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Pollution aside, the problem with expanding Heathrow lies in the disruption and delay inevitable in such a complex project

Get ready for another season of that interminable saga, Heathrow’s third runway. There was a lull during the Covid pandemic when the airport’s owners, despite winning permission from the supreme court in 2020 to submit a planning application, cooled their jets while they waited for passenger numbers to recover. Now the whole thing is back, courtesy of Rachel Reeves. The chancellor is reported to be preparing to use a speech next week to declare support for a third runway at Heathrow alongside wider airport expansion in the south-east.

The best form of airport expansion is none at all, environmentalists (some of them in the cabinet) will argue, but it looks as if Reeves has dismissed those objections in the name of economic growth. A £1.1bn investment in Stansted, to enable it to grow its annual capacity from 29 million passengers to 43 million, was welcomed by the government last year.

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The Climate Change Commission identified three major changes since 2019: other countries are doing more, impacts are becoming more severe, and delaying action shifts costs to future generations. Robert McLachlan, Professor in Applied Mathematics, Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa – Massey University Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.

Using an internal carbon price is one of the four key levers that companies must pull in order to be a climate leader, although only 41% of corporate frontrunners are doing so thus far, said a non-profit during the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Integrating biodiversity and water credits into the voluntary carbon market (VCM) could help better address the existing funding gap on nature, the president of Singapore told an event at the ongoing World Economic Forum's (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland on Tuesday.

The energy transition is "unstoppable" despite US President Donald Trump's decision to quit the Paris Agreement and roll back on environmental policies, the UN climate chief said in Davos on Tuesday.

Project developer Replanet is considering how to make measuring biodiversity credits from landscape-scale initiatives of up to 300,000 hectares affordable, despite a lack of demand.

Major economies published a joint article to defend the importance of Just Energy Transition Partnerships (JETPs) on Tuesday, and to reaffirm their commitment to raising climate finance.

A carbon project verification company has announced its expansion to cover afforestation, reforestation, and revegetation (ARR) activities, it said Tuesday.

The Arab League on Monday signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with a Qatari sustainability institution to enhance regional cooperation and build local capacity on carbon markets, according to reports in regional media.

Key political figures in Europe have joined centre-right calls for greater flexibility in meeting EU climate targets, supporting instead a technology-neutral approach that puts renewables, nuclear, and other clean technologies on an equal footing to meet the EU’s decarbonisation objectives.

More policy incentives are needed to encourage the nascent carbon dioxide removal (CDR) sector, given a wide gap in price perceptions among market participants, according to results of a recent pricing survey.

More than 40% of individual corals monitored around One Tree Island reef bleached by heat stress and damaged by flesh-eating disease

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More than 40% of individual corals monitored around a Great Barrier Reef island were killed last year in the most widespread coral bleaching outbreak to hit the reef system, a study has found.

Scientists tracked 462 colonies of corals at One Tree Island in the southern part of the Great Barrier Reef after heat stress began to turn the corals white in early 2024. Researchers said they encountered “catastrophic” scenes at the reef.

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A Swedish project that protects and restores valuable butterfly habitat is able to continue and expand after Microsoft provided funding for a local non-profit to buy all the biodiversity credits generated from the project over a two-year period.

Nearly 70% of EU commitments on soil protection and restoration have been fulfilled to date, though some key measures still hang in the balance, according to an assessment released by the European Commission.

European carbon prices slid lower on Tuesday morning as weaker sentiment brought an end to an eight-day rally, with more participants eyeing the possibility of a sell-off as technical signals pointed to an overbought market, while UK Allowances steadied after bouncing back from Monday's record low.

The government of South Australia (SA) has opened public consultations on the draft text of the state's first Biodiversity Act aimed at enhancing nature protection, including through establishing conservation targets and increasing penalties for environmental crimes.

The Bank of England's Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) has suggested "there is scope to rationalise" and simplify the climate regulation facing UK financial services in a bid to boost economic growth, in a recent letter sent to Westminster.

An academic has questioned the marketing of English biodiversity net gain (BNG) units as voluntary biodiversity credits due to issues with the metric.

Critical CO2 stores held in permafrost are being released as the landscape changes with global heating, report shows

A third of the Arctic’s tundra, forests and wetlands have become a source of carbon emissions, a new study has found, as global heating ends thousands of years of carbon storage in parts of the frozen north.

For millennia, Arctic land ecosystems have acted as a deep-freeze for the planet’s carbon, holding vast amounts of potential emissions in the permafrost. But ecosystems in the region are increasingly becoming a contributor to global heating as they release more CO2 into the atmosphere with rising temperatures, a new study published in Nature Climate Change concluded.

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A Chinese tech major has agreed a deal with a California-based climate finance company for the purchase of nature-based carbon removals to 2040.