The Guardian Climate Change

More than 30 businesses have written to the environment secretary calling for mandatory reporting of wasted food

Food companies should have to report how much they throw away as a first step towards reducing the vast amounts of edible food squandered in the UK, a group of prominent businesses have said.

About a third of the food produced globally every year is binned, much of it before it reaches the consumer at a cost of almost £22bn annually to the UK economy.

Thanks to the city’s famously rainy climate, trees suffering in the south can be moved, says the Royal Horticultural Society

The climate is changing British gardens everywhere. Well, almost everywhere. The Royal Horticultural Society has modelled how global heating will affect its property until 2075 and discovered that summers will be hotter and drier in all its gardens – except in Manchester.

Greater Manchester’s renown as a rain trap – there is even a website tracking rainfall, called Rainchester – means that the RHS Bridgewater garden in Salford is being earmarked for species that thrive in a cooler, wetter climate.

Along the Madeira river basin, in the Amazon, locals blame climate change and human greed for the wildfires

“All of that up there is Paradise,” said Maria Moraes de Souza, gesturing to the string of villages among which she lives along one of the Amazon’s most important waterways.

But lately life in this supposedly Arcadian community has taken a toxic turn, as the River Madeira’s waters have fallen to their lowest level since the 1960s and the skies overhead have filled with smoke from wildfires that are raging across Brazil.

Pawpaw, a tree fruit that can help farmers and the environment, stays resilient in face of a climate crisis

About five years ago, Matt Feyerabend, co-owner of an Arkansas ice-cream business, wanted to explore new flavors and use more native fruits, so while delivering a batch of product to a restaurant in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, he asked if anyone knew a grower of pawpaws, a tree fruit native to the United States with a flavor described as a mix between a mango and a banana.

A server said her father, a veterinarian, had trees on his property. Feyerabend and his wife, Meghan, now annually purchase hundreds of pounds of the fruit from the vet and other growers and sell pawpaw ice-cream and other treats containing the fruit and its seeds.

Intense heat in the north, epic rains in Miami, fires in New Mexico and California. Trump plans for ‘energy dominance’, removing protection from mining and drilling on public lands

This article was produced in partnership with the non-profit newsroom Type Investigations, with support from the Wayne Barrett Project.

Living in an energy-efficient zero-carbon home with an air source heat pump has cut energy bills drastically

• Are heat pumps the future or just a lot of hot air?

This Monday, it will be two years since Julian and Juliette Rayner moved into their new zero-carbon home on a development about 20 minutes drive from Bristol.

The property boasts a range of new technologies that makes it highly energy-efficient and enable the couple to generate their own electricity and live a greener lifestyle.

Supporters rally to Rachel Kyte after criticism of appointment over link to investment firm Quadrature Capital

The UK’s new climate envoy will retain her role on the board of a charity whose founders made a multimillion-pound donation to the Labour party and have investments in fossil fuels, the Guardian has learned.

Rachel Kyte, the former World Bank climate chief who was announced as the UK’s special representative on climate this week, is on the climate advisory board of Quadrature Climate Foundation, a charity set up by the founders of the Quadrature Capital investment company.

September has offered little reprieve after a sweltering summer, with Las Vegas on 102nd day of temperatures above 100F

Brutal heat continues to plague the south-west US, with excessive heat alerts lingering long into September as parts of the region set grim new records for deaths connected to the sweltering temperatures.

Autumn has offered little reprieve for cities that have already spent months mired in triple-digit temperatures. This week, Las Vegas, Nevada; Phoenix, Arizona; and Palm Springs, California, are all grappling with severe weather, with highs that have pushed over 100F (38C). More than 16 million people in the US were under heat alerts on Friday, according to the National Weather Service, mostly clustered in the southern tips of Nevada, Arizona and California.

The Middle East crisis, Russian drone attacks in Kyiv, Hurricane Helene and Paris fashion week: the last seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

Storm made landfall in Florida Thursday and has caused deaths, damage and about 4m power outages in multiple states

• Hurricane Helene – live updates

Helene has reportedly killed at least 10 people and inflicted more than 4m power outages across the south-eastern US after crashing ashore in north-western Florida late on Thursday as a potent category 4 hurricane, according to officials.

The storm – which registered maximum sustained winds of 140mph – had weakened to a tropical storm over Georgia early on Friday, when residents whose communities experienced Helene’s peak effects more directly were only just beginning to fathom the recovery process ahead.

Builders already have the tools needed to build cooler homes for an increasingly hotter world

The US sweltered under record-breaking heat this year, with new research suggesting that air conditioning is no longer enough to keep homes cool. Spiraling energy demands and costs of indoor cooling now have planners looking to alternative ways to keep buildings cool – some fresh out of the lab, others centuries old.

“The amount of buildings we expect to go up in the next couple decades is just staggering,” says Alexi Miller, director of building innovation at the non-profit New Buildings Institute (NBI). “If we build them the way we built them yesterday, we’re going to use a phenomenal amount of energy. There are lots of ways we could be doing this better. It’s not all fancy, emerging technology – there’s some basic stuff we don’t do nearly enough.”

Environment has barely figured in leadership campaign but soon the party must decide where it stands

• UK politics live – latest updates

When the Conservatives gather in Birmingham this weekend for their first party conference out of government in 15 years, the environment is not likely to be top of most members’ minds, amid the fever of a leadership campaign.

That is probably a good thing, many green-tinged Tory insiders feel. The leadership campaign is dominated by the right wing of the party, with the favourite, Robert Jenrick, slugging it out on issues such as immigration, Brexit and the “scourge of woke” with Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat.

Climate activists opposed to the Mountain Valley pipeline were accused of breaking West Virginia’s new critical infrastructure law

• Revealed: how the fossil fuel industry helps spread anti-protest laws across the US

It was around dawn on a chilly day last November when West Virginia state troopers forcibly extricated Jerome Wagner out from a 25ft-deep pit where he was locked to a drilling machine being used to finish construction of a beleaguered gas pipeline.

The veteran climate activist was trying to draw attention to the Mountain Valley pipeline (MVP) – a 300-mile (480km) fossil fuel project mired by environmental controversies and blocked by court orders and regulatory red tape until it was pushed through by the Biden administration in mid-2023.

There is little difference between this government’s and its Conservative predecessor’s policies on expansion

There seems to be no difference between Conservative and Labour policies on nuclear power. Both support the current building of Hinkley Point C in Somerset, the planned Sizewell C station in Suffolk, an unspecified number of small modular reactors all over Britain as well as the far-off dream of nuclear fusion.

However, few scientists serious about the threat of the climate crisis believe new nuclear power stations are part of the solution in reducing carbon output. Building them is too slow and costly, while solar and wind are quicker and cheaper in making a dent in fossil fuel consumption and eliminating it.

Forecasters warn that storm, one of the most powerful to hit the US this year, could create a ‘nightmare’

• Tell us: have you been affected by Hurricane Helene?

Hurricane Helene strengthened to a catastrophic category 4 storm as it barreled toward Florida’s Gulf coast, making it one of the most powerful storms to hit the US this year.

The storm is expected to make landfall on Thursday night. Forecasters warn the enormous storm could create a “nightmare” scenario, with a potentially life-threatening storm surge that could reach 15-20ft (4.6-6.1 meters) in the Big Bend area of Florida’s Panhandle region.

The stylish Populus hotel boasts eco-friendly construction and tree planting for every guest. Is this the hospitality of the future – or hot air?

Travelers to Denver, Colorado, will soon have the opportunity to spend the night in what promises to be “the first carbon positive hotel in America”. So say the creators behind Populus, a new 265-room, stylish, yet climate-conscious luxury hotel in the heart of the city.

Set to open in mid-October, the building is a striking addition to the city’s skyline – a sleek, three-corner structure built to resemble a grove of aspen trees, with each window shaped like the tree’s iconic “knots”. Its climate claims, too, are equally provocative. The hotel’s creators have promised to overcompensate for their emissions by a factor of 400% to 500%, through a combination of low-carbon construction, eco-friendly operations and a huge tree planting campaign throughout Colorado.

Lobbyists and lawmakers have coordinated to enact new laws that increase criminal penalties for peaceful protests

Fossil fuel lobbyists coordinated with lawmakers behind the scenes and across state lines to push and shape laws that are escalating a crackdown on peaceful protests against oil and gas expansion, a new Guardian investigation reveals.

Records obtained by the Guardian show that lobbyists working for major North American oil and gas companies were key architects of anti-protest laws that increase penalties and could lead to non-violent environmental and climate activists being imprisoned up to 10 years.

On my return to the UK from Brazil I’ve seen how northern latitudes are behaving like the equatorial margins

Returning to British suburbia from the Brazilian Amazon is always disconcerting, but it has been doubly weird in the past few days because the London commuter belt has been inundated with volumes of rain that normally belong in the tropics.

Mini-tornadoes, flash floods and the dumping of a month’s worth of rain in a single day have flooded transport hubs, high street pubs, and the shrubs of semidetached homes.

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!

It isn’t fit for humans now,

Lilly, an 8.5-metre tall puppet designed to help children talk about the environment, provokes mixed response

They say it is rude to comment on a baby’s appearance but that has not stopped the residents of Rochdale, who awoke on Wednesday to a “freaky” new arrival.

Lilly, an 8.5-metre tall puppet designed to help children talk about the environment, went on display in the town centre to a somewhat bewildered response.

Ethanol made from maize has been touted as a green fuel, but a closer look at its production puts paid to this claim

Ethanol made from corn was touted as a clean, renewable fuel for vehicles. Because the maize plants absorb carbon dioxide as they grow they were deemed environmentally friendly, and this is now big business in the US where billions of gallons of ethanol are blended into nearly all petrol supplies.

The problem is that actually ethanol is worse for the climate than petrol. Growing maize and producing ethanol from its starch ends up creating more greenhouse gas emissions than petrol – tilling the land for maize releases carbon in the soil, fertilisers produce their own emissions and emissions are given off when ethanol is burned in engines.