The Guardian Climate Change

As the climate crisis has deepened, protesters have become more confrontational – and their ambitions have grown

The head of ExxonMobil told to “eat shit” as he was about to receive an award. A US senator and coal boss called a “sick fuck”, almost sparking a brawl. Theatre shows interrupted. As the climate crisis has deepened, protests aimed at those deemed responsible are becoming starkly personal, and often confrontational.

At the vanguard of this new style of in-your-face activism is Climate Defiance, a group of just a handful of core staffers now marking its first birthday following a year of disrupting, often crudely, the usually mundane procession of talks, speeches and panels that feature Joe Biden administration officials, oil company bosses and financiers.

Brazil, Germany, Spain and South Africa sign motion for fairer tax system to deliver £250bn a year extra to fight poverty and climate crisis

• ‘Why we need a global tax on billionaires’

The world’s 3,000 billionaires should pay a minimum 2% tax on their fast-growing wealth to raise £250bn a year for the global fight against poverty, inequality and global heating, ministers from four leading economies have suggested.

In a sign of growing international support for a levy on the super-rich, Brazil, Germany, South Africa and Spain say a 2% tax would reduce inequality and raise much-needed public funds after the economic shocks of the pandemic, the climate crisis and military conflicts in Europe and the Middle East.

Green Finance Institute report said further pollution could cut 12% off GDP by 2030s

The destruction of nature over the rest of the decade could trigger a bigger economic slump in Britain than those caused by the 2008 global financial crisis and the Covid pandemic, experts have warned.

Sounding the alarm over the rising financial cost from pollution, damage to water systems, soil erosion, and threats from disease, the report by the Green Finance Institute warned that further breakdown in the UK’s natural environment could lead to a 12% loss of gross domestic product (GDP) by the 2030s.

Finance chiefs say higher taxes for the super-rich are key to battling global inequality and climate crisis

• Billionaires should pay minimum 2% wealth tax, say G20 ministers

When the governors of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund convened for the spring meetings last week, it was all about the really big questions. What can the international community do to accelerate decarbonisation and fight climate change? How can highly indebted countries retain fiscal space to invest in poverty eradication, social services and global public goods? What does the international community need to do to get back on track towards reaching the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)? How can multilateral development banks be strengthened to support these ambitions?

There is one issue that makes addressing these global challenges much harder: inequality. While the disparity between the richest and poorest countries has slightly narrowed, the gap remains alarmingly high. Moreover, in the past two decades, we have witnessed a significant increase in inequalities within most countries, with the income gap between the top 10% and the bottom 50% nearly doubling. Looking ahead, current global economic trends pose serious threats to progress towards higher equality.

Svenja Schulze is Germany’s minister for economic cooperation and development; Fernando Haddad is the minister of finance in Brazil; Enoch Godongwana is the minister of finance in South Africa; Carlos Cuerpo is the minister of economy, trade and business and María Jesús Montero the minister of finance in Spain

Researchers in the Netherlands find climate change is increasing vulnerability of some species

Climate change is causing apparently healthy trees to die after periods of heat and drought. Many may not die immediately but repeated periods of hot weather seem to increase the vulnerability of some species more than others.

Researchers studied 20 species of conifers planted 100 years ago in the same place in the Netherlands, taking tree ring samples to see how they did in droughts between 1970 and 2013. From the distance between the rings it is possible to tell how much each species’ growth was affected.

Few economic and social benefits will come to Africans if processing is all done overseas, says Wanjira Mathai

Africa must take greater control in the industries it supplies with raw materials to lift its people from poverty and seize its own destiny in a low-carbon world, one of the continent’s leading environmentalists has urged.

Wanjira Mathai, the managing director for Africa and global partnerships at the World Resources Institute thinktank, said much more of what the continent produced must be processed and made use of close to where it is produced, if the world is to shift to a low-carbon footing.

Illnesses such as dengue and malaria to reach unaffected parts of northern Europe, America, Asia and Australia, conference to hear

Mosquito-borne diseases are spreading across the globe, and particularly in Europe, due to climate breakdown, an expert has said.

The insects spread illnesses such as malaria and dengue fever, the prevalences of which have hugely increased over the past 80 years as global heating has given them the warmer, more humid conditions they thrive in.

Coordinated withdrawal agreed after several member states and UK have quit energy charter treaty

European lawmakers have voted to escape a treaty that lets investors sue governments in private courts for pursuing policies that stop the planet from heating.

Fossil fuel companies have used the energy charter treaty (ECT), an international trade agreement from the 1990s, to demand billions of euros of taxpayers’ money in opaque tribunals set up to protect investors.

The divestment movement has a long history among US student activists, including in the overlapping movements of today

Cameron Jones first learned about fossil fuel divestment as a 15-year-old climate organizer. When he enrolled at Columbia University in 2022, he joined the campus’s chapter of the youth-led climate justice group the Sunrise Movement and began pushing the school in New York to sever financial ties with coal, oil and gas companies.

“The time for institutions like Columbia to be in the pocket of fossil fuel corporations has passed,” Jones wrote in an October 2023 op-ed in the student newspaper directed toward the Columbia president, Minouche Shafik.

British Medical Association says decision to take Dr Sarah Benn off medical register for five months ‘sends worrying message’

Doctors groups are calling for urgent consideration of the rules for medical professionals who take peaceful direct action on the climate crisis, which they say is the “greatest threat to global health”, after a GP was suspended from the register for non-violent protest.

Dr Sarah Benn, a GP from Birmingham, was taken off the medical register for five months on Tuesday by the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS), the disciplinary arm of the General Medical Council (GMC), over her climate protests. The tribunal said Benn’s fitness to practise as a doctor had been impaired by reason of misconduct.

High winds, rains, winter storms and tropical cyclones accounted for 80% of power interruptions over the last 20 years

Power outages in the US are rising, as climate-related extreme weather strain an already burdened energy grid.

Over the last decade, severe storm outages increased by 74% compared with the previous 10 years.

Investors lodge 58% protest vote against emissions report but defiant chair Richard Goyder maintains company is part of solution to climate change

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Woodside Energy has suffered an embarrassing rebuke of its climate credentials after its emissions plan was overwhelmingly rejected by shareholders at its annual general meeting on Wednesday.

Investors lodged a 58% vote against Woodside’s climate report, representing the strongest protest recorded against any of the dozens of listed companies around the world that regularly put climate-related resolutions to shareholders.

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A dawn chorus of flutes, whistles and chirps once flowed through my Cambridge window, but there has been a shocking collapse in birdlife. What can be done?

Every year from February through to June, the early morning chorus of birdsong is one of the most evocative manifestations of spring. During late winter I open the bedroom window before going to sleep, to hear that incredible mix of flutes, whistles and chirps that begin before first light, when I wake. I listen for the layers of song that simultaneously come from close by and far away.

This year though, the dawn chorus that once was the soundtrack for spring in central Cambridge has collapsed. It was noticeably quieter in 2023, and this year strikingly so. Blackbirds are depleted and song thrushes no longer heard at all. The dunnocks – once one of the most common garden songsters – have disappeared, as have the chaffinches, whose early February song was among the first audible confirmations of lengthening days. The cheery chatter of house sparrows is absent and the once familiar sound of coal tits has fallen silent. Long-tailed tits are now rare, and so far this year I’ve heard no blackcaps. Great and blue tits, robins and goldfinches, are still present, but down in number.

The region is turning towards Russia and other global players when it comes to security. Tackling the climate crisis would contribute to a solution

Two apparently separate developments in the Sahel are linked by more than geography. Last week, the US confirmed that it will withdraw more than 1,000 troops from Niger after the military junta revoked a security pact – just six years after a new $110m military base opened. Meanwhile, a record heatwave is the latest deadly extreme weather event.

The US had hoped to maintain the military agreement despite last summer’s coup, part of a wave of military power grabs across the central Sahel and the wider region. French troops had already been expelled, with France earlier withdrawing from Mali and Burkina Faso. Mali’s regime also ordered an end to the UN stabilisation mission. Western departures come alongside the growing presence of Russian mercenaries, including the Wagner group.

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Sarah Benn is first of three GPs facing disciplinary tribunals this year over climate activism

A doctor who went to jail after a series of climate protests has been taken off the medical register for five months – and still faces being permanently struck off.

The Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS) – the disciplinary arm of the General Medical Council (GMC) – suspended Dr Sarah Benn on Tuesday, having found last week that her fitness to practise as a doctor had been impaired by reason of misconduct.

Philippe Lamberts warns far-right gains in elections could destroy plan to protect nature and biodiversity

The EU’s green deal to restore biodiversity, clean the continent’s soil, air and water, and mitigate climate breakdown is at high risk of being killed off, the co-president of the Green group of MEPs has warned.

The Belgian MEP Philippe Lamberts said the green deal, which has informed everything from tax policy to environment law making, would be a thing of the past if the far right made significant gains in the June EU parliamentary elections.

Trudi Warner on a year being pursued by government lawyers determined to prosecute her over a jurors’ rights protest

Two days before Trudi Warner faced court under threat of a contempt of court prosecution, she fell off her bike and ruptured the tendons in her hand.

Now the hand is black and blue, tightly bandaged, and requires surgery. It is an indication that 69-year-old Warner, who spent her working life as a child social worker and has committed her retirement to climate action, is not as tough and unflappable as her demeanour suggests.

Claire O’Neill, a former climate minister, says PM’s move was to ‘try and create political division and dividing lines’

The UK government’s decision to weaken some of its climate commitments was a “retrograde step” that would set back vital cross-party action to cut carbon emissions, Claire O’Neill, a former Conservative climate minister, has said.

O’Neill, who was known as Claire Perry when she served as a minister under David Cameron and Theresa May, said the rolling back of emission reduction efforts by Rishi Sunak appeared to be a ploy for political advantage.

Chris Stark says populist response and culture war around the term is inhibiting environmental progress

The concept of “net zero” has become a political slogan used to start a “dangerous” culture war over the climate, and may be better dropped, the outgoing head of the UK’s climate watchdog has warned.

Chris Stark, the chief executive of the Climate Change Committee (CCC), said sensible improvements to the economy and people’s lives were being blocked by a populist response to the net zero label, and he would be “intensely relaxed” about losing the term.

Organizers at Columbia, Tulane and the University of Virginia write to attorneys general arguing schools’ investments are illegal

Campus organizers at three universities filed legal complaints on Monday arguing that their schools’ investments in planet-heating fossil fuels are illegal, the Guardian has learned.

The students from Columbia University, Tulane University and the University of Virginia each wrote to the attorneys general of their respective states calling on them to scrutinize their universities’ investments. They accuse their universities of breaching the Uniform Prudent Management of Institutional Funds Act, a law adopted by 49 states that requires non-profit institutions to consider their “charitable purposes” when investing, and exercise “prudence” and “loyalty”.