Category Archives: Environment

Uganda’s ‘locust commander’ leads the battle against a new enemy

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The army has been called in to eliminate the insects swarming across Africa, but their mission is dangerous and unending

  • Photographs by Edward Echwalu for the Guardian

Sitting at a plastic table in the garden of Timisha hotel in Soroti, eastern Uganda, Major General Samuel Kavuma takes a drag of his cigarette and looks down at his phone, which has barely stopped ringing for the past hour.

A military figure for nearly 40 years, Kavuma fought the Lord’s Resistance Army insurgent group. Now, he’s become the “locust commander”, the man leading the fight against the country’s worst locust outbreak in decades.

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Malcolm Turnbull warns of ‘catastrophic’ future without net zero emissions goal – politics live

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The former prime minister has stepped into the climate debate, with a stark warning to moderate Liberals to act. All the day’s events, live

Greg Hunt will be giving the next coronavirus update at 1.10pm

Meanwhile, the lights keep flickering in Parliament House, which can only mean that my moods have begun to physically manifest.

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UK must act to stamp out ‘curse’ of plastic sachets, say campaigners

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Calls for sachets to be included in UK and European legislation banning other single-use items

The government must act urgently to stamp out the “curse” of single-use plastic sachets, billions of which are helping to fuel the global plastics crisis, campaigners are warning.

A coalition of more than 50 business leaders, politicians and campaigners is demanding that the plastic sachets – used for everything from ketchup to shampoo – be included in European and UK legislation outlawing other “throwaway” items such as plastic straws and cotton buds.

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Greta Thunberg and Malala Yousafzai meet at Oxford University

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Swedish climate activist visits Yousafzai’s college while in UK for Bristol youth protest

The teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg has met Malala Yousafzai at the University of Oxford where the Nobel peace prize winner is a student.

Yousafzai, 22, posted a photo on Instagram of herself and Thunberg sitting on a bench with their arms around each other on Tuesday, with the caption: “Thank you, @gretathunberg” and a heart emoji.

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Barnier pours scorn on Johnson’s spokesman ahead of trade talks

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EU negotiator signals future relationship negotiations are on course for acrimonious start

Negotiations over Britain’s future relationship with the EU appear on course for an acrimonious start after Michel Barnier poured scorn on Boris Johnson’s spokesman and suggested the new Northern Ireland secretary did not understand the withdrawal agreement.

Barnier said he expected the talks, starting on Monday, to be “very difficult” but pronounced Brussels as “ready” following the official sign-off by EU ministers of their instructions for their chief negotiator.

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Against the grain: why millet is making a comeback in rural India

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Nagaland farmers are bringing back the ancient crop – said to have near-miraculous powers – as a less water-intensive alternative to rice

  • Photographs courtesy of NEN Nagaland

Whülü Thurr is a staunch believer in ancient farming traditions. “There is an old adage,” she says, “which goes ‘even a single stalk of millet can revive a dying man’.”

The 65-year-old farmer, from New Phor village in Nagaland state, north-east India, is a devotee of the ancient grain millet, and is well versed in its nutritional benefit. She is one of the few farmers here who has stayed with the traditional crop over the decades. Many other farmers in Nagaland, the majority of whom are women, have stopped growing it due to a lack of demand.

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Coronavirus closures reveal vast scale of China’s secretive wildlife farm industry

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Peacocks, porcupines and pangolins among species bred on 20,000 farms closed in wake of virus

Nearly 20,000 wildlife farmsraising species including peacocks, civet cats, porcupines, ostriches, wild geese and boar have been shut down across China in the wake of the coronavirus, in a move that has exposed the hitherto unknown size of the industry.

Until a few weeks ago wildlife farming was still being promoted by government agencies as an easy way for rural Chinese people to get rich.

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Newly waterproofed Arctic seed vault hits 1m samples

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Rapid climate change forced urgent upgrade of ‘failsafe’ doomsday storage facility

The Arctic global seed vault has reached the milestone of having 1m varieties stored in its deep freeze. The new deposits are being made after unexpected flooding of its entrance tunnel in 2017 prompted an upgrade.

Seeds from 60,000 crop varieties from across the world are being placed in the vault to back up those held in other seed banks.

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Canada: police clear rail blockade by Indigenous anti-pipeline activists

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Several members of the Tyendinaga Mohawk nation arrested in growing political crisis for Justin Trudeau

Police in Canada have removed Indigenous activists from a railway line in Ontario, where a two-week protest against a contentious natural gas pipeline has blocked train traffic and fueled a growing political crisis for prime minister Justin Trudeau.

The Wet’suwet’en nation have lived on their territories in what is now British Columbia for thousands of years. They have never signed treaties or sold their land to Canada. 

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Coalition reignites climate war over Labor’s emissions policy – politics live

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Government MPs have lashed out at Labor over its emissions target, with arguments in parliament’s corridors. All the days events, live

Parliament starts at 10am.

Tellingly, Joel Fitzgibbon is on board with Labor’s plan. Here he is writing for his local paper, the Newcastle Herald over the weekend:

The aspiration of carbon neutrality by 2050 (zero net emissions) offers a conservative and low-risk path to satisfying the commitment Malcolm Turnbull made in Paris on our behalf back in 2015.

First, it provides plenty of time to think and act, including the time needed to embrace existing and future technologies.

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UK weather: flooded communities warned of more heavy rain

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75mph winds expected to bring more torrential downpours to one of wettest Februarys ever

A storm is expected to bring further bands of torrential rain to flood-hit communities as it sweeps across Britain.

Forecasters have issued a yellow weather warning as the 75mph storm brings a fresh deluge of rain, up to 50mm (2in) in some places.

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What’s the catch? British fishermen’s hopes and fears for Brexit deal

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Fishing was a powerful factor in the case for leaving the EU. On the eve of crucial trade talks, the Observer finds optimism tempered by caution on the quays of Devon and Cornwall

Neil Watson was eight or nine when his dad took him out to sea for the first time. Soon he was earning his first pocket money by washing fish boxes on the quay at Brixham in south Devon. Three years after he started crewing, he got his skipper’s ticket and eventually he bought his own boat. For 30 years, he regularly spent seven days at sea followed by one night off, only stopping when his boat sank two years ago.

“I fished through good times and bad times. Fishing’s like riding a wave – one minute you’re up the top, and the next you’re down in the trough,” he said. Now Watson works at Brixham’s fish market, one of the largest in England, where £40m of fish was sold last year across the UK and Europe. A fisherman’s life is brutal, he said, but he badly misses the camaraderie.

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Greta Thunberg’s mother reveals teenager’s troubled childhood

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Swedish opera singer Malena Ernman gives emotional account of daughter’s battles with autism and an eating disorder

Greta Thunberg’s extraordinary transformation from a near-mute 11-year-old into the world’s most powerful voice on the climate crisis is revealed today by her mother.

Related: Malena Ernman: ‘Greta was the child, we were the emperor. And we were all naked’

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California street shut down after 40,000 bees swarm from hotel

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Several people hospitalized in Pasadena after Africanized bees emerge from hotel’s eaves: ‘Something set them off’

A swarm of as many as 40,000 Africanized bees sent several people to hospital and closed a street in California, after swarming from the eaves of a Howard Johnson Inn.

Related: Ursus urbinus: 'elderly' 400lb bear spotted roaming Los Angeles suburb

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Minamata review – Johnny Depp attempts redemption in heartfelt look at disaster that struck Japanese town

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Depp plays real-life US photojournalist W Eugene Smith who travels to cover the story of mercury poisoning that caused horrendous disfigurements

Minamata is not a masterpiece and there are one or two cliches here about western saviours and boozy, difficult, passionate journalists who occupy the perennial Venn diagram overlap between integrity and alcoholism. This movie’s producer-star Johnny Depp has form on this score, with his starstruck impersonation of Hunter Thompson. And once again, he has chosen a role in which he wears a hat indoors. But Minamata is a forthright, heartfelt movie, an old-fashioned “issue picture” with a worthwhile story to tell about how communities can stand up to overweening corporations and how journalists dedicated to truthful news can help them.

Depp plays real-life US photojournalist W Eugene Smith whose glory days were in the second world war and the decades following, working for Life magazine in that now-forgotten era when analogue cameras were incapable of lying and magazines with compelling photos could command newsstand sales.

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JP Morgan economists warn climate crisis is threat to human race

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Leaked report for world’s major fossil fuel financier says Earth is on unsustainable trajectory

The world’s largest financier of fossil fuels has warned clients that the climate crisis threatens the survival of humanity and that the planet is on an unsustainable trajectory, according to a leaked document.

The JP Morgan report on the economic risks of human-caused global heating said climate policy had to change or else the world faced irreversible consequences.

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Paris launches emergency bed bugs hotline

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New campaign includes advice on how to prevent and treat an infestation, and a number to call for expert help

The French government launched a campaign Thursday, complete with an emergency number, to combat an influx of unwelcome visitors that have left Parisians in despair: bedbugs that have settled in homes and hotels to feed, uninvited, on human blood.

After disappearing from France in the 1950s, the insects have made a resurgence, according to the ministry of housing, which cited international travel and growing resistance to insecticide as the main causes.

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Canadian police had ‘no authority’ to search pipeline activists, says watchdog

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Letter offers scathing criticism of police’s tactics against Wet’suwet’en people amid growing protest over gas pipeline

Canadian federal police had “no legal authority” to make ID checks and searches on activists seeking to block a pipeline project on Indigenous territory, according to newly released correspondence from the force’s oversight body.

The nine-page letter written by Michelaine Lahaie, chair of the Civilian Review and Complaints Commission for the RCMP, offers scathing criticism of the police’s continued use of tactics against Indigenous people which she had previously warned against.

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African killifish may hold key to stopping ageing in humans

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Turquoise killifish is able to suspend its development for longer than its average lifespan

The curious ability of the African turquoise killifish to press pause on its development could have intriguing implications for human ageing, say researchers.

Certain creatures, including the killifish, can put themselves into suspended animation as an embryo – a trait known as diapause. The phenomenon is thought to have evolved in response to pressures such as seasonal changes in the environment – for example ponds drying up – or sudden challenges that pose a risk to the creatures. In other words, diapause allows the animal to put its development or birth on ice until conditions improve.

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