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National Trust says these are ‘alarm signals we cannot ignore’ as climate breakdown puts pressure on wildlife
Extremes of weather have pushed nature to its limits in 2025, putting wildlife, plants and landscapes under severe pressure, an annual audit of flora and fauna has concluded.
Bookended by storms Éowyn and Bram, the UK experienced a sun-soaked spring and summer, resulting in fierce heath and moorland fires, followed by autumn floods.
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In 2014 the Malaysian Airlines jet vanished over the Indian Ocean. Now the team that located Shackleton’s Endurance is looking again with the latest undersea robots
More than a decade after Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 went missing after veering thousands of miles off course, its location remains unknown.
The Malaysian government has promised to pay a private company, Ocean Infinity, $70m (£56m) to search for the plane on a “no find, no fee” basis.
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Old Sulehay Forest, Northamptonshire: Distant church bells are about all I can hear as I stand below a 500-year-old small-leaved lime – a tree that may be making an unlikely comeback
On a bright winter’s day, I stand at the centre of a ring of multi‑stemmed small-leaved limes. Their gnarled bases are furred with moss and feathered with sprays of epicormic growth. Lime trees are notoriously hard to age, but this one is probably more than 500 years old, shaped and reshaped by centuries of coppicing, now with a vast canopy stretching nearly 20 metres.
Looking up, I marvel at the intricate fractal lattice of branches and twigs of each tree. Every stem holds its own space, the crowns kept neatly apart from their neighbours – a quiet phenomenon known as crown shyness. This seems somehow appropriate, given how quiet the woodland is. It feels emptied, with only the rush of a chill wind numbing my bare fingertips, a peal of distant church bells, and a robin offering its muted winter song.
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With the snow line edging higher, 186 French ski resorts have shut, while global heating threatens dozens more
When Céüze 2000 ski resort closed at the end of the season in 2018, the workers assumed they would be back the following winter. Maps of the pistes were left stacked beside a stapler; the staff rota pinned to the wall.
Six years on, a yellowing newspaper dated 8 March 2018 sits folded on its side, as if someone has just flicked through it during a quiet spell. A half-drunk bottle of water remains on the table.
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Merlin has been trained to identify the songs of more than 1,300 bird species around the world
When Natasha Walter first became curious about the birds around her, she recorded their songs on her phone and arduously tried to match each song with online recordings. After a friend recommended Merlin Bird ID, a free app, she tried it in her London garden and was delighted to discover the birds she assumed were female blackbirds – “this is how bad a birder I was” – were actually song thrushes and mistle thrushes.
“I’m obsessed with Merlin – it’s wonderful and it’s been a joy to me,” says Walter, a writer and human rights activist. “This is what AI and machine-learning have been invented for. It’s the one good thing!”
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Mersey Valley Way takes in Manchester and Stockport on its 13-mile route with other walks to be identified in 2026
A new river walk has been announced by the government as ministers try to improve access to nature in England.
The 13-mile (21km) walk will go through Greater Manchester and the north-west of England. There will be a river walk in each region of the country by the end of parliament, the government has pledged.
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From merrily dismissing climate science, to promoting irresponsible health claims, the podcast was an unintentional warning for our times
Looking back on this crazy year, one event, right at the start, seems to me to encapsulate the whole. In January, recording his podcast in a studio in Austin, Texas, the host, Joe Rogan, and the actor Mel Gibson merrily dissed climate science. At the same time, about 1,200 miles away in California, Gibson’s $14m home was being incinerated in the Palisades wildfire. In this and other respects, their discussion could be seen as prefiguring the entire 12 months.
The loss of his house hadn’t been confirmed at the time of the interview, but Gibson said his son had just sent him “a video of my neighbourhood, and it’s in flames. It looks like an inferno.” According to World Weather Attribution, January’s fires in California were made significantly more likely by climate breakdown. Factors such as the extreme lack of rainfall and stronger winds made such fires both more likely to happen and more intense than they would have been without human-caused global heating.
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Action began in January, before an all-out strike in March. For locals, the flytipping, vermin, maggots and mess are taking a huge environmental and emotional toll
It’s an icy cold winter morning, and 80-year-old Mohammed Bashir is armed with a broom, tackling the large pile of rubbish that has accumulated outside his terraced house in Small Heath, Birmingham.
This has become an almost daily activity for Bashir since the city’s bin strike started 50 weeks ago and, like many in the city, he is starting to lose patience.
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Just 70km from Melbourne yet only accessible by ferry, the island’s isolation is the source of its appeal and its biggest drawback
Approaching French Island on the ferry at dawn, if you’re lucky you might be greeted by the sight of hundreds of ibis in flight. From far away, they look like starlings in murmuration, the flock constantly swelling and shifting like the sea far beneath them.
Just 70km from Melbourne in the middle of Western Port Bay, French Island is a remote haven hidden in plain sight. While nearby Phillip Island boasts popular holiday attractions, a motorcycle grand prix, a population of nearly 14,000 and a bridge to the mainland, French Island – twice its size – can only be accessed by an expensive, intermittent two-car barge from the small town of Corinella, or passenger ferry from Stony Point. It’s a refuge for native wildlife and for a small human population – just 139 in the last census – who live entirely off-grid and prefer things to stay quiet.
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The Caatinga in the north-east has been transformed by the heating climate in just a generation and could become the country’s first desert
Every Tuesday at dawn, Raildon Suplício Maia goes to the market in Macururé, in Brazil’s Bahia state, to sell goats. He haggles with buyers to get a good price for the animals, which are reared in the open and roam freely.
Goats are the main – and sometimes only – source of income for the people of Macururé, a small town in the Brazilian sertão.This rural hinterland in the country’s north-east is known for its dry climate and harsh conditions.
Raildon Suplicio Maia, a goat farmer from Macururé sells his animals at the market. Grazing has disappeared and he now spends any profit on feed
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