Category Archives: Environment

‘Lost generation’: education in quarter of countries at risk of collapse, study warns

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Covid, climate breakdown, poverty and war threaten return to school after pandemic kept 1.5bn children out of classes

The education of hundreds of millions of children is hanging by a thread as a result of an unprecedented intensity of threats including Covid 19 and the climate crisis, a report warned today.

As classrooms across much of the world prepare to reopen after the summer holidays, a quarter of countries – most of them in sub-Saharan Africa – have school systems that are at extreme or high risk of collapse, according to Save the Children.

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Health journals make joint call for urgent action on climate crisis

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Editorial in publications worldwide urges leaders to take measures to stop ‘greatest threat to public health’

More than 200 health journals worldwide are publishing an editorial calling on leaders to take emergency action on climate change and to protect health.

The British Medical Journal said it is the first time so many publications have come together to make the same statement, reflecting the severity of the situation.

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The six problems aviation must fix to hit net zero

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With passenger numbers growing and time to slash emissions dwindling fast, the industry must tackle urgent stumbling blocks on fuel, frequent flyers and more

Aviation tanked in 2020. The number of people taking flights fell by three quarters compared with 2019 levels and as a result there was a significant drop in greenhouse gas emissions from aviation. But as countries open up and people begin to fly again, aviation is expected to see a slow climb back to previous levels. The industry anticipates a return to 2019 passenger numbers globally by 2023 and to be back on track with previous growth projections within a couple of decades.

All this is bad news for the planet. CO2 emissions from the industry are likely to triple by 2050. But if the world is to limit global heating to 1.5C, it needs to have hit net zero CO2 emissions by this time. Aviation is a complicated sector to decarbonise. It has some prickly ingredients: difficult technological solutions, hidden extra climate effects, an association with personal freedoms and a disproportionately wealthy and powerful customer base. Here are just a few of the big hurdles the sector will need to overcome if it is ever to be carbon neutral.

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Hurricane Ida: drone footage shows damage in Grand Isle, Louisiana – video

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Drone footage has captured the extent of destruction caused by Hurricane Ida in the barrier island town of Grand Isle in Louisiana. The US death toll from Ida has risen towards 60. In Louisiana, the confirmed storm-related death toll is nine. 

It is nearly a week since one of the most powerful storms ever to hit the US mainland made landfall in Louisiana. The White House has said the president, Joe Biden, will survey storm damage in New York City and Manville, New Jersey

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Louisiana Shell refinery left spewing chemicals after Hurricane Ida

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Power outages from the storm have left air quality tracking systems out of commission, making public health concern hard to gauge

Behind a playground littered with downed tree branches, Shell’s refinery in Norco, Louisiana spewed black smoke from its stacks. The smell of rotten eggs, the signature scent of sulphur emissions, lingered in the air. In an effort to burn off toxic chemicals before and after Hurricane Ida, many industrial facilities sent the gases through smoke stacks topped with flares.

But the hurricane blew out some of those flares like candles, allowing harmful pollution into the air.

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‘People try to stop us speaking up’: Angelina Jolie’s lessons from young activists

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The actor’s latest project is a book to teach teenagers their rights. Here, she sits down with four young people to hear what they’re fighting for

• Read an interview with Jolie here

Angelina Jolie How do you feel the older generation are handling things?

Christina Adane, 17, a British anti-poverty campaigner, originally from Ethiopia If you’d asked me a year ago, I’d have said they had failed us and left us with a bunch of problems. I still feel that way at times, but I think cross-generational communication is crucial when fighting issues like racial and climate justice. It’s easy to fall into the mentality of us v them, youth v old people in power. But loads of older people want to help us. So it’s about connecting with decision-makers and ensuring they are listening, so they can represent us where we are not represented – in government, at meetings at the top of companies. We need to work with the older generation.

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Thousands of kilometres from anywhere lies Point Nemo, a watery grave where space stations go to die

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The space cemetery, named for the fictional captain in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, is where the International Space Station is likely to end up

At the furthest point from any landmass on earth, and 4km under the sea, lies the space cemetery.

When their outer space journeys come to an end, old satellites, rocket parts and space stations are sent to this desolate spot in the Pacific Ocean to rest on the dark seabed forever.

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‘Climate crisis is here’ says Biden in week of storms, floods and wildfires

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The president warned that ‘we need to act now’ as trail of destruction blighted west, south and north-east

The widespread destruction caused by extreme weather coast to coast, with Hurricane Ida spreading devastation from Louisiana to New York while record wildfires scorch California, prompted Joe Biden to level with America this week, saying it was “yet another reminder that … the climate crisis is here”.

“We need to be much better prepared. We need to act,” Biden said in a speech on Thursday at the White House.

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More than 40 killed in US north-east amid sudden heavy rains and flooding

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Deaths and damage spanned huge areas in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Maryland

The death toll from floods and tornadoes in the US north-east rose past 40 on Thursday, as authorities continued to digest the full impact of the remnants of Hurricane Ida.

Ida struck Louisiana last Sunday, knocking out power to the city of New Orleans and causing deaths in that state and Mississippi.

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An elephant seal: the nose does something no nose should do | Helen Sullivan

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It shudders

The writer Jenny Diski is on her way to Antarctica. At Grytviken, an abandoned whaling station on South Georgia, she spots a “grey, jellied mountain”.

“Elephant seal is one of those euphemistic names humans give creatures who remind them of what they don’t want to be reminded of,” she writes. But her fellow travellers want to be reminded: they take pictures. Maybe the elephant seal will get a spot on someone’s wall. It will be the first time in history that a person has chosen to decorate using that face.

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Photos from ‘beyond the grave’: camera discovery reveals climber’s last images before fatal avalanche

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Two decades ago Richard Stiles escaped an avalanche in New Zealand, but friend Steve Robinson wasn’t so lucky. Now the mountain has given up some of its secrets

When mountaineer Chris Hill found a backpack with an old camera in it on the Hooker Glacier – an 11km chunk of ice on New Zealand’s South Island – he was intrigued and decided to get the film inside developed.

Hooker is at the base of Aoraki (Mount Cook), in a national park of icy peaks where hundreds of climbers have died, dozens of them never to be found.

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Opec member urges oil producers to focus more on renewable energy

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Iraqi minister and International Energy Agency chief urge oil producing countries to move away from fossil fuel dependency

The finance minister of Iraq, one of the founding members of the global oil cartel Opec, has made an unprecedented call to fellow oil producers to move away from fossil fuel dependency and into renewable energy, ahead of a key Opec meeting.

Ali Allawi, the deputy prime minister and finance minister of Iraq, has written in the Guardian to urge oil producers to pursue “an economic renewal focused on environmentally sound policies and technologies” that would include solar power and potentially nuclear reactors, and reduce their dependency on fossil fuel exports.

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Without help for oil-producing countries, net zero by 2050 is a distant dream | Ali Allawi and Fatih Birol

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To meet climate targets and avoid economic collapse, countries such as Iraq need international support in the transition to clean energy

• Ali Allawi is deputy prime minister and finance minister of Iraq. Fatih Birol is executive director of the International Energy Agency

In the Middle East and north Africa, global warming is not a distant threat, but an already painful reality. Rising temperatures are exacerbating water shortages. In Iraq, temperatures are estimated to be rising as much as seven times faster than the global average. Countries in this region are not only uniquely affected by global temperature rises: their centrality to global oil and gas markets makes their economies particularly vulnerable to the transition away from fossil fuels and towards cleaner energy sources. It’s essential the voices of Iraq and similar countries are heard at the Cop26 climate change conference in Glasgow this November.

To stand a chance of limiting the worst effects of climate change, the world needs to fundamentally change the way it produces and consumes energy, burning less coal, oil and natural gas. The International Energy Agency’s recent global roadmap to net zero by 2050 shows the world’s demand for oil will need to decline from more than 90m barrels a day to less than 25m by 2050. This would result in a 75% plunge in net revenues for oil-producing economies, many of which are dominated by a public sector that relies on oil exports and the revenues they produce.

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After slavery, oystering offered a lifeline. Now sewage spills threaten to end it all

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Black people are disproportionately suffering under the weight of a sewage crisis in Virginia, a symptom of decades of neglect by local governments

On a cold winter morning early this year, Mary Hill was helping her 101-year-old mother get ready for the day when she received a distressing email alert. Tens of millions of gallons of raw sewage were heading for her prized family oyster beds.

Yet Hill was not surprised that the wastewater pipe built in the 1940s had succumbed to corrosion. “Here we go again,” she thought grimly.

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‘I’ve never said we should plant a trillion trees’: what ecopreneur Thomas Crowther did next

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The ecologist admits ‘messing up’ in the past, but says his Restor project will be ‘a Google Maps of biodiversity’, showing the impact of restoration – from a forest to your own back garden

Listen to our podcast: Can we really solve the climate crisis by planting trees? – part one

Thomas Crowther understands more than most the danger of simple, optimistic messages about combating the climate crisis. In July 2019, the British ecologist co-authored a study estimating that Earth had space for an extra trillion trees on land not used for agriculture or settlement. Its implications were intoxicatingly hopeful. By restoring forests in an area roughly the size of China, the press release accompanying the paper suggested two-thirds of all emissions from human activities still present in the atmosphere could be removed.

The study, led by Jean-François Bastin, a postdoctoral researcher at Crowther’s lab in ETH Zürich, Switzerland, was the second most featured climate paper in the media in 2019, according to one analysis. It inspired the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) One Trillion Trees Initiative, launched last year after Salesforce billionaire Marc Benioff read the paper on the recommendation of Al Gore, the former US vice-president. The Time magazine owner told everyone he could about the research: chief executives, friends and world leaders, even convincing climate sceptic Donald Trump to back the WEF initiative with a multibillion tree commitment.

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Make historic campaign to ban leaded petrol ‘blueprint to phase out coal’, says UN

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Hailing end to toxic fuel additive, Guterres says same commitment is needed to eliminate other pollutants

The UN secretary general and environmentalists have welcomed a declaration by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) on the end of leaded petrol in the face of years of “underhand” opposition.

As Algeria became the last country to stop selling the toxic fuel last month, the two-decade campaign to ban it has been called a “milestone for multilateralism”.

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Cyprus prepares for Mediterranean oil spill from Syrian power plant

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Officials in Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus say 20,000 tonnes of oil is approaching its coastline

Turkish Cypriot authorities have taken emergency action to stop an oil slick blamed on a faulty power plant in Syria from wreaking environmental havoc along some of the island’s finest unspoilt coastline.

Officials in the war-partitioned country’s breakaway north erected what local media described as a 400 metre barrier off the Karpas peninsula to prevent the slick reaching its pristine shores.

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Wild cockatoos observed using tools as ‘cutlery’ to extract seeds from tropical fruit

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Goffin’s cockatoos on Indonesia’s Tanimbar Islands crafted three different types of tools from tree branches to obtain seeds from sea mangoes

Australian bird of the year 2021: nominate your favourite for the shortlist

Wild cockatoos have been observed using three types of tools as “cutlery” to extract seeds from tropical fruit.

Researchers made the discovery while studying Goffin’s cockatoos on the Tanimbar Islands, a remote archipelago in Indonesia.

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Concerns over plan to disinfect classrooms in Wales with ozone

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Machines to be used to clean up after Covid outbreaks part of £5.9m initiative to improve air quality

A £3.3m scheme to provide schools in Wales with machines that disinfect classrooms after a Covid outbreak has prompted calls for reassurance over their safety.

The Welsh education ministry said on Monday that all schools, universities and colleges in Wales would be supplied with ozone disinfecting machines for cleaning up Covid-hit classrooms.

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Leaded petrol era ‘officially over’ as Algeria ends pump sales

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UN announcement marks ‘huge milestone for global health and our environment’

The era of leaded petrol is officially over, the UN has announced, eliminating a major threat to human and planetary health.

UN experts have called the use of the fuel, which began in 1922, a “catastrophe for the environment and public health”. By the 1970s, nearly all petrol produced around the world contained lead. Now the last country to use it, Algeria, has finally stopped selling it in petrol stations.

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