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Iran war has increased gas price, with effects on UK energy bills that could be avoided, Common Wealth says
Household energy bills could be reduced by up to £203 a year by stopping expensive fossil gas setting the price of energy in the UK, according to a report.
Under the existing system, gas – the most expensive form of electricity production in the UK system – set the price of energy 85% of the time in 2024 in the UK, even though it generates only about a quarter of Britain’s electricity.
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Move will put national security and lives overseas at risk, critics say, as overall UK aid budget is slashed to 0.3% of gross national income
Climate aid to developing countries from the UK will be cut by about 14% to roughly £2bn a year under government plans, in a move critics said would put national security and lives overseas at risk.
The move follows bitter rows with the Treasury, which wanted deeper cuts owing to pressure on spending resulting from the war in Iran.
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Trillions of insects embark, largely unnoticed, on epic journeys every year across mountain ranges, deserts and seas, and it is only now, as their numbers suffer huge declines, that scientists are tracking their movements
On a cloudless sunny day in October 1950, ornithologists Elizabeth and David Lack stood on a mountain pass in the Pyrenees and observed a once-in-a-lifetime spectacle – clouds of migrating insects.
Up to 500 butterflies were fluttering past them every hour through the 2,200m-high Puerto de Bujaruelo mountain pass on the French-Spanish border. By mid-afternoon dragonflies were skimming through, outnumbering the butterflies by 10 to one. The spaces between were filled with thousands of tiny flies.
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Exclusive: finding out who owns land will become simpler under plans to make the best use of green spaces and hit net zero targets
Finding out who owns land in England is to become much simpler because a paywall will be lifted from large parts of the Land Registry, the government is to announce.
A small number of landowners control the majority of land but finding out who owns what is difficult to piece together, even for government departments, owing to the way the Land Registry operates. Freeing up access will make it easier to determine ownership of key areas, such as river catchments, grouse moors and peatland.
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Frome, Somerset: A small patch of land, leased by the council, will be the site of a new community project. And so we descend, ready to rewrite its future
Who crawled along Snail’s Bottom? Who found beauty on Bonnyleigh Hill? Who measured Little Acre Farm? This small patch of Somerset – like everywhere else in Britain – is a storied landscape, every feature named and memorialised by mostly forgotten individuals. Our job over the next two hours is to take one such name, one such story, and overwrite it with something better.
Over a level crossing, through a kissing gate and on to a public footpath running down sloping ground. I had only been told the local epithet for this banana-shaped paddock after we moved here, though my arm already understood its origin. A priapic stallion, its coat studded with burdock burrs like a peppered mackerel, had clamped its jaws around my humerus. “That’s bitey horse field,” people told me. Bitey no more, for the poor fly-grazing beast has left, and our ever-proactive town council has secured the land on a 99-year lease.
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Perhaps the biggest surprise is that it tricks ants into moving its seeds with a scent that mimics their larvae
Plants are superb at enticing animals to pollinate their flowers or carry off their seeds. But one plant co-opts an astonishing combination of fire, bees and ants to mastermind its reproduction.
The South African Natal crocus, Apodolirion buchananii, has a gloriously bright white flower that emerges from the ground before its leaves appear in early spring. But the flower only blooms shortly after fire breaks out naturally in its native grasslands, leaving it standing like a beacon among the blackened grass to help lure bee pollinators, with an irresistible sweet scent that wafts through the air.
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Exclusive: Fixing a leak can be simple and equivalent to closing a coal power station, making lack of action maddening, say analysts
The world’s worst mega-leaks of the potent greenhouse gas methane in 2025 have been revealed by an analysis of satellite data.
The super-polluting plumes from oil and gas facilities have a colossal heating impact on the climate but often result from poor maintenance and can be simple to fix. The assessment found dozens of mega-leaks, each having the same global heating impact as a coal-fired power station.
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Conservation can be hard work. But not when it comes to helping these little orange and brown beauties
You’ve almost certainly seen gatekeeper butterflies, even if you don’t know them by name. The gatekeeper is, says naturalist and butterfly enthusiast Matthew Oates, “a charming butterfly; a charming meditation of soft oranges and browns”. Traditionally found in the “scrub edges” (the borders between grassland and woods) and at hedge margins, they are frequently seen in suburban and urban areas, near garden gates (hence their name) and at the base of shrubs. The gatekeeper is in no hurry, so you’ll get to enjoy it. “It doesn’t dash about at great speed,” says Oates. “It flops around; both males and females bask a lot.” As a bonus, Oates adds, gatekeeper males are “extremely polite to each other”, unlike lots of other butterflies, which are highly territorial. “They’re gentlemen.”
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Puffins, guillemots and razorbills are being washed up dead or dying on Europe’s Atlantic coast in what scientists call a ‘wreck’
Thousands of seabirds – mostly puffins, but also many guillemots and razorbills – are being washed up dead or dying on the Atlantic coasts of western Europe, in what scientists call a “wreck”.
This year’s events, the consequence of a series of severe storms during the late autumn and winter, are the worst since 2014, when as many as 54,000 birds were found stranded. Of these, well over half – between 30,000 and 34,000 – were puffins.
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Prof Kaveh Madani, winner of the Stockholm water prize, was accused of sabotage with his environmental work
Eight years before he got the call telling him he had won the Stockholm water prize, Prof Kaveh Madani was being interrogated by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, accused of being a spy for the CIA, MI6 or the Mossad.
Today he is in exile and on Wednesday won the world’s most prestigious water prize for combining “groundbreaking research on water management with policy, diplomacy and global outreach, often under personal risk and political complexity”.
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