For 10 years, the scientist and photographer Jeroen Hoekendijk has been observing pinnipeds such as seals and walruses on the fragile North Sea archipelago stretching along the Dutch, German and Danish coastline. A remainder of the now-drowned Doggerland, left behind after the ice age, the low-lying islands are an advance warning sign of the warming and rising seas of the climate crisis
Photographs by Jeroen Hoekendijk, text by Philip Hoare
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
01/01/2026 - 03:00
01/01/2026 - 00:00
Tim Smit also says extreme political views will fade when people realise good things around the corner
Sir Tim Smit says the world is in a better place than it was when he co-founded the Eden Project 25 years ago and he believes people are more attuned to the natural world.
Speaking as the project in Cornwall reaches its 25th anniversary, Smit describedextreme political views as the “roar” of people fearful that they cannot control the future but he said they would fade when people realised that good things were around the corner.
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12/31/2025 - 12:00
Legal action has brought important decisions, from the scrapping of fossil fuel plants to revised climate plans
This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Paris agreement. It is also a decade since another key moment in climate justice, when a state was ordered for the first time to cut its carbon emissions faster to protect its citizens from climate change. The Urgenda case, which was upheld by the Netherlands’ supreme court in 2019, was one of the first rumblings of a wave of climate litigation around the world that campaigners say has resulted in a new legal architecture for climate protection.
Over the past 12 months, there have been many more important rulings and tangible changes on climate driven by legal action.
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12/31/2025 - 10:47
Microplastics in rivers, lakes, and oceans aren’t just drifting debris—they’re constantly leaking invisible clouds of chemicals into the water. New research shows that sunlight drives this process, causing different plastics to release distinct and evolving mixtures of dissolved organic compounds as they weather. These chemical plumes are surprisingly complex, often richer and more biologically active than natural organic matter, and include additives, broken polymer fragments, and oxidized molecules.
How the climate crisis showed up in Americans’ lives this year: ‘The shift has been swift and stark’
12/31/2025 - 10:00
Guardian US readers share how global heating and biodiversity loss affected their lives in ways that don’t always make the headlines
The past year was another one of record-setting heat and catastrophic storms. But across the US, the climate crisis showed up in smaller, deeply personal ways too.
Campfires that once defined summer trips were never lit due to wildfire risks. There were no bites where fish were once abundant, forests turned to meadows after a big burn and childhood memories of winter wonderlands turned to slush.
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12/31/2025 - 09:00
I’ve spent six years writing about environmental justice. The uncomfortable truth is that we’re not all in it together – but people power is reshaping the fight
It’s been another year of climate chaos and inadequate political action. And it’s hard not to feel despondent and powerless.
I joined the Guardian full time in 2019, as the paper’s first environmental justice correspondent, and have reported from across the US and the region over the past six years. It’s been painful to see so many families – and entire communities – devastated by fires, floods, extreme heat, sea level rise and food shortages. But what’s given me hope during these six years of reporting as both an environmental and climate justice reporter are the people fighting to save our planet from catastrophe – in their communities, on the streets and in courtrooms across the world.
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12/31/2025 - 09:00
Albanese will face a crucial test on the economy while the Coalition deals with existential questions after an election drubbing
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Before 14 December, Anthony Albanese was enjoying the most successful year of his long parliamentary career.
A landslide election win delivered Labor 94 lower-house seats and crushed its political opponents.
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12/31/2025 - 07:30
Environmental advocates notched key wins at local and state levels this year despite Trump rollbacks
As 2025 draws to a close, environmental advocates across the US find themselves weighing a year marked by both setbacks and successes.
Despite major environmental reversals taken by the Donald Trump administration including loosening fossil fuel rules and weakening endangered-species safeguards, conservationists, lawmakers and researchers still notched key wins at local and state levels.
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12/31/2025 - 07:00
The challenges and strains have been almost too much to take. But in 2025, words of depth and courage have been an antidote to numbness
I once saw a young glassblower in Istanbul, still new to his craft, shatter a beautiful vase while taking it out of the furnace. The artisan master standing by his side calmly nodded and said something that I still think about. He told him: “You put too much pressure on it, you kept it unbalanced and you forgot that it, too, has a heart.”
The year we are leaving behind has been plagued from the start by a series of social, economic, environmental, technological and institutional challenges, all happening with such speed and intensity that we are yet to fully comprehend their impact on our lives, let alone on future generations. As the overwhelming strain of domestic and geopolitical changes continues to build up, I cannot help but remember the man’s words. Too much pressure. Unstable, uncertain and replete with deep inequalities. This could well be the year we forgot that the Earth, too, has a heart. It definitely feels like the year when the world was broken.
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12/31/2025 - 06:00
The bioscience startup has attracted billions in investment – and a flurry of criticism, but founder tells the Guardian plans to bring back the woolly mammoth will not be derailed
Death and taxes are supposed to be the things we can depend on in this life. But in 2025, the American entrepreneur Ben Lamm sold much of the world on the idea that death did not, after all, need to be for ever.
This was the year the billionaire’s genetics startup, Colossal Biosciences, claimed it had resurrected the dire wolf, an animal that disappeared at the end of the last ice age, by tweaking the DNA of grey wolves. According to the company, it had also edged closer to bringing the woolly mammoth back from the dead, with the creation of genetically engineered “woolly mice”.
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