Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels rose faster than ever last year, according to scientists who say the rise is “incompatible” with goals set by the Paris Agreement, the United Kingdom’s Met Office said, as reported by BBC News.

Carbon levels are currently over 50 percent higher than before the rampant burning of fossil fuels by humans began.

“This is obviously bad news,” said professor Richard Betts, head of climate impacts research at the Met Office and University of Exeter, whose team analyzed the rapidly rising rate of carbon, as The Guardian reported. “But even if it looks like we won’t meet the ambitious Paris goal of 1.5C, it is still worth making every effort to limit the rise. 1.5C is not a cliff-edge after which all is lost. There are lots of solutions already available without any new inventions. This must be extra motivation to work even harder.”

According to the most recent data from Hawaii’s Mauna Loa observatory — where measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide have been recorded for over 60 years — the rate at which carbon is increasing has begun to outpace the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s pathways to limit global heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius, reported Carbon Brief.

The record pace of carbon emissions has been fueled by fossil fuels and other contributors like wildfires and drought, BBC News reported. Agricultural land use changes are also a major factor.

Carbon Brief reported that natural carbon sinks were weaker last year, which allowed Earth’s atmosphere to retain more carbon. Some of this was connected with El Niño conditions toward the start of 2024. El Niño leads to hotter and drier conditions in the tropics and shifts weather patterns across the globe.

These conditions inhibit the growth of vegetation, releasing more carbon from decay and wildfires and causing less carbon to be removed by land-based ecosystems.

The global average temperature set a new record last year, heightening the impacts of extreme weather, wildfires, heat waves and floods caused by the climate crisis.

“Who pays the price for climate destruction around the globe? Not the fossil fuel industry pocketing profits and taxpayer subsidies as their products wreak havoc,” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said on Wednesday in an address to the UN General Assembly, as reported by The Guardian. “Every day people suffer: with their lives and livelihoods; with higher insurance premiums, volatile energy bills, and higher food prices.”

Last year’s carbon dioxide emissions of 3.6 parts per million (ppm) were twice the level consistent with the path to net zero and 1.5 degrees Celsius, Betts said. They were also higher than the Met Office’s projection of 2.8 ppm. The office’s 2025 prediction is 2.3 ppm, as the forecast of cooler temperatures brought by La Niña will help conditions that encourage increased vegetation growth.

“Today, governments around the globe spend nine times more making fossil fuels cheaper than they do on making clean energy more affordable for consumers,” Guterres said. “We must tear down these walls.”

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While scientists have long known that pesticide use could impact pollinators, a new study reveals how fertilizer could negatively impact these important organisms. Not only that, but the research, which was conducted at the site of the longest ecological experiment in global history, revealed that high fertilizer use could also lead to a decline in flowering plants.

A team led by researchers at the University of Sussex and Rothamsted Research examined fertilizer use over a two-year period at the Park Grass Experiment, Rothamsted. The site is home to the longest-running ecological experiment in the world, which was originally established in 1856 to determine how inorganic fertilizers versus organic manure impacted hay yields, but researchers in the 1850s found that these fertilizers and manures were negatively affecting local species. Following that discovery, the site has become an ongoing experiment to test impacts of varying factors on ecology and soil health. 

A sign describes the Park Grass Experiment at Rothamsted Estate in Hertfordshire, England. Paul Gravestock / Flickr

After increasing the amounts of nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), potassium (K) and magnesium (Mg) through fertilizer use on the site, the researchers found significant impacts on the number of pollinators and, in turn, the species variety and abundance of flowers.

The amount of pollinators in the untreated land plots were about 95% higher than in areas with high fertilizer use, and bees in particular had up to a 9.35 times higher rate of abundance in untreated plots. Plots with higher amounts of fertilizers had higher amounts of flies and beetles. 

The team also determined that fertilizer use negatively impacted flowering plants, which had better abundance and diversity when pollinator abundance was higher. The researchers published their findings in the journal npj Biodiversity.

In total, higher levels of nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus led to a five-fold decline in flowering plants and a 50% decline in pollinators, as The Guardian reported.

“As you increase fertilisers, pollinator numbers decrease – that’s the direct link that​ to our knowledge has never been shown before,” Nicholas Balfour, lead researcher of the study, told The Guardian. “It’s having a drastic effect on flowers and insects. The knock-on effect goes right up the food chain.”

The researchers determined that other land management strategies, such as using lime or clover, could help maintain better yields while reducing biodiversity loss. The results showed that plots with lime had 50% more pollinators, 70% more pollinator species richness, 15% more flower abundance and 68% more flower species richness, compared to plots without lime.

According to the study, agricultural grasslands make up about 25% of Earth’s land, but artificial nitrogen fixation and using other fertilizers on these lands makes up about 1.4% of global carbon emissions. Further, fertilizer use leads to soil eutrophication, which changes ecosystems and can lead the grasslands to lose biodiversity of native plants and pollinators.

As The Guardian reported, the UK uses about 100 kilograms of fertilizer for every 1 hectare of agricultural grassland. In the study, the highest amount of fertilizer use was about 144 kilograms of fertilizer per hectare, which led to around 50% declines in pollinators, with the biggest impacts on native bees.

According to the study authors, reducing fertilizer use on agricultural grasslands could lead to improved biodiversity, better resilience to extreme weather, natural pest control, improved soil health, reduced air pollution, and other benefits.

“To realize these benefits, well-designed policies are needed to incentivize the sustainable management of pastoral landscapes,” the authors concluded. “Our data indicate that soil nutrients management strategies that favour nitrogen-fixing legumes, i.e. low to zero N and intermediate P, K and Mg inputs, with lime addition can lessen the trade-off between biodiversity and yield in agricultural grasslands.”

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If you were a bird flying thousands of miles over land or sea with other migrating birds, what would you talk about to pass the time?

Songbirds may converse with other species during their long migrations, forming social bonds and possibly exchanging information about the flight, according to a new study led by researchers at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).

“The night sky teems with migrating songbirds, aloft in their millions following routes etched in evolutionary time. But those flight paths may not be entirely innate,” a press release from UIUC said.

The researchers analyzed data from more than 18,300 hours of calls recorded in-flight, which suggested songbirds might “talk” with migration mates.

“We can’t be sure what they’re saying, but birds might broadcast calls during flight to signal their species, age, and sex. And we can certainly speculate that these flight calls could relate to navigation or finding suitable stopover habitat,” said lead author of the study Benjamin Van Doren, an assistant professor in UIUC’s Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences, in the press release.

Research from 2024 by co-authors of the new study at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, Appalachian Laboratory found evidence to suggest that songbirds “buddy up” with other migrating species at stopover sites, but until now there wasn’t any evidence that different species “pair up or communicate vocally on the wing.”

Van Doren believes memory and innate patterning are important drivers of behaviors during migration, but said “it’s time to rethink songbird migration through a social lens.”

“In recent years, there has been an increasing recognition of the importance of social information in bird migration, but scientists have mainly documented this in species that travel during the day or in family groups,” Van Doren noted. “The social environment also seems to be important in species like hawks and storks that form huge aggregations during their daytime migrations. Young birds learn behaviors from observing other birds and how they navigate — and not necessarily from family.”

Most songbirds make their journeys at night, when visual cues aren’t necessarily discernable. This led Van Doren to think about the possibility of other social cues, so he used his access to acoustic recordings from 26 sites of autumn nocturnal bird migrations in eastern North America taken over a three–year period.

“These nocturnal acoustic recordings are really the only window onto this unseen but absolutely massive flow of birds — hundreds of millions aloft over the U.S. on any given night during migration,” Van Doren said. “It’s something people aren’t usually aware of because it happens when we’re sleeping.”

The thousands of hours of recordings were processed by a machine learning tool that allowed the research team to detect 27 species’ signature flight calls, including 25 well-sampled songbirds.

The team first identified species, then measured the frequency with which certain calls co-occurred, testing at intervals of 15 seconds, half a minute and one minute. They found associations that were stronger than would be expected by chance, regardless of the time elapsed.

Searching for an explanation of the associations, the researchers found that the similarity of calls and wing lengths of species were most important. By contrast, birds who “buddy up” during migration stopovers were not maintaining the same relationships while flying, nor were they necessarily in the air with closely related birds or species who shared their specific habitat preferences.

“Species with similar wing sizes were more likely to associate, and wing length is directly linked to flight speed. If you imagine two species flying at similar speeds because they have similar wings, then it’s much easier for them to stick together,” Van Doren explained. “As for vocalizations, it is possible that species’ calls have converged over time because of this social link or that species that happen to give similar calls are simply more likely to gravitate towards each other.”

Van Doren noted that 25 individuals was a small representative subset of songbird species who migrate at night, some of whom don’t vocalize during flight. Van Doren and his team have plans to conduct more research, including tracking individual birds’ “conversations” with flight partners by attaching tiny microphones to be worn throughout their migrations.

The preliminary results bring up many speculative theories, such as that short-lived songbird species who aren’t able to rely on their parents for guidance might rely on social ties during the journey. In addition, the rapid loss of bird biodiversity due to habitat destruction and climate change may jeopardize co-migrating partner species.

“This study really calls into question the long-held idea that songbirds migrate alone, solely following their own instincts,” Van Doren said. “Learning more about the consequences of these social connections — not only for migration, but also for other aspects of their biology — will be important to inform and manage the risks they face in a changing world.”

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The Constitutional Court of Ecuador has determined that coastal marine ecosystems have rights of nature, including the right to “integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes,” per Chapter 7, Articles 71 to 74 in the country’s constitution.

This is not the first time that Ecuador has established legal rights for nature. In fact, Ecuador was the first country in the world to establish that nature held legal rights, Earth.org reported. In 2008, Ecuador added rights for Pacha Mama, an ancient goddess similar to the Mother Earth entity, in its constitution. 

The law included a series of articles establishing that nature has the right to restoration and that the government will take precautions and restrictions against people harming or destroying ecosystems, according to the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature.

As Inside Climate News reported, the country has previously protected land and wild animals. The latest ruling is the first time that Ecuador’s rights of nature have been applied to marine environments.

The case started in 2020, when industrial fishers filed that article 104 of the Organic Law for the Development of Aquaculture and Fisheries was unconstitutional, arguing that it violated rights of nature because it could lead to overfishing by small-scale fishers within a defined 8-nautical mile zone established by the law. The fishers also argued that the Zone for Artisanal Fishing violated their rights to benefiting from nature.

The court disagreed with the arguments and determined the Zone for Artisanal Fishing was necessary to protect local fish species and their ecosystems. It determined that nature, including marine ecosystems, involves a network of interrelated elements, and as one element is impacted, the whole ecosystem can be impacted. Expanding industrial fishing into the zone could threaten marine life, according to the decision.

“Most of the surface of the planet Earth — currently approximately 70.8% — is covered by oceans and seas. Marine-coastal ecosystems are highly dynamic and are interconnected by a network of surface currents and deep. Their health helps ‘in efforts to adapt to climate change and mitigation of its effects’, which contributes to making them essential for ‘the healthy functioning of the planet,’” the court shared in its ruling.

According to United Nations, developing a rights of nature framework in legislation can lead to ecosystem preservation and restoration as well as supporting human rights.

“For example, Ecuador’s framework provides interesting legal tools to orient the choices of decision-makers; all people have universal rights to represent Nature and can bring suit in her name,” the UN reported. “Also, Ecuador has introduced a series of ecocentric principles: principle of precaution, prevention, in dubio pro natura, non regression, tolerance, among others which have been key to stopping development projects threatening the integrity of Nature and preserving biodiversity under an ecosystemic oriented governance.”

Moving forward, the latest ruling from the Constitutional Court of Ecuador is expected to establish a precedent that allows more people to sue on behalf of nature to protect marine environments from exploitation, including fossil fuel development.

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The United Kingdom’s crackdown on climate protesters is setting a “dangerous” global precedent, according to the UK Director of Human Rights Watch (HRW) Yasmine Ahmed, reported The Guardian.

British authorities are undermining democratic rights, particularly the right to protest peacefully, according to HRW’s World Report 2025.

“Many of us had hoped that an incoming Labour government would have repealed the undemocratic anti-protest legislation introduced under the previous administration, especially given Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s background as a human rights lawyer,” Ahmed said in a press release from HRW. “That they have chosen not to, and are instead defending these measures in court, beggars belief. Peaceful protest is a cornerstone of a healthy and functioning democracy.”

The 546-page report examined human rights practices in more than 100 countries. In many places, governments took action to stop, wrongfully arrest and imprison activists, political opponents and journalists. Civilians were unlawfully killed by government forces and armed groups and driven from their homes while access to humanitarian aid was blocked.

“In many of the more than 70 national elections in 2024, authoritarian leaders gained ground with their discriminatory rhetoric and policies,” HRW said.

In “a huge victory for democracy” in May of 2024, the UK’s High Court deemed some anti-protest measures unlawful. However, the incoming Labour government appealed the ruling in December.

“We’re at a stage where we’re talking about the… dangerous hypocrisy of what the UK government is saying and doing, and also the fact that the international community and the UN have [raised] and continue to raise the alarm about how this UK government responds to protest, and in particular climate protest,” Ahmed said, as The Guardian reported.

The new Labour government has not amended or repealed the Public Order Act 2023, which has been called “deeply troubling legislation” by Volker Türk, United Nations high commissioner for human rights, the press release said. Nor has it amended or repealed the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022. Both laws give the police much greater authority, while at the same time undermining democratic rights to peaceful assembly and freedom of speech.

The overall effect of the laws has been to make participating in climate activism progressively more risky, so that fewer people want to take the chance of potential legal consequences, reported The Guardian.

“They have introduced laws which mean that the circumstances where the police can interfere and stop protesters are now much more expansive than they were,” Ahmed said, as The Guardian reported. “So for example, lowering thresholds around what is considered serious disruption; introducing noise level thresholds and disruption levels around noise; introducing orders that, before any crime has actually been committed, essentially prevent protesters from being able to engage with others that may be involved in protests, [from] engaging online; and then also changing penalties [for some offences] from what would have been fines to now possible imprisonment.”

A total of 34 climate protesters were jailed in the UK in 2024, said Tim Crosland, co-founder of Defend Our Juries. Five Just Stop Oil activists were given the longest jail sentences ever for non-violent protest actions — four and five years — for “conspiracy to cause a public nuisance,” following a video call concerning a protest on the M25 expressway, reported The Guardian.

The sentences came just after the Labour government was elected, and on the heels of what HRW said was “more than a decade of backsliding on human rights” by the Labour government’s Conservative predecessors.

According to HRW, additional human rights concerns include hate speech and xenophobia; failure to sufficiently address racial discrimination along with continuing colonial legacies, the cost of living crisis and challenges to the establishment of a “humane and rights respecting migration system.”

“We live in incredibly uncertain times and now, more than ever, we need leaders who are going to stand up for the rule of law and our rights and freedoms,” Ahmed said in the press release. “How can the UK expect to be taken seriously when criticizing crackdowns in Moscow, Beijing, or Tehran, while spending thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money to clamp down on peaceful protests at home, including on climate protesters.”

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