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Investigation by Guardian and Carbon Brief finds just a fifth of funds to fight global heating went to poorest 44 countries
China and wealthy petrostates including Saudi Arabia and UAE are among countries receiving large sums of climate finance, according to an analysis.
The Guardian and Carbon Brief analysed previously unreported submissions to the UN, along with data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), that show how billions of dollars of public money is being committed to the fight against global heating.
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Advocates say conservative states’ push to define gender as ‘biological sex’ would backslide on decade-old language within the UN
A row over the definition of the term “gender” threatens to bog down pivotal talks at the Cop30 climate summit.
Before the UN talks in Brazil, hardline conservative states have pushed to define gender as “biological sex” over their concerns trans and non-binary people could be included in a major plan to ensure climate action addresses gender inequality and empowers women.
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Commercial cooking shown to be cause of unusual peaks when policy was operating during pandemic in autumn 2020
It is widely accepted that the UK government’s “eat out to help out” policy added to the spread of Covid-19 during the summer of 2020.
New analysis reveals that it added to air pollution, too, at a time when the public was urged to minimise air pollution to protect vulnerable people shielding or isolating with Covid.
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Radio host uses chart songs that didn’t quite make top spot to highlight issue of Windermere pollution
If you Sit Down and wonder why Britain’s streams, rivers and lakes are so filthy, you’re probably Holding Out for a Hero to halt this Scandalous discharge of sewage.
Step forward the Lake District Radio DJ Lee Durrant, who will go Radio Ga Ga with a 24-hour live broadcasting marathon on Friday, playing songs that peaked at No 2 in the charts to highlight the ongoing stench of not quite Golden Brown “number twos” floating downstream.
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Study estimates 53,000 females have died on South Georgia since 2023, with ‘dramatic impact’ on future of the species
Bird flu has wiped out half of South Georgia’s breeding elephant seals, according to a study that warns of “serious implications” for the future of the species.
The remote island in the South Atlantic Ocean is home to the world’s largest southern elephant seal population. Researchers estimate 53,000 females died after bird flu hit in 2023.
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Crook, County Durham: There’s a contemplative pleasure to gathering up the leaves this time of year, and it’s a benefit to legions of invertebrates and toadstools too
I can hear the distant, angry growl of a leaf blower, carried on the wind, nature’s leaf blower. Otherwise, it’s quiet here in the garden, sheltered by a high hedge, raking fallen leaves, one of autumn’s contemplative tasks, reviving memories of watching for first signs of their unfurling in spring, and sitting in their shade during summer’s heatwaves.
An ever-changing palette of colours settles on the path: today, burnt orange and cinnamon shades of Amelanchier, crimson spindle, yellow hawthorn, scarlet cherry foliage. What to do with them? There are too many to consign to the compost heaps. Send them away in the garden waste wheelie bin? Corral them in a chicken wire cage until they eventually become crumbly leaf mould? There’s another option: raking them back under the trees and hedge, into the flowerbeds, closing a loop in the cycle of life. Six years of doing just that has produced some wonderful displays of woodland toadstools. First to show this year were clusters of lilac-tinted wood blewits (Lepista nuda), followed by sepia boletes (Xerocomellus porosporus) with domed caps cracked like crazy paving. Pallid, warty puffballs are shouldering aside layers of decay, ready to shed their spores.
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From deforestation to emissions trading, vital policies are being watered down in the name of ‘competitiveness’. But Europe is shooting itself in the foot
Climate action has long been a flagship European policy. As negotiators gather in Brazil for Cop30, however, Europe’s leadership risks faltering. Things were very different a decade ago in Paris, when a landmark deal to limit global heating to 1.5C was achieved at Cop21. That agreement relied on an understanding between the US and China – one that would be difficult to replicate today. Its ambition was elevated by Europe acting in concert with a broad coalition of global south countries.
The Paris climate agreement paved the way for the European Green Deal in 2019, which enshrined into law the ambition of climate neutrality in the EU by 2050 and introduced the world’s first comprehensive plan to achieve it, featuring a robust set of pricing, regulatory and funding measures.
Nathalie Tocci is a Guardian Europe columnist
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Climate summit in Brazil needs to find way to stop global heating accelerating amid stark divisions
“It broke my heart.” Surangel Whipps, president of the tiny Pacific nation of Palau, was sitting in the front row of the UN’s general assembly in New York when Donald Trump made a long and rambling speech, his first to the UN since his re-election, on 23 September.
Whipps was prepared for fury and bombast from the US president, but what followed was shocking. Trump’s rant on the climate crisis – a “green scam”, “the greatest con job ever perpetrated”, “predictions made by stupid people” – was an unprecedented attack on science and global action from a major world leader.
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Host uses Indigenous concepts and changes agenda to help delegates agree on ways to meet existing climate goals
Shipping containers, cruise ships, river boats, schools and even army barracks have been pressed into service as accommodation for the 50,000 plus people descending on the Amazon: this year’s Cop30 climate summit is going to be, in many ways, an unconventional one.
Located in Belém, a small city at the mouth of the Amazon river, the Brazilian hosts have been criticised for the exorbitant cost of scarce hotel rooms and hastily vacated apartments. Many delegations have slimmed down their presence, while business leaders have decamped to hold their own events in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
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Brazil’s president welcomes world leaders while navigating divided government, promising action on deforestation and emissions
Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has welcomed world leaders to Belém for the first climate summit in the Amazon, where conservationists hope he can be a champion for the rainforest and its people.
But with a divided administration, a hostile Congress and 20th-century developmentalist instincts, this global figurehead of the centre left has a balancing act to perform in advocating protection of nature and a reduction of emissions.
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