Wednesday, 4 November 2026
International edition · English
News, analysis, explainers and guides on the climate and biodiversity crisis. We always separate measured facts, scientific projections and opinion.
71 articles · RSS
A wall of water more than 100 metres high swept through 60 kilometres of valley in seconds. Two months on, the UN's project services agency calls it one of the most destructive and deadliest climate-related disasters and urges rich countries to keep their promises.
Little winter snow, heatwaves from May to September and the 0 °C isotherm above 4,000 metres for 76 days: the result is the second-worst year for Swiss glaciers since measurements began.
Today is International Snow Leopard Day, created to protect the great cat of Asia's mountains. We look at how many are left, what threatens them and what works to protect them.
Measurement campaigns by the Swiss glacier monitoring network document the biggest losses since records began. We explain what the numbers mean and why they matter beyond Switzerland.
In May 2025 a huge flow of ice, rock and mud almost completely destroyed the village of Blatten, in the Lötschental. A preventive evacuation avoided a far greater tragedy. We look at what happened and why it is a warning for the whole of the Alps.
Europe has lowered the wolf's level of protection after years of debate between farmers and conservationists. Does that mean it can be hunted? What happens in Spain? The answers, without slogans.
At the start of the century fewer than a hundred were left. Today the Iberian lynx numbers more than 2,400 and is no longer listed as Endangered on the Red List. This is how it was achieved and what could still go wrong.
The European Copernicus service ranked 2024 as the warmest year on record and the first to exceed the 1.5 °C threshold. Have we already broken the Paris Agreement? Not exactly. Here is why.
The Sierra Nevada de Mérida once had at least six glaciers. By 2024 the last one —Humboldt— had shrunk into a small ice field. Venezuela thus became the first country in modern times to lose all its glaciers.
When a border follows the watershed across a glacier, melting can move it. That is what has happened around the Matterhorn, where Switzerland and Italy have had to adjust their shared boundary.
Adopted in 2024 after a fiercely contested process, the Nature Restoration Regulation requires EU countries to bring degraded ecosystems back. What it says, what it does not say and when its effects will be seen.
A glacier is a balance between the snow it gains and the ice it loses. When the books come out in the red year after year, it retreats. We explain why this is happening almost everywhere and what it means for us.
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