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Its key temperature goal has been missed but experts say the agreement is still proving a vital moral compass for progress
It was a curious way of conducting negotiations. Ahead of the 2025 climate summit, in the Amazonian port of Belém last year, the Brazilian hosts had taken off the table the issue that most had assumed would be at its heart: concrete plans from each country laying out exactly what they would be doing to cut their greenhouse gas emissions.
Brazil was insisting, instead, that these plans – the bedrock of the Paris agreement – were the business of national governments and not up for negotiation. “In that case, it will be a very short Cop,” one seasoned global south negotiator told the Guardian shortly before, reflecting a widespread unease. “There is nothing to negotiate.”
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The UK is 14th most light-polluted country, but in south-west England the veil is lifted at the dark skies festival
“It’s just mind-blowing,” says the astronomer and teacher Jo Richardson. She is standing in Exmoor national park talking about Saturn, the first planet she ever saw through a telescope.
But it is not the cosmic colour of the planet that Richardson is drawn to, nor its mysteries – it is the vastness. “Saturn, on average, is 800m miles away,” she says, the equivalent to travelling the circumference of the Earth 32,000 times. “You can see it through a telescope here. That’s just nuts.”
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Charity’s AGM decides overwhelmingly to begin tendering process amid criticism of Barclays’ fossil fuel investments
The National Trust has voted overwhelmingly to seek a new banking partner in a significant victory for members who have long argued that its relationship with Barclays was at odds with its commitment to protecting the natural world.
The resolution, passed at the charity’s annual general meeting on Saturday with the backing of its board of trustees, instructs the organisation to begin a competitive tendering process for its banking arrangements.
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The seasonal transformation offers the chance to enjoy warm, golden colours before winter
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Cairngorms: The scale and depth of damage is shocking, but there are precious small signs of recovery
It’s over three months since the fire started that eventually engulfed 25 square kilometres of moorland and forest in the Cairngorms. I’ve now seen much of the area where the fire raged and have been shocked at the blackness of the land, how many of the moorland pines are dark as charcoal, their needles an unnaturally singed rust colour that goes on into the far distance, into the forest itself.
I joined a party going up one of the affected glens to plant over 3,000 trees: cell-grown goat and creeping willow, downy birch and alder – montane species, often miniature varieties, that previously have grown in this habitat but been devastated by overgrazing. The seeds had been collected from nearby remnant populations and grown in the Cairngorms Connect Tree Nursery, part of an ongoing programme of landscape restoration.
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YouGov survey finds support for tree planting and emissions taxes but opposition to air travel and fuel levies
Europeans believe human-made climate change is real, a survey has shown, with most feeling action must be taken soon – as long as they do not have to sacrifice too much to achieve it.
The YouGov poll of six European countries showed between 69% (Germany) and 80% (France) of respondents believed the climate was changing, with few (1%-4%) denying it and 14-20% believing it was changing, but not as a result of human activity.
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This week’s best wildlife photographs from around the world
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Humans have always been awed by the power and beauty of lightning. How does the experience and understanding of it change in a warming world?
In a rock shelter in Kakadu national park in the north of Australia is an image of a being the Bininj people call Namarrkon. His flesh bleached away to reveal the bones beneath, he wears stone axes on his head, elbows and knees, and wields a great band of lightning that runs from his ankles up, over his head.
Namarrkon’s journey from the Arafura Sea to the Arnhem Land escarpment helped shape the landscape, according to the dreamtime stories of the Bininj. And in the great storms that arc and rumble across the landscape during the buildup and the wet season, it is Namarrkon who splits the clouds with his stone axes to create the thunder and lightning and release the life-giving rain.
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Juneau has little arable land, a short growing season and few farmers – and deep traditions of residents and the land feeding each other
Forty miles north-west of Alaska’s capital, the highway just ends.
At Glacier Highway’s most northern point, the pavement turns to gravel, the gravel widens into a turnaround and the tire tracks curve back the way they came. At the far end, the woods begin, a narrow hiking trail slipping toward the southern end of Berners Bay.
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The move to clean electricity will form the focus of the climate summit, which begins next week in coal-obsessed Turkey. The outlook doesn’t look good
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Holding a climate conference under the presidency of one coal-obsessed country might be regarded as a misfortune for the planet – sharing it between two starts to look provocative. But at this year’s Cop31 UN climate summit in Antalya, coal exporter Australia and coal consumer Turkey will be trying to shift the focus away from dirty fossil fuels and towards clean electricity, with a target on the table to meet 35% of final energy demand from electricity by 2035.
Will they succeed? The geopolitical outlook for Cop31 is worse than for almost any recent “conference of the parties” under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Conflicts in Ukraine, Iran and Gaza are destabilising global alliances, an unpredictable White House is sowing economic uncertainty and AI is threatening to unleash digitised chaos.
‘Bunch of baloney’: calls grow for Cop summit reforms as countries on track to fail nature targets
The Amazon’s canary in the coalmine: what a tropical fish can tell us about climate upheaval
The next global pandemic could be brewing on a mink farm in Utah – and little is being done to stop it
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