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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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One in every 25 participants at 2025 UN climate summit is a fossil fuel lobbyist, according to Kick Big Polluters Out
More than 1,600 fossil fuel lobbyists have been granted access to the Cop30 climate negotiations in Belém, significantly outnumbering every single country’s delegation apart from the host Brazil, new analysis has found.
One in every 25 participants at this year’s UN climate summit is a fossil fuel lobbyist, according to the analysis by the Kick Big Polluters Out (KBPO) coalition, raising serious questions about the corporate capture and credibility of the annual Cop negotiations.
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When the rain started I had to find a way home to my children. I could never have imagined how long it would take. This is Ruchira’s story
Location Mumbai, India
Disaster Maharashtra floods, 2005
Ruchira Gupta is an English-to-Hindi interpreter, a former lawyer, and mother of two daughters. In 2005, she was working at a small law firm in Mumbai, India when heavy rainfall flooded the country’s western state of Maharashtra, killing 926 people. Between 1950 and2015, there was a threefold increase in extreme rain events in India.
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Local people describe devastating impact of millions of toxic beads from Southern Water site near Camber Sands
The massive spill of plastic beads at Camber Sands is devastating for local people, wildlife and tourism and the beads are dispersing along the coast, residents heard at an emotional public meeting on Thursday.
Millions of tiny, toxic plastic beads are thought to have escaped into the sea from Eastbourne sewage works in East Sussex about two weeks ago when a screen keeping them in broke. They began to wash up on Camber Sands beach last Thursday, with the situation worsening over the weekend.
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From Taradell to Galicia, cooperatives are supplying cheap, clean electricity to homes and helping tackle fuel poverty
It began in the small Catalan town of Taradell as a plan to provide local people with allotments where they could grow their own food.
Four activists came together with the aim of promoting good environmental practices in local agriculture and business, as well as supplying renewable energy. The project, however, was about much more than growing vegetables.
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The best of this week’s wildlife photographs from around the world
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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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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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