Protesters at World Bank and IMF meetings, along with new research, are railing against a globalized system that fails to produce enough food and has massive climate impacts.

This month, Friends of the Earth and more than a dozen advocacy groups published a report tracking the profits of the world’s largest food companies. “It is not, in fact, a food system,” Conant said. “It’s an agribusiness financial complex.”

“Debt repayment is actively siphoning off the fiscal space countries need to fund the very transition required to survive climate change,” (...) “The protesters are calling out the architecture that demands austerity in the Global South to maintain liquidity in the North.”

“This is a decision to decide. An important one, and not the same thing as protection,”

“On a question that has divided this parliament before, and in a month when there is considerable external interest in Greenland’s minerals, Inatsisartut spoke with one voice,” Poulsen said. “Every member present voted for it.”

While collecting data from nearly 1,700 reefs worldwide, we found over a dozen more sites that had way more fish than expected. These reefs are examples of “bright spots” – places where nature is exceeding expectations given their environmental and social pressures, such as overfishing, habitat destruction, and climate change.

So what are bright spots and why do they matter for conservation? Our new study offers some answers.

In light of the planetary polycrisis, it is time to challenge the dominant strand of Western thought that asserts only humans possess rights and that other species exist solely for human benefit. [...] This form of democratic self-organization is based on the idea that all species and nature as a whole have rights.

From occupied Jerusalem to the occupied West Bank and beyond, Israel uses archaeology to rewrite history and displace Palestinians from their land.

These shades reduce the amount of light reaching the corals by around 60 percent. Although they don’t cool the water, they can protect the corals from UV damage.

Neither the shaded corals nor controls died during the heatwave, despite it being the second highest on record. The corals under the underwater umbrellas, regained some of their colour once sheltered by their new shading and lost less colour than expected during the heat stress event.

“Solutions like shading can offer temporary protection on small scales,”

A report from Durham and Lancaster universities describes the US military as “one of the largest climate polluters in history, consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more CO2e (carbon-dioxide equivalent) than most countries.”

Migrants and those who help them are living in a kind of state of exception, where European law has been suspended and prolonged arbitrary police and military rule prevails.

Researchers [...] have analysed precipitation and river flow records in more than 10,000 rivers between 1951 and 2020. In nearly one-third of rivers, they found that flow trends did not match with the changes observed in rainfall and snow.

Made from fungal networks cultivated using agricultural waste and water, the material has already met key international safety benchmarks – marking an important step toward real‑world use.

By now you probably know what’s happened to the musician Macklemore.

You have an American billionaire — who’s been prosecuted for being part of an illegal sex ring in his off time — deciding that a musician can’t say anything to support a people who are being genocided with American weapons.

The zero-emission, multipurpose solar-powered platform for sustainable agriculture.

In Madre de Dios, in the Peruvian Amazon, thousands of people depend on gold mining, while the spread of mercury and deforestation are transforming the country’s most biodiverse tropical forest. In La Pampa, one of the region’s main gold mining hubs, a formalized artisanal mining operation is trying to prove that another way of mining is possible. While facing roadblocks, violence, informal economies, and government neglect, it seeks to produce “clean gold” using mercury-free technologies. Through the daily lives of workers, merchants, and small-scale miners, the film explores the tensions between survival, pollution, and legitimacy in one of the Amazon’s most complex extractive economies.

• On Jan. 8, 2026, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians Tribal Council unanimously passed a resolution recognizing the inherent legal rights of the Longperson (Ganvhidv Asgaya), an interconnected waterway system whose headwaters rise in the Great Smoky Mountains and end in the sea.

• The resolution was brought forward by the NAIWA Daughters, a group of Indigenous girls aged 10 to 17, making it the first all-female-led rights-of-nature effort in the U.S., and only the second such youth-led resolution passed by a Tribal nation.

• The effort followed 18 months of grassroots organizing and built on the foundations of the rights-of-nature movement, which holds that ecosystems and natural entities should have legal standing to exist and flourish.

• The Longperson resolution grants the waterway five inherent rights and has already spurred related action, including a separate tribal resolution to raise funds for removing the Ela Dam.

The assumption has long been that throughout most of history the concentration of power and inequality both increase with population size, because people lacked the wherewithal to get things done without top-down, coercive leadership. These two studies [1, 2] showed that population size matters but is not deterministic. In both studies, it only explained around a quarter of the variability in equality or degree of autocracy.

In addition, in our data we see evidence for democratic practices in other parts of the world than ancient Greece and republican Rome at roughly the same time, or maybe even slightly earlier. These two civilizations may have had the biggest influence on modern society, which is a function of how records were kept and stored and transmitted over time, and we don’t mean to diminish the importance of those places. But they’re not unique as people have presumed. And it’s certainly not true that every place else was organized autocratically.

Finally, we show that everything did not change with farming. This is a very entrenched argument: the idea that with farming and sedentary life, everything changed rapidly, and that then we were on an inevitable course of increasing scale, increasing concentration of power, and so on. Our data don’t support that. It’s not that agriculture wasn’t a key innovation. It was, and it did have long-term impacts. But they weren’t always immediate or the same.

I think those are the key points: We are finding evidence that does not conform to very longstanding and entrenched views, not just in archaeology, but across the social sciences.