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Signs tout a natural paradise, but pollution from over-farming has left Northern Ireland’s Lough Neagh choked by toxic algae
The bright, cheery signs dot the shoreline like epistles from another era, a time before the calamity.
“Ballyronan marina is a picturesque boating and tourist facility on the shores of Lough Neagh,” says one. “Contours of its historical past embrace the virginal shoreline.”
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As Swiss glaciers melt at an ever-faster rate, new species move in and flourish, but entire ecosystems and an alpine culture can be lost
• Photographs by Nicholas JR White
From the slopes behind the village of Ernen, it is possible to see the gouge where the Fiesch glacier once tumbled towards the valley in the Bernese Alps. The curved finger of ice, rumpled like tissue, cuts between high buttresses of granite and gneiss. Now it has melted out of sight.
People here once feared the monstrous ice streams, describing them as devils, but now they dread their disappearance. Like other glaciers in the Alps and globally, the Fiesch is melting at ever-increasing rates. More than ice is lost when the giants disappear: cultures, societies and entire ecosystems are braided around the glaciers.
The Aletsch glacier viewed from Moosfluh, looking towards the Olmenhorn and Eggishorn peaks
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Preserving the Amazonian rainforest keeps communities safe from the health risks of wildfires and deforestation, research has found
For Bolivian park ranger Marcos Uzquiano, the fallout from wildfires in the Amazon goes far beyond the damage they do to wildlife and biodiversity. “It’s devastating – it undermines all the functions and benefits that forests provide to Indigenous communities. They affect the air we breathe and cause respiratory infections, eye irritation and throat inflammation,” he says.
Uzquiano’s experience at Beni Biosphere Reserve is reflected in new research which suggests that preserving Amazonian forests helps to protect millions from disease. Analysing 20 years of data on 27 diseases – including malaria, Chagas disease and hantavirus – researchers found that municipalities in the Amazon biome near healthy forests on Indigenous lands across eight countries faced a lower risk of disease.
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Blackstone founder Stephen Schwarzman acted legally, but residents complained to Southern Water
A Donald Trump-backing billionaire has been stopped from transporting water in tankers to fill a lake on his Wiltshire estate during a drought.
Southern Water has told tanker companies to cease delivering water to Stephen Schwarzman’s 2,500-acre estate after local residents filmed vehicles going day and night to its grounds.
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Phil Bellamy’s daughters refuse to ride in his electric car without travel sickness tablets. Are there other solutions?
It was a year in to driving his daughter to school in his new electric vehicle that Phil Bellamy discovered she dreaded the 10-minute daily ride – it made her feel sick in a way no other car did.
As the driver, Bellamy had no problems with the car but his teenage daughters struggled with sickness every time they entered the vehicle. Research has shown this is an issue – people who did not usually have motion sickness in a conventional car found that they did in EVs.
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Drakes Broughton, Worcestershire: The scourge of rural litter is enough to bring anyone together, even a farmer and us, trying to camp for the night in his field
In deepest rural Worcestershire – unfamiliar country for a mountaineer and a Welshman – we need a place to sleep. Our hedged lane skirts a little copse, and tired eyes pick out a gap; a couple of big steps over the brambles and we’re in. We haul the bike trailer (heavy with cans and bottles, picked up over some 300 miles on England’s dirty roads) into the woods. Damien Gabet, with whom I’m here to wild camp, is on a 1,000-mile journey in the shape of a Lucozade bottle as part of an anti-litter campaign, all the while removing as many plastic bottles as he can fit in his small orange trailer.
Beyond the wood is a field where the corn has been cut: a perfect spot, hidden from view, disturbing no one. Stars start to blink awake as we make our home for the night. Suddenly, the rumble of an engine – a silver Range Rover turns the corner. A familiar weariness grip me: I’m already resigned to being moved on, to take some stick for our trespass.
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The corporate-financed backlash to calls for global climate progress has been greatly empowered by the Trump administration. It’s never been more critical to challenge the misinformation that could turn a crisis into a catastrophe
Support the Guardian’s independent, fact-based journalism today
A little over a decade ago I published a book, This Changes Everything, which explored the reality of the climate crisis as a confrontation between capitalism and the planet. For a few years after the book came out, it seemed like we might just win a breakthrough. A cascade of large and militant mobilisations pressed the case for keeping warming below 1.5C as global calls for a green new deal grew louder and louder. Countries across the world announced long-term plans to reduce emissions and to hit net-zero targets; so did some of the largest corporations on the planet.
And then … well, we all know what happened. A corporate-financed backlash on all fronts. In the first 100 days of Trump’s second term, his administration took more than 140 actions to roll back environmental rules and push for greater use of fossil fuels. He signed executive orders to ease restrictions on their extraction and export, filled his cabinet with oil industry supporters, gutted federal agencies on the forefront of the climate crisis, and cancelled life-saving environmental justice projects.
Join George Monbiot and special guests on 16 September for a special climate assembly to discuss the growing and dramatic political and corporate threats to the planet. Book tickets – in person or livestream
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Viral videos have shifted public opinion about water monitors, long held in contempt in Thai culture, even as rising numbers of the reptiles pose problems for residents
Shortly after dawn, Lumphini Park comes alive. Bangkok residents descend on the sprawling green oasis in the middle of the city, eager to squeeze in a workout before the heat of the day takes hold. Joggers trot along curving paths. Old men struggle under barbells at the outdoor gym. Spandex-clad women stretch into yoga poses on the grass.
Just metres away, one of the park’s more infamous occupants strikes its own lizard pose. About 400 Asian water monitor lizards call Lumphini Park home, and this morning they are out in full force – scrambling up palm trees, swimming through the waterways and wrestling on the road.
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In the remote state of Meghalaya, foraged foods are helping to diversify state-provided menus – and tackle chronic malnutrition
Excited chatter and the clattering of steel plates drown out the din of the monsoon rains: it is lunchtime in Laitsohpliah government school in the north-east Indian state of Meghalaya. The food has been cooked on-site and is free for everyone, part of India’s ambitious “midday meal” – PM Poshan – programme to incentivise school enrolment.
The scheme covers more than 1m state-run schools across the country, but the menu at Laitsohpliah is hyperlocal, thanks to a recent charity initiative in the state.
A lunch of rice, dal, potatoes with east Himalayan chives, cured dry fish and sohryngkham, a wild berry pickle
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Heroic firefighting and a lucky turn in weather helped avert disaster once, but ‘a perfect storm of conditions’ remains
During a 2024 wildfire season described as “unprecedented”, the tiny central Idaho town of Stanley and nearby Redfish Lake Lodge narrowly missed incineration by two fires: the Bench Lake and then the Wapiti blazes.
It took heroic firefighting efforts and favorable turns in weather conditions for the town – a mountain mecca for tourists from around the world – to survive without the loss of a single life or home.
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