Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
This summer, Scott Morrison has faced international criticism over his climate change policies. But this government is just the latest in a long line that have either failed on meaningful climate policy at home, orblocked stronger climate action on the world stage.
In this episode of Full Story, Guardian Australia editor Lenore Taylor explores Australia’s long track record of stalling on climate change action.
Charities caution that ‘UK aid risks becoming a vehicle for UK foreign policy’ if post-Brexit merger comes to fruition
A coalition of aid groups including the British Red Cross, Cafod and Oxfam GB has warned Boris Johnson that to abolish the Department for International Development would suggest Britain is “turning our backs on the world’s poorest people”.
One climate diplomacy expert said it would be “political suicide” to merge DfID with the Foreign Office in 2020, the same year the UK is hosting the UN climate summit, since the move would tie up senior civil servants when they were most needed to tackle the response to the climate crisis.
Partial agreement at COP25 that countries must be more ambitious to fulfil Paris goals
Climate talks in Madrid have ended with a partial agreement to ask countries to come up with more ambitious targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions in order to meet the terms of the 2015 Paris accord.
Few countries came to this year’s talks with updated plans to reach the Paris goals, though the EU finally agreed its long-term target of reaching net zero emissions by 2050. Experts say more ambitious emissions cuts are needed globally if the Paris pledge to hold global heating to no more than 2C is to be met.
Brazil, India and China singled out in UN talks as acting to block agreement on article 6 of Paris agreement
Poor countries have accused a handful of richer nations of holding up progress on tackling the climate crisis at UN talks in Madrid, as demonstrators and activists vented their frustration in the final hours of two weeks of negotiations.
The talks dragged on with negotiators battling into the early hours of Saturday to salvage a result, as governments wrangled over the details of a seemingly arcane issue: carbon markets, governed by a provision of the 2015 Paris agreement known as article 6.
She has barely ever been in a car, and never eaten meat or flown. Now 31, she lives on the 15th floor of a city centre tower from where she can just see the ocean 500 yards away on one side and the suburbs and informal settlements sprawling as far as the eye can see on the other.
Life is OK in this megacity. She earns the exact median income and is as green as she feels she can be: she has no children yet, her carbon footprint is negligible, and her apartment, built in the early 2000s, has been retrofitted for climate change with deep insulation, its own solar air-con and heating systems.
Only a fifth of the companies will remain on track, according to analysis of their disclosures
More than four fifths of the world’s largest companies are unlikely to meet the targets set out in the Paris climate agreement by 2050, according to fresh analysis of their climate disclosures.
A study of almost 3,000 publicly listed companies found that just 18% have disclosed plans that are aligned with goals to limit rising temperatures to 1.5C of pre-industrialised levels by the middle of the century.
Glorious scenes in Edinburgh as thousands of children, parents, students and musicians gather at the Meadows for the Climate Strike.
“This is our Earth and our Future. We need to take care of it ,” said 11-year-old Leila Koita, pictures here with friends Eilidh Tedesco, Norah Turner, Tilly Torrie, Megan Berger and NaN Zhang.
Norah’s mum, Jo Spencely says she hasn’t been on a demo for decades but she is here to show support. “I’m massively concerned about their future. I almost can’t bear to read about the climate. It’s so scary.”
The march sets off at 11:30am and will pass through Edinburgh city centre and end with a rally in front of the Scottish Parliament. As in London, police have imposed restrictions, in this case by refusing permission for the marchers to walk down Princes Street.
As elsewhere, this is just the start of a week of climate action. On Saturday, activists will stage a “die in”, Monday will be a “day of disruption”, musicians will join a “Love the Planet Festival” on Wednesday, and there’ll be another rally outside parliament the following day.
Even Emmeline Pankhurst has joined in the protests in Manchester. A statue of the suffragette hero has donned a bright orange lifejacket and a placard that asks: “Ready for rising sea levels to reach this height?”
The stunt was the idea of Katie Bradshaw and Ryan Griffiths, both 31, who described themselves as first-protestors who felt the need to act today.
“Emmeline still carries that Mancunian spirit of standing up for what she believes in and great causes,” said Griffiths. “Climate change is so important and we think it’s something herself would be an issue she would be at the forefront of if she were around today.”
Bradshaw added: “We’ve got to do our bit and even if it’s just putting some signs up and making people realise we need to look after our planet. If she was around today she’d be supporting it.”
Scientists in Geneva warn that cutting carbon emissions from cars and factories is not enough
Attempts to solve the climate crisis by cutting carbon emissions from only cars, factories and power plants are doomed to failure, scientists will warn this week.
A leaked draft of a report on climate change and land use, which is now being debated in Geneva by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), states that it will be impossible to keep global temperatures at safe levels unless there is also a transformation in the way the world produces food and manages land.
Scientist behind study urges platform to tweak algorithms to ‘prioritise factual information’
The majority of YouTube videos about the climate crisis oppose the scientific consensus and “hijack” technical terms to make them appear credible, a new study has found. Researchers have warned that users searching the video site to learn about climate science may be exposed to content that goes against mainstream scientific belief.
Dr Joachim Allgaier of RWTH Aachen University in Germany analysed 200 YouTube videos to see if they adhered to or challenged the scientific consensus. To do so, he chose 10 search terms:
Financial sector warned it risks losses from extreme weather and its stakes in polluting firms
The global financial system faces an existential threat from climate change and must take urgent steps to reform, the governors of the Bank of England and France’s central bank have warned, writing in the Guardian.
In an article published in the Guardian on Wednesday aimed at the international financial community, Mark Carney, the Bank’s governor, and François Villeroy de Galhau, the governor of the Banque de France, said financial regulators, banks and insurers around the world had to “raise the bar” to avoid catastrophe.
Experts warn that failure to act risks spike in global temperatures
Dramatic rises in atmospheric methane are threatening to derail plans to hold global temperature rises to 2C, scientists have warned.
In a paper published this month by the American Geophysical Union, researchers say sharp rises in levels of methane – which is a powerful greenhouse gas – have strengthened over the past four years. Urgent action is now required to halt further increases in methane in the atmosphere, to avoid triggering enhanced global warming and temperature rises well beyond 2C.