The Guardian Climate Change

Stephanie Carrie gives tours and educates Angelenos on the importance of the urban forest – and how to improve it

On a recent Sunday morning, 25 Angelenos gathered under a large rusty leaf fig tree for a walking tree tour in a local Culver City park that was also playing host to an outdoor tai chi class as well as a group of yogis.

As we walked past Chinese elm trees, coast live oaks and Brazilian pepper trees, Stephanie Carrie shared the history of the city’s celebrated palm trees with a rapt audience. Many of today’s trees, planted in the 1930s, are approaching the end of their lives – and while they have become symbols of the city, they also guzzle water, fueling calls to replace them with drought-resistant trees.

The man behind Amy and Senna has turned his attention to ‘techno-authoritarianism’ in the genre-defying 2073. He talks to our journalist – one of the movie’s unlikely stars – about the events that fed his dystopian vision

It was some time in the early 2000s and Asif Kapadia, already a successful film director, a wunderkind whose first feature in 2001, The Warrior, won the Bafta for outstanding British film, was travelling back from New York.

“There’s a beautiful, gorgeous sunset over Manhattan. I’m in a limo being taken to the airport. And I was taking photos of Manhattan because I was driving over Brooklyn Bridge and it’s just all so cinematic and I became subconsciously aware of the driver watching me in the rear view mirror.

Despite a clever comms strategy, there are significant credibility issues around the assumptions on which the cost estimates are based

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The Coalition has moved a considerable way on climate and energy since Scott Morrisson brought a lump of coal into the parliament and told us not to be afraid. On Friday, the Coalition finally released the long-awaited details of the nuclear plan it will take to the election and, once again, asks us not to be afraid – of the price tag, the higher climate pollution and a range of other variables.

However, despite a clever comms strategy, there are significant credibility issues around the assumptions on which the cost estimates are based, and there are other critical issues that have been left unanswered. Australians have a right to consider all the issues they are being asked to vote on, with facts rather than political rhetoric. These issues can be broadly listed under three headings: the economics, the environment and the law.

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Nicki Hutley is an independent economist and councillor with the Climate Council

The fall of Assad in Syria, protests in Georgia, the Franklin Fire in Malibu and the reopening of Notre-Dame de Paris: the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

Amid Italian island’s worst drought, towns such as Troina are fighting for survival as supplies run dry and tensions rise

An ancient Sicilian proverb goes like this: “When water to two fountains flows, one will stay dry – that’s how it goes.” The residents of the small town of Troina in the heart of Sicily, struck by a long and unprecedented drought, perhaps understand its meaning better than anyone else. When authorities decreed that the little water left in their dam should be shared with the villages of another province, they took action, and, on 30 November, occupied the distribution centre of the reservoir, blocking access.

“It’s a war between the poor; we are aware of it,” says Salvatore Giamblanco, 66, owner of a bed and breakfast in Troina. “But we had no other choice. The dam is drying up. We have difficulty finding water for ourselves. I had to cancel numerous reservations due to the lack of water. If we also have to share what little we have with other towns, we will all be left dry.”

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• John Pesutto defies calls to resign after being ordered to pay $300,000 for defaming Moira Deeming
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News bargaining code announcement expected today

The youth minister, Anne Aly, spoke with ABC News Breakfast just earlier ahead of the news bargaining code announcement, expected today.

What I can say is that the government believes that journalists should be fairly compensated for the work that they do, that there is a current regime in place but that’s not working. And so that’s why the government has turned its attention to updating this code and ensuring that social media companies pay for the news that they use as content on their platforms.

Marginalised communities have been elevated during hearings in The Hague on impact of climate crisis

The village of Veraibari in Papua New Guinea sits at the mouth of the Kikori River, just before it opens into the Pacific. “Veraibari was so beautiful when I was a child,” remembers Ara Kouwo, 52. “I used to walk down to the beach passing under mango trees.”

Kouwo’s testimony was one of many included in written submissions to the international court of justice (ICJ) before hearings that began last week and continue until Friday in a landmark case in which the court has been asked to give an advisory opinion on “the obligations of states in respect of climate change”.

Residents accuse the oil firm of overstating the benefits of its ethane cracker plant – and playing down the harms

Nadine Luci lives on a breezy hill south-western Pennsylvania, but hardly ever opens her windows for fear the air outside is harming her.

“I have to live in a cocoon year-round,” she said.

Javier Milei’s push for extraction and cuts to land protections have left people fearing for their way of life – and environmentalists concerned about the future

Like many who follow Mapuche traditions in the Mendoza region of Argentina, Gabriel Jofré, 50, raises goats, moving between the plains in winter and the peaks of the Andes in summer, amid the region’s 4,000 glaciers. But the future of his people’s ancestral way of life is threatened, he says, by the climate crisis and plans for mining projects in the area.

In October, the local governor, Alfredo Cornejo, led the National Institute of Indigenous Affairs to reconsider the recognition of ancestral lands belonging to three Mapuche communities, potentially paving the way for the auction of public lands, 34 new copper exploration projects and the creation of the Malargüe western mining district.

Harnessing wind, hydro and maybe geothermal power, the tiny Canary Island of El Hierro is blazing a trail for sustainable energy – and the secret is all in the mix

• Words and photographs by Ofelia de Pablo and Javier Zurita

A vertiginous outcrop with more than 500 volcanoes, El Hierro, the most westerly of the Canary Islands, is less than 12 miles (20km) wide but features elevation differences of more than 1,500 metres. Swept by strong Atlantic winds and pockmarked with volcanic craters, it has spent the past decade harnessing its natural features to create clean electricity – with the goal of being the first island to reach self-sufficiency in energy.

Now, the island is reaching new milestones. Energy generated by wind and water has enabled its 11,000 inhabitants to be completely self-sufficient in electricity for 10,000 hours since its renewables project was established.

Wind turbines not only produce most of the energy needed for islanders’ daily use, but also El Hierro’s three desalination plants, which supply water to the island

Andrew Powell first said he was not ‘100% convinced’ 12 years ago while holding the portfolio during the Campbell Newman era

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Queensland’s environment minister has told parliament he stands by his comments more than a decade ago that he was “a bit sceptical” about human involvement in climate change.

Andrew Powell returned to the environment, tourism, science and innovation portfolio last month, having held it under the former premier Campbell Newman in 2012.

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The disease killed 600,000 people amid 263m cases globally in 2023, says WHO, calling for nations to address funding shortfall

Malaria killed almost 600,000 people in 2023, as cases rose for the fifth consecutive year, according to a new report from the World Health Organization (WHO).

Biological threats such as rising resistance to drugs and insecticides, and climate and humanitarian disasters continue to hamper control efforts, world health leaders warned.

From rural buses to solar panels, our Green agenda has been transformative. Yet, vested interests and big polluters helped to poison the well of public thinking

• Eamon Ryan was Irish Green party leader from 2011 to 2024

Ireland’s Green party went into government in 2020 determined to bring Ireland from laggard to leader on the climate crisis. Public opinion was with us, and we won more than 7% of the national vote. This mandate allowed us to negotiate a coalition agreement with Ireland’s two large centrist parties that was recognised by European Green colleagues as one of the greenest deals they had seen.

Over the past four and a half years we worked flat out to implement that programme. I think most independent experts would say the impact has been transformational. Last year Ireland’s emissions fell 6.8%, despite having one of Europe’s fastest growing economies and record population growth. The Greens switched spending in favour of public transport, cycling and walking. We rolled out a new rural bus service every week, while cutting young people’s fares by 60%. Passenger numbers took off immediately and we are only at the start of the transformation. A pipeline of big new projects is coming through our planning system, ready to go.

Eamon Ryan served as the minister for the environment and transport in Ireland’s outgoing coalition government and was Green party leader from 2011 to 2024

Research shows UK police arrest environmental and climate protesters at three times the average global rate

British police arrest environmental protesters at nearly three times the global average rate, research has found, revealing the country as a world leader in the legal crackdown on climate activism.

Only Australia arrested climate and environmental protesters at a higher rate than UK police. One in five Australian eco-protests led to arrests, compared with about 17% in the UK. The global average rate is 6.7%.

US Fish and Wildlife Service extends protections to ‘iconic’ insects, who experts say may not survive climate crisis

The US Fish and Wildlife Service announced a decision on Tuesday to extend federal protections to monarch butterflies after years of warnings from environmentalists that populations are shrinking and the beloved pollinator may not survive the climate crisis.

Officials plans to add the butterfly to the threatened species list by the end of next year following an extensive public comment period.

Drastic shift driven by frequent wildfires, pushing surface air temperatures to second-warmest on record since 1900

The Arctic tundra is undergoing a dramatic transformation, driven by frequent wildfires that are turning it into a net source of carbon dioxide emissions after millennia of acting as a carbon sink, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) said on Tuesday.

This drastic shift is detailed in Noaa’s 2024 Arctic Report Card, which revealed that annual surface air temperatures in the Arctic this year were the second-warmest on record since 1900.

After just 12 hours without power, we were cold, isolated and facing the fact that everyday life is far more precarious than it seems

It was the cold that woke me up. Some time in the early hours of Saturday, as Storm Darragh blasted through our bit of rural Oxfordshire, the power lines had come down; by the time the central heating would otherwise have been firing up, the house was decidedly arctic.

The novelty of lighting candles, chopping firewood and making coffee on a sputtering camping stove carried everyone through the first few hours. But by mid afternoon frontier spirit was palpably waning, along with everyone’s phone batteries. By early evening there wasn’t much to do except agree that obviously we have it easy compared with Ukraine – now in its third icy winter of Russia using attacks on domestic power infrastructure as an extra weapon of war, which puts this minor domestic inconvenience into perspective – and that our digitised lives have become quite madly, recklessly vulnerable to a sudden loss of power.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

Government should point to evidence of FSA licensing of additive, says chair of environment and climate change committee

The government must urgently reassure consumers that feed additives given to cattle to reduce methane emissions are harmless, and a vital tool in tackling the climate crisis, the chair of an influential parliamentary committee has warned.

Lady Sheehan, chair of the environment and climate change committee of the House of Lords, called on ministers to step up as a row has blown up over the prospective use of the additive Bovaer in British dairy herds supplying Arla, the dairy company.

First comprehensive study on health and climate change in small island developing states lays bare impact of the crisis and calls for action from richer countries

The 65 million people living in the world’s small island nations face “catastrophe” from the health impacts of climate breakdown, say experts behind a Lancet Countdown report.

Heatwaves, drought, insect-borne diseases and extreme weather are getting worse because of the climate crisis, putting lives and livelihoods at risk, found the report, the first comprehensive analysis of the state of climate change and health in island states.

European Commission scientific advisers say technology to offset global heating could wreak havoc on weather

Europe should ban space mirrors, cloud whitening and other untested tools being touted to reflect the sun’s rays, the European Commission’s scientific advisers have said, but said the door should be left open for research into their development.

The scientists said the risks and benefits of solar radiation modification (SRM) – also known as solar geoengineering – were “highly uncertain”. They called for an EU-wide moratorium on using it as a way to offset global heating.