The Guardian

Oxfam research suggests up to 40% of bank’s reported climate-related spending cannot be accounted for

The World Bank has come under fire for failing to show that its claimed spending on the climate crisis is real, in a report suggesting up to 40% of its reported climate-related spending is impossible to account for.

Of $17.2bn that the World Bank reported it spent on climate finance in 2020, up to $7bn cannot be independently verified, according to research by Oxfam.

Poultry farmers from Arctic to Portugal reported 2,500 outbreaks in past year, with migrating birds taking avian flu to North America

The UK and continental Europe have been hit by an “unprecedented” number of cases of avian flu this summer, with 47.5m birds having been culled since last autumn, according to new figures.

Poultry producers from as far north as Norway’s Svalbard islands to southern Portugal have together reported almost 2,500 outbreaks of the disease since last year.

Climate Change Committee chair says measures needed to cut energy bills will also help reach net zero

Tackling the cost of living crisis requires insulating British homes as a matter of urgency and deploying renewable energy generation faster, the chair of the Climate Change Committee (CCC) has said.

Lord Deben, a Conservative former environment secretary, said the measures needed to bring down energy bills were the same as those needed to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions.

Loss-making venture led by Amit Gudka eyes continent as countries move towards using renewable power

The co-founder of collapsed energy supplier Bulb is planning to expand his loss-making battery storage venture into Europe as the energy crisis escalates.

Amit Gudka hopes to develop Field Energy, the business he set up after leaving Bulb in February 2021, on the continent as countries attempt to switch toward renewable power.

Wildlife charities accused of trying to ‘upset people’ by urging members to condemn environment policies

Tory MPs have criticised the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), accusing it of using claims of a government attack on nature as a “marketing strategy”.

The bird charity, one of the UK’s oldest and most respected conservation organisations, has joined the country’s other largest environment NGOs, including the Wildlife Trusts and National Trust, to condemn mooted plans to create investment zones – which would weaken environment protections – and to get rid of the post-Brexit nature-friendly farming subsidy.

Burgundy insect farm ramps up production to offer a meat-free future

In a box-like building on an out-of-town industrial estate in Burgundy, trays of Alphitobius diaperinus – otherwise known as the lesser mealworm – are being fattened up by robots then cooked, dried and turned into protein-rich powder and oil.

This is the headquarters of Ÿnsect a French company that is building the world’s largest insect farm, to open at the end of the year in preparation for what the French company believes will be a large increase in demand for a healthy alternative to meat.

Time is running out to protect the RSPB and National Trust from climate crisis-denying, neoliberal lobbyists and their nature-hating Tory cronies

Perhaps the unelected 2022 Conservative government’s most surprising achievement has been to radicalise the the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Flask-swiggers best known for shivering silently in freezing hides, usually they await the seasonal arrival of a particular kind of swan. But Kwasi Kwarteng’s kamikwasi budget has made landscape and wildlife collateral damage for his deregulated New Investment Zones, the Japanese knotweed of ultra-Conservative economic ideology, and the twitchers are twitching with rage.

“We are angry!” squawked the normally placid RSPB, in an urgent communique entitled Stop the Attack on Nature. “The UK government has launched an unprecedented attack on nature. They are threatening to tear up the laws that protect our best wildlife sites, weakening protections for nature in the planning system and may be about to scrap vital proposals that would help farmers help nature. We will not stand by and let this happen.” Take to the streets bird-fans. Riot! And remember, a tube of birdfeeder nuts squeezed into a tied-off sock can make a functional cosh, while a barn-style bird-table roof can be adapted into truncheon-resistant headgear. Twitchers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your choughs.

Climate warnings have been around for decades. Guardian reporting on the issue dates back as far as 1890

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It reads like a summary of the year so far: drought in Europe, floods in Pakistan, and a high pressure system ‘stuck’ in the North Atlantic, disrupting normal weather patterns. And scientists blaming it all on climate change.

But the Guardian article in question was not published in 2022, but in 1978.

Climate breakdown is far more intense in 2022 than even many scientists expected, yet the world still isn’t treating this like a crisis

I became a climate activist 16 years ago. Back then, not many people cared about climate change. The eye rolls were audible. Media coverage was scarce, and what little there was glibly included “both sides”. It was frustrating and tragic to see such a clear and present danger and to know that it was still mostly avoidable, yet ignored by society.

I assumed that intensifying, in-your-face climate disasters would serve as a sort of backstop to finally force action. I even hoped that humanity would listen to scientists and start acting before things got that bad. I didn’t think this was too much to expect; after all, the scientific fundamentals are easy enough to grasp.

Peter Kalmus is a climate scientist and author of Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution

Hydroponics unit can produce saplings six times faster than it takes to grow them naturally outdoors

It is a long way from the romance of a sun-dappled Highland glen. Picture instead a white cube equipped with the computer-controlled automation you would sooner expect to see in an Amazon or Ikea warehouse.

Scotland’s state forestry agency believes this prefabricated structure, erected at an agricultural research centre near Dundee, could play a significant part in its quest to help combat climate heating by greatly expanding the country’s forest cover.

Ahead of the UN biodiversity conference, our reporter reflects on lessons of hope and change in three years reporting with the Guardian’s age of extinction team

Saying you’re a biodiversity reporter doesn’t mean much to a lot of people. “What do you actually write about?” they ask. And this is exactly why there should be more journalists on this beat. The nature crisis continues to fly under the radar.

In 1992, at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, there was a wave of enthusiasm about tackling the great environmental problems, and so governments set up three UN conventions to deal with climate change, biodiversity loss and desertification. Since then, the climate crisis has been treated as separate to the biodiversity crisis, yet there is huge overlap between the two.

African Parks, of which the prince is president, is one of three parties accused of rushing a mass translocation of the mammals

Two wildlife organisations, including one headed by Prince Harry, have been accused of caring about animals more than people after three men died following an elephant translocation in Malawi.

In July, more than 250 elephants were moved from Liwonde national park in southern Malawi to the country’s second-largest protected area, Kasungu, in a three-way operation between Malawi’s national park service and the NGOs African Parks and the International Fund for Animal Welfare (Ifaw).

Exclusive: Revelation comes after agency’s chair told MPs in May the practice had only recently come to light

The Environment Agency knew raw sewage was being illegally dumped into English rivers from wastewater treatment works a decade ago, a leaked report shows.

However, the agency’s chair told MPs in May that the practice had only recently come to light.

For too long we’ve dismissed Indigenous knowledge of the natural world. At Sydney’s botanic garden, signage is starting to reflect Aboriginal names

Like all botanic gardens, the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney is a classic artefact of the activities that took place during the colonisation of Australia in the 18th and 19th century.

It was established to create a patch of landscape that mirrored those found in the United Kingdom, with the aim of “discovering” and documenting the floral biodiversity of New South Wales (in itself a name reflecting the perspective of those holding power).

Photos and videos of sharks and other marine life swimming in suburban flood waters make for popular hoaxes during heavy storms. But a mobile phone video filmed during Hurricane Ian’s assault on south-west Florida isn’t just another fishy story. 

A large, dark fish with distinct dorsal fins was filmed thrashing around an inundated Fort Myers backyard. Experts were divided over whether the clip showed a shark or another large fish. Nevertheless, some Twitter users nicknamed the hapless fish the 'street shark'

• Shark tale? Video of large fish in flooded Florida yard goes viral

Sphagnum moss found to drastically slow down rainwater runoff in Peak District ‘outdoor laboratory’ study

A “superhero” moss can significantly reduce the risk and severity of flooding for communities living in downstream areas, researchers have found.

Scientists from the conservation group Moors for the Future Partnership who conducted a six-year study into sphagnum moss found that planting it in upland areas could dramatically slow the rate at which water runs off the hillsides, preventing river catchments being inundated with water downstream.

The city joins a growing number across the US in limiting the use of artificial turf made with dangerous PFAS compounds

Boston’s mayor, Michelle Wu, has ordered no new artificial turf to be installed in city parks, making Boston the largest municipality in a small but growing number around the nation to limit use of the product because it contains dangerous chemicals.

All artificial turf is made with toxic PFAS compounds and some is still produced with ground-up tires that can contain heavy metals, benzene, VOCs and other carcinogens that can present a health threat. The material also emits high levels of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and sheds microplastics and other chemicals into waterways.

Ian is one of the five worst hurricanes in America’s recorded history. That’s not a fluke – it’s a tragic taste of things to come

Climate change once seemed a distant threat. No more. We now know its face, and all too well. We see it in every hurricane, torrential rainstorm, flood, heatwave, wildfire and drought. It’s even detectable in our daily weather. Climate disruption has changed the background conditions in which all weather occurs: the oceans and air are warmer, there’s more water vapor in the atmosphere and sea levels are higher. Hurricane Ian is the latest example.

Ian made landfall as one of the five most powerful hurricanes in recorded history to strike the US, and with its 150 mile per hour winds at landfall, it tied with 2004’s Hurricane Charley as the strongest to ever hit the west coast of Florida. In isolation, that might seem like something we could dismiss as an anomaly or fluke. But it’s not – it’s part of a larger pattern of stronger hurricanes, typhoons and superstorms that have emerged as the oceans continue to set record levels of warmth.

Michael E Mann is presidential distinguished professor of earth and environmental science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is author of The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet

Susan Joy Hassol is director of the nonprofit Climate Communication. She publishes Quick Facts on the links between climate change and extreme weather events

The best of this week’s wildlife pictures, including an injured pangolin, a trapped dragonfly and a sneaky pig

The prime minister’s ideology encourages the extraction of as much income as possible from nature before abandoning it

The ecological destruction Liz Truss plans to unleash on this country is not collateral damage. It is not a byproduct of her economic programme. It’s a mark of true faith, a sign that she is following her ideology to the letter. For fundamental to this doctrine – neoliberalism – is the belief that everything on Earth can and should be turned into something else.

The founding father of neoliberalism is Friedrich Hayek. His frankly deranged tract The Constitution of Liberty enjoys almost biblical status among his disciples. Margaret Thatcher was perhaps the book’s most famous advocate, and Truss now carries the flame. It inveighs against the protection of the living world. Rather than seeking to protect the soil – the delicate ecosystem from which 99% of our calories are produced – Hayek says it makes sense to extract as much value as it can produce, exhaust it “once and for all”, then abandon the land. The role of soil is to create a “temporary contribution to our income”, which we can then invest in other moneymaking schemes. For “there is nothing in the preservation of natural resources as such which makes it a more desirable object of investment than man-made equipment”.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist