A preening brush turkey, a wise cassowary and some hungry terns are among the winning and shortlisted photos in this year’s prize. They were chosen from thousands of entries across nine categories, including the special theme of diurnal raptors. Funds raised by the competition support bird conservation programs in Australia
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
11/24/2025 - 08:23
Firefighters call for long-term investment and say UK is dangerously underprepared as climate crisis worsens
Wildfires have devastated more moorland, forests and fields in the UK this year than at any time since records began, putting huge pressure on the country’s fire service, figures show.
The Global Wildfire Information System estimates that by November, wildfires had burned 47,026 hectares (116,204 acres) in 2025 in the UK – the largest area in any year since monitoring began in 2012, and more than double the area burned in the record-breaking summer of 2022.
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11/24/2025 - 08:00
Hunger is part of American life. Even as a professional adult, it’s never too far from Dr Angie Morrill’s thoughts
I asked my older sister why we sang the Patty Cake song so often as children: Patty cake, patty cake, baker’s man. Bake me a cake as fast as you can! She replied simply: “Because we were hungry.”
Her answer stayed with me, and I thought about some happy memories: mom making Toll House cookies while The Wizard of Oz played on television. Delivering baked goods to elders and friends in our Native urban community at Christmas; we are enrolled citizens in the Klamath Tribes, whose traditional homelands are in southern Oregon and northern California. Sharing food is a cultural value for Native people. Mom taught us to always offer food and drinks to our guests. It’s also important to have enough food to share.
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11/24/2025 - 05:00
Blazes that smoulder in the permafrost, only to reignite, are extending fire season though winter, leaving vegetation struggling to recover
In May 2023, a lightning strike hit the forest in Donnie Creek, British Columbia, and the trees started to burn. It was early in the year for a wildfire, but a dry autumn and warm spring had turned the forest into a tinderbox, and the flames spread rapidly. By mid-June, the fire had become one of largest in the province’s history, burning through an area of boreal forest nearly twice the size of central London. That year, more of Canada burned than ever before.
The return of cold and snow at the close of the year typically signal the end of the wildfire season. But this time, the fire did not stop. Instead, it smouldered in the soil underground, insulated from the freezing conditions by the snowpack. The next spring, it reemerged as a “zombie fire” that continued to burn until August 2024. By then, more than 600,000 hectares (1.5m acres) had been destroyed.
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11/24/2025 - 04:00
Conchologists, and citizen scientists team up to seek out endangered mollusc species along River Thames
It is tiny, hairy and “German” – and it could be hiding underneath a piece of driftwood near you. Citizen scientists and expert conchologists are teaming up to conduct the first London-wide search for one of Britain’s most endangered molluscs.
The fingernail-sized German hairy snail (Pseudotrichia rubiginosa) is found in fragmented patches of habitat mostly along the tidal Thames.
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11/24/2025 - 03:00
The fingerprints of Russia and Saudi Arabia are all over the decision text in Brazil. But a group of nations led by Colombia and the Netherlands offer hope
Genevieve Guenther is the founding director of End Climate Silence
The 30th conference of the parties (Cop30), the annual climate summit of all nations party to the UNFCCC, just ended. Stakeholders are out in the media trying spin the outcome as a win. Simon Stiell, climate change executive secretary for the UN is, for instance, praising Cop30 for showing that “climate cooperation is alive and kicking, keeping humanity in the fight for a liveable planet”. But let us be clear. The conference was a failure. Its outcome, the decision text known as the Global Mutirão or Global Collective Effort, is, in essence, a form of climate denial.
In 2023, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) determined that the world had already developed, or planned to develop, too much fossil fuel to be able to halt global heating at 2C. It acknowledged that the capital assets built up around fossil fuels must be stranded – that is to say, abandoned and not used – if warming was to be limited to 2C. But the Cop30 decision text ignores all this. Indeed, it never even mentions fossil fuels.
Genevieve Guenther is the founding director of End Climate Silence, and the author of The Language of Climate Politics
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11/24/2025 - 02:00
The Philippines is one of the countries most at risk of the climate emergency due to its low-lying island geography. With sea temperatures rising, the country deals with increasingly frequent and intense typhoons, rising sea-levels that threaten coastal communities, and changing rainfall patterns that disrupt agriculture. The country is one of the smallest contributors to climate change but one of the places most affected by its impacts. Gideon Mendel’s visceral portraits from his project Drowning World show people in Bulacan province dealing with the climate emergency in their daily lives
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11/23/2025 - 21:53
Opposition claims key diplomatic role at next year’s conference in Turkey would make Bowen a ‘part-time minister’ while Australians face inflated energy prices
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Experts have dismissed claims Chris Bowen cannot remain a senior minister while playing a leading role in international climate negotiations, with one describing the argument as evidence of an Australian “culture cringe”.
Australia failed in its long-running bid to co-host the Cop31 climate summit with Pacific nations next year after Turkey refused to withdraw from the consensus process despite limited support.
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11/23/2025 - 20:44
Getting to net zero CO2 emissions globally means we can halt global warming. This requires a rapid phase-out. It’s physics
With another set of global climate talks behind us, the Australian government faces some tricky tasks before it takes over negotiations at the next round of talks next year in Turkey.
Cop30 in Belém, Brazil, did not deliver the bold fossil fuel phase-out roadmap we needed, but it did nudge the system forward with more scrutiny of fossil fuel producers.
And despite the weakness of the outcome, one can gain some important comfort by the fact that Bélem – and the G20 in Johannesburg at the weekend – both solidly endorsed the Paris agreement, its central goal of keeping warming to 1.5C and the importance of net zero emissions.
Cop30 agreed that an “ambition accelerator” will be needed to fill the gap between what governments are planning (projected to warm the world by 2.6C) and the agreed guardrails of the Paris agreement: a limit of 1.5C.
It also, crucially, began the momentum for developing a roadmap for a just transition away from fossil fuels, with more than 80 countries – including Australia – signing the “Belém declaration” on a transition away from fossil fuels.
While this declaration didn’t get support from the whole conference, Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has promised to move forward on its implementation during the course of this year, until he hands over to Cop31 in Turkey.
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11/23/2025 - 19:01
Government panel’s final report calls for ‘radical reset’ of planning and environmental rules to get reactors built faster and cheaper
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The UK has become the “most expensive place in the world” to build a nuclear power station because of overly complex bureaucracy and regulation, according to a government review.
The nuclear regulatory taskforce was set up by Keir Starmer in February after the government promised to rip up “archaic rules” and slash regulations to “get Britain building”.
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