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2025 Was One of Three Hottest Years on Record, Scientists Say

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Monday, December 29, 2025

Climate change worsened by human behavior made 2025 one of the three hottest years on record, scientists said.The analysis from World Weather Attribution researchers, released Tuesday in Europe, came after a year when people around the world were slammed by the dangerous extremes brought on by a warming planet. Temperatures remained high despite the presence of a La Nina, the occasional natural cooling of Pacific Ocean waters that influences weather worldwide. Researchers cited the continued burning of fossil fuels — oil, gas and coal — that send planet-warming greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.“If we don’t stop burning fossil fuels very, very, quickly, very soon, it will be very hard to keep that goal” of warming, Friederike Otto, co-founder of World Weather Attribution and an Imperial College London climate scientist, told The Associated Press. “The science is increasingly clear.”Extreme weather events kill thousands of people and cost billions of dollars in damage annually.WWA scientists identified 157 extreme weather events as most severe in 2025, meaning they met criteria such as causing more than 100 deaths, affecting more than half an area’s population or having a state of emergency declared. Of those, they closely analyzed 22.That included dangerous heat waves, which the WWA said were the world's deadliest extreme weather events in 2025. The researchers said some of the heat waves they studied in 2025 were 10 times more likely than they would have been a decade ago due to climate change.“The heat waves we have observed this year are quite common events in our climate today, but they would have been almost impossible to occur without human-induced climate change,” Otto said. “It makes a huge difference.”The WWA said the increasingly frequent and severe extremes threatened the ability of millions of people across the globe to respond and adapt to those events with enough warning, time and resources, what the scientists call “limits of adaptation.” The report pointed to Hurricane Melissa as an example: The storm intensified so quickly that it made forecasting and planning more difficult, and pummeled Jamaica, Cuba and Haiti so severely that it left the small island nations unable to respond to and handle its extreme losses and damage. Global climate negotiations sputter out This year's United Nations climate talks in Brazil in November ended without any explicit plan to transition away from fossil fuels, and though more money was pledged to help countries adapt to climate change, they will take more time to do it.Yet different nations are seeing varying levels of progress. “The geopolitical weather is very cloudy this year with a lot of policymakers very clearly making policies for the interest of the fossil fuel industry rather than for the populations of their countries," Otto said. “And we have a huge amount of mis- and disinformation that people have to deal with.”Andrew Kruczkiewicz, a senior researcher at the Columbia University Climate School who wasn't involved in the WWA work, said places are seeing disasters they aren't used to, extreme events are intensifying faster and they are becoming more complex. That requires earlier warnings and new approaches to response and recovery, he said.“On a global scale, progress is being made," he added, "but we must do more.”The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See – December 2025

Climate change worsened by human behavior made 2025 one of the hottest years ever recorded

Climate change worsened by human behavior made 2025 one of the three hottest years on record, scientists said.

The analysis from World Weather Attribution researchers, released Tuesday in Europe, came after a year when people around the world were slammed by the dangerous extremes brought on by a warming planet.

Temperatures remained high despite the presence of a La Nina, the occasional natural cooling of Pacific Ocean waters that influences weather worldwide. Researchers cited the continued burning of fossil fuels — oil, gas and coal — that send planet-warming greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

“If we don’t stop burning fossil fuels very, very, quickly, very soon, it will be very hard to keep that goal” of warming, Friederike Otto, co-founder of World Weather Attribution and an Imperial College London climate scientist, told The Associated Press. “The science is increasingly clear.”

Extreme weather events kill thousands of people and cost billions of dollars in damage annually.

WWA scientists identified 157 extreme weather events as most severe in 2025, meaning they met criteria such as causing more than 100 deaths, affecting more than half an area’s population or having a state of emergency declared. Of those, they closely analyzed 22.

That included dangerous heat waves, which the WWA said were the world's deadliest extreme weather events in 2025. The researchers said some of the heat waves they studied in 2025 were 10 times more likely than they would have been a decade ago due to climate change.

“The heat waves we have observed this year are quite common events in our climate today, but they would have been almost impossible to occur without human-induced climate change,” Otto said. “It makes a huge difference.”

The WWA said the increasingly frequent and severe extremes threatened the ability of millions of people across the globe to respond and adapt to those events with enough warning, time and resources, what the scientists call “limits of adaptation.” The report pointed to Hurricane Melissa as an example: The storm intensified so quickly that it made forecasting and planning more difficult, and pummeled Jamaica, Cuba and Haiti so severely that it left the small island nations unable to respond to and handle its extreme losses and damage.

Global climate negotiations sputter out

This year's United Nations climate talks in Brazil in November ended without any explicit plan to transition away from fossil fuels, and though more money was pledged to help countries adapt to climate change, they will take more time to do it.

Yet different nations are seeing varying levels of progress.

“The geopolitical weather is very cloudy this year with a lot of policymakers very clearly making policies for the interest of the fossil fuel industry rather than for the populations of their countries," Otto said. “And we have a huge amount of mis- and disinformation that people have to deal with.”

Andrew Kruczkiewicz, a senior researcher at the Columbia University Climate School who wasn't involved in the WWA work, said places are seeing disasters they aren't used to, extreme events are intensifying faster and they are becoming more complex. That requires earlier warnings and new approaches to response and recovery, he said.

“On a global scale, progress is being made," he added, "but we must do more.”

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Photos You Should See – December 2025

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Hawaii Farmers Are Fighting to Keep Their Soil From Flushing Out to Sea

Farmers in Hawaii are adapting to effects of a changing climate by combining traditional Hawaiian practices with new, regenerative agricultural techniques to save soils, streams and reefs

Young cacao trees stand in an unlikely spot on the northeastern slopes of the Waianae Range, growing on a windswept point overlooking Oahu’s North Shore. “Our soil, in the summer, becomes a powdery flour,” says Max Breen of Kamananui Cacao Farm. “A lot of runoff, a lot of blowing. … Challenging to plant a wind-sensitive crop up here.”Breen is adapting. He planted his chocolate-bearing trees under a runway of black matting and mulch, interspersed with native and locally important saplings — gandules or pigeon peas, aalii and iliee. Those shrubs and plants will grow faster and protect the sensitive cacao from the harsh sun and ruthless coastal winds. The mulch and matting will help hold the soil in place against the wind and rain.Soil is paramount to crop health but especially important in historically productive areas such as central and northern Oahu. Farmers there were already contending with the repercussions of decades of plantation agriculture, which wrought almost irreparable damage on once-deep topsoils. Now, they’re trying to hold onto the light topsoil that’s left.Climate change is only making that harder. The region is experiencing more intense periods of drought, which dries out the soil, followed by more intense periods of rain, which flushes it off the farm and muddies the coastal waters miles below.Without soil on the land, farming is crippled. With soil in the water, sea life suffocates. Farmers like Breen understand their soil was built over millions of years and is difficult to replace, and they recognize their farms have an influence on the entire watershed’s health — what happens in the mountains affects the reefs below. For this part of Oahu, that means Kaiaka Bay, which is showing elevated levels of sediments and contaminants across most metrics, including possible chemical pollutants. Over the past three years, Agriculture Stewardship Hawaii has helped Breen and 10 others within the same watershed prevent more than 25 dump truck loads — more than 300 tons — of sediment from making its way into Kaukonahua Stream and eventually the ocean. Approximately 735 pounds (333 kilograms) of nitrogen and 317 pounds (148 pounds) of phosphorus were stopped from entering the stream too. The farmers’ methods reflect a return to Indigenous agricultural values that blend new techniques with a more holistic approach to environmentally friendly food production. This involves negotiating modern property lines, water availability and environmental priorities. Breen underscored the need to be able to retain the water when it comes, while ensuring the land is primed for its arrival — for the farm and for the watershed. Scientists estimate annual rainfall will drop 16% to 20% in the Kamananui watershed between 2040 and 2070, or 11 to 14 fewer inches (28 to 36 centimeters) of rain. The temperature is predicted to rise 2% to 4%, or up to 3.1 degrees Celsius, according to the Pacific Drought Knowledge Exchange developed by University of Hawaii climate scientist Ryan Longman. “One or two degrees Celsius warmer,” Longman says, “is still going to have profound implications to ecological function and for food production.”Despite the challenging outlook, the farms all have similar goals: to educate the public on the virtues of agriculture, to reinvigorate a stagnant agricultural economy and to increase the islands’ self-sufficiency.For Kamananui, education is baked into the business model. Any given day can bring a gaggle of tourists to sample raw cacao from one of the 7-year-old farm’s 1,600 mature trees. Those trees will produce thousands of pounds of chocolate this year, and the yield is expected to rise.Kamananui was recently named among the 50 best cacao growers in the world, joining a growing list of internationally recognized Hawaii growers in a niche-but-burgeoning homegrown cacao and chocolate industry. That recognition is part of the draw for tourism, which a 2022 survey found accounts for about 30% of farmers’ incomes. During these tours, guides introduce visitors to the Native Hawaiian ahupuaa land division system. The practice was once prevalent throughout Hawaii, balancing food production and environmental health to sustain their residents. The health of theaina and wai, land and water, was central to the practice. Now, after years of polluting and extractive plantation agricultural practices, pockets of farmers are returning to a holistic approach to agriculture that shuns the idea of extraction. Letting nature inform the work is part of that, as Breen and his colleagues adopt measures to keep both soil and water on the land while growing out their chocolate enterprise. “As we spend time here, I see how the land reacts to water, especially when we get big storms,” Breen said. “What soil stays wet, what floods, where ephemeral streams are created — the land, it just kind of teaches us as we go.”Chandeliers of bananas hang heavy on the limbs of green and yellowing plants 1.5 miles (2.4 kilometers) downslope from the cacao orchard. Plots of bare dirt surround the banana patches. The land is freshly tilled, previously blanketed with bushy velvet beans, which farmer Gabriel Sachter-Smith turned over as he prepped for the next planting. Sachter-Smith is known for his bananas — he has a bank of roughly 150 varieties. But he’ll be cycling in beans again next season to inject nitrogen into the soil, suppress weeds and stabilize the earth. The beans will decompose underground, adding nutrients to the land for the bananas when they’re planted. Strong, healthy soils absorb more water and retain it longer, which is important as climate change intensifies rain events while supercharging drought. This practice is just one form of regenerative agriculture, a cultivation canon that has emerged in prominence throughout Hawaii in the wake of pineapple and sugar plantations. Central to the regenerative ethos is the rebuilding of the environment and restoring balance.It’s costly and time-consuming, Sachter-Smith says, but he is driven by a sense of responsibility to his farm, environment and community.Agriculture Stewardship Hawaii has been supporting Sachter-Smith, Kamananui and nine other farms and ranches within the watershed to do the work, facilitating grants of $6,000 to $47,000 to help them take on conservation projects as part of their work. “It’s really about having a suite of practices that work together that support viable farm operation but that also provide valuable environmental outcomes for all,” said Dave Elliot, executive director of Agriculture Stewardship Hawaii. Many farmers want to integrate these practices into their everyday work, which is why grant funding and technical assistance is important. Sustainability for farmers is not just environmental, Sachter-Smith said, it’s a question of economic viability. The state doesn’t keep data on how many farmers or farms have adopted regenerative techniques, partly because it’s difficult to define, Hawaii Farmers Union Vice President Christian Zuckerman said. Unlike organic certification, which has a strict set of parameters, regenerative agriculture is still in its infancy.There is growing interest in the cultivation method, particularly among the younger generation of farmers and ranchers. Larger farms recognize soil conservation is good for their bottom line: more healthy soil means fewer fertilizers need to be purchased. “It’s not just bottom-line driven,” Zuckerman said. “It’s understanding that you have to be thinking seven generations ahead. We’re not just thinking about tomorrow. It’s a shift in mindset.” Regenerative techniques are an exciting “back to the future” development in farming, yielding results at the cutting edge of agricultural science, says researcher Noa Lincoln, who leads the University of Hawaii Indigenous Cropping Systems lab.It has been prone to politicization. Earlier this year, the Trump administration canceled — and is now remodeling — a $3.1 billion initiative to help farmers and ranchers do more to conserve soils and implement climate-friendly techniques. U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins called the program a “green new scam.” Hawaii was set to receive about $30 million in support. State lawmakers have mostly ignored legislation that would promote these practices. In 2022, the state enacted a law to create a cover crop initiative to help farmers buy seed for velvet beans and other crops. It never resulted in a program.The erstwhile federal initiative promised a lot but ended up being “actively harmful” to Sachter-Smith’s operation, he said. Grants are an important source of capital for farmers, especially when they’re adopting techniques new to them. But they are hard work, farmers say, requiring grantees to jump through bureaucratic hoops that sometimes work counter to their intuition. “We’re just small, at the end of the day. The money we’re working with is peanuts,” Sachter-Smith said. “But those peanuts mean a lot to us farmers.” Na Mea Kupono’s 14 ponds are nestled in the outskirts of Waialua, surrounded by homes a stone’s throw from Kaukonahua Stream. Taro grows from some of the ponds, others sit fallow, while tilapia swim in another, all situated between Sachter-Smith’s banana farm and Kaiaka Bay. Native, endemic and endangered birds loiter, with species such as aeo, kolea, akekeke and koloa nesting and idling in the kalo and lichen-covered rocks. In a fully functional ahupuaa such ponds would help control waterflow, cleaning it as it flows coastward from pond to pond. That still is the case, albeit a modern interpretation. Property lines and land and water uses have interrupted the ancient systems but Steve Bolosan and Kaimi Garrido see it as their responsibility to maintain the area as a loi kalo. They are witnessing water become more scarce as nearby properties are developed amid a changing climate. “When the new guys are coming in, they’re changing the flow of the drains,” Bolosan says. “But we feel we’re stewards and that’s our kuleana — this is one of the last pieces of old Hawaii.”The loi has a natural spring they can draw from but they have noticed a drop in rain in recent years, which is why they sought funding to help implement their windbreaks and to remove invasive grasses from their streamside land. They plan to plant native species in place. Framing the farm with milo and kukui trees and mulch helps retain soil while protecting the plot from winds, which hamper plant growth, fuel soil erosion and blow dry the greenery, parching the soils.Sitting near the edge of the watershed, 1.5 miles (2.4 kilometers) from Kaiaka Bay, the farmers take pride in the birdlife and the techniques they use, Indigenous or otherwise. “It’s really important that we are chemical-free,” Garrido said. “We use no herbicides or synthetic fertilizer.” Other farms working with Agricultural Stewardship installed bioswales, shallow trenches filled with vegetation that act like Na Mea Kupono's loi. They are sponges for moisture, filtering water and slowing its flow downhill. They are often found in urban landscapes to help manage stormwater. Many regenerative techniques being promoted these days have their roots in Indigenous methods, a cornerstone of Agriculture Stewardship Hawaii’s work, according to watershed program manager Sophie Moser. To better understand the impacts of their work, the organization uses modeling technology developed by Minnesota’s Board of Water and Soil Resources. The program is still in its pilot stages on Oahu, focused on Agricultural Stewardship’s project areas on the North Shore and in Waimanalo. The models take what practices each farm implements to estimate how much sediment and nutrients the farms retain. Agriculture Stewardship’s partner farms each reduced up to 90 tons of sediment, 210 pounds of nitrogen (95 kilograms) and 91 pounds (41 kilograms) of phosphorus per year. “We can incentivize things but it’s hard now with how many different landowners there are,” Moser said. “In my dream world everyone living on agricultural land within one watershed would turn to more traditionally minded ways of managing so the water is coming out cleaner than it came into their property, and better for downstream people.”Kaiaka Bay has become known for its murky brown waters. After heavy rain, it’s even darker. It’s popular nonetheless, thronged by hopeful anglers who may not know the site has about one-third the fish population of an average Oahu fishing spot. Authorities attribute this to several factors, particularly the sediment that blankets the seafloor, clouds the water and strains the resident sea life. Excess nitrogen and phosphorus promote blooms of algae that potentially release toxins. Runoff carrying agricultural chemicals poses an equally toxic hazard. “Wherever the water falls, it’s bringing everything that it’s touching out into the ocean,” says Tova Callender of the state Division of Aquatic Resources. Callender, based on Maui, says any techniques for soil retention and erosion control are resoundingly positive, even if the payoff isn’t obvious or immediate. “They’re not blowing smoke; everything that they’re doing is meaningful,” Callender said of the farmers’ efforts upstream. “If we had intact upper forests and we had regenerative agriculture on all our ag lands and we hadn’t filled in our wetlands, I wouldn’t have a job. And that would be great.”The Main Hawaiian Islands’ reefs are worth $33.57 billion in economic terms, according to a 2011 report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The economic value of the Koolau watershed alone is between $7.4 billion and $14 billion, according to the University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization. Public-private partnerships’ work on watershed preservation efforts in the mountains and highland forests has continued for years but little data has been collected or made available on the effects of urban and agricultural conservation efforts for nearshore waters. Sediments only add to the increasing impacts of climate change on the reefs, which regularly face bleaching events as ocean temperatures rise. Without coral reefs, the islands are even more exposed to other climate change-associated threats, such as surging seas during stronger storms.It’s hard to tell just how much progress has been made through regenerative techniques because positive changes on a few acres in the hills take a while to manifest downstream. But it’s all part of an integrated system, as it was in the days when the land was managed as an ahupuaa — a past that Kamananui Orchards cacao farmer Breen occasionally ponders. “Just thinking about that, to me as a farmer here,” Breen said, “makes me feel inspired.”This story was originally published by Honolulu Civil Beat and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See – December 2025

Climate
Agriculture
Chemicals

Clouds are vital to life – but many are becoming wispy ghosts. Here’s how to see the changes above us

As reflective white clouds become scarcer, learning to read the clouds could become essential in helping glimpse the changes upon us.

Thomas Koukas/Unsplash, CC BY-NC-NDAs a scholar researching clouds, I have spent much of my time trying to understand the economy of the sky. Not the weather reports showing scudding rainclouds, but the deeper logic of cloud movements, their distributions and densities and the way they intervene in light, regulate temperatures and choreograph heat flows across our restless planet. Recently, I have been noticing something strange: skies that feel hollowed out, clouds that look like they have lost their conviction. I think of them as ghost clouds. Not quite absent, but not fully there. These wispy formations drift unmoored from the systems that once gave them coherence. Too thin to reflect sunlight, too fragmented to produce rain, too sluggish to stir up wind, they give the illusion of a cloud without its function. We think of clouds as insubstantial. But they matter far beyond their weight or tangibility. In dry Western Australia where I live, rain-bringing clouds are eagerly anticipated. But the winter storms which bring most rain to the south-west are being pushed south, depositing vital fresh water into the oceans. More and more days pass under a hard, endless blue – beautiful, but also brutal in its vacancy. Worldwide, cloud patterns are now changing in concerning ways. Scientists have found the expanse of Earth’s highly reflective clouds is steadily shrinking. With less heat reflected, the Earth is now trapping more heat than expected. A quiet crisis above When there are fewer and fewer clouds, it doesn’t make headlines as floods or fires do. Their absence is quiet, cumulative and very worrying. To be clear, clouds aren’t going to disappear. They may increase in some areas. But the belts of shiny white clouds we need most are declining between 1.5 and 3% per decade. These clouds are the best at reflecting sunlight back to space, especially in the sunniest parts of the world close to the equator. By contrast, broken grey clouds reflect less heat, while less light hits polar regions, giving polar clouds less to reflect. Clouds are often thought of as an ambient backdrop to climate action. But we’re now learning this is a fundamental oversight. Clouds aren’t décor – they’re dynamic, distributed and deeply consequential infrastructure able to cool the planet and shape the rainfall patterns seeding life below. These masses of tiny water droplets or ice crystals represent climate protection accessible to all, regardless of nation, wealth or politics. On average, clouds cover two-thirds of the Earth’s surface, clustering over the oceans. Of all solar radiation reflected back to space, clouds are responsible for about 70%. Clouds mediate extremes, soften sunlight, ferry moisture and form invisible feedback loops sustaining a stable climate. Earth’s expanse of white, reflective clouds is shrinking decade after decade. Bernd Dittrich/Unsplash, CC BY-NC-ND When loss is invisible If clouds become rarer or leave, it’s not just a loss to the climate system. It’s a loss to how we perceive the world. When glaciers melt, species die out or coral reefs bleach and die, traces are often left of what was there. But if cloud cover diminishes, it leaves only an emptiness that’s hard to name and harder still to grieve. We have had to learn how to grieve other environmental losses. But we do not yet have a way to mourn the way skies used to be. And yet we must. To confront loss on this scale, we must allow ourselves to mourn – not out of despair, but out of clarity. Grieving the atmosphere as it used to be is not weakness. It is planetary attention, a necessary pause that opens space for care and creative reimagination of how we live with – and within – the sky. Seen from space, Earth is a planet swathed in cloud. NASA, CC BY-NC-ND Reading the clouds For generations, Australia’s First Nations have read the clouds and sky, interpreting their forms to guide seasonal activities. The Emu in the Sky (Gugurmin in Wiradjuri) can be seen in the Milky Way’s dark dust. When the emu figure is high in the night sky, it’s the right time to gather emu eggs. The skies are changing faster than our systems of understanding can keep up. One solution is to reframe how we perceive weather phenomena such as clouds. As researchers in Japan have observed, weather is a type of public good – a “weather commons”. If we see clouds not as leftovers from an unchanging past, but as invitations to imagine new futures for our planet, we might begin to learn how to live more wisely and attentively with the sky. This might mean teaching people how to read the clouds again – to notice their presence, their changes, their disappearances. We can learn to distinguish between clouds which cool and those which drift, decorative but functionally inert. Our natural affinity to clouds makes them ideal for engaging citizens. To read clouds is to understand where they formed, what they carry and whether they might return tomorrow. From the ground, we can see whether clouds have begun a slow retreat from the places that need them most. Learning to read the clouds can help us glimpse the changes above. Valentin de Bruyn/Wikimedia, CC BY-NC-ND Weather doesn’t just happen For millennia, humans have treated weather as something beyond our control, something that happens to us. But our effects on Earth have ballooned to the point that we are now helping shape the weather, whether by removing forests which can produce much of their own rain or by funnelling billions of tonnes of fossil carbon into the atmosphere. What we do below shapes what happens above. We are living through a very brief window in which every change will have very long term consequences. If emissions continue apace, the extra heating will last millennia. I propose cloud literacy not as solution, but as a way to urgently draw our attention to the very real change happening around us. We must move from reaction to atmospheric co-design – not as technical fix, but as a civic, collective and imaginative responsibility. Professor Christian Jakob provided feedback and contributed to this article, while Dr Jo Pollitt and Professor Helena Grehan offered comments and edits. Rumen Rachev receives funding from Edith Cowan University (ECU) through the Vice-Chancellor's PhD Scholarship, under the project Staging Weather led by Dr Jo Pollitt. He is also a Higher Degree by Research (HDR) member of the Centre for People, Place, and Planet (CPPP) at ECU.

Climate
Crisis
Forests

Virginia Offshore Wind Developer Sues Over Trump Administration Order Halting Projects

The developers of a Virginia offshore wind project are asking a federal judge to block a Trump administration order that halted construction of their project, along with four others, over national security concerns

Dominion Energy Virginia said in its lawsuit filed late Tuesday that the government's order is “arbitrary and capricious” and unconstitutional. The Richmond-based company is developing Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, a project it says is essential to meet dramatically growing energy needs driven by dozens of new data centers.The Interior Department did not detail the security concerns in blocking the five projects on Monday. In a letter to project developers, Interior's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management set a 90-day period — and possibly longer — “to determine whether the national security threats posed by this project can be adequately mitigated.”The other projects are the Vineyard Wind project under construction in Massachusetts, Revolution Wind in Rhode Island and Connecticut and two projects in New York: Sunrise Wind and Empire Wind. Democratic governors in those states have vowed to fight the order, the latest action by the Trump administration to hobble offshore wind in its push against renewable energy sources. Dominion's project has been under construction since early 2024 and was scheduled to come online early next year, providing enough energy to power about 660,000 homes. The company said the delay was costing it more than $5 million a day in losses solely for the ships used in round-the-clock construction, and that customers or the company would eventually bear the cost.Dominion called this week's order “the latest in a series of irrational agency actions attacking offshore wind and then doubling down when those actions are found unlawful.” The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management didn't immediately respond to an email seeking comment.U.S. District Judge Jamar Walker set a hearing for 2 p.m. Monday on Dominion's request for a temporary restraining order.The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See – December 2025

Climate
Energy
Government

The World Has Laws About Land and Sea, But Not About Ice

As the Arctic melts and people spend more time there, defining our relationship to sea ice becomes more necessary.

When the Chinese cargo freighter Istanbul Bridge set sail for Europe in late September, it took an unusual route. Instead of heading south for the 40-day voyage through the Suez Canal, it tacked north. The freighter arrived in the United Kingdom at the port of Felixstowe just 20 days later—successfully launching the first-ever Arctic commercial-container route from Asia to Europe.For most of human history, the surface of the world’s northernmost ocean has been largely frozen. Now scientists predict that most of the Arctic Ocean’s 6.1 million square miles may be seasonally ice-free as soon as 2050. Economically, a less icy Arctic spells opportunity—new shipping routes and untapped fossil-fuel reserves. Climatologically, it’s a calamity. Legally, it’s a problem that has to be solved.  Much of the ocean’s center, the northernmost stretch surrounding the pole, will be subject to the lawlessness of the high seas—which will become a problem as more ships try to navigate a mushy mix of water and sea ice. And although the Arctic is the world’s fastest-warming region, and contains its most rapidly acidifiying ocean, it has few environmental protections. Scientists don’t have a clear idea of which species might need defending, or of the climate effects of unbridled shipping. (Ships puff black carbon, which reduces ice reflectivity and, in the short term, causes up to 1,500 times more warming than carbon dioxide.)In October, the United Nation’s special envoy for the ocean, Peter Thomson, called for countries to agree to a “precautionary pause on new economic activities in the Central Arctic Ocean” to buy time to study the climate and environmental risks of increased activity. Others are asking for an agreement akin to the 2020 Artemis Accords, which committed 59 nations to the “peaceful” and “sustainable” exploration of space. But some polar-law scholars argue that curbing climate catastrophe may require a more radical reimagining: to make sea ice a legal person.For centuries of seafaring, ice was an obstacle blocking people out, not an environment anyone thought to protect. Even in the Arctic, “we have laws about the land, we have the Law of the Sea, but we don’t have laws about ice,” Apostolos Tsiouvalas, a postdoctoral researcher with the Arctic University of Norway, told me. Because dealing with ice hasn’t been a major concern, even for the five nations that border the Arctic, and because ice is always transforming, its place in the law is confused at best.In many cases, solid ice extending from a coastline has been treated as legal land, and ice carried by a current has been considered water. During the Cold War, both Russia and the United States maintained scientific “drift stations” on detached ice floes. In 1970, when a shooting occurred on one American station, several nations debated where, exactly, the crime took place. Was the ice Canadian, because it likely calved from a glacier on Canada’s coast? Was it an American island? After some back-and-forth, the vessel-size chunk of ice legally transformed—by no small imaginative leap—into an American ship.The so-called Arctic Exception of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea does extend states’ rights to impose laws far from the coastline, in areas that are ice-covered for most of the year. The point was for Arctic states to help prevent accidents and pollution, but states have since used the exception to extend their geographical sovereignty. But the term ice-covered complicates these claims. How much ice means “covered”? Are we talking uncrossably frozen, or just a few drifting bits?That’s the problem with regulating icy regions: Even if these cryo-categories were more formalized, none would apply for very long. A large majority of Arctic ice is sea ice, which forms on ocean surfaces when salt water freezes. (It’s distinct from icebergs, which calve from landbound glaciers.) Human activity may have accelerated its melt, but sea ice was already one of the planet’s most dynamic systems, its surface area fluctuating by millions of miles season to season. It’s always either melting or freezing, and as it melts, its fragments can travel hundreds of miles along waves and currents.In an article published this month in the journal The Yearbook of Polar Law, Tsiouvalas and his co-authors, Mana Tugend and Romain Chuffart, argue that piecemeal updates to current laws simply will never keep up with this fast-changing and threatened environment. Future governance of sea ice will require a transformation of some sort, and they argue that the clearest path forward is to bring the rights-of-nature movement to the high north.  Since Ecuador’s landmark 2008 constitutional protection of nature, Bolivia, India, New Zealand, and other countries across the world have made natural entities legal persons, or otherwise given them inviolable rights. The UCLA Law professor James Salzman, who has taught a class on nature’s rights, told me that this idea does not represent a single legal framework but that it does answer what he calls the “Lorax problem” of environmental law, referring to the Dr. Seuss character who claims to “speak for the trees.” Granting a voiceless entity legal personhood provides it with a representative to argue on its behalf.With this designation, Tsiouvalas and his co-authors note, sea ice would get the highest legal status possible. In many cases, environmental protections can be bent to accommodate other, conflicting benefits to human society. But personhood grants an inherent right to exist that can’t be superseded. The new paper is mostly an ethical exploration and, the authors acknowledge, still just a stepping stone to more concrete regulations, but granting ice rights would create firmer standing to, for example, keep ships out of areas that humanity might otherwise want to use. The authors also note that rethinking sea ice’s status could include Indigenous people who have been routinely excluded from decisions around Arctic sovereignty and whose millennia of living on and with ice could guide its future governance.But Sara Olsvig, the chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, told me recently that the legal interest in Arctic rights of nature is a “worrying development.” To Olsvig, the phrase rights of nature itself implies some separate concept of nature that doesn’t exist for the Inuit. And in the past, the environmentalist movement has elevated its idea of “nature” above the interests of Indigenous people. Decades-long bans against whale and seal hunting, for instance, devastated the cultural continuity and health of Inuit in the far north.To answer such concerns, any legal right granted needs to be very clear about the duties that follow, Salzman said: If sea ice has a right to not be harmed, what constitutes “harm”? Would that mean blocking all human interference with the ice, or merely banning fuels that emit black carbon? After all, the major threat to sea ice—global emissions—“is not something that can be locally managed,” Salzman pointed out, and so far, natural resources have obtained legal personhood only in a national context. Rights for sea ice would require international agreement, which could be not only harder to achieve but harder to enforce. Sara Ross, an associate law professor at Dalhousie University, in Canada, told me that, in her view, legal personhood granted via international treaty would be too dependent on goodwill agreements to be effective.But in some ways, legal personhood for nonhumans is an old idea, Ross said. Most countries grant it to corporations, and in the United States and Commonwealth countries, it’s typical for ships too. She especially likes the ship comparison, because—as maritime law has already discovered—floating pieces of ice aren’t so dissimilar. She imagines a more circumscribed role for sea-ice personhood, connected to, say, setting standards that ban icebreaking or heavy fuel emissions in icy areas. If these mandates are violated, local Inuit communities would have the power to sue on behalf of the ice—whether or not they could prove how much one particular ship degraded one particular stretch of ice. Without some legal protections put in place, the sea ice will soon disappear that much faster. In October, the U.S. bought new icebreaking ships from Finland and undermined an International Maritime Organization agreement that would have had shipowners pay a fee for the greenhouse gases their vessels emit. The next week, just after the conclusion of the Istanbul Bridge’s voyage, Russia and China made a formal agreement to co-develop the Northern Sea Route that the ship had followed. If summer sea ice disappears entirely, scientists predict accelerated catastrophe—leaps in temperature, more frequent and stronger storms, global sea-level rise—which will threaten the planet’s general livability. “The fact that we need sea ice to survive is not a rights-of-nature argument,” Salzman said. “But it’s still a pretty good case to make.”

Climate
CO2
Health

Scenes From an Unfolding Climate Drama

The last 10 global climate summits have played out on vastly different stages: from the hopeful consensus of the Paris Agreement through a subsequent pandemic shock, petrostate spectacles and a hoped-for reckoning with environmental justice in the Amazon. But the new scripts often seem like reruns, with minor plot twists; a new villain, a new […]

ICN international climate policy reporter Bob Berwyn reviews the past decade of the United Nations Climate Change Conference.Story and photos by Bob BerwynThe last 10 global climate summits have played out on vastly different stages: from the hopeful consensus of the Paris Agreement through a subsequent pandemic shock, petrostate spectacles and a hoped-for reckoning with environmental justice in the Amazon. But the new scripts often seem like reruns, with minor plot twists; a new villain, a new planet-saving technology or a new text that raises more questions than it answers. The struggle remains unresolved. A close look at the settings and the actors shows a process paralyzed between performative self-awareness and transformative, meaningful action.

Climate
Technology

Suggested Viewing

THE SPRAYER

In the land occupied with the sprayers army, no one has the right to grow any kind of plants either in public or private. So many of the people and soldiers do not even know how a plant grows or looks like, until one day one of the soldiers finds a seed buried deep down in the dust and his curiosity is just the beginning of something extraordinary, something big, something revolutionary.

Plants
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Animation

The Straight Poop

Our animated short entertains while presenting eye-opening information on one of the fastest, most effective ways to slow the rate of global warming. Our film is an engaging way of addressing the dangers of climate change that educates in a non-threatening comical way. Individuals concerned about climate change can make relatively small personal choices that can have a huge positive effect.

Animals
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Just Can't Stop!

a musical tribute to Exxon and climate change

Music
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A Low Carbon Future for China’s Furnace Cities

China’s economic development and rapid urbanization has led to a dramatic rise in energy consumption due to excessive heating and air-conditioning causing carbon emissions of immense proportions. China’s government has set the ambitious target of reducing CO2 emissions by 40–45% by 2020 against the 2005 baseline. A UK/China-funded team working on how to solve the problem in some of the most extreme climate regions in China. The team discovers groundbreaking solutions using computational-fluid-dynamics simulations.

CO2
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Climate

Crossing the Divide

An Iowa farmer reacts swiftly when he hears that radical climate marchers plan to disrupt peace in his tiny town. What he does after that offers a lesson for would-be peacemakers everywhere.

Inspirational
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Climate

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