This unusual photograph, shot under ultraviolet light with a 13-second exposure, shows some of the damage caused on land by fishing out at sea.

Gaurav Patil’s image of a fishing net that has been carried by ocean currents and become tangled in a mangrove tree on the shore of Nandgaon village, south of Mumbai, India, has won the overall prize in the 2026 . The competition is organised by US non-profit organisation Mangrove Action Project to raise awareness of the precarious position of the world’s mangrove forests.

Mangroves less than 1 per cent of all tropical forests, but provide crucial habitat for wildlife and store up to 10 times more carbon than the same area of inland forest. Despite better recent news after decades of decline, more than half of mangrove ecosystems are to be at .

Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of lost, abandoned and discarded fishing gear litter the oceans, carried around the globe by currents and eventually getting caught up or breaking down into microplastics. This gear can severely damage mangrove ecosystems, entangling marine life and choking mangrove trees.

“This photographer has put life into a subject that normally looks dull but is deeply important for conservation. Ghost nets are a real problem,” said judge Dhritiman Mukherjee in an announcement about the prize.

Don’t treat your pets for parasites such as ticks and fleas unless they actually need treating. We can’t be sure that these treatments are safe for you and your family, and there is growing evidence that they pose a danger to wildlife.

So says a by the Environment and Climate Change Committee of the UK’s House of Lords. It is calling for the sale of these treatments to be restricted, so people can only buy them after consultation with a vet, pharmacist or qualified pet shop staff.

The main issue is that there is no rigorous assessment of pet treatments before they are approved, the report says. It has simply been assumed by national and international regulators that they are safe, but this assumption is turning out to be wrong.

In particular, at least two potent pesticides found in tick and flea treatments are getting into UK rivers at levels high enough to affect wildlife. These pesticides can break down into other substances that are even more harmful.

“There is also worryingly insufficient evidence to assess whether or not [pet parasite medicines] are harmful to human health,” says the report.

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It also says regulators aren’t sufficiently independent. Both UK and international regulators “appear to be too influenced by and beholden to the views of the industry”, it states.

While the report focuses on the UK, the same tick and flea treatments are sold in many countries. “This is a worldwide issue,” says at Imperial College London, one of the experts who gave evidence to the committee.

“There’s been a historical assumption that any veterinary medicine used in non-food animals – cats and dogs, companion animals – is associated with negligible environmental risk,” she says. “Effectively, they have no meaningful environmental risk assessment.”

But recent research shows they do pose a risk, says Perkins. “It’s really opened up a Pandora’s box, because we have dozens of these products that have been approved based on this assumption that we now know is not scientifically valid.”

For instance, two common pesticides found in products such as spot-on flea treatments are fipronil, a broad-spectrum insecticide, and imidacloprid, a neonicotinoid. “They’re incredibly potent at extremely low levels,” says Perkins.

Both pesticides used to be used on farms until they were banned a few years ago. But they have continued to be found in rivers. In fact, with the development of more sensitive tests, they are turning up “pretty much everywhere in waterways”, says Perkins.

Initially, it was thought this was a legacy of their use by farmers, but work by Perkins and others suggests parasite medications are now the main source of these pesticides in waterways. In many cases, levels are high enough to harm invertebrates such as mayflies, dragonflies and caddisflies, with knock-on effects on the fish and birds that feed on them.

We don’t know how big a problem this is, says the report. “The true scale of environmental harm resulting from pet parasite medications is not known.”

How are the pesticides getting into rivers? Once they are applied to pets, they end up all over the home, says Perkins. When people bathe their pets or wash pet bedding, they can end up in wastewater.

Product packaging currently recommends that dogs are not bathed for four days after treatment, but this needs to be extended to 28 days, the report recommends.

Another major source of the pesticides in water is hand-washing, says Perkins. “We detected [pesticides] in the wash-off even before we asked people to stroke their pets, so they’re just constantly on the hands of pet owners.”

Products containing fipronil and imidacloprid are now being replaced by ones containing isoxazolines, typically sold in the form of chewable tablets. Isoxazolines are less water-soluble but can bind to sediments and accumulate in soils and sewage sludge. They might be ending up in fields when sewage sludge is sprayed as fertiliser and harming pollinators.

“There has not been much work done to date to assess this,” says the report.

Shed dog fur is yet another way these chemicals can end up in the environment. The report says contaminated fur has been found in bird nests.

In light of these findings, the use of pet parasite medications should be minimised until there is independent research clarifying their risks, says the report. At present, manufacturers of parasite treatments are promoting the idea that routine treatment for parasites is required, and encouraging pet owners to get them via monthly subscriptions. “However, the benefits of routine, and certainly monthly, pet parasite medicine usage are not supported by scientific evidence.”

It is an excellent report, says Perkins, but she hoped it would go further and recommend making these products prescription-only. Some wildlife groups, meanwhile, want .

Yet another reason for restricting their use is to slow the development of resistance, says Perkins. She sees a lot of animals treated with old spot-on treatments containing fipronil that still have fleas. “We need effective parasite treatments, and we need to make sure we preserve their efficacy,” she says.

Parts of the UK have seen zero rainfall for the entire month of July for the first time in their history, underscoring the scale and severity of the ongoing drought gripping the country.

The Met Office, the UK’s national weather service, said July’s weather had been “truly exceptional”, with both England and Wales enduring their driest July in 190 years, coupled with extreme heat and almost unbroken sunshine. Rainfall across southern England averaged just 1.5 mm for July 2026, just 2 per cent of the 1991-2020 average, while mean temperatures were 3.2°C above average for the time of year.

At London’s Kew Gardens, which hosts a Met Office weather station, there has been no measurable rainfall at all in July, the first time that has happened at the site since records began in 1871.

Meanwhile, Heathrow Airport in London has seen 42 consecutive days and counting without any rain, a new record for the site, which has been monitored since 1948.

And in Stratfield Mortimer, a village outside the city of Reading, zero rainfall was recorded in July for the first time in its history. The nearby market town of Wokingham recorded just 0.1 millimetres of rainfall over the same period, according to data released by the University of Reading.

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“Some parts of the Reading area remained without measurable rainfall throughout the calendar month, the only time this has happened since continuous local rainfall records began in 1858, almost 170 years ago,” said at the University of Reading in a statement.

The story is similar across southern England, with at least 20 Met Office weather stations seeing zero rainfall for July for the first time in their recorded history, according to provisional data seen by New Scientist. They include stations in Lincolnshire, Dorset, Kent, Greater London, Essex, Monmouthshire, Surrey, the Isle of Wight, East Sussex, Hereford & Worcester and Hampshire.

In north London, software engineer has been operating a private weather station since 2009 near Hampstead Heath. He says July 2026 was the first calendar month without any measurable rain in the local area, based on both his own 17-year time series and Met Office records for the area dating back to 1871.

More than half of England and all of Wales is now officially in drought, causing landscapes to turn yellow, wildfires to burn and farmers to warn of looming crop shortages. In Europe, the prolonged hot, dry weather has sparked huge wildfires and driven river levels to historic lows. Low river levels on the Danube have forced operators to shut down nuclear power reactors in Hungary and Romania, while in Germany low water levels on the Rhine have curtailed shipping.

But even though rain will bring relief, it also carries risks. , also at the University of Reading, says there is now a “really substantial” risk of severe flash flooding in the UK, when rain finally falls on sun-baked soils. “Most of the soils are crusted; reservoirs are stressed,” he says. “It’s not a day or two of rainfall that will solve it all. It might actually pose the greatest hazard of them all.”

A pyrocumulonimbus cloud, a looming thunderstorm generated by an intensely hot wildfire, has been observed with radar in France for the first time. These deadly “fire clouds” of rising hot air, smoke and moisture, which accelerate blazes with strong winds and soaring embers, are expected to become more common in Europe as wildfires there get bigger.  

“You have this tilted column that is sucking air and then propagating embers in front, and it also creates lightning. That’s another way of lighting up fuels in front of the fire, so these cells are unstoppable,” says at the University of Corsica, France. “You cannot stop a thunderstorm, and neither can you stop a firestorm, a strong pyrocumulonimbus.”

Alongside huge blazes in Spain, France has been suffering a wildfire in the Gironde region, which President Emmanuel Macron has called the country’s most severe crisis since the second world war. The fire has burned more than 420 square kilometres since last week, coming within 15 kilometres of the city of Bordeaux and forcing around 220,000 people to evacuate. It generated a pyrocumulonimbus cloud on 24 July and another on 25 July, according to regional officials. Embers and lightning ignited new fires around the original inferno.

“We faced another firestorm, the same incredible, unprecedented, unknown phenomenon as the one we saw on Friday, when we realised we were entering a new dimension,” Gironde prefect Sophie Brocas told journalists.

It is a miracle this pyrocumulonimbus-fuelled fire hasn’t claimed any casualties, Filippi says.

Sometimes the “fire-breathing dragon of clouds”, pyrocumulonimbus are typically generated by massive wildfires in the forests of North America, Siberia and Australia. They’ve spurred on infamous fires like the that killed 173 people in Australia in 2009 and the conflagration that in 2016. Canada’s record-breaking wildfires in 2023 142 of these storms.

In Europe, however, there have been only a handful of confirmed pyrocumulonimbus in Spain and Portugal, including one during Portugal’s devastating Pedrógão Grande fire in 2017, which destroyed hundreds of homes and killed 66 people. But that appears to be changing.

“You have to have two things happening at the same time: an extreme heat source and an unstable atmosphere that interacts with the fire,” says at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. “If… the heat from the fire increases, like it’s projected to increase from our studies, then yes, you should see more of these events.”

This firestorm begins to take shape when temperatures as high as 800°C send a plume of smoke into the sky. As the hot air rises and cools, water vapour condenses onto the ash to form pyrocumulus clouds, like the fluffy white clouds you might see on a summer day, only brown or grey.  

If the plume is hot enough and the atmosphere is unstable enough, the cloud can keep rising to reach the upper troposphere at 10,000 metres, the cruising altitude of a passenger plane. It sometimes reaches the stratosphere, as much smoke as a moderate volcano. It becomes a pyrocumulonimbus when the static electricity from colliding ice particles sparks thunder and lightning.

Although rain from the cloud often evaporates in the hot air, this kind of thunderstorm nonetheless creates its own weather system. The cloud’s updraft pulls in air, fanning the flames with winds reaching 160 kilometres per hour and accelerating the fire’s spread by up to five times, according to Filippi.

Meanwhile, strong downdrafts create erratic gusts that carry embers off to start new fires. Dozens of lightning strikes can blazes as far as 100 kilometres ahead of the main fire. It can also create fire tornadoes of twisting flames. As the winds, embers and lightning strengthen and expand the wildfire, it releases more heat and smoke, a feedback loop that can amplify the rising cloud for many hours.

Both wind shear higher in the atmosphere and erratic gusts at the ground can take the fire in unpredictable directions, making it nearly impossible to contain its acceleration or plan targeted evacuations.

“The fire front is constantly shifting. We cannot fight it directly. It’s a David-versus-Goliath scenario,” Eric Brocardi of the National Firefighters Federation of France local media about the Gironde fire on 2 August.  

Wildfire plumes have expanded in height since 2003 in the western US, creating more pyrocumulonimbus clouds, an increase that’s projected to continue.

Pyrocumulonimbus will have more chances to occur in Europe as well, as the fastest-warming continent experiences more extreme heat, such as the record-breaking heatwave in June, and wildfires. could also contribute, such as when a wet spring last year boosted vegetation growth on the Iberian peninsula, only for record summer heat to dry it out. This led to Europe’s worst-ever wildfires, including a in Spain.

“We need to adapt, so get prepared,” Filippi says. “Burn-proof and reduce the amount of fuel around your house.”

��’m terrified by how fast weather extremes are ramping up as the world heats up, and there’s much, much worse to come unless we leave fossil fuels in the ground. The only way to do that is to end our dependency on oil and gas – and all the fuss about whether the UK will allow more drilling in the North Sea is a distraction from this.

Some people talk about the UK government’s current policy of not approving more licences for exploration in the North Sea as if it will reduce the amount of oil and gas that is burned, and thus help limit how much more carbon dioxide ends up in the atmosphere. But it won’t. All it will do is change where the oil and gas that gets burned comes from.

What does matter is burning less fossil fuel. That means things such as getting more electricity from renewable sources, and more vehicles and heat pumps running on that electricity.

So I won’t be judging the climate credentials of the UK’s new prime minister, Andy Burnham, on whether or not his government decides to in the North Sea. It’s what is done to further reduce our use of fossil fuels that’s crucial in climate terms. And here Burnham has already made a good start by cutting the value-added tax (VAT) on electricity, which will make .

��’m not saying bans on drilling are a complete waste of time – they have a part to play in protecting vulnerable environments, such as the Amazon rainforest. But I don’t see how they will ever help limit emissions.

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At this point, you might be thinking, “but if enough countries ban drilling, it will make a difference”. There are already nearly 60 restrictions on fossil fuel production in 25 countries, . But many of these are regional restrictions to protect places such as the Arctic, or bans on production methods such as fracking. And 15 have already been repealed. No major producers are planning to completely stop producing oil and gas, and the known reserves of fossil fuels are way more than enough to trash the climate. The bottom line is that some countries will keep on churning out fossil fuels as long as they can sell them, so the key is to reduce demand, not supply.

That said, most of the arguments used by supporters of further North Sea gas and oil exploration . For starters, more drilling is not going to bring down energy prices in the UK. North Sea oil and gas is sold at global market prices, and there’s not enough oil or gas left in the North Sea to make a dent in those prices.

Going all out on renewables, by contrast, would break , and help bring down energy bills. This is what is Spain .

Another dubious claim is that more drilling is going to make oodles of money for the UK. But production in the North Sea already has to be supported by tax breaks and subsidies, and is declining year on year. of the oil and gas has already been extracted, so further drilling will, at most, slow the rate of decline. And what remains is harder to get out, so costs are higher. If the wars pushing up oil prices come to an end, it might not even be profitable – until recently, the world was building up .

Then there’s the exaggerated claim that North Sea gas is “four times cleaner” than imported liquid natural gas, or LNG. The emissions associated with producing LNG are around four times higher than those for North Sea gas, because of the energy required to liquefy it. But what matters are the total emissions, including those from burning the gas, and on this count .

LNG now accounts for . If that could be reduced by more North Sea gas production, there should be a little less CO2 emitted. It would also mean less money going to countries that obstruct climate action – the UK now gets 37 per cent of its gas from the US, for instance.

But the UK also gets gas from Norway via pipelines, and the production emissions of this are even lower than those of North Sea gas. So in climate terms, buying more Norwegian pipeline gas would be better than increasing North Sea production.

Overall, then, what happens in the North Sea just doesn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things – more drilling is neither a climate catastrophe, nor an economic panacea. Instead, the UK and other countries need to focus on what really matters – much more drastic action to replace fossil fuels or discourage their use. You only need to look at to see why it’s so vital.