Environment news

• Theresa May defends 'long-term' plastic waste plan

  11-01-2018 16:35 via BBC News
  Campaigners say "emergency" action is needed now as the PM unveils a 25-year plastics crackdown.
  
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• ‘My classroom was 30C. No one was learning. Then I started to feel dizzy’ – This is climate breakdown

  11-11-2026 13:00 via Environment | The Guardian
  As a UK heatwave intensified in early summer this year, the health impacts began to worsen. This is Gill’s storyLocation: London, UKDisaster: UK heatwave, 2026Gill (not her real name), 43, is a teacher in London. In 2026, during the hottest summer on record, she suffered a seizure after experiencing heat exhaustion while teaching. The heatwave was made worse by the climate crisis. Continue reading...
  
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• Cop31 live: ‘Fossil fuels must go the way of the dinosaurs’ - UN chief hits out at industry lobbying

  11-11-2026 11:09 via Environment | The Guardian
  Third day of UN talks begin but leaders of many big polluting nations absentAfter a couple of hosts provide us a bit of background on Antalya (founded in 200BC, apparently) it is time to hear from António Guterres, the outgoing secretary-general of the UN, who will probably not be dancing.Guterres starts by praising Turkey for the “excellent organization” of the Cop, which gets smattering of applause and perhaps a few raised eyebrows given the transport nightmares endured by attenders. Cont
  
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• Burnham lauds £12bn offshore wind investment as he prepares for climate summit

  11-11-2026 10:46 via Environment | The Guardian
  Package for plan off Norfolk coast revealed as government tries to calm critics after approving Jackdaw gasfieldUK politics live – latest updatesAndy Burnham has hailed a record investment in offshore wind, as the government tries to repair its green credentials after approving the controversial Jackdaw gasfield in the North Sea.On Wednesday the government announced a £12bn investment from the German energy company RWE and the US private equity firm KKR, as the prime minister prepares to trav
  
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• Bird flu has caused catastrophic die-offs – could a wave of extinctions follow?

  11-11-2026 10:00 via Environment | The Guardian
  As the IUCN global conservation body prepares to update its red list of endangered species, scientists explain why calculating the true toll of a pandemic is so hardIt began with the brown skuas. The migratory seabirds had arrived on the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia in 2023, harbouring a deadly passenger. Within months, the southern elephant seals that had come ashore to breed became sick. Mothers and newborn pups were weak and trembling, with many struggling to breathe. What followed w
  
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• Cop31 live: World leaders to speak at climate crisis summit

  11-11-2026 09:22 via Environment | The Guardian
  Third day of UN talks begin but leaders of many big polluting nations absentSolving the climate crisis is hard but even getting to the venue to discuss it has become a challenge here in Antalya. Snarled roads and packed trams left people waiting for hours in traffic and lines yesterday and there was widespread horror at the prospect of an even worse situation this morning with the arrival of world leaders.The Cop31 venue, on the outskirts of Antalya, is festooned with police and masked soldiers
  
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• Developing countries in limbo as rich nations delay new climate finance plans

  11-11-2026 08:00 via Environment | The Guardian
  Many governments are yet to set targets, leaving recipient countries struggling to plan and attract private investmentDeveloping countries have been left in limbo by the failure of some of the world’s biggest economies to flesh out their plans for new climate finance.Poor countries are supposed to receive $300bn a year from the governments of industrialised nations by 2035, along with about $1tn from other sources, to help them cope with the effects of extreme weather and shift to a low-carbon
  
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• Back of the net! Scotland’s historic salmon fishers – in pictures

  11-11-2026 08:00 via Environment | The Guardian
  Colin McPherson has spent three decades working on Catching the Tide, his moving portrayal of fishers and an old way of life that is dying out Continue reading...
  
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• Why are Britain's streets still so polluted? Because the car industry dinosaurs do what they like, and politicians let them | George Monbiot

  11-11-2026 07:00 via Environment | The Guardian
  The transition to electric vehicles should be moving apace, but it is not. And why? Incompetence, expedience and cowardiceThis is how it works. An industry puts tremendous effort into resisting change: lobbying governments, mobilising the media, pouring money into junktanks. It argues that a transition would threaten jobs, or damage the national interest, or harm poor people, while what it really fears is the cost of retooling its plants or developing new protocols. Then, when the inevitable cli
  
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• Humble house sparrows roosting in Spain evoke a childhood memory

  11-11-2026 07:00 via Environment | The Guardian
  Forget the hoopoes and the ring-necked parakeets, the highlight of our trip was a sound I hadn’t heard for 50 yearsAs dusk falls on a warm October evening, I gradually become aware of a strange, high-pitched sizzling noise. From our table outside a busy bar, with Spaniards celebrating their national holiday, it reminds me of water carelessly tossed into a scorching frying pan.I approach a bougainvillea bush decked with rich purple flowers, and the collective clamour separates into distinct not
  
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• Country diary: Could this be the most beautiful fungus in the UK? | Sarah Lambert

  11-11-2026 06:30 via Environment | The Guardian
  
  Upwood, Cambridgeshire: This woodland is a stronghold for elm trees – and that brings the prospect of finding a stunning rarity, the wrinkled peachAbove me, a lively breeze moves through the tall elms, branches creaking between gusts. Most of the crowns look healthy, but a few stand skeletal against the sky, suggesting Dutch elm disease. Below them, the woodland floor is scattered with fallen trunks. I find pale bonnet fungi rising from the mossy bark and the frilled fans of tripe fungus. Wher
  
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• Thousands of rare wildflowers rescued from eroding Scottish coast

  11-11-2026 06:00 via Environment | The Guardian
  
  Conservationists relocate 3,400 one-flowered wintergreens, a species estimated to have lost more than half its UK population in the past 50 yearsThousands of one of Britain’s rarest wildflowers have been moved to safety from an eroding Scottish shoreline where they were at risk of falling into the sea.Conservationists rescued 3,400 one-flowered wintergreen plants at Culbin Forest in Moray, in an effort to protect a species estimated to have lost more than half its UK population in the past 50
  
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• Cop31 as it happened: ‘Everything and everyone we love is at stake,’ Greta Thunberg warns

  10-11-2026 16:35 via Environment | The Guardian
  Host Turkey celebrates new oilfields as UN climate summit prepares to host world leaders from more than 90 countriesWe’ve just heard from Patricia Espinosa, the former UN climate boss (succeeded by Simon Stiell) and now we are hearing from former US secretary of state and climate ambassador, John Kerry.Kerry has congratulated Brazil for keeping the fossil fuel transition issue alive, and the room has erupted in cheers. Continue reading...
  
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• Cop31 live: ‘Everything and everyone we love is at stake,’ Greta Thunberg warns

  10-11-2026 15:34 via Environment | The Guardian
  Host Turkey celebrates new oilfields as UN climate summit prepares to host world leaders from more than 90 countriesWe’ve just heard from Patricia Espinosa, the former UN climate boss (succeeded by Simon Stiell) and now we are hearing from former US secretary of state and climate ambassador, John Kerry.Kerry has congratulated Brazil for keeping the fossil fuel transition issue alive, and the room has erupted in cheers. Continue reading...
  
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• This small Alaska town is swamped by cruise ship visitors every summer. But what happens when they all go home?

  10-11-2026 14:00 via Environment | The Guardian
  Skagway’s 1,100 permanent residents are caught between a boom time – when the ships bring more than a million tourists – and a lull in winterOctober comes to the small Alaska coastal town of Skagway like a sigh. The shops that were bustling throughout the crazed tourist season are reducing their opening hours or beginning to close. The hordes of employees sleeping in overcrowded bunkhouses are leaving or have left.The crowds of cruise passengers who have filled the streets since April, wea
  
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• Cop31 may involve lots of talking about talking – but there are wins to be had

  10-11-2026 13:46 via Environment | The Guardian
  In this week’s newsletter: what to expect of the next two weeks at the critical UN climate talks. Plus, this week’s most important reads• Don’t get Down to Earth delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereThe world has again convened for Cop, the annual ritual to confront humanity’s greatest-ever threat. Aside from its own lore and acronyms, this conference is starting to feel a little like Groundhog Day.Representatives from almost all countries, bar the recalcitrant version of the US under
  
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• Slight fall in carbon emissions from fossil fuels as Iran war drives renewables push

  10-11-2026 12:55 via Environment | The Guardian
  However, authors of a comprehensive assessment to be presented at Cop31 warn talk of a global turnaround prematureCop31 live – latest updatesSoaring oil and gas prices following the war in Iran have encouraged people to look beyond fossil fuels, leading to an easing of climate-damaging carbon emissions this year.Carbon dioxide from oil, gas and coal is forecast to flatline for 2026, based on data from the year so far, according to a comprehensive assessment by scientists. Emissions from burnin
  
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• ‘We said no, no, no, but they kept insisting’: the Paraguayan people battling a eucalyptus empire

  10-11-2026 12:00 via Environment | The Guardian
  It is Paraguay’s largest private investment but local people accuse a forestry giant of ignoring their contamination concerns over its vast plantationWhen Paracel arrived in Tacuarita, an Indigenous community of homes made from planks and plastic sheeting in Paraguay’s poorest region, six years ago, it was a welcome sight. The company improved the dirt roads and dug an electric-powered well, saving villagers a two-mile journey to fetch water from a cattle pond that often made them sick. It a
  
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• Cop31 live: host Turkey celebrates new oilfields as climate summit enters second day

  10-11-2026 11:58 via Environment | The Guardian
  UN climate summit prepares to host world leaders from more than 90 countries as scientists find global carbon emissions flatlined this yearWe’ve just heard from Patricia Espinosa, the former UN climate boss (succeeded by Simon Stiell) and now we are hearing from former US secretary of state and climate ambassador, John Kerry.Kerry has congratulated Brazil for keeping the fossil fuel transition issue alive, and the room has erupted in cheers. Continue reading...
  
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• Cop31 live: host Turkey celebrates new oil fields as climate summit enters second day

  10-11-2026 10:54 via Environment | The Guardian
  UN climate summit prepares to host world leaders from more than 90 countries as scientists find global carbon emissions flatlined this year.A short update on our Cop31 bus journey from hell.We have arrived. It only took three and a half hours. And it turned out I had the key for our Guardian Cop31 media cubicle, which meant my colleagues had to do some wrangling to get inside. Continue reading...
  
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• Cop31 live: slight drop in fossil fuel emissions revealed as conference enters second day

  10-11-2026 09:51 via Environment | The Guardian
  UN climate summit prepares to host world leaders from more than 90 countries tomorrowBus horror update. So I am still on the bus and it has been three hours. We think we are still half an hour away (I said that an hour ago).Some people got off and tried the tram. Splitters. We watched a packed tram go past and leave a few of the splitters on the platform. Continue reading...
  
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• How a Jordan mosque is recycling ritual water to create a green oasis

  10-11-2026 06:00 via Environment | The Guardian
  In a country of severe water scarcity, the Abu Obeida mosque in Deir Alla captures ablution wastewater before it reaches the sewers to use for irrigationThe Abu Obeida mosque in Deir Alla, Balqa, to the west of Amman, stands in one of the hottest and most arid stretches of the Jordan valley. Yet an oasis of trees and flowerbeds surrounds it, improbably green against a landscape of bare ochre hills, watered by drip irrigation lines that run along the ground between the roots.The water does not co
  
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• Alien menace or victim of xenophobia? The battle over Britain’s parakeets

  10-11-2026 06:00 via Environment | The Guardian
  Established in UK cities for decades and much loved for their green plumage, the Himalayan birds have been recast as an ecological threat. But is the idea of invasive species itself a problem?Before we saw a single parakeet, we heard them: a disembodied static that grew louder as we approached Hither Green cemetery in south-east London. It was an early evening in late June, and we had come to witness an invasion. By the time my friend and I reached the cemetery’s western edge, the clamour was
  
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• High fossil fuel prices spread inflation ‘like a cancer’, UN climate chief tells Cop31

  09-11-2026 18:47 via Environment | The Guardian
  Simon Stiell makes opening address at summit in Turkey, where talks are under way about speeding up shift to electrificationA global fossil fuel price crisis is “spreading inflation like a cancer” around the planet, the UN’s climate chief, Simon Stiell, told the opening plenary of critical UN climate talks in Turkey.Stiell joined Cop31 hosts Turkey and Australia, which is leading the negotiations, in promoting renewable energy and a new electrification goal as an optimistic alternative to
  
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• These Australian ‘forest fairies’ have all but disappeared from the wild – now they have a new neighbourhood

  09-11-2026 15:00 via Environment | The Guardian
  Exclusive: With only a handful of lowland Leadbeater’s possums left in Victorian forests, conservationists hope a bespoke sanctuary will help the acrobatic marsupials bounce backSign up for climate and environment editor Adam Morton’s free Clear Air newsletter hereWith just 13 animals left, time was running out for the Leadbeater’s possums at Yellingbo conservation area.The critically endangered forest sprites have exacting habitat needs. They prefer cool, wet and dark forest, with large o
  
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• ‘I’m surrounded by millions of people but I could still die from the heat’ – This is climate breakdown

  09-11-2026 13:00 via Environment | The Guardian
  He went to Saudi Arabia to perform the sacred hajj pilgrimage – then the heat came. This is Zirrar Ali’s storyLocation: Mecca, Saudi ArabiaDisaster: Heatwave, 2024After a transformative experience in Iran, Zirrar Ali quit his corporate 9-5 job and began travel writing. Seven years later, he and his elderly father were participating in the sacred five-day Muslim pilgrimage, the hajj, when temperatures soared to more than 51C. The climate crisis has already made peak temperatures in Mecca abou
  
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• This grim story of marine park whales could yet have a positive outcome – if it teaches us to value other species | Elle Hunt

  09-11-2026 11:00 via Environment | The Guardian
  There is no ‘saving’ these traumatised mammals from places like Marineland in Canada. Humans need to understand that our actions are not easily undoneRemember “Save the whales”? Now that was an environmental campaign everyone could get behind. Surely you don’t want whales to die!It may have got the 1986 global ban on commercial whaling over the line, but in these sophisticated times that slogan seems woefully reductive, even naive. As Greenpeace warns on its website, 40 years later: �
  
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• Rare call for more electricity supplies as wind power drops across Europe

  09-11-2026 09:12 via Environment | The Guardian
  Neso issues ‘electricity margin notice’ for gas power plants on Britain to fire up and boost generation this morning amid energy shortfallThe government body tasked with keeping the lights on has issued a rare call for more electricity supplies this morning due to low wind power generation forecasts across Europe on Monday.A notice issued by the National Energy System Operator (Neso) on Sunday night said it faced a “shortfall” of almost 1,400 megawatts in its electricity supply margins f
  
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• ‘A new age of climate extremes’: Earth accumulating heat at accelerating rate

  09-11-2026 08:30 via Environment | The Guardian
  Increased heat will supercharge extreme weather events, warns UN agency as Cop31 climate summit beginsHeat is accumulating in Earth’s systems at an accelerating rate, the UN’s weather agency has reported as the Cop31 climate change summit begins in Turkey, with 2026 on track to be one of the four warmest years on record.The imbalance between incoming energy from the sun and energy leaving Earth reached its highest level since monitoring began, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said
  
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• A new start after 60: I was burnt out and facing redundancy. So I set up a bee farm – and learned the joys of a simple life

  09-11-2026 07:30 via Environment | The Guardian
  Jeff Lee had spent decades as an investigative journalist. But when he upped sticks with his wife to buy a farm in rural British Columbia, he didn’t just change jobs – he found a different way to liveJeff Lee became interested in beekeeping in his late 50s after his wife, Amanda, took part in a “beard of bees” event at Science World’s “science of fear” exhibition in Vancouver, Canada, where they lived. She stepped into a Perspex booth, a caged queen bee was placed beneath her chin
  
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