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Faltering governments will be blamed for famine and conflict abroad, and face stagnation and inflation at home, says climate chief at start of Cop30
Governments failing to shift to a low-carbon economy will be blamed for famine and conflict abroad, and will face stagnation and rising inflation at home, the UN’s climate chief warned on Monday at the start of the Cop30 climate talks.
Simon Stiell, the executive secretary of the UN framework convention on climate change, addressed the gathering of ministers and high-ranking officials from nearly 200 countries, in a stark portrayal of the price of failure on the climate crisis.
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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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The failure by state governments to do anything about pollution means it has often been met with apathy. But at a rare protest anger and frustration were rife
As a familiar smoky evening haze gathered over Delhi, the crowd began to assemble in their hundreds. Mothers and children, students, retirees and environmentalists were all united by a basic but desperate demand: the right to breathe safely in India’s capital.
“Delhi is not a liveable city any more, it’s a death trap,” said Radhika Aggarwal, 33, an engineer who joined the protest on Sunday.
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An expert describes how communities in some of the world’s driest areas are demanding transparency as secretive governments court billions in foreign investment
This Q&A originally appeared as part of The Guardian’s TechScape newsletter. Sign up for this weekly newsletter here.
The data centers that power the artificial intelligence boom are beyond enormous. Their financials, their physical scale, and the amount of information contained within are so massive that the idea of stopping their construction can seem like opposing an avalanche in progress.
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Environmentalists seeking to end logging, smuggling and pollution in DRC’s Mangrove Marine park faced threats, violence and rape
People who have tried to expose unlawful ownership and profit-making from protected land in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have faced threats, violence and rape, an investigation has found.
The DRC government hired the conservation worker Kim Rebholz in 2022 to safeguard the Mangrove Marine park, an internationally recognised nature reserve on the country’s tiny coastline. The Congo basin rainforest, to the east, is the largest rainforest after the Amazon.
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Blacka Moor, South Yorkshire:Even among the yellowing birch leaves the goldcrest stood out, a slight creature with a mighty presence
Perhaps in sympathy with the changing clocks, cloud had blanketed the moor, bleeding colour from the woods beneath, the light fading before it had properly arrived. It seemed one of those days when nothing much would happen, the sort that might put a hole in your mood. And yet, as the afternoon wore on, the blanket thinned and colour returned, like someone unexpectedly turning up a dimmer switch.
The yellowing birch leaves sparked into life and, easing my way down steep ground, I kicked over a Russula cyanoxantha, a charcoal burner mushroom, its cream-tinged underside glowing brightly in the preternatural dusk.
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Ari loved his community and set up a volunteer group to fight wildfires. One day his brother Bilal received the phone call he had long dreaded. This is Bilal’s story
LocationHalabja, Iraq
DisasterWildfires, 2025
Bilal Mukhtar is a teacher living in Halabja, in the Hawraman region of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region. Wildfires are breaking out here with increasing frequency, caused by natural events and compounded by hotter and drier weather. Iraq is experiencing its worst drought in nearly a century. Climate change makesdrought and wildfire in Iraq more likely.
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Installing a dedicated charger is good option – so too is switching to an EV tariff and charging at night or smartly
When you buy an electric vehicle you need to think about how you will charge it at home.The two main things you will need are a charger and a smart meter.
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The spread of African swine flu among the wild boars the animals eat has led to the deadliest winter for attacks on people in the Russian region for decades – and a spike in tiger killings
The attacks seemed to come from nowhere. At first, the tigers snatched guard dogs on the edge of villages in Russia’s far east, emerging from the forest at night to prey. Others went for livestock, going after horses and cattle.
Then the attacks on people began. In January, an ice fisher was mauled at night and dragged away by a big cat, just weeks after a forester had been killed. In March, another man was attacked and partly eaten by a tiger. It was the deadliest winter for tiger attacks in Siberia for decades.
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At 104, Betty Reid Soskin has had the most extraordinary life, from protest singing to civil rights activism to meeting the Obamas. She reflects on what it takes to stay strong and keep going
Betty Reid Soskin was 92 when she first went viral and became, in effect, a rock star of the National Park Service. She was the oldest full-time national park ranger in the US – this was back in 2013; she’d become a ranger at 85 – but she had been furloughed along with 800,000 other federal employees during the government shutdown. News channels flocked to interview her. She was aggrieved not to be working, she told them; she had a job to do.
“In a funny way, I suppose that started lots of things,” Soskin says. Her memoir, Sign My Name to Freedom, was published in 2018, and a documentary about her work, No Time to Waste, was released in 2020. Another film is in the works. Barack Obama called her “profoundly inspiring”. Annie Leibovitz photographed her. Glamour magazine named her woman of the year. Now, Reid Soskin is 104, and “all of whatever I was supposed to do, I’ve done”, she says.
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