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An Indigenous journalist’s experience of entering the belly of Cop where time does not flourish, it is consumed
I feel as if I’ve been swallowed. And in the creature’s stomach, I walk with the sensation of being drowned. My nose hurts, with the same pain we feel when we are struggling to breathe. That’s my perception of the blue zone of Cop30, the official area for the negotiations. The architecture makes me think of the stomach of an animal.
My eyes hurt, seeing so many people coming and going through the main corridor. This is the scene of a makeshift forest. On the walls are large paintings of a jaguar, a monkey, an anteater and a lizard. In the middle of the corridor are plants that resemble açaí palm trees, and below them, small shrubs. The place of nature within the blue zone is ornamental.
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As summer went on, the temperature climbed and climbed. Every day became harder. This is Neha’s story
Location Manesar, India
Disaster Indian heatwave, 2024
Neha is 25 years old and works for a large multinational company at a warehouse in Manesar, Haryana state,so she can send money back home to her family. In 2024, her working conditions worsened after a deadly heatwave spread acrossnorthern India. Climatebreakdown is increasing the frequency and intensity of heatwaves in India by warming the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.
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Two-year study finds area of woodland in Devon to be ideal habitat to support a controlled release of the creatures
The prospect of European wildcats prowling in south-west England has taken a leap forward after a two-year study concluded a reintroduction was feasible – and most local people were positive about the idea.
Having been absent for more than a century, mid-Devon has been judged to have the right kind of habitat to support a population of Felis silvestris.
The south-west contains enough woodland cover connected by other suitable habitat to support a sustainable wildcat population.
Two surveys were conducted by researchers at the University of Exeter. In one, 71% of 1,000 people liked the idea of wildcat return. In the other, 83% of 1,425 who responded expressed positivity.
Wildcats pose no significant risk to existing endangered wildlife populations such as bats and dormice. Wildcat diets concentrate on widespread commonly found species, with 75% of their prey consisting of small mammals including voles, rats, wood mice and rabbits.
Wildcats pose no threat to people, domestic pets or farming livestock such as lambs. Commercial and domestic poultry can be protected from wildcats with the same precautions deployed for existing predators such as foxes.
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Hogshaw, Derbyshire: To hear one in December isn’t totally unheard of – any excuse to revel in that uplifting, deceptively simple sound
It was unmistakable: at dawn, through the bedroom window, a voice of declarative power and pure tones with a volume to rattle the glass. Did-uu … did-uu … did-uu, chwit, chwit chwit. It was a song thrush, and one of those rare occasions when I’ve heard one singing this side of Christmas. I’m tempted to add the “wrong” side, but we’ll come to that.
The customary seasonal order for our three breeding thrushes starting to sing is mistle, then song, with blackbird a month later. However, if we are ranking them in terms of vocal merit then that sequence is usually reversed. It must be added instantly, however, that if the vote were purely on mass approval then the song thrush would come first.
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Analysis shows small hike in populations of insect-eating species after 2018 ruling, but full recovery may take decades
Insect-eating bird populations in France appear to be making a tentative recovery after a ban on bee-harming pesticides, according to the first study to examine how wildlife is returning in Europe.
Neonicotinoids are the world’s most common class of insecticides, widely used in agriculture and for flea control in pets. By 2022, four years after the European Union banned neonicotinoid use in fields, researchers observed that France’s population of insect-eating birds had increased by 2%-3%. These included blackbirds, blackcaps and chaffinches, which feed on insects as adults and as chicks.
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The search for a ginkgo-toothed beaked whale had taken five years, when a thieving albatross nearly ruined it all
It was an early morning in June 2024 and along the coast of Baja California in Mexico, scientists on the Pacific Storm research vessel were finishing their coffee and preparing for a long day searching for some of the most elusive creatures on the planet. Suddenly a call came from the bridge: “Whales! Starboard side!”
For the next few hours, what looked like a couple of juvenile beaked whales kept surfacing and disappearing until finally Robert Pitman, a now-retired researcher at Oregon State University, fired a small arrow from a modified crossbow at the back of one of them.
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Abernethy, Cairngorms: Even in this part-plantation where there is much uniformity, high winds ensure the woodland can never stay the same
After the summer’s cacophony of greens, the broadleafs among the Scots pines are turning – the larches to green-yellow and bronze, the birches to a warmer yellow, but turning to bronze and copper too. I’m walking along a path with a line of larchesand mostly pines behind. Storm Amy has made its presence felt, and a number of trees are windthrown.
Through new gaps I see a couple of gnarly “granny” pines I’d not noticed before, so I head in towards them, crackling over fallen twigs and branches festooned with lichens. This area is for the most part plantation, so the trees are quite uniform in age, spacing and girth, with some granny outliers that speak to an earlier time. I find a storm path of sorts, diagonal lines where trees have dominoed, or where one has partially fallen and is resting on another. Each points north-east to a fault.
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Ending use of coal, oil and gas is essential in tackling climate crisis – but even talking about it is controversial
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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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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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Photo: Vivian Grisogono
