The Guardian

A video shot by farmer and wool classer Nicole Fragar shows persistent heavy rain and flooding in NSW has led to an explosion in the mosquito population. 'This video was taken after four nights of decent rainfall. The mosquitos came out with a vengeance,' Frager says

• ‘We saved the cat’: flood-hit NSW town of Forbes could be divided for days

Exclusive: Funding from rich countries is critical issue at Cop27 and poll shows many think UK has duty to provide it

A significant majority of people in the UK think the country has a responsibility to pay for climate action in poorer and vulnerable countries, an opinion poll shows.

The issue of rich, polluting countries providing substantial funding to developing countries is central to the UN’s Cop27 climate summit in Egypt. Experts have warned that, without the flow of many billions of dollars to help cut emissions and cope with increasingly severe environmental impacts, there will not be the trust needed for the combined global action required to beat the crisis.

Tuvalu says it plans to build a digital version of itself, replicating islands and landmarks and preserving its history and culture, as rising sea levels threaten to submerge the tiny Pacific island nation. Seemingly speaking from within the digital replica of one Tuvalu island, the foreign minister Simon Kofe, said it was the only way to preserve their country 'piece by piece' so that they can remind their 'children and grandchildren what their home once was'.

• Could a digital twin of Tuvalu preserve the island nation before it’s lost to the collapsing climate?

Vanuatu’s climate change minister says Pacific support for Australian bid should be conditional

• Follow our Australia news live blog for the latest updates
• Get our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcast

Australia must stop subsidising new fossil fuel developments if it is to win a key Pacific nation’s support for its plan to co-host a major UN climate summit in 2026.

The Albanese government has launched a campaign at the Cop27 climate talks in Egypt to co-host the annual climate conference with Pacific neighbours in four years. The proposal could bring tens of thousands of people to an Australian city for climate negotiations and advocacy and has won support from the Pacific Islands Forum.

‘There’s not much we can do except wait’, say residents anxious to check on damage to homes and businesses

• Follow our Australia news live blog for the latest updates
• Get our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcast

Flood waters in the New South Wales town of Forbes appear to have peaked just below the record set in 1952 but residents are anxious about when the water will recede so they can start the clean-up.

The Lachlan River started rising on Monday and hit 10.68 metres on Wednesday afternoon – just below the 10.8 metre record – before dropping 1cm on Thursday morning.

Boardrooms around Australia will be noting what shareholders can do if you don’t take climate change issues seriously

Mike Cannon-Brookes and his collaborators have succeeded in sending shock waves throughout the boardrooms of major companies around Australia. His campaign, via shareholder activism, has resulted in a mass clean-out of the board of directors of Australia’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, AGL Energy. Perhaps more importantly it has resulted in AGL management substantially accelerating their exit out of coal.

AGL’s decision to close Loy Yang A power station by 2035 probably helped precipitate the decision of the Victorian Labor party (facing an election on 26 November) to commit to seeing all coal power closed by 2035, and an expansion of renewable energy to 90% of the state’s power supply.

Evidence doesn’t back former editor Chris Mitchell’s assertions in his effort to undermine the nature of global heating

• Get our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcast

International climate summits always spark a flurry of reports, analysis and stock-takes on the climate crisis. They’re also a cue for some conservatives to signal their own virtues.

In segments on Sky News Australia, the Cop27 talks in Egypt – now in their final days – were variously described as “performative art”, a “global centre of virtue signalling” and a “religion” of “climate madness”. Australia’s pledge to cut emissions was a “highway to hell”.

Stark findings add pressure on Cop27 negotiators to deliver meaningful funding to vulnerable countries

The heavy rain behind recent devastating flooding in Nigeria, Niger and Chad was made about 80 times more likely by the climate crisis, a study has found.

The finding is the latest stark example of the severe impacts that global heating is already wreaking on communities, even with just a 1C rise in global temperature to date. It adds pressure on the world’s nations at the UN Cop27 climate summit in Egypt to deliver meaningful action on protecting and compensating affected countries.

President-elect said he would work to save Amazon rainforest and key ecosystems in rousing Cop27 speech

President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has told the world that “Brazil is back” at Cop27, vowing to begin undoing the environmental destruction seen under his far-right predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, and work towards zero deforestation of the Amazon rainforest.

Followed by a carnival atmosphere wherever he went on Wednesday, Lula told the climate summit that his new administration would go further than ever before on the environment by cracking down on illegal gold mining, logging and agricultural expansion, and restoring climate-critical ecosystems.

Excess profits look set for a levy in the autumn statement but first define ‘excess’ and for who

“It’s like entering a lottery: you know something’s coming your way, but you’ve got no idea exactly what,” says one chief executive of a large UK electricity generator about the looming windfall tax on his sector. It’s a fair comment. Government thinking on the generators – as opposed to the North Sea oil and gas producers, who already have a levy – has been spinning like a wind turbine for six months.

Back in May, then-chancellor Rishi Sunak said he was “urgently evaluating” the scale of excess profits being made by generators on the entirely sensible grounds that not all windfall profits have been made by firms producing dirty hydrocarbons. Nuclear power plants, windfarms, solar farms, hydro projects and biomass burners may also be doing very nicely thanks to a UK energy system that ties the price of electricity to the price of gas.

Activists stage demonstrations at the climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh as Brazil’s president-elect calls for future Cop to happen in Amazon

• Cop27 live – latest news updates
  

It’s arrogant of the activists who attacked a Klimt to assume anyone who cares about art doesn’t also care about the planet

Another day, another gallery: the attacks on art in the name of climate action have become a headline-hogging obsession with a hideous escalating logic. The nastier the treatment a famous masterpiece gets, the bigger the media coverage.

Now, members of Letzte Generation Österreich (Last Generation Austria) have smeared “non-toxic fake oil” all over the glass covering of Gustav Klimt’s Death and Life, a colouristic vision of pink and gold intertwined human bodies menaced by the grim reaper. Not that you can see much of that in the disturbing images of the attack at the Leopold Museum in Vienna: a black and purple stain all but obscures the delicate picture. The aggression of the attack takes this wave of action a step further than tomato soup on Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers and mashed potato on a Monet. But a step further to where?

New modelling suggests climate change-driven variability will be detectable decades earlier than previously expected

• Get our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcast

Stronger La Niña and El Niño events due to global heating will be detectable in the eastern Pacific Ocean by 2030, decades earlier than previously expected, new modelling suggests.

Researchers have analysed 70 years of reliable sea surface temperature records in the Pacific Ocean to model changes in the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (Enso) under current projections of global heating.

Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup

The siren call of climate-burning expansion bewitches British politics. More of the same will emerge in the autumn statement

If things had been different, Rishi Sunak might have topped off his trip this week to the G20 summit in Bali with a quick dash back to Sharm el-Sheikh for the final hours of Cop27. But gone, sadly, are the days when getting a climate deal over the line was top priority for world leaders. Now they prefer to show up for the opening ceremony and then leave. It’s safer to grace the platform when there’s only hot air and the moral high ground at stake. And besides, Sunak has a diary clash tomorrow. He and Jeremy Hunt don’t have time to save the planet. They have to try to save the Tory party.

Like a couple of cleaners wading around in the aftermath of a bloodbath, the prime minister and his chancellor have been warning everyone for weeks how messy things are going to be in their autumn statement. Cut spending. Raise taxes. Raid pensions. Everyone is going to have to make sacrifices. Nothing is off the table. Nothing, that is, except identifying (and punishing) the architects of the chaos.

Tim Jackson is professor of sustainable development at the University of Surrey and director of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity

The focus at the climate conference turns to biodiversity, and a draft cover text is expected to emerge

Funding for the countries that are on the front lines of the climate crisis was supposed to have been one of the big themes of this year’s summit.

But the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) and other developing countries have said they are gravely concerned with the lack of progress on funding for loss and damage.

We have come too far to fail on loss and damage finance. Three quarters of humanity is relying on a favourable outcome at COP27.

AOSIS and our fellow developing countries have toiled for the past thirty years to be heard on this issue. AOSIS has worked tirelessly this year to build consensus, devise a clear loss and damage response fund proposal, and ensure the commitment of the international community to come to COP27 and negotiate on this issue in good faith.

There’s a big roar from the crowd as Lula arrives and files into a meeting room next to the pavilion.

Chants of “Ole, ole, ole, ola, Lula, Lula!” restart. It is unclear whether he is going to address the crowd. I have not seen so much excitement at Cop27 so far.

Gulf petrostate hired PR firms to stress its part in next year’s climate summit before this year’s had begun

The United Arab Emirates has been using its role as the host of next year’s UN climate conference to launder its international reputation, long before this year’s event – Cop27 in Sharm el-Sheikh – began.

The Emirates, which will host Cop28 in November 2023, hired public relations and lobbying agencies specifically to promote its role as the future host before this year’s conference had began, an unusual move that exceeded the promotional efforts of past host nations and suggests an increased Emirati role in this year’s Cop27 conference.

Leaders say December biodiversity summit in Montreal is ‘unprecedented’ chance to turn tide on nature loss

The architects of the Paris agreement have urged world leaders to reach an ambitious sister deal for nature at the Cop15 biodiversity conference this December while warning that limiting global heating to 1.5C is impossible without protecting and restoring ecosystems.

On biodiversity day at the Cop27 climate conference in Egypt, Christiana Figueres, Laurence Tubiana, Laurent Fabius and Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, who helped design the Paris agreement, said that Cop15 would be an “unprecedented” opportunity to turn the tide on nature loss.

Data visualisation is one of the most important tools journalists have to explain the world, even going back to the 1800s, but it's not accessible for everyone. Guardian Australia's data and interactive editor Nick Evershed has been working on adding new elements to his visualisations to try to widen accessibility to vital information

• What is the sound of Facebook’s value crashing? Noisycharts turns news into noise
  

Australian climate change minister asked to take over struggling summit negotiations over how to fund climate financing for poor countries

• Follow our Australia news live blog for the latest updates
• Get our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcast

In a sign Australia has come in from the cold at climate talks after years of being criticised as a laggard, Chris Bowen has been asked to take a leadership role in the final days of faltering negotiations at the UN summit in Egypt.

It came on a day in which Australia’s climate change minister was effusively praised by the US climate envoy, John Kerry, and signed up to a global alliance that aims to massively expand offshore wind energy.

Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup