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Keys crops such as cereals, potatoes, sugar and oils grown in areas with moderate to very high risk
The vast majority of the UK’s essential foods, including cereals, potatoes, sugar and oil, are grown in areas of England rated as having a moderate to very high risk of drought.
A very high proportion – 81% – of England’s fresh produce is concentrated in parts of the country that are already experiencing water stress, according to the analysis by the nature-focused investment fund Rebalance Earth.
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Plans for one of Europe’s largest AI campuses in a Unesco-designated reserve have sparked a fierce local backlash
The datacentre revolt spreading across the US has reached the rolling hills of north Devon in an uprising against a planned hyperscale AI data campus in the middle of a globally protected landscape.
Perched on an inland cliff, the town of Great Torrington has views that stretch for miles over the landscape of the Unesco biosphere reserve in which it sits, taking in the winding River Torridge and rolling acres of wooded valley and wildflower meadows. Pastoral and peaceful, its history was notably punctured by violence in 1646 when the royalists’ resistance in the first English civil war was brought to an end by the parliamentarian New Model Army in a battle fought out in the narrow streets in heavy rain and darkness.
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Powered by sun and wind, the uncrewed vehicle will collect data to help Australian scientists better understand how oceans absorb emissions
A small uncrewed vessel has embarked on a lap around Antarctica and may not return for months.
The seven-metre craft, which looks like a large kayak in hi-vis orange, is expected to travel about 22,000km through inhospitable waters, propelled by powerful westerly winds and energy from the sun. The journey is seven times the distance between Sydney and Perth.
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This year’s ‘godzilla’ climate phenomenon has already broken temperature records. We ask a climate scientist what is happening
This year’s huge El Niño, which comes less than two years since the last one, has already broken temperature records. To understand what is happening, and why, the Guardian interviewed Prof Mat Collins, a climate scientist at the University of Exeter, the author of some of the world’s most important climate reports and an expert on the dynamics of the El Niño southern oscillation.
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Lewes, East Sussex: Owls, bats, badgers and countless birds are my new neighbours, but I’ve been particularly taken by a mystery tree – and its resident treecreeper
I have made the woods my home, moving from Brighton to the outskirts of Lewes, where the garden backs on to the remains of an old oak wood. Here there’s a riot of wildlife: a badger that makes snuffle holes in the lawn, a family of tawny owls in the trees and a cauldron of bats in the chimney.
I have plans to let the wood expand into the garden, but in the meantime there’s a mystery tree whose branches almost reach my bedroom window. It’s nearly dead, stressed from too many droughts, perhaps, or coming to a natural end. Some have suggested it’s a willow, but I suspect it’s a cultivated species I’m not familiar with.
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After the available money ran out after just six hours, some fear they will have to reverse efforts to boost nature
On Tuesday morning, farmer Peter Hatley logged on to his computer at 10am. England’s 2026 sustainable farming incentive (SFI) was opening for applicants and, after three bad harvests, the money would be a lifeline.
But Hatley, who runs a 240-hectare family farm in Cambridgeshire, was faced with repeated error messages. He called the government’s helpline, which he says acknowledged there were problems with the scheme, but says by the time the problem was fixed, the money had gone.
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Award-winning novelist celebrates late partner’s love of birds with gift to establish the Graeme Gibson chair in avian biology
If she could be any bird, Margaret Atwood would transform into a raven. “They’re very smart. They’re social, playful and just a very successful bird,” she says while seated in a corner of a bird observatory in the Lake Erie Islands archipelago. “They’re quite an intelligent problem solver.”
The observatory, which she set up with her late partner, Graeme Gibson, is located on the west shore of Pelee Island – the southernmost community in Canada – and is so new that there are no lightbulbs in a handful of lamps.
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Fewer than 400 Eriskay ponies remain. One of the rarest native breeds in the world, their plight is unique because the community living on their tiny Hebridean island are fighting for them. The ponies wander the village and townsfolk care for them together
On the slopes of Beinn Sciathan, a rocky outcrop in the Outer Hebrides, white and grey ponies roam freely. Eriskay ponies, one of the rarest native breeds in the world, are critically endangered.
They have often been mixed with the Highland pony and other breeds, giving the false impression of higher population numbers. Only about 300 to 400 Eriskay ponies are thought to remain.
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Tom Calver has sacrificed milk yields to give his cows a more varied diet of plants and believes the result is better cheese and richer farmland
In the rolling hills of Somerset, hundreds of thousands of cows placidly munch lush green grass to produce milk for cheddar.
But six fields stand out. Rather than uniform grass, they have technicolour wildflowers sprouting across the meadows. Farmer Tom Calver said that to allow the flowers to grow he has to keep fewer cows and leave some fields ungrazed as they mature.
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Scientists are racing to understand how fires behave as hotter summers turn green landscapes into tinderboxes
From the scorched heathlands of the New Forest to the smouldering valleys of south Wales and burned-out homes in Stourbridge, an extraordinary summer of wildfires has left its mark across Britain.
To most of us, these charred landscapes may look like pure devastation, but to a trained wildfire investigator they are full of clues. Heat-scorched leaves can become frozen in position, preserving evidence of the wind direction as the fire passed through. Soot or staining on rocks, the pattern of fallen grass and bracken, and even how those stems have burned, provide further information about how the fire itself moved.
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