This article examines far-right nature by showing how contemporary movements weave ecological and public-health discourses into forms of political storytelling with broad public appeal. Focusing on cases from Europe and the United States, it traces how Rassemblement National’s eco-populism, the agrarian ultranationalism of Călin Georgescu, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” coalition channels public concern over climate and health crises into exclusionary narratives. The rhetoric of far-right nature can be difficult to identify and critique, in part because its ostensible concern with well-being and the environment often distances it from culturally dominant images of classical fascism. Nevertheless, the article demonstrates resonances between contemporary far-right nature and the biopolitical and organicist imaginaries of interwar fascist movements. Combining approaches from the environmental humanities with scholarship on fascism and the far right, the article argues that a public-facing environmental humanities must attend not only to imagination and storytelling but also to the political work environmental narratives perform within reactionary and exclusionary projects.

The goal of the Paris Agreement is to prevent global temperatures from rising by more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursue efforts to limit them to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. This requires a significant reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions and achieving net zero emissions by 2050. Portfolio alignment metrics are forward-looking metrics intended to help investors understand whether their investment portfolios are on track to meet the Paris Agreement goals. They also aim to encourage capital flows towards activities needed for a net zero transition. Since 2020, several metrics have been put forward by industry groups and explored in technical papers. Companies and actuaries have been exploring the practicalities of these metrics and starting to incorporate them into investment reporting and design. But this has not been without key challenges. The Net Zero and Implications for Investment Portfolios working party aims to help actuaries improve their understanding of what net zero means for an investment portfolio and what the key mechanisms are to achieve this, as well as key challenges to date and the outlook for development.

Survival is a key life history trait influenced by climate variability and resource availability in many bird species. Understanding the factors affecting survival in threatened species is critical for effective conservation management. However, we lack knowledge regarding survival rates and their annual variations for most threatened species. In this study, we use mark-recapture data collected in eastern Spain between 2011 and 2019 to estimate the annual adult survival of the Endangered Dupont’s Lark Chersophilus duponti, a steppe specialist passerine. We also aim to assess whether survival rates are linked to plant productivity, as a surrogate of resources available, and climate variability during the post-breeding (autumn) and winter periods. A total of 113 adults (89 males and 24 females) were ringed, which yielded 43 recaptures. The average adult survival rate over the nine-year period was slightly higher than previous estimates for Dupont’s Lark and other related species. Nonetheless, we observed substantial annual fluctuations in survival (ranging from 0.34 to 0.80), largely driven by winter climate conditions. Survival rates decreased during winters with a higher number of frost days (below 0ºC) and increased accumulated rainfall. These findings provide new insights into the population dynamics of the species and suggest that factors other than adult annual survival may be contributing to its declining status. Among those factors, a critical area for further research is to study and characterise the dispersal patterns and survival of juvenile birds, which remain largely unknown for this species.

Fossil fuel companies no longer deny anthropogenic climate change in litigation, but they challenge the validity of climate science in establishing legal responsibility. Research on climate litigation, social movements, and legal mobilization has focused primarily on plaintiffs’ perspectives, showing how they use the judicial process as a site of knowledge production. This article shifts the focus onto defendants, conducting an analysis of scientific disputes in major climate change lawsuits and developing a typology grounded in both empirical analysis and theoretical insights for studying their arguments about science and evidence. Corporate defendants build evidentiary counter-narratives, challenge the substantive quality of plaintiffs’ claims, and contest the scientific integrity of compromising evidence. The future impact of such litigation will hinge on how courts evaluate climate research as legal evidence, and whether corporate defendants are successful in their efforts to reframe, undermine, and discredit the science.

A database of ca. 970 radiocarbon dates on bones, teeth, and tusks of the woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius Blum.) from Siberia was created in order to understand the spatiotemporal distribution of this species over the last 50,000 14C years (BP). Mammoths populated all parts of Siberia until ca. 12,000 BP. After that, a few refugia exited south of ca. 60°N at ca. 10,600–12,000 BP, and in the northern part of mainland Siberia mammoths survived until ca. 9700 BP. At ca. 9500–3700 BP, they existed only in today’s insular regions such as the New Siberian Islands and Wrangel Island in the High Arctic. The relationship between the dynamics of mammoth populations and climatic fluctuations is complicated. In the warmer intervals (interstadials), the number of mammoths in Siberia was generally slightly larger than in the colder times (stadials); however, the difference is often not significant. The connection between the dynamics of mammoth populations and climatic fluctuations in Siberia is therefore complicated and non-linear.

Global warming is not only a serious threat for humanity but increasingly structures political competition in Western Europe. The rise of green (niche) parties and public awareness of the issue pressure mainstream parties to emphasise climate protection. Yet, while scholars reflect on the factors influencing mainstream parties’ environmental agendas, we know little about what triggers climate standpoints and about the role public opinion plays in this process. This study measures the salience of climate protection in 292 election manifestos of mainstream parties in 10 Western European countries since the 1990s and estimates the impact of different factors on their climate agenda using OLS regressions. The findings suggest that green parties are not the driving factor, and that it is the public salience of environmental issues and pressure from the Fridays for Future movement influencing mainstream parties’ agendas. Accordingly, mainstream parties seem to be responsive to public opinion pressure adopting climate protection stances. The study further proposes a different measure of niche party success than that used in previous studies.

Editors’ introduction to the interview: Modern environmentalism, whose genesis tracks mainly from the 1960s and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), has forced the anthropocentric emphasis of democracy to account. Nonhuman actors like trees, ecological systems, and the climate have increasingly become anthropomorphized by humans representing these actors in politics. Aside from challenges to the anthropocentric concepts of citizenship, political representation, agency, and boundaries in democratic theory, environmentalism has warned of apocalyptic crises. This drives a different kind of challenge to mainly liberal democracies. Scientists and activists are becoming increasingly fed up with the seeming incompetence, slowness, and idiocy of politicians, interest groups, and electors. Eyes start to wander to that clean, well-kempt, and fast-acting gentleman called authoritarianism. The perfect shallowness of his appearance mesmerizes like a medusa those that would usually avoid him. Serfdom increasingly looks like a palpable trade-off to keep the “green” apocalypses at bay. Democracy’s only answer to this challenge is to evolve into a cleverer version of itself.

Political polarization is a group phenomenon in which opposing factions, often of unequal size, exhibit asymmetrical influence and behavioral patterns. Within these groups, elites and masses operate under different motivations and levels of influence, challenging simplistic views of polarization. Yet, existing methods for measuring polarization in social networks typically reduce it to a single value, assuming homogeneity in polarization across the entire system. While such approaches confirm the rise of political polarization in many social contexts, they overlook structural complexities that could explain its underlying mechanisms. We propose a method that decomposes existing polarization and alignment measures into distinct components. These components separately capture polarization processes involving elites and masses from opposing groups. Applying this method to Twitter discussions surrounding the 2019 and 2023 Finnish parliamentary elections, we find that (1) opposing groups rarely have a balanced contribution to observed polarization, and (2) while elites strongly contribute to structural polarization and consistently display greater alignment across various topics, the masses, too, have recently experienced a surge in alignment. Our method provides an improved analytical lens through which to view polarization, explicitly recognizing the complexity of and need to account for elite-mass dynamics in polarized environments.

Rapid deforestation in the tropics reduces the global carbon sequestration and storage capacity of forests. However, abandoned lands can recover naturally through secondary succession. While soil organic carbon (SOC) represents the largest carbon pool in young secondary forests, its drivers remain poorly understood. Here, we assessed the roles of environmental conditions (macro- and microclimate) and forest attributes (biomass and litter nutrients) in determining three key ecosystem processes (litter production, decomposition, and soil respiration) that influence SOC dynamics in secondary forests. We collected data from young secondary tropical dry and wet forests (2.3–3.6 years old) in Ghana. Wet forests had higher aboveground biomass, soil temperature and moisture, and litter production, whereas dry forests had higher litter nutrient concentrations and faster decomposition rates. SOC and soil respiration rates were similar between forest types. Structural equation modelling showed that (1) litter decomposition increased with litter production, litter nitrogen concentration, and soil temperature (rather than soil moisture), and (2) decomposition was the only significant driver of SOC. These findings highlight the central role of litter decomposition in building SOC during early forest succession and the indirect influence of climate on belowground carbon dynamics through its effects on litter quantity and quality and microclimate.

Climate anxiety is a profound psychological, and even spiritual, problem of our times. The predicted and unpredictable consequences of climate change can cast a shadow of fear and doubt over our sense of the imminent and far future. The best cure to climate anxiety is the development of courage. Courage means upholding something noble in the face of one’s fears. In this article I explore what it means to be courageous in the face of the climate crisis.