The Guardian

Experts say boarded-up communal space illustrates crisis in social housing funding and need to protect play areas

Families in south London say their children have stopped playing outside after communal spaces and playgrounds were ripped out to make room for new homes and then left boarded up when Southwark council ran out of money.

The council began tearing down large parts of the Bells Gardens and Lindley estates in Peckham last August but abandoned the build in January due to a funding crisis driven by rising interest rates. All that remains of the previous play area is a small pitch surrounded by hoardings and out of sight of the flats.

Dramatic changes in energy industry and EVs reducing fossil fuel use, but shipping, aviation and industry a long way from net zero

Humanity has made some uneven progress in reducing our addiction to fossil fuels – but there remain three areas of our lives in which we are notably not on track to kick the habit over the next 30 years, according to a new analysis.

Record levels of investment in clean energy (solar has been called the cheapest source of electricity in history by the International Energy Agency) and a decline in coal-powered generation means less and less of the world’s power will come from fossil fuels between now and 2050, the analysis from Rhodium shows.

The best of this week’s wildlife photographs from around the world

First study to tally asthma exacerbations with air pollution during pandemic finds numbers admitted to A&E fell 41% in 2020

A new study in Oxford has found that emergency hospital admissions for asthma dropped by 41% in 2020 as air pollution from traffic fell due to Covid restrictions.

Dr Suzanne Bartington from the University of Birmingham, who led the Oxford study, said: “The Covid-19 pandemic led to a unique opportunity where we could study the impacts of rapid changes in human activities on air quality.”

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Keir Starmer’s announcement is a historic mistake on economic, political and environmental grounds

On Thursday, they finally made it official. For the first time, the EU’s climate change service confirms, global warming has exceeded 1.5C above preindustrial levels across an entire year. The speed and scale of that rise represents a terrifying precedent if it is not reversed, and a shocking act of collective damage to the planet.

It also casts Thursday’s other grim climate announcement – Labour’s long-trailed decision to retreat from its signature commitment to spend £28bn a year equipping the economy to reach its climate targets – into even starker relief. Labour ended up choosing an embarrassing day to make its announcement. But the truth is that any day would have been a bad day for such a humiliating rowback.

No one expected the Tories to crash the economy like they did. Building a greener Britain means being honest about this

The coming election will be a once-in-a-generation choice: between five more years of economic failure or a long-term plan to invest in Britain’s future. At the beginning of a new age of economic and technological change, we have the chance to seize these historic opportunities so we can once again be a thriving, prosperous nation.

We are under no illusion about the scale of the challenge facing us. Taxes are at a 70-year high, our public services are on their knees, the national debt is continuing to rise, and the cost of living crisis is still biting for families across our country. These are not signs of a successful economy. They are the symptoms of 14 years of economic failure and a Britain that is worse off.

Judicial review looking at claims agency allowed destructive levels of nutrients from chicken manure to enter waterway

One of the country’s favourite rivers is going into a “death spiral” say campaigners, as lawyers argued in court that the Environment Agency was failing to apply the law and save the waterway.

Anti-pollution charity River Action took the Environment Agency (EA) to court on Wednesday for a judicial review, claiming it is allowing destructive levels of nutrients from chicken manure to enter the River Wye.

Italy’s data protection body investigates claims police shared names and addresses with firm collecting penalties for TfL

The names and addresses of thousands of EU drivers were unlawfully accessed by Italian police and shared with the company that collects Ulez penalties on behalf of Transport for London (TfL), investigators believe.

The Italian data protection authority is investigating claims by Belgium’s government that an unnamed police department misused official powers to pass the personal details of Belgian drivers to Euro Parking Collections, which is employed by TfL to issue fines to enforce London’s low emission zone (Lez) and ultra-low emission zone.

Feat by scientists at Oxfordshire facility described as ‘fitting swansong’ for pioneering project as reactor is decommissioned

The prospect of a green energy source based on the power of the stars has received a boost after scientists set a world record for the amount of energy created by fusing atoms together.

Researchers at the Joint European Torus (JET), an experimental fusion reactor at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Oxfordshire, generated 69 megajoules of energy over five seconds from a mere 0.2 milligrams of fuel in the final fusion experiment performed at the facility.

As the photographer turns 80, we look back as some of his most striking images from around the world. Salgado has been awarded Sony’s Outstanding Contribution to Photography Award 2024, and a selection of his work can be seen at Somerset House in London between 19 April and 6 May

• Photographer Sebastião Salgado at 80: ‘They say I was an aesthete of misery’

A volcano in south-western Iceland has erupted for the second time this year, the country's meteorological office has said. Live images captured lava gushing out of a fissure, sending plumes of smoke and ash into the air. It the sixth outbreak on the Reykjanes peninsula since 2021, before when the volcano had been inactive for about 800 years. 'Reykjanes is fed by five volcanic systems, many of which come to life every 800 to 1,000 years,' said Dave McGarvie, a volcanologist at Lancaster University

• Iceland’s Reykjanes fires may burn for decades, history suggests

Warming of the land surface increased from 1.48C after another year of data was added, annual climate statement reveals

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Australia’s climate has officially warmed by 1.5C since 1910, according to the Bureau of Meteorology’s long-term record of temperatures.

The figure is revealed in the bureau’s annual climate statement that found 2023 was Australia’s joint-eighth warmest year on record, with the national temperature 0.98C above the average between 1961 and 1990.

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Experts say the endangered insect numbers fell by 59% this year, blaming pesticide use and climate change for the reduction

The number of endangered monarch butterflies at their wintering areas in Mexico has dropped by 59% this year to the second lowest level since record keeping began, experts said, blaming pesticide use and climate change.

The annual butterfly count doesn’t calculate the individual number of butterflies, but rather the number of hectares they cover when they clump together on tree branches in the mountain pine and fir forests west of Mexico City. Monarchs from east of the Rocky Mountains in the US and Canada overwinter there.

Ruling, specific to three dicamba-based weedkillers, is major blow to Bayer, BASF and Syngenta

Dealing a blow to three of the world’s biggest agrochemical companies, a US court this week banned three weedkillers widely used in American agriculture, finding that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) broke the law in allowing them to be on the market.

The ruling is specific to three dicamba-based weedkillers manufactured by Bayer, BASF and Syngenta, which have been blamed for millions of acres of crop damage and harm to endangered species and natural areas across the midwest and south.

The press is covering the 2024 campaign as if climate isn’t on the ballot, but 56% of US voters are ‘concerned’ or ‘alarmed’ about the crisis

Fact one: more voters face national elections in 2024 than ever before in recorded history – about 4 billion people, nearly half the human population.

Fact two: last year was the hottest in recorded history – and scientists warn that oil, gas and coal burning must be rapidly phased out if we are to preserve a livable planet.

Mark Hertsgaard is executive director and co-founder of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration committed to more and better coverage of the climate story, and the Nation magazine’s environment correspondent

Kyle Pope is executive director of strategic initiatives and co-founder of Covering Climate Now, and a former editor and publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review

This article is published here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now

The Biden administration suspended new permits for natural gas terminals. Can we see more of this kind of backbone?

Ten days ago Joe Biden did something remarkable, and almost without precedent – he actually said no to big oil.

His administration halted the granting of new permits for building liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals, something Washington had been handing out like M&Ms on Halloween for nearly a decade. It’s a provisional “no” – Department of Energy experts will spend the coming months figuring out a new formula for granting the licenses that takes the latest science and economics into account – but you can tell what a big deal it is because of the howls of rage coming from the petroleum industry and its gaggle of politicians.

Bill McKibben is the founder of Third Act, which organizes Americans over 60 for progressive action and which worked this fall to persuade the administration to stop granting the LNG permits

Campaigners argue in legal challenge that loophole has allowed poultry farmers to pollute river

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The Environment Agency and the UK government failed to protect the River Wye from catastrophic decline by allowing pollution from industrial chicken farming to saturate the land and devastate the protected river, a legal challenge is to argue.

The Danish photographer Soren Solkær first saw starling murmurations as a child near Wadden Sea in the south of the country. After photographing the phenomenon for three years in the marshlands of Denmark, Solkær’s new work, Starling, published by Edition Circle, expands his scope to trace the birds along their migration routes to the Netherlands and Italy

This year, photographers had the chance to win up to £100 for capturing a striking image of the night sky over South Downs national park, England, in one of three categories: Starry skyscapes, Nature at night and Magnificent moon