Jack Graham

Governments are meeting in Ottawa, Canada, this week for the next round of global talks over a treaty to end plastic pollution, as the world struggles with more than 400 million metric tons of plastic waste produced each year.

Producing 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.

A year of record temperatures and extreme weather - from floods to fires - is due to a deadly cocktail of man-made climate change mixed with cyclical El Niño weather, scientists say.

A spate of recent heatwaves in West Africa, for example, would not have happened without climate change and was made still worse by the El Niño event, scientists from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group found in a new report. 

Clothing factories that supply H&M and Zara are buying cotton linked to environmental destruction and land-grabbing in Brazil's Cerrado - a biodiversity hotspot where deforestation is soaring, research by the Earthsight nonprofit has found.

While global concern has focused on the impact of beef and soy farming in the Amazon, deforestation alerts in Brazil's lesser-known Cerrado tropical savannah jumped 44% in 2023, data from the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) shows.

As African countries race to build homes for their soaring populations, material shortages and under-investment threaten to limit the scope of a green revolution in the continent's construction industry.

The building boom presents a huge opportunity to turbocharge Africa's clean energy transition by adopting green design techniques and climate-friendly materials to slash the emissions caused by building houses.

Millions of people have joined tree-planting campaigns through the decades - hoping to slow global warming and counteract mass deforestation - but a new study suggests the overall climate benefit has been overstated.

The potential for reforestation projects to mitigate climate change depends largely on where they are located, according to the research, published in the journal Nature Communications.

When storms batter Scotland's Shetland Islands, as they frequently do, the force of the winds whipping through its streets and valleys leave you in no doubt that this is Britain's windiest place.

Now islanders are looking to those fierce winds to take the place of the declining coffshore oil and gas industry that transformed their economy from the 1970s.

Local energy developer Angus Ward first studied the potential of wind power in the archipelago, 100 miles (160 km) north of the Scottish mainland, using data from the Met Office national weather service as a student in the 1970s.

When U.S. voters head to the polls in November to decide a likely showdown between President Joe Biden and Donald Trump, they will join the ranks of about two billion people voting worldwide this year.

In a record year for democracy, nations that are home to more than half the global population will have elections, including Indonesia in February, India by May and the United States and Britain later in the year.

From popstar Taylor Swift's jetsetting on tour to billionaire Elon Musk's fleet of planes, the use of private jets by the rich and famous has drawn increasing criticism as concern grows over air travel's role in global warming.

Yet few events attract more polluting private flights than next week's World Economic Forum (WEF) at Davos, where heads of state, business leaders and others will discuss pressing issues including geopolitical instability and climate change.

On the coast of Tanzania's Mafia Island lies a blue lagoon - a dream-like pool of bright turquoise water, filtered and cooled by the mangroves which surround it.

Ailars David, a marine conservation warden at the reserve, said the plan is to build a boardwalk for tourists to reach the lagoon so they can swim surrounded by nature and the freshest of air.

As Dubai's COP28 U.N. climate summit enters its final week, momentum has grown behind a global target to triple renewable energy such as wind and solar by 2030, with nearly two-thirds of countries putting their weight behind the pledge.

About 130 countries now back the goal which aims to accelerate renewable energy capacity to 11,000 gigawatts (GW) in a bid to speed the world's transition to cleaner power.