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Draft Motion for a Resolution prepared for the EU Parliamentary Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety, March 2016
Draft Motion prepared by Rapporteurs Pavel Poc (Socialists and Democrats Group), Kateřina Konečná on behalf of the European United Left and Nordic Green Left group, Bas Eickhout of the Greens / European Free Alliance Group, Piernicola Pedicini of the Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy Group, Mark Demesmaeker, Sirpa Pietikäinen and Frédérique Ries. This draft Motion was carried forward for the vote in a Parliamentary Plenary Session in April 2016.
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Prime minister tells delegates in Tuvalu and Fiji that ‘super El Niño’ brewing in the Pacific shows climate change is ‘here right now’
Anthony Albanese has warned Australia faces a hazardous summer, likely including floods, cyclones and extreme heat, due to the immediate threat of the climate change and a rising “super El Niño”.
Speaker alongside national leaders at a climate summit in Fiji, the prime minister said the expected nasty summer and the demonstrated impact on Pacific island countries – including low-lying Tuvalu – showed the world could not afford to let the goal of limiting global heating to 1.5C “just slip from our grasp”.
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Exclusive: Campaign group’s analysis of North Yorkshire plans finds datacentre would have to burn 4.9m tonnes of wood a year
Drax’s planned datacentre could produce nearly double the emissions of all flights out of Gatwick airport each year by burning 4.9m tonnes of wood annually, an analysis has shown.
Campaigners say this would make it “one of the dirtiest datacentres out there”.
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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 – nearly 50 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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The country’s far-right president is courting billionaire investors by removing a block on foreign ownership of land and natural resources
On 19 September, Marta Sahores, an 84-year-old chemistry professor and activist who has mobilised against mega-mining projects for more than two decades, took to the streets in Argentina. Alongside workers, retirees, students, Indigenous groups and human rights organisations, Sahores was there to protest against the country’s far-right president, Javier Milei. During the marcha de la bronca – the “march of anger” – protesters held signs reading, among other rallying cries, “The land is not for sale”.
Marching in Esquel, a town nestled in the foothills of the Andes in Chubut province, she also held up a sign defending the country’s water resources against what she called the government’s “handover” to investors.
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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.
Continue reading...Latest statistics also show, for the second year in a row, more over-16s vape than smoke.
Infrared technology is used in patients' bedrooms and can monitor their breathing and pulse.
US psychiatrist and neurologist Karl Deisseroth and his German colleagues Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel have been awarded for their work.
Early recommendations could be issued if evidence highlights patient safety risks, the chair says.
Hugo Flint-Cahan, 34, was fatally attacked by Rolando Torres-Pena, 22, at a mental health trust in east London.
At least 32 children have died in India's Balaghat district since May amid outbreaks of measles and malaria.
A force should have flagged mental health services after a family called about their son, IOPC says.
Social anxiety is more common than many think. Here's what you need to know about the condition.
The PM was at times emotional during his conference speech in which he outlined his long-term plan for the UK.
Andy Burnham wants to outline his ideas for a free-at-the-point-of-use social care system in his first speech to Labour conference as prime minister.
Deep in the mountains of Palawan, Conservation International scientists are capturing what few people ever see: the secret lives of the Philippines’ rarest species.
At Maido — the Lima restaurant recently crowned the best in the world — one of the star dishes is paiche, a giant prehistoric river fish.Its journey to the table begins on a small family farm deep in Peru’s Amazon.
“Jane Goodall forever changed how people think about, interact with and care for the natural world,” said Daniela Raik, interim CEO of Conservation International.
Conservation International’s Neil Vora was selected for TIME’s Next 100 list — alongside other rising leaders reshaping culture, science and society.
Climate change is happening. And it’s placing the world’s reefs in peril. What can be done?
After decades of negotiation, the high seas treaty is finally reality. The historic agreement will pave the way to protect international waters which face numerous threats.
The Amazon rainforest, known for lush green canopies and an abundance of freshwater, is drying out — and deforestation is largely to blame.
The ocean is engine of all life on Earth, but human-driven climate change is pushing it past its limits. Here are five ways the ocean keeps our climate in check — and what can be done to help.
In a grueling and delicate dance, a team led by Conservation International removes a massive undersea killer.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. These pictures might be worth even more. An initiative featuring the work of some of the world’s best nature photographers raises money for environmental conservation.
