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Locals say Google’s $15bn project in Andhra Pradesh has resulted in smallholdings being taken back off them by the government

When the government officials arrived in Tarluvada last year, they came with abundant promises.

Google, one of the world’s richest and most powerful tech companies, would soon be bringing a “golden opportunity” to this tiny village in south India: a $15bn AI datacentre.

This year’s ‘godzilla’ climate phenomenon has already broken temperature records. We ask a climate scientist what is happening

This year’s huge El Niño, which comes less than two years since the last one, has already broken temperature records. To understand what is happening, and why, the Guardian interviewed Prof Mat Collins, a climate scientist at the University of Exeter, the author of some of the world’s most important climate reports and an expert on the dynamics of the El Niño southern oscillation.

Lewes, East Sussex: Owls, bats, badgers and countless birds are my new neighbours, but I’ve been particularly taken by a mystery tree – and its resident treecreeper

I have made the woods my home, moving from Brighton to the outskirts of Lewes, where the garden backs on to the remains of an old oak wood. Here there’s a riot of wildlife: a badger that makes snuffle holes in the lawn, a family of tawny owls in the trees and a cauldron of bats in the chimney.

I have plans to let the wood expand into the garden, but in the meantime there’s a mystery tree whose branches almost reach my bedroom window. It’s nearly dead, stressed from too many droughts, perhaps, or coming to a natural end. Some have suggested it’s a willow, but I suspect it’s a cultivated species I’m not familiar with.

Even before adding solar panels, your roof can help you keep cool and lower your energy bills

• Change by degrees offers life hacks and sustainable living tips each Saturday to help reduce your household’s carbon footprint

• Got a question or tip for reducing household emissions? Email us at changebydegrees@theguardian.com

With an historic El Niño under way in the Pacific, Australia could face record temperatures this summer. For those in hot homes, reflective roof coatings can be a cost-effective way to beat the heat.

The upstairs bedrooms and office in Nic Jacobson’s two storey home in inner-suburban Adelaide used to get unbearably hot, even when his large air-conditioning system was running flat out.

Powered by sun and wind, the uncrewed vehicle will collect data to help Australian scientists better understand how oceans absorb emissions

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A small uncrewed vessel has embarked on a lap around Antarctica and may not return for months.

The seven-metre craft, which looks like a large kayak in hi-vis orange, is expected to travel about 22,000km through inhospitable waters, propelled by powerful westerly winds and energy from the sun. The journey is seven times the distance between Sydney and Perth.

Many people despise these birds for violently defending their babies in nests they create in ridiculously vulnerable areas. My community, however, became devoted to them

It was early September when the two spur-winged plover chicks hatched.

They hit the ground running, literally. Shortly after emerging from the speckled brown eggs their mother had laid in a shallow divot, they were scurrying around on their disproportionately long, stilt-like legs. They looked like fluffy brown and white cotton balls that could blow away in the wind.

Award-winning novelist celebrates late partner’s love of birds with gift to establish the Graeme Gibson chair in avian biology

If she could be any bird, Margaret Atwood would transform into a raven. “They’re very smart. They’re social, playful and just a very successful bird,” she says while seated in a corner of a bird observatory in the Lake Erie Islands archipelago. “They’re quite an intelligent problem solver.”

The observatory, which she set up with her late partner, Graeme Gibson, is located on the west shore of Pelee Island – the southernmost community in Canada – and is so new that there are no lightbulbs in a handful of lamps.

After years of illegal mass flytipping in Gospić, fed-up residents decided to take matters into their own hands

“Gospić is our home,” Željka Šikić shouted to a crowd of 40,000 people outside the Croatian parliament earlier this month. The slogan is the name of a campaign she helped to set up to protest against the illegal dumping of waste in Gospić, a town in the mountainous Lika region of central Croatia.

Between 2022 and 2024, waste was illegally abandoned at several sites in the town. At one of the biggest, just 50 metres from Šikić’s home, an estimated 35,000 tonnes of waste, some of it hazardous, was dumped and buried.

After the available money ran out after just six hours, some fear they will have to reverse efforts to boost nature

On Tuesday morning, farmer Peter Hatley logged on to his computer at 10am. England’s 2026 sustainable farming incentive (SFI) was opening for applicants and, after three bad harvests, the money would be a lifeline.

But Hatley, who runs a 240-hectare family farm in Cambridgeshire, was faced with repeated error messages. He called the government’s helpline, which he says acknowledged there were problems with the scheme, but says by the time the problem was fixed, the money had gone.

National Trust has transformed Sandilands in Lincolnshire into a nature reserve with wetlands and wading pools

There is no chance of a birdie or an eagle any more. But there are skylarks, short-eared owls, avocets and curlew.

Sandilands, a former golf course on the Lincolnshire coast, has been transformed by the National Trust into a 2km-long nature reserve with wetlands, wading pools, rough grassland and coastal scrub.

Hundreds of thousands are expected to die, millions to go hungry. This is not just about weather patterns, but about injustice

Some warnings are so grave that it is almost impossible to fully comprehend them. The descriptions of a super-sized, “Godzilla-level” El Niño already heating our planet would sound hyperbolic were they not issuing from eminent scientists. They say that the weather pattern, which occurs roughly every two to seven years, may be the strongest in at least a millennium. With its peak yet to come, the temperature rise in the Pacific Ocean has already surpassed the previous high.

The consequence will be huge amounts of heat in an atmosphere already experiencing frighteningly higher temperatures due to the human-caused climate crisis. Next year is almost certain to be the hottest on record globally, breaking this year’s record. The World Food Programme has warned that 50 million people are likely to be pushed into acute hunger. Others estimate that the extra heat from El Niño alone will cause the deaths of 450,000 people by February, from Nigeria and Indonesia to the US. That extraordinary toll is in addition to those killed by the wildfires, droughts and floods it is likely to bring – and also to deaths caused by global heating.

Former Yes musician Rick Wakeman plays a piano concert to bears at a sanctuary in Vietnam. His concert was performed live on a Yamaha grand piano positioned in Animals Asia in the Tam Dao national park. Wakeman is trying to raise awareness of 125 animals that remain stuck in cages at ‘bile farms’ in the country

Known as the ‘energy bars of the sea’ the fish are a key food source for many species, but closing fisheries to allow numbers to recover would cost millions

It began on 28 July, when fishers near Saldanha Bay on the west coast of South Africa reported seeing dead sardines (also known as pilchards) floating at sea. Then, in early August, more dead sardines began washing up on beaches near Cape Town.

In the weeks that followed, similar reports came in from places across a vast area spanning 2,600km (1,600 miles) of coastline, such as Henties Bay in Namibia and Mbotyi in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa.

Biggest study of its kind provides insights into bats’ evolution – a potential gamechanger for research into treating viruses and cancer in humans

In the northern forests of the Congo-Brazzaville, as the sun slips away, a distinctive honking fills the dusky sky. Every evening, thousands of hammer-headed fruit bats depart their daytime roosts in search of mates, calling out through large, box-shaped snouts that give the flying mammals the appearance of a winged moose. Here, along the Congo River, scientists have been collecting DNA swabs and tissue samples from the bats for years, working deep into the night in spacesuit-like protective gear.

Those hard-won samples are now among the thousands of specimens gathered from bats across the world that have helped to reshape what we know about the bat family tree.

Each autumn the traditional alpabzug (descent of herds) sees farmers in Switzerland move their livestock from mountain pastures down to valley barns. In the Griesalp area above Kiental around 70 alpacas were herded down the valley, before being transported by truck to their winter farm at Aeschi, near Spiez, in the Bernese Oberland

There is hope in solar power. As the UN meets, we are urging leaders to pursue a clear goal: clean energy for all by 2030

• Our message to global leaders: we need solar power everywhere by the decade’s end

As climate experts from around the world gather in New York for their annual week of talking through the world’s deepest dilemma, the vibes are mostly bad.

Though 2026 seems likely to set a new global temperature record (and 2027, as El Niño gathers steam, is almost certain to break it), and though the planet has careened from one climate disaster to another (European heatwaves that killed tens of thousands, a Nepali flood that wiped out entire communities), and though scientists warn that we’re reaching precisely the global tipping points they’ve long feared (the new research on the faltering great currents of the Atlantic should send a literal chill up your spine), there’s a distinct lack of political momentum.

The path forward is difficult, but the way is clear. We want solar for everyone, everywhere, before the decade is out.

We know that standing up to the powerful can be scary. But if there is one thing that unites us, it is that we live beneath the same sun. That unity is our strength, and we must use it to act now.

Bill McKibben is the Schumann distinguished scholar at Middlebury College. He is the founder of Third Act, organizing people over 60 for progressive change

As the UN gathers, signatories from Bernie Sanders to Yeb Saño issue an open letter calling for clean power for all

• The climate fight has one great ally. You just can’t look at it directly


We the undersigned write this letter out of great fear and great hope.

Over the last few months, we’ve seen the world set ablaze by both war and warming. From the conflict in Iran, which has claimed thousands of lives and disrupted billions more, to the series of ever worsening climate disasters, from wildfires in Europe to collapsing glaciers in Nepal, the world seems to be falling apart exactly when it needs to be coming together.

This year’s ‘super' El Niño currently heating up the planet has surpassed the highest temperature ever recorded for the phenomenon, several months before it has even reached its expected peak. But what exactly is an El Niño and how do they work? Matilda Boseley explains

• Huge El Niño projected to cause 450,000 deaths in next six months

A magical new film captures the secret life of the deep sea in a stretch of the ocean at risk from industrial mining

A magical film that explores the wonders of the deep sea through the eyes of a team of scientists and an underwater robot called Isis will be shown in selected cinemas across the UK next month.

The documentary, How Deep Is Your Love, offers a playful, irreverent and bittersweet look at our anthropocentric view of Earth, as it switches perspective from humans to deep sea animals and back again. It follows a research team from the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London, who sail for 12 days to reach a remote region called the Clarion Clipperton Zone, a biodiversity-rich area of the Pacific between Hawaii and Mexico. It takes Isis five hours to make the 3-mile (5km) descent to the bottom of this harsh world, where sunlight cannot penetrate, and where nodules rich in minerals mark it out as a hotspot for industrial mining.

The Canadian government has committed C$25m to try to rescue the caribou in the province – but there is no agreement on how best to save the keystone species

The caribou of Quebec are at breaking point. The province, home to 15% of Canada’s population of woodland caribou, has seen numbers crash to about half of what they were a decade ago. For years, local First Nations people, researchers and environmental groups have criticised the provincial government’s lack of action on protecting caribou, an animal considered a keystone species by Indigenous peoples.

A recently announced agreement between the federal and Quebec governments has raised hopes that the province will finally be compelled to release a protection strategy. The federal government has committed C$25m (£13m) to the province for caribou over five years, with an additional C$15m for the First Nations communities on whose land the herds live.

New research links last month’s disaster to fossil fuel pollution. Supporting disaster-hit countries must be at the centre of climate politics

Following a familiar pattern, coverage of the glacier collapse on the Nepal-Tibet border three weeks ago has subsided with the initial shock. But while the world’s attention has shifted, Nepal remains in the midst of an appalling tragedy. As well as at least 1,300 people who are known to have been killed, more than 5,000 are missing, some of them trapped in tunnels linked to the 13 hydropower plants that were damaged by the floods. On Wednesday four bodies were recovered from one of these tunnels, with searches ongoing. Families of the missing people are desperate for news.

Last week the country’s foreign minister, Shisir Khanal, said that it would ask the UN’s loss and damage fund for $20m (£15m) towards a total rebuilding cost of around $5bn (£3.75bn) – including the replacement of up to 20,000 homes. The first academic study linking the disaster to the climate crisis will now be added to that application. Scientists at Imperial College London, along with international collaborators on the World Weather Attribution project, found that a number of drivers of the glacier fall had been made worse by atmospheric heating. While not the sole cause, fossil fuel pollution was judged to have destabilised the geology of the mountain environment.

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As three siblings came of age and had to leave their pack, scientists tracked the dogs’ perilous 2,500-mile odyssey to find their own territory

It sounds like a Disney movie: three wild dogs, all brothers, on an epic journey to find a home of their own after their family tells them to leave. They dodge cars and hunters in search of a new life, navigating bushmeat snares and the hostility of a human-dominated landscape until they find a new haven on the African savannah.

But this is exactly what happened in Zambia last year, when three endangered African wild dogs made the longest-ever recorded single journey of any mammal from the continent. The brothers travelled more than 2,500 miles (4,100km) over eight months in their “dispersal” – when a young dog comes of age and must establish new territory to find a mate and start a family of their own.

Critically endangered Bornean orangutans flee forests as staff at Rangkong research station work round the clock to stave off blaze

Wildfires in Indonesia are sweeping through a critical research site for Bornean orangutans and are now threatening a celebrated research camp, home to one of the world’s longest-running studies of wild apes.

In the past few days, the fires have burned within 200 metres of Rangkong research station, a satellite of Cabang Panti research station, which lies about four miles north in Gunung Palung national park.

The country is one of just three that still permits commercial whaling, while its government has faced mounting pressure to ban the practice

Iceland will submit a bill in February 2027 which could permanently ban whaling in its waters, a move that would leave Norway and Japan as the only two countries to permit commercial whaling.

Whaling in Iceland has been put under intense scrutiny since a government-commissioned report was published in 2023 that found harpooned whales took two hours to die. The report led to a temporary suspension of the hunt that year.

Anglers will help scientists investigate the porbeagle, tope and blue shark to boost knowledge and conservation

‘We have really cool sharks,” says Dr Lucy Hawkes. She is not referring to animals in the rich coastal waters of South Africa or Mexico, but instead talking about the species that live around Britain. Hawkes, an associate professor at the University of Exeter, is co-leading a new three-year project to investigate the lives of three of England’s most vulnerable shark species.

“I like the porbeagle, which looks like a baby great white shark,” she says. “Surfers could see one and absolutely poop their pants, but they’re not dangerous. It’s amazing that we share the water with some pretty exciting animals.”