A rare Caribbean island where beaches aren’t the draw
Saba, a speck of a five-square-mile Caribbean island — a special municipality of the Netherlands — is left off many maps.
Our Unequal Earth: how environmental injustice divides the world
Five luminaries explain the concept of ‘environmental justice’ and reveal why, alongside the climate crisis, it is one of the most pressing issues of our time…
Paradise Beach, Eastern Cape, Southe Africa
Surfers all over the world know Jeffreys Bay, home to a legendary wave and a major international competition. A bit outside of town, across a causeway, is a quieter coast called Paradise Beach.
Sri Lanka wields mangroves, its tsunami shield, against climate change
Fifteen years after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, Sri Lanka’s government intends to keep expanding the island’s coastal green belt — the chain of mangrove swamps credited with limiting the damage and destruction of the deadly waves.
Shocked scientists find 400km of dead and damaged mangroves in Gulf of Carpentaria, Australia
A cascade of impacts including rising sea levels, heatwaves and back-to-back tropical cyclones has created 400km of dead and badly damaged mangroves in the Gulf of Carpentaria, a scientific monitoring trip has discovered.
Wahala: trouble in the Niger delta – photo essay
Covering 70,000 sq km (27,000 sq miles) of wetlands, the Niger delta used to be an incredibly rich ecosystem that contained one of the highest concentrations of biodiversity on the planet before the oil industry moved to the area.
South Atlantic humpback whales have rebounded from near extinction
After being hunted nearly to extinction in the early 20th century, a population of humpback whales in the southern Atlantic Ocean has almost entirely recovered, according to a new study.
Army Corps’ proposal for sand dunes in newest plan brings questions about cost, feasibility
A $32 billion plan for a coastal barrier system to protect the Houston-Galveston region, including 14-foot-high dune fields is seen as the latest innovation designed for Texas to engineer its way out of an existential crisis: a coastline gradually vanishing and increasingly vulnerable to massive storm surges and sea level rise.
Scientists rush to rescue sea turtles threatened by mysterious Brazil oil spill
Crude oil has been washing up along a 1,200-mile stretch of coastline of the Brazilian northeast for over a month, leaving more than 150 of Brazil’s postcard-perfect beaches covered in thick, sludgy black patches. It is also along this coastline that olive ridley and loggerhead sea turtles come to make their nests and lay their eggs.