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After last year’s Cop16 biodiversity talks in Cali left key issues unresolved, the extra summit will attempt to seek consensus, especially over funding
Global talks to halt the loss of nature will reopen today in Rome, amid “loss of trust” in the United Nations-led process and concerns that countries will not turn up for the meeting. Delegates are due to meet at Cop16, the UN’s biodiversity conference, to discuss global targets to stop nature loss by 2030.
The additional meeting in Rome was called after talks were suspended in confusion in the Colombian city of Cali in November when they overran and delegates left to catch flights home.
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Environment secretary will hope move can reset relations with farmers after inheritance tax row
The environment secretary, Steve Reed, is to announce a five-year extension of the seasonal farm worker scheme in an attempt to reset relations with farmers after fury over inheritance tax.
Making his pitch to farmers at the National Farmers’ Union conference in central London on Tuesday, Reed will also announce the opening of a new national biosecurity centre to tackle diseases including foot-and-mouth and bluetongue.
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Distinctive, slender deep-sea creature, also known as ‘doomsday’ fish, seen wriggling on Baja California beach
A shimmery, slinky oarfish – a deep-sea creature that is rarely seen near the surface – was spotted in Baja California Sur, along Mexico’s Pacific Coast, this month. A group of people visiting the area noticed the shiny, wriggling fish along the beach, and tried to guide it back into the water.
The slender creatures live at depths between 660 and 3,280ft underwater, and on the rare occasions that they have been seen by humans, they have usually been dead – washed ashore after storms. In Baja California Sur, Robert Hayes of Idaho, who was visiting the beach with his wife, saw a live fish and quickly began filming it.
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Dog walker’s close encounter prompts debate over whether the animals, once native to UK, should remain
Sightings of wild boar on Dartmoor have raised suspicions a guerrilla rewilder has been releasing them – and prompted a debate over whether they should be allowed to remain.
Videos of a group of boar on the moors in Devon were posted online earlier this month, and a dog walker has recently complained of a close encounter with one of them, which frightened his pet.
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Lady’s Spring Wood, North Yorkshire: Sitting close to the River Derwent, it has provided for a castle, a fort and now a town. It deserves better than poo bags and beer cans
It seems to be precisely when February’s sleet and muck threaten to become unbearable that the aeons-old conversation between celestial and terrestrial turns to growth and greening. We’re now past the pagan quarter festival of Imbolc, which honours a goddess of many guises. Of particular relevance here, in the iron age territory of the Brigantes, she was Brigantia. Of her other guises, the foremost was the Celtic Brighid, goddess of springs, of healing and farming, or poetry wisdom and smithing – the stuff of creation.
We pay a family visit to Lady’s Spring Wood in nearby Malton, named for the water that rises alongside the Yorkshire Derwent. Small channels spill in braided rivulets, their clarity a startling contrast to the murky flow of the river. It’s a place that is triple blessed, by topography, geology and hydrology, with elevated ground for security, river clay for pottery, a floodplain for farming, and before that for hunting and gathering, the river for transit and, principally, the springs for life.
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Anthocyanins in nuts, fruits and vegetables seem to lessen harmful effects of microplastics on reproductive systems
Antioxidants that give fruits and flowers their vibrant colors seem to counteract some of the most dangerous reproductive system effects of exposure to microplastics, such as decreased fertility, and could ultimately be used in developing treatments, new peer-reviewed research shows.
The paper focused on microplastics’ reproductive toxicity and plant compounds called anthocyanins, which are widely found in nuts, fruits and vegetables. The new review of scientific literature on anthocyanins found that the compounds are probably protective against a range of plastic-induced impacts on hormones, reductions in testosterone and estrogen, decreased sperm counts, lower sperm quality, erectile dysfunction and ovarian damage.
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For more than 20 years, scientists have followed the animals in Norway’s Arctic archipelago to understand how they may adapt to changing threats as the ice they depend on melts
When Rolf-Arne Ølberg is hanging out of a helicopter with a gun, he needs to be able to assess from a distance of about 10 metres the sex and approximate weight of the moving animal he is aiming at, as well as how fat or muscular it is and whether it is in any distress. Only then can he dart it with the correct amount of sedative. Luckily, he says, polar bears are “quite good anaesthetic patients”.
Ølberg is a vet working with the Norwegian Polar Institute, the body responsible for the monitoring of polar bears in Svalbard, an archipelago that lies between mainland Norway and the north pole. Every year he and his colleagues track the bears by helicopter, collect blood, fat and hair samples from them and fit electronic tracking collars.
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As well as intense human suffering, three years of war have had a catastrophic environmental effect, killing wildlife, felling trees and increasing emissions
Since 2022, the Guardian photographer Alessio Mamo has been tracking the impact of Russia’s war in Ukraine. The Kremlin’s full-scale invasion, which began three years ago on Monday, caused millions of Ukrainians to flee. Cities have been flattened, villages occupied and lives destroyed. At least 46,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed and many more injured in Europe’s biggest conflict since the second world war.
Aerial view of craters caused by rocket fire in a field in the liberated area between Kharkiv and Donetsk regions. Ammunition and missile residues in these craters may become a source of chemical pollution that could reach the groundwater
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The January blazes wiped out a thriving communal food pathway unique to the Altadena neighborhood, but farmers are starting to plan for its renewal
In Choi Chatterjee and Omer Sayeed’s Altadena backyard, beehives produced pounds of honey, copious amounts of fruit and vegetables were harvested, and hens laid plenty of fresh eggs. A couple of pygmy goats and a pair of 100-pound tortoises, Layla and Manju, roamed the urban farm, keeping the weeds trimmed, the compost turned and the soil alive with microbes, much to the delight of the hundreds of visitors who have enjoyed free tours and home-cooked meals since the couple began offering them in 2020.
Passersby were often drawn to the Chatterjee-Sayeed residence since the lush butterfly-filled parkway next to their home has served as a free communal garden for more than a decade. Neighbors were welcome to stop by for persimmons, guavas, nopal pads, herbs and varieties of citrus. “We’d get 100 to 200 pomegranates and just hand them out to whoever was walking by,” said Chatterjee, who is co-director of the Urban Ecology Center at Cal State LA. “It was just bustling with life.”
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The rare sighting of two common short-beaked dolphins hints at an environmental success story
When New Yorkers were graced by the presence of two dolphins in the city’s East River earlier this month, marine experts said such a sighting was rare – but also a sign that this spring and summer season could be a good one for spotting more marine mammals, both great and small.
On the morning of 14 February, a pair of common short-beaked dolphins was spotted alongside Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Experts tracking them observed that they lingered until 17 February, swimming up and down the fast-flowing channel that divides Manhattan from the boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn and is lined with skyscrapers.
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