The Guardian Climate Change

Among world’s top 60 banks those in US are biggest fossil fuel financiers, while Barclays leads way in Europe

The world’s big banks have handed nearly $7tn (£5.6tn) in funding to the fossil fuel industry since the Paris agreement to limit carbon emissions, according to research.

In 2016, after talks in Paris, 196 countries signed an agreement to limit global heating as a result of carbon emissions to at most 2C above preindustrial levels, with an ideal limit of 1.5C to prevent the worst impacts of a drastically changed climate.

Survivors pick through debris-littered streets and damaged buildings as rescue workers dispatched amid warning some areas cut off by flooding

More than 300 people were killed in flash floods that ripped through multiple provinces in Afghanistan, the UN’s World Food Programme said, as authorities declared a state of emergency and rushed to rescue the injured.

Many people remained missing after heavy rains on Friday sent roaring rivers of water and mud crashing through villages and across agricultural land in several provinces, causing what one aid group described as a “major humanitarian emergency”.

Fears Climate Change Committee’s advice not to allow carryover from last carbon budget will be ignored

Ministers are considering plans to weaken the UK’s carbon-cutting plans by allowing the unused portion of the last carbon budget to be carried over to the next period.

This would go against the strong recommendation of the government’s statutory climate advisers, the Climate Change Committee.

Climate scientists have told the Guardian they expect catastrophic levels of global heating. Here’s what that would mean for the planet

• World is on edge of climate abyss, UN warns
• Climate scientists expect global heating to blast past 1.5C target

Global heating is likely to soar past internationally agreed limits, according to a Guardian survey of hundreds of leading climate experts, bringing catastrophic heatwaves, floods and storms.

Only 6% of the respondents thought the 1.5C limit could be achieved, and this would require extraordinarily fast, radical action to halt and reverse the world’s rising emissions from fossil fuel burning.

Death toll may rise as search continues for victims under mud and rubble and as more rain approaches

At least 50 people, mainly women and children, have been killed in flash flooding in the northern Afghanistan province of Baghlan.

The number was confirmed by Hedayatullah Hamdard, the head of the provincial natural disaster management department, who said it could increase in the coming days.

War in Gaza, floods in Kenya and Brazil, the Olympic flame in Marseille and the Met Gala in New York: the last seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

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

You just need to know who to listen to

• See more of Fiona Katauskas’s cartoons here

As a scientist, I’m faced with indifference and a failure to understand the reality of the climate crisis every day. We must wake people up

• Bill McGuire is professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at UCL

Do you find climate breakdown funny? Do you think it’s a laughing matter that we are on track to bequeath to our children and their children a planet changed for the worse beyond all recognition? I don’t – and I’m sure the presenters of Radio 4’s Today programme don’t either. But I couldn’t help feeling we were having a bit of a Don’t Look Up moment yesterday, hearing them brush off predictions by top climate scientists that our world will end up at least 2.5C hotter as depressing and “gloomy”. This is not to say that laughter and grim news shouldn’t or can’t go together. I work with comedians to help get the climate crisis message across, but we use humour to aid understanding and to help cope, not to denigrate and mock.

The truth is that most people, including many professional journalists, and most politicians, don’t really “get” climate breakdown. Partly this reflects a heads-in-the-sand attitude, but mainly it flags a poor understanding of just how bad things are set to get.

Group says two women in their 80s took hammer and chisel to protective glass at British Library

Two Just Stop Oil protesters have smashed the glass around Magna Carta at the British Library.

The Rev Sue Parfitt, 82, and Judy Bruce, 85, a retired biology teacher, targeted the protective enclosure with a hammer and chisel on Friday morning.

In the country’s south, up to half of the annual predicted rain fell in just 10 days – the third such event in a year. Experts say it is time to plan for a new normal

• Photographs by Daniel Marenco

When the torrential rain began to swallow her city block, Cristiane Batista, 34, grabbed her three children, a couple of backpacks and her smartphone and waited at the door, hoping to be picked up by the municipal trucks preparing to evacuate the population of Muçum, in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.

“I was terrified. The house was about to flood. We had to get out of there,” she says.

Exclusive: Wopke Hoekstra says EU must press ahead with cutting greenhouse gases and use policy to bring about economic benefits

Europe’s climate chief has warned against politicians trying to use the climate crisis as a wedge issue in the forthcoming EU parliament elections, calling instead for climate policy that will bring wider economic benefits.

Wopke Hoekstra, the EU commissioner for climate action, said Europe had no choice but to press ahead with strong measures to cut greenhouse gases, whoever was in power, but added that more attention was needed to help businesses thrive in a low-carbon world.

Trust aims to boost small pearl-bordered fritillary colonies in Shropshire Hills by planting 20,000 violets this year for their caterpillars

A mass planting of marsh violets across England’s Shropshire Hills is to take place to try to prevent further decline of the small pearl-bordered fritillary or Boloria selene, a rare UK butterfly.

The small pearl-bordered fritillary’s distribution across the UK has plunged 71% since the mid 1970s and the species is now listed as vulnerable, according to the 2022 state of UK butterflies report.

Waste and cost among drawbacks, as researchers say renewables could power UK entirely

In the battle to prevent the climate overheating, wind and solar are making impressive inroads into the once dominant market share of coal. Even investors in gas plants are increasingly seen as taking a gamble.

With researchers at Oxford and elsewhere agreeing that the UK could easily become entirely powered by wind and solar – with no fossil fuels required – it seems an anomaly that nuclear power is still getting the lion’s share of taxpayer subsidies to keep the ailing industry alive.

A fifth of female climate scientists who responded to Guardian survey said they had opted to have no or fewer children

“I had the hormonal urges,” said Prof Camille Parmesan, a leading climate scientist based in France. “Oh my gosh, it was very strong. But it was: ‘Do I really want to bring a child into this world that we’re creating?’ Even 30 years ago, it was very clear the world was going to hell in a handbasket. I’m 62 now and I’m actually really glad I did not have children.”

Parmesan is not alone. An exclusive Guardian survey has found that almost a fifth of the female climate experts who responded have chosen to have no children, or fewer children, due to the environmental crises afflicting the world.

Farmers ‘on the brink’ after record rains, phasing out of EU subsidies and price volatility

British farmers are considering walking away from their farms as the recent record run of wet weather has left the sector “on the brink”, rural bodies have warned.

The Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) and the Soil Association raised concerns over the perilous situations facing many in their industry, with profits being squeezed and extreme weather driven by the climate crisis putting financial and mental strain on farm owners.

Experts issue warning after finding global average concentration in March was 4.7ppm higher than same period last year

The largest ever recorded leap in the amount of carbon dioxide laden in the world’s atmosphere has just occurred, according to researchers who monitor the relentless accumulation of the primary gas that is heating the planet.

The global average concentration of carbon dioxide in March this year was 4.7 parts per million (or ppm) higher than it it was in March last year, which is a record-breaking increase in CO2 levels over a 12-month period.

Fighting spirit helped us achieve the Paris accords in 2015 – and we need it now the world is on course to overshoot 1.5C

• ‘Hopeless and broken’: why the world’s top climate scientists are in despair

• Christiana Figueres was the head of the UN climate change convention from 2010 to 2016

“Hopeless and broken”: that is how a top scientist interviewed by the Guardian described feeling as she and hundreds of other climate experts shared harrowing predictions of the future of the planet this week.

I resonate with her feelings of despair. Even as the former head of the UN climate change convention that achieved the Paris agreement in 2015, I, like many, can succumb to believing in the worst possible outcome. Just after I assumed the role of UN climate chief in 2010, I said to a room full of reporters that I didn’t believe a global agreement on climate would be possible in my lifetime.

Top climate figures respond to Guardian survey of scientists who expect temperatures to soar, saying leaders must act radically

• Climate scientists expect global heating to blast past 1.5C target

The world is on the verge of a climate abyss, the UN has warned, in response to a Guardian survey that found that hundreds of the world’s foremost climate experts expect global heating to soar past the international target of 1.5C.

A series of leading climate figures have reacted to the findings, saying the deep despair voiced by the scientists must be a renewed wake-up call for urgent and radical action to stop burning fossil fuels and save millions of lives and livelihoods. Some said the 1.5C target was hanging by a thread, but it was not yet inevitable that it would be passed, if an extraordinary change in the pace of climate action could be achieved.

Andreas B. Heide has been shortlisted for a Shackleton award for his work in the far north, getting up close to nature to connect people emotionally with a fragile ecosystem

To say the images of Andreas B. Heide during his working day are dramatic is an understatement: a freediver deep underwater in a black wetsuit, his lean silhouette enhanced by powerful bladed fins, looking up towards a group of orcas; or standing on an ice sheet next to a small sailboat in the Arctic, amid a sea full of dangerous looking ice floes in poor visibility.

But for the marine biologist and adventurer, plunging into freezing waters with orcas or embarking on a 4,500-mile sailing expedition from the Arctic north to the UK and back, documenting whale behaviour and their dramatic encounters with polar bears, whales and walruses, is all part and parcel of storytelling that he hopes can ultimately change human behaviour. He works with scientists and conservationists, photographers and drone pilots, to underline the importance of conservation in the extreme north, under challenging conditions.

The crew land at the Sjuøyane, Svalbard 2023, wearing a rifle for polar bear protection. From left: Zimbabwean sailor Tawanda Chikasha; Andreas B. Heide; Spanish marine biotechnologist Almu Alvarez; and Norwegian photographer Tord Karlsen. Photograph: Tord Karlsen/Barba

If passed, the groundbreaking measure could be a model for other states to hold fossil fuel companies liable

Vermont is poised to pass a groundbreaking measure forcing major polluting companies to help pay for damages caused by the climate crisis, in a move being closely watched by other states including New York and California.

Modeled after the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund program, which forces companies to pay for toxic waste cleanup, the climate superfund bill would charge major fossil fuel companies doing business within the state billions of dollars for their past emissions.