Exclusive: UK’s biggest water company assessed risks before cutting back on cost of environmental work, investigation shows
Thames Water intentionally diverted millions of pounds pledged for environmental clean-ups towards other costs including bonuses and dividends, the Guardian can reveal.
The company, which serves more than 16 million customers, cut the funds after senior managers assessed the potential risks of such a move.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
12/23/2024 - 09:00
12/23/2024 - 09:00
Read more from My DIY climate hack, a series on everyday people’s creative solutions to the climate crisis
Single-use plastic bags are not only wasteful, they cause serious damage to the environment and our health. Anne-Marie Bonneau, 56, is on a mission to put more reusable produce bags into the world. With the help of her sewing bee group, who make them from upcycled fabric, they’ve given more than 4,000 bags away.
As more cities and states implement plastic bag bans, Bonneau, who is known online as the Zero-Waste Chef, is helping people in California’s Silicon Valley make the move away from single-use plastic bags and spreading joy in the process.
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12/23/2024 - 08:25
The reptile, who later became Australia’s answer to Paul the octopus, ‘passed away peacefully’ in Darwin
Burt, the giant crocodile that featured in hit Australian comedy Crocodile Dundee, has died.
Crocosaurus Cove, an aquarium and exhibition space in Darwin, Australia, where Burt was housed, announced the news on social media, saying that the crocodile “passed away peacefully” and was “estimated to be over 90 years old”.
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12/23/2024 - 08:00
Palestinians accuse UK firm of breaching human rights laws by piping oil allegedly used by Israeli army
Palestinian victims of the war in Gaza are taking legal action against BP for running a pipeline that supplies much of Israel’s crude oil.
The claimants have sent the British oil company a letter before claim, alleging it is breaching its stated commitments to human rights under international law.
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12/23/2024 - 07:00
Exclusive: Efforts to eradicate American mink help boost population of river-residing mammal in 11 areas of country
Water voles continue to decline in their distribution across Britain but there are signs of recovery in some regions, with populations bouncing back in 11 key areas, according to a report.
The river-residing mammal, which inspired Ratty in the Wind in the Willows, has revived in number in parts of Yorkshire, Oxfordshire, Hertfordshire and East Anglia thanks to targeted conservation work.
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12/23/2024 - 05:00
Hundreds of thousands of people were killed in Aceh in 2004. Now warning systems are in place, but some feel more could be done
It was just before 8am on Sunday 26 December 2004 when the earthquake struck. Abdul Rahem, 47, a fisher, was strolling along the beach, enjoying the morning breeze near to his home in Lam Awe, a sleepy fishing village on the coast of Aceh in Indonesia. He retreated to paddy fields when the violent shaking and swinging stopped. But it wasn’t until he heard the cries of neighbours that he realised something was seriously wrong. People were shouting: “The water is coming.”
Rahem raced home to get his elderly father, and supported him as they tried to flee along the broken road, which had been twisted and torn by the quake. His father urged him to go ahead and leave him, but Rahem refused. “I said, ‘No, no, no, if we die, we die together.’”
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12/23/2024 - 02:00
For ecologists restoring the vast bogs of remote Karelia, wild reindeer are not just part of the environment but entwined with the ancient culture of the boreal forests
The Finnish folk musician Liisa Matveinen lives in a mustard-coloured house in Ilomantsi, 12 miles (20km) from the Russian border. Large books of folk songs line her walls. Sitting in her kitchen, Matveinen sings about a humble hunter going into the woods to find reindeer.
The song tells us how they were “honoured” providers of food, clothing and a sense of place, says Matveinen, who is recognised as a doyenne of Finnish folk music.
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12/21/2024 - 12:00
For the past decade, the Barcelona-based visual artist Xavi Bou has devoted his work to revealing “the hidden beauty of natural movement”. His initial focus was birds; now he’s moved on to insects. In collaboration with US entomologist Adrian Smith he’s created an eye-popping series that captures – by merging multiple frames into a single image – the rhythmic flutterings of butterflies and chaotic leaps of spittlebugs and treehoppers. As well as their beauty, Bou was struck by the crucial role that insects play in ecosystems, even as their numbers plummet – it’s estimated that the biomass of flying insect species has decreased by 75% over the past 27 years. “We need to move beyond seeing insects as mere nuisances,” says Bou. “They are fascinating, essential creatures, and we owe them a great deal.”
See more of Xavi Bou’s images here
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12/21/2024 - 10:00
Rosetta’s Kitchen in North Carolina now dishes up donated animal products to weather steep losses and feed people in need – but not all are happy with the change
One day in October, a trailer with an unusual delivery pulled up outside Rosetta’s Kitchen, a beloved vegan restaurant in downtown Asheville, North Carolina.
The contents: 1,500lbs of donated frozen meat, destined for area residents eating free meals at the restaurant after Hurricane Helene battered the region in late September.
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‘I didn’t realize the role rice played’: the ingenious crop cultivation of the Gullah Geechee people
12/21/2024 - 07:00
Researchers in North Carolina used underwater sonar to map a system created by enslaved people centuries ago
As a former deputy state underwater archaeologist, Mark Wilde-Ramsing can’t help but look down. While rowing around North Carolina’s Eagles Island, at the tip of the Gullah Geechee corridor, he noticed signs of human-made structures, visible at low tide. Though he’d retired, he was still active in the field and knew his former agency hadn’t recorded the structures – which meant he had come across something previously undocumented. The next step was figuring out exactly what he’d found.
Wilde-Ramsing knew the area had once been full of rice fields. His neighbor, Joni “Osku” Backstrom, was an assistant professor in the department of environmental sciences at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington whose specialty was shallow-water sonar, and he had the skills and technology to explore the area. Using a sonar device, the duo detected 45 wooden structures in the river, and the remote sensing tool allowed Backstrom and Wilde-Ramsing to acoustically map the canal beds.
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