Climate

Run by teenagers, for teenagers, the Green Crew helps students get their hands dirty with projects like tree planting, trail restoration and invasive species removal.

The Portland area is a hot spot for vegans, who have the most environmentally friendly diets. It has also yielded a game-changing dessert.

Climate Change Committee says original goal of a 75% emissions cut by 2030 will now be delayed by up to six years

The UK’s climate watchdog has warned that Scotland needs to take “immediate action at pace and scale” to cut its emissions after ministers axed a series of policy pledges.

The Climate Change Committee (CCC), an official advisory body, said ministers in Edinburgh needed to take urgent action to curb emissions from buildings and transport to cut Scotland’s overall emissions to nearly zero by 2045.

Abandoned a target to cut car miles by 20% by 2030.

Dropped a pledge to rapidly decarbonise homes by mandating low-carbon heating systems.

Cut funding for tree planting.

Missed targets to restore degraded peatland.

Ignored calls for a plan to cut meat and dairy consumption, and failed to use their powers to tax air travel more heavily.

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Health of adolescents worldwide has reached a ‘tipping point’, authors of Lancet commission analysis warn

Almost half a billion adolescents worldwide will be living with obesity or overweight and 1 billion at risk of preventable ill health by 2030, according to an international report.

While adolescent mortality has declined by more than a quarter over the past two decades, comprehensive analysis of global data calculated that in five years, at least half of the world’s 10- to 24-year-olds will be living in countries where preventable health problems such as HIV/Aids, early pregnancy, depression and poor nutrition pose a “daily threat to their health, wellbeing and life chance”. Young people’s health has reached a “tipping point”, the authors warned.

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Burgum defends Trump budget slashing green funds, saying AI and Iran pose bigger threats than warming

The US has “plenty of time” to solve the climate crisis,” the interior secretary, Doug Burgum, told a House committee on Tuesday.

The comment came on his first of two days of testimony to House and Senate appropriators in which he defended Donald Trump’s proposed budget, dubbed the “one big, beautiful bill”, that would extend tax reductions enacted during Trump’s first term, while cutting $5bn of funding for the Department of the Interior.

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BP has funded Washington’s National Gallery of Art, UK’s Royal Shakespeare Company and National Portrait Gallery

Oil interests have funded cultural institutions such as museums, youth organizations and athletic groups in recent years, new research shows, in what appears to be a public relations effort to boost their image amid growing public awareness of the climate crisis.

Top US fossil fuel lobby group the American Petroleum Institute (API) sponsored a 2017 workshop for the Pennsylvania Girl Scouts, featuring “activities that mimicked work in the energy industry”. Energy giant BP in 2016 sponsored Washington DC’s National Gallery of Art and continues to fund the British Museum in London. And in 2019, Shell sponsored the golf event the Houston Open for the 26th time.

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Simon Stiell says investors ‘ready to hit the go button’ if they have the right signals from governments

The climate crisis has raised the price of commodities and exacerbated famine – and only strong action on greenhouse gas emissions can restore economic stability, the UN’s climate chief has said.

Simon Stiell, the executive secretary of the UN framework convention on climate change, was speaking in Panama, where recent years of drought drove the water to perilous lows that disrupted international trade.

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The hemlines were high and the diamonds hefty as the world’s second-richest fiancee and her entourage stormed the Seine. Formez vos bataillons!

To Cannes, in the country of France, where last night Jeff Bezos’s fiancee, Lauren Sánchez, got what she deserves: a philanthropy award. Lauren was honoured at something called the Global Gift Gala, where she received the women empowerment award for her commitment to climate justice, social justice and coming off at absolutely all times as a woman who refers to her breasts as “my girls”. Regular readers will know I have a huge amount of time for her. She accepted her gong wearing a necklace with a diamond pendant slightly larger than an Amazon warehouse, once again redrawing the blueprint that other humanitarians will simply need to watch and learn from.

Meanwhile, if there were awards for hen nights – or bachelorette parties, in the American style – then Lauren would surely have taken one for her full-scale invasion of Paris last weekend, after French forces withdrew and declared the city open. Hand on heart, I initially assumed Lauren was the new US ambassador to France, but then remembered that state department randos were probably seated in some windy overspill gazebo for Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, while Lauren had pride of place ahead of the actual cabinet as part of Oligarchs’ Row. Plus, having just Googled, I discover the Senate yesterday confirmed Trump’s pick for the ambassador to France – his own son-in-law’s former jailbird dad.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

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Alice Mah’s book explores cultural and ecological loss through the lens of a trip to south China

When Alice Mah, a university professor, visited her family’s ancestral village for the first time in 2018, she knew it would not be a grand homecoming. Her father’s lack of interest in ever making the trip to south China had suggested that much. But what she did not know was that it would unleash waves of eco anxiety that would follow her back to the UK.

As documented in her new book Red Pockets, Mah confronts her family’s past – the site where her ancestral home used to be, untended graves and the descendants of the villagers who remained. This presents her with a whole host of debts and the impossibility of ever really repaying them.

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The pandemic and harsh laws suffocated climate movements as we knew them. Get ready for a new kind of action

On 21 April 2019, I was on Waterloo Bridge in London with my younger siblings. Around us were planters full of flowers where there were once cars, and people singing. This was the spring iteration of Extinction Rebellion, when four bridges in London were held by protesters. My siblings, then 14, had been going out on school strike inspired by Greta Thunberg, and wanted to see her speak.

We were there for less than a day, but the occupations of bridges and other blockades lasted for 11 days. Tens of thousands of people mobilised in the UK that spring. An estimated 500,000 people were affected by the shutdowns the movement imposed on central London’s road networks, and more than 1,000 protesters were arrested in what was then an official part of XR’s strategy.

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Rising oceans will force millions away from coasts even if global temperature rise remains below 1.5C, analysis finds

Sea level rise will become unmanageable at just 1.5C of global heating and lead to “catastrophic inland migration”, the scientists behind a new study have warned. This scenario may unfold even if the average level of heating over the last decade of 1.2C continues into the future.

The loss of ice from the giant Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets has quadrupled since the 1990s due to the climate crisis and is now the principal driver of sea level rise.

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Once, getting ready for the apocalypse was for the paranoid. Now, in the face of cyber-attacks, climate breakdown and nuclear threats, the UK government recommends it. Should everyone have a survival kit?

This is a great time to be a shopkeeper, if that shop is for those worried about the breakdown of civilisation. “It started with Covid, and people weren’t looking for toilet rolls, put it that way,” says Justin Jones, who runs the online UK Prepping Shop, whose stock ranges from emergency food and wind-up radios to crossbows and body armour.

Business is booming, as is the British prepping scene – 22,700 members of the UK Preppers and Survivalists Facebook group, 6,000 in the UK Preppers Club Facebook group. The scene is not as well-known as its US and Canadian equivalents, but that’s partly by choice. “Preppers are by nature a little bit secretive,” says Bushra Shehzad, who is researching prepping for a PhD in marketing and consumer behaviour at Newcastle University. “They are sceptical of people who aren’t part of it asking questions, which I think is because they’re portrayed in a manner that many of them don’t agree with.”

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The Trump administration had issued a highly unusual stop-work order on the Empire Wind project last month, leading to intense pushback from officials in New York.

Nearly every other government in the world has recognized that a hotter planet poses a profound threat to humans and ecosystems.

How fast we cut climate pollution will define how safe or scary the world becomes as our children grow up

At its core, the most fundamental duty of any government is to safeguard the security and wellbeing of its people. The climate crisis is hitting Australians hard.

Right now, farmers in South Australia and Victoria are battling drought, while Queensland farmers pick up the pieces after heart-breaking floods. Globally, 2024 was the hottest year on record and the first time average temperatures surged 1.5C above preindustrial levels. We are living through longer, deadlier heatwaves, devastating bushfires, more frequent and intense floods, and rising sea levels that threaten coastal communities.

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Expert-backed ideas for continued progress.

Aubrey Williams produced huge, colourful abstract paintings and was influenced by music and climate issues

An artist whose work was part of the first wave of abstract art to hit the UK and presaged the climate breakdown protests as well as debates over the legacies of British colonialism is undergoing an “overdue” reappraisal, according to experts and critics.

Aubrey Williams, a Guyanese artist who moved to Britain in the 1950s, was a respected figure in his lifetime and the subject of several exhibitions in the UK. But after his death from cancer in 1990, the artist’s influence and the legacy of his abstract painting slowly faded from view in Britain.

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The administration is not only allowing more greenhouse gases. It is undermining the nation’s ability to understand and respond to a hotter planet.

As the mercury soars, people have been told to shelter inside. But for those in poor housing in places like Bengalaru, there is no respite

At noon, Khustabi Begum is sitting on the steps leading to her three-room home, trying to escape the stifling April heat indoors. But respite is hard to come by in Rajendra Nagar, a slum in south Bengaluru. “It’s just as hot outside, but it feels worse indoors. It’s been really hot for the past five or six days, but at least there’s an occasional breeze outside,” says the 36-year-old.

Inside Begum’s dimly lit living room, ceiling fans whir. One corner is stacked with sacks of onions and just outside their home is a vending cart. “My husband sells erulli, belluli [onions, garlic],” she says.

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Energy retailer says carbon offsetting ‘not the most effective way’ to reduce emissions

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A major Australian energy company has acknowledged that carbon offsets do not prevent or undo damage caused by greenhouse gas emissions and apologised to its customers for allegedly misleading marketing.

More than 400,000 Australians had signed up to Energy Australia’s “go neutral” carbon offset program that since 2016 had promised to offset emissions released due to their electricity and gas consumption.

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