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Unspecified number of vessels due to depart Barcelona on Sunday, with dozens more expected to leave other Mediterranean ports on 4 September
A flotilla carrying humanitarian aid and activists, including Swedish climate campaigner Greta Thunberg, is due to leave from Barcelona on Sunday to try to “break the illegal siege of Gaza”, organisers said.
The vessels will set off from the Spanish port city to “open a humanitarian corridor and end the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people”, said the Global Sumud Flotilla.
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The political pushback against positive green progress has been shocking. But as corporations and those in power turn away, the overwhelming majority of people in the world want more ambitious climate action
Support independent environment journalism today
Extreme politics and extreme weather go hand in hand, and both have to be confronted if we are to understand and overcome the polycrisis we are living through.
Yet few media organisations are examining why the climate emergency is creating a new era of demagogues. Even fewer are scrutinising how those authoritarian leaders are trying to misdirect public attention away from the root cause of our current global malaise.
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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Transforming bare and compacted soil in vineyards can boost numbers of important invertebrate, say advocates
Vineyards are generally the most inhospitable of landscapes for the humble earthworm; the soil beneath vines is usually kept bare and compacted by machinery.
But scientists and winemakers have been exploring ways to turn vineyards into havens for worms.
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Climate.gov, which went dark this summer, to be revived by volunteers as climate.us with expanded mission
Earlier this summer, access to climate.gov – one of the most widely used portals of climate information on the internet – was thwarted by the Trump administration, and its production team was fired in the process.
The website offered years’ worth of accessibly written material on climate science. The site is technically still online but has been intentionally buried by the team of political appointees who now run the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
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Toxic algae cases in Northern Ireland’s Lough Neagh have tripled since last year, as local fishers’ incomes plummet
The UK’s largest lake, Lough Neagh, is on course to record its worst year of potentially toxic algal blooms to date, as rescue plans remain deadlocked.
As a ban on eel-fishing in the lake is extended yet again, with local fishers’ incomes falling by 60% since 2023, there have so far this year been 139 detections of cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) growths recorded at the lough and its surrounding watercourses, according to a government pollution tracker. This is more than treble the number for the same point in 2024 (45). The data covers the 400 sq km freshwater lough, its tributaries, and smaller peripheral bodies of water, including Portmore Lough and Lough Gullion.
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Inkpen, Berkshire:It’s been an awful year for their breeding numbers, yet here we are, at our back garden gate, watching two young adults that feel like our own
Most evenings at dusk, we take a last cup of tea out to watch the barn owls from the back garden gate. A pair has used the box in our neighbour’s field ever since we put it up five years ago, and for the first time, they have raised two chicks. This is heartening enough, but it feels almost miraculous considering 2025 has been so bad for barn owls. It’s thought poor grass growth in a hot, dry year has suppressed numbers of their main prey, voles and mice, which were already low from natural fluctuations.
And so, over spring and summer, we have watched as each fluffy owlet emerged from the box and tiptoed along the oak branches like ghouls. We’ve watched their parents sweep in to feed them – sometimes at worryingly long intervals – the siblings waiting on the nestbox platform, turning their heads upside down, snapping at flies. We have seen them fledge, bouncing from tree to tree above the old paddock, then out to measure and survey Home Field.
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Nurturing everything from bacteria and fungi to worms is seen as essential to helping minimise use of chemicals and machinery
Nick Padwick hunches over a microscope, examining a sample of compost he has made on his Norfolk farm. “Look at that bad boy! That’s a bacteria-feeding nematode!” he exclaims. “Stunning fungal hyphae.”
Padwick, the farm manager at Wild Ken Hill since 2018, is part of a growing movement of farmers taking a deep interest in the microscopic life forms upon which their livelihoods depend. Under this approach to regenerative farming, nurturing diverse soil communities – from bacteria and fungi to microscopic animals and worms – is seen as an essential prerequisite for growing healthy foods with minimal or no use of agrochemicals or soil-damaging machinery.
Use microscopy to identify missing or imbalanced soil organisms.
Create nutrient-rich compost from farm waste, such as straw and wood chips.
Put this compost in mesh bags and steep them in water, like giant teabags, to make extracts that can reintroduce beneficial microbes to depleted soils.
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Pollution, warm oceans and hungry urchins devastated Pacific kelp. Now, thanks to divers with hammers, one of the world’s most successful rehabilitation projects has helped it rebound
On an overcast Tuesday in July, divers Mitch Johnson and Sean Taylor shimmy into their wetsuits on the back of the R/V Xenarcha, a 28ft boat floating off the coast of Rancho Palos Verdes, south of Los Angeles. Behind them, the clear waters of the Pacific are dotted with a forest of army-green strands, waving like mermaid hair underwater.
We are here to survey the giant Pacific kelp, a species that once thrived in these ice cold waters. But over the past two decades, a combination of warm ocean temperatures, pollution, overfishing and the proliferation of hungry sea urchins that devour the kelp has led to a 80% decline in the forest along the southern California coast.
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Experts say data reported by beachgoers is ‘hugely useful’ after a slow official response to disaster
Sixty-one leafy seadragons, 604 Port Jackson sharks, 1,999 southern fiddler rays and 287 bluespotted goatfish make up a fraction of the dead washed up on South Australian beaches in the past months.
Since the algal bloom hit SA, hundreds of citizen scientists have come together to create what has become one of the main sources of data on the disaster.
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Heat deaths could surge in the state as energy poverty linked to Trump’s energy and trade policies burns
It was the hottest day of the year so far when the central air conditioning started blowing hot air in the mobile home where Richard Chamblee lived in Bullhead City, Arizona, with his wife, children, and half a dozen cats and dogs.
It was only mid-June but the heat was insufferable, particularly for Chamblee, who was clinically obese and bed-bound in the living room as the temperature hit 115F (46C) in the desert city – situated 100 miles (160km) south of Las Vegas on the banks of the Colorado River.
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