The Guardian

Caribbean Development Bank head urges help for countries classed as developing but not among poorest

Middle-income developing countries hit by devastating climate disaster risk missing out on rescue funds, the head of one of the world’s development banks has warned.

Hyginus Leon, the president of the Caribbean Development Bank, told the Guardian that some developing countries with per capita incomes that would disqualify them for some forms of overseas aid could be made ineligible for climate funds.

Fertiliser use on key crops down more than a quarter on 2010-19 average, while yields increased 2.4%

Britain’s farmers increased their yields of major crops last year despite significant reductions in fertiliser use, according to research.

Making artificial fertilisers relies on natural gas, the price of which rose sharply last year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Fertiliser prices almost tripled, from £233 a tonne in 2020 to £766 a tonne in 2022, which farmers say led to a reduction in their use.

You’re more likely to die taking a selfie than in a shark attack: as oceans warm, we need to get used to close encounters

Silly season is upon us and sharks are dominating the headlines again. As a marine conservationist, if I see another headline along the lines of “Menacing man-eating shark lurking off the coast of Britain” accompanied by a photo of a basking shark – a species that exclusively consumes plankton – I think I might scream.

It seems all a shark needs to do these days is push its dorsal fin above the ocean waves and panic immediately ensues. Just this week, that’s exactly what happened off the French coast. A blue shark – a species typically found in the open ocean with an extremely low record of unprovoked attacks on humans – was spotted close to the shoreline. Instant drama ensued, with lifeguards closing the beach and swimmers watching on from the water’s edge. What is it about sharks that makes us lose our minds?

Hannah Rudd is the author of Britain’s Living Seas: Our Coastal Wildlife and How We Save It, a marine scientist at Shark Hub UK, and policy and advocacy manager at the Angling Trust

Pro-car campaigns fail to cut through in Britain. Labour must dare to stand firm in defence of green policies

Once so clogged with noxious fumes that it earned the nickname the Smoke, London has been battling pollution for more than a century. From the Great Stink to the Great Smog, successive public health emergencies have for decades prompted ambitious anti-pollution measures, gradually transforming the capital for the better.

The Victoria Embankment containing Joseph Bazalgette’s pioneering sewer system, the magnificent Abbey Mills pumping station and the groundbreaking Clean Air Act 1956 stand among other initiatives as testaments to the unflinching conviction of past leaders in tackling London’s pollution problems head-on.

Phineas Harper is chief executive of the charity Open City

The best of this week’s wildlife photographs, including deer in Greece, busy ants and the return of the kākāpō

The UN secretary general, António Guterres, said scientists have confirmed July was on track to be the world's hottest month on record. Guterres warned 'the era of global warming has ended, the era of global boiling has arrived' after recent global temperatures shattered records. The steady rise in global average temperatures, driven by pollution that traps sunlight and acts like a greenhouse around the Earth, has made weather extremes worse

• ‘Era of global boiling has arrived,’ says UN chief as July set to be hottest month on record

Wildfires have turned the hills surrounding the temple of Segesta to ash after days of fires spreading across Sicily. Local authorities said the blaze was put out around the archaeological site, but it is temporarily closed to check for any damage. The island has been devastated by wildfires that have killed at least three people, while heatwaves and severe storms affected the north of Italy

• ‘Era of global boiling has arrived,’ says UN chief as July set to be hottest month on record

Drone footage from the island of Rhodes in Greece, which has been hit be a string of fierce wildfires, gives an idea of the scale of destruction left by the blaze. The footage, from the towns of Asklipio and Kiotari, shows the charred embers of several burnt out cars and scorched trees and earth. Large areas of land were burnt grey and black, in fires that prompted the island's authorities to declare a state of emergency and carry out a mass evacuation of locals and tourists from affected areas. Greece is one of almost a dozen Mediterranean countries that struggled to control wildfires that broke out amid a record breaking heatwave in July

• Greece ‘at war with fire’ amid chaotic evacuation of tourists from Rhodes

• Climate crisis up close: a week of wildfires in Rhodes

• ‘Like a blowtorch’: Mediterranean on fire as blazes spread across nine countries

Wildfires spread across nine Mediterranean countries, killing at least 40 people, most of them in Algeria. Algerian authorities said 34 people had died in the mountainous northern region, with neighbouring Tunisia similarly battling wildfires.

Across the Mediterranean, Sicily and large parts of Calabria were among dozens of wildfires, Italian authorities reported, amid a record-breaking heatwave. Two people were killed in their homes, said officials in Sicily. Firefighters also battled blazes in Turkey, Croatia, Syria, Gran Canaria and a natural park near Lisbon in Portugal.

The frequency and intensity of the blazes were 'unequivocally' linked to the human-induced climate emergency, said the scientist Izidine Pinto: 'In terms of heatwaves, more often we see that every study that we do, we see the fingerprint of climate change intensifying these type of events, of heatwaves. So, it's pretty clear'

• ‘Like a blowtorch’: Mediterranean on fire as blazes spread across nine countries

• Rhodes wildfires are climate wake-up call, says UK minister

Biden had the last opportunity of any president to keep the world under 1.5C of heating. Instead he is squandering time we do not have

We’ve passed into a ferocious new phase of global heating with much worse to come. Biden must declare a climate emergency.

I’m terrified by what’s being done to our planet. I’m also fighting to stop it. You, too, should be afraid while also taking the strongest action you can take. There has never been a summer like this in recorded history: shocking ocean heat, deadly land heat, unprecedented fires and smoke, sea ice melting faster than we’ve ever seen or thought possible. I’ve dreaded this depth of Earth breakdown for almost two decades, and, like many of my colleagues, I’ve been trying to warn you. As hard as I could. Now it’s here.

Peter Kalmus is a climate scientist and author of Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution

These hulking vehicles are lethal to pedestrians, disastrous for the environment and have no place on our city streets

Walking on a busy London street recently, I heard a shout. “Don’t hit me,” a cyclist screamed, as a Land Rover driver reversed into his path. Next, it was my turn to jump out of the way. The driver lurched forward, veering unexpectedly in my direction just as I was crossing a sidestreet.

A moment later, another panicked voice behind me; a little girl scooting in front of her mother overshot the pavement ever so slightly, and came just inches from the driver’s path. Behind the steering wheel the driver appeared impassive, apparently unaware of the consternation in her wake.

Laura Laker is a journalist who writes about cycling and urban transport

Reporter Narelle Towie found herself joining volunteers and marine officials trying to save a pod stranded on Cheynes beach in Western Australia

• As shots rang out, the battle to save Western Australia’s stranded pilot whales was over

It was the little cries of the dying young ones that hit me hardest.

The sound is hard to describe – like a high-pitched squeak, a forlorn whistle amid the noise of breaking waves.

Airlines have missed 98% of their previous environmental targets yet they keep pushing to persuade more people to fly

Even with lethal wildfires licking around southern Europe’s holiday hotspots, airlines such as Ryanair are still flying people towards the flames. Aviation, dubbed “the fastest way to fry the planet’ by environmental campaigners, due to its high carbon emissions, is back as our default means of getting away. But our chosen means of transport, flying, incrementally wrecks the climates, prospects and lives of the places being flown to. This is no tragic, unforeseen irony, but a deliberate, heavily promoted act of self-destruction.

At precisely the moment when everything should bend to make less climate-damaging choices easier and more attractive, exactly the opposite is happening. Why?

All four seasons were among top 10 hottest since 1884, with extreme heat likely to occur more frequently

2022 was the warmest year on record in the UK, the Met Office has confirmed, with experts warning the unprecedented heat is a sign of things to come.

It was also the first year in which a temperature above 40C (104F) was recorded in the UK. A record-breaking 40.3C was recorded on 19 July at Coningsby, Lincolnshire.

Amid the despair and doomism is a real climate emergency. We must act accordingly

How to respond to the avalanche of record-breaking extreme weather and temperatures terrorising the planet? For many scientists it is a moment of genuine despair, but also a time to resist climate doomism.

For British tourists still flying to Greece while it is on fire, and a few holdout news organisations, the answer seems to be to look away or deflect. We shouldn’t join them. Equally, as Michael Mann and Susan Joy Hassol have argued, there is no need to inflate the magnitude of what is happening. The reality is confronting enough.

Report says nearly 200 cases filed around the world in past 12 months challenging governments and firms

Lawsuits challenging government and corporate inaction on the climate breakdown have become an important driver of change, according to a UN body.

A report by the UN Environment Programme (Unep) and the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University says litigation is setting precedents for climate action all over the world, even beyond the jurisdictions in which cases are filed. But it warns of a growing legal backlash as cases are filed that could delay climate action and criminalise activists.

Officials are baffled by the remarkable behaviour of a large pod of pilot whales that grouped together in a heart shape before stranding themselves on a remote Western Australian beach on Tuesday evening.

By Wednesday morning, more than 50 whales lay dead on the shore, with volunteers, government workers and scientists fighting to save 46 more

• ‘We have never seen this’: scientists baffled by behaviour of pilot whales before WA mass stranding

• ‘What is the sea telling us?’: Māori tribes fearful over whale strandings

British professor elected chair of UN’s expert panel, which warned in March that 1.5C threshold could be hit in 10 years

The British professor Jim Skea has been elected to head the UN’s climate expert panel, taking the helm of the organisation charged with distilling the best science to guide global policy in a crucial decade in human history.

Skea, who is a professor of sustainable energy at Imperial College London and who co-chaired the report on solutions in the panel’s latest round of publications, said in a statement he was “humbled” to have been elected chair at a meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in Nairobi, Kenya.

The Australian’s latest adventure – two years traversing oceans and ice caps – aims to promote ‘carbon neutral exploring’

Geoff Wilson has spent much of his adult life exploring the planet. He has completed the only wind-assisted crossing of the Sahara and the fastest unsupported crossing of Greenland, south to north. He has stood atop Tanzania’s Mt Kilimanjaro with his father and spent a year sailing the world with his wife and three children. He holds the record for the longest solo unsupported polar journey in human history.

Wilson is the definition of a modern-day adventurer – a recipient of the Australian Geographic Society’s highest honour, the “lifetime of adventure” award. Having devoted decades to redefining what human beings are capable of, he is next seeking to prove that adventure doesn’t have to come at the expense of the planet.

Drone footage showed the scale of devastation in Algeria's northern Bouria region after deadly wildfires spread through mountain ranges on Tuesday, killing at least 34 people. About 8,000 firefighters battled blazes in 15 provinces, leading to the evacuation of more than 1,500 people. The Algerian online news site TSA quoted the National Meteorological Office as saying that temperatures had soared to about 50C (122F) in some areas

• ‘Like a blowtorch’: Mediterranean gripped by wildfires as blazes spread in Croatia, Portugal