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Increased heat will supercharge extreme weather events, warns UN agency as Cop31 climate summit begins
Heat is accumulating in Earth’s systems at an accelerating rate, the UN’s weather agency has reported as the Cop31 climate change summit begins in Turkey, with 2026 on track to be one of the four warmest years on record.
The imbalance between incoming energy from the sun and energy leaving Earth reached its highest level since monitoring began, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said in its State of the Global Climate update.
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Exclusive: Louise Haigh likely to weaken mandate for sales that forms key part of emission reduction plan
Ministers are expected to make steep cuts to the government’s electric vehicle (EV) targets this week, in a move that will relieve carmakers but alarm many Labour MPs who are worried about the government’s commitment to the green agenda.
Louise Haigh, the de facto deputy prime minister, will finalise the plan after a crunch meeting in Downing Street on Wednesday to settle a long-running dispute between the transport, energy and business departments.
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Neso issued ‘electricity margin notice’ for gas power plants in Britain to fire up and boost generation this morning amid energy shortfall
The government body tasked with keeping the lights on issued a rare call for more electricity supplies on Monday morning due to low wind power generation forecasts across Europe.
A notice issued by the National Energy System Operator (Neso) on Sunday night said it faced a “shortfall” of almost 1,400 megawatts in its electricity supply margins from 6am until 11am on Monday.
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Hexham, Northumberland: Revelations aplenty as we embark on a spider hunt with a man called Fran who knows his arachnids
We gathered at the bandstand, an elegant Edwardian building in the abbey grounds, all slender ironwork and tented top. Fran Garcia was leading a spider walk and our group of 10 included two children, one of them my granddaughter. Fran is a member of the British Arachnological Society and communicates knowledge with lively humour.
As an introduction to spiders he explained their anatomy and web building using a bizarre range of items: wire and ropes of varying thicknesses, a bottle of glue, a folding knife to demonstrate tarantula jaws. Then Fran passed around an egg sac from a wasp spider, Argiope bruennichi, a species found in southern England but moving north. Teardrop-shaped and papery, it was subtly marked in grey and beige to blend with grasses.
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Ineos is driving exports with potentially far-reaching environmental and social repercussions
“My children started getting sick,” says Lois Bower-Bjornson,a campaigner at the Clean Air Council in Washington County, Pennsylvania.
“My oldest son had rashes all over his body. His ears, his eyelids, everywhere. My youngest had terrible nosebleeds, it was so bad that he became anaemic and would almost pass out. He would wake up bleeding.”
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Delegates from more than 190 countries are gathering in Turkey for climate talks, but the US will be absent
As the planet faces unprecedented human-caused global heating, heads of government are meeting for the next fortnight for the latest round of climate talks. We ask why it matters and what is likely to be achieved.
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Naturalists divided over potential impact of proposals to increase number of wild raptors in England and Wales
White-tailed eagles reintroduced into England and Wales imperil endangered seabird populations and risk wiping out some colonies, ecologists and conservationists are warning.
Puffins, guillemots, razorbills, fulmars and kittiwakes are among the birds for which breeding populations could collapse if large numbers of white-tailed eagles are released, according to some academics and conservationists.
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High-stakes talks involving 190 countries begin on Monday as world grapples with El Niño supercharged by fossil fuels
The Cop31 summit must produce progress, “a tangible outcome... that people can see is real”, its host has said as scores of world leaders and representatives of close to 190 countries gather in Turkey for the UN climate talks.
The high-stakes meeting begins on Monday, as countries around the world grapple with the strongest El Niño weather system on record, supercharged by fossil fuels, which is set to take hundreds of thousands of lives and cause damage costing trillions of dollars.
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What are the relationships and dominant interests in play, as the summit kicks off after a bitter row over its hosting?
Hosting Cop was a key pledge from Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese in 2021, while in opposition, before his successful election campaign. But arcane rules meant the country had to wait its turn to bid and was then embroiled in an angry row with Turkey over the hosting. The final compromise put Australia in charge of the negotiations which will take place in the Turkish city of Antalya. The bitter taste left by the row lingers and Australia has seemed to some a rather half-hearted host. The country’s media has been much quieter on Cop than previous host countries, and although Albanese will speak at the opening of the leaders’ segment, he is unlikely to stay long.
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Its key temperature goal has been missed but experts say the agreement is still proving a vital moral compass for progress
It was a curious way of conducting negotiations. Ahead of the 2025 climate summit, in the Amazonian port of Belém last year, the Brazilian hosts had taken off the table the issue that most had assumed would be at its heart: concrete plans from each country laying out exactly what they would be doing to cut their greenhouse gas emissions.
Brazil was insisting, instead, that these plans – the bedrock of the Paris agreement – were the business of national governments and not up for negotiation. “In that case, it will be a very short Cop,” one seasoned global south negotiator told the Guardian shortly before, reflecting a widespread unease. “There is nothing to negotiate.”
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