Fintan McDonnell

Thousands of years from now, future civilisations visiting the Arctic island of Svalbard will stumble upon a treasure trove of data from our age: software from tech companies, documents from the Vatican Museum, the recipe for McDonalds’ burgers.

At least, that’s what the Arctic World Archive is counting on. The project, founded by data storage company Piql, says it has found a way to keep digital data safe for thousands of years, safe from everything from solar flares, to flooding, to nuclear bombs. The company says more than 60 institutions from 20 countries have deposited data in its vault, which was built inside the same coal mine as the famous Global Seed Vault.

A two-year long drought in the semi-desert municipality of Colón, in the central Mexican state of Querétaro, has left many struggling with dead crops and water rationing.

But at the same time, the local government in Querétaro is giving incentives to companies to build data centres that generally use large amounts of water to cool their servers.

Artificial intelligence lives on power and water, fed to it in vast quantities by data centres around the world. And those centres are increasingly located in the global south.

One estimate from the University of California, Riverside says AI’s total water demand by 2027 could be more than half the total annual water withdrawal of the UK. But all we really have are estimates. Big tech firms have been secretive about the amount of public water used by individual data centres, and up to half of all data centres don’t even measure how much water they use, according to one survey.

We’re creating so much data that soon we’ll be running out of space to store it. Can DNA help us shrink our data hoarding problem?

Modern life is powered by cloud data. But the virtual storage has a hidden carbon footprint – and the AI boom could supercharge it

On paper, Lebanon’s coastline is public and open to all. In practice, it’s a different story.

Activists say up to 80% of the country’s coast is occupied by private businesses that charge for entry, and the remaining 20% is often crowded and full of pollution.

Despite its snow-covered peaks and abundance of rivers, Lebanon is one of the most water-stressed countries in the world.

How did this happen - and what happens if Lebanon runs out of water?

Kevin is the UK’s top roundabout fan. What can his obsession teach us about cutting emissions from traffic?

Groceries are getting much more expensive – but one Dutch organisation thinks they should cost even more to account for the environmental and social damage they cause.

Neighbourhood store De Aanzet in Amsterdam is the first in the world to implement “true pricing” – a system of extra charges for food products that reflect the negative impacts from their production, from underpaid workers to carbon emissions and land and water use.

The taxi industry is one of the most gender-skewed professions in the world. The situation is slightly better when it comes to ride-hailing apps like Uber, but that comes with its own problems: women are paid less than men, platforms have been sued over safety, and working in the gig economy is precarious.