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The Guardian, Jan. 20, 2026
Changing temperatures may be behind change in behaviour, which experts fear threatens three species’ survival.Penguins in Antarctica have radically shifted their breeding season, apparently as a response to climate change, research has found.
Dramatic shifts in behaviour were revealed by a decade-long study led by Penguin Watch at the University of Oxford and Oxford Brookes University, with some penguins’ breeding period moving forward by more than three weeks.
The changes threaten to disrupt penguins’ access to food, increasing concerns for their survival. “We are very concerned because these penguins are advancing their season so much, and penguins are now breeding earlier than in any known records,” said the report’s lead author, Dr Ignacio Juarez Martínez.
“The changes are happening so fast that the penguins could end up breeding at times when their prey is not available yet. This could result in a lack of food for the penguin chicks in the first weeks of their life, which could be fatal. Even if the penguins could match their prey’s behaviour, we can’t expect them to keep this pace up much longer.”
The researchers examined changes in the timing of penguin breeding between 2012 and 2022, specifically their “settlement” at a colony – the first date at which penguins continuously occupied a nesting zone. Three species – Adélie (Pygoscelis adeliae), chinstrap (P antarcticus) and gentoo (P papua) – were studied, with colony sizes ranging from a dozen nests up to hundreds of thousands of nests.
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Reuters, Jan. 20, 2026
The world is facing irreversible water "bankruptcy", with billions of people struggling to cope with the consequences of decades of overuse as well as shrinking supplies from lakes, rivers, glaciers and wetlands, U.N. researchers said on Tuesday.Nearly three-quarters of the global population live in countries classified as "water insecure" or "critically water insecure", and 4 billion people face severe water scarcity at least one month per year, the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health warned in a report."Many regions are living beyond their hydrological means, and many critical water systems are already bankrupt," said Kaveh Madani, lead author and director of the institute.
"By acknowledging the reality of water bankruptcy, we can finally make the hard choices that will protect people, economies and ecosystems," he said.
The report said water supplies are "already in a post-crisis state of failure" after decades of unsustainable extraction rates that have drawn down water "savings" contained in aquifers, glaciers, soils, wetlands and river ecosystems, with supplies also degraded by pollution.
More than 170 million hectares of irrigated cropland - an area larger than Iran - are under "high" or "very high" water stress, and economic damage from land degradation, groundwater depletion and climate change amounts to more than $300 billion a year worldwide, the report said.
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EARTHORG, Jan. 20, 2026
From mass firings and climate research funding cuts to the rollback of environmental protections and a retreat from international pledges, Earth.Org examines some of US President Donald Trump’s most consequential actions since his inauguration on January 20, 2025, and what they mean for Americans and the world.
2025 was a pivotal year for US climate policy. Since assuming office for his second term, Donald Trump has taken sweeping actions to reverse America’s environmental agenda and withdraw from international commitments. These moves have fundamentally altered the nation’s role in the global fight against climate change, a crisis the President has dismissed as a “con job”.
A long-time defender of planet-warming fossil fuels, Trump’s focus has been on strengthening ties with the industry in spite of the countless climate commitments the US has made at home and on an international level. From a former fracking executive taking the reins of the Energy Department to an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) packed with political appointees who formerly lobbied for the chemical and fossil fuel sectors, Trump has surrounded himself with the right people to execute his anti-climate agenda.
On day one, Trump declared a “national energy emergency”. It came despite the fact that the US had hit record production levels under the previous administration and was currently producing more oil than any other nation in history. The move allowed the administration to reverse many of the Biden-era environmental regulations and open up more areas to oil and gas exploration. And that is exactly what followed.
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