Climate, in brief

The World Meteorological Organization, the UN agency that tracks weather and the air, published its yearly report on air quality and climate on Monday. [1]

Its finding: rules in many rich countries have cut what comes out of chimneys and exhaust pipes, and wildfire smoke is growing as a source of pollution anyway. [1]

The agency says meeting the World Health Organization's guidelines for clean air will get harder, because extreme fires are becoming more likely. [1]

PM2.5 - soot particles small enough to pass out of the lungs and into the blood - ran above its long-run average in northern Canada, parts of Russia and west-central Africa in 2025, all because of fires. [1]

North-west Spain was a hot spot after exceptional late-summer fires. Europe had extreme heat and destructive fires this year in Spain, France and Greece. [1]

A study quoted in the report found extreme fire-smoke events have tripled worldwide since the 1990s. It links them to nearly 100,000 extra deaths a year between 2010 and 2018. [1]

Particles from a fire are especially harmful because they arrive with a load of toxic chemicals, the agency's scientific officer Lorenzo Labrador said. Breathing them inflames the whole body. [1]

The live example is Borneo, the island shared by Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei. About 200,000 hectares of forest and farmland have burned on the Indonesian side since early July. [2]

The smoke has crossed borders to Singapore, Manila and Kuala Lumpur. It is the region's worst haze in more than a decade. [2]

Forecasters expect this El Nino - a periodic warming of the Pacific that shifts weather worldwide - to be the largest in at least 1,000 years, and a UN agency says it could push 50 million people into acute hunger. [6][7]

These fires burn in peat - waterlogged ground where dead plants have piled up for thousands of years without rotting. Drained and dried, it smoulders underground, and hand tools and portable pumps are what volunteers have to fight it with. [2][3]

A hectare of deep peat can hold more than 6,000 tonnes of carbon, about what 4,800 cars put out in a year. Burning releases it fast. [2]

Malaysia lifted an emergency declaration in Serian, a district of Sarawak state on Borneo, after air quality readings dropped back down. [4]

None of this is a one-off. Canada's 2023 fire season burned 15.1 million hectares, about seven times the average of the previous twenty years. [5]

It released 554 million tonnes of carbon, roughly 23% of everything the world's wildfires emitted that year. Most of it, 423 million tonnes, came out of the soil rather than the trees. [5]

Why it matters. Watch whether the Borneo fires are still burning when this El Nino peaks around November, because that is what decides whether the smoke season ends or runs on into the new year. [2][6]

China has paused approvals for new battery storage factories while officials review how much production capacity the country already has and has planned, the financial outlet Cailianshe reported. Projects that have not broken ground are on hold; those already under construction carry on. [8] The worry is too many factories chasing the same buyers. Chinese solar and electric car makers went through that squeeze, and solar firms moved into batteries when panel profits collapsed. [8] From 1 September China also began charging a 2% tax on lithium-ion batteries, ending an eleven-year exemption. [9]

Why it matters. China makes most of the world's grid batteries, so a pause in Beijing's approvals office is a decision about how cheap storage will be everywhere else. It lands on new entrants hardest, because the firms that already have concrete poured keep their place in the queue.

The heavy oil that powers most of the world's cargo fleet is heading into a shortage. Refineries have been damaged by strikes in Russia and the Middle East, and those still running are choosing to make diesel, petrol and jet fuel, which pay better. [10] Energy Aspects, a consultancy, forecasts a shortfall of 218,000 barrels a day this quarter. The main shipping fuel is up 76% since the Iran war began, to just under $825 a tonne in Singapore. [10]

Why it matters. Ships carry almost everything that is traded, so their fuel bill ends up inside freight rates and then inside prices in shops. Asia is worst placed, because Singapore imports more than half of the roughly one million barrels a day it sells.

The Dangote refinery near Lagos, the largest in Africa, is raising money on the stock market. Its owner, the Nigerian businessman Aliko Dangote, is looking to raise $1.6 billion by offering 4.1 billion shares at 525 naira each, and the offer opens on 14 September. [11] The plant matters well beyond Nigeria: it runs at 650,000 barrels a day and has been pushing out more diesel, petrol and jet fuel while its output of heavy ship fuel falls. [10]

Why it matters. This is the same switch that is starving the shipping fleet, seen from the refinery's side, and it is being rewarded with money from investors. Nigerian savers are being invited to buy into a plant whose profits currently come from a war.

Eight Indonesian airports stayed closed on Monday because of ash from Anak Krakatau, a volcano in the strait between Java and Sumatra. Jakarta's main airport was shut until 6pm local time. Ash reached 6,000 metres on the Java side and 15,000 metres on the Sumatra side. The disaster agency told people to wear masks outdoors, and schools in Jakarta and Lampung switched to remote lessons. The volcano grew out of the crater left by Krakatoa, whose 1883 eruption killed more than 36,000 people. [12]

Why it matters. It is a second kind of dirty air over the same country in the same week, and it shows how quickly ordinary life stops when the sky is unbreathable: no flights, no school.

Divers off Jeju island in South Korea report that its soft corals are slumping for the second time in two years. Soft corals have no hard skeleton and hold themselves up with internal fluid pressure, so a change in the water makes them sag and break off. About half of one cluster off the islet of Beomseom has been struggling for months. [13] Marine heatwaves around Korea have grown almost four times longer over the past decade, to 83.3 days. [13]

Why it matters. The colonies are a national monument inside a UNESCO-listed biosphere reserve and the nursery for much of Jeju's sea life, and one researcher says each round of damage leaves them less able to recover than the last.

A study in Nature Communications used three decades of data - 6,659 catch records covering 1,246 species in 254 regions - to test what extreme ocean conditions do to fishing. Hot water alone hurts. Water low in plankton, the tiny drifting life that feeds everything else, also hurts. When the two arrive together the chance of a very poor catch rises sharply, most of all in tropical seas. [14] The species hit hardest are the ones people rely on for food. [14]

Why it matters. It lands on the countries with the least money to absorb a bad year, and it explains why fish stocks sometimes crash in a season that looked survivable on temperature alone.

A study in Nature Health went through 30 million US death records over eleven years and worked out how many people air conditioning kept alive in extreme heat: about 5,267 a year, or nearly 58,000 between 2010 and 2020. [15] The same machines feed the warming that makes the heat. Most of the electricity running them comes from burning fossil fuels, and the UN expects greenhouse gas from cooling to rise from 4.5 billion to 7.2 billion tonnes a year within 25 years. [15]

Why it matters. UN officials estimate about half a million people die of heat worldwide each year, so nobody is arguing for fewer air conditioners. The researchers found more than half the cases they looked at were offices cooled so hard that workers wear jumpers in summer.

A divided US federal appeals court ruled that the country's constitution gives people no right to clean drinking water, and no right to accurate information from public officials either. The ruling upholds the dismissal of a lawsuit brought over lead-contaminated tap water in Jackson, Mississippi. [16] The court did not decide whether that water was safe. It decided that the claim had no basis in the constitution, which ends this route to a remedy. [16]

Why it matters. Lead damages the developing brain, and the people who drank the water are left with the state and city bodies that ran the system in the first place.

New Mexico, once the largest producer of uranium ore in the United States, banned new leasing of state-owned land for uranium mining on Friday. The state land commissioner, Stephanie Garcia Richard, signed the order in Santa Fe. The state has hundreds of abandoned uranium shafts, two active leases and no working mines. [17] It does not stop mining on federal land inside the state, and the US government has been pushing to restart domestic uranium production, adding one New Mexico project to a fast-track permitting list. Two companies still aim to start producing there next year. [17]

Why it matters. Nuclear power needs fuel, and the fuel comes out of somebody's ground; this is a state government deciding it will not be its own.

The outdoor clothing company Patagonia joined conservation and Native American groups in suing the US president over the shrinking of Bears Ears National Monument in southern Utah. A proclamation signed in July cut 91% of the protected area, more than 1.2 million acres of red-rock canyons full of archaeological sites, and cut a second Utah monument, Grand Staircase-Escalante, by nearly 1.7 million acres. [18] The case opens a wider legal fight over whether a president has the power to shrink such sites at all. [18]

Why it matters. Protection that one signature can remove is a weaker thing than it looks, and the answer will apply to every national monument, not just these two.

Brooke Rollins, who runs the US Department of Agriculture, and her husband Mark Rollins, an oil and gas executive, together hold as much as $2.5 million in fossil fuel investments, in disclosures filed in July. At least $1 million is in a partnership with oil and gas interests in Iraqi Kurdistan, and $1 million more in a Texas venture. [19] US diesel prices hit record highs this week, and her department has cut support for cheaper renewable energy on farms. [19]

Why it matters. Farmers are paying record diesel prices and higher fertiliser prices caused by the war, and the official whose department is meant to help them is invested in the industry selling the fuel.

A California start-up called Deep Fission is preparing to lower a nuclear reactor down a borehole in south-east Kansas. A mile of rock is meant to do the job of the thick concrete dome around a normal reactor, and the weight of the water above supplies the pressure. That removes two of the most expensive parts of a nuclear plant. The reactor is nine metres tall, less than a metre wide, and designed to make 15 megawatts. [20] The US energy department approved the safety design this month. [20]

Why it matters. The parts are all ordinary - a pressurised water reactor, an oil-industry borehole, a geothermal heat exchanger - and one outside engineer says the hard bit is proving they work together, and that nobody can easily reach the reactor to inspect it.

Projects that put solar panels and grid batteries on the same site pulled in a record $25 billion in the first half of 2026, according to BloombergNEF. That is nearly double the previous record, set in the second half of 2025. [21] The pairing exists because solar's weakness is timing: nothing at night, a flood of power on sunny afternoons. A battery on the same site lets the project behave like a plant that can be turned up or down. Nearly half the storage the United States added last quarter sat beside a solar farm. [21][22]

Why it matters. It is the clearest sign yet that batteries have stopped being an add-on and become part of how a solar farm is designed and financed.

Steel, cement and chemical plants need heat of several hundred degrees, and they still mostly get it by burning gas or coal. A Boston company, Electrified Thermal Solutions, is selling a stack of firebricks that conduct electricity. The bricks heat up when cheap power is available, hold the heat, then release it as hot air into a furnace or boiler. [23] The system stores heat at up to 1,800C and can deliver anything from 200C upwards. [23]

Why it matters. Industrial heat is one of the hardest parts of the energy system to run on electricity. A store that soaks up power when it is cheapest also helps a grid carrying a lot of midday solar.

Skyven Technologies, a company with sites in Texas and Antwerp, says its industrial heat pump has reached a sustained coefficient of performance of 8.0 at its Dallas demonstration centre. That means eight units of heat delivered for every unit of electricity used, because the machine moves heat rather than making it. The centre managed 6.5 when it opened in November 2025. [24] Skyven says 8.0 is about ten times better than a conventional boiler, and the machine lifts heat from 38C to 185C. [24]

Why it matters. Factory steam is a large and quiet share of world emissions, and a machine this efficient changes the sum a plant manager does when deciding whether to keep the gas boiler.

Researchers at the University of Exeter reviewed the studies published between 2015 and 2026 on building solar cells into the bodywork of vehicles. Their conclusion is that the point is not adding driving range, which is small, but keeping the battery topped up and in good condition when the car is parked. [25] They also argue that the industry needs its own test standard, because existing solar ratings are measured on flat panels held still, and a car body is curved and moving. [25]

Why it matters. Battery replacement is the largest single cost hanging over a used electric car, so a technology that slows the wear changes what the car is worth years later.

Rescuers pulled Chandika Kumari Shrestha alive out of her collapsed four-storey house in Betrawati, ten days after the flood that buried the Nepali village. She had survived in a narrow pocket of air among water and mud, and her family had already begun the eleven-day mourning ritual. Police heard a voice calling for help while walking around the ruin. [26] More than 1,300 people died in the floods across Nepal and thousands are still unaccounted for. [26]

Why it matters. Betrawati was among the worst-hit places, and rescue teams there are still finding people, alive and dead, in the same rubble.

The molecules that make soap foam and stop oil and water separating are called surfactants, and they are in detergent, paint, food and cosmetics. Most are built from oil. A team writing in Communications Chemistry, a Nature journal, built a computer method that sorts plant proteins by the shape they take when they settle on a surface. [27] Sequence alone did not predict how a protein behaves. Splitting each settled protein into blocks did, and the method found hundreds that work like the oil-based molecules. [27]

Why it matters. It is a screening shortcut rather than a product, and it matters because finding plant replacements for these molecules has until now been mostly trial and error.

A wind turbine lasts 20 to 30 years, and the large number installed in the early 2000s are reaching the end of that. Solar panels last longer, up to about 40 years, but the earliest ones are old now too. Unless the parts are reused or the materials recovered, both become electronic waste. [28] There is a catch in how recycling is measured: targets are set by weight, so a recycler can hit them on the heavy glass, frames and cables and leave the solar cell alone. [28]

Why it matters. A UK waste company estimates about 350 million tonnes of electronic waste is already sitting in landfill worldwide, and the equipment now coming out of service was built when nobody was planning for this day.