The planet continues to warm, and indicators of climate change show an increasingly worrying situation. The global average temperature between January and September 2026 stood at 1.47°C above pre-industrial levels, according to the update of the State of the Global Climate report published this Monday by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), coinciding with the start of COP31 in Turkey. A figure that could still increase further by the end of the year, with the possibility of exceeding the fateful 1.5°C of warming. The organization also warns that the exceptionally intense El Niño episode currently underway may aggravate the warming and extreme weather events well into 2027.

With the price of oil skyrocketing due to the conflict in Iran and deadly heat waves and floods the order of the day, the world's governments should be focused on the fight against the climate emergency and reducing dependence on fossil fuels. But, paradoxically, this year's UN climate change summit, COP31, which kicks off this Monday in Turkey, is shaping up to be one of the most inconsequential and least productive of all those held so far. The Turkish government shares the presidency of the summit with Australia's (it was the consensus solution they found because both countries wanted to host the summit) and, in an attempt to offer some tangible result from the meeting, proposes including in the final agreement a commitment to reach 35% electrification by 2035 globally (we are currently at 23%).

Oliver A. Ryder, an American geneticist and conservationist, has dedicated nearly fifty years to investigating how molecular biology can help preserve threatened animal species. Director of Conservation Genetics at the San Diego Zoo (California, United States) and co-chair of the Animal Biobanking Specialist Group of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, he is one of the founders of the Frozen Zoo, a collection of thousands of animal cell samples that is, he claims, a “genetic insurance policy” for the Earth.

For every dollar invested in solutions to protect nature, 33 are allocated to activities that contribute to its degradation. This is the contradiction that has loomed over the United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP17) held in Yerevan, Armenia. After two weeks of tug-of-war and a final round of negotiations lasting nearly 12 hours, the COP17 presidency declared the summit closed with a triumphant tone, announcing nearly 2 billion dollars in new funding commitments to conserve biodiversity – a figure still far from the goal of mobilizing 200 billion annually by 2030, agreed upon in 2022 in the Kunming-Montreal Framework.

Meteorological models are beginning to outline an unusual scenario for this time of year: the possible breakdown or a very significant alteration of the polar vortex. Forecasts from the main models –such as the European ECMWF– point to a very pronounced weakening of this structure during the first days of November that could end up modifying the atmospheric circulation of the entire northern hemisphere. This scenario has not yet been confirmed, but the indications have gained weight in recent days.

Digitization shook the music industry at the end of the nineties: the internet and MP3s allowed songs to circulate around the world without physical media, and this forced an adaptation of copyright and royalties. Now biodiversity is facing a similar challenge: with the arrival of Digital Sequence Information (DSI), the DNA and RNA sequences of plants, animals, and microorganisms can be consulted in open-access databases, without the need to physically travel to the place of origin. This is the case of the Madagascar periwinkle, a plant from which vincristine and vinblastine are derived, two cancer drugs with which it is now possible to innovate without having to obtain new samples of the plant, which makes scientific research cheaper and easier.

“I have a request: do not call it a monk seal. That is an invention, a literal translation from Spanish without any tradition in our language.” With this very clear warning, the Majorcan biologist and conservationist Joan Mayol touches a raw nerve in maritime memory: “In our sea, it has always been called a sea old man, sea calf, or sea lion. And recovering its name is not a whim, but the first step to restoring the dignity of an animal that lived with us for millennia.” This claim is the starting point for rediscovering a discreet giant that, for decades, we condemned to oblivion.

When he was a boy, he was gifted a Super-8 camera and made his first short film at just 13 years old. Born in Rosario (Argentina), Claudio Lauria was a “precocious” filmmaker, who learned very early on the mobilizing power of a good documentary, at a time when the Argentine dictatorship banned any form of cultural expression. Years later, once settled in Catalonia, he became a pioneer again when he founded the Environmental Film Festival, today called Suncine and considered the oldest of its kind in the world. Lauria defines himself as a “militant of culture, cinema, and life,” and it is largely thanks to his activism that Suncine—which will celebrate its 33rd edition from November 4th to 22nd—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.

Europe is facing uncomfortable climate forecasts: with current policies, the global temperature will rise by 1.5°C by 2030, about 2°C by 2050, and up to 3°C by 2100. On the Old Continent, where the speed of climate warming is even higher, temperatures could reach 4 or 5 degrees higher by the end of the century. Faced with this scenario, the European Union warns: it is necessary to move from prevention to adaptation. For this reason, the European Commission presented this Tuesday a proposal for a climate resilience law that will require member states to assess climate risks and adopt a national plan to address them. Governments will have to identify public authorities responsible for each climate risk and will have to designate an official to oversee the plan. And behind the proposal lies, above all, an economic argument.

They are two animals that we associate with distant and wild lands, but it seems that soon we will be able to find them in our rivers and mountains. The most precocious is the beaver, the largest rodent in the northern hemisphere, which is arriving in Catalonia via the Ebro. The jackal still lives far away, but the expansion of its European population suggests its arrival in the coming years. The coming of both promises new challenges, opportunities, and conflicts that will need to be managed with care.

Barcelona is the second European city that had the most additional deaths due to heat caused by climate change during the summer. Specifically, 1,587 deaths can be attributed to global warming out of a total of 1,842 deaths due to high temperatures. This is stated in a study published in the journal Nature Health within the framework of an investigation conducted by Imperial College London and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

The heavy rainfall storm that affected Catalonia on October 3rd and 4th could have been much more than an episode of strong storms. An analysis published on the official blog of the State Meteorological Agency (Aemet) points out that the powerful mesoscale convective system that developed off the Catalan coast showed signs compatible with an attempted formation of a tropical cyclone, a process that "had not been documented until now in the Mediterranean," as highlighted in the same work. In fact, the storm forecasts already indicated the possibility of the formation of a medicane —a Mediterranean mini-hurricane—, although it ultimately did not happen.

"Prepare our country for the worst while we are still in time to prevent the worst from becoming a catastrophe." This is the cry of nearly 700 people, including scientists, science communicators, researchers, civil society, and public figures in an open letter addressed to the Government—and to the Generalitat Valenciana—in which they request action before El Niño arrives, a climate phenomenon originating in the Pacific Ocean that is characterized by a large release of thermal energy into the atmosphere and which can lead to practically unprecedented downpours. Researcher at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) Jordi Solé and UPC professor and Doctor of Physics Olga Alcaraz warned this Tuesday that El Niño will create another layer of heat in a Mediterranean that, as we have seen in recent weeks with exceptional rainfall, is already extremely hot.

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.

The summer we have just left behind is the one that has caused the most heat-related deaths in the last decade in Spain. The Daily Mortality Monitoring System for all Causes (MoMo) of the Carlos III Health Institute (ISCIII) estimates that between May 15 and September 30, there were 5,807 deaths attributable to high temperatures.

This past week the Generalitat has announced that it will take charge of 75 million euros of the costs caused by the recent torrential rains. The figure is a small sample of the constant drip of public spending caused by the effects of the ecological crisis. But the climate problem does not only affect the public treasury, it also entails an economic drain for families and insurance companies. To know the monetary impact of these phenomena, the European Environment Agency has compiled the annual losses that extreme weather phenomena have meant in the European Union (EU). Although the economic figures only take into account direct expenses – for example, those registered by governments and insurers – and not indirect ones, the data are implacable.

The images of the Besòs river full to the brim and about to overflow a week ago have been one of the most prominent photographs left by the storm of recent days on the Catalan coast. A scene that had not been seen for decades and that not only made many in the area remember tragedies like the 1962 flood, but also put the spotlight back on the urbanization project around the Three Chimneys of Sant Adrià.

Raymond T. Pierrehumbert (United States, 1954) studies the most extreme climates in the Universe, those of distant planets where it rains glass or that of gaseous worlds where the daytime temperature is so high that the molecules of the atmosphere break down into atoms. Also that of Earth, both the current one and the one from 4.5 billion years ago. This perspective allows him to put into context to what extent the pale blue dot on which we are lucky to live is exceptional – and at the same time fragile. Professor of planetary physics at the University of Oxford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he is one of the most recognized specialists in climate crisis. He has visited the CosmoCaixa Science Museum in Barcelona to convince us that we must reduce CO₂ emissions to zero. Because there is no other option.

Although there are more satellites orbiting the planet continuously sending high-resolution images and atmospheric data, radars that detect precipitation in real time, meteorological stations, rain gauges, radiosondes, and supercomputers capable of performing calculations on a scale unthinkable just a decade ago, it is still difficult to know exactly if a strong storm will unleash, where and when it will do so, and how much rain it will leave.