University of Cádiz

Early this morning, the Minister of Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, declared a state of emergency of national interest in the Community of Madrid and the province of Ávila due to the forest fires in Villa del Prado, San Martín de Valdeiglesias and Burgohondo. According to Carlos Novillo, the Regional Minister for the Environment, Agriculture and the Interior of the Community of Madrid, the fires were beyond the capacity of the fire services to extinguish and posed a serious threat to the population. The Madrid 112 Security and Emergency Agency has reported that, although the night-time firefighting efforts have been effective, the fires have still not been contained or brought under control. More than 10,000 people remain evacuated.

Data from the Copernicus European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) show that, as of 22 July, 119,458 hectares have been burnt in Spain. The average number of hectares burnt from 2006 to 2025 up to this date stands at 35,736 hectares. The fire in the Sierra Norte de Guadalajara, which has scorched more than 30,000 hectares and is still active, together with numerous fire fronts in other provinces and the fire in Los Gallardos (Almería), in which 13 people died, have caused the total area burnt to soar.

The wildfire in Los Gallardos (Almería), which broke out on Thursday evening, has so far claimed 13 lives. Initial investigations suggest that a fallen power line may have been the cause of the fire. The blaze has burnt more than 3,000 hectares and has left 1,400 people displaced.

An analysis based on Google Trends data collected between 2005 and 2025 showed that the proportion of menopause-related searches referring to commercial products and services increased by between 15 and 20 percentage points in the UK, Australia and the US. These findings suggest that people may increasingly be seeking non-clinical approaches to managing the menopause, not only for symptom relief but also for guidance, monitoring and support outside of clinical consultations. The study is published today in the journal JAMA Network Open.

A team has proposed an indicator known as the plastic particle footprint (PPF) to measure the environmental impact of microplastics and nanoplastics in products. In an article published in Science Advances, the authors apply this calculation to four everyday items and claim that calculating this footprint could “radically change the best material option”. For example, a polyester T-shirt and a cotton one have a similar carbon footprint, but the PPF of the former is higher than that of the cotton garment.

The 2025 wildfire season was the worst the European Union has seen in the last century. According to a report by the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS), managed by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC), more than one million hectares were burned last year. Some 43% of that figure was burned in the major fires that occurred in Spain and Portugal during the summer. The report also covers the rest of the European continent, the Middle East, and North Africa, resulting in a total of more than two million hectares of burned area.

A study based on models and data concludes that adverse health effects related to plastic emissions could more than double by 2040 if current practices do not change. The authors note that their model could not assess the potential impacts associated with many chemicals contained in plastics, nor with the microplastics and nanoplastics that form throughout their life cycle, due to a lack of data and “a serious lack of transparency regarding their composition.” The results are published in The Lancet Planetary Health. 

According to a study compiling data from 10,000 marine animal necropsies, 35% of birds, 12% of mammals, and 47% of turtles examined had ingested macroplastics, causing death in 1.6%, 0.7%, and 4.4% of these animals, respectively. The types of plastic that pose the greatest risk are rubber for birds, soft plastics and fishing debris for mammals, and hard and soft plastics for sea turtles, concludes this study published in PNAS.

After 10 days of meetings and beyond the deadline, representatives from more than 180 countries gathered at the UN headquarters in Geneva (Switzerland) have failed to agree on a global treaty against plastic pollution, the first legally binding one. This negotiation was, in principle, the last chance to reach an agreement, after the last meeting in Busan (South Korea) also ended without a treaty in December, two and a half years after negotiations began.

Four people have died in the fires that began last weekend on the Iberian Peninsula and have spread to different areas of Galicia, Castile and León, Andalusia, Castile-La Mancha, Extremadura and Madrid. The heatwave that continues to grip the country, strong gusts of wind and their changing direction, and the thermal drought are hampering firefighting efforts. The government declared on Tuesday a pre-emergency phase and thousands of people have had to be evacuated.