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After speculation and conflicting pressures, prime minister will attend climate summit next month
Keir Starmer will travel to the Amazon rainforest for the UN climate summit next month, Downing Street has confirmed, after weeks of speculation that he would not.
No 10 said on Monday the prime minister would fly to Belém, in Brazil, for what experts say will be the most significant Cop meeting since Paris in 2015.
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Homeowners urged to use more robust planting and permeable materials to help mitigate flood risk
Nearly half of the UK’s garden space is paved over, a new study has found.
The Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) has conducted the largest ever audit of the UK’s gardens, and found that they are an untapped – and until now, mostly unmeasured – potential resource for nature.
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Iida Turpeinen’s novel has been a sensation in her native Finland. On the eve of its UK publication, she talks about her compulsion to tell of the sociable giant’s plight
Iida Turpeinen is the author of Beasts of the Sea, a Finnish novel tracing the fate of a now-extinct species: the sea cow. Similar to dugongs and manatees, the sea cow was only discovered in 1741 by the shipwrecked German-born naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller but by 1768 it had already become the first marine species to be eradicated by humans.
Translated into 28 languages and shortlisted for the country’s most prestigious literary award, the Finlandia Prize, Beasts of the Sea was described by the Helsinki Literacy Agency as the most internationally successful Finnish debut novel ever. Turpeinen, 38, a PhD student of comparative literature, is now a resident novelist at Finland’s Natural History Museum. Her book will be published in the UK on 23 October.
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As biodiversity declines, locating and conserving the planet’s plant life is becoming more important. The Millennium seed bank in Wakehurst, West Sussex, has been doing just that for 25 years, collecting and storing seeds and keeping them in trust for countries all over the world should they ever be needed. To mark the anniversary, Patrick Greenfield took a tour of the site. He tells Madeleine Finlay about the journey a seed takes from arrival to cold storage, and how some are already helping to return endangered plant species to the wild
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The Marches, Shropshire: The larvae of gall wasps burrowed into these acorns in summer. Now they’re gone, leaving behind the weird, hardened detritus
Under a woodsmoke sky, the lime trees smell yellow, their leaves defy gravity, hanging on to summer stains, a few stray into the cool, breathless air and vanish. Those leaves that have fallen lose their leafiness to decay, as John Clare says, in the poem Decay, “To be, – and to have been, – and then be not.” This is anticyclonic gloom. High pressure, low cloud, roofed by warm air, poor visibility, misty and grey. Gloom. It’s interesting that the sullen and despondent mood, Gloom, has left its evil twin Doom, and lumbered into meteorology to be the official poster-spirit of dim light.
I like a bit of autumnal gloom, and so do the crows, it seems. In dreamy mood and a gothic disdain for showiness, they make some cursory flaps around the field to settle in old oaks and caw six times as if that has some oracular significance. Maybe it has. In the scrunch of acorns under one oak, with a thinning crown and stag-headed, are lots of knopper galls. When they first formed in August, these flanged extrusions from pedunculate oak acorns were green, then red and sticky, created by the larvae of the tiny gall wasp Andricus quercuscalicis feeding on the seed within and producing weird crown-like growths.
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While Nigel Farage promotes retro plans to reopen coalmines, will he really tell thousands of clean energy workers to leave their well-paid, local jobs?
This government is bad at proclaiming what it’s for. But to find out, follow the money. Its boldest investment is in green energy, designed to create prodigious returns in economic growth, employment, training, climate action and more. So far it has been hard to sell. Wafty talk of greenness passes most people by, and “whose growth is it, anyway?” is a realistic question in a country of stagnant pay and public decay. But, this week, Ed Miliband put flesh on the green words, making jobs and projects concrete. A very big number of green jobs – 400,000 by 2030 – are set to be created in 31 “priority occupations”, from welders to production managers, plumbers and joiners, everywhere from Centrica’s £35m state-of-the-art training academy in Lutterworth to Teesside’s net-zero decarbonisation cluster.
This is what a Labour industrial strategy should look like. Nigel Farage’s retro campaign for this week’s Caerphilly byelection promises to reopen Welsh coalmines. But well-paid, clean, green-energy jobs within their home districts are what Miliband’s Doncaster North constituents want, the minister tells me, not sending young people down reopened mines. Government figures show wind, nuclear and electricity jobs pay more than most – the average advertised salary in the wind sector is £51,000 a year, against an average £37,000. Unions, once sceptical and fearful of losing jobs in unionised industries, now sign up with guarantees that any new plant getting grants must “support greater trade union recognition” and a fair work charter.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
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Conservationists argue president’s oil expansion plans clash with his image as a global leader on climate change
Brazil’s Petrobras has been given permission to drill for oil near the mouth of the Amazon River, casting a shadow over the country’s green ambitions as it prepares to host UN climate talks.
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the president, has come under fire from conservationists who argue his oil expansion plans clash with his image as a global leader on climate change.
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Since 1985, the country’s toad population has almost halved, with hundreds of thousands killed on the roads each year. But many people are determined to protect them – including 274 dedicated patrol groups
It’s 7.30 on a Friday evening, but I’m not heading to the pub or putting on a film. Instead, I’ve caught the train to a market town in Wiltshire, where I’m meeting up with members of Warminster toad patrol. These are volunteers who – like similar groups up and down the country – give up their evenings to protect their local toad population.
For the common toad (scientific name Bufo bufo) is becoming increasingly uncommon. A recent study led by amphibian and reptile charity Froglife showed that the UK toad population has almost halved since 1985. To see a creature that has been a stalwart of the British countryside – not to mention a prominent feature of literature and folklore – in decline is “worrying”, says Dr Silviu Petrovan, senior researcher at the University of Cambridge and lead author of the study. Toads “don’t require very specific conditions” and “should be able to live quite well in most of the habitats in Britain,” he says – so if even they are not managing to survive, “it kind of suggests that things are not as they should be”.
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When a fishing boat left port in Alaska in December 2019 with an experienced crew, an icy storm was brewing. What happened to them shows why deep sea fishing is one of the most dangerous professions in the world
The Scandies Rose fishing boat set out to sea from Kodiak, Alaska on 30 December 2019 with a crew of seven, into weather as bad as anything December could throw. “It was enough of a shitty forecast,” said one of the crew in later testimony, “I didn’t think we were going to leave that night.” At 8.35pm, fierce, frigid winds were blowing. Some boats stayed in harbour but the Scandies Rose still set out. “We knew the weather was going to be bad,” said deckhand Dean Gribble, “but the boat’s a battleship, we go through the weather.”
The boat was carrying 7,000kg of bait and was headed north towards the Bering Sea. “She was trim, said Dean, and a good boat. Gary Cobban was a good captain.” One of the last jobs before departure was to stack the crab pots properly. There were 198 on board. That is a heavy load but not unusual. Each pot measured more than 2 metres by 2 metres. “Big, heavy fucking pots,” Gribble said.
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Plans for a fossil fuel project in Wadden Sea nature reserve have angered local people and campaigners, as political enthusiasm for renewables wanes
Peering out on a clear day from the windswept dunes that dapple the north-western tip of Germany, on a gull-shaped island in the Wadden Sea nature reserve, tourists hoping to spot seals may soon see a dark metal platform rise out of the water.
The planned structure is one of several fossil fuel projects that Germany is pushing to build despite a legal deadline to stop polluting the atmosphere with carbon emissions in 20 years’ time. The joint Dutch-German venture, which received the green light from regional authorities last month, seeks to extract 13bn cubic metres of gas from just outside a protected area at the marine border between the two countries.
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