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US carbon fintech firm acquires South African hemp producer, forms biomass partnership
The week in wildlife – in pictures
The best of this week’s wildlife pictures, including sharks swimming with a kayaker and a rainbow lorikeet
Continue reading...Amid the climate crisis, Covid and crumbling democracies, I find hope in people who show the best of humanity | Trent Zimmerman
It’s the potential of individuals to change the world which is at the heart of democratic liberalism – but their actions must be matched by global support
As we farewell 2022, many of the world’s citizens will be hoping for a better new year. It is hard to look back on the past year – indeed couple of years – without a high degree of angst about the direction of our global community.
We have been battered by a pandemic that, while past the peak for most nations, is still disrupting societies and economies. After two years of its hermit-like isolation, 1.4 billion Chinese citizens are now experiencing a nationwide Covid onslaught for the first time with ripples that will not only affect the lives of those in China but the rest of the world linked to the second largest economy.
Continue reading...Tales of killer wild boar in UK are hogwash, say environmentalists
Branded ‘farmland pests’ and a risk to humans, boar are breathing life back into the countryside
Read the coverage about the wild boar that have made their home in Scotland and you’d be forgiven for thinking the country had become overrun with mutant, dangerous, sheep-eating feral pigs.
According to the Telegraph, they “eat anything” and “attack humans”, and local press in Scotland refers to them as a “farmland pest” that “fights back”. Farming unions have told the BBC that the animals are frequently seen killing and eating sheep, though there has been little evidence of this.
Continue reading...Conservationists turn to glue to make seeds stick on windy Yorkshire moor
Project has been planting grass to help restore vital peatland but found some of it was not taking
Green sludge pours out of thick hosepipes wielded by two Welshmen in a bog in the north of England. It is not many people’s vision of cutting-edge technology.
But although the goop splattering messily on to bare patches of moorland may not look much, it is the first of its kind – a special type of glue designed to help restore vital peatland, which has been disappearing at rapid rates.
Continue reading...From Loki to Behemoth: waves of the English coastline – in pictures
Rachael Talibart captures the ebb and flow of the English coastline through photographs that frame erupting waves and the days surrounding violent storms. Her recent work has culminated in a book Tides and Tempests. These images are best viewed full screen
Continue reading...It’s that fantastic, plastic time of year – and now we can’t recycle it | Jess Harwood
Everything is plastic, or it’s wrapped in plastic!
Jess Harwood is a comic artist and climate campaigner living on Gadigal land. She is on Instagram @jessharwoodart
Continue reading...Release of 10 quolls boosts ‘insurance’ population of endangered marsupial
The animals were released into Aussie Ark’s 400-hectare Barrington Wildlife Sanctuary
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In a “globally significant moment” which gives a near-extinct species a second lease at survival, 10 eastern quolls have been released into a New South Wales nature reserve.
The animals were released into Aussie Ark’s 400-hectare Barrington Wildlife Sanctuary in the state’s Upper Hunter region, bolstering a flourishing insurance population of quolls.
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Continue reading...KraneShares slashes carbon holdings by nearly 20% after announcing large 2022 dividend
New York-based fund manager seeks to launch second carbon allowance ETF
The Guardian view on the death of the Hardy Tree: a legend uprooted | Editorial
An ash surrounded by gravestones in an ancient churchyard reveals humanity’s urge to tell its own stories through trees
The toppling of a tree, without injury, in a city churchyard would not normally make news headlines, but the mighty ash outside London’s Old St Pancras church was one of the capital’s most venerated natural landmarks and a destination of literary pilgrimage. Encircled with gravestones that it seemed to be absorbing into its root system, the Hardy Tree acquired its name, and its celebrity, from a story that the poet and novelist Thomas Hardy, then a young architect’s apprentice in a rapidly growing London, was personally responsible for stacking its trunk with stones cleared to make way for the expansion of the Midland railway line in the mid-1860s.
By Hardy’s time, the literary pedigree of Old St Pancras churchyard was well-established. It was the original resting place of the pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, whose daughter Mary Shelley was said to have gone there for secret trysts with her future husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Hardy himself wrote of overseeing the exhumations. He was charged with turning up at unexpected times to ensure that the clerk of works was doing a respectful job and not simply dumping the bones, as had happened in previous cemetery clearances.
Continue reading...There’s no such thing as ‘freak’ weather any more – and 2023 already looks like a disaster movie | John Vidal
As Storm Elliott rages and 2022 is declared the UK’s warmest year yet, why are leaders still in denial about extreme weather?
The 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow was based on the idea that the main north Atlantic Ocean current could slow and then reverse, superstorms would flash-freeze the northern hemisphere and a new ice age would abruptly descend. It was dismissed as “profoundly silly”, “a ludicrous popcorn thriller” informed by “lousy science”, and some scientists argued it depicted meteorological phenomena “as occurring over days, instead of decades or centuries”.
Storm Elliott, the “bomb cyclone” that hit the US over the holidays, should have made some of those critics uncomfortable. Temperatures in places plunged in just a few minutes as one of the greatest North American storms ever recorded swept down from the Arctic to Mexico, sometimes at hurricane speed. It brought death, chaos and misery for tens of millions of people.
Continue reading...European gas prices fall to pre-Ukraine war level
Milder winter, alternative imports and energy reduction cuts demand after Russian invasion pushed up prices
European gas prices have dipped to a level last seen before Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in February, after warmer weather across the continent eased concerns over shortages.
The month-ahead European gas future contract dropped as low as €76.78 per megawatt hour on Wednesday, the lowest level in 10 months, before closing higher at €83.70, according to Refinitiv, a data company.
Continue reading...All solar system's planets visible in night sky
This year, I only needed to open my window in Brazil to witness the climate crisis | Eliane Brum
My snapshot of 2022 shows the Amazon burning – but what it doesn’t communicate is the pain
I have covered the Amazon as a journalist for almost 25 years. It started in 1998, with a trip along the Trans-Amazonian Highway. In 2017, I moved to the city of Altamira in Pará, northern Brazil; it is the centre of the deforestation, forest fires and social devastation caused by the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam. I moved here because I no longer wanted to be just a “special correspondent to the Amazon”, but so I could describe what was happening to the largest tropical forest on the planet from the inside. Despite this long experience, 2022 was the first year in which I watched the forest burn from the window of my home. I didn’t need to go to the fire, as journalists normally do. The fire had come to me.
The photo I’ve chosen, taken by my husband, is from the night of 27 August. Later, Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research revealed that it was the worst August for fires in the Amazon since 2010. Fires and deforestation rose considerably under Jair Bolsonaro who, this year, was narrowly defeated in the presidential election by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, or Lula, as he is better known.
Eliane Brum is one of the creators of the trilingual news platform Sumaúma and the author of Banzeiro Òkòtó: the Amazon as the Centre of the World, which is published in the UK in 2023. This article was translated by James Young
Brazil’s Bolsonaro publishes decree to boost VER generation from public forest concessions
Thousands of tonnes of recycling to be transported interstate after fire at ACT processing facility
Materials Recovery Facility near Canberra had processed 60,000 tonnes of waste a year which will be moved to other capital cities
Thousands of tonnes of waste will have to be transported from the Australian Capital Territory to other metropolitan capitals after a fire at one of the largest recycling centres in Australia.
The fire largely destroyed the Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) in Hume on Monday night – another setback for the nation’s recycling efforts, which have been struggling to keep pace with demand.
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Continue reading...Indonesia validates first REDD+ project under new carbon trading regulation
California offset issuances crater to 8-year low in 2022, as DEBs volume inches up
What risks could pet hamsters and gerbils pose in Australia?
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