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After UK’s hottest summer on record, Ardingly near Haywards Heath is just 19% full – and next-closest reservoir is unusable due to broken treatment works
“You can see the water level at Ardingly going down and down. I don’t remember ever seeing it this low,” says Caroline Allan, a lifetime resident of Haywards Heath, the nearest town to one of England’s most depleted reservoirs.
The Ardingly reservoir, managed by South East Water and serving about 95,000 properties in and around Haywards Heath and Uckfield in Sussex, is currently 19% full.
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This week’s best wildlife photographs from around the world
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Scientists call for incentives to preserve vegetation as study highlights benefits of plentiful planting in London
Your front garden could be a first line of defence against air pollution, according to a year-long field study in two London neighbourhoods.
The UK’s 26m gardens cover nearly 5% of the country’s land area, but they account for a much larger share in urban areas. In Greater London, domestic gardens cover 41% of the city, compared with 27% of Cardiff and 23% of Edinburgh.
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In this week’s newsletter: There are too many meetings, and not enough decisions, say experts – and time is running out
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When things are not going well at an environmental summit, organisers often tell delegates that the “world is watching” in an attempt to focus minds. But spend any time at biodiversity Cop17 in Armenia and it is clear that the world’s attention is elsewhere.
The negotiating halls of Yerevan’s Meridian centre are subdued. Environment ministers have arrived from all corners of the world to plan their response to being so far behind the biodiversity targets they agreed four years ago. Right now, they appear on track to miss nearly all of them. They risk continuing the miserable record of never having met a biodiversity target they have set for themselves.
The climate crisis will destroy our economies – we learned this 20 years ago. When will we act?
Heat killed ‘staggering’ 50,000 people in Europe’s cities this summer, scientists warn
Angry Labour MPs urge leadership not to overrule energy secretary on Rosebank
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As many as 8 million people have been affected by food shortages, electricity blackouts and health clinic closures
Extreme drought driven by an historic El Niño is affecting as many as 8 million people in Papua New Guinea, causing a cascade of issues from shortages of food and water, to electricity scarcity and schooling disruption.
An influential coalition that includes churches, trade unions and business groups has said the Pacific nation is in the midst of a “national crisis”, but there appears to be “no coordinated plan to protect vulnerable communities from the worsening impacts of El Niño.”
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Oxford study shows Manx shearwaters get lost when their body clocks get out of sync
Seabirds returning from foraging trips can be thrown hundreds of miles off course by a form of jet lag that arises when their body clocks get out of sync with local time, researchers say.
Tracking data from Manx shearwaters on the west coast of the UK revealed that when the birds returned home to their colonies after trips over the Atlantic, their rapid eastward flights disrupted their sense of time and navigation.
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Loch Insh, Cairngorms: In my three decades in Scotland I’ve adjusted to the darkness of this time of year, and found glory in the quality of light
It is the one clear day in a fortnight of heavy cloud, wind and rain, so I am out by the loch, basking in the rays of light, breathing them in, hoarding for the weeks to come.
This time of year makes them all the more precious. Here in the Highlands, once we are past the autumnal equinox, we can almost feel the Earth tipping away from the sun as the light grows shorter each day and the night steals back. It’s a turn that is especially obvious when the clocks change and our evenings are suddenly dark.
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There is no end in sight for the drivers of illegal mining, while police action appears ineffective
Cora Bailey has been encountering illegal miners ever since she first started treating injured animals in the townships around Roodepoort, west of Johannesburg, in 1991. But as the price of gold has soared, so too has activity in the abandoned mine shafts that mark the area.
In late September, dozens of zama zamas – the name given to illegal miners in South Africa, meaning roughly “to take a chance” in Zulu – arrived to dig for gold across the dirt road from her charity, Claw (Community Led Animal Welfare).
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Replacing diesel-powered ferries with electric vessels could reduce emissions and improve air quality
Cutting through New York Harbor in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, the small white boat we were riding on caught the attention of passengers aboard a nearby sightseeing ferry.
“It’s quite a curiosity at the moment,” Eric Laakmann, the chief executive and co-founder of Vessev, said.
Climate Central is an independent group of scientists and communicators who research and report the facts about our changing climate and how it affects people’s lives.
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This year thousands of the golden-coloured butterfly have arrived in Britain in what one expert calls ‘a bold attempt at colonisation’
The Queen of Spain has invaded. The enigmatic British visits of this gorgeous golden-coloured butterfly with distinctively shaped, squared-off hindwings have been recorded by lepidopterists for four centuries. Usually there are barely a handful of sightings each summer of a butterfly that is widespread across continental Europe.
This year, thousands have flown in, some from France and Spain that have reached the south coast, and others from the Netherlands, which have fluttered into East Anglia.
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