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The Naylors’ four-bedroom home in Milton Keynes acts like a mini-power station after retrofitting solar panels, a battery and a heat pump
Clare Naylor paid close attention to how much energy she and her family were using last winter, filling hot-water bottles and bringing out extra blankets to ensure they didn’t go over budget. This year, she won’t have to worry as she is guaranteed not to receive a bill.
While millions of British households face the highest energy charges in three years from today after a 4% rise in the price cap, and predictions of a 16% increase in January, upgrades to Naylor’s home mean she will not have to pay anything.
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The global climate phenomenon has triggered devastating infernos in the ape’s Indonesian heartlands, with long-term effects on the animals still unknown
The mother’s hands were peeling from walking on the torched ground. Her eight-month-old baby, which clung to her side, was dehydrated and thin. The pair, named Mama Abu and Abu (“ash” in Indonesian), were found in an oil palm subsidiary estate, rescuers say.
The orangutan pair were saved last month from wildfires that are devouring Indonesia’s forests and peatland, unleashing thick smog, and destroying the habitat of some of the planet’s most vulnerable species.
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Frome, Somerset: With a sway and a swoosh, we’re entering the season to enjoy psithurism – the aural quality of the breeze in the trees
The wind-catchers along the bottom of the valley miss nothing. Even the lightest breath has them whispering. And when the wind strengthens, they do a good imitation of the river streaming over boulders below their feet. Truly, when it blows, it pours.
Pass a poplar and you are enjoying the best example of psithurism, the sound of wind in trees. All this growing season, I have listened politely to oaks, alders and willows, but if I rocked up in a pub looking for chatty company, I’d want a poplar on the bar stool next to me.
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Alpine regions in Europe experiencing extreme glacier collapse due to heat-trapping effects of fossil fuel pollution
Switzerland has lost almost one-fifth of its ice in just five years, research has found, in a dramatic reshaping of the Alpine country whose big white glaciers have been reduced to moonlike rock deserts, scientists say.
Swiss glaciers shrank by 5.5% in the first eight months of 2026, according to an annual monitoring report, after a summer of scorching heatwaves that followed a winter with little snow. The reduction in ice volume falls just shy of the record set in 2022 and brings the total loss of glacier ice since 2021 to 19.4%.
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Environment Agency warns residents of 6m at-risk properties to prepare for wet and windy three months ahead
More than two million people in England are unaware their properties are at risk of flooding, as the UK braces for a wet and stormy start to the winter, according to the Environment Agency.
Experts say the next three months are more likely than usual to be wet and windy – due to a combination of large-scale weather patterns and the “subtle” impact of a supercharged El Niño – increasing the risk of flooding.
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Exclusive: Environment secretary Angela Eagle to make pledge as part of efforts to protect against extreme weather
Half a million trees will be planted across England in the next three years to protect against extreme weather, the environment secretary, Angela Eagle, will pledge on Wednesday morning.
Mayors, local authorities, charities and grassroots groups will be given new funding and responsibilities for restoring natural landscapes such as wetlands, river edges and meadows, which can provide natural flood management and reduce the damage done by droughts.
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Study says UK-based banks provided $8.3bn in coal financing in four years, with Barclays and HSBC leading rise
UK banks are Europe’s biggest financial backers of the global coal industry, providing billions of pounds in funding for the climate-wrecking fossil fuel in the past four years, according to a report.
The study found UK-based banks had provided $8.3bn (£6.2bn) in coal financing since Cop26 in Glasgow in 2021, when global leaders pledged to “phase down” coal use. This compared with $4.9bn from German banks and $3.4bn from French banks over the same period.
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Porfirio Garcés is one of the ‘Jerico 11’, who face kidnapping charges after opposing a copper mine. Now, with a far-right president prioritising extraction, their fight has become more urgent
In the rural hamlet of Palo Cabildo in Colombia’s western Andes, 87-year-old farmer Porfirio Garcés tends to his anthuriums in the garden of his small house. He talks with passion about his vinyl record collection, which ranges from classical to pop music, but his main interest now lies elsewhere: his homeland, to which he feels a deep connection – and his desire to protect it.
Numerous water sources originate in the area, supplying not only Jericó, where Garcés lives, but also several neighbouring towns in the Antioquia region. A sign with a clear message hangs on the main porch of his property: “Yes to water.”
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Gavin Newsom says Trump is a ‘gift’ to the climate cause for dispelling notions of fossil fuel energy security
Of all the epithets hurled at Donald Trump since he became US president, perhaps the most unusual was delivered last week – that he is, in fact, some sort of environmentalist.
Trump is the “greatest gift” to the environmental movement, argued Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, due to the fallout from the US-Israel war on Iran.
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Multinational tea companies still occupy ancestral highlands of communities displaced during British colonial era
For British colonialists, the fertile and cool uplands of central Kenya were the “White Highlands”, to be reserved exclusively for European settlers. Local communities were forced from the land, which was turned into plantations for tea and other crops.
In recent decades, descendants of the displaced have fought to reclaim their ancestral land, some of which is now occupied by multinational tea companies and other large corporations.
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