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Rail services, schools and sports events hit, with deaths of three elderly people in France partly blamed on intense heat
Western Europe is enduring a ferocious heatwave forecast to break temperature records, with half of France on red alert, rail services in Belgium disrupted and sports events in Spain and Germany cancelled or postponed.
French authorities on Monday placed 49 of the country’s 96 mainland departments on a level 1 danger-to-life warning, urging 35 million people to exercise “absolute vigilance”, drink water often, avoid all strenuous exertion and stay out of direct sun.
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People trained to experience world as otters, salmon and other River Tone creatures for pioneering research
What does a kestrel make of the dog sniffing in the long grass below? Why does an exhausted salmon pause before a weir? How will an otter experience the rumble of a passing train?
Eighteen people have spent six weeks swimming, slithering and soaring as otters, salmon, earthworms, red deer and kestrels in an attempt to better document the risks for wild animals in our human-dominated landscape.
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Prime minister was forced to row back on some policies despite strong support among voters for climate action
Keir Starmer has faced a problem no Labour government has needed to deal with before. His energy and climate policies – core to solving the cost of living crisis – have come under attack from opposition parties, which have made dismantling the agenda one of their top priorities, second only to immigration, in their pitch to voters.
This is new in British politics, where a cross-party consensus on the climate and environment has held at least since the days of Margaret Thatcher. She warned the UN of the climate crisis in 1988; David Cameron in 2006 urged voters to “vote blue, go green”; Theresa May enshrined in law the requirement to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050; Boris Johnson championed the Cop26 UN climate summit in Glasgow in 2021; even Rishi Sunak only tried a partial rollback of green policies as a last desperate throw before calling an election.
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UN’s World Food Programme and agriculture agency issue joint appeal for funds to avert global hunger crisis before it happens
Adugna Woyessa was a little boy the first time drought tore his country apart. As harvests failed in rain-starved regions of Ethiopia in the early 1970s, and his school turned a classroom into a grain store for farmers to send aid, he had no idea that scientists were beginning to connect the force parching its fields with cyclical shifts in trade winds that had long supercharged violent weather from South America to Australia.
The now notorious El Niño – Spanish for “little boy” – was named by fishers in the Pacific in the 1800s, but it was not until the 1970s that scientists understood its global nature and began to piece together the historical impact of the natural weather pattern characterised by hot years and brutal extremes.
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Abernethy forest, Cairngorms: One of my favourite species, the tiny twinflower, does better in Scots pinewoods than most places in the UK. Now I just have to find some
The soundtrack to my day is the calls of siskins, blackcaps, willow warblers, coal tits and tree pipits, the drumming of a great spotted woodpecker and an occasional cuckoo. But this morning my gaze is aimed downwards. I’m walking slowly, gingerly, looking for a colony of twinflowers that I know I’ve seen around here before.
They’re one of my favourite flowers and a sign for me that summer is here. Standing just 10cm in height, their stems form a delicate Y with two, tiny, beautiful pale pinkish-white bell‑shaped flowers that hang from each of the tops.
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Smaller, cheaper cars built for narrow city streets are becoming more stylish – but require careful design decisions
The winding backstreets of London, Paris and Rome are a large part of their charm. But they are also a problem for electric carmakers. For a long time, squeezing big batteries into smaller, cheaper cars to fit European streets was too much of a problem, so manufacturers focused on bloated SUVs instead.
But that is finally changing. Battery technology has improved and Europe’s carmakers havecut manufacturing costs enough that they can now sell cars that might have a chance of fitting down a medieval lane or two.
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Exclusive: European Commission planning to rewrite key law to allow water-intensive mines in regions suffering from drought
The European Commission plans to rewrite the EU’s flagship water protection law to speed up the development of critical minerals mines, despite many being located in drying and water-stressed regions, analysis has found.
Mining is a water-intensive industry, requiring large volumes of water for ore processing, dust suppression, waste management and mine dewatering. While modern projects recycle water, they still require significant amounts, and in water-stressed regions those demands can add to pressure on already stretched rivers, aquifers and water supplies.
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A national heatwave plan has been activated to help people stay cool during the Netherlands’ increasingly hot summers
Households in Amsterdam are being urged to hang their curtains outside their windows as health experts recommend simple hacks to moderate the heatwave rolling across the Netherlands, where homes were built for old-fashioned damp and coldish northern European weather.
In a viral social media post last week, Eline Coolen, the heat coordinator at the city’s public health institute, urged sweaty city-dwellers to rig up temporary curtain rails or drape curtains or sheets outside to stop the sun’s rays reaching their large windows.
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Forced to stay home or switch jobs, working mothers are bearing the brunt of the climate crisis as classes go online for weeks or months at a time
Outside, the temperature has passed 41C (105.8F). Inside Sakshi Katyal’s city apartment, the air conditioner is blasting but it does little to relieve the stress of balancing housework and helping her five-year-old log in on a laptop to online classes. Her daughter’s school closed in May and Katyal is not clear when it will reopen. Probably not till the autumn.
Schools across Delhi and in about half of India’s 28 states have been ordered to close from mid-May until the end of June, when in many places the summer break starts. There is no official record of closures in past years but the Guardian has spoken to school officials who say the number of days schools are shut for because of the heat has risen sharply. The impact on families, especially on working women, has been huge.
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Opposition to plans for ‘small paradise’ island of Sazan becomes wave of dissent against establishment
For Ina Shkurti, like so many Albanians, the island of Sazan has played an outsized role. As a child she bathed in its “always calm and emerald green” waters, as a teenager it figured in her dreams and as an adult it was an indelible part of the memory and desire that drew her back, every summer, to Vlore, her home town across the sea.
What Shkurti never imagined was that plans to build a mega-resort on Sazan – one of two luxurious complexes on Albania’s southern coast backed by Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner – would trigger a revolt, an uprising that has convulsed the Balkan state in a spasm of disgust over the perceived excesses of “a rotten oligarchic class” just as it hopes to complete accession talks with the EU.
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