On this extreme heat

while monsoons start in India

Author

Gaia Solaris
June 30, 2025

In partnership with

Dear overheated Earthlings, don't forget to drink lots of water.

If you live in Europe—or pretty much anywhere on this planet right now—you’re most likely struggling with an intense heat wave that’s started earlier than ever and is already lasting weeks.

People are collapsing on city streets. Crops are wilting. Forests are burning. Infrastructure is failing. Yet somehow, governments still treat this like an anomaly instead of the direct, predictable consequence of decades of inaction.

Nature keeps shouting at us, and somehow we keep ignoring it.

This isn’t a warning anymore. It’s happening.

What’s most surreal is how normalised it’s all becoming. Meteorologists calmly report “record-breaking temperatures” like sports scores, while headlines casually mention “urban heat islands” without naming what’s really killing us: the fossil fuel economy.

And let’s be honest—this isn’t just a climate issue. It’s a justice issue.

Because those who contributed the least to this crisis are the ones already losing their homes, livelihoods, and lives. While CEOs fly between climate summits in private jets, rural workers in southern Europe, Asia, and Africa are dying of heatstroke in the fields.

We can’t rely on governments to fix this. The conversations that matter—the real ones, the urgent ones—are happening in communities, at the grassroots level, in the spaces between official summits.

The heat is a symptom. The disease is systemic.

We have to stop waiting for someone else to take responsibility. We are past the point of hoping that those in power will wake up.

It’s up to us now.

Let’s organise, adapt, and dismantle what’s killing our planet before it gets any hotter.

Helena Constela, Head of Content

🗞️ In Climate News

  • 🇺🇳 UN expert urges criminalizing fossil fuel disinformation, banning lobbying

    • Elisa Morgera, the UN special rapporteur on human rights and climate change who presents her damning new report to the general assembly in Geneva on Monday, argues that the US, UK, Canada, Australia and other wealthy fossil fuel nations are legally obliged under international law to fully phase out oil, gas and coal by 2030 – and compensate communities for harms caused.

  • 🌍 Europe on alert as first major heatwave of 2025 pushes temperatures to 42ºC

    • Spain’s state meteorological office, Aemet, issued a special heat warning on Friday, saying temperatures could reach 42C in some southern areas of the country over the coming days.

      “Very high and persistent temperatures are expected, both during the day and at night, which could pose a risk to exposed and/or vulnerable people,” Aemet said.

  • 🇹🇻 A third of Pacific island nation applies for Australian climate change visa

    • More than a third of Tuvalu citizens have entered the ballot for a world-first climate visa which would allow them to permanently migrate to Australia.

      Opening for the first intake on 16 June, the influx of registrations could indicate that programme will be hugely oversubscribed, with only 280 visas awarded to Tuvalu citizens from the random ballot each year.

  • 🇨🇳 Heavy rain hits China's flood-stricken Guizhou for second time in a week

    • Located at the confluence of three rivers and home to 300,000 residents, Rongjiang was inundated earlier this week by record downpours that left six dead and forced more than 80,000 people to flee their homes. The amount of rain that fell over 72 hours was double the city's average for June.

  • 🇮🇳 India's monsoon covers country nine days early, accelerating planting

    • The monsoon is the lifeblood of India's nearly $4 trillion economy, delivering almost 70% of the rainfall needed to water farms and replenishing aquifers and reservoirs.

  • 🇹🇷 Firefighters in Turkey battle to contain wildfires

    • They are battling wildfires for a second day raging in the western province of Izmir fanned by strong winds, the forestry minister and local media said on Monday

      Wildfires in Kuyucak and Doganbey areas of Izmir were fanned overnight by winds reaching 40-50 kph (25-30 mph) and four villages and two neighbourhoods had been evacuated, Forestry Minister Ibrahim Yumakli said.

  • 🇧🇷 Brazil strikes deal with Musk’s Starlink to curb criminal use in the Amazon rainforest

    • Starlink’s lightweight, high-speed internet system has rapidly spread across the Amazon, a region that for decades struggled with slow and unreliable connectivity. But the service has also been adopted by criminal organizations, which have used it to coordinate logistics, make payments and receive alerts about police raids.

  • 🇵🇪 Peru’s Amazon communities accuse the state of failing to stop mercury pollution from illegal mining

    • Indigenous and rural communities along the Nanay River in Peru’s northern Amazon filed a complaint on Friday accusing the government of failing to stop illegal gold mining that is contaminating their water and food with toxic mercury.

  • 🇵🇦 Panama boosts protections in the Darién Gap, but deforestation threats still loom

    • Thousands of people used to cross the Darién Gap every day. Emerging from the rainforest, they would stop in small towns across southern Panama, where migrant reception centers provided food, water and medical treatment, before the long journey to the U.S. But last year, the government shut down several crossing routes, leaving many of these small towns quieter than they have been in years.

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♾️ eco-story

The story of Astrid Puentes Riaño is rooted in the soil of Colombia. Born in Bogotá to a family with campesino roots, her early memories are of mountain air, clean water, and the quiet freedom of rural landscapes.

“Being outside gave me the freedom and thus happiness that I could not have in the city,” she recalls.

But her journey—from a child inhaling the crisp air of the Llanos to a leading global voice for environmental justice—was shaped not only by landscapes, but by injustice.

While still in law school, Puentes began working with Fundepúblico, a Colombian NGO. She dove into cases that revealed the deep and often invisible intersection of environmental harm and human rights abuse: Afro-descendant communities sickened by toxic spills; schools menaced by the unsafe dumping of industrial waste; campesino and Indigenous communities excluded from decisions that directly impacted their lands and livelihoods. In each case, it became clear: environmental harm disproportionately affects the marginalized.

Just as revealing were the blind spots of mainstream conservation efforts.

“Many of the environmental conservation work in Colombia was done from a very northern and western perspective, with top-down actions, that while intending to conserve some areas, were excluding many of the people that either lived in these areas, and even helped to conserve them,” she says.

🌏 The Culture Column

📺 What we’re watching: The Human Element

📸 Profile of the week: @climatehuman