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Subsidies awarded to eight new projects help keep UK on track to decarbonise by 2030
A make-or-break auction for the UK government’s goal to create a clean electricity system by 2030 has awarded subsidy contracts to enough offshore windfarms to power 12m homes.
In Great Britain’s most competitive auction for renewable subsidies to date, energy companies vied for contracts that guarantee the price for each unit of clean electricity they generate.
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Data leads scientists to declare 2015 Paris agreement to keep global heating below 1.5C ‘dead in the water’
Last year was the third hottest on record, scientists have said, with mounting fossil fuel pollution behind “exceptional” temperatures.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said 2025 had continued a three-year streak of “extraordinary global temperatures” during which surface air temperatures averaged 1.48C above preindustrial levels.
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Energy company also under pressure from worse oil trading performance and weaker oil prices
BP has said it expects to write down the value of its struggling green energy business by as much as $5bn (£3.7bn), as it refocuses on fossil fuels under its new chair, Albert Manifold.
The oil company said the writedowns were mostly related to its gas and low-carbon energy divisions in its “transition businesses”, but added that wiping between $4bn and $5bn off their value would not affect its underlying profits when it reports its full-year results in February.
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Exclusive: Some scientists say many detections are most likely error, with one high-profile study called a ‘joke’
High-profile studies reporting the presence of microplastics throughout the human body have been thrown into doubt by scientists who say the discoveries are probably the result of contamination and false positives. One chemist called the concerns “a bombshell”.
Studies claiming to have revealed micro and nanoplastics in the brain, testes, placentas, arteries and elsewhere were reported by media across the world, including the Guardian. There is no doubt that plastic pollution of the natural world is ubiquitous, and present in the food and drink we consume and the air we breathe. But the health damage potentially caused by microplastics and the chemicals they contain is unclear, and an explosion of research has taken off in this area in recent years.
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Waresley, Cambridgeshire:In a near-freezing lake, I’m treated to an up-close view of one of my favourite birds
The spring-fed lake is a picture of tranquillity this morning. On the far side, ivy-clad trees touch trunks with their watery counterparts, creating an image of a child’s mirror painting folded along the shoreline. Only the soft blurring of branches distinguishes reflection from reality.
The scene might look serene, but I must focus on my breathing to stay calm as I lower myself slowly into the water, which has chilled to a wintry 6C. I started cold water swimming last month, hoping it would help relieve the chronic pain caused by adenomyosis. It’s only my fourth session, and I’m wondering if I have the confidence to swim across the lifeguarded lake when a quick movement on the water catches my attention. I spot a dumpy ball of fluff that isn’t there.
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Wildfires now destroy twice as much tree cover per year as two decades ago – a crisis fuelled by climate change
The world is losing forests to fire at an unsustainable rate, experts have warned.
Wildfires have always been part of nature’s cycle, but in recent decades their scale, frequency and intensity in carbon-rich forests have surged.
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Seven out of 10 targets have little likelihood of being met by 2030, Office for Environmental Protection says
The government will not meet its targets to save wildlife in England and is failing on almost all environmental measures, the Office for Environmental Protection watchdog has said.
In a damning report, the OEP has found that seven of the 10 targets set in the Environment Act 2021 have little likelihood of being met by 2030, which is the deadline set in law.
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The international swan census takes place this weekend, with volunteers helping count whooper and Bewick’s swans
Volunteer birders across the UK and Ireland will be among those taking part in the six-yearly international swan census this weekend, counting numbers of the countries’ two wintering species, whooper and Bewick’s swans.
The survey, which last took place in January 2020, aims to track changes in the populations of these charismatic wildfowl in the UK and Ireland. The whoopers have mainly travelled from Iceland and the Bewick’s from Siberia.
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In countries such as South Sudan, the great herds have all but disappeared. But further south, conservation success mean increasing human-wildlife conflict
It is late on a January afternoon in the middle of South Sudan’s dry season, and the landscape, pricked with stubby acacias, is hazy with smoke from people burning the grasslands to encourage new growth. Even from the perspective of a single-engine ultralight aircraft, we are warned it will be hard to spot the last elephant in Badingilo national park, a protected area covering nearly 9,000 sq km (3,475 sq miles).
Technology helps – the 20-year-old bull elephant wears a GPS collar that pings coordinates every hour. The animal’s behaviour patterns also help; Badingilo’s last elephant is so lonely that it moves with a herd of giraffes.
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Whether it’s the financial crash, the climate emergency or the breakdown of the international order, historian Adam Tooze has become the go-to guide to the radical new world we’ve entered
In late January 2025, 10 days after Donald Trump was sworn in for a second time as president of the United States, an economic conference in Brussels brought together several officials from the recently deposed Biden administration for a discussion about the global economy. In Washington, Trump and his wrecking crew were already busy razing every last brick of Joe Biden’s legacy, but in Brussels, the Democratic exiles put on a brave face. They summoned the comforting ghosts of white papers past, intoning old spells like “worker-centered trade policy” and “middle-out bottom-up economics”. They touted their late-term achievements. They even quoted poetry: “We did not go gently into that good night,” Katherine Tai, who served as Biden’s US trade representative, said from the stage. Tai proudly told the audience that before leaving office she and her team had worked hard to complete “a set of supply-chain-resiliency papers, a set of model negotiating texts, and a shipbuilding investigation”.
It was not until 70 minutes into the conversation that a discordant note was sounded, when Adam Tooze joined the panel remotely. Born in London, raised in West Germany, and living now in New York, where he teaches at Columbia, Tooze was for many years a successful but largely unknown academic. A decade ago he was recognised, when he was recognised at all, as an economic historian of Europe. Since 2018, however, when he published Crashed, his “contemporary history” of the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath, Tooze has become, in the words of Jonathan Derbyshire, his editor at the Financial Times, “a sort of platonic ideal of the universal intellectual”.
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