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Record dry conditions in South America have led to wildfires, power cuts and water rationing. The world’s largest river system, the Amazon, which sustains some 30 million people across eight countries, is drying up.

By learning the secrets of 2,000-year-old cement, researchers are trying to devise greener, more durable modern options.

World Without End topped bestseller lists but was criticised for embracing nuclear power

In 2019, France’s best known climate expert sat down to work with its most feted graphic novelist. The result? Perhaps the most terrifying comic ever drawn.

Part history, part analysis, part vision for the future, World Without End weaves the story of humanity’s rapacious appetite for fossil fuel energy, how it has made possible the society people take for granted, and its disastrous effects on the climate.

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Oakland residents told to flee as 80 firefighters battle blaze amid power shut-offs to combat major ‘diablo wind’

A fast-moving brush fire Friday in northern California damaged at least 10 structures in the hills of Oakland, prompting an evacuation order as it grew to 13 acres (4 hectares).

No injuries were immediately reported. Crews were called to the area around 1.30pm for a vegetation fire. In less than 30 minutes, the blaze had grown, requiring more firefighters to race to the scene. By 2.30pm, more than 80 firefighters were working to control the blaze alongside state crews, the Oakland fire department said.

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The Supreme Court’s decision to not temporarily block an E.P.A. rule this week signals ‘rising influence’ of Justice Barrett, one analyst said.

The death of Yahya Sinwar, tributes to Liam Payne, Comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas and the world twins festival: the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

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Democratic presidential nominee has raised alarm about Trump’s plans but has not said much about her own

• US politics – live updates

As the US south-east struggles to rebuild after two deadly and climate-fueled hurricanes, some environmental advocates are demanding Kamala Harris flesh out a strong climate plan.

Since Hurricanes Helene and Milton ravaged parts of the country, the vice-president has slammed Donald Trump’s climate record by airing a new campaign ad showing the oft-criticized moment the former president redrew a hurricane’s path with a marker, and taking aim at Trump’s spread of climate misinformation and history of withholding disaster aid.

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It’s all in the line of sight

• See more of Fiona Katauskas’s cartoons here

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Eoghan Daltun rewilded his land in West Cork and wants more of Ireland to do the same.

Some 90 percent of the economy in this coastal California region relies on visitors. But overtourism, the high cost of living and most worrisome, the effects of global warming, create a future of uncertainty.

La demanda de energía se ha acelerado debido a las grandes inversiones que las empresas tecnológicas han realizado en inteligencia artificial, la cual requiere mucha más potencia que otros negocios tecnológicos más convencionales.

Survey of young people aged 16-25 from all US states shows concerns across political spectrum

The overwhelming majority of young Americans worry about the climate crisis, and more than half say their concerns about the environment will affect where they decide to live and whether to have children, new research finds.

The study comes just weeks after back-to-back hurricanes, Helene and Milton, pummeled the south-eastern US. Flooding from Helene caused more than 600 miles of destruction, from Florida’s west coast to the mountains of North Carolina, while Milton raked across the Florida peninsula less than two weeks later.

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Hundreds of Times readers wrote to us and shared their experiences of installing heat pumps, including the good, the bad and the daunting.

Winter is coming. But will it bring snow? NOAA announced its annual winter outlook on Thursday.

Carbon emissions from forest fires increased more than 60 percent globally over the past two decades, according to a new study.

Los investigadores que estudian los delfines mulares encontraron poliéster y otros plásticos en todos los animales que analizaron.

Mary Barra, G.M.’s chief executive, said that the company had fixed battery-manufacturing problems and that its electric vehicles would soon be profitable.

It is mind-bog-gling, syllable pun intended, that scientists still do not know how many wetlands lost protection in last year’s crippling of the Clean Water Act by the Supreme Court. A new peer-reviewed study in the journal Science said the range of possible protection loss is between a fifth of nontidal wetlands to nearly all of them.

Lead author Adam Gold, a watershed researcher for the Environmental Defense Fund, said the wild uncertainty is because the court arbitrarily created a new standard for federal protection divorced from the science of how wetlands support larger streams, rivers, lakes and the ocean.

The Sackett case involved an Idaho couple who sued after the Environmental Protection Agency stopped their backfilling of a lot near a lake to build a home. The court was unanimous in saying that in the case of that couple, the EPA overstepped its authority. But a 5-4 conservative majority, led by Justice Samuel Alito, a long-time skeptic of both EPA authority, and what constitutes any kind of pollution, went a fateful extra step.

Alito famously said that carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning, a key contributor to global warming, is not a pollutant. That is despite studies tying carbon dioxide to skyrocketing rates of childhood asthma. A 2011 study in the journal Asthma and Allergy, said the parallel increase of global asthma and carbon dioxide emissions is “remarkable.” There is evidence linking elevated carbon dioxide to longer pollen seasons.

On wetlands, Alito’s razor-thin majority instituted an “eyeball” test. The court said a wetland merits federal protection only if it is “indistinguishable” from larger waters, evidenced by a “continuous surface connection” to them.

An American Bittern on the Outer Banks in North Carolina, where wetlands are under constant threat of development. Photo by Derrick Z. Jackson. Court Rejects Decades of Science

The ruling was hailed by industrial and agricultural polluters and developers. Groups that filed briefs against the EPA’s authority included the US Chamber of Commerce, the American Petroleum Institute, and the National Association of Home Builders. The Chamber of Commerce said the ruling put an end to a  “tortured definition” of water protection that “threatened to strangle projects with years of red tape.”

But the court’s tortured institution of a visual test for continuous water in wetlands rejected decades of federal wetlands science, much of it conducted under the administrations of Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Barack Obama.

Federal reports found that all types and sizes of nontidal wetlands, that is places without visible, continuous surface connections, still serve critical downstream ecosystem functions. Some are seemingly far from large bodies of water. In others, water flows into underground aquifers. In others still, the soil is saturated but surface water is visible for only part of the year.

And then there are ephemeral streams that run only during rainfalls. A 2008 EPA report published during the Bush administration said, “Given their importance and vast extent, it is concluded that an individual ephemeral or intermittent stream segment should not be examined in isolation.”

Years later, a 2015 EPA report published during the Obama administration said, “All tributary streams, including perennial, intermittent, and ephemeral streams are physically, chemically, and biologically connected to downstream rivers.” It emphasized there is “ample evidence that many wetlands and open waters located outside of riparian areas and floodplains, even when lacking surface water connections, provide physical, chemical, and biological functions that could affect the integrity of downstream waters. Some potential benefits of these wetlands are due to their isolation rather than their connectivity.”

That left Gold with the unenviable task of trying to fit a square peg of data into the round hole of nonsense—that one must see water in a wetland for it to be wet enough to be a wetland. Basically, he found out that any future permitting disputes between developers and federal agencies, especially for inland, nontidal wetlands, will likely depend on legal decisions of “wetness.”

For instance, if just geographically isolated wetlands were removed from protection, that would amount to 19% of the nation’s 90 million acres of nontidal wetlands. If a court ruled that a wetland must be flooded for more than a month during the growing season, that would knock out 61% of wetlands from federal protection. If a wetland needed to be semi-permanently flooded, that would remove 91% of acreage from protection.

“I was surprised by the uncertainty,” Gold said in a telephone interview. “A reason it is so hard to determine is because the language used by the court is neither scientific nor objective.” He said the high court’s insistence on a ‘continuous surface connection’ as a condition for protection “are subjective words that are not defined by anything related to how wetlands work. If we start parsing out wetland protection by how ‘wet’ they are, it is highly unclear where this all ends up.”

Wetlands Are Environmental Heavyweights

What we do know is that wetlands are an underrated champion of the environment, the economy and climate mitigation, despite representing less than 6% of land in the contiguous United States. Wetlands are the nurseries for commercial and recreational fisheries, which generated $321 billion and supported 2.3 million jobs in 2022, according to a report last year by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Along with anglers, wetlands are the critical backdrop for hunters and wildlife watchers, who spent $400 billion in 2022, according to a report last year by the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

Shorebirds enjoy feasting in the muck of the Hackensack Meadowlands. Wetland habitat is critical for shorebirds, which are experiencing some of the fastest declines in the avian world. Photo by Derrick Z. Jackson.

Yet, the nation is losing ground on wetlands. A report this year by the US Fish and Wildlife Service found between 2009 and 2019, the nation lost enough acreage of forest and scrub wetlands to equal the size of Rhode Island. That cannot happen when so many studies also show how wetlands are a carbon sink.

Globally, wetlands such as peatlands, mangroves, salt marshes, and seagrass meadows cover 6% of the world’s surface. But they sequester a third of the world’s organic ecosystem carbon. A 2022 study in the journal Science said the function of wetlands as a climate workhorse makes preserving them a matter of “utmost importance.”

Losing so many acres of wetlands also cannot happen when the EPA says wetlands are “biological supermarkets” for insects and small fish that are feasted on by larger creatures: fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and mammals. The agency says wetlands are the sole home for more than a third of the nation’s threatened and endangered species. Nearly half of threatened and endangered species dine in, or seek shelter in, wetlands during their lives.

It also cannot happen when wetlands literally save property and lives by being buffers against winds and storm surges. A 2020 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that wetland losses in Florida between 1996 and 2016 resulted in an additional $430 million in property damage from Hurricane Irma in 2017.

A 2021 study in the journal Global Environmental Change found that globally coastal wetlands save $447 billion in damages and 4,620 lives a year. A 2019 study in the journal of Marine and Freshwater Research found that the world’s wetlands deliver $47 trillion a year in ecosystem services. The prime ones are erosion and flood control, waste treatment, water purification, recreation, and tourism.

The Hackensack Meadowlands in New Jersey, from which New York City skyscrapers are visible. The buffering effect of the wetlands spared many communities in the area the worst of flooding from Superstorm Sandy in 2012. Photo by Derrick Z. Jackson. States Offer Unwieldy Checkerboard of Wetland Protections

None of those wetland benefits registered with the Supreme Court majority that now demands an “eyeball” test of surface water to determine if a wetland is a wetland. Such a test leaves protection to the mercy of the states.

An analysis by the Environmental Law Institute found that 24 states do not independently protect their wetlands, relying completely on the Clean Water Act. The map of the states with no protections and those with their own protections closely mirrors the red and blue maps of presidential elections. Most states in the South and the Great Plains have no protections, thus leaving their wetlands at the highest risk of destruction (though notable exceptions include the Everglades wetlands in Florida and prairie pothole wetlands in Minnesota).

None of that makes sense when everyone (except perhaps five members of the Supreme Court) knows that pollution from one state can easily travel downstream into another state. Even Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who this year voted in a 5-4 majority to block EPA rules to limit power plant and industrial pollution from crossing state lines, joined the court’s three liberals, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson in saying the new test of a “continuous surface connection” raises all kinds of questions.

“How does that test apply to the many kinds of wetlands that typically do not have a surface water connection to a covered water year-round—for example, wetlands and waters that are connected for much of the year but not in the summer when they dry up to some extent?” Kavanaugh wrote. “How ‘temporary’ do ‘interruptions in surface connection’ have to be for wetlands to still be covered?

“How does the test operate in areas where storms, floods, and erosion frequently shift or breach natural river berms? Can a continuous surface connection be established by a ditch, swale, pipe, or culvert?”

That is why Adam Gold found it so hard to come up with a firm number of how many wetlands have lost protection. “No one likes uncertainty,” Gold said. “Not the regulators, not the permit applicants, not the scientists…. It is very clear what a wetland is. But now it’s unclear what protections they have.”  

That is because for the majority of the Supreme Court, a wetland where the water is out of sight is a wetland out of mind.

Oil majors’ conduct can constitute reckless endangerment due to fossil fuels’ affect on global heating, advocates claim

New York state prosecutors could press criminal charges against big oil for its role in fueling hurricanes and other climate disasters, lawyers wrote in a new prosecution memorandum that has been endorsed by elected officials across the state.

The 50-page document, published by the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen and the progressive prosecutors network Fair and Just Prosecution on Thursday, comes as the US south-east struggles to recover from the deadly hurricanes Helene and Milton, both of which scientists have found were exacerbated by the climate crisis. It details the havoc wrought on New York by 2021’s Hurricane Ida and 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, and other deadly climate events such as extreme heatwaves across the US this past summer.

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The destruction in northern Italy has ignited debate in a country where just 6% of homes are insured against natural disaster

It was 2am when the parish priest, Giovanni Samorì, was woken by a phone call from the mayor of Traversara ordering him to start ringing the church bells. The traditional call now forms part of the civil protection procedure deployed by many Italian towns. Its aim: to warn residents of impending calamity.

As torrential rain pounded the village, Samorì sprang into action, a task he compares to “sounding the death knell”. It worked: the evacuation of Traversara’s 480 residents was swift and, despite the priest’s foreboding, there were no deaths.

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