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António Guterres urges world to act on fossil fuels as continent braces for record-breaking heat; French PM to hold emergency meeting after heat deaths
Italy’s health ministry has declared a red heatwave alert in 15 cities including Milan and Rome on Tuesday and said the number would go up to 16 on Wednesday.
During a red alert – the highest level – the ministry advises people to eat light, stay indoors in the hottest parts of the day and sprinkle themselves with cool water.
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Half a century on, Britain braces for temperatures up to 40C as global heating brings yet more extreme weather
The summer of 1976 is seared into national memory as one of record heat. Harvests failed, farmers despaired, Britain imported an extra million tonnes of grain, food prices rose by 12%, taps ran dry, and each day, 250 people died from heat-related deaths.
The heatwave, which began 50 years ago on Tuesday, brought 15 consecutive days on which the peak temperature was above 32C. Half a century later and 32C no longer feels shocking.
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Energy secretary hails £100bn milestone in this parliament and says it is ‘only the start of what we want to achieve’
Ed Miliband has hailed a boost to UK jobs and growth as government data reveals that private sector companies have pledged more than £100bn in investment into the green economy so far in this parliament.
Offshore wind, solar power and the electricity grid make up the bulk of the planned investment, most of it between 2024 and 2031, which will go to all regions of the UK and comes from a mixture of UK companies and overseas sources including the EU and Japan.
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The country’s biggest tree – named Heaven Sword of the Da’an River – is a carbon-storing behemoth hosting whole neighbourhoods of wildlife. But this and other giant trees are under threat
The higher you climb up the gigantic, millennia-old trees of Taiwan’s forests, the more layers of habitat and life emerge. On the forest floor, ferns thrive in the moist shade. Flying squirrels and owls sleep inside the hollow tree trunks. Yellow bell-shaped rhododendron flowers spring from the lower tree canopy. Higher still, dense lichen spread. Up in cloud-drenched branches, a rare, hardy orchid, Bulbophyllum ciliisepalum, can be spotted.
“In one tree, every species has their preferred location,” says Dr Rebecca Hsu, assistant researcher at the Taiwan Forestry Research Institute. “Every metre the temperature, the wind, the sun, the light is different.”
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Queen’s University, Belfast:The corvids in the branches above me spring a surprise – there’s a black crow among them
The rain hurries me to shelter at the woods’ edge, but I’m scarcely under the branches of a mature sycamore when the canopy starts to thrash. Abrasive voices erupt from the foliage as a rabble of crows dispute. One leaps into a gap between the leaves, crouching, its ash-grey body low over a branch and fanning its black tail. The throat inflates to bray the bird’s anger. In response, the object of its fury hops on to the branch above it, all the while giving as good as it gets. Something niggles me about that one – I squint, then blink in surprise. It’s a black crow.
As a bookish youngster growing up in rural County Fermanagh, it took a while for me to grasp that the crows I encountered in real life were not, in fact, black. The hooded or grey crow is the common crow across all of Ireland. With its two-tone livery of grey torso and black extremities, it’s a handsome bird. The “hoodie” is also found in the north of Scotland. The closely related all-black carrion crow is a far more familiar sight throughout the rest of Britain, with sparse numbers along the east coast of Northern Ireland.
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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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The colour-coordinated ‘clean girl’ athleisure aesthetic is dead. Now it’s all about mismatched outfits and vintage sportswear
At first, the goblins came for our downtime. Going “goblin mode” was a lifestyle confined to the home – to the bed, mostly. The “comforts of depravity” it brought (“watching 90 Day Fiancé on mute while scrolling endlessly through social media, pouring the end of a bag of chips in your mouth”, for example) weren’t compatible with doing anything productive.
Enter the gym goblin. The optics remain much the same – think ancient T-shirts, knackered socks, oversized cardigans – but the setting has changed, with goblincore devotees rising up from unmade beds, Diet Cokes in hand, to hit the treadmill. It’s Diana, Princess of Wales’s oversized college sweatshirts meets Josh O’Connor’s half-tracksuit look for the Disclosure Day press tour – and the polar opposite of the matcha-drinking, Lululemoned “clean girl” aesthetic that dominates fitness circles.
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In HBO documentary The Welcome Table, director Josh Fox brings together people from across the world whose lives have been dramatically altered by the climate crisis
In an age of division, director Josh Fox is hoping to bring people of all kinds together. Specifically, he wants them to share a table – to break bread for a meal, and come together in exuberant song.
In his new documentary film The Welcome Table, the director of the the Emmy-winning Gasland travels around the world to talk to people at the leading edge of global warming’s effects. The film is part stark warning of the climate crisis, part opportunity to enter into the experience of those living in the corners of the globe. It culminates with the sounds of these individuals together at an enormous table in New Orleans, eating and rejoicing.
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Is it an alien? A dinosaur? Is it going to kill us all? Our writer hits Ashdown Forest for the Big One Hundred celebrations – and finds its magic enchanting new generations
The rolling idyll of heath and forest, spinney and stream that gave us the Heffalump, the Woozle and, most famously of all, Winnie-the-Pooh, has a new fantastical resident. Creeping through the bracken, making strange cooing and purring noises, is a shapeshifting creature with a huge tubular nose and eyes inspired by adders. It shimmies with iridescent patches and the psychedelic purple of flowering heather in high summer.
Poppet, a puppet made by costume designer Jack Irving and brought to life by a team of 10 award-winning puppeteers, is performing for schoolchildren in Ashdown Forest, East Sussex. The primary school class squeal with delighted fear as the purple apparition transforms itself from caterpillar to bird to munching monster in sinuous moves.
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