Breaking Waves: Ocean News

Government hopes for 30% of city’s fleet to be electric by 2030, in move hailed as ‘gamechanger’ on air pollution The unruly chaos of Delhi’s roads would be unrecognisable without the rickshaws and scooters that zip through India’s capital in their millions, emitting toxic fumes in their wake. But now, ambitious policies aim to give the city’s most recognisable vehicles an environmental makeover. On Monday, Delhi’s government announced plans to eventually ban petrol scooters, motorbikes and autorickshaws in favour of those running on electricity, in an attempt to bring down dangerously high pollution levels in the city by the end of the decade. Continue reading...

As the the shocking heatwave continues, our European environment correspondent Ajit Niranjan answered your questions about which countries have responded best, who is being held to account, and why people are surprised after decades of warnings sloth_101 asks: Most reports still talk about this issue in terms of “records”? Technically, that might be correct but it feels like it’s missing the urgency of the matter. “Records” are meant to be broken. These records clearly are not. Isn’t there a better way to describe it? For example, how “climate change” is often replaced with “climate emergency” or “climate breakdown”? Ajit: I had never thought about it like that before but I can see how it can be read that way. It is partly a limitation of the language and partly an issue of accuracy. Ideally, I would spell it out – “Germany has been hit by heat it has never seen before” – but, because we are talking about measurements since records began, rather than over a longer period of history. I prefer to speak of “record-breaking” heat. The urgency can still be conveyed by describing the damage that hot weather does to our bodies and stating the death toll, which comes to tens of thousands of people across Europe in a typical summer. Each year heat kills 10 ten times more people than murderers in Europe. Ajit: So far there has been fairly little evidence of this happening. Far-right parties talk a lot about migrants and climate, but almost exclusively as separate issues. One recent exception is Switzerland, where a referendum this month on capping the country’s population at 10 million people linked the impact of migration on the Alpine nation’s natural resources, but the link here was more about environmental degradation than climate breakdown. Some data suggests migrants tend to pollute about as much as the native-born population – flying more but driving less - so there is no obvious avenue by which they would hold foreigners responsible for increased temperatures. What seems more likely is that, as temperatures rise to intolerable levels in North Africa and the Middle East, increased migration to Europe will force far-right parties to confront the paradox that the migration they want to stop will be exacerbated by the fossil fuel pollution they support. Continue reading...

A warm start to winter is part of a global trend of extreme and unseasonable temperatures caused by global heating Many parts of Australia have already broken early winter maximum and minimum temperature records. In southern Australia, Sydney and Melbourne had their warmest-ever starts to winter. Daily observations show both cities experienced above-average June temperatures almost every day of the month. Continue reading...

Teams painstakingly combed endangered Atlantic habitat over several years, helping to grow 8m native trees A small band of volunteers has helped to grow nearly 8m native trees in Scotland, crucial to efforts to restore lost parts of the Atlantic rainforest, after collecting 11m seeds by hand. About 100 volunteers, including retired teachers and doctors, office workers and young families, have spent tens of thousands of hours venturing into often remote woods in the western Highlands and islands to search out seed-bearing trees. Continue reading...