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Fossil fuel emissions have hit a record high while many nations have done too little to avert deadly global heating
The world is still on track for a catastrophic 2.6C increase in temperature as countries have not made sufficiently strong climate pledges, while emissions from fossil fuels have hit a record high, two major reports have found.
Despite their promises, governments’ new emission-cutting plans submitted for the Cop30 climate talks taking place in Brazil have done little to avert dangerous global heating for the fourth consecutive year, according to the Climate Action Tracker update.
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Working with jaguars in Brazil’s Pantanal was a huge source of joy. But the wildfires are getting worse. This is Abbie’s story
Location Pantanal, Brazil
Disaster Wildfires, a number of years
Abbie Martin splits her time between captaining a boat in the Virgin Islands and doing research in Brazil’s Pantanal, a region that includes the world’s largest tropical wetland and where she founded the Jaguar Identification Project. Fires in the Pantanal have reached new extremes, killing at least 17 million vertebrate animals and burning 27% of the vegetation cover in 2020. Climatebreakdown made the Pantanal drier between 2001-21, increasing the occurrence of above-average fires in the region.
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Exclusive: ‘Deep-rooted injustices’ affect billions of people due to location of wells, pipelines and other infrastructure
A quarter of the world’s population lives within three miles (5km) of operational fossil fuel projects, potentially threatening the health of more than 2 billion people as well as critical ecosystems, according to first-of-its-kind research.
A damning new report by Amnesty International, shared exclusively with the Guardian, found that more than 18,300 oil, gas and coal sites are currently distributed across 170 countries worldwide, occupying a vast area of the Earth’s surface.
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Tyrella Beach, County Down: The surface of the sea is churning with desperate fish and hungry seabirds. This is life and death down the end of a telescope
Out to sea there is a squadron of juvenile great black-backed gulls, each one dark as a witch’s cape against the tide’s limpid sheen. I turn my scope to match their flight, chasing them until they splash down at the edge of a messy raft of birds.
At first I just tick off the species: adult herring, common and great black-backed gulls, dipping their heads almost casually into the water; a gannet irritably wielding its sword-like bill at the mob; razorbills and guillemots in their seasonal tuxedos, diving down and popping up around the larger birds. Askance of the main fray, cormorants buck smoothly under the surface and more gulls tip from the sky. When a winter‑white black‑headed gull struggles back into the air with a silver rag hanging from its bill, I pull back my scopeand finally realise what’s happening. I’m witnessing a feeding frenzy – a bait ball.
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I had always wanted to see one and on a trek in Guyana there he was, his appearance quite bizarre
Seeing a special bird can take enormous effort, as I discovered recently on a quest in the jungles of Guyana. As we headed along a narrow river towards our destination, we had to cope with heat and humidity and navigate huge rocks and fallen logs. All this just to see a baby bird.
I say baby, but harpy eagles – named after mythical ancient Greek spirits with a raptor’s body and a woman’s head – are easily the biggest bird of prey in the Americas, and one of the largest in the world.
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Sefton, Merseyside: These longhorns will be here till spring, roaming (almost) free, disturbing the ground, creating a foothold for native wildlife
They’re huddled at the entrance to their enclosure: a quartet of broad‑backed ruminants contemplating their winter lodgings. They arrived yesterday, when the dunes were under siege from wind and rain. But these are hardy cattle and there are plenty of hollows in which to shelter. This group might be here until April – there’s no rush to explore.
The council’s Green Sefton service has two winter-grazing enclosures over more than 228 hectares of the Ainsdale and Birkdale Sandhills nature reserve. English longhorns, on loan from the Lancashire Wildlife Trust, are used for conservation grazing to help manage the sand dune grassland and dune slack habitats. At other times of the year, herpetologists might encounter sand lizards, great-crested newts and natterjack toads. Today I’m visiting to view the cattle up close, to understand this project and its benefits.
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World’s biggest polluter on track to hit peak emissions target early but miss goal for cutting carbon intensity
China’s carbon dioxide emissions have been flat or falling for 18 months, analysis reveals, adding evidence to the hope that the world’s biggest polluter has managed to hit its target of peak CO2 emissions well ahead of schedule.
Rapid increases in the deployment of solar and wind power generation – which grew by 46% and 11% respectively in the third quarter of this year – meant the country’s energy sector emissions remained flat, even as the demand for electricity increased.
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Climate summit in Brazil needs to find way to stop global heating accelerating amid stark divisions
“It broke my heart.” Surangel Whipps, president of the tiny Pacific nation of Palau, was sitting in the front row of the UN’s general assembly in New York when Donald Trump made a long and rambling speech, his first to the UN since his re-election, on 23 September.
Whipps was prepared for fury and bombast from the US president, but what followed was shocking. Trump’s rant on the climate crisis – a “green scam”, “the greatest con job ever perpetrated”, “predictions made by stupid people” – was an unprecedented attack on science and global action from a major world leader.
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Host uses Indigenous concepts and changes agenda to help delegates agree on ways to meet existing climate goals
Shipping containers, cruise ships, river boats, schools and even army barracks have been pressed into service as accommodation for the 50,000 plus people descending on the Amazon: this year’s Cop30 climate summit is going to be, in many ways, an unconventional one.
Located in Belém, a small city at the mouth of the Amazon river, the Brazilian hosts have been criticised for the exorbitant cost of scarce hotel rooms and hastily vacated apartments. Many delegations have slimmed down their presence, while business leaders have decamped to hold their own events in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
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Brazil’s president welcomes world leaders while navigating divided government, promising action on deforestation and emissions
Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has welcomed world leaders to Belém for the first climate summit in the Amazon, where conservationists hope he can be a champion for the rainforest and its people.
But with a divided administration, a hostile Congress and 20th-century developmentalist instincts, this global figurehead of the centre left has a balancing act to perform in advocating protection of nature and a reduction of emissions.
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