English references

Most research on “forever chemicals” focuses on how best to remove them from the environment. But solutions to tricky problems often emerge from the most unexpected of places—as demonstrated by a new study that instead redirects the pollutants into becoming tools for extracting precious lithium. In a recent Nature Water study, a team led by Rice University researchers describes a novel way to use spent perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, to recover lithium from high-salinity brine pools. The team tapped into the fluorine content inside PFAS leftovers, using it to attract lithium from briny water. Remarkably, the team was able to collect lithium fluoride at 99% purity and confirmed that the sample was pure enough to boost the stability and performance of lithium-ion batteries.

The Gulf Stream is part of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). The AMOC is a tipping element and may collapse under changing forcing. However, the role of the Gulf Stream in such a tipping event is unknown. Here, we investigate the link between the AMOC and Gulf Stream using a high-resolution (0. 1°) stand-alone ocean simulation, in which the AMOC collapses under a slowly-increasing freshwater forcing. AMOC weakening gradually shifts the Gulf Stream near Cape Hatteras northward, followed by an abrupt northward displacement of 219 km within 2 years. This rapid shift occurs a few decades before the simulated AMOC collapse. Satellite altimetry shows a significant (1993–2024, p < 0.05) northward Gulf Stream trend near Cape Hatteras, which is also confirmed in subsurface temperature observations (1965–2024, p < 0.01). These findings provide indirect evidence for present-day AMOC weakening and demonstrate that abrupt Gulf Stream shifts can serve as early warning indicator for AMOC tipping.

Industry’s spin and privileged access to the highest levels of the Commission, alongside the current EU hostility to new green rules and mania for deregulation, appear to have fatally undermined a key European Green Deal ambition.

Researchers identify sharp rise to about 0.35C every decade, after excluding natural fluctuations such as El Niño

A recent UK national security assessment on biodiversity and ecosystem collapse made headlines, not for its dire warnings, but for its omissions. It's part of a larger trend of governments keeping climate security reports from the public.

What if the real danger wasn’t the crises ahead… but the established illusion that we can solve them without changing the system that produces said crises? In this uncompromising and deeply eye-opening talk, renowned systems thinker and strategist Arthur Keller challenges one of the most comforting ideas of our time: the belief that “solutions exist” to the great planetary predicaments of our time. Climate action, energy transition, technical innovation… are all crucial, yet they’re somewhat off topic if they remain integrated within a system that inexorably turns nature into waste. Arthur reframes the situation with brutal clarity. Humanity is not facing an ecological crisis: it is nature that’s facing a human crisis. The problematic is no collection of isolated problems to tackle one by one: it is rather the symptom of a civilization operating beyond planetary limits. Decarbonizing energy without transforming the underlying system, he argues, is like treating cancer with painkillers. The disease keeps sprea

The new joint policy brief offers a deep dive into the ways in which the social and solidarity economy can advance the objectives of the Roadmap by supporting the eradication of poverty beyond growth.

Extinction Rebellion says some members have been visited by agents claiming to be FBI amid Trump’s threats toward liberal groups

As global soy giants walk away from a landmark pact, land grabbers move in to clear the forest for new crops.

China’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions fell by 1% in the final quarter of 2025, likely securing a decline of 0.3% for the full year as a whole.

By the end of this century, parts of Africa could face heatwaves for 250-300 days a year, which will make it difficult for people to survive.

The world seems headed into another El Nino, just 3 years after the last one. Such quick return normally would imply, at most, an El Nino of moderate strength, but we suggest that even a moderately strong El Nino may yield record global temperature already in 2026 and still greater temperature in 2027. The extreme warming will be a result mainly of high climate sensitivity and a recent increase of the net global climate forcing, not the result of an exceptional El Nino, per se. We find that the principal drive for global warming acceleration began in about 2015, which implies that 2°C global warming is likely to be reached in the 2030s, not at midcentury.

In Belem, Brazil’s leader, President Lula da Silva, opened the talks by denouncing obstructionists who “reject scientific evidence and attack institutions.” “They manipulate algorithms, sow hatred and spread fear,” he said, describing a surge in disinformation and propaganda aimed at blocking action to slow climate change. The summit, for the first time, put the issue on the agenda. A coalition of countries and international agencies issued a separate “Declaration on Information Integrity on Climate Change,” calling on governments to address climate disinformation, promote transparency and protect journalists, scientists and environmentalists.

Climate change is making it challenging to identify future host cities.

The Senate is on the verge of taking up a bill with the Orwellian title “Fix Our Forests Act.” It is designed to do the opposite, as Dan Galpern and I describe in an op-ed published yesterday in the Boston Globe, which is copied below with permission of the Globe. The bill would result in swaths of the public’s national forests becoming “categorical exclusion” zones open to logging exempt from any environmental review. Thus, the bill would override the purposes for which national forests were set up, including “outdoor recreation, range…watershed, and wildlife and fish purposes.” This sin is rationalized under the pretense that the Act will reduce wildfire risk and improve forest health by “thinning” the forest. This is nonsense, as our op-ed discusses.

Exclusive: Ben Goldsmith will work on issues including fishing and green belt preservation to attract green Tories

Testimony from medics, morgue and graveyard staff reveals huge state effort to conceal systematic killing of protesters

“Water crisis” has become the default label for almost any episode of water stress, from short-lived droughts to decades-long overuse of rivers and aquifers. Yet in many regions of the world, water problems no longer resemble a crisis in the conventional sense. They represent a post-crisis failure state in which human–water systems have exceeded their hydrological carrying capacities, and societies have spent beyond their sustainable hydrological budgets for so long that critical water assets are depleted, some ecosystem damages are irreversible on human time scales, and a return to “normal” is infeasible even with prohibitive economic, social, and environmental costs.

Flagship report calls for fundamental reset of global water agenda as irreversible damage pushes many basins beyond recovery

Much of today's sustainability discourse emphasizes efficiency, clean technologies, and smart systems, but largely underestimates fundamental physical constraints relating to energy-matter interactions. These constraints stem from the fact that Earth is a materially closed yet energetically open system, driven by the sustained but low power-density flux of solar radiation. This Perspective reframes sustainability within these axiomatic limits, integrating relevant timescales and orders of magnitude. We argue that fossil-fueled industrial metabolism is inherently incompatible with long-term viability, while post-fossil systems are surface-, materials-, and power-intensive. Long-term sustainability must therefore be defined not only by how much energy or material is used, but also by how it is used: favoring organic, carbon-based chemistry with limited reliance on purified metals, operating at low power density, and maintaining low throughput rates. Achieving this requires radical technological shifts toward l