Category Archives: Environment

Human composting could be the future of deathcare

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Washington becomes first US state to legalise practice as interest in green burials surges in UK

It is viewed as a fitting end for a banana skin or a handful of spent coffee grounds. But now people are being urged to consider human composting and other environmentally friendly “deathcare” options.

Speaking before a talk at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Seattle on Sunday, Lynne Carpenter-Boggs, a professor of soil science and sustainable agriculture at Washington State University, said: “Death certainly isn’t the biggest environmental impact we have in our life process. But we can still look for new alternatives.”

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French ski resort moves snow with helicopter in order to stay open

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Local council leaders said they were forced into ‘exceptional’ move to protect jobs

A French ski resort has angered ecologists by using a helicopter to move snow from higher up the mountains after exceptionally mild weather left its slopes bare.

Officials at Luchon-Superbagnères in the Pyrenees authorised the “exceptional” emergency operation overnight on Friday.

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‘We’re not giving up’: defiant Wet’suwet’en activists gain allies in pipeline fight

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Pressure on Justin Trudeau’s government grows even as some politicians decry ‘hard-left ideology’

As armed Canadian police officers advanced through snow towards their camp, the group of Indigenous women was absorbed in a drumming ceremony to honour the spirits of missing and murdered Indigenous women across the country.

Rows of red dresses hung from a fishing line slung across the road, and from pine and spruce trees in the surrounding forest – each one a memorial to the thousands of Indigenous women killed or disappeared in recent years.

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Earth just had hottest January since records began, data shows

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  • Average global temperature 2.5F above 20th-century average
  • Antarctic has begun February with several temperature spikes

Last month was the hottest January on record over the world’s land and ocean surfaces, with average temperatures exceeding anything in the 141 years of data held by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Related: Antarctic temperature rises above 20C for first time on record

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Bolsonaro attacks Pope Francis over pontiff’s plea to protect the Amazon

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  • Pope urged Catholics to ‘feel outrage’ over Amazon destruction
  • Bolsonaro: ‘What is Greenpeace? Nothing but rubbish’

Brazil’s far-right president Jair Bolsonarohas lashed out at Pope Francis after the pontiff pleaded for the protection of the Amazon rainforest, and attacked the environmental group Greenpeace as “rubbish”.

“Pope Francis said yesterday the Amazon is his, the world’s, everyone’s,” said Bolsonaro, who has often railed against international criticism of his environmental policies as an attack on Brazilian sovereignty.

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Car ‘splatometer’ tests reveal huge decline in number of insects

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Research shows abundance at sites in Europe has plunged by up to 80% in two decades

Two scientific studies of the number of insects splattered by cars have revealed a huge decline in abundance at European sites in two decades.

The research adds to growing evidence of what some scientists have called an “insect apocalypse”, which is threatening a collapse in the natural world that sustains humans and all life on Earth. A third study shows plummeting numbers of aquatic insects in streams.

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Living in the climate emergency: Australia’s new fire zone

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Areas of Australia have burnt during the recent bushfire season that used to be too wet to burn. In this first episode of The Frontline, a new series that shows how everyday Australians are already experiencing the climate crisis, we go inside the new fire zone

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Giant dams enclosing North Sea could protect millions from rising waters

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Dams between Scotland, Norway, France and England ‘a possible solution’ to problem

A Dutch government scientist has proposed building two mammoth dams to completely enclose the North Sea and protect an estimated 25 million Europeans from the consequences of rising sea levels as a result of global heating.

Sjoerd Groeskamp, an oceanographer at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, said a 475km dam between north Scotland and west Norway and another 160km one between west France and south-west England was “a possible solution”.

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When Lambs Become Lions review – on the trail of Kenya’s elephant killers

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This coolly even-handed documentary dips into the lives of an ivory poacher and a stressed-out wildlife ranger trying to obstruct the illegal trade

Jon Kasbe’s documentary When Lambs Become Lions has been much praised on the festival circuit, and it is cleverly and effectively made, seeking to grip you the way a thriller would. Yet I’m not sure that I was completely on board with this film, which appears to have smoothly carpentered its narrative in the edit. Is it almost too good to be true?

The film gives us a coolly even-handed study of some ivory hunters in Kenya – and also the rangers, the hunters of the hunters, who have to roam through the landscape, in their camouflage gear and assault rifles, on the lookout for those who are illegally killing elephants for their tusks.

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A humanitarian crisis looms in Africa unless we act fast to stop the desert locust

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The destructive migratory pest threatens catastrophe as it swarms through countries already plagued by food insecurity

A colleague at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) tells a terrifying story about the desert locust.

In 2005 she visited farmers in Niger as they prepared to harvest their crops. Just hours later, a swarm of locusts swept through the area and destroyed everything. One month later, truckloads of families were forced to leave their homes because they had nothing to eat.

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Counting the cost of Australia’s summer of dread

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Australia’s catastrophic bushfire season has taken 33 lives, destroyed thousands of homes, shrouded cities in smoke and devastated the country’s unique wildlife. Guardian Australia surveys the damage

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Alarm over collapse of chinstrap penguin numbers

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Global heating suspected to be behind sharp decline in populations across Antarctic islands

Colonies of chinstrap penguins have fallen by more than half across islands in Antarctica, prompting scientific concern that “something is broken” in the world’s wildest ecosystem.

After more than a month counting chicks in the South Shetland Islands, researchers suspect global heating is behind the sharp fall in numbers of the distinctive birds, which get their name from a black line that runs below the beak from cheek to cheek.

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I have witnessed the horrors of climate change in the Pacific. Australia, it is time for action | Jacynta Fuamatu

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Pacific Islanders have been experiencing climate-induced disasters for years, now they have reached Australia

Living in Australia as a Pacific Islander means every weekend there’s a social gathering to attend, whether it’s a birthday, wedding, fundraiser for someone’s medical treatment or a traditional rite of passage.

More recently, however, the community get-togethers to mobilise our people have been to push for stronger climate action and have a more sombre undertone.

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Fires and floods: maps of Europe predict scale of climate catastrophe

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Without urgent action, rising sea levels by end of century could leave cities under water

A series of detailed maps have laid bare the scale of possible forest fires, floods, droughts and deluges that Europe could face by the end of the century without urgent action to adapt to and confront global heating.

An average one-metre rise in sea levels by the end of the century – without any flood prevention action – would mean 90% of the surface of Hull would be under water, according to the European Environment Agency.

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Storm Ciara hammers UK with hurricane-force winds and floods

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Northern English towns inundated again as transport systems struggle to cope

Hurricane-force winds and flooding have caused severe disruption across much of Britain, including damage to hundreds of properties and the cancellation of trains, flights and ferries.

Storm Ciara brought heavy rain and winds of more than 90mph, knocking out power to homes in some areas. The upheaval is likely to last into the start of the working week and there is more bad weather to come.

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Activists try to occupy British Museum in protest against BP ties

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Environmental group puts pressure on museum to end its partnership with oil company

Dozens of activists have coated themselves in plaster and are trying to occupy the British Museum overnight in a bid to pressure the institution to cut ties with oil corporation BP.

About 60 protesters were taking part in the defiant act of impromptu sculpture making as the museum in London attempted to close its doors at 5pm on Saturday.

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Fear in Mexico as twin deaths expose threat to monarch butterflies and their defenders

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The deaths of two butterfly conservationists have drawn focus to a troubling tangle of disputes, resentments and violence

The annual migration of monarch butterflies from the US and Canada is one of the most resplendent sights in the natural world – a rippling orange-and-black wave containing millions of butterflies fluttering instinctively southward to escape the winter cold.

The spectacle when they reach their destination in central Mexico is perhaps even more astonishing. Patches of alpine forest turn from green to orange as the monarchs roost in the fir trees, the sheer weight of butterflies causing branches to sag to the point of snapping. Tens of thousands of the insects bounce haphazardly overhead, searching replenishment from nearby plants.

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Armed ecoguards funded by WWF ‘beat up Congo tribespeople’

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Exclusive: Inquiry into $21.4m conservation project reports ‘credible’ evidence of abuse

Armed ecoguards partly funded by the conservation group WWF to protect wildlife in the Republic of the Congo beat up and intimidated hundreds of Baka pygmies living deep in the rainforests, an investigation into a landmark global conservation project has heard.

A team of investigators sent to northern Congo by the UN Development Programme (UNDP) to assess allegations of human rights abuses gathered “credible” evidence from different sources that hunter-gatherer Baka tribespeople living close to a proposed national park had been subjected to violence and physical abuse from the guards over years, according to a leaked draft of the report.

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UK unprepared for COP 26 conference, warn climate leaders

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Former UN climate envoy joins list of experts frustrated at Britain’s lack of leadership

The UK is showing a “lack of coherence” in its leadership of vital UN climate crisis talks this year and giving the damaging impression that the talks are not a high priority, one of the world’s leading voices on the climate crisis has said.

Mary Robinson, a former UN climate envoy and Ireland’s first female president, also said the perception that major British politicians, including the ex-prime minister David Cameron and former foreign secretary William Hague, were unwilling to take on the role of leading the COP 26 summit was damaging.

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EU states clash over use of toxic mercury in light bulbs

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Lighting industry’s exemption from 2011 ban may jeopardise climate goals, says Sweden

A row over lamps is emerging as a first major test of the EU’s commitment to its much-vaunted European Green Deal and the bloc’s target of carbon neutrality by the middle of the century.

A debate over the continued use of mercury in fluorescent lighting has split the 27 member states with Germany’s industrial interests being pitted against the environmental concerns of Sweden, according to leaked correspondence.

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