While insufficient vegetable intake has become a global health concern, the diversity of vegetable species, varieties, and crop wild relatives that support our diets is also being lost. A Perspective published in PNAS argues that conserving vegetable biodiversity and linking it to breeding, school meals, local markets, and policy can be key to improving nutrition and building food systems resilient to climate change.

The Thailand National Science and Technology Fair 2026 (NST Fair 2026), one of the country's largest science and technology events, opened on August 15. The fair runs through August 23 and typically attracts around 200,000 students and members of the public each year.

The World Resources Institute (WRI), drawing on the latest data from researchers at the University of Maryland, reports that forest fires have become more widespread and destructive over the past two decades, while their share of global tree cover loss has also increased. According to data for 2001–2025, forest fires now burn more than twice as much tree cover each year as they did 20 years ago, and more than three times as much in the tropics.

The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) reported that July 2026 was the joint-second warmest July globally, with an average surface air temperature of 16.90°C, 0.67°C above the 1991–2020 average and 1.47°C above the estimated pre-industrial baseline. The month also set a new July record for sea surface temperatures across the extra-polar oceans.

UN News reports that biodiversity loss in Africa and other developing regions is already having serious impacts on people’s lives and livelihoods, including through declining agricultural productivity and shrinking coastal fishery resources. Meanwhile, the official website of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) introduces the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) as an international framework for addressing these challenges, explaining that it sets out four goals for achieving a “world living in harmony with nature” by 2050 and 23 targets to be achieved by 2030.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has warned that climate-related disasters are reaching “nightmare proportions.” Supporting this concern, a paper published in Scientific Reports finds that the number of days with extreme fire-weather conditions in Southern Europe has more than doubled over recent decades, increasing the risk of large-scale wildfires.

A study published in Geophysical Research Letters has revealed that most of the carbon emissions from Canada's record-breaking 2023 wildfires originated not from trees, but from the combustion of soils and peatlands. The fires burned approximately 15.1 million hectares, making them the largest wildfires ever recorded in Canada and about seven times the average annual area burned over the previous two decades.

During the spring and early summer of 2026, large parts of Europe, from Portugal to Finland, experienced below-average rainfall combined with successive heatwaves, affecting agriculture, water resources, river transport, and energy production. The World Weather Attribution (WWA) initiative, which examines the links between extreme weather events and climate change, analysed the ongoing European drought and found that human-induced climate change has substantially contributed to the severity of the event.
 

Every year on July 26, UNESCO observes the International Day for the Conservation of the Mangrove Ecosystem. The day serves as an opportunity to raise awareness of the value of mangrove ecosystems, which play vital roles in climate change mitigation, biodiversity conservation, coastal protection, and the sustainable development of local communities. This article highlights discussions from the 7th Mangrove Macrobenthos and Management Conference (MMM7) and a workshop organized by the Japan International Research Center for Agricultural Sciences (JIRCAS), exploring future prospects for international collaboration toward sustainable mangrove management.