Breaking Waves: Ocean News

Here are 26 images by the shortlisted artists who submitted works for the 21st William and Winifred Bowness photography prize. Tamara Dean has been named the winner. The judges says her photograph is ‘operatic and poetic: an opus that is the culmination of a sustained body of work evident not only in its conception and process but also in its exquisite execution and presentation’ Continue reading...

With nearly £30m of funding, I’m giving communities power over local energy. They know the gravity of global heating, and they want to be part of the solution Andy Burnham: UK must fully commit to reaching net zero by 2050 On the day I became prime minister, I pledged to bring power to every postcode. Today, we begin to make good on that promise in the most literal sense. With nearly £30m of funding for People’s Power projects, communities across every nation of the UK will soon have the chance to build and control their own clean energy supply. This investment means villages, towns and cities can harness the natural resources around them with solar panels on libraries, publicly owned windfarms, hydro schemes in their rivers, or whatever else works for them. The purpose is to put money back in people’s pockets while giving them a direct role in tackling the climate crisis. Andy Burnham is prime minister of the United Kingdom Continue reading...

The US decision to remove limits on coal and gas plant emissions is rooted in a perception of manliness in these industries You can impress a certain kind of person at a party by reciting the fact that there are more yoga instructors in the US than there are coalminers. In fact, the disparity is greater than this catchy phrasing suggests: there are actually more yoga instructors in the US than there are people employed in the entirety of the coalmining industry, miners and otherwise. It’s not even especially close: about 38,000 people in the US work in coal, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, compared to about 100,000 yoga instructors who are registered with the Yoga Alliance, an industry group. If you looked only at the numbers, you might think a politician would be incentivized to talk about the interests of the yoga industry, about the dignity that yoga jobs give to American families, or about the need to foster growth in the yoga industry, more than they talk about these things for coal; after all, yoga, not coal, is putting food on the table in more American households. But no politician would ever talk about the interests of yoga teachers, or wax poetic about their role in the American dream, the way they do with coal miners; if they did, they’d be laughed out of the room. And we all know why: yoga is thought of as decadent, cosmopolitan and feminine, while coal mining is imagined as hardscrabble, honorable and masculine. Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist Continue reading...

Analysis of global resources reveals depletion in world’s water savings bank to 42% below normal levels last year Rivers across the world experienced one of their driest years in more than three decades in 2025, a comprehensive study of global water resources has found. The assessment of the global water cycle by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reveals a depletion in the world’s water savings bank: the amount of freshwater held on or under the ground, including groundwater, lakes, rivers, snow, ice moisture in the soil and inside plants and trees, was 42% below normal across the world last year. Continue reading...