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Use of enclosed combustors leaves regulators heavily reliant on oil and gas companies’ own flaring data
Oil and gas equipment intended to cut methane emissions is preventing scientists from accurately detecting greenhouse gases and pollutants, a satellite image investigation has revealed.
Energy companies operating in countries such as the US, UK, Germany and Norway appear to have installed technology that could stop researchers from identifying methane, carbon dioxide emissions and pollutants at industrial facilities involved in the disposal of unprofitable natural gas, known in the industry as flaring.
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Susan Hall became member a day after an exposé about its contents – much of which is directed at Sadiq Khan
Susan Hall, the Tory candidate for London mayor, has joined a Facebook group which contains Islamophobic hate speech and abusive comments about her opponent Sadiq Khan, the day after an exposé about its contents.
Khan told the Guardian these revelations “could have a direct impact on not just my safety but the safety of my family and staff”.
A YouTube video alleging that “Islamists” were “taking over Britain”.
Abuse towards Khan, including a post that read: “Seriously can’t believe Khan hasn’t been taken out yet … if dark forces can take out Princess Diana I’m sure they can take out this money grabbing little parasite”.
Examples of vandalism: one user shared a photo of an enforcement van with its tyres slashed, noting “two flat tyres and sprayed camera”. Another user responded: “Well done to whoever that was”.
Numerous Islamophobic comments, including one commenter calling Khan a “terrorist sympathiser”, and another saying that the London mayor “will see a big upsurge in public feelings and possibly major riots, mosques burnt down and innocent Muslims unable to walk the streets”.
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Viruses that cause mild sniffles in humans are devastating populations of chimpanzees and gorillas. In some ape communities, it’s a bigger killer than habitat loss or poaching
There was something wrong with the chimpanzees. For weeks, a community of 205 animals in Uganda’s Kibale national park had been coughing, sneezing and looking generally miserable. But no one could say for sure what ailed them, even as the animals began to die.
Necropsies can help to identify a cause of death, but normally, the bodies of chimps are found long after decomposition has set in, if at all. So when Tony Goldberg, a US wildlife epidemiologist visiting Kibale, got word that an adult female named Stella had been found freshly dead, he knew this was a rare opportunity to look for an answer.
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Porlock Weir, Somerset: Once part of a horse paddock, this sessile oak now has been left stranded by the retreating coast, and endures hard coastal winters
Sessile oaks are emblematic of the south-west, where they grow mossed and twisted in the region’s acidic soil and plenteous rain. Their Latin name, Quercus petraea, means “oak of rocky places” and they thrive in the shallow clitter of Exmoor’s steep, misty hillsides.
Sessile means immovably fixed in position, and refers to the way the acorns grow attached directly to the twigs. This differs from pedunculate oaks (Quercus robur), which dangle their acorns on pendular stems.
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Rishi Sunak claimed to have farmers’ backs but their union’s president is far from convinced, as he spars with the government over floods, falling markets and fraught retailer relations
‘This is the first time I’ve had my lawn cut by somebody else,” says Tom Bradshaw, the new president of the National Farmers’ Union. Just over a month after being voted into the role, he admits life has become “hectic”.
He is standing outside the idyllic farmhouse in rural Essex where he has lived since he was six, and the garden is all perfect flower beds and newly manicured grass. Nothing here looks hectic, but Bradshaw really is a busy man.
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To protect our local river we had to prove it was being used for swimming. But that, bizarrely, is the reason we were rejected
The state of Britain’s rivers is incredibly depressing: the water companies dump too much sewage, the farmers dump too much muck, and the regulators are too cowed and underfunded to do their job and stop them.
It wasn’t always this way. As a child I used to swim in the River Wye and I remember the clouds of mayflies in the summer, as well as huge leaping salmon. It was thanks to this wealth of wildlife that the Wye was classified as a special area of conservation along its whole length. Sadly, however, thanks to the failure of the Welsh and British governments to protect the river, much of this abundance is gone, and the Wye’s official status is now “unfavourable – declining”, thanks to pollution from manure and sewage.
Oliver Bullough is the author of Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals
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Amsterdam is home to 45,000 sq metres of ‘blue-green’ roofs, which absorb rainwater and allow it to be used by building residents to water plants and flush toilets
You might visit Amsterdam for its canals, and who could blame you, really. But the truly interesting waterways aren’t under your feet – they’re above your head.
Beautiful green roofs have popped up all over the world: specially selected plants growing on structures designed to manage the extra weight of biomass. Amsterdam has taken that one step further with blue-green roofs, specially designed to capture rainwater. One project, the resilience network of smart, innovative, climate-adaptive rooftops (Resilio), has covered more than 9,000 sq metres (100,000 sq ft) of Amsterdam’s roofs, including 8,000 sq metres on social housing complexes. Citywide, the blue-green roof coverage is even bigger, estimated at more than 45,000 sq metres.
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A new $47m vessel is preparing for its maiden voyage in coastal waters, but there are fears the Kangei Maru could one day mean a return to hunting in the Southern Ocean
The dish of the day has the appearance and consistency of steak. But the item on the menu at Nisshin Maru in Shimonoseki isn’t brisket or rib-eye – it is a prime cut of the restaurant’s speciality: whale meat.
Every few minutes, chefs in the open kitchen produce another plate of cetacean delicacies – raw sashimi marbled with fat, slices of “bacon”, roast minke whale cut into bite-size pieces and served with a selection of dipping sauces. On a warm weeknight, every table is full.
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More than half of the country’s forestry is in community and Indigenous hands – and from CO2absorption to reducing poverty the results are impressive
Dexter Melchor Matías works in the Zapotec Indigenous town of Ixtlán de Juárez, about 1,600ft (490 metres) above the wide Oaxaca valley in Mexico, where community forestry has become a way of life. Like him, about 10 million people across the country live in and make a living from forests, with half of that population identifying as Indigenous.
As average temperatures soar around the world and wildfires rage across the Americas, in Mexico, where more than a quarter of the country suffers from drought, the number of wildfires has remained steady since 2012.
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Native forest logging will cease in south-east Queensland this year – but how long will it take forests to recover?
It’s just after 8pm when Jess Lovegrove-Walsh, walking down a pitch-black fire trail through bushland about 100km west of Brisbane, trains her spotlight on a pair of laser-red eyes deep in the canopy.
“That’s a big long tail, it’s either a possum or a glider,” she yells, as a fellow ecologist from the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland, Paul Revie, runs ahead with his camera.
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