Category: Climate

The Hudson Bay peatlands are a haven for biodiversity and a powerful carbon sink. | The Water Brothers & Wildlands League The largest herds of caribou in the world make their homes here. Polar bears give birth to cubs in dens dug into this soil, some of them more than 200 years old. And birds…

Vegan heaven (just kidding — these soybeans will mostly be processed into farm animal feed). | Ben Brewer/Bloomberg Americans have a weird relationship with soy, one of the most important and widely cultivated crops in the world.  Most of us associate the protein-packed, butter-yellow orbs known as soybeans with niche vegetarian products like tofu, soy…

Here’s a sobering fact: Even if the entire world transitions away from fossil fuels, the way we farm and eat will cause global temperatures to rise 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels — the critical threshold set in the Paris Climate Agreement. The further we go above that limit, the more intense the effects of…

The wildfires in Los Angeles earlier this year were likely the costliest blazes on record. The modern age of burning has been ignited by human hands.  Though wildfires are natural and necessary in many ecosystems, their expanding path of destruction in recent years has been worsened by all the different ways humanity has reshaped the…

Jane Goodall, who has died at the age of 91, was a titan in the world of conservation who revealed much of what we know about chimpanzees and animal behavior. | Europa Press via Associated Press Jane Goodall, one of the most influential environmental figures in human history, has died at 91 while doing what…

Electricity prices keep inching up, and there’s little reason to think they’ll fall back down anytime soon. Like most Americans this month, your most recent power bill may have given you a shock. Residential electricity rates have risen fast across the US — more than 30 percent on average since 2020 and almost double the…

Workers handle piles of damaged lead-acid batteries in Khan Younis, Gaza, in 2021. Across much of the Global South, discarded batteries like these are often recycled unsafely, releasing toxic lead into communities. | Rizek Abdeljawad/Xinhua via Getty Images Remember the Flint, Michigan, water crisis? The public health disaster that, at its peak, poisoned nearly 5…

Wind turbines are seen in front of Mount San Jacinto in Palm Springs, California, on June 6, 2025. | Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images Talking about climate change can feel hopeless. Even the good news, on the rare occasion we get some, feels hollow. But for the most part, it’s bad news. The…

A search and rescue team looks for people in Hunt, Texas, on July 7, 2025, following severe flash flooding. Even though a major hurricane has yet to make landfall this season, 2025 has been a year of devastating floods. Thousands of flash floods across the country this summer sent torrents of water into people’s homes,…

At Vox’s climate desk, we’ve spent the past few months digging into a threat that’s easy to swat away in the moment — but increasingly harder to escape: the rise of mosquito and other vector-borne diseases in the United States. Most of us think of mosquitoes as little more than a summer nuisance. But climate…