The UK Space Agency and space startup Vast just signed an agreement to send Paralympic sprinter and below-knee amputee John McFall into orbit as early as 2027. Most coverage framed it as a victory for inclusion. As a space health researcher, I think something far more interesting happened.

For 70 years, spaceflight has assumed a rigid archetype: a healthy white man with a military background. The assumption was that physical uniformity minimised risk. As we prepare for Mars, the evidence increasingly suggests the opposite.

Star Trek understood this decades ago: exploration rewards difference. The further you travel into uncertainty, the more kinds of human experience you need. It debuted in 1966 with a Black female communications officer, a Japanese helmsman, a Russian navigator, a biracial Vulcan, and a captain who made mistakes and felt his humanity down to the last drop.

What strikes me now as a scientist is not how idealistic that vision was, but how practical. Despite decades of spaceflight, we still cannot reliably predict how one person’s health will change in space. Consider Mars 500, a 520-day simulated isolation mission between 2007 and 2011 where six male crew members in identical conditions diverged dramatically in psychological resilience. Two participants remained stable; three developed severe sleep disturbances; and one suffered persistent depression.

Additionally, around 17% of astronauts experience significant physical deterioration in spaceflight despite following identical exercise regimes. Disability does not necessarily introduce uncertainty into spaceflight; uncertainty is already the norm.

Who performs best in space?

Sometimes those excluded perform better. In 1961, several female pilots outperformed the men of Mercury 7 programme, the first US astronauts. Jerrie Cobb scored in the top 2% of all candidates ever assessed by Nasa. Several of the women outperformed the men on cardiovascular endurance. And the late Wally Funk remained in an isolation tank for over ten hours while the male Mercury astronaut record was just over three. But the women never flew. Nasa insisted on military jet pilot experience as an entry requirement, while simultaneously barring women from flying military jets.

About a decade earlier, Nasa recruited eleven deaf men to study motion sickness, a condition affecting 60 to 80% of astronauts in their first days of weightlessness. Motion sickness happens when conflicting inner-ear signals cause nausea and disorientation severe enough to impair performance. Most of the eleven men had lost vestibular function (the inner-ear balance system) following childhood meningitis. In rotating rooms and on rough seas, as experienced test pilots were sick around them, the deaf participants played cards. The trait that excluded them from military careers made them unusually tolerant of the environments that undid everyone else.

Researchers are finally investigating this issue: like asking whether amputees, who carry less mass and respond differently to microgravity, offer advantages in space. People with lower-limb mobility impairments or vascular differences may be naturally adapted to the headward fluid shifts of weightlessness that cause brain swelling and vision changes in around 70% of astronauts.

When a cooling leak filled Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano’s helmet with water during a 2013 spacewalk, it left him nearly blind and deaf to mission control. He survived by navigating back to the airlock using touch alone. On Mars where dust storms reduce vision to near-zero, blind people would have an advantage here as they are dependent on other senses.

There is no perfect astronaut

The myth of the perfect astronaut has always been just that – a myth. Chuck Yeager, celebrated as the gold standard of what an astronaut should be, broke two ribs the night before he broke the sound barrier in 1947. He concealed the injury, improvised a way to seal his cockpit door using a broom handle, and flew anyway. The right stuff was never about physical perfection. It was about adaptation.

In 1985, Soviet cosmonauts Vladimir Dzhanibekov and Viktor Savinykh manually docked with the dead and uncontrolled Salyut 7 station and spent a week manually rewiring it in freezing pitch-black conditions to bring it back to life. For many people in the disability community, navigating broken infrastructure, sensory issues and isolation is an everyday reality. Disabled people spend their lives adapting to environments designed for somebody else. That makes us experts at navigating the unknown.

The real “right stuff” is interdependence: being creative together with your crew when a plan fails. When Apollo 13’s oxygen tank exploded in 1970, the crew came home not because of perfect engineering, but because people depended on each other under pressure. A Mars mission, years from home and communication delays of 20 minutes each way, will demand it. Astronauts will face problems nobody could anticipate, because that is the nature of exploration.

Disability is an extreme environment

Every person who lives long enough will experience disability at some point. It is my normal. In my research career, I have improvised creative solutions to inaccessible equipment, and learned to pace my energy carefully. Even getting into the building or having access to a bathroom could be my engineering problem for the day.

I’ve been told using a mobility aid is unprofessional and for years, even doctors dismissed my symptoms. When they finally had an answer, it came with a caveat: there is no cure and no treatment pathway. The medical system had reached its limit. I had not. These experiences forced me to monitor my own health, adapt and advocate for myself. On a Mars mission, millions of miles from the nearest specialist, every astronaut will need exactly that skill.

Perhaps the most undervalued asset the disability community brings to space is its relationship with joy. Disabled people do not survive extreme environments through stoicism alone. They survive through humour, putting flowers on their wheelchairs (like mine), and deeply loving communities. On a three-year Mars mission, that may be the most critical thing of all.

Design can be better too. Deaf pilot Sheila Xu described in June 2026 at the United Nations how she designed a colour-changing light signal system to use instead of auditory cues during parabolic flights, aircraft that fly a steep arc to produce brief periods of weightlessness, used in astronaut training. It improved safety for everyone on board, deaf or not, when engine roar made verbal commands impossible. This is the “curb cut effect”: solve for the margins, and you make the system better for everyone.

The good news is we are seeing a paradigm shift. In 2021, Hayley Arceneaux spent three days in orbit on SpaceX’s Inspiration4, becoming the first person with a prosthetic bone to reach space. In 2025, ESA engineer Michaela Benthaus became the first wheelchair user on a suborbital commercial flight. McFall’s selection marks the first time a major space agency has cleared a disabled astronaut for long-duration scientific work in orbit.

Progress does not come from excluding each other, but from discovering what becomes possible when the universe’s criteria finally replace our own.

The goal, then, should not be simply to send one disabled astronaut to space and call it progress. It is to involve disabled thinkers, engineers, and designers at every stage of mission planning. The systems they would help build would be demonstrably better for it.

Adaptation, more than perfection, may turn out to be what matters most.

Zoe Elisabeth Swann Baillie, PhD is supported by funding from the Leverhulme Trust via the Leverhulme Centre for Humanity and Space.

Mountain snow and meltwater from glaciers in the Himalayas determine how much water is available for drinking, farming and hydropower for millions of people in India, Pakistan, Nepal, China and Afghanistan.

This is especially important during the spring and early summer crop-growing season when meltwater helps sustain the flow of rivers and provides the region with a vital buffer against the worst impacts of a dry season or drought. Because many of these rivers cross national borders, changes in water supply can also heighten regional tensions when resources are scarce.

Meltwater from snow is one of the pillars of survival – but it’s proved difficult in the past to get accurate measurements across this challenging terrain.

So measuring where and how much snow falls is essential. My team’s new research gives improved estimates of snowfall across the west-central Himalayas. Results show that in just one winter, the previous best available snowfall analyses underestimated total seasonal snowfall by 37% over Lake Hampta area in Himachal Pradesh. By including new snowfall observations, we reduced that error dramatically.

Why snowfall predictions have been wrong

Because most instruments were originally designed to measure rain over very small areas, rather than snowfall spread across large areas, most calculations of snowfall levels have historically been inaccurate. A rain gauge around the size of a dinner plate was used in the past – too small for the purpose and therefore missing large amounts of snow. These small devices were particularly bad at catching snow during strong winds. As a result, mountain water resources are often misunderstood and have been underestimated by 50–100% over the years.

To change this, we developed a new way to measure snowfall using commercially available water-pressure sensors deployed on the lakebeds. The team installed these instruments at three lakes – Ghepan and Hampta in the western Himalayas, and Mugu in Nepal. Unlike conventional instruments, these sense the whole lake surface – an area of thousands to billions of square metres – to measure the timing and intensity of snowfall. These use water pressure in lakes to directly measure the mass (water content) of accumulating snow, providing an accurate and unbiased estimate of snowfall. This is based on Archimedes principle of displacement: as snow accumulates on a frozen lake, it changes the water pressure beneath.

Snowfall from these devices was analysed and used to refine physical processes in a weather model. This is the same model which provides weather predictions over the UK but is customised for mountainous regions. The results show the model can generally reproduce both when the snow falls and how much accumulates, and is particularly good at representing extreme snowfall events. We now have new insights into where and when snow falls across the region at much finer detail than previous estimates, making mountain water resources more predictable. In contrast, a snowfall map based on previous analysis shows a much more uniform distribution and considerably less snowfall.

Planning for water shortages

This information could help regional communities adapt and improve water planning, help manage reservoirs and protect vulnerable infrastructure from snow-related hazards. It could also support engineering interventions such as snow harvesting in areas that receive abundant snowfall, for example, by artificially storing meltwater in community-managed reservoirs and into ice stupas (an artificial glacier) designed to gradually release water during the growing season.

An understanding of when snow falls will be crucial for predicting when it will melt and how much water will flow into rivers and help communities and policymakers better prepare for future water shortages.

The Himalayan ice fields are important because they are the largest permanent ice-cover outside of the polar regions and contain some of the largest reservoirs of freshwater on earth.

With this region starting to see more water shortages it’s time to start reassessing reliance on mountain water supplies. But how much water the mountains provide, and how it will change, remain remarkably uncertain.

Good measurements of snowfall are now more important than ever for predicting the future of water resources, which until now have been lacking. For example, a single long-running active weather station above 4,000 metres has provided one of the few continuous snowfall records across the vast 566,000 square kilometres of Himalayan headwaters that feed the Brahmaputra, Indus and Ganges river basins.

This work is also deeply personal for me. I grew up in a city just 50 kilometres from the outer Himalayas. On family holidays, I was captivated by the thriving beauty of pines and junipers against the backdrop of the Himalayas, while learning that mountains and rivers are more than just landscapes. Those experiences fostered a lasting connection to the region, and I continue to return to the mountains whenever I can.

Water is a precious commodity upon which every society depends, and shortages can cause untold misery.

With better snowfall estimates, we are already beginning to understand how to make the future of the mountain eco-system more predictable, and help people cope.

Siddharth Gumber receives funding from the National Environmental Research Council (NERC), The Big Thaw project (NE/X005267/1).

Young people in low- and middle-income countries appear generally more optimistic about how AI can enhance their work prospects and social lives than their western peers, according to our new survey of people in ten countries in Africa and South Asia.

While debates in higher-income countries often focus on job losses, misinformation and mental health risks, many of the 1,864 young adults we surveyed (all aged 18-35) placed more emphasis on the opportunities artificial intelligence tools present for them. In particular, nearly 80% of our participants expect AI to deliver improved education and learning for them.

Until now, there has been little evidence of how young people in middle- and low-income countries use AI, and how they feel about this technology – for good and bad. The 2026 youth AI survey – run by global charity Restless Development and academics from the universities of Makerere in Uganda and Cambridge in the UK – seeks to correct this imbalance.

It comes immediately after the UN Independent International Scientific Panel released its preliminary report on AI. Commenting on the need for more science about AI’s use around the world, the UN’s secretary general, António Guterres, admitted: “The world cannot govern what it cannot understand.”

Our responses were collected in Angola, Kenya, India, Nepal, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe – with the UK included for comparison. Two-thirds of respondents said they use AI every day, with Meta AI the most common tool, followed by Claude.

The extent of AI use is striking given the obstacles many young people encounter. In every African country surveyed except Nigeria, more than half said high data costs limit their access. Weak internet connections and a lack of digital skills were also raised, with many relying on basic-feature phones. By contrast, UK participants said ethical concerns played a stronger role in limiting their AI usage.

AI work opportunities

While few respondents (14%) said they earn income directly from AI tools yet, half expected AI to improve their employment and economic opportunities within the next five years.

Currently, AI’s main work-related uses among our respondents are learning new skills and job searches. In almost every lower-income country, young people held broadly positive attitudes about AI’s future role in their working lives – although many (32%-50% per country) expressed concerned about its impact on their future income.

How will your income be affected by AI?

Among those from lower-income countries, more than seven in ten thought AI would bring them better education and learning opportunities in the near future. A 28-year-old self-employed man in Nepal commented: “AI has the potential to empower young people in developing countries like Nepal by improving access to knowledge, digital skills, and economic opportunities.”

Our sentiment analysis found respondents to be most positive in Tanzania and Zambia, with young women there even more upbeat than young men. In the UK, young men diverged from their international peers in feeling more negative towards AI and work.

Biggest AI concerns

Some respondents described AI tools as “Americanised”, built around western norms and unable to grasp local nuance. They worried this could lead to their languages being further marginalised.

“These AI tools are fed major languages that are spoken worldwide, unlike Shona,” said a 25-year-old student in urban Zimbabwe. Shona is spoken by around 14 million people mainly in southern Africa, but is severely underserved by AI and other technology tools.

A Ugandan respondent was similarly critical about provision for her native language, Luganda – the country’s most widely spoken Indigenous language. “AI barely knows the spellings, grammar and how to interpret sentences. It’s not even familiar with our culture at all, which increases mistakes when we get to things concerning our own world.”

What most concerns you about AI?

Despite the widespread belief that AI would improve education and training, some held strong reservations. A 21-year-old female student in rural Uganda said: “Slowly by slowly, AI is making us dumb. We can no longer think for ourselves.”

The more often these young people use AI, the more worried they appear to be about it. The biggest concerns highlighted by daily users were around who owns their data and the power of AI companies.

Concern about AI’s environmental impact and the welfare of AI workers followed a similar pattern of higher usage co-existing with higher concern. Mental health is the only domain where non-users worry slightly more than daily users.

Gender differences

Significantly more young men (38%) than women (23%) reported having “a lot” of AI knowledge. This probably reflects a combination of diverging gender self-confidence, which tends to emerge from school age, and different levels of AI use. “AI is scary but helpful too,” said one female homemaker in urban Nepal.

Almost twice as many men than women use AI to search for work (33% vs. 17%). This difference is probably rooted in gendered access to data and technology, as well as differing social roles – such as the tendency for women to do more care work.

What have you used AI for in the past month?

In most of the ten lower-income countries surveyed, young women expressed greater concern about AI than men – with their biggest concern being over who owns their data. In the UK, 68% of young women were strongly concerned about data ownership, compared with 29% of men.

What young people want from AI

Many of our participants stressed the need for cheaper data and internet connections that work well. But they also want AI tools that fit their lives and culture – and speak their language. Until then, most recognise that talk of AI “leapfrogging” traditional stages of economic and social development is just that – talk.

Some efforts to make AI more inclusive and relevant for lower-income countries are underway. These include initiatives for “frugal AI”, as well as regional collaborations such as Masakhane for African languages and QuechuaBase in Peru.

How can AI be made safer?

Most of our participants framed AI safety as much more of a governance problem than a technical one. Many countries are establishing new AI policies, shaped in part by global forums such as the UN-led AI for Good summits. Overwhelmingly, our respondents agreed that governments, not tech companies, should be setting the rules when it comes to AI regulation and privacy protection.

Anna Barford receives funding from UKRI. She has previously been funded by the British Academy, Leverhulme Trust, ESRC, the Asian Development Bank, the Mastercard Foundation, and a philanthropic gift to the University from Unilever. She is a co-director of the Business Fights Poverty Institute and does consultancy work for the International Labour Organization.

Anthony Mugeere works as a Research Fellow for the Advocates Coalition for Development, Uganda's leading thinktank specialising in advocacy and analysis on climate change. He has received funding from the British Academy and the Mastercard Foundation to conduct research on climate change and young people.

Giulia Occhini does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

A fossil mammal tooth smaller than a grain of rice does not announce itself loudly. It must be hard won from sediment and stone. Then, under a microscope, it reveals itself – no longer just a speck of blackness but a surface of cusps, ridges and worn edges.

It is a small object, easily missed. Yet five such teeth from northern Alaska, belonging to three newly discovered species of long-extinct rodent-like mammals, hold an unexpectedly large history: of polar environments, shifting continents, winter darkness – and of mammals moving through this world that was colder, stranger and more connected than we once imagined.

The fossil mammal teeth at the centre of my new study with US colleagues come from the Late Cretaceous Prince Creek Formation, around 73 million years ago. At that time, northern Alaska’s palaeolatitude was roughly 80-85°N (10-15° closer to the north pole than it is today).

Our discovery shows the Arctic was not simply a cold, lifeless edge of the Cretaceous world, but a place where mammals adapted, diversified, migrated and originated. It raises deeper questions about what it means for a species to be native to a place whose landscapes, climates and inhabitants are forever changing.

The Arctic is not an empty landscape now, and nor was it in the deep past. It was a distinctive and demanding biome, with months of winter darkness, freezing temperatures and strong seasonality.

Rivers crossed this landscape. Plants grew through the long light of summer. Dinosaurs lived and thrived there, and evidence suggests they reared their young in the Arctic. There was also a diversity of birds, fish and mammals: tenacious denizens of the polar dark.

The teeth we found

Finding miniscule fossil mammals is not the kind of palaeontology that begins with a spectacular skeleton weathering from a cliff. It begins with bulk sediment. Bags and buckets of it.

The material is dug out, washed, sieved through fine screens, dried, then meticulously sorted grain by grain beneath a microscope.

Mammalian palaeontology often depends on fragments: a tooth cusp, a root, a worn edge of enamel. It asks for patience more than drama. The field site may be remote, the landscape vast, but the discovery happens at the scale of a fingertip. It is an act of attention.

The five teeth described in our new study are multituberculates: a group of rodent-like mammals that lived alongside dinosaurs. They are the longest-lived mammal group to date, with a history spanning well over 100 million years. Our own species Homo sapiens, by comparison, is only a few hundred thousand years old.

But their success was not permanent. After surviving for longer than any other mammalian lineage, multituberculates eventually vanished, with their last representatives disappearing around the Eocene-Oligocene boundary, roughly 34 million years ago.

The teeth we found at Prince Creek represent three new species: Camurodon borealis, Kaniqsiqcosmodon polaris and Qayaqgruk peregrinus. The last of these sits especially close to the heart of the story.

Qayaqgruk peregrinus has close evolutionary affinities with a group of multituberculates discovered in Mongolia,, indicating that, many millions of years ago, these minute mammals moved between Asia and North America through a polar land corridor.

This was not the world of Pangaea, the single giant continent of earlier Earth history. By 73 million years ago, the continents were taking on more familiar shapes, but they had not yet settled into the map we know today.

North America was split by a shallow inland sea, and its far northwestern edge lay near northeastern Asia, creating a high-latitude corridor through which animals could move between continents.

The Arctic corridor itself was not unknown. Fossils of dinosaurs, birds and some mammals have shown that animals were migrating between Asia and North America during the Cretaceous.

But for multituberculates, the picture was much less clear. Their fossil record left open whether they crossed between the continents early and repeatedly, or only later in the Cretaceous. Qayaqgruk peregrinus helps close that gap.

Its name draws on the language of the Iñupiat, Alaska Native people, from the region where the fossils were found. Qayaq is a legendary Iñupiaq hero and wanderer whose journeys are told in The Epic of Qayaq.

Many of its Mongolian relatives carry the suffix -baatar, meaning hero in Mongolian, so the name also links its Alaskan discovery to its Asian evolutionary affinities.

Kaniqsiqcosmodon polaris is the oldest known member of the Microcosmodontidae family of multituberculates, suggesting this lineage, later known from North America, may have had a polar origin. Camurodon borealis represents the northernmost known occurrence of the North American family Cimolomyidae.

Five teeth are not a complete ecosystem, but they are enough to show these mammals were not occasional strays at the edge of their range. They belonged to the Arctic.

Surviving mass extinction

Survival in this environment was not a passive condition. Multituberculates survived through the end-Cretaceous mass extinction, 66 million years ago, when as much as 75% of all life on Earth went extinct, including the non-avian dinosaurs.

The adaptations that helped these ancient Arctic species live though deep winter cold, short dark days and seasonal scarcity may have given them advantages when the world’s ecosystems were devastated.

This is not to say the Arctic was a refuge in any simple sense. Evolution is rarely simple – it is full of bottlenecks and unexpected openings. But tiny mammals already adapted to seasonal scarcity may have carried some advantages into a disrupted world.

The Alaskan multituberculates did not belong to the Arctic because they had always been there, or because their lineages had never moved. They belonged because they were part of that ecosystem for a time: shaped by its dark, its cold, its flora, its fauna, its seasons and its routes of passage.

Fossils make this kind of belonging harder to define, but more interesting. They give the word indigenous, at least when we use it for species, a chronology: deep time shows that belonging is not always a matter of original presence, but of ecological participation across changing landscapes.

These five multituberculate teeth from the Prince Creek Formation are small enough to vanish in a pinch of sediment. Yet in their enamel are continents, seasons, darkness, ancestry and journeys.

They show that the ancient Arctic was not an evolutionary margin. It was a living biome, a passage between worlds, and part of the deep history of mammalian evolution.

Sarah Shelley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

The most destructive wildfire season on record in Europe was in 2025, with more than one million hectares burned and tens of thousands of people displaced by fires across the continent.

For people in Ireland and Britain, the type of destructive wildfires that ravage southern Europe each summer can seem like a distant problem. But these fires are not confined to the dry Mediterranean landscapes of Spain, Portugal and Greece. In recent years, they have started to extend into regions more commonly associated with rain-soaked hills and bogs.

In 2026, this trend has continued with major wildfires breaking out across Scotland, Northern Ireland and Ireland.

As fires spread across the Highlands and Moray in Scotland this April, public warnings focused heavily on dry weather, campfires and accidental ignitions. In Northern Ireland, cautions were issued as firefighters battled several large gorse fires across the Mourne Mountains and other upland ares.

Similar warnings were issued nationally in Ireland over the Easter bank holiday weekend, when the public was urged to avoid lighting fires or bringing barbecues into the countryside. The threat of wildfires is only expected to ramp up this summer as temperatures rise further.

These are important messages. But focusing only on how fires start risks missing a slower and less visible transformation already unfolding across many upland landscapes. The real wildfire story in places like Ireland and Scotland is not just about climate or how fires start. It is also about how rural upland landscapes themselves are changing.

Changing farming styles

Recent research explores how decades of agricultural policy reform under the EU’s common agricultural policy, alongside falling farming populations and declining active land management, are reshaping vegetation patterns across Ireland’s uplands.

Historically, many upland landscapes were actively managed through livestock grazing, cutting and controlled patch burning. These practices helped maintain open landscapes and reduced the build-up of highly flammable vegetation.

But that balance has shifted. Reduced grazing pressure and changing land management practices are contributing to the expansion of highly flammable vegetation such as gorse, heather and purple moor grass.

While lower grazing pressure can bring biodiversity benefits and support natural regeneration, it can also increase the amount and proliferation of flammable vegetation across the landscape, known as fuel loads and fuel continuity. In practice, this means larger and more connected stretches of vegetation that allow fires to spread more rapidly and across greater distances.

This is especially concerning in upland areas where the average age of people working on farms is rising, and active land management is declining. Rural depopulation and labour shortages mean fewer people are available to manage what is known as commonages in Ireland and common grazing in Scotland. That means less maintenance of grazing systems and a reduction in the small, controlled vegetation burns that historically decreased wildfire risk by clearing vegetation and creating firebreaks. As one upland farmer in County Kerry recently described it to me: “It’s a bomb waiting to go off.”

Increasing flammability

Climate change is intensifying these risks. Hotter, drier conditions increase the likelihood that vegetation will dry out, increasing flammability. But climate alone does not explain why some landscapes burn more severely than others.

Wildfire risk is also shaped by what is growing on the land, how landscapes are managed, and whether fuel loads are reduced or allowed to accumulate over time. Experts responding to the recent Scottish fires also highlighted the role of vegetation build-up, prolonged dry conditions and changing land management in shaping fire behaviour, warning that historically wetter regions may face increasing wildfire risks in the future.

Similar patterns have already emerged across parts of southern Europe, where rural depopulation and land abandonment have contributed to increasingly severe wildfire regimes.

Recent research from Italy has shown abandoned land, declining grazing and reduced active land management have contributed to fuel accumulation, and to the build-up of dense, continuous vegetation – conditions associated with increasingly large and severe wildfires. While the climates and landscapes of Ireland and Scotland differ from the Mediterranean, similar long-term changes are beginning to emerge here.

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Read more: The Pennine hills are full of holes – here’s how they’re helping fight climate change

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This creates a difficult tension for policymakers and conservationists. Reduced grazing pressure and natural regeneration can support biodiversity recovery in upland systems. Yet these same changes may also increase wildfire risk where vegetation becomes dense, continuous and unmanaged. The challenge is therefore not choosing between farming or conservation, but finding ways to support landscapes that can sustain biodiversity, rural livelihoods and wildfire resilience together.

Wildfire risk in Ireland and Scotland can no longer be understood simply as a problem of careless ignitions or extreme weather. It runs much deeper than that. It is increasingly tied to long-term changes in how upland landscapes are farmed, governed and managed.

If future policy is serious about reducing wildfire risk, it must look beyond seasonal warnings and begin addressing the deeper forces reshaping our uplands.

Will Hayes is affiliated with the Department of Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, and the Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires, Environment and Society. Funding for this research was provided by the Leverhulme Trust.