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Activists hope appeal court’s decision will mean death of third runway expansion plan
In the bar of the Five Bells pub, campaigners against a third runway at Heathrow were celebrating.
The 400-year-old establishment in Harmondsworth has been at the centre of the fight against the airport’s expansion for nearly 20 years. Under the plans, half of the ancient village would be destroyed, including a number of listed buildings and a small housing estate. The rest would be at the perimeter fence of the new runway, and would be, residents say, uninhabitable due to the thunderous noise and pollution.
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Teenage activist tells huge crowd: ‘We will not be silenced because we are the change’
Tens of thousands of people, many of them children skipping school, braved heavy rain to join a climate strike headed by Greta Thunberg in Bristol city centre.
The vast crowd fell silent as the 17-year-old activist told them governments were acting like children and so it fell to young people to be “the adults in the room”.
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Isolation and bad weather are compounding the strain from what National Farmers’ Union calls the “anti-meat agenda”
When 20-year-old shepherd Ffion Hooson opened up on social media about her recent mental health struggles, she was overwhelmed by the response.
Her father had suffered a stroke, leaving her to run their farm in Denbighshire, North Wales, alone. The responsibility and bad weather had crushed her to breaking point, she said.
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Greta Thunberg-effect behind sales boom in books on everything from plastic waste to endangered wildlife
I’m reading one of a small forest’s-worth of beautiful new picture books about the environment with my eight-year-old twins. The Sea, by Miranda Krestovnikoff and Jill Calder, takes us into mangrove swamps and kelp forests and coral reefs. We learn about goblin sharks and vampire squids and a poisonous creature called a nudibranch. Then we reach the final chapter on ocean plastics. When we learn that by 2050 there could be more plastic in the ocean than fish, Esme bursts into inconsolable tears.
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Flooding scheme on Arcadian stretch of river hopes to show water and people can co-exist in harmony
Just a few minutes from Richmond station, the River Thames flows past a parade of royal palaces, stately homes and well-groomed parks. Known as the Arcadian Thames, or London’s countryside, this is where the capital begins to transform into the wilderness beyond it.
But this is a wilderness that has been tamed and controlled over time, much like the rest of the river. To help boats moving along it and to protect riverside communities from flooding, much of the Thames has been straightened and canalised – the natural flood plain either side has been built over and water has been penned in with flood defences.
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Bank of England governor warns City about need for businesses to fully disclose climate impact
Businesses must improve how they disclose their impact on the environment or risk failing to meet climate targets, the Bank of England governor, Mark Carney, warned the City on Thursday.
Without disclosure rules that allow investors to compare how businesses are meeting the climate challenge, the world risks missing targets to be carbon neutral by 2050, Carney said.
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Report also calls for ban on black plastic and an end to bottom trawling at sea
Litter louts should be fined a minimum of £500 as part of measures to protect wildlife, according to a thinktank.
Bright Blue recommends 50 new policies in its report, including banning black plastic and non-flushable wipes, ending UK taxpayer subsidies for wood burning in power stations and outlawing the destructive practice of bottom trawling at sea.
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George Eustice rejects need for inquiry as NFU president calls for ‘seismic investment’
The government has rejected calls for a public inquiry into the UK flooding disaster, arguing that it has the crisis under control.
The environment secretary, George Eustice, came under sustained attack at the National Farmers’ Union annual conference, but said the government had already saved thousands of homes from flooding and would be spending “record” amounts on future defences.
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The River Severn broke its banks and breached emergency defences after further rain pushed the high water levels left by Storms Ciara and Dennis even higher, while flood water was still causing havoc in County Westmeath and Snaith, East Yorkshire after the River Shannon and River Aire burst their banks
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Non-native species must be part of the mix if the UK is to meet its tree-planting targets, says outgoing Forestry Commission head Sir Harry Studholme
Non-native conifer plantations have long been a scourge of conservationists – blamed for wiping out woodland species and disfiguring landscapes. But exotic conifers will be better at tackling the climate emergency than much-cherished broadleaved woodlands, according to the outgoing chairman of the Forestry Commission.
Sir Harry Studholme, who has headed England’s forestry agency for the last seven years, warned that there must not be a repeat of past mistakes in the rush to plant trees to meet the government’s target of net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
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