sustainability

The food on your plate travelled thousands of kilometres through a complex chain involving dozens of countries. This system is extraordinarily efficient — and dangerously brittle. Here's how the global food system actually works.

Coffea arabica survives in a narrow climate band that is shrinking fast. Here is the science behind why your morning cup is under threat — and what the coffee industry is racing to do about it.

Neodymium, dysprosium, cobalt, lithium — these obscure elements power every EV, wind turbine, and smartphone on the planet. But their supply chain is dangerously concentrated, environmentally destructive, and increasingly weaponized.

Climate change is happening, it's caused mainly by human emissions, and the evidence comes from thousands of independent measurements. Here's the science, the consequences, and the realistic path forward.

An EV is dramatically simpler than a petrol car — a battery, a motor, some software. Here's how the parts work together, the trade-offs versus combustion, and what's coming next.

Solar panels turn sunlight directly into electricity using the photoelectric effect. They're now the cheapest form of new power generation in most of the world. Here's how they work and whether they pay off.

The world clears about 10.9 million hectares of forest a year, slightly more than the area of Iceland. Here is what drives it, what it costs the climate, and which fixes have measurable results.

Nuclear power has the lowest death rate per kWh of any major energy source. It's also the most feared. Here's what the data actually says — beyond Chernobyl, beyond Fukushima.

Green hydrogen is made by splitting water with renewable electricity, so burning it releases only water. It is promising for industries that cannot easily electrify, but it is costly and wasteful elsewhere.

We produce 400 million tonnes of plastic per year. Most ends up in landfills, in the ocean, or as microplastics in our food. Here's the science of plastic pollution and what's actually being done.

Earth's proven fossil fuel reserves alone contain roughly three times more carbon than is compatible with keeping warming under 2°C. Here's what the physics, geology, and history say would actually happen if we burned it all.

Solar and wind are cheap but not dispatchable. Grid-scale battery storage fills the gap for hours, not weeks. This article covers how the systems work, how fast costs fell, what Hornsdale and California showed, and where batteries still fall short.