When he was a child he was given a Super-8 camera and he made his first short film at only 13 years old. Born in Rosario (Argentina), Claudio Lauria was a “precocious” filmmaker, who learned very early on the power of mobilization of a good documentary, at a time when the Argentine dictatorship banned any form of cultural expression. Years later, already settled in Catalonia, he was a pioneer again when he founded the Environmental Film Festival, now called Suncine and considered the oldest of its kind in the world. Lauria defines himself as a “militant for culture, cinema, and life,” and it is largely thanks to his militancy that Suncine –which from November 4 to 22 will celebrate its 33rd edition– has just been declared by the Catalan Parliament as a “strategic cultural event for Catalonia”.

The human species has stopped having the survival of the species as its fundamental objective. This was how forceful the Italian biologist and science communicator Stefano Mancuso was during his intervention at Enfoquem, the debate forum organized by ARA this Monday and Tuesday at the Sant Pau Modernist Site in Barcelona. In conversation with the deputy director of ARA, Ignasi Aragay, Mancuso admitted to having shifted from optimism to "moderate pessimism" regarding current technological advances, but even so, he defended some "solutions" to current climate and environmental challenges, such as the renaturalization of cities.

“A map is a technical tool, but it also shapes our perception of peoples and continents”. This is how Togo's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Robert Dussey, justified the resolution approved by the UN, which recommends using a different world map from now on.

When Jonathan was born, Charles Darwin was only 23 years old. This giant tortoise of the Aldabra species is the longest-living (terrestrial) animal in the world known to date. It is 194 years old and still today it walks, at a very slow pace, through the gardens of Plantation House, which is the residence of the governor of Saint Helena, one of the Seychelles islands. It has lost its sight and sense of smell, and it must be fed (basically lettuce and carrots), but it is still active and weighs about 180 kilograms. Now, scientists have studied its DNA to try to extract data that will help us live longer.

"I am not in favor of recycling, because there are many chemical substances in plastics and many that we still do not know are there or how they act." This is how forcefully scientist Laura Monclús, from the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute (NGI), expressed herself this Monday in Barcelona. This toxicology expert has stated that increasing the percentage of recycled plastic will not solve the plastic crisis, but rather what is needed is to rethink the "essentiality" of plastic products: "If there is any product that is essential to be made of plastic, which there are, it will be necessary to ensure that they are completely safe (for health), but the majority of the plastics we consume are not essential," warned Monclús, during a conference on the Global Plastics Treaty organized by the Waste Agency of Catalonia.

Sea level rise is one of the impacts of the climate crisis that are already irreversible, as the UN warns. As the oceans warm, water rises mainly due to a phenomenon of thermal expansion, and to this is added the water poured in by both melting terrestrial glaciers and the continental ice of the poles as it thaws. It is precisely this last cause, the melting of the polar ice caps, that has been accelerating the most in recent years. Now, a new study published in Scientific Data, from the Nature group, offers the most precise portrait obtained to date on ice loss in Greenland and Antarctica.

The philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) said that joy is not a fleeting state of mind but an emotion that comes from knowledge and reason, and that it becomes a political and ethical tool to transform society. Four centuries have passed and the world does not offer many reasons for joy, between the climate crisis and the rise of hate speech, but Francisco Javier Vera is determined, he says, to "resume the philosophy of the Dutchman Baruch Spinoza" and use joy to change the world. "It is not about denying reality, but about assuming it to try to imagine possible alternative futures not from anger or uncertainty but from joy," he argues.

When the two towers of the World Trade Center in New York collapsed onto the asphalt and claimed nearly three thousand lives, a new geopolitical order began to be built. If today we are witnessing a gradual transformation of the world order, which is also disrupting old global structures, that was a clean cut, a turning point for the world that barely lasted two hours. The Bush Doctrine, which was promoted as a response, dealt the first major blow of demolition to international law, in the name of the so-called "war on terror." The strategy devised by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and other neoconservative hawks surrounding George W. Bush imposed the concept of preventive war as a blank check for Western powers, basically the United States, to attack other countries unilaterally. A new type of war was then set in motion that was no longer between states but pitted governments against insurgent groups with international tentacles. And the era of surveillance also began, with state control over privacy in the name of national security.

Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente was the voice of the wild world for an entire generation. Now his youngest daughter also dedicates her life to explaining the wonders of nature, assuming her father's legacy, but in a very different context, both due to the media environment and the critical situation that natural life is suffering. Odile Rodríguez de la Fuente is a biologist, science communicator, and president of Rewilding Spain. She wrote Félix: un hombre en la tierra, four years ago, when the 40th anniversary of the iconic naturalist's death was reached, and now she publishes Som natura to try to instill in new generations the enthusiasm for nature that she herself inherited from her father.

Drought is not just a problem at home: it is a phenomenon that has increased by 30% since 2000 worldwide. In fact, it is estimated that by 2050, three out of every four inhabitants of the planet will be affected by drought. Even so, the United States has blocked a global agreement against drought and has postponed international negotiations on this issue until 2028. All the world's governments gathered in Mongolia this August have not managed to sign a binding treaty in this regard, but they have announced that they will mobilize 1.3 billion dollars to restore land and combat desertification in 23 states. The protocol to finance these projects, however, was to be defined within this global agreement against drought, which has been left pending.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, the international order born out of World War II seems to be in its terminal phase. The symptoms are clearly visible: wars that drag on, borders as spaces of conflict, a new arms race, protectionism, trade wars, disinformation, electoral interference, a crisis of liberal democracies, and a growing inability of international institutions to impose rules.

A sign from the gods, a bad omen, a cosmic wonder, an evidence that mathematics governs the visible world... Eclipses have fascinated humanity since the dawn of time. And at each historical stage they have been interpreted in different ways. Today we know that an eclipse is "the total or partial occultation of a celestial body by the interposition of another celestial body between it and the observer". But perhaps it was more romantic to believe that a dragon devoured the sun, as they thought in China in the 8th century BC.

Days before July 4, 1776, Benjamin Franklin invited twenty-one chiefs of the Iroquois nations to Philadelphia. These leaders represented the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, a league of six Indigenous nations whose territories spanned part of what is now New York, Quebec, and Ontario. The Indigenous delegates were lodged on the second floor of the Pennsylvania State House—now known as Independence Hall—directly above the room where the U.S. Declaration of Independence was about to be signed.

A universal public subsidy of 150 euros per month that can only be spent on agroecological and local food. This is the Food Social Security system proposed by a report from the cooperative el Pa Sencer, which was presented this Tuesday in Barcelona at an event chaired by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Sofía Monsalve Suárez.

Almost all children in the world face at least one climate threat. But nearly half – about 1.1 billion children – are exposed to three different climate threats that put their health and survival at risk, according to the report Children’s climate risk report 2026, published this Tuesday by Unicef.

In 1874, Jules Duruof and his wife got lost while trying to cross the Atlantic by balloon. At that time, balloons – and airships too – had no maneuverability and were often at the mercy of the wind. They fell into the water, but a fishing boat was able to pick them up. Other aeronautical daredevils were not so lucky. All this led Baldomer Oller, an aeronautics enthusiast born in Calaf and exiled in Paris, to want to devise a device that would allow the balloon to be directed where its crew wanted, and from this came the patent for the airship Catalunya. But the story of this Catalan exiled in Paris is much more interesting and goes beyond technological entrepreneurship. It is a story of trade unionism, anarchism, imprisonment and torture, exile and return, with the culmination of a surprising invention that was never built.

In May of last year, workers at NASA's Goddard Laboratory received the order to go home and work remotely. The Trump administration was rescinding the lease on the building where, since the 1960s, this institute has led the climate and Earth research of the North American space agency. It was an attempt to dismantle the center, which preceded the threat of total closure proposed by the White House in its budget for NASA last year. Fortunately, Congress halted that massive funding cut. But that did not prevent the purge of the Office of Government Efficiency (DOGE) led by Elon Musk from targeting NASA's Earth science program and other U.S. scientific agencies that are crucial for global climate research.

Amitav Ghosh (Calcutta, 1956), one of India's most important fiction writers, has for many years placed his pen at the service of climate activism. Ten years ago he published in English The great derangement: climate change and the unthinkable (now available in Spanish published by Capitán Swing with the title El gran delirio. Cambio climático y lo impensable). As he explained these days in the CCCB debates, Ghosh understands this "great derangement" as a collective disorder that makes us all incapable of assuming the gravity and reacting adequately to the climate emergency. An incapacity that he particularly denounces within literature.

Very few people know that oil was produced in Collserola. In the middle of the last century, owners of farmhouses in this mountain range surrounding Barcelona owned olive trees, made self-consumption oil from them, and sold the surplus. But with the abandonment of the countryside throughout Catalonia, all this productive activity was also lost and the olive trees of Collserola, some centuries old, were swallowed by the forest. If in 1956 21.5% of Collserola were cultivated land, now it is only 6.4%. This not only represents a loss of the typical biodiversity of the area, but also has a dangerous collateral effect: it increases the risk of fire.

A space crew must have diverse professional profiles. "In future long-duration missions, not only engineers and technicians will be needed, but also culture, humanities, and communication," remarks Jennifer García Carrizo, a science communicator at Rey Juan Carlos University. She herself is proof: in February 2025, she participated as a journalist in the Hypatia II mission, which – with an all-female crew – simulated the conditions of Mars in the Utah desert. It was "twelve suns," in practice fifteen days, of an intense mission that she now recounts in the book Mission Mars.