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Red warnings issued in Hungary, Poland, Romania and the Balkans, with authorities urging people to stay indoors
Parts of central, eastern and southern Europe sweltered on Monday as the “heat dome” behind last week’s record-breaking temperatures shifted east, bringing dangerous conditions to a new swathe of the continent.
Budapest is forecast to exceed 40C on Tuesday, according to models from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.
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Energy system operator says sum needed to deliver clean power targets while meeting rising demand is up by 50%
The cost of rewiring Great Britain’s electricity networks through the 2030s is now 50% higher than before the Labour government came to power, and could reach almost £90bn in the next decade, according to the energy system operator.
Building new high-voltage transmission lines and infrastructure to connect low-carbon energy to the grid in the 2030s was initially forecast by the energy system operator to cost £58bn.
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Outer Hebrides: It’s nearly 100 years since anyone lived on this hostile archipelago, though their ‘village’ remains – as does an astonishing wealth of wildlife
Dawn on a deep-rolling ocean, and I am about to realise a dream. We’re 35 nautical miles west of the Outer Hebrides, on board the expedition cruise ship M/V Sea Spirit, approaching the archipelago of St Kilda – the most remote outpost of the British Isles, and the UK’s only dual Unesco world heritage site. Impregnable sheer cliffs spike the seascape, rising to 1,400 feet, and we’re in the company of Risso’s dolphins, flights of gannets and hurrying auks.
We make landing at Hirta, the largest of the four islands at about 2.7 square miles. Above the great storm beach lies a deserted, unnamed “village”, a thin crescent of traditional Hebridean cottages. Nowadays, the only inhabitants are St Kilda wrens (Troglodytes troglodytes hirtensis) – larger and darker than the mainland populations – but each cottage also bears a simple plaque listing the last family to live there.
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Exclusive: £75m publicity drive will ask people to treat water as precious resource and cut daily use by 28 litres
The biggest ever campaign to encourage the public to reduce their water use will launch this week, as the UK emerges from record temperatures attributed to the climate crisis.
The £75m publicity drive, called Let’s Save Water, will advise and encourage people to treat water as a precious resource and has a target for everyone to cut their daily use by 28 litres – or two large buckets – from the current average use of about 140 litres a day.
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Teams painstakingly combed endangered Atlantic habitat over several years, helping to grow 8m native trees
A small band of volunteers has helped to grow nearly 8m native trees in Scotland, crucial to efforts to restore lost parts of the Atlantic rainforest, after collecting 11m seeds by hand.
About 100 volunteers, including retired teachers and doctors, office workers and young families, have spent tens of thousands of hours venturing into often remote woods in the western Highlands and islands to search out seed-bearing trees.
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In 1993, she squeezed a $333m settlement from a Californian energy company in a scandal over contaminated water. Three decades later, she has a new target in her sights – and it’s global
When Erin Brockovich woke to find 30 emails from people from the same town, she realised something was going on. People email Brockovich all the time because of what happened in 1993, when she was instrumental in suing Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) on behalf of residents of the town of Hinkley, California, whose groundwater had been contaminated. The case resulted in a settlement of $333m – then the largest ever payout for a direct-action lawsuit. When she was immortalised by Julia Roberts in the 2000 film Erin Brockovich, she became the hero we didn’t know we needed, a modern day Joan of Arc. She had won against PG&E with no formal legal training.
The emails she received a few weeks ago were about datacentres. In April, she put a callout on her website asking for anyone with concerns about one near them to get in touch. Within a month, 3,862 people had replied. Tech companies have needed datacentres to power their technology “for ever”, she says, but the new ones being built to power AI? “This feels like Hinkley on steroids.”
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Home-grown food may become a niche product for wealthy in our supermarkets as British farmers’ incomes plummet
For Liz Webster, who farms 647 hectares (1600 acres) in Wiltshire, south west England, the latest impact of Brexit has been particularly brutal. About £400 per animal has been wiped off the price she can get for her beef cattle, a hefty blow at a time when all the inputs – feed, energy, fertiliser – are going through the roof.
The fall in price, on livestock that typically fetch £2,000 to £3,000 per animal, is the result of a flood of cheaper meat arriving from Australia, the result of one of the new trade deals the government has signed since the UK left the European Union. Prices for beef in the supermarkets have remained broadly the same, but farmers have seen their income plummet.
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The government’s requisition of a historic green space has ignited a fierce debate about air quality and heat stress in India’s scorching capital
For decades, the social highlight of winters in Delhi for the “beautiful people” was the polo season. A sprinkling of royalty and diplomats, impeccably groomed women in pearls and chiffon saris, along with wealthy industrialists sporting silk pocket squares used to gather to watch polo players compete under the mild, balmy sun.
They cheered on handsome players who, once the match was over, had children shrieking in delight as they put on a heart-stopping display of tent-pegging derring-do. Swish champagne lunches and other après-polo celebrations followed.
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The H5N1 virus has now reached every continent on the planet. What does it mean for some of the world’s unique species?
It was a rough five-day sail from the Falkland Islands and, as the science expedition approached the South Georgia coast, they found fur seal carcasses floating on the water. “There were these moments when it would hit us,” says Dr Jane Younger, remembering the expedition to the British subantarctic territory six months ago.
Younger, an ecologist at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies at the University of Tasmania, was with scientists from the United States, France, South Africa and the Falklands to check on the spread of the H5N1 variant of bird flu.
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The CLP’s ‘tough on crime’, pro-development agenda brings sweeping changes, which advocates say cut the NT’s most vulnerable out of the conversation
The Northern Territory is out of sight – and often out of mind – for many Australians. But for 18 months, environment, First Nations, justice and family groups have been sounding the alarm with increasing urgency.
The populist “tough on crime” agenda which saw the Country Liberal party, led by Lia Finocchiaro, sweep to power in 2024 has been taking shape, and those representing the territory’s most vulnerable people, communities and ecosystems are worried.
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