"Two years after a landmark UN-brokered deal to protect nature from a massive wave of destruction, delegates will gather at a new COP in Colombia in late October to assess their progress."

"New research shows how toxic chemicals hitch a ride with seabirds flying from southern latitudes to the Arctic."

"When he was just 18 years old, Emmanuel Akatire traveled about 500 miles from his home in Zorko, Ghana, to Accra, the nation’s capital, to find the only work he could — sifting through vast piles of discarded electronics to find valuable scrap metal. A week’s worth of painstaking, often dangerous work, earns him the equivalent of about 60 U.S. dollars."

"Among the many pieces of critical infrastructure that Hurricane Helene knocked offline in Asheville, N.C., was a key federal office for monitoring the global climate. Work is underway to get the facility running again, but the outage is likely to delay some agencies’ monthly updates on global warming and other climate indicators."

"Russ Lewis has picked up some strange things along the coast of Long Beach Peninsula in Washington state over the years: Hot Wheels bicycle helmets with feather tufts, life-size plastic turkey decoys made for hunters, colorful squirt guns." ... "These items aren’t like the used fishing gear and beer cans that Lewis also finds tossed overboard by fishers or partygoers. They’re the detritus of commercial shipping containers lost in the open ocean."

"The adoption of ship scrubbers—technology meant to clean up dirty fuel—has caused a surge in heavy metal pollution."

"Ukrainian officials say the Russians deliberately poisoned the Seym River, which flows into the Desna. The Desna connects with a reservoir in the Kyiv region and a water supply used by millions."

"From his sickbed, eight-year-old Ukasha could see his siblings play with a ball in the courtyard. His head hurt and his body felt too heavy to move. Ukasha had typhoid fever – an illness he should have recovered from in days. It had been a month."

"Climate negotiators from Europe, Latin America and some island nations are bracing for the potential return to the world stage of Donald J. Trump, who withdrew the United States from the fight against global warming during his first term."