“Right now, most models assume that if you have photosynthesis, you have growth. We find that’s not the case,” said Mukund Palat Rao, a carbon cycle scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University and lead author of the study. “Just because there is more photosynthesis might not necessarily mean more tree growth in the future.” At sites in the eastern US, the researchers found about 36% of yearly carbon uptake occurred after the tree growth stopped in late summer. At sites in California, it was about 26%. More detailed measurements at four sites showed wood growth was restricted to periods of low aridity and temperature, which are becoming rarer as the global rise in temperature makes heatwaves and droughts more common.......read on    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/13/trees-store-less-carbon-than-thought-study

It’s the wildest place I have walked’: new national park will join up Chile’s 2,800km wildlife corridors. Guardian  John Bartlett in Punta Arenas  Government poised to officially protect 200,000 hectares of remote Patagonian coastline and forest . Chile’s government is poised to create the country’s 47th national park, protecting nearly 200,000 hectares (500,000 acres) of pristine wilderness and completing a wildlife corridor stretching 1,700 miles (2,800km) to the southernmost tip of the Americas.The Cape Froward national park is a wild expanse of wind-torn coastline and forested valleys that harbours unrivalled biodiversity and has played host to millennia of human history.

“I have been to many exceptional places, and I can tell you that the Cape Froward project is the wildest place I have walked through,” said Kristine Tompkins, the renowned US conservationist at the heart of the project. “It’s one of the few truly wild forest and peak territories left in the country, and the richness of the Indigenous history in the region makes a case for these territories to be preserved for all time.” It is the 17th national park created or expanded in Chile and Argentina by Tompkins Conservation and its successor organisation, Rewilding Chile. The groups have spent the best part of a decade knitting together a patchwork of land purchases and state-held properties to create the park. In 2023, they signed an agreement with the Chilean government to donate the land to become Cape Froward national park.

In February, a population of 10 huemul, an endangered deer species, was found in the park, and a network of cameras regularly captures wild pumas and the endangered huillín, a river otter. The area also encompasses 10,000 hectares of sphagnum bogs, a sponge like moss which stores carbon deep below the ground. Benjamín Cáceres, the conservation coordinator in the Magallanes region for Rewilding Chile, is a native of Patagonia who first visited Cape Froward at the age of 12 with his conservationist father, Patricio Cáceres. “My father was always a dreamer,” he said. “When he found out about an abandoned lighthouse all those years ago, he brought us here as a family to dream with him – and that’s where this story began for me.” The San Isidro lighthouse is one of seven designed and built by the Scottish architect George Slight along the treacherous strait of Magellan. It was abandoned in the 1970s and itinerant fishers would come by to salvage wood until the roof collapsed. Now, Patricio and Benjamín’s vision for the restored lighthouse is becoming a reality. It has been converted into a museum of the natural and human history of the area and – together with a cafe on the beach below – will become the entry point for the new national park. 

Dotted along the shoreline are delicate archaeological sites that enshrine the history of the Kawésqar, a nomadic Indigenous people who navigated fjords, rocky beaches and forests in canoes carved from trees. “This mosaic of ecosystems is tremendously important,” said Cáceres. “The bogs and subantarctic forests are incredibly fragile, and the cultural legacy of the Kawésqar territory, the era of explorers, then whalers; all of this history and biodiversity will be preserved in some form in the future national park.” In amongst shells buried in silty mud at Kawésqar campsites are bird and dolphin bones from feasts. There are even circles of stones set out as fish traps on the beaches, and trees stripped of their bark to line the hulls of Kawésqar canoes.......read on    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/25/cape-froward-new-national-park-patagonia-chile

South Asia faces chronic declines in water tables because of groundwater-dependent agriculture and urbanization. Those shortages then affect agriculture, and consequently, the global food supply. “Millions of farmers are trying to grow more food from shrinking, polluted or disappearing water sources,” Madani says to the Guardian’s Damian Carrington. “Water bankruptcy in India or Pakistan, for example, also means an impact on rice exports to a lot of places around the world.”The American Southwest is another region with significant water problems. Researchers behind a 2017 study estimated that the Colorado River’s flow has dropped by about 20 percent in the 21st century compared with the average flow in the previous century. That’s causing conflict between Western states over how to manage the river’s dwindling waterof the global population lives in water-insecure or critically water-insecure countries, according to the U.N. report.“

The global scope of the report is useful in showing repeat patterns,” Melissa Scanlan, director of the Center for Water Policy at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, tells Sarah Kaplan at the Washington Post. “It’s not just the Southern Hemisphere; it’s not just the Middle East. There is something larger at play in terms of how we’re treating water across the world,” says Scanlan, who was not involved in the U.N. report.The report calls for global action to tackle the widespread water issue......read on    https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/united-nations-declares-that-the-world-has-entered-an-era-of-global-water-bankruptcy-180988045/