This Global News explainer looks at carbon pricing, one of the most debated tools for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. It sets out the basic idea: put a price on carbon pollution so that polluters pay for the damage instead of passing it on to everyone else for free.
What the video covers
Why some governments treat a carbon "tax" as a way to make polluters pay
The main objection: that the money is just revenue and isn't spent on climate action
What the research says about whether carbon prices actually reduce emissions
The evidence
Carbon pricing is one of the most studied climate policies. British Columbia introduced a revenue-neutral carbon tax in 2008, and studies of it found emissions fell with little measurable harm to the province's economy. Carbon pricing now covers roughly a quarter of global emissions. The political debate is real (Canada dropped its consumer carbon price in 2025 but kept pricing for large industrial emitters), but economists broadly agree that putting a price on pollution is one of the cheapest ways to cut it.
In this BBC film, Sir David Attenborough looks at the extinction crisis: around a million species are at risk of extinction. He explains why the loss of nature isn't just a wildlife problem but a threat to people too.
What the video covers
The scale of biodiversity loss, with a million species at risk
Threats to food and water security as ecosystems break down
How losing nature undermines our ability to control the climate
Why destroying habitats raises the risk of new pandemic diseases
The evidence
The "one million species" figure comes from the 2019 global assessment by IPBES, the intergovernmental science panel on biodiversity. It found that nature is declining faster than at any time in human history, driven mainly by land and sea use, overexploitation, climate change, pollution and invasive species. Healthy ecosystems pollinate crops, purify water and store huge amounts of carbon in forests, soils and oceans. When wildlife habitats are destroyed and people and animals come into closer contact, diseases are more likely to jump from animals to humans.
This short NASA Goddard visualization shows how Earth's surface temperature has changed since modern record-keeping began in 1880. Each frame compares temperatures with the 1951–1980 average, so warming shows up as a steady spread of warmer-than-normal colours across the globe.
What the video shows
NASA's analysis that 2017 was the second-warmest year on record at the time, about 0.90 °C above the 1951–1980 average
That 2017 was the third year in a row more than 1 °C above late-1800s levels
How the record is built: about 6,300 weather stations, ship- and buoy-based sea-surface measurements, and Antarctic research stations
Since this video was made
The trend it shows has continued. Every year since 2015 has been warmer than any year before it, and 2024 became the warmest year on record, about 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels. Independent groups, including NASA, NOAA, the UK Met Office, Berkeley Earth and Japan's Meteorological Agency, use different methods and reach the same result, which is strong evidence that the warming is real and not an artifact of how the data are processed.
This 36-second animation from Windy.com shows temperature anomalies for every country from 1880 to 2017, based on NASA's GISTEMP dataset. It is one of the quickest ways to see that warming is happening almost everywhere, not just in a few places.
Why anomalies matter
A temperature anomaly is how much warmer or cooler a place is than its own long-term average, not its actual temperature
Anomalies let scientists compare hot and cold regions fairly and track change over time
They are the standard measure used to track global warming
The evidence
The animation makes two well-established findings easy to see. Warming is global: by the end of the record nearly every country is warmer than its historical average. Warming is also uneven: land warms faster than the oceans, and the Arctic is warming several times faster than the planet as a whole. That uneven pattern is why a cold winter in one place doesn't contradict a warming world, a common talking point in climate denial.
This explainer from India's Down To Earth magazine covers a sobering milestone: 2024 was the first calendar year in which global temperatures exceeded 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels, the limit set in the Paris Agreement. It draws on a United Nations Environment Programme report urging the world to plan for an "overshoot" of that limit.
What the video covers
Why breaching 1.5 °C in the coming years is now considered unavoidable
The "overshoot, peak and decline" pathway, compared to a fever
Keeping the peak below 2 °C, and as short as possible
Bringing temperatures back down through net-zero emissions, cutting methane, and removing carbon from the atmosphere
Current policies, which point to around 2.6 °C of warming by 2100
An important detail
The Paris limit refers to long-term average warming over about 20 years, not a single year. So one year above 1.5 °C doesn't mean the goal has formally been missed, but it shows how close we are. Every tenth of a degree matters: limiting the peak and shortening the overshoot means less extreme heat, sea-level rise and damage to ecosystems. It is a reason for urgent action, not despair.
This short GOOD Magazine animation looks at which cities are most at risk from climate change, and at a surprising link between the most vulnerable cities and the most resilient ones. It frames climate change as a human displacement problem as well as an environmental one.
What the video covers
A projection that global warming could create 150 million "climate refugees" over 40 years
The five cities it identifies as most at risk
How those cities relate to the world's most resilient cities
The evidence
Estimates of climate migration vary widely because they depend on emissions, adaptation and how "climate refugee" is defined. The World Bank's Groundswell report projected that up to 216 million people could be forced to move within their own countries by 2050 if strong action isn't taken. Weather-related disasters already displace tens of millions of people each year. Low-lying coastal cities face rising seas and storm surge, while hot, water-stressed cities face extreme heat and drought. The people with the fewest resources to adapt are usually hit hardest.
Recorded at the TED Countdown Summit in Nairobi in June 2025, this talk has Al Gore taking stock of climate action a decade after the Paris Agreement. He challenges “climate realism,” a fossil fuel industry narrative claiming energy transitions are always slow and that the world should focus on adapting rather than cutting emissions.
What it covers
Why Gore calls “climate realism” a myth
Falling renewable energy costs and rapid growth in solar, wind and electric vehicles
Projections of up to two billion climate refugees by 2050
Why he dismisses carbon capture as a distraction
Barriers to clean energy investment in developing countries
Why it matters
The talk shows how climate denial has shifted from rejecting the science to questioning whether action is practical. Gore closes on a hopeful note, arguing that the tools to solve the crisis already exist and that political will is a renewable resource.
