The Guardian

A new international organisation should be set up to raise and distribute funds to nations who will suffer the worst impacts of global heating.

That is the key conclusion of a UK report – Addressing the Impacts of Climate Change – that will be debated this week at the COP25 climate talks in Madrid. The authors argue that the cash raised by the new body should be used in addition to the $100bn a year rich countries have pledged to help poorer nations cut their carbon emissions and adapt to the climate crisis.

We compare the manifestos, from Labour’s £8.2bn a year to the Tories’ pothole fund

In an election dominated by Brexit, the climate crisis and the NHS, cycling is not most people’s top priority. However, with transport now accounting for a higher share of overall emissions than any other sector, helping people drive less and cycle more is arguably crucial in tackling climate change.

Improving conditions for cycling could help our congested, polluted towns and cities, tackle the inactivity crisis, reduce the burden on the NHS and make streets and neighbourhoods safer and more pleasant.

Granted personhood in 2017 by the New Zealand parliament, the Whanganui is the first river in the world to be recognised as an indivisible and living being. But it still faces challenges from farming, forestry and development – and despite its beauty, the data suggests much needs to be done to nurse it back to full health

• Saving the Whanganui: can personhood rescue a river?

Howard Hyland has lived next to the Whanganui river for his whole life. He runs the Whanganui River outrigger canoe club and understands that 'we've got to stop polluting the river'.

New Zealanders who live close to the Whanganui river, which has been given legal personhood, speak of how important it is to them. 'How we look after it belongs to all of us'.

Coalition says approvals take three and a half years, the reality can be longer, putting threatened species at risk

Australia’s national environment law is under review, an exercise the government has said is aimed at cutting “green tape”.

Scott Morrison and the environment minister, Sussan Ley, announced the review of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act last month. It is a statutory review of the act that occurs every 10 years.

The minke whale was discovered on Friday by a patrol boat under Battersea Bridge

An eight-foot whale was washed up on the shore of the Thames yesterday, where it was found by a patrol boat under Battersea Bridge.

The minke whale was found on Friday evening at about 10pm by a Port of London Authority boat, but is not yet known how the creature came to arrive in London, or why it died.

French hunters claim tradition justifies their exemption from EU rules. But with many species endangered, there is growing pressure for a ban

It is early morning in the heart of Provence, and somewhere behind the tall black pine trees a rousing dawn chorus begins. We are crouching out of sight among the rosemary bushes and wild asparagus listening to the melodic musical phrases of song thrushes and blackbirds.

This is Marcel Pagnol country, rich in flora and fauna and of exceptional natural beauty; but there is no sign of the singing birds anywhere in the rustling foliage, trees or sky.

Denmark’s industrial pig farms are stunningly productive, but there is another side to their success

Last year, Ole Kjaer was the number one pig farmer in Denmark. Unsurprisingly, in the land of Danish bacon, this is a pretty hotly contested award.

The biggest factor in his high profit rate? The astonishing productivity of his pigs. Each of Kjaer’s sows produces an average of 41 piglets a year.

In the UK, the average sow produces 25.8 pigs a year. In the US that number rises to 26.4. But in Denmark, the world’s laboratory for industrial pig farming, the average sow produces 33.3 piglets – and some farmers, like Kjaer, manage to push that figure even higher. Some believe that one day they could even reach the magic number of 50.

Genuine fascists remain on the political margins, but we can increasingly imagine the space that eco-fascism might occupy

Earlier this year, when the fascist responsible for the El Paso massacre cited ecological degradation as part motivation for his killing spree, many considered him entirely deranged.

Eco-fascism sounds oxymoronic, a mashup of irreconcilable philosophies.

Large turnouts in Madrid before UN summit, and in Sydney after deadly wildfires

Hundreds of thousands of young people have taken to the streets from Manila to Copenhagen as part of the latest student climate strikes to demand radical action on the unfolding ecological emergency.

School and university students around the world walked out of lessons on Friday with large turnouts in Madrid, where world leaders will gather on Monday for the latest UN climate summit, and Sydney, where protesters demanded action after devastating wildfires.

The pick of the best flora and fauna photos from around the world, including a giant tortoise and a painted stork

Your article (Guardian climate score: how did your MP do?, 11 October) notes that “the approach used has certain limitations”. In fact it is massively flawed in its methods, and misleading and partial as a result. It takes just 16 climate-, energy- and environment-related votes in parliament among hundreds cast between 2008 and 2018, and adds a narrative based on the register of MPs’ interests.

But not all votes are the same, and many of these issues are highly contested. The landlord energy efficiency vote, for example, was on just one of many amendments to the 2011 energy bill, and reasonable people can (and did) disagree about its likely effect. Yet the climate score includes it, and yet somehow ignores the energy bill itself, a major piece of environmental legislation.

Plan is part of ‘green new deal’ but campaigners say it is not enough to tackle climate crisis

The first EU-wide “climate law” would enshrine a legally binding target of reaching net-zero carbon by 2050, and Europe’s greenhouse gas emissions would be halved by 2030, under a set of proposals being discussed by the incoming European commission.

Cars would be subject to new air pollution standards, following the disastrous cheating that allowed diesel pollutants to be masked, and all vehicles may be brought within the EU’s carbon emissions trading scheme, which would affect drivers across the bloc. Three quarters of road transport would have to be moved to rail and inland waterways, and pricing would have to be adjusted to reflect the carbon output of different modes of transport, which is likely to prove controversial.

The climate crisis is the biggest global threat that humanity faces. But despite action being demanded for years, many governments have continued to sustain an economy that is bad for the environment. The Green New Deal proposes a different way forward and has been mentioned by the Labour party, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders in the US, and school strikers around the world. But what does it mean? Maya Goodfellow explores what the Green New Deal is and how would it work. 

Agri-park high in the Andes preserves the expertise to breed strains fit for a changing climate

With a climate changing faster than most crops can adapt and food security under threat around the world, scientists have found hope in a living museum dedicated to a staple eaten by millions daily: the humble potato.

High in the Peruvian Andes, agronomists are looking to the ancestral knowledge of farmers to identify genetic strains which could help the tubers survive increasingly frequent and intense droughts, floods and frosts.

Pupils to declare December vote a ‘climate election’ after new data highlights urgency of crisis

Children and young people in more than 100 towns and cities across the UK will walk out of classrooms on Friday for the latest youth strike to highlight the escalating climate crisis.

Strikers in the UK will focus on the forthcoming election, which they have vowed to make a “climate election” by demonstrating the growing public concern about the ecological crisis.

But growth in LNG sector alone almost enough to offset decline and result of increase in renewables

Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions have flatlined due to the effects of the drought, which has caused a large drop in carbon dioxide from the agriculture sector.

The government’s quarterly greenhouse data for the year to June 2019, published on Friday, shows Australia’s emissions fell by 0.1% on the previous year – equivalent to 0.4m tonnes of carbon dioxide.

Winning images will be exhibited at the society’s annual conference in Belfast next month

Labour says failure to share document raises doubts about Tories’ promise to halt fracking

The Cabinet Office has defied a court order to release a secret government report on the UK’s fracking industry.

Officials were expected to hand over the report on Monday, days before Britain’s first general election leaders’ debate on the climate crisis, after the information tribunal ruled it was in the public interest to disclose its findings in full.