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Protests, natural disasters and First Nations pride were among the memorable images from the past year taken by Australia’s wire agency photographers

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Experts say prolonged delay in replacing chair signals that government does not take net zero policy seriously enough and is harming investment

Rishi Sunak has come under fierce attack from UK climate experts for his government’s failure over the past 18 months to appoint a new chair of the independent committee that advises ministers on emissions targets.

In a letter to the prime minister leaked to the Observer, the UK’s leading organisation working on the economic effects of global warming condemned the “excessive delay” in finding a replacement to previous chair Lord Deben.

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Cautious optimism among experts that emissions from energy use may have peaked as net zero mission intensifies

Global efforts to slow a runaway climate catastrophe may have reached a critical milestone in the last year with the peak of global carbon emissions from energy use, according to experts.

A growing number of climate analysts believe that 2023 may be recorded as the year in which annual emissions reached a pinnacle before the global fossil fuel economy begins a terminal decline.

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Several US banks and hedge funds opened accounts in California’s WCI-linked carbon market in Q4, while dairy digester offset developers continue to exit the cap-and-trade programme, according to state data published Friday.

Farmers in Switzerland want the predators to be reduced in number to protect livestock.

Overflows are only meant to spill sewage after heavy rain, but last year saw 1.75 million hours of discharges

Regulated parties and speculators built up 2024 vintage net holdings of California Carbon Allowances (CCAs) and RGGI allowances (RGAs) into the last trading week of 2023, while the US Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) did not report Washington allowance (WCA) positions in data published Friday.

Disastrous events included flash flooding in Africa and wildfires in Europe and North America

The hottest year in recorded history casts doubts on humanity’s ability to deal with a climate crisis of its own making, senior scientists have said.

As historically high temperatures continued to be registered in many parts of the world in late December, the former Nasa scientist James Hansen told the Guardian that 2023 would be remembered as the moment when failures became apparent.

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Conservationists say government strategy to recover England’s degraded temperate rainforest is a good start but want a target to double the area by 2050

Conservationists have praised the launch of a new government strategy to revive the remaining fragments of the vast temperate rainforests that were once “one of the jewels of Britain’s nature crown”.

Temperate rainforest, also known as Atlantic woodland or Celtic rainforest, once covered most of western Britain and Ireland. The archipelago’s wet, mild conditions are ideal for lichens, mosses and liverworts. But centuries of destruction have meant that only small, isolated pockets remain.

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The best of this week’s wildlife photographs from around the world

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Conservationists celebrated findings but warned that species and habitats are in overall decline in Britain

Spectacular feeding frenzies of Atlantic bluefin tuna, surging numbers of glowworms, and a record-breaking breeding season for pied flycatchers are among the British wildlife highlights of 2023.

But conservationists warned that overall wildlife continued to decline, with one in six species at risk of extinction – and that wildlife was being challenged in new ways by global heating, disease and other destructive human activities.

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Escaping poverty, violence and the climate crisis are factors, but the main driver is rich societies demanding cheap labour

We seem to be living in times of unprecedented mass migration. Images of people from Africa crammed into unseaworthy boats desperately trying to cross the Mediterranean, asylum seekers crossing the Channel into Britain, and “caravans” of migrants trying to reach the Mexico-US border all seem to confirm fears that global migration is spinning out of control.

A toxic combination of poverty, inequality, violence, oppression, climate breakdown and population growth appear to be pushing growing numbers of people from Africa, Asia and Latin America to embark upon desperate journeys to reach the shores of the wealthy west.

Hein de Haas is professor of sociology at the University of Amsterdam, and the author of How Migration Really Works

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Colombia-based credit standard Cercarbono has released for public consultation a methodology that will allow project developers to earn Voluntary Biodiversity Credits (VBCs) for the protection of ecosystem indicator species.

Khai Cowley, 15, was killed by a suspected great white shark off Ethel beach on the Yorke Peninsula

A teenage boy killed in a shark attack off the coast of South Australia has been remembered as a talented and dearly loved member of the surfing community.

The 15-year-old, identified by friends and a family member as Khai Cowley, was mauled by a suspected great white while surfing off the remote Ethel beach on the Yorke Peninsula west of Adelaide about 1.30pm on Thursday.

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With Chandrayaan-3, Aditya-L1 and Gaganyaan, India's space agency Isro has had a spectacular year.

Finding the elusive species in far north Queensland is a unique challenge for birders. But the search demands extraordinary enthusiasm

For 100 years, the night parrot was the undisputed mystery bird of Australian ornithology. Until the discovery and subsequent study of a tiny population in Queensland’s far west in 2013, two specimens found by the side of remote outback roads in 1990 and 2006, also in Queensland, were the only hard evidence of its continued existence.

With the parrot now present and accounted for, there remains one Australian bird that has never been photographed: the buff-breasted buttonquail.

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The climate crisis poses an existential threat to cricket. Governing bodies like New Zealand Cricket need to up their sustainability game. Chris McMillan, Professional Teaching Fellow in Sociology, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.

When people first came to Australia 65,000 years ago, the Earth was in an ice age. Then the seas rose, drought and floods came – and still people endured. Penny van Oosterzee, Adjunct Associate Professor James Cook University and University Fellow Charles Darwin University, James Cook University Barry Hunter, Acting CEO, North Australian Indigenous Land and Sea Management Alliance, Indigenous Knowledge Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.

Air quality improvements 2019-2022 from lowering vehicle emissions came even before scheme’s expansion to whole of city

More toxic air pollution has been averted by London’s ultra-low emission zones than is produced by the capital’s airports or its river and rail transport combined, according to a new analysis of the effects of the Ulez.

The report showed that improvements in air quality between 2019 and 2022 from lowering motor vehicle pollution – even before the expansion of the Ulez throughout the capital since August – rivalled the potential savings from entirely cleaning up London’s aviation or industrial and commercial heat and power generation.

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When we started out, we didn’t dare dream it would lead to this: expanded rainforest, a beaver release, and rewilding at Balmoral

Sid Rawle, the 1960s peace campaigner and infamous “King of the Hippies”, once remarked that if land ownership in Britain were to be divided equally, we would each get about an acre. Surprisingly, this thought experiment would just about hold true today.

The UK measures 60m acres in total and is home to around 67 million of us. There is something rather beguiling about such extreme egalitarianism – impractical though it might be. One person, one vote, one acre. But there’s also something about it that rather helps clarify the mind should you ever find yourself, as I have done recently, trying to reform the mind-bogglingly large amounts of land owned by the British royal family.

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