Flux continu

Il y a un an, Donald Trump a suspendu l’ensemble des programmes de l’Agence des Etats-Unis pour le développement international (Usaid), qui pesait près de 40 milliards de dollars par an, mais représentait 40 % de l’aide mondiale et finançait une myriade de projets venant en aide aux plus fragiles.

New year, new acronym! The newly established Intergovernmental Science-Policy Panel on Chemicals, Waste and Pollution (ISP-CWP) will meet in its first Plenary session from February 2-6 in Geneva, Switzerland. The Panel is designed to provide scientific assessments on chemicals, waste, and pollution to inform policymakers at national, regional, and international levels.

The first session of the Plenary of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Panel on Chemicals, Waste and Pollution (ISP-CWP P1) will be hosted by the Government of Switzerland, from 2 to 6 February 2026 at the Geneva International Conference Centre (CICG). The session will be preceded by regional and stakeholder meetings on 1 February 2026, at the same venue. The tentative schedule for the first session is available here. Please note that this schedule is subject to change.

It looked like snow under water: white, endless, and still. The reef, my friend Lisbeth said, was “the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.” For a second, I almost agreed. Then, I stared at it for a long time before replying. She wasn’t wrong about its beauty. But she was also showing me death. Bleached coral isn’t a kind of coral. It’s the moment just after the funeral, what’s left when life is gone. A cathedral of bone-white skeletons stretching over an empire of calcified death. From above, it glows like marble. Up close, it’s a graveyard.

Unless global heating is reduced to 1.2C ‘as fast as possible’, warm water coral reefs will not remain ‘at any meaningful scale’, a report by 160 scientists from 23 countries warns

The world will warm more than expected due to future changes in ozone, which protects the Earth from harmful sun rays but also traps heat as it is a greenhouse gas. While banning ozone-destroying gases such as CFCs has helped the ozone layer to recover, when combined with increased air pollution the impact of ozone could warm the planet 40% more than originally thought.

Almost 100 countries reject draft treaty as ‘unambitious’ and ‘inadequate’

Just three decades ago, Kabul’s population was less than 2 million, but the toppling of the Taliban in 2001 led to an influx of migrants, lured by the promise of increased security and economic possibility. As its population grew, so did the demand for water. Kabul relies almost entirely on groundwater, replenished by snow and glacier melt from the nearby Hindu Kush mountains. But years of mismanagement and over-extraction have caused those levels to drop by up to 30 meters over the last decade, according to Mercy Corps.

The human fingerprint on global warming was likely evident in Earth’s atmosphere far earlier than previously thought—even before the invention of modern cars, a new study says. Using a combination of scientific theory, modern observations and multiple, sophisticated computer models, researchers found a clear signal of human-caused climate change was likely discernible with high confidence as early as 1885, just before the advent of gas-powered cars but after the dawn of the industrial revolution.

Microplastics have been found for the first time in human ovary follicular fluid, raising a new round of questions about the ubiquitous and toxic substances’ potential impact on women’s fertility. The new peer-reviewed research published in Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety checked for microplastics in the follicular fluid of 18 women undergoing assisted reproductive treatment at a fertility clinic in Salerno, Italy, and detected them in 14.