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Today, we are close to the critical moment when conventional economic growth becomes impossible on a finite planet, constrained by two parallel factors: resource depletion and pollution. Tthe depletion of fossil fuels and other mineral commodities is placing heavy constraints on both industrial and agricultural production. We are not running out of anything yet, but the cost of extraction is increasing, just as the damage that extraction causes to the ecosystem. On the other side, pollution is appearing in more than one form. Chemical pollution is growing in terms of heavy metals, endocrine-disruptors, and other poisoning substances, while climate change can be seen as another form of pollution generated by the excess of CO2 in the atmosphere.

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.

States and financial bodies using modelling that ignores shocks from extreme weather and climate tipping points

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.

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

l'observatoire US de la dérégulation environnementale

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.

Climate change could lead to half a million more deaths from malaria in Africa over the next 25 years, according to new research.

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.

Dario Amodei questions if human systems are ready to handle the ‘almost unimaginable power’ that is ‘potentially imminent’

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

The authors of a new book argue that the ocean cannot be saved by legislation alone. Paul Watson is one of the authors, along with academic Sarah Levy. Watson was an early member of Greenpeace, and founded the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, but is no longer linked to either organization. While he maintains he has never caused physical injury to anyone, he promotes "aggressive non-violent" direct action, and is currently wanted by the Japanese state.

The world has entered an era of “global water bankruptcy” that is harming billions of people, a UN report has declared. The overuse and pollution of water must be tackled urgently, the report’s lead author said, because no one knew when the whole system could collapse, with implications for peace and social cohesion. All life depends on water but the report found many societies had long been using water faster than it could be replenished annually in rivers and soils, as well as over-exploiting or destroying long-term stores of water in aquifers and wetlands.

Scientists expect 41% of the projected global population to face the extremes, with ‘no part of the world’ immune

Breathing in air pollution like ozone and PM2.5 harms nearly every major system in the human body

The decline in the health of nature around the world poses a threat to the UK's security and prosperity, an intelligence committee has concluded in a long-awaited report. The document warns of "cascading risks" from the degradation of some of the planet's most important ecosystems, including conflict, migration and increased competition for resources.

Ecosystem destruction will increase food shortages, disorder and mass migration, with effects already being felt

Global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security - A national security assessment

Like living beyond your financial means, using more water than nature can replenish can have catastrophic results.

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

As climate and geopolitics shocks bite, countries are rebuilding food buffers. The UK clings to neoliberal ideas while households pay the price

“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.

US demand to own Greenland leaves little scope for compromise, and forcing the issue would entail end of Nato Greenland, with a population of fewer than 57,000, might not seem to be the territory on which the future of the relationship between Europe and the US, the viability of Nato as the world’s most successful defence alliance, or even the fractured relations between the UK and Europe would be determined. But battlefields are sometimes the product of chance, rather than choice. It now feels as if Donald Trump’s threat to impose 10% tariffs on eight fellow Nato states for sending troops last week to support Greenland’s sovereignty may be one of those clarifying moments in which Europe had no option. Successive European leaders condemned Trump’s blackmail and intimidation on Sunday and they sounded as if they meant it.

Progress of artificial general intelligence could stall, which may lead to a financial crash, says Yoshua Bengio, one of the ‘godfathers’ of modern AI

Melting glaciers, coastal areas wiped off the map and regular 40C heat in Europe. Climate experts warn the gloomy predictions of long term environmental change are no longer the future - they are already here. Last year was the third hottest on record, with the World Meteorological Organization this week warning that 2025 continued a run of “extraordinary” global temperatures. The EU has said the Paris climate agreement of 1.5C could be broken before 2030, a decade sooner than expected.

Satellite analysis warns that widespread land subsidence threatens 1.6 billion people by 2040, with 86% of the at-risk population concentrated in Asia

The world's oceans absorbed a record amount of heat in 2025, an international team of scientists said Friday, further priming conditions for sea level rise, violent storms, and coral death.

We are living in a time of polycrisis. If you feel trapped – you’re not alone. I hadn’t fully grasped how the idea of a better future sustained me – now I, like many others, find it difficult to be productive

Bronwen Maddox says Trump’s rejection of international law leaves UK and Europe facing huge dilemma

A new international analysis published in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences on 9 January finds that the Earth's ocean stored more heat in 2025 than in any year since modern measurements began. The finding is the result of a major international collaboration led by the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, involving more than 50 scientists from 31 research institutions worldwide. The 2025 heat increase was 23 Zetta Joules (23,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Joules of energy), which is equivalent to ~37 years of global primary energy consumption at the 2023 level (~620 Exa Joules per year). The assessment combines data from major international data centers and independent research groups, including three observational products (Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences; Copernicus Marine; and NOAA/NCEI) and an ocean reanalysis (CIGAR-RT) from three continents: Asia, Europe, and America. These groups confirm that the 2025 ocean heat content (OHC) reached the h

Data group forecasts deficit of 10mn tonnes by 2040, equivalent to nearly one-third of current global demand

It has the world's largest reserves, produces comparatively little, and has a type of oil that the US needs. […] Over the weekend, the United States bombed Venezuela, and captured its president Nicolás Maduro. There has been a lot of speculation about the legality, true motive and implications going forward. Oil has been a central part of the discussion. I wanted to get a quick overview of what the global picture looks like. So here are five(ish) simple charts that give some context on the history of oil in Venezuela, and why the United States — which is, by far, the world’s largest producer itself — would care so much.

Trump is no longer bending the rules – he is demolishing them, with consequences far beyond Caracas

Legal action has brought important decisions, from the scrapping of fossil fuel plants to revised climate plans

The datasets used to diagnose the modern history of the planet’s climate — and to proclaim that the world is now very near to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming — typically begin with the year 1850. The new one goes all the way back to 1781. This extended time frame matters because greenhouse gases in the atmosphere increased 2.5 percent between 1750 and 1850, enough to have caused some warming that the data hasn’t accounted for.

The activist and author of Here Comes the Sun discusses rapid advances in solar and wind power and how the US ceded leadership in the sector to its main rival

This year, ExxonKnews reported on Big Oil targeting its critics, pushing false solutions, and encouraging political allies to help the industry escape accountability.

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

Study author says tech companies are reaping benefits of artificial intelligence age but society is left to pay cost

Global temperature in 2025 declined 0.1°C from its El Nino-spurred maximum in 2024, making 2025 the second warmest year. The 2023-2025 mean is +1.5°C relative to 1880-1920. The 12-month running-mean temperature should decline for the next few months, reaching a minimum about +1.4°C. Later in 2026, we expect the 12-month running-mean temperature to begin to rise, as dynamical models show development of an El Nino. We project a global temperature record of +1.7°C in 2027, which will provide further confirmation of the recent global warming acceleration.

Pour convaincre les électeurs de droite et du centre d’agir pour protéger la planète, élus et ONG essaient d’adapter le message.

Perception, pattern-seeking, and the role of neurodivergence in a failing civilisation

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

Glacial earthquakes are a special type of earthquake generated in cold, icy regions. First discovered in the northern hemisphere more than 20 years ago, these quakes occur when huge chunks of ice fall from glaciers into the sea. Until now, only a very few have been found in the Antarctic. In a new study soon to be published in Geophysical Research Letters, I present evidence for hundreds of these quakes in Antarctica between 2010 and 2023, mostly at the ocean end of the Thwaites Glacier – the so-called Doomsday Glacier that could send sea levels rising rapidly if it were to collapse.

World Inequality Report 2026

Data from World Inequality Report also showed top 10% of income-earners earn more than the other 90%

The Global Environment Outlook, Seventh Edition: A Future We Choose, the product of 287 multi-disciplinary scientists from 82 countries, is the most comprehensive scientific assessment of the global environment ever carried out.

UN GEO report says ending this harm key to global transformation required ‘before collapse becomes inevitable’

The global collapse arrives piecemeal. Germany is going first.

Short-Term Energy Outlook

Cutting-edge materials and thoughtful urban planning can help cities beat the negative heating effects of climate change.

Around 56 million years ago, Earth suddenly got much hotter. Over about 5,000 years, the amount of carbon in the atmosphere drastically increased and global temperatures shot up by some 6°C.

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

I always say that models are not predictions; they are qualitative illustrations of what the future could be. But as the future gets closer to the present, models can start being seen as predictive tools. It is the weather/climate dichotomy, so aptly exploited to confuse matters by politically minded people in the discussion about climate. Right now, we are getting close to the point that we could forecast a collapse in the same way as we can forecast the trajectory of a tropical storm. So, you remember how “The Limits to Growth” generated a long term forecast in 1972. Here it is

Logging and mining are destroying swathes of the Congo rainforest, with the result that African forests went from being  a carbon sink to a carbon source in 2010 to 2017

Budgets are now climate policy. But mainstream media hasn’t caught up.