The Guardian

Delegates from 180 nations set out pathway to binding global agreement on tackling plastic pollution as soon as 2025

Nation-state representatives have taken the first concrete step toward a legally binding treaty to regulate plastic, described as the most important green deal since the 2015 international climate agreement.

The banging of a recycled-plastic gavel, on Friday night at Unesco headquarters in Paris, signalled the end of a fraught process, marked by accusations of exclusion and industrial lobbying. Talks threatened to fall apart, but in the end delegates were able to broadly agree on key elements that the treaty should contain, laying the groundwork for the future agreement.

Commitments to improve water quality and reduce stress from commercial fishing could mean the reef avoids going on world heritage danger list

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The head of Unesco has praised the Albanese government for making new commitments to protect the Great Barrier Reef, signalling Australia could avoid seeing it being placed on a list of world heritage sites in danger.

Unesco’s director-general, Audrey Azoulay, was commenting on a letter from environment minister Tanya Plibersek that outlined new commitments to improve water quality and reduce the stress from commercial fishing over the reef.

Ice-free summers inevitable even with sharp emissions cuts and likely to result in more extreme heatwaves and floods

It is now too late to save summer Arctic sea ice, research has shown, and scientists say preparations need to be made for the increased extreme weather across the northern hemisphere that is likely to occur as a result.

Analysis shows that even if greenhouse gas emissions are sharply reduced, the Arctic will be ice-free in September in coming decades. The study also shows that if emissions decline slowly or continue to rise, the first ice-free summer could be in the 2030s, a decade earlier than previous projections.

Google-designed tools help 9,000 young Climate Cardinals volunteers who translate reports into more than 100 languages

A network of young volunteers that translates climate information into dozens of languages is being boosted by new artificial intelligence tools designed by Google.

Since founding Climate Cardinals three years ago to improve global climate literacy, Sophia Kianni, 21, has built a network of 9,000 young volunteers around the world who translate reports and content into more than 100 languages, including Swahili, Hebrew, Urdu, Mandarin and Hindi.

State Farm will almost entirely stop issuing new policies in California – with climate-exacerbated wildfires and bad public policy a large reason why

State Farm, the country’s largest property insurer, announced this week that it will almost entirely stop issuing new policies in California, the country’s largest property insurance market. The reasons for forgoing all that new business are entirely economic. The company cited “historic increases in construction costs outpacing inflation, rapidly growing catastrophe exposure, and a challenging reinsurance market”. Those things are owed largely to the wildfires engulfing bigger parts of the state in bigger chunks of the year.

California’s woes have a lot to do with the climate crisis, which fuels the hot, dry conditions that turn wooded hills into kindling. It’s also a political failure. Housing crises in the Golden State have pushed more and more people out of densely populated areas and into the so-called wildland-urban interface – places that are cheaper to live in, and more prone to burn. Wealthy homeowners in fire-prone enclaves are also reluctant to move, keen to keep rebuilding properties that keep getting destroyed.

Kate Aronoff is a staff writer at the New Republic and the author of Overheated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet – And How We Fight Back

Images from around the world taken on World Environment Day, an annual global event celebrated on 5 June to raise awareness, mobilise action and promote environmental sustainability

Barring public access to beaches and other sites is not a model for development. Transparency and engagement are needed

Walk along a Caribbean beach, which may stretch for miles, and your stroll is guaranteed to be cut short by an angry hotel security guard. In recent years, the Caribbean has seen a worrying trend of governments readily selling off assets to foreign corporations and political financiers.

Prime real estate, protected land and valuable resources are being relinquished without consideration for long-term consequences. It raises questions about whether remnants of the colonial mindset still prevail in political ideologies and decision-making.

Leading scientists write to PM amid campaign against expansion of clean air zone in London

World-leading air pollution scientists have called on Rishi Sunak to distance himself from Conservative colleagues who are dismissing the facts on the serious health risks of toxic air.

In a letter, Prof Frank Kelly and 35 other prominent air pollution scientists call on the prime minister to tell his colleagues not to endorse “merchants of doubt” who “undermine the factual and truth foundations of life.”

One year after Bruno Pereira and Dom Phillips were killed in the Amazon, their work explaining what is happening there goes on

The decision by Brazilian police to charge two more men with the murders of Bruno Pereira and Dom Phillips, in the Javari valley region of the Amazon, brings the possibility of justice one step closer. To the three fishers already in custody for the shootings, which took place one year ago, have been added the alleged leader of a transnational illegal fishing network, Ruben Dario da Silva Villar, nicknamed Colombia (where he also has citizenship). A fourth fisher, Jânio Freitas de Souza, is alleged to have been one of Silva Villar’s henchmen on the Itaquaí river, where the killings took place.

For friends and supporters of the two men’s work defending the Amazon and its Indigenous inhabitants, the investigation’s progress offers some relief. If such acts of violence go unpunished, criminal organisations that wield power in the Amazon will be further emboldened in their use. But even if convictions are secured, this will be the exception and not the rule when it comes to attacks on environmental defenders – defined by the United Nations as people who strive to protect human rights relating to nature.

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Proposed compensation would be paid to developing countries that must transition away from fossil fuels

Rich industrialised countries responsible for excessive levels of greenhouse gas emissions could be liable to pay $170tn in climate reparations by 2050 to ensure targets to curtail climate breakdown are met, a new study calculates.

The proposed compensation, which amounts to almost $6tn annually, would be paid to historically low-polluting developing countries that must transition away from fossil fuels despite not having yet used their “fair share” of the global carbon budget, according to the analysis published in the journal Nature Sustainability.

Simon Stiell tells conference in Bonn the world is at ‘tipping point’ and must fight together for common good

The world is at a “tipping point” in the climate crisis that requires all countries to put aside their national interests to fight for the common good, the UN’s top climate official has warned.

Simon Stiell, the executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, pointed to recent findings from scientists that temperatures were likely to exceed the threshold of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels within the next five years.

Monitoring stations that already test for pollution could have dual purpose of mapping declines in biodiversity, reveals new study

From owls to hedgehogs to fungi, genetic material from plants and animals is being inadvertently hoovered up by air-quality monitoring stations around the world, creating an untapped “vault of biodiversity data”, according to a new scientific paper.

Globally, thousands of air filters are continually testing for heavy metals and other pollutants in the atmosphere. Scientists are now realising that this monitoring network is also picking up invisible traces of genetic material known as airborne environmental DNA (eDNA) from bits of hair, feathers, saliva and pollen.

Lawyers for chemical company say they are making ‘significant’ progress over deal with city of Stuart, Florida

US industrial conglomerate 3M and the city of Stuart, Florida are making “significant” progress to settle a water pollution suit tied to toxic “forever chemicals” and sought to delay a trial, according to a court filing on Sunday.

3M was scheduled to face trial in South Carolina federal court on Monday in a lawsuit brought by the Florida city accusing the company of manufacturing PFAS, or per- and polyflouroalkyl substances, despite knowing for decades that the chemicals can cause cancer and other ailments.

Concentrations of plastics in round-the-world race through remote ocean environments found to be up to 18 times higher than during previous event in 2017-18

Sailors testing the waters during the Ocean Race, which travels through some of the world’s most remote ocean environments, have found microplastics in every sample.

Up to 1,884 microplastic particles were found per cubic metre of seawater in some locations, up to 18 times higher than in similar tests during the last Ocean Race, which ended in 2018. Scientists noted that the sensitivity of their instruments is now higher.

How to Save the Amazon will be published so Dom Phillips’ work telling the stories of rainforest defenders does not die with him

One year after Dom Phillips was killed in the Brazilian Amazon, friends and colleagues have come together in a show of journalistic solidarity to keep his legacy alive and finish the book the British journalist was working on at the time of his death.

Phillips and his Brazilian companion, the Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira, were killed while returning from the remote Javari valley in the western Amazon last June. Three men have been charged with murder and are being held in high-security prisons while awaiting a decision on whether they will face trial.

The federal environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, announced the $160m plan on Monday afternoon

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The federal and Queensland governments will phase out commercial gillnet fishing in the Great Barrier Reef world heritage area by mid-2027 and create new net-free zones to better protect endangered marine species.

The environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, announced the $160m plan Monday afternoon and said it would significantly reduce net fishing and high-risk fishing on the reef that injure and kill threatened dugongs, turtles, dolphins and protected shark species.

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We get it, nature really wants to kill us (fair enough too) but can’t we just go to the beach? Is that too much to ask?

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Black-veined whites, thought to have died out in 1920s, have seemingly returned due to warmer climate

When they last roamed England in 1925, they counted Winston Churchill as a fan. Now, black-veined whites – an extremely rare species of British butterfly – have been spotted fluttering once again.

Small numbers of the black and white insects have been spotted in fields and hedgerows in south-east London, nearly a century after the species was thought to have become extinct in the UK.

Oxfam report says only $11.5bn (£9.2bn) of climate finance in 2020 devoted to helping vulnerable states

Rich nations are undermining work to protect poor and vulnerable countries from the impacts of the climate crisis, by providing loans instead of grants, siphoning off money from other aid projects or mislabelling cash, new research suggests.

Only $11.5bn (£9.2bn) of climate finance from rich countries in 2020 was devoted to helping poor countries adapt to extreme weather, despite increasing incidences of climate-related disaster, according to a report from the charity Oxfam.

Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira were killed in a region where 23 Indigenous groups live – and we all face the same danger

Among my people, the Marubo, knowledge is transmitted through oral history, passed down by elders throughout the centuries. For many generations these stories described the approach of people we call nawas – outsiders who always brought misfortune, usually in search of natural resources from the forests we inhabit.

My ancestors spoke of Catholic missionaries from Spain and Portugal, of Peruvian rubber barons and logging companies. The stories my generation tells are of fundamentalist evangelical missionaries, illegal miners and fishing gangs bankrolled by drug trafficking networks.