Genetic selection could help farmers and breeders reduce greenhouse gases from crops, particularly rice cultivation, research by the University of Warwick and Cranfield University shows. 

Food systems are key drivers of the world’s most urgent challenges, from chronic diseases and rising inequality to accelerating climate change and biodiversity loss, according to the 2025 EAT-Lancet Commission on Healthy, Sustainable, and Just Food Systems. The new report finds that while the world produces enough food calories for everyone, nearly 3.7 billion people are without access to a healthy diet, meaningful wages, or a clean environment. At the same time, food production is a significant contributor to environmental degradation, accounting for nearly 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions and pushing the transgression of the planetary boundaries (climate change, biodiversity loss, land use change, freshwater consumption, nutrient pollution, and novel entities such as pesticides and antibiotics). This crisis of inequity and environmental harm threatens human health and the resilience of planet Earth.

A study comparing evacuation patterns in response to two 2024 hurricanes, Milton and Helene, found that people in coastal areas with frequent hurricane exposure were much more likely to travel out of harm’s way compared to people in inland areas who were more likely to stay put. Researchers at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health led the study. Their findings appear in the journal Environmental Research Letters.  

Wildfire disasters worldwide are growing notably in frequency and cost, according to a new study, with nearly half of the most damaging events over the last 44 years occurring in just the past decade, driven largely by increasingly extreme fire weather in vulnerable, densely populated regions. The findings, informed by an analysis of global reinsurance data and international disaster reports, reveal a concerning trend and highlight the need to adapt for a more fire-prone world. Humans have coexisted with wildfires for millennia, but climate change, land mismanagement, and expansion into flammable landscapes have intensified risks. However, despite widespread concerns, the authors of this new study say there has been little systematic global evidence on whether societally disastrous wildfires – events with major social and economic consequences – are becoming more frequent or costly. This may be due, in part, to the lack of long-term, global data on the socioeconomic effects of wildfires, with many governments worldwide keeping such information inaccessible to the public. To address this gap, Calum Cunningham and colleagues compiled and harmonized two global disaster databases – Munich Re’s NatCatSERVICE, one of the most comprehensive proprietary reinsurance datasets, and the publicly available Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) – to examine wildfire disasters from 1980 to 2023. These integrated datasets allowed the authors to evaluate, at a global scale, both societal impacts and financial losses from major wildfire disasters (i.e., those that caused 10 or more fatalities or were among the 200 largest wildfire-related economic losses relative to national GDP).

 

Cunningham et al. found that wildfire disasters have become markedly more burdensome worldwide over the last 40 years, with a pronounced acceleration beginning around 2015. Major economic disasters from wildfires have increased more than fourfold since 1980, with 43% of the 200 most damaging events occurring in just the past decade. Wildfire fatality events have also risen significantly, tripling in frequency since 1980. According to the findings, this escalation is driven by a combination of intensifying climate conditions that promote extreme fire weather and human factors such as expansion of the wildland–urban interface, land-use shifts, and long-term fire suppression policies. Although fire-prone biomes such as Mediterranean, temperate conifer, and boreal forests bear a disproportionate share of disasters, significant impacts are now also emerging in diverse regions, particularly along the margins of affluent urban areas where financial consequences are especially pronounced.

Catastrophic wildfires – those causing massive damage and soaring suppression costs – are increasing in frequency and intensity worldwide, a trend expected to worsen with climate change. In a Policy Forum, Robert Gray and colleagues use British Columbia (BC), Canada, as a case study of a government at a crossroads: continue reactive spending on suppression and recovery or invest in strategies to reduce future wildfire risk. “Although we focus on BC, this same tough question, along with lessons learned and our main recommendations, apply to regional and national governments in dozens of countries,” Gray et al. write. Over the past decade, BC has lost more than 7 million hectares to wildfire, with suppression and recovery costs topping $4.8 billion. Indirect costs, including health impacts and economic disruption, are far higher. Here, the authors argue that governments like BC are faced with an important policy choice; either continue to focus on response and recovery, or embrace proactive, long-term fire mitigation and prevention. Gray et al. highlight that scaling up wildfire mitigation requires public and political support for sustained, multidecade investments, along with cost-management strategies, yet governments continue to prioritize reactive spending despite evidence that prevention is far more cost-effective. They propose four recommendations: set clear resilience goals based on economic and risk analyses; foster public understanding and support for short-term sacrifices like prescribed burns; implement collaborative, hands-on landscape-scale interventions with scientists, Indigenous leaders, industry, and communities; and leverage public concern and scientific evidence to secure long-term political commitment and funding for preventive wildfire management.

A new study has found that UK Members of Parliament (MPs) and the public overestimated the time left to meet a critical deadline for limiting global warming. 

Researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA) surveyed a representative sample of the previous House of Commons and the public in Britain and other countries on their knowledge of a well-publicised statement from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).