Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva says Amazonia suffering its worst drought in more than 40 years
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has flown into the Amazon amid growing alarm over the droughts and wildfires sweeping the rainforest region and others parts of Brazil.
Speaking during a visit to a riverside community near the city of Tefé, the Brazilian president said Amazonia was suffering its worst drought in more than 40 years. He said he had come to discover “what is going on with these mighty rivers” that in some places now resemble deserts.
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09/10/2024 - 16:30
09/10/2024 - 12:34
This year, the USDA put some limits on added sugars for the first time. But changes face robust resistance
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09/10/2024 - 11:22
Rising temperatures causing largest glacier in Dolomites to lose 7-10cm of depth a day, according to scientists
The Marmolada glacier, the largest and most symbolic of the Dolomites, could melt completely by 2040 owing to rising average temperatures, experts have said.
Italian scientists who are monitoring glaciers and the impact of climate emergency, and who took part in a campaign launched by environmentalist group Legambiente, the international commission for the protection of the Alps (Cipra), with the scientific partnership of the Italian Glacier Committee, said on Monday the Marmolada was losing between 7 and 10cm of depth a day.
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09/10/2024 - 10:53
Full bag of snack left in cave occasioned National Park Service to educate public about delicate ecosystems
A full bag of Cheetos, discarded by a subterranean visitor to the Big Room in Carlsbad Caverns national park in New Mexico, has led the US National Park Service to issue a warning that discarded food could have a “huge impact” on the cave’s delicate and at-risk ecosystem.
“At the scale of human perspective, a spilled snack bag may seem trivial, but to the life of the cave it can be world changing,” the park said in its post about the garbage that was recently discovered there, threatening the balance of the unique cave system environment.
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09/10/2024 - 10:00
The Project hopes competition will raise big money for underfunded organisations working to protect beloved species
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Tense competition is brewing between the greater glider and the koala in Australia’s marsupial of the year vote but there are hopes a silky tailed species that “mates themselves to death” could win over voters and maybe even save it from heading towards extinction.
Network Ten’s The Project launched the competition in collaboration with organisations and charities that work with or help preserve the habitat of marsupials, many of them endangered, in a bid to raise funds for them.
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09/10/2024 - 09:11
Promise to ‘transition away from fossil fuels’ made at Cop28 climate talks has been left out of draft resolutions
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Campaigners have claimed some of the world’s largest economies are turning their backs on a pledge made last year to transition away from fossil fuels.
Ministers from the G20 group of developed and developing countries, including the US, UK, China and India, will meet in Rio de Janeiro on Wednesday to discuss the global approach to the climate crisis.
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09/10/2024 - 07:00
Under the Tories, non-violent climate protesters were jailed for up to five years – and there is little sign that Labour will change tack
Linda Lakhdhir is the legal director of Climate Rights International
In December 2023 when Stephen Gingell was sentenced to six months in prison for slow marching for half an hour on the Holloway Road in north London, the sentence was considered shocking. Unfortunately, it is far from the exception. In fact, my organisation, Climate Rights International, has spent the past eight months looking into restrictions on climate protests among western democracies and has found that the UK – mostly under the Conservatives – has introduced some of the harshest anti-protest legislation in recent years.
You may remember Morgan Trowland and Marcus Decker, who were sentenced to multi-year prison sentences in April 2023 for climbing the cables of the Queen Elizabeth II bridge to object to new oil, gas and coal projects. The three-year sentence imposed on Trowland was, at the time, the longest ever for a climate protest in the UK. But, it has since been surpassed. In July, in a case that made international headlines, five fossil-fuel protesters were sentenced to four- and five-year sentences after participating in a Zoom call about staging climate protests on the M25.
Linda Lakhdhir is the legal director of Climate Rights International
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09/10/2024 - 06:00
European flat oyster is defined as ‘collapsed’ in UK but there are hopes it could return to coastal waters
A box marked “special delivery” arrived about midday at Spurn Discovery Centre, on a remote East Yorkshire peninsula in the Humber estuary.
It is unlikely the postal worker had any idea it contained 300,000 living oyster larvae – tiny pinprick-sized organisms destined to become part of a new oyster reef just off the English coast.
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09/10/2024 - 05:00
The source of new renewable energy is also a battleground over China’s cheap exports of panels that has split US firms
The Biden administration touts solar energy as one of its big success stories, a booming new industry that is curbing the effects of the climate crisis and creating high-paying jobs across the country. But the more complicated truth is that the United States is mired in a long-running trade war with China, which is flooding the market with artificially cheap solar panels that carry an uncomfortably large carbon footprint and threaten to obliterate the domestic industry.
The price of solar panels has plummeted 50% over the past year, largely, industry insiders say, because of deliberate Chinese overproduction of key components and a game of international cat-and-mouse over trade rules often likened to a game of “Whac-A-Mole”. As different sets of rules get established, Chinese companies have proved adept at moving their manufacturing plants to other countries, in south-east Asia, and shifting strategies to work around US tariffs and other deterrent measures.
This article was amended on 10 September 2014. An earlier version incorrectly stated that this year’s RE+ conference took place in Las Vegas, Nevada.
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09/10/2024 - 04:01
Last year Antartica’s sea ice was 1.6m sq km below average – the size of Britain, France, Germany and Spain combined. This week it had even less than that
Sea ice surrounding Antarctica is on the cusp of reaching a record winter low for a second year running, continuing an “outrageous” fall in the amount of Southern Ocean that is freezing over.
The Antarctic region underwent an abrupt transformation in 2023 as the sea ice cover surrounding the continent crashed for six months straight. In winter, it covered about 1.6m sq km less than the long-term average – an area roughly the size of Britain, France, Germany and Spain combined.
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