Felix Dodds comments on sustainable development, coffee & life

Photograph: Richard Fitzpatrick/Biopixel Guest blog:  Alix Willemez, PhD , Plane Crash Survivor | Climate Governance Expert | Systems Thinker Making Complex Environmental Change Accessible | Optimism & Resilience Speaker | Author | College of Europe 🎓 Cambridge 🎓 Sorbonne 🎓 111 meters long. Almost 4,000 square meters. The size of a football field! And this is one single living organism. Not a reef made of multiple colonies. One individual. A “super coral” of nearly 4,000 m² has just been documented on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. Impressive? Yes. Surprising? Not really. What makes this discovery even more remarkable is how it was found: during a reef census by a mother–daughter team working with Citizens of the Reef. Even in one of the most studied marine ecosystems on Earth, giants can remain hidden until targeted monitoring reveals them. To understand it better, the site has now been mapped using high-resolution imaging and 3D spatial modeling in collaboration with...

UN Climate Change, 26 February 2026  - A  UN Body  has approved the first credits to be issued under the UN carbon market established by the Paris Agreement.  The approved activity is a clean‑cooking  project  in Myanmar, which distributes efficient cookstoves that reduce harmful household air pollution and lessen pressure on local forests.   UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell said:   “Over two billion people globally are without access to clean cooking, which kills millions every year. Clean cooking protects health, saves forests, cuts emissions and helps empowers women and girls, who are typically hardest hit by household air pollution. The first credits to be issued through the UN carbon market under the Paris Agreement come from a clean‑cooking project, and they show how this mechanism can support solutions that make a big difference in people’s daily lives, as well as...

Guest blog by  Rhett Ayers Butler  Founder and CEO of Mongabay, a nonprofit organization that delivers news and inspiration from Nature’s frontline via a global network of reporters. José Albino Cañas Ramírez did not die in a war zone, though war had shaped the place where he lived. On the evening of February 16th, two men came to the shop he ran from his home in Portachuelo, in Colombia’s Caldas department, opened fire, and disappeared along footpaths threading the Indigenous reserve. Cañas Ramírez was a cabildante — a member of the governing council — of the Resguardo of Colonial Origin Cañamomo Lomaprieta, an Emberá Chamí territory of more than 23,000 people. Leaders said the killing struck at Indigenous self-government itself. The Emberá Chamí, “people of the mountains,” inhabit steep, biodiverse lands long contested by guerrillas, paramilitaries, criminal groups, miners, and state interests. Activists describe a double pressure: illegal armed actors on one side, developm...

Guest blog by Hafsah Abdi on behalf of CYMG to UNEP Delegation to IPBES 12 .   Hafsah is an MA Development Studies student at York University, Toronto, Canada.                          “Every business depends on biodiversity, and every business impacts biodiversity.” This was the final message read after a very intense week attending the 12th Plenary of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). From 3-8 February 2026, five CYMG delegates joined over 150 member governments, scientists, Indigenous peoples, and civil society actors in the industrial city of Manchester, United Kingdom, to negotiate and approve key scientific outputs. This marked the first time a Children and Youth Major Group to the United Nations Environment Programme (CYMG to UNEP) delegation participated in an IPBES forum after obtaining accreditation in November 2025.  Often called the biodiversity equivalent of the IPCC, IPBES is the leading intergover...

  Welcome to this month's edition of the World Benchmarking Alliance (WBA) newsletter. These past few weeks have taken WBA from the World Economic Forum in Davos to the 64th Commission on Social Development of the United Nations, advancing conversations on the state of global corporate accountability. In this edition, we share our reflections from these global moments and other key updates from across our work. Have a good read!     ...