@JuliaN
Thank you for sharing the instructions to replicate the error.
I was able to replicate the error simply by trying to load cartopy with the conda/analysis3-25.09 environment (but the same error seems to pop out for other conda/analysis3 environments):
/g/data/xp65/public/apps/med_conda_scripts/analysis3-25.09.d/bin/python3 -c "import cartopy"
# ERROR 1: PROJ: proj_create_from_database: Open of /g/data/xp65/public/./apps/med_conda/envs/analysis3-25.09/share/proj failed
So the error seems to be related to the conda/analysis3 environments and not to VSCode or Jupyterlab.
I’ll try to dig deeper. Thank you for letting me know!