Around The Web

Vietnam is one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change - we meet the families on the front lines.

A band of volunteer firefighters are on a mission to stop their stretch of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest from going up in flames.

From 3D printing using plastic waste to growing cherry trees in the Himalayas, young people are not sitting idle while the world burns. Danilo Ignacio de Urzedo, PhD candidate, University of Sydney Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.

The US entrepreneur says prototype flights of his Moon-Mars rocket system will begin in months.

On 20 September, filmmakers Cybele Malinowski, Charlie Ford and Amy Low created a makeshift set at the global climate strike event held in Sydney, Australia. They interviewed 18 passionate young people from different backgrounds about why the event matters. The result is an intimate, raw and formidable series capturing the thoughts, fears and hopes of Australia’s next generation

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Manmade sea walls and the effects of climate change eating away at Stockton beach, and locals are rallying to save it

Noel Burns started work on Stockton beach as a council lifeguard in 1971 and spent 37 years with his eyes fixed on the surf and the sand.

“Mate, I’m broken-hearted,” says the 70-year-old. “It’s terrible what it looks like now. They have been studying this [erosion] for 20 years but nothing is getting done. Everyone is getting angry now.”

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The man who wrote the book on living off-grid in the city plans to retreat to a rural bolthole, saying eco-friendly progress has not kept pace with the speed of climate collapse

Michael Mobbs, you might say, has been preparing for this moment his entire life.

The 69-year-old former environmental lawyer who, in 1996, converted his two-storey 19th century Sydney terrace into one of the world’s first inner-city self-sufficient homes, is selling his famous passion project and moving to a remote coastal location to prepare for what he predicts will be impending societal collapse induced by climate change.

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Some have stood for thousands of years, yet trees enjoy little legal protection. Campaigners aim to change that

A dark green tree stands on the north side of the medieval stone church in Defynnog. The tree is broader than it is tall and has divided into two quite separate trees over the centuries. Beneath its low boughs, multiple trunks resemble molten lava. Some limbs twist like sinews; others are ramrod straight. Some patches of wood are as smooth as liquid; other parts are as spiny as a sea urchin. There are stag’s antlers of dead branches but also spiky fresh foliage that turns ancient stumps into enormous shaving brushes.

All forms of tree seem to be present in this fantastical, sculptural yew in a small Welsh village in the Brecon Beacons. But the most extraordinary feature of this ancient tree is that it is less protected than the much younger church beside it. Now a petition calling for legal protection for ancient yews has gained 230,000 signatories. The trees’ fate has been discussed by the ancients of the House of Lords and barristers are drawing up plans for new legislation.

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British zoologists part of global project to release 15,000 endangered partula species vital to French Polynesia

They are some of the smallest animals on our planet, measuring from 1cm to 2cm in length. But the recent return of thousands of tiny tropical tree snails to French Polynesia represents one of the biggest reintroduction programmes ever attempted by conservationists.

More than 15,000 partula snails – bred by a total of 16 key international conservation organisations, including the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), and Edinburgh, Chester and Amsterdam zoos – have been shipped out to Polynesia over the past five years. A few weeks ago, the most recent arrivals – more than 4,000 Partula rosea and Partula varia snails – were released on the islands of Huahine and Moorea in the Society Islands. (The archipelago, which includes Tahiti and Bora Bora and covers an area of 1,600 sq km in the South Pacific, is noted for its coral-fringed lagoons and rugged mountains.)

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Report estimates up to £20bn a year in investment needed to build net-zero carbon economy

The UK will need investment worth billions of pounds every year to remove enough greenhouse gases from the air to meet its 2050 climate targets, according to a report commissioned by the government.

The report, by analysts at Vivid Economics, estimated that the UK would need as much as £20bn a year to remove up to 130m tonnes of carbon dioxide from the air.

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In August 2018, Greta Thunberg, then 15, skipped school to protest alone outside the Swedish parliament in Stockholm for urgent climate action. In just 13 months, she has become the figurehead of a global movement that has pushed the crisis to the top of the news agenda and inspired millions to take to the streets.

These are five of the key speeches that helped spark the #climatestrike movement

• Greta Thunberg: teenager on a global mission to ‘make a difference’

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Greta Thunberg hit back at critics including Donald Trump on Friday before she marched in a climate strike in Montreal, saying their mockery of children shows her message has become ‘too loud to handle’. The 16-year-old climate activist said: ‘We are having so much impact that people want to silence us. We’ve become too loud for people to handle so they try to silence us. So we should also take that as a compliment.’ Thunberg invited aboriginal Canadians to lead the march with her because ‘they are often the ones who are at the front line’ of global warming

• Climate crisis: 6 million people join latest wave of global protests

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Teen has private meeting with Canadian prime minister, who later says he ‘agrees with her completely’

• Climate crisis: 6 million people join latest wave of global protests

The teen activist Greta Thunberg has urged Justin Trudeau and other world leaders to do more for the environment as she led half a million protesters in Montreal as part of a global wave of “climate strikes.”

The 16-year-old Swede met privately with the Canadian prime minister but later told a news conference with local indigenous leaders that he was “not doing enough” to curb greenhouse gases responsible for global warming.

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

An initiative in Paris is trying to persuade restaurants to turn food waste into compost.

The Transportation and Climate Initiative (TCI) draft framework will provide few specific details about the final structure of the proposed fuel sector ETS in the Northeast US, but it could delve into equity issues and broader programme elements, sources told Carbon Pulse.

There are plenty of large whites and red admirals still around – and some unexpected new arrivals

Lots of people have commented on all the butterflies this summer and it certainly feels like a return to the good old days of, say, 1995, rather than recent years when late-summer flowers were depressingly bereft of butterflies.

The Big Butterfly Count results support these perceptions with sightings of 1.1m of the most common five species combined, compared with 660,000 in 2018.

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Live sheep trade resumes, water tensions boil over, hunting study released, multiple cow births.

What can science do to preserve marine life and help it develop in harmony with our own human development? This program is a re-issue from the Off Track archives while Ann takes a short break.

North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) raised its power sector carbon reduction target recommendation on Friday, with academic institutions slated to help the agency research how a cap-and-trade programme or other clean energy policies may reach that target.