Pacoima is hemmed in by highways and heavy industry, and its residents are fighting pollution with hyperlocal air quality monitoring
Jose Luis Salas looks up at the ladder. “Are you ready?” he asks Shance Taylor, an environmental project manager who’s holding a white container, about the size of a shoebox, covered with wires and numbers.
Taylor nods and climbs up to reach the side of Salas’s tidy house in Pacoima, a neighborhood in Los Angeles’s north-east San Fernando valley. The curious box in their hands is known as Aeroqual sensor – part of a community air-quality monitoring program run by Pacoima Beautiful, a local environmental group.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
06/09/2026 - 08:00
06/09/2026 - 08:00
Sharp rise in hospital visits will in turn drive up annual healthcare costs for heat-related conditions to over $1bn
People in the US are poised to endure another summer of unusually ferocious heat and there will be little respite in the years ahead, with a new study finding that the coming 15 years could see a doubling in hospitalizations due to heat-related illnesses.
The number of annual heat-related emergency department visits or hospitalizations across the US are set to rise from about 109,000 cases a year to as many as 237,000 cases by 2040, the new research has estimated.
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06/09/2026 - 07:00
The climate phenomenon is intensifying an already unequal global economy
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06/09/2026 - 06:00
The species is abundant within the protected archipelago but when they migrate outside the marine reserve to give birth they run the gauntlet of industrial fishing
The unmistakable fluted T-shape of a scalloped hammerhead shark slides by, followed by a diver holding his breath and a metal spear like an extra-long snooker cue. The spear hits the fish behind its dorsal fin and the 2-metre shark darts away, disgruntled but otherwise unharmed.
Carlos Robalino, a marine biologist from the Galápagos Islands, trained as a shark researcher in Mexico but is now back home and working as a junior researcher at the Charles Darwin Foundation. When we meet in March, he is one of the divers on the foundation’s research expedition to Darwin and Wolf, the most northerly islands in the Galápagos marine reserve.
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06/09/2026 - 06:00
Turkish minister Murat Kurum says ‘electrifying daily life’ will be priority for this year’s UN climate summit
The world should aim to meet a third of its energy needs from electricity within a decade to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the host of the next UN climate summit has said.
While about a third of global electricity generation already comes from renewable sources, other energy-intensive sectors – chiefly transport, heating and industries – have lagged behind. Close to four-fifths of final energy still comes from fossil fuels, as a result.
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06/09/2026 - 03:00
JPMorgan Chase leads 65 banks making decisions incompatible with restraining rising temperatures, researchers say
The world’s largest banks committed $906bn in financing to the fossil fuel industry last year, an “unfathomable” increase in investment locking in years more of coal, oil and gas production as the world continues to overheat, a new report has found.
The surge in new fossil fuel lending, up $64bn or nearly 8% on 2024, shows that the world’s largest 65 banks are making decisions incompatible with international agreements to restrain rising global temperatures, according to the coalition of environmental groups behind the new analysis.
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06/09/2026 - 00:00
Datacentre off Shanghai coast uses less power and water than land-based equivalent
The world’s first wind-powered underwater datacentre has started operations off the coast of Shanghai, as China presses forwards with solutions for energy challenges created by the country’s artificial intelligence boom.
The Shanghai Lingang undersea datacentre demonstration project, which launched in May, has a capacity of 24 megawatts. It is a joint effort between HiCloud Technology and China Communications Construction, a state-owned company.
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06/08/2026 - 19:00
The 12 finalists will be exhibited at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery during Beaker Street festival from 6 to 17 August, including images of newborn fish, a native wasp and satellite trails across the night sky
The language of termites: Liss Fenwick’s The Colony – in pictures
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06/08/2026 - 12:28
The Global Justice Report offers a hopeful bargain: tax extreme wealth and replace consumer excess with social and economic security for all
Humanity can raise living standards, reduce inequality and keep global heating within a 2C rise, according to a sweeping vision for planetary survival, the Guardian reported last week. In an age of ecological dread, that is a bracingly hopeful claim. The optimism came courtesy of the Global Justice Report, produced by Thomas Piketty’s World Inequality Lab.
It arrives against the grain of the times. Anti‑migrant demagoguery, fossil-fuel revivalism, attacks on multilateralism and billionaire capture all militate against the redistributive state capacity that the report requires. Yet Prof Piketty’s team insists that decarbonisation, “sufficiency” and equality can mean a good life for most people.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
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06/08/2026 - 11:45
Global effort needed to limit effects of pollution, industrial fishing and climate crisis, World Ocean Assessment says
The world’s oceans are under “severe and accelerating” pressure from human activities, with the rate of sea-level rise double that of a decade ago, according to a damning assessment from the United Nations.
The “intensifying” stressors, which include pollution and large-scale industrial fishing, are cumulative, said the report, resulting in widespread biodiversity loss and putting ocean systems under “severe strain”.
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