News

Local non-profits and schools are helping students explore traditional practices paired with modern science to make food sovereignty a reality

The Blackfeet Nation is a remote and rugged landscape on the windswept plains of northern Montana. While rich in resources, the remote location and management by the federal government have made food access a challenge here.

Only four grocery stores serve the entire reservation. Fresh, healthy produce and meat options are often limited at these stores, and prices are higher than in neighboring communities, making access difficult for low–income families. Instead, highly processed foods, rich in sugars, carbohydrates and fat make up the bulk of the food choices.

French multinational is ordered to remove its website messages about aiming for carbon neutrality

• Business live – latest updates

A French oil company engaged in “misleading commercial practices” about the scope of its environmental commitments, a court has ruled.

TotalEnergies, which this month said it aimed to “ramp up production of gas”, was found on Thursday to have probably misled consumers with claims about its climate policies. The civil court in Paris ordered the company to remove messages from its website that said it wanted to reach carbon neutrality by 2050 and be a big player in the energy transition.

Humans have been selectively breeding animals for millennia. If we can help species survive by tweaking their DNA in a lab, I say bring it on

Do you think we should genetically modify wildlife? What if we could make seabirds resistant to the flu that has been exterminating them en masse, just by tweaking their DNA a smidgen? Or make fish that can shrug off pollution, or coral that can survive warming waters? Engineer in the sorts of change that could occur naturally, given enough time, if only the wildlife would stop dying already.

Thanks to newly emerging methods, such as Crispr, these feats are within reach. Recently, conservationists met at the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) 2025 World Conservation Congress where they debated GM wildlife and voted on a proposed moratorium that would stymie their release into the wild. Ahead of the meeting, a group of more than 90 NGOs issued a press release urging the IUCN to “say no to engineered wild species.” But humans have been altering the DNA of other species for millennia.

Helen Pilcher is a science writer and the author of Bring Back the King: The New Science of De-Extinction

Former European officers say spending on low-carbon power would make nations more resilient to threats from potential aggressors

Investment in renewable energy should be counted under defence expenditure, says a group of retired senior military personnel, because the climate crisis represents a threat to national security.

They have called for increased spending on low-carbon power as a way of making the UK and other European countries more resilient to threats from Russia and other potential aggressors.

Environment Agency rates eight of nine companies as poor and needing improvement

• Business live – latest updates

• UK politics live – latest updates

England’s water company ratings have fallen to the lowest level on record after sewage pollution last year hit a new peak, with eight of nine water companies rated as poor and needing improvement by the Environment Agency.

The cumulative score of only 19 stars out of a possible 36 is the lowest since the regulator began auditing the companies using the star rating system in 2011.

In 2005, the Guardian documented the births of 10 babies as a way to tell the story of millions across the continent. We caught up with three of them, finding hardship – and hope

Twenty years ago, the Guardian featured 10 newborn babies in countries across Africa, describing their births, their families and the environments they had been born into. We followed these babies at five-year intervals up to 2015 – the date the United Nations had set for achieving the millennium development goals – as a way to tell stories that might be those of millions of others across the continent as they worked to provide the best chance for their children.

Although some progress was made, the millennium development goals were not met by 2015 and that year UN member states adopted a new approach – the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development with 17 goals for ending poverty and inequality, while also tackling the climate crisis. With five years to go, only 18% of those goals are on track to be met.

The migration of Christmas Island’s red crabs is in full swing, with roads closed in some places to protect millions of the crustaceans. Every year, the crabs emerge from the forest to travel to the ocean to breed, creating a red tide across the island. The Christmas Island national park said a massive spawning event will take place around 15 and 16 November, with a second spawning in mid-December

Boreas, whose icy winds herald winter, was regarded as saboteur of heroes and saviour of cities by ancient Greeks

The ancient Greeks personified the north wind as the god Boreas, and his chill breezes were a sign of the imminent arrival of winter. Boreas was depicted as a winged man in a billowing cloak holding a conch shell. He had a notoriously bad temper that produced violent storms, and he shipwrecked Odysseus and Hercules.

But in some cities, Boreas was a hero and saviour. When a Persian fleet threatened Athens in about 480BC, an oracle instructed the Athenians to pray to the winds. According to Herodotus, “from clear and windless weather” a storm blew up out of the north that lasted for three days. The storm was said to have destroyed virtually all the Persian ships, causing the invasion to fail.

Private member’s bill backed by Chris Packham and Natalie Bennett would impose a duty of care on government and business

A radical proposal to change the legal status of nature will be launched today in the House of Lords, with the unveiling of the UK nature’s rights bill initiative.

The private member’s bill aims to legally enshrine the idea that there can be no lasting economic progress or social justice without respect for the natural world, and to change the legal status of nature from objects, property and resources to a legal subject with inherent rights.

From a red-throated loon landing on water, to good and bad hair days and an airborne squirrel, here is a selection of the finalists in this year’s Nikon Comedy Wildlife awards. A winner will be announced on 9 December

In 2024, nearly a million hectares of Ukraine’s land burned. Heat, mines and shelling contributed, but footage of drones targeting firefighters has raised the question of war crimes

Natalia Pryprosta was tending to her pigs when fire swept into the village of Studenok, near the city of Izium in eastern Ukraine. There was no time. She grabbed her papers, pulled her elderly mother into a friend’s car, and tried to get the animals out of the shed. Smoke and the speed of the blaze made it impossible. She didn’t see the animals burning, but learned of their fate later.

Smoke smothered Studenok, turning the village as dark as night. Pryprosta’s neighbours fought the flames with shovels, digging in scorched earth to stop the crown fire’s advance. Firefighters arrived, but the blaze was relentless. At one point, it surged around a fire truck, trapping the crew.

Use of wood-burning stoves and fires in homes is mostly unnecessary and their toxic pollution costs the NHS millions

The burning of wood and coal in homes contributes to almost 2,500 deaths a year in the UK, analysis has found. Stopping unnecessary burning would save the NHS more than £54m a year, the experts concluded.

Wood-burning stoves and open fires are one the biggest sources of small pollution particles, which cause heart and lung disease, and their use has risen in recent years. The report also links this toxic air pollution to 3,700 cases of diabetes and 1,500 cases of asthma a year, although the health impacts are likely to be underestimated.

Exclusive: Promise to remove almost all fossil fuels from UK’s electricity supply by 2030 may be quietly abandoned over cost

Ministers are considering dropping one of their central green pledges in an effort to keep energy bills down, sources have told the Guardian.

Government insiders say Keir Starmer is prepared to miss his own target of removing almost all fossil fuels from the UK’s electricity supply by 2030 if doing so proves much more expensive than building gas power instead.

Get out of the Honda Gwyneth!

• Sign up here to get an email whenever First Dog cartoons are published

• Get all your needs met at the First Dog shop if what you need is First Dog merchandise and prints

Dan Zafra captured a timelapse of something he could only dream of - red sprites, also known as red lightning, flashing above the Milky Way - while photographing from the Clay Cliffs in New Zealand's South Island on 11 October. Red sprites are brief, large-scale electrical discharges that occur high above thunderstorms, reaching altitudes of up to 90km. They are almost impossible to see with the naked eye and last just a few milliseconds

• ‘A perfect coincidence’: rare red lightning captured in New Zealand skies

Guano, a fertiliser derived from seabird excrement, enriched Peru in the 19th century and was shipped around the world in huge quantities. On Santa Island, north of Lima, workers still mine it in the toughest of conditions

Photographs by Ernesto Benavides/AFP/Getty Images

Iida Turpeinen’s novel has been a sensation in her native Finland. On the eve of its UK publication, she talks about her compulsion to tell of the sociable giant’s plight

Iida Turpeinen is the author of Beasts of the Sea, a Finnish novel tracing the fate of a now-extinct species: the sea cow. Similar to dugongs and manatees, the sea cow was only discovered in 1741 by the shipwrecked German-born naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller but by 1768 it had already become the first marine species to be eradicated by humans.

Translated into 28 languages and shortlisted for the country’s most prestigious literary award, the Finlandia Prize, Beasts of the Sea was described by the Helsinki Literacy Agency as the most internationally successful Finnish debut novel ever. Turpeinen, 38, a PhD student of comparative literature, is now a resident novelist at Finland’s Natural History Museum. Her book will be published in the UK on 23 October.

While Nigel Farage promotes retro plans to reopen coalmines, will he really tell thousands of clean energy workers to leave their well-paid, local jobs?

This government is bad at proclaiming what it’s for. But to find out, follow the money. Its boldest investment is in green energy, designed to create prodigious returns in economic growth, employment, training, climate action and more. So far it has been hard to sell. Wafty talk of greenness passes most people by, and “whose growth is it, anyway?” is a realistic question in a country of stagnant pay and public decay. But, this week, Ed Miliband put flesh on the green words, making jobs and projects concrete. A very big number of green jobs – 400,000 by 2030 – are set to be created in 31 “priority occupations”, from welders to production managers, plumbers and joiners, everywhere from Centrica’s £35m state-of-the-art training academy in Lutterworth to Teesside’s net-zero decarbonisation cluster.

This is what a Labour industrial strategy should look like. Nigel Farage’s retro campaign for this week’s Caerphilly byelection promises to reopen Welsh coalmines. But well-paid, clean, green-energy jobs within their home districts are what Miliband’s Doncaster North constituents want, the minister tells me, not sending young people down reopened mines. Government figures show wind, nuclear and electricity jobs pay more than most – the average advertised salary in the wind sector is £51,000 a year, against an average £37,000. Unions, once sceptical and fearful of losing jobs in unionised industries, now sign up with guarantees that any new plant getting grants must “support greater trade union recognition” and a fair work charter.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

Labour would do well to remember its manifesto promise to revive Britain’s global leadership on development

With borrowing costs rising and western governments including the UK cutting their aid budgets, unsustainable debts are driving a development crisis across the global south.

In the latest evidence, Ethiopia last week faced the threat of being sued by its creditors in the English courts, after long-running negotiations about restructuring $1bn (£740m) of its debt collapsed.

They are peaceful, female-led and use sex in everyday interactions. Now a new conservation scheme could offer a lifeline to our critically endangered close relatives living on the Congo river

A few dozen large nests appear in the mist of equatorial dawn, half-hidden behind a tangle of vines and leaves. That is where the bonobos sleep, 12 metres above the ground. But it has rained all night, and the primates are in no hurry to get up. It is 6.30am when the first head emerges. It gives a cry, a sharp bark, and another silhouette unfolds from its cocoon of branches. And then another. Within five minutes, the whole group is awake – yawning, stretching, straightening. Their features are fine, their limbs long and delicate, their build less stocky than that of chimpanzees, their closest cousins.

Bonobos live on the left bank of the Congo River

Bird migrations rank as one of nature’s greatest spectacles. Thanks to GPS tracking, scientists are uncovering extraordinary insights into ancient and mysterious journeys – and new threats that are reshaping them.

Bird migrations rank as one of nature’s greatest spectacles. Thanks to GPS tracking, scientists are uncovering extraordinary insights into ancient and mysterious journeys – and new threats that are reshaping them.

As storm-chasing seabirds, Desertas petrels seek out hurricanes that draw deep-sea creatures to the surface. Only about 200 pairs remain, although the population is stable.

Determined to find a solution to the discarded plastic nets, Ian Falconer found a way to convert them into filament for 3D printing, for use in products from motorbikes to sunglasses

Ian Falconer kept thinking about the heaps of discarded plastic fishing nets he saw at Newlyn harbour near his home in Cornwall. “I thought ‘it’s such a waste’,” he says. “There has to be a better solution than it all going into landfill.”

Falconer, 52, who studied environmental and mining geology at university, came up with a plan: shredding and cleaning the worn out nets, melting the plastic down and converting it into filament to be used in 3D printing. He then built a “micro-factory” so that the filament could be made into useful stuff.

Allegations related to flood control projects have sparked widespread anger and protests in the Philippines

Philippine health worker Christina Padora waded through July’s waist-high flood water to check on vaccines and vital medications stored in the village clinic, something she had regularly done during previous typhoons.

But this time she didn’t make it. Taking hold of a metal pole that she failed to see was connected to a live wire, the 49-year-old was fatally electrocuted in the water.

The volcanic island of Surtsey emerged in the 1960s, and scientists say studying its development offers hope for damaged ecosystems worldwide

The crew of the Ísleifur II had just finished casting their nets off the coast of southern Iceland when they realised something was wrong. In the early morning gloom in November 1963, a dark mass filled the sky over the Atlantic Ocean. They rushed to the radio, thinking that another fishing vessel was burning at sea, but no boats in the area were in distress.

Then, their trawler began to drift unexpectedly, unnerving the crew further. The cook scrambled to wake the captain, thinking they were being pulled into a whirlpool. Finally, through binoculars, they spotted columns of ash bursting from the water and realised what was going on: a volcano was erupting in the ocean below.

Struggling fishers in Hastings say the industry is dying after a deal giving away access to its waters made a tough job impossible

A small flotilla of gaily coloured fishing boats line the shingle beach at Hastings, East Sussex. Behind them are the bulldozers that shunt them into the waves and beyond, in neat rows, are black wooden fishermen’s huts and fish stalls, where on a good day teenage daughters, wives and retired skippers sell some of the day’s catch.

This is the Stade, a Saxon word for “landing place” from where wooden boats have set off since before William the Conqueror arrived in 1066.

Peter White outside his shed. He has been fishing for 52 years