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Energy secretary prepares new pledge for big UK carbon cuts in next decade amid potential cabinet division
Ed Miliband is facing his first key test on Labour’s ambitions for global climate leadership, with a crucial decision looming on how far and how fast to cut the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions.
The energy secretary is preparing a new international pledge for the UK to cut carbon sharply in the next decade, but could face opposition within the cabinet.
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Critics say eels could be smuggled eastwards towards Asia but exporter says they are for ‘restocking’ project
Millions of critically endangered eels have been exported from the Severn estuary to Russia this year and conservationists fear export quotas will be increased next year.
A tonne of glass eels, the young elvers that swim into European estuaries from the Sargasso Sea each spring, was flown to Kaliningrad this year, double the amount exported to the Russian port the previous year.
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Subsidiary of electricity firm SSE signs ‘unique and novel’ employment and social housing deal with local councils
More than 1,000 new homes are expected to be built across northern Scotland linked to a £20bn investment in grid infrastructure needed to meet the UK’s green energy targets.
SSEN Transmission, a subsidiary of the electricity firm SSE, has signed a deal with local councils and housing associations in the Highlands to fund at least 1,000 new properties as well as the refurbishment of existing, unoccupied ones.
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Deforestation fell by a third when the guerrilla leader Ivan Mordisco violently enforced a logging ban, but now he has changed tack and is threatening Cop16 biodiversity talks
In the Amazon states of southern Colombia, uniform patches of cattle pasture suddenly give way to trees so numerous and densely packed that the blots of emerald, lime green and white overlap as vines, leaves and tree trunks merge into one.
According to official figures, this place is an international success story: the frontline of the country’s fight against deforestation, which it slashed last year by 36%.
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Mowi Scotland, which supplies Tesco, Asda and Sainsbury’s, blames a rise in sea temperatures for the deaths, while campaigners say expanding farms will make things worse
More than a million dead fish, the biggest mass die-off of farmed salmon in Scotland in a decade, have been recorded at a farm belonging to the UK’s largest supplier.
The deaths at two adjacent Mowi Scotland sites in Loch Seaforth on the Outer Hebrides – licensed as one farm by the Scottish government – rose to just over a million during the year-and-a-half production cycle that it usually takes to raise a salmon in seawater, and which in this case began in spring 2023. Mowi supplies salmon to retailers including Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Asda and Ocado. Many of its farms, including those in the Hebrides, are certified under the RSPCA Assured label, which guarantees higher animal welfare standards.
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Since February, 630m empty cans and bottles have been deposited at reverse vending machines
After initial consumer confusion and irritation, Ireland’s first ever bottle deposit return scheme has finally been embraced by the public, with 111m containers returned in August – up from 2m in February when the scheme launched – new data shows.
Re-turn, which was mandated by the Irish government, to implement the scheme as part of a bid to meet EU 90% recycling targets, said that in the eight months since February, 630m containers have been deposited at reverse vending machines up and down the country.
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In the mountainous area near Asheville, affected growers must now replenish water-logged and often tainted land
Hurricane Helene took much from western North Carolina where I live, farm and raise my family.The stories are harrowing: houses obliterated by landslides, whole families washed away, corpses revealed as the waters receded.
Suddenly, there’s deep climate trauma here, in a place where we mistakenly thought hurricanes happened to Floridians and coastal communities, not us. Helene stole our sense of security: we now side-eye trees, which crushed homes, power lines, cars and people. And the rain, the farmer’s frequent wish, turned our rivers maniacal.
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Australia’s solar waste problem – identified as a priority by the federal government in 2016 – is becoming larger and more urgent
In a 50m shed south of Brisbane, solar panels are being turned into silver and copper.
Photovoltaic panels no longer capable of producing electricity are having their aluminium and wires removed before being ground up and refined into plastic, glass, silicon, silver and copper. So far, nothing has gone to waste.
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When ancient carvings were vandalised, the Wauja feared their knowledge was lost. But 3D imaging has created a replica at the heart of Brazil’s first Xingu people’s museum
It is not yet dawn in Ulupuwene, an Indigenous village in the Brazilian Amazon, but the Wauja people have already risen to prepare for the festive day ahead. The sound of clarinet-like instruments floats across the village, on the banks of the Batovi River, as women sweep the earthen floor between the thatched oca,or traditional houses.
Men paint their bodies with charcoal and bright-red achiote seeds. As the sun rises over the rainforest, men, women and children all meet in the village centre to sing and dance.
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The small town of Dimock saw its water become brown, undrinkable, even flammable – and its residents are still feeling the effects
Fracking has burst back on to the national stage in the US presidential election contest for the must-win swing state of Pennsylvania. But for one town in this state that saw its water become mud-brown, undrinkable and even flammable 15 years ago, the specter of fracking never went away.
Residents in Dimock, a rural town of around 1,200 people in north-east Pennsylvania, have been locked in a lengthy battle to remediate their water supply that was ruined in 2009 after the drilling of dozens of wells to access a hotspot called the “Saudi Arabia of gas” found deep underneath their homes.
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