Floating Futures
Alessandro Gandolfi

Imagine a city where suburbs float on water. Floating homes already exist in coastal communities in places like the Philippines and Vietnam. Now, high-income nations facing dangerous sea-level rise are looking to those examples.

Among them is the Netherlands, where over a quarter of the land is below sea level and around two-thirds of it is at risk of flooding.

This photograph shows floating houses in the IJburg district at the edge of Amsterdam, the largest Dutch city. The image comes from , a new series by photojournalist Alessandro Gandolfi.

The affluent, relatively high-density IJburg community comprises 158 waterside homes, 55 of which are floating. Residents are connected by bridges and roads, and most houses have a boat outside instead of a car.

Simply raising the dykes is no longer enough against the rising waters, Gandolfi writes in his photo essay. “Experts warn that mastering water’s whims is an illusion. The answer, they say, lies in a shift of mindset – the philosophy of meebewegen: not fighting against water, but learning to live with it.”

The homes at IJburg aren’t houseboats or retrofitted vessels like the ones lining Amsterdam’s canals, but architect-designed homes intended to encourage community living. They are built to be sustainable, with rooftop solar panels and careful management of sewage and other waste.

But their biggest difference from other houses will always lie below, in their watery foundations.

This unusual photograph, shot under ultraviolet light with a 13-second exposure, shows some of the damage caused on land by fishing out at sea.

Gaurav Patil’s image of a fishing net that has been carried by ocean currents and become tangled in a mangrove tree on the shore of Nandgaon village, south of Mumbai, India, has won the overall prize in the 2026 . The competition is organised by US non-profit organisation Mangrove Action Project to raise awareness of the precarious position of the world’s mangrove forests.

Mangroves less than 1 per cent of all tropical forests, but provide crucial habitat for wildlife and store up to 10 times more carbon than the same area of inland forest. Despite better recent news after decades of decline, more than half of mangrove ecosystems are to be at .

Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of lost, abandoned and discarded fishing gear litter the oceans, carried around the globe by currents and eventually getting caught up or breaking down into microplastics. This gear can severely damage mangrove ecosystems, entangling marine life and choking mangrove trees.

“This photographer has put life into a subject that normally looks dull but is deeply important for conservation. Ghost nets are a real problem,” said judge Dhritiman Mukherjee in an announcement about the prize.

Don’t treat your pets for parasites such as ticks and fleas unless they actually need treating. We can’t be sure that these treatments are safe for you and your family, and there is growing evidence that they pose a danger to wildlife.

So says a by the Environment and Climate Change Committee of the UK’s House of Lords. It is calling for the sale of these treatments to be restricted, so people can only buy them after consultation with a vet, pharmacist or qualified pet shop staff.

The main issue is that there is no rigorous assessment of pet treatments before they are approved, the report says. It has simply been assumed by national and international regulators that they are safe, but this assumption is turning out to be wrong.

In particular, at least two potent pesticides found in tick and flea treatments are getting into UK rivers at levels high enough to affect wildlife. These pesticides can break down into other substances that are even more harmful.

“There is also worryingly insufficient evidence to assess whether or not [pet parasite medicines] are harmful to human health,” says the report.

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It also says regulators aren’t sufficiently independent. Both UK and international regulators “appear to be too influenced by and beholden to the views of the industry”, it states.

While the report focuses on the UK, the same tick and flea treatments are sold in many countries. “This is a worldwide issue,” says at Imperial College London, one of the experts who gave evidence to the committee.

“There’s been a historical assumption that any veterinary medicine used in non-food animals – cats and dogs, companion animals – is associated with negligible environmental risk,” she says. “Effectively, they have no meaningful environmental risk assessment.”

But recent research shows they do pose a risk, says Perkins. “It’s really opened up a Pandora’s box, because we have dozens of these products that have been approved based on this assumption that we now know is not scientifically valid.”

For instance, two common pesticides found in products such as spot-on flea treatments are fipronil, a broad-spectrum insecticide, and imidacloprid, a neonicotinoid. “They’re incredibly potent at extremely low levels,” says Perkins.

Both pesticides used to be used on farms until they were banned a few years ago. But they have continued to be found in rivers. In fact, with the development of more sensitive tests, they are turning up “pretty much everywhere in waterways”, says Perkins.

Initially, it was thought this was a legacy of their use by farmers, but work by Perkins and others suggests parasite medications are now the main source of these pesticides in waterways. In many cases, levels are high enough to harm invertebrates such as mayflies, dragonflies and caddisflies, with knock-on effects on the fish and birds that feed on them.

We don’t know how big a problem this is, says the report. “The true scale of environmental harm resulting from pet parasite medications is not known.”

How are the pesticides getting into rivers? Once they are applied to pets, they end up all over the home, says Perkins. When people bathe their pets or wash pet bedding, they can end up in wastewater.

Product packaging currently recommends that dogs are not bathed for four days after treatment, but this needs to be extended to 28 days, the report recommends.

Another major source of the pesticides in water is hand-washing, says Perkins. “We detected [pesticides] in the wash-off even before we asked people to stroke their pets, so they’re just constantly on the hands of pet owners.”

Products containing fipronil and imidacloprid are now being replaced by ones containing isoxazolines, typically sold in the form of chewable tablets. Isoxazolines are less water-soluble but can bind to sediments and accumulate in soils and sewage sludge. They might be ending up in fields when sewage sludge is sprayed as fertiliser and harming pollinators.

“There has not been much work done to date to assess this,” says the report.

Shed dog fur is yet another way these chemicals can end up in the environment. The report says contaminated fur has been found in bird nests.

In light of these findings, the use of pet parasite medications should be minimised until there is independent research clarifying their risks, says the report. At present, manufacturers of parasite treatments are promoting the idea that routine treatment for parasites is required, and encouraging pet owners to get them via monthly subscriptions. “However, the benefits of routine, and certainly monthly, pet parasite medicine usage are not supported by scientific evidence.”

It is an excellent report, says Perkins, but she hoped it would go further and recommend making these products prescription-only. Some wildlife groups, meanwhile, want .

Yet another reason for restricting their use is to slow the development of resistance, says Perkins. She sees a lot of animals treated with old spot-on treatments containing fipronil that still have fleas. “We need effective parasite treatments, and we need to make sure we preserve their efficacy,” she says.

Parts of the UK have seen zero rainfall for the entire month of July for the first time in their history, underscoring the scale and severity of the ongoing drought gripping the country.

The Met Office, the UK’s national weather service, said July’s weather had been “truly exceptional”, with both England and Wales enduring their driest July in 190 years, coupled with extreme heat and almost unbroken sunshine. Rainfall across southern England averaged just 1.5 mm for July 2026, just 2 per cent of the 1991-2020 average, while mean temperatures were 3.2°C above average for the time of year.

At London’s Kew Gardens, which hosts a Met Office weather station, there has been no measurable rainfall at all in July, the first time that has happened at the site since records began in 1871.

Meanwhile, Heathrow Airport in London has seen 42 consecutive days and counting without any rain, a new record for the site, which has been monitored since 1948.

And in Stratfield Mortimer, a village outside the city of Reading, zero rainfall was recorded in July for the first time in its history. The nearby market town of Wokingham recorded just 0.1 millimetres of rainfall over the same period, according to data released by the University of Reading.

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“Some parts of the Reading area remained without measurable rainfall throughout the calendar month, the only time this has happened since continuous local rainfall records began in 1858, almost 170 years ago,” said at the University of Reading in a statement.

The story is similar across southern England, with at least 20 Met Office weather stations seeing zero rainfall for July for the first time in their recorded history, according to provisional data seen by Âé¶čŽ«Ăœ. They include stations in Lincolnshire, Dorset, Kent, Greater London, Essex, Monmouthshire, Surrey, the Isle of Wight, East Sussex, Hereford & Worcester and Hampshire.

In north London, software engineer has been operating a private weather station since 2009 near Hampstead Heath. He says July 2026 was the first calendar month without any measurable rain in the local area, based on both his own 17-year time series and Met Office records for the area dating back to 1871.

More than half of England and all of Wales is now officially in drought, causing landscapes to turn yellow, wildfires to burn and farmers to warn of looming crop shortages. In Europe, the prolonged hot, dry weather has sparked huge wildfires and driven river levels to historic lows. Low river levels on the Danube have forced operators to shut down nuclear power reactors in Hungary and Romania, while in Germany low water levels on the Rhine have curtailed shipping.

But even though rain will bring relief, it also carries risks. , also at the University of Reading, says there is now a “really substantial” risk of severe flash flooding in the UK, when rain finally falls on sun-baked soils. “Most of the soils are crusted; reservoirs are stressed,” he says. “It’s not a day or two of rainfall that will solve it all. It might actually pose the greatest hazard of them all.”