Breaking Waves: Ocean News

Even if president-elect rolls back climate progress, John Podesta reaffirms commitment to a clean planet at Cop29 The US climate envoy John Podesta said the fight “for a cleaner, safer” planet will not stop under a re-elected Donald Trump even if some progress is reversed, speaking at the Cop29 UN climate talks on Monday as they opened in Baku, Azerbaijan. “Although under Donald Trump’s leadership the US federal government placed climate-related actions on the back burner, efforts to prevent climate change remain a commitment in the US and will confidently continue,” said Podesta, who is leading the Biden administration’s delegation at the annual talks. Continue reading...

Authorities have been racing to evacuate people reluctant to leave villages affected by the erupting Mount Lewotobi Laki-Laki volcano on the Indonesian island of Flores. Volcanic material has continued to spew from its crater since 3 November, prompting authorities to extend the danger area and increase the number of evacuees. Lewotobi Laki-Laki is one of 120 active volcanoes in Indonesia At least 10 dead as volcanic eruptions destroy houses in Indonesia Continue reading...

Much is unclear about how Donald Trump’s return to power will affect efforts to tackle global heating but there are a few things we can say You’ve probably already heard the worst-case takes: that a second Trump presidency is a disaster for the climate, and will almost certainly lead to emissions being higher than they otherwise would have been. There’s obvious truth in that. But it’s also true that Trump 2.0 will almost certainly not play out in line with immediate post-election predictions. We have been here before. As the writer and analyst Ketan Joshi points out, in 2016 it was projected that Trump’s policies would lead to a steep rise in US emissions – a fork in the road at odds with the decline forecast if Hillary Clinton had won. Continue reading...

How do you capture the effects of the climate crisis on people right now? We have collected testimonies from around the world This is climate breakdown: ‘I heard on the scanner there’s a child in the water’ In March 2024, the Guardian’s environment desk began collaborating on a project that we hope will give voice to the growing number of people around the world living through the daily impact of climate breakdown. Our journalists have worked alongside researchers and humanitarian workers at the Climate Disaster Project (CDP) in Canada and the International Red Cross to compile a series of testimonies from survivors of recent extreme weather events. CDP is an international teaching newsroom coordinated out of the University of Victoria in Canada that collaborates with disaster survivors. The teams are trained in trauma-informed interview skills, and spent hours speaking with people, listening to their stories and then relaying them in a way that takes us all through the experience. In publishing these testimonies and sharing them with you, we were able to help fulfil the project’s aim of creating “a people’s history of climate change” that would honour the dignity of the survivors. Continue reading...