The Guardian Climate Change

Inverbervie, on the north-east coast of Scotland, faces an existential threat, with storms carving away metres of shoreline. Can anything be done to save what is left?

A decade ago, on my friend’s birthday, we took a huge tent and stayed the night at our local campsite. We laughed as we put the tent up where the grass met the shingle beach, the sunshine glistening on the water, the sound of the waves scraping the stones. I remember a night of ghost stories, teenage gossip and chasing each other with seaweed.

But the land where we pitched our tent is no longer there. It’s somewhere in the North Sea.

Authorities cut short school term as weather bureau warns of severe heatwave conditions this week

Authorities in the Indian capital, have ordered schools to shut early for the summer holiday, after temperatures in Delhi hit 47.4C (117F).

City officials told schools to shut with “immediate effect” due to the blistering heat, according to a government order quoted by the Hindustan Times on Tuesday, cutting the term by a few days.

Experts call for conservation action as the features on Rapa Nui’s famous monoliths are eroded by fire and rain

The Ahu Tahai moai, on the east side of Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, is an impressive 4.5 metres high. Carved from a soft volcanic rock, the statue looks out solemnly over the island, with its back to the bay.

The Tahai (“where the sun sets”) and the island’s other thousand or so moai were erected roughly between 1100 and 1700 as a representation of Rapa Nui’s ancestors.

‘Critical slowing down’ of recovery raises concern over forest’s resilience to ecosystem collapse

More than a third of the Amazon rainforest is struggling to recover from drought, according to a new study that warns of a “critical slowing down” of this globally important ecosystem.

The signs of weakening resilience raise concerns that the world’s greatest tropical forest – and biggest terrestrial carbon sink – is degrading towards a point of no return.

• Read more from the DIY Climate Changers, a new series on everyday people’s creative solutions to the climate crisis

Jim Gregory, 59, loves to cycle. More than a decade before the work-from-home revolution, the Iowa business owner was grappling with a conundrum now faced by many: how to stay active while spending so much of his day at the computer.

Jim wondered if he could combine the joy of cycling with a desire to reduce his energy consumption. Thus was born the PedalPC, a machine built from a repurposed bicycle trailer that generates enough electricity to run his computer, printer, phone chargers and home wifi.

Sensing election-year traction, coalition of 20 environmental groups also demand entrenchment of pause in gas-export licences

Joe Biden’s administration is coming under renewed pressure to escalate its curbs on the US’s booming trade in fossil fuels by halting new deepwater oil-export facilities, as well as entrenching its pause in gas-export licences.

A coalition of 20 environmental groups, sensing election-year traction with Biden as he seeks a second term as US president, has written to officials demanding a freeze on deepwater oil-export facilities, similar to the move announced by the Biden administration earlier this year when it paused new licenses for liquified natural gas (or LNG) exports.

These spaces are crucial for our wellbeing, but cash-strapped councils are being forced to treat them as revenue earners

My local green space, Brockwell Park in Brixton and Herne Hill, south London, is an oasis of calm in the busy city. Friends catch up in the walled garden, where wisteria trails over pillars and roses and bluebells explode from the earth. In the community garden, local people work together to grow vegetables and run sessions to connect nature-deprived children to the land.

In the centre of the sometimes crushing metropolis, this park means everything to me – it keeps me sane, and it gives me hope. But this green lifeline is, every summer, taken away, as I await the arrival of the park’s music festival season with dread. As huge metal walls go up, dividing us from the green, and HGVs begin flattening the grass and soil, I feel a genuine sense of horror. A large part of the park is cut off for weeks, and our community’s heart is pulled out as people stream into events whose expensive tickets most people living round here could never afford. And the same is happening in shared green spaces all over the UK.

Rebecca Tamás is a writer of environmental nonfiction and a poet. Her most recent book is Strangers: Essays on the Human and Nonhuman

Jeff Bezos’s $10bn climate and biodiversity fund has garnered glittering prizes, but concerns have been voiced over the influence it can buy – and its interest in carbon offsets

Late last month, the coronation of Jeff Bezos and his partner Lauren Sánchez as environmental royalty was complete. At Conservation International’s glitzy annual gala in New York, with Harrison Ford, Jacinda Ardern and Shailene Woodley looking on, the couple were given the global visionary award for the financial contribution of the Bezos Earth Fund to the natural world.

“Jeff and Lauren are making history, not just with the sum of their investment in nature but also the speed of it,” said the Conservation International CEO, Dr M Sanjayan, whose organisation received a $20m grant from Bezos in 2021 for its work in the tropical Andes.

Exclusive: EPA chief executive says ‘foundational’ rule changes put climate impacts ‘front and centre' of planning process

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New coalmines, gas fields and other big sources of greenhouse gases in New South Wales will need to provide more rigorous plans to minimise pollution and reduce carbon emissions before they are approved, under new rules imposed on Monday.

Revised assessment requirements and guidelines from the Environment Protection Authority mark a “foundational” tightening of rules for firms planning new projects or modifying existing ones that emit at least 25,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent a year, said Tony Chappel, the NSW EPA chief executive.

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A state industrial strategy is needed to reduce carbon output, produce cleaner growth and redistribute jobs around the UK

Theresa May and Boris Johnson both argued for levelling up and for a state-supported green transition undergirded by an industrial strategy. Neither delivered and their successor, Rishi Sunak, has repudiated their legacy as prime minister. He looks to the City to deliver growth, with banks determining the rate of investment to meet the challenge of the climate emergency. This is a recipe for failure. The Climate Change Committee (CCC), the government’s independent advisers on cutting carbon emissions, warned last year of “worryingly slow” progress to meet net zero targets. The government is not engaging on what it will take to decarbonise.

Weaning the country off fossil fuels and on to green energy is a complex transition that should be a job for the state, not the free market. Yet Britain is bottom of the league for state spending on renewables in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. In the offshore industry alone 30,000 workers could end up with nowhere to go by 2030 without new roles in green industries. Relying on big finance to meet that gap will entrench today’s failing model, which emphasises the need to attract significant capital flows through deregulation and privatisation, strengthening the hand of boom-and-bust financial services and weakening labour rights. The flipside is a bigger trade deficit and a destructive politics of redistribution to asset holders and to London.

Britain’s railways are spending billions on bolstering the tracks against geological movements caused by extreme weather. But technology and new infrastructure will not save every service

Under the chalk cliffs east of Folkestone sits the Warren, a coastal wilderness largely owned by the railway, hosting a nature trail for walkers, as well as the Victorian rail line that runs on to Dover.

It is also, problematically for Network Rail, an active landslide. “Our monitoring here,” says Derek Butcher, principal geotechnical engineer for the southern region, “shows we’re actually moving ever closer to France – despite Brexit.”

Thousands of homes and farming land damaged in Ghor province, a week after over 300 people killed in flash floods

At least 60 people have been killed in a fresh bout of heavy rain and flooding in central Afghanistan, according to an official.

Dozens others remained missing, said Abdul Wahid Hamas, spokesperson for Ghor’s provincial governor, on Saturday. He said the province had suffered significant financial losses, with thousands of homes and properties damaged and hundreds of hectares of agricultural land destroyed in the floods on Friday, including in the province’s capital city, Feroz Koh.

About 60 flights cancelled after members of Letzte Generation glue themselves to ground at Munich

Eight climate activists have been arrested after causing Munich airport to close, leading to about 60 flight cancellations.

Six activists broke through a security fence and glued themselves to access routes leading to runways, officials and local media reported.

War in Gaza, the Russian offensive in Kharkiv, protests in Georgia, the Northern lights and the Cannes Film Festival: the last seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

Warning: this gallery contains images that some readers may find distressing

San Pedro Sula is rated ‘dangerous’ as effects of forest fires, El Niño and the climate crisis cause a spike in respiratory illnesses

The air quality in San Pedro Sula, the second-largest city in Honduras, as been classified as the most polluted on the American continent due to forest fires and weather conditions aggravated by El Niño and the climate crisis.

IQAir, a Swiss air-quality organisation that draws data from more than 30,000 monitoring stations around the world, said on Thursday that air quality in the city of about 1 million people has reached “dangerous” levels.

A 1C increase in global temperature leads to a 12% decline in world gross domestic product, researchers have found

The economic damage wrought by climate change is six times worse than previously thought, with global heating set to shrink wealth at a rate consistent with the level of financial losses of a continuing permanent war, research has found.

A 1C increase in global temperature leads to a 12% decline in world gross domestic product (GDP), the researchers found, a far higher estimate than that of previous analyses. The world has already warmed by more than 1C (1.8F) since pre-industrial times and many climate scientists predict a 3C (5.4F) rise will occur by the end of this century due to the ongoing burning of fossil fuels, a scenario that the new working paper, yet to be peer-reviewed, states will come with an enormous economic cost.

NBIM, one of oil group’s largest investors, calls for ‘additional disclosures’ about green commitments ahead of AGM

Norway’s state investment fund has urged Shell to clarify its climate targets as the oil group braces for its biggest ever green shareholder rebellion at next week’s annual general meeting.

Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM), which manages $1.6tn on behalf of the people of Norway and is one of Shell’s largest investors, urged the company to give investors more information about its plans for the next decade after its new chief executive watered down climate commitments earlier this year.

Fossil-fuel dependent country hopes to provide bridge between wealthy global north and poor south at November gathering

Oil is inescapable in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. The smell of it greets the visitor on arrival and from the shores of the Caspian Sea on which the city is built the tankers are eternally visible. Flares from refineries near the centre light up the night sky, and you do not have to travel far to see fields of “nodding donkeys”, small piston pump oil wells about 6 metres (20ft) tall, that look almost festive in their bright red and green livery.

It will be an interesting setting for the gathering of the 29th UN climate conference of the parties, which will take place at the Olympic Stadium in November.

Government, including far-right leader Geert Wilders, announces it will abandon key green policies in strategy

The Netherlands’ new right-wing coalition government aims to reintroduce daytime speeds of 80mph on motorways as part of a number of proposed changes to the country’s environmental policies which have sparked concern.

The move echoes the anti-green stance of other right-wing parties across the continent, as environmental issues become popular bogeymen for populist politicians. In Germany, for example, heat pumps have been politicised, as members of the far-right party AfD have called the Green party “our enemies’.

Russian constitutional court is considering claim, which activists hope will raise awareness about emissions

A group of activists are fighting for the right to scrutinise Russia’s climate policies, and in particular its enormous methane emissions, in court.

Russia’s constitutional court is considering a claim brought by 18 individuals and the NGO Ecodefense that insufficient action by the Russian state to cut national greenhouse gas emissions is violating their rights to life, health and a healthy environment.