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Study reveals that pesticide poisoning kills 11,000 people each year, with India accounting for nearly 60% of fatalities
Almost half of the world’s farmers are poisoned by pesticides every single year, a study has found.
Using publicly available data from 2006-2023, the study, which was commissioned by Pesticide Action Network, found there to be an estimated 402-433m cases of unintentional acute pesticide poisoning of farmers and farm workers every year.
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Campaigners say pheasants and partridges reared ‘on industrial scale’ do not have same protections as chickens
The government is considering a crackdown on pheasant shooting in England as part of a consultation on strict new animal welfare laws that would affect shoot organisers.
Ministers are already considering plans for the issuing of licences for those who run game bird shoots. The proposals mean anybody associated with wildlife crime, such as the poisoning or shooting of birds of prey, would be banned from hosting shooting events.
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Andy Burnham has announced a crackdown, but doubts remain over authorities’ ability to take on organised crime
“There were parents dropping their children off and then heaving from the smell,” says Liz Thompson, 45, who runs Blessings Nursery in Bradford, West Yorkshire.
During the recent heatwaves, the smell from an illegal waste dump on Midland Road, just metres from the nursery, became so unbearable that staff had to keep the doors and windows shut and the children couldn’t play outside.
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Meteorologists say mean average temperature of 16.5C was made 130 times more likely by climate crisis
This year’s summer was the UK’s hottest on record, according to provisional data, and the Met Office said the season’s mean temperature was made 130 times more likely by the climate crisis.
Record-breaking and back-to-back heatwaves have scorched much of Europe. In England, temperatures peaked at 38.1C (100.1F) at Kew Gardens in London on 13 August, and June had already been confirmed as the country’s hottest since records began in 1884. Scientists have said these heatwaves are only possible because of the climate crisis driven by burning fossil fuels.
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As families await news of missing loved ones, the disaster is a stark reminder of how the climate crisis is creating a fast-growing threat. Plus, the town considered India’s ‘Jurassic Park’
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It has been hard not to despair while watching the ruinous floods swallow parts of Nepal, and harder, still knowing that the agony compounds each passing day for dozens of Indian families whose members remain unaccounted for.
Social media is awash with desperate pleas, photos and details of the young and old, men and women, from Mumbai to Kolkata, posted by families searching for traces of life. The disaster unfolded when a melting glacier slammed into the valley below, unleashing a deadly cascade of rock and ice down the Bhote Kashi River, which flows from Tibet into Nepal.
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Head of tree collections at Kew ‘very worried about this autumn’ as hot, dry summer has caused brittleness
High winds associated with El Niño could cause widespread mortality among tree species already weakened by a prolonged period of extreme heat and drought, experts have warned.
This summer much of Europe has been scorched by a series of record-breaking climate crisis-induced heatwaves. The impact is notable across much of England’s countryside, where once green land has turned brown, and many trees are undergoing “early autumn” – wilting and losing their leaves early – to cope with extreme heat.
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Savings grow as energy prices in Great Britain rise and cost of panel installation falls, analysis finds
Households in Great Britain’s cloudiest regions could still save more than £400 a year on their energy bills by installing rooftop solar panels, research has found.
Rising wholesale energy prices mean the potential savings from a home solar panel system have climbed in recent years, as the cost of installation has continued to fall, leading to increased demand.
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Climate experts warn US Kalshi and Polymarket users are ‘gamifying disasters’ as they bet on events like heatwaves and daily temperatures
Online prediction markets, saturated by money staked on sport, crypto and politics, have now set their sights on a promising new area of growth: betting on the future livability of the planet itself.
The rise of gamified predictions on the unfolding climate crisis, and shorter-term weather forecasts, has been underscored by a new deal that allows Kalshi, a leading online financial exchange, to access data from the Weather Company, owner of the Weather Channel, to verify weather-related betting outcomes.
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Arthur Downing, author of Power and the People: A History of British Energy, says all-encompassing rapid transition will need a mutualised system
Have you ever wondered why it is that most houses in the UK are reliant on gas boilers? Not what’s stopping more people from replacing them with heat pumps, but instead why and how the gas boiler became so ubiquitous in the first place?
Arthur Downing, the author of the new book Power and the People: A History of British Energy, can tell you exactly why. “We only have boilers in our houses because of a state-owned enterprise that went into everybody’s home and installed natural gas-suitable appliances at no direct cost,” he says. The nationalised gas industry of the 1940s to the 1980s, which oversaw this huge project, was for three decades one of the “most dynamic, innovative, efficient industries in Britain”, Downing says. Yet few of us would use these terms to describe it as such now.
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Northern landscapes could soon look different, as wildfires and storms disturb boreal forests
A warmer world is making high latitude forests more deciduous and less evergreen, research shows. Global heating has increased the likelihood of extreme events such as wildfires and storms and this warmer and less stable environment is favouring deciduous trees over evergreens.
Boreal forest stretches for miles and miles across high northern latitudes, covering huge swathes of Canada, Russia, Alaska and Scandinavia. It makes up nearly a third of global forest area and is mainly made up of evergreen trees such as spruce and fir. But this landscape could change.
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