No collapswashing

From floods to droughts, erratic weather patterns are affecting food security, with crop yields projected to fall if changes are not made

Exclusive: UCL scientists find large swathes of southern Europe are drying up, with ‘far-reaching’ implications

EU officials warn climate breakdown and wildlife loss ‘are ruining ecosystems that underpin the economy’ […] The European way of life is being jeopardised by environmental degradation, a report has found, with EU officials warning against weakening green rules. The continent has made “important progress” in cutting planet-heating pollution, according to the European Environment Agency, but the death of wildlife and breakdown of the climate are ruining ecosystems that underpin the economy.

Earth’s average temperature rose more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels in 2024 for the first time – a critical threshold in the climate crisis. At the same time, major armed conflicts continue to rage in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan and elsewhere. What should be increasingly clear is that war now needs to be understood as unfolding in the shadow of climate breakdown. The relationship between war and climate change is complex. But here are three reasons why the climate crisis must reshape how we think about war.

Extreme heat is breaking records around the world, with wildfires and poor air quality compounding the crisis, according to a report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) released Thursday.

António Guterres says ‘sun is rising on a clean energy age’ as 90% of renewable power projects cheaper than fossil fuels

Heat caused 2,300 deaths across 12 cities, of which 1,500 were down to climate crisis, scientists say

Mark Lynas has spent decades pushing for action on climate emissions but now says nuclear war is even greater threat Climate breakdown is usually held up as the biggest, most urgent threat humans pose to the future of the planet today. But what if there was another, greater, human-made threat that could snuff out not only human civilisation, but practically the entire biosphere, in the blink of an eye?

Fifteen years ago, smack in the middle of Barack Obama's first term, amid the rapid rise of social media and a slow recovery from the Great Recession, a professor at the University of Connecticut issued a stark warning: the United States was heading into a decade of growing political instability.

Researchers say Aardvark Weather uses thousands of times less computing power and is much faster than current systemsA single researcher with a desktop computer will be able to deliver accurate weather forecasts using a new AI weather prediction approach that is tens of times faster and uses thousands of times less computing power than conventional systems.

Some narratives in international development hold that ending poverty and achieving good lives for all will require every country to reach the levels of GDP per capita that currently characterise high-income countries. However, this would require increasing total global output and resource use several times over, dramatically exacerbating ecological breakdown. Furthermore, universal convergence along these lines is unlikely within the imperialist structure of the existing world economy. Here we demonstrate that this dilemma can be resolved with a different approach, rooted in recent needs-based analyses of poverty and development. Strategies for development should not pursue capitalist growth and increased aggregate production as such, but should rather increase the specific forms of production that are necessary to improve capabilities and meet human needs at a high standard, while ensuring universal access to key goods and services through public provisioning and decommodification. At the same time, in high

Publié par Good Works de l’Institut Schumacher, S’effondrer ensemble: Vers l’écoliberté écrit par Jem Bendell, est désormais disponible. Yes, the French version of ‘Breaking Together’ is now available, published by Good Works, of The Schumacher Institute. Initialement sur Amazon, il sera disponible sur d’autres plateformes et dans les librairies d’ici novembre, et sera disponible en tant qu’epub gratuit au début de 2025. Je présenterai le livre fin octobre à Grenoble et/ou Genève. Initially, on Amazon, it will be available on other platforms and from book shops by November, and will be available as a free epub in early 2025. I will give a talk about it in Grenoble and/or Geneva in late October.

Rapid ocean warming and unusually hot winter days recorded as human-made global heating combines with El Niño

New paper claims unless demand for resources is reduced, many other innovations are just a sticking plaster Record heat, record emissions, record fossil fuel consumption. One month out from Cop28, the world is further than ever from reaching its collective climate goals. At the root of all these problems, according to recent research, is the human “behavioural crisis”, a term coined by an interdisciplinary team of scientists.

the biophysical limits of food production are being reached. Second, current food production systems are actively destroying the very resource base upon which they rely. Third, the majority of food production and all its storage and distribution is critically dependent upon fossil fuels, not only making the food supply vulnerable to price and supply instability, but also presenting an impossible choice between food security and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Fourth, climate change is already negatively impacting the food supply and will do so with increasing intensity as the Earth continues to warm and weather destabilises. Fifth, the trajectory of increasing food demand that cannot easily be reversed. Sixth, the prioritisation of economic efficiency and profit in world trade has undermined food sovereignty and the resilience of food production at multiple scales, making both production and distribution highly vulnerable to disruptive shocks. Considered individually, each one of the hard trends presents a

The collapse of modern societies has already begun. That is the conclusion of two years of research by the interdisciplinary team behind Breaking Together. How did it come to this? Because monetary systems caused us to harm each other and nature to such an extent it broke the foundations of our societies. So what can we do? This book describes people allowing the full pain of our predicament to liberate them into living more courageously and creatively.

Carbon dioxide emissions from wildfires, which have been gradually increasing since 2000, spiked drastically to a record high in 2021, according to an international team of researchers led by Earth system scientists at the University of California, Irvine.

Major mapping project reveals PFAS have been found at high levels at thousands of sites across Europe. EURACTIV's media partner, The Guardian, reports. Pollutants known as “forever chemicals”, which don’t break down in the environment, build up in the body and may be toxic, have been found at high levels at thousands of sites across the UK and Europe, a major mapping project has revealed.

We know that the easiest way for a politician to secure power is to appease those who already possess it, those whose power transcends elections: the oil barons, the media barons, the corporations and financial markets. We know that this power appoints the worst possible people at the worst possible time. We know how, as elderly billionaires seek to grab ever more of the life that slips from them, they create a death cult....

Key UN reports published in last two days warn urgent and collective action needed – as oil firms report astronomical profits The climate crisis has reached a “really bleak moment”, one of the world’s leading climate scientists has said, after a slew of major reports laid bare how close the planet is to catastrophe.

The EU is on track to break a promise to cut methane emissions by 30% by 2030 made due to a “policy vacuum” on livestock emissions, a report has warned.Most of Europe’s methane emissions come from agriculture – particularly livestock – but the EU has avoided using policy levers such as its €387bn common agricultural policy to directly tackle the problem

Denmark ‘gets ball rolling’ at UN ahead of protests as poor nations call for greater collective commitment. Youth groups in Africa are preparing to embark on a series of climate demonstrations on Friday to highlight the problem of “loss and damage” to poor countries blighted by climate breakdown, as only one rich country has so far stepped up with funding for the problem.

School and university students all over the world are planning to take school strikes one step further and occupy our campuses to demand the end of the fossil economy. Taking a lesson from student activists in the 1960s, the climate justice movement’s youth will shut down business as usual. Not because we don’t like learning, but because what we’ve learned already makes it clear that, without a dramatic break from this system, we cannot ensure a livable planet for our presents and futures.

Three former UN climate heads say gap between government promises and actions will change environment irreversibly

Oil and gas majors are planning scores of vast projects that threaten to shatter the 1.5C climate goal. If governments do not act, these firms will continue to cash in as the world burns

On Sunday, Vladimir Putin ordered his nuclear deterrent forces to be placed on a “special regime of combat duty”. The Russian defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, has now clarified what this meant: the increased manpower devoted to Russia’s strategic nuclear triad: land-based strategic nuclear rocket forces, sea-based nuclear deterrents in the northern and Pacific fleets and its fleet of long-range strategic bomber aircraft that can carry nuclear weapons.

A violent bomb cyclone affecting Iceland on February 7 and 8, 2022, produced hurricane-force winds and record-breaking waves at the southern coast of the country. One of the waves reached 40 m (131 feet) and blew off the scale, making it by far the highest measured wave off the coast of Iceland and among the highest ever measured in the world.

Satisfying the increased demand for food is placing pressure on the world’s water, land and soil resources. Agriculture has its part to play in alleviating these pressures and contributing positively to climate and development goals. Sustainable agricultural practices can lead to direct improvements in the state of land, soil and water, and generate ecosystem benefits as well as reduce emissions from land. Accomplishing all these requires accurate information and a major change in how we manage the resources. It also requires complementing efforts from outside the natural resources management domain to maximize synergies and manage trade-offs.

Pandering to the rich has got us into this mess. The correlation between wealth and polluting behaviour could not be clearer

How close is nuclear fusion to break-even? If you trust the headlines we're getting close and the international project ITER is going to be the first to produce energy from fusion power. But not so fast. Scientists have, accidentally or deliberately, come to use a very misleading quantity to measure their progress. Unfortunately we're much farther away from generating fusion power than the headlines suggest. "Donc, si tout va bien, l'EROEI d'ITER sera de 0,4 ou 0,5 pour 1 - encore plus minable qu'un biocarburant basé sur les algues. " - Philippe Gauthier

En tant que scientifiques et universitaires du monde entier, nous appelons les décideurs politiques à s’engager ouvertement face au risque de perturbation, voire d’effondrement, de nos sociétés. Cinq ans après l’accord de Paris sur le climat, nous n’avons pas réussi à réduire nos émissions de carbone, et nous devons maintenant en tirer les conséquences.

A public letter signed by over 250 scientists and scholars from 30 countries, calls on policy makers to engage more with the growing risk of societal disruption and collapse due to damage to the climate and environment. The letter invites focus on how to slow, prepare for, and help those already suffering from, such disruptions. The signatories are specialists in a range of subject areas that relate to this challenge, who commonly believe it is time to listen to all the scholarship on humanity’s predicament.

En tant que scientifiques et universitaires du monde entier, nous appelons les décideurs politiques à s'engager ouvertement face au risque de perturbation, voire d'effondrement, de nos sociétés. Cinq ans après l'accord de Paris sur le climat, nous n'avons pas réussi à réduire nos émissions de carbone, et nous devons maintenant en tirer les conséquences.

Atlas du Plastique : faits et chiffres sur la crise du plastique

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Des dizaines de milliers de déchets plastiques polluant la planète sont générés par une poignée de multinationales dont Coca-Cola, Nestlé ou encore Pepsico, a assuré Break Free from Plastics, une coalition mondiale d'ONG, dans un rapport publié mercredi à Manille.

In the Second World War, Britain’s media was a crucial part of the war effort to save the country from fascism. Now it must meet its responsibility to tackle the climate emergency. The first of the Extinction Rebellion three demands calls on the government to declare a climate & ecological emergency and to work with the media to tell the public the truth of the depth of the crises.

The NGO Shipbreaking Platform is a global coalition of organisations working to reverse the environmental harm and human rights abuses caused by current shipbreaking practices and to ensure the safe and environmentally sound dismantling of end-of-life ships worldwide. Just as the goods they transport, ships too become waste when they reach the end of their operational lives. Yet only a fraction is handled in a safe and clean manner. The vast majority of the world's end-of-life fleet, full of toxic substances, is simply broken down - by hand - on the beaches of South Asia. There, unscrupulous shipping companies exploit minimal enforcement of environmental and safety rules to maximise profits.