The Guardian

Chapel Fell, Weardale The male’s black and white plumage is striking, but at close range a greyhen is captivatingly beautiful

Every autumn, for the past four years, I’ve seen black grouse (Tetrao tetrix) here. Always single birds, most likely wanderers from the lek at Langdon Beck in Teesdale, just a few miles south.

This morning there were six – four males and two females, in a sheltered hollow in rough pasture, halfway down the fellside. In the distance they could have been mistaken for large free-range chickens, but just a glance through binoculars revealed the distinctive profile and plumage of the male black grouse, striking even in autumn.

Marrakech communique commits countries including Australia to reducing emissions from the oil and gas industry

Australia has signed an international agreement committing to reducing methane emissions from the oil and gas industry, and calling for other countries to do the same, sparking claims it is being hypocritical and could “seriously damage our reputation in climate talks”.

The Marrakech communique, signed this week at the first meeting of parties to the Paris agreement in Morocco, commits a coalition of countries including Australia to take measures to reduce methane emissions in the oil and gas industry.

Two reports place the country near the bottom of the league for emissions level, use of renewables and action to combat global warming

Australia has been singled out again as a climate laggard, being ranked fifth-worst for emissions and policies among developed countries and among the six worst countries in the G20 when it comes to climate action.

In the climate change performance index, released overnight at the UN climate talks in Marrakech, Australia comes ahead of only Kazakhstan, South Korea, Japan and Saudi Arabia.

Energy minister Josh Frydenberg raises concern with American counterpart over US activists seeking to stop Adani’s giant Carmichael coalmine

Australia has used a summit on reducing greenhouse gas emissions to lobby the US energy minister in support of the development of one of the world’s largest coalmines.

The move, by the Australian environment and energy minister, Josh Frydenberg, at the Marrekech meeting, won Australia the “fossil of the day” award, announced daily by the Climate Action Network to the countries that perform the worst at UN climate talks.

US secretary of state John Kerry urges countries to treat the earth’s changing climate as an urgent threat as he addresses the uncertainty created by the election of Donald Trump. ‘Obviously an election took place in my country, and I know it’s left some here and elsewhere feeling uncertain about the future,’ he told the audience, before reiterating that a majority of citizens in the US believe climate change is a real threat

• John Kerry: We will fight to keep US in the Paris climate deal
  

World Coal Association boss Benjamin Sporton puts his case for a place at the UN climate talks, but won’t criticise climate science denial supporters

An awful lot of people would really like it if Benjamin Sporton went home and never came back.

Sporton is the boss of the World Coal Association and he’s walking the halls of the United Nations climate change talks.

Secretary of state says the outgoing Obama administration is determined to prevent Trump withdrawing the US from the landmark deal

John Kerry has signalled that the outgoing Obama administration is preparing a fight to ensure that Donald Trump does not withdraw the US from the landmark Paris agreement, to prevent catastrophic climate change.

“This is bigger than one person, one president,” the US secretary of state said in Marrakech, before his last address to the UN climate summit being held there. “We have to figure out how we’re going to stop this.”

Researchers from the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna and the University of Oxford have shown that Goffin’s cockatoos can make and use elongated tools out of different materials. In video footage released on Wednesday, the cockatoo makes tools from wood and twigs, but also from cardboard, suggesting the birds can anticipate how the tools will be used

Darren Capewell of the Malgana Native Title Working Group, Indigenous ranger David Green and Richard Nelly, the former director of the Bindiyarra Aboriginal Community Corporation, discuss a proposal by native title holders to partner with the Western Australian government to create more than 210 Indigenous ranger jobs in remote communities and stimulate WA’s regional economy through the creation of a major new parks network. Under the proposal, which was announced in Perth on Tuesday, 5m hectares of former pastoral land would be converted into national parks and Indigenous rangers would manage and maintain their essential tourism infrastructure

International Energy Agency chief says current government pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions are inadequate

The Paris agreement on climate change risks failure unless countries come forward with more ambitious and detailed plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the world’s energy watchdog has warned.

The agreement, reached almost a year ago, is only a “framework”, said the International Energy Agency on Wednesday, and requires sweeping policy changes among governments around the world to put its aims into force.

Herefordshire Massive oaks, neolithic tombs and a farmer on a quad bike checking his sheep are a few of the highlights on this 12-day walk

Often within sight of the Malverns, Black Mountains or Radnor Forest, our 12-day walk along the Herefordshire Trail leads from place to place around the county. Massive oaks used to be pollarded, and, in derelict orchards, clumps of mistletoe colonise old trees. Wayside hedgerows are loaded with haws, rotting blackberries, holly and spindle berries; crab apples strew rough lanes and bullaces keep yellow leaves and wrinkled purple fruit.

Churches, from Dore Abbey to Pudleston, are decorated with flowers, fruit and swags of hops for harvest festivals. Pheasants bred for shoots feed and shelter in scrubby woods and, above Leintwardine, mature birds scuttle and glide between coverts of maize as five red kites wheel overhead.

Frank Bainimarama calls on Donald Trump to make a ‘personal change of heart and public change of policy on climate change’ at the United Nations climate change conference in Morocco. ‘Please take another look at the overwhelming scientific consensus of the man-made effects of global warming,’ he says, before inviting the US president-elect to see the communities that have been moved out of the way of the rising seas and meet the families of those killed by cyclone Winston

Petition supports nations such as Ecuador and Venezuela that tried to initiate a conflict of interests policy

A petition calling for fossil fuel lobbyists to be excluded from the UN climate change negotiations has been forced into the hands of the US delegation in Morocco, where almost 200 nations are meeting to work out ways to implement the 2015 Paris agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

The US delegation initially said it could not formally receive the petition signed by more than 500,000 people but later contacted Corporate Accountability International, agreeing to receive it on Wednesday.

The Australian Institute of Landscape Architects recently handed out their trophies for landscape architecture projects at the National Landscape Architecture Awards.

From urban hospital gardens to penguin viewing areas, from gorge trails to cultural precincts, all the projects focused on green spaces and sustainably minded infrastructure ‘to promote health, social and economic prosperity for urban and regional communities’.

Nasa released data earlier this year showing that global surface temperatures across land and ocean in February were a whopping 1.35C warmer than the average temperature for that same month from 1951 to 1980. As the COP22 comes to a close, it’s time we think hard, and think creatively, about the way forward and start preparing for new initiatives. Building on the impressive success of COP21 in Paris, many political and business leaders as well as representatives of civil society seem eager to engage. That is a good thing, but it is not enough.

For better and, increasingly, for worse, our global system of governance rests overwhelmingly on territorial nation-states. In this system, each country’s government represents its own national interest. No one represents humanity as a whole. Such devotion to narrow interests leads to a host of profound problems, well known to economists and students of human behaviour. In various contexts they are known as “the tragedy of the commons”, “the prisoner’s dilemma”, “exporting externalities”, and “free riding”. When asked to act for the common good, nation-states are predisposed to echo Cain’s notorious response: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

My friend Alan Boatman, who has died suddenly in his sleep aged 46, ran his own environmental consultancy, Geo-Sys, in Laos, working on projects identifying and mitigating the impact of resource exploitation in this remarkable area of south-east Asia. Recognising the depth of his experience, the United Nations Drug Control Programme hired Alan to conduct opium surveys in Afghanistan and Laos. At one stage this led to an uncomfortable disagreement with the authorities, as his figures from the field research differed from theirs, but Alan was unmoved and held his ground.

Alan developed a sense of adventure from an early age. He was born in Gibraltar, son of Ian, who worked on overseas projects for Cable & Wireless, and Carolyn, a poet, and was brought up in the Gambia and St Lucia, with two sisters, Kelly and Dale. Alan went to school in Essex, at Holmwood House and Felsted school. He then did a variety of jobs, including working in insurance, in a ski resort in France, as a deckhand on a private yacht and helping to open a night club in Antigua.

Nottinghamshire council approves iGas planning application to drill two wells at Misson, the third UK site to be approved for exploration this year

An energy company has been given the green light to explore for shale gas in the East Midlands, the first step towards the site being potentially fracked in the future.

Nottinghamshire council approved iGas’s planning application to vertically and horizontally drill two wells at Misson in north Nottinghamshire, by a vote of seven to four.

‘Grave consequences’ for food supply with wheat production halved since the start of the war and the area of fields planted at an all-time low

Food production in Syria is edging nearer to collapse with wheat production having halved since the start of the war and the area of fields planted now at an all-time low, according to the UN.

The World Food Programme and Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warned of grave consequences for the availability of food in the warn-torn region unless immediate assistance is provided to farmers. Lack of food could add to the 11 million Syrians already displaced by five years of conflict, they said.

The world’s temperature is running at 1.2C above pre-industrial levels after another year of record-breaking heat affecting people around the world

Latest figures from the UN’s World Meterological Organization (WMO) released on Monday showed that 2016 would very likely become the hottest year on record. This is a new high for the third year running, and means that 16 of the 17 hottest years on record have been this century.

This year saw searing heatwaves from South Africa to India, Arctic ice reach its equal second-lowest extent and coral mortality of up to 50% in parts of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

UN’s Ban Ki-moon expresses hopes that the US president-elect will drop plans to quit a global accord aimed at weaning the world off fossil fuels

The UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, said on Tuesday that action on climate change has become “unstoppable“, and he expressed hopes that US president-elect, Donald Trump, would drop plans to quit a global accord aimed at weaning the world off fossil fuels.

At a meeting of almost 200 nations in Morocco to work out ways to implement the 2015 Paris agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions, Ban said US companies, states and cities were all pushing to limit global warming.