Durante años, las redes sociales han planteado la pregunta por la edad del usuario con una ligereza que rozaba la farsa. Bastaba un clic para acceder. Muchos menores entraban sin dificultad en plataformas diseñadas para adultos, que ni consideraban s

The ways roads are used, with ever larger and heavier vehicles, have dramatic consequences on the environment – and electric cars are not the answer Today, there is an average of 37 tonnes of road per inhabitant of the planet. The weight of the road network alone accounts for a third of all construction worldwide, and has grown exponentially in the 20th century. There is 10 times more bitumen, in mass, than there are living animals. Yet growth in the mass of roads does not automatically correspond to population growth, or translate into increased length of road networks. In wealthier countries, the number of metres of road per inhabitant has actually fallen over the last century. In the United States, for instance, between 1905 and 2015 the length of the network increased by a factor of 1.75 and the population by a factor of 3.8, compared with 21 for the mass of roads. Roads have become wider and, above all, much thicker. To understand the evolution of these parameters, and their environmental impact, it is helpful to trace the different stages in the life of the motorway.  Until the early 20th century, roads were used for various modes of transport, including horses, bicycles, pedestrians and trams; as a result of the construction of railways, road traffic even declined in some European countries in the 19th century. The main novelty brought by the motorway was that they would be reserved for motorised traffic. In several languages, the word itself – autostrada, autobahn, autoroute or motorway – speaks of this exclusivity.  Roman roads varied from simple corduroy roads, made by placing logs perpendicular to the direction of the road over a low or swampy area, to paved roads, as this engraving from Jean Rondelet’s 19th‑century Traité Théorique et Pratique de l’Art de Bâtir shows. Using deep roadbeds of tamped rubble as an underlying layer to ensure that they kept dry, major roads were often stone-paved, metalled, cambered for drainage and flanked by footpaths, bridleways and drainage ditches Like any major piece of infrastructure, motorways became the subject of ideological discourse, long before any shovel hit the ground; politicians underlined their role in the service of the nation, how they would contribute to progress, development, the economy, modernity and even civilisation. The inauguration ceremony for the construction of the first autostrada took place in March 1923, presided over by Italy’s prime minister Benito Mussolini. The second major motorway programme was announced by the Nazi government in 1933, with a national network planned to be around 7,000 kilometres long. In his 2017 book Driving Modernity: Technology, Experts, Politics, and Fascist Motorways, 1922–1943, historian Massimo Moraglio shows how both programmes were used as propaganda tools by the regimes, most notably at the international road congresses in Milan in 1926 and Munich in 1934. In the European postwar era, the notion of the ‘civilising’ effect of roads persevered. In 1962, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, then‑secretary of state for finances and later president of France, argued that expanded motorways would bring ‘progress, activity and life’. This discourse soon butted up against the realities of how motorways affected individuals and communities. In his 2011 book Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, Peter D Norton explores the history of resistance to the imposition of motorised traffic in North American cities. Until the 1920s, there was a perception that cars were dangerous newcomers, and that other street and road uses – especially walking – were more legitimate. Cars were associated with speed and danger; restrictions on motorists, especially speed limits, were routine.  Built between 1962 and 1970, the Westway was London’s first urban motorway, elevated above the city to use less land. Construction workers are seen stressing the longitudinal soffit cables inside the box section of the deck units to achieve the bearing capacity necessary to carry the weight of traffic Credit: Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy To gain domination over cities, motor vehicles had to win priority over other street uses. Rather than restricting the flow of vehicles to minimise the risk of road accidents, a specific infrastructure was dedicated to them: both inner‑city roads and motorways. Cutting through the landscape, the motorway had, by definition, to be inaccessible by any other means of transport than motorised vehicle. To guarantee the fluidity of traffic, the construction of imposing bridges, tunnels and interchanges is necessary, particularly at junctions with other roads, railways or canals. This prioritisation of one type of user inevitably impacts journeys for others; as space is fragmented, short journeys are lengthened for those trying to navigate space by foot or bicycle.  Enabling cars to drive at around 110–140km/h on motorways, as modern motorways do, directly impacts their design, with major environmental effects: the gradient has to be gentle (4 per cent), the curves long (1.5km in radius) and the lanes wide, to allow vehicles to overtake each other safely. As much terrain around the world is not naturally suited to these requirements, the earthworks are considerable: in France, the construction of a metre of highway requires moving some 100m3 of earth, and when the soil is soft, full of clay or peat, it is made firmer with hydraulic lime and cement before the highway’s first sub‑layers are laid. This material cost reinforces the criticisms levelled in the 1960s, by the likes of Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford, at urban planning that prioritised the personal motor vehicle. When roads are widened to accommodate more traffic, buildings are sliced and demolished, as happened in Dhaka’s Bhasantek Road in 2021 Credit: Dhaka Tribune Once built, the motorway is never inert. Motorway projects today generally anticipate future expansion (from 2×2 to 2×3 to 2×4 lanes), and include a large median strip of 12m between the lanes, with a view to adding new ones. Increases in speed and vehicle sizes have also translated into wider lanes, from 2.5m in 1945 to 3.5m today. The average contemporary motorway footprint is therefore 100 square metres per linear metre. Indeed, although the construction of a road is supposed to reduce congestion, it also generates new traffic and, therefore, new congestion. This is the principle of ‘induced traffic’: the provision of extra road capacity results in a greater volume of traffic. The Katy Freeway in Texas famously illustrates this dynamic. Built as a regular six‑lane highway in the 1960s, it was called the second worst bottleneck in the nation by 2004, wasting 25 million hours a year of commuter time. In 2011, the state of Texas invested US$2.8 billion to fix this problem, widening the road to a staggering total of 26 lanes. By 2014, the morning and afternoon traffic had both increased again. The vicious circle based on the induced traffic has been empirically demonstrated in most countries: traffic has continued to increase and congestion remains unresolved, leading to ever-increasing emissions. In the EU, transport is the only sector where greenhouse gas emissions have increased in the past three decades, rising 33.5 per cent between 1990 and 2019. Transport accounts for around a fifth of global CO₂ emissions today, with three quarters of this figure linked to road transport. Houston’s Katy Freeway is one of the world’s widest motorways, with 26 lanes. Its last expansion, in 2008, was initially hailed as a success, but within five years, peak travel times were longer than before the expansion – a direct illustration of the principle of induced traffic Credit: Smiley N Pool / Houston Chronicle / Getty Like other large transport infrastructures such as ports and airports, motorways are designed for the largest and heaviest vehicles. Engineers, road administrations and politicians have known since the 1950s that one truck represents millions of cars: the impact of a vehicle on the roadway is exponential to its weight – an online ‘road damage calculator’ allows you to compare the damage done by different types of vehicles to the road. Over the years, heavier and heavier trucks have been authorised to operate on roads: from 8‑tonne trucks in 1945 to 44 tonnes nowadays. The European Parliament adopted a revised directive on 12 March 2024 authorising mega‑trucks to travel on European roads; they can measure up to 25 metres and weigh up to 60 tonnes, compared with the previous limits of 18.75 metres and 44 tonnes. This is a political and economic choice with considerable material effects: thickness, rigidity of sub‑bases and consolidation of soil and subsoil with lime and cement. Altogether, motorways are 10 times thicker than large roads from the late 19th century. In France, it takes an average of 30 tonnes of sand and aggregate to build one linear metre of motorway, 100 times more than cement and bitumen.  The material history of road networks is a history of quarrying and environmental damage. The traces of roads can also be seen in rivers emptied of their sediment, the notches of quarries in the hills and the furrows of dredgers extracting sand from the seabed. This material extraction, arguably the most significant in human history, has dramatic ecological consequences for rivers, groundwater tables, the rise of sea levels and saltwater in farmlands, as well as biodiversity. As sand is ubiquitous and very cheap, the history of roads is also the history of a local extractivism and environmental conflicts around the world.  Shoving and rutting is the bulging and rippling of the pavement surface. Once built, roads require extensive maintenance – the heavier the vehicles, the quicker the damage. From pothole repair to the full resurfacing of a road, maintenance contributes to keeping road users safe Credit: Yakov Oskanov / Alamy Once roads are built and extended, they need to be maintained to support the circulation of lorries and, by extension, commodities. This stage is becoming increasingly important as rail freight, which used to be important in countries such as France and the UK, is declining, accounting for no more than 10 per cent of the transport of commodities. Engineers might judge that a motorway is destined to last 20 years or so, but this prognosis will be significantly reduced with heavy traffic. The same applies to the thousands of motorway bridges: in the UK, nearly half of the 9,000 highway bridges are in poor condition; in France, 7 per cent of the 12,000 bridges are in danger of collapsing, as did Genoa’s Morandi bridge in 2018. If only light vehicles drove on it, this infrastructure would last much longer. This puts into perspective governments’ insistence on ‘greening’ the transport sector by targeting CO2 emissions alone, typically by promoting the use of electric vehicles (EVs). Public policies prioritising EVs do nothing to change the mass of roads or the issue of their maintenance – even if lorries were to run on clean air, massive quarrying would still be necessary. A similar argument plays out with regard to canals and ports, which have been constantly widened and deepened for decades to accommodate ever-larger oil tankers or container ships. The simple operation of these infrastructures, dimensioned for the circulation of commodities and not humans, requires permanent dredging of large volumes. The environmental problem of large transport infrastructure goes beyond the type of energy used: it is, at its root, free and globalised trade. ‘The material life cycle of motorways is relentless: constructing, maintaining, widening, thickening, repairing’ As both a material and ideological object, the motorway fixes certain political choices in the landscape. Millions of kilometres of road continue to be asphalted, widened and thickened around the world to favour cars and lorries. In France, more than 80 per cent of today’s sand and aggregate extraction is used for civil engineering works – the rest goes to buildings. Even if no more buildings, roads or other infrastructures were to be built, phenomenal quantities of sand and aggregates would still need to be extracted in order to maintain existing road networks. The material life cycle of motorways is relentless: constructing, maintaining, widening, thickening, repairing, adding new structures such as wildlife crossings, more maintaining.  Rising traffic levels are always deemed positive by governments for a country’s economy and development. As Christopher Wells shows in his 2014 book Car Country: An Environmental History, car use becomes necessary in an environment where everything has been planned for the car, from the location of public services and supermarkets to residential and office areas. Similarly, when an entire economy is based on globalised trade and just‑in‑time logistics (to the point that many service economies could not produce their own personal protective equipment in the midst of a pandemic), the lorry and the container ship become vital.  The final stage in the life of a piece of motorway infrastructure is dismantling. Like the other stages, this one is not a natural outcome but the fruit of political choices – which should be democratic – regarding how we wish to use existing roads. Dismantling, which is essential if we are to put an end to the global extractivism of sand and aggregates, does not mean destruction: if bicycles and pedestrians were to use them instead, maintenance would be minimal. This final stage requires a paradigm shift away from the eternal adaptation to increasing traffic. Replacing cars and lorries with public transport and rail freight would be a first step. But above all, a different political and spatial organisation of economic activities is necessary, and ultimately, an end to globalised, just-in-time trade and logistics. In 1978, a row of cars parked at a shopping centre in Connecticut was buried under a thick layer of gooey asphalt. The Ghost Parking Lot, one of the first projects by James Wines’ practice SITE, became a playground for skateboarders until it was removed in 2003. Images of this lumpy landscape serve as allegories of the damage caused by reliance on the automobile Credit: Project by SITE Lead image: Some road damage is beyond repair, as when a landslide caused a large chunk of the Gothenburg–Oslo motorway to collapse in 2023. Such dramatic events remind us of both the fragility of these seemingly robust infrastructures, and the damage that extensive construction does to the planet. Credit: Hanna Brunlöf Windell / TT / Shutterstock 2025-06-03 Reuben J Brown Share

A small home in Wayne County, Missouri was torn apart by a tornado. An aerial image by Jeff Roberson taken on March 15 depicts chunks of stick-framed walls and half-recognizable debris strewn across a patchy lawn in an eviscerated orthography of middle-American life. Elisa Iturbe, assistant professor of Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, describes this scene as “an image of climate impact, climate victimhood…these walls are doing the hard work of containment, of containing the rituals of human lifestyle.” Roberson’s image embodied the themes that emerged from the Projective Territories Symposium: The atomized fragility of contemporary American domesticity, the fundamental link between ways of living and modes of land tenure, and the necessary primacy of form in architecture’s response to the incoming upheaval of climate change. Lydia Kallipoliti talked about her 2024 book Histories of Ecological Design; An Unfinished Cyclopedia. (Andy Eichler) Projective Territories was hosted at Kent State University’s College of Architecture and Environmental Design on April 3 and 4. Organized and led by the CAED’s assistant professor Paul Mosley, the symposium brought Iturbe, Columbia University’s associate professor Lydia Kallipoliti, California College of the Arts’ associate professor Neeraj Bhatia, and professor Albert Pope of Rice University to Kent, Ohio, to discuss the relationship between territory and architecture in the face of climate change. “At its core, territory is land altered by human inhabitation,” read Mosley’s synopsis. “If ensuring a survivable future means rethinking realities of social organization, economy, and subsistence, then how might architecture—as a way of thinking and rethinking the world—contribute to these new realities?” Projective Territories kicked off on the afternoon of April 3 with a discussion of Bhatia’s Life After Property exhibition hosted at the CAED’s Armstrong Gallery. The exhibition collected drawings, renderings, and models by Bhatia’s practice The Open Workshop on a puzzle-piece shaped table constructed from plywood and painted blue. Nestled into the table’s geometric subtractions, Bhatia, Pope, Mosley, and CAED associate professor Taraneh Meshkani discussed Bhatia’s research into the commons: A system of land tenure by which communities manage and share resources with minimal reliance on the state through an ethic of solidarity, mutualism, and reciprocity. Neeraj Bhatia presented new typologies for collective living. (Andy Eichler) The symposium’s second day was organized into a morning session, “The Erosion of Territory,” with lectures by Kallipoliti and Iturbe, and an afternoon session, “The Architecture of Expanding Ecologies,” with lectures by Bhatia and Pope. Mosley’s introduction to “The Erosion of Territory” situated Kallipoliti and Iturbe’s work in a discussion about “how territories have been historically shaped by extraction and control and are unraveling under strain.” Lydia Kallipoliti’s lecture “Ecological Design; Cohabiting the World” presented questions raised by her 2024 book Histories of Ecological Design; An Unfinished Cyclopedia, which she described as “an attempt to clarify how nature as a concept was used in history.” Kallipoliti proposed an ecological model that projects outward from domestic interiors to the world to generate a “universe of fragmented worldviews and a cloud of stories.” Iturbe’s “Transgressing Immutable Lines” centered on her research into the formal potentials for Community Land Trusts—nonprofits that own buildings in trust on existing real estate. Iturbe described these trusts as “Not just a juridical mechanism, but a proposal for rewriting the relationship between land and people.” “Ecology is the basis for a more pleasurable alternative,” said Mosley in his introduction to the day’s second session. “Cooperation and care aren’t the goals, but the means of happiness.” An exhibition complementing the symposium shared drawings, renderings, and models. (Andy Eichler) Neeraj Bhatia’s lecture “Life After Property” complemented the previous days’ exhibition, problematizing the housing crisis as an ideological commitment to housing rooted in market speculation. Bhatia presented new typologies for collective living with the flexibility to formally stabilize the interpersonal relationships that define life in the commons. Albert Pope finished the day’s lectures with “Inverse Utopia,” presenting work from his 2024 book of the same name, which problematizes postwar American urban sprawl as an incapability to visualize the vast horizontal expansion of low-density development. Collectively, the day’s speakers outlined a model that situated the American domestic form at the center of the global climate crisis. Demanding complete separation from productive territories, this formal ideology of the isolated object is in a process of active dismemberment under climate change. The speakers’ proposed solutions were unified under fresh considerations of established ideas of typology and form, directly engaging politics of the collective as an input for shaping existing space. As Friday’s session drew to a close, the single-family home appeared as a primitive relic which architecture must overcome. Albert Pope’s images of tower complexes in Hong Kong and council estates in London that house thousands appeared as visions of the future. “The only way we can begin to address this dilemma is to begin to understand who we are in order to enlist the kinds of collective responses to this problem,” said Pope. Walker MacMurdo is an architectural designer, critic, and adjunct professor who studies the relationship between architecture and the ground at Kent State University’s College of Architecture and Environmental Design.

Following the 2022 Unity for Humanity Summit, we’re looking for social impact creators who are using real-time 3D to make the world a better place. Is that you? If your answer is yes, or even maybe, Unity is awarding funding, technical support, and mentorship to help bring changemaking projects to life in 2023.To help you make the most of this opportunity, we’ve put together a few tips to guide you through the application process. Not sure if you need the support? We also spoke with three past grantees about their experience and how the support has helped them realize their creative vision.1. Lead with your passion.Are you dedicated to making the world a better place? That’s exactly what our judges will be looking for, so try to get that across in your application.2. Keep a record of all of your answers.To avoid potentially losing your hard work, write your submission text in a separate document before entering it into the Typeform application.3. Read the application criteria and questions carefully.There are no trick questions – we’re transparent about the projects that are eligible and the judging criteria we’ll be using, so make sure your application includes all the required information to improve your chance of being selected.For more guidance, watch our session on grant application tips from the 2021 Unity for Humanity Summit.To make sure all applicants have as much information and context as possible, we make our judging criteria clear. All projects must be impact-driven – meaning that they have measurable impact goals and/or calls to action – and encompass social, healthcare, education, humanitarian, and/or environmental issues. Projects must also align with at least one of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals.When reviewing grant applications, we consider inclusion, impact, viability, and vision:Inclusion – Inclusive storytelling is at the heart of the Unity for Humanity program. Does your project reflect a diversity of experiences and backgrounds? Does it have a natural connection to the community and audience being represented or served through the work? Does your application demonstrate that you are thinking about future audiences and distribution of the work in an inclusive way?Vision – Is there a strong motivation for creating the work? Does your project express a unique perspective? Does it reflect a strong sense of compassion for humanity?Impact – Does your project have measurable impact goals and calls to action? Is your project aligned with at least one of the UN Sustainable Development Goals?Viability – Does your team have a realistic plan of execution for the production and distribution of the project so that it can achieve the greatest impact? Is it realistic in scope?For more detailed information on applying, read our Unity for Humanity FAQ. If your project’s timeline doesn’t align with this year’s application period, you can pre-register for next year’s grant to receive inspiration, tips, and grant news.We spoke with three past Unity for Humanity grantees to learn about the impact receiving the grant has had on the development of their project.Love Death Design, creators of Gone to Water / Ido al Agua, an immersive documentary that brings first-hand accounts of environmental injustice in Los Angeles, Tongva Land, into a virtual space of protest.AnythingEverything, creators of Powers of X, an immersive film exploring our planet’s environmental fragility relative to the effects of global consumption and man-made climate breakdown.Presencias, creators of Origen, a series of virtual, digital and real-world experiences that reveal ancestral stories through nature.Q: What inspired you to create a social impact project?Love Death Design, creators of Gone to Water / Ido al Agua – New media can be leveraged as a profoundly impactful mode of storytelling: we can protest in virtual spaces, we can employ new technologies to demand sustainable future architectures.“New media can be leveraged as a profoundly impactful mode of storytelling.” – Love Death Design, creators of Gone to Water / Ido al Agua“Gone to Water” is a term that describes the process by which an oil well becomes unproductive and therefore unprofitable, eventually filling with water. We chose to apply for UFH support to create this immersive documentary on urban oil extraction and its community health impacts on Tongva Land – in South Los Angeles because for those most affected by environmental racism, it is a matter of survival. Los Angeles is considered a microcosm of the world for its rich cultural contributions but it is also a snapshot of environmental injustices faced by BIPOC and low-income communities throughout the world.AnythingEverything, creators of Powers of X – We are incredibly excited about using emerging technologies like XR to enable new formats for storytelling and create positive change, particularly when it comes to education about the climate crisis. With Powers Of X, we saw a powerful opportunity to harness VR and AR's unique ability to convey scale in order to reveal the impact we each have on the planet in a much more tangible way.Presencias, creators of Origen – Having been in contact with stories, memories of this land’s origin, led us to think that collaborating with storytellers from the various territories (the Amazon, the Andes and northwestern Argentina) to jointly create an experience in first person, interwoven by meaningful interactions, could result In a significant project capable of touching many hearts.“The project has driven an initiative to replant 20 different species in the mid-Ucayali region of the Amazon Rainforest.” – Presencias, creators of OrigenSomething incredible happened from the production phase of Origen, thanks to the collaborative networks it has woven, the project has driven an initiative to replant 20 different species in the mid-Ucayali region of the Amazon Rainforest. We understood that a project with these characteristics transcends what it can generate in the public once released. It is since its construction, through its dialogue with reality, that starts to generate an impact on multiple levels.Q: How did you come up with the idea for your project?Presencias, creators of Origen – The story of this project began more than ten years ago thanks to the bond with an incredible Mapuche descendant woman, Celeste, a great friend I’ve known since I was 19 (she’s also a script supervisor in the VR experience). Since then, in successive trips that I’ve made in Latin America, Celeste asked me to take presents of great symbolic value to her friends, guardians of other territories. It was revolutionary for me to be in contact with these women, their stories and this powerful network. Eventually these experiences became the opportunity to collectively create Origen.Q: What impact has the Unity for Humanity Grant had on your project?Love Death Design, creators of Gone to Water / Ido al Agua – Support from the Unity for Humanity Grant enabled our small creative design studio to produce a large scale project, collaborating with a wide spectrum of community members, activists and artists across South Los Angeles – Tongva Land. We were able to afford hardware to create the work, time and space to produce it, and the ability to compensate all our contributors – as well as offer free community workshops. As this is a pilot project for our artist-led studio, Love Death Design, having the support to realize the work in scope with our vision has been impactful and has greatly lifted our presence as under-represented artists and voices in the XR community.We are so grateful to have the support to co-create this work with community members, activists, and artists on the frontlines of environmental injustice and hope that this piece provokes those who experience it to consider their privilege and position, and join us in demanding the end of neighborhood drilling.“UFH was instrumental in helping us get our project off the ground and taking our concept from abstract idea to a tangible prototype.” – AnythingEverything, creators of Powers of XAnythingEverything, creators of Powers of X – We have used the UFH funding in order to conduct research around the subject matter, refine the conceptual experience, and most importantly to develop a functioning prototype which demonstrates the format and can be used in order to raise follow-on funding for the full production. We have successfully completed the prototype and we could not have done it if it wasn't for the help, resources, and support we received from Unity For Humanity.Presencias, creators of Origen – For the development of the experience and to implement the first steps of the replanting initiative that emerged as a result of the process of creating the firsts chapters of Origen.Receiving the grant was what made possible for this first chapter of Origen to come off paper and become a reality. It also gave us the freedom to create with so much autonomy, it allowed us to delve into the artisanal and interdisciplinary part of the project, which was crucial to respect its identity.The premiere of the first chapter, “The Journey to the Heart of the Amazon Rainforest,” is approaching and we are starting the pre-production of chapter two – “The Journey to the Andes” – which keeps us working and very excited for what is to come.The Unity for Humanity 2023 Grant is open for applications until 11:59 pm PT on December 9, 2022. Join our Social Impact creator Discord to speak to the Unity for Humanity team, ask questions, and meet other creators. Apply for the grant today.

A panda keeper does a health check on the cub of giant panda Xi Mei at the Wolong Nature ReserveAmi Vitale These images from the Earth Photo 2025 competition shortlist tell revealing, inspiring and unexpected stories about the climate and life on our planet. Pictured top, photographer Ami Vitale’s image Pandamonium shows a giant panda keeper checking the health of a panda cub in the Wolong National Nature Reserve in Sichuan province, China. The keeper’s outfit is part of an effort to reduce the impact of human contact on the bears. Next, below, is Sue Flood’s Crabeater Seals, shot on an ice floe in the Southern Ocean, off the Antarctic Peninsula. For Flood, such photos can bring the region’s wonder to those who may never visit. Crabeater Seals Southern Ocean, Antarctic peninsulaSue FloodAdvertisement Paradise to Ashes, La Palma by Jonathan Browning pictured below, shows the aftermath of the 2021 Cumbre Vieja volcanic eruption on this island in the Canaries, Spain. A woman has remade her garden, removing lava that destroyed mature palms and replacing them with new trees. La Palma. An island of the Canaries. Two years after the Cumbre Vieja volcanic eruption in late 2021Jonathan Browning The final image below is Vincenzo Montefinese’s Lost Oases, shot in Tinzouline, Draa valley, Morocco. Here, a man adjusts a solar panel that powers a water pump that irrigates nearby palm groves. Climate change and water use have shrunk the valley’s oases by two-thirds over the past century. Today, farmers must dig more wells, often illegally, to access groundwater. Tinzouline, Draa valley, MoroccoVincenzo Montefinese The photos and videos on the shortlist were chosen by a panel including New Scientist picture editor Tim Boddy and head of editorial video, David Stock. The winners will be revealed on 16 June. The Earth Photo 2025 exhibition is at London’s Royal Geographical Society from 17 June to 20 August before it tours the UK. Topics:

Peter Green Chilled, a major distributor of chilled and fresh products to British supermarkets, has reportedly fallen victim to a ransomware attack orchestrated by an as-yet unnamed cyber criminal operation, becoming the latest organisation in the British retail sector to be affected by a security incident. Established as a haulage company working with Somerset dairy suppliers 60 years ago, Peter Green has grown into a little-known but well-established player in the nation’s cold chain – temperature-controlled warehousing and transport – sector, supplying the likes of Aldi, Sainsbury’s and Tesco among others. It is also a supplier of IT services including transport and warehouse management systems (T/WMS), electronic data interchange (EDI), stock and temperature control systems, and vehicle tracking and monitoring. According to BBC Radio 5 Live’s Wake up to money programme – which was first to report the story – the attack appears to have begun on the evening of Wednesday 14 May and has left the organisation unable to accept new orders. A spokesperson for Peter Green told the programme it was not in a position to be able to discuss the incident further. However, one of the organisation’s customers, The Black Farmer founder Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones, said that almost a week into the incident, he had been offered no solution for how Peter Green was going to get stock he had already delivered to its warehouses out to retailers. “If they’re not delivered in the next couple of days, because they’re fresh products, they have to be thrown away,” said Emmanuel-Jones. “For a small business it is pretty devastating. To make matters even worse is that we’ve just also got a delivery that’s come in from Sweden that is stuck at a port because Peter Green is not taking in any other stock from any suppliers, so we have to try to find some way of getting it to the supermarkets.” Emmanuel-Jones told the radio programme that his business could stand to lose up to £100,000, losses that would be hard for a small organisation to bear. Computer Weekly reached out to Peter Green Chilled but found its email addresses non-responsive. Absent further information from Peter Green, at the time of writing, any links to the ongoing DragonForce/Scattered Spider incidents affecting Marks and Spencer (M&S) and Co-op are unproven and merely speculative. However, David Mound, senior penetration tester at third-party risk specialist SecurityScorecard, said the firm’s team was closely monitoring the “emerging pattern” of cyber attacks impacting food retailers. He said that in drawing other household names into the fray, the developing Peter Green incident highlighted the fragility of interconnected digital supply chains, and was creating a cascading effect throughout the retail sector. “These incidents reflect a growing trend among cyber criminal groups to exploit sectors where time sensitivity and perishability heighten pressure to restore operations, increasing the likelihood of ransom payments,” said Mound. “In food retail, even short-term disruption can lead to spoilage, logistical bottlenecks and loss of consumer trust. “Attackers are no longer just targeting data; they’re targeting urgency,” he said. “In environments where product expiration and just-in-time delivery are business-critical, threat actors understand that every hour offline amplifies the pressure to pay. “Many critical logistics and IT providers are insufficiently risk-tiered or assessed,” added Mound. “There is an urgent need for sector-wide collaboration on third-party risk intelligence and resilience standards. “SecurityScorecard urges all organisations in the food and retail sectors to re-evaluate their third-party risk posture and ensure suppliers are assessed not only for compliance, but for operational resilience under duress.” Timeline: UK retail cyber attacks 22 April 2025: A cyber attack at M&S has caused significant disruption to customers, leaving them unable to make contactless payments or use click-and-collect services. 24 April: M&S is still unable to provide contactless payment or click-and-collect services amid a cyber attack that it says has forced it to move a number of processes offline to safeguard its customers, staff and business. 25 April: M&S shuts down online sales as it works to contain and mitigate a severe cyber attack on its systems. 29 April: The infamous Scattered Spider hacking collective may have been behind the ongoing cyber attack on M&S that has crippled systems at the retailer and left its ecommerce operation in disarray. 30 April: A developing cyber incident at Co-op has forced the retailer to pull the plug on some of its IT systems as it works to contain the attack. 1 May: Co-op tells staff to stop using their VPNs and be wary that their communications channels may be being monitored, as a cyber attack on the organisation continues to develop. 1 May: Harrods confirms it is the latest UK retailer to experience a cyber attack, shutting off a number of systems in an attempt to lessen the impact. 2 May: The National Cyber Security Centre confirms it is providing assistance to M&S, Co-op and Harrods as concerns grow among UK retailers. 7 May: No end is yet in sight for UK retailers subjected to apparent ransomware attacks. 13 May: M&S is instructing all of its customers to change their account passwords after a significant amount of data was stolen in a DragonForce ransomware attack. 14 May: Google’s threat intel analysts are aware of a number of in-progress cyber attacks against US retailers linked to the same Scattered Spider gang that supposedly attacked M&S and Co-op in the UK.