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Exclusive: Mukhtar Babayev says clear accounting crucial to build trust as developing world seeks trillions in support
Poor countries must demonstrate clearer accounting and transparency to back up their calls for trillions of dollars of climate finance, the president of global climate negotiations has said.
Mukhtar Babayev, the ecology minister of Azerbaijan, who will lead the Cop29 UN climate summit in November, urged governments in developing countries to draw up reports showing their progress on cutting greenhouse gas emissions, and their spending on the climate crisis.
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This part of South America is no stranger to major rainfall, but last week’s storms were particularly devastating
Torrential rainstorms in Brazil’s southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul have caused the worst flooding the country has seen in 80 years, many deaths and the displacement of thousands of families. Central parts of the state were hit the hardest after the storms began last Monday, with unofficial weather stations in the area recording 50-100cm (20-40in) of rain over the past week.
Widespread floods and landslides have caused major damage to homes and infrastructure, most alarmingly triggering the partial collapse of a small hydroelectric dam on Thursday, which sent a 2-metre-high wave through the surrounding area. At least 57 deaths have been reported and 24,000 people have been displaced, alongside an estimated 500,000 being without power and clean water.
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Llanilar, Ceredigion: Walking an old railway route I find carpets of bluebells under the canopy, and a burst of fresh foliage
The buttercups are coming into flower in the churchyard of St Hilary’s, and a few dandelions have already set seed – the globular heads barely moving in the still morning air. Nearby, a metal plaque, slightly corroded by time and weather, celebrates Llanilar’s victory as Cardiganshire’s best kept village in 1965 and 1966. The church sits on a river terrace that falls away to the flood plain of the Afon Ystwyth, and a steep banked lane guides me down past brightly emergent beech hedges to the site of the old railway station.
Beyond the gravel station yard, little remains to show that this was once an important railway line, joining mid-Wales to the south. The line here closed at the end of 1964, after massive winter flooding not far from where I’m standing severely damaged the trackbed and a bridge. The rest of the line lost its passenger service a few months later, fading into the past with so many other rural routes. Last autumn, a Senedd petition exceeded the 10,000 signatures needed to consider a debate in the Welsh parliament on the feasibility of reopening the line. Time will tell.
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Audio collected with underwater microphones suggests numbers at least stable after centuries of industrial whaling left only a few hundred alive
Centuries of industrial whaling left only a few hundred Antarctic blue whales alive, making it almost impossible to find them in the wild.
New research suggests the population may be recovering. Australian scientists and international colleagues spent two decades listening for their distinctive songs and calls, and have found the whales – the largest animals ever to have lived – swimming across the Southern Ocean with growing regularity.
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About 6,000 have been installed this year, a quarter of them rapid chargers that can power up a car in under an hour
The UK has installed a record number of public electric car chargers this year, as companies race to keep up with the growing number of battery vehicles on British roads.
Nearly 6,000 new chargers were installed during the first three months of 2024, according to quarterly figures from data company Zapmap published by the Department for Transport. About 1,500 of those were rapid chargers, capable of charging a car in less than an hour.
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Organisers of this year’s environmental conference hope cooperation on green issues could help ease global tensions
This year’s Cop29 UN climate summit will be the first “Cop of peace”, focusing on the prevention of future climate-fuelled conflicts and using international cooperation on green issues to help heal existing tensions, according to plans being drawn up by organisers.
Nations may be asked to observe a “Cop truce”, suspending hostilities for the fortnight-long duration of the conference, modelled on the Olympic truce, which is observed by most governments during the summer and winter Olympic Games.
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Developing a daily practice of sustainability can help ease your anxiety about the future – so I tried it out for a week
When it comes to climate change, I, like many others, often wonder: does it matter if we adjust our individual behaviors to be more sustainable, or are these efforts insignificant?
Many experts argue that focusing too granularly on individual responsibility can shift the burden from destructive industry and policy on to regular folk. Eventually, we can burn out on the endless micro-responsibilities and not have juice for the big stuff.
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Your daily caffeine habit is not good for the planet. Thankfully, researchers are finding alternatives to ground coffee beans
Name: Synthetic coffee.
Age: Three.
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‘I’m very alarmed by everybody’s lack of alarm, that’s the scariest thing for me,’ says Warming Up author Madeleine Orr
If Madeleine Orr had been searching for a launch pad for her book, Warming up: How Climate Change is Changing Sport, last week provided the perfect rocket boosters. Only two years after the Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, brandished a “green card for the planet” in a video message, football’s world governing body signed a four-year sponsorship deal with the Saudi oil and gas conglomerate Aramco, the world’s largest corporate greenhouse gas emitter, the third biggest carbon emitter since the industrial revolution (behind China’s state coal company and the former Soviet Union) and one with plans, alongside other fossil fuel companies, to expand production in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary.
“A comedian couldn’t write that,” says Orr over the phone from North Carolina. “It is textbook greenwashing. I’m kind of sad that I didn’t put it in the book as case study No 1. But it is a practice that has been going on for 100 years.”
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The 5,614km barrier runs from South Australia to southern Queensland and was built to keep dingoes out, but some experts say it’s ‘making things worse’ for semi-arid ecosystems
In the far-western reaches of New South Wales, the world’s longest fence tracks through the red dirt making a cartographically straight path along state borders.
The 5,614km fence starts in South Australia, where it’s called the dog fence, and joins the NSW border near Broken Hill, where it becomes that state’s responsibility and is called the wild dog fence. At Cameron Corner it veers north into Queensland and becomes the wild dog barrier fence. It follows the route set out in the 1940s by the old dingo fence, used to keep dingoes out of remote grazing land to the west and prime agricultural country in Queensland’s Darling Downs.
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