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Exclusive: Ministers accused of trying to keep investment firm’s withdrawal from partnership with NatureScot under wraps
A funding deal to raise £100m from private investors for urgently needed nature restoration in Scotland has fallen through without the Scottish parliament being told.
The Guardian has learned that Aberdeen, the investment firm, decided to withdraw from a partnership with the agency NatureScot to raise at least £100m for conservation projects from commercial and private investors late last year.
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The government hails the ‘green revolution’ as a solution to economic decline, but some young jobseekers say the rhetoric does not match their experience
On paper, Jake Snell, 19, sounds like the perfect candidate for a role in the UK’s burgeoning green energy sector. He has high grades in maths and physics A-level, a distinction in BTec engineering and another distinction in an extended engineering diploma. He has also done work experience at an engineering company.
He is from Lowestoft, a coastal town in Suffolk, outside Great Yarmouth. Both towns contain areas that fall within the most deprived 20% in England and are part of a wider pattern of coastal places with low employment opportunities.
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We delve into the best stories on how sport is changing around the climate crisis, and what can be done to navigate a way forward
Nelson Mandela said: “Sport can create hope where once there was only despair.” Too optimistic? In 2026, almost certainly. Sport is still a common language, uniting unlikely groups like an all-powerful Esperanto, but it is in trouble.
The pitches we play on, rivers we swim, seas we surf, mountains we climb, parks we run in, air we breathe – all are being degraded by the burning of fossil fuels as the climate crisis turns the sporting landscape upside down.
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Amid growing evidence of fungi’s key role in ecosystems and storing carbon, African scientists are championing the need to preserve ‘funga’ as much as flora and fauna
Madagascar has long been celebrated for its remarkable wildlife, with the vast majority of its species – from ring-tailed lemurs to certain species of baobab trees – found nowhere else on the planet. But when discussing the island nation’s endemic treasures, fungi are often left out of the conversation.
Yet “fungi are some of the most important things in the world”, says Anna Ralaiveloarisoa, a Malagasy scientist. “They feed 90% of terrestrial plants. Without them, there is no life on the Earth.”
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Rising temperatures and extreme drought are driving more destructive spring fires across the Great Plains. This year, forces aligned to create the perfect storm in Nebraska
In a normal year, the vast grasslands that roll across the American Great Plains would be starting to green. But at the center of the US, where most of the nation’s beef producers graze their herds, this spring brought fire instead of moisture, leaving more than a million acres black and barren.
Multiple blazes raged across Nebraska, where the records for the annual acreage burned were obliterated in a single month. The state logged the largest blaze ever recorded when the Morrill fire cascaded across more than 642,000 acres (260,000 hectares) before it was contained in March.
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A skull fragment found in a tray of unsorted fossils collected more than a century ago leads to discovery
A prehistoric fossil, hiding in plain sight in museum storage for more than a century, has revealed that giant echidnas once roamed Victoria.
The Owen’s giant echidna, Megalibgwilia owenii, lived during the Pleistocene, a geological epoch that began 2.5m years ago. It grew to about 1 metre long and weighed up to 15kg – about twice the size of Australia’s modern echidnas.
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Dozens of feral pachyderms linked to drug kingpin to be killed because of threat to native species and villagers
Colombian officials have authorized a plan to cull dozens of hippos descended from animals brought to the country in the 1980s by Pablo Escobar, after the feral beasts displaced native species and threatened local villagers.
The environment minister, Irene Vélez, said the decision was reached because other methods to control their population had been expensive and unsuccessful, including neutering some of the animals or moving them to zoos. Vélez said that up to 80 hippos would be affected by the measure. She did not say when the hunting would begin.
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Trump’s EPA chief Lee Zeldin’s presence shows how much influence climate deniers now have, experts say
As scientists confirmed that March was the United States’ most abnormally hot month in recorded history, dozens of climate deniers gathered to promote misinformation and tout their newfound influence on federal policy.
At a conference hosted by the prominent science-denying thinktank the Heartland Institute last week, a crowd of mostly middle-aged men in suits claimed the world is finally waking up to the idea that the climate crisis does not exist.
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From peak-bagging to thru-hiking, Americans have turned traversing land into personal milestones. This wilderness ranger and Indigenous writer has witnessed it firsthand
Këmituxwe Éhènta Wehikiyànkw
You are walking in our old homeland
After spending 12 years backpacking some of America’s wildest trails as a wilderness ranger for the US Forest Service – and then losing that job to politics – last spring I set out for the Appalachian Trail (AT), the longest hiking-only footpath in the world.
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Male humpback, which has repeatedly stranded and freed itself in Germany in past month, is to be left in peace to die
When a 10-metre long humpback whale became stranded on a sandbar in the Baltic Sea last month, none of those who went to its rescue could have known how it might turn lives and livelihoods upside down.
About a month after the first sighting of the male whale, near Wismar and Timmendorfer Strand on the north German coast, it has repeatedly stranded and freed itselfand is now stranded once more, with rescuers saying it is in the throes of death.
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pub. Verso, London, New York, 2012
pub. Random House, 2006
