Tom Rivett-Carnac describes stubborn optimism as grit in the face of an unavoidable challenge, not cheerfulness, and the research supports the distinction: Maria Ojala found hope based on denial predicted less pro-environmental behaviour among Swedish teenagers, while constructive hope predicted more

The phrase has a stricter meaning than everyday optimism, and the stricter meaning is the one the evidence supports. In a later two-country study worry predicted climate-friendly behaviour better than hope did, and hope contributed mainly where worry was already present.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Sep 10, 2026

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Political Economy

The figure quoted as $7.4 trillion in annual fossil fuel subsidies is mostly not money changing hands. About $6.7 trillion of it is damage the IMF says goes uncharged, three-quarters of that from air pollution and climate, on a definition other agencies reject.

Explicit fossil fuel subsidies came to $725 billion in 2024. The figure usually quoted is ten times larger because the IMF counts uncharged environmental damage as a subsidy as well, a definition the OECD and the IEA reject. The damage is not what is in dispute. The total attached to it rests on a contested accounting choice, and the mortality estimates underneath it differ by more than a factor of two.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Sep 12, 2026

Flora and Fauna

Since 1955, William and Mary's Batten School and VIMS have run a Juvenile Finfish Trawl Survey in the Chesapeake Bay using a five-minute tow of a 20-foot net, and it now samples more than 1,200 sites every year to track how young fish populations shift decade to decade.

Since 1955, William & Mary's Batten School and VIMS have run the Juvenile Finfish Trawl Survey with a five-minute tow of a 20-foot net across the lower Chesapeake Bay — a deliberately unchanged method that now samples more than 1,200 sites a year and has captured seven decades of ecological change, from the blue catfish invasion to the 2026 rebound in juvenile blue crabs.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Sep 9, 2026

Terra Daily

A 91-year-old hiker known as Grey Beard has walked the entire Appalachian Trail end to end, reported as the oldest person to do it, PBS NewsHour reports — the full length rather than sections, at an age when most thru-hikers have long stopped

At 91, Dale Sanders walked every step of the 2,197-mile Appalachian Trail, proving that endurance isn't measured in youth but in relentless forward motion.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Sep 8, 2026

Terra Daily

Virginia held three rounds of public input between March 2025 and January 2026 before publishing its South Van Dorn Street safety recommendations in July 2026.

Virginia's July 2026 safety report on South Van Dorn Street took ten months of public meetings to produce — three rounds of input that will shape a 2.5-mile suburban arterial carrying up to 37,000 vehicles a day.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Sep 7, 2026

Flora and Fauna

Sea lamprey control has quietly become an integrated pest-management system: lampricides, physical barriers, pheromone-baited traps and sterile-male releases, refined over decades of adaptive trials against a parasite that filter-feeds for years as larvae before turning on native fish.

Sea lamprey control on the Great Lakes and Lake Champlain now combines four tools — lampricides, barriers, pheromone traps, and sterile-male releases — refined over seven decades to hold a jawless Atlantic parasite that filter-feeds for years as a larva before turning on native fish.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Sep 7, 2026

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Terra Daily

Earth science, climate impacts, ecosystems, agriculture, forests, and the broad environmental changes shaping life on a changing planet.

Flora and Fauna

In 1965, a bottlenose dolphin named Peter was taught to mimic English words in a flooded Caribbean house where researcher Margaret Howe Lovatt lived waist-deep in seawater with him for 10 weeks, and the dolphin learned to blow air through his blowhole to shape recognisable versions of 'hello' and 'ball'.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team

Climate Science

How does a rodent felling saplings across a headwater stream raise a valley's water table by a metre or more and store measurably more carbon in the wet sediment behind its dams than the trees it cut down?

By Terra Daily Editorial Team

Flora and Fauna

When crews broke ground on a Mojave solar plant in California’s Ivanpah Valley, the permit allowed 38 adult desert tortoises to be moved — biologists then collected 166, and across the valley Fish and Wildlife would eventually release more than 9,100 into a fenced translocation site.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team

Flora and Fauna

On Hutchinson Island, Florida, a nuclear plant's intake canal delivered 921 sea turtles to the screens in a single year — 557 of them green turtles — and crews put 97.7 per cent back in the Atlantic alive, as they have with more than 20,000 turtles since 1976.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team

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Shake and Blow

Earthquakes, volcanoes, severe weather, fire, tectonics, disaster response, and the natural hazards reshaping communities and landscapes.

Disaster Management

Zaporizhzhia accident would impact neighbouring countries: Ukraine

By Terra Daily Editorial Team

Weather Report

Year so far the hottest in US history

By Terra Daily Editorial Team

Disaster Management

'Worse than war': trauma of Libya flood haunts survivors

By Terra Daily Editorial Team

Weather Report

World sees record August heat for second year running

By Terra Daily Editorial Team

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Water World

Oceans, rivers, polar ice, water systems, marine life, and the environmental changes affecting the planet's blue and frozen regions.

Water World

Nearly 11,000 acres along the Mimbres River in southwestern New Mexico became a new Wildlife Management Area this month, carrying pre-1907 water rights and critical habitat for the yellow-billed cuckoo and Chiricahua leopard frog after Trust for Public Land closed the ranch with the state.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team

Iron and Ice

Jupiter is so massive that its shared centre of gravity with the Sun lies just outside the Sun’s surface — making it the only planet whose individual barycentre with the Sun falls beyond the Sun itself, and the largest contributor to the star’s planetary wobble.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team

Water World

On Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, after two dams came down on the Elwha River, average Chinook returns rose from 2,827 fish a year to 4,734 — and the share taken for hatchery breeding fell from 53 per cent to 31 per cent as more Chinook were left to spawn in the restored channel

By Terra Daily Editorial Team

Iron and Ice

Saturn's moon Titan is the only place beyond Earth where a person could stand outside without a pressure suit — its atmosphere is 50 per cent thicker than ours and blocks even the galactic cosmic rays that would make Mars lethal over time

By Terra Daily Editorial Team

About Terra Daily

News about planet Earth.

Terra Daily is an independent publication covering planet Earth, natural hazards, water systems, ecosystems, climate impacts, and the science behind life on a changing planet. The site pairs a deep archive with current reporting on the research, communities, policy shifts, and environmental events shaping Earth's living and physical systems. We employ modern AI technologies to support our editorial workflows; every published piece is editorially directed and reviewed.

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