The Guardian

Family and friends delight in telling me tall tales about rodents and now my unfortunate phobia has been passed on to my children

While I couldn’t spontaneously name them, I feel sure there were good qualities I wanted to pass on to my children. But all I’ve managed to transmit is a violent fear of rodents, and even that, to only one of them. I didn’t realise how successful I’d been until a couple of years ago, when we saw a mouse in my son’s bedroom. I screamed; he screamed. I jumped on the bed; he jumped on a chair – but it was a revolving one, so he started spinning round, screaming, and I screamed more. Mr Z ran in expecting an intruder, though I notice he didn’t bring anything to use as a weapon. As much as I reviled it, I felt a bit sorry for the mouse. It was all so ultra.

Consequent to this very noisy, melodramatic phobia, it pleases my associates to tell me stories about mice and rats, which, generally speaking, aren’t true. My brother-in-law told me that, if they have a rat problem on a building site, they contain all the rats in a zone where the only food source is each other, until finally they have one giant rat, and they shoot it in the head. It stalks my dreams, this mutant rat cannibal, even though it makes no sense. On holiday, my friend told me there was a rat in the kitchen, and while I could recognise this at 50 paces as the title of a popular song, I nevertheless believed that there was also a real rat, in the kitchen.

Lack of funding and staff limit climate sector’s impact on conservation and net zero efforts, say workers

Staff shortages, a lack of specialist personnel and low pay are major barriers to achieving net zero, according to workers in the UK environment sector.

The trade union Prospect, many members of which work in the climate and environment sector, received more than 500 responses to a survey on workplace trends.

Candidates include an oak in Exeter that survived the blitz and a walnut in a car park in Perth

Urban trees that provide vital food and shelter for wildlife in towns and cities take a starring role on the Woodland Trust tree of the year shortlist.

They include a holm oak in Exeter that survived the blitz and another oak in Surrey that Queen Elizabeth I reputedly had a picnic under.

In a new reality of climatic instability and volatility, proactive planning for the very worst needs to be part of the new normal

The dreadful scale of the loss of life on the Hawaiian island of Maui has emerged day by day, as search and rescue teams scour ash and rubble. But it is already clear that the wind-fuelled blaze which last week ripped through the historic town of Lahaina was the deadliest wildfire in the United States for more than 100 years.

Hundreds are still missing, and the sheer intensity of the fire means that the identification of bodies and the notification of relatives will be a difficult and slow process. The west Maui town itself, the former capital of the Hawaiian kingdom, is a charred wasteland in which close to 3,000 structures were burned to the ground at terrifying speed.

We asked a panel of commentators for their view on the government’s electoral strategy

In the face of Labour poll leads, Rishi Sunak and his government appear to be increasingly focused on rightwing campaigns related to the culture wars, migration and opposition to environmental initiatives and targets. Do you think this is, or could be, a credible strategy?

John Redwood is the Conservative MP for Wokingham

Many see climate breakdown as a problem of the future, but it’s here now. To move forward, we must understand our part in it

During the summer of 2021, I flew to Greece to learn more about the wildfires there. I wanted to hear people’s stories, to understand what it meant to be displaced by environmental disaster. I have family in Greece and Cyprus and the approach of each summer causes a lot of anxiety. That year, fires were raging in Greece, Spain, France, Italy, Croatia and Cyprus, and I was three months pregnant. Feeling Evie growing inside me made me wonder what kind of world she would live in – and made me all the more determined to learn as much as I could about what people had experienced.

I spent a lot of time in Mati, a small town on the east coast of Greece, less than 20 miles from Athens. There, I talked to local people, and their experiences profoundly moved me. In a cafe that had survived the fire, a hub of safety and community for survivors, I met brave children who now have to live with terrible scars, physical and emotional. I met a man who could not even speak to me, his eyes filling with tears, and he told me that he had no words in a way that has stayed with me ever since.

Polymer from black soldier flies seen as promising source as it has no other competing uses such as food

Dead flies could be turned into biodegradable plastic, researchers have said.

The finding, presented at the autumn meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS), could be useful as it is difficult to find sources for biodegradable polymers that do not have other competing uses.

Fresh fruit and vegetables from Europe will be more expensive as drought and wildfires shrink supplies

A healthy diet in the UK will be put at risk by climate breakdown as European droughts shrink fresh fruit and vegetable supplies, experts have said.

Fresh produce from the Mediterranean, upon which the UK is reliant, will become more expensive and harder to obtain as extreme heat causes yields to reduce, putting a healthy diet out of reach of the poorest in society, according to a report by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU).

Conservationists hope to tempt the subspecies from Kangaroo Island by planting drooping sheoaks and eucalypts

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Conservationists are planting trees to lure the endangered glossy black cockatoo back to the South Australian mainland, where it has been extinct for decades.

Two potential “scouting” birds have already been spotted.

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Head of industry standards body says more people are turning to renewable technology as energy costs grow

British households are making more green energy upgrades than ever before after installing a record number of solar panels and heat pumps in the first half of the year, according to the industry’s official standards body.

The industry figures show there were more green energy installations in June alone than in any six-month period in previous years.

Activist Mikaela Loach staged a protest over investment firm’s ‘bankrolling’ of the climate crisis

A leading climate crisis author has staged a walkout at Edinburgh international book festival in protest at its sponsor’s links to fossil fuel companies.

The author and climate activist Mikaela Loach interrupted a discussion about changing the climate narrative on Saturday evening to lead a demonstration about the festival’s main sponsor, the investment company Baillie Gifford.

Median premiums across all areas rose 28% in the year to March, and actuaries warn climate disasters are driving them to unaffordable heights

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Home insurance premiums have climbed by 50% in high-risk parts of Australia as global heating increases the frequency and cost of climate disasters, a new report has found.

The Actuaries Institute’s research on home insurance affordability and funding for flood costs, released on Monday, found median home insurance premiums rose by 28% in the year to March, sitting at an average of $1,894 across all states.

As the Australian summer approaches, my apprehension is both a daily shock and uncannily normalised – and I know I’m not the only one feeling it

These days, when I come back into the house after being out on the land, it’s dust that I drop, not the mud I carried in on my boots and clothes during the past three years when the rain kept everything, and everyone, sodden most of the time. The rain that also kept at bay the feeling of impending disaster that now attaches itself to the arrival of an Australian summer.

Not that La Niña was safe, as all of those whose homes and habitats were washed away know. But in the early months of 2023, as if the weather gods had snapped a finger, soaked turned to parched, and I find myself here again. Borne by news of soaring temperatures and wildfires in the northern hemisphere, the shift from a medium to a high likelihood of the arrival of El Niño to the official declaration of its onset, and the feeling of hardening earth under my feet, summer dread is returning to my body.

US government plans to roll out carbon capture rather than phase out fossil fuels prompts outcry in heavily industrial state

Millions of dollars of investments in new carbon capture projects in Louisiana – with more announced this week, are unwelcome developments to some environmental activists in the state.

“We’ve been trying to fix the oil and gas damage, while at the same time trying to push the transition away from it,” said Monique Hardin, director of law for the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice.

Academics – and polls – say majority of voters back action on climate change and will punish Tories for ‘weak tactic’

The prime minister Rishi Sunak’s decision to intensify attacks on green groups and exploit opposition to environmental protests could rebound badly for his party at the next general election, academics have warned.

They argue that public support for achieving net zero emissions by 2050 in the UK is now entrenched and unlikely to be overturned. This view is backed by opinion polls, which show that 71% of the British public support moves that will lead to curtailment of the country’s fossil fuel emissions.

Observer investigation reveals the shocking state of the country’s protected freshwater sites of special scientific interest

More than 90% of freshwater habitats on England’s most precious rivers are in unfavourable condition, blighted by farming pollution, raw sewage and water abstraction, an Observer investigation reveals.

None of the approximately 40 rivers with protected habitats in England are in overall good health, according to an analysis of government inspection reports. These include the River Avon in Hampshire, the Wensum in Norfolk and the Eden in Cumbria.

The zero-emission fuel may exist in abundant reserves below ground. Now large sums are being invested to look for it

For more than a decade, the village of Bourakébougou in western Mali has been powered by a clean energy phenomenon that may soon sweep the globe.

The story begins with a cigarette. In 1987, a failed attempt to drill for water released a stream of odourless gas that one unlucky smoker discovered to be highly flammable. The well was quickly plugged and forgotten. But almost 20 years later, drillers on the hunt for fossil fuels confirmed the accidental discovery: hundreds of feet below the arid earth of west Africa lies an abundance of naturally occurring, or “white”, hydrogen.

Lacking policies or ideas, today’s Tories sow division and spread hopelessness in a bid to disrupt the unity of progressive voters

As Rishi Sunak transforms himself into the driver’s champion and rightwingers savage net zero targets as a fascist plot of the wokerati, get ready for the thing you thought impossible: a general election even stupider than the last. Essentially, it’s looking as if it will be a referendum on whether climate change exists. What better time for such a dumb question, than right when we can all see it?

It won’t always be expressed so simply. Sometimes it will be: “Who will stand up for the humble driver of diesel cars, already squeezed in so many directions, in ways that I, not even quite a billionaire, can totally understand?” Other times it will be: “What can we do about Just Stop Oil protesters, who pose an existential threat to society with their vile and undemocratic tactics?” Probably only at the Faragist fringes will people openly repudiate the goal of net zero, while the Conservative core picks more contestable battles on low-traffic neighbourhoods, oil and gas licences, heat pumps.

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

Water scarcity threatening agriculture faster than expected, warns Cop15 desertification president

The world is likely to face major disruption to food supplies well before temperatures rise by the 1.5C target, the president of the UN’s desertification conference has warned, as the impacts of the climate crisis combine with water scarcity and poor farming practices to threaten global agriculture.

Alain-Richard Donwahi, a former Ivory Coast defence minister who led last year’s UN Cop15 summit on desertification, said the effects of drought were taking hold more rapidly than expected.

Although some wish they were