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Ed Miliband said the draft text risked talks taking a backward step as a deadline looms for a climate finance deal
My colleague Patrick Greenfield is following the plenary where countries give their formal response to the draft text.
Cop29 president Mukhtar Babayev gets the plenary started. He asks countries to give their thoughts on the latest iterations of text to inform future versions. He says that with collective effort, he believes that the summit can be finished by 6pm tomorrow.
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On Qikiqtaruk, off Canada, researchers at the frontier of climate change are seeing its rich ecology slide into the sea as the melting permafrost leaves little behind
Last summer, the western Arctic was uncomfortably hot. Smoke from Canada’s wildfires hung thick in the air, and swarms of mosquitoes searched for exposed skin. It was a maddening combination that left researchers on Qikiqtaruk, an island off the north coast of the Yukon, desperate for relief.
And so on a late July afternoon, a team of Canadian scientists dived into the Beaufort Sea, bobbing and splashing in a sheltered bay for nearly two hours. Later, as they lay sprawled on a beach, huge chunks of the island they were studying slid into the ocean.
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Exclusive: Trail would help region with few areas where people can walk in countryside, report says
A new trail along the east coast of England should be created, a Tory thinktank has said, because farmland is preventing those who live there from having access to nature.
A report from Onward has found that in most rural areas, people enjoy extensive rights-of-way networks. But across the east of England, there are many areas where people have barely anywhere they are allowed to walk in the countryside. This, the report says, is because of large areas of high-grade farmland in that area, but also because Lincolnshire has the largest backlog for recognition of historical but unrecorded rights of way, with more than 450 outstanding applications.
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Peace Brigades International calling for new act to force companies with links to UK to do due diligence
Human rights defenders have faced brutal reprisals for standing up to extractive industries with links to UK companies or investors, according to a report calling for a law obliging firms to do human rights and environmental due diligence.
Peace Brigades International (PBI) UK says a corporate accountability law requiring businesses to do due diligence on their operations, investments and supply chains could have prevented past environmental devastation and attacks.
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St Dominic, Tamar Valley: Leaves are filling up the tracks, glimmering in the murky shade, and our garden grows ever-more wild in the dry, mild weather
In gloomy November days, sunshine is at a premium. To the north, mist shrouds Kit Hill’s summit stack, but eastwards occasional streaks of pinkish light reflect on Dartmoor’s faded expanses of purple moor grass.
In the dullness, muted autumnal colours are strangely luminous, contrasting with the continuing growth of greenery. Black Angus yearlings lie content and replete on their lush green pasture; the pedigree herd of pale brown South Devon cattle also remain out of doors, alternated between fields, one distinguished by an ancient free-standing oak and hedgerow beeches. Rooks and jackdaws flock about the almost leafless beech, ignored by two imperturbable buzzards perched on telephone posts, overlooking the brown earth of a cultivated field sown with winter barley.
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Communities on Paraná River fear privatisation of waterway operations will destroy way of life
River communities in Argentina fear that Javier Milei’s plans to privatise operations on a key shipping route could lead to environmental damage and destroy their way of life.
Since taking office almost a year ago, the self-styled “anarcho-capitalist” president has pledged to privatise a number of the state’s assets. The latest is the Paraguay-Paraná waterway – a shipping route of strategic importance for Argentina and its neighbours.
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All of a sudden I heard this loud noise at the back of my house. The window was smashed in what was supposed to be our secure room. This is Roseman’s story
Location Union Island, the Caribbean
Disaster Hurricane Beryl
Roseman Adams, a nature conservation officer and part of the island’s disaster preparedness committee, was at home on Union Island when Hurricane Beryl hiton 2 July. It was the earliest-formingcategory 5 hurricane on record, demolishing almost all of the buildings on the island of 2,500 people. The climate crisis is making hurricanes ever more intense and destructive.
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‘While it was dark, I climbed up and put remote control cameras in the tree. I’d never have got the shot if I’d been up there. An orangutan always knows you’re there’
I was following orangutans in Borneo with my wife, Cheryl Knott, a primatologist who has spent 30 years working in Gunung Palung national park, in the Indonesian part of Borneo. I am a biologist by background, and did my PhD research in rainforest ecology in Borneo, before I went into photography and film-making. I saw so much destruction in the rainforest back in the 90s, and it dawned on me that I could publish scientific articles that maybe 10 people would read – or an article in National Geographic that 10 million people would see.
I was getting increasingly serious about my photography while working on my PhD when I got funding from the National Geographic Society for field research. Through that connection, I was able to show them my pictures and eventually I published an article in the magazine about my work, which in turn meant I was able to get an assignment to document Cheryl’s orangutan PhD.
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Interviews and analysis of court documents show how the world’s most prestigious consulting firm quietly helps fuel the climate crisis
Two giant, mirrored walls are set to rise out of the sands of the Arabian desert. They will run parallel for more than 100 miles from the coast of the Red Sea through arid valleys and craggy mountains. Between them, a futuristic city which has no need for cars or roads will be powered completely by renewable energy.
This engineering marvel, its creators say, will usher in “a revolution in civilization”. It’s the jewel in the crown of a $500bn Saudi government project known as Neom, turning a vast scrubland into a techno-utopia and world-class tourist and sporting destination. Perhaps a harbinger for the end of oil, it will supposedly put the powerful petrostate at the forefront of the energy transition. For American consulting giant McKinsey & Company, its advising on this project appears to be making good on the firm’s green promises.
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A recent strike narrowly missed slave trade archives in Barbados, and experts warn more and worse is to come as global heating intensifies storms
When the Barbados National Archives, home to one of the world’s most significant collections of documents from the transatlantic slave trade, reported in June that it had been struck by lightning, it received widespread sympathy and offers of support locally and internationally.
A section of the 60-year-old building, Block D, located on the grounds of the “Lazaretto” (the island’s former colony for people with leprosy), caught fire, and sustained serious damage. Official documents including hospital and school records were lost. “It was not just paper that was in the building, but documents that have stories about our families and ancestors,” says the chief archivist, Ingrid Thompson.
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