Campaigners say designation promotes unsustainable sheep farming at expense of nature recovery and local communities
Conservationists have launched a campaign to revoke the Lake District’s Unesco world heritage status, arguing that it promotes unsustainable sheep farming at the expense of nature recovery and local communities.
In a letter to Unesco, the ecologist Lee Schofield argues that the designation “promotes a false perception of farming, is not economically sustainable, is working against crucial efforts to restore the natural environment and mitigate the impacts of climate change, does not help sustain farming livelihoods, is not wanted by local people and is contributing to damaging overtourism.”
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
06/07/2025 - 06:00
06/07/2025 - 04:00
NGO says Afghan capital’s 7 million people face existential crisis that world needs urgently to address
Kabul could become the first modern city to completely run out of water, experts have warned.
Water levels within Kabul’s aquifers have dropped by up to 30 metres over the past decade owing to rapid urbanisation and climate breakdown, according to a report by the NGO Mercy Corps.
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06/07/2025 - 03:00
Environmental lawyer Cormac Cullinan lauded for his work to establish continent’s legal status to protect its interests
Cormac Cullinan has a dream. A dream, he says, that will “change how humanity sees, understands and relates to Antarctica”. The vast frozen continent – home to emperor and Adélie penguins, leopard and Ross seals, and feeding grounds for orcas, beaked whales and albatrosses – should be recognised as an autonomous legal entity “at least equivalent to a country”, says the environmental lawyer.
And this week that dream became one step closer to reality as judges awarded Cullinan the Shackleton medal for the protection of the polar regions.
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06/06/2025 - 22:12
Frogs, salamanders, and other amphibians are not just battling habitat loss and pollution they're now also contending with increasingly brutal heat waves and droughts. A sweeping 40-year study shows a direct link between the rise in extreme weather events and the growing number of species landing on the endangered list. Europe, the Amazon, and Madagascar have become danger zones, with amphibians unable to adapt quickly enough. But there s hope scientists are calling for focused conservation efforts like habitat restoration and micro-refuges to help these vulnerable creatures survive.
06/06/2025 - 08:00
A little-known provision would open thousands of nearby acres to a foreign mining company, risking acid drainage
The story is co-published with Public Domain, an investigative newsroom that covers public lands, wildlife and government
A little-known provision of Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” would open thousands of acres of public lands at the edge of Minnesota’s Boundary Waters wilderness to a foreign-owned mining company.
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06/06/2025 - 07:10
Exclusive: emissions from power-hungry warehouses at Lincolnshire facility expected to be 850,000 tonnes a year
A vast new datacentre to feed Britain’s rising demand for artificial intelligence could cause more greenhouse gas emissions than five international airports.
Elsham datacentre in Lincolnshire is on course to cost £10bn and its 15 power-hungry computer warehouses are projected to release five times the carbon dioxide of Birmingham airport, including from take-offs and landings.
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06/06/2025 - 06:00
Exclusive: Friends of the Earth tells Keir Starmer any major green cuts by Rachel Reeves will be challenged
If the decisions the UK government makes in its upcoming spending review are not in line with the net zero climate target it risks being taken to court again, campaigners have said.
Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, will set out her spending review for the rest of this parliament on Wednesday. Amid continuing economic uncertainty and Labour’s promise to boost defence spending, many departments are facing deep cuts to dearly held commitments.
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06/06/2025 - 01:00
As delegates prepare for the global gathering, the president is caught between opposing sides in a row over bottom trawling in France’s marine protected areas
On his trawler in Saint-Malo, one of France’s most important ports for scallops and crabs, Laurent Mevel is fixing his nets. “We really want to protect the seas,” says the 60-year-old fisher. “But we’ve got crews, we’ve got employees.
“If you don’t fish any more, the fish will come from Ireland, from Scotland. Now the fish you buy from shops comes by plane. And costs less.”
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06/06/2025 - 01:00
The best of this week’s wildlife photographs from around the world
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06/05/2025 - 23:00
Call me a middle-class ‘bobo’, but inspired street art has nothing in common with sprayed-on assertions of ‘me, me, me’
Among the layers of life in Paris that energise me, I might list: peeling back the city’s music scene all the way to figuring out where, and when, the musicians go to jam together; the unassuming flair of even a basic brasserie; the way one can pivot, in the span of a week, from an art gallery opening to a friend’s concert to another friend’s restaurant to discover his Corsican-influenced menu, and end it by lingering on a terrace, “remaking the world” with others who challenge you – calmly – to see something a different way.
Among the things about this city that exhaust me are the people who cram their way into the Métro without letting you step out first (seriously, what neurons are misfiring in the heads of these people?), and the sheer prevalence of tags. It’s when you leave Paris for a bit and come back that you realise how many tags there are. How swaths of a city that is otherwise arrestingly beautiful look as if a giant toddler high on methamphetamines stumbled through them, scribbling on everything in sight with a giant Sharpie.
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