"The big recent changes are the war causing spikes in diesel, fertilizer, and chemical prices," Jeffrey Dorfman explained, highlighting the direct impact of the conflict on agricultural costs.
Nawaf al-Akhras describes the daily round trip to a water filling station as a torment for his family, stating, 'My entire day with my son is spent waiting in line to fill water, with people coming from very far distances.'
I make 1,200 pesos (1.80) a day, so I have to work two days to buy a bottle of oil. It has been weeks since he ate meat. His last meal, last night, was a dish of white rice and fried banana.
Women are responsible for collecting water in more than 70% of rural households that do not have access to mains water across the developing world. Women and girls collectively spend 250m hours a day collecting water globally. The climate crisis is exacerbating the problem, according to a new report from the UN.
Absolutely, I have experienced investing in a way that green growth has led to both equitable growth and decarbonization, but also have lived experience of what degrowth can do to a country, and how, in my view, [degrowth] is not really a solution.
We have an urgent responsibility. Our existing economic system is incapable of addressing the social and ecological crises we face in the 21st century. When we look around we see an extraordinary paradox. On the one hand, we have access to remarkable new technologies and a collective capacity to produce more food, more stuff than we need or that the planet can afford. Yet at the same time, millions of people suffer in conditions of severe deprivation. What explains this paradox? Capitalism.
In Turkana, the land is rugged, roads disappear into dust, and villages are scattered across vast distances in a county of just more than a million people. Despite it being the rainy season, weather experts warn that Turkana and other arid regions may receive little relief. Authorities say drought is once again taking place, with 23 of Kenya's 47 counties affected.
In 2009, Wall Street had just imploded, and the Mojave Desert town of Victorville, California-sunblasted, shoddily constructed, and abruptly abandoned-was one of the housing bubble's most spectacular wipeouts. But amid the boarded-up McMansions and tumbleweed-traversed deserted culs-de-sac, the journalist Yasha Levine stumbled upon an entirely different story. Seeking water, a drought-stricken Victorville bulk-purchased enough to supply as many as 30,000 families for a year. The arrangement gave Levine pause: Since when did a public resource like water come with a deed? That question unspooled into the reporting behind his new documentary, Pistachio Wars.
As water-intensive data centres expand worldwide, their impact on sanitation, inequality and disease is emerging as a serious and under-examined threat. Bubble is probably the word most associated with AI right now, though we are slowly understanding that it is not just an economic time bomb; it also carries significant public health risks. Beyond the release of pollutants, the massive need for clean water by AI data centres can reduce sanitation and exacerbate gastrointestinal illness in nearby communities, placing additional strain on local health infrastructure.
The Colorado River is an interconnected system, sustained by Rocky Mountain snowpack, rainfall and groundwater. It is fragile, and under increasing stress. Two and a half decades into this century, the river that built the modern West has 20% less water flowing through it than it did on average in the last century. As heat and drought intensify, so do the stakes: Failure to recognize the severity of changing conditions, managing the river in parts without considering needs of the whole and inadequate planning for long-term shortages put the future of all the basin at risk.
How will we be fed? That's the biggest question not seriously being addressed amid all this talk about whether or not artificial intelligence will end up taking over all of our jobs. Formidable though the technology appears, similar fears have popped up repeatedly since the Industrial Revolution, and most working-age adults remain employed. Still, what is sorely missing is a serious debate about what to do if this future in fact materializes.
The world has flipped from a scarcity crisis to a crisis of drowning in abundance. We have entered the era of the Super Glut -a structural deluge where we are extracting hydrocarbons faster than the global economy can burn them. According to the IEA's January 2026 report, global oil supply is projected to surge by 2.5 million barrels per day (bpd), reaching a definitive record of 108.7 million bpd. This is not a temporary surge; it is a permanent shift in market dynamics.
"The numbers are really, really bad," Swain says. "If this were November, they might be less meaningful. We're not in November-we're heading toward mid-February. The normal numbers are pretty high. To be at half of them means that, in absolute terms, the deficit is large."
Outside, it's an overcast and blustery February day in Kent hardly the ideal conditions for growing tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers. Yet inside the enormous glasshouses run by grower Thanet Earth, the climate has been optimised to a humid 20C, perfect for the regimented rows of small pepper plants poking out of raised trays. Growing fresh produce indoors in the south of England year-round requires plenty of energy to provide light, warmth and carbon dioxide.
Most Americans now accept the basic physics of climate change-that manmade greenhouse-gas emissions are raising global temperatures. Yet the public discussion of climate change is still remarkably broken in the United States. Leaders of one political party frame climate change as an existential emergency that threatens human life and prosperity. Leaders of the other dismiss it as a distraction from economic growth and energy security. Economists like me, trained to think about trade-offs,
