The Guardian Climate Change

Stories of dismay but also resilience as crisis in food production builds after 18 months of exceptionally wet weather

Farmers have been dealing with record-breaking rainfall over at least the past year, meaning food produced in Britain has fallen drastically.

Livestock and crops have been affected as fields have been submerged since last autumn on account of it being an exceptionally wet 18 months.

Results highlight the difficulties government faces in selling energy transition to sceptical public

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Voters have backed Anthony Albanese’s Future Made in Australia plan but are under the misapprehension that renewables are the most expensive form of power.

Those are the results of Guardian’s latest Essential poll of 1,145 voters, illustrating the difficulty for Labor of selling the energy transition to sceptical voters.

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AustralianSuper says it has ‘ongoing concerns’ about how the country’s biggest oil and gas company will reach net zero emissions by 2050

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Australia’s biggest superannuation fund has joined a protest vote against Woodside Energy’s failure to do more to address the climate crisis, saying it has unanswered questions about the fossil fuel company’s plans.

AustralianSuper said it had spent “a lot of time reviewing and engaging” with Woodside on its climate transition plan before the company’s annual general meeting on Wednesday, and still had “ongoing concerns” about how it would reach net zero emissions by 2050.

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Historic hearing will receive submissions from people whose human rights have been affected by climate change

Julian Medina comes from a long line of fishers in the north of Colombia’s Gulf of Morrosquillo who use small-scale and often traditional methods to catch species such as mackerel, tuna and cojinúa.

Medina went into business as a young man but was drawn back to his roots, and ended up leading a fishing organisation. For years he has campaigned against the encroachment of fossil fuel companies, pollution and overfishing, which are destroying the gulf’s delicate ecosystem and people’s livelihoods.

Trudi Warner was accused of contempt for holding placard reminding jurors of right to acquit based on conscience

A high court judge has thrown out an attempt by the government’s most senior law officer to prosecute a woman for holding a placard on jury rights outside a climate trial.

Mr Justice Saini said there was no basis for a prosecution of Trudi Warner, 69, for criminal contempt for holding a placard outside the trial of climate activists that informed jurors of their right to acquit a defendant based on their conscience.

Though touted as a model of environmental preservation, the country has recently signalled a shift from phasing out fossil fuels to boosting the economy. Franz Tattenbach on the tension between green credentials and growth

“This country is what the world would like to be but is not,” says Franz Tattenbach, Costa Rica’s minister of environment and energy. The 69-year-old economist is keenly aware of his role as guardian of the country’s reputation for forward-looking biodiversity initiatives and forest restoration. Since the 1970s, successive governments have sought to do justice to its wildlife, enacting a widely praised conservation policy that has boosted the country’s image as a model of environmental preservation.

From his ninth-floor office window in San José, Tattenbach can see the mountains surrounding the Central Valley. Beyond them lie the jungles, the wild beaches and the areas where nearly 6% of the world’s biodiversity resides in just 51,100 sq km (19,700 sq miles) of land, and extensive marine protected area.

Funds will be targeted at disadvantaged areas to create 200,000 jobs, after last week’s oil and gas lease restrictions in Alaska

Joe Biden will mark Monday’s Earth Day by announcing a $7bn investment in solar energy projects nationwide, focusing on disadvantaged communities, and unveiling a week-long series of what the White House say will be “historic climate actions”.

The president is traveling to Virginia’s Prince William Forest Park to deliver a speech touting his environmental record, including measures to tackle the climate crisis and increase access to, and lower costs of, clean energy.

Norway’s KLP and the UK’s LGIM among those who say they have concerns over energy giant’s carbon transition goals

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Woodside Energy is facing the prospect of an overwhelming protest vote against its climate plans when shareholders meet on Wednesday, as global investors pick apart the emissions strategy of Australia’s biggest oil and gas company.

Norway’s largest pension fund, KLP, and Britain’s biggest asset manager, LGIM, are the latest investors to disclose they will vote against Woodside’s climate report, citing concerns over its carbon transition plans.

Louisiana State University allowed Shell to influence studies after a $25m donation and sought funds from other fossil fuel firms

• This story is co-published with the Lens, a non-profit newsroom in New Orleans

For $5m, Louisiana’s flagship university will let an oil company weigh in on faculty research activities. Or, for $100,000, a corporation can participate in a research study, with “robust” reviewing powers and access to all resulting intellectual property.

Those are the conditions outlined in a boilerplate document that Louisiana State University’s fundraising arm circulated to oil majors and chemical companies affiliated with the Louisiana Chemical Association, an industry lobbying group, according to emails disclosed in response to a public records request by the Lens.

Our climate is influenced not just by Pacific weather patterns but by the Indian and Southern oceans, as well as global heating trends

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The Bureau of Meteorology has declared the end of the 2023-24 El Niño event.

Since 1910, there have been 29 El Niños, a phase that sees easterly equatorial winds in the Pacific slow or even reverse. These increase the odds in eastern Australia for a dry winter into spring.

Chris Stark, head of the Climate Change Committee, says Tories’ decision to dilute key green policies has had huge diplomatic impact

Rishi Sunak has given up Britain’s reputation as a world leader in the fight against the climate crisis and has “set us back” by failing to prioritise the issue in the way his predecessors in No 10 did, the government’s green adviser has warned.

Chris Stark, the outgoing head of the Climate Change Committee (CCC), said that the prime minister had “clearly not” championed the issue following a high-profile speech last year in which he made a significant U-turn on the government’s climate commitments. The criticism comes after Sunak was accused of trying to avoid scrutiny of Britain’s climate policies by failing to appoint a new chair of the CCC.

Keir Starmer must learn from the Tories’ failures and ensure green projects are well planned and resourced

In the energetic pursuit of net zero, billions of pounds could be squandered needlessly. That’s the lesson from countries as diverse as Italy, the US and UK, where the rush to subsidise green projects suggests vast sums are at risk. Worse, they could be lining the pockets of multinational businesses and City financiers.

In the UK, 14 years of austerity has left the public sector struggling to make coherent, strategic decisions. When a decision is finally made, it is a panic measure that quickly unravels. The fallout could be that voters become disenchanted with green tech, especially if the dash for net zero leads to higher taxes and higher borrowing while early adopters unwittingly pay for costly mistakes.

Recordings of healthy fish are being transmitted to attract heat-tolerant larvae back to degraded reefs in the Maldives

An underwater experiment to restore coral reefs using a combination of “coral IVF” and recordings of fish noises could offer a “beacon of hope” to scientists who fear the fragile ecosystem is on the brink of collapse.

The experiment – a global collaboration between two teams of scientists who developed their innovative coral-saving techniques independently – has the potential to significantly increase the likelihood that coral will repopulate degraded reefs, they claim.

Green members demand meeting after Scottish government abandons pledge to cut emissions 75% by 2030

Scottish Greens are to hold a vote to determine the future of the party’s power-sharing agreement with the Scottish National party, after the government abandoned its pledge to cut carbon emissions 75% by 2030.

Members will be able to vote on whether their party should continue to cooperate with the SNP after the announcement on Thursday that the Scottish government was scrapping its key climate pledge.

The Green party MP on her stint as a chambermaid, a brush with the law and the importance of hairspray

Born in Worcestershire, Caroline Lucas, 63, studied at the University of Exeter where she gained a PhD in English. She joined the Green party in 1986 and went on to become leader in England and Wales from 2008 to 2012, and co-leader from 2016 to 2018. Since 2010 she has been MP for Brighton Pavilion, the UK’s first and only Green party MP. At the next election she plans to retire from parliament. Her new book, Another England: How to Reclaim Our National Story, has just been published. She is married with two sons.

When were you happiest?
Picnicking on the Downs with my family and dog – birds singing, sea sparkling, and mobile switched very firmly off.

War in Gaza, floods in Dubai, the knife attack in Sydney and the Grand National at Aintree: the last seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

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

Environmental groups say bosses should ‘hang their heads in shame’ as firm bows to pressure from shareholders to cut costs

Unilever is to scale back its environmental and social aims, provoking critics to say its board should “hang their heads in shame”.

The consumer goods company behind brands ranging from Dove beauty products to Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream was seen as perhaps the foremost proponent of corporate ethics – particularly under the tenure of its Dutch former boss Paul Polman.

Idea Angela Rawlings had a decade ago for Snæfellsjökull has snowballed into a full-blown campaign with a team of 50 people

Standing in the shadow of Iceland’s Snæfellsjökull, – a 700,000-year-old glacier perched on a volcano and visible to half the country’s population on any given day – in 2010, Angela Rawlings was struck by an unconventional thought.

“It suddenly just came to me. What if the glacier was president?” said Rawlings. It was a seemingly unorthodox way to push forward a movement that was already swiftly advancing; Ecuador had enshrined legal rights for nature while Māori in New Zealand were working to secure legal personhood for the Whanganui River.

Environmentalists celebrate new rules but Alaska politicians call it an ‘illegal’ attack on state’s livelihood and predict lawsuits

The Biden administration said on Friday it will restrict new oil and gas leasing on 13m acres (5.3m hectares) of a federal petroleum reserve in Alaska to help protect wildlife such as caribou and polar bears as the Arctic continues to warm.

The decision – part of an ongoing, years-long fight over whether and how to develop the vast oil resources in the state – finalizes protections first proposed last year as the Biden administration prepared to approve the controversial Willow oil project.

Exclusive: Study released at Cop28 misused research to underestimate impact of cutting meat eating, say academics

A flagship UN report on livestock emissions is facing calls for retraction from two key experts it cited who say that the paper “seriously distorted” their work.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) misused their research to underestimate the potential of reduced meat intake to cut agricultural emissions, according to a letter sent to the FAO by the two academics, which the Guardian has seen.