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Mayor to make major policy shift and say scale of housing crisis requires breaking taboo
Sadiq Khan is announcing plans to build on parts of London’s green belt, in a dramatic shift in housing policy aimed at tackling “the most profound housing crisis in the capital’s history”.
In a major speech on Friday, the mayor of London is expected to say the scale of the challenge, which could need about 1m new homes built in the next decade, requires a break from longstanding taboos.
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Researchers say AI could give every developing country a vital early warning system of extreme events
Weather forecasting has gradually been getting more and more sophisticated. It has also got far more important as the climate gets more unpredictable and extreme events threaten to cause massive economic damage and loss of life. So an early warning system is vital.
Ever larger computer systems making millions of calculations over many hours are now part of the daily forecasting in most developed countries. Sadly large parts of the world, many very vulnerable to dangerous climate events, do not have the money, personnel or computing power to develop the 10-day forecasting system they need.
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Knowth, County Meath, Ireland: In among the summer-green fields here is the great mound, constructed by neolithic man with, perhaps, one eye to the sky
From the top of Knowth’s great mound, my gaze leaps over its smaller satellite mounds and wanders across an expanse of summer-green fields. This isBrú na Bóinne, a vast neolithic complex looped by the River Boyne, where the landscape is dominated by three artificial “hills” that were layered over passage tombs built about 5,000 years ago.
The most famous of the three is to the south – Newgrange, which is aligned with the winter solstice sunrise. To the east is Dowth, which aligns with winter sunsets. And then there’s this one beneath my feet, the great mound, containing two back-to-back chambers facing east and west. As ever with such ancient structures, the big question is: what was it for?
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Producers promoted chemical recycling – processes used to break plastics into constituent molecules – but knew of limitations
Plastic producers have pushed “advanced recycling” as a salve to the plastic waste crisis despite knowing for years that it is not a technically or economically feasible solution, a new report argues.
Advanced recycling, also known as chemical recycling, refers to a variety of processes used to break plastics into their constituent molecules. The industry has increasingly promoted these technologies, as public concern about the environmental and health effects of plastic pollution has grown. Yet the rollout of these technologies has been plagued by problems, according to a new analysis from the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI), a fossil-fuel accountability advocacy group.
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The University of Queensland system is intended to give policymakers idea of how species traverse the oceans and what it will take to save them
Off the east coast of Florida, female loggerhead turtles swim more than 1,000km north, hugging the edge of the continental shelf to get to feeding grounds.
Humpback whales move through Moreton Bay off the Brisbane coast in Australia, on their way to feed around the Balleny Islands more than 4,000km away off the Antarctic coastline, where wandering albatross circle above, travelling 1,000km a day.
Get Guardian Australia environment editor Adam Morton’s Clear Air column as an email
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Small-scale schemes are replacing dirty diesel with clean electricity in remote areas – and ensuring a just transition
When the coronavirus pandemic hit in 2020, Roxana Borda Mamani had to leave Mexico, where she was studying for her degree in rural development and food security, and return to her remote village in the Peruvian Amazon.
At the time, the Indigenous community in Alto Mishagua had neither an internet connection nor a reliable energy source. “How am I going to study?” Borda asked. “With energy from the sun,” replied her friend, a fellow member of the Latin American Observatory for Energy Geopolitics at the Brazil-based Federal University of Latin American Integration (Unila).
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After a relationship breakup, rambling 700 miles from the Highlands to Dorset with Martin helped restore my faith in people
I’ve always had a keen sense of adventure. During the summer holidays, my parents would push me and my sister out of the front door and tell us only to come home to eat. I went from roaming the streets of Hackney in east London as a child, to trekking, wild camping and hitchhiking the length of the Americas in my late 20s.
After returning to my home in Liverpool, I worked as a photographer and got into a relationship. When we broke up years later, I was distraught – but it led me back to the life of exploration that I’d put on the back‑burner. In the summer of 2016, I embarked on a solo 1,000-mile (1,600km) route through Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. Not wanting to feel sealed off from the wondrous environments around me, I did the majority of it on foot.
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With less than a month before the start of the 2025 hurricane season, residents are still recovering from catastrophic damage from the past two years
Idalia. Debby. Helene.
Not visiting friends, not neighbors. All hurricanes that have not yet faded into memory for the residents of Taylor county in Florida, where all three powerful storms hit in just two years.
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Commoners say restrictive grazing may be raising risk of fires like one that scorched 500ha of moorland
The spot where the wildfire broke out could hardly have been worse. Cut Hill is one of the remotest and highest peaks on Dartmoor, miles from any road, a place of tussocky, ankle-turning terrain.
And the weeks of hot weather meant the molinia, the moorland grass, was as tinder dry as farmers can remember it at this time of year. Once it took hold, on Sunday, the fire raged.
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From a New Forest giant inspiring an asthmatic teen to a herd of animal puppets walking to the Arctic Circle, theatre far and wide is taking action – but with energy and optimism, rather than doom-laden tales
Climate stories are typically defined by despair. The future we are told of is such a tragic, barren dystopia, it’s hard to look at head-on. But a flood of theatre-makers are writing their way past fear into something more useful, inspiring action through love, music, puppetry and folklore. “The ones who profit most from the idea that we’re doomed are the oil companies and the people massively polluting our planet,” reasons playwright Flora Wilson Brown. “If we allow ourselves to think there’s nothing we can do, we won’t do anything. There’s still time to act.”
Wilson Brown rejects this nightmarish narrative in her play, The Beautiful Future Is Coming, at Bristol Old Vic. Exploring the impact of the climate crisis through the eyes of three couples, the play jumps between 1856, 2027 and 2100. In the scenes set in the past, life is returned to Eunice Foote, the real scientist who discovered the greenhouse effect years before the man who took credit for it; in the future, we visit the Svalbard seed vault, where humanity has stashed the ambition of life on another planet. “It’s about making the impact emotional,” Wilson Brown says, “rather than statistical.”
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