall won’t fall down” without any mortar or cement. This means that if you have to fix one section, the whole wall remains secure, whereas “when a mortared wall cracks, the entire wall is in peril”.

“What price do you put on forever?”, stone wall expert Kristie de Garis told the magazine. “Mortared walls need to be redone roughly every 15 to 30 years. But there are dry stone walls still standing after thousands of years.”

‘Renaissance’ fuelled by sustainability

The most important aspect of stone is probably its “ecological value”, said Christiane Fath in World-Architects.com. Though it has always been popular and used in some of the most famous buildings in the world – think Cologne Cathedral, the Colosseum, or Notre Dame – in the era of climate change, stone is heading for a “renaissance” after major developments in Germany, specifically Cologne, Leipzig and Berlin.

Its benefits are manifold, wrote Fath. Created by natural processes, its production “consumes little energy”, and its “buildings can be recycled” if approached intelligently. Stone building’s human input should not be overlooked: despite the use of machinery in its production, the creation of stone elements is still an “artisan process” providing “additional cultural value”, and is a celebration of timeless craftsmanship.

“Building in brick is increasingly unsustainable”, said Amy Frearson in the FT. Processing bricks involves additional ingredients like lime, sand, and cement, even before the “energy cost of firing and shipping”. Sustainability aside, stone is a way of “delivering the very local character that the government wants” when developing houses, something which is important to local councils.

One major drawback of turning to stone as a material is the problem of “perception”, said the broadsheet. Added to the higher cost, and despite its strong load-bearing capacity, stone has cultivated a “luxury surface finish” image. This drives stringent demand for “uniform varieties”, “leaving anything short of perfect to be rejected and creating a lot of surplus”.

Eels have been a staple of European diets for millennia, from London’s jellied eels to Spanish angulas. But the world’s appetite is bringing them to the brink of extinction.

European rivers once teemed with eels; now numbers have collapsed due to overfishing, habitat loss, pollution and climate change. Scarcity, combined with an insatiable demand for the grilled dish, has sent prices soaring and spawned a “thriving illegal trade”, said The Guardian.

Europol recently estimated that up to 100 tonnes of juvenile eels are smuggled from Europe each year, generating €2.5–3 billion in peak years. That makes eel trafficking one of the world’s most lucrative wildlife crimes.

Baby eels: a prized delicacy

“Tiny, translucent and no longer than a finger, juvenile European eels, also known as glass eels, might not look like much,” said Mongabay. But demand for these “slippery creatures” has made them among “the world’s most trafficked animals”.

Adult eels have never been successfully bred in captivity at scale, so farms are “entirely dependent” on wild-caught juveniles to raise to maturity and sell for the table. Glass eels are “a high-value commodity” – especially in China and Japan, the world’s foremost eel consumers.

In the 1990s, after decades of intense overfishing, eel populations around Japan “began to collapse”. Asian farms increasingly turned to wild-caught European juveniles. But every eel taken from the wild causes “lasting ecological consequences”, conservationists say, because the species plays “multiple roles” in ecosystems.

By 2007, the European eel was listed as critically endangered. In response, the EU imposed a zero-export quota, banning trade with countries outside the bloc. Then, “an illegal global market and food fraud developed”, said a 2024 study. The “lucrative market for European eel outside Europe” attracted the attention of criminal organisations, and turned Europe into “the source of the international illegal eel trade”.

In 2023, EU authorities seized more than a million live eels in nearly 5,200 operations, almost all destined for Asia.

Future of eel ‘hangs on a hook’

“The future of the eel hangs on a hook,” said Follow the Money. The European eel population has declined by more than 90% since the 1970s.

Between last October and June this year alone, Europol’s Operation Lake, its flagship action against eel trafficking, seized 22 tonnes of glass eels. But despite increasing enforcement, European eels are still “ending up grilled at high-end restaurants as unagi, a prized Japanese delicacy”, said Mongabay. It is a “highly complex, organised crime”, involving smuggling, document fraud, tax evasion and money laundering. Sophisticated criminal networks in Europe and Asia work “in tandem”.

And it’s not just a European crisis: according to a recent study led by Chuo University in Japan, more than 99% of eels consumed worldwide belong to three endangered species: American, Japanese and European.

Even for importers trying to source legal eels, “it is very difficult to determine where these eels originally came from”, Dr Hiromi Shiraishi from Chuo University told The Guardian. Legal variations are exploited by traffickers. European eels are taken to Africa, where they are “cleaned” into legal exports towards Asia. There is “no traceability”. Fish are digitally tracked from fisher to consumer, but there is no such global system for eels. All the while, traffickers “remain one step ahead, their routes as slippery as the fish themselves”.

But soon there will be “an opportunity to reduce this illegal trade”, said Sheldon Jordan and Yves Goulet in The Globe and Mail. In late November, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species will consider the EU’s proposal to enhance the protection of all eel species. At the moment, only the European eel is listed under CITES – but they look so similar that officers “cannot reliably tell them apart” without costly DNA tests. Listing all eel species under CITES would “close loopholes traffickers exploit”.

What happened

Hurricane Melissa, a slow-moving Category 5 tempest with sustained winds of up to 175 mph, began lashing Jamaica late Monday before making landfall this morning. Melissa is this year’s most powerful storm and is expected to be the strongest ever recorded in Jamaica, dumping up to 40 inches of rain on some parts of the Caribbean island and flooding other areas amid a storm surge of up to 13 feet, the U.S. National Hurricane Center warned Monday.

Who said what

Jamaican officials said Monday evening that at least three people had already died as a result of the storm, which has also been blamed for four deaths in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness told CNN Monday he did not believe there was “any infrastructure within this region that could withstand a Category 5 storm.” Forecasters expected flooded roads and towns, damaged bridges and airports, landslides and a wrecked power grid.

“Tens of thousands of families are facing hours of extreme wind gusts above 100 mph and days of relentless, torrential rainfall,” said AccuWeather Chief Meteorologist Jonathan Porter. Melissa is crawling along at about 3 mph and “slow-moving major hurricanes often go down in history as some of the deadliest and most destructive storms on record.”

“I have been on my knees in prayer,” Holness said at a news conference. And based on conversations with other leaders, “it would appear the entire world is praying for Jamaica.” The U.S. has an “unusually large fleet of U.S. military ships deployed nearby” as part of President Donald Trump’s Venezuela and drug-boat operations, The Washington Post said. And “many of the personnel” aboard “are trained to respond to natural disasters,” as the U.S. has long done in the Caribbean.

What next?

The U.S. has emergency relief supplies ready and can provide “lifesaving assistance to affected countries and people across the country when it is in the interest of the United States,” a State Department official told the Post. Hurricane Melissa, now “moving slower than expected,” should pass across southeast Cuba and the Bahamas Wednesday, The New York Times said.

Climate change doesn’t just pose an existential threat to our planet. It’s also ratcheting up national security risks. With increasing food insecurity, resource scarcity and unstable borders, climate change could lead to a rise in political tensions both within the U.S. and between other countries.

How is climate change a security risk?

An unpredictable climate “leads to heightened risks of interpersonal and intergroup violence,” said the World Economic Forum. A one-degree Celsius uptick in temperature can “increase interpersonal violence by approximately 2%, while intergroup conflict risk” can increase by “2.5% to 5%.” This is largely attributed to resource loss. With a two-degree change, “not only will there be continual extreme weather events, but the average climate will have changed so that crops now grown can no longer survive; water shortages will become widespread; and food will be in short supply,” said Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, at Newsroom.

As a result, there will be climate refugees deepening “regional conflicts that could explode to encompass many countries,” said Trenberth. Climate change “takes things that we were already worried about, like extremism or terrorism, and exacerbates the scale or nature of those threats,” Scott Moore, a practice professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, said to Time. “If you have these intensified climate change impacts, they place stress on things like food systems, and worsen already existing tensions within countries.”

The U.S., in particular, faces a “compounding threat when it comes to conflict, disease, migration, poverty,” as well as the “ability of the American military to operate effectively globally,” said Jake Sullivan, former President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, to The New York Times. In addition, playing a “leading role in the innovation and manufacturing of clean energy technologies” is “vital” for the U.S. economy.

What is the government doing about it?

The threat of climate change on national security has been identified on both sides of the U.S. political aisle, at least until recently. It was first acknowledged by President George W. Bush in 1991, and first listed as a threat by the U.S. national security community in 2008. However, in the U.S. intelligence community’s 2025 Annual Threat Assessment, any mention of climate change was noticeably absent for the first time in more than a decade. Instead, they focused on the “most extreme and critical direct threats to our national security," said Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, in a Senate Intelligence Committee meeting when questioned about the climate change exclusion.

The Trump administration has been known to deny climate change and curtail programs dedicated to the environment or aid. It has “defunded climate science, shut down USAID, cut billions from foreign aid,” as well as “withdrawn America from the Paris Climate Agreement,” said William S. Becker at The Hill. Unfortunately, failing to acknowledge the threat climate change poses will make the administration's national security sector “less nimble,” said Mark Nevitt, an associate professor of law at Emory University, to Time. “You can’t just wish climate change away.”

Renewable energy overtook coal power to become the largest source of electricity in the world for the first half of 2025. However, many forms of renewable energy have an efficiency problem, with production not matching up to demand. Storing the excess energy with megabatteries could offer a promising way to bridge the gap.

Storing the sun

One of the biggest problems with many renewable power sources is the mismatch between supply and demand. The production rates of energies like solar and wind “fluctuate according to the weather, the time of day and the season,” said OilPrice.com. For example, when the “sun is shining and solar panels are producing the most energy,” it “also happens to be when the lights are switched off and relatively few people are home using appliances.” This causes an oversupply of energy. The solution could be to store the excess energy in the form of megabatteries.

There are several methods of energy storage, but megabatteries are growing in popularity. The batteries soak up extra power and “discharge energy as the sun sets and demand rises,” said the Financial Times. In addition, “breakthroughs in battery design have played a major role in improving efficiency.” The price of lithium-ion batteries has also dropped significantly since 2010. The “core appeal of batteries is flexibility,” said the European Business Magazine. They “store power when it’s cheap and abundant, then release it when it’s scarce or expensive,” which makes them “invaluable for stabilizing grids,” and “profitable for operators who play the peaks and troughs of wholesale markets.”

“What grid operators and utilities value from batteries is flexibility,” Mark Dyson, a managing director at the Colorado-based nonprofit RMI, said to the Financial Times. “They can be a ‘swiss army knife’ and do whatever is needed on the grid, when and where that is required.” Megabatteries are “quietly redefining what energy security looks like,” said the European Business Network. In the past, “it meant barrels of oil or cubic meters of gas,” but now it is “measured in megawatt-hours of flexible storage — the ability to shift electricity from when it’s produced to when it’s needed.”

Big potential

The use of megabatteries has expanded globally, specifically in the U.S. and China, but also across Europe and Asia. More recently, the electric vehicle brand Tesla “released an upgraded version of its grid-battery product that will allow developers to build bigger energy-storage projects faster,” said Canary Media. Called Megablocks, one of them can hold “20 megawatt-hours of power, which can be discharged for up to four hours at peak capacity,” and “scaled up for a large project, 248 megawatt-hours can fit into an acre.”

Large megabattery projects are becoming more necessary. The increase in AI data centers and concerns over energy grid reliability mean “batteries are expected to become a crucial cog in energy systems across the world, especially with their costs plummeting,” said the Financial Times. The market for them is growing in turn. “Battery storage today is what wind and solar were a decade ago,” said a London-based infrastructure investor to the European Business Magazine. “The risk is lower, regulation is clearer and capital is flooding in.”

We’re going dark. The Earth is reflecting less light than it used to, especially the Northern Hemisphere. While climate change is to blame, the reverse is also true: the planet being darker — and absorbing light instead of reflecting it — is in turn worsening climate change. But scientists are still unsure exactly how the change in Earth’s reflectivity will affect our planet’s future.

A light problem

Climate change is darkening the Earth, according to a study published in the journal PNAS. Data from NASA’s Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) satellites found that the planet is reflecting much less light into space than it did two decades ago. In addition, while both sides of the planet should be receiving and reflecting equal amounts of sunlight, Earth’s Northern Hemisphere (NH) is reflecting less than the Southern Hemisphere (SH), thus retaining more heat and appearing dimmer.

This affects the Earth’s radiation budget, which is the “amount of light the planet absorbs and re-emits into space as outgoing longwave radiation,” said Popular Mechanics. Any imbalance between the NH and SH is typically “offset by the oceanic currents that transport energy from the southern hemisphere to the northern hemisphere.” But this research suggests that “surface changes have tipped the balance so much that ocean currents haven’t been making up the difference for the past two decades.”

Along with the NH dimming and warming more than the SH, the “NH tropics are getting wetter, which suggests changes in large-scale atmospheric circulation are occurring,” said the study.

A dim future

The reason for this phenomenon, like most environmental problems, is climate change. Melting Arctic ice and reduced snow cover are actively dimming the glow of the planet. The NH “used to be so snowy that all that white was bouncing tons of light back into space,” said Vice. Temperatures have increased, melting the snow cover and “exposing these darker surfaces that absorb more sunlight instead of reflecting it,” said the BBC.

Changes in cloud formation have also contributed to the dimming Earth. Low-lying clouds “decreased in recent decades,” said Popular Mechanics. Ironically, this may be because we have been polluting less than we used to. In the NH, “stricter environmental regulations have reduced aerosol pollution, which previously reflected sunlight,” said the BBC. So, while the air has been cleaner, it has also incurred an unintended consequence. On the SH, “aerosol levels are increasing due to events like bushfires and volcanic eruptions, which reflect more sunlight.”

In a positive feedback loop, the Earth’s darkening is “accelerating the effects of climate change, and an asymmetric hemispheric darkening could produce its own complex impacts, including disruptive shifts in precipitation,” said 404 Media. Researchers are “watching for signs that the symmetry might reemerge in the future, or if asymmetry is perhaps the new normal.”

“All of this means that our planet isn’t just growing darker to outside observers,” said Vice. “Darkness is a symptom of a planet that is getting hotter. So hot that it’s essentially causing a planet-wide brownout.”

What if cropdusting could cool down the climate? What about rockdusting? Turns out sprinkling rock dust on fields may enhance a process called rock weathering, capable of trapping and removing atmospheric carbon. While the method would be low-cost, there is little data on how much carbon can truly be offset through the process.

Drop it like it’s hot

Rock weathering is a natural carbon removal process that occurs when “rain falls through the atmosphere” and “combines with CO2 to form carbonic acid,” said Undo, a London-based business dedicated to carbon removal. When the acid falls on the landscape, the CO2 “interacts with rocks and soil, mineralizes and is safely stored in solid carbonate form.” Scientists want to supercharge this process in a system called enhanced rock weathering.

The process of rock weathering can be enhanced when rocks are “crushed into a fine dust over land where soybeans, sugar cane and other crops are grown,” said The Washington Post. Then, as it rains, “chemical reactions pull carbon from the air and convert it into bicarbonate ions that eventually wash into the ocean, where the carbon remains stored.” As an added benefit, these carbonates are minerals that “help farmers by replenishing depleted soils,” said the World Economic Forum.

The method has the potential to sequester billions of tons of carbon and slow climate change. “Not too many people have the opportunity to change the temperature of the planet,” said Shawn Benner, a hydrogeologist and geochemist at Terradot, a company working on expanding enhanced rock weathering, to the Post. While covering fields in rock dust is relatively inexpensive, the main difficulty lies in the “logistics of transporting and spreading the rock dust,” said the World Economic Forum. This obstacle “could be overcome by using local sources of rock dust and developing efficient spreading methods.”

Carbon questions

Reducing emissions and moving toward renewable energy is no longer enough to curb climate change. Unfortunately, as countries “fall woefully short of their emissions reduction targets,” there has been a “growing consensus that large-scale carbon removal will be necessary to avoid some of the worst effects of climate change,” said the Post. As a result, methods like enhanced rock weathering are coming to the forefront. However, like with other carbon removal methods, there are “concerns persisting over the efficacy of its verification procedures and ultimately how much carbon it can effectively remove,” said Data Center Dynamics.

Companies working on enhanced rock weathering have “drawn some skepticism from researchers who say they want to see data and peer-reviewed research,” said the Post. There are still questions as to the accuracy of the estimated amount of carbon being removed through this process, especially long term. Conditions, including the type of rock dust, the type of soil and overall climate, can affect the amount of carbon removal as well. Companies are “experimenting with various silicate rocks, including basalt, wollastonite, olivine and crushed concrete, which differ in terms of weathering rates,” said Data Center Dynamics.

“It’s at an exciting juncture,” said David Beerling, the director of the University of Sheffield’s Leverhulme Center for Climate Change Mitigation, to the Post. “But there’s a need for caution in ensuring that we have rigorous, cost-effective [tracking and verification] so that people don’t make claims for carbon credits that aren’t substantiated.”