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Regional leaders call on Boris Johnson to act as Kent and East Sussex are hit by flooding

Boris Johnson must overhaul the system for deciding where flood-defence funding is spent and launch an emergency response unit to prevent a repeat of the “catastrophic” damage caused by the November floods, leading politicians have said.

Nearly 100 flood warnings were in place across much of England on Sunday, hampering the Christmas getaway, with towns and villages deluged in Kent and East Sussex.

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Energy giant Iberdrola predicts renewables will take ‘much more relevant position’ in Australia in coming years – and hopes to develop further projects

Spanish energy giant Iberdrola says it has decided to invest $500m in a wind and solar farm in South Australia as the first of a series of renewable power projects it hopes to develop in Australia.

Iberdrola’s head of renewables, Xabier Viteri, said that in the new year the company would also probably increase its target for renewable energy from the “ambitious” target of 10GW by 2022.

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It’s an emotional time to be an entomologist, as ecological diversity that once existed slips away

How many Christmas beetles have you seen this year?

The insects – a genus containing some 35 separate species – traditionally appear in summer. Many settlers saw the scarabs, shimmering in festive red and green, as embodying the European holiday tradition.

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Exclusive: Labor accuses Scott Morrison of using adjustments to Australia’s soil carbon data as an excuse not to act on climate change

Australia’s official greenhouse gas records have been adjusted such that emissions are now significantly higher than previously believed for the years when Labor was in power, and no longer rise each year since the Coalition repealed the carbon price.

The revisions, made clear in data published during the recent UN climate conference in Madrid, have allowed Scott Morrison to start claiming that emissions are now lower than when the Coalition was elected in 2013 and in any year when Labor was last in government.

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Boeing's Starliner spacecraft has returned early after a timing error meant it failed to dock with the International Space Station.

Justin Rowlatt lands in a dazzling white and blue world to join scientists checking up on Antarctic ice.

These three teenagers are passionate about issues they see around them, and are training to be activists at The Advocacy Academy in London.

Across northern NSW and southern Queensland, people have stepped up to truck water to those whose supplies have run dry

A few months ago, Russell Wantling pulled over to the side of the road near the southern Queensland town of Stanthorpe to speak to a family he saw carrying buckets of water from the town dam. Again and again, they lugged each bucketload up the dam wall and poured it into a tank strapped to the tray of an old ute.

“I just stopped and asked what they were doing,” Wantling says. “He said to me that they had no water, he couldn’t afford to buy water because he’d lost his job. So I went to my wife and said ‘we’ve got to do something, this is terrible’.

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Global Greengrants UK, one of the four groups we are helping to fight the climate crisis, supports indigenous Brazilians

• Please donate to our appeal here

It is midnight at an almost deserted bus station and one of the Amazon’s most courageous warriors is sitting on a plastic chair and breastfeeding her child, apparently indifferent to the hefty price on her head.

Illegal miners have offered 100g of gold to anyone who kills Maria Leusa Munduruku, a forest defender, indigenous leader and women’s rights activist who has spearheaded campaigns to halt invasions of the Tapajós river basin by polluters, loggers and dam builders.

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The plant has flowered for the first time in Britain, but the climate crisis is making such events rarer than ever

It is famous for smelling like “a thousand dead elephants rotting in the sun”, its petals resemble decaying flesh, and it is so rare that outside its natural habitat in Papua New Guinea, few botanists in the world have ever seen it in flower.

Now this highly pungent orchid – Bulbophyllum phalaenopsis – is in bloom for the first time in a glasshouse at Cambridge University Botanic Garden.

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The big cats’ resourceful new behaviour was recorded by a WWF study on a remote island off the coast of Brazil

A thriving population of jaguars living on a small, unspoilt island off the coast of the Brazilian Amazon has learned to catch fish in the sea to survive, conservationists have found.

The Maracá-Jipioca Ecological Station island reserve, three miles off the northern state of Amapá, acts as a nursery for jaguars, according to WWF researchers who have collared three cats and set up 70 camera traps on the remote jungle island.

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At least 8 new electric vehicle models will hit Australian shores in 2020, opening up choice for drivers wanting to reduce transport emissions or simply have the latest in auto tech.

The post Eight new electric vehicle models set to join Australia market in 2020 appeared first on RenewEconomy.

Two of out three of Australia’s independently ranked safest cars are electric vehicles, and both of those are Teslas.

The post Telsa Models X and 3 ranked among Australia’s Top 3 safest cars for 2019 appeared first on RenewEconomy.

A daily summary of our news plus bite-sized updates from around the world.

The family had brought the tree to their home and decorated it before they spotted the bird, who initially didn’t want to leave

A Georgia family got a real hoot from its Christmas tree: more than a week after they bought it, they discovered a live owl nestled among its branches.

Katie McBride Newman said on Friday that she and her daughter spotted the bird on 12 December. They had bought the 10ft-tall tree from a Home Depot, brought it back to their Atlanta area home and decorated it with lights and, coincidentally, owl ornaments.

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California and Quebec will auction off 65.7 million current and future vintage allowances on Feb. 19, as the quarterly sales fall significantly from 2019 levels.

European carbon closed a little lower on Friday, ending a four-day streak of gains, but EUAs recovered from a gas market-induced intraday sell-off earlier in the day to notch a better than 10% rise for the week.

The government has an opportunity to pivot in 2020 – to actually do something rather than pretending to

It’s hot as I write this final column for 2019, the day is creeping towards 40C. It’s dry. The ground is like concrete, and dust is obscuring yellowed grass on my parched suburban block. Bushfire smoke has rolled in and out of Canberra. Smoke is the last thing I smell before going to sleep and the first thing I smell as I wake up.

With the summer stretching out in front of us and no significant rain forecast before April, according to the Bureau of Meteorology, December and January promises extreme weather, burning bushland, eerie blood-red sunsets. Towns are on the brink of running out of water. Instead of resting and recharging with their loved ones, emergency services workers are spending their days toiling in a hellscape.

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An estimated 120-150 million EU carbon allowances that remain to be auctioned by the UK before it formally exits the bloc and its ETS at the end of 2020 are most likely to be spread evenly across 10 months of sales next year, experts predict.

The pick of the best flora and fauna photos from around the world, from fighting sloths to rescued orangutans

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