Airline emissions in Europe top pre-Covid levels despite pledge to decarbonise. Promises to cut emissions and use more fuel-efficient planes fail to stop rise, with Ryanair’s carbon footprint 50% up on 2019

 

The T&E thinktank says that although the EU and the UK have tried to manage environmental costs via the emissions trading system, the scheme does not price in most of the sector’s pollution, as it only includes flights entirely within Europe. Photograph: Lewis Whyld/PA

 by Gwyn Topham Transport correspondent

 

Emissions from flying in Europe have now passed pre-pandemic levels, with Ryanair’s carbon footprint 50% higher than in 2019, research has shown.

Total aviation emissions continue to increase despite industry pledges to decarbonise and the introduction of more fuel-efficient planes, driven by the massive expansion of low-cost carriers.

According to analysis by thinktank Transport & Environment (T&E), Ryanair’s CO₂ emissions alone in 2025 reached 16.6 megatonnes (Mt) of CO₂ – around the same amount as the total annual emissions of a small European country such as Croatia. The airline carried just over 200 million passengers in 2025, compared with 140 million in 2019.

The entire European aviation sector emitted 195Mt of CO₂ in departing flights last year, a 2% increase on levels before Covid paused international travel.

 

Although the EU and the UK have tried to manage some of the environmental costs through the emissions trading system (ETS), T&E said the system does not price in most of the sector’s pollution, as it only includes flights entirely within Europe.

That means long-haul flights on legacy carriers’ aircraft, which burn more fuel, are outside its scope. Airlines operating predominantly within Europe pay more under the system – Ryanair pays an average of €50 (£36) a tonne of carbon, while Lufthansa pays about €20. London-New York traffic alone generated nearly 1.4Mt of CO₂ in 2025, but is not drawn into the ETS.

T&E wants the carbon market extended to all departing flights to raise more public revenue and accelerate aviation’s slow decarbonisation. Such a move, it said, could quadruple the €4.1bn raised for EU states by 2030, and fund production of sustainable aviation fuel and measures to avoid contrails, the plumes of cloud formed by planes in certain conditions that could exacerbate global heating.

While the aviation industry has been lobbying to suspend or weaken ETS and other taxes and regulatory requirements on flying during the Middle East crisis, the report found that the carbon market costs were negligible compared with fuel volatility. Jet fuel prices that have roughly doubled from pre-Iran war levels add €90 a passenger on long-haul flights, compared with just €3 from following the sustainable aviation fuels mandate.

“Ticket prices are rising because of Europe’s reliance on fossil fuels, not because of the climate measures intended to steer the sector away from them,” Giacomo Miele, author of the T&E analysis, said.

“Aviation emissions hitting a new high is a clear signal that the industry has no intention of cleaning up its act. It is time to stop subsidising fossil fuel dependency and start investing in the future of a sustainable aviation sector.”

 

A spokesperson for Ryanair said its greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) were rising as it was Europe’s fastest-growing airline, adding: “All of this growth takes place at lower fares but on new fuel-efficient aircraft, so our GHG per passenger are falling. Ryanair’s growth is also displacing air travel on less-efficient legacy airlines whose GHG per passenger is much higher than Ryanair’s.”

Ryanair said the ETS emissions figures were “completely discredited” since they excluded flights operated by airlines who were “indefensibly exempted from their fair share of enviro taxes by Europe’s discriminatory ETS system, which taxes only intra-EU flights while it exempts all flights including the most polluting long-haul flights”.

Ryanair says that when all flights are included it ranks behind Lufthansa, Air France/KLM and British Airways owner IAG for total emissions, while having the lowest CO₂ emissions a head of the big European airlines, of about 64g a passenger kilometre.

Alaska’s 2025 mega tsunami highlights risk to cruise lines as glaciers retreat. Researchers say 481-metre wave in fjord was triggered by rockslide linked to climate crisis

 

Glaciers in Alaska's Denali national park have been found to be melting faster than at any time in the past four centuries due to rising summer temperatures. Photograph: VW Pics/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

by Maya Yang

A mega tsunami in Alaska last year in a fjord visited by cruise ships is a stark warning of the risks of coastal rockslides and glacier retreat fueled by the climate crisis, a new study warns.

Scientists recorded the world’s second-tallest tsunami after it struck the Tracy Arm fjord in south-east Alaska last August after a massive rockslide around the toe of a glacier. The tsunami reached 481 metres (1,578ft) in height; by comparison the Eiffel Tower is 330 metres (1082ft).

According to the new research published in Science on Wednesday and led by Dan Shugar, a geomorphologist of the University of Calgary, the sequence began at 5.26am local time on 10 August 2025. A large landslide collapsed 1km vertically onto the South Sawyer glacier and into the narrow, 48km fjord, producing the huge tsunami.

An oblique aerial photograph of Sawyer Island, largely stripped of trees, taken during a US Geological Survey reconnaissance flight on 13 August 2025. Photograph: John Lyons/U.S. Geological Survey.

There were no fatalities at the early hour but the area is visited by approximately three cruise ships passing through daily, along with other vessels traveling within a few kilometers of the landslide site.

 

Just hours after the landslide, a sightseeing vessel from Juneau and a National Geographic tour boat – each capable of carrying more than 100 passengers, were due to enter the fjord. The day before, two cruise ships carrying thousands of passengers had already visited the area, with another scheduled to arrive the following day.

At the time of the event, Dennis Staley from the US Geological Survey called the tsunami “a historic event”, adding to the Guardian: “I feel like we dodged a bullet.”

“With fjord regions increasingly visited by cruise ships, and climate change making similar events more likely, this unanticipated, near-miss event highlights the growing risk from landslides and tsunamis in coastal environments,” researchers said in their report.

A near-source animation of the tsunami generated by the August 10, 2025 Tracy Arm landslide.

 

They also noted that the tsunami was only slightly smaller than the world’s tallest, recorded in Lituya Bay, Alaska, in 1958 at 530 metres (1,728ft). The Tracy Arm event also triggered a 36-hour seiche – a standing wave that oscillates within a closed body of water.

The study further found that the landslide generated long-period seismic waves equivalent to those of a 5.4 magnitude earthquake.

Eyewitness accounts in the report highlighted the tsunami’s far-reaching effects. A group of kayakers camping on Harbor Island, about 55km away, reported water surging past their tent, sweeping away one of their kayaks along with other gear.

Another observer aboard a motor vessel in No Name Bay, roughly 50km from the landslide, described seeing a 2 to 2.5 metre wave cresting along the shoreline from the direction of Tracy Arm, followed by a second wave of about 1 metre, the researchers said.

In the study, researchers found that landslide-generated tsunamis can “have substantially higher runups (the maximum height water reaches on a slope) than earthquake tsunamis, owing to larger, localized variations in water depth and direct water-column displacement by slope failure – most pronounced in confined water bodies like fjords”.

Pointing to climate crisis-driven glacier retreat, researchers noted that “without the rapid glacier retreat, the landslide would likely not have resulted in such a wave because it would have collapsed entirely onto glacier ice or might not even have occurred at all”.

In recent years, fjords with retreating tidewater glaciers have become increasingly popular destinations for cruise ships. According to the study, annual cruise passenger numbers in Alaska have risen from about 1 million in 2016 to 1.6 million in 2025.

Aerial photographs show a clear trimline along the far side of the fjord where a tsunami stripped vegetation from the slopes. Photograph: John Lyons/U.S. Geological Survey

Combined with accelerating glacier retreat and permafrost degradation driven by the climate crisis, the risk of large-scale landslide-generated tsunamis is also increasing across the Arctic.

As a result, researchers emphasized both the scale and potential reach of such events. They called for stronger risk mitigation measures, including systematic monitoring of unstable slopes, more realistic tsunami-modeling scenarios and enhanced protection for local communities, tourists and critical infrastructure.

Several tsunamis have occurred in Alaska over the last decade, with a large landslide generating a 18 to 55 metre wave in Kenai fjords national park in 2024, as well as another landslide near a receding glacier in Taan fjord in south-east Alaska that caused a 193 metre tsunami in 2015.

‘Point of no return’: New Orleans relocation must start now due to sea level, study finds. Louisiana’s cultural hotspot could be surrounded by Gulf of Mexico before end of this century, authors say

 

By Oliver Milman

 

The process of relocating people from New Orleans should start immediately, as the city has reached a “point of no return” that will see it surrounded by the ocean within decades due to the climate crisis, a stark new study has concluded.

Ongoing sea-level rise and the rampant erosion of wetlands in southern Louisiana will swallow up the New Orleans area within a few generations, with the new paper estimating the city “may well be surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico before the end of this century”.

Low-lying southern Louisiana faces multiple threats, with rising sea levels driven by global heating, compounded by strengthening hurricanes, also a feature of the climate crisis, and the gradual subsidence of a coastline that has been carved apart by the oil and gas industry.

 

Southern Louisiana is facing 3-7 metres of sea-level rise and the loss of three-quarters of its remaining coastal wetlands, which will cause the shoreline “to migrate as much as 100km (62 miles) inland”, thereby stranding New Orleans and Baton Rouge, according to the study, which compared today’s rising global temperatures with a period of similar heat 125,000 years ago that caused a rise in sea level.

This scenario makes the region the “most physically vulnerable coastal zone in the world”, the researchers state, and requires immediate action to prepare a smooth transition for people away from New Orleans, which has a population of about 360,000 people, to safer ground.

Louisiana has already experienced population loss in recent years, and this trend will accelerate in a disordered way, the paper warns, should no action be taken to confront the perils faced by its largest city and surrounding communities.

“While climate mitigation should remain the first step to prevent the worst outcomes, coastal Louisiana has evidently already crossed the point of no return,” added the perspectives paper, published in the Nature Sustainability journal. A perspectives paper is a scholarly article that provides an assessment, rather than new data.

Billions of dollars have been spent to fortify New Orleans with a vast network of levees, floodgates and pumps erected after 2005’s catastrophic Hurricane Katrina. But the growing threats to the city mean the levees, which already require hefty upgrades to remain sufficient, will not be able to save the city in the long run, the new paper warns.

 

“In paleo-climate terms, New Orleans is gone; the question is how long it has,” said Jesse Keenan, an expert in climate adaptation at Tulane University and one of the paper’s five co-authors.

 

Keenan said the timeframe available to plan a retreat isn’t certain but “it’s most likely decades rather than centuries”.

“Even if you stopped climate change today, New Orleans’s days are still numbered,” he added. “It will be surrounded by open water, and you can’t keep an island situated below sea level afloat. There’s no amount of money that can do that.”

City, state and federal leaders should begin work to help support people moving away from the New Orleans region in a coordinated way, starting with the most vulnerable communities, such as those in Plaquemines parish who live outside the levee system, Keenan said.

“New Orleans is in a terminal condition, and we need to be clear with the patient that it is terminal,” he said. “There is an opportunity for palliative care, we can transition people and the economy. We can get ahead of this.”

But, he added, “no politician wants to first give this terminal diagnosis. They will speak about it behind closed doors, but never in public.”

New Orleans faces obvious challenges – situated in a bowl-shaped basin below sea level, the city already has 99% of its population at major risk of severe flooding, the worst exposure of any US city according to a separate study released last week.

“Even compared to all other US cities, New Orleans really stands out, which is alarming,” said Wanyun Shao, a co-author of this study and a geographer at the University of Alabama.

“There is no specific timeline to how long New Orleans has left but we know it’s in big trouble. They are facing one of the highest sea level rises in the world and I don’t know how long human effort can fight against that tide. It’s like a timebomb.”

Shao said she concurred that relocation of people would have to take place. “I know it’s a politically and emotionally charged issue, there are people with a deep attachment to New Orleans,” she said. “But managed retreat, no matter how unappealing it may be, is the ultimate solution at some point.”

A major pressure upon this southern cultural hotspot is that its surrounding land is briskly receding. Since the 1930s, Louisiana has lost 2,000 sq miles of land to coastal erosion, equivalent to the size of Delaware, with a further 3,000 sq miles set to vanish over the next 50 years. The rate of land loss is so rapid that a football pitch-sized area is wiped out every 100 minutes.

To help counter this, Louisiana last decade settled upon a new sort of plan that eschewed building yet more flood defenses and instead sought to harness the Mississippi River’s natural ability to rebuild land. Levees and other infrastructure have, until now, straitjacketed the naturally meandering Mississippi and pushed the sediment it carries straight into the Gulf of Mexico, rather than replenish the coastal wetlands.

The so-called Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion project, which broke ground in 2023, would help restore a more natural flow in the Mississippi Delta and allow sediment to build up in coastal areas where it has been lost. More than 20 sq miles of new land would be created over the next 50 years under the plan, the project estimated.

However, Jeff Landry, Louisiana’s Republican governor, scrapped the project last year, arguing its $3bn cost was too high and that it threatened the state’s fishing industry. “This level of spending is unsustainable,” Landry said at the time, adding that the project imperiled the livelihoods of “people who have sustained our state for generations”.

Proponents of the project, which was funded via a settlement from BP over the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010, decried the decision as disastrous for the state, pointing out fishing communities will need to move anyway because of worsening erosion.

Garret Graves, a Republican former congressman who once led the state’s coastal restoration agency, said Landry was guilty of a “boneheaded decision” that would “result in one of the largest setbacks for our coast and the protection of our communities in decades”.

According to the new research paper, the loss of the sediment diversion plan “effectively means giving up on extensive portions of coastal Louisiana, including the New Orleans area”.

A legal effort to force oil and gas companies to pay for damage to Louisiana’s coastline, meanwhile, is also in doubt. This month, the US supreme court allowed the fossil fuel industry to federally contest a state jury decision that Chevron pay $740m to remedy harm caused to wetlands by dredging canals, drilling wells and dumping wastewater.

“The combination of these decisions is driving a scenario where the state has stopped trying to build land,” Keenan said. “That just accelerates the timeline. They could be buying time, but that option is foreclosed now, meaning it’s a certainty the New Orleans levees will fail again multiple times. The flood water will have nowhere else to go.”

While the US has never wholesale moved a major city before, numerous communities have relocated for economic reasons in the past, with some now being shifted due to the climate crisis, too. In Louisiana, the government could start planning and building appropriate infrastructure in safer areas on the other side of Lake Pontchartrain, the large estuary that sits to the north of New Orleans, Keenan said.

“This could be an opportunity for New Orleans to help migrate people further north, invest in long-term infrastructure and make that sustainable,” Keenan said.

“That exodus has already begun, so if nothing is done, people will just trickle out over time and it will be an uncoordinated mess. The market will speak as people won’t be able to get insurance. Louisiana has to stop the bleeding and acknowledge this is happening. But at the moment there is no plan.”

Timothy Dixon, an expert in coastal environments at the University of South Florida who was not involved in the new paper, said the study “does a nice job” of highlighting the challenge Louisiana faces with subsiding land combined with rising sea levels.

“New Orleans is not going to disappear in 10 years or anything like that, but policymakers really should’ve thought about a relocation plan a century ago,” said Dixon, whose own research has recommended a measured retreat from coastal Louisiana.

“Governments may not have the ability to just command people to leave, but people will volunteer to move and we are seeing that already. I’m not optimistic our political system is capable of dealing with this stuff, it will take leadership and unpopular decisions. Also, many people don’t want to move. They love where they are born.”

Landry’s office was contacted for comment but did not respond.

The sub-Arctic town pitching itself as Canada's gateway to Europe. "But again, let's remember that climate change is upon us," he noted. "What's the polar season going to look like in 10 years' time, or 20 years' time?"

 

Churchill mayor Mike Spence is hoping his town's port can serve as a hub for shorter shipping from Canada to Europe 

by  Nadine YousifSenior Canada reporter, Churchill, Manitoba 

 

The Port of Churchill sits idle for most of the year, blanketed by snow and frozen by the bitter cold climate of Canada's sub-Arctic. It's only operational in the summer for four months, sometimes five.

But where weather is a hindrance, it has geography on its side - the northern Manitoba port sits on the Hudson Bay, a vast body of water with a direct route through the Bay's strait into the Labrador Sea and the north Atlantic Ocean.

From there, cargo ships sail more quickly to Europe, and can reach Africa and South America, delivering goods ranging from food to critical minerals, and even – Canada's leaders hope – liquified natural gas (LNG).

For decades, ambitions of expanding the Port of Churchill have fallen short — derailed, locals argue, under years of poor management as experts openly questioned whether an Arctic port makes good economic sense. Canada is now hoping to change that, guided by the inevitability of climate change, the challenge of US tariffs, and Europe's energy shortage fuelled by ongoing global conflicts.

"Canada has an abundance of resources, and this port expansion will mean we can ship more to the world," Prime Minister Mark Carney said earlier this year.

The expansion of the Port of Churchill has been flagged as a key project by Carney that has the potential to transform Canada's economy and reduce its trade reliance on the US, working towards the prime minister's goal of doubling non-US exports in the next decade.

To outsiders, Churchill is known as the Polar Bear Capital of the World. Its economy has long relied on seasonal tourism, with visitors flocking to the town in the late summer and autumn to catch a glimpse of the northern lights and local wildlife like beluga whales, caribou and — as its moniker suggests — polar bears.

But it is also the site of Canada's only Arctic deep-water seaport, meaning it has the potential to accommodate ultra-large container vessels, oil tankers and LNG ships. With rail access to Churchill through southern Manitoba, the town has a direct travel path to resource-rich western Canada.

Because of Churchill's frigid sub-Arctic temperatures, the port is currently operational for only about four to five months a year 

The Port of Churchill opened nearly a century ago and was primarily used to export grain from the prairies. That ended in 2016, as shipments declined with producers opting for cheaper routes. It reopened in 2019, when it began shipping grain again as well as key supplies to other parts of northern Canada.

For Churchill, a remote town of approximately 1,000 residents, developing the port is seen as an opportunity to create hundreds of jobs and improve quality of life.

The port had fallen into disrepair under a Denver-based company that took ownership of it in 1997, said Mike Spence, the mayor of Churchill and co-chairman of the Arctic Gateway Group, a consortium of indigenous and community groups that now own the port.

Spence said the group wanted "to take control of our own destiny". The ownership transfer was finalised in 2018.

Since then, Ottawa has spent C$320m ($235m; £174m) on the port, including on its maintenance and restoration.

"The previous owner didn't invest in the port, in the rail line," Spence told the BBC, speaking inside a small restaurant attached to a hotel that he co-owns in Churchill — one of the few that stays open in the off-season winter months.

Work has since been done to modernise the railway and the port's infrastructure. In August 2024, the port delivered its first critical mineral shipment ever to Belgium.

It is now funding studies to see if it can be economically viable year-round, and if so, become a hub that would be capable of delivering resources to Europe. The port has also been pitched as a way for Canada to strengthen its Arctic sovereignty.

Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew said the goal is to start shipping out gas from the Port of Churchill by 2030 - a timeline dismissed by his political opponents as a "complete fabrication".

Alex Crawford, an assistant professor and researcher of Arctic climate systems at the University of Manitoba, is part of a team that was tapped by Arctic Gateway Group to study open water shipping in the region.

"Ice-free shipping year-round is not going to happen this century, even with a really aggressive warming scenario," he said.

He told the BBC that navigating Canada's Arctic waters is a complicated task because ice forms inconsistently along the Hudson Bay, making it difficult for ships to travel through for most of the year without an escort of costly icebreakers.

Icebreakers have been used by Russia in recent years to export natural gas and minerals year-round from Siberia to Asia through the Northern Sea Route. The vessels, which are nuclear-powered, have been dubbed "the world's largest and most powerful" by the US Naval Institute.

Canada's icebreaker fleet is much smaller by comparison, and plans to build new ships have been derailed over decades by bureaucracy and limited resources.

 In recent years, Canada launched a plan to build a new fleet, including a class 2 icebreaker that can operate year-round and cut through ice as tall as 10ft. It is this type of advanced icebreaker that would make navigating through the frozen Hudson Bay possible, Crawford said.

 

There are also questions on whether a port expansion would jeopardise the local wildlife and with it, the valuable tourism industry.

Mayor Spence said that concern will be part of ongoing engagement with the local community.

"But again, let's remember that climate change is upon us," he noted. "What's the polar season going to look like in 10 years' time, or 20 years' time?"

He added that people in the region want employment. "The trick here is to find a balance."

Others are skeptical about just how much economic potential the Port of Churchill can unlock, especially if it is not operating year-round.

Ecotourism is Churchill, Manitoba's largest industry, as visitors flock to the town in the summer months to catch a glimpse of polar bears and the northern lights

"From a standard maritime shipping perspective, it does not make much sense unfortunately," said Jean-Paul Rodrigue, a professor of Maritime Business Administration at Texas A&M University in Galveston.

Rodrigue noted that navigating Arctic waters in and of itself is expensive because ships need to be especially equipped for the harsher conditions. He added that demand for LNG is typically constant, meaning the port would need to operate 12 months of the year.

Businesses, he said, will need to consider whether it's worth the extra costs to shorten travel by just a few days.

He noted that the Port of Churchill has long been "a symbol of Canadian Arctic maritime ambitions".

Those ambitions, he argued, have not been realised because the project has failed to deliver a clear business case in the past.

While the Port of Churchill's development has been flagged as a focus area for Prime Minister Carney's economic growth plans, it is not on the shortlist of projects due to receive more immediate federal government support, signalling its expansion is not yet a sure thing.

But Rodrigue is not entirely pessimistic. He said the port could serve a niche, particularly for stockpiling and delivering strategic minerals mined in western Canada.

Canada now finds itself at an "inflection point", he said, which could transform the way businesses and the public view the port.

Here’s some good news for a change. In 2025 tropical deforestation fell by more than a third after reaching record levels the previous year.

 

Data from the Drivers of Tropical Forest Loss (2008 to 2019) Geo-Wiki Campaign

 

 By Fabiano Maisonnave

 Experts welcomed the data with hope — and caution. Tropical forest loss is still 46% higher than ten years ago. Today’s newsletter looks at how Brazil’s 2023 anti-deforestation plan is starting to bear fruit. We also bring you the latest on how climate change impacted Europe’s temperatures, glaciers and oceans last year.

  

Deforestation win

 

Tropical forest loss declined significantly last year, falling 36% after reaching a record level in 2024. Still, the world lost 4.3 million hectares (10.6 million acres) of rainforest — an area roughly the size of Denmark, or more than 11 soccer fields every minute.

New data from the University of Maryland, published through the World Resources Institute’s Global Forest Watch, shows that the loss of primary — or mature and largely undisturbed — humid tropical forests slowed down in 2025. But it was still 46% higher than a decade earlier, and last year saw a relative lull in wildfires after an exceptionally bad fire year in 2024. Blazes are increasing in the tropics due to warmer temperatures and more severe droughts

 

Outside the tropics, the climate signal was starker. Wildfires burned 5.3 million hectares in Canada, making 2025 the country’s second-worst fire year on record. In France, fire-driven tree-cover loss was the most severe on record, seven times higher than in the previous year. 

The analysis uses a broad definition of forest loss that includes not just deforestation for agriculture but also timber harvesting and natural disturbances to forests. 

At the COP26 climate summit in 2021, more than 100 countries pledged to halt and reverse forest loss by 2030. The world remains far from that goal as agricultural expansion and fires continue to destroy important biodiversity hotspots and carbon sinks. Forest loss in 2025 was still about 70% too high for countries to be on track for the deadline, according to the World Resources Institute, or WRI.

“Achieving this goal in the coming years will not be easy as forests become more vulnerable to climate change, and as humanity’s demand for food, fuel and materials from forests and the lands they stand on continues to grow,” said Elizabeth Goldman, co-director of Global Forest Watch at WRI.

Smoke rises during a fire in the Brazilian Amazon

Photographer: Leonardo Carrato/Bloomberg

 

 

Brazil, which encompasses two-thirds of the Amazon, the world’s largest rainforest, recorded the largest absolute area of primary forest loss. But it cut that loss by 42% from the previous year. The report attributes the decline to stronger environmental policy and enforcement under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

The improvement stands in stark contrast to 2024, when Brazil’s Amazon suffered its worst drought on record, fueling unprecedented forest fires.

André Lima, Brazil’s secretary for deforestation control, said in a phone interview that the country’s forest policy rests on “two agendas that are intertwined” — curbing deforestation and controlling fires. He said the government relaunched the federal anti-deforestation plan in 2023 under Lula and is now beginning to see results. Citing Brazil’s official data, Lima said Amazon deforestation fell 50% in 2025 compared with 2022.

Tokyo workers asked to swap suits for shorts to combat energy costs and heat

 

People on the Shibuya crossroad during an intense Tokyo heatwave in June last year. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

by Justin McCurry in Tokyo

 

Public servants working for the Tokyo metropolitan government are being encouraged to swap their suits for shorts this summer to combat sweltering heat and rising energy costs caused by the US-Israel war on Iran.

Inspired by the country’s Cool Biz energy-saving initiative, Tokyo officials hope the measure will cut dependence on air conditioning.

Cool Biz, launched by the environment ministry in 2005, initially encouraged bureaucrats to dispense with ties and jackets, but has so far stopped short of allowing them to display their bare legs in front of colleagues.

Japan and other countries in Asia are growing anxious about the economic effects of the conflict in the Middle East, amid rising oil prices and shortages of petroleum products such as jet fuel.

 

Resource-poor Japan is particularly vulnerable to a prolonged war as it depends on the Middle East for 90% of its oil imports, most of which pass through the strait of Hormuz. About 20% of the natural gas used in South Korea comes via the same route.

Vietnam, South Korea and other countries have taken steps to ration energy use, while other Asian nations have encouraged government officials to work from home or reduced the length of the working week. In Seoul, authorities have urged residents to make short trips on foot or by bicycle.

 

Japan has already tapped into its large strategic oil reserves, with local media reporting on Friday that it plans to release a further 20 days’ worth from 1 May. It is also sourcing oil imports from suppliers that do not use the strait of Hormuz.

Experts have warned that if shipping in the vital waterway doesn’t return to normal soon, the world’s fourth-biggest economy will eventually face a crude oil shortage. That could force businesses and households to make more drastic cuts in petrol and electricity usage reminiscent of those introduced during the oil shocks of the 1970s.

The threat of an energy crunch had been “one of the factors” in allowing Tokyo government staff to wear casual clothes to work, Agence France-Presse said, adding that some employees had been spotted in shorts, T-shirts and short-sleeved blouses since the initiative’s launch this week to coincide with the start of Japan’s heatstroke warning system.

“I was a bit nervous, but it’s very comfortable, and I feel like it’ll improve my work efficiency,” a metropolitan government official who was wearing shorts to the office for the first time told the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper. “As it gets even hotter, I’d like to come in earlier and work from home as well.”

Citing “a severe outlook for electricity supply and demand,” Tokyo’s governor, Yuriko Koike, who as environment minister was behind the Cool Biz campaign two decades ago, told reporters: “We encourage cool attire that prioritises comfort, including polo shirts, T-shirts and sneakers and – depending on job responsibilities – shorts”.

War notwithstanding, Japanese employers have been forced to rethink old rules on workplace attire as a result of the climate crisis. Last year, the country endured its hottest summer since records began in 1898, according to the meteorological agency.

Now that it is no longer unheard of for temperatures to rise to 40C or above, the agency last week announced a new extreme weather event: kokusho, or “cruelly hot”.

After 1,200 years, cherry blossom record to live on despite Japanese scientist’s death. Prof Yasuyuki Aono’s meticulous work charted shifting bloom dates as a marker of climate change

 

People viewing cherry blossoms in Osaka last week. Photograph: Jiji Press/EPA

by  Chris Baraniuk

 

Even in his final months, he counted the days until the cherry blossoms. Prof Yasuyuki Aono of Osaka Metropolitan University spent his career gathering data on the spring flowering dates of cherry trees in Japan in what is one of the world’s longest climate records tracking a seasonal occurrence.

Using sources dating as far back as the 9th century, he revealed that cherry tree flowerings have occurred progressively earlier in recent decades – a now famous marker of climate change.

 

Last April, Aono posted a photo to social media of his spreadsheet. He had just completed the 2025 entry, recording “4 [April]” as the peak flowering date for the particular cherry tree species he tracked, the mountain cherry, or Prunus jamasakura.

Below this, the next row was already marked “2026” but Aono never got to fill it in. He died on 5 August last year, according to former colleagues contacted by the Guardian.

Yasuyuki Aono learned old forms of Japanese so he could read 9th-century records. Photograph: Richard Primack

“You can very much see that he planned to continue,” said Tuna Acisu, a data scientist at Our World in Data, an online platform that publishes a chart based on Aono’s cherry tree data. “That made me a little bit emotional.”

Now, following a search launched by Acisu last week – sparked by fears that no one would be able to continue the 1,200-year cherry blossom record – a researcher in Japan has stepped forward and offered to make formal observations of the mountain cherry’s spring flowerings.

“He is consulting the same sources as Prof Aono to get us this year’s cherry blossom peak bloom and said he will confirm the date in the coming days,” Acisu said. The researcher in question asked to remain anonymous until the arrangement is finalised.

Acisu and colleagues first realised that something may have happened to Aono when they noticed in January that his university web page was no longer active. They then learned that he had died and that no other researcher or institution had emerged to carry on his observations. Spring arrived with no new mountain cherry data.

After Acisu launched her campaign to find a new cherry blossom observer, she received dozens of messages. “It’s really great to know that the dataset is being continued,” she said, expressing her gratitude to the new researcher. “I feel very relieved.”

 

Crucially, Acisu had sought a contact in Japan who could continue tracking not only the same species of cherry, but also in the same location: Arashiyama, Kyoto.

There are other projects that monitor cherry tree flowerings around Japan, since cherry bloom festivals are an important part of culture and tourism in the country, but not this specific species. For example, the Japan Weather Association monitors a different species: the Somei-yoshino cherry (Prunus x yedoensis), which was cultivated in the 19th century.

 

That Aono was able to compile flowering data for the mountain cherry over a period spanning more than 1,200 years is what gave his data series such significance, said Acisu.

Scientists have found the signature of climate change in a wide variety of other sources, including tree rings, plant pigments deposited in seabed sediments, and even temperature and humidity records jotted down by organ tuners in British churches.

Among the revelations made by Aono were the 2021 and 2023 peak flowering dates – they are the earliest in the entire mountain cherry record, occurring on the 85th and 84th day of those years, respectively.

Aono’s work on the mountain cherry was “extremely important”, said Toshio Katsuki, a dendrologist at the Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute in Ibaraki prefecture, who added that efforts to continue recording the same species’ spring flowering dates would be academically valuable.

Tourists wearing kimonos pose with cherry blossoms in Kyoto at the end of March this year. Photograph: Manami Yamada/Reuters

Richard Primack, a professor of biology at Boston University, met Aono on a trip to Japan in 2006. Aono told him that he had learned to read old forms of Japanese in order to build up his dataset of mountain cherry flowering dates. In dusty historical archives, Aono would find references to cherry blossom festivals in Kyoto and, from that, was able to calculate the flowering dates for specific years.

While some years are missing, the earliest record he found dated to 812. “It was really quite an amazing experience,” said Primack, remembering the meeting. “You just realise how dedicated an individual he was.”

In a paper published earlier this month, Primack and Katsuki described how flowering of the Somei-yoshino cherry also appears to be affected by climate change in southern areas of Japan. Data from 1965 to 2024 shows that milder winters were increasingly causing the spring-flowering cherries to have “a kind of bedraggled look, rather than a full, dazzling display,” said Primack. “Many of the flower buds were falling off without opening.”