Breaking Waves: Ocean News

As the IUCN global conservation body prepares to update its red list of endangered species, scientists explain why calculating the true toll of a pandemic is so hard It began with the brown skuas. The migratory seabirds had arrived on the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia in 2023, harbouring a deadly passenger. Within months, the southern elephant seals that had come ashore to breed became sick. Mothers and newborn pups were weak and trembling, with many struggling to breathe. What followed was a horrific mass casualty event, caused by the highly infectious avian influenza (H5N1). By 2025, more than 53,000 female elephant seals had died on South Georgia. That is especially alarming, scientists say, because the island is home to more than half of the global breeding population. Continue reading...

Colin McPherson has spent three decades working on Catching the Tide, his moving portrayal of fishers and an old way of life that is dying out Continue reading...

The transition to electric vehicles should be moving apace, but it is not. And why? Incompetence, expedience and cowardice This is how it works. An industry puts tremendous effort into resisting change: lobbying governments, mobilising the media, pouring money into junktanks. It argues that a transition would threaten jobs, or damage the national interest, or harm poor people, while what it really fears is the cost of retooling its plants or developing new protocols. Then, when the inevitable cliff edge approaches, it whines that change is coming too soon. For reasons beyond its control, it isn’t ready, so the government must delay its plans. This is what triggered the Dutch nitrate crisis, and the UK’s repeated “emergency” exemptions from the ban on a devastating class of pesticides. Now the same dynamic is driving the UK’s crisis over the transition to electric vehicles (EVs). The result is that, as the global climate summit, Cop31, begins, it looks as if our gift to the world will be a major, predictable and entirely avoidable increase in the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions. George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...

Conservation group acquires former US president’s family farm with plans to transfer it to the state in 2028 Jimmy Carter’s family farm has been acquired by a group dedicated to permanently protecting the south-west Georgia land where the late former president’s conservation ethic took hold, officials announced on Monday. A statement from the Conservation Fund said it plans to open Carter’s family farm – on about 2,458 acres (995 hectares) outside his home town of Plains, Georgia – to the public for hunting, fishing and other outdoor recreation as soon as 2027, with the group set to transfer the land to the state’s natural resources department in 2028. Continue reading...