Climate Crisis, Biosphere & Societal Collapse

Most Hawaiʻi residents believe sea level rise is already affecting the state, expect major impacts within their lifetimes, and support significant changes to how and where development occurs. At the same time, many remain uncertain about how large-scale adaptation should be financed.

They talk about a type of person who understands or recognises the meaning of the phrase ‘nothing is certain’. This person understands or recognises their nepantla – that they are in between spaces, times, destinations, life and death – and so they recognise their indeterminacy, instability and radical uncertainty, what Mexistentialists call zozobra. In short, they are sure of one thing: that ‘nada es seguro’. That’s my father.

Zooming out from these esoteric debates about ecosystem services, what really stayed with me were all these biologists I met who basically shrugged their shoulders, gave me these sad sighs of resignation, and conceded that they didn’t actually believe these strategies were going to work. Yet they still embraced the framework.

Keeping Europe safe from extreme weather “is not rocket science”, a top researcher has said, as the EU’s climate advisory board urges countries to prepare for a catastrophic 3C of global heating.

Green Party Leader Elizabeth May said the Carney government is not serious about climate change. May, who supported Carney’s budget in December, has since questioned the prime minister’s word after accusing him of a climate policy flip-flop.

For decades, national and local U.S. law enforcement agencies have sent officers to Israel to learn new policing and counterterrorism tactics, which some participants said were too potent to be implemented at home: monitoring telecommunications and scraping internet content to decide whom to arrest; mining health records and location data to track others down; photographing civilians on the street to determine whether they should be questioned; and shooting them with impunity.

Revisiting our work through the lens of Kantian philosophy shows why misinformation is so entrenched. We are trying to repair a broken digital public sphere at the informational level, when the deeper fracture lies at the metaphysical level: in the loss of shared structures through which reality appears. The real challenge is not “How do we correct false claims?” but: How do we restore a common world of shared appearance in which truth is once again possible?

The incident magnified existing issues of low wages and burnout. “The cumulative impact of grief, trauma, and exposure to violence can be really challenging,” Aalhus says. When “coupled with the uncertainty of the work and the political rhetoric that makes this into a moral conversation,” she adds, “it can be really draining for people.”

Costa Rica avoided mano dura but not its logic: security policy hardened through civilian punitive measures that narrowed democratic space rather than addressing the roots of violence. During the 2000s, rising petty crime created incentives to judicialize insecurity. The introduction of fast-track courts in 2009, presented as a response to an inefficient justice system, produced a sharp increase in the prison population. As a result, Costa Rica now ranks twenty-second globally in prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants and holds the third-highest incarceration rate in Central America.

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework states that plastic pollution must be eliminated by 2030. So why haven’t we enacted measures that make a real difference?

“We have to have a working-class-centered politics if we are going to succeed,” she said, “and also if we are going to stave off the scourge of authoritarianism, which provide political siren calls to allure people into finding scapegoats to blame for rising economic inequality, both domestically and globally.”

Every institution faces the same fundamental paradox. Institutions foster cooperation by rewarding good behaviour and punishing rule-breakers. Yet they themselves depend on cooperative members to function. We haven’t solved the cooperation problem – we’ve simply moved it back one step. So why do institutions work at all? To understand this puzzle, we need to first ask what makes human cooperation so extraordinary in the natural world.

But the river has been overdrawn for more than a century. As demand continues to grow, rising temperatures and lower precipitation caused by the climate crisis are taking an increasingly larger share of declining supplies, a trend only expected to worsen as the world warms.

What’s been quite remarkable to me is that on an international level, Israel has continued to enjoy unprecedented diplomatic, financial, and military cover despite carrying out a live streamed genocide. This is not because I ever had any hope or faith that the international community would protect Palestinians from such violence. But I did think they would put up a bigger fight to protect the legal framework that they have set up themselves in order to maintain the world order they designed.

There’s a lesson here that bears attention today, at the apparent twilight of the same modern world, when the fundamental problem we face involves the degree to which the truth must now compete with such a vast multiplicity of falsehoods that discovering truth itself becomes unviable.

Continued global heating could set irreversible course by triggering climate tipping points, but most people unaware

Climate change is throwing a snag in one of the most important considerations during the home-buying process—location. With catastrophic wildfires, hurricanes and sea-level rise climbing, experts are urging prospective homebuyers to take regional climate risks into account before settling down somewhere with a 30-year mortgage.

The project involves robots, one of the world’s largest research aquariums, and droves of world-renowned scientists. The scale is unlike anything I’ve ever seen.

Maintaining exploitation, Mattei argues, requires specific policies — namely austerity, through which the state disciplines workers by imposing material insecurity. The formation of mainstream economics, she shows, was inextricably bound up with its ability to legitimate austerity by cloaking capitalist interests behind pretensions of neutrality. Such claims to objectivity, along with reliance on complex mathematical models, depoliticized economic questions, facilitating their placement in the hands of unelected “experts” and reinforcing forms of authoritarian governance.

The two previous global bleaching events, in 1998 and 2010, had lasted one year.

The problem isn’t only the loud extremists. It’s the centrist ecosystem that has made itself indispensable by presenting drift as stability. Centrism in Britain is less a set of principles than a style: a preference for triangulation over truth, ‘responsibility’ over morality, ‘electability’ over leadership. It treats politics as a stress test of optics rather than a contest of values. It confuses the avoidance of conflict with coherence. And it creates a vacuum, an absence of moral clarity, that the far right is delighted to fill.

Between 2013 and 2023, the number of ships entering waters north of the 60th parallel increased by 37%, according to the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental forum made up of the eight countries with territory in the Arctic. In that same period, the total distance traversed by ships in the Arctic increased 111%.

That pattern seems to be holding. In 2024, global GDP per capita reached a new high as did annual carbon emissions. But as climate targets slip and warnings mount that tipping points may already have been crossed, faith in growth for growth’s sake is starting to fracture.

Dirty” or “extremely dirty": these are the classifications of 46% of the world’s aquatic environments. This conclusion comes from a study that compiled and systematized data from 6,049 records of waste contamination in aquatic environments on all continents over the last decade.

A new study reveals that chemicals used to replace ozone-damaging CFCs are now driving a surge in a persistent “forever chemical” worldwide. The pollutant, called trifluoroacetic acid, is falling out of the atmosphere into water, land, and ice, including in remote regions like the Arctic. Even as older chemicals are phased out, their long lifetimes mean pollution is still rising.

But I’ve come to wonder whether the only thing worse than arguing on the internet is not arguing on the internet. Something happened over time, and I think it coincided with the rise of Donald Trump and the emergence of Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok as the social media platforms of choice. A lot of people just stopped bothering to defend their ideas against people who disagree with them. The arguments dried up.

A rising number of American homeowners are ready relocate this year due to extreme weather events and other climate-related concerns.

Chronic exposure to pollution from wildfires has been linked to tens of thousands of deaths annually in the United States, according to a new study.

In December, Russia’s State Duma passed a law allowing clear-cut logging in Lake Baikal’s Central Ecological Zone, a move swiftly approved by the Federation Council and signed by Vladimir Putin. Although the legislation — set to take effect on March 1, 2026 — permits such logging only under specific conditions, environmentalists and activists have no doubt that officials and businessmen with a stake in the region will have little trouble securing the necessary approvals. And they warn that the consequences for the lake and its unique flora and fauna could be irreversible.

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Microplastics are present in all beverages, but those packaged in glass bottles contain more microplastic particles than those in plastic bottles, cartons or cans. This was the surprising finding of a study conducted by the Boulogne-sur-Mer unit of the ANSES Laboratory for Food Safety. The scientists hypothesised that these plastic particles could come from the paint used on bottle caps. Water and wine are less affected than other beverages. These findings have highlighted a source of microplastics in drinks that manufacturers can easily take measures to address.

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Deforestation has killed more than half a million people in the tropics over the past two decades as a result of heat-related illness, a study has found.

On Tuesday 16 September, a Guardian panel of experts will be looking to answer questions about the forces driving the pushback against a greener world.

From nickel processing plants in Indonesia to rare earth mines in Myanmar, Chinese companies are expanding operations in sectors that environmentalists warn could have severe long-term consequences for rivers, air quality and local communities.

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They expect it to retreat several more kilometers in the next few years.

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The Trump administration’s proposed budget seeks to shut down the laboratory atop a peak in Hawaii where scientists have gathered the most conclusive evidence of human-caused climate change since the 1950s.

The world’s oceans are in worse health than realised, scientists have said today, as they warn that a key measurement shows we are “running out of time” to protect marine ecosystems.

Although Caribbean island nations account for only a small fraction of global greenhouse gas emissions, they are disproportionately affected by climate change. This has prompted calls for the world’s wealthiest nations to provide substantial financial support to help small island nations strengthen their adaptive capacity.