Around the world, CBAM has faced strong criticism. India and China describe it as "green protectionism," arguing that it puts unfair pressure on developing economies. At the same time, the EU has not yet created dedicated funding to help exporters in lower-income countries adapt. Without this support, the mechanism may not achieve the desired results. What about consumers? Although CBAM is mainly aimed at industry, its ripple effects will reach consumers in the EU.
A 400-mile blanket of fog has socked in California's Central Valley for weeks. Scientists and meteorologists say the conditions for such persistent cloud cover are ripe: an early wet season, cold temperatures and a stable, unmoving high pressure system. But take a stroll through X, Instagram or TikTok, and you'll see not everyone is so sanguine. People are reporting that the fog has a strange consistency and that it's nefariously littered with black and white particles that don't seem normal.
In the summer they bloom, in the fall they ripen and in the winter you can roast them on an open fire-or at least, hear Nat King Cole sing about them in his 1961 rendition of "The Christmas Song." Historically, chestnuts have been an integral part of the holiday season. Though harvested in the fall, their flavor peaks in the wintertime, making for a tasty seasonal treat. During the holiday season, you can find them in midtown on street corners as an annual treat for tourists and New Yorkers alike.
Rikki Held grew up on her family's ranch in Montana, watching the land transform amid the climate crisis. The Powder River, which runs through the property, has sometimes dried up during drought, leaving crops and livestock without water. At other points, rapid snowmelt and heavy rains have caused flooding and eroded riverbanks, making the land difficult to use. Two years ago, the 24-year-old and a group of other young people won a groundbreaking legal victory, intended to prevent those impacts from worsening.
The Trump administration is pressuring Mexico with more tariffs to force its southern neighbor to settle its water debt of nearly one billion cubic meters, of which Mexico has committed to delivering 249 million before the end of January. Meanwhile, the high demand for water from the agricultural sector is forcing President Claudia Sheinbaum to perform a balancing act to avoid jeopardizing access to water for irrigation systems in the north of the country.
Breaking PG&E's monopoly with cheaper, greener energy is a compelling vision offered by MCE (aka Marin Clean Energy) and other community choice aggregators. However, as Contra Costa County residents are learning, MCE is no longer delivering on the promise of local government-controlled community choice aggregators, or CCAs. In fact, they may be better off with PG&E after all. Although it has "Marin" in its name, MCE is now largely a Contra Costa County operation.
The Bay Area's commercial Dungeness crab season can begin Jan. 5, state officials announced Friday, now that many of the migrating behemoths of the sea have safely made their way down the coast. The decision comes after a series of delays since November meant to protect whales from getting tangled in fishing lines, and it comes with a key restriction: Fleets will have to operate under a 40 percent trap reduction.
Next time you're winding through the forest along I-80 on the way to North Tahoe, keep an eye out for a pretty blue lake to the right near Emigrant Gap. Nestled in the Sierra Nevada foothills, that lake Lake Putt is part of a 650-acre undeveloped property now being transformed into the Gateway Park at Tahoe National Forest, set to offer camping, trails, fishing and nature learning opportunities when it opens in 2028.
Commodore Sloat officials say they received handwritten letters from students asking the school to reduce plastic waste -- and school leaders listened. In partnership with Revolution Foods, the school has switched to compostable trays. "It's good for the environment because it can be composted instead in the trash," said teacher Raphael Hitzke. "It's amazing for 10- to 11-year-olds to be heard and having their voices heard. They're our future. They have brand new ideas. We need to listen to them."
There isn't a nook or cranny in the Almaden Valley that Ali Henry hasn't spent time in. She grew up here, camping, boating and fishing with her dad and her grandparents. Those long, sun-drenched days on the water often finished with fresh-caught trout sizzling over a campfire. Today, Henry is devoting her life to preserving and celebrating some of her favorite childhood hangouts as Santa Clara County Parks' first-ever woman chief park ranger.
Low pressure will dominate the UK's weather over the weekend and early next week, bringing periods of rain, locally heavy, and showers. With some areas already experiencing saturated ground, further rainfall could lead to localised impacts, including a risk of surface water flooding. By the middle of the week, we'll see a gradual transition to drier conditions with high pressure building to the northeast of the UK.
Think about how you currently handle waste. Are your team members spending valuable work hours making multiple trips to the local dump? Are they bagging up endless amounts of waste, or worse, dealing with overflowing bins? Every minute they spend on these tasks is a minute they aren't spending on revenue-generating activities, serving customers, or doing the specialised work you hired them for.
Southern Spain was hit by storm Emilia this week. In the early hours of Tuesday morning, a tornado, along with heavy rain, wreaked havoc in the seaside town of La Cala de Mijas, Malaga. The tornado swept through the town, tearing down the 67,000 Christmas lights erected along the main high street. It is estimated the storm caused 500,000 in damages.
Most people assume waste issues start after Christmas, but the rise actually begins a few weeks beforehand. Parcel packaging, wrapping materials and extra food shopping create almost double the usual waste. That is when households are most at risk of these lesser known fines.
On the banks of the Yukon River, after arriving by canoe only a few miles from the Canadian border, I shared some salmon with Karma Ulvi, the chief of the Native Village of Eagle in Alaska. But the fish we ate wasn't caught locally: A plane had delivered the salmon from Bristol Bay, in the southwest corner of the state, over 1,000 miles away. For the Native tribes that have lived along the Yukon for millennia, importing is the only option.
Next year will bring heat more than 1.4C above preindustrial levels, meteorologists project, as fossil fuel pollution continues to bake the Earth and fuel extreme weather. The UK Met Office's central forecast is slightly cooler than the 1.55C reached in 2024, the warmest year on record, but 2026 is set to be among the four hottest years dating back to 1850. A blanket of carbon smothering the Earth has begun to jeopardise the stable conditions in which humanity has thrived, worsening weather extremes and increasing the risk of catastrophic tipping points.
Then there's the personalization and sense of VIP exclusivity; here, everything can be curated and customized, from private catamaran charters to bespoke island-hopping itineraries. Spend mornings exploring diamond-clear tidal pools and natural grottoes with a private guide, and afternoons sunbathing and snorkeling on a secluded beach reachable only by boat. While away evenings with butler-served dinners in a gleaming glass villa or snack on conch in a feet-in-the-sand 'old-BVI' boutique bolthole.
If you're of a certain generation, you might be able to trace your affinity for orcas to repeated viewings of a certain movie: the seminal 1993 film Free Willy. That movie led to a herculean effort that would eventually rope in the U.S. Air Force to rescue the movie's star, an orca named Keiko, from captivity. It also cemented the idea of orcas as intelligent, curious animals who deserve to live outside of captivity.
As the calendar turns the final pages on 2025, the information technology sector stands at a critical juncture regarding its environmental commitments. This year was not marked by technological breakthroughs solving decarbonisation, but by the decisive maturation of sustainability from a strategic differentiator into an operational and regulatory imperative. This transition involved a painful reckoning with data complexity, supply chain reality, and the sheer energy appetite of modern computing, driven primarily by the rapid proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI).
For technology leaders, this year has been defined less by what to promise and more by how to deliver. The conversation has matured, but unevenly. Some organisations are now treating sustainability as an organisational capability, whilst others are still trying to reconcile their ambitions with fragmented systems and incomplete data. The task for 2026 will be to embed sustainability into the digital and operational fabric of business - to move decisively from strategy to systems.
