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Backlog delaying ‘shovel-ready’ ventures will be cleared with aim of building virtually zero-carbon power system by 2030
Britain’s energy system operator is pulling the plug on hundreds of electricity generation projects to clear a huge backlog that is stopping “shovel-ready” schemes from connecting to the power grid.
Developers will be told on Monday whether their plans will be dismissed by the National Energy System Operator (Neso) – or whether they will be prioritised to connect by either the end of the decade or 2035.
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Allendale, Northumberland: Every winter I return to it with my secateurs, but hollies certainly know how to protect themselves
It has become an annual ritual, the cutting of branches from this shapely holly for a winter wreath. A mixture of the wild and of things garnered from my garden, I push twigs and vines into a metal frame packed with moss from drystone walls. Resinous rosemary and pine, silver seedheads of clematis, trails of ivy, lichens, ferns, honesty – each year is different with whatever I happen to find.
This particular holly is always a good source of scarlet berries, but this year it is even more jewelled than usual. It has, for now, been untouched by birds who cannily eat shorter-lived fruits first (wild raspberry, rowan, elder), leaving the solid drupes of holly until other food is scarce. Then its bounty might be guarded by a mistle thrush, possessively seeing off other possible feasters. Hollies are dioecious, with male and female flowers on different trees, so this is a female, its fertility the result of bees ferrying pollen from nearby males.
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Cameras capture lone creature collecting materials for its lodge in riverside nature reserve
A wild beaver has been spotted in Norfolk for the first time since beavers were hunted to extinction in England at the beginning of the 16th century.
It was filmed dragging logs and establishing a lodge in a “perfect beaver habitat” on the River Wensum at Pensthorpe, a nature reserve near Fakenham in Norfolk.
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Exclusive: ‘extremely unhelpful’ policy seen as deterrent to clearing thousands of dump sites across England
Millions of pounds in landfill tax owed to the government has to be paid by the Environment Agency (EA) if it clears any of the thousands of illegal waste dumps across the country.
Of the £15m that taxpayers are paying for the clearance of the only site the agency has committed to clearing up – a vast illegal dump at Hoad’s Wood in Kent – £4m is landfill tax.
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Caistor St Edmund, Norfolk: I have memories of seeing them at night, on our pyjama-clad safaris round the farm, but they haven’t been here for a decade
There’s a shimmering in the sky and I can’t work it out. Driving, I can only snatch glimpses of flickering light. I pull into a lay-by near home. Now I can make out five or six broad-winged birds, flying in a loose flock. They are black and white and their motion reflects the low sun, flashing light and contrasting dark, like a disturbance in the force field.
Lapwings, or “peewits” as they are known for their call, are birds of my childhood. Every spring, they nested in the same field and, in winter, flocks gathered. I loved their crest and the way their petrol-sheened plumage changed with the light, from dark green to bronze or purple.
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RSPB says growing trend for honouring species that are in decline is not matched by action on conservation
Britain’s street names are being inspired by skylarks, lapwings and starlings, even as bird populations decline.
According to a report by the RSPB, names such as Skylark Lane and Swift Avenue are increasingly common. Using OS Open Names data from 2004 to 2024, the conservation charity found that road names featuring bird species had risen by 350% for skylarks, 156% for starlings and 104% for lapwings, despite populations of these having fallen in the wild.
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Conservationists say changes, coupled with underfunding, will curb take-up and leave less land protected for nature
An ambitious scheme to restore England’s nature over coming decades has been undermined after the government inserted a clause allowing it to terminate contracts with only a year’s notice, conservationists have said.
The project was designed to fund landscape-scale restoration over thousands of hectares, whether on large estates or across farms and nature reserves. The idea was to create huge reserves for rare species to thrive – projects promoted as decades-long commitments to securing habitat for wildlife well into the future.
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Mark Carney is considering lifting a tanker ban that has protected coastal communities for 53 years
The distress call went out to the Canadian coast guard station after midnight on an October night. The Nathan E Stewart, an American-flagged tugboat, sailing through the light winds and rain of the central British Columbia coast, had grounded on a reef.
The captain tried to reverse, moving the rudder from hard over port to hard over starboard. The boat pivoted but did not move, and the tug repeatedly struck the sea bed.
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Bureaucratic delays and funding shortages stall plans to carve out a forest reserve for the uncontacted Indigenous group on the southern fringe of the Brazilian Amazon
In 2024, agents of the National Foundation for Indigenous Peoples (Funai) walked more than 60 miles through rainforest on the southern fringe of the Brazilian Amazon on a mission to monitor and help protect a group of Indigenous people who had no contact with the modern world.
What they found was a small basket freshly woven from leaves, a child’s footprints on the bank of a creek, and tree trunks hacked open hours before to extract honey. There were huts abandoned a year before that were sinking into the forest floor, and brazil nut pods discarded around old campfires. They were all signs that the Pardo River Kawahiva people were there.
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Former Perth curator Mark Harvey is one of the few people on Earth to have described 1,000 new species, many of them arachnids. Colleagues say his legacy is ‘unquantifiable’
For most people around the world, 16 August 1977 was memorable because it was the day Elvis Presley died.
“We turned the radio on when we got back in the car and that was the headline. Elvis was dead,” remembers Dr Mark Harvey.
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