The Guardian Climate Change

Cost of environmental damage will be six times higher than price of limiting global heating to 2C, study finds

Average incomes will fall by almost a fifth within the next 26 years as a result of the climate crisis, according to a study that predicts the costs of damage will be six times higher than the price of limiting global heating to 2C.

Rising temperatures, heavier rainfall and more frequent and intense extreme weather are projected to cause $38tn (£30tn) of destruction each year by mid-century, according to the research, which is the most comprehensive analysis of its type ever undertaken, and whose findings are published in the journal Nature.

Government support for green manufacturing is actually the easy part. To truly reduce emissions, we must stop digging up and burning fossil fuels

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Last week Anthony Albanese finally announced the government’s major plan for the transition to a renewable energy economy. The Future Made in Australia plan was quickly derided by critics as “picking winners”, in the misguided view that the market is better at deciding how to tackle climate change and that the market is in any way free or lacking distortions.

It’s an article of faith among many economists and commentators that governments should not try to “pick winners”, despite the fact that Australia has a long and glorious tradition of doing so.

Creating visually distinctive plants likely to become important as more weed-like crops are grown for food

Genetically engineering crops to be colourful could help farmers produce food without pesticides, as it would make it easier to spot weeds, scientists have said.

This will be increasingly important as hardy, climate-resistant “weeds” are grown for food in the future, the authors have written in their report published in the journal Trends in Plant Science.

Cars submerged in raging flood waters, planes on flooded runways and ankle-deep water at a metro station – this is what the United Arab Emirates and its desert city of Dubai look after a deluge. Dubai received about as much rain in 24 hours as it usually does in a year

• Desert city of Dubai floods as UAE hit by heaviest rainfall in 75 years

Phoenix broke several heat records last year. Now Grant Park, which has inequitable tree cover, is seeing a tree-planting drive that promises some respite from 100F temperatures

It was a relatively cool spring day in Phoenix, Arizona, as a tree-planting crew dug large holes in one of the desert city’s hottest and least shaded neighborhoods.

Still, it was sweaty backbreaking work as they carefully positioned, watered and staked a 10ft tall Blue palo verde and Chilean mesquite in opposite corners of resident Ana Cordoba’s dusty unshaded backyard.

Pressure piles on World Bank and IMF to steer countries to low-carbon transition at spring summit

Governments of wealthy countries must pledge hundreds of billions more in overseas aid payments channelled through the World Bank to avert the worst effects of the climate crisis, civil society experts and economists have said.

The International Development Association fund, the arm of the World Bank that disburses loans and grants to poor countries, is worth about $93bn (£b75n) but that figure must be roughly tripled by 2030, according to economic experts.

‘We must do all we can to become more sustainable’, says shadow environment minister

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Queensland’s Liberal National party has backed one of the most ambitious emission reduction targets in Australia – much to the disappointment of some of their federal counterparts.

While the federal opposition is still yet to unveil mid-term climate targets as part of its net zero by 2050 promise, the Nationals leader, David Littleproud, has decisively ruled out joining his state counterparts in their ambitious pledge.

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The challenge for a resource-rich, medium-sized economy such as Australia is to identify the right green industries to focus on, while minimising the risks to taxpayers

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It’s taken a while to get here but Anthony Albanese is on the verge of promising what some economists and most clean energy advocates have been urging Australian governments to do for years. Or at least a version of it.

The prime minister’s promised “Future Made in Australia” act is clumsily named, and the announcement last week had few details, but the idea – that the government will need to use its weight to help develop green industries if the country is to make a rapid transition from fossil fuels to a clean economy – has been a long time coming.

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As the soundscape of the natural world began to disappear over 30 years, one man was listening and recording it all

Read more: World faces ‘deathly silence’ of nature as wildlife disappears, warn experts

The tale starts 30 years ago, when Bernie Krause made his first audio clip in Sugarloaf Ridge state park, 20 minutes’ drive from his house near San Francisco. He chose a spot near an old bigleaf maple. Many people loved this place: there was a creek and a scattering of picnic benches nearby.

As a soundscape recordist, Krause had travelled around the world listening to the planet. But in 1993 he turned his attention to what was happening on his doorstep. In his first recording, a stream of chortles, peeps and squeaks erupt from the animals that lived in the rich, scrubby habitat. His sensitive microphones captured the sounds of the creek, creatures rustling through undergrowth, and the songs of the spotted towhee, orange-crowned warbler, house wren and mourning dove.

Heavy rain likely to cause low yields in Britain and other parts of Europe, with drought in Morocco hitting imports

• Which UK foods are at risk?

The UK faces food shortages and price rises as extreme weather linked to climate breakdown causes low yields on farms locally and abroad.

Record rainfall has meant farmers in many parts of the UK have been unable to plant crops such as potatoes, wheat and vegetables during the key spring season. Crops that have been planted are of poor quality, with some rotting in the ground.

Many products consumed by Britons could be hit by floods and droughts driven by climate crisis

• UK facing food shortages and price rises after extreme weather

From floods to droughts, extreme weather driven by human-caused global heating has become the new normal, causing havoc with the global food supply system.Many products bought and consumed in the UK are at risk of low supply and increased prices.

Intense patches of cold water rising from the depths are killing sharks, rays and other creatures, researchers say

A climate-disrupted ocean is pushing sharks, rays and other species to flee ever-hotter water in the tropics, only for them to be killed by increasingly intense upwells of cold water from the depths, a study has found.

One of the authors of the paper described the “eerie” aftermath of a mass die-off of more than 260 marine organisms from 81 species in a singular event of extreme cold upwelling off the coast of South Africa in 2021.

The percentage of reef areas experiencing bleaching-level heat stress is increasing by about 1% a week, scientists say

Global heating has pushed the world’s coral reefs to a fourth planet-wide mass bleaching event that is on track to be the most extensive on record, US government scientists have confirmed.

Some 54% of ocean waters containing coral reefs have experienced heat stress high enough to cause bleaching, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Coral Reef Watch said.

Paris agreement negotiator Todd Stern attacks premiers who say that decarbonisation programmes are unrealistic and should be slowed down

Political leaders who present themselves as “grownups” while slowing the pace of climate action are pushing the world towards deeper catastrophe, a former US climate chief has warned.

“We are slowed down by those who think of themselves as grownups and believe decarbonisation at the speed the climate community calls for is unrealistic,” said Todd Stern, who served as a special envoy for climate change under Barack Obama, and helped negotiate the 2015 Paris agreement.

The legal repression of activism has been fast and frightening, yet it won’t make protesters disappear and only sows division

Years ago, when Dr Sarah Benn recognised the scale of the climate crisis, she made sure that she was doing all the right things. She recycled, she went vegan, she stopped flying, she voted Green, she signed petitions. It was because she didn’t see real change happening, despite doing all those things, that she then went further. She glued her hand to a building. She sat down in front of an oil terminal. And she stood on a grass verge with a handwritten sign, saying, “Stop New Oil”.

Benn’s story will be pretty familiar to anyone with a passing interest in the current wave of climate protest. This wave grew out of deep frustration with existing avenues for change. And it did feel, for a time, as if these protests might be a catalyst for the wider shift that so many people recognised was urgently needed. The marches and sit-downs sparked so much sympathy and curiosity, even with politicians from Michael Gove to Dawn Butler. I remember walking along a street on an Extinction Rebellion march in 2019 and people were cheering from their windows. A big part of all the early protests was outreach, with protesters talking to people on the streets, in communities and workplaces, and finding eager responses.

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The marine mammals are increasingly endangered as warmer waters push them into ship traffic and fishing gear

A North Atlantic right whale has been spotted entangled in rope off New England, worsening an already devastating year for the vanishing animals, federal authorities said.

Right whales number less than 360 and are vulnerable to entanglement in fishing gear and collisions with ships. The entangled whale was seen on Wednesday about 50 miles (80km) south of Rhode Island’s Block Island, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said.

Decision by European court of human rights around vulnerability of older women to heatwaves marks significant shift

A landmark legal ruling at the European court of human rights could open the floodgates for a slew of new court cases around the world, experts have said.

The Strasbourg-based court said earlier this week that Switzerland’s failure to do enough to cut its national greenhouse gas emissions was a clear violation of the human rights of a group of more than 2,000 older Swiss women. The women argued successfully that their rights to privacy and family life were being breached because they were particularly vulnerable to the health impacts of heatwaves.

Company is fighting Dutch court ruling that says it must emit 45% less CO2 by 2030 than in 2019

Shell has argued that it “lobbies for, not against, the energy transition” on the final day of its appeal against an important climate ruling.

The fossil fuel company is fighting the decision of a Dutch court in 2021 that forces it to pump 45% less planet-heating CO2 into the atmosphere by 2030 than it did in 2019. In court on Friday, Shell argued the ruling is ineffective, onerous and does not fit into the existing legal system.

War in Gaza, destruction in Ukraine, protests in Naples and a total eclipse of the sun: the last seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

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

UK vineyards are thriving as far north as Yorkshire and Scotland as investors cash in on tax breaks and hotter summers

“We’ve never had frost here,” says Adrian Pike, gesturing across rows of vines just starting to show signs of tiny buds in the weak Kent spring sunshine.

Westwell vineyard is on the site of a former monastery and sits close to the Pilgrims’ Way on the North Downs, the historic route to Canterbury that runs along the top of the hill behind the vineyard.