Seaweed has become a key cash crop as climate change and industrial trawling test the resilient culture of the semi-nomadic Vezo people
Along Madagascar’s south-west coast, the Vezo people, who have fished the Mozambique Channel for countless generations, are defined by a way of life sustained by the sea. Yet climate change and industrial exploitation are pushing this ocean-based culture to its limits.
Coastal villages around Toliara, a city in southern Madagascar, host tens of thousands of the semi-nomadic Vezo people, who make a living from small-scale fishing on the ocean. For centuries, they have launched pirogues, small boats carved from single tree trunks, every day into the turquoise shallows to catch tuna, barracuda and grouper.
A boat near lines of seaweed, which has become a main source of income for Ambatomilo village as warmer seas, bleached reefs and erratic weather accelerate the decline of local fish populations
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
12/24/2025 - 00:00
12/24/2025 - 00:00
Scientists working for government breed biological control agents in lab to take on species choking native wildlife
Crayfish, weevils and fungi are being released into the environment in order to tackle invasive species across Britain.
Scientists working for the government have been breeding species in labs to set them loose into the wild to take on Japanese knotweed, signal crayfish and Himalayan balsam, and other species that choke out native plants and wildlife.
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12/24/2025 - 00:00
npj Ocean Sustainability, Published online: 24 December 2025; doi:10.1038/s44183-025-00180-z
Observations of mariculture associated N2O loss: a need for system specific studies
12/23/2025 - 13:25
New protections for hares, and more humane conditions on farms, should be welcomed by all
Looking after wildlife and improving the lives of farm animals and pets are the related but distinct aims of the government’s new animal welfare strategy for England. Its launch is timely: more than 1 billion chickens and around 8 million turkeys are reared each year – with many of the latter slaughtered in the run-up to Christmas. Winter is also peak season for pet abandonments, with animal charities particularly fearful this year, given the already high numbers of dogs and cats being dumped.
Pledges to end the use of cages for laying hens, and cramped farrowing crates for pigs, will be welcomed by all who object to animal cruelty. So will a proposal to replace the carbon dioxide stunning of pigs with an alternative that is less distressing for them. New rules for farmed fish are also on the way. Until now, fish have been largely excluded from the evolving set of regulations aimed at minimising suffering at the point of slaughter.
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12/23/2025 - 11:07
Work under way to refloat boats on emptied waterway after earthwork more than 200 years old fails
The dramatic breach of a canal in the early hours of Monday, which sent two narrowboats tumbling into a hole and left others stranded, was caused by the collapse of an artificial embankment that had stood for more than 200 years.
As emergency services declared the major incident phase over more than 24 hours after the embankment failure, work was beginning to isolate the damaged section of the canal and refloat boats still stranded either side of the emptied section of waterway.
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12/23/2025 - 07:53
U-turn lifts limit from £1m to £2.5m after protests and warnings that family farms were at risk
Ministers will increase the threshold for taxing inherited farmland from £1m to £2.5m after months of pressure from campaigners and MPs representing rural areas.
In a statement slipped out just before Christmas, the environment department announced the U-turn, which will apply from April when the tax kicks in.
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12/23/2025 - 07:12
No 10 has largely played down health secretary’s comments
The Treasury has published this explainer setting out in detail how the inheritance tax rules will apply to farms after today’s announcement.
When the government first announced its plan to extend inheritance tax to farms, it said that this would raise around £520m a year from 2028-29.
The changes we are implementing reflects the concerns that have been raised while preserving the majority of the revenue from reform to help cut debt and borrowing and fund public services. The costings for today’s announcement will be incorporated into the next OBR forecast.
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12/23/2025 - 04:00
As the number of the semi-aquatic creatures soars so can tensions. But the Swiss have a tried and tested system to calm the neighbours and restore harmony
“I hate beavers,” a woman tells the beaver hotline. Forty years ago she planted an oak tree in a small town in southern Zurich – now at the frontier of beaver expansion – and it has just been felled: gnawed by the large, semi-aquatic rodents as they enter their seasonal home-improvement mode.
The caller is one of 10 new people getting in touch each week at this time of year. Beavers, nature’s great engineers, can unleash mayhem during winter as they renovate their lodges and build up their dams. For people, this can mean flooding, sinkholes appearing in roads and trees being felled. A single incident can clock up 70,000 Swiss francs (£65,000) in damages.
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12/23/2025 - 01:00
Met Office says temperatures are tracking ahead of 2022 after year of heatwaves and drought, though late cold spell could yet intervene
Forecasters say 2025 is “more likely than not” to break the record for the hottest year in the UK since records began, after a summer of heatwaves and drought followed by a mild autumn.
According to the Met Office, the official forecaster, the mean temperature for 2025 is tracking well ahead of the previous highest year, set in 2022. However, a colder spell expected from Christmas until the new year makes it too close to call definitively.
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12/22/2025 - 21:53
Advocates say State Electricity Commission’s $650m Delburn windfarm will be a ‘new chapter’ for region previously home to Hazelwood coal power station
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Victoria will have its first publicly owned windfarm after the government’s electricity commission spent $650m on a 33-turbine project in the Latrobe valley.
Construction of the Delburn windfarm is due to start in early 2026 and climate advocates said the purchase of the project by the State Electricity Commission marked a key turning point for a region known for its privately owned coal plants.
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