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International leaders visit Tuvalu as part of climate talks co-hosted by Australia ahead of Cop31 conference
Pacific island leaders have urged a promised global transition away from fossil fuels must not be left open to renegotiation as they gather in tiny Tuvalu in a bid to build momentum before a major climate summit.
About 50 dignitaries – 14 national heads including Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese, a list of climate change ministers and the heads of global agencies – flew to the low-lying atoll nation in a bid to bring attention to the plight of the countries most at risk from the climate crisis.
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Party in England and Wales ditches commitment to phase out nuclear in major shift in its energy policy
Green party members have voted to end the party’s opposition to nuclear power, dropping a commitment to phase out the technology in a major shift in its energy policy.
The motion, adopted at conference, removes a “blanket opposition to nuclear fission” and instead commits the Green party of England and Wales to assessing nuclear projects alongside other low-carbon technologies.
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An international symbol for the city, the sign is also hallmark of the region’s environmental richness
Atop Mount Lee, in the heart of Los Angeles, the wind is quiet. Two red-tailed hawks sail above, barely flapping as they coast the thermal air like surfers on a wave. Standing beside the giant letters of the Hollywood sign, the city seems peaceful. On a clear day, blocks and blocks of homes unfold beneath and the skies reveal sights all the way to Catalina Island – 10 miles out, across the Pacific.
That’s the beauty seen from the Hollywood sign.
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Combs Moss, Derbyshire: There is plenty to be gloomy about, but today was not the day for it up on the moor
The morning was sunlit and the sky the sort of deepest blue dome that makes your heart sing – and all the louder for being at the time of least natural sound.
Autumn is the most silent season for birds, but at least I could hear the passing meadow pipits more clearly as they came out of the blue in small numbers and crossed overhead on migration. There is something inherently melancholic about their plaintive piping calls, which seem at one with the mood of upland treeless places.
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Exclusive: Cop31 leader calling for global curbs on climate-heating gas has landfills producing some of world’s worst plumes
Two or three nights each week, the smell descends. Residents of villages on the rural outskirts of Istanbul don’t know what the smell is, but they have been plagued by it for years: a smell so bad they have to sleep with their windows closed even during hot summer nights. They know the source, too: the huge Silivri municipal waste dump a few miles away that is belching out stinking gases as food and other organic waste rots.
“The smell is not subtle. It suffocates you,” said Kemalettin Özenç, sitting outside a tea shop in the village of Yolçatı. “It’s worse when the air is still: sometimes families linger until midnight out here. Even when you go inside it’s inescapable.”
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As trawlers compete with Greenland sharks for halibut and cod, conservationists and fishers clash over what to do about misunderstood species
‘When I accidentally catch a shark, I bring it to my dogs,” Henrik Jensen, a 27-year-old from Greenland’s west coast, says casually. “I don’t let it back down because [the sharks] bully me and cut my lines.”
Jensen has fished for halibut in Ilulissat, Greenland’s third largest town, for a decade. He works an hour north of the town’s main iceberg-laden fishery, which sustains the livelihood of nearly 400 fishers. There, the halibut are bigger and more plentiful, but so are the Greenland sharks.
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Shadow chancellor will also promise to scrap affordable homes regulations as part of strategy to refocus on growth
The Conservatives will announce a bonfire of regulations including abolishing affordable homes and community funding rules as well as scrapping Natural England and the Environment Agency.
The shadow chancellor, Andrew Griffith, will say the party intends to “streamline regulations” that protect nature and oblige developers to include affordable homes and community services such as GP surgeries, to speed up infrastructure and housebuilding.
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My student house in Manchester had several thousand other occupants. Despite pest controllers regularly dousing the property, the glossy, greasy, relentless insects marched onwards, endlessly reproducing
‘You do know about the cockroaches?” I’ve forgotten most things people said to me in the 80s, but never that. It was said by one of the occupants of the student house in Longsight, Manchester, that I had signed up to live in the following year. When the landlord had shown me and my future housemates the property, the tenants had been out. He told us they were third years doing their finals and must not be disturbed under any circumstances. (What can I say? We were gullible back then.) Days before summer term ended though, I’d knocked on the door to show a friend where I’d be living. Instead, I learned that the house was infested.
The weird thing is, we moved in anyway. In truth, although I understood this was very bad news, I didn’t quite realise what a cockroach was. There was no internet, so I would have had to go to a library to know what I know now: their march, their canter, their crunch if you step on one. Their soft, sweet, sour smell (uric acid which they store in their fat, apparently). Sometimes, in the back of a shop, or a restaurant loo, I catch that scent and I know what it is.
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A statewide initiative pairs climate-focused coursework with community service – and is spreading to other states
As a student at a high school not far from Denver’s main airport, Anthony Muñoz wondered whether the jet fuel from airplanes flying above his campus was harming living things.
An avid gardener, Muñoz partnered with a local university to create a garden on the campus of his charter school, Vista Academy, filling it with native plants that could detect ground-level ozone pollution. He also worked with climate scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a federal office in nearby Boulder, who directed Muñoz on what data to collect, what the condition of leaves reveals about air quality and why milkweed matters for monarch butterfly migration.
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The co-founder of the Right to Roam campaign and author of The Book of Trespass discusses the Oxfordshire riverside community he calls home and how Hardwick Hall has been taken back by the people
On the banks of the Thames in South Oxfordshire, the Hardwick estate has been owned by the Rose family for generations. When Sir Charles Rose, a banker, sportsman, yachtsman and aviator, sped through the lanes in his Rolls-Royce in the early days of motoring, he inspired Kenneth Grahame to create Mr Toad in The Wind in the Willows. Grahame’s character became a symbol of decadent aristocracy whose foolishness leads to the temporary loss of a fine house to weasel-socialists.
Now Toad Hall has been taken over for good and Nick Hayes, artist, writer and co-founder of the Right to Roam campaign, has had a riverside view of this striking turn of events. When Hayes, who lives on a beautiful wide-beamed barge on the Thames, became the Hardwick estate’s artist-in-residence, he discovered that Rose’s heirs are, in effect, disinheriting themselves. The estate is gradually being turned into a charity which will be run by the tenants and the alternative community that has grown up in its shelter.
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