Category Archives: Climate crisis

‘Another hellish day’: South America sizzles in record summer temperatures

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Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil and Paraguay are reeling from a historic heatwave with temperatures as high as 113F

Cities and towns across southern South America have been setting record high temperatures as the region swelters during a historic heatwave.

“Practically all of Argentina and also neighboring countries such as Uruguay, southern Brazil and Paraguay are experiencing the hottest days in history,” said Cindy Fernández, meteorologist at the official National Meteorological Service.

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World’s poorest bear brunt of climate crisis: 10 underreported emergencies

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Care International report highlights ‘deep injustice’ neglected by world’s media, as extreme weather along with Covid wipes out decades of progress

From Afghanistan to Ethiopia, about 235 million people worldwide needed assistance in 2021. But while some crises received global attention, others are lesser known.

Humanitarian organisation Care International has published its annual report of the 10 countries that had the least attention in online articles in five languages around the world in 2021, despite each having at least 1 million people affected by conflict or climate disasters.

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‘They saw bigger things’: Richard Leakey, Edward O Wilson and Thomas Lovejoy remembered

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Friends and colleagues pay tribute after the recent deaths of these groundbreaking naturalists, who shifted our understanding of the world and our future

Over Christmas and the new year, three of the world’s leading naturalists died. Thomas Lovejoy, a conservation biologist credited with popularising the term “biodiversity” and a passionate defender of the Amazon, died on 25 December. A day later, Edward O Wilson, known to many as the “modern-day Darwin”, died in Burlington, Massachusetts. On 2 January, Richard Leakey, a world-renowned Kenyan conservationist who helped establish Africa as the birthplace of humankind, died at his home in Nairobi.

From presidents to undergraduate students, thousands have paid tribute to the three men, whose achievements range from developing theories on forest and island ecosystems to reforming the Kenyan civil service and devising proposals to protect half the planet for nature. Alongside grand accomplishments, which were sometimes controversial, their passing has been a chance to reflect on the small and the mundane: fleeting interactions that inspired careers, kind words that propelled research projects, and generosity of spirit that has helped amplify the voices of those that practise and produce science.

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‘More people is the last thing this planet needs’: the men getting vasectomies to save the world

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With the climate crisis becoming ever more urgent, a growing number of young, childless men are taking the drastic decision of being sterilised for environmental reasons

When Lloyd Williamson lay on his back in a GP’s clinic late last November, it was for the surgical culmination of years of soul searching. Williamson, who is 30 and from Essex, remembers wanting a family as a child, but something changed in his early 20s. “I thought: you know what? I don’t want to bring a life into this world, because it’s pretty shitty as it is and it’s only going to get worse,” he says, two weeks after his vasectomy.

Williamson was largely motivated to sterilise himself by the climate crisis. Given the link between fossil-fuelled economic growth and population growth, he believes that having fewer children is one thing individuals can do to help. “We can’t offset our carbon problem on to the next generation, because it’s not fair on them,” he says.

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2021 was New Zealand’s hottest year on record

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Experts say we can expect more of the same, with 2021 beating all records since 1909

Last year was New Zealand’s hottest year on record, according to the country’s National Institute of Water and Aeronautic Research (NIWA), and seven of the past nine years are among New Zealand’s warmest ever. The country’s steadily rising temperature brings increased risk of major floods, bushfires and storms.

According to NIWA, New Zealand’s average temperature in 2021 was 13.56 degrees Celsius. It’s the highest average NIWA has recorded since it began its seven-station annual temperature series in 1909, and breaks the previous record set in 2016 by 0.11 degrees.

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Brexit decision left UK firms paying 10% more than EU rivals for emissions

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Government refusal to link carbon market to EU’s has led to higher cost for British businesses

British businesses are paying substantially more to produce carbon dioxide than their EU rivals because of the government’s refusal to link the UK carbon market to the bigger European market after Brexit.

The difference is putting UK industry at a significant competitive disadvantage to European rivals, at a time of soaring energy prices, but does not result in any additional benefit to the environment.

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Don’t Look Up: four climate experts on the polarising disaster film

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Critics haven’t been kind to Adam McKay’s eco-satire, but many climate experts are lauding it. Here four give their views

Rarely has a film been as divisive as Adam McKay’s climate satire Don’t Look Up. Although it has been watched by millions, and is already Netflix’s third most watched film ever, the response from critics was largely negative. Many found its story of scientists who discover an asteroid heading for Earth a clumsy allegory for the climate crisis, while others just found it boring. But many in the climate movement have praised the film, and audience reviews have been generally positive.

We asked four climate experts to give their views on the film. Warning: spoilers ahead.

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Filipinos count cost of climate crisis as typhoons get ever more destructive

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The Philippines adds little to global emissions but faces some of its worst effects in extreme weather. Climate justice is needed

A few days before Christmas, Super-typhoon Rai – known locally as Odette – ravaged the Philippines. The morning after the onslaught, on my way back to Iloilo City from San Jose, Antique, I could see the ocean still boiling; houses blown away and great trees knocked down, making roads impassable. The sights were terrifying.

Lost lives continue to climb two weeks on. Vast numbers of buildings were destroyed – from houses to schools; food crops lost to flooding. At first, I did not know what to feel – anger, helplessness? Later, I knew what I wanted: climate justice.

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Apocalypse nowadays: the new wave of films about the end of the world

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Armageddon once delivered thrills and megabucks spectacle. Now it’s the unnerving backdrop for satires and family drama

Which films kept you entertained over the holidays? Was it Silent Night, the sweary festive Britcom starring Keira Knightley? The courtroom drama Naked Singularity, with John Boyega as a crusading lawyer? Or did you watch Leonardo DiCaprio as a dorky astronomer in Don’t Look Up, a slapstick political satire? Whichever it was, I hope you poured yourself a large one, because none of those films are quite as light as they seem. All take place in the shadow of imminent Armageddon.

That’s right: the end of the world is nigh, and it’s no longer the preserve of megabudget disaster movies or bleak survivalist thrillers. These days the looming obliteration of our species can just as readily form the backdrop to some governmental mockery or a boozy country-house drama.

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Colorado wildfire: up to 1,000 buildings destroyed as Biden declares disaster

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At least seven reported injured while cause of the blaze remains under investigation

Up to 1,000 buildings may have been destroyed in the record wildfire that swept through a Colorado area abutting the Rocky Mountains, as Joe Biden declared the situation a disaster and experts warned that the climate crisis and suburban expansion contributed to the devastation.

After declaring that it was a miracle, based on the latest information, that no one was killed in the fire that roared with little notice through Boulder county on Thursday, officials said that more than 500 and as many as 1,000 homes and businesses may have been razed.

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Sands of time are slipping away for England’s crumbling coasts amid climate crisis

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Along the eastern shore, seaside attractions are being demolished and millions of homes are at risk as rising sea levels speed erosion

From a distance, the beach at Winterton-on-sea in Norfolk looks like the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan, with hundreds of grey bodies lying motionless across the sand. On closer inspection, it becomes clear they are not fallen soldiers but a huge colony of seals taken to the land for pupping season.

It’s an amazing annual sight that draws tourists and nature-lovers from across the country, but another process is taking place that is pushing people back – the growing threat of coastal erosion. Just along from where the armies of grey seals lay with their white pups, there used to stand the Dunes Cafe, a much-loved beach facility with a large and loyal clientele.

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‘We’ll get it done. Come hell, high water or Covid’: Can 2022 be a super year for nature?

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Biodiversity talks in Kunming are likely to be delayed again, but the world urgently needs a Paris-style agreement for nature

It was supposed to be a “super year for nature”: 2020 was going to be “a major opportunity to bring nature back from the brink”. But then the coronavirus pandemic set in and long-held plans to tackle the environmental crisis, kickstarted at Davos in January, where the financial elite underscored the risks of global heating and biodiversity loss to human civilisation, never happened. The biggest biodiversity summit in a decade, Cop15 in Kunming, China, where world leaders were expected to strike a deal to halt and reverse the destruction of ecosystems by reaching a Paris-style agreement for nature was postponed until 2021. The Cop26 climate summit was also postponed for a year.

As we enter 2022, there has still not been a super year for nature. Substantive negotiations for the biodiversity Cop15 meeting in China, the little sister to the climate convention, are likely to be delayed a fourth time as a result of the Omicron variant. Preparatory talks planned for January 2022 in Geneva have been pushed back – again – until March in a process that is feeling increasingly cursed, despite the best efforts of organisers.

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‘It parodies our inaction’: Don’t Look Up, an allegory of the climate crisis, lauded by activists

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Adam McKay’s end-of-the-world film is a ‘powerful’ depiction of society’s response to scientific warnings, campaigners say

Don’t Look Up, the latest celluloid offering from the writer-director Adam McKay, has become Netflix’s top film globally despite dividing critics and viewers.

The film, a satire in which two scientists played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence attempt to warn an indifferent world about a comet that threatens to destroy the planet, is an intentional allegory of the climate crisis.

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‘Our house was gone, it was sea and sand’: life on the vanishing coasts – in pictures

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Coastal communities in Mexico, Bangladesh and Somalia are struggling to adapt to the climate crisis. Many people have already lost livelihoods and homes to rising waters

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Desmond Tutu’s devotion to the planet and to justice for all | Letters

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Readers commemorate the late South African archbishop, and the causes of peace, equality and environmentalism that he championed

Your informative obituary of Archbishop Desmond Tutu (26 December) missed an important dimension – his warnings on the need to save the planet. In March 2004, he delivered a lecture entitled God’s Word and World Politics at the United Nations as part of Kofi Annan’s public lecture series on cutting-edge topics in the humanities, natural sciences, social sciences and the arts.

The archbishop said: “Ecological concerns are a deeply religious, spiritual matter. To pollute the environment, to be responsible for a disastrous warming, is not just wrong and should be a criminal offence; it is certainly morally wrong. It is a sin.”
Prof Abiodun Williams
Tufts University

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Engineering the future: meet the Africa prize shortlist innovators

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Turning invasive plants into a force for good and powering healthcare with solar – here are three of the 2022 nominees

From a solar-powered crib that treats jaundiced babies to fibre made from water hyacinth that absorbs oil spills, innovators from nine African countries have been shortlisted for the Royal Academy of Engineering’s 2022 Africa prize.

This year half of the shortlist of 16 are women, and for the first time it includes Togolese and Congolese inventors. The entrepreneurs will undergo eight months of business training and mentoring before a winner is chosen, who will receive £25,000, and three runners-up, who win £10,000 each. All the projects are sustainable solutions to issues such as access to healthcare, farming resilience, reducing waste, and energy efficiency. The Guardian spoke to three of the shortlisted candidates.

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Charity appeal in Guatemala, where the fight for land and water rights is a battle for survival

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This year’s appeal has already raised over £500,000. We report on an organisation supporting Indigenous communities against wealthy vested interests

José Méndez walked up the mountain behind his rural Ch’orti’ Mayan community of Corozal in eastern Guatemala. He pointed towards an abandoned home of the plantation owner who used to run this hillside. “Right outside that house they killed our three compañeros, the exact same day the county government recognised us as an Indigenous community with rights to the land.”

Further up the mountain, in the mist of corn and coffee fields, Méndez shows off a large water reservoir that irrigates the community’s crops as well as small household gardens of nutritious and medicinal herbs. “This is what we sacrificed for. To recover our land and our water to have a chance to survive here.”

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A seed for all seasons: can ancient methods future-proof food security in the Andes?

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In Peru’s remote villages, farmers have used diverse crops to survive unpredictable weather for millennia. Now they are using this knowledge to adapt to the climate crisis

In a pastoral scene that has changed little in centuries, farmers wearing red woollen ponchos gather on a December morning in a semicircle to drink chicha, made from fermented maize, and mutter an invocation to Pachamama – Mother Earth – before sprinkling the dregs on the Andean soil.

Singing in Quechua, the language spread along the vast length of the Andes by the Incas, they hill the soil around plants in the numerous small plots terraced into a patchwork up and down the Peruvian mountainside.

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Guardian and Observer climate justice charity appeal raises £500,000

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Nearly 6,000 readers have donated towards causes that will help communities affected by the climate crisis

An incredible £500,000 has been raised for climate justice good causes by generous Guardian and Observer readers, in the space of just over a fortnight since the launch of the 2021 charity appeal.

Nearly 6,000 people have so far donated to the appeal, which will be shared between four charities: Practical Action, Global Greengrants Fund UK, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, and Environmental Justice Foundation.

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End trade barriers to help tackle climate crisis, says WTO chief

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Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala calls for changes to ensure developing nations are resilient to affects of extreme weather

Removing trade barriers around the world would help to tackle the climate crisis, enable a “just transition” away from fossil fuels and make developing countries more resilient to the impacts of global heating, the head of the World Trade Organization has said.

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who took over as director general of the global watchdog last March, said: “Trade is part of the solution, not part of the problem … We need a global effort to climate-proof the supply chains and infrastructure of the most vulnerable economies or risk undoing hard-won economic progress and development.”

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