🗞️ In Climate News

• 🇪🇸 Spain and Portugal wildfires drive worst EU season on record

  • A record one million hectares - equivalent to about half the land area of Wales - have burned across the European Union so far this year, making it the worst wildfire season since records began in 2006.

• 🌊 Collapse of critical Atlantic current is no longer low-likelihood, study finds

  • The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) is a major part of the global climate system. It brings sun-warmed tropical water to Europe and the Arctic, where it cools and sinks to form a deep return current. The Amoc was already known to be at its weakest in 1,600 years as a result of the climate crisis.

• 🌳 Deforestation has killed half a million people in past 20 years, study finds

  • Land clearance is raising the temperature in the rainforests of the Amazon, Congo and south-east Asia because it reduces shade, diminishes rainfall and increases the risk of fire, the authors of the paper found.

    Deforestation is responsible for more than a third of the warming experienced by people living in the affected regions, which is on top of the effect of global climate disruption.

• 🇵🇰 Pakistan evacuates a million people as farming belt hit by worst floods in decades

  • Torrential monsoon rain and neighbouring India's release of excess water from its dams swelled three rivers that flow into the eastern province, forcing authorities to breach river banks in some places - causing flooding in more than 1,400 villages, Punjab's disaster management authority said.

• 🇺🇸 Fema staff warn Trump’s cuts risk exposing US to another Hurricane Katrina

  • Donald Trump’s attacks on the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) risk exposing the US to another Hurricane Katrina, staff at the agency have warned Congress in a withering critique that also takes aim at its current leadership.

• 🚜 ‘We cannot do it the way our fathers did’: farmers across Europe struggle to adapt to the climate crisis

  • I’m not ready to change jobs,” says Stellios Boutaris, a wine producer with vineyards in Naoussa and Amyndeon in northern Greece, as well as on the island of Santorini. But, he adds, “we cannot do it the way our fathers did.”

    Boutaris is determined to keep producing in the region and keep the family business going but says “the curve is not looking good” as the climate crisis puts pressure on producers across the Mediterranean.

• 🇲🇽 NGOs launch novel community projects to conserve Mexico’s ocelots

  • Esteban Dominguez has lived for more than 20 years close to one of the biggest conservation areas in southeastern Mexico — Calakmul Biosphere Reserve on the Yucatán Peninsula. He’s used to spotting monkeys, coatis, eagles, tapirs, deer, wild turkeys, owls, and even pumas and jaguars. But he recalls only a couple times when an ocelot (Leopardus pardalis) briefly crossed his path.

• 🇸🇸 In South Sudan's Tambura region, displaced women battle uncertainty and insecurity

  • Since violence erupted in Tambura, Western Equatoria, in 2021, thousands of civilians have been forced to flee their homes and seek sanctuary in displacement camps, where women still face a fragile security situation and uncertainty for the future of their children and families.

• 🇬🇲 Gambian fishermen are fighting trawlers

  • Gambian crews on international trawlers fishing on the country's shores have become the accidental targets of local fishermen's anger, whose livelihoods are threatened by the foreign vessels' aggressive fishing strategies.

📈 Cool Trends

• 🧱 Lego using cooking oil to make plastic bricks

• 🦊 Fur production plummeted by 85% over 10 years

♾️ eco-story

Some 30,000 years ago, Stone Age people decorated a cave, today known as Cueva de los Casares, in central Spain with pictures of mating humans (most famously), geometric shapes, and animals. The most popular carved animal is the wild horse.

Cueva de los Casares sports at least two dozen images of wild horses. Eventually, these Pleistocene-epoch horses vanished — likely slaughtered for food or domesticated. But some 10,000 years later, wild horses have again returned to central Spain — this time to help with out-of-control fires and bring economic opportunity to a struggling region.

In 2023, Rewilding Spain, a branch of Rewilding Europe, brought in the first 16 Przewalski’s horses (Equus ferus przewalskii) from France to the highlands of Spain’s Guadalajara province, one of the least populated parts of the country. Once extinct in the wild, Przewalski’s horse is the last fully wild horse in the world, genetically distinct from all domesticated horses. Originally from Mongolia, they’ve been rewilded to a number of countries in Europe.

“It was an amazing feeling … to bring these animals here,” says Pablo Schapira, team leader with Rewilding Spain. Before returning to his home country, Schapira spent a dozen years in Africa working with the NGO African Parks, including on species reintroductions.

He says doing reintroductions in his home country “was amazing because I didn’t think it was possible.”

Today, the project has 35 Przewalski’s horses.

Przewalski’s foal nursing. Since the beginning of the project, four foals have been born. Image by Juan Maza.

🌏 The Culture Column

📺 What we’re watching: Only on Earth

📸 Profile of the week: @rewilding_spain
📖 What we’re reading: Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life, by George Monbiot
🤯 Shocking fact we learnt this week: Przewalski’s horses are the last fully wild horse species in the world

🗞️ In Climate News

• 🇺🇳 In landmark opinion, the World Court says climate change is an 'existential threat'

  • he United Nations' highest court on Wednesday underlined "the urgent and existential threat posed by climate change" as it started to read out an opinion on the legal obligations of states to take action.

    The non-binding opinion by the International Court of Justice, also known as the World Court, is likely to determine the course of future climate action across the world.

• 🍄 Earth’s underground network of fungi needs urgent protection, say researchers

  • The research, published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, found that 90% of the biodiverse hotspots of mycorrhizal fungi were in unprotected ecosystems. Loss of the ecosystems could lead to reductions in carbon drawdown, crop productivity and ecosystem resilience to climate extremes.

• 🇬🇷 Greek fir forests dying as heat peaks and snow cover wanes

  • Less water and moisture mean that fir trees become more vulnerable to attacks by pests that bore into their bark to lay eggs and create tunnels, disrupting the trees' ability to transport nutrients between roots and branches and leading to their death.

• 🇨🇾 Two dead, homes burn in massive wildfire in Cyprus

  • At least 100 square kilometres (39 square miles) was razed to the ground in a wine-producing region north of the city of Limassol after the blaze broke out around midday on Wednesday, with several fronts still active on Thursday morning.

• 🇻🇳 Severe floods triggered by storm Wipha kill at least 3 in Vietnam's Nghe An

  • Heavy rains triggered by tropical storm Wipha have caused severe flooding in the central Vietnamese province of Nghe An, killing at least three people and leaving one more missing.

    With a long coastline facing the South China Sea, Vietnam is prone to typhoons that often cause deadly floods and mudslides. Wipha is the first major storm to hit the country this year.

• 🇻🇺 The tiny Pacific nation of Vanuatu turns to the world court as climate disasters mount

  • “We used to know every inch of that reef,” he said. “It was like a friend.”

    Now, it’s unrecognizable. After Cyclone Pam battered the reef in 2015, sediment from inland rivers smothered the coral beds. Crown-of-thorns starfish swept in and devoured the recovering polyps. Back-to-back cyclones in 2023 crushed what was left. Then, in December 2024, a 7.3 magnitude earthquake shook the seabed.

• 🇺🇸 Wildfire near Grand Canyon expands almost twentyfold over 24 hours

  • What officials have dubbed the White Sage Fire in Jacob Lake, Arizona — roughly 650 miles southwest of Denver, Colorado — has grown from 1,000 acres to nearly 20,000 acres, according to a government website that tracks U.S. wildfires. It is 0% contained.

• 🇱🇦 Large-scale illegal wildlife shops in Laos found scamming Chinese tourists

  • The tour companies are believed to take a 20-40% cut of the profits for their role in delivering an estimated 11,000 unsuspecting Chinese tourists to the shops each year. GI-TOC was able to identify 11 Chinese tour operators who lure tourists onto these trips and into these shops.

• 💎 Challenges persist in TMC’s bid to mine the deep sea, even after boost from Trump

  • After years of delay, the deep-sea mining plans of Canadian firm The Metals Company (TMC) now appear to be progressing as it pursues a controversial new path to securing a license to mine in international waters under U.S. jurisdiction.

📈 Cool Trends

• ⚰️ A sustainable coffin that enriches nature by biodegrading in just 45 days and giving human nutrients back in the most natural way

• 🦜 Making glass visible to birds to avoid colissions

♾️ eco-story

On the evening of July 3rd, as the sun went down over Kerrville, Texas, a small city of some twenty-five thousand people and the seat of Kerr County, the water in the Guadalupe River was just four inches deep, according to the U.S. Geological Survey’s stream gauge there. The area hadn’t had any rain since mid-June. R.V. campers in the HTR TX Hill Country campground in Kerrville, some of whom had arrived at the sixty-five-acre facility only hours before, could barely hear the river, even though they were parked in premium spots next to it.

At 3:30 A.M. on July 4th, Dalton Rice, the city manager, went out for an early-morning jog along the sluggish waterway. The river had risen to 1.71 feet, around the average depth. Kerrville’s much anticipated “Fourth on the River” celebration at the riverside Louise Hays Park was scheduled for that afternoon, and Rice saw “not a drop of rain” during his run, he later told Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor of Texas. By 4 A.M., when Rice went home, “there was very light rain,” he said that day. “We did not see any signs of the river rising at that time.”

Rice was apparently unaware that a few hours earlier, at 1:14 A.M., the Austin-San Antonio office of the National Weather Service had sent a flash-flood warning for south-central Kerr County. The area it covered included the town of Hunt, about twelve miles upstream from Kerrville, where Camp Mystic, a girls’ sleepaway camp, was situated, at the confluence of Cypress Creek and the south fork of the Guadalupe. At 4:03 A.M., the warning was upgraded to an emergency: “This is a PARTICULARLY DANGEROUS SITUATION. SEEK HIGHER GROUND NOW!” The stream gauge at Hunt showed the river nearing twenty-two feet, twelve feet higher than its banks. In the next hour, it would rise to thirty-seven feet, at which point the gauge stopped transmitting.

🌏 The Culture Column

📺 What we’re watching: Belle River: The Resilience of a Sinking Town (New Yorker short documentary)

Belle River: The Resilience of a Sinking Town

www.newyorker.com/video/watch/the-new-yorker-documentary-belle-river-the-resilience-of-a-sinking-town

📸 Profile of the week: @climatevisuals
📖 What we’re reading: The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World, by Jeff Goodell
🤯 Shocking fact we learnt this week: Jakarta is sinking by up to 15cm per year

🗞️ In Climate News

• 🇬🇧 Drought declared in English Midlands after hot, dry weather takes its toll

  • The Environment Agency announcement follows England's driest start to the year since 1976, leaving many rivers across the Midlands at extremely low levels.

    Declaring a drought is a public sign that water companies might introduce restrictions on water use if they aren't already in place. That can involve hosepipe bans, which have already started for millions of people in Yorkshire.

• 🇦🇺 Indigenous elders lose landmark climate battle against Australian government

  • In 2021, community elders Pabai Pabai and Paul Kabai launched legal action against the then-Liberal government for breaching its duty of care to protect the Torres Strait Islands from the impacts of climate change.

• 🌪️ The next ‘Storm of the Century’ could be even stronger, new study shows

  • Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania and an author of the study, was trapped in a Philadelphia hotel room for three days during Snowmageddon. It was this experience that first sparked his curiosity about how these storms might be affected by global warming.

• 🇺🇸 The Trump admin just hired 3 outspoken climate contrarians. Scientists are worried what comes next

  • Each were given positions in the Energy Department, which is led by Secretary Chris Wright, a former oil and gas fracking executive.

    The researchers are John Christy and Roy Spencer, both of whom are research scientists at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, and Steven E. Koonin of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

• 🇹🇼 Typhoon Danas lashes southern Taiwan with record winds, injuring hundreds

  • Over 700 trees were felled across western cities and towns and road signs were ripped off and strewn across the streets, government data showed.

    More than 650 electric poles and three major electric towers were knocked down across the island, in what Taiwan Power Company described as damage "unseen for decades" to its power grid.

• 🇱🇧 Lebanon's worst drought on record drains largest reservoir

  • Water levels at Lebanon's largest reservoir on the Litani River have fallen to historic lows amid what experts describe as the country's worst drought on record, threatening agriculture, electricity production, and domestic water supplies.

    The Litani River National Authority said inflows to Lake Qaraoun during this year's wet season did not exceed 45 million cubic metres, a fraction of the 350 million cubic metres annual average.

• 🇨🇳 China tells EU new climate target coming in autumn

  • China and the EU each missed a February deadline to submit new national climate change targets to the United Nations, which set out how much a country will cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 2035 - and will be used to assess global progress towards averting disastrous levels of warming.

• 🇧🇷 Brazil’s Arariboia set to be the first Indigenous land with legal cattle

  • A crackdown on illegal cattle herds inside the Arariboia Indigenous Territory in Brazil has hit unexpected pushback that could make this the first area of its kind in the country to allow licensed cattle ranching.

    That raised concerns among Indigenous rights activists about outsiders once again bringing their illegal herds back into this protected territory, and the environmental damages that would entail.

•  🇲🇾 ‘Hopeful sign’ as Eurasian otter reappears in Malaysia after a decade

  • The last confirmed Eurasian otter (Lutra lutra) sighting by scientists in Malaysia was in 2014, near Danum Valley Field Centre, a conservation area also in Sabah.

📈 Cool Trends

• 💧 Pulling microplastics out of water, before they reach the ocean or our bodies

• 🏊 Natural pools that instead of chlorine, use plants and good bacteria to keep the water clean

♾️ eco-story

For more than three decades, Mark Erdmann has worked where many only dream of diving—on the reefs and in the tangled mangroves of Indonesia’s farthest reaches. A marine biologist by training and a conservationist by necessity, Erdmann has spent much of his life documenting new species, persuading local communities to back marine protection, and fighting off the encroachment of extractive industries. His career, by his own account, has spanned more than 220 species discoveries, a handful of close encounters with crocodiles, and the creation of a new model for shark rewilding.

Erdmann’s journey began in a remote island village off the coast of South Sulawesi in 1991, where he arrived as a Ph.D. student studying coral reef ecology. His neighbors, he quickly realized, were bomb fishers and shark finners. The shift from science to action was swift.

“It was clear that more than science was needed; active protection was critical,” he recalls.

That realization became a life’s work. As Vice President of Asia-Pacific Marine Programs at Conservation International and now Executive Director of ReShark and Shark Conservation Director at Re:wild, Erdmann has been at the forefront of efforts to transform marine protection from a top-down regulatory exercise to a bottom-up, community-owned endeavor. Few places showcase this as clearly as Raja Ampat, the archipelago off West Papua that has become the crown jewel of Indonesian marine conservation.

🌏 The Culture Column

📺 What we’re watching: Extinction: The Facts

📸 Profile of the week: @resharkorg
📖 What we’re reading: Emperors of the Deep: Sharks—The Ocean's Most Mysterious, Most Misunderstood, and Most Important Guardians, by William McKeever
🤯 Shocking fact we learnt this week: Sharks have existed for over 400 million years, making them older than the first trees on Earth.

🗞️ In Climate News

• 🧊 Melting glaciers and ice caps could unleash wave of volcanic eruptions, study says

  • The loss of ice releases the pressure on underground magma chambers and makes eruptions more likely. This process has been seen in Iceland, an unusual island that sits on a mid-ocean tectonic plate boundary. But the research in Chile is one of the first studies to show a surge in volcanism on a continent in the past, after the last ice age ended.

• 🇺🇸 Texas flash floods: more rain forecast as death toll passes 100

  • The death toll from the flash floods that have wreaked devastation in Texas since Friday has passed 100 and is expected to rise further as more victims are found and more rain threatens to deluge the region.

    Camp Mystic, the girls summer camp on the banks of the Guadalupe River in Texas, has confirmed that 27 children and counsellors died.

• 🇦🇺 South Australia ‘helpless’ in face of deadly marine algal bloom spreading to Adelaide beaches

  • Until recently, city beaches had escaped the worst of the deadly bloom of Karenia mikimotoi algae, which had devastated marine life from the Fleurieu peninsula, the Kangaroo Island, the Yorke peninsula and the Ramsar-listed Coorong amid warmer-than-normal sea temperatures.

• 🇬🇷 Wildfires are tearing through a popular tourist hotspot in Greece, forcing mass evacuations

  • More than 200 firefighters are struggling to tackle an out-of-control wildfire on Crete — Greece’s largest island and a tourist hotspot — as authorities order mass evacuations.

    The fire broke out Wednesday afternoon near Ierapetra, a town on the island’s southeast coast, amid unusually high temperatures, 3 to 5 degrees Celsius (5.4 to 9 Fahrenheit) above average, and gale-force winds of around 50 miles an hour.

• 🇺🇸 Congressionally mandated climate reports disappeared from their federal websites

  • Legally mandated national climate assessments disappeared this week from the federal websites built to display them, making it harder for state and local governments and the public to learn what to expect in their backyards from a warming world.

• 🛜 Google just bought 200 megawatts of fusion energy that doesn’t even exist yet

  • Google and Massachusetts-based Commonwealth Fusion Systems announced a deal Monday in which the tech company bought 200 megawatts of power from Commonwealth’s first commercial fusion plant, the same amount of energy that could power roughly 200,000 average American homes.

• 🌵 Recent droughts are 'slow-moving global catastrophe' - UN report

  • From Somalia to mainland Europe, the past two years have seen some of the most ravaging droughts in recorded history, made worse by climate change, according to a UN-backed report.

    Describing drought as a "silent killer" which "creeps in, drains resources, and devastates lives in slow motion" the report said it had exacerbated issues like poverty and ecosystem collapse.

• 🇮🇳 India's Kerala state seeks $1.1 billion in compensation from MSC over oil spill

  • The high court in Kerala issued an order late on Monday asking port authorities to effect "the arrest, seizure and detention" of another MSC ship anchored in the Vizhinjam Port in the state until it deposits securities for the claim amount.

• 🌍 From flood to famine: Rainfall chaos fuels Africa’s drought crisis

  • Climate change is intensifying water scarcity across Africa while also exacerbating droughts. Despite a brief uptick in rainfall across the continent, critical water shortages persist, particularly in major river basins such as the Zambezi.

📈 Cool Trends

• 🏠 Sleek, sustainable homes that are breaking the stereotype for prefab construction

• ♻️ Using recycled plastics to make building materials like interlocking bricks

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♾️ eco-story

At an empty outpost deep in a forest in Mexico, biologists were checking whether the windows had been broken or the furniture stolen, or if any animals had made a home inside.

The outpost had been built in 2015 for a tree-planting and forest restoration project, but it was paused in 2023. The land had been degraded by decades of farming; massive flooding every few years made restoration work too difficult and expensive for Plant-for-the-Planet, the organization that had purchased it.

Researchers with Plant-for-the-Planet know they’ve fallen victim to overambition before, attempting to restore complex ecosystems they didn’t fully understand, and often with a very tight budget. At this idle site, they still hoped to get some support through a government wildlife program. But until that happened, the outpost would remain empty.

“For it to make sense to restore a forest, we really need to be thinking in terms of decades and centuries,” Anna Gee, the group’s forest restoration and conservation project manager, told Mongabay. “How do you create a forest that’s going to be able to sustain itself and self-perpetuate into the future and isn’t just going to get cut down again in 20 years?”

🌏 The Culture Column

📺 What we’re watching: Our Planet | Forests

📸 Profile of the week: @plantfortheplanet_official

📖 What we’re reading: Earth, by Iain S. Stewart, John Lynch

🤯 Shocking fact we learnt this week: In Uganda, Kenya, and other places, Indigenous and rural communities have been forcibly evicted to make way for “climate-friendly” forestry projects backed by corporations and development banks.

🗞️ In Climate News

• 🇺🇳 UN expert urges criminalizing fossil fuel disinformation, banning lobbying

  • Elisa Morgera, the UN special rapporteur on human rights and climate change who presents her damning new report to the general assembly in Geneva on Monday, argues that the US, UK, Canada, Australia and other wealthy fossil fuel nations are legally obliged under international law to fully phase out oil, gas and coal by 2030 – and compensate communities for harms caused.

• 🌍 Europe on alert as first major heatwave of 2025 pushes temperatures to 42ºC

  • Spain’s state meteorological office, Aemet, issued a special heat warning on Friday, saying temperatures could reach 42C in some southern areas of the country over the coming days.

    “Very high and persistent temperatures are expected, both during the day and at night, which could pose a risk to exposed and/or vulnerable people,” Aemet said.

• 🇹🇻 A third of Pacific island nation applies for Australian climate change visa

  • More than a third of Tuvalu citizens have entered the ballot for a world-first climate visa which would allow them to permanently migrate to Australia.

    Opening for the first intake on 16 June, the influx of registrations could indicate that programme will be hugely oversubscribed, with only 280 visas awarded to Tuvalu citizens from the random ballot each year.

• 🇨🇳 Heavy rain hits China's flood-stricken Guizhou for second time in a week

  • Located at the confluence of three rivers and home to 300,000 residents, Rongjiang was inundated earlier this week by record downpours that left six dead and forced more than 80,000 people to flee their homes. The amount of rain that fell over 72 hours was double the city's average for June.

• 🇮🇳 India's monsoon covers country nine days early, accelerating planting

  • The monsoon is the lifeblood of India's nearly $4 trillion economy, delivering almost 70% of the rainfall needed to water farms and replenishing aquifers and reservoirs.

• 🇹🇷 Firefighters in Turkey battle to contain wildfires

  • They are battling wildfires for a second day raging in the western province of Izmir fanned by strong winds, the forestry minister and local media said on Monday

    Wildfires in Kuyucak and Doganbey areas of Izmir were fanned overnight by winds reaching 40-50 kph (25-30 mph) and four villages and two neighbourhoods had been evacuated, Forestry Minister Ibrahim Yumakli said.

• 🇧🇷 Brazil strikes deal with Musk’s Starlink to curb criminal use in the Amazon rainforest

  • Starlink’s lightweight, high-speed internet system has rapidly spread across the Amazon, a region that for decades struggled with slow and unreliable connectivity. But the service has also been adopted by criminal organizations, which have used it to coordinate logistics, make payments and receive alerts about police raids.

• 🇵🇪 Peru’s Amazon communities accuse the state of failing to stop mercury pollution from illegal mining

  • Indigenous and rural communities along the Nanay River in Peru’s northern Amazon filed a complaint on Friday accusing the government of failing to stop illegal gold mining that is contaminating their water and food with toxic mercury.

• 🇵🇦 Panama boosts protections in the Darién Gap, but deforestation threats still loom

  • Thousands of people used to cross the Darién Gap every day. Emerging from the rainforest, they would stop in small towns across southern Panama, where migrant reception centers provided food, water and medical treatment, before the long journey to the U.S. But last year, the government shut down several crossing routes, leaving many of these small towns quieter than they have been in years.

📈 Cool Trends

• 🌱 Protecting crops from extreme heat with low-cost modular "greenhouse-in-a-box" for small-scale farmers

• 🧱 Locking CO₂ into building materials, turning waste into climate-positive plastic

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♾️ eco-story

The story of Astrid Puentes Riaño is rooted in the soil of Colombia. Born in Bogotá to a family with campesino roots, her early memories are of mountain air, clean water, and the quiet freedom of rural landscapes.

“Being outside gave me the freedom and thus happiness that I could not have in the city,” she recalls.

But her journey—from a child inhaling the crisp air of the Llanos to a leading global voice for environmental justice—was shaped not only by landscapes, but by injustice.

While still in law school, Puentes began working with Fundepúblico, a Colombian NGO. She dove into cases that revealed the deep and often invisible intersection of environmental harm and human rights abuse: Afro-descendant communities sickened by toxic spills; schools menaced by the unsafe dumping of industrial waste; campesino and Indigenous communities excluded from decisions that directly impacted their lands and livelihoods. In each case, it became clear: environmental harm disproportionately affects the marginalized.

Just as revealing were the blind spots of mainstream conservation efforts.

“Many of the environmental conservation work in Colombia was done from a very northern and western perspective, with top-down actions, that while intending to conserve some areas, were excluding many of the people that either lived in these areas, and even helped to conserve them,” she says.

🌏 The Culture Column

📺 What we’re watching: The Human Element

📸 Profile of the week: @climatehuman

📖 What we’re reading: The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet, by Jeff Goodell

🤯 Shocking fact we learnt this week: Hot weather kills an estimated half a million people each year. The average annual death toll is greater than that from wars or terrorism

🗞️ In Climate News

• 🌡️ Three years left to limit warming to 1.5C, leading scientists warn

  • The Earth could be doomed to breach the symbolic 1.5C warming limit in as little as three years at current levels of carbon dioxide emissions.

    That's the stark warning from more than 60 of the world's leading climate scientists in the most up-to-date assessment of the state of global warming.

• 🪫 Race to mine metals for EV batteries threatens marine paradise

  • Stark images, captured from a drone by environmental campaigners and shared with the BBC, appear to show how nickel mining has stripped forests and polluted waters in one of the most biodiverse marine habitats on Earth.

• 🪸 An explosion of sea urchins threatens to push coral reefs in Hawaii ‘past the point of recovery’

  • The turquoise water of Hōnaunau Bay in Hawaii, an area popular with snorkelers and divers, is teeming with spiny creatures that threaten to push the coral reef “past the point of recovery,” new research has found.

• 🇳🇿 New Zealand government sued over ‘inadequate’ plan to reduce emissions

  • Climate lawyers are taking the New Zealand government to court, alleging its plan to reduce planet-heating pollution contains “glaring holes,” which will have “huge consequences for our country.”

    Two groups, Lawyers for Climate Action NZ and the Environmental Law Initiative, argue that the government’s plan to reach net zero before 2050 is “neither credible nor capable” of reducing emissions.

• 🇧🇷 Brazil's soy farmers raze Amazon rainforest despite deforestation pact

  • Brazilian soy farmers are pushing further into the Amazon rainforest to plant more of their crops, putting pressure on a landmark deal signed two decades ago aimed at slowing deforestation.

    Many are taking advantage of a loophole in the Amazon Soy Moratorium, a voluntary agreement signed by the world's top grain traders in 2006 that they would not buy soy grown on land deforested after 2008.

• 🇨🇱 Chile's vital underwater forests face threats from mining, warming seas

  • In the cold seas off Chile's arid northern coast an underwater forest teems with life. Towers of red and green seaweed float upwards from the sea floor, providing food for wildlife, income for locals - and oxygen and carbon capture for the planet.

    For scientists, these forests hold even more potential as sustainable protein, food and other materials, though they are threatened by warming oceans and human pollution.

• 🇧🇷 Brazil & China megarailway raises deforestation warnings in the Amazon

  • Brazil is a country shaped by highways. The transportation model adopted by President Juscelino Kubitschek in the 1950s has been expanded by successive administrations across the political spectrum since then, involving substantial investments in road construction, maintenance and incentives for the automotive industry. This long-standing preference for cars, buses and trucks contributed to the decline and eventual scrapping of Brazil’s railway system.

• 🇵🇬 Papuan women’s mangrove forest in Indonesia is increasingly threatened by development and pollution

  • On the southeastern coast of the city of Jayapura, Petronela Merauje walked from house to house in her floating village inviting women to join her the next morning in the surrounding mangrove forests.

    Merauje and the women of her village, Enggros, practice the tradition of Tonotwiyat, which literally means “working in the forest.” For six generations, women from the 700-strong Papuan population there have worked among the mangroves collecting clams, fishing and gathering firewood.

• ⛏️ Global demand spurring Indonesia’s mining boom comes at a cost for many communities

  • The people of Kabaena — including Indigenous Bajau, a group that has traditionally lived near and relied on the sea — are among what experts estimate are thousands of communities around Indonesia where traditional ways of life have been devastated by the impacts of a rapidly expanding mining industry. Most of the materials mined in Indonesia fuel the international supply chain for stainless steel, electric vehicle batteries and more.

📈 Cool Trends

• 🇮🇩 Natural bridges to reconnect the last Javan gibbons

• 🪸 Creating reefs from pets’ and humans’ ashes

♾️ eco-story

Climate change is rapidly altering the way of life of the Indigenous Wayuu people, a semi-nomadic Indigenous group living in the arid La Guajira region, which spans northern Colombia and Venezuela.

Prolonged droughts, intensified by climate change, have worsened water scarcity, straining the Wayuu’s already limited access to drinking water and resources for livestock and agriculture. As rainfall becomes more erratic, food insecurity rises, with crops failing and livestock struggling to survive.

Health risks also escalate, with heat waves increasing dehydration and extreme weather events leading to flooding and waterborne diseases.

Their way of life is also being threatened as companies and the government — who want to capitalize on the region’s wind potential — seek to build wind farms.

A lot of the Wayuu population preserve traditional, semi-nomadic ways of living on “rancherias,” which are thatched-like roofed huts, made from dried cacti and mud and herd cattle and goats. They also have a traditional governance system and laws based on their cultural and spiritual practices.

The worsening conditions have forced many Wayuu to migrate, either to urban centers or across borders, further intensifying their socio-economic struggles. This displacement threatens their traditional livelihoods of farming, fishing and herding. The impacts extend beyond economics, as the Wayuu’s cultural identity, rooted in their spiritual connection to the land, is also at risk.

🌏 The Culture Column

📺 What we’re watching: The Territory

📸 Profile of the week: @culturalsurvival
📖 What we’re reading: Wayuu: People of the Columbian Desert by Benjamin Villegas
🤯 Shocking fact we learnt this week: La Guajira is one of the driest regions in South America. Coal giant Cerrejón has privatized the Ranchería River, fueling severe droughts that force Wayuu women to trek hours daily for water.

🗞️ In Climate News

• 🇦🇫 Kabul at risk of becoming first modern city to run out of water, report warns

  • Water levels within Kabul’s aquifers have dropped by up to 30 metres over the past decade owing to rapid urbanisation and climate breakdown, according to a report by the NGO Mercy Corps.

• 🌡️ Marine heatwave found to have engulfed area of ocean five times the size of Australia

  • Almost 40 million sq kilometres of ocean around south-east Asia and the Pacific – an area five times the size of Australia – was engulfed in a marine heatwave in 2024, a World Meteorological Organization (WMO) report has revealed.

• 🪸 Scientists are heartbroken as pristine coral gardens hit by Western Australia’s worst bleaching event

  • The Rowley Shoals are on many a diver’s bucket list. The three coral atolls, hundreds of kilometres off the Western Australian coastline, are teeming with pristine coral gardens that for a long time, unlike many of the world’s reefs, had escaped the ravages of global heating.

• 🦈 Endangered sharks being killed at alarming levels in Pacific, Greenpeace claims, after cutting 20km of vessel’s longline

  • The campaign group said activists on the Rainbow Warrior this week observed a longline fishing operation by the Playa Zahara in the South Fiji Basin.

• 🇳🇬 Nigeria’s deadly flood exposes urgent need for climate adaptation plan

  • Ndagi woke up to screams on the morning of May 29 to see that the rain had flooded his entire neighbourhood. While his house was not directly affected, from a distance he could see people being swept away by the water. They were “calling for help but we couldn’t help them because it was risky”, he said. 

• ❄️ Nearly 40% of the world’s glaciers are already doomed

  • Researchers estimate glaciers will eventually lose 39% of their mass relative to 2020, a trend that is already irreversible no matter what comes next and will likely contribute a 113-millimeter increase to global sea level rise.

• 🤖 Tech giants' indirect emissions rose 150% in three years as AI expands, UN agency says

  • Indirect carbon emissions from the operations of four of the leading AI-focused tech companies rose on average by 150% from 2020-2023, due to the demands of power-hungry data centres, a United Nations report, opens new tab said on Thursday.

• 🌎 Latam-Caribbean development bank doubles oceans funding to $2.5 billion

  • The Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean (CAF) will double to $2.5 billion its investments in protecting the oceans and supporting sustainable marine economic activities, it said on Saturday.

    The bank has already exceeded its existing oceans funding commitment, of $1.25 billion over 2022-2026, with investments including strengthening marine protected areas and supporting small-scale fisheries.

• 🇬🇹 Guatemala's Fuego volcano eruption cools after over 700 evacuated

  • A Liberian-flagged cargo ship, MSC ELSA 3, carrying roughly 640 declared containers, sank off the coast of Kerala state in southern India. Indian authorities rescued all 24 crew on board, but most of the containers remain untraced and their contents unknown, raising environmental concerns.

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📈 Cool Trends

• 🪟 Transparent solar panels, so windows can create electricity

• 🤖 A liquid robot, the "Particle-armored liquid roBot", that can scoop up and transport particles.

♾️ eco-story

On the evening of May 9, 2019, conservationist and teacher Itakwu Innocent narrowly survived an assassination attempt outside his home in Kubong-Bette, a small farming village in the southeastern Nigerian state of Cross River.

“Daddy! Gun!” Innocent recalls his son screaming seconds before a shot was fired. The bullet scraped his temple, shredding his earlobe into a dangling piece of bleeding flesh.

“They thought I was dead,” Innocent says.

The attempt on Innocent’s life epitomizes the threats facing African scientists who come from, and work on, the frontlines of rural conservation.

Innocent’s intricate connection to the grassroots ecosystem gives him a deep understanding of the land and the people that surround him. Yet, this connection exposes him to attacks and threats that, unlike foreign or urban-based scientists, he lacks resources to confront or escape.

“One cannot run away from his home,“ he says. “This is my only home. And if I don’t save it, who will?”

🌏 The Culture Column

📺 What we’re watching: The Ivory Game

📸 Profile of the week: @wildlifedirect
📖 What we’re reading: The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, by David Wallace-Wells
🤯 Shocking fact we learnt this week: Women make up only 11% of leadership roles in African conservation NGOs, despite growing numbers of female scientists and field officers doing frontline work.

🗞️ In Climate News

• 🇻🇺 Vanuatu criticises Australia for extending gas project while making Cop31 bid

  • Climate minister says greenlighting North West Shelf project until 2070 is not the leadership Pacific countries expect as Australia seeks to host summit.

• 🇪🇺 Only two European states have net zero military emissions target, data shows

  • Just two of 30 European countries —Austria and Slovenia—have set a date to stop their militaries from emitting planet-heating emissions, a Guardian analysis has found, raising concerns about the carbon cost of Europe’s coming rearmament wave.

• 🌊 Deep-sea science expedition embarks on 40th voyage

  • The RRS James Cook left the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton on Friday morning to continue its long-term study of the Porcupine Abyssal Plain.

• 🇨🇦 Western Canada wildfires emergency hits another province as thousands flee

  • He has declared a state of emergency as 14 wildfires rage uncontrollably in the province.

    A day earlier, 17,000 people were told to flee wildfires in the neighbouring province of Manitoba, which declared its own state of emergency. More than 166 fires are actively burning across Canada, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre.

• 🇨🇭 Glacier collapse buries most of Swiss village

  • The Swiss village of Blatten has been partially destroyed after a huge chunk of glacier crashed down into the valley.

    Although the village had been evacuated some days ago because of fears the Birch glacier was disintegrating, one person has been reported missing, and many homes have been completely flattened.

• 🇮🇳 At least 34 dead in India's northeast after heavy floods

  • More than a thousand tourists trapped in the Himalayan state of Sikkim were being evacuated on Monday, a government statement said, and army rescue teams were pressed into service in Meghalaya state to rescue more than 500 people stranded in flooded areas.

• 🇳🇬 Death toll rises to at least 200 in devastating floods

  • Another 500 people are still missing but rescue operations were called off, as local authorities no longer believe there could be any survivors.

    Floods swept through Mokwa, in the north-central Niger State, after torrential rain fell on Wednesday night and into Thursday.

• 🇮🇩 Indonesia quarry collapse kills 19, search continues for victims trapped under rubble

  • A rock collapse at a quarry at Cirebon in West Java province has killed 19 people, injured eight and there are six still missing, local police said on Sunday.

• 🇮🇳 Cargo ship carrying ‘hazardous material’ capsizes off India coast

  • A Liberian-flagged cargo ship, MSC ELSA 3, carrying roughly 640 declared containers, sank off the coast of Kerala state in southern India. Indian authorities rescued all 24 crew on board, but most of the containers remain untraced and their contents unknown, raising environmental concerns.

📈 Cool Trends

• 🍄 Fungal biobatteries: 3-D printed batteries using fungi

• 🌳 Using biodegradable cardboard “donuts” to grow trees in dry areas

♾️ eco-story

“You can’t stop important, high-quality journalistic work.” Alessandra Sampaio, widow of British journalist Dom Phillips, says it was the main driver that led her to unite forces with his friends to finish his book after he was killed in 2022. “As soon as the tragedy happened, it became very clear to me and also to [Dom’s] journalist friends, from whom I had a lot of support, that it was important to finish the book,” Sampaio tells Mongabay in a video interview.

On June 5, 2022, Phillips and Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira were brutally killed in the Javari Valley region, in the Brazilian Amazon. The British journalist was investigating illegal fishing in the region, aimed to be the second-last trip for his book, according to Sampaio.

Near the Brazil-Colombia-Peru triple border, the Javari Valley region is a hotspot for organized crime, including drug traffickers, illegal loggers and poachers. The region is home to the second-largest Indigenous territory in Brazil — 8.5 million hectares (21 million acres), an area twice the size of Switzerland — and an estimated 17 isolated Indigenous groups live there, with little to no contact with the rest of the world.

Three years later, How to save the Amazon: A journalist’s fatal quest for answers, by Phillips with contributors, will be launched beginning May 31 in the United Kingdom, the United States and Brazil, accompanied by dedicated events in the three countries.

🌏 The Culture Column

📺 What we’re watching: Green River: The Time of the Yakurunas

📸 Profile of the week: @amazonconservationteam
📖 What we’re reading: How to Save the Amazon: A Journalist's Deadly Quest for Answers, by Dom Phillips
🤯 Shocking fact we learnt this week: Over the past decade, more than 300 environmental defenders have been murdered in Brazil while protecting forests, Indigenous territories, and natural resources.

🗞️ In Climate News

• 🇺🇸 Busy hurricane season expected as forecasters fear Trump cuts

  • The coming Atlantic hurricane season is expected to be busier than usual, US science agency NOAA has warned, just as cuts to American research are raising fears about the ability to track and prepare for these often deadly storms.

• 🇬🇧 UK sea temperatures soar after exceptionally warm spring

  • Temperatures in the seas around the UK and Ireland have soared in the past week with some areas now 4C warmer than normal, with potential implications for marine life and people going swimming.

• 🔥 Tropical forests destroyed at fastest recorded rate last year

  • Researchers estimate that 67,000 sq km (26,000 sq mi) of these pristine, old-growth forests were lost in 2024 – an area nearly as large as the Republic of Ireland, or 18 football pitches a minute.

• 🇧🇷 Brazil activists decry green rollbacks as senate passes ‘devastation bill’

  • The upper house passed the so-called “devastation bill” with 54 votes to 13 late on Wednesday, paving the way for projects ranging from mining and infrastructure to energy and farming to receive regulatory approval with little to no environmental oversight.

• 🇨🇩 Illegal logging in rebel-held Congo threatens gorillas, alarms environmentalists

  • The Kahuzi-Biega National Park is a UNESCO World Heritage site west of Bukavu, the second-largest city in eastern Congo, which was seized by Rwanda-backed M23 rebels in February. It is home to hundreds of species of birds and one of the last groups of eastern lowland gorillas, also known as Grauer's gorillas.

• 🇬🇷 Firefighters test readiness as Greece enters wildfire season

  • "This year too, conditions are going to be particularly difficult," Climate Crisis and Civil Protection Minister Giannis Kefalogiannis told reporters. "We will all go to battle."

• 🇮🇳 Majority of Indian districts face high heatwave risk, study shows

  • Nearly 60% of Indian districts, home to three-quarters of the population, face a "high to very high" risk from extreme heat, with rising night-time temperatures and humidity compounding the health impact, a study has found.

• 🇷🇺 Weather set to hit harvest in Russia's largest grain region

  • High temperatures and a lack of rain over the coming months are expected to deplete the harvest in Russia's largest grain region Rostov, the head of the local grain lobby group said after a farming emergency was declared.

• 🇦🇺 More than 700 rescued and 50,000 isolated as flooding intensifies in Australia

  • A fifth person has been confirmed dead as record flooding hits the NSW Mid North Coast, with tens of thousands of people isolated and many more without power.

📈 Cool Trends

• 🇵🇦 Indigenous-led project rewriting the rules of reforestation

• 🍂 Using fallen leaves from urban areas, not from forests, to create bags that don’t harm a single tree

♾️ eco-story

On a remote, crescent-shaped island surrounded by crystal-clear ocean live some of the most plastic-contaminated birds in the world. They have bellies so full of fragments, they crunch when touched.

Lord Howe Island — a speck of land about 370 miles off mainland Australia, home to just a few hundred people — is the breeding ground for tens of thousands of sable shearwaters: dark brown-colored, long-winged ocean birds with strong hooked bills.

Scientists from the ocean research group Adrift Lab have been visiting for nearly two decades to monitor these birds’ exposure to plastic pollution. Every year they find more contamination, but this year was shocking, said Jennifer Lavers, a marine biologist and coordinator of Adrift Lab, who recently returned from the island.

Shearwaters were found with levels of plastic far exceeding anything the scientists had seen before. They discovered an extraordinary 778 pieces of plastic inside one chick alone, smashing the previous record of 403 pieces.

It “left us all speechless,” Lavers said. The scientists are now trying to solve the mystery of why this year was so bad. Plastic pollution is on the rise but “does that explain a doubling in 12 months? Absolutely not,” she told CNN. “So there’s something else going on.”

🌏 The Culture Column

📺 What we’re watching: The Story of Plastic

📸 Profile of the week: @adriftlabscience
📖 What we’re reading: Plastic Ocean: How a Sea Captain's Chance Discovery Launched a Determined Quest to Save the Oceans, by Charles Moore, Cassandra Phillips
🤯 Shocking fact we learnt this week: A single seabird chick was found with 778 pieces of plastic in its stomach

🗞️ In Climate News

• 🇨🇴 Illegal wood from Colombia’s rainforests enters US and EU supply chains

  • A new report from the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) estimates that about 94% of the wood for flooring and decking exported by Colombia between 2020 and 2023 lacked certification; about 20% of that wood went to the U.S., Canada and European Union countries.

• 🇧🇷 Eucalyptus for Brazil’s steelmaking dries out communities in Minas Gerais

  • Despite years of complaints by a local NGO, Aperam, the steelmaking company that owns the plantations, continues to hold FSC certification for sustainable forestry. A recent audit, however, has flagged problems in its most recent assessment for certification.

• 🇿🇦 Over 100 vultures dead after eating poisoned elephant in South Africa

  • On May 6, a team consisting of the South African National Parks rangers and staff from the Endangered Wildlife Trust found a carcass of an elephant laced with highly toxic pesticides in a remote part of the park.

  • The critically endangered white-backed vulture (Gyps africanus) was the most impacted, with 112 found dead at the scene. The IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority, estimates the species has lost 81% of its population in just under 40 years.

• 🇺🇸 NOAA to stop tracking cost of climate crisis-fueled disasters: ‘Major loss’

  • The agency said its National Centers for Environmental Information would no longer update its Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database beyond 2024, and that its information – going as far back as 1980 – would be archived.

• 🇲🇿 Mozambique announces petrochemical city on sensitive marine area

  • The $2 billion petrochemical city project, expected be completed by 2028, will be built by the Hong Kong-based Phoenix International Group, Chapo said at the launch. The project will include thermal power stations, refineries, maritime terminals, units to produce polymers and fertilizers and residential areas with schools and hospitals.

• 🌏 Global sea levels are rising faster and faster

  • Since 1993, satellites have kept careful watch over the world’s oceans, allowing scientists a clear view of how they are behaving. What they have revealed is alarming.

    Sea level rise was unexpectedly high last year, according to a recent NASA analysis of satellite data.

    More concerning, however, is the longer-term trend. The rate of annual sea level rise has more than doubled over the past 30 years, resulting in the global sea level increasing 4 inches since 1993.

• 🇰🇪 Kenya expert warns of ecological disaster due to insect trafficking

  • Two Belgian teenagers found with 5,000 ants in Kenya were given a choice of paying a fine of $7,700 or serving 12 months in prison — the minimum penalty for the offense — for violating wildlife conservation laws.

    Authorities said the ants were destined for European and Asian markets in an emerging trend of trafficking lesser-known wildlife species.

• 🇵🇷 Puerto Rico drops climate lawsuit after US DoJ sues states to block threats to big oil

  • Puerto Rico’s lawsuit, filed in July, alleged that the oil and gas giants had misled the public about the climate dangers associated with their products. It came as part of a wave of litigation filed by dozens of US states, cities and municipalities in recent years.

    Donald Trump’s administration has pledged to put an end to these cases, which he has called “frivolous” and claimed are unconstitutional.

• 🇦🇷 Video: first-ever wild jaguar's release in Argentina

  • Miní, a wild-born female jaguar, takes an unbelievable journey from the Iberá Wetlands to the Gran Chaco forest to revive a dwindling population of jaguars in Argentina. Conservationists led by the former CEO of Patagonia, Kristine Tompkins, are working to reintroduce South America’s top predator.

📈 Cool Trends

• 🇹🇿 Building a future from seaweed in coastal Tanzania

• 🇨🇭Turning train tracks into solar power plants 

♾️ eco-story

Across the Pan-Amazon region, communities who developed the bioeconomy concept centuries ago and practice it today still have a hard time accessing its benefits.

Developed by Indigenous peoples centuries ago, it was only recently that the bioeconomy’s role in mitigating climate change and protecting biodiversity has gained momentum. Currently valued at $4 trillion globally, the bioeconomy is expected to reach $38.5 trillion by 2050.

In the Pan-Amazon, home to more than 400 Indigenous peoples and the world’s largest river basin — but also to poverty and hunger levels above national averages and escalating violence — the bioeconomy represents a promising solution. “It offers livable alternatives to increasingly prevalent illicit activities and reduces the pressure of threats from loggers, miners and farmers,” Joaquin Carrizosa, strategic adviser to the Secretariat of the Pan-Amazon Network for Bioeconomy, told Mongabay.

In September 2024, it secured a new, high-profile ally: the G20 group of the world’s biggest conventional economies. The G20 Initiative on Bioeconomy (GIB), which lists 10 voluntary high-level principles, is the first multilateral agreement to address the subject, according to the Brazilian government, which held the rotating G20 presidency at the time.

🌏 The Culture Column

📺 What we’re watching: We Are Guardians

📸 Profile of the week: @indigenousclimateaction
📖 What we’re reading: Bioeconomy: Shaping the Transition to a Sustainable, Biobased Economy, by Iris Lewandowski
🤯 Shocking fact we learnt this week: Indigenous peoples comprise less than 5% of the global population but protect 80% of Earth's biodiversity.

🗞️ In Climate News

• 🇳🇿 State of emergency as high winds and floods hit New Zealand

  • The area of low pressure quickly deepened in the Tasman Sea off the west coast of New Zealand and travelled eastwards, with the centre of low pressure moving across the northern island and creating very strong winds, particularly through the Cook Strait, the body of water that separates the two islands.

• 🇺🇸 Justice department sues Michigan and Hawaii over climate suits against big oil

  • The suits, which legal experts say are unprecedented, mark the latest of the Trump administration’s attacks on environmental work and raise concern over states’ abilities to retain the power to take climate action without federal opposition.

• 🇬🇧 Lowest rainfall in 90 years as temperatures set to soar in Yorkshire

  • Just 78mm (3in) of rainfall has been recorded at Sheffield's Weston Park weather station since the start of February - the lowest since 1938.

    Typically we would expect to see around 184mm (7in) and, by contrast, the same period in 2024 was the sixth wettest on record, when 300mm (11.8in) fell.

• 🇮🇳 Climate change-driven heatwaves hit Delhi’s Red Fort market traders

  • Researchers from Greenpeace India and the newly formed Workers’ Collective for Climate Justice South Asia interviewed ten market sellers from the huge Lal Qila (Red Fort) Market, as well as activists and social workers supporting this community.

• 🇺🇸 EPA moves to cancel nearly 800 climate justice grants issued under Biden

  • The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency plans to terminate 781 environmental justice grants aimed at protecting vulnerable communities, nearly doubling previous estimates and triggering legal battles over the move’s legality.

• 🇰🇷 South Korea's deadly fires made twice as likely by climate change, researchers say

  • Fires in the country's southeast blazed for nearly a week, killing 32 people and destroying around 5,000 buildings before they were brought under control in late March.

• 🇦🇺 Lake Bolac farmer found guilty of destroying Aboriginal rock formation

  • In 2021, the 65-year-old used an excavator to remove rocks from a 1,500-year-old, 300-metre-long stone arrangement resembling an eel on his Lake Bolac property. 

    The giant formation is known to Djap Wurrung traditional owners as the kuyang ceremonial ground and has been a recognised and registered site of Aboriginal significance since 1975.

• 🇨🇦 What Carney’s win means for environment and climate issues in Canada

  • Canada’s 2025 federal election campaign started on the heels of a prime minister stepping down and a tariff war brewing across the border. The dramatic twists upended what was an assumed Conservative win to instead keep the Liberals in power for their fourth consecutive term.

• 🇧🇷 Eucalyptus for Brazil’s steelmaking dries out communities in Minas Gerais

  • Acesita was privatized in 1992, and in 2011 the company and its plantations came under the control of Europe-based Aperam. Experts warn that these vast plantations have drained much of the water resources that once sustained the Alto Jequitinhonha Valley’s most marginalized communities, including quilombos, settlements established by formerly enslaved Africans.

📈 Cool Trends

• 🌍 A women-led accelerator reviving food security in Africa

• 👖 ‘You sold it – now recycle it’: the protesters mailing worn-out clothes to the shops they bought them from

♾️ eco-story

I met my six-year-old self last night.
She couldn’t sleep. She was scared.

She only wanted to talk about the seagulls and the cormorants, the fish and the dolphins she had seen covered in a thick, black layer—their feathers and wings glued together as they struggled to open them, their eyes shut. They were trying to survive under a petroleum blanket that spread faster than they could ever outrun it.

“Why?” she asked. “Why did they let it happen? Why are animals suffering? Why aren’t the waves moving? Why is the ocean black?”

I could have answered her. I could have explained that a handful of old men allowed it to happen. We could have talked about how they got away with it—how a carefully managed chain of irresponsibility and corruption let them walk free.

But she didn’t want to hear it. And even if she had, she wouldn’t have understood.

Twenty-three years later, I don’t think I understand it either.

🌏 The Culture Column

📺 What we’re watching: An Inconvenient Truth

📸 Profile of the week: @patiencenabukalu
📖 What we’re reading: Resistance Guide: How to Sustain the Movement to Win, by Paul Engler, Sophie Lasoff
🤯 Shocking fact we learnt this week: Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts, and those that engage a threshold of 3.5% of the population have virtually never failed to bring about change.

🗞️ In Climate News

• 🇺🇸 Trump moves to begin deep-sea mining despite environmental and legal concerns

  • President Donald Trump signed an executive order on April 24 to expedite the process of exploring and mining for minerals on the deep ocean seafloor, in both US and international waters. 

•  🐬 Whales and dolphins at risk as report reveals ecological decline in Gulf of California

  • The recent “Assessment of the Ecological Health of the Gulf of California” report shows a decline in several populations of animals throughout the narrow sea flanked by the Mexican mainland and Baja California.

• 🇧🇷 Indigenous delegates at the UN raise alarm for isolated peoples in the Amazon

  • Deforestation is closing in on some communities in the Amazon and many lack official recognition of records of their existence, say representatives at the 10-day gathering in the U.N. headquarters in New York City. 

• 🇹🇷 Powerful earthquake shakes Istanbul

  • More than 150 people were injured when they jumped from buildings in Istanbul on Wednesday as one of the strongest quakes in years hit the city.

• 🇪🇨 Magnitude 6.3 earthquake strikes Ecuador, 20 injured

  • The government said in a report that 20 people were injured and around 135 families were affected by the earthquake. Several public buildings and private homes were damaged, and some areas also experienced power outages.

•  🇬🇧 Area burned by UK wildfires in 2025 already at annual record

  • More than 29,200 hectares (292 sq km or 113 sq miles) has been burnt so far, according to figures from the Global Wildfire Information System, which has recorded burnt area since 2012.

• 🇹🇻 Pacific island states urge rich countries to expedite plans to cut emissions

  • All governments are supposed to publish new plans this year on cutting greenhouse gas emissions, but so far only a small majority have done so, and some of the plans submitted have been inadequate to the scale of action needed.

• 🪸 84% of the world’s reefs hit by bleaching after worst global event on record

  • Reefs in at least 82 countries and territories have been exposed to enough heat to turn corals white since the global event started in January 2023, the latest data from the US government’s Coral Reef Watch shows. 

• 🌍 Severe drought in Africa persists and is expected to worsen

  • Large regions in northern, southern, and central-western Africa, as well as northern Madagascar, are experiencing severe drought conditions due to two or more years of lower-than-average rainfall and higher than usual temperatures. These are the findings of a new report from the Copernicus Global Drought Observatory.

📈 Cool Trends

• 🇮🇳 Fueling a culinary and ecological revival in India 

• 🏠 Houses made from just sandbags and barbed wire

♾️ eco-story

“For me, the 100th anniversary of Virunga National Park is the fruit of resistance. A peaceful resistance led by local activists [and] environmentalists,” says François Kamaté, environmental activist and founder of the local branch of Extinction Rebellion located in Rutshuru, on the edges of the park in Central Africa.

Originally called Parc National Albert, Virunga National Park (PNVi in French) was created on April 21, 1925, in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) by the royal decree from Belgium, its then-colonizing nation. Virunga was the first national park in Africa. It was initially created to protect wildlife and the environment from human encroachment.

“The idea, at the time, was to keep nature under wraps and avoid any form of human intervention. In other words, no fire, no logging, no intervention on animals, we let nature evolve,” says Jean-Pierre d’Huart, former scientific curator of the Virunga Park and co-editor of a book dedicated to the park’s centenary.

More than just a place for research, the park became — during times of peace — a major tourist attraction in the region, especially due to its population of mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei). Located in the Albertine Rift, on the border with Rwanda and Uganda, Virunga has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1979. Covering an area of 790,000 hectares (1.95 million acres), the park is renowned for its rich fauna: In addition to mountain gorillas, it is home to endangered wildlife like chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and the extremely rare okapi (Okapia johnstoni). It is also home to Africa’s largest hippopotamus (Hippopotamus amphibius) population. Virunga’s mountain ranges include Mount Nyiragongo and Mount Nyamuragira, the two most active volcanoes in Africa.

🌏 The Culture Column

📺 What we’re watching: Virunga

📸 Profile of the week: @virunganationalpark
📖 What we’re reading: The Healing Wisdom of Africa: Finding Life Purpose Through Nature, Ritual, and Community by Malidoma Patrice Somé
🤯 Shocking fact we learnt this week: Over 200 rangers have been killed while protecting Virunga’s wildlife and forests. It is considered the most dangerous conservation job on Earth.

🗞️ In Climate News

• 🇺🇸 Trump issues order to block state climate change policies

  • The move is the latest in a string of efforts by Trump's administration to pump up domestic energy output and push back against largely Democratic-led policies to curb carbon emissions.

• 💿 Amazon, Google and Microsoft are building datacentres that will take water from the world’s driest areas

  • In response to questions from SourceMaterial and the Guardian, spokespeople for Amazon and Google defended their developments, saying they always take water scarcity into account. Microsoft declined to provide a comment.

• 🇳🇿 Many native New Zealand species face threat of extinction, report finds

  • The ministry of the environment’s three-yearly update collates statistics, data and research across five domains – air, atmosphere and climate, freshwater, land, and marine – to paint a picture of the state of New Zealand’s environment.

• 🇮🇳 It's only early April and north India is bracing for extreme heat

  • The Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) has said northern and central states - including Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan and Gujarat - can expect maximum temperatures to cross 40C.

• 🌳 Green activist group is pausing work after backlash by investors

  • The Netherlands-based group, which has been one of the most successful shareholder activists of recent years, blamed “the changing political landscape” and “the backlash against climate-conscious investors” for the decision by “most institutional shareholders” to pull their support for climate resolutions.

• 🇺🇸 Elon Musk’s xAI powering its facility in Memphis with ‘illegal’ generators

  • KeShaun Pearson took a seat in front of the Shelby county board of commissioners in Memphis, Tennessee, on Wednesday morning. In the gallery behind him, a small group of people held up signs that said “Our air = our lives” and “Our water, Our future.” With a manner-of-fact demeanor, Pearson addressed the commissioners.

• 🇳🇵 Nearly 100 killed after heavy rain in India, Nepal

  • India's weather office expects heavy rain with thunderstorm, lightning and gusty winds over central and eastern India till Saturday.

    The monsoon season usually begins in June in southern India, and summer months in the recent past have been marked by intense heatwaves that have killed several people.

• 🇨🇬 Dozens die in floods hitting Congo’s capital

  • The Ndjili River running through the megacity of 17 million people, one of the largest on the continent, burst its banks and submerged major roads, including Lumumba Boulevard, the main road leading to the airport. Government officials said thousands of people have been displaced and at least 33 had been killed, though they warned that the death toll would likely rise as the floods recede. 

• 🐕 Kathmandu Valley toxic air is choking street dogs, too

  • “They didn’t run to me like usual,” said Bhattarai. “One of my favourite dogs near Rosebud School was quite aggressive, coughing, sneezing and avoiding the biscuit. It looked like it was struggling to breathe.”.

📈 Cool Trends

• ♳ Reusing curb plastic waste and building a circular economy

• 💧 Distributing water filters and clean stoves to poorer communities

♾️ eco-story

Teaching climate-resilient farming to young people in rural Global South communities and encouraging them to stay in school could help ward off mental health problems triggered by worsening climate change impacts, according to new research in Africa.

Hardship caused by severe drought, floods and storms is taking a dramatic toll on young people’s emotional wellbeing in climate-hit countries, with the effects going far beyond climate anxiety, found the groundbreaking study focused on teens in rural Madagascar.

“The fears that they go through are in the present tense, not the future tense,” said Samuel Solomon, a psychology professor at University College London (UCL) and co-author of the study conducted in remote villages in the south of the island nation off Africa’s southeast coast.

Madagascar, which is classified by the United Nations as one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries, is repeatedly affected by drought, extreme heat and cyclones, exacerbating hunger and setting back development in a nation where about three-quarters of people are poor.

The situation in the south is particularly dire due to changes in the climate, “with fertile land turning into desert and water sources depleting”, said the study, conducted among 83 participants with an average age of 15 in six communities.

🌏 The Culture Column

📺 What we’re watching: Madagascar, in the Hell of the Tropics

📸 Profile of the week: @oneyoungworld
📖 What we’re reading: The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, and Economics for a Warming World, by William D. Nordhaus
🤯 Shocking fact we learnt this week: Nearly 250 million children missed school due to extreme weather in 2024

🗞️ In Climate News

• 🇬🇧 More than half of UK's butterfly species are in long-term decline

  • The UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme said that 31 of 59 species have had their numbers fall since 1976, when monitoring began.

    It also found that 2024 was the fifth-worst year for butterfly numbers across the country, with all but eight species suffering declines on the previous year - though populations can fluctuate year-on-year in response to the weather.

• 🍄 Nearly one-third of fungi on IUCN Red List are threatened with extinction

  • The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) recently updated its Red List of Threatened Species to include an additional 482 fungi, bringing the total to roughly 1,300 species of mushrooms, puffballs and other fungi. More than 400 of the species assessed are at risk of extinction, primarily threatened by agricultural expansion, deforestation and climate change, according to the IUCN’s latest update.

• 🥩 An oil-rich West African island offers decades of insight into the wild meat trade

  • The volcanic island of Bioko, about 160 kilometers northwest of mainland Equatorial Guinea, is carpeted in lush green tropical rainforest. This forest is home to many endemic animals, including Bioko drill monkeys (Mandrillus leucophaeus poensis), listed as endangered, and black colobus monkeys (Colobus satanas satanas), critically endangered.

• 📑 Average person will be 40% poorer if world warms by 4C, new research shows

  • The study by Australian scientists suggests average per person GDP across the globe will be reduced by 16% even if warming is kept to 2C above pre-industrial levels. This is a much greater reduction than previous estimates, which found the reduction would be 1.4%.

• 🇺🇸 US could see return of acid rain due to Trump’s rollbacks, says scientist who discovered it

  • A blitzkrieg launched by Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on clean air and water regulations could revert the US to a time when cities were routinely shrouded in smog and even help usher back acid rain, according to Gene Likens, whose experiments helped identify acidic rainwater in the 1960s.

• 🇺🇸 State lawmakers are looking to ban non-existent ‘chemtrails.’ It could have real-life side effects

  • An unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that claims the US government is controlling the weather, or its citizens, by spraying dangerous “chemtrails” from airplanes has now made its way into several state legislatures where it could manifest into real-life laws.

• 🚀 SpaceX rocket cargo project threatens Pacific seabirds

  • It would not be the first time that SpaceX's activities have affected protected birds. A SpaceX launch of its Starship rocket in Boca Chica, Texas, last year involved a blast that destroyed nests and eggs of plover shorebirds, landing the billionaire Musk's company in legal trouble and leading him to remark jokingly that he would refrain from eating omelets for a week to compensate.

• 🇯🇵 Japan estimates feared megaquake could kill 300,000 people

  • Japan is one of the world's most earthquake-prone countries, and the government sees about an 80% chance of a magnitude 8 to 9 earthquake along a tremulous seabed zone known as the Nankai Trough.

    Under the worst-case scenario, based on a potential magnitude 9 earthquake in the area, Japan is likely to see 1.23 million evacuees or 1% of its total population. As many as 298,000 people could die from tsunamis and building collapses if the quake occurs late at night in winter, the report showed.

• 🇲🇲 Myanmar earthquake toll crosses 3,000; heat and rains fuel disease risk

  • Last Friday's 7.7-magnitude quake, one of Myanmar's strongest in a century, jolted a region home to 28 million, toppling buildings such as hospitals, flattening communities and leaving many without food, water and shelter.

📈 Cool Trends

• 🩱 Turning ghost fishing nets into swimwear

• 🌊 Using Ethiopia's Warka tree as inspiration, creating towers that harvest moisture from the air and provide water to communities

♾️ eco-story

Kilometers above the Earth’s surface, the ozone layer protects humanity and all life from the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays. But in the troposphere, at ground level, this gas can wreak havoc on planetary health in myriad ways. As temperatures increase due to climate change, the ozone problem is forecast to worsen in many parts of the world — including heavily populated urban and rural areas in the tropics.

Ground-level zone isn’t a direct emission; it’s created when precursors such as methane, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide and volatile organic compounds react together with sunlight. These precursors include many anthropogenic sources — especially the burning of fossil fuels (in vehicles, by industry and at power plants) and via agriculture and wildfires, all of which crank up tropospheric ozone levels.

“The problem with ozone is it’s an incredibly active molecule and somewhat unstable in the environment. It interacts with everything it touches,” Nathan Borgford-Parnell, coordinator of the Scientific Advisory Panel and Science Affairs at the Climate & Clean Air Coalition, told Mongabay in an interview.

🌏 The Culture Column

📺 What we’re watching: When the Water Ends

📸 Profile of the week: @pure.rae.of.sunshinee
📖 What we’re reading: The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, and Economics for a Warming World, by William D. Nordhaus
🤯 Shocking fact we learnt this week: Livestock make up 62% of the world’s mammal biomass; humans account for 34%; and wild mammals are just 4%

🗞️ In Climate News

• 🇳🇱 Netherlands’ largest forest biomass plant canceled

  • Dutch forest campaigners are claiming a significant victory over one of the Netherlands’ top energy providers, Vattenfall, after the company decided in late February to cancel plans to build the nation’s largest wood pellet burning plant for energy.

• 🇵🇦 Panama conducts large illegal fishing bust in protected Pacific waters

  • Authorities seized six longliner vessels on Jan. 20 for fishing illegally in protected waters. They also opened an investigation into an additional 10 vessels that surveillance data showed had apparently been fishing in the area but left by the time authorities arrived.

• 🇲🇲 Powerful Myanmar earthquake kills dozens, also hits Thailand

  • The quake also hit Thailand and an official said that at least nine people had died in the capital Bangkok. Rescuers were searching through the rubble of a tower block that was under construction and collapsed in the quake.

• 🇰🇷 South Korea contains main blazes in week-old wildfires

  • It’s the country's largest forest fire on record, a minister said on Friday, as rain and better weather allowed more helicopters to fly and dump water, dousing the flames.

    Spread by strong winds in bone-dry conditions, the wildfires have killed at least 28 people and charred more than 45,000 hectares (111,000 acres) in the southeastern region.

• ❄️ Arctic winter ends with lowest sea ice cover in recorded history

  • The Arctic reaches its maximum sea ice in March each year and then starts a six-month melt season. The National Snow and Ice Data Center said the peak measurement taken Saturday was 14.33 million square kilometres - about 80,000 square kilometres smaller than the lowest previous peak in 2017.

• 🇪🇺 Almost every European country experienced a hotter winter than usual

  • In recent months, attribution studies have found that it doubled the likelihood of Central Europe’s deadly floods in September, and made the hot, dry weather that drove January’s LA wildfires 35 per cent more likely. The heatwave that left students fainting in South Sudan last month was ten times more likely to occur in our era of fossil fuel burning.

• 💧 Earth’s storage of water in soil, lakes and rivers is dwindling. And it’s especially bad for farming

  • Their paper, published Thursday in the journal Science, finds that global warming has notably reduced the amount of water that’s being stored around the world in soil, lakes, rivers, snow and other places, with potentially irreversible impacts on agriculture and sea level rise.

• 🇦🇺 Vast areas of Australia’s Queensland under water after ‘unprecedented’ flooding

  • Communities across the Australian state of Queensland are bracing for more rain after record-breaking floods cut off roads and inundated vast areas of the region’s outback.

• 🇪🇸 A parched Spain has emerged from drought only to face floods

  • Drought relief came at a price, as flash floods forced hundreds of people to evacuate their homes, closed schools and highways and swept cars away. While it can be difficult to identify climate change as the cause of a single event, scientists say it is making such swings between dryness and downpour ever more extreme.

📈 Cool Trends

• 🌳 Restoring ecosystem adopting botanist Akira Miyawaki’s method

• 🌊 Creating a biodegradable plastic that dissolves in seawater within hours

♾️ eco-story

Tucked between the village and the forest, Haruna and his father-in-law worked diligently through the night distilling dried patchouli plants, stoking the boiler with firewood, drops of fragrant patchouli oil trickling into plastic bottles.

A sense of satisfaction washed over them as they watched the container fill with thick, rich brown oil, a sign of high-quality patchouli, the result of their hard work and precision.

Haruna, 42, who like many Indonesians only uses one name, is a patchouli farmer in Simboro, a sub-district of western Sulawesi. He and his father-in-law have been waiting in line for several weeks to finally be able to process their harvest in a modest steam distillation facility an hour’s drive from their farm. Demand for the plant’s oils has skyrocketed in recent years, and so too has the number of farmers in the region who grow and process it. But the trend has an uglier underbelly as Indonesia’s vast rainforest is cleared to make way for patchouli farming. That loss of a vital ecosystem also increases the threat of landslides.

🌏 The Culture Column

📺 What we’re watching: 

📸 Profile of the week: @kynantegar
📖 What we’re reading: The Jungle School, by Butet Manurung
🤯 Shocking fact we learnt this week: As of 2023, global demand for patchouli oil is over 1,600 metric tons (1,600 long tons; 1,800 short tons) per year, of which over 90% is produced by Indonesia.

🗞️ In Climate News

• 🇺🇸 Three Greenpeace entities collectively must pay Energy Transfer, which was co-founded by a prominent Trump donor, more than $660m.

  • A pipeline company’s victory in court over Greenpeace, and the huge damages it now faces, will encourage other oil and gas companies to legally pursue environmental protesters at a time when Donald Trump’s energy agenda is in ascendancy, experts have warned.

• ❄️ Glacier meltdown risks food and water supply of 2 billion people, says UN

  • Two-thirds of all irrigated agriculture in the world is likely to be affected in some way by receding glaciers and dwindling snowfall in mountain regions, driven by the climate crisis, according to a Unesco report.

• 🐺 Court orders Trump administration to address pesticide risks to endangered species

  • This isn’t the first time pesticide safety has come before the Trump administration. In 2017, the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) conducted an analysis revealing that two pesticides — malathion and chlorpyrifos — were so toxic they posed an existential threat to more than 1,200 endangered animal and plant species, according to an investigation by The New York Times.

• 🇮🇩 ‘Sustainable’ palm oil firms continue illegal peatland clearing despite permit revocation

  • Palm oil companies in Indonesia continue to operate on protected peatlands and clear forests, despite having their forestry permits revoked and being certified as sustainable, a new report alleges.

  • Local environmental NGOs Pantau Gambut and Kaoem Telapak investigated three companies operating in Central Kalimantan province on the island of Borneo: PT Agrindo Green Lestari (AGL), PT Citra Agro Abadi (CAA) and PT Bangun Cipta Mitra Perkasa (PT BCMP). Their findings implicate all three in illegal peatland conversion, deforestation and recurring fires.

• 🇪🇸 Heavy rains in southern Spain trigger flooding and evacuations

  • Unrelenting rains in southern Spain have triggered flash floods and evacuation orders in the Andalusian provinces of Málaga and Córdoba, where 19 waterways are at red level for risk of flooding. One body has been found and at least three more people are reported missing.

• 🇲🇿 Widespread damage in Mozambique following passage of Cyclone Jude

  • ECHO estimates more than 10,500 people were displaced in Madagascar and almost 5,000 in Malawi. In all, at least 400,000 people were affected across the three hit African countries.

    Cyclone Jude first made landfall in northern Madagascar on March 8, displacing thousands who had to stay in temporary shelters, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported.

• 🇧🇷 Brazil declares environmental emergency ahead of 2025 fire season

  • The measure, decreed by environment minister Marina Silva on Feb. 27, gives authorities extra powers and resources to nip wildfires in the bud before they spread uncontrollably.

  • Brazil’s federal government will hire an additional 250 federal firefighters and give six of the eight Amazonian states 45 million reais ($8 million) to bolster state-level fire brigades.

• 🇪🇨 Ecuador declares environmental emergency after oil pipeline rupture

  • A landslide triggered by intense rainfall ruptured Ecuador’s Trans-Ecuadorian Oil Pipeline System (SOTE) on 13 March, causing a major oil spill that has polluted around 80km of river across the province of Esmeraldas. 

  • The company suspended pumping operations and dispatched technical teams to assess the damage and deploy containment barriers. 

• 🇧🇷 ‘Unprecedented’ Supreme Court bill threatens Indigenous rights in Brazil

  • Land invasions, increasing violence and congressional bills against territorial rights enshrined by the 1988 Federal Constitution. But now the latest threat has come from the Supreme Court through a draft bill to open up Indigenous territories to mining and other economic activities, an “unprecedented” move in Brazil’s history by an institution that’s entitled to protect the rights of minorities — and the Constitution, Indigenous rights’ advocates said.

📈 Cool Trends

• 🎨 Cleaning polluted beaches and providing careers to Artisans in high-impact communities

• 🎽 Creating biodegradable and carbon neutral textiles, engineered from food waste

♾️ eco-story

The restoration of Indigenous women’s traditional roles through rematriation represents a powerful force in environmental leadership and climate action. This movement recognizes and reinstates women’s sacred responsibilities as water protectors and land guardians, roles deeply embedded in many Indigenous cultures’ traditional governance systems.

Indigenous women’s leadership emerges from matriarchal traditions where women held significant decision-making power in environmental stewardship. These traditional governance models recognized women’s unique relationship with water as life-givers and their profound understanding of environmental cycles and relationships. Today, this traditional authority finds new expression in climate action and environmental protection.

The rematriation of environmental leadership manifests through the restoration of women’s traditional decision-making roles and sacred responsibilities to water and land. This process involves revitalizing matriarchal governance systems that have historically guided sustainable resource management. Women’s ecological knowledge, passed down through generations, provides crucial insights for addressing current environmental challenges. The integration of traditional female leadership models emphasizes the importance of intergenerational knowledge transfer and cultural continuity while celebrating women’s environmental wisdom.

🌏 The Culture Column

📺 What we’re watching: The Last Ice

📸 Profile of the week: @akahansen
📖 What we’re reading: A World Without Ice, by Henry N. Pollack
🤯 Shocking fact we learnt this week: Trees can suffer from loneliness

🗞️ In Climate News

• 🇰🇭 Indigenous community calls out Cambodian REDD+ project as tensions simmer in the Cardamoms

  • Human Rights Watch published a 118-page report detailing allegations of physical abuse, threats, violence and a failure to meet best practice standards by Wildlife Alliance and the Ministry of Environment in February 2024.

• 🇸🇻 Mangroves at risk as El Salvador begins work on new airport

  • Officials broke ground February 25 on the Airport of the Pacific near the coastal town of La Unión, in eastern El Salvador, an area rich in mangrove ecosystems that support wildlife and prevent coastal erosion. Many communities in the area worry that the airport will spark a wave of unregulated development that could result in even more environmental damage.

• 🇺🇸 US exits fund that compensates poorer countries for global heating

  • The Trump administration has withdrawn the US from a global agreement under which the developed nations most responsible for the climate crisis pledged to partly compensate developing countries for irreversible harms caused by global heating.

• ❄️ Global sea ice hit record low in February, scientists say

  • The combined area of ice around the north and south poles hit a new daily minimum in early February and stayed below the previous record for the rest of the month, the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said on Thursday.

• 🦋 America’s butterflies are disappearing at a catastrophic rate

  • The first countrywide systematic analysis of butterfly abundance found that the number of butterflies in the Lower 48 states has been falling on average 1.3% a year since the turn of the century, with 114 species showing significant declines and only nine increasing, according to a study in Thursday’s journal Science.

• 🇦🇷 Argentina declares three-day mourning as flood death toll rises to at least 16

  • The deadly floods struck Friday when a year's worth of rain fell in a matter of hours in and around Bahia Blanca, a major port city located in the south of Buenos Aires province, with entire neighborhoods inundated by the fast-rising waters.

• 🇯🇵 Japan battles largest wildfire in decades

  • More than a thousand people have been evacuated as Japan battles its largest wildfire in more than three decades.

    The flames are estimated to have spread over about 1,200 hectares (3,000 acres) in the forest of Ofunato in the northern region of Iwate since a fire broke out on Wednesday, according to the Fire and Disaster Management Agency.

• 🇸🇸 South Sudanese women disproportionally affected by climate change-fuelled heat

  • Researchers have found that women and girls in the conflict-torn nation of South Sudan are facing greater health risks and worsened inequality due to the negative impacts of climate change as the country battles record-breaking heat.

• 🌏 Over 100 daily child deaths linked to air pollution in East Asia

  • The agency found that all 500 million children living in the region are exposed to unhealthy levels of air pollution. Of them, 235 million live in countries where average annual particulate matter (PM2.5) levels exceed levels deemed safe by the World Health Organization (WHO) by more than five times.

• 🇮🇳 Climate change intensifies India's heatwave crisis as El Nino looms

  • As India grapples with unusually high temperatures, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) has predicted an early and intense summer this year, with prolonged heatwaves. The country recently saw its warmest February since 1901, along with one of the driest winters in recent history, which has raised concerns about the ongoing climate crisis.

📈 Cool Trends

• 🌫️ Fog harvesting to provide water for arid cities

• 🎨 Creating underwater museums against trawling

♾️ eco-story

Isaac Romero’s transformation, from a high-pressure role at Inditex to becoming a passionate advocate for regenerative agriculture, is a tale of rediscovery, purpose and hope for a more sustainable future.

“I used to work at Inditex, in their footwear division in Alicante.”

Inditex, the Spanish multinational known for brands like Zara and Bershka, is one of the largest fashion retailers in the world. The company — now worth over $170 billion (USD) — epitomises fast fashion, a business model that encourages rapid turnover of styles to meet high consumer demand.

“It was an ultra-consumerist world, and it was draining me. My job was to boost sales, to constantly push for more and more, but in my personal life, I had stopped buying almost anything; I no longer believed in the system I was a part of.”

🌏 The Culture Column

📺 What we’re watching: To which we belong

📸 Profile of the week: @richardperkins.co
📖 What we’re reading: For the Love of Soil: Strategies to Regenerate Our Food Production Systems, by Nicole Masters
🤯 Shocking fact we learnt this week: Indigenous peoples around the world have been practicing regenerative agriculture for more than a thousand years

🗞️ In Climate News

• 🇮🇩 Surge in legal land clearing pushes up Indonesia deforestation rate in 2024

  • Indonesia’s deforestation increased in 2024 to its highest level since 2021, with forest area four times the size of Jakarta lost; 97% of this occurred within legal concessions, highlighting a shift from illegal to legal deforestation.

• 🇲🇽 Oaxaca Indigenous leader’s murder leaves land defenders’ safety in doubt

  • Since the country began to develop the Interoceanic Corridor of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, a large railroad project that runs across several Indigenous territories, including Romero’s, communities have reported dispossession, increased criminalization and violence.

• 🌡️ January 2025 was the hottest January on record beating 2024 by 0.1°C

• 🇺🇸 Jeff Bezos fund ends support for climate group amid fears billionaires ‘bowing down’ to Trump

• 🇳🇴 Norwegian oil giant cuts green investment in half

  • Chief executive Anders Opedal said that the transition to lower carbon energy was moving slower than expected, costs had increased, and customers were reluctant to commit to long term contracts.

• 🧠 A dramatic rise in microplastics found in human brains, study finds

• 🗽 New York sued by 22 US states over $75 billion climate superfund

  • Twenty-two states, led by West Virginia, are suing to block a recently approved New York law that requires fossil fuel companies to pay billions of dollars a year for contributing to climate change.

• 🇧🇷 Yanomami tribe hails Lula’s fight against illegal mining in Amazon

• 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 The climate crisis is forcing two-thirds of England’s farmers to make changes

• 🇺🇸 Trump aggressively working to dismantle U.S. efforts to fight climate change

  • Among the many big moves taken by the Trump administration, boosting fossil fuel development has been a priority. In a series of actions, President Trump is following through on his promise not just to ramp up oil and gas production, but to sharply curtail any effort to deal with climate change. William Brangham reports.

📈 Cool Trends

• 🍝 Cooking with solar ovens, that use sunlight instead of fuel or electricity

• 🌳 Opening spaces for nature in towns and cities with pocket forests

♾️ eco-story

Faith is an important part of Carlos Vicente’s story.

“Faith is the foundation of my life.”

Carlos’ mother was from the northeast of Brazil.

“Her parents migrated from the northeast to the south. When they arrived, they were drawn into the slavery system, so my grandfather decided to return to the northeast. Even though their situation there was very difficult, they were free, they were not slaves. They took a ship to travel back to the northeast, but it was damaged along the way, and they needed to get off the boat in Cabo Frio, so my mother’s family started a new life in this very small town.”

🌏 The Culture Column

📺 What we’re watching: IRI at the Amazon Summit 2023

IRI at the Amazon Summit 2023

vimeo.com/855070307?share=copy

📸 Profile of the week: @iribrasil
📖 What we’re reading: Glimpses of Utopia: Real ideas for a fairer world, by Jess Scully
🤯 Shocking fact we learnt this week: Over 40% of global tropical deforestation occurs in Brazil

🗞️ In Climate News

• 🇻🇳 Vietnam grapples with ‘alarming popularity’ of online illegal wildlife trade

  • A new investigation by wildlife trade monitoring group TRAFFIC has uncovered an “alarming” slew of online adverts offering illegal wildlife products for sale in Vietnam, despite pledges from multiple platforms to clamp down on such content.

• 🇲🇽 Mexico misses one-year deadline to submit new protected areas’ management plans

  • It’s been one year after Mexico’s government announced the creation of 20 new protected areas, but the country’s environment ministry has failed to publish a single protected area management plan, despite being required to do so by law.

• 🇧🇷 Wildfires in Brazil Burn Area Larger than Italy, Worsening Amazon’s Climate Crisis

  • Wildfires in Brazil ravaged an area larger than all of Italy in 2024, with a total of 30.8 million hectares (119,000 square miles) of vegetation destroyed, according to a report by the monitoring platform MapBiomas. This marks a 79% increase in burned land compared to the previous year.

• 🇦🇺 Firefighters battle bushfires amid extreme heat in Melbourne, Australia

  • Firefighters in Victoria are battling dangerous bushfire conditions as temperatures exceed 40°C in parts of the state, including Melbourne.

    A total fire ban has been implemented for several regions, including Mallee, Wimmera, South-West, North-Central, and Central, which covers Melbourne.

• 🇬🇧 UK climate and nature bill dropped after deal with Labour backbenchers

  • Ministers have seen off a bill that would have made the UK’s climate and environment targets legally binding, after promising Labour backbenchers that they would have input into environmental legislation.

• 🇺🇸 As Trump targets Biden’s environmental justice initiatives, activists gear up for legal fights

  • Activists across the United States say they’re preparing to take the federal government to court after President Donald Trump unveiled a series of executive orders Monday that seek to undo much of his predecessor’s climate and environmental justice legacy.

• 🇲🇬 Madagascan locals pull together to save thousands of endangered tortoises

  • The animals were swept away from their sanctuary and left swimming for their lives in floods caused by tropical cyclone Dikeledi earlier this month.

    The 12,000 radiated and spider tortoises, housed at the Lavavolo Tortoise Centre, had been confiscated from illegal wildlife traffickers.

• 🇮🇪 Ireland and Northern Ireland battered by record winds from Storm Eowyn

  • It was the first time a red warning had been put in place for the entire country since Storm Ophelia in 2017, which killed three people.

• 🇮🇩 Floods and landslides in Indonesia leave at least 20 dead

  • The landslide was triggered by particularly intense rainfall in the mountainous area close to Pekalongan in the central part of the island, leading to bridges collapsing and houses and cars being buried in the thick mud.

• 🇺🇸 Trump eliminates help for Black and Latino communities hit harder by pollution

  • President Donald Trump in his first week eliminated a team of White House advisors whose job it was to ensure the entire federal government helped communities located near heavy industry, ports and roadways. Trump eliminated the “Justice40” initiative the Biden administraton had created. It required 40% of the benefits from certain environmental programs go to hard-hit communities.

📈 Cool Trends

• ⛽️ Turning recycled oil into clean fuel

• 🌴 Using palm oil waste to grow a low carbon, sustainable leather alternative

♾️ eco-story

Thousands of wildfires tear through southern Italy every year, fueled by scorching temperatures and the hot, dry, sirocco winds that sweep in from the Sahara. The climate crisis is pouring gasoline on these blazes, but the Mafia may be lighting the spark, according to new research.

While hot, dry winds prime the land for Italy’s ferocious fires, it’s humans who start them. More than half are set intentionally for reasons ranging from land clearing to personal vendettas.

As fires cluster in areas where mafia control is strong, there is an increased scrutiny on these criminal groups.

The Mafia is “weaponizing” fire in the region for control and financial gain, said UC Berkeley researcher Lauren Pearson. She spent months speaking to prosecutors, the police, environmental groups and locals in Sicily, where Mafia groups are active.

🌏 The Culture Column

📺 What we’re watching: Bring Your Own Brigade

📸 Profile of the week: @nemonte.nenquimo
📖 What we’re reading: We Will Be Jaguars: A Memoir of My People, by Nemonte Nenquimo, Mitch Anderson
🤯 Shocking fact we learnt this week: Wildfires can burn underground for months or even years

🗞️ In Climate News

• 🇾🇹 French controlled island Mayotte devastated by cyclone, death toll rises to 31 but feared to be a lot higher.

• 🧨 Countries fail to reach agreement about Global Plastic Treaty

  • Countries negotiating a global treaty to curb plastic pollution failed to reach agreement on Monday, with more than 100 nations wanting to cap production while a handful of oil producers were prepared only to target plastic waste.

  • Over 200 petrochemical lobbyists attended said negotiations.

• 🇧🇷 Pesticide exposure drives up rural women’s cancer risk in Brazil farming belt

  • Women farmers living in Brazil’s Paraná state run a 60% chance of developing breast cancer and a 220% increase in the risk of metastasis, according to a new study.

• ♻️ Coca-Cola cuts back on reusable plastic pledge

  • Coca-Cola is reducing its plastic recycling targets from previous commitments, which advocacy groups say is an abandonment of its reuse goals. The beverage giant’s announcement comes just as talks for a global plastic treaty stalled this month.

• 🐺 EU votes to weaken protection for European wolves

  • Wolves across Europe are set to lose their “strictly protected” status. The move is seen as a win for farmers concerned about loss of livestock, but conservationists warn that removing protections will jeopardize stable wolf populations.

• 🇪🇺 EU negotiators postpone deforestation ban and reject proposed changes

  • Companies will have at least one more year to adapt to new EU rules to prevent deforestation, which would ban the sale of products sourced from deforested land in the EU.

• 🇨🇬 Congo on alert over mystery flu-like disease as death toll rises

  • Among the hospital fatalities, 10 were attributed to a lack of blood transfusions, while 17 succumbed to respiratory complications. The illness has affected approximately 380 people, nearly half of whom are children under the age of five.

• 🇿🇦 Six bodies retrieved from illegal goldmine in South Africa

  • Authorities have been restricting food and water supplies to encourage them to evacuate the mine. Many illegal miners known as Zama Zamas come from neighbouring Mozambique and Lesotho and often face harsh conditions to work and reside in South Africa.

• 🇺🇸 Small North Carolina town sues energy ‘Goliath’ in historic climate action

  • The litigation accuses Duke Energy of waging a “deception campaign” to obscure the climate dangers of fossil fuels. Those efforts resulted in delayed action to curb planet-heating pollution, which has pushed up the costs of climate action today, the lawsuit says.

📈 Cool Trends

• 🦭 conservation of the caspian seal

• 🧻 Growing your own toilet paper

♾️ eco-story

Thoughts on COP29

About a month ago I was invited by the nascent Fins Initiative to attend and contribute to their project during COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan. Having been observing the “commitments” and “talks” for a few years I was curious to actually witness these in person at the yearly Conference Of Parties.

As many of us are aware, the yearly convention has been held in different countries for the last 29 years. Resulting in many treaties, agreements, negotiations and so on. The most celebrated and well known was the Paris Agreement signed in 2015 that had the goal of limiting temperature rise to 1.5°C– and which no country is on track to meet 9 years later.

Many boycotted Baku calling on the hypocrisy of a petrol-state hosting the climate talks. However, my main takeaway from my Azerbaijani week was just that, in my opinion Azerbaijan itself is the country that benefitted the most from this year’s summit.

🌏 The Culture Column

📺 What we’re watching: Dirty Energy

📸 Profile of the week: @finsinitiative
📖 What we’re reading: The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power, by Daniel Yergin
🤯 Shocking fact we learnt this week: Oil consumption, which has steadily risen over three decades, reached 4.53 billion metric tons in 2023.