Starting on Monday, about 10,000 government negotiators, scientists, journalists and campaigners will gather at a purpose-built venue in a national park in Mongolia’s capital Ulaanbaatar to discuss how to stop land turning into desert as the world warms. Drought is currently sweeping much of the Northern hemisphere, leaving normally green urban parks looking like dry […]
Dr Victoria Harvey is a researcher and senior carbon consultant who focuses on the UK advertising industry. Helen Phillips’ book, ‘Hum’, is set in a dystopian near future, in a city suffering the effects of climate breakdown and with dire air quality. Robots (the Hums) press advertising messages during conversations, meetings and even as they […]
A new draft text to revive deadlocked UN plastics treaty talks does not include specific measures on managing runaway plastic production, a growing source of greenhouse gas emissions, drawing criticism from some countries and campaigners that ambition for the global pact is shrinking. After diplomats met in Nairobi early in July for the first time […]
Layers of red dust coat South Africa’s Saldanha Bay, a legacy of the one billion-plus tonnes of iron ore exported from what was once a quiet coastal fishing town in the 1970s. Now the government wants to turn this area into the “oil and gas hub of South Africa”, but opposition from local communities and […]
Steven Stone is acting director of the United Nations Environment Programme’s Office of Science In 1934, American economist Simon Kuznets presented a paper to Congress advocating for a new way of measuring economic performance. The United States was reeling from the Great Depression, and Kuznets – a future Novel prize winner – wanted to gauge just […]
Amira Odeh Quiñones is a hydrologist and Caribbean organiser for the 350.org climate campaign group El Niño, likely to be one of the strongest in modern history, has arrived on Caribbean shores. Drought is slowly creeping up on our islands. But unlike the fiery wildfires ravaging parts of Europe, there’s no smoke signalling the damage […]
About a quarter of the countries signed up to the Paris Agreement are still breaching its rules by failing to submit a new national climate plan, 18 months after the February 2025 deadline. Forty-five nations had not submitted a plan known as a nationally determined contribution (NDC), according to the Paris Agreement Implementation and Compliance […]
China’s use of coal for electricity grew in the first half of 2026 as a record amount of wind and solar power was wasted through curtailment, new research has found. The world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter brought 30 gigawatts (GW) of new coal power capacity into operation in the six months to June and coal-fired […]
Bemnet Agata is a communications officer at the Tax Justice Network, where Alison Schultz is a research fellow. We are entering an age of permanent volatility. Climate change is making extreme weather more destructive. Geopolitical tensions are disrupting energy markets and supply chains. Governments are expected not only to decarbonise their economies, but to protect […]
Leaders of the Santa Marta coalition – a group of governments, businesses and civil society organisations seeking to transition away from fossil fuels – hope it can withstand the loss of one of its founding members as a far-right, pro-fossil fuel government takes office in Colombia this week. In April, Colombia hosted 57 governments in […]
