Journalism

South Sudan, the world's newest country, has been grappling with extreme weather events for almost half of its independent history.

Devastating floods in South Sudan have displaced millions of people, subsequently worsening the country’s ongoing conflict and food security crisis. The U.N. estimates(Opens in a new tab) that around two-thirds of South Sudan’s population of 10 million will not have enough to eat during the lean season in 2023, which runs from April until July.

To find out about the crisis first-hand and the severe impact climate change is having on the country, Mashable spoke to Wendy Ahonda, a young climate activist from South Sudan, who has been campaigning with UNICEF for the past few years. In the aftermath of the floods in October 2022, she traveled to flood-struck areas to gather information about the needs and problems of those most affected by the crisis.

While July 2021 was marked by devastating floods across Europe, this summer the continent is enduring a record-breaking heatwave. Many European regions have reached all-time high temperatures, resulting in the spread of wildfires. This includes the UK, where temperatures reached 40.2°C for the first time in history. To make sense of it all, we spoke to Len Shaffrey‬, professor of climate science at the University of Reading, who talked us through the heatwave's timeline and explained why Europe has been warming faster than most of the world.

Can you imagine Venice without its iconic waters? After a winter of low snow and rainfall, a record low level tide of -62 centimetres above mean sea level has emptied some of the ancient city's 150 canals. This has stranded some boats and gondolas and complicated emergency and essential services. Last summer, Northern Italy announced a state of emergency after the region's rivers and lakes faced the most severe droughts in over 70 years.

In the race to catch up with renewable energy, the question of aesthetics is rarely on the table. Considering our growing need for energy independence away from fossil fuels, this is somewhat understandable. Yet, many individuals and entire regions are refusing to make the leap to renewable energy exactly because of the way solar panels and wind turbines look. In the city of Amsterdam, whose historic centre is a protected conservation area, solar panels ruin the traditional landscape and are therefore not permitted. Dutch designer Marjan van Aubel is working on ways to change that - not by challenging policy, but by disrupting our preconceived ideas of what solar panels should and could look like. One stunning example are the colourful solar panel skylights her studio designed for the Netherlands Pavilion at Dubai Expo 2020. In this video, she talks to Mashable about the importance of creating technology in symbiosis with our environments, why the solar energy of the future needs to be beautiful as well as sustainable, and how she's already achieving this.

ECHO is a small yellow robot currently living with a colony of emperor penguins in Antarctica. The robot is part of a project by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution studying climate change's impact on the South Pole's most iconic inhabitants. Physicist Daniel Zitterbart, who has been working alongside ecologist Céline Le Bohec, tells us about how ECHO works, what the project is trying to achieve, and his hopes for the future.

In early 2017, the first whispers of an anti-gay purge had begun to appear from the Russian Chechen Republic. Kremlin-critical newspaper Novaya Gazeta reported that suspected gay men were being arrested by forces loyal to the region’s leader, Ramzan Kadyrov. Some were detained before being returned to their families, who were encouraged to murder the men themselves in so-called “honour killings”. Others simply never returned.

At the time, officials in Moscow promised to investigate the reports. Although Chechnya has autonomy from Russia in areas such as law enforcement and education, the region’s government still reports to the Kremlin and falls under Russian federal law. But in reality, the purge has continued. Human rights groups reported a second wave of detentions and deaths in December 2019.

The smallest details have the power to evoke youthful memories once forgotten. For documentary filmmaker Alina Manolache, her childhood lives on in Radio Vacanta: a beach radio station in 1990s Romania which, above all else, broadcast announcements about children lost on the beach. The stories themselves were trivial, and all of the children featured were soon reunited with their families — but the announcements left a deep impression on Manolache. Their haunting memory became the premise of her first feature documentary, Lost Kids on The Beach.

“That’s the first thing you feel when you step your foot there. “We are coming to take you away.” Because there are diamond mines there, there’s petrol, and it’s full of natural resources. The greedy people want those resources. Step by step, they come in, they make those buildings where they accommodate you, and they take everything away from you. That’s what happens to minorities all around the world.”

There is a point in summer, somewhere between August and September, where time is experienced differently. The days feel like a long stretched afternoon and everything that happens in one’s life is elevated to a metaphor. In Jerzy Sladkowski’s Bitter Love this is the time when a group of people from across Russia board a cruise ship to enjoy a three-week holiday across the river Volga.

Diving even deeper into the intimacy of getting to know a person, the camera lets us study the characters in fascinating details: their expressive faces, their wrinkles, their cuts. The way Alexander warms his hands when he’s cold, or the plaster on his knee. All those elements tell their own little stories, inviting us into the private lives within a microcosm. The pit is its own world, and its inhabitants constitute a galaxy.

Here, on this planet, all waters are connected. If we could continuously ride on a stream, we could travel from one end of the world to the other. Somehow, Aquarela manages to embody the idea of such movement. Water creates us, connects us, dictates our lives, but water decides when they end too. Photographing the untameable element, the film effortlessly, yet without preaching, becomes an environmental warning.