NEWS: 2026 Has Arrived
Earth in 2025: Where Climate Became Daily Life
By the end of 2025, climate change was no longer framed as a future risk. It had become a daily condition shaping how people live, work, and move across landscapes. Global temperatures hovered around the 1.5°C threshold, not as an abstract benchmark but as lived experience. Prolonged heatwaves across South Asia and the Middle East disrupted school calendars, agricultural labour, and urban life. In Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan, the burden fell hardest on those working outdoors and those living in informal or marginal settlements, where cooling, water, and shelter are limited.
The tenth anniversary of the Paris Agreement marked a quiet shift. The 1.5°C target, once a line not to be crossed, increasingly functioned as a reference point for what had already been lost. For many communities, adaptation was no longer a policy debate but a household calculation.
Natural systems showed similar strain. Rivers across the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Meghna basins became less predictable, with intense floods followed by extended dry periods. Forests were fragmented by roads, tourism, and monoculture plantations. Coastal and marine ecosystems faced rising temperatures, salinity intrusion, and declining fish stocks. Biodiversity loss appeared not as collapse, but as absence. Fewer pollinators. Thinner catches. Familiar species quietly disappearing.
Yet 2025 also reminded us how much remains unseen. Scientists documented thousands of new species, from deep-sea corals to fungi with untapped ecological potential. Life persisted in overlooked corners, adapting even as pressure mounted.
"For ETHNOMAD, this is not background context.
It is the ground we work on."
Across Rajasthan, India, our fieldwork with tribal communities living inside and alongside conservation areas shows how climate stress, conservation policy, and livelihood loss intersect. Pastoralists, forest dwellers, and fishing communities are not peripheral to environmental protection. They are often its most experienced stewards, even as they are pushed to the margins.
Looking into 2026, this focus expands. ETHNOMAD projects will trace climate impacts and cultural resilience across a wider arc, from Afghanistan and India through Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, and onward to Australia. Our work will continue to document how people negotiate heat, water scarcity, conservation boundaries, and displacement, not as case studies, but as lived realities.
Global forums like COP30 have begun to acknowledge loss and damage. New monitoring tools and early-warning systems may improve forecasts. But the essential story remains human.
2026 will not reverse climate change. What it can reveal is how cultures endure under pressure, how knowledge persists in constrained spaces, and what is lost when people are excluded from decisions about the land they have long protected.
That is the work ETHNOMAD continues to do: careful documentation, long listening, and telling the stories that policy summaries leave out.
To go deeper into how climate change is felt on the ground, through land, memory, and movement, read:
"When the Earth Moves Us."
