Cooperation on OceanEye, which aims to create ‘real-time’ model of world’s oceans, comes amid efforts to boost EU ties

Britain is to join a major new ocean science programme, led by the EU, to better forecast extreme weather and climate events, the environment secretary is to announce in New York.

The announcement on Wednesday will come as Andy Burnham’s government aims to rebuild the UK’s relationship with Europe, and follows warnings this year’s “supersized” El Niño, tracked in the Pacific Ocean, will fuel more extreme weather globally.

A magical new film captures the secret life of the deep sea in a stretch of the ocean at risk from industrial mining

A magical film that explores the wonders of the deep sea through the eyes of a team of scientists and an underwater robot called Isis will be shown in selected cinemas across the UK next month.

The documentary, How Deep Is Your Love, offers a playful, irreverent and bittersweet look at our anthropocentric view of Earth, as it switches perspective from humans to deep sea animals and back again. It follows a research team from the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London, who sail for 12 days to reach a remote region called the Clarion Clipperton Zone, a biodiversity-rich area of the Pacific between Hawaii and Mexico. It takes Isis five hours to make the 3-mile (5km) descent to the bottom of this harsh world, where sunlight cannot penetrate, and where nodules rich in minerals mark it out as a hotspot for industrial mining.

After losing much of its forests in recent decades, the country’s people have led the way in planting saplings across the country as part of the government’s Green Legacy Initiative

When Halima Kedir first began planting trees, she was met with scepticism and even mockery. “My neighbours discouraged me,” she recalls, sitting on a wooden chair in her garden, which is lush with the trees and fruits she has planted – banana, olive and grevillea among them.

“They thought I was striving for nothing, but with time, many are realising that trees can be part of the solution to our problems as a way to fight climate change and food insecurity,” she says.

The country is one of just three that still permits commercial whaling, while its government has faced mounting pressure to ban the practice

Iceland will submit a bill in February 2027 which could permanently ban whaling in its waters, a move that would leave Norway and Japan as the only two countries to permit commercial whaling.

Whaling in Iceland has been put under intense scrutiny since a government-commissioned report was published in 2023 that found harpooned whales took two hours to die. The report led to a temporary suspension of the hunt that year.

Her Horizon Fund seeks $100m to stop practice harming 230m women and girls globally

Frontline activists and leaders in the fight against female genital mutilation, which has affected more than 230 million women and girls worldwide, have welcomed an unprecedented $15.5m (£11.4m) fund aimed at creating “unstoppable momentum” to finally end the practice.

The launch of the fund comes as women’s rights are increasingly under attack and donor funding is in sharp decline, particularly for work led by FGM survivors in local communities. It is thought to be the largest single philanthropic contribution to ending the practice of FGM.

A local initiative is testing simple ways to stop algal blooms in the River Fal threatening some of England’s most biodiverse marine habitats

On a rocky beach in Cornwall, a group of wetsuit-clad freedivers and snorkellers are wading into the shallows. Below St Mawes Castle, built by Henry VIII to defend Falmouth harbour, they disappear in a swish of florescent pink and green fins.

They are volunteers, trained by the Cornwall Wildlife Trust to use underwater cameras and floating GPS devices to detect changes in marine habitats over time.

Two volunteers, Simon Tagney and Max Behnert, prepare to survey the seabed beneath the 16th-century St Mawes Castle. Photograph: Luke Gartside/The Guardian

The 3,500 population is divided over the venture, which would bring investment and jobs, but critics claim the environmental cost would be too high

It is among the world’s last pristine wildernesses, with unique coastal waters rich in krill and squid that attract sea lions, elephant seals, dolphins and whales, and where penguins, of which there are five different species locally, outnumber people.

But plans to make the Falkland Islands, one of the most remote and furthest-flung British overseas territories, a new frontier for salmon farming has split the 3,500-strong population. Now, people opposed to salmon farming are calling for a referendum because they have lost confidence in a consultation process they claim is biased towards the industry.

In this week’s newsletter: a Guardian investigation reveals that the UK exported 139,000 tonnes of rubbish to poor districts in Adana, where farmers are left to cope with microplastics, toxic smoke, and debris

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A year ago this month, when global talks to end our spiralling plastic crisis collapsed, Emma Hardy, Britain’s then marine minister and the UK’s head of delegation, said she was “hugely disappointed”. The UK is committed to working, at home and abroad, to “protect the environment and pave the way to a circular economy”, she pledged.

But Britain, one of the world’s largest exporters of plastic waste, remains part of a global trade that enables us to send mountains of plastic rubbish to other, mostly poorer countries, fuelling pollution, health impacts and waste crime.

‘Danger no longer only comes from the hitmen, but from the state’: the Honduran farmers labelled terrorists for protecting their land

El Niño could push 50 million people into acute hunger before end of next year

‘We stared into an abyss’: the men and women battling France’s megafire

Britain exported 139,000 tonnes of rubbish to Turkey last year, leaving smallholders and poor districts of Adana to cope with the debris, microplastics and toxic smoke

• UK plastic ‘waste colonialism’ found to be polluting Turkey’s farming heartland

Plastic debris clings to the reeds in a waterway metres from where Ayhan*, a farmer in Adana, southern Turkey, is harvesting aubergines. “We get pollution from all sides here,” he says, referring to the plastic recycling zone upstream, as well as a nearby textile plant that he suspects is making the water acidic. “The plastics are all there, by the bank, and the fumes come this way.”

Between May 2021 and July 2024, 13 British companies sent 545 shipments of household and supermarket plastic waste, totalling 52,000 tonnes, to the Kemal Deniz recycling zone, under a mile from Ayhan’s aubergine fields, according to data analysed for the Guardian by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), an international NGO.

An eight-month expedition will set off soon from Norway on a mission to find new species before the climate crisis and pollution changes the northern ocean for ever

Six scientists and six crew will travel next month to Kirkenes, a remote Arctic town in Norway near the Russian border, to begin an odyssey to one of the most inhospitable, inaccessible and least-studied regions on Earth. There, they will climb onboard a futuristic, floating laboratory – the French-built Tara polar station.

They will enter a harsh and isolating environment: months of complete darkness and temperatures as low as -50C (-58F). Arriving in Norway on 14 August, they will await good conditions and an icebreaker to open a route for them before setting off on an eight-month voyage, overwintering through long, intense polar nights onboard a 26-metre-long, 16-metre-wide vessel built to be frozen into the pack ice, which will drift slowly over the north pole to Greenland.

Amid fears the wreck will be more accessible to explorers – and new species – as the climate warms, conservationists want to create the region’s first underwater protected area

The harsh temperatures, treacherous currents and shifting pack ice of the Antarctic’s Weddell Sea, which crushed and sank his ship, Endurance, in 1915, led Ernest Shackleton to describe it as the “worst portion of the worst sea in the world”.

For more than a century, the inhospitable conditions, which present a challenge even for modern icebreaker ships, helped to protect the lost wreck, which was discovered in 2022, its structure still largely intact.

Conservationists say cherished creatures such as whales, dolphins and seabirds are being killed in large numbers by fishing tackle

Thousands of Britain’s most charismatic and protected marine wildlife, including whales, porpoises, dolphins, seals and seabirds are being killed as “collateral damage” by fishing vessels every year, according to the first-ever analysis of bycatch data.

The analysis, by the Wildlife and Countryside Link, a coalition of voluntary conservation groups, reveals the devastating toll bycatch, the accidental capture and killing of non-target species by fishing vessels, is having on marine species.

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”.

Marine biologist Issah Seidu has found a way for Ghana’s fishing communities to earn a living – and help protect the ancient and critically endangered fish species

Guitarfish are an odd-looking and ancient species, with the tail of a shark and the flattened body of a ray, but their coveted fins have driven populations to the brink of extinction. In west Africa, where their meat is also a local delicacy, many guitarfish species are among the most critically endangered fish in the ocean.

Conservationists at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) describe the slow-maturing ray, which produce young annually, as an “indicator species”, which reflect the overall health of an ecosystem and pose challenges in the way coastal fishing of them is managed. The IUCN red list categorises more than half of guitarfish species as critically endangered.

Experts say dismantling the ocean observation system will ‘severely degrade’ the accuracy of weather predictions

The Trump administration’s plan to dismantle an ocean observation system vital to understanding the climate crisis and marine ecosystems would “severely degrade” the accuracy of weather predictions and El Niño forecasts, with economic consequences for the US, European and American scientists have warned.

Decommissioning the US system, which plays a major part in a global ocean observation network, would lead to a massive increase in error in the annual estimates of ocean heating rates, according to research published last month.

In an exclusive interview, a seafarer describes the strike on the MKD Vyom in the Gulf of Oman that killed his friend and crewmate, Dixit Solanki

The blast tore through the engine room of the tanker MKD Vyom without warning on the morning of 1 March. “There were immense shock waves and a fireball,” says Basis*, a seafarer on one of the first ships to suffer a fatal attack in the Gulf of Oman during the US and Israeli airstrikes against Iran.

“For one or two seconds, I was knocked out,” he says. “Everything went black. The power was gone. I looked up – fire and thick black smoke was pouring down.”

Damning testimony from the crew of one longline tuna-fishing boat has lifted the lid on the treatment of workers in the fleets supplying fish to the UK and EU

Abdul was the first to fall sick, in February 2025, four months into his first ever stint on a longline tuna fishing vessel in the Indian Ocean. Told he was “weak” and “overreacting” by other crew members, he forced himself to keep working, even when he could barely stand, his legs swollen and bruised.

In the months that followed, other crew members of the Tai Xiang 5, a Chinese vessel belonging to Shandong Zhonglu Oceanic Fisheries, a large state-owned fishing company, allegedly began to suffer similar symptoms: swollen, painful limbs and debilitating weakness, with some becoming very short of breath. They were offered no proper medical care, claims Abdul, 36, nor rest from the gruelling 16-hour days, for which they earned 4.6m Indonesian rupiah (about £198) a month.

Sustainability certification by Marine Stewardship Council may be obscuring labour abuses in seafood supply chains, say researchers

The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), which operates a “blue tick” scheme to indicate the sustainability of fish, has been accused of creating an “illusion” of ethical sourcing, after a study reported that widespread labour abuses have taken place on the fishing vessels it approves.

One in five vessels where the crew reported abuses to the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) over the last five years took place on ships catching seafood certified as sustainable by the MSC, researchers found.

Huge industrial trawlers are competing for krill – the main food source for whales – in the Southern Ocean, removing vital nutrients from the ecosystem

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In Antarctica, one of our planet’s last great wildernesses, a remarkable comeback is taking place.

In the very same waters of the Southern Ocean where whalers slaughtered more than 2 million whales during the 20th century, pushing a number of species to the brink of extinction, populations are recovering. Humpback whales have been the fastest to bounce back since commercial whaling was banned in 1986, and populations are nearly at pre-whaling levels. Blue whales, the world’s largest animal, have been slower.

Fears net zero is ‘next Brexit’ as oil crisis fuels political climate divide

US has caused $10tn worth of climate damage since 1990, research finds

‘Yes to fields of wheat, no to fields of iron’: how the world’s greenest country soured on solar

‘It smells like a rancid fish and chip shop’: at sea with the Antarctic’s krill supertrawlers

‘There’s biological treasure here’: Chile’s endemic seals gain protection with new marine park

Surfing’s big break: how climate crisis insurance may save El Salvador’s waves

Sixty years after the discovery of a colony of Juan Fernández fur seals, previously thought to be extinct, a landmark agreement extends ‘no take’ zone around the wildlife-rich archipelago

Six decades ago, pioneering oceanographer and conservationist Sylvia Earle made a bittersweet discovery while diving off Chile’s oceanic islands with the US National Science Foundation vessel, the Anton Bruun. She found the remains of a baby fur seal, one of the world’s most isolated aquatic mammals.

Endemic to the Juan Fernández archipelago, in the Pacific Ocean, and once prized for its fur and meat, the species, Arctocephalus philippii, was believed to have been hunted to extinction in the 19th century. But, Earle said: “A baby must have a mum and dad somewhere.”

Pioneering oceanographer and conservationist Sylvia Earle. Photograph: Andy Mann/Blue Marine Foundation