Cabot Institute for the Environment blog

Urgent action is needed to protect Madagascar’s forests. Rijasolo/AFP via Getty Images Global climate change doesn’t only cause the melting of polar ice caps, rising sea levels and extreme weather events. It also has a direct effect on many tropical habitats and the animals and plants that inhabit them. As fossil fuel emissions continue to drive climate change, large areas of land are forecast to become much hotter and drier by the end of this century. Many ecosystems, including tropical forests, wetlands, swamps and mangroves, will be unable to cope with these extreme climatic conditions. It is highly likely that the extent and condition of these ecosystems will decline. They will become more like deserts and savanna. The island nation of Madagascar is of particular concern when it comes to climate change. Of Madagascar’s animal species, 85% cannot be found elsewhere on Earth. Of its plant species, 82% are unique to the island. Although a globa...

2022 was another year of “unprecedented” weather. Provisional figures indicate that it was the warmest so far recorded, with almost every month hotter than average. Much of the country had a notably mild New Year, despite the cold snap in mid-December. This was preceded by the third warmest autumn on record , and that by a scorching summer, with the hottest day ever recorded in July. But summer’s heat waves were also accompanied by a rise in the number of daily deaths across the country. People around the world are becoming increasingly more aware of events like these, and their impact in the UK is particularly concerning amidst the ongoing cost-of-living, energy, and NHS crises. Aerial view of the Wennington wildfire, London, 19 July 2022. Source: Harrison Healey, Wikimedia Commons  (CC BY 3.0). Ahead of the Fourth UK Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA4), the Climate Change Committee (CCC) are asking what we know about the impact of past and present climate change on natural ...

Temperature anomaly in Europe, Jan 1. Much of the continent was 10°C or more (dark red and grey) above the long-term average. WX Charts , CC BY-NC An extreme winter heatwave meant countries across Europe experienced a record-breaking New Year’s Day . New daily temperature records for the month of January were set in at least eight countries : Belarus, Czechia, Denmark, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Netherlands and Poland. In many cases the temperatures were not just breaking the old highs, but smashing them by massive margins. On a typical January day in Warsaw, Poland, temperatures would barely go above freezing, yet the city recently experienced 19℃, breaking the previous January high by 5.1℃ . New January records were set at thousands of individual stations in many other countries such as 25.1℃ at Bilbao airport in Spain , 0.7℃ hotter than the previous record set only last year. Large areas of central and Eastern Europe experienced tempera...