sustainability

Former Arsenal defender Hector Bellerin, now at Real Betis, talks to BBC Sport’s Elizabeth Conway about his attempts to live a more sustainable life after being named global champion at the BBC Green Sport Awards.

READ MORE: Bellerin – the footballer who cycles to work

According to UNHCR, more than seven million Syrians remain displaced inside the country.

The United Nations has said that one million Syrian refugees have returned to their country since the fall of longtime ruler Bashar al-Assad last December, while warning that funding for humanitarian operations is falling.

“In just nine months, one million Syrians have returned to their country following the fall of the Bashar al-Assad government on 8 December 2024,” the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) said in a statement on Tuesday.

The agency added that 1.8 million people displaced within Syria during its nearly 14 years of civil war had also returned to their areas of origin.

Nearly half of Syria’s pre-war population of 13 million was displaced by the conflict that began after the Assad regime’s crackdown on peaceful antigovernment protests as part of the Arab Spring protests in 2011.

Challenges for returnees

While describing the mass returns as “a sign of the great hope and high expectations Syrians have following the political transition in the country,” UNHCR said many of those heading back are struggling to rebuild their lives.

“Destroyed homes and infrastructure, weak and damaged basic services, a lack of job opportunities, and volatile security are challenging people’s determination to return and recover,” the agency said.

According to UNHCR, more than seven million Syrians remain displaced inside the country and more than 4.5 million are still abroad. It urged greater investment in stabilisation efforts and increased support for vulnerable families.

Call for humanitarian support

“The international community, private sector, and Syrians in the diaspora must come together and intensify their efforts to support recovery and ensure that the voluntary return of those displaced by conflict is sustainable and dignified and they are not forced to flee again,” said Filippo Grandi, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

A recent UNHCR survey found that 80 percent of Syrian refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt and Iraq want to return home one day, with 18 percent saying they hope to do so within the next year.

“They have endured a lot of suffering in the past 14 years and the most vulnerable among them still need protection and assistance,” Grandi said. “Sustained support to hosting countries like Jordan, Lebanon and Türkiye is equally critical to ensure returns are voluntary, safe and dignified.”

UNHCR warned that funds for humanitarian operations are dwindling. Inside Syria, only 24 percent of the required funding is available, while for the wider regional Syria response, just 30 percent of the requested funds have been provided.

“This is not the time to cut back support for the Syrian people and their push for a better Syria for them and the region,” the agency said.

As global plastic treaty talks end in failure, with no agreement, all is not lost in the global momentum to cut plastic pollution. United States lawmakers recently introduced the Microplastics Safety Act, for example, mandating the Department of Health and Human Services to study microplastics exposure and health impacts. The bill reflects growing concern in Congress about the plastics health crisis and the broad bipartisan support to address it.

However, given that plastic production, use, and hence exposure, continue to increase every year, we should not wait idly for the US report’s findings or more failed global plastic treaty talks. There is enough evidence to take action now. Below, we highlight three areas that can help reduce everyone’s exposure to microplastics: culture, business and policy.

In culture, there are many default behaviours that we can rethink and re-norm. What if we saw more people bringing their own metal or wooden cutlery to the next barbecue, more shoppers bringing home whole fruit instead of plastic-wrapped pre-cut, and more kids and employees bringing their own refillable water bottles and coffee mugs to school and work? The more we see it normalised, the more we’ll do it. That’s how social norming works.

And having Hollywood in on this would certainly help. Two years ago, Citywide, a feature film shot in Philadelphia was Hollywood’s first zero-waste film, which is a great start. More of this is welcome, including walking the talk within movie, television and advertising scenes by swapping in refillable and reusable containers where single-use plastics would otherwise be the default or showcasing repeat outfits on characters to decentre environmentally harmful fast fashion, much of which is made from plastic.

In business, thankfully, some local grocers allow shoppers to go plastic-free. More grocers should make this shift because consumers want it. Providing staples like cereal, oats, nuts and beans in bulk bins and letting shoppers bring their own containers is a good start. Buying in bulk tends to be more affordable but unfortunately, few stores offer that option, especially stores that target shoppers with lower incomes. Even shoppers with higher incomes lack options: Whole Foods, for example, has bulk bins but in most of its locations requires customers to use the provided plastic containers or bags, which defeats the purpose.

More low-hanging fruit for grocers: try using the milk bottle approach. In some grocery stores, milk is still available in glass bottles, which is good, albeit it comes with a steep deposit. Let’s extend that model of returnable containers to other products, and at a more affordable rate. Take yoghurt, for example. Stores could have an option to buy it in returnable glass containers, since the current plastic containers aren’t recyclable. This is not a fantasy but a possibility: a newly opened grocery store in France offers all of their items plastic-free.

For restaurants, more and more businesses across the US are supporting the use of returnable containers and cities like the District of Columbia offer grants to help ditch disposables. This is exactly what we need more of. People want the option to bring their own containers or use a returnable container so that they can have take-out without risking their health and the environment with exposure to plastic. Let’s give the people what they want.

Policy is arguably the hardest of the three paths to tackle since culture and business track more closely and immediately with consumer demand. To be clear, most Americans, in a bipartisan way, are sick of single-use plastics, which is why plastic bag bans are popping up across the US, and state capitals are seeing more legislative proposals to hold producers of plastic responsible for the life cycle of plastic. What makes policy the more difficult space is the petrochemical lobby that often stands in the way, keeping policymakers mum about the human health and environmental impacts while encouraging industry subsidies: the US has spent $9bn in tax subsidies on the construction of new plastics factories over the past 12 years.

Given the health and environmental harms associated with plastics production, the obvious policy fix is to make the producers responsible for the pollution, forcing them to clean up in places locally like Beaver Creek, Pennsylvania, where the local economy suffered after an ethane cracker plant started operating there. And then to clean up globally for the harm done, since governments are left with the tab of $32bn while the public is left with the costs of health impacts from endocrine-disrupting chemicals found in plastic.

The industry, meanwhile, is fighting tooth and nail to keep selling its harmful products, misleading the public into thinking recycling is an effective solution to plastic waste. It’s not, of course, which is why California is suing ExxonMobil for deception about plastics recycling. Meanwhile, the industry continues to interfere with United Nations global plastics treaty negotiations.

It’s time we diverted those billions of dollars that taxpayers spend subsidising deadly plastics production and, instead, develop products, companies and systems that make the low-plastic life the default option for everyone. That’s the healthier future we want to live in.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

In the wake of January’s horrific fires, detractors of Los Angeles — an urban reality often seen as a toxic mixture of unsustainable resource planning and structurally poor governance systems — are having a field day.

Los Angeles knows how to weather a crisis — or two or three. Angelenos are tapping into that resilience, striving to build a city for everyone.

Their criticism is not new: For most of the 20th century — and certainly for the last five decades or so — Los Angeles has been seen by many urbanists as less city and more cautionary tale — a smoggy expanse of subdivisions and spaghetti junctions, where ambition came with a two-hour commute.

Planners shuddered, while architects looked away, even as they accepted handsome commissions to build some of L.A.’s — if not the world’s — most iconic buildings.

In 1961, Jane Jacobs, the famed urban theorist and community activist, referred to “the ballet of the good city sidewalk” in her landmark 1961 book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” If Manhattan was her “ballet of the sidewalk,” L.A. was a suburban parking lot with delusions of grandeur.

“Los Angeles is a city of pleasure and peril; we’ve always known this,” Zeina Koreitem, founding partner of Downtown L.A. architecture studio Milliøns, said following the fires. “We consume our environment instead of living with it.”

And yet, like so many Hollywood plot twists, maybe we misunderstood the protagonist.

What if L.A.’s so-called flaws — its low density, car culture and decentralized sprawl — weren’t liabilities in a changing world, but underappreciated assets? Not because they were the right urban solutions all along, but because the systems beneath them are shifting?

Urban form has always followed transportation infrastructure. Roman roads influenced the creation of grid-based military cities. Railways shaped satellite towns. Subways gave rise to vertical density.

Today, the emergence of autonomous mobility solutions like robot taxis as well as distributed energy — decentralized, small-scale energy generation located near where energy is actually consumed — is redrawing those relationships once again — and the L.A. model just may be a big beneficiary in the long run.

Dismissed as the nemesis of sustainable urbanism, L.A. can, in fact, be well-positioned for the next chapter. Technologies like rooftop photovoltaics, vehicle-to-grid systems and AI-optimized resource flows do not depend on compactness. They benefit from space, sunlight and flexibility — qualities that Los Angeles has in abundance across its 1,600 square miles of urbanized area.

That vast, polycentric mass — long derided by urban experts residing in denser cities — can also be an asset in the years ahead as autonomous mobility becomes ubiquitous. Elastic, demand-driven autonomous services — which will inevitably also extend to Los Angeles airspace — can and will complement an increasingly built-out Metro light rail system and increased bus rapid transit routes, helping open up economic opportunities to those in once disadvantaged, isolated neighborhoods.

Instead of forcing the city into a European mold, perhaps the question is how the city’s existing DNA might evolve. Could its low-rise form become a testing ground for neighborhood-scale energy networks? Could it become a solar-powered metropolis built on microgrids, where each district produces and manages its own resources?

There is already a shift underway. L.A.’s wide boulevards and streets are being reimagined for a new mix of mobility modes: e-bikes, delivery bots, shared shuttles, autonomous vehicles. A city that was once an ode to the freeway is fast becoming a globally recognized source of innovations in multimodal transport. This is what CoMotion LA has been looking at for the last eight years: bringing together public and private stakeholders to imagine a city of seamlessly connecting mobility options.

Young Angelenos increasingly prioritize neighborhoods where walking, biking and public transit are viable. Following a COVID-induced hiatus, downtown’s renaissance, with banks converted into lofts and vibrant public spaces, is showing — once again — a new appetite for urban living.

Cul-de-sac homes in Calabasas in October 2024. Dismissed as the nemesis of sustainable urbanism, L.A. can, in fact, be well-positioned for the next chapter.

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

Los Angeles is even emerging as a global pioneer in rethinking the curb — often treated as an afterthought — looking at ways those stretches of sidewalk can serve new functions: a charging node, a logistics port, a civic gathering point.

Meanwhile, the scattershot green spaces across Los Angeles offer another opportunity. Rather than a singular large park like New York’s Central Park or Boston Common, the city could develop an ecological mesh, a “sponge city” capable of managing stormwater and heat while fostering public life. Because sustainability is not only about emissions or energy. It is also means access, health and shared space.

This isn’t about longing for midcentury Los Angeles, or about replicating Copenhagen. It’s about testing new possibilities — much like what we’re exploring this year at the Biennale Architettura in Venice. There, participants from diverse disciplines are investigating how we can adapt to a changing planet. We begin with the understanding that climate change is no longer a distant threat; it is a present condition. Our response must be adaptive, experimental and iterative: a continuous process of design evolution, shaped by trial and error, much like nature itself.

But the United States and the world do not need a single model of urban sustainability — they need many. New York might go vertical and social. Barcelona is building out superblocks for pedestrians. Rotterdam is going resilient and water-wise. And Los Angeles? It could — and we believe, it will — become a solar-powered, biodiversity-rich metropolis that helps us rethink what urban sustainability really means.

The sustainable city of the future should not look the same everywhere. It should build on the best of what each place already is and push that to its most imaginative conclusion. “No city has ever been produced by such an extraordinary mixture of geography, climate, economics, demography, mechanics and culture,” said Reyner Banham, the British architectural historian who wrote about Los Angeles a half-century ago. “Nor is it likely that an even remotely similar mixture will ever occur again.”

Los Angeles may have been the warning of the 20th century. But it could become the blueprint of the 21st.

John Rossant is chief executive of CoMotion and international impresario of the multimodal transportation world.

Carlo Ratti is the director of the Senseable City Lab at MIT and the curator of the Biennale Architettura 2025.

Salt crusts crackle underfoot as Habibullah Khatti walks to his mother’s grave to say a final goodbye before he abandons his parched island village on Pakistan’s Indus delta.

Seawater intrusion into the delta, where the Indus River meets the Arabian Sea in the south of the country, has triggered the collapse of farming and fishing communities.

“The saline water has surrounded us from all four sides,” said Khatti from Abdullah Mirbahar village in the town of Kharo Chan, about 15km (9 miles) from where the river empties into the sea.

As fish stocks fell, the 54-year-old turned to tailoring, until that too became impossible, with only four of the 150 households remaining.

“In the evening, an eerie silence takes over the area,” he said, as stray dogs wandered through the deserted wooden and bamboo houses.

Kharo Chan once comprised about 40 villages, but most have disappeared under rising seawater. The town’s population fell from 26,000 in 1981 to 11,000 in 2023, according to census data.

Khatti is preparing to move his family to nearby Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, which is swelling with economic migrants, including people from the Indus delta.

The Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum, which advocates for fishing communities, estimates that tens of thousands of people have been displaced from the delta’s coastal districts.

However, more than 1.2 million people have been displaced from the overall Indus delta region in the last two decades, according to a study published in March by the Jinnah Institute, a think tank led by a former climate change minister.

The downstream flow of water into the delta has decreased by 80 percent since the 1950s, as a result of irrigation canals, hydropower dams and the effects of climate change on glacial and snow melt, according to a 2018 study by the US-Pakistan Center for Advanced Studies in Water.

That has led to devastating seawater intrusion. The salinity of the water has risen by about 70 percent since 1990, making it impossible to grow crops and severely affecting the shrimp and crab populations.

“The delta is both sinking and shrinking,” said Muhammad Ali Anjum, a local WWF conservationist.

Beginning in Tibet, the Indus River flows through disputed Kashmir before traversing the entire length of Pakistan. The river and its tributaries irrigate about 80 percent of the country’s farmland, supporting millions of livelihoods. The delta, formed by rich sediment deposited by the river as it meets the sea, was once ideal for farming, fishing, mangroves and wildlife.

But more than 16 percent of fertile land has become unproductive due to encroaching seawater, a government water agency study found in 2019.

In the town of Keti Bandar, which spreads inland from the water’s edge, a white layer of salt crystals covers the ground. Boats carry in drinkable water from kilometres away, and villagers cart it home via donkeys.

“Who leaves their homeland willingly?” said Haji Karam Jat, whose house was swallowed by the rising water level.

He rebuilt farther inland, anticipating more families would join him. “A person only leaves their motherland when they have no other choice.”

British colonial rulers were the first to alter the course of the Indus River with canals and dams, followed more recently by dozens of hydropower projects. Earlier this year, several military-led canal projects on the Indus River were halted when farmers in the low-lying riverine areas of Sindh province protested.

To combat the degradation of the Indus River Basin, the government and the United Nations launched the “Living Indus Initiative” in 2021. One intervention focuses on restoring the delta by addressing soil salinity and protecting local agriculture and ecosystems.

The Sindh government is currently running its own mangrove restoration project, aiming to revive forests that serve as a natural barrier against saltwater intrusion. Even as mangroves are restored in some parts of the coastline, land grabbing and residential development projects drive clearing in other areas.

Neighbouring India, meanwhile, poses a looming threat to the river and its delta, after revoking a 1960 water treaty with Pakistan, which divides control over the Indus basin rivers. It has threatened never to reinstate the treaty and to build dams upstream, squeezing the flow of water to Pakistan, which has called it “an act of war”.

Alongside their homes, the communities have lost a way of life tightly bound up in the delta, said climate activist Fatima Majeed, who works with the Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum.

Women, in particular, who for generations have stitched nets and packed the day’s catches, struggle to find work when they migrate to cities, said Majeed, whose grandfather relocated the family from Kharo Chan to the outskirts of Karachi.

“We haven’t just lost our land; we’ve lost our culture.”

F1 launched its sustainability strategy in 2019 with a long-term commitment to reduce carbon emissions in areas like travel, logistics, and energy use.

Changing the now 24-race calendar, so grands prix are grouped together by region to reduce travel, has also helped F1 in its quest for greater sustainability, with Japan moving to an April slot and Azerbaijan twinning with Singapore in the autumn since the 2024 season.

Team factories are now using more green energy such as wind and solar power, resulting in a 59% reduction in emissions from these facilities compared to seven years ago.

Other initiatives that have contributed include F1 expanding the use of biofuel trucks for transporting freight in Europe, which reduced related carbon emissions by an average of 83%.

From the 2026 season and beyond, F1 is introducing new regulations that will feature environmentally friendly cars with engines that have a near 50-50 split between electric and internal combustion power – and use fully sustainable fuels.

To further improve the flow of the calendar, Canada switches to an earlier date in May, followed by a run of nine European races, starting with Monaco in June and ending with the new Madrid Grand Prix in September.

“Formula 1 has always been synonymous with innovation and the desire to improve,” added Domenicali.

“Once again, this mentality has allowed us to make important progress, not only for those who work in this world, but also for society as a whole.

“While continuing to grow globally, we have shown that sustainable development is possible and that the strategies we have adopted are yielding tangible results.”

The report said any remaining unavoidable emissions in 2030 “will be offset using credible programmes in line with latest best practice guidance”.

Carbon offset programs typically help to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by supporting projects which reduce environmental harm, such as tree planting schemes.

The seal population has increased from about 4,000, considered nearly extinct, in the late 1980s to about 50,000.

Lithuania will make a concerted effort to save its grey seal population, which has managed to stabilise though continues to remain vulnerable, in the Baltic Sea as it contends with shrinking fish stocks, pollution and the negative effect of climate change.

Over the years, Lithuania has introduced several bans, including on toxic pesticide usage and commercial cod fishing, in an effort to fortify its grey seal population.

The effects of climate change on the seals’ habitat are severe, as the Baltic Sea, which is shared by the European Union and Russia, rarely freezes over now, depriving the seals of sanctuaries to rear their cubs.

“Mothers are forced to breed on land in high concentration with other seals,” said Vaida Surviliene, a scientist at Lithuania’s Vilnius University told the AFP news agency. “They are unable to recognise their cubs and often leave them because of it,” she said.

Survival rates for cubs in the wild can be as low as 5 percent, according to local scientists.

Rearing cubs ashore also leaves mother seals exposed to humans, other wild animals, rowdy males, as well as a higher risk of diseases, according to Arunas Grusas, a biologist at the Baltic Sea Animal Rehabilitation Centre in the Lithuanian port of Klaipeda.

Grusas first began caring for seals in 1987, when he brought back a pup to his office at the Klaipeda Sea Museum, which now oversees the new rehabilitation centre built in 2022.

“We taught them how to feed themselves, got them used to the water – they had to get comfortable with the sea, which spat them out ashore practically dying,” Grusas said.

The very first cubs were placed into makeshift baths set up in an office. The scientists then nursed them back to health, first with liquid formula before moving on to solid food.

In the late 1980s, the seals were nearly extinct – there were just about 4,000 to 5,000 left in the sea, from a population of about 100,000 before World War II.

Recently, a growing number of adult seals have been washing up on Lithuanian beaches.

Scientists like Grusas point the finger at near-shore fishing nets, where seals desperate for food end up entangled and ultimately drown.

Once the seals are ready to re-enter the wild, scientists release them into the sea with GPS trackers, which show the seals generally favour a route north towards the Swedish Gotland island in the middle of the Baltic Sea, where fish are more plentiful.

Some, however, are scared to venture off alone and return to the boat from which they were released. Eventually, they all find their way back to the wild.

The annual maximum ice extent in the Baltic Sea has been decreasing rapidly since the 1980s, with the lowest extent on record in the winter of 2019-2020.

Our appetite for data is growing fast. And so is the number of data centres filled with computer servers.

They store and process the data generated by our online activity, from social media to shopping to cloud storage.

And they consume massive amounts of water and electricity.

Big Tech companies are building data centres in places like drought-stricken Queretaro, in Mexico.

We met some of the locals who are struggling to get by on rationed water as more of these thirsty facilities are built nearby.