‘Use your £11bn climate fund to pay for family planning,’ UK told

More than 60 NGOs call for spending rule change, saying people on frontline of climate crisis want greater access to reproductive healthcare

The UK government has been urged to open up its £11bn pot of climate funding to contraception, as research from low-income countries shows a link between poor access to reproductive health services and environmental damage.

In a letter to Alok Sharma, president of the UN Cop26 climate conference, an alliance of more than 60 NGOs has called for the funding eligibility rules to be changed to allow projects concerned with removing barriers to reproductive healthcare and girls’ education to access climate funds.

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Forget GDP, ‘vulnerability index best gauges aid’ to small islands

Commonwealth research says UVI is better measure of small island states’ aid needs, especially on climate

Small island nations on the climate crisis frontlines have been overlooked in overseas aid, according to a new index.

Urging a move away from the current benchmark of using gross domestic product (GDP) to measure aid allocation, researchers from the Commonwealth secretariat and the Foundation for Studies and Research on International Development (Ferdi), a French thinktank, have developed the universal vulnerability index (UVI) as an alternative. GDP, they claim, fails to reflect the realities nations face, particularly on climate.

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Climate crisis to shrink G7 economies twice as much as Covid-19, says research

G7 countries will lose $5tn a year by 2050 if temperatures rise by 2.6C

The economies of rich countries will shrink by twice as much as they did in the Covid-19 crisis if they fail to tackle rising greenhouse gas emissions, according to research.

The G7 countries – the world’s biggest industrialised economies – will lose 8.5% of GDP a year, or nearly $5tn wiped off their economies, within 30 years if temperatures rise by 2.6C, as they are likely to on the basis of government pledges and policies around the world, according to research from Oxfam and the Swiss Re Institute.

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Johnson must push G7 to pay billions more in climate aid, say experts

Rich countries urged to stump up to help developing nations cut greenhouse gas emissions

Boris Johnson must push rich countries meeting in Cornwall in June to come up with tens of billions of dollars more in aid for poor countries to deal with climate breakdown, or face the failure of vital UN climate talks to be hosted by the UK in Glasgow in November, according to leading climate experts.

The UK holds the presidency this year both of the annual meeting of the G7 group of the world’s economic superpowers, and of the Cop26 climate summit.

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Kenya faces $62bn bill to mitigate climate-linked hunger, drought and conflict

Country accounts for less than 0.1% of global emissions but suffers disproportionately from related disasters, say new report

Kenya needs $62bn (£46bn) to mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis in the next 10 years, according to a government document sent to the UN framework convention on climate change. It equates to almost 67% of Kenya’s GDP.

The report illustrates the scale of the challenge as the country aims to cut greenhouse gases by 32% within the next decade. It will rely on international sources to fund close to 90% of the expenditure. Securing such a colossal amount of often contentious climate financing from rich countries yet to honour their commitments to the $100bn target pledged during the 2015 Paris agreement will be a tall order.

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A third of my country was just underwater. The world must act on climate | Sheikh Hasina

The climate crisis and Covid-19 are crying out for international cooperation, writes the prime minister of Bangladesh

One-third of my country was underwater last month. The heaviest rains in almost a decade began and have still not abated. More than 1.5 million Bangladeshis are displaced; tens of thousands of hectares of paddy fields have been washed away. Millions of my compatriots will need food aid this year.

Calamities, alas, never strike alone. The floods, which come in the wake of widespread destruction caused by Cyclone Amphan in May, are making it more difficult to contain the coronavirus. More than 2.4 million people had already been moved from the destructive path of the storm without delivering them into the even greater danger of Covid-19. Yet while the infection and death rates have been contained, concerns remain until a foolproof safeguard is acquired. Economic lockdowns have hit our textile industry and exports and forced hundreds of thousands of our international migrant workers to return home, with the vast majority remaining unemployed.

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I lived the climate crisis every day of my childhood. This November, I’ll vote on it | Jessica Díaz Vázquez

Chemical headaches, plant sirens – these were the constant background to my home and school life. My community is on the climate frontline

My teacher first taught me about global warming in the third grade. She explained how an increase in greenhouse gases increased the amount of heat that could be trapped in our atmosphere. We discussed how climate change is melting the ice caps polar bears call home, leading to their extinction. We didn’t discuss how the climate crisis was already at our homes.

I grew up with the smell of freshly made salsa from chiles picked from our backyard garden, the bright colors of fruit gifted to us by neighbors, and the sound of off-key singing to Joan Sebastian and Selena Quintanilla. At school, my friends and I slipped between English and Spanish, moving between the topics of our English essay to la quinceañera de nuestra mejor amiga with ease. But looming over my vibrant community was, and is, the fossil fuel industry.

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‘A critical situation’: Bangladesh in crisis as monsoon floods follow super-cyclone

Despite flood planning efforts hundreds have been killed and millions hit as third of land is submerged by non-stop rain

Bangladesh could be plunged into a humanitarian crisis as it undergoes the most prolonged monsoon flooding in decades while it is still recovering from the effects of super-cyclone Amphan.

Despite the UN has lauding its new initiatives for early intervention aimed at preparing communities for crisis, 550 people have been killed and 9.6 million affected by the disaster in Bangladesh, Nepal and north-eastern India, according to the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent.

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Rewilding will make Britain a rainforest nation again | George Monbiot

I will take vision and a willingness to confront vested interests, but we can restore our trashed ecosystems

The forests still burn, but the world now looks away. In both the Amazon basin and the rainforests of Indonesia, the world-scorching inferno rages on, already forgotten by most of the media. Intricate living systems, species that took millions of years to evolve, are being incinerated in moments, then replaced with monocultures. Giant plumes of carbon tip us further into climate breakdown. And we’re not even talking about it.

Related: World losing area of forest the size of the UK each year, report finds

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Naomi Klein: ‘We are seeing the beginnings of the era of climate barbarism’

The No Logo author talks about solutions to the climate crisis, Greta Thunberg, birth strikes and how she finds hope

• Read an extract from her new book, On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal here

Why are you publishing this book now?
I still feel that the way that we talk about climate change is too compartmentalised, too siloed from the other crises we face. A really strong theme running through the book is the links between it and the crisis of rising white supremacy, the various forms of nationalism and the fact that so many people are being forced from their homelands, and the war that is waged on our attention spans. These are intersecting and interconnecting crises and so the solutions have to be as well.

The book collects essays from the last decade, have you changed your mind about anything?
When I look back, I don’t think I placed enough emphasis on the challenge climate change poses to the left. It’s more obvious the way the climate crisis challenges a rightwing dominant worldview, and the cult of serious centrism that never wants to do anything big, that’s always looking to split the difference. But this is also a challenge to a left worldview that is essentially only interested in redistributing the spoils of extractivism [the process of extracting natural resources from the earth] and not reckoning with the limits of endless consumption.

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Bury bodies along UK’s motorways to ease burial crisis, expert suggests

New approaches to disposing of the dead needed as graveyards and crematoria are almost full

From burials in pyramids to scattering ashes and even plastination, there has been no shortage of ideas about how to deal with human corpses.

But with graveyards and crematoria almost full in Britain, the conundrum of what to do with the dead has resurfaced with new urgency. Now a leading public health expert has suggested the sides of motorways, cycle paths and even brownfield or former industrial sites could be transformed to house the dead.

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