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Mayor to make major policy shift and say scale of housing crisis requires breaking taboo
Sadiq Khan is announcing plans to build on parts of London’s green belt, in a dramatic shift in housing policy aimed at tackling “the most profound housing crisis in the capital’s history”.
In a major speech on Friday, the mayor of London is expected to say the scale of the challenge, which could need about 1m new homes built in the next decade, requires a break from longstanding taboos.
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Scientists fear early emerging insects may fall out of sync with pathogens, predators or availability of food
Midsummer butterflies are on the wing in early May after a sunny spring sparked one of the most advanced seasons for Britain’s Lepidoptera on record.
The Lulworth skipper – usually found in June and July – is flying at Lulworth Cove in Dorset, the chequered skipper emerged in April rather than mid-May in Scotland and the first swallowtail, which is commonest in mid-June, was spotted in Norfolk on 1 May.
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Researchers say AI could give every developing country a vital early warning system of extreme events
Weather forecasting has gradually been getting more and more sophisticated. It has also got far more important as the climate gets more unpredictable and extreme events threaten to cause massive economic damage and loss of life. So an early warning system is vital.
Ever larger computer systems making millions of calculations over many hours are now part of the daily forecasting in most developed countries. Sadly large parts of the world, many very vulnerable to dangerous climate events, do not have the money, personnel or computing power to develop the 10-day forecasting system they need.
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Knowth, County Meath, Ireland: In among the summer-green fields here is the great mound, constructed by neolithic man with, perhaps, one eye to the sky
From the top of Knowth’s great mound, my gaze leaps over its smaller satellite mounds and wanders across an expanse of summer-green fields. This isBrú na Bóinne, a vast neolithic complex looped by the River Boyne, where the landscape is dominated by three artificial “hills” that were layered over passage tombs built about 5,000 years ago.
The most famous of the three is to the south – Newgrange, which is aligned with the winter solstice sunrise. To the east is Dowth, which aligns with winter sunsets. And then there’s this one beneath my feet, the great mound, containing two back-to-back chambers facing east and west. As ever with such ancient structures, the big question is: what was it for?
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Producers promoted chemical recycling – processes used to break plastics into constituent molecules – but knew of limitations
Plastic producers have pushed “advanced recycling” as a salve to the plastic waste crisis despite knowing for years that it is not a technically or economically feasible solution, a new report argues.
Advanced recycling, also known as chemical recycling, refers to a variety of processes used to break plastics into their constituent molecules. The industry has increasingly promoted these technologies, as public concern about the environmental and health effects of plastic pollution has grown. Yet the rollout of these technologies has been plagued by problems, according to a new analysis from the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI), a fossil-fuel accountability advocacy group.
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The University of Queensland system is intended to give policymakers idea of how species traverse the oceans and what it will take to save them
Off the east coast of Florida, female loggerhead turtles swim more than 1,000km north, hugging the edge of the continental shelf to get to feeding grounds.
Humpback whales move through Moreton Bay off the Brisbane coast in Australia, on their way to feed around the Balleny Islands more than 4,000km away off the Antarctic coastline, where wandering albatross circle above, travelling 1,000km a day.
Get Guardian Australia environment editor Adam Morton’s Clear Air column as an email
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Many saw the beloved tree that Adam Carruthers and Daniel Graham cut down as a part of north-east England’s DNA
“It was just a tree,” said a mystified Adam Carruthers, one of the two men who illegally cut down the tree at Sycamore Gap in the early hours of a stormy night nearly two years ago. “It was almost as if someone had been murdered.”
Carruthers was right about the reaction to the felling. Many likened its loss to that of a good friend or relative. Its destruction prompted feelings of sadness, grief and then blind fury. Some people wept.
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Despite attempts to build resilience by improving infrastructure and first response, extreme weather events and US aid cuts have left many feeling vulnerable
When the monsoon rains came last September, they swept away most of the village of Panauti, in the foothills of the Nepali Himalayas. The Roshi River overflowed after the unprecedented rainfall, triggering landslides and destroying most of the roads and bridges.
Peering through the thick blanket of relentless rain “felt like waiting for morning to arrive so we could see the world again”, says Bishnu Humagain. “We lost everything – our home, our agriculture, and all of our belongings.”
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After a relationship breakup, rambling 700 miles from the Highlands to Dorset with Martin helped restore my faith in people
I’ve always had a keen sense of adventure. During the summer holidays, my parents would push me and my sister out of the front door and tell us only to come home to eat. I went from roaming the streets of Hackney in east London as a child, to trekking, wild camping and hitchhiking the length of the Americas in my late 20s.
After returning to my home in Liverpool, I worked as a photographer and got into a relationship. When we broke up years later, I was distraught – but it led me back to the life of exploration that I’d put on the back‑burner. In the summer of 2016, I embarked on a solo 1,000-mile (1,600km) route through Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. Not wanting to feel sealed off from the wondrous environments around me, I did the majority of it on foot.
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With less than a month before the start of the 2025 hurricane season, residents are still recovering from catastrophic damage from the past two years
Idalia. Debby. Helene.
Not visiting friends, not neighbors. All hurricanes that have not yet faded into memory for the residents of Taylor county in Florida, where all three powerful storms hit in just two years.
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