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UK Health Security Agency also issues red heat alert for six English regions, indicating risk to life even for the healthy
Met Office forecasters have issued a rare red weather warning for Wednesday and Thursday in the face of extreme heat and humidity, while a red heat health alert has been issued in England indicating “a risk to life for even the healthy population”.
The weather warning covers southern Wales as far west as Swansea, and an area of England that includes London and runs from the inland areas of Kent across to Somerset, as far north-west as Birmingham, and as far north-east as southern Cambridgeshire.
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People trained to experience world as otters, salmon and other River Tone creatures for pioneering research
What does a kestrel make of the dog sniffing in the long grass below? Why does an exhausted salmon pause before a weir? How will an otter experience the rumble of a passing train?
Eighteen people have spent six weeks swimming, slithering and soaring as otters, salmon, earthworms, red deer and kestrels in an attempt to better document the risks for wild animals in our human-dominated landscape.
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Prime minister was forced to row back on some policies despite strong support among voters for climate action
Keir Starmer has faced a problem no Labour government has needed to deal with before. His energy and climate policies – core to solving the cost of living crisis – have come under attack from opposition parties, which have made dismantling the agenda one of their top priorities, second only to immigration, in their pitch to voters.
This is new in British politics, where a cross-party consensus on the climate and environment has held at least since the days of Margaret Thatcher. She warned the UN of the climate crisis in 1988; David Cameron in 2006 urged voters to “vote blue, go green”; Theresa May enshrined in law the requirement to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050; Boris Johnson championed the Cop26 UN climate summit in Glasgow in 2021; even Rishi Sunak only tried a partial rollback of green policies as a last desperate throw before calling an election.
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UN’s World Food Programme and agriculture agency issue joint appeal for funds to avert global hunger crisis before it happens
Adugna Woyessa was a little boy the first time drought tore his country apart. As harvests failed in rain-starved regions of Ethiopia in the early 1970s, and his school turned a classroom into a grain store for farmers to send aid, he had no idea that scientists were beginning to connect the force parching its fields with cyclical shifts in trade winds that had long supercharged violent weather from South America to Australia.
The now notorious El Niño – Spanish for “little boy” – was named by fishers in the Pacific in the 1800s, but it was not until the 1970s that scientists understood its global nature and began to piece together the historical impact of the natural weather pattern characterised by hot years and brutal extremes.
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Abernethy forest, Cairngorms: One of my favourite species, the tiny twinflower, does better in Scots pinewoods than most places in the UK. Now I just have to find some
The soundtrack to my day is the calls of siskins, blackcaps, willow warblers, coal tits and tree pipits, the drumming of a great spotted woodpecker and an occasional cuckoo. But this morning my gaze is aimed downwards. I’m walking slowly, gingerly, looking for a colony of twinflowers that I know I’ve seen around here before.
They’re one of my favourite flowers and a sign for me that summer is here. Standing just 10cm in height, their stems form a delicate Y with two, tiny, beautiful pale pinkish-white bell‑shaped flowers that hang from each of the tops.
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Smaller, cheaper cars built for narrow city streets are becoming more stylish – but require careful design decisions
The winding backstreets of London, Paris and Rome are a large part of their charm. But they are also a problem for electric carmakers. For a long time, squeezing big batteries into smaller, cheaper cars to fit European streets was too much of a problem, so manufacturers focused on bloated SUVs instead.
But that is finally changing. Battery technology has improved and Europe’s carmakers havecut manufacturing costs enough that they can now sell cars that might have a chance of fitting down a medieval lane or two.
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Exclusive: European Commission planning to rewrite key law to allow water-intensive mines in regions suffering from drought
The European Commission plans to rewrite the EU’s flagship water protection law to speed up the development of critical minerals mines, despite many being located in drying and water-stressed regions, analysis has found.
Mining is a water-intensive industry, requiring large volumes of water for ore processing, dust suppression, waste management and mine dewatering. While modern projects recycle water, they still require significant amounts, and in water-stressed regions those demands can add to pressure on already stretched rivers, aquifers and water supplies.
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Half a century on, Britain braces for temperatures up to 40C as global heating brings yet more extreme weather
The summer of 1976 is seared on to national memory as one of record heat. Harvests failed, farmers despaired, Britain imported an extra million tonnes of grain, food prices rose by 12%, taps ran dry, and each day, 250 people died from heat-related deaths.
The heatwave, which began 50 years ago on Tuesday, brought 15 consecutive days where the peak temperature was above 32C. Half a century later and 32C no longer feels shocking.
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Is it an alien? A dinosaur? Is it going to kill us all? Our writer hits Ashdown Forest for the Big One Hundred celebrations – and finds its magic enchanting new generations
The rolling idyll of heath and forest, spinney and stream that gave us the Heffalump, the Woozle and, most famously of all, Winnie-the-Pooh, has a new fantastical resident. Creeping through the bracken, making strange cooing and purring noises, is a shapeshifting creature with a huge tubular nose and eyes inspired by adders. It shimmies with iridescent patches and the psychedelic purple of flowering heather in high summer.
Poppet, a puppet made by costume designer Jack Irving and brought to life by a team of 10 award-winning puppeteers, is performing for schoolchildren in Ashdown Forest, East Sussex. The primary school class squeal with delighted fear as the purple apparition transforms itself from caterpillar to bird to munching monster in sinuous moves.
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Divers have observed just a ‘couple of dozen’ of the cephalopods along the heritage-listed Cuttlefish Coast in South Australia, causing locals and marine scientists to worry
Mid-June is usually the peak time for giant Australian cuttlefish to gather near Whyalla, in South Australia’s Spencer Gulf.
Nearly every year, they come in their thousands – and sometimes hundreds of thousands – to assemble in the shallows to breed. It’s a globally unique natural phenomenon, celebrated locally as “Cuttlefest”.
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