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Hundred-and-fifty-year-old Wych elm in Newcastle, Co Down has grown sideways owing to strong winds
The “astonishing and bizarre” Bendy Tree in Northern Ireland has been crowned the winner of this year’s tree of the year competition.
The wych elm tree, located in Newcastle, County Down, owes its name to its near horizontal trunk, which has grown sideways owing to the strong seaside winds coming off the Irish Sea.
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Nine out of 10 people felt motivated to act after watching film outlining threats to food security, economy and public health
The British government must be honest about the scale of the threat posed by climate and nature breakdown, researchers have said, after nine out of 10 people surveyed after watching a briefing on the issue felt more motivated to act.
Last November, in the “first-of-its-kind national emergency briefing”, nine experts gave stark assessments in Westminster Hall in London of the scale of the changes needed in the UK to adapt to the rapidly changing climate and ecological landscape.
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The Norwegian government has given a permit to a mining company to release waste into Førde fjord despite a 17-year battle by campaigners and a supreme court ruling against it
Shortly after the Norwegian stock market closed on 17 June 2026, a few dozen local people from the small west coast town of Vevring crowded around a laptop in a school. Surrounded by children’s drawings and windows looking out over Førde fjord, they listened as news arrived from Oslo. Norway’s supreme court had ruled against its government: a permit to release mining waste directly into the fjord two miles upstream was illegal, the court said.
The moment marked the end of a 17-year fight, one of Norway’s most protracted environmental battles in living memory. In Oslo, Ingvild Fonn Asmervik, the project leader for Naturvernforbundet (Friends of the Earth Norway), compared the joy she felt to giving birth to her child. For Anne-Line Thingnes Førsund, a third-generation fisher living on the banks of the fjord in Vevring and a volunteer for the charity’s local branch, it was more of a relief. Like a mountain lifting off her shoulders, she said.
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The UK state is dumping its responsibilities on our doorsteps, while green-lighting policies that lead us closer to crisis
Would you mind fixing the NHS? And while you’re at it, could you please build an anti-missile system in your garden? Then regulate the banks, replace the water mains, tax the very rich and use the proceeds to rebuild our schools. Well, come on people: what are you waiting for?
I exaggerate, but this isn’t very far from the approach taken by the government’s Prepare campaign. Crucial functions, way beyond the scope of individual action, are dumped on our doorsteps while those in power fail to act. As a result, our national resilience is arguably lower than at any time since the second world war. At the Labour conference last week, Andy Burnham promised “a Britain where people feel the country has got their back again”. To make good on that pledge, he will have to change almost everything.
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
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Linkenholt, Hampshire and Wexcombe, Wiltshire:Even to the untrained eye, traditional ones and modern, regenerative ones look very different
Stubble fields, those post-harvest acres of short straws, seem to be lasting longer into the season, as farmers respond to changing practices. I have a wistful attachment to stubble fields: for so long a kind of temporary commons where, for a few redundant weeks before autumn or winter ploughing, you could shortcut across them, the dew-filled straws flicking water up the inside of your legs. But today, stubble fields aren’t all equal.
Below Cleve Hill Down, a tractor is drilling winter wheat directly into bare seedbed between the stubble. Regularly sprayed with herbicide, it is free of weeds or any green – a pale-gold spread of machine-knitted tweed. A hundred years ago, the stubble would be left, full of weeds, birds and insects, until midwinter ploughing, allowing frosts to break down the clods.
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A landmark report reveals that the world must change the way it produces food to avoid a biodiversity collapse
Conservation comebacks for wild tigers, tuna and green sea turtles prove that global nature loss can be reversed, scientists have said. But a report warns food production must be the next “positive tipping point” if the world is to avert biodiversity collapse.
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) analysed nearly 36,000 animal populations and more than 5,000 species, producing the largest ever database of vertebrate wildlife. Scientists found populations had declined by an average of 73% since 1970, showing that “nature continues to be degraded at an alarming scale”, with “no sign of losses slowing”.
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Chinstrap penguins on Zavodovski Island in Antarctica down by two-thirds since 2011, probably due to climate crisis
The world’s largest penguin colony has declined by two-thirds since 2011, most likely because of the climate crisis, a study has revealed.
Scientists said the rapid demise of chinstrap penguins on Zavodovski, the northernmost of the South Sandwich Islands in Antarctica, increased the risk of a wider ecosystem collapse.
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Inquest under way into why President Lula’s success in curbing Amazon deforestation has not led to success at polls
More fire, more ash, more crime, more death. And a globally important ecosystem driven ever more rapidly towards a point of no return. That is the prospect for the Amazon rainforest for at least the next four years if Flávio Bolsonaro holds on to the lead he established this week in the first round of Brazil’s presidential election.
This appears to be of far more concern to the outside world than to voters in Latin America’s biggest, richest and most biodiverse nation.
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A mix of natural disasters could all befall the state at once as it finds itself in the crosshairs of the climate phenomenon
On a cloudless autumn afternoon, sunlight sparkled on the water that had quietly swallowed a busy intersection to the north of San Francisco, as the surrounding rush-hour traffic slowed to a painful crawl.
There were no crashing waves or storm surges to blame for the flood. Marin county was one of many areas up and down the California coast affected by high tides last week, as parts of the Pacific swelled with excess warmth.
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Wendy Wales and Tony Lonergan’s four-year fight over MACH Energy’s Mount Pleasant coalmine went all the way to the high court
When Wendy Wales and Tony Lonergan and a few of their neighbours in the New South Wales Hunter region decided to take on the expansion of a local coalmine, people thought they were “crazy” to engage in the David and Goliath battle.
“When we started this, people thought we were crazy – a little community group taking on a billion-dollar coal company, arguing that the climate harm from burning this coal is our problem too,” Wales says.
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