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Chrystia Freeland, Canadian finance and deputy prime minister, resigned from her cabinet post on Monday just hours before tabling of the national fall fiscal update, citing differences with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau about the best path forward for the country as reasons for her departure.

A major Japanese life insurer on Monday announced it will invest 3.8 billion yen ($25 million) into the Manulife Forest Carbon Fund (MFCF).

The UK Department for Transport (DfT) has launched a consultation on Monday laying out proposals for how to implement the UN's Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA).

Rainfall patterns are changing, crops are ripening earlier, and the normal rhythms of farming have fallen off – exactly as climate scientists warned

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Smell is the most evocative sense. I lit a mozzie coil this week and a flood of childhood memories came back. The great long, dry days of summer stretched before us as the five of us slept side-by-side in a canvas tent like a can of sardines. Playing cards in a classic Australian caravan park. Running across hot sand before jumping on a towel to save our feet. Summer meant sliding down green waves, dodging bluebottles, too much sunburn and fish and chips.

In the last 30 years though, summer has meant harvest and the battle to get the crop off in a reasonable state for the best possible price. It has meant never knowing whether the wheat would be in the bin before Christmas Day.

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It is probably wrong to touch, even gently, a sea anemone. But even now, I find it difficult to resist

In her book Theatres of Glass, Rebecca Stott writes about the Victorian craze for home aquariums – which swept London in the 1850s, with people taking animals from the seaside and making miniature rock pools at home in large glass enclosures or pie dishes. The craze did not last long; people didn’t have a way to oxygenate the water and most of what they collected died.

But among the people who loved the idea that you could create a rock pool at home was Mary Ann Evans – who wrote as George Eliot. She and her partner, the philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes, spent two summers hunting sea anemones in the town of Ilfracombe, where they were “absolutely fascinated” by what they saw, says Stott. Commenting on how difficult they found it at first to spot the anemones they had been told were as “plenty as blackberries”, Eliot wrote that it is “characteristic enough of the wide difference there is between having eyes and seeing”.

Lewes, meanwhile, wrote in an article for the Westminster Review:

We must always remember the great drama which is incessantly acted out in every drop of water, on every inch of earth. Then and only then do we realise the mighty complexity, the infinite splendour of nature. Then and only then do we feel how full of life, varied, intricate, marvellous, world within world, yet nowhere without space to move is this single planet, on the crust of which we stand and look out into shoreless space peopled by myriads of other planets, larger, if not more wonderful than ours.

Viciously, then, I lock my door.
The gas-fire breathes. The wind outside
Ushers in evening rain. Once more
Uncontradicting solitude
Supports me on its giant palm;
And like a sea-anemone
Or simple snail, there cautiously
Unfolds, emerges, what I am.

At nights birds hammered my unborn
child’s heart to strength, each strike bringing
bones and spine to glow, her lungs pestled
loud as the sea I was raised a sea anemone
among women who cursed their hearts
out,

Helen Sullivan is a Guardian journalist. She is writing a book for Scribner Australia

Do you have an animal, insect or other subject you’d like to see profiled by this columnist? Email helen.sullivan@theguardian.com

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One of the world’s longest continuous bird counts has dashed the ‘wistful optimism’ of scientists hoping for a La Niña-driven recovery

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Drier conditions have led to waterbird numbers in eastern Australia plummeting by 50% compared with 2023, one of the country’s largest wildlife surveys has found.

Conducted annually since 1983, the eastern Australian waterbird aerial survey is one of the world’s longest continuous bird counts as well as one of the largest by geographical distance covered.

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Harmonising the rules around growing carbon markets in the BRICS countries would support international trade within the bloc, reducing barriers to cross-border carbon trading and attracting more investors, according to a Russian report.

Stretch of river in West Yorkshire was first to get bathing status in 2020 but has since recorded poor water quality

The first river to be given bathing water status in England is in limbo waiting for the Environment Agency (EA) to approve crucial nature-based solutions that are part of £43m in improvements to cut sewage pollution.

In the West Yorkshire town of Ilkley, campaigners were the first to use the EU-derived bathing water regulations to drive a cleanup of their river. But since part of the River Wharfe was granted bathing water status in 2020, water quality has persistently been recorded as poor, most recently in the latest classifications last month. If it remains poor next year, when the status is up for renewal, it could lose its bathing water designation.

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The English government is consulting on plans to overhaul its environmental rules for the construction of buildings, aiming to shift away from a fragmented approach on topics such as nutrient mitigation towards a system centralised around a new fund.

The EU should introduce a carbon contracts for difference (CCfD) auctioning mechanism, fed by the EU ETS Innovation Fund, to incentivise CO2 capture and storage, a Brussels-based advocacy group for oil and gas producers said on Monday.

Rainforest nations should meet for a summit in Papua New Guinea ahead of next year’s COP30 in Brazil, set to be a crucial event for nature, according to a PNG governor.

European carbon prices weakened in moderate trading on Monday in correlation to losses in natural gas, as the Dec-24 futures contract neared its expiry and activity shifted to the Dec-25.

Clean cooking carbon project developers are generally optimistic about the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market's (ICVCM) assessment process, even if methodologies are rejected from the organisation's quality stamp.

A food and drink multinational has dropped a plastic offsetting project in Indonesia, withdrawing its accreditation request under Verra's plastic programme.

A waste management company has teamed up with a UK university to measure and verify carbon capture in soil, targeting what it said could be a £200 million opportunity in the carbon credit market.

A large building materials company has signed a cooperation agreement with a carbon capture startup, aiming to use the technology to help decarbonise its global portfolio of industrial plants.

China saw annual growth in thermal power production slightly outpace total power output in November, while renewable additions slowed from the same period last year, according to government data published Monday.

Legislative proposals to govern the transport of CO2 in Europe are coming, but may only see the light of day after Poland wraps up its six-month EU presidency, the country's state secretary for climate and environment told an event in Brussels last week.

The EU’s Clean Industrial Deal initiative, due at the end of February, will seek to rebalance climate action and economic growth, with four key areas of action to accelerate decarbonisation, said EU climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra last week.

South Korea has allocated 2.7 trillion won ($1.9 billion) in the government budget for 2025 for developing technologies aimed at tackling climate change, including hydrogen as well as carbon capture, utilisation, and storage (CCUS).