Environment news

• Colombian guerrillas withdraw threat to disrupt UN biodiversity summit

  31-07-2024 20:04
  
  Central General Staff militant group previously said Cop16 event scheduled for October in Cali ‘would fail’A dissident rebel group has backed down from its threat to disrupt the UN biodiversity summit in Colombia later this year.The Central General Staff (EMC), a guerrilla faction that rejected the country’s 2016 peace agreement, said on Wednesday it would order its militants not to target the Cop16 negotiations that are due to begin in Cali in October.Find more age of extincti
  
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• X-rays reveal tiny half-billion-year-old creature

  31-07-2024 17:00 via bbc.com
  
  The creature, the size of a poppy seed, dates back 520 million years and is almost perfectly preserved.
  
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• Government sets record budget for green energy auction

  31-07-2024 16:08 via bbc.com
  
  The government says its budget to support a renewable energy auction will rise 50%.
  
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• Extreme ‘heat dome’ hitting Olympics ‘impossible’ without global heating

  31-07-2024 15:00
  
  Scorching temperatures in Mediterranean countries and north Africa already causing increase in premature deathsThe “heat dome” causing scorching temperatures across western Europe and north Africa, and boiling athletes and spectators at the Olympic Games in Paris, would have been impossible without human-caused global heating, a rapid analysis has found.Scientists said the fossil-fuelled climate crisis made temperatures 2.5C to 3.3C hotter. Such an event would not have happened in th
  
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• Loss and damage: how the first climate survivors to receive funds are rebuilding their lives in Malawi

  31-07-2024 11:00
  Cyclone Freddy left a trail of destruction when it hit southern Africa last year. Sixteen months later, 2,695 households have received relocation payments with no strings attachedGladys Austin is a climate disaster survivor. In March last year the 39-year-old mother of six stood in ankle-deep water in the room where her family slept. She tried to stay calm as the relentless rain battered her home. Her village’s trading centre, school and the chief’s home, built on an elevated foundat
  
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• From Scotland to Malawi: climate survivors are rebuilding with world first loss and damage fund

  31-07-2024 11:00
  Cyclone Freddy left a trail of destruction when it hit southern Africa last year. Sixteen months later, 2,695 households have received relocation payments with no strings attachedGladys Austin is a climate disaster survivor. In March last year the 39-year-old mother of six stood in ankle-deep water in the room where her family slept. She tried to stay calm as the relentless rain battered her home. Her village’s trading centre, school and the chief’s home, built on an elevated foundat
  
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• Where have all Britain’s garden butterflies gone?

  31-07-2024 07:00
  
  Despite a decade of wilding, my flowers appear to be hosts of a party to which no guests have turned upWhere are all the butterflies? After 10 years of wilding, my garden has never been fuller of nectar, long grass and plants such as ivy and buckthorn, which are caterpillar food plants for certain species.The scabious, knapweed and buddleias look glorious. But this is a bad dream where I’m hosting a party and no guests have turned up: most flowers are bereft not only of butterflies but bee
  
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• ‘Really special’: Farm near London to be rewilded to enable new housing in Essex

  31-07-2024 07:00
  
  Farm north of London to be returned to something like pasture once enjoyed by Anglo-Saxon kingIt was once woodland where Harold Godwinson, the last crowned Anglo-Saxon king, rode in pursuit of deer. Over recent decades, the hillside with a panoramic view of London has become arable fields, pony paddocks and a Christmas tree plantation.But now Harold’s Park, a 200-hectare (500 acre) farm just north of the M25 on the edge of the capital, is to be rewilded and returned to something like the t
  
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• Country diary: Pine martens, dragonflies … this scarred peat bog is healing | Sean Wood

  31-07-2024 06:30
  
  Abbeyleix Bog, County Laois, Ireland: I was sceptical about whether this valuable but struggling habitat would be restored in my lifetime. I’m delighted to be proved wrongThe Irish peat extraction agency Bord na Móna once explained to me: “We are a development agency, not a conservation organisation.” I had bemoaned the destruction of bogland ecosystems across the country through the use of huge extraction machinery and the indiscriminate removal of woodlands and ground
  
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• Labour tries to attract clean energy contracts with record £1.5bn for auction

  31-07-2024 01:01
  
  The new budget comes after the previous government failed to award a single new offshore wind contract in 2023The Labour government will make record amounts of funding available to clean energy developers after it increased the value of its summer subsidy auction by 50%, to £1.5bn.The addition, compared with figures previously announced, means the total budget is seven times the amount available at last year’s auction, the government said. Continue reading...
  
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