Migration, Monarchs and Insurance
Meltdowns
River Rights and Legal Lagoons
Coral and Ocean Clean-ups
Protection, Plastic, Paralysis
Geopolitics and Genocide
Bill McKibben’s Letter from America
Sacred Land and Spiritual Sanctuaries
Available Now: Voices of the Earth plus news, books, and more…
Every time we turn on the news or open a newspaper it seems that we are confronted by disaster. Headlines that scream outrage or take great delight in focusing attention on all that is bad in the world. From the conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan; rising attacks on democracy and science; and the backtracking from commitments to combat climate change and protect biodiversity. In the face of all this, it can seem that there is very little to make us hopeful.
Yet quietly, persistently, doggedly, there are individuals, organisations, businesses and even some governments taking the kind of action to protect our environment that a few years ago we wouldn’t have dared to dream about. These are environmental defenders in the very broadest sense. From Indigenous peoples standing up and fighting for their rights to be recognised and to protect their homes and their environment, to the innovators creating new ways for us to reduce our impact on the planet, and the conservationists helping species better cope with the changes we have made to their environment.
All of this feels like it is happening despite not because of our political leaders, but as the ‘voices’ in this magazine remind us, we have the power both to change ourselves and to change the systems that guide us. As someone with a legal and international policy background, my sense is that every day we discover or grant ourselves new tools, like the recent International Court of Justice opinion on climate liability. Cynthia Houniuhi, President of the Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change and one of those who brought the case to the ICJ, is clear that it is not a call to litigate, but instead a call to unite in action. Instead of apportioning blame, the ruling affirms that all governments have a shared responsibility to protect our common home. The opinion also confirms that the human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment is inherent in the enjoyment of other human rights. In other words, human rights and protection of the environment are two sides of the same coin.
The economics are also starting to stack up: we are seeing renewables reach parts of the world that have been almost entirely excluded from development, opening up opportunities for better health, education and environmental outcomes. Despite the attempts to curtail their growth, renewables are now the cheaper option 90% of the time and made up 92.5% of all new electricity capacity additions and 74% of electricity generation growth in 2024. As renewables become cheaper and easier to make and install, this will only grow. With these tools we have the power to step outside the rules and change the game, but to do so we need to pay attention and support those voices that are championing good. I hope these stories of defenders of nature will inspire you to see what is possible and what we can achieve — and are achieving — when we really put our mind to it.
Clare Hamilton, Deputy Chief Executive, RSGS
RSGS, Lord John Murray House, 15-19 North Port, Perth, PH1 5LU tel: 01738 455050 email: enquiries@rsgs.org www.rsgs.org
registered in Scotland no SC015599
Research carried out by Ordnance Survey (OS) ahead of National Map Reading Week in July found that 52% of UK adults believe maps are vital. Getting from A to B (55%), discovering new places we wouldn’t have otherwise known (48%) and helping us explore the outdoors safely (45%) were the top three reasons why maps remain relevant.
OS found that 84% of adults claimed they could read maps well. Almost half of respondents (48%) use at least one digital map app (such as OS Maps). Younger people (aged 18-24) are the most likely to use digital maps (67%), with only 2% of that age group regularly using paper maps. Among older people (aged over 65), 18% said they use digital maps, while 27% prefer to use paper maps.
See getoutside.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/guides/map-reading-week for inspiration and guidance on map reading.
On 13th September, the Fair Maid’s House is taking part in Doors Open Day 2025, on the theme of ‘Heritage of Routes, Networks and Connections’. The RSGS Collections Team will explore items from our diverse and riveting collection of artefacts and maps that illustrate our architectural heritage, in Scotland and abroad. RSGS Writer-in-Residence Jo Woolf will be signing copies of her new book Voices of the Earth.
13th September
RSGS has signed up for the first time to a UK-wide programme promoting legacy giving. Remember A Charity Week runs from 8th to 14th September 2025.
Legacy gifts have always been an integral way to support RSGS, and have resulted in several of our offices and most of our physical collections, as well as providing the resources for us to continue operating and to remain an independent charity. Indeed, we owe much of the past 141 years of RSGS’s existence to the gifts people have made in their Wills.
Please consider helping us in this way. You can follow our social media, check out the video on our legacy page on our website, or contact Mike at our HQ if you’d like to discuss it further. And do keep an eye out for an online explanatory session on tax efficient giving from Azets Wealth Management at 11am on 15th September.
RSGS: a better way to see the
Starting in September, we have a brilliant line-up for our 2025–26 Inspiring People talks programme, all with incredible stories to share. Audiences at our 13 Local Groups across Scotland (Aberdeen, Ayr, Borders, Dumfries, Dundee, Dunfermline, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Helensburgh, Inverness, Kirkcaldy, Perth and Stirling) will hear in person from leading explorers, photographers, communicators and scientists.
The first talks of the programme will take place in the week commencing 15th September, with polar adventurer Preet Chandi speaking in Kirkcaldy, Glasgow and Edinburgh, reflecting on three solo expeditions in Antarctica and earning four Guinness World Records.
Other speakers in the programme before Christmas include writer and artist Andrew Barr, presenting Atlas of Scotland, a creative project that uses hand-drawn maps and illustrations to tell Scotland’s story; photographer Quintin Lake, talking about his photographic journey around the coast of Britain; presenter George McGavin, on switching to a career in broadcasting
after 25 years in academia, in order to reach a wider audience about biodiversity; cartographer James Cheshire, considering how maps have inspired some of the greatest scientific discoveries and also led to terrible atrocities; adventurer Louis Hall, reflecting on crossing the Ligurian Alps on horseback; Dr Yoseph Araya, sharing how we can harmonise our relationship with plants, nature and one another to address the environmental challenges we face today; endurance runner Jamie Ramsay, talking about his solo, unsupported run spanning 17,000 kilometres from Vancouver to Buenos Aires; documentary-maker Sarah Roberts, taking the audience to Iceland to investigate what this country is doing to confront the climate emergency; mountaineer Stephen Venables, considering his own adventures in South Georgia, along with its history of exploration; geologist Luisa Hendry, giving a geological tour of Scotland; explorer and filmmaker Jude Kriwald, sharing his remarkable journey cycling solo from England to India; Earth scientist and presenter Dr Adrian Hall, exploring the scenery of the Scottish Highlands; and writer and climber Anna Fleming, sharing the journey behind her book Time on Rock, tracing her development as a climber on the diverse crags of the UK.
Tickets for all Inspiring People talks for 2025–26 are now available through www.rsgs.org/events. Tickets are free for RSGS members, students and under-18s, and £15 for general admission. Book now to secure your ticket for what promises to be an exceptional line-up of speakers.
Margaret Wilkes will be known to so many of our members as a collections expert and Board member, but many will not realise how long she has been involved in our work. Margaret has volunteered in strategic, philanthropic and practical roles for RSGS for the past 39 years, and alongside a passion for the subject she has an encyclopaedic knowledge of maps and a remarkable recall for so much of RSGS’s recent past. She has served as a Trustee, collections lead, and Local Groups Chair, and has been a lifelong champion of all things geographical.
In between finding the time to travel to Perth most weeks, Margaret has also coauthored, with Chris Fleet and Professor Charles Withers, exquisite books on Scottish maps: Scotland: Mapping the Nation and Scotland: Mapping the Islands. In both cases, she gifted her royalties from these books to RSGS to help towards volunteer expenses. Margaret was presented with the Scottish Geographical Medal at a small gathering at RSGS HQ on 18th August 2025. As our Chief Executive said in his speech on the day, “It is hard to think of a volunteer who has committed more of their time, energy and thought to the Society and to Geography and for such an extended time.”
In June, we had a great turnout at the Fair Maid’s House for our Discovery Day themed on the 250th anniversary of the discovery of South Georgia. We were joined by RSGS Writer-inResidence Jo Woolf, Margaret Wilkes with the RSGS Collections Team, broadcaster Dr Vanessa Collingridge, and climber Stephen Venables. Each speaker had half an hour to give their perspective and delve into the rich history of Antarctic exploration.
RSGS Chief Executive Mike Robinson signing the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s Fellows Register, with RSE Education Vice-President Dr Janet Brown looking on. See The Geographer, summer 2025, page 3 for details.
In a new record high for clean electricity, official figures from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero show that wind, solar, hydro and biomass generated 50.4% of UK power in 2024, up from 46.5% in 2023, due to record high levels of wind and bioenergy power. At the same time fossil fuels fell to a record low share of 31.8% of generation; oil production fell by 8.8% and natural gas production was down 10%.
Energy minister Michael Shanks said, “This clean, secure, homegrown power is exactly what we want more of through our clean power mission, further reducing our exposure to the rollercoaster of fossil fuel markets.”
Meanwhile, renewable energy accounted for nearly 40% of electricity generation in China in the first half of 2025, with additional wind and solar power generation exceeding the increase in total electricity consumption, while renewable energy accounted for 92% of China’s new power capacity installations during this period.
In May, Business Minister Richard Lochhead MSP visited Fife College to learn how it has delivered the UK’s first geospatial qualification in a college. The new Geospatial Foundation Skills course provides an 18-week introduction to GIS and Earth Observation, emphasising core skills, with each student undertaking a practical project with industry.
Bruce Gittings, Chair of AGI Scotland and Senior Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, said, “This course is entirely complementary to what is offered at university level. We have seen that it can attract school leavers, as well as those with interesting backgrounds and experiences coming back into employment or seeking a career change.”
Researchers led by Takuzo Aida, a materials scientist who heads the Emergent Soft Matter Function Research Group at the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science in Wako, Japan, are tackling the problem of microplastics in the ocean with a new material that biodegrades in saltwater. This new plastic is a culmination of Aida’s three decades of pioneering work as an expert in supramolecular polymers. His team set out to discover a combination of compounds that would create a supramolecular material with good mechanical strength, but that could break down quickly under the right conditions into non-toxic compounds and elements, which could then be further processed by naturally occurring bacteria. The team’s experiments showed that the material disintegrated in salt water after just a few hours.
See www.riken.jp/en/news_pubs/research_news/rr/20250327_1 for more information.
At the end of July, NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) launched a first-of-its-kind high-resolution satellite to map Earth’s changing ice and land surfaces in unprecedented detail. The NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) satellite has two radar instruments, operating at different wavelengths, to produce a dynamic, threedimensional view of Earth.
NISAR will scan nearly all of the planet twice every 12 days, and measure vertical physical shifts on the ground that are as small as one centimetre, even through clouds and at night. It will help with responses to disasters such as floods, earthquakes and landslides, by providing up-todate information about how Earth has behaved, and with infrastructure monitoring and agricultural management.
Duncan Moss FRICS, a Principal Geospatial Consultant at Ordnance Survey (OS), has been honoured with an OBE for services to technical consultancy and government resilience. From major sporting events to international summits, his geospatial expertise has played an essential role in government planning.
Duncan has worked closely with a wide range of UK public sector partners and international allies to convene a collaborative community of interest focused on using the power of geography to deliver a shared common operating picture and situational awareness. He is a strong supporter of Mapping for Emergencies (www. ordnancesurvey.co.uk/contact-us/mapping-for-emergencies). He is involved with the Scottish National Centre for Resilience (ncr.glasgow.ac.uk), which focuses on improving countrywide resilience to natural hazards, and with Scotland’s Dynamic Coast (www.dynamiccoast.com), a collaborative partnership concerned with increasing coastal erosion, sea level rise and coastal flood impacts caused by climate change.
Almost 92% of the world’s population now has access to electricity, up from 87% in 2010. But only 74% (up from 64% in 2015) has access to clean cooking fuels and technologies, with around 2.1 billion people still dependent on polluting fuels such as charcoal, dung and wood.
These are among the findings of the 2025 progress report on Goal 7 of the Sustainable Development Goals (access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all). Other key findings are that the share of renewable energy in total energy consumption has increased; energy intensity has decreased; and installed renewable energy generating capacity has almost doubled.
See trackingsdg7.esmap.org for more information, including the full report and data by country.
Wilson Jamieson and his daughter Catherine Lowe visited RSGS in July with a copy of Wilson’s undergraduate dissertation on Roy’s map of Scotland: An assessment of the Accuracy with which Roy portrayed the human landscape
Wilson, an Aberdeen University Geography student from 1965 to 1969, supervised by Dr Jeffrey Stone, was looking for a long-term home for his publication.
Roy’s map had many admirers, but at that time no one had tried to assess how accurate it was. Wilson’s study compared it with local maps of the same period. In 1968 Roy’s map was in the British Museum in London and only black and white copies were available in Scotland. So, he had to travel to London to view the original maps and obtain colour copies for his research.
Wilson went on to become a Modern Studies teacher in Stirling and then a teacher training lecturer at Jordanhill College of Education.
RSGS University Medals are awarded to the outstanding graduating honours geography students in Scottish universities. In June, a presentation was made to Abby McAllister, who graduated from Aberdeen University with an honours degree in BSc Geography and a Grade Point Average which placed her at the top of her cohort in terms of overall academic performance. Abby’s final year dissertation, for which she received a First Class mark, was an investigation into livelihood choices and the sustainability of the fishing industry in northeast Scotland.
In May, for its 150th episode, the Access to Inspiration podcast (www.accesstoinspiration.org) hosted by polar explorer and motivational speaker Sue Stockdale FRSGS featured a compelling conversation with one of the world’s most impactful conservation philanthropists, Kris Tompkins, former CEO of Patagonia and President of Tompkins Conservation. Together with her late husband Doug Tompkins (co-founder of The North Face and Esprit), Kris has helped create 15 national parks and two marine parks, protecting over 15 million acres of land and 30 million acres of ocean in South America. Their work is now at the forefront of rewilding efforts, restoring ecosystems and reintroducing species such as jaguars, giant river otters, and the endangered huemul deer.
Jennifer McDermott, an Associated Press Climate and Environment team member, has reported on a breakthrough for tidal energy, in which Scotland and the United Kingdom are global leaders. SAE Renewables’ MeyGen site in the Inner Sound of the Pentland Firth has been operating for more than six years. Four turbines produce 1.5 megawatts each, enough electricity collectively to power up to 7,000 homes annually.
Tidal energy technologies are still in the early days of their commercial development. Keeping a large turbine in place in the harsh sea environment is a challenge. Achieving six years in the water with constant operations is a “very significant milestone” that bodes well for the future of tidal energy, said Rémi Gruet, CEO of the trade association Ocean Energy Europe.
See apnews.com/article/tidal-energy-turbine-marine-meygen-scotlandffff3a7082205b33b612a1417e1ec6d6 for details.
Reforestation is a prominent climate change mitigation strategy, but available global maps of reforestation potential are widely criticised and highly variable, which limits their ability to provide robust estimates of the locations and total area of opportunity.
Researchers behind a new study published in the journal Nature Communications (www.nature.com/articles/s41467025-59799-8) have worked to develop global maps that address common critiques, build on a review of 89 reforestation maps created at multiple scales, and present eight reforestation scenarios with varying objectives, including providing ecosystem services, minimising social conflicts, and delivering government policies.
Across scenarios, they found up to 195Mha (million hectares) available (71–92% smaller than previous estimates), dropping as low as 6Mha if only statutorily protected areas are targeted. Few locations simultaneously achieve multiple objectives, suggesting that a mix of lands and restoration motivations will be needed to capitalise on the many potential benefits of reforestation.
Scientists from the SETI Institute and the University of California have documented, for the first time, humpback whales producing large bubble rings during friendly interactions with humans. This finding contributes to the WhaleSETI team’s broader goal of studying non-human intelligence to aid in the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. “Humpback whales often exhibit inquisitive, friendly behaviour towards boats and human swimmers,” said co-lead author and marine wildlife photographer Jodi Frediani. “We’ve now located a dozen whales from populations around the world, the majority of which have voluntarily approached boats and swimmers, blowing bubble rings.” See www.seti.org/news/whaleseti-curious-humpbackwhales-approach-humans-and-blow-bubble-smoke-rings for more information.
In June, the administration of President Donald Trump announced plans to abandon further US National Science Foundation support for the Thirty Meter Telescope, intended to be built on Mauna Kea, Hawai’i. In July, the Spanish government submitted a formal proposal to host the telescope on La Palma, Canary Islands, with a pledge to contribute €400 million. “Spain reinforces its commitment as a refuge for science, betting on excellent research and technological innovation,” wrote the Spanish minister for science and innovation, Diana Morant.
The Penguin Foundation (penguinfoundation.org) is dedicated to protecting the native wildlife of Phillip Island, Australia, home to the world’s largest colony of little penguins. For some years, it has engaged people from around the world in knitting little penguin rehabilitation jumpers, which play an important role in saving penguins affected by oil spills. When rescued birds are admitted to the Phillip Island Nature Parks Wildlife Clinic, they are given knitted jumpers which act as a barrier to prevent them from preening their oily feathers with their beaks before rescue staff are able to wash them clean.
One group to get involved recently was the Knitting Nannas, of Hazelgrove Court Care Home in Saltburn, Teesside. Hazelgrove activities co-ordinator Sharon Lewis said, “The residents love getting involved and using their lifelong skills to support others. It gives them a sense of purpose and pride.”
In August, First Minister John Swinney received a copy of RSGS’s fourth ‘Young Geographer’ magazine, Health in a Changing Climate, from young geographer Alice Mains, and a copy of RSGS’s Into the Red report from RSGS Chief Executive Mike Robinson.
Each year, the British Academy elects to its fellowship up to 52 outstanding UK-based scholars. Congratulations to two Scotland-based geography academics elected in 2025. Professor Chris Philo, University of Glasgow, is Editor-in-Chief of our Scottish Geographical Journal; his research interests focus on history and theory of geographical inquiry, the Frankfurt School and the antifascist geographical imagination, historical geography of ‘madness’, asylums and psychiatry in Britain, and contested geographies of social difference. Professor Tim Cresswell, Ogilvie Chair at the University of Edinburgh, focuses on the role of geographical knowledge and imagination in the formation of social and cultural life in a range of empirical domains from documentary photography and ballroom dancing to city planning and migration policy.
A new study published in Nature Communications Earth and Environment (www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02312-2) indicates that guano from penguin colonies is likely helping to cool Antarctica somewhat, helping slow the effects of climate change via an ecological chain reaction. Measurements in 2023 found that the ammonia wafting off guano from a colony of over 60,000 Adélie penguins on the Antarctic Peninsula is reacting with dimethyl sulphide produced by offshore phytoplankton to produce lots of aerosol particles, spurring the formation of clouds which reflect more sunlight back into space, shading the continent. The geo-biosphere is complex.
We are hosting two special one-off events at AK Bell Library in Perth this autumn. Join us for an evening of expertise! Tickets can be booked at www.rsgs.org/events
Darren Conway (7.30pm, 23rd September)
Acclaimed BBC cameraman Darren Conway has received Royal Television Society awards for Television Journalism Camera Operator of the Year, and an OBE for his outstanding contribution to British broadcast journalism. He will share powerful stories from a career spent filming on the front lines. With decades of experience capturing some of the most poignant images of conflict in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, Darren offers a rare behind-the-scenes look at the realities of international news reporting, and at inspiring people he has met along the way.
Ros Atkins (7.30pm, 25th October)
BBC journalist Ros Atkins is best known for his clear, fact-based video explainers that have engaged millions worldwide. He has covered major global events for the BBC, including elections, climate summits, and breaking news stories, and is currently the BBC’s Analysis Editor. Join him as he shares insights from a distinguished career in broadcasting.
Three contributors to The Geographer this year have recently won prizes for their work. Featured in the spring edition of the magazine, the Seawilding Garden took gold at the Chelsea Flower Show, while Kate Bradbury won the People’s Book Prize for Non-Fiction for One Garden Against the World (our spring Reader Offer). Jen Stout won the Highland Book Prize for Night Train to Odesa (our summer Reader Offer). Kate and Jen will be speaking in this season’s Inspiring People talks programme: Kate in Aberdeen, Dundee, Dunfermline and Edinburgh; Jen in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Kirkcaldy.
In August 2024, the Australia–Tuvalu Falepili Union put in place transformational arrangements to safeguard the future of Tuvalu in the face of climate change. In addition to part-funding the Tuvalu Coastal Adaptation Project (see The Geographer, winter 2024, pages 10–11), the Australian government has launched a landmark ‘climate migration deal’: a special visa arrangement allowing Tuvaluan citizens to migrate to Australia to live, work, and study as permanent residents. Over 3,000 Tuvaluans (almost a third of the population) entered a ballot for the first batch of 280 visas.
“For the first time, there is a country that has committed legally to recognise the future statehood and sovereignty of Tuvalu despite the detrimental impact of climate changeinduced sea level rise,” said Tuvalu’s prime minister, Feleti Teo. “Australia recognises the devastating impact climate change is having on the livelihoods, security and wellbeing of climate vulnerable countries and people, particularly in the Pacific region,” said Australia’s foreign affairs department.
RSGS hosted two interns from Switzerland over the summer. Ruari Burdon and Flavian Pfister spent two weeks at the Fair Maid’s House developing new programmes for our interactive ‘Pufferfish’ globe. They put together quizzes and a fun facts programme about every country on the planet, as well as using NASA and NOAA data to incorporate visualisations about migration patterns, earthquakes and tsunamis amongst other issues. Pop in and see what they have done.
Dr Angus Miller FRSGS, geologist
Why should we care about the Scots geologist James Hutton, 300 years after his birth? Perhaps because this humble, far-sighted polymath laid the foundations for our modern understanding of the Earth, and recognised the large-scale processes that create a habitable world. Next year marks the 300th anniversary of Hutton’s birth on 3rd June 1726, and the Edinburgh Geological Society, Scottish Geology Trust and the James Hutton Institute are working together to better tell the story of Hutton’s Unconformity at Siccar Point, located 4km east of Cockburnspath on the Scottish Borders coast. There is broad support for improving access to Siccar Point and helping people to understand its importance, without damaging the location physically or spiritually. We are launching a ‘crowdfunder’ on 15th September 2025 to raise funds to develop a new Deep Time Trail. Donations will be rewarded with high-quality facsimile copies of John Clerk of Eldin’s Lost Drawings from Hutton’s Theory of the Earth, donated by the family of John Clerk. Other unique gifts including a ‘Hutton Hat’ (hand-knitted, showing Hutton’s three most significant outcrops). Find out more about the crowdfunder, together with plans for Siccar Point and other tercentenary activities, at james-hutton. org and www.scottishgeologytrust.org/crowdfunder
Michel Forst, UN Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders under the Aarhus Convention
In June 2022, I was elected as the first Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders. This mandate had been established a few months before, in October 2021, under an international treaty on environmental democracy: the Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making, and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters (Aarhus Convention).
This mandate of Special Rapporteur has been established by the Parties to the Aarhus Convention — that is, the 47 countries, and the European Union, that ratified the Convention — as a rapid response mechanism to urgently deal with cases of intimidation, threats and attacks against environmental defenders. The legal basis for that mandate is the binding obligation imposed on Parties by article 3 (8), to “ensure that persons exercising their rights in conformity with the provisions of this Convention are not penalised, persecuted, or harassed in any way for their involvement.” In other words, a binding obligation to prevent such threats against environmental defenders.
Over the last three years, I received and dealt with many complaints reporting concrete cases of alleged threats on environmental defenders within Aarhus Parties. I also travelled extensively to meet with environmental defenders. My objective was to understand these threats and identify their similarities and differences across countries. I also wanted to ask environmental defenders what they expected from my mandate and how it could best contribute to protecting them, since this is what it was designed for.
I can’t say that the information I gathered through these complaints and travels came as a complete shock. I had known for a long time that environmental defenders, as human rights defenders, were particularly at risk of retaliation, as they stand up to powerful political and economic interests. This fact explained why I had taken up my role from the very beginning with a heightened sense of responsibility.
However, I must say that I was not quite expecting what I observed either. As I have said on many occasions before, I had not anticipated that the criminalisation of environmental activism had reached such a threshold that I would receive so many reports of peaceful environmental defenders being explicitly compared to terrorists, dismissed from their job, targeted by laws designed to restrict their right to protest, subjected to Orwellian investigations and surveillance, to humiliating and inhumane treatment in police custody, or to long prison sentences.
In addition to being very concerning and sometimes appalling in their own right, these threats do not only affect those directly targeted. They are also an attack on environmental democracy. How can a democracy function, and what is left of it, when people fear to seek information that concerns the health of their families and communities? When people fear to protest against decisions that they see as harmful to the lives of present and future generations? When people fear to report and demand accountability for environmental violations, because all of this exposes them to stigmatisation as ‘eco-terrorists’, abusive lawsuits for ‘defamation’, arbitrary arrests, or threats
on their loved ones?
This may sound like a gloomy portrait of what happens in countries where democracy has never been highly regarded, or of a faraway reality. But, it isn’t. This is only a limited list of the variety of very concrete threats environmental defenders face in most parts of the word, including those parts that we regard as lands of human rights and the rule of law.
Since I was elected, I have received several complaints that concern environmental defenders in the UK, like Dr Hart. Dr Hart’s case is one of the many that struck me because of what it says of the world we live in. Dr Hart is a medical doctor who took part in various climate protests, including a civil disobedience action at a petrol station. This action resulted in property damage of £11,000 for Exxon Mobil, a multinational company with an annual revenue of over £70 billion. Because of his participation to this action, Dr Hart was not only sentenced to 12-months imprisonment, but he also had his medical licence suspended and still risks losing it as a result of the ongoing fitness to practice proceedings that are pending before the General Medical Council. Beyond the incredibly disproportionate sanction by the courts, and the unfairness of being punished twice for the same action, one can wonder: what is the GMC trying to achieve, by depriving Dr Hart from the very possibility of being a doctor, for having asked to address what the GMC itself calls “one of the greatest threats to human health”?
When witnessing the treatment reserved to Dr Hart, how can we expect other medical doctors in the future, or anyone really, to continue speaking out against environmental damages or ineffective climate action? And, if no one does, where does that leave us? It is my role under the Aarhus Convention to contribute to protect environmental defenders like Dr Hart. The fight to protect them is a fight to safeguard environmental democracy, and ultimately to protect the right of everyone to live in a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment. This should not be the fight of a few experts, but of everyone.
“What is the GMC trying to achieve, by depriving Dr Hart from the very possibility of being a doctor, for having asked to address what the GMC itself calls ‘one of the greatest threats to human health’?”
Laurence Tubiana FRSGS, Chief Executive Officer, European Climate Foundation
Climate change is no longer a distant threat. It is already a destabilising force, driving food insecurity, disrupting supply chains, fuelling displacement, and undermining political stability. Rising temperatures and extreme weather are accelerating ecological breakdown, with cascading economic consequences. Insurers warn that climate-driven disasters could render whole regions and sectors uninsurable; threatening credit access, financial stability, and deepening inequality.
Yet the international system for addressing this threat is under strain. The geopolitics of climate action have shifted: conflict, fragmentation, and nationalism are weakening cooperation. The United States, the world’s secondlargest emitter, has embraced climate denial as part of a wider retreat from internationalism. It is a profound act of self-harm, but also a blow to multilateralism at a critical moment.
The Paris Agreement, celebrating its tenth anniversary, must prove its resilience. Its core structure remains sound: a shared long-term goal, national flexibility, and the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities. But it now faces its toughest test: can it deliver faster emissions cuts in a more divided and volatile world?
and its long-term interests rely on a functioning multilateral system. If it can hold its nerve and table an ambitious 2035 target, it will be well placed to press others, including China, to follow suit.
As host of COP30, Brazil has a unique opportunity. Few countries embody the stakes of climate action more starkly. The economic costs of inaction are mounting: floods, droughts and wildfires are costing it entire points of GDP, driving inflation, and exacerbating fiscal pressures. The Amazon rainforest, critical to global climate stability and biodiversity, is approaching a dangerous tipping point.
“The geopolitics of climate action have shifted: conflict, fragmentation and nationalism are weakening cooperation.”
COP30 in November, in Belém, Brazil, will be that test. Countries are due to submit new national climate plans (Nationally Determined Contributions) outlining their emissions targets through 2035; a pivotal moment for the Paris system. Crucially, despite US backsliding, no other country has walked away. Most still recognise that coordination serves their national interest, even if climate has slipped down political agendas. Voters, too, remain more supportive than assumed: a recent global survey across 125 countries found that 89% of people want stronger political action on climate. But momentum will not rebuild itself. It will require visible leadership, and that leadership is currently missing. If the multilateral process is to hold, major emitters and regional powers must step up. The requirement for consensus in the UN system cannot become an excuse for paralysis. Coalitions of the willing, and of the doing, must lead the way forward.
Europe, including the UK, has every reason to lead. It is warming at twice the global rate,
Nowhere exemplifies the deep links between climate action and democracy better than Brazil, a megadiverse and vibrant (but threatened) democracy itself. Political shifts decisively alter its emissions trajectory. Under Jair Bolsonaro, environmental protections were undermined and emissions surged. Under President Lula, deforestation has fallen, enforcement has returned, and Brazil has re-emerged as a credible voice in climate diplomacy.
Brazil’s geopolitical position gives it real leverage. It is trusted across the Global South, respected in the West, and engaged with China. As chair of both the G20 and BRICS this year, it has a platform. For Lula, COP30 is a chance to position Brazil as a bridge-builder, and to defend multilateralism by example.
There are reasons for hope. Despite the political polarisation of climate action in parts of the West, the global energy transition is accelerating. According to the International Energy Agency, investment in clean energy is now nearly double that in fossil fuels. China is driving much of this acceleration, exporting solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles to much of the world, especially developing countries. In 2024, Pakistan alone imported more than 17GW of solar capacity from China, tripling solar’s share of its electricity mix in four years.
New solutions are emerging to expand climate finance for developing countries, which remains the toughest issue in international climate negotiations. At the fourth Financing for Development conference in Seville in July, eight countries — including France, Spain, Kenya and Barbados — launched a coalition committed to introducing levies on premium air travel, with proceeds going to climate and development. In a world of tight public budgets, it is right that those with the greatest means, and who account for a disproportionate share of aviation emissions, contribute more. There is now a window to enlist more countries to this coalition ahead of COP30.
The stakes are high. COP30 will not resolve every issue. But it can restore momentum and show that climate diplomacy can still deliver. Brazil has a historic opportunity to lead. Europe must back it. The world cannot afford to let this moment pass.
Gunther Thallinger, Member of the Board of Management of Allianz SE, Investment Management, Sustainability
CO2 emissions directly increase the amount of energy trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere. This is not a vague or future issue — it is physical reality. The more emissions, the more energy retained. The more energy, the more extremely the atmosphere behaves. Storms intensify. Heatwaves last longer. Rain falls harder. Droughts cut deeper. This is the first principle.
These extreme weather phenomena drive direct physical risks to all categories of human-owned assets — land, houses, roads, power lines, railways, ports, and factories. Heat and water destroy capital. Flooded homes lose value. Overheated cities become uninhabitable. Entire asset classes are degrading in real time, which translates to loss of value, business interruption, and market devaluation on a systemic level.
The insurance industry has historically managed these risks. But we are fast approaching temperature levels — 1.5°C, 2°C, 3°C — where insurers will no longer be able to offer coverage for many of these risks. The math breaks down: the premiums required exceed what people or companies can pay. This is already happening. Entire regions are becoming uninsurable. (See: State Farm and Allstate exiting California’s home insurance market due to wildfire risk, 2023.)
This is not a one-off market adjustment. This is a systemic risk that threatens the very foundation of the financial sector. If insurance is no longer available, other financial services become unavailable too. A house that cannot be insured cannot be mortgaged. No bank will issue loans for uninsurable property. Credit markets freeze. This is a climateinduced credit crunch.
This applies not only to housing, but to infrastructure, transportation, agriculture, and industry. The economic value of entire regions — coastal, arid, wildfire-prone — will begin to vanish from financial ledgers. Markets will reprice, rapidly and brutally. This is what a climate-driven market failure looks like.
Some argue that the state will step in where insurers withdraw. But this assumes the state — ie, the taxpayer — can afford to do so. That assumption is already breaking. Covering the cost of three or four major wildfires or floods in a single year strains public budgets to the limit. If multiple high-cost events happen within short time spans — as climate projections expect — then no government can realistically cover the damages without either austerity or collapse. (See: Germany’s €30B flood relief in 2021; Australia’s rising disaster relief costs 2020–2023.)
There is also the false comfort of ‘adaptation’, as many risks do not lend themselves to meaningful adaptation. There is no way to ‘adapt’ to temperatures beyond human tolerance. There is limited adaptation to megafires, other than not building near forests. Whole cities built on flood plains cannot simply pick up and move uphill. And as temperatures continue to rise, adaptation itself becomes economically unviable.
Once we reach 3°C of warming, the situation locks in. Atmospheric energy at this level will persist for 100+ years due to carbon cycle inertia and the absence of scalable industrial carbon removal technologies. There is no known pathway to return to pre-2°C conditions. (See: IPCC AR6, 2023; NASA Earth Observatory: The Long-Term Warming Commitment.)
At that point, risk cannot be transferred (no insurance), risk cannot be absorbed (no public capacity), and risk cannot be adapted to (physical limits exceeded). That means no more mortgages, no new real estate development, no long-term investment, no financial stability. The financial sector as we know it ceases to function. And with it, capitalism as we know it ceases to be viable.
Capitalism must now solve this existential threat. The idea that market economies can continue to function without insurance, finance, and asset protection is a fantasy. There is no capitalism without functioning financial services. And there are no financial services without the ability to price and manage climate risk.
There is only one path forward: prevent any further increase in atmospheric energy levels. That means keeping emissions out of the atmosphere. That means burning less carbon or capturing it at the point of combustion. These are the only two levers. Everything else is delay or distraction.
The good news: we already have the technologies to switch
“A house that cannot be insured cannot be mortgaged. No bank will issue loans for uninsurable property. Credit markets freeze. This is a climate-induced credit crunch.”
Bill McKibben, author, educator, environmentalist, co-founder of 350.org
I’m sure that many readers are staring across the Atlantic at America and wondering what the hell is going on. It is a very good question, and most of the answers are unhappy.
Since Donald Trump’s inauguration, his administration — comprised largely of people who spent their lives ‘extracting resources’ or lobbying to make that extraction easier — have managed to undo a great deal of the hard work of generations of environmentalists. They have undone the rule which protects existing roadless areas on the national forests, and they have mandated steep increases in treecutting on those vast lands; the newly passed budget bill will double the timber harvest over the next nine years, taking us back to 1990 levels. They’ve gone to work rescinding habitat protection for endangered species, and they’ve opened up millions of acres in Alaska to drilling and mining.
“For the first time in the global warming era, the laws of economic gravity are helping, not hurting.”
On every front a fast-moving ideologically committed administration is moving to loot the fifty states in the guise of an ‘energy emergency’ and a ‘timber emergency’. The ability of the administration to function in emergency mode — to ignore or suspend time-honoured practices of consultation and comment — has left the environmental community squarely on the back foot, clinging to practices that may have no real purchase in this new world. That’s especially true since it is the Supreme Court which has
warming era, the laws of economic gravity are helping, not hurting; the economic wind is in our sails, as it were. That’s of course because of the precipitous fall in the price of clean energy, including in the last two years the rapid expansion of batteries big enough to make sun and wind a round-the-clock proposition. In California, for instance, enough solar panels and wind turbines have gone up in the last few years that the world’s fourth largest economy now generates more than 100% of its power from renewable sources for long hours almost every day. And enough batteries have been installed on the grid that when the sun goes down they are running much of the Golden State off stored sunshine all evening. As a result, California is using 44% less natural gas to generate electricity this year than it did in 2023. That’s a big number, big enough to matter in how hot the planet eventually gets.
In this battle we need constantly to get ahead of the propaganda from Big Oil. That’s why some of us are coming together across the environmental movement on 21st September, the fall equinox, for what we’re calling SunDay (Sunday.earth). It’s a celebration of the possibilities for clean energy, with the goal of making it clear to people this is no longer ‘alternative energy’, but instead the obvious, commonsense, and beautiful way forward. Imagine a planet where we cease combustion and instead rely on that large ball of burning gas hanging a convenient 93 million miles away. It could transform, among other things, our ruinous politics: an energy source that can’t be hoarded, and which you can’t fight wars over, would change the nature of both power and
I offer no guarantees of success; obviously we’ve already lost much to an overheating climate, and we will lose more still. But I do think it’s clear that for the first time in the 40 years I’ve been at work on this question we actually have a valuable card to play. We look to places like Scotland for leadership, as it learns how to exploit its winds; and increasingly we look to China as well, with mixed emotions but with admiration for their disciplined ability to change big systems at speed.
Environmentalism, in some ways, was another American invention (with that Scotsman John Muir playing a large
Fermín Koop, Dialogue Earth
In 2024, Elisa Morgera was appointed as the United Nations’ special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights in the context of climate change, becoming the second person to hold the position since its creation in 2021. Special rapporteurs are independent human rights experts appointed by the UN to examine, monitor, advise and report on human rights issues, or situations in particular countries. Their mandates can be thematic or country-specific and they speak independently from the UN system.
Since taking on the role, Morgera, a professor of global environmental law at the University of Strathclyde, has produced three thematic reports, including one on the need to ‘de-fossilise’ our economies. Another, on critical minerals, is in the works. She has also made a visit to the vulnerable Pacific island nation of Vanuatu to report on climate and human rights action.
In this interview with Dialogue Earth, Morgera highlights the need to phase out fossil fuels and transition towards renewables, but only in a way that does not violate human rights. She speaks about the impact of critical minerals extraction on communities, and the need for approaches to climate governance and international processes to be more inclusive and meaningful.
How do you define your role, and what impact do you hope to have?
The aim of my mandate is to clarify how we can better protect human rights in the context of climate change, looking into the disproportionate impacts of climate change, and clarifying states’ obligations and businesses’ responsibility to protect human rights. After I was appointed, I prepared two reports to set the scene, synthesising the work other UN rapporteurs have done on climate change, human rights and intersectionality, also looking at access to information. Then I engaged in a process of speaking to states, human rights holders, defenders, children and NGOs from all regions of the world.
What emerged is the need to prioritise climate solutions that are the most effective at protecting human rights, based on the available science. There is [currently no intergovernmentally agreed] prioritisation of solutions on the basis of climate law. This year, my first report is focused on the phase-out of fossil fuels as a matter of international human rights law, building, among other areas of science, on the evidence of human rights holders affected by fossil fuels, across their full life-cycle.
What do you see as the most urgent priorities in linking human rights and climate change today?
“We need legislation to clarify how all companies need to protect human rights in the context of climate change.”
Even if we crossed 1.5°C global average temperature rise last year, that doesn’t mean we have crossed it for good, and we should not give up on the absolute priority to keep climate action in line with 1.5°C pathways. That is why it’s so important to take effective climate action, meaning the phase-out of fossil fuels and the transition towards renewables — but only in a way that is effective for climate mitigation and doesn’t violate human rights, especially of those most affected by climate change. My second report this year will be on a human rights-based approach to renewables, including critical minerals. The energy transition is not just about energy, it’s also how we protect nature, water and food. I’m really happy that the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, in its recent advisory opinion on the climate emergency, emphasised the need to protect the climate as part of the life-supporting systems on this planet.
Were you satisfied with the opinion?
I’m very supportive of all the findings of the Inter-American Court. It relied on work done by over 20 UN special rapporteurs, building on what we learnt from affected human
rights holders, and clarified in terms of international legal obligations at the UN system level. The advisory opinion is as extensive as we were expecting, providing detailed guidance on human rights and climate change. An aspect of the opinion that is remarkable is how the court clarified its findings are not only based on the Inter-American legal system, but many are also based on general international law, which is relevant for every state.
Latin America is seeing a trend towards ‘green extractivism’ amid heightened demand for minerals for the energy transition. How should governments and companies approach these transitions in a rights-respecting way?
The ‘lithium triangle’ [of Argentina, Bolivia and Chile] has been a target for extraction for more than ten years, but we see the search for minerals relevant to the energy transition is now happening in every region of the world. Since I took office, I have heard many testimonies from communities everywhere of their human rights being violated in the context of these minerals.
We need to question our energy demands and projections. If our search for critical minerals is still supporting the same economic model that is underlying the fossil-fuelbased economy — a model not in line with human rights and planetary boundaries — then we are not really addressing the climate crisis effectively. The search for critical minerals can’t be justified if it does not take a more holistic approach to environmental sustainability and human rights. If activities that are meant to be about climate mitigation emit significant greenhouse-gas emissions and harm nature’s contributions to regulate the climate, we are in fact harming the climate system, and we can’t afford for that to happen.
What responsibility do private companies — particularly those in fossil fuels and extractive industries — have in upholding human rights in the context of the climate crisis?
We need national legislation that is much clearer on the responsibilities of companies to phase out fossil fuels. Based on common but differentiated responsibilities of different countries in contributing to climate change, the phase-out won’t be the same in all countries, but national legislation needs to give a clear direction that fossil fuels is no longer a viable sector.
We also need legislation to clarify how all companies need to protect human rights in the context of climate change. We see that in some countries, but we need more progress. Businesses need to assess in advance if any of their activities or their value chains can have negative impacts on human rights and take preventing action, sharing that information with the public, creating spaces for dialogue and accepting complaints if these actions do not seem fit to protect human rights by potentially affected communities.
“We need to be clearer on which climate solution should be prioritised.”
How should states ensure meaningful participation of Indigenous peoples, youth and other marginalised groups in climate decision-making?
The Escazú Agreement and the Aarhus Convention are critical, as they specifically focus on public participation in decision making related to the environment and human rights. Other global human rights treaties provide obligations for public access to information, making sure we have enough understandable and accessible information to be able to exercise our right to participation in decision making and access to justice on matters that affect our human rights. States need to open up their decision-making processes, allowing defenders to contribute, justify decisions on the basis of these contributions, and provide guarantees of access to justice if the decisions that are adopted do not appear fit to effectively protect our human rights in the context of climate change.
Are there structural weaknesses in global climate governance that undermine human rights protections?
We are not sufficiently including biodiversity, ocean, health sciences and the experience of people affected by climate change as part of climate governance. Doing so would help us to prevent the same mistakes of the past: undermining water, food and nature, and violating people’s rights. Another challenge is the lobbying and the power of certain industries in climate policy spaces, which is diverting attention from priority climate issues into other directions that are not sufficiently proven to be effective in terms of climate change mitigation. We need to address conflict of interest in any climate governance space and to be clearer on which climate solution should be prioritised.
What are your expectations for the COP30 climate summit in Brazil this November?
We need to address the inclusivity of this decision-making process, making sure that environmental defenders and human rights holders can contribute to COP negotiations, while tackling conflict of interest and the growing number of fossil-fuel lobbyists that are part of national delegations. We also need a clear process to monitor progress in phasing out fossil fuels. Otherwise, the COP will keep losing legitimacy. In addition, we need to make sure that NDCs [Nationally Determined Contributions, countries’ climate action plans] are aligned with the 1.5°C target, but it’s unclear who will call out states that do not have sufficiently ambitious NDCs. If all these expectations do not materialise at COP30, we are left with the question of whether the COP is a space for meaningful climate action.
Julian Jackson, Seabed Mining Project Director, The Pew Charitable Trusts
The United Nations Ocean Conference, which drew 15,000 people (including 64 heads of government) to France in June, spotlighted the broad recognition — spanning geographies, industries and cultures — that the ocean needs to be conserved.
Among the notable outcomes of the convening, four additional countries announced their support for a moratorium or precautionary pause on deep-sea mining for minerals in areas of the ocean beyond any country’s jurisdiction. Currently, 37 governments support this call.
Also during the conference, more than a dozen nations ratified the High Seas Treaty, also known as the Agreement on the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Marine Biological Diversity in Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction, or BBNJ Agreement. The treaty will enable the creation of high seas marine protected areas and, as of early August 2025, requires ratification by only eight more countries to enter into force. The United Kingdom signed the agreement in September 2023 but, as of early August 2025, has not yet ratified it.
Despite this global support for protecting international waters, there is a growing push from a handful of governments and businesses to begin mining of the deep seabed. However, many experts question the economic viability of mining and processing minerals such as cobalt, nickel, manganese and lithium from the deep ocean when they are commonly found elsewhere and are already facing a decrease in anticipated demand as manufacturing technologies evolve.
Seabed mining would overlap with other marine management and conservation commitments — including those set by international bodies responsible for managing fisheries; the BBNJ Agreement’s aim to establish ocean protections; and a commitment by nearly 200 countries to protect 30% of the ocean by 2030, a goal known as ‘30 by 30’. For example, the nations that are part of the Convention on Biological Diversity declared an area of the Atlantic to be ecologically significant because scientists believe it’s possible that life on Earth began there. Yet many of these nations also are members of the ISA, which allows that region to be explored for future mining.
“Mining activities have the potential to negatively impact vital ecosystem services that people rely on.”
Cooperation with other ocean users is also critical. As governments continue to negotiate deep-sea mining regulations at the ISA, collaboration is vital for ensuring that international laws are developed and implemented consistently. A moratorium on deep-sea mining would provide the necessary time and space for nations to effectively coordinate, uphold their legal obligations and honour commitments to safeguard the ocean, its biodiversity and its resources for current and future generations.
But economics is not the only reason to reconsider seabed mining. Scientists know that the deep ocean is home to significant biodiversity and that mining would cause irrevocable damage to the fragile marine environment. Mining activities have the potential to negatively impact vital ecosystem services that people rely on, such as the healthy functioning of fisheries. The world’s regional fisheries management organisations have already established rules governing the fishing of particular species in areas of the high seas. But scientists have found that as the temperature of the ocean increases, commercially fished species, including tuna, will probably be pushed into areas where extensive mining is now planned. Mining consequences, such as plumes of sediment that travel throughout the water column, could disrupt the feeding and reproduction patterns of tuna, increase their stress hormone levels and expose them to toxic metals that could harm humans who consume tuna.
Amid these concerns, the Global Tuna Alliance and other seafood industry groups have joined governments and other sectors in calling for a moratorium on deep-sea mining. Nevertheless, as governments are negotiating a regulatory framework through the International Seabed Authority (ISA) to govern deep-sea mining in areas beyond any country’s jurisdiction, some governments are pushing to allow mining to commence despite a lack of science to determine whether it can be done without harming the marine environment. It is important that nations not view seabed mining activities in isolation. Legal experts have determined that the countries working to develop the ISA’s deep-sea mining regulations must consider and, where appropriate, incorporate other international laws and climate protection.
FURTHER READING www.pew.org/en/projects/seabed-mining-project
The Pew Charitable Trusts (June 2025) Why Deep-Seabed Mining Needs a Moratorium (www.pew.org/en/research-andanalysis/fact-sheets/2025/06/why-deep-seabed-mining-needs-amoratorium)
The Pew Charitable Trusts (June 2023) Deep-Sea Mining May Harm Thousands of Species — Before They Are Even Discovered (www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/datavisualizations/2023/deep-sea-mining-may-harm-thousands-ofspecies-before-they-are-even-discovered)
Mining International (May 2025) Polymetallic Nodule Mining and the Future of Deep Sea Mineral Extraction (www.mininginternational.org/polymetallic-nodule-mining-and-the-future-ofdeep-sea-mineral-extraction)
Robin Clegg, The Ocean Cleanup
Every year, millions of tons of plastic flow into our oceans, endangering marine life, damaging ecosystems, and entering the human food chain. While this environmental crisis has grown more visible in recent decades, one organisation has stepped up with a bold and measurable plan to tackle it at scale. The Ocean Cleanup, founded in 2013 by Dutch innovator Boyan Slat, is on a mission to rid the world’s oceans of plastic pollution.
A dual front: oceans and rivers
The Ocean Cleanup’s work spans two interconnected battlefronts: the open ocean and the world’s most polluted rivers. In the heart of the Pacific, they are targeting the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP): a vast, swirling gyre of plastic debris between Hawaii and California, three times the size of France. Here, their floating systems have caught plastic which has then been retrieved for recycling.
But ocean clean-up alone is not enough. Research shows that 1,000 of the world’s most polluted rivers are responsible for roughly 80% of the plastic entering our oceans. To intercept plastic before it escapes to sea, The Ocean Cleanup developed the Interceptor™: a vessel designed to extract floating debris from rivers.
approach ensures that each deployment contributes to measurable, long-term reduction of ocean plastic.
As of July 2025, the non-profit has collected over 30 million kilogrammes of trash from aquatic ecosystems around the world.
Collaboration is key
None of this happens in isolation. The Ocean Cleanup partners with governments, local waste companies, NGOs, scientists, and private donors. It recently announced a collaboration with Amazon Web Services Inc to leverage their advanced artificial intelligence, machine learning, and cloud computing capabilities to enable and accelerate The Ocean Cleanup’s goal to clean the GPGP and remove 90% of floating ocean plastic by 2040.
“The Ocean Cleanup has collected over 30 million kilogrammes of trash from aquatic ecosystems around the world.”
Deployed in hotspots from Indonesia and Malaysia to Jamaica and the Dominican Republic, these sleek, barge-like machines trap thousands of kilogrammes of waste every week, removing everything from plastic bottles and bags to household goods, tyres, and even refrigerators.
At the recent UN Ocean Conference in Nice, France, it announced plans to rapidly expand its work to intercept and remove ocean-bound plastic pollution with a 30 Cities Program. This is scaling the organisation’s proven Interceptor solutions across 30 key cities in Asia and the Americas, aiming to eliminate up to one-third of all plastic flowing from the world’s rivers into the ocean before the end of the decade.
Understanding the system: smarter waste management
What sets The Ocean Cleanup apart isn’t just its innovative engineering; it’s also its commitment to systemic change. In many regions, waste is mismanaged not due to apathy, but due to lack of infrastructure, oversight, or investment. To address this, the team has developed a framework to understand local waste systems and help governments and partners improve long-term outcomes.
By partnering with local authorities and NGOs, The Ocean Cleanup helps enhance waste collection, valorisation (reuse and recycling), and regulation, empowering communities to prevent pollution at the source, not just remove it downstream.
Scaling up with science and strategy
The Ocean Cleanup’s success hinges on its use of science, data, and adaptive strategy. Sophisticated models identify plastic hotspots, while sensors and GPS technology track every catch. Monitoring and impact measurement aren’t afterthoughts: they’re built into every project from the outset. This evidence-based
Since the launch of a partnership in 2022, Kia has played an integral role in The Ocean Cleanup’s operations, contributing financial resources, technical expertise, and in-kind support, including logistical, mobility and research assistance, to accelerate the removal of plastic waste from the ocean. The collaboration has also led to tangible progress in developing a circular resource system for ocean plastic through innovations in recycling and its application in Kia accessories.
Looking ahead
The Ocean Cleanup exemplifies a new kind of environmental action: data-driven, collaborative, scalable, and optimistic. While the task is immense, progress shows what is possible when innovation meets determination.
In an age where the health of our oceans reflects the health of our planet, this organisation reminds us that humanity can still choose to be a force for healing. By defending our rivers and oceans from the tide of plastic, they are helping to safeguard nature for future generations.
As Founder and CEO Boyan Slat said, “We want to put ourselves out of business. The only way to truly stop ocean plastic is to stop it from getting there in the first place.”
Dr Carly Randall and Dr Cathie Page, Australian Institute of Marine Science
A first-of-its-kind portable coral aquaculture system has been successfully trialled in Australia and the Maldives to support coral reef restoration. The system was built to be packed away and moved in sea containers to remote areas to fasttrack a restoration method that harnesses coral spawning.
Spawning is how many species of corals reproduce: in this annual event, the corals on the reef synchronously release eggs and sperm into the water, creating the next generation of corals and helping coral reefs to repair and recover.
ReefSeed, the self-contained coral aquaculture system developed by the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), includes both power and life-support capabilities. It’s designed to be taken to remote areas to produce millions of coral larvae for reef restoration during annual spawning.
Teeming with a quarter of all ocean life, coral reefs are the rainforests of the sea, providing a nursery for a quarter of the world’s fish. But globally, coral reefs face enormous pressures with increasingly frequent, widespread and severe disturbances.
Climate change is the most significant threat to coral reefs worldwide, causing sustained, unprecedented, high sea temperatures leading to heat stress and mass coral bleaching events. Global emissions reduction remains the most important way to minimise the impact of climate change on coral reefs. However, with average global temperatures already more than 1°C above pre-industrial levels, emissions reduction is no longer enough to guarantee survival of coral reefs as we know them.
Our research focuses on scaling up the production of healthy young corals to numbers that can be used across entire reefs or regions, alongside other multidisciplinary investigations into complementary reef restoration approaches. We are also pursuing ways these techniques can be operationalised and used by reef communities in remote regions, independent of specialist expertise or expensive, large-scale aquaculture facilities. ReefSeed does just that.
ReefSeed includes AIMS’s autospawner technology that facilitates fertilisation of large numbers of coral eggs with minimal labour. Compared to manual spawning methods, ReefSeed is designed to maximise fertilisation success and larval production, while reducing labour costs for restoration efforts at scale: each system can produce millions of coral larvae and hundreds of thousands of coral seeding devices per spawning season.
The mobile coral spawning system maintains water filtration and temperature controls using an independent power source. It draws water from the ocean to support a multi-phase coral rearing process that starts with holding adult broodstock corals through to the settlement of coral larvae and the deployment of the juveniles back onto the reef.
The AIMS team designed and built ReefSeed and first tested it during the Great Barrier Reef’s synchronised mass spawning event in October 2024, following extensive bleaching and damage caused by cyclones and floods. It worked! Throughout that testing, we worked with the Maldives Marine Research Institute (MMRI) and Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, to prepare for field trials of ReefSeed in the Maldives.
“Coral reefs are the rainforests of the sea.”
We hosted several MMRI biologists and technicians during the coral spawning on the Great Barrier Reef, where they were trained on the ReefSeed system and learned about restoration techniques developed and refined by AIMS. ReefSeed was then packed and shipped to the Maldives, where it was set up and trialled on Maniyafushi Island, in the South Malé Atoll, during coral spawning in early 2025.
Scientists and technicians from AIMS and MMRI collected local corals to bring into the ReefSeed system in readiness for coral spawning, which happens in the Maldives over several months. It was wonderful to see our colleagues put their training into action and share their knowledge and experience of Maldivian corals with us.
MMRI Director Khadeeja Ali told us ReefSeed had given them hope in restoring reefs that faced tremendous stress, significantly strengthening their capacity to implement and improve coral reef restoration programmes.
ReefSeed was awarded US$1.5m over three years by the G20 Coral Research and Development Accelerator Platform (CORDAP), the only international organisation fully dedicated to funding global research and development for tropical and cold-water coral restoration and conservation.
ReefSeed uses science and technology developed under the Australian Government’s Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program (RRAP). RRAP is funded by the partnership between the Australian Government’s Reef Trust and the Great Barrier Reef Foundation.
Dr Lily K Bentley and Professor Daniel Dunn, University of Queensland
From the enormous blue whale to the delicate monarch butterfly, animals of all shapes and sizes migrate across the globe. These migrations connect distant habitats, from the tropics to the poles. They are also crucial to both the health of species making these epic journeys, and the habitats where they live.
It is hard to visualise these epic, globe-spanning journeys and the habitats they connect. But an interactive map we developed, alongside an international team of scientists from the University of Queensland and Duke University and in partnership with the Global Ocean Biodiversity Initiative, can help
Known as MiCO (Migratory Connectivity in the Ocean), this map is a valuable conservation tool that demonstrates just how connected our oceans are due to animal migration. It is freely available at mico.eco/system/mapper, and has just been updated with our newly published research in Nature Communications
This research synthesises thousands of records of more than 100 species of birds, mammals, turtles and fish that connect almost 2,000 crucial habitats.
Humans have contemplated animal migrations for millennia. Representations of and theories about these journeys are observable in Stone Age rock art and the writings of Ancient Greek philosophers. Indigenous peoples and local communities have also long relied upon and understood the seasonal movements of culturally important species.
But for much of human history, identifying specific destinations of migratory species was an inexact science. This has started to change in recent decades, as scientists have developed and deployed animal-borne satellite tags which can record and transmit an animal’s location as it migrates. These tags can be very expensive to deploy and collect data from. They also require enormous investments of time and expertise. But they are crucial if we are to understand where migratory species go when they’re outside the range of normal human observations.
The journeys of migratory species also span multiple jurisdictions. This means cooperation between countries is required to ensure they are protected. For example, many albatross species receive significant conservation investment at their nesting islands within national jurisdictions. But they are at high risk of being incidentally caught and killed or injured in longline fisheries operating in international waters.
For our new study, we reviewed the literature on the movements of marine migratory species from 1990 to 2017. We synthesised the start and end points of migrations reported in more than 1,300 individual studies. These studies covered 109 marine species. This information was then aggregated to remove duplicate data and combine sites very near to each other (on a global scale) into one ‘metasite’ to make it easier to display. Each data point is also linked to the study from which it comes. This means you can always find the work of the original team who tagged those animals. In synthesising the studies in this manner, we created an interactive map and downloadable dataset
estimating the measured migratory connections of the global ocean. If you look up the green turtle map, for example, you can see just how much information there is for this highlystudied species. The red links show many tracked movements from breeding to foraging areas within each ocean basin. Sperm whales, on the other hand, are globally distributed. But we only have information about connectivity for animals in the Atlantic and east Pacific oceans. Because researchers are yet to track animals in all parts of the globe, the map is missing some information about the migratory movements of key species in particular areas. We are planning updates as more information becomes available.
This summary of migratory information is important for improving global conservation. Scientists have published many papers on migrations, both of single populations or species, and combining data about taxonomy from several different sources. But these can be difficult to keep up with for managers or policymakers who may not have time to engage with every single piece of emerging scientific literature. Our information can help identify stakeholders when planning or managing a conservation project. Many of these stakeholders may be across an ocean basin or even in a different hemisphere.
The scientific synthesis we provide can help countries take more informed actions to achieve the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework’s target (www.cbd.int/gbf/targets) of conserving a ‘well-connected’ 30% of terrestrial, inland water, coastal and marine areas by 2030. This is particularly true in the high seas, as a mechanism to implement protected areas outside of national waters is developed under the soon-to-beratified High Seas Treaty.
In addition to sharing the enormous scope of work that has been conducted on the migration of large ocean animals over the last decades, our work has already fed into policy processes. For example, it has been used by seven United Nations conventions or organisations. We hope to formalise the role of our map as a node of the Convention on Migratory Species’ Atlas of Animal Migration at their next meeting in March 2026.
More broadly, we hope this work will support better international collaboration to conserve our incredible oceanic migrants for years to come.
“This map demonstrates just how connected our oceans are due to animal migration.”
Jacob Swanson, Karen Oberhauser, Ernest Williams, Monarch Butterfly Fund
Each year, millions of monarch butterflies migrate from Canada and the United States along the coasts, across the Great Lakes, over the Great Plains, and through Mexico, down to one particular habitat: the oyamel fir forests of central Mexico’s transvolcanic mountains.
Protecting that place and conserving the monarch butterfly’s incredible migration requires cooperation and commitment from countless people and organisations in Mexico. Early on, a 1986 presidential decree formed the Monarch Butterfly Special Biosphere Reserve, which was renamed the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve and expanded from 16,110 to 56,000 hectares in 2000. Near the reserve, non-profit organisations and individuals in the local communities work together to study monarchs, preserve their winter and migratory habitat, and educate tourists and local people about monarch biology and conservation.
For people in the United States wanting to help their beloved monarchs while monarchs are away for the winter, it can be difficult to know where to direct their attention (and their donations). That’s where the Monarch Butterfly Fund steps in.
the establishment of oyamel fir trees at altitudes of 3,600 and 3,800 metres is feasible and that planted stands could eventually serve as overwintering sites for monarchs under future climates.
These experiments help us plan for future conditions to ensure that monarchs have healthy overwintering forests into the future, but MBF also supports considerable work to keep the current forests healthy and give monarchs the best possible chance to thrive.
“In 2024, Alternare worked to reforest 105ha of the monarch reserve with 45,918 trees.”
MBF has also supported the Mexican community-based conservation organisation Alternare for over two decades. In 2024, with the help of funding from MBF, Alternare worked to reforest 105 hectares of the monarch reserve with 45,918 trees, all while working closely with the local communities. The year’s planting involved 24 nurseries, as well as 988 people to maintain the nurseries to have the seedlings ready for planting.
The Monarch Butterfly Fund (MBF) was officially formed in 2009 with the combination of the Monarch Butterfly Sanctuary Foundation and the Michoacán Reforestation Fund, originally formed in 1996 and 1997, respectively.
The MBF board of directors is made up of monarch butterfly advocates and conservationists who have been promoting monarch butterfly conservation for decades. The board includes ecologists and researchers with over 100 years of combined experience studying butterflies and conservation, and experienced citizen science experts and participants, including members in Mexico who work closely with those on the ground protecting and researching the monarch’s winter home.
The vast majority of MBF’s donations come from the United States, where donations to the US-based charity are taxdeductible. Since its foundation, MBF has distributed over $1 million to organisations, individuals, and students working toward four core initiatives: habitat conservation, scientific research and monitoring, outreach and education, and sustainable development.
The MBF funds new people and organisations every year, including undergraduate and graduate researchers through its Lincoln P Brower Awards, which honour late co-founder Lincoln Brower. But it also has long-term partners with whom it works on sustained efforts to protect, understand, and restore habitat.
One long-term project that MBF has funded is the research of Dr Cuauhtémoc Sáenz-Romero and his colleagues, who are evaluating how the monarchs’ overwintering habitat, which consists of oyamel fir trees (Abies religiosa), could adapt to warmer climates, shifting to higher elevations as temperatures rise. To compensate for an expected warming of 2.3°F, the oyamel forests that monarchs rely on would need to shift approximately 500 metres higher in elevation than the current upper limit of the tree’s natural distribution of 3,550 metres.
The team’s research has shown that
With funding from MBF, organisations in Mexico have planted more than 400,000 trees in and around the reserve. Other habitat projects have focused on evaluations of tree survival rates, managing bark beetles, and maintaining forest health and biodiversity, among others.
In December 2024, monarchs occupied 1.79ha in their overwintering sites, about double the previous year’s total, but down from the average of 2.81ha over the past decade and even further below the average when researchers first started measuring the overwintering colonies in the early 1990s.
Monarchs face numerous threats across their range, from habitat loss and degradation to the impacts of climate change. The survival of the monarch butterfly and its amazing migration across thousands of miles starts and ends with these forests.
That’s what the Monarch Butterfly Fund is focused on: conserving the monarch migration for generations to come.
Johannes Fritz, Waldrappteam Conservation and Research, Austria; Helena Wehner, Department of Remote Sensing, Institute of Geography and Geology, University of Wuerzburg, Germany
Once widespread across Europe, the northern bald ibis (Geronticus eremita) — a striking bird with a long curved bill, bare red face and shimmering black plumage — disappeared from the continent by the early 17th century. Today, the ibis soars again in European skies thanks to an ambitious reintroduction project that blends ancient instincts with modern conservation science.
For more than 20 years, Waldrappteam Conservation and Research (www.waldrappteam.at), with partners across Europe, has worked on bringing this iconic migratory bird back to the wild. The goal was not only to reintroduce the species, but also to establish a completely new migratory tradition, which is an audacious initiative, never done before.
To achieve this, we implemented an unconventional approach: Young ibises from zoo breeding programmes are handraised by human foster parents. Once fledged, they are trained to follow their foster parents, flying on the back seat of a microlight aircraft. By that technique they are guided on their first autumn migration from breeding sites north of the Alps to southern wintering grounds in Tuscany, Italy.
term, this emergency measure is far from being a long-term solution.
In order to sustainably encounter the increasing threat of climate change, we developed a new migratory route to Andalusia. It is more than three times as long as the original route, but it avoids major mountain barriers. This allows the birds to migrate later in the season and still reach suitable wintering grounds. It also connects our migratory population with a sedentary ibis colony in Andalusia established by Proyecto Eremita (www.zoobotanicojerez.com/proyecto-eremita), creating the potential for a resilient, panEuropean population.
“We led 32 young ibises on a 2,300km journey from BadenWürttemberg to Andalusia.”
Between 2004 and 2022, 15 human-led migration flights successfully guided 277 juvenile birds to Tuscany, where they were released in the WWF nature reserve Laguna di Orbetello.
In 2011, the first bird returned independently. By 2012, a wild pair had successfully raised chicks, marking the start of a self-sustaining migratory population.
Today, the northern bald ibises breed in four breeding colonies: three north of the Alps and one in Carinthia. In 2024, 59 chicks fledged in the wild, raising the total population to 280 individuals. The project has received cofunding twice from the European LIFE Programme, which is one of the world’s most successful conservation initiatives.
The current LIFE project, implemented by ten partners under leadership of Vienna Zoo, aims to build a self-sustaining population of at least 350 birds. This threshold value towards self-sustainability results from a population viability analysis by the Leibnitz Institute in Berlin.
However, just as this historic project was bearing fruit, a new challenge emerged due to climate change. Warm autumns are delaying migration. Birds breeding north of the Alps are now departing weeks later than they did just a decade ago. Crucially, this delay means many no longer find the thermal air currents needed to cross the Alps, an essential part of their journey. Increasingly, birds remain stranded in the north as winter sets in, unable to continue south.
To prevent fatalities, our team has to step in, capturing and transporting the grounded birds by road to the southern foothills of the Alps from where they continue towards Tuscany. This saves their lives. But while effective in the short
In 2023, we led 32 young ibises on a 2,300-kilometre journey from BadenWürttemberg to Andalusia. It was the longest guided bird migration until then.
Over 43 days and 19 flight stages, the birds arrived safely and adapted well to their new winter habitat. In 2024, we repeated the migration with an even larger group of 36 birds, this time starting from southeast of Bavaria and covering 2,700 kilometres. For the upcoming years, we aim to guide more birds to Andalusia. These efforts secure the survival of the mid-European northern bald ibis colony. They represent a broader lesson in adapted conservation. As climate change reshapes ecosystems and migratory patterns, conservationists must find new ways to support species whose instincts, evolved over millennia, no longer match today’s reality.
In addition, the project also demonstrates the power of collaboration. Zoos, scientists, communities and conservationists across Europe are part of this effort. The new Iberian connection may even echo ancient migration routes used by ibises for thousands of years; routes lost when the species vanished from Europe centuries ago.
Today, through commitment and innovation, we are helping these birds rediscover the skies. Their graceful, V-shaped formations are not only a sign of species recovery. They also offer hope: a reminder that with vision and cooperation, even such ambitious conservation goals can be achieved.
Jojo Mehta FRSGS, Chief Executive Officer and co-founder, Stop Ecocide International
When decisions made by those in positions of power lead to mass environmental destruction, we must ask: where is the accountability?
Regulation, although essential, is often compromised or gamed by those with the resources to do so: activities are recategorised; toxin limits are regularly exceeded; safety protocols are skipped. Those responsible for the gravest harms rarely have to take personal responsibility. International environmental law contains few outright prohibitions, and international criminal law has scant environmental provision. But that is beginning to change.
Efforts to secure ecocide as a new core international crime, defined as “severe and either widespread or longterm damage to the environment,” are now influencing legal frameworks and public consciousness globally. This is not merely a matter of policy reform. Ecocide law bridges environmental protection and human rights, ethical responsibility and legal enforcement. It recognises that destroying the natural world undermines the foundations of human existence: health, food, water, shelter and life itself. Crucially, it acknowledges that the most severe environmental harm typically falls on those least responsible for causing it. True justice must transcend borders, generations and species.
destruction must be prevented and punished under international criminal law to safeguard both planetary health and human wellbeing.
This international momentum reflects broader progress at national and regional levels. The European Union’s recently revised Environmental Crime Directive requires all member states to criminalise some conduct comparable to ecocide by May 2026, while the Council of Europe has adopted a treaty enabling prosecution of environmental destruction ‘tantamount to ecocide’. Domestic ecocide bills are also advancing across Latin America, Europe and the Caribbean. These converging efforts signal that impunity for large-scale environmental destruction is no longer acceptable, creating a multi-layered framework of legal protection for both ecosystems and the communities that depend on them.
“Ecocide law bridges environmental protection and human rights, ethical responsibility and legal enforcement.”
As world leaders prepare to gather in Belém for COP30 in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, the urgency of these legal developments has never been clearer. The Amazon, which drives rainfall patterns across South America and supports millions of inhabitants including over 400 Indigenous communities, embodies both the stakes and the promise of this legal evolution. For millennia, Indigenous communities have protected these lands. Now, as their guardianship faces unprecedented threats, international law offers them the potential of protection in return.
As some of the most powerful nations threaten to retreat from the international legal order they once helped build, those most threatened by its failure are working to reshape institutions to truly serve the most vulnerable. Vanuatu, a nation which has long endured the impacts of sea-level rise, intensifying storms, and prolonged droughts, has led two parallel initiatives aimed at closing the international accountability gap for large-scale ecological harm.
In July 2025, the International Court of Justice delivered a landmark advisory opinion confirming that states have binding legal obligations to protect the environment and climate system. The ruling emerged from a formal UN General Assembly request, itself sparked by a grassroots campaign led by 27 law students from eight Pacific Island nations and championed by Vanuatu alongside over 130 supporting states. The Court’s findings establish that environmental protection is not merely a policy recommendation but a legal obligation, and that failure to prevent serious environmental harm constitutes a wrongful act. It is also a key human rights consideration, as “the full enjoyment of human rights cannot be ensured without the protection of the climate system and other parts of the environment.”
Alongside these state-level obligations, Vanuatu is leading Pacific nations in a growing coalition to establish preventive law based on individual criminal accountability. In September 2024, Vanuatu, Fiji and Samoa formally proposed an amendment to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court to include ecocide. The initiative, now backed by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, reflects a growing consensus among countries on the front lines of ecological vulnerability, that the most severe forms of environmental
Advocates of ecocide law will be present at COP30, building on momentum across international, regional and domestic levels. The choice facing state representatives is stark: continue treating mass environmental destruction as acceptable collateral damage, or recognise it as the crime it is. We are not powerless. The mechanisms for change exist. When shaped with care and applied with courage, the law can be a powerful tool for shifting moral boundaries, deterring would-be perpetrators and delivering justice.
Maria-Teresa Vicente-Giménez, Professor of Philosophy of Law, University of Murcia
Mar Menor is one of the largest coastal lagoons in the Mediterranean. Located in the south-east of Spain, in the region of Murcia, the lagoon has a surface area of 135 square kilometres, with a catchment area of 1,600 square kilometres. This ecosystem, which is of great ecological and emotional value for all local inhabitants, is badly degraded and in danger of collapse.
In October 2019, the death cry of Mar Menor lagoon became the cry of the citizens for the right to life, protection and recovery of Mar Menor. The pain we felt as we contemplated the death throes of the lagoon and the collapse of an ecosystem, moved people for the first time to a new level of ethical and moral awareness, consciousness and understanding.
People demanded justice from a new understanding and ecological standpoint that broke down borders and united us with the lagoon. We wanted legal rights for Mar Menor; the same rights as those of the people and corporations that exploit its riches and treat it as if it were only an object for unlimited economic profit, without considering that Mar Menor is alive and interacts with our own lives. We achieved this, by means of a Popular Legislative Initiative that was taken on board by the Congress of Deputies and voted into law by both the Congress and the Senate. With Law 19/2022 of 13th September, we endowed Mar Menor with legal personality, making it the first ecosystem in Europe to have its own rights. This includes the right to exist and evolve naturally, the right to protection, the right to conservation and the right to restoration.
shift in the paradigm of protection from the more traditional anthropocentrism to a moderate ecocentrism.” It also recalls Article 6, which it describes as a “universal general power, conferred by law to act in the interest of the new legal person.” We have left behind the anthropocentric error of considering human beings as independent from and superior to Nature, and it is recognised that Nature and human beings are part of the same reality.
In 2023, Mar Menor began to exercise its rights in the courts through the private action recognised in Article 6 of Law 19/2022, which allows any person to bring an action to enforce the rights and protections in the Law. The Magistrate-Judge of Cartagena, Raúl Sánchez Conesa, was the first to apply Law 19/2022. He has now done so in three judicial procedures that aim to investigate crimes against natural resources and the environment that affect Mar Menor. These resolutions affirm that “in order to safeguard the rights of Mar Menor that may have been affected by the actions being investigated … actions are to be undertaken on behalf of the legal entity Mar Menor,” through members of its representative and governance bodies, public administrations and citizens, in application of Articles 3 and 6 of Law 19/2022.
“We have left behind the anthropocentric error of considering human beings as independent from and superior to Nature.”
Only one political party, VOX, voted against the rights of Mar Menor, and filed an appeal of unconstitutionality. On 26th December 2024, the Ruling of the Plenary of the Constitutional Court was published in the Official State Gazette (BOE) which recognised the constitutionality of all the articles of the Law on the legal personality of the Mar Menor and rejected the appeal for unconstitutionality in its entirety.
In its ruling, the Constitutional Court, in accordance with Law 19/2022, leaves the past behind and opens a new future: “a
On 30th June 2025, we bestowed a ‘guardianship’ on Mar Menor (Article 3 of Law 19/2022, of 30th September, developed by RD 90/2025, of 11th February). This guardianship, comprised of a Committee of Representatives, a Monitoring Commission (the guardians) and a Scientific Committee, was constituted on 30th June 2025. Three ‘tutors’ were elected, one by each Committee and one by the Commission. The tutors subsequently selected a manager, whose first task was to give Mar Menor lagoon and its basin a tax identification number and open a current account for it.
The future of Mar Menor is still not certain; it is open to a new development model within the limits of our ecosystem. This is the legacy of an enlightened society equipped with information and knowledge, which has awakened international recognition for having turned a dream into a new reality. Let us continue on the path towards a world at peace with Nature and with Humanity.
Emma Montlake, Case Director, Environmental Law Foundation, and Director, Love Our Ouse
The Sussex Ouse is 36 miles long, rising in Slaugham in West Sussex, finishing its journey across Sussex into the sea at Newhaven. In parts tidal, and though heavily modified with many impediments to its right to flow, it is home to some iconic species, the largest sea trout in the country and a strange, ethereal gathering of thin-lipped grey mullet. Thousands of fish gather in the spring, where the clear waters of the Winterbourne chalk stream in Lewes meet the muddy brown waters of the tidal part of the Ouse. It is said they gather to clean themselves of parasites and purge themselves of sea water in the clear chalk water… it is a wonderful wildlife spectacle.
In 2022, four Lewes residents with a passion for the River Ouse set up a Community Interest Company, Love Our Ouse (LOO, loveourouse.org/rights-of-rivers). LOO’s aims were to celebrate, educate and take action for the Ouse.
“There is a bubbling grassroots movement in the UK for rights of rivers.”
Reflecting ambitions, in February 2023 one of LOO’s Directors, then a District Councillor, proposed a Rivers Rights motion for the Ouse, to Lewes District Council (LDC). The motion proposed that LDC would explore the development of a Rights Charter for the Ouse, working with local stakeholders, including Sussex Wildlife Trust (SWT) and the Ouse and Adur Rivers Trust (OART). The motion was passed with strong cross-party support and was a ‘watermark’ moment for the Ouse, and indeed all rivers across the country.
Since the passing of the motion, LOO has engaged multiple stakeholders through consultative and participatory events, exploring what rights the river has and what a charter might contain and achieve. Working with water regulators, NGOs and river communities, LOO ran workshops, a river people tour and a river summit to steer thinking on the draft charter, with invited delegates including the Environment Agency and Natural England. The Charter was developed over a twoyear period; many iterations later, in December 2024 it was formally presented to LDC.
pollution and, importantly for the river, to have an influential voice in decisions that affect it.
On the question of whether the Charter will be legally binding, as a starting point we see it as analogous to Climate Emergency Declarations made by local authorities and which are now being cited in planning appeals and judicial review cases as ‘material considerations’ in planning decisions. In addition, getting references to the Charter in local planning policy will give it further weight in planning decisions.
Through LDC’s declaration a door has been opened to legal rights, though more needs to be done to ensure the realisation of these rights. What this does achieve, though, is to pave the way for court decisions to be made using the principles: any such decision would start to embed, in common law precedent, those rights through the courts.
The Charter will also assist the Council in taking decisions which respect the principles, ultimately over courses of action protecting the substance at their heart, whether or not they are enshrined in common or statutory law by then.
Rights of nature is a growing global movement, codifying nature’s rights into legal systems nationally, locally, statutorily and constitutionally. For example, we see nature and river guardians appointed to represent nature’s voice, and in the globally famous case of the Whanganui River, the river itself was recognised as having the same rights as a person.
The Seine in Paris similarly may also soon have a ‘voice’ in decisions that affect it. Rights of nature jurisprudence represents the paradigm shift required to reset our thinking about how we share the planet with other species, away from resource and exploitation and towards kinship and relationality, that recognises that humans are part of nature and not separate from it, and nature has its own intrinsic rights to exist.
The Charter is the outcome of a participatory approach, ultimately co-created by Steering Committee Members, LOO, LDC, SWT, OART, Railway Land Wildlife Trust and the Southwood Foundation, all major contributors. But that we can also count regulators and water companies amongst those who have had a voice in the Charter’s shape and form is an important element of the Charter’s roots. The Ouse was fortunate to have the advice of lawyers at the Environmental Law Foundation instructing a great team at Hogan Lovells and international barrister Monica Feria Tinta.
On 25th February 2025, LDC announced that they will “support” and “champion” the Ouse Charter. For a local council to have decided to “support the principles within the Rights of Rivers Charter” is momentous. Those principles document certain proposed rights: to flow, to be free of
There is a bubbling grassroots movement in the UK for rights of rivers, and the Ouse has set a course. It serves as an inspiration to other councils and rivers. Since February, six similar motions have been passed by local authorities. Wealden DC, Basingstoke and Deane, Southampton, Winchester. Last week a parish council passed a motion to explore a charter of rights for a 1,000-year-old yew tree in a graveyard in Sussex. When it comes to charters, we have a long history in this country. Think Magna Carta and the influence on history that charter entailed.
If we are to save nature, to truly cherish the wonder all around us and the more than human world (and the odds are looking poor) then we need to think big, to reimagine the future. The challenge is enormous. Rights of nature is a tool in that armoury. It is worth reminding readers that we give rights to ships and companies; nature and rivers, it would seem, are ripe for rights. It is in our gift.
This article is adapted from a blog post that first appeared in February 2025 on Sussex Wildlife Trust’s news page, sussexwildlifetrust.org.uk/news/does-the-river-ouse-have-rights
Dr Erin O’Donnell, Senior Lecturer and ARC Research Fellow, University of Melbourne Law School; Dr Julia Talbot-Jones, Senior Lecturer in the School of Government, Victoria University of Wellington
In 2017 in the space of a week, the world gained three notable new legal persons: the Whanganui River in New Zealand, and the Ganga and Yamuna Rivers in India.
In New Zealand, the government passed legislation that recognised the Whanganui River catchment as a legal person. This significant legal reform emerged from the long-standing Treaty of Waitangi negotiations and is a way of formally acknowledging the special relationship local M ori have with the river.
In India, the Uttarakhand high court ruled that the Ganga and Yamuna Rivers have the same legal rights as a person, in response to the urgent need to reduce pollution in two rivers considered sacred in the Hindu religion.
What are legal rights for nature?
Legal rights are not the same as human rights, and so a ‘legal person’ does not necessarily have to be a human being. Take corporations, for example, which are also treated in law as ‘legal persons’, as a way to endow companies with particular legal rights, and to treat the company as legally distinct from its managers and shareholders.
power to take action, particularly if such action is politically controversial.
Both New Zealand and India face considerable challenges in ensuring that the new legal rights granted to the rivers are successfully enforced. At present, New Zealand seems significantly better prepared than India to meet these challenges. In New Zealand, the new system for managing the river will slot into existing systems of government, whereas India will need to set up completely new organisations in a matter of weeks.
“Conferring legal rights to nature is just the beginning of a longer legal process, rather than the end.”
Granting legal rights to New Zealand’s Whanganui River catchment (Te Awa Tupua) has taken eight years of careful negotiation. The new legislation, introduced at the national level, transfers ownership of the riverbed from the Crown to Te Awa Tupua, and assigns a guardian the responsibility of representing Te Awa Tupua’s interests.
Giving nature legal rights means the law can see ‘nature’ as a legal person, thus creating rights that can then be enforced. Legal rights focus on the idea of legal standing (often described as the ability to sue and be sued), which enables ‘nature’ to go to court to protect its rights. Legal personhood also includes the right to enter and enforce contracts, and the ability to hold property.
There is still a big question about whether these types of legal rights are relevant or appropriate for nature at all. But what is clear from the experience of applying this concept to other non-human entities is that these legal rights don’t mean much if they can’t be enforced.
Enforcing nature’s legal rights
What does it take to enforce the legal personhood of a river or other natural entity? First, there needs to be a person appointed to act on its behalf.
Second, for a right to be enforceable, both the ‘guardians’ and users of the resource must recognise their joint rights, duties, and responsibilities. To possess a right implies that someone else has a commensurate duty to observe this right. Third, if a case requires adjudication by the courts, then it takes time, money, and expertise to run a successful legal case. Enforcing legal rights for nature therefore requires not only legal standing, but also adequate funding and access to legal expertise.
And finally, any actor seeking to enforce these rights will need some form of legislative independence from state and national governments, as well as sufficient real-world
The guardian will consist of two people: one appointed by the Whanganui Iwi (local M ori people), and the other by the New Zealand government. Substantial funds have been set aside to maintain the health of the Whanganui River, and to establish the legal framework that will be administered by the guardian, with support from independent advisory groups.
In contrast, almost overnight, the High Court in India has ruled that the Ganga and Yamuna Rivers will be treated as minors under the law, and will be represented by three people —the director general of Namami Gange project, the Uttarakhand chief secretary, and the advocate general — who will act as guardians for the river. The court has requested that within eight weeks, new boards should be established to oversee the cleaning and maintenance of the rivers. Few further details of the proposed institutional framework are available.
In both cases, there are still big questions about the roles and responsibilities of the rivers’ guardians. How will they decide which rights to enforce, and when? Who can hold them to account for those decisions and who has oversight? Even in the case of the Whanganui River, there remain biting questions about water rights and enforcement. For instance, despite (or perhaps because of) longstanding concerns about levels of water extraction by the Tongariro Power Scheme, the legislation specifically avoids creating or transferring proprietary interests in water.
Ultimately, both of these examples show that conferring legal rights to nature is just the beginning of a longer legal process, rather than the end. Although legal rights can be created overnight, it takes time and money to set up the legal and organisational frameworks that will ensure these rights are worth more than the paper they’re printed on.
Mike Robinson, Chief Executive, RSGS
Images of Marrakech and the spectacular Atlas Mountains of Morocco.
See pages 34–35 for more.
All images © Mike Robinson
Global Witness
Red-tagging, which falsely brands legitimate activists as terrorists, is used to silence land and environmental defenders online and in real life. Red-tagging is a practice that connects online and real-world harms, where individuals or groups (often progressive political activists or land and environmental defenders) are labelled as communists, terrorists or subversives, with inadequate evidence. In some political contexts, this can lead to serious consequences, including further harassment, threats, violence and even extrajudicial killings. Major social media platforms often fail to prevent the disinformation’s spread.
The term ‘red-tagging’ is most commonly used in the context of The Philippines. The practice surged during the government-led crackdown on activists under President Rodrigo Duterte and has intensified further under current president Ferdinand Marcos Jr. But the term’s origins go back further than the Duterte government. In the late 1940s, during the McCarthy era in the USA, there are references in US congressional hearings to possible communist sympathisers receiving a ‘red tag’. Merriam-Webster lists the first use of its synonym, ‘red-baiting’, in 1927.
Both Amnesty International and Global Witness have reported extensively on the practice, highlighting its use by state actors and other powerful entities to silence dissent and target human rights defenders. In the Philippines, the media outlet Rappler, as well as local civil society organisations such as Kalikasan PNE and Karapatan, have documented its use for years. In the first global survey of land and environmental defenders about the digital threats they face, published by Global Witness in 2025, nine out of the ten Filipino defenders surveyed said they had been abused online because of their political affiliations.
How do digital threats and climate action intersect?
Digital threats, such as disinformation campaigns and online harassment (often spearheaded by inauthentic accounts), can significantly undermine climate action by pushing environmental activists and defenders out of online conversations. These online harms can even lead to criminalisation, physical attacks and other real-life consequences. When online harassment spills over into the real world, it endangers activists and hinders their work.
Some land and environmental defenders told Global Witness that online harassment and threats had had made them feel discouraged. Others reported a loss of productivity from online attacks. Another survey of climate scientists found that harassment had made many less likely to discuss climate change online.
The link between red-tagging and defending the environment Red-tagging is frequently used against land and environmental defenders who oppose projects that damage the environment, such as mining operations, deforestation and large-scale infrastructure projects. By falsely associating these defenders with designated terrorist groups (most notably the New People’s Army in The Philippines), redtagging aims to delegitimise their cause and silence their opposition.
The case of Jonila Castro and Jhed Tamano in The Philippines illustrates this danger. These young environmental activists were allegedly abducted by the military, who reportedly attempted to solicit a confession from them to being communist rebels. The two women had been working with
fishing communities opposed to the Manila Bay reclamation project; the controversial construction of a mega airport that has displaced over 700 families and caused irreversible damage to the endangered biodiversity hotspot. Human rights groups have condemned Castro and Tamano’s treatment as a case of apparent state-sponsored abduction and red-tagging. Cutting resources to content moderation teams is a choice Red-tagging is just one of the digital threats that defenders face. A survey of defenders conducted by Global Witness found that the four online platforms where such threats most commonly occur are owned by either Meta or X. It is worrying to see that in recent years both companies have cut down their trust and safety teams and reduced their use of human content moderators globally.
Mere weeks before Donald Trump was inaugurated for a second term, Meta also changed its community guidelines to increase the threshold of what would constitute hate speech online, under the banner of “get[ting] back to our roots around free expression,” as CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a video statement.
These are deliberate choices with potentially grave consequences for the free speech of those who speak out about environmental destruction. Both Meta and X have it within their power to help fix this problem. This would not only benefit users most at risk, like defenders and the climate movement overall, but also help to improve the experience online for everyday users.
“Indigenous Peoples’ traditional stewardship of the land has been repeatedly credited as a vital defence against environmental destruction.”
Red-tagging targets Indigenous Peoples in The Philippines Indigenous Peoples in The Philippines are among those vulnerable to red-tagging as retribution for their resistance to extractive industries. They are often at the forefront of defending their ancestral lands from destructive mining and hydropower activities.
The militarisation of mining in Indigenous territories — where the military have killed, harassed and displaced communities to make way for new critical mineral mining tenements — further exacerbates this issue, creating a climate of fear and intimidation. Too often, Indigenous defenders who resist losing their home to land grabs find themselves denounced with trumped-up terrorism charges.
Red-tagging not only endangers the lives and safety of environmental defenders but also undermines crucial efforts to address climate change and protect the environment. In The Philippines, nearly half of Indigenous Peoples’ demarcated ancestral territories overlap with biodiversity hotspots. Indigenous Peoples’ traditional stewardship of the land has been repeatedly credited as a vital defence against environmental destruction. The mining industry’s threat to Indigenous communities, then, is disastrous for the environment too.
By silencing those who speak out against destructive and extractive practices, red-tagging allows environmental damage to continue unchecked.
Rueben George, with Michael Simpson
In the winter of 2017, some Elders from our local nations decided to construct a traditional watchhouse on our territory, directly along the path of the Trans Mountain Pipeline. We had already been fighting Kinder Morgan and Trans Mountain for years in the courts and at public hearings. Tsleil-Waututh Nation staff couldn’t risk getting arrested by participating in civil disobedience actions because that could undermine all the legal work that we’d invested in. It’s typically not our style as the Tsleil-Waututh Nation to put blockades up, but we have a saying, “We are all going in the same direction,” which means that we are all headed toward our shared goals even if we approach them in different ways. Some people are willing to risk arrest and do whatever it takes, whereas others can’t; that’s why going in the same direction as our allies is important. So, even though I couldn’t get arrested because of my role within the nation, there was nothing stopping my mom from doing that. She has placed her body on the line to shut down the work of Trans Mountain three times. The first time was in 2014, and she was arrested. Someone took a photo of me standing face to face with an RCMP officer that day, and it looks like we are about to strangle each other. That image was published in the news and made things look like there was a really serious standoff going down, but I was actually saying to that cop, “You better take care of my mom!” and he was telling me, “We heard she’s diabetic, so we have sandwiches and juice and apples waiting for her in case she needs them.”
Upper Nicola, and Secwépemc relatives. By ruling in our favour, the court nullified the federal government’s approval of the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion on the grounds that it had not fulfilled its constitutional duty to consult with First Nations on the project. The court affirmed that the duty to consult requires the government to engage in a meaningful two-way dialogue with First Nations, and it concluded that what the government had actually done was merely register our concerns before approving the project without any effort to accommodate those concerns… Additionally, the court ruled that the NEB did not adequately consider the impact that increased oil tanker traffic would have on the endangered Southern Resident orca population in the Salish Sea.
“We needed something out on the land to demonstrate that this was our territory.”
The idea of the watchhouse arose when some of the Elders in our communities decided that we needed something out on the land to demonstrate that this was our territory and that we were present on it. It could have been an artefact, a totem pole, or anything that signified who we are and that this is our land, but the Elders decided it would be a watchhouse because these structures have been used by our ancestors for thousands of years to monitor and protect our lands, waters, and people.
Before the structure was built, the Elders visited this site and put down traditional medicines to bless the ground. As they did this, they shared teachings about how everything has a spirit, including the trees that became the posts for the four corners of the watchhouse. Our Elders blessed those posts because the spirit of those posts would be watching over the land and water, helping to protect us. Those posts are like ribs that cover the spirit of that house, and the spirit of that house is the heart that beats the love and courage of our Indigenous law. Traditionally a watchhouse would have dirt floors, and that dirt would connect us to who we are each time we set foot on it, reminding us that we’re rooted down into the earth and this place we call home.
The Trudeau government responded to the Federal Court of Appeal ruling by announcing that it would engage in additional consultation measures and seek reapproval. Since the government had already purchased the pipeline, this essentially meant that public consultation and adjudication of the pipeline would be conducted by the owner of the pipeline. Trudeau’s Cabinet proceeded to reapprove the project in 2019, less than a year after the court had negated the government’s initial approval. Once again, we told the courts about how the increased oil tanker traffic would jeopardise our food systems and kill the endangered Southern Resident orcas. We told them how a spill could make millions of people sick and how there was no strong economic case for this project. We told them about all the negative impacts that this pipeline would have. And ultimately they agreed with us, but they determined that the pipeline expansion was nevertheless in the best interests of Canada. So even when we win, we lose.
©
Prystupa
On 30 August 2018, Canada’s Federal Court of Appeal ruled in favour of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation’s legal challenge that we brought forward with our Squamish, Stó:lō, Coldwater,
This article was extracted with permission from It Stops Here: Standing Up for Our Lands, Our Waters and Our People by Rueben George with Michael Simpson. Copyright © 2023 Rueben George and Michael Simpson. Published by Allen Lane, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.
Jo Woolf FRSGS, RSGS Writer-in-Residence
From the deck of a freighter, Jean Malaurie watched an unfamiliar land begin to emerge out of a passing squall. A sandy beach, fringed here and there with grass, gave way to soaring slopes of rock and scree. Two vast rivers of ice disgorged themselves into the depths of a fjord. Absolute silence prevailed.
A cluster of huts stood on level ground, close to the shore. Built of peat and stones, these were the homes of the people of Siorapaluk, and Malaurie studied them with interest. A free-thinking geographer and geologist, he planned to live in this little community in the far north of Greenland, which, in 1950, was still relatively unchanged by the outside world. While planning to conduct geological and topographical surveys, he also wanted to pay close attention to the people themselves: their way of life, their language, their oral history and their legends.
Malaurie’s possessions and his newly-purchased team of dogs were already being loaded onto a launch. The ship’s arrival had been noticed, and a few figures could be seen running down the beach. Malaurie was the only visitor. “I had made a complete break,” he wrote. “From now on, I was on my own: my mission was beginning.”
Jean Malaurie was born in 1922 to a French family living in Mainz, a German city which at that time was occupied by Allied forces controlling the Rhineland in the aftermath of the Great War. The family re-settled in France in 1930. During the Second World War, Malaurie defied the Service du Travail Obligatoire or Compulsory Work Service which decreed that French workers should be sent to Germany to compensate for its loss of manpower. His refusal forced him into hiding until the liberation of Paris in 1944.
Disko Island in Greenland, Malaurie was struck by what he called “the dictatorship of the hard sciences.” He explained: “The expedition included physicists and geophysicists, but no biologists or ethnographers. A great polar expedition that forgot about the inhabitants!”
What fascinated Malaurie was the complex relationship between Indigenous people and their environment, and he saw an opportunity to study this in the polar regions. Ironically, it was in the heat of southern Algeria, while working in the Ahaggar Mountains for the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), that he received the breakthrough he’d been hoping for: a telegram giving him the go-ahead for a year-long expedition to northern Greenland. All of a sudden, he needed to arrange transport to Thule.
“What fascinated Malaurie was the complex relationship between Indigenous people and their environment.”
It was the explorer Knud Rasmussen who gave the name ‘Thule’ to a trading post that he’d established in 1910 in northwest Greenland. Rasmussen was evoking the Ultima Thule described by early classical writers as a place on the northernmost margins of the known world. To Malaurie, however, arriving some 40 years later, Thule was merely a stopover. Siorapaluk lay 120 miles further north, and offered the “perfect isolation” that he sought.
After the war, Malaurie studied geography at the University of Paris, where a recommendation by his geography lecturer, Professor Emmanuel de Martonne, gained him a post with Expéditions Polaires Françaises, a polar research programme founded and directed by Paul-Émile Victor. During one of these expeditions, while helping to map the mountains of
Settling himself into an empty hut, Malaurie built furniture out of shipping crates and suspended an outdoor meat cache six feet above the ground, safe from dogs and polar bears. On first meeting, the people of Siorapaluk were polite but wary. Malaurie offered some friendly words in Greenlandic, but knew that their acceptance of him would take time, nurtured by sensitivity and respect. He wrote: “I am like a migratory bird in this ancient society, curious about the nature over which I fly; landing on a lake, the bird comes to realise that the ripples and eddies must subside before he can attune all his senses and dialogue with the people of nature.”
Malaurie’s patience was rewarded. As summer turned to winter, he learned to drive his dogs and was soon travelling long distances through darkness and appalling weather. Hunting, eating and sleeping alongside the Inuit, he effectively became one of them. During the long nights he listened, fascinated, as they talked about their ancestors and shared their wisdom of the spirit world. He learned about the importance of angakkoqs or shamans, and sat with storytellers who described ancient times, when humans and animals spoke to each other.
“Malaurie couldn’t help but communicate his love of the Arctic to others.”
Indigenous communities: the process of westernisation would happen quickly, almost without their knowing. He wrote: “Were these hunters the last kings of Thule? Yes, they were. Their way of life, the only one possible if one wants to live entirely off the northern lands, was and is doomed. But does this mean that these people in all their individuality are doomed also? I do not believe so…”
In the spring of 1951, in the company of Kutsikitsoq, Qaaqqutsiaq, and their wives, Natuk and Padloq, Malaurie set out to map the plateaus of Inglefield Land and Washington Land. Together, Malaurie and Kutsikitsoq reached the North Magnetic Pole, and shortly afterwards the whole party crossed from Greenland into Canada. Returning to Siorapaluk, Malaurie said that he owed his success to his companions, with their problem-solving intelligence and generosity. When the time came for Malaurie to leave, he loaded his sledge with geological samples and harnessed his dogs for an overland trek to Thule. His friends Sakaeunnguaq and Qaalasoq went with him for the journey. As they approached their destination, one of Malaurie’s companions tapped his shoulder and pointed. He got out his binoculars. At first, he thought he was seeing a mirage.
In the space of a few weeks, a vast complex of buildings had risen up: a city, he wrote, “of hangars and tents, of sheet metal and aluminium, glittering in the sun amid smoke and dust.” Lines of trucks and cranes stretched away into the distance, and an army of bulldozers was busy shifting earth and stones. This was the US Air Base at Thule (now known as the Pituffik Space Base), still under construction, and its very existence was top secret. (In 1953 the inhabitants of nearby Inuit settlements were forcibly relocated to New Thule (Qaanaaq) some 80 miles to the north.)
The officer in charge came out to meet them. Barely hearing Malaurie’s explanation, and alarmed by a potential security breach, he demanded: “Who gave a Frenchman clearance to be on this base?” Malaurie’s retort was instinctive: “Who gave you ‘clearance’ to be on Inuit land, General?”
Later, Malaurie returned to the Air Base for another look. This time he was granted access, and he chatted freely with the staff. Immediately, he saw the implications for Greenland’s
Amid mounting global interest in the natural resources of the Arctic, Malaurie realised that he, more than perhaps anyone of his era, was in a position to defend the rights of the people he held so dear. He undertook many more expeditions to the Arctic and acted as a consultant for governments seeking expertise on Indigenous populations. He wrote: “Traditional societies should move forward at their own pace, which is not our pace; they should not go for abrupt change but for a slow, considered evolution so that they can take the best, not the worst, of what our Western civilisation has to offer.”
For the experiences shared with his Inuit friends, Malaurie cherished long-lasting gratitude. He wrote: “I owe much to these exemplary men, who obliged me to discover in depth my own identity. They reminded me that a man’s life should be a constant challenge that enables him to become what he truly is. They were my second – and more important – university, and I shall be indebted to them all my life.”
Malaurie couldn’t help but communicate his love of the Arctic to others and was determined to give voice to Indigenous knowledge and concerns. In 1955 he founded Terre Humaine, a landmark collection of ethnographical works that give a voice to oppressed populations around the world who are on the brink of dissolution or disappearance. Inspired by his expedition to northern Greenland, Malaurie’s book, Les Dernier Rois de Thulé (The Last Kings of Thule), formed the first in this series; subsequent editions contain works by Claude LéviStrauss, Per Jakez Hélias, Margaret Mead, Theodora Kroeber and Wilfred Thesiger.
Other books by Malaurie himself, including Lettre à un Inuit and De la Pierre à l’âme, consider the future of Arctic peoples and the challenges posed by a changing environment. He urged them to take courage, and to pass their history like a sacred torch from one generation to the next. First peoples, he wrote, “have always lived in communion with the spirits of the earth, and they are the sentinels standing on guard for it.”
Harbouring a family connection to Perthshire and a fondness for Scotland, Professor Malaurie stated in later life that he deeply wished he could have been the publisher of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song. He was delighted, therefore, when he was awarded the RSGS Mungo Park Medal in 2005, alongside his many other awards and honours.
Malaurie was elected to France’s first Chair of Polar Geography within the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales; he founded the Centre d’Études Arctiques; and was appointed UNESCO’s Goodwill Ambassador in charge of Arctic polar issues. The Malaurie Institute of Arctic Research Monaco–UVSQ (MIARC, miarctic.org), directed by Professor Jan Borm, was set up during Malaurie’s lifetime in collaboration with the Institute of Oceanography of Monaco. It is dedicated to the study of Malaurie’s circumpolar research in the Arctic and is still the place to go in France for all those wanting to continue his research. Malaurie passed away in February 2024, aged 101.
Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, President and Coordinator, Association of Women and Indigenous Peoples of Chad
I’m an Indigenous woman, and I’m a goodwill ambassador to the President of the Republic of Chad. The Association of Women and Indigenous Peoples of Chad (AFPAT) has two primary aims. First, the protection and promotion of human rights and the rights of Indigenous peoples through national, regional and international legislation. Second, the protection of the environment through the three Rio conventions: the fight against climate change, the fight against the advancing desert, and the protection of the environment. It’s all about sustainable development.
AFPAT was created because of my own background, and because, thanks to my mother, I was lucky enough to go to school. I was born into a society where children, let alone girls, aren’t sent to school. But going to school enabled me to understand how much my community is discriminated against. And I said to myself that if I experienced this discrimination, what must it be like for a young girl who hasn’t had the chance to go to school: they must be even more marginalised. I realised that I couldn’t talk about human rights or girls’ or women’s rights, without talking about the rights of the environment or of living beings. So, AFPAT immediately moved to protect both the environment and human rights. It’s a personal experience, but also a community experience: the experience of the nomadic or semi-nomadic Peul Mbororo people and communities of the Sahel.
the government to lobby for national adaptation plans and national development plans, and we use them at international level to negotiate climate, biodiversity and desertification issues during the COPs, and at other UN meetings to talk about the rights of Indigenous peoples.
We do a lot to protect the environment by using the traditional knowledge of communities of Indigenous peoples. For example, maybe people in Europe look at their phones to see if it’s going to rain or not. But our grandparents look at the positions of the clouds, the movements of the birds, the little insects, and that enables them to make a prediction, not just for the week, but for the season. That’s how nomads adapt and move around. We observe a lot. The stars, the moon, the sun. We work with communities to develop and preserve this traditional knowledge, because it’s knowledge that enables us to survive. I really enjoy this work because I’m always learning from my elders.
“If you grow up in a society dominated by masculinity, and you’re a woman, you really have to have the courage to rise.”
AFPAT acts at local, community, national and international levels. Locally, we work with Indigenous Peule women who are nomads or semi-nomads. For example, in a region of Mayo Kébbi where they grow a lot of peanuts and do all the processing throughout the year, we help them to have machines to husk, grind and then process their raw materials. In other regions, it’s for milk processing and selling milk, to help them access the market.
These projects with the women have enabled us to do other projects with the men. I particularly like one called participatory mapping. It allows us to map the land. It helps to create harmony between communities, as they fight just to get access to a watering hole or a plot of land. So, the map is drawn up to limit inter-community conflicts and recreate harmony. That in turn enables women to have access to land, and with that access they practise agro-ecology. These local projects on adaptation and resilience enable us to work with
Chadian women are resilient and strong. And they have all the knowledge. But if you grow up in a society dominated by masculinity, and you’re a woman, you really have to have courage to rise. When you go to the market, you can see a woman with a baby on her back, who can walk for miles to earn an income, go back home and feed her children; a woman singing who may have a baby on her back but who can work the land; and nomadic women who may have two or three children with them but who can go behind the cattle and sell their milk. Not to mention women who went to school, have diplomas, are members of parliament, and so on. Chadian women play a major role in the country’s development and politics. But they need to be brought to the fore. We need decision-making positions for women, because if they take decisions, they take them for everyone, so that they can help their boys to flourish, so that they can get a good education, so that their husbands can get some rest, and so that their fathers can have a good life. We need to invest in women because by doing so we’re investing in the nation, investing in the preservation and resilience of a society. Young people constitute c70% of sub-Saharan Africa’s population. We need to give them a chance. Of course, we have many co-leaders, including the President, who are young. But what we need is more responsibility for young people, more training and more diversification. We can give them the chance to become diplomats, to become major business leaders in the private, agricultural and marginalised sectors. We need to support young people with access to resources. We need to use them for our development. That’s what I’m trying to do with my small association. I’ve always liked to have a lot of young people working with me. Maybe I cannot give them all of the opportunities they deserve, but there are others who can. Give young people that chance. Educate them. It’s the future of our country.
Stephen Martin, Scottish Catholic International Aid Fund (SCIAF)
In 2016, I visited SCIAF’s Zambian partner Caritas Kabwe to develop a farming project to be submitted to the Scottish Government for funding. The project was known locally as the Kumena (tilling the soil) Project.
The philosophy of the project was to collaborate with smallscale farmers in Kabwe in central Zambia to increase their yields through farming in a way that restores soil health. In the end, the project ran for seven years with additional funding from SCIAF supporters and the Scottish Government over the period.
Soils were tested at the start and at the end of the project. The soils were tested for their acidity (pH), organic matter content (OM), and their levels of nitrogen (N), potassium (P), phosphorus (K), and magnesium (Mg) as well as their lead content.
Right from the start, we knew that we needed to test the soils, as the project’s location was upwind from one of the most polluted towns on Earth — polluted due to mining and smelting of heavy metals, namely lead, zinc, and some silver and vanadium. The mine opened in 1906 and officially closed in 1994, but casual mining of the slag heaps and re-smelting of previous waste continues to pollute the surroundings.
an average increase in maize of over 2MT/ha. Soils improved with increased levels of organic matter and improved pH, along with increased potassium and phosphorus. The improvements were incremental, and it will take years to fully restore depleted, exhausted soils. But they had taken a significant first step.
‘Lead Farmers’ in the community innovated and made the project their own. They used their deep knowledge of their land to build on the skills and knowledge imparted by the staff from our local partner Caritas Kabwe. Indeed, the embedding of our local colleagues within the target communities was central to the success of the project, especially as COVID impacted the ability to move long distances.
The amazing increase in yield and improvement in drought resistance is testament to the fact that if you respect nature and work with it, farmers will prosper, while their soils heal from years of exploitation.
“We needed to test the soils, as the project’s location was upwind from one of the most polluted towns on Earth.”
A 2025 human rights report stated that some Kabwe soils had lead levels of 60,000mg/kg, vastly exceeding the 200mg/kg threshold considered hazardous. On top of these concerns were worries that years of chemical fertiliser use, along with practices of burning crop residue, had left soils acidic and extremely low in organic matter.
Fortunately, the first batch of results indicated that the farmers we were working with were far enough away from the smelting sites to avoid dangerous levels of lead pollution. However, their soils were generally extremely acidic and low in organic matter.
The project initially focused on liming to decrease acidity, where possible, and adopting farming practices such as composting and using animal manure to fertilise planting basins, thus increasing the soils’ organic matter. With our local partners, we encouraged the adaption of sustainable agricultural practices which focused on improving soils using local resources. Healthy soils with a neutral pH and improved levels of organic matter are more resilient against drought and provide a better medium for crops to thrive. Soils rich with organic matter act as a sponge, holding moisture within the soil.
By the end of the project, the farmers we supported enjoyed
For SCIAF, the learning was clear. If we are working with small-scale farmers, it is essential to know the condition of their soils. Quick wins in yield can be obtained by fixing acidic soils with lime. Increasing organic matter is equally important in holding soil moisture and carbon and releasing nutrients essential for healthy growth and good crop yields.
As Catherine, one of the smallholders we worked with, said, “SCIAF and their partners taught us skills we need to survive. I learnt how to make organic manure as I can’t afford to buy conventional fertiliser. The maize you can see here is a testimony to what I’m saying. Unlike before, we can now eat breakfast, lunch and dinner.”
Elsa Tsioumani, International Institute for Sustainable Development
Indigenous Peoples have lived in close relationship with the natural world for centuries. Through their sustainable and relational knowledge and production systems, they have shaped and maintained vast ecosystems, species, and genetic diversity critical for climate stability, water cycle regulation, and agricultural productivity, as well as for their cultural continuity. Their global situation, however, is closely tied to a history of colonial, capitalist, and nation-state violence, which led to dispossession, displacement, marginalisation, and forced assimilation.
While Indigenous Peoples still struggle for recognition and implementation of their inherent rights, including to selfdetermination, land, and natural resources, their resistance and advocacy has resulted in some progress on the international stage. A new report published by the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) sheds light on recent developments relevant to their engagement and recognition under the three Rio Conventions: the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).
their rights and integrate their knowledge into climate action. Indigenous Peoples’ constant advocacy led to consolidation of their participation, including through establishment of the Local Communities and Indigenous Peoples Platform and its Facilitative Working Group, a rare example of a body within the UN system with equal representation of Indigenous Peoples and parties.
“Indigenous Peoples have shown that coordination, coalition building, and articulation of their rights can promote change.”
Under the UNCCD, lack of an official constituency for engagement has historically obstructed their full and effective participation in the process. The 2024 decision to establish two new caucuses, one for Indigenous Peoples and one for Local Communities, is a development that is expected to significantly improve the recognition of their ongoing contributions to combat land degradation and increase their involvement.
Based on long-standing observer participation and interviews with key people, as well as a literature review, the report shares the story of Indigenous Peoples’ engagement in global environmental governance, an engagement built on their distinct knowledge systems and their critique of the Western understanding of nature as a resource. Highlighting decisions taken in 2024, it showcases how the history of each of the Rio Conventions has been marked by procedural advances concerning the recognition of Indigenous Peoples’ knowledge, rights, and participation in decision making, albeit at different paces. Developments under each Rio Convention depend on the leeway allowed by the legal and institutional framework, the degree of activism by Indigenous Peoples’ organisations, and ally support.
These advances and the ongoing obstacles that Indigenous Peoples face in environmental negotiations are part of an unfolding story of resistance and advocacy. In their engagements with these government-centred climate, biodiversity, and desertification processes, Indigenous Peoples have shown that coordination, coalition building, and articulation of their rights can promote change. The report assesses their steps, noting that:
• sustained advocacy of Indigenous Peoples as rights holders has paid off with increased understanding in the international arena of their valuable contributions to sustainability and deeper institutionalisation of their participation;
• advances in the human rights system have helped open avenues for Indigenous Peoples in the Rio Conventions, though acceptance of human rights language is inconsistent and may act as a lightning rod; and
• access to direct funding remains a key demand of Indigenous Peoples’ organisations under all three Rio Conventions, both for their participation in meetings and continuation of customary practices on the ground.
In the CBD, consistent efforts by the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity resulted in the establishment of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Article 8(j) on traditional knowledge in 1998, followed by innovations that gave Indigenous Peoples preferential status with regard to other observer groups and access of their self-nominated representatives to practically all bodies established under the Convention. Such procedural openings led to increased recognition of Indigenous Peoples’ rights in the legally-binding 2010 Nagoya Protocol on access and benefit-sharing and the 2022 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, and culminated in the historic creation, in 2024, of a permanent Subsidiary Body on matters related to Indigenous Peoples, local communities, and traditional knowledge.
Under the UNFCCC, recognition of Indigenous Peoples as an official observer constituency in 2001 was followed by the acknowledgement in the Paris Agreement of the need to respect
By sharing the context and contributing steps that led to the 2024 decisions under the Rio Conventions, the report offers guidance on where arrangements for Indigenous Peoples stand in each process, with implications for what remains to be done. There is undoubtedly some progress to celebrate at the international level, the authors conclude. However, with authoritarian regimes rising around the globe and legal systems being increasingly weaponised against Indigenous Peoples defending their land and resources, challenges at the national level persist and are likely to grow.
IISD (2025) Indigenous Peoples in the Rio Conventions (www.iisd.org/publications/report/indigenouspeoples-in-rio-conventions)
Professor Yongchuan Yang, School of Environment and Ecology, Chongqing University, China; Dr Li Huang, School of Ecology and Environmental Sciences, Yunnan University, China; Dr Cheng Jin, School of Ecology, Sun Yat-Sen University, China
In the soft mist of Mount Putuo, an island sanctuary off China’s eastern coast, stands a solitary tree known to science as Carpinus putoensis. For over two centuries, this unassuming tree with serrated leaves has clung to existence within the grounds of Huiji Temple. It is the last known mature specimen of its kind in the wild. Its survival is no accident, but a testament to a profound, centuries-old relationship between spiritual devotion and ecological stewardship in China. Recent landmark research reveals a startling truth: China’s Buddhist and Taoist temples have acted as vital arks for biodiversity for nearly 2,000 years. Studying nearly 47,000 ancient trees (over 100 years old) across 6,545 temples, we found these sacred spaces harbour a concentration of ancient life unmatched elsewhere in human-dominated landscapes. The density of old trees within temple grounds is more than 7,000 times higher than in surrounding areas. They include 61 threatened species, and eight species, like the critically endangered Putuo hornbeam and the once ‘extinct in the wild’ parasol tree (Firmiana major), survive exclusively within these consecrated walls. Some, like the ginkgos (Ginkgo biloba) planted during the Tang Dynasty, are living chronicles of China’s history, having witnessed millennia of climatic shifts and human endeavours. The secret to this remarkable preservation lies at the intersection of faith and ecology. Buddhism and Taoism, deeply woven into Chinese culture, revere specific plants. Buddhism associates key moments in the Buddha’s life with trees: born under the Ashoka tree (Saraca asoca), enlightenment under the Bodhi tree (Ficus religiosa), final nirvana under twin Sāl trees (Shorea robusta). As Buddhism spread from India’s tropics into China’s diverse and often colder climates centuries ago, a fascinating ecological adaptation unfolded. The original sacred Indian species struggled in new environments. Chinese monks, driven by spiritual need, sought functional and symbolic substitutes from the local flora. They employed sophisticated ecological reasoning, looking for native trees that could fulfil the same religious roles and visually resonate with the originals. This process, termed ‘Buddhist tree species substitution’, reveals profound indigenous ecological knowledge. In milder regions, monks selected local species closely related (phylogenetically similar) and visually akin (similar tree form, bark, leaves) to the Indian originals. In harsher climates, especially freezing northern zones, the search widened. Here, resilience became paramount. Monks identified distantly related native trees that shared crucial specific features, like leaf shape or fruit type, with the sacred originals. The iconic ginkgo is the supreme example. Native to tiny, isolated glacial refuges in southern China, it was chosen across northern temples for its hardiness and perceived spiritual equivalence to the Bodhi tree. Its ubiquitous presence in ancient temple courtyards today is a direct result of culturally driven translocation and nurturing.
presence — translated into tangible, long-term protection rooted in reverence rather than formal conservation policy. This ‘cultural shield’ proved remarkably effective and resilient, persisting through dynastic changes and modern development pressures.
The global significance of China’s temple tree sanctuaries cannot be overstated. They offer powerful lessons for contemporary biodiversity conservation worldwide.
“In an era where pristine wilderness shrinks, sacred sites provide critical refuges, especially for long-lived ancient trees.”
The temples demonstrate that deep-seated cultural or spiritual values can inspire powerful, long-term conservation commitment, often at minimal financial cost. This intrinsic motivation can be more sustainable than externally imposed regulations. Protecting sites deemed sacred leverages existing community beliefs and social structures.
In an era where pristine wilderness shrinks, sacred sites within otherwise heavily altered landscapes provide critical refuges, especially for long-lived ancient trees. These ‘cultural keystone structures’ maintain ecological functions. The genetic legacy of ancient temple trees, as survivors of past climatic upheavals, may hold keys to adaptation in our changing climate.
The historical translocation and successful establishment of species like the ginkgos far beyond their native range, driven by cultural needs, prefigure modern concepts of assisted migration. Temples acted as early, successful ex situ conservation sites, preserving species when they vanished from the wild. This shows the potential for culturally supported initiatives to aid species facing habitat loss or climate displacement.
China’s case is exceptionally well documented, but the phenomenon is global. India’s sacred groves, Japan’s shrine forests, Ethiopian church forests, West Africa’s ancestral tree sites, and even the ancient yews in English churchyards all echo this pattern. Sacred natural sites are recognised as vital components of global conservation networks, protecting disproportionately high biodiversity.
The temple model isn’t a replacement for large protected areas or scientific conservation strategies. Instead, it highlights the immense value of integrating traditional ecological knowledge and cultural practices into broader conservation frameworks. Recognising and supporting the stewardship of indigenous communities and religious institutions managing sacred sites is crucial. They remind us that effective conservation can blossom not just from scientific mandate, but also from the deep roots of reverence, tradition, and a harmonious vision of humanity’s place within the natural world.
The temple environment itself provided the critical safe haven. Viewed as sacred spaces, temples were largely protected from the rampant deforestation that swept across China. Within these walls, trees were planted, cared for, and left undisturbed for generations. The spiritual significance bestowed upon them — as symbols of enlightenment, longevity, or divine
Chris Fleet FRSGS, Map Curator, National Library of Scotland
John Harvie-Brown was an ornithologist and naturalist, who studied bird migration in great depth and who also published widely on vertebrate fauna in Scotland. A keen explorer, he knew Scotland well, and his Naturalist’s Map of Scotland was a very conscious effort to map Scotland’s natural environment for the first time. Harvie-Brown was a wealthy landowner, “keen with his rod and gun,” and although he would not have seen himself as an ‘environmental defender’, he engaged in systematic and careful observation of nature. He was also one of the most important supporters of the British Association’s campaign in the 1880s to recruit the keepers of lighthouses to record observations of bird migration, which explains why lighthouses are clearly shown on the map with red asterisks.
By collaborating with John George Bartholomew, he was able to gather a variety of physical environmental data from the firm’s other maps. The main colour coding distinguishes ‘Cultivated Land’ in green, ‘Woodland’ in dark green, ‘Moorland’ in purple and ‘Deer Forests’ in blue, whilst also highlighting ‘Faunal’ regions in red, and ‘Salmon Rivers’ in blue. Arguably this map was the forerunner of the more detailed land-use surveys in the 20th century, which have always been useful tools for understanding and defending the rural landscape.
“Harvie-Brown engaged in systematic and careful observation of nature.”
JA Harvie-Brown and JG Bartholomew, Naturalist’s Map of Scotland (Edinburgh: John Bartholomew & Co, 1893). Image courtesy of the National Library of Scotland. View online at maps.nls.uk/view/74414125
Mike Robinson, Chief Executive, RSGS
The build-up
I don’t get out much, so it was an especial pleasure this year to undertake an adventure that I’ve been dreaming about for years: to climb Toubkal and other high peaks in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco.
As ever, I had originally planned a trip which was ambitious and a bit over-complicated, and this made it impossible to recruit like-minded companions who had the same availability or inclination. Despite a lack of time, I didn’t want to risk it turning into an Instagram-style holiday, where there’s only time to parachute in, pose for a picture and leave. I wanted to savour the adventure, not rush it, and to take time to enjoy it in what I decided were seven different ways to enjoy a trip. Firstly, there is joy in dreaming about a trip, and I had been doing that for the best part of a decade. Then there is pleasure in planning and understanding a new place. There is excitement in finally booking it: that moment that it all suddenly feels real. The anticipation in the lead-up to departure. Then there’s the enjoyment of the trip itself, of course. A bitter-sweet contrast of the return home, perhaps wishing for a longer break but missing your own bed, or greenery in this case. And then, even longer-term, the joy of reminiscence.
where steep switchback roads weaved through valleys and lush foliage of dusty green olives and argan trees nestled below the crumbling hills which fade into the heat haze. The mountains all look like a landslide waiting to happen, and houses of red clay and block-work perch on the ridges and in the valley bottoms. Despite the areas we travelled through being fortunate to escape the worst of the earthquakes in September 2023, there were still occasional reminders of its continued impact: the odd collapsed wall, or debris of a slope collapse.
“The road started to narrow and steepen as we made our way to the mountain village of Imlil.”
The road started to narrow and steepen as we made our way to the mountain village of Imlil, and as we pulled in along the narrow streets, we parked our bags and ourselves under a large tree to find shade, and were greeted with the obligatory sweet tea. The bags were loaded onto mules, and we rushed to use the last working toilet in the back of the outdoor shop. I took that moment to hire boots for my son, because my old ones I’d insisted he wear had fallen apart in the airport. Then it was time for the off.
I had considered travelling overland, but I quickly worked out that I had to be as pragmatic as possible if this trip was to see the light of day. For example, few of my pals could get the same time off, and the flight from Edinburgh to Marrakech cost less than the train to London (let alone trains through France and Spain, ferries and overnight accommodation in between). How are we supposed to encourage sustainable travel, when it is just so paralyzingly expensive by comparison? And so, instead of three weeks of climbing, surfing and visiting deserts, it became a much simpler week in Morocco, with four days in the Atlas.
Any general apprehension I had about the trip was heightened by a new injury I sustained to my ankle and calf muscle, and by an old injury to my back, which flared up again in the weeks before departure. I went to see a physio who told me to avoid climbing uphill. And after a tick bite got infected, my doctor gave me antibiotics and told me to avoid sunlight. Marvellous – I’m going to climb mountains in North Africa… all I need now is to discover I have an allergy to sand or camels! I did wonder if I should call the whole thing off, and when BEAR Scotland decided to dig up every major road in central Scotland including the one literally at the bottom of my drive, I started to wonder if a higher being was dropping hints that I really shouldn’t be going.
But after waiting for so long, I wasn’t going to give up on my dream, and so, despite all the uncertainties, I did manage to persuade three of my family (Euan, Jamie and Izzy) to come with me, and in June of this year we finally made it to Morocco.
And the journey
After a couple of days in the heat, hustle and bustle of the medina and the calm and cool air of a beautiful riad, it was time to leave Marrakech behind, and make our way to the hills. Fairly quickly, we worked our way through the rocky desert that in some ways resembled more of a cleared demolition site than a rich sandy expanse, and arrived in hill country
It was a long, windy walk by a waterfall and through leafy glades and out into a dustier landscape full of thistles and alpine flowers. The path between them was a constant, steady uphill, on grey dust and rocks, my feet slipping and sliding slightly with every occasional step.
We were serenaded by Alpine choughs that wheeled around each of the main cafes or houses that we passed on the way up. We regularly had to clear the path to make way for mules that trotted through much more quickly carrying our luggage. I took my time spotting rocks, some with a deep blue sheen, others with fossilised sea creatures embedded in them. With every 100 metres of climbing we lost about a degree centigrade of temperature, which was a relief since we had left nearly 40°C heat in Marrakech. As we slowly picked our way upwards, it began to return to temperatures that I found more natural and comfortable.
The route itself seemed split into sections in my mind. The first was the open, dusty valley floor, before we started to take the low switchback routes up on the ridges. We passed fertility rock, where a lunch was laid out for us, to get our strength up for the second half of the walk. Soon afterwards, we passed a valley full of goats, picking their way between the pink flowers and variegated thistles. Then, as we rounded the narrow corner into another glen, we were met by a huge roll of thunder. It sent Izzy into a fit of giggles, making me realise that she would cope just fine with anything the Atlas threw at us.
It was a welcome relief, after a five-hour walk in, to finally find the refuge. Just as the rain started and the wind picked up, whistling ferociously around
the square-sided building. The refuge itself was dark and stone-built, stuck on the only flat ground below the looming peaks of Toubkal and Ouanoukrim.
It was hard to believe the depth of gloom that enveloped us as we first walked into the refuge. We stumbled in almost complete pitch-black through a hall with a mud floor, and stepped up into a dark wood-lined corridor. The room we were staying in was almost as gloomy, despite one small window which barely seemed to let in any light. And there was little chance to lay out kit, or stretch or sort anything, as the rooms were so cramped.
There were four people per bunk across the top, the same below, and there were two opposite up top and two below on the other bunk. It was clean, but not comfortable, but I guess it was better than a tent, and there were toilets and cold showers. It was just so dark.
We convened for sweet tea in the first dining area and waited for dinner, which, when it turned up, was a feast: tagines of beef or vegetables with bread, plus soup to start and fruit to finish. It was an impressive feat, considering where we were. Dinner though was quite quiet. Everyone was apprehensive of the days that lay ahead of us, particularly because of fears of altitude sickness.
That first night was uncomfortable, and it only took one person to snore for everybody to lose a night’s sleep, so, by
the morning, people were feeling a wee bit sketchy and wired. When we finally set off to scale the two peaks of Ouanoukrim, it was a relief simply to get out of the refuge, back out into the fresh air, into the wind and the dust, and start the long trudge upwards.
The path was narrow, so most of the time we were forced into single file, walking over scree and loose rock. Pulling up onto the main shoulder was increasingly windy and steep and the going was heavy, and people were starting to feel a wee bit dizzy with the altitude. When we hit the shoulder, an ice patch filled the lowest point, framing a view of low sandy mountains off in the distance. Our next section was a steep scramble of maybe 250 metres, which needed care, especially as it began to rain and grow slippy. One or two of our group were a bit nervous. I spent time trying to keep an eye on them until we eventually climbed over this section where it opened up to a rounded summit. It still took another half hour or so before we reached the top, but the views of Toubkal that opened up in the near distance were worth every step.
In the end, after a long day, with bits of me seizing up, and still facing a five-hour walk out, I decided Toubkal was too much for my aged back, and uncharacteristically chose the sensible option, and sat it out. I’m pleased to say everyone else did manage, and it was a great trip, and a real joy to share the overall experience with them. See pages 22–23 for images of the trip.
“The views of Toubkal were worth every step.”
Bronwen Maddox, Director and Chief Executive, Chatham House
The sirens warning of Israeli and Iranian missiles have ended across those two countries and their neighbours. But the uncertainty that remains will impede efforts to end Israel’s continuing activities in Gaza and the West Bank, and that risks further destabilising the region.
The most immediate questions are whether Iran’s nuclear weapons programme has survived. Claims and counterclaims continue; Israel asserts obliteration of Iran’s nuclear programme, but while Iran acknowledges extensive damage it also declares victory.
can realistically stop Israel but under Trump shows no sign of doing so; its ambassador, Mike Huckabee, has said the US is no longer pursuing a two-state solution.
Jordanian officials, who are watching travel patterns closely, say they have not yet seen a big influx of Palestinians from the West Bank. But the monarchy sees a potential inrush — on top of those it received at the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 and during the 1967 war — as threatening the entire stability of the country.
“Iran is thoroughly penetrated by Israeli and other intelligence agents.”
It is clear from the targeted Israeli assassinations of military leaders and nuclear scientists that Iran is thoroughly penetrated by Israeli and other intelligence agents. Those agents will now be pursuing one question above all others: what has happened to the 408kg of highly enriched uranium that Iran is known to have? This could be used on its own to make at least one rough nuclear weapon, or with one more stage of enrichment, into the material for around nine efficient nuclear weapons.
The second uncertainty is whether Iran has retained centrifuges that could perform that enrichment. These linked ‘cascades’ of tall cylinders, needing high and steady power supply, are fragile. All known sites of these were demolished in the Israeli and US strikes. But there is uncertainty about whether Iran might have built a small assembly at a site it had not declared to the IAEA, the UN nuclear watchdog.
The IAEA’s latest report, just before Israel’s strikes, declared Iran not to be in compliance with the requirements of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to which it is a signatory. It also said that Iran had withdrawn from the Additional Protocol, an extra inspection regime designed to prevent the kind of secret ‘breakout’ which North Korea managed in its dash for a weapon, and that it had lost much of its ability to track where Iran had put its nuclear material.
For Israel’s part, it may feel that it can rely on spies to tell it if Iran restarts the programme, but there is a widespread belief among officials, both Western and in the region, that Iran will try to play for time in negotiations and will secretly rebuild as much as it can. For Israel, such negotiations could be a constraint, limiting its licence to keep striking Iran if it felt there was cause. But the US will probably back negotiations if Iran seems willing; Trump shows every sign of wanting to declare a victory now and avoid further military engagement.
For the region, the uncertainty over Iran’s capabilities and the possibility of further Israeli action will not help resolve the worst live conflicts. Israel’s attack on Iran distracted international attention from the near-famine and daily death toll in Gaza, and deflected criticism from the UK, France and Germany of its actions there. It also at least temporarily silenced domestic criticism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the strategy in Gaza, his failure to extract the remaining hostages or to complete his purported mission: the eradication of Hamas.
The same is true of Egypt, which does not want to import the Muslim Brotherhood ideology, closely linked to Hamas, if Israel tries to get Palestinians to leave to the south.
Meanwhile, Saudi interest in normalisation of relations with Israel appears to be fading. It may well pursue the defence deals it wants directly with the US, and not press for a wider deal. The condition it made for that deal, of Israeli commitment to a state for the Palestinians, is not in sight.
Iraq and Jordan are also concerned that the conflict may distract attention from Syria where there is concern that new leader Ahmed Al-Sharaa may revert to his ISIS roots, be forced to do so by hardliners around him, or be ousted or killed if he does not.
Neighbouring countries of Iran and Israel may uneasily edge their way forwards after these weeks of tension, continuing to forge links with China, export oil to it, and pursue the green energy and AI programmes in which they have been investing heavily. But while international and regional pressure may secure a ceasefire in Gaza, it is hard to see it for now extracting a path to a Palestinian state, even if countries continue to pay lip service to that goal.
For now, Trump and his team have given Israel licence — beyond what even government hardliners expected — to control Gaza, and increasingly the West Bank.
After two years of attacks on Iran’s proxies, and now Iran itself, Israel has shown it is the dominant military power in the region. It displays less interest than in the past in accords with Saudi Arabia; the question it still faces is whether the prospect of ‘forever war’ in what it persistently portrays as a ‘tough neighbourhood’ is one in which the country will flourish.
That prospect alarms its neighbours. More quietly, so does the possibility that Iran, even if battered now, has extra incentive to revive its nuclear programme and retains the means to do so.
Netanyahu appears determined to press ahead with his hard-line cabinet members’ aims: to seize control of Gaza and to support settlers in the West Bank seizing land and harassing Palestinian farmers. The US is the only power that
This article was originally published on 30th June 2025 at www.chathamhouse.org/2025/06/middle-east-still-fearsisrael-and-iran and is reproduced here with permission from Chatham House.
“
When 15-year-old Tala* asked her sister a simple question — “What happens to those under the rubble?” — she never imagined she’d experience the answer just one hour later. “I found myself trapped beneath a large wall, with only faint light and the sounds of distant noise. I tried to get up, but I couldn’t move,” she said. “I gathered what little strength I had left and cried out, ‘Help me!’ But no one could hear me. I repeated it over and over until someone finally did. As they started to pull me out from under the rubble, I lost consciousness.”
Tala was pulled from the wreckage of an Israeli military airstrike in Jabalia, northern Gaza in October 2023 — one of countless attacks over the past 21 months that have killed over 60,000 Palestinians, including more than 17,900 children, and injured more than 146,000. She was transferred to the Indonesian Hospital, in Beit Lahia, unable to see and critically injured.
“Tala’s injuries were severe, and her leg-length discrepancy affected her posture and gait,” said Dr Nahla. “Using entirely manual techniques, we worked on strengthening her muscles and correcting her posture. Over 18 sessions, she regained her independence.”
“Tala was pulled from the wreckage of an Israeli military airstrike in Jabalia.”
Even with limited equipment, due to Israel’s tightened blockade on Gaza, Dr Nahla and her team made do. “She [Tala] began taking better care of herself, smiling and laughing more. Watching her regain independence and show signs of psychological recovery has been deeply rewarding. She’s a very different person from the girl who first began her recovery, though her journey is still ongoing.”
“When I woke up, I tried to open my eyes but couldn’t see anything. I kept trying, but in vain,” she said. Her brother, faced with an unimaginable choice, had to prioritise which part of her body to try to save: “I can’t choose between her eyes and her leg; both are indispensable.” He chose her eyes. At the time, he was the only family member with Tala and the sole person able to make such a decision on her behalf.
“They rushed me into surgery. Though the chances of success were slim, thankfully the operation was successful,” said Tala. But, after her surgery, Tala woke up to more devastating news: “I began to regain my sight and saw my uncles and relatives [in the hospital], but not my mother or father. I froze as I was told my father and my brother Haitham were killed. Mum lost her left leg, and my little sister lost both.”
While undergoing treatment at the Indonesian Hospital, Tala witnessed the siege on the hospital by Israeli forces. Tala was evacuated south in an ambulance convoy. Separated from her mother and youngest sister — who were both evacuated for medical treatment abroad — Tala continued her journey for medical care with only two of her sisters by her side, eventually reaching Deir al-Balah in central Gaza.
“When I went for a check-up, they discovered shrapnel still lodged in my leg. The doctor said it needed to be removed urgently. Without anaesthesia [because there was none], he cut into my leg to remove the shrapnel and stitched it up. The pain was unbearable.”
With a fractured pelvis and four breaks in her right leg, Tala endured months of surgeries using internal and external fixators — but she still couldn’t walk, nor could she access the physiotherapy she desperately needed.
“When they removed the internal fixation, I was terrified to take a step. I desperately wished to find someone who could help me with physiotherapy, but I couldn’t find anyone, until I heard about MAP.”
In October last year, Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP, www. map.org.uk) established its Solidarity Polyclinic in Deir al-Balah, an advanced medical point delivering emergency and primary healthcare, mental health support, nutrition, physiotherapy, wound care, and much more. Tala began treatment under the care of physiotherapist Dr Nahla Musallam.
Tala, once fearful of standing, now walks on her own. “When I started [treatment] with MAP, I was on crutches and couldn’t put weight on my leg. I was unsure whether I should even try to step on it… at first, the pain was unbearable. But with each session, I got better. Gradually, I let go of the crutches and started walking on my own. Alhamdulillah.”
MAP’s Solidarity Polyclinic is one of the few remaining lifelines in a healthcare system systematically dismantled by the Israeli military. Since October 2023, Israeli forces have killed 1,580 healthcare workers, only 18 out of 36 hospitals remain even partially operational, and equipment and supplies have been blocked from entering Gaza for more than five months.
“Our physiotherapy unit relies on manual methods because critical equipment is delayed or blocked. Despite these limitations, we never turn patients away. We adapt, educate families on at-home exercises, and provide the best care we can,” said Dr Nahla.
Tala’s journey is far from over. But it is proof of what is possible with care, commitment, and solidarity. Your support through MAP can help ensure other Palestinians are not left behind.
* Name changed to protect the identity of the person involved.
Zizette Darkazally, Associate Fellow, Middle East and North Africa Programme, Chatham House
Israel appears to be planning to expand its operations to take military control of the whole Gaza Strip. Recognition of Palestine by France, the UK and others may be the last hope for a route to peace.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in May that Israel will “take control of the entire Gaza Strip.” Shortly afterwards, he announced a plan to “intensify” Israel’s military offensive in Gaza and to retain the territory that Israel has seized since the beginning of the war.
Netanyahu also gave the green light to allowing a “basic amount of food” into the enclave following an 11-week blockade and amid growing international alarm at reports by humanitarian agencies over widespread hunger in Gaza, with UN General Secretary António Guterres posting that “The situation for Palestinians in Gaza is beyond description, beyond atrocious and beyond inhumane.”
It is unclear whether “taking control of Gaza” is a temporary measure, but the renewed offensive, the mobilisation on the ground and official statements suggest that Israel is heading towards a long-term military occupation of the Strip.
Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partner, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, has even called on Israelis to embrace the word ‘occupation’.
In May, Israel launched a US-led initiative to allow food into Gaza creating a handful of logistics and distribution hubs near Israeli military positions in the Strip. These new hubs would be operated by private military security contractors. This scheme has effectively bypassed the existing international humanitarian aid system.
The United Nations has said it will not take part in such a US-backed operation, describing the plan as lacking impartiality, neutrality and independence. Entrusting aid provision to private military contractors would create a dangerous precedent, blurring the lines between humanitarian relief and military force and putting humanitarians at risk everywhere. The costs of security and the logistics of this new and unnecessary approach would also far exceed the value of the aid itself. Disastrous for both sides
politically, economically and militarily unsustainable. After 19 months of war, barely 50% of Israeli reserve soldiers are reporting for duty in some units, although the exact figure is hotly debated.
Commanders now post recruitment ads on social media for combat soldiers, cooks, medics and drivers. Reports of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and suicide amongst soldiers who served in Gaza since Hamas’s cross-border attack on 7 October, are a source of significant concern for Israeli military commanders.
Given that Netanyahu, Smotrich and others are very open about their desire to see “voluntary emigration“ of the Gazan population, it is much more likely that Israel’s objective of taking control of the Strip will not be to deliver services, but to restrict services, including food, and to drive out the population.
Politically, such measures will sever the historical and political linkage of the West Bank and Gaza and squash any possibility of seriously re-starting a Palestinian-Israeli political track.
Exacerbate regional and international tensions
Netanyahu has said Israel’s objectives are “to accomplish all of Israel’s war goals, including the release of all our hostages, destroy Hamas’s military and governance capabilities and ensure that Gaza will never again pose a threat to Israel.”
In May, he also set the implementation of Trump’s Gaza relocation plan as a new condition for ending the war, and accused Hamas of systematically looting food aid, which Hamas denies.
“This Israeli government appears to want to take Gaza back decades.”
But in the region, a prolonged Israeli military presence in the Gaza Strip would exacerbate already mounting tensions with previously friendly neighbouring countries, particularly Egypt and Jordan. And it would make it more difficult for other Arab countries to justify any sort of dealings with Israel, let alone normalisation of relations.
Washington once hoped to persuade Saudi Arabia to normalise relations with Israel, using a bilateral security pact as leverage.
Instead of moving towards political and economic independence for Palestinians, as envisaged since the Madrid Peace Conference in 1991, this Israeli government appears to want to take Gaza back decades to the post-1967 era of full military occupation — where the Israeli military runs every facet of Palestinian daily life. This would be disastrous for the more than two million Palestinians in the 140 square mile Gaza Strip. And for Israel, such a reoccupation would be not just short-sighted, but
But during US President Donald Trump’s visit to the Gulf, Saudi Arabia succeeded in delinking normalisation of relations with Israel from securing a bilateral security deal with the US. The Saudis have also retained the political space to be more aggressive and forthcoming in flexing political muscle to convince the US to take action — if they wish to.
Trump’s tour of the region was an indicator of his growing personal rift with Netanyahu. The president’s trip was remarkable for its exclusion of Israel and followed his
“Recognising Palestine may be the last chance to revive hope for peace and a political track.”
decisions to reopen nuclear talks with Iran and halt US attacks on the Houthis in Yemen — an agreement that appeared to exclude Israel and provide it with no assurances.
However, this pressure has not translated yet into any action on the ground in Gaza or the West Bank, except perhaps for enabling a minuscule amount of aid to enter the Strip. The meniscal of aid allowed into Gaza since May was described by one senior UN aid official as “a drop in the ocean” of what was urgently needed.
Beyond the region, military reoccupation would also further isolate Israel — even its supportive European friends are now saying ‘enough’. France, the UK and Canada threaten to take “further action, including targeted sanctions,” if Israel does not halt its offensive.
The UK has suspended negotiations with Israel on a new free trade agreement and has imposed sanctions on a number of Israeli settlers and two sitting Israeli ministers. The European Union has also decided to order a review of the EU-Israel association agreement. And foreign ministries of 20 donor countries demanded that Israel allow the UN to deliver aid.
Recognising Palestine as a state
While these moves largely remain in the realm of political messages, a more tangible step would be to recognise Palestine as an independent state. During his speech before the UK Parliament earlier this month, President Macron reiterated France’s intention to join the 148 other states that have done so, a step France was considering to work towards during an upcoming conference (in late July) that it will cochair with Saudi Arabia in New York. The UK is also reported to be considering such a step.
Recognition is not a symbolic gesture, or an empty statement. Recognising Palestine may be the last chance to revive hope for peace and a political track. It would have significant legal implications, and would impact the foreign policy decisions, trade and arms agreements of the states who would take that step.
Most importantly, it would end Israel’s veto over Palestinian statehood. Israel’s legislation last year rejecting the establishment of a Palestinian state coupled with decades of Israel’s settlement construction, widely regarded as illegal under international law, have undermined the foundations for a viable Palestinian state.
At this critical juncture, perhaps even just one further year of delay risks the possibility of having no land and no people left to recognise. The French-Saudi chaired meeting is a serious opportunity to create a political process that could bring peace and security for both Israelis and Palestinians.
This article was originally published on 23rd May 2025 at www.chathamhouse.org/2025/05/gaza-war-hunger-and-politics and is reproduced here with permission from Chatham House. See www.chathamhouse.org/about-us/our-departmentsand-programmes/middle-east-and-north-africa-programme for more information about Chatham House’s work on the region
Mary Robinson FRSGS and Helen Clark, The Elders
A statement, following our visit to Egypt and the Rafah border crossing, 9-12 August 2025
Today we express our shock and outrage at Israel’s deliberate obstruction of the entry of life-saving humanitarian aid into Gaza, causing mass starvation to spread. The targeted killing of journalist Anas al-Sharif and four of his colleagues in Gaza is an attempt to silence the truth. Truth matters.
What we saw and heard underlines our personal conviction that there is not only an unfolding, human-caused famine in Gaza. There is an unfolding genocide.
We saw evidence of food and medical aid denied entry, and heard witness accounts of the killing of Palestinian civilians, including children, while trying to access aid inside Gaza.
The deliberate destruction of health facilities in Gaza means children facing acute malnutrition cannot be treated effectively.
At least 36 children starved to death just in the month of July.
No shelter materials have entered Gaza since March this year, and we saw huge numbers of tents ready for delivery but blocked by the Israeli authorities.
“Truth matters.”
This leaves families already displaced multiple times without protection. 96% of households face water insecurity.
Israel must open all border crossings into Gaza, including at Rafah, immediately.
The 1948 Genocide Convention was created in the aftermath of the Holocaust to prevent this crime ever happening again. But it is being flouted in word and deed by Israel in Gaza, and by powerful UN member states who are not holding Israel’s leadership to account.
We urge Israel and Hamas to re-engage in ceasefire talks and agree a deal. Hamas must immediately release all the remaining Israeli hostages, and arbitrarily detained Palestinian prisoners must be released by Israel.
France and Saudi Arabia have shown commendable leadership by convening the recent New York conference on the twostate solution. It is vital to build on this momentum before September, with collective action and implementation of the measures identified by the Working Groups to uphold international law.
We call for recognition of the State of Palestine by at least 20 more states by September, including G7 members, EU member states and others. We welcome Australia’s announcement in this regard.
But this will not halt the unfolding genocide and famine in Gaza. Transfers of arms and weapons components to Israel must be suspended immediately. We commend Germany’s significant decision to suspend exports of arms that could be used in Gaza, and urge others to follow.
Targeted sanctions should be imposed on Prime Minister Netanyahu and all members of his security cabinet.
States must also move to suspend existing and future preferential trade arrangements with Israel. We urge a qualified majority of EU member states to invoke Article 2 and suspend the trade pillar of the EU–Israel Association Agreement. The Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund’s divestment from Israeli firms linked to violations of international law should catalyse governments, businesses and financial entities to take similar action.
The uncomfortable truth is that many states are prioritising their own economic and security interests, even as the world is reeling from the images of Gazan children starving to death.
Dr Blake Morton, University of Hull
The red fox has long straddled the line between wilderness and suburbia. More recently, it has boldly leaped into cities like London, Zurich, and Sydney, making foxes the most widespread terrestrial urban carnivore on the planet. For researchers at the British Carnivore Project (BCP), this incredible feat poses an important question: can encounters with urban foxes help residents rebuild their dwindling connection with nature?
Urbanisation reduces people’s opportunities and willingness to engage meaningfully with the natural world. In fact, the UK ranks 59th out of 65 countries in the world for nature connectedness. This disconnection matters because bonding with nature is important for human wellbeing and long-term support for conservation.
occasional mischief, are well positioned to be symbols of urban coexistence rather than conflict. Communicating information about the boldness of urban foxes to the public doesn’t necessarily turn people against them. Instead, it could open the door for having more conversations about people coexisting with them, such as disposing of waste properly by securing the lids of outdoor bins, or avoiding feeding foxes in gardens so they don’t become too dependent on humans.
“Urban foxes pose a particular challenge because they sit at the intersection of admiration and annoyance for many people.”
The BCP is a nationwide initiative led by researchers and students from the University of Hull and other UK institutions. We study how environmental changes, especially spatial factors related to urbanisation, affect the behaviour and cognition of wild British carnivores, including foxes, badgers, and pine martens. We also study how such impacts shape people’s perceptions and relationships with nature more broadly.
Urban foxes pose a particular challenge because they sit at the intersection of admiration and annoyance for many people. While most of the UK public finds foxes delightful, some urban residents see them as pests due to nuisance behaviours such as raiding bins, digging gardens, and making eerie night-time calls. A study by the BCP, published in the journal Animal Behaviour (doi. org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2023.07.003), highlights how this tension is particularly palpable in large metropolises such as London, where foxes often behave bolder compared to their countryside cousins.
For many people, glimpses of an urban fox are one of their closest connections to nature, and so ensuring that these experiences remain positive, not negative, is important for helping to protect urban foxes from being persecuted. To help achieve coexistence, effective means of communicating environmental messages to people are necessary.
In another recent study by the BCP, now published in the journal Biological Conservation (doi.org/10.1016/j. biocon.2024.110653), we tested how providing people with information about ‘bold’ fox behaviour might influence (either positively or negatively) their perceptions of the species.
In a controlled experiment, 1,364 people were randomly assigned to one of two groups: Group 1 was given videos or text depicting foxes behaving boldly, such as solving puzzle feeders in people’s back gardens; Group 2 was given neutral content of foxes walking through random landscapes. Afterward, both groups answered the same survey on their views about foxes.
The results were surprising. Over 80% of participants held relatively positive feelings toward foxes regardless of the information they were given, suggesting that public affection for foxes is strong and resilient, even when people are made aware of their ‘nuisance’ behaviour.
Why does this matter? It shows that foxes, despite their
Such messages are especially relevant in urban areas, where children and young people are growing up increasingly alienated from nature. For this reason, the BCP recently created Urban Tails, a free educational booklet for 9–14-year-olds. Based on the research of BCP and other scientists, the booklet invites young readers to explore the exciting world of urban foxes through a series of stories and outdoor activities. Developed with input from teachers and conservationists, Urban Tails takes a place-based approach by rooting foxes in local landscapes to help young readers understand that human-wildlife relationships are shaped by geography, animal ecology, and human behaviour.
Ideal for educators, youth workers, and nature clubs, the goal of Urban Tails is to offer ready-to-use materials to help young readers develop an emotional connection and sense of stewardship for exploring and understanding the natural world, even in the heart of the city. When young people feel personally invested in their environment, they’re more likely to develop healthier, more sustainable relationships to protect it. Ultimately, the story of urban foxes is one of mutual adaptation. As cities expand, people must help guide urban planning and community-based practices to support human–nature coexistence. Foxes and other urban wildlife have learned to live alongside us. Now, the question is whether we can learn to live alongside them.
Visit www.blakemorton.co.uk/ case-studies to learn more about the ongoing work of the British Carnivore Project, and www. blakemorton.co.uk/download/1293 to download a free copy of Urban Tails
Ailsa Mackay, National Centre for Resilience, University of Glasgow
As the climate crisis accelerates, so too does the need to rethink how we build resilience. Climate-induced natural hazards, including but not limited to flooding, wildfires, heatwaves and storms, are reportedly increasing in both frequency and intensity. These risks are also compounded by other challenges, like biodiversity loss, pollution, social inequality and economic instability. Traditional responses to these challenges often focus solely on infrastructure or emergency plans aimed at ‘bouncing back’, but these alone are not enough. Resilience must be broader, with a focus on capacity to navigate uncertainty and absorb multiple stressors, whilst creating a more inclusive and sustainable world.
Resilience is something that lives not just in systems and strategies, but in people, communities, and the ecosystems they depend on. By working closely together we can work to bridge gaps across academic research, public policy, and real-world application to build a safer, stronger, and more prepared future. Working with nature, not against it
everyday life. Often arriving at deeper and more meaningful insights.
Our interactive card game for children ‘Are you prepared?’, co-designed with children, educators and resilience experts and distributed to all primary schools across Scotland, is an example of this in action (bit.ly/4o6nP8q).
Bringing it all together: connecting knowledge, nature, and communities
“Lithium development can have considerable local and regional impacts on water.”
Building resilience demands collaboration that crosses boundaries between sectors, disciplines, and lived experiences.
One of the most effective ways to build resilience is to work with nature rather than against it. Nature-based solutions, such as peatland restoration and natural flood management, provide approaches that can reduce physical risk and restore biodiversity, improve water quality, and support carbon storage to create healthy catchments that can play a vital role in managing both drought and flood risks (bit.ly/3Ut9up3).
Understanding the concept
But resilience isn’t just about physical defences. It’s about how we understand risk, how we prepare, and how we support each other. It’s about our emotional strength, social cohesion, and community knowledge. By prioritising people and local communities, resilience can be rooted in local experience and culture, with solutions designed to feel relevant, accessible, and empowering to the communities they are designed for.
Tools like storytelling, local history and personal reflection help open up conversations in a way that technical reports or policy briefings cannot. Helping people connect more deeply with the challenges they face and with the actions they can take.
Creativity as a catalyst for connection
Creative engagement provides us with powerful ways to explore complex topics like climate change and resilience, making space for personal interpretation, emotional expression, and inclusive conversation.
Using creative approaches that complement science and policy, encourage diverse voices, new perspectives and cross-sector collaboration, through community-led projects, people can be invited to think about resilience in ways that are imaginative and grounded in
The National Centre for Resilience (ncr.glasgow.ac.uk) plays a vital role connecting academic research with community voice and government policy, to help ensure that responses to climate risks are evidence-based and rooted in real lives and local places. As a trusted partner to the Scottish Government and guided by a steering group of experts from organisations such as The Met Office, British Geological Survey, and the Scottish Flood Forum, we work to champion approaches that value people, creativity, and the natural environment. Based at the University of Glasgow, we provide a platform for researchers across the UK and beyond to influence national priorities and contribute to practical, place-based action tailored to Scotland’s needs. Whether that’s through co-designed tools like our children’s card game or community-led nature restoration projects, we support ways of working that recognise the power of creativity and connection in helping people prepare, adapt, and thrive in the face of change.
Looking ahead: resilience as shared responsibility
Protecting natural ecosystems must be central to how we build resilience going forward, because human wellbeing and ecological health are so deeply interconnected. When we care for the environment, we also care for the systems that sustain our communities. To truly adapt and thrive, we need to create space for people to engage meaningfully with the risks they face. That means listening to diverse voices, investing in relationships, and supporting creative, inclusive approaches that empower action. By coming together across sectors, disciplines, and communities, we can shape a future where we can live well within a changing world.
I’ve lived in Edinburgh since I was a student. I had never been to Edinburgh until my mother and I came over on the train from Dundee for the Edinburgh Festival to watch Margot Fonteyn dancing in Firebird. I came up as a student in 1955, and other than working away in the Middle East, I’ve always lived here. I believe it was when I was a student that I became a member of RSGS.
I loved to travel. We didn’t go very far afield those days, but I loved visiting different bits of Scotland, the far west and the north.
After the war, my father got a job in Ireland running this little iron foundry. We lived in the middle of a bog in Ireland, in this funny little town called Athy, which is now quite a big town and doing quite well. I was up in a boarding school in Dún Laoghaire.
Once my sister finished school, I moved to a little boarding house in Inverness. It was lovely, very old-fashioned. It was run by three sisters: one was a headmistress and historian and very good at English literature, another taught us French, and the other was matron. It was a great experience, and from both those schools I still have friends.
We had a wonderful Geography teacher in Inverness — she was inspirational — so I knew I wanted to do a Geography degree, possibly with the objective of ending up doing cartography.
us later in life, so we were very close to them and the whole family.
I studied Geography at the University of Edinburgh with Professor Wreford Watson, who had been there for a year I think, so he was new and full of enthusiasm and made a lot of innovations, so it was a good time to be there.
In the end, my interest in cartography stayed and I tried to join the Directorate of Military Survey when I graduated, but they weren’t recruiting that year, so I got a job at Bell Baxter High School in Cupar. I went to the Directorate of Military Survey the following year.
I was a bit disappointed my first year there because I seemed to spend the whole year filing maps in map chests. Eventually someone came around and said, “we have a job in Cyprus; is anyone interested?” That was a great break for me. I was given the choice of going on an RAF plane or a cargo ship which took 12 passengers; and so, of course, I wanted to go by ship.
“John Bartholomew played quite a big role, because I was cheeky enough to write to him from school.”
We were involved in a new series on East Africa, and then they were doing a whole new series on the whole of the Arabian Peninsula. The RAF would go out and fly sorties up and down this route, and some army surveyors would go down to take other information from the ground and bring it back, and we’d collate it all and out came the maps at the other end.
John Bartholomew played quite a big role, because I was cheeky enough to write to him from school and say I was interested. I had no idea how you got into cartography, and he said to me, “well, you ought to go down to the geography department and do a degree there,” so I followed that advice.
We became friends. I was a good friend of his wife. He was one of five siblings, and I ended up knowing the whole tribe; they were all very nice. In fact, his sister and her husband lived in the flat underneath
When I came back to Britain, I had decided to leave the Tolworth office, and I came up to Edinburgh. I went to see the university Geography department just to say hello, and came out with a job, so that was nice. That was where I met Sandy, my husband. He had come back from the Gold Coast, where he had been a soil surveyor. He was there as a PhD student. It was very serendipitous for me to meet him.
Not long after we were married, we travelled to the very north
of Thailand, and came down on the bus and got off at various places. We flew to Calcutta and met up with a professor of geography there. Then we moved to Dhakka, where Sandy had a friend who had been a soil surveyor with him in West Africa. We had a marvellous nine days in Bangladesh, which was East Pakistan in those days. And then we were supposed to be going from there up to Kathmandu.
However, we got to the airport and suddenly there were air warnings because India and Pakistan had gone to war, so one side of the war was mostly Muslim and the other was Hindu. We couldn’t get out. We were at the airport all day, and then somebody said that there were no planes because they couldn’t fly across India, so we went back to Brahmanbaria and we somehow managed to get on a train to Chittagong, where there was a Dutch cargo boat that was going along the delta front and up the delta to pick up a load of jute. It only had three days to get over the delta bar, which you could only take a ship over at a certain time. When somebody realised that some jute belonging to Hindus was at the bottom of the hold, ridiculously, the whole lot came out and the Hindus’ jute was thrown into the river, and we missed getting over the delta bar in time, so we were stuck on this ship. We eventually got out and took a flight down to Colombo in Ceylon (Sri Lanka).
huge success within the college, so we did get involved with that, off and on for many years.
Sandy was a Chairman of the RSGS Edinburgh Group and he was very keen on it. I think we were both separate members and became joint members. I don’t really remember a time when we weren’t members. We used to go to most of the lectures along with an amazing number of older people who were incredibly faithful.
“We got to the airport and suddenly there were air warnings because India and Pakistan had gone to war.”
One of the best speakers we had in Edinburgh was Michael Palin at the Usher Hall. He is such a good talker and entertainer. The electricity had died, so he couldn’t share his photos of his travels, but he managed to keep on talking and totally engaging in the dark. It was just a star thing. I do go to a lot of the lectures still, but Covid got in the way, so I’m glad that some are recorded that I can watch at home sometimes. I think it’s good that you follow amazing people that do amazing adventures.
It was awfully hard work for all of you at RSGS during Covid, but you have some wonderful ideas. The extra magazine was particularly good. The magazine is brilliant, by the way; I’m really impressed with that.
It was a bit disastrous for Sandy’s research, because we were supposed to go into the Hindu Kush and to Delhi and Bombay, but it had its own high points. The only other passenger on the ship was a Brazilian, who couldn’t hack it at all; he’d never been in anything slower than a jet airplane. We loved Oregon, I have to say. I had never been to America, and I wasn’t sure I was going to like Americans very much. Sandy used to tell people he’d have one of our daughters with a pin handy to poke me if I got stroppy with the customs people. But it was lovely. I’ve had a great connection with Lewis & Clark College ever since. They phoned up Sandy and asked about setting up a student exchange. They had too many students come in one year, so they developed this overseas programme which has been a
Jo Woolf FRSGS, RSGS Writer-in-Residence
The idea for Voices of the Earth evolved quite naturally, as a result of listening to what people have to say about their experiences of the Earth’s diverse natural environments. Having spent the last ten years or so researching these fascinating stories, I’ve learned that every one of them is uniquely different: no two people, for example, travelling separately through the desert or the rainforest, will have the same encounters or face the same set of problems. The story they tell will be theirs alone.
So, how to choose? Firstly, I wished to move on from The Great Horizon and explore fresh faces and fresh ground. I wanted to discover not just what these people achieved, but why they did it, and how they dealt with the challenges. I wanted to ask: what can we learn from them? — and by that I mean not just from their written reports and physical findings, but from their mindset and mental attitude, their motivation and their vision.
grin shared some anecdotes about male European climbers that might not have made it into the newspapers. Betty was reassured, although she scarcely had breath to thank him. Black clouds were gathering in the south: before the last stretch there was time only to swallow some mint cake and strap on their crampons. While Betty and Ang Temba were still a short way behind, cutting steps, Mingma stopped and pointed. The summit! Monica wrote: “We saw the ice-slope easing off ahead to end suddenly in an unexpected little apex of snow. The sight of it was like a dose of oxygen. I took an enormous breath, said, ‘All right, come on,’ and we went up side by side to the summit.”
“These people were dynamic, colourful and utterly human, with emotions that leap effortlessly over a gap of 50 or 100 years.”
The timeframe of Voices of the Earth matches that of RSGS itself, beginning in the late 1800s with explorers who ventured across little-known deserts, plumbed the world’s oceans, and struggled against the raw elements of ice and rock on summits that some people feared were too high for human survival. Taking as my starting point the RSGS Visitors’ Book, I looked for the less familiar names, and I was delighted to find that, far from being obscured behind the frosted pane of history, these people were dynamic, colourful and utterly human, with emotions that leap effortlessly over a gap of 50 or 100 years.
Here is Aurel Stein, on the brink of an archaeological breakthrough in Central Asia:
On a cold evening in November 1900, Marc Aurel Stein pitched his tent on a high vantage point in the foothills of the Kunlun Mountains. He was tired, thirsty and hungry, but there would be no food and very little water until the rest of his men arrived with their ponies, which might not be until the next morning. This didn’t worry him greatly; he would quite cheerfully go without his dinner because he was so excited about tomorrow.
The full moon was rising, shimmering at first on the dust haze that cloaked the flat landscape to the north, and then steadily growing in brilliance until Stein could scarcely believe his eyes. Was he really on the edge of the notorious Taklamakan Desert, where no life was said to exist, whose very name signified a place of no return? Maybe the moonlight was playing tricks on him. “It seemed,” he wrote, “as if I were looking at the lights of a vast city lying below me in the endless plains.”
And here are Monica Jackson, Betty Stark and Evelyn Camrass, with Mingma and Ang Temba in the Jugal Himal on the Scottish Women’s Himalayan Expedition of 1955: The final push up the glacier seemed endless. Monica, Betty, Mingma and Ang Temba fought their way up to the shining slopes of pure ice that they had seen from the ridge, cutting steps where necessary. Betty found herself struggling, firstly taking two breaths with every step, then three and four. She told the others that she was holding them back; they assured her she was not. Mingma went further, and with a wicked
There are other factors at play here, too. Before they departed for the Himalayas, Monica, Betty and Evelyn had to contend with publicly expressed doubts about the competence of women climbers. Betty explained: “If we slipped up and so got into trouble, there were plenty of people who would say, ‘These women should never have been allowed out in the mountains on their own.’” And they weren’t alone in facing prejudice. Less than a decade later, Myrtle Simpson’s critics felt that, as a woman, she should stay at home with her children rather than take them on expeditions to the Arctic. “Stay at home!” she says scornfully. “I was jolly well not going to do that!” Instead, she tucked her baby into the cosy fur lining of a komse, a traditional Sami cradle, and strapped it on her back. Later on, she watched her youngsters play happily for months on end with children in Greenland. Needless to say, they thrived.
Indigenous people are an integral part of many journeys. Orkneyman John Rae learned fieldcraft from First Nations, Métis and Inuit people as he tramped for hundreds of miles across the vast wilderness of the Canadian Arctic, and some of them accompanied him on his travels. In the rainforests of South America and Papua New Guinea, Benedict Allen deliberately sought out Indigenous people whom he got to know so well that he entrusted them with his life. The story of his first encounter with the Yaifo and its heartwarming sequel is one of the many highlights of the book.
While adventurous travel is undeniably risky, it can bring an exhilarating sense of freedom. Dodging hippos as he sped down the Blue Nile, Colonel John Blashford-Snell didn’t just embrace whitewater rafting, he invented it. Poised on the face of El Capitan or Ulvetanna, Leo Houlding cherishes unforgettable moments in the company of friends. Travelling with camels through Morocco, Alice Morrison writes: “Maybe the definition of complete happiness is when you see the oasis at the end of your day’s walk and you know that’s where you’re going to pitch your tents and spend the night. You’ve got a fire, you’ve got food, you’ve got water — you’ve got everything to look forward to.” And in so many ways, all these people are opening the doors of possibility for new generations.
With current concerns about climate change, pollution, threats to wildlife and exploitation of natural environments, I wanted to include the voices of modern-day conservationists and campaigners who are infusing us with much-needed hope for the future: Lewis Pugh, for example, a pioneering
cold-water swimmer and United Nations Patron of the Oceans; Jojo Mehta and Polly Higgins, who set up Stop Ecocide International; Chris Packham, conservationist and TV presenter, drawing on his formidable knowledge of the natural world to demand change: “We have a conscience,” he says, “and if we act upon it as individuals we can make a difference.”
Writing this book has been a challenge, an education, a privilege and a pleasure. I’ve been moved by the stories of people who have overcome adversity to change the course of their own lives and thereby change the lives of others for the better. I’ve felt the commitment and passion of quiet defenders of forests and the ancient bonds that connect us to them. And I’ve been inspired by against-the-odds success stories such as the search for Shackleton’s lost ship by the Endurance22 Expedition team, scouring the floor of the Weddell Sea while holding their nerve against a looming Antarctic winter.
Thanks to Doug Allan, we can imagine what it’s like to swim with a humpback whale who is hanging vertically in the water to get a better look at him. We can learn from Sal Montgomery how to read rapids that haven’t been run before, and why it’s a good idea to sing when you’re walking along a riverbank in Kamchatka. We can hear Gordon Buchanan’s recollections of living with a pack of wolves on Ellesmere Island, share with Mark Evans the wonder of sleeping beneath a desert sky, and read Rory Stewart’s thoughts on Afghanistan, twenty-three years after he set out to walk through that war-torn country with no guarantee of coming out the other side. There are many more, and if I haven’t mentioned them it’s because I’ve run out of space.
Writing this book has also confirmed to me, beyond anything else, the importance of preserving our inherent connection to the Earth — to nature, to wildlife, to the outdoors — even if we’re not crossing continents or navigating oceans. In every chapter, in everybody’s story, you can feel the truth of it. The 19th-century naturalist, Alexander von Humboldt, wrote: “Nature everywhere speaks to man in a voice that is familiar to his soul.”
Voices of the Earth is out now!
Buy your copy at: www.rsgs.org/shop or via the QR code
“All these people are opening the doors of possibility for new generations.”
Jo Woolf’s new book, Voices of the Earth, was published in August 2025 by Madwolf Design and is available from www.rsgs.org/shop
Readers of The Geographer can buy Voices of the Earth in hardback for £25, with FREE UK p&p until 30th September 2025. To order, please visit www.rsgs.org/shop and quote discount code ‘VOTE’ at the checkout.
Ani Dasgupta (Disruption Books, September 2025)
Discover how seven critical developments have converged to support an unprecedented shift toward hope in the battle against climate change and environmental injustice. World Resources Institute leader Ani Dasgupta puts forth a map to a better future, where we can achieve low-carbon emissions and safeguard our resources while cultivating economically vibrant businesses, cities and countries, with a commitment to relentless progress through a global collaboration between governments, businesses, and citizens.
Louis D Hall (Duckworth, March 2025)
James Cheshire (Bloomsbury Publishing, October 2025)
In a long-forgotten map library, James Cheshire was stunned to find some of the most significant maps from the last two centuries: atlases that expanded 19th-century horizons; maps that were wielded to wage war and negotiate peace; charts that traced the peaks of the Himalayas and the depths of the ocean; maps produced to settle borders in central Europe or the wealth of those in inner-city London. Beautifully illustrated, this book reveals why cartography matters and how map-making has helped transform our understanding of the world. James is speaking to RSGS audiences in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Kirkcaldy in October.
Inspired by Don Quixote, Louis Hall headed west with his horse Sasha from Italy’s Apennine Mountains to Spain’s Cape Finisterre, unprepared for most of the dangers that faced them, and even less prepared for the lessons that Sasha, and the young woman who joined them part way, taught him about life’s potential and complexities. This glorious piece of rich, romantic travel writing takes the reader along old paths, into ancient villages, sharing rural homes and stables of farmers and shepherds in the Ligurian Alps, Pyrenees, Basque country and Galician coast. Louis is speaking to RSGS audiences in Ayr, Borders, Dumfries and Helensburgh in September.
Anne Strathie (The History Press, November 2024)
The objects in this book relate to a key period in polar exploration history, from the 1770s to the 1930s. Some were used by famous explorers; more testify to important work by mariners, scientists and artists, or sometimes overlooked roles played by explorers’ relatives and supporters. They include Mrs Elizabeth Cook’s ‘ditty box’, Francis Crozier’s penguin specimen, an expedition prospectus, and HMS Erebus’s long-lost bell. Collectively, they evidence a continuum of polar endeavour and reflect levels of international collaboration to which we should aspire.
Neil Ansell (Birlinn, August 2025)
Nature writer Neil Ansell has suffered from progressive hearing loss his whole life. As his world was becoming ever more silent, he heard something unexpected: the haunting call of the great northern diver. Realising that there might still be remarkable sounds in nature within his reach, if he could only find himself in the right place at the right time, he journeyed across the mountaintops and islands of the Scottish Highlands, the marshes of England and the hills of Wales, to hear rare and elusive creatures that he had not previously encountered.
Quintin Lake (Hutchinson Heinemann, May 2025)
In April 2015, photographer Quintin Lake set off on a five-year journey to walk around the coastline of mainland Britain. The result is this celebration of a small island with a vast coastline, with over 1,300 photos, and stories of his adventures, capturing the glorious and often surprising world between land and sea. Discover charming seaside towns such as Staithes in Yorkshire, venture to the desert landscape of Dungeness in Kent, marvel at the beautiful desolation of Scotland’s Knoydart Peninsula, explore the contrast between industry and nature along the Welsh coast path. Quintin is speaking to RSGS audiences in Aberdeen, Dundee, Dunfermline, Edinburgh and Glasgow in September/October.
We have had a suggestion from members to start an RSGS Book Club and Discussion Group to discuss the books and articles featured in The Geographer, using the Explorers’ Room in the Fair Maid’s House. If you would be interested in leading or participating in such a group, please let us know by emailing enquiries@rsgs.org. If we have enough interest from members, we will take this forward.
Follow us on social media