The Guardian

While planting rates have risen in Scotland, carbon capture figures overall have fallen every year since 2009, official data shows

The amount of carbon dioxide captured by the UK’s forests has fallen by millions of tonnes and will remain at historically low rates for over a decade, because of a failure to quickly replace old forest stocks.

Official data shows the amount of CO2 absorbed annually by trees in the UK peaked at just under 20m tonnes in 2009, but has fallen every year since. Millions of mature conifers have been felled but not replaced, reducing the carbon they capture and store.

Labor, the Greens and the teals should be focusing on widening the footprint of support for climate action, rather than preserving product differentiation

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Over the past decade or so, there have been times when I’ve felt more like a war correspondent than a political one. And ahead of the opening of the new parliament on Tuesday, Peter Dutton is certainly not signalling an armistice.

Dutton has locked the Liberal party into voting against Labor’s 43% emissions reduction target because he thinks he can continue to weaponise medium-term climate action against a new government, at a time when inflation is running hot and interest rates are rising.

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Current plans predicated on stable growth seem foolish when we know that shocks such as global heating aren’t going away

Temperatures in Britain hit 40C. Runways melt at major airports. The London fire brigade reports its busiest single day since the second world war as fires rage around the city. The Met Office warns of temperatures so high they “could lead to serious illness or loss of life”.

Meanwhile, inflation grinds inexorably upwards. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is part of it, but other pressures were already apparent. Staples such as coffee saw price rises as a result of extreme weather disrupting harvests. Even silicon chips have been affected, with droughts in Taiwan putting the hugely water-intensive production of semiconductors at risk.

James Meadway is director of the Progressive Economy Forum

It’s not too late to avert the climate crisis from becoming even more deadly – but the window is closing

High temperature records are being obliterated across western Europe, some of which had been previously set during the heatwave in 2003 that is estimated to have left tens of thousands dead. Raging wildfires are displacing thousands of people, one of the many compounding impacts of the climate crisis. This heatwave is another reminder that we have already breached unsafe levels of global heating.

As our planet warms, these lethal heatwaves will become more frequent and more intense. In fact, we may look back on these years as some of the coolest, compared with what will come if we do not act now. Human life will encounter life-threatening impacts with increasing frequency and mounting consequences. Countless scientific reports have been conveying this reality for decades.

Andrea Dutton is an international expert on climate change and sea level rise who is a MacArthur Fellow and a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

Green Tory hits out at critics of Boris Johnson’s environmental land management policy

The next prime minister must press ahead with changes to farm subsidies that prioritise protecting nature and the environment, despite attacks on the policies from within the Conservative party, the prominent green Tory Ben Goldsmith has urged.

“Environmental land management contracts should be defended at all costs,” he told the Guardian. “They would tie agriculture subsidies to stewardship and the restoration of soils and nature. They incentivise the transition to more regenerative agriculture. They are about making space for nature. They are a huge win for the natural environment in this country.”

The fire service is at the frontline of the climate crisis – yet with 11,500 frontline staff cut we are simply not equipped for it

Over the last 27 years as a firefighter, I have fought plenty of wildfires and other extreme weather events, and I have seen at first hand how these incidents have become more frequent and extreme. At my former station in Herne Bay, on the north Kent coast, we had specialist equipment for fighting wildfires, and we would travel for miles to tackle flames raging across land.

None of it compared to what I experienced in this week’s heatwave.

The best of this week’s wildlife pictures, including hot cows, a lost walrus and a pelican in a traffic jam

UK temperatures exceed 40C while France and Portugal hit new highs, with some extreme consequences

Record-breaking heat continued to affect parts of western Europe during the past week, with UK temperatures exceeding 40C (104F) for the first time since records began.

On Tuesday, several weather stations across London, Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire broke the 40C barrier, with a top temperature of 40.3C in Coningsby, Lincolnshire. A further 39 stations across central and southern England also broke the previous highest temperature of 38.7C, which was set in July 2019.

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Improved monitoring has shown nearly 6,000 tigers, says International Union for Conservation of Nature, with population ‘stable or increasing’

There are 40% more tigers in the wild than previously thought, with as many as 5,578 around, though they remain an endangered species, according to a leading conservationist group.

The jump in numbers was due to improved monitoring, with the population thought to be stable or increasing, said the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Habitat protection projects showed that “recovery is possible”.

The pictures from 2000, 2021 and 2022 offer a new view into its dramatically low water levels, now at just 27% capacity

Stark images of the “bathtub ring” around Lake Mead have come to symbolize the devastating effects of drought at America’s largest reservoir. Now, newly released satellite pictures from Nasa offer a new view of how dramatically water levels have declined over the past 22 years.

The images, which cover the years 2000, 2021 and 2022, show once-full tributaries transformed into dry crevasses. The lake, which supplies water to roughly 25 million people across the American west, is currently at its lowest levels since it was filled in 1937. As of July 18, it stands at just 27% of its capacity.

Electric vehicle advocates and auto industry say Australia needs nationally mandated fuel efficiency standards

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The federal government is under pressure to act to increase the uptake of electric vehicles after the Australian Capital Territory became the first state or territory to announce an end to the sale of petrol cars.

The Zero Emission Vehicle strategy was announced by the ACT chief minister, Andrew Barr, on Tuesday and commits the territory to phasing out internal combustion engines by 2035. This means no new petrol engine vehicles could be sold in the territory past that date.

100 million Americans are enduring searing temperatures as Biden declines to announce a climate emergency

The National Weather Service has warned that extreme heat will affect more than 100 million people in the US this week, with triple-digit temperatures in some states and broken temperature records in many areas across the country.

“Above-normal temperatures will continue to prevail across much of the US through the end of the week, with a significant portion of the population remaining under heat-related advisories and warnings,” the agency said.

European Commission’s Frans Timmermans says biodiversity situation is ‘really very, very scary’

The human-made crisis engulfing the natural world is “just as threatening, perhaps even more so” than the climate crisis, one of the EU’s most senior officials has warned.

Speaking to the Guardian, Frans Timmermans, the vice-president of the European Commission, said he hoped “we can heighten the sense of urgency” about the destruction of the natural environment, where the situation is “really very, very scary”.

‘Nature’s engineers’ who create wetlands with their dams are recognised as native wildlife

Beavers are to be given legal protection in England, meaning it will be illegal to kill or harm them as they are formally recognised as native wildlife.

This is a step forward for the charismatic rodents, which were hunted to extinction in the country 400 years ago but have reappeared owing to illegal releases around the country.

Vast sums provide power to ‘buy every politician’ and delay action on climate crisis, says expert

The oil and gas industry has delivered $2.8bn (£2.3bn) a day in pure profit for the last 50 years, a new analysis has revealed.

The vast total captured by petrostates and fossil fuel companies since 1970 is $52tn, providing the power to “buy every politician, every system” and delay action on the climate crisis, says Prof Aviel Verbruggen, the author of the analysis. The huge profits were inflated by cartels of countries artificially restricting supply.

Kylie Jenner is far from the only celebrity to make short hops using private jets despite mounting concerns over the climate crisis

Kylie Jenner has faced a torrent of criticism for her decision to take her private jet on a flight that lasted just 17 minutes. But the practice of taking brief journeys on luxury aircraft appears to be common among the rich and famous despite mounting concerns over the climate crisis.

Jenner, the 24-year-old socialite and businesswoman, has faced online opprobrium after she posted an Instagram picture of herself and her partner, rapper Travis Scott, on the runway of an airport between two private jets with the caption “you wanna take mine or yours?”

There is an increasing likelihood of above-average rainfall for much of Australia in the coming months, the Bom says, with another La Niña likely

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Severe storms and widespread flooding across eastern Australia and elevated fire risks in the Northern Territory are predicted for the coming months, with a third successive La Niña weather pattern also likely.

The Bureau of Meteorology’s outlook for August to October has forecast above-average rainfall from Queensland down to the south coast of New South Wales, with parts of the Northern Territory also slated to get above-average rain during that time.

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Report says global south has been ‘used as place to dump waste’ and that people of colour are suffering disproportionately

The climate and ecological crises are a legacy of systemic racism and people of colour suffer disproportionately from their harms, a Greenpeace UK report says. Globally, the report says, it is people of colour who, despite having contributed the least to the climate emergency, are now “disproportionately losing their lives and livelihoods” by the millions because of it.

“The environmental emergency is the legacy of colonialism,” the report says. This was because colonialism had “established a model through which the air and lands of the global south have been … used as places to dump waste the global north does not want”, the report says.

One of UK’s biggest funders of scientific research will no longer profit from businesses such as BP and Shell

One of the UK’s biggest philanthropic investors has quietly sold its stakes in large oil and mining companies such BP and Shell.

The Wellcome Trust is one of the biggest funders of scientific research in the UK with a £38bn investment fund. For almost a decade it has resisted pressure from organisations, including the Guardian, who argued that profiting from fossil fuel companies was incompatible with the Trust’s objective of improving public health and wellbeing.