Conservation scientists have highlighted substantial gaps in the compensation for lost or downgraded protected areas. These gaps risk undermining global efforts for the protection of biodiversity and threaten the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework targets, which aim to conserve 30% of the planet by 2030.
10/01/2024 - 10:53
10/01/2024 - 10:31
Why do the mass killers of the fossil fuel industry walk free while the heroes trying to stop them are imprisoned?
The sentences were handed down just as Hurricane Helene hit North Carolina. As homes were smashed, trucks swept down roads that had turned into rivers and residents were killed, in the placid setting of Southwark crown court two young women from Just Stop Oil, Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland, were sentenced to two years and 20 months, respectively, for throwing tomato soup at the glass protecting Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. No prison terms have been handed to the people whose companies deliver climate breakdown, causing the deaths of many thousands and destruction valued not at the £10,000 estimated by the court in damage to the painting’s frame but trillions.
Everywhere we see a farcical disproportion. The same judge, Christopher Hehir, presided over the trial of the two sons of one of the richest men in Britain, George and Costas Panayiotou. On a night out, they viciously beat up two off-duty police officers, apparently for the hell of it. One of the officers required major surgery, including the insertion of titanium plates in his cheek and eye socket. One of the brothers, Costas, already had three similar assault convictions. But Hehir gave them both suspended sentences. He also decided that a police officer who had sex in his car with a drunk woman he had “offered to take home” should receive only a suspended sentence. Hehir said he wanted “to bring this sad and sorry tale to its end with a final act of mercy”. The solicitor general referred the case to the court of appeal for being unduly lenient, and the sentence was raised to 11 months in jail.
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10/01/2024 - 10:00
At least 468 shot by government controllers last year out of an estimated population of as few as 2,640 in the state’s east, advocates say
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Traditional owners and dingo advocates say a Victorian government decision extending the right to kill dingoes on private and public land until 2028 could threaten local populations with extinction.
A government order, which took effect on Tuesday, declared dingoes were “unprotected wildlife” under the state’s Wildlife Act. The ruling means dingoes can be killed by trapping, poisoning or shooting across large parts of eastern Victoria, despite being listed as threatened under the state’s Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act.
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10/01/2024 - 10:00
RMIT-led study recommends a national recycling scheme to reduce the 200,000 tonnes of textiles sent to landfill each year
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Most Australians are confused about what to do with their unwanted clothes, leading about a third to throw their closet clutter in the rubbish, according to the first national survey of clothing use and disposal habits.
The RMIT-led survey of 3,080 Australians found 84% of people owned garments they hadn’t worn in the past year, including a third who hadn’t touched more than half of their wardrobe.
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10/01/2024 - 06:36
Existing plant-based cheeses often fail to deliver the textures that dairy lovers prize
Stretchy dairy cheese could now be made without any cows, after the development of yeast strains that produce the crucial milk proteins.
The key to the development, by Israeli company DairyX, is producing casein proteins that are able to self-assemble into the tiny balls that give regular cheese and yoghurt their stretchiness and creaminess. Existing plant-based cheeses often fail to deliver the textures that dairy lovers prize, and the company believes it is the first to report this breakthrough.
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10/01/2024 - 05:00
The smell of chlorine pervades Conyers as residents say BioLab’s accident was a danger hiding in plain sight
For Vonnetta West the plume of smoke rising in the sky outside her home in the city of Conyers, Georgia, was a sign not just of immediate risk – but a danger that had been hiding in plain sight for years.
The plume was the result of an accident at the BioLab pool and spa chemical company in the city of nearly 20,000 residents about 25 miles east of Atlanta. Tens of thousands of people were impacted by an evacuation order for those immediately nearby or by the wider shelter-in-place order for those further away. The smell of chlorine drifted over much of the Atlanta area.
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10/01/2024 - 04:40
Government urged to use power to control companies such as Thames Water and reform the industry
Thames Water and other failing water companies should be placed into special administration to allow the government to tackle much-needed reforms to the industry, campaigners say.
Triggering special administration would put Thames and other failing companies in government control, removing company directors and ending the dividends paid to shareholders. The companies could then be transferred to new owners who could be publicly owned or controlled.
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10/01/2024 - 04:00
The historic North Carolina city was touted as a climate ‘haven’ – a reputation deadly Hurricane Helene left in ruins
Nestled in the bucolic Blue Ridge mountains of western North Carolina and far from any coast, Asheville was touted as a climate “haven” from extreme weather. Now the historic city has been devastated and cut off by Hurricane Helene’s catastrophic floodwaters, in a stunning display of the climate crisis’s unlimited reach in the United States.
Helene, which crunched into the western Florida coast as a category 4 hurricane on Thursday, brought darkly familiar carnage to a stretch of that state that has experienced three such storms in the past 13 months, flattening coastal homes and tossing boats inland.
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10/01/2024 - 02:00
Everyday Plastic calls supermarket takeback schemes a diversion and says there is too much plastic packaging
Seventy per cent of soft plastic collected in supermarket recycling schemes and tracked after collection ended up being burned, an investigation by campaigners has found.
By placing trackers inside packages of soft plastic that were collected by Sainsbury’s and Tesco in July 2023 and February 2024, campaigners found that most of them ended up being incinerated rather than recycled.
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10/01/2024 - 01:00
Fifteen of the nimble, tree-climbing mammals were released last month at secret locations in Devon
Fifteen pine martens are darting through the woods of Dartmoor for the first time in 150 years after the rare but recovering species was reintroduced into south-west England.
The nimble, tree-climbing mustelids were released last month at secret locations in the steep, tree-lined valleys of Devon in what conservationists are hailing as a historic step in the restoration of the region’s woodlands.
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