Jack Graham

President Donald Trump signed an executive order this week to encourage the U.S. government and consumers to purchase plastic drinking straws, in a major change of direction from his predecessor Joe Biden's measures against single-use plastics.

Producing these plastics, from Barbie dolls to water bottles, generates large amounts of planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, while the accumulation of plastic products in the environment pollutes lands and oceans.

On his first day back in office, President Donald Trump declared a "national energy emergency" with a plan to boost oil and gas production and withdrawing the United States from a global pact to fight global warming.

With an inauguration speech and series of executive orders signalling a dramatic departure from his predecessor, President Joe Biden, Trump in his second term as U.S. president is expected to have a major impact on climate action at home and abroad.

At the U.N. COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan, one issue is dominating proceedings: money.

Countries are tasked with agreeing a new financial goal to help developing nations tackle climate change, a figure U.N. agencies say should reach $1 trillion a year by the end of the decade.

As the evening rush hour descends upon Nairobi, Kenyan motorcycle taxi driver Kariuki Mwangi skilfully weaves through the congestion on his electric bike, acutely aware that a quiet revolution is humming beneath him.

His emissions-free two-wheeler is at the forefront of a movement sweeping across several African cities, where ambitious initiatives are propelling the shift towards cleaner public transport.

The scale of the challenges facing the world in tackling climate change and protecting nature are not modest, from transforming how we power our lives to reversing deforestation.

Jeffrey Bezos, the Amazon founder and world's second-richest man, used a small slice of his fortune to create the $10 billion Bezos Earth Fund in 2020 to find and scale solutions.

He's not in the room but he's the talk of the town.

As delegates scuttle round COP29 climate talks in Baku, President-elect Donald Trump is the name on everyone's lips.

While tens of thousands attend the U.N. COP29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, a group of more than 120 grassroots African female activists have snubbed the talks and already attended a "counter-COP" in Senegal.

Members of the Women's Climate Assembly (WCA) are seeking reparations for environmental and social damages inflicted by historic mining, and a greater say in the extraction of critical minerals needed for the world's transition to clean energy.

World leaders meet this week for the COP29 climate conference, gathering in Azerbaijan under the shadow of President designate Donald Trump, who has pledged to withdraw the United States from international climate commitments.

Trump's stunning comeback aside, countries are under pressure to ramp up their action on climate change given that 2024 risks being the warmest year on record, according to the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service.

Shuttering the world's dirtiest power plants could help to eliminate vast amounts of planet-heating emissions that are threatening international climate goals of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit). 

From India to Poland, these super polluting power plants most often run on coal and emit tens of millions of metric tons of carbon dioxide a year. 

On a string of wild and rocky islands off northwestern Canada, the Haida people revere the cedars that tower overhead as a nurturing older sister.

For millennia, the trees have given the Indigenous Haida timber to build beamed longhouses, blankets to weather winter, canoes to wend the waterways and shoes to shod their feet.

In the archipelago's rare, temperate rainforests - some of which are thought to pre-date the last ice age - mammoth red cedars dapple the damp undergrowth far below, land that is rich with huckleberry and ferns and carpeted in luminous moss.