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From floods to droughts, erratic weather patterns are affecting food security, with crop yields projected to fall if changes are not made
Experts have warned that the world’s ability to feed itself is under threat from the “chaos” of extreme weather caused by climate change.
Crop yields have increased enormously over the past few decades. But early warning signs have arrived as crop yield rates flatline, prompting warnings of efficiency hitting its limits and the impacts of climate change taking effect.
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Digital facilities that track wastage down to the gram have brought about behavioural change among users
Min Geum-nan walks towards a metal bin beneath her apartment block in Gangdong district, eastern Seoul carrying a small bag of vegetable peelings. She taps her resident card on the reader, the lid swings open, she empties the contents and scans again and a digital screen flashes: 0.5kg.
“You have no choice but to pay attention because you can see exactly what you’re wasting,” says Min, who has lived in the complex for 15 years and watched the system arrive in 2020.
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The molluscs are decimating food chains in Switzerland, have devastated the Great Lakes in North America, and this week were spotted in Northern Ireland for the first time
Like cholesterol clogging up an artery, it took just a couple of years for the quagga mussels to infiltrate the 5km (3-mile) highway of pipes under the Swiss Federal Technology Institute of Lausanne (EPFL). By the time anyone realised what was going on, it was too late. The power of some heat exchangers had dropped by a third, blocked with ground-up shells.
The air conditioning faltered, and buildings that should have been less than 24C in the summer heat couldn’t get below 26 to 27C. The invasive mollusc had infiltrated pipes that suck cold water from a depth of 75 metres (250ft) in Lake Geneva to cool buildings. “It’s an open invasion,” says Mathurin Dupanier, utilities operations manager at EPFL.
Mathurin Dupanier indicates the water cooling systems that were blocked by the invasive quagga mussels. Photographs: Phoebe Weston/the Guardian; École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
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Hayling Island, Hampshire: Piles of goose barnacles are stranded on the beach after a long journey hitched on a barrel. They’re fascinating creatures, but they won’t survive long
A message pinged on to my phone – a photo from a friend out walking her dog. Her whippet, head cocked and nose quivering, was investigating a strange object that had washed up on the beach. Later, curiosity got the better of me and, though it was raining heavily, I went down to the shore to see for myself.
The blue drum lay stranded in a fresh seam of shingle, surrounded by storm-tossed debris – cuttlebones, wrack, and a profusion of single-use plastics. But what immediately drew the eye was the living cargo spilling over its sides – a dense aggregation of common goose barnacles (Lepas anatifera), castaways which, as larvae, cling to whatever floats past them – from driftwood and buoys to ship hulls and turtles.
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Forecast is slightly cooler than the record 1.55C reached in 2024, but 2026 set to be among four hottest years since 1850
Next year will bring heat more than 1.4C above preindustrial levels, meteorologists project, as fossil fuel pollution continues to bake the Earth and fuel extreme weather.
The UK Met Office’s central forecast is slightly cooler than the 1.55C reached in 2024, the warmest year on record, but 2026 is set to be among the four hottest years dating back to 1850.
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Spells of unseasonably mild weather are prompting species such as the skylark to burst into song
December is not noted for birdsong in the UK, as most species are more concerned with finding food during the short hours of daylight than preparing for the breeding season to come. Yet during spells of unseasonably mild winter weather some will practice their sweet refrains.
Over the past few weeks I’ve heard several species singing: not quite as forcefully as in the spring, but enough for me to take notice.
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Canadian researchers tracking bear known as X33991 noticed she had gained a second cub who likely needed help
Scientists in Canada have documented a rare case of female polar bear adopting a new cub, in an episode of “curious behaviour” that highlights the complex relationships among the apex Arctic predators.
Polar Bears International, a non-profit conservation group, said on Wednesday that when they first placed a GPS collar on a female polar bear in the spring, she had one young cub. But when she was spotted with two cubs of roughly the same age last month, they realized they were witnessing an exceedingly rare case of adoption.
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In this week’s newsletter: A generation is using the legal system to demand accountability for climate harm
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Rikki Held grew up on her family’s ranch in Montana, watching the land transform amid the climate crisis. The Powder River, which runs through the property, has sometimes dried up during drought, leaving crops and livestock without water. At other points, rapid snowmelt and heavy rains have caused flooding and eroded riverbanks, making the land difficult to use.
Two years ago, the 24-year-old and a group of other young people won a groundbreaking legal victory, intended to prevent those impacts from worsening. In August 2023, a judge ruled in favour of plaintiffs in Held v Montana, in which 16 young people accused the state of violating their constitutional rights by promoting planet-warming fossil fuels. The state’s supreme court affirmed the judge’s findings late last year, but plaintiffs say lawmakers have since passed new laws that violate that ruling. So last week, they filed a new petition calling on the supreme court to enforce their earlier win, one of several youth-led constitutional climate lawsuits filed in the US this year.
‘A shift no country can ignore’: where global emissions stand, 10 years after the Paris climate agreement
The trauma after the storm: Hurricane Melissa leaves trail of emotional devastation across Jamaica
Synthetic chemicals in food system creating health burden of $2.2tn a year, report finds
Montana youth activists who won landmark climate case push for court enforcement
More than 40 Trump administration picks tied directly to oil, gas and coal, analysis shows
Youth-led US climate activists widen focus to fight authoritarianism
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Were children’s bones found at the edge of European lake settlements an attempt to appease water gods?
Flood protection takes many forms, from the levees of Louisiana to the drains of East Anglia. Some villages in bronze age Europe may have had a more unusual barrier: a circle of skulls.
Researchers from Basel University have found children’s skulls at the edge of lake settlements vulnerable to flooding, dating to the ninth century BC. As flooding became worse, villages in the Circum-Alpine region in what is now Germany and Switzerland started building defences. These included log palisades, houses on stilts, and flood walls reinforced with stone and skulls.
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In the Peloponnese mountains, the usually hardy trees are turning brown even where fires haven’t reached. Experts are raising the alarm on a complex crisis
In the southern Peloponnese, the Greek fir is a towering presence. The deep green, slow-growing conifers have long defined the region’s high-altitude forests, thriving in the mountains and rocky soils. For generations they have been one of the country’s hardier species, unusually capable of withstanding drought, insects and the wildfires that periodically sweep through Mediterranean ecosystems. These Greek forests have lived with fire for as long as anyone can remember.
So when Dimitrios Avtzis, a senior researcher at the Forest Research Institute (FRI) of Elgo-Dimitra, was dispatched to document the aftermath of a spring blaze in the region, nothing about the assignment seemed exceptional. He had walked into countless burnt landscapes, tracking the expected pockets of mortality, as well as the trees that survived their scorching.
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