-
Jaguars, giant armadillos and ocelots among species threatened by shrinking habitat in one of the richest areas of biodiversity in the world
In the Gran Chaco forest, vast green expanses – home to jaguars, giant armadillos and howler monkeys – have turned to fields of dust. The forest once brimmed with life, says Bashe Nuhem, a member of the Indigenous Qom community, but then came a road, and soon after that logging companies. “It was an invasion. Loggers came without any consultation and families moved away. Those that stayed were left with only a cemetery of trees,” she says.
The Gran Chaco is South America’s second-largest forest after the Amazon; its 100m hectares (247m acres) stretch across Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil and Bolivia. It is also one of the richest areas of biodiversity in the world – host to more than 3,400 species of plants, 500 birds, 150 mammals, 120 reptiles and 100 amphibians.
Continue reading...
-
On average, five fatal whale strikes occur in the country’s waters each year, the highest in the world – and just a fraction of the total number killed, say researchers
- Photographs by Francis Pérez
The memory of a blue whale gliding past his small boat haunts Patricio Ortiz. A deep wound disfigured the cetacean’s giant body – a big chunk had been ripped from its dorsal fin. Cargo ships are the only adversary capable of inflicting such harm on a blue whale, he says.
“Nothing can be done when they’re up against those floating monsters.”
Continue reading...
-
Paper in Nature Climate Change journal reveals major role wealthy emitters play in driving climate extremes
The world’s wealthiest 10% are responsible for two-thirds of global heating since 1990, driving droughts and heatwaves in the poorest parts of the world, according to a study.
While researchers have previously shown that higher income groups emit disproportionately large amounts of greenhouse gases, the latest survey is the first to try to pin down how that inequality translates into responsibility for climate breakdown. It offers a powerful argument for climate finance and wealth taxes by attempting to give an evidential basis for how many people in the developed world – including more than 50% of full-time employees in the UK – bear a heightened responsibility for the climate disasters affecting people who can least afford it.
Continue reading...
-
Trials will test ways to block sunlight and slow climate crisis that threatens to trigger catastrophic tipping points
Real-world geoengineering experiments spanning the globe from the Arctic to the Great Barrier Reef are being funded by the UK government. They will test sun-reflecting particles in the stratosphere, brightening reflective clouds using sprays of seawater and pumping water on to sea ice to thicken it.
Getting this “critical missing scientific data” is vital with the Earth nearing several catastrophic climate tipping points, said the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria), the government agency backing the plan. If demonstrated to be safe, geoengineering could temporarily cool the planet and give more time to tackle the root cause of the climate crisis: the burning of fossil fuels.
Continue reading...
-
Whitehall analysis provides no data or research to support the government argument that environmental legislation holds up building
There is very little evidence that protections for nature are a blocker to development, the government has admitted in its own impact assessment of the controversial new planning and infrastructure bill.
The analysis by Whitehall officials provides no data or research to back up the government’s central argument that it is environmental legislation that holds up building.
Continue reading...
-
Inkpen, Berkshire: Settled against one my favourite oaks, the birdsong falls away and the subterranean bumps and noises begin
I’ve been waiting for a good time to go badger watching at an old, old sett I’ve known for 20 years. I’m hoping for a first sight of this year’s cubs, which begin to emerge around now. An evening after rain is best, before the nettles get too high. In damp ground, the worms might be up and badgers love to forage those, but we haven’t had significant rain in weeks. Tonight will have to do.
I settle against the broad, rough trunk of a favourite oak. The evening is perfectly still, the sun has gone down in a deepening blue sky. The flattened state of the bluebells indicates that the cubs have been out and playing. Housework has also taken place, as two piles of bedding lie airing between the sett entrances, waiting to be taken in. They are mostly composed of wild garlic leaves that double up as fly repellent. The sett has a clean, in-use smell: the cool cathedral scent of scraped chalk earth, the green bacon whiff of claw-shredded elder bark, a warm muskiness. I am relieved to see the sett still active, though badgers do well here.
Continue reading...
-
Trade in uncertified hardwood illegally logged in Chocó rainforest and imported by US and Europe is financing paramilitaries, says Environmental Investigation Agency
The Atrato River winds through the dense rainforest of Colombia’s Chocó region for nearly 400 miles (600km) before spilling into the Caribbean Sea. Some of these tropical forests are among the wettest on Earth. Their flooded lowlands and swollen rivers are so impenetrable they have acted as an evolutionary barrier, making Chocó a haven for rare and remarkable species found nowhere else on the planet.
“We have so many animals that you won’t even know the names of many of them,” says María Mosquera, a community leader in the region, whose name has been changed to protect her identity.
Continue reading...
-
Successive cyclones have gradually worn away the northern tip of the Queensland barrier island, which shields coastal residents on the mainland
Jen Kettleton-Butler is on “a postage stamp of island” trying to rescue an echidna she calls Eddie.
Wind roars in her microphone and the camera she holds pans from a public toilet that is disappearing beneath waves to a thin strip of coastal forest that, too, is being reclaimed by the ocean.
Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email
Continue reading...
-
Campaigner Hannah Bourne-Taylor fears goal of requiring all new homes in England to include a hollow brick to help endangered cavity-nesting birds may be dropped
On more than 50 occasions over the past three years, Hannah Bourne-Taylor has lugged an oversized brick through the parliament’s security screening.
Security staff know her fondly as “the swift brick lady”. But now Bourne-Taylor is having to ruffle political feathers over what appears the simplest of nature-friendly measures – a small legal clause requiring all new dwellings in England to include a £35 hollow brick, providing homes for endangered cavity-nesting birds including swifts, house martins, sparrows and starlings.
Continue reading...
-
Even before his call for a net zero ‘reset’, there had been criticism of ex-PM’s lucrative links with fossil fuel nations
From the lush gardens of the Four Seasons luxury hotel in Sharm el-Sheikh, amid banks of bougainvillaea and trailing jasmine, green lawns and air-conditioned courtyards, the surrounding desert is kept at bay by hidden sprinklers, and the chaotic poverty of the rest of Egypt by high walls and discreet security.
In late 2022, on the sidelines of the Cop27 UN climate conference, the former UK prime minister Tony Blair was holding high-level meetings with senior figures from politics and business. His role in the negotiations raised questions for some, who began to worry that, having been a respected elder statesman on the subject – one who as prime minister crafted the UK’s first real climate measures, and made it the priority for the UK presidency of the G8 group of countries in 2005 – he might now be becoming, in the words of one Whitehall insider, “a serious threat to sensible climate policy”.
Continue reading...
