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Almost half of global land area saw extreme drought for at least one month, according to Lancet Countdown
Heat-related deaths, food insecurity and the spread of infectious diseases caused by the climate crisis have reached record levels, according to a landmark report.
The Lancet Countdown’s ninth report on health and the climate breakdown reveals that people across the world face unprecedented threats to their health from the rapidly changing climate.
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Representatives from nearly 200 countries at the UN’s Cop16 summit in Colombia have yet to break the deadlock over who pays and how much
Experts agree that the world needs $700bn (£539bn) a year to restore nature – but no one knows where the money is going to come from, and anger is building about rich countries failing to pay their share.
With representatives of nearly 200 countries gathered in Colombia for the UN Cop16 biodiversity summit, the question of who will fund conservation and how those funds will be distributed is a key battleground – and as negotiations push into their second week, frustration is growing at the lack of movement.
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Researchers found 38,000 fewer people – 10 times number of murders – would have died if atmosphere was not clogged with greenhouse pollutants
Climate breakdown caused more than half of the 68,000 heat deaths during the scorching European summer of 2022, a study has found.
Researchers from the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) found 38,000 fewer people would have died from heat if humans had not clogged the atmosphere with pollutants that act like a greenhouse and bake the planet. The death toll is about 10 times greater than the number of people murdered in Europe that year.
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Department’s finances were slashed during austerity and campaigners say more cuts will stall progress to meet nature and climate targets
Rachel Reeves has been urged not to cut the government’s environment funding in the budget as analysis shows the department’s finances were slashed at twice the rate of other departments in the austerity years.
Between 2009/10 and 2018/19, the environment department budget declined by 35% in monetary terms and 45% in real terms, according to Guardian analysis of annual reports from the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), the Environment Agency and Natural England. By comparison, the average cut across government departments during the Conservative austerity programme was about 20%. During the first five years of austerity, it was the most cut department.
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Widespread in England, it joins other species to have expanded range in recent years due to climate change
It may have been a fairly awful summer for butterflies but Scotland continues to enjoy some pleasant lepidopteran surprises, thanks to global heating.
Its list of resident species increased by one this year when the gatekeeper, never officially recorded north of the border in the past century, was spotted in several locations. Meanwhile, the elusive white-letter hairstreak, which was only recorded for the first time close to the River Tweed in 2017, has now been found in Dundee, more than 60 miles farther north.
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Exclusive: Linked accounts on X push petrostate’s posts about climate summit and drown out criticism
Scores of apparently fake social media accounts are boosting Azerbaijan’s hosting of the Cop29 climate summit, an investigation has revealed.
The accounts were mostly set up after July, at which time seven of the top 10 most engaged posts using the hashtags #COP29 and #COP29Azerbaijan were critical of Azerbaijan’s role in the conflict with Armenia, using hashtags such as #stopgreenwashgenocide. By September this had changed, with all of the top 10 most engaged posts coming from the official Cop29 Azerbaijan account.
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Residents describe impact of floods and downpours – with some places hit with a year’s worth of rain in just eight hours
The gratitude that greeted Tuesday’s dawn downpours was short-lived in Utiel. When the longed-for rains finally reached the town in the drought-stricken eastern Spanish region of Valencia, they were merciless in their abundance.
“People were very happy at first because they’d been praying for rain as their lands needed water,” said Remedios, who owns a bar in Utiel. “But by 12 o’clock, this storm had really hit and we were all pretty terrified.”
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A 2022 law gave wildland firefighters with ‘presumptive cancer coverage’, but the list of ailments left out a range of cancers affecting women
Riva Duncan was overjoyed when Congress in 2022 approved better support for federal wildland firefighters during their cancer battles. As a retired fire officer of the US Forest Service (USFS), Duncan had spent years fighting for the friends and colleagues who disproportionately fell ill.
The 2022 law gave firefighters so-called “presumptive cancer coverage” – meaning they were eligible for workers compensation and the process to receive federal financial support for disability and death was streamlined. Finally, she thought, firefighters wouldn’t have to prove cancer and other illnesses, including lung and heart diseases, had derived from their hazardous and carcinogenic work to receive needed funds.
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Already targeted for opposing the EACOP oil pipeline, claims that he was gay forced Nyombi Morris to flee
When an anonymous caller threatened to rape and arrest Nyombi Morris if he did not stop “promoting homosexuality”, he knew he had to flee Uganda. The 26-year-old climate activist, who had become outspoken about LGBTQ+ rights after his sister was revealed as a lesbian and expelled from school last year, has faced a fierce backlash for his advocacy.
And things only got worse after his environmental non-profit organisation, Earth Volunteers, began collaborating with LGBTQ+ groups to support young people who identified as gay and were at risk of persecution.
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How can anyone cope with the loss of their pregnancies? When I watched Tahlequah the whale grieve her calf and go on to have another, it felt like the omen I needed to try again
It was winter 2018. I had just miscarried my twins. Technically, I had failed to miscarry them and had to have not one, not two, but three surgical procedures under general anaesthetic to “extract the retained products of conception”. Each time I ended up back in hospital with severe pains or heavy bleeding, the doctors would scan me, express their surprise that there was still some “tissue” remaining in my uterus and schedule another surgery.
Just over six weeks after learning about our loss, I was feeling absolutely dreadful, once again in hospital and still testing positive for a pregnancy. The whole experience was surreal. But there was something about it that made complete sense to me: my body was no more ready to let go than my mind was. I was still holding on to my babies in every way I could.
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