Tropical Cyclone Ditwah, which made landfall in Sri Lanka on 28 November 2025, is considered the country’s worst natural disaster since the deadly 2004 tsunami. It intensified the northeast monsoon, bringing torrential rainfall, massive flooding, and 215 severe landslides across seven districts.
Nature is a double-edged sword for global business. A groundbreaking report will reveal how businesses profit from exploiting natural resources while simultaneously impacting biodiversity.
“I see more philanthropic support aligning with systems thinking, linking climate stability, biodiversity protection, Indigenous leadership, and community resilience,” says Michael Northrop, Program Director at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
As geopolitical challenges and tensions escalate globally, one thing is clear: fragmented politics will not fix a fractured planet. This is why the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA) – the world’s highest decision-making body on the environment – is so critical to address our shared and emerging environmental threats.
For the past decade, Yemen has been at the center of a severe and multifaceted humanitarian crisis, marked by widespread violence between various Middle Eastern actors, widespread civilian displacement, economic decline, and the collapse of essential services that serve as lifelines for displaced communities.
Although Africa holds more than 30 per cent of the world’s critical green minerals—including cobalt, lithium, manganese, and rare earth elements vital for building batteries, wind turbines and solar panels— this has not translated into prosperity for the continent.
The UN climate talks at COP30 once again brought the critical issue of climate finance to the forefront of global discussions.
However, while much of the debate revolved around traditional forms of aid directed at developing countries most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, a faster, more
transformative approach lies in expanding access to carbon markets.
When the world gathered in Glasgow for COP26, the mantra was “building back better.” Two years later, in Sharm El Sheikh, COP27 promised “implementation.” This year, in Belém, Brazil, COP30 arrived with a heavier burden: to finally bridge the chasm between lofty rhetoric and the urgent, measurable steps needed to keep 1.5 °C alive.
COP30 in Belém is not just another annual climate meeting; it is the 32-year report card of the world governance architecture that was conceived at the Rio Earth Summit of 1992. And that is what report card says: delivery has been sporadic, cosmetic and perilously disconnected with the physics of climatic breakdown.
Following tense, nightlong negotiations and bitter rows between more than 190 country delegations, a “politically charged Belém package" was finally forged at COP30—so named because of the highly contentious and difficult-to-negotiate issues within the climate talks.
Belém, at the mouth of the Amazon River, was always going to be a symbolic host for the UN COP30 climate summit, but the mood here has gone far beyond symbolism.
A new independent evaluation of the Global Environment Facility’s food systems programs says they are delivering strong environmental and livelihood gains in many countries but warns that a narrow focus on farm production, weak political analysis, and shrinking coordination budgets are holding back deeper transformation.
The oceans are a fundamental part of Earth's climate system, regulating it by absorbing and storing vast amounts of solar heat, redistributing that heat around the globe through currents, and absorbing a significant portion of human-caused carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions—yet scientific research into them remains underfunded.
Just 30 minutes from where the UN climate negotiations are unfolding in the port city of Belém, Afro-descendant communities are engaged in a fierce struggle for the full recognition and legal titling of their ancestral territories—critical as their security and livelihoods are compromised by businesses wanting to set up contaminating landfill sites and drug cartels.
Around the world, the climate crisis is fast becoming the biggest public-health threat of the century. Extreme heat now kills more Europeans than any other natural disaster. Floods in Asia displace millions and contaminate water supplies. Mosquito-borne diseases once confined to the tropics are appearing in southern Europe and the United States.
The language of agricultural sustainability changes like the seasons—from “climate-smart” to “regenerative,” “agroecological,” and “nature-positive.” Each term reflects good intentions, but the growing list risks duplication, confusion and delays.
The heat in the Hangar Convention Center of the Amazonia, in the northeastern Brazilian city of Belém, has reached the negotiation rooms of the climate summit. Over the past 72 hours, one of the most delicate and significant discussions of this climate meeting has been taking place: the path to progressively abandon the production and use of coal, gas, and oil.
As the COP30 negotiations intensify in Belém, Brazil, civil society organizations and research experts have called out major financial institutions for promoting foreign interests in controlling Africa's land by formalizing land tenure and seeking to convert Africa's land into industrial farms or carbon markets.
At a Conference of the Parties, where science intersects with politics, reaching agreements is often a tricky business. What is inside the last-minute negotiations as the COP presidency tries to get the parties to agreement at the final plenary?
Funding cuts from the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe have left a funding gap in climate change programmes across Africa.
Decades ago, a little girl was born in a place called Cleveland, Ohio, in the heart of the United States of America. Born to a woman from the deep South, the place of Martin Luther King, her mother left her ancestral lands for the economic opportunities in the north.