The Guardian

We’re entering a new age for the Earth’s climate and for the way we conceive of finance

“Macrocritical resilience” may be the most mystifying two-word phrase you need to know. Though you may never have heard these two words before, what they describe affects everything you live and strive for. Wonky as it sounds, it is a common sense idea: what generates value is more valuable than what we count in dollars. And yet, it is only in the last few years that we are truly beginning to understand that macrocritical indicators—elements of human experience that shape the health and viability of the overall economy—really do describe how and where value and capability come into being.

On Christmas Eve, 2013, the small island nation of St. Vincent and the Grenadines experienced the most intense rainfall in its history. 15 percent of gross domestic product was wiped out in just a few hours. In 2004, Hurricane Ivan caused $900 million worth of damage in Grenada—more than twice the nation’s GDP. One of the executive directors of the International Monetary Fund noted that when so much value can be lost so suddenly, “you no longer know what the value of a dollar is.”

Kendal, Lake District A skeleton unearthed by a Victorian archaeologist should give us clues as to when wolves last roamed the Lakeland fells

From my study window I watch jackdaws making their chattering sorties above the rooftops and over Kendal Fell. Across the road a footpath leads up the fell, less well known now as Helsfell, and on through two small areas of woodland. What I can’t see, and hadn’t known until recently, though I walk the area most days, is that deep in the far wood is a cave of significant archaeological importance.

In the 1880s an amateur archaeologist, John Beecham, spent five summers excavating it. He discovered the bones of bear, wild cat, polecat, wild boar and iron age oxen – Bos longifrons, the first domesticated cattle – and the complete skeleton of a wolf. All undated, the collection became dispersed, but the wolf still resides in Kendal Museum, which is having it restored with the help of Arts Council funding].

After five years of failed negotiations, conservations are hopeful Russia is prepared to make a deal to protect the Ross Sea and East Antarctica

An international agreement to protect some of Antarctica’s unique and pristine marine ecosystems could be reached within a fortnight, with scientists and conversationists hopeful of a breakthrough after five years of failed negotiations.

Delegates from 24 nations and the European Union gathered in Hobart on Monday to commence two weeks of talks at the annual meeting of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR).

Dan Hoey, an angler from Port Fairy, a coastal town in Victoria, Australia, was out fishing with his brother and a client when he noticed a great white shark circling his boat. Video captured by Hoey’s chartered fishing business, Salty Dog Charters, shows him fending off the shark with a household broom

Medicines classified as ‘critically important in human medicine’ appear to be in frequent use, says European Medicines Agency

Use of some of the strongest antibiotics available to treat life-threatening infections has risen to record levels on European farms, new data shows.

The report reinforces concerns about the overuse of antibiotics on farms, following revelations from the Guardian of the presence of the superbug MRSA in UK-produced meat, in imported meat for sale in UK supermarkets, and on British farms.

Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 17 October 1916

Grey clouds, like wisps of smoke, raced yesterday across a sullen, leady sky, and the roaring woods scattered their bronzed leaves for the savage wind to play with. Then the scud came, rain wind-driven in blinding sheets, forcing the cattle under the lee of the hedge and rattling on the thatched stack like hail. But soon all changed; the rain stopped, the sky cleared, and the sun found a gap through which it could shine cheerfully; the sheep in the stubbing shook themselves, showering rainbow-tinted drops from their heavy fleeces, and a few larks, rising some fifty feet or so above their chirruping comrades, sang joyfully. In the wood the bracken is yellow or brown, withering fast, but red campions still flower abundantly and there are blossoms on the brambles; these will never fruit, and many of the still red berries cannot ripen unless the sun has more continuous power.

The wind-lashed mere was flecked with white-capped waves, which broke in light spray even against the low-sunk bodies of the grebes and in actual foam against the bluff breasts of the sooty coots. In the shelter of the western wood were four herons, two on the swaying branches, two on mooring stumps, half opening their great wings occasionally when a fiercer gust than usual disturbed their balance; but a score of martins – young birds, too – continued their incessant fly-hunt, skimming this way or that, indifferent to wind or rain, and ready to nip at any gnat or small fly which ventured from its leafy shelter in the fitful gleams of sunshine.

A bar-tailed godwit on the mudflats may be on her way from the Arctic to sub-Saharan Africa. But she’s a lightweight compared to her New Zealand cousins

A long-billed, long-legged wader stands on the edge of the mud, waiting for the tide to recede so she can begin to feed. Nothing about her stands out: she isn’t strikingly pied like the avocets; she doesn’t have the curlew’s impossibly long, curved bill; and she isn’t flying around while yelling a frantic, urgent call like the redshanks.

Yet she has a far better story to tell than any of them. For she is a bar-tailed godwit: one of the greatest of all the bird world’s global travellers. She has already flown here to the river Parrett, that muddy river flowing into the Bristol Channel, from her breeding grounds far to the north – somewhere on the Arctic tundra in Scandinavia or Northern Russia.

No amount of spin or legal obfuscation can reconcile the UK government’s clamour for shale gas with its obligations as enshrined in the Paris climate change agreement. Consequently, when the UK’s communities secretary, Sajid Javid, gave the go-ahead for fracking in Lancashire (Report, 7 October), he was making a clear statement that the government has no interest in abiding by either the spirit or the maths of the Paris agreement.

Shale gas is a high carbon energy source. When used for generating electricity its emissions of carbon dioxide are about 30-90 times higher than the full lifecycle emissions of either renewables or nuclear. Given the rapid phase-out of the UK’s existing coal power stations, shale gas will not be produced at sufficient scale and in the necessary timeframe for it to be a substitute for coal.

Every day, one in nine people around the world do not have enough food to support a healthy, active lifestyle. The problem has been compounded by climate change, which often has a devastating impact on food security. Severe drought across three continents has led to shortages of food, water and energy in recent months. Tearfund is helping communities to grow crops, find alternative sources of food or fuel, and increase resilience to climate change

Photographs: Tearfund

Vultures are rarely viewed as the poster boys and girls of the natural world. They have repulsive eating habits and are strikingly ugly. Nevertheless, they play a critical role in maintaining the ecological health of many parts of the world.

Vultures consume animal carcasses more effectively than any other scavengers and because their digestive juices contain acids that neutralise pathogens such as cholera and rabies they prevent diseases spreading. They act as dead-end hosts for numerous unpleasant ailments. But many ecologists are now warning that vultures across the planet are under serious threat thanks to habitat loss, deliberate and accidental poisoning, and use of the birds’ body parts as traditional medicine cures.

Experts emphasize that the incident, in which a great white broke through a cage holding a diver, was a ‘one in a million occurrence’

Shark enthusiasts are concerned about the impact of a viral video that showed a great white shark breaking into a cage occupied by a diver in Mexico.

The diver survived, but the harrowing video shed light on a decades-old tourism industry that allows people to be within an arm’s length of great white sharks, separated only by the sea and some metal bars.

They went to Kigali to eliminate hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) and take 0.5C out of future global warming, and the 170 countries that successfully negotiated an amendment to the Montreal protocol treaty agreed to get rid of 90% of them. Not bad for four days and three long nights of hard work.

The Kigali deal on HFCs is in fact fiendishly complicated and has taken years to negotiate in various technical and political forums. The final agreement, announced on Saturday morning caps and reduces the use of HFCs in a gradual process beginning in 2019.

HFCs deal is vital for reducing emissions but poorer countries rely on old coolant technologies and will now have to upgrade

They went to Kigali to eliminate hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) and take 0.5C out of future global warming, and the 170 countries who successfully negotiated an amendment to the Montreal Protocol agreed to get rid of 90% of them. Job done. Not bad for four days and three long nights’ work.

In fact the Kigali deal on HFCs, announced on Saturday morning, is fiendishly complicated and has taken years to negotiate in different technical and political forums. It was only struck by an ambitious agreement to give countries different timescales to phase them out, alongside major chemical and big food companies accepting change, the personal determination of the US secretary of state, John Kerry, to get a deal before the election and developing countries agreeing to invest heavily in new technologies.

Delegates celebrate a global deal to limit the use of hydrofluorocarbon gases, in a major effort to combat climate change. The agreement was reached at a climate conference in the Rwandan capital Kigali on Saturday morning. US secretary of state John Kerry hails it a ‘monumental step forward’

• Climate change: global deal reached to limit use of hydrofluorocarbons

The continuing refugee crisis in Europe, #FeesMustFall protests in South Africa, the aftermath of Hurricane Matthew – the best photography in news, culture and sport from around the world this week

The worst drought for decades in Ethiopia’s northern highlands has ended, but unusually heavy downpours threaten to ruin crops and exacerbate food insecurity as flash flooding turns roads to rivers and swamps fields

Photographs by James Whitlow Delano/USAid

One year on from collapse of the Samarco dam, which killed 19 people and polluted one of the country’s most important rivers, and communities are still suffering

• Samarco dam collapse: one year on from Brazil’s worst environmental disaster

Global deal on HFCs – greenhouse gases far more powerful than carbon dioxide – seen as ‘largest temperature reduction ever achieved by single agreement’

A worldwide deal has been reached to limit the use of greenhouse gases far more powerful than carbon dioxide in a major effort to fight climate change.

The talks on hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, have been called the first test of global will since the historic Paris Agreement to cut carbon emissions was reached last year. HFCs are described as the world’s fastest-growing climate pollutant and are used in air conditioners and refrigerators.

Almost half of all plastic bottles used in the home end up in landfill sites, research shows, with huge impacts on marine life

British households are failing to recycle as many as 16m plastic bottles every day – a “staggering” number and nearly half the total of more than 35m which are used and discarded daily – according to new research.

A juvenile whale calf has been cut free after becoming entangled in a shark net at Coolangatta Beach in Queensland, Australia. Conditions were calm, and so was the calf’s mother, which helped to speed up the rescue.