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National Trust says these are ‘alarm signals we cannot ignore’ as climate breakdown puts pressure on wildlife
Extremes of weather have pushed nature to its limits in 2025, putting wildlife, plants and landscapes under severe pressure, an annual audit of flora and fauna has concluded.
Bookended by storms Éowyn and Bram, the UK experienced a sun-soaked spring and summer, resulting in fierce heath and moorland fires, followed by autumn floods.
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Planet’s oldest bee species and primary pollinators were under threat from deforestation and competition from ‘killer bees’
Stingless bees from the Amazon have become the first insects to be granted legal rights anywhere in the world, in a breakthrough supporters hope will be a catalyst for similar moves to protect bees elsewhere.
It means that across a broad swathe of the Peruvian Amazon, the rainforest’s long-overlooked native bees – which, unlike their cousins the European honeybees, have no sting – now have the right to exist and to flourish.
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Attenborough, 99, enthuses about tube-riding pigeons, foxes, parakeets and others in Wild London for the BBC
Filming the wildlife of London requires an intrepid, agile presenter, willing to lie on damp grass after dark to encounter hedgehogs, scale heights to hold a peregrine falcon chick, and stake out a Tottenham allotment to get within touching distance of wary wild foxes.
Step forward Sir David Attenborough, who spent his 100th summer seeking out the hidden nature of his home city for an unusually personal and intimate BBC documentary.
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In 2014 the Malaysian Airlines jet vanished over the Indian Ocean. Now the team that located Shackleton’s Endurance is looking again with the latest undersea robots
More than a decade after Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 went missing after veering thousands of miles off course, its location remains unknown.
The Malaysian government has promised to pay a private company, Ocean Infinity, $70m (£56m) to search for the plane on a “no find, no fee” basis.
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Old Sulehay Forest, Northamptonshire: Distant church bells are about all I can hear as I stand below a 500-year-old small-leaved lime – a tree that may be making an unlikely comeback
On a bright winter’s day, I stand at the centre of a ring of multi‑stemmed small-leaved limes. Their gnarled bases are furred with moss and feathered with sprays of epicormic growth. Lime trees are notoriously hard to age, but this one is probably more than 500 years old, shaped and reshaped by centuries of coppicing, now with a vast canopy stretching nearly 20 metres.
Looking up, I marvel at the intricate fractal lattice of branches and twigs of each tree. Every stem holds its own space, the crowns kept neatly apart from their neighbours – a quiet phenomenon known as crown shyness. This seems somehow appropriate, given how quiet the woodland is. It feels emptied, with only the rush of a chill wind numbing my bare fingertips, a peal of distant church bells, and a robin offering its muted winter song.
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Spring-like weather experienced by many Americans to end, while heavy snow in Japan brings deadly conditions
A week of extremes in the US as Arctic air plunges southwards across many states, sweeping away record-breaking warmth from last weekend. With low pressure in the west drawing up warm, humid air from the Gulf of Mexico, much of the south and midwest basked in spring-like weather this weekend with temperatures widely an extraordinary 15-20C above normal for late December.
This week, however, most people will ditch their summer clothes for hats and scarves as a ridge pressure builds across the west, allowing for a polar air mass to dive southward, bringing freezing temperatures and the risk of snow.
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With the snow line edging higher, 186 French ski resorts have shut, while global heating threatens dozens more
When Céüze 2000 ski resort closed at the end of the season in 2018, the workers assumed they would be back the following winter. Maps of the pistes were left stacked beside a stapler; the staff rota pinned to the wall.
Six years on, a yellowing newspaper dated 8 March 2018 sits folded on its side, as if someone has just flicked through it during a quiet spell. A half-drunk bottle of water remains on the table.
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When the hot winds hit Roebourne, as many as 16 people pile into Yindjibarndi elder Lyn Cheedy’s home – one of the few with air conditioning
Few places are more exposed to extreme weather than Roebourne, a tiny cyclone-prone town on the Western Australian coast, where public housing residents endure 50C heat without air conditioning.
Lyn Cheedy, a Yindjibarndi elder, takes her grandson to the pool most afternoons.
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Trump ratcheted up his questionable claims about the environment and how to deal, if at all, with the threats to it
In the past decade at the forefront of US politics, Donald Trump has unleashed a barrage of unusual, misleading or dubious assertions about the climate crisis, which he most famously called a “hoax”.
This year has seen Trump ratchet up his often questionable claims about the environment and how to deal, if at all, with the threats to it. In a year littered with lies and wild declarations, these are the five that stood out as the most startling.
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Action began in January, before an all-out strike in March. For locals, the flytipping, vermin, maggots and mess are taking a huge environmental and emotional toll
It’s an icy cold winter morning, and 80-year-old Mohammed Bashir is armed with a broom, tackling the large pile of rubbish that has accumulated outside his terraced house in Small Heath, Birmingham.
This has become an almost daily activity for Bashir since the city’s bin strike started 50 weeks ago and, like many in the city, he is starting to lose patience.
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pub. Bowtie Press, UK, 2005
pub. Souvenir Press, London, 2002
First published by Henston Ltd, 1988, new edition 1994. Later edition published by Interpret Publishing, Dorking, Surrey UK.
pub. Henston, Guildford UK, 1985, revised 1987, 1988, 1994.
pub. Crossing Press CA 1994
