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Exclusive: England ‘desperately unprepared’ for effects of crisis including water shortages and heatwaves
Just 20 staff are working on climate adaptation within a key government department tasked with protecting the environment and maintaining food security, a freedom of information request has revealed.
The officials make up 0.3% of staff within the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
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It might seem an unlikely way to stop overheating, but many owners have found the tech a lifeline in hot weather
“If it is 35C outdoors, I can get the temperature down to 21C,” says Andrew Ingram of the sanctuary that his living room has provided this summer.
“On the nights I’ve slept in there, you have to put your thick pyjamas on,” jokes Ingram, who lives in Maidenhead, Berkshire, with his wife, Sue.
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Populations starting to stabilise but much still needs to be done to reverse loss of 30m that almost led to species vanishing
How do you lose 30 million house sparrows? That is the number that have vanished from Britain’s hedgerows, fields and gardens during my lifetime.
I can recall clouds of sparrows rising up in the fields behind my suburban childhood home on the edge of London. But by the late 1990s they had simply vanished from many of their former haunts.
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Frome, Somerset: While other plants are withering or skeletal, tansy is growing in great profusion, and it rewards close observation
At first light, the scent of ’76 hangs in the air, a reminder of that endless summer burning itself into autumn, just like this one. I first caught a sniff of it walking home one sweltering evening in the June heatwave and said: “Too soon, too soon.”
Now the toasted aroma of spent grass is everywhere – on crispy playing fields, straw village greens, and these scorched tawny meadows of the combe. Scattered groups of cattle have their heads down here. For them I think eating the grass must be like consuming a Pot Noodle before the water is poured in.
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Tenacious and confounding, the horseshoe crab pre-dates dinosaurs and has copper-based blood vital to vaccine safety
They pre-date dinosaurs, eat food using their legs and contain blue blood that we use to keep us healthy. Horseshoe crabs are the supreme, if offbeat, survivors of the invertebrate world.
Often called “living fossils” for visually obvious reasons – horseshoe crabs resemble a sort of prehistoric helmet (their Japanese name translates as “helmet crab”) – these animals have barely changed appearance along a lineage that stretches back 445m years.
It’s invertebrate of the year again! From 3-12 August, every day we will profile one of the thousands of amazing invertebrates that our readers have nominated. And then, when you’ve heard about all of them, we’ll open the voting so you can choose your favourites. Don’t hesitate to get in touch with thoughts and ideas: email us at [email protected] with Invertebrate in the subject line.
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The wild capture and release of a female big cat into a nature reserve is the first step towards reintroducing a population that hasn’t been seen for 70 years
On 31 July, “Umit” – which means hope in Kazakh – was released into a nature reserve on the edge of Lake Balkhash after more than a decade of careful planning to return the caspian tiger to the region. With this release, Kazakhstan became the first country to restore its tiger range after they had been thought extinct, with the last reliable sighting in the country recorded more than 70 years ago.
Umit – a wild-caught female tiger transported from the Russian far east – will be joined by more big cats in the coming years, with plans to establish a self-sustaining population of about 50. A wild-caught male flown from Russia is still being monitored by authorities and will be released when he is judged fit to survive alone. Two wild tiger cubs are also being reared on the reserve in special enclosures, with as little human contact as possible, and are likely to be released into the marshlands next year, to feast on boar, deer and kulans, a type of wild donkey.
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Reporters Jillian Ambrose and Damian Carrington discussed their story on oil firms’ profits amid the war in Iran and the climate crisis and answered your related questions
PCMcGarry asks: Given the facts that we live on a collection of islands and that tides are predictable, what serious efforts have been made to harness sea power and with what success?
Damian:
The UK is actually home to the world’s most powerful tidal stream turbine, operated by Orbital Marine Power, off Orkney and, the company says now moving into commercial deployment. But the device produces 2MW of power, the same as a small wind turbine. So there is a huge scale up needed to make a difference, and putting electric equipment in moving salty water is tough.
There are big tidal plants in France, South Korea and China, but a large tidal lagoon project for Swansea a decade ago was cancelled by ministers in 2018 who said it was too expensive compared with alternatives such as offshore wind farms and nuclear power.
The climate crisis is causing winter rainfall in the UK to increase, as the Met Office states:
“The winter half-year (October to March) for the most recent decade, 2016–2025, has been 3% wetter than 1991–2020, and 13% wetter than 1961–1990.”
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Eilish Rothney’s first instinct was to get rid of the wasps entering her converted shipping container in Norfolk. Now she enjoys their constant hum
When wasps began streaming through a rusted gap in her office door one June morning, Eilish Rothney’s first instinct was the same most people would have: get rid of them. The reserve manager for the Trinity Broads, part of the Norfolk Wildlife Trust, had discovered a wasp colony taking up residence in her office, a converted shipping container.
“They just built the nest inside my door,” she says. “My first thought was: ‘Oh no, I have to get rid of that now.’ But then I realised: ‘Wait, why? Why do I have to do that?’”
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Devons Road estate residents describe months-long ordeal of not being able to wash, clean or cook for much of the day
Christmas Day in east London. Beatrice Asante empties a bag of potatoes into her kitchen sink and turns on the tap. Nothing. She turns it off and on again. Still nothing. What now?
Asante rushes out to the only shop that is open, the local Nisa convenience store. She buys several big plastic bottles of water. Enough, she thinks, to make dinner and to last until the taps start running again.
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Volunteers are on the lookout for sick birds as outbreak shatters ‘fairytale belief’ that disease would not reach Australia
Bird enthusiast Jean Turner hoped avian flu would never arrive at her doorstep.
At her home on Kangaroo Island in South Australia, bossy fairy wrens chirp at her from the deck, grey currawongs clumsily fall into her bird bath, and fluffy, hooded plover chicks emerge from speckled eggs in front of her binoculars.
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