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Party held out prospect of act while in opposition but plan did not make it into election manifesto
Ministers should bring forward a new clean air act that would ban wood burning, clear diesel vehicles from the roads and force councils to cut pollution, a group of more than 60 charities have urged before the king’s speech on Wednesday.
Labour held out the prospect of a clean air act while in opposition in 2023, but this was dropped from the final election manifesto, and the government has made no move to reinstate it.
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Court cases in Kenya point to a growing market for ants as exotic pets in Asia and Europe that has implications for conservation and biosecurity
In the biblical text Book of Proverbs, King Solomon describes the harvester ant as a model of wisdom and industriousness: “Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise!”
Almost 3,000 years later, the thriving international parallel market for a distinct species of the ant native to east Africa has been thrust into the global spotlight after a series of convictions in Kenya for ant smuggling.
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Matter Industries founder Adam Root has developed a filter to trap microfibres at home and on an industrial scale. But is it just a drop in the ocean?
The dinky device slots seamlessly into the modest space above my washing machine. A pipe snakes down from it, drawing in wastewater from my clothes washes. At the end of each wash cycle, the machine makes a polite whirring noise: that’s the sound of the groundbreaking bit of technology working, according to its inventor, Adam Root. That invention is a microplastics filter.
“The most common thing we hear [from customers] is: ‘I cannot believe how much material is coming out of the washing machine,’” says Root. “Somebody sent me [photos of] dinner-platefuls.”
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Families turn to dirty fuels such as firewood, bringing fears over air pollution and fragility of energy transition
In the ramshackle lanes of a south Delhi slum, Afshana Khatoon crouched wearily on her haunches and began lighting a small pile of firewood.
She had only just returned from six hours spent trudging through the urban forests and dry parks of India’s capital looking for kindling to turn into a makeshift stove. As the unforgiving summer heat soared above 40C, she had walked for miles, piling the sticks and fallen branches into a bundle on her head while sweat ran down her face.
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Preseli Hills, Pembrokeshire: Bouldering on volcanic rock is hard on the hands, and I have no established path to work with, but it’ll be worth it
I’ve been eyeing up this jagged rock edge all week. From my home away from home, I can see it from the windows, looming darkly on the brow of the hill. The storms of the last few days have passed, lingeringonly as a fierce wind that should dry the rock nicely.
I’ve never been to Carn Ffoi before, but I’ve always wanted to explore those broken tors that dot the hills of Carningli Common. Below them, the sandy Trefdraeth bay opens its arms to the Irish sea and its changing tempers, and the gorse, still singed from last year’s fires, gives way to scrub and close-cropped grass. The view of the endless, rugged coast will be special.
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It is the most extracted solid material on Earth – but this extraction can threaten ecosystems and livelihoods
Malé is one of the world’s most overcrowded cities, but it faces double pressure. As well as a growing population, the capital of the Maldives is also threatened by rising sea levels. Owing to climate breakdown, its living space is shrinking.
So the justification for a land reclamation project seemed clear. Take sand from elsewhere in the archipelago and use it to build up the land available for Malé’s people. What could go wrong? After all, it’s only sand, right?
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Cockrow Bridge in Surrey will open in the coming weeks to provide wildlife, including lizards and insects, with the ability to move between fragmented habitats
When James Herd moved near to Wisley Common 17 years ago, the heathland nature reserve was teeming with wildlife. “I’d take the dog around the common in spring and summer, and every few hundred metres I’d hear the rustle of a lizard in the undergrowth – and I’d see adders,” he says.
But over the past decade, the Surrey Wildlife Trust’s director of reserves management, who oversees the internationally important habitat, has seen that wildlife become depleted.
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The Kenyan player has been recognised for his advocacy and grassroots work to tackle sport’s carbon footprint
“Most well-known people who talk about climate change are in North America and Europe,” says Kenyan rugby sevens star Kevin Wekesa, “but for us this is a very relevant conversation. It is not only about future tournaments or big international pledges. In Kenya, we see the effects in rising heat, cracked pitches and changing weather in communities where young athletes are growing up.”
A year before competing in his first Olympic Games at Paris 2024, Wekesa responded to Kenya’s relegation from the top tier of international sevens by offering free rugby coaching in schools across Kenya. After travelling to a school in Kirinyaga on the slopes of Mount Kenya, a wet and verdant region, Wekesa found an unplayable dry field and was forced to cancel the session. One of the students told Wekesa that conditions had been similar for two months, while another suggested the unfamiliar weather was because of climate change.
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After a series of deaths on the beaches of Brittany, one bereaved family set out to prove the foul-smelling bloom was to blame
When her phone rang at around 5pm on 8 September 2016, Rosy Auffray was still at work. It was one of her daughters, distressed, calling to tell her that their father, Jean-René, had not come back from his daily run. Only the family dog had returned, alone and exhausted. Rosy rushed back home.
When she arrived, Rosy noticed that the dog was behaving bizarrely: she refused to walk, then collapsed under a bush. Her fur stank of rotten eggs, of overflowing sewers. Rosy knew where that smell came from: the mudflats roughly three miles from the family home in Brittany, where seaweed had been accumulating and putrefying. The soggy, decomposing seaweed stretched for miles along the shore, sometimesas much asfive feet thick, killing other plants and suffocating fish and small birds.
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As dingoes vanish from parts of Australia, a new documentary is calling on governments to move away from eradication and towards solutions that benefit both farmers and animals
Carol Pettersen was a small child when her family moved deep into the bush around the Fitzgerald river, on Western Australia’s south coast. It was the 1940s, and her white father and Aboriginal mother had broken the law simply by being together. So the bush became their refuge.
In that country of mallee heath, banksias and low coastal scrub, dingoes were part of the family’s hidden world. At night, Pettersen could hear them calling through the dark; by day, she glimpsed them moving through the bush – a flicker of red fur among the trees.
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Photo: Vivian Grisogono
