Berta Cáceres, the environmental campaigner from Honduras, was shot dead at her home by armed intruders last months. For years, she led protests against the building of dams, illegal logging and plantations. Despite repeated threats to her safety, Cáceres refused to be silenced. Photograph: Tim Russo/AP

‘Time was running out’: Honduran activist’s last days marked by threats

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Source: Guardian Environment

Nine hundred years ago, 62 sailors landed in Bari bearing the relics of their patron saint, in a bid to revive the city’s fortunes. But it was fishing, an aqueduct and a bustling cultural scene that made Bari the thriving Italian port it is today

White stone on the Adriatic.

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Source: Guardian Environment

Malaria death rates have fallen 60% since 2000, but with some mosquitoes developing resistance to treated bednets, is it time to change strategy?

The underlying fact seems incontrovertible: mosquito resistance to the insecticides used to treat bednets is growing. The question is what can be done to combat this resistance and ringfence the dramatic drop in global malaria deaths over the past 15 years?

Since 2000, the numbers of people dying of malaria have dropped by 60% and cases of the disease have fallen by 37%, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).

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Source: Guardian Environment

Salt lakes, dust rivers and ice shelves were among the images captured by European Space Agency and Nasa satellites last month

Thousands of saline lakes span the south-western part of Western Australia, at the headwaters of the Frankland river, north of Stirling Range national park.

Millions of years ago, declines in rainfall caused river flows to ebb and river valleys to fill in with sediment. Wind then sculpted the loose sediment to form the lake basins that remain today. Some of the lakes now fill with runoff directly from the Stirling Range; others are controlled primarily by groundwater.

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Source: Guardian Environment

A coalition of governments, oil companies, and other key parties works for climate action and carbon pricing

Would it surprise you to learn that governments, oil companies, NGOs and major investors are coming together to map—and to motivate—the decarbonization of the global economy?

The Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition (CPLC) is a policy-focused alliance of national and subnational governments, intergovernmental agencies, businesses and institutional investors, nonprofits and stakeholder networks. It was launched on the first day of the Paris climate negotiations, and its mission is simple: to collaborate across borders, across sectors, sharing information, know-how and capacity, to build the most economically efficient tools for decarbonization into every nation’s climate plan as soon as possible.

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Source: Guardian Environment

Campaign to Protect Rural England accuses councils of altering boundaries and the government of facilitating the process

The number of houses planned for England’s green belt has risen to 275,000, nearly 200,000 more than four years ago, making a mockery of government pledges to protect the countryside, a report says.

The Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) says the number of planned homes on the green belt has increased by 55,000 in a year, with the area around London and the West Midlands under particular threat.

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Source: Guardian Environment

Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 25 April 1916

A solitary swallow, alternately beating seaward over the sand and drifting downwind above the dunes and golf links, passed me as it coasted along the Wirral shore towards the Lancashire side of the river, but beyond a small party of white wagtails on the shingle and a few silent willow wrens in the bushes inland it was the only summer bird I saw. Further inland, however, more migrants have appeared, for so long ago as Good Friday a friend found four species together on one of the sewage farms of the Upper Irwell, a favourite food and shelter providing spot for incoming birds. Swallows and white wagtails were there, and, in addition, the beautiful canary-coloured yellow wagtails (also reported from further south about the same time). The fourth kind was the sandpiper, long after its average date of arrival, and all of these had arrived during the night of the 20th, for none was visible on the previous day.

The salt-laden breeze from the ruffled waters of Liverpool Bay failed to disturb the bumblebees, which were more active than I had seen them for many weeks. Big, many-banded females whirred from flower to flower, and one plump black-bodied bee poised on whirring wings above the gorse, and as it contemplated each blossom protruded a long flexible tongue and dived under the golden lips; its thighs were orange with pollen. And all the time the tuneful larks, ignoring the wind, filled the air with gladness.

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Source: Guardian Environment

Giles Fraser says the EU “has become a huge and largely invisible way of redistributing wealth from the poor to the rich” (Why our landed gentry are so desperate to stay in the EU, 21 April). Clearly there is an element of the common agricultural policy that does do just that, to which capping payments to rich farmers may be the answer, but the overall situation is in fact the opposite.

According to the eminent historian Tony Judt in his masterful Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, “taken all in all, the EU is a good thing … from the late eighties, the budgets of the European Community and the Union nevertheless had a distinctly redistributive quality, transferring resources from wealthy regions to poorer ones and contributing to a steady reduction in the aggregate gap between rich and poor: substituting, in effect, for the nationally based Social-Democratic programmes of an earlier generation.”

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Source: Guardian Environment

It was a spectacular signal of global intent on Friday when more than 170 governments signed up to the Paris deal. But it’s just the start of a long, hard road

The danger of gala events like the official signing of the climate change treaty at the UN in New York on Friday, crowned with a guest appearance from Leonardo DiCaprio and with 60 heads of state in attendance, is the impression they create that the job is done. It was certainly a spectacular demonstration of global intent to get more than 170 signatures on the deal agreed in Paris in December at the first time of asking; but what matters is making it legally binding. For that, it must be not just signed but ratified by at least 55 countries, and it must cover 55% of emissions. Nor does the Paris deal go far enough. It was only a step on a long, hard road. The targets that each country set themselves do not go nearly far enough. Now the gap between reality and the ambition of holding global warming below 2C needs addressing. In Churchillian rhetoric, this is not the end, nor the beginning of the end, but it is the end of the beginning.

There are powerful reasons to pursue the Paris summit objective. According to the Japan Meteorological Agency, each of the past 11 months was warmer than the 20th-century average. Nasa statistics showed that 2015 was even hotter than the previous record-setting year of 2014. Yet despite the way the evidence is stacking up, political leaders in polluting countries continue to argue about whether and how fast they need to act. In the US, President Barack Obama’s climate plan has hit trouble in the supreme court, where the regulation of emissions from coal-fired plants has been blocked. Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic candidate for the presidency, is pledged to continue Mr Obama’s commitment to tackling emissions, but her probable rival, Donald Trump, is certainly not. The US and China are committed to ratifying the climate change treaty, but for others, such as India, it may be more complicated.

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Source: Guardian Environment