The Guardian Climate Change

A backlash against climate initiatives appears to have resonated in conservative strongholds – and could influence future policy

• A country divided: five key takeaways from the German election

The empty factories in Plattling and Straßkirchen sit just 6 miles (10km) apart but they tell two very different tales about the state of Germany’s economy.

In Plattling, an ailing paper factory closed two years ago and put 500 people out of work – a casualty of high gas prices and a symbol of the nationwide “deindustrialisation” that conservatives have blamed squarely on the Greens.

Uncertainty over climate and economy means ‘investment portfolio’ approach needed, researchers say

An “investment portfolio approach” needs to be applied to large-scale tree planting across the world to reduce the risks of the wrong species being planted in the wrong place, economists have said.

Countries have made ambitious pledges to plant billions of trees to remove greenhouse gases and tackle global heating. The UK has committed to plant 30,000 hectares (74,000 acres) of trees each year by 2025 and maintain the rate until 2050, the European Commission has pledged to plant 3bn trees across member states by 2030, and the US under the previous administration committed to planting 1bn trees by the same date.

Companies will never solve the climate emergency alone. The impetus for change needs to come from government

It would be very easy to be sharply critical of BP, given its sudden volte-face on its environmental commitments. Under pressure from a shareholder, Elliott Management, it has abandoned the green ambitions it announced in 2020 and pivoted squarely back to an overwhelming focus on oil and gas.

While easy, it would arguably be unhelpful, and perhaps even misguided. Because viewed in the round, this isn’t really about BP: it’s about capitalism at large, and its inability to respond to the climate crisis in the manner we need.

Brett Christophers is a professor in the Institute for Housing and Urban Research at Sweden’s Uppsala University and author of The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet

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Scientist sounds alarm over ‘canary in the coalmine’ species including beetles and spiders

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Donald Trump’s blitz on federal science agencies has increased the risk of endangered species going extinct, fired government experts have warned.

The new administration, and its so-called “department of government efficiency”, led by the billionaire Elon Musk, has fired thousands of employees at science agencies, with funding halted at the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

Bold pledges to fund climate projects now appear under threat, exposing deeper fiscal constraints and policy dilemmas within the government

In October, the prime minister, chancellor and energy secretary pledged billions to kickstart the UK’s first carbon capture projects – one of the biggest green spending promises of the parliament. By December, Ed Miliband was signing contracts, Sir Keir Starmer vowed to “reignite our industrial heartlands” and Rachel Reeves warned that without bold action, Britain would be stuck with low growth and falling living standards. More importantly, net zero targets wouldn’t be met without removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Fast forward and the Treasury is, reportedly, preparing to scrap the £22bn plan, after economic growth failed to materialise. What a difference a few weeks make.

In her second novel Elegy, Southwest, the Australian author writes into the climate crisis from a millennial perspective with a mixed sense of melancholy and hope

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There is a hole in the heart of Madeleine Watts’ melancholic second novel Elegy, Southwest. “A really big, and expensive, hole,” says Lewis, one half of the married couple whose desert road trip forms the novel’s narrative arc. The hole, a land artwork in progress, is titled “Negative Capability” after “a quality that Keats believed the best artists possessed: the ability to stay open to doubt and uncertainty”. It’s a quality Watts has in spades.

“My general personality is to go up close to the thing that makes me sad or frightened. I go up close and tinker around and it feels like I gain a modicum of control. It doesn’t necessarily feel cathartic but I’ve done something,” the Australian author says.

Self-denial will save the Earth, we’re told. But big emitters seemingly haven’t had the memo

That I fully expect to be dead by the time the UK achieves net zero is, of course, no reason to dodge interim advice from the Climate Change Committee (CCC), the UK’s official climate authority. Its latest report to government is of particular interest to the public, in arguing that a third of the emissions cuts required to achieve net zero by 2050 will have to come from consumers themselves.

Unless we – individual households – accept heat pumps and electric cars and deterrents to flying and less meat (skipping two kebabs per week), the CCC explains, the target cannot be met. And assuming the introduction of a selective news blackout that reduces public awareness of UK plutocrats, celebrities and influencers with colossal carbon footprints, such a behavioural transformation may not be impossible.

MPs ask ‘what will be left of Labour programme?’ amid calls for rethink and plan to speak out against decision

• Labour MP Emily Darlington: ‘International aid is as vital as defence spending – cutting either undermines British security’

Keir Starmer is facing a backbench revolt by Labour MPs this week as anger mounts over the government’s decision to cut the international development budget by almost half in order to pay for an increase in defence spending.

The Labour chair of the all-party select committee on international development, Sarah Champion, who has already called on the government to rethink the decision, has secured a debate in the Commons on Wednesday at which dozens of Labour backbenchers are considering intervening to express their dismay.

Coalition energy efficiency package also on the cards as climate advocates urge better subsidies on solar and other alternatives

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Labor is expected to flick the switch on a household battery incentive scheme in a dual cost-of-living and climate action pitch to voters.

Guardian Australia understands the government is preparing a large residential energy efficiency package as part of Anthony Albanese’s re-election platform.

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Backing of Glencore angers campaigners who have highlighted firm’s environmental breaches in South Africa

One of the world’s biggest banks, JP Morgan, has promoted ­environmental and “sustainable” funds to customers which have invested more than £200m in the mining giant Glencore, it can be revealed.

Ethical investing has become big business for JP Morgan and other financial giants, with worldwide “sustainable” investing expected to surpass $40tn by 2030. But the industry now faces scrutiny over the rules around investments focusing on environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues.

More than a thousand people have been evacuated near forest of Ofunato in northern region of Iwate

More than a thousand people have been evacuated as Japan battles its largest wildfire in more than three decades.

The flames are estimated to have spread over about 1,200 hectares (3,000 acres) in the forest of Ofunato in the northern region of Iwate since a fire broke out on Wednesday, according to the Fire and Disaster Management Agency.

2024-25 summer at 1.89C above long-term average ‘will be one of the coolest in the 21st century’, according to one expert

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Last summer was Australia’s second-hottest on a record going back to 1910, at 1.89C above the long-term average, according to data from the Bureau of Meteorology.

The second-hottest summer – coming after the second-hottest winter and the hottest spring on record – included the second-hottest January and the third-hottest December.

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The nuclear plan handily leapfrogs the next 10 years – when a Dutton government might actually hold office – a critical time for emissions reduction

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I don’t often agree with Matt Canavan on matters to do with global heating. But when the senator labelled the Coalition’s nuclear plan a “political fix” last year, I think he was speaking the truth.

For 15 gruelling years the Coalition has been trying to distract a voting public, ever more aware of the climate crisis, from its inability to get a credible climate and energy policy past the climate sceptics and do-nothing-much-to-reduce-emissions exponents in its own ranks (including the Queensland senator).

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Floods, whale strandings and coral bleaching all more likely, say researchers, as 10% of ocean hits record high temperatures in 2023-24

The world’s oceans experienced three-and-a-half times as many marine heatwave days last year and in 2023 compared with any other year on record, a study has found.

The sustained spike in ocean temperatures cost lives and caused billions of dollars in storm damage, increased whale and dolphin stranding risks, harmed commercial fishing and sparked a global coral bleaching, according to the paper published on Friday in Nature Climate Change.

Favourites such as cod, haddock and salmon could be replaced as UK waters warm up, scientists warn

UK waters, particularly the southern North Sea, are warming fast, making the North Atlantic one of the world’s marine “hot spots”. Scientists have been asked by the UK government to forecast what this means for British food supply and predict potentially dangerous tipping points that lie ahead.

While the UK already has milder winters because of warmer seas and heavier rain because of extra moisture in the atmosphere, this investigation is about what is happening under the waves. Already fishers are travelling ever further north to catch British favourites such as cod and haddock, and some salmon stocks face extinction.

Employees informed by email that their jobs would be cut off at end of day in move a worker called ‘wrong all around’

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The Trump administration has fired hundreds of workers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), the US’s pre-eminent climate research agency housed within the Department of Commerce, the Guardian has learned.

On Thursday afternoon, the commerce department sent emails to employees saying their jobs would be cut off at the end of the day. Other government agencies have also seen huge staffing cuts in recent days.

In Sierra Nevada del Cocuy, people have watched the ice fields turn to exposed rock and experts predict these vital water sources could be lost in 30 years

• Words and photographs by Euan Wallace in the Sierra Nevada del Cocuy, Colombia

At an altitude of 4,200 metres in the Sierra Nevada del Cocuy, Colombia, Edilsa Ibañéz Ibañéz lowers a cupped hand into the water of a glacial stream. A local guide and mountaineer, she has grown up drinking water that runs down from the snowy peaks above. As she stands up, however, the landscape that greets her is markedly different from that of her childhood.

“We used to think the ice would be eternal,” says Ibañéz, 45. “Now it is not so eternal. Our glaciers are dying.”

Synechococcus elongatusis soaks up carbon dioxide for its photosynthesis and stores more than other strains

Chonkus may sound like a champion Sumo wrestler but it is the nickname for a superpower strain of microbe that absorbs lots of CO2 relative to its size and stores it in its large cells.

Chonkus’s real name is Synechococcus elongatus, and it is a large and heavy strain of blue-green alga that soaks up CO2 for its photosynthesis, grows fast in dense colonies and stores more carbon than other strains of this microbe.

Attempts to discredit the Climate Change Authority risk undermining public trust in both politicians and our government

Taking a wrecking ball to science and public institutions might sound distinctly Trumpian, but as the Climate Change Authority announced their latest findings into the impact of delaying our energy transition to accommodate nuclear earlier this week, we all found ourselves with a front-row seat to see how this may play right here at home.

“Political appointments” to peak statutory bodies, or plum diplomatic postings, are frequently a topic of discussion within both the media and general population. But what happens when this conversation is flipped on its head and a senior bureaucrat is threatened with being terminated because they are seemingly actually allowing the independent institution they oversee to do its job?

University announces new BA, after survey found most 14- to 18-year-olds want more rigorous climate change education

The University of Sussex will introduce what it says is the UK’s first undergraduate degree focused on climate justice.

The BA course, called “climate justice, sustainability and development”, will begin in 2026. The university says it will equip students with a blend of expertise in climate politics, activism and environmental human rights.