We created Earth in Action to provide a lens into what's happening on our planet, as it happens. Whether it's something typical, like the current air temperature, or an extreme event like a major dust storm, we wanted to provide an opportunity for people to see them.
Scientists used satellite data to study vertical land motion from 2015 to 2023. Findings revealed that regional studies substantially underestimate sea level rise. NASA projects more than double the expected rise by 2050.
Signals from Global Navigation Satellite Systems are quite vulnerable. They are exceptionally weak, meaning that any radio noise near their frequency, accidental or malicious, can interfere with reception. I am confident that there are people in every government who understand the problem. The challenge is getting leadership to both understand and act to reduce the risk.
The winter we had this year, it was colder than last year, so the snow held more water. That water ends up in our waterways. Mississauga is home to many bodies of water, including rivers, lakes, stormwater ponds and Lake Ontario, which increases flooding especially this time of year.
The storm from Sunday into Monday has the potential to become a bomb cyclone, which occurs when central pressure drops at least 0.71 inches of mercury (24 millibars) in 24 hours or less. That rapid strengthening would generate an expansive and intense wind field.
Every city contains two transportation systems. One is the visible network of roads, rail lines, sidewalks, and bus routes mapped in planning documents. The other is the invisible geography of privilege and exclusion embedded within it: the neighborhoods that received highways instead of parks, the communities whose bus routes were cut, the sidewalks that abruptly end at the edge of a district.
While humans have assembled a lot of weather data, flash floods are too short-lived and localized to be measured comprehensively, the way the temperature or even river flows are monitored over time. That data gap means that deep learning models, which are increasingly capable of forecasting the weather, aren't able to predict flash floods.
Tucked into the ridges overlooking California's San Francisco Bay and against an expansive nature area, the house Thouati and his wife have owned for 30-some years sits in one of the highest wildfire-threat areas in the state. A scientist with a penchant for diving deep, he poured into the research. Hundreds of articles later, he said, it became clear I had to swallow my pride.
"So whenever people think about hot weather, they always talk about the temperature," he says. "There's two issues with that. First of all, most people don't realise that the temperature is measured in the shade. So if you're in direct solar radiation, the amount of heat stress you're exposed to is much greater as it will stress your body out a lot more."
While the data shows 80% of people live within walking distance of green or blue spaces such as a river, park or woodland, it also reveals a disparity between rural and poorer urban areas. In some areas of local authorities, fewer than 20% of residents live close to these spaces, according to data released by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs on Wednesday.
As the Class of 2026 prepares to enter the workforce this summer, they-like last year's graduates and those already in the job market-are facing what economists now call a "low hire, low fire" economy. Whether this is driven by AI or other economic factors remains hotly debated, but the causes are beside the point for new grads looking for jobs postgraduation in an economy marked by a pullback in early-career hiring.
Across history, the relocation of capital cities has often been associated with moments of political rupture, regime change, or symbolic nation-building. From Brasília to Islamabad, new capitals were frequently conceived as instruments of centralized power, territorial control, or ideological projection. In recent decades, however, a different set of drivers has begun to shape these decisions. Rather than security or representation alone, contemporary capital relocations are increasingly tied to structural pressures such as demographic concentration, infrastructural saturation, environmental risk, and long-term resource management.
A lack of insurance coverage in Southeast Asia threatens an increasingly important hub for supply chains, as the region is battered by tropical storms, major flooding, and other natural disasters. Total losses from natural disasters across Asia-Pacific last year totaled $73 billion, yet just $9 billion was insured, according to Germany reinsurance company Munich Re. That makes Asia one of the world's least insured regions against natural disasters.
We're seeing more frequent, more severe extreme weather events and that inevitably affects claims and affects pricing it can't not. And this is happening all over the globe. More, after this week's most important reads.
Weather alerts were lifted for 13 counties yesterday, but emergency services stressed that the flooding threat will not ease for a number of days. The levels of the Rivers Liffey, Slaney, Nore, Suir, Barrow and Blackwater remain high, with pressure mounting on ESB to sanction releases from major reservoirs including Poulaphouca, which are near capacity and potentially adding to the flooding challenge.
Beneath the visible surface of cities lies an invisible architecture. Subways, tunnels, water systems, data cables, and bunkers form a dense network that sustains urban life while remaining largely unseen. The ground beneath our feet is not a void but a complex territory that holds the infrastructures, memories, and anxieties of our age. In recent years, as land becomes scarce and climate pressures intensify, architects and urbanists have turned their gaze downward, rediscovering the subterranean as both a physical and conceptual frontier.
One year ago, Nancy Ward, then the director of the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES), petitioned the Federal Emergency Management Agency to spearhead the cleanup of toxic ash and fire debris cloaking more than 12,000 homes across Los Angeles County. Although Ward's decision ensured the federal government would assume the bulk of disaster costs, it came with a major trade off.
That local exodus is documented by Cornell-led research that mapped annual moves between U.S. neighborhoods from 2010 to 2019 in detail 4,600 times greater than standard public data. Called MIGRATE, the new, publicly available dataset revealed that most of those displaced remained within the affected county - moves not captured in county-level public migration data aggregated every five years.
Jane Jacobs was also one of the voices that challenged this predominantly rationalist logic, arguing that truly vibrant streets are those capable of sustaining the diversity of everyday life, its informal exchanges, and the forms of care and natural surveillance that emerge from them. What these authors share is a fundamental insight: streets are not merely infrastructures for circulation, but social ecosystems, shaped by the relationships, uses, and encounters that take place within them.
Cities around the world share a common goal: to become healthier and greener, supported by civic infrastructure that restores ecosystems and strengthens public life. The question is how to reach this. Global climate targets, local building codes, and municipal standards increasingly guide designers and planners toward better choices. Still, many cities struggle to translate these frameworks into everyday, street-level comfort and long-term ecological protection.
