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Towering above Delhi’s skyline, emitting an inescapable stench of rotting flesh, are giant mountains of rubbish. Several miles wide and more than 200ft (60 metres) high, they are visible from across the city and stand as symbols of Delhi’s inability to deal with its trash.
Hannah Ellis-Petersen visited communities living in the shadow of Bhalswa’s overfilled landfill heaps, to see how they have become reliant on the mountain that is simultaneously poisoning them
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Only 14% of farmers surveyed for Farmdex report had 10% or more profit margin amid drop in subsidies since Brexit
A third of British farmers are making a loss or breaking even as they struggle with the loss of subsidies and looming inheritance tax changes, a report on post-Brexit farming has found.
Only 14% of farmers surveyed for McCain Foods’ inaugural Farmdex report said they made 10% or more profit in the past year. In fact, many are making no profit at all, with 35% of the farmers reporting making a loss or breaking even.
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Scientists are only beginning to grasp the scale of the issue and understand what impact the tree frogs may have on the islands’ rare wildlife
On the way to her office at the Charles Darwin research station, biologist Miriam San José crouches down near a shallow pond shrouded by vegetation and reaches deep into the foliage, pulling out a small green plastic box recorder.
She left it there overnight to capture the infamous croaks of a Fowler’s snouted treefrog (Scinax quinquefasciatus), known to Galápagos scientists as an invasive threat, with repercussions researchers are only beginning to grasp.
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From sharks to rays, from island cliffs to the tribes of Africa’s Omo Valley, Cristina Mittermeier’s show A Greater Wisdom celebrates the beauty of our planet – and highlights the biggest threats it faces
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River Action bringing legal action against water regulator over who should foot bill for firms’ past failures to invest
Ofwat is unlawfully allowing water companies to charge customers twice to fund more than £100bn of investment to reduce sewage pollution, campaigners will allege in court on Tuesday.
Lawyers for River Action say the bill increases being allowed by Ofwat – which amount to an average of £123 a year per household – mean customers will be paying again for improvements to achieve environmental compliance that should have been funded from their previous bills.
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As global leaders and environmental activists descend on Brazil for next week’s Cop30 climate summit, Madeleine Finlay speaks to the Guardian’s global environment editor, Jon Watts, who recently sat down for an exclusive interview with the UN secretary general, António Guterres. As he approaches his penultimate summit as the UN chief, Guterres reflected on humanity’s progress in attempting to limit global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, why Indigenous voices must be listened to and how he remains positive in the face of the climate crisis
‘Change course now’: humanity has missed 1.5C climate target, says UN head
Support the Guardian: theguardian.com/sciencepod
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Holkham, Norfolk: A local company is attempting to revive not just European flat oysters, but a whole wealth of species on a nearby seabed
It sits on my desk as I write, a memento from our Norfolk visit, where I found it at the tide’s edge. This blue-and-ochre shell comprises 30 or more fine layers of wavy calcium, rising to a swollen weathered apex. You could imagine the original bivalve sitting in your palm as an intact and living whole. But for that thought experiment to be true, I’d have to be more than 100 years old. Because this European flat oyster is a relic of a lost Victorian ecosystem.
The colony that gave rise to my shell had probably existed here for thousands of years, until the dredgers got to work, as they have on 90% of wild oyster reefs worldwide, and smashed it apart, then took the lot. Native oysters are functionally extinct here, as they are around most British coastlines.
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Indigenous leaders, environmental activists and forest defenders are determined to make this a summit like no other
A day into a river voyage between Santarém and Belém, a dozen or so passengers on the Karolina do Norte move excitedly to the port side of the boat to see the cafe au lait-coloured waters of the Amazon river mix with the darker, clearer currents of the Xingu.
“That confluence is like the people on this boat,” said Thais Santi. “All from different river basins, but coming together for this journey.”
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We are raiding the Guardian long read archives to bring you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors.
This week, from 2022: Kenya’s great lakes are flooding, in a devastating and long-ignored environmental disaster that is displacing hundreds of thousands of people
By Carey Baraka. Read by Reice Weathers
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In The White House Effect, now available on Netflix, archival footage is used to show how the US right moved from believing to disputing the climate crisis
In 1988, the United States entered into its worst drought since the Dust Bowl. Crops withered in fields nationwide, part of an estimated $60bn in damage ($160bn in 2025). Dust storms swept the midwest and northern Great Plains. Cities instituted water restrictions. That summer, unrelentingly hot temperatures killed between 5,000 and 10,000 people, and Yellowstone national park suffered the worst wildfire in its history.
Amid the disaster, George HW Bush, then Ronald Reagan’s vice-president, met with farmers in Michigan reeling from crop losses. Bush, the Republican candidate for president, consoled them: if elected, he would be the environmental president. He acknowledged the reality of intensifying heatwaves – the “greenhouse effect”, to use the scientific parlance of the day – with blunt clarity: the burning of fossil fuels contributed excess carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, leading to global warming. But though the scale of the problem could seem “impossible”, he assured the farmers that “those who think we’re powerless to do anything about this greenhouse effect are forgetting about the White House Effect” – the impact of sound environmental policy for the leading consumer of fossil fuels. Curbing emissions, he said, was “the common agenda of the future”.
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