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Charities in England that bid for share of millions say idea that Treasury could keep money is ‘heartbreaking’
Charities that bid for a share of millions of pounds of water company fines to restore rivers in England polluted by sewage say the UK government will be guilty of an appalling breach of trust if the cash is diverted to Treasury coffers.
“I appreciate that the Labour government have inherited a mess, I am a Labour supporter myself, but I think this is a really deeply appalling decision for a Labour government given the promises they made, and it is a really worrying indication of where we are headed,” said Kathryn Soares, chief executive of the Nene Rivers Trust. Soares runs one of a number of groups waiting more than eight months for grants from an £11m fund made up of water company fines for pollution which Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, wants to divert to the Treasury, it was revealed on Sunday.
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Juan Guillermo Garcés had a brush with death while burning jungle for cattle pasture – now he runs a nature reserve in Colombia where more than 100 new species have been discovered
- Words and photographs by Anastasia Austin and Douwe den Held
Juan Guillermo Garcés remembers coming face to face with death at age 17. Smoke filled the air, choking his lungs. The temperature rose and Garcés struggled to see through the haze. Panic set in as he watched monkeys, snakes, lizards and birds desperately trying to escape the flames surrounding them.
Garcés and his brother started the fire that nearly killed them to clear a large stretch of land. But when the wind suddenly changed direction, they found themselves locked in. The brothers survived, but the fire destroyed the little remaining patch of virgin forest on the family’s 2,500-hectare (6,200-acre) ranch, nestled along Colombia’s Magdalena River. Experiencing firsthand what the animals and plants endured was a turning point for Garcés.
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Climate negotiator André Aranha Corrêa do Lago given top job, bypassing Brazilian environment minister Marina Silva
Brazil has announced the top team for the next UN climate summit, which will be hosted in Belém this November, bypassing the country’s environment minister, Marina Silva, in favour of a veteran diplomat for the crucial role of president of the talks.
The experienced climate negotiator and secretary for climate, energy and environment, André Aranha Corrêa do Lago, will preside over the Cop30 summit, which is expected to draw scores of world leaders to Brazil – though not Donald Trump, who soon after his inauguration on Monday ordered the US’s withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement.
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Pollution aside, the problem with expanding Heathrow lies in the disruption and delay inevitable in such a complex project
Get ready for another season of that interminable saga, Heathrow’s third runway. There was a lull during the Covid pandemic when the airport’s owners, despite winning permission from the supreme court in 2020 to submit a planning application, cooled their jets while they waited for passenger numbers to recover. Now the whole thing is back, courtesy of Rachel Reeves. The chancellor is reported to be preparing to use a speech next week to declare support for a third runway at Heathrow alongside wider airport expansion in the south-east.
The best form of airport expansion is none at all, environmentalists (some of them in the cabinet) will argue, but it looks as if Reeves has dismissed those objections in the name of economic growth. A £1.1bn investment in Stansted, to enable it to grow its annual capacity from 29 million passengers to 43 million, was welcomed by the government last year.
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Old Moor, South Yorkshire: After the early January freeze, the valley is creaking back to life, with stoats, sparrowhawks and a surprise survivor
Winter is letting go its grip – for now, anyway. The hard freeze of early January relented somewhat this week; here in the wetlands of the Dearne Valley, the ice sheets drew back a little, if only a little, and a streak of dark clear water opened up by the far shore. A crowd scene developed: wigeons, tufted ducks, shelducks, a chorus of cormorant families on the bank, and, beyond them, on the grass, the heavy black bodies of coots, grazing in a herd like miniature water buffalo. A drake pintail moved elusively through it all like a reluctant celebrity, given away only by his crisp white shirt-front.
Away from the lake, this is a landscape of streaks, striations, cloud and sky, snow and willow, grass and ice. Finches are feeding busily in the alders, among the derelict birds’ nests. In the quiet ponds, thickets of reed have been warped by the weight of the weather. Shufflings and mutterings near the waterline turn out to be the ice beginning to yield. A small snow of down feathers drifts from the upper storeys of an electricity pylon: a female peregrine is plucking her prey up there, balanced awkwardly on the second crossarm.
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President declares energy emergency, reiterates Paris withdrawal plan and overturns emissions standards
Donald Trump declared a national energy emergency on the first day of his new presidency, as part of a barrage of pro-fossil fuel actions and efforts to “unleash” already booming US energy production that included also rolling back restrictions in drilling in Alaska and undoing a pause on gas exports.
The emergency declaration, which made good on a campaign-trail promise but could be open to legal challenge, would allow his administration to fast-track permits for new fossil fuel infrastructure.
Trump sworn in as 47th president – follow live inauguration updates
Factchecking Trump’s speech
A who’s who of far-right leaders in Washington
Migrant groups at US-Mexico border await mass deportations
‘Doge’ violates federal transparency rules, lawsuit claims
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Acronyms, in-jokes and online fan clubs spring up as viewers across the globe prepare for Sydney’s first corpse bloom in 15 years – from a safe distance
In a Sydney greenhouse, a tall pointed flower is about to bloom for the first time in years.
To the scientific community, the Botanic Gardens of Sydney’s corpse flower is known as amorphophallus titanum, which translates to large, deformed penis. But online, the rare endangered plant has taken on a new name: Putricia.
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First Quantum Minerals’ copper operation was shut down more than a year ago, but Indigenous people report restrictions on movement and unexplained illness and death
For the people of the nine Indigenous communities within the perimeter of the sprawling Cobre Panamácopper mine, travelling into and out of the concession is far from straightforward. An imposing metal gateway staffed by the mining company’s security guards blocks the road. People say the company severely restricts their movement in and out of the zone, letting them through only on certain days.
The mining concession, located 120km (75 miles) west of Panama City, is owned by Canada-based First Quantum Minerals, which operates through its local subsidiary, Minera Panamá. The company’s private security guards, not the national police, patrol the concession. Local residents, mostly subsistence farmers of modest means, say that First Quantum operates as a state within a state.
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Altadena’s Village Playgarden education center served diverse families with outdoor classrooms, small farm and animals – till it was destroyed by flames
In Altadena, it had become the hot ticket among the preschool set.
But when Geoff and Kikanza Ramsey-Ray first bought the two-acre property at the edge of town in 2008, it was a shambles. The home was a rental for over 30 years and the grounds were woefully neglected. Yet the couple saw promise. Nestled against Angeles Crest national forest, with a mountain view and on a road with few other homes, the place felt protected and perfect for their vision: an early education center called Village Playgarden.
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Bubbles of air trapped in ancient Antarctic ice, dating up to 2m years old, contain unknown information about Earth’s past climate
Traversing the world’s most unforgiving continent requires a generous measure of stoicism. “We took risks, we knew we took them,” wrote the Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott in 1912, trapped by a fierce blizzard in the days before he died, on an ill-fated expedition to reach the south pole. “Things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint.”
More than a century later, elemental extremes are still an unfortunate fact of life for scientists in Antarctica. Despite three seasons of bad luck which have delayed his team’s quest to find the world’s oldest ice, the paleoclimate scientist Dr Joel Pedro remains sanguine. He has good reason to be: this summer, after multiple setbacks and a relocation, a plan years in the making is finally coming to fruition.
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