Turning plastic trash into high-quality liquid products

Researchers have developed a new catalyst that can cleave plastic’s strong carbon-carbon, converting it into higher value products.
Brazilians rally to clean beaches amid outrage at Bolsonaro’s oil spill inaction

Nobody knows where the oil is from or why it keeps washing up on Brazilian beaches. “People in the north-east are cleaning the oil from the coast with their own hands while the federal government is immobile…”
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.