Insurer says actual amount of insured losses from storms Desmond, Eva and Frank will not be known for some timeDirect Line Insurance Group has estimated the total cost of clients’ claims from the three storms that hit Britain in December are between £110m and £140m.The company, Britain’s largest motor insurer, said it expected claims in both its home and commercial divisions. Continue reading...

For British politicians, foreign aid to Africa has become a cherished emblem of our idealism and generosity. But what happens when our funds harm those they are meant to help?One day in late 2010, a farmer – I will call him Opik – woke up in his village in the remote Ethiopian province of Gambella. In this lush lowland area of savanna bordering South Sudan, the semi-nomadic Anuak people have lived for centuries, cultivating sorghum and maize, swimming in the river and gathering nuts, berries and fruits from the trees and wild honey from the forest. “It was paradise,” Opik recalled.The Anuak have an intimate relationship with their landscape. Their highest traditional authority is a spiritual leader called the wat-ngomi, who must sanction any human intervention in nature. Some trees are deemed sacred and cannot be cut down. Spirits live in certain sites and even the boundaries of their territory are inscribed with religious meaning. Everyone knows where the land of one community ends and that of another begins. This intimacy is reflected in their language: “How are you?” in the Anuak language is piny bede nidi, which literally translates as “how is the earth?” The reply is piny ber jak (“the earth is fine”) or piny rac (“the earth is bad”). Continue reading...

South Downs, West Sussex There’s an explosion of flapping wings above the forest as dozens of wood pigeons rise in panicAll things must pass, even this rain. No sooner does this thought occur to me, as I look across the mixed woodland and fields from my vantage point, than a rainbow arches from the ground into the cloud, brightening in the strengthening sun. The warmer, dry air seems to cast a spell across the landscape, and it comes alive.Wood pigeons spring up and criss-cross the sky. A buzzard cries a plaintive “mew” from the top of a prominent oak. Gangs of finches and buntings – goldfinches, chaffinches, bramblings, yellowhammers – bounce through the air over the fields, and settle in the tops of the trees around me, whistling and chirruping. I watch the rainbow slowly fade. Columns of vapour rise from the green conifers in the distance. Continue reading...

SoCalGas says it will install equipment to lessen the escape of gas from a well but local residents attack slow response to what official called ‘a mini-Chernobyl’The owners of the blown-out natural gas well near Los Angeles said on Sunday they would install equipment to suck up and capture some of the leaking methane – amid rising anger at the potential threat to public health and the climate.

For Britain’s birds, the weather in January is absolutely crucial. Cold, hard winters mean death; mild ones greatly increase their chances of survival. To see the difference in fortunes, we only need to compare two winters just over a quarter of a century apart: the Big Freeze of 1962-63 and the winter of 1988-89, one of the mildest on record.Winter 1962-63 has gone down in meteorological history as the winter to end all winters. From New Year’s Day until the end of February snow fell somewhere in Britain every single day, and temperatures remained six degrees below the usual average at a numbing 0C. Continue reading...

Tom Steyer calls on president to seize opportunity to explain his actions on the environment and convince Americans that they must be irrevocableBillionaire climate activist Tom Steyer pressed Barack Obama on Monday to go out with a bang and make global warming central to the message of his last State of the Union address.

Affluent Chinese are putting two Mexican species at risk due to demand for dried swim bladders. But will this year’s Cites meeting on the wildlife trade force a crackdown?

Dilley quits weeks after coming under fire when it emerged he was on holiday in Barbados as floods hit northern EnglandSir Philip Dilley resigned from his £100,000 a year post as chairman of the Environment Agency, saying he was not able to meet the “inappropriate” requirements of the part-time job.The engineer, heavily criticised for taking a holiday to Barbados during the Christmas floods that hit parts of Yorkshire and Lancashire, cited the expectation for him “to be available at short notice throughout the year” prompting his decision to quit. Continue reading...

SciDev.Net: The underground water in many densely populated regions is vulnerable to pollutants, reveals studyThe groundwater in many of Africa’s most crowded regions lies close to the surface, making it vulnerable to pollution, a study shows.Regions along the Gulf of Guinea are at high risk of groundwater pollution on the continent, according to a map drawn by researchers at the Université Catholique de Louvain’s Earth and Life Institute in Belgium. Much of Central Africa and some coastal lands in northwest Africa are also vulnerable. Continue reading...

Zimbabwe hunter Martin Nel axes plan to sell 100 raffle tickets for $1,500 each after outcry from animal rights groupsA professional hunter in Zimbabwe has cancelled a plan to raffle a lion hunt in the US after protests from activists.Martin Nel said he was scrapping the raffle at a hunters’ convention, in which he had hoped to sell 100 raffle tickets for $1,500 (£1,000) each in Las Vegas next month. Continue reading...

Report quietly published last month shows efforts to cut government’s carbon emissions, domestic flights, waste and water usage fell short on all countsThe government has failed to meet its own targets for cutting the environmental impact of the state’s operations, according to a Defra report quietly published last month.The “greening government commitments”, which began when David Cameron declared he would lead the “greenest government ever” in 2010, were intended to deliver big cuts in carbon emissions, domestic flights, waste and water usage. Continue reading...

Reducing carbon emissions is truly important to mitigating climate change. But in the meantime, it’s faster and cheaper to save and regrow tropical treesThere was already dramatic evidence that our planet is undeniably warming before 30 December 2015, when the world heard that the ice at the North Pole was melting. (The temperature on 30 December 2015 was, by some reports, 33ºF [0.7ºC], 50ºF above average).And yet one immediate, effective way to fight climate change and save polar ice caps is half a world away, in the tropics. Tropical forest conservation and restoration could constitute half of the global warming solution, according to a recent peer reviewed commentary in Nature Climate Change. Continue reading...

Wildlife Trust estimates tree disease has left around 1,000 mature English elms, which are the exclusive habitat of declining white-letter hairstreakA species of rare UK butterfly is under threat after a widespread tree disease caused its only habitat to virtually disappear.

Rare earths are ubiquitous in our gadgets and have transformed our lives, but sourcing them is costing the environmentSmartphones, tablets, desktop computers – ubiquitous gadgets for the digital age, they astonish us with their near omniscience and delight us with their myriad apps. But, according to David S Abraham, there’s another reason we should be impressed with our devices – they are a veritable compendium of chemicals. “The iPhone itself has half the elements known to man in it,” he explains down the line. “They each have the little functions that they do and without one of them the product won’t work in the way that we expect it to.”Abraham should know. A natural resource strategist, he has trekked around the world, from a vast niobium mine in Brazil to an antiquated processing plant in Estonia, investigating how a bunch of exotic-sounding elements have transformed our lives. The upshot is The Elements of Power, a book that explores an epoch Abraham believes to be as profound as those born of stone, iron and bronze: the “rare metal age”. Continue reading...

Association of British Insurers says average payout for domestic claims is £50,000 – a rise on last year – but total cost will be less than half of 2007 floodsThe final bill for the flood damage caused by this winter’s storms is likely to reach £1.3bn, the Association of British Insurers (ABI) has said. The figure covers damage caused to homes, businesses and motor vehicles by storms Desmond, Eva and Frank during December and over the new year.The ABI said that nearly £24m of emergency payments had already been made to households and businesses. More than 3,000 families are now in alternative accommodation while their homes are being repaired. Continue reading...

Sightseer’s nose stitched up after snake bites face during a show in the Thai holiday spot of PhuketA Thai company that runs snake shows has paid £2,200 (US$3,200) in damages to a Chinese tourist after she was attacked by one of their pythons when she tried to kiss it.A video clip posted online shows two men during a show calmly holding the python. A long-haired woman wearing a backpack leans over to kiss it. Continue reading...

Claxton, Norfolk I was so shocked I looked round for someone to receive the tidings: a bumblebee at New Year!

Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 12 January 1916We have again during the past week had some heavy rainfalls, keeping the rivers of this district at flood level, but the water falls rapidly after the returning storms, leaving the meadowland each time covered with silt. There is no doubt, therefore, that this season has been a very fortunate one up to the present for those who have such land in their holding.The gale of the New Year time has, I find, done considerable mischief. A friend tells me he has had about four hundred trees blown down, including some large park timber that had no signs of decay, but no doubt the wind caught them from an unusual quarter, and they were uprooted. Last night the wind blew very hard, but at daylight the air was calm and birds were singing as they do on an April morning. Signs of spring are everywhere. The primroses are out in the gardens though I have not seen any in the woodlands. A poplar tree, potted two years ago, made a magnificent growth last season – an exceptional one for tree development, - and the young branches are already showing a number of small but perfect leaves. Continue reading...

It seems astonishing that the Amazon rainforest is fertilised by Saharan dust blown across the Atlantic. The large sand grains in dust storms fall quickly to the ground, but smaller particles can travel thousands of kilometres. Saharan dust can cause air pollution in the eastern Mediterranean to reach 10 times European limits. Italy, Spain and Portugal are also frequently affected.The southerly winds that gave most of the UK its warmest December on record also bought Saharan dust. From London to South Wales, it caused air pollution to reach four on the 10-point UK pollution scale on the 17th and eight on the 27th . Smaller quantities were measured in Leicester and over most of England. Continue reading...

Ted Cruz, an avowed opponent of the influential biofuel lobby, is riding high in the polls as the global oil price falls. Big Corn is staring down the barrelFor decades, presidential candidates seeking to compete in the Iowa caucuses have dutifully pledged their support for the production and sale of ethanol.Related: Republican 2016 contenders invade Iowa to talk up ethanol and court rich donors Continue reading...

Mild weather of December expected to give way to wintry blast this week, with highs of 5C (41F) in south and freezing in northBritain is bracing itself for an icy blast over the coming week when temperatures are expected to drop below freezing and bring snow and widespread frosts.The chill weather will be a sharp change from the mild weather last month, the wettest on record and the warmest ever December, when temperatures averaged 7.9C (46.2F). Continue reading...

Seismologists’ warnings about hydraulic fracturing and wastewater disposal divide residents, politicians and companies in Colorado and Oklahoma, while temblors increase around the regionOklahomans don’t blink when they hear warnings about tornadoes, drought or ice-storms. Earthquakes, however, catch their attention.Related: Series of small earthquakes hit near Oklahoma crude oil storage hub Continue reading...

Volkwagen will showcase its new vehicles at the US’s largest car show on Monday in the face of the ongoing fallout from DieselgateOn Sunday night, as Detroit fills with auto journalists and car executives, Volkswagen will hold a media party at Fishbone’s, the Cajun-themed restaurant in the city’s Greektown neighbourhood. It’ll be the opening salvo in a PR offensive the German company will be hoping can finally turn the tide after arguably the worst year in its history.Three months after the revelation that Volkswagen Group was using an illegal software fix called a “defeat device” to circumvent US environmental regulations on about 600,000 of its diesel-powered passenger cars, the company will showcase its new vehicles at the US’s largest car show on Monday.

Tom Blass proves a compelling guide as he travels through the myth and history of northern Europe’s marginal watersAt the end of this long, rich, illuminating and enjoyable study of the North Sea, Tom Blass describes his subject as an entity that “words can only fail”. “What I know,” he continues, “is that it is everything we say it is and none of those things, that it exists inside us and yet transcends us – possesses no boundaries other than those we inflict on it, neither moral values, nor narrative structures. They are all with us and not the sea.”This might strike some as a curious admission. But it is Blass’s knowledge that his study is doomed to be partial, combined with his concern that he risks dispelling the wonder and the variety of his subject by containing it within language, which lends this book much of its power. He is often uncertain about how to think and write about the subjects he encounters – and that lends his judgments weight. Continue reading...

Diver and photographer Alexander Semenov braves Russia’s freezing White Sea to explore the wonders beneathIt looks like a bloody organ wrenched from a human body. In fact, this is a lion’s mane jellyfish. Shot last summer in Russia’s White Sea by diver and photographer Alexander Semenov, it is one of a host of underwater creatures few would want to meet. But Semenov is different. “I think I’m [a] lucky guy,” he says, reflecting on his opportunity to both see these remarkable creatures for himself, and reveal their splendour to others.The son of two biologists, Semenov is head of a team of scientific divers at the White Sea Biological Station. He sees himself akin to “a 19th-century naturalist” in his approach to investigating and probing the planet’s myriad lifeforms. Continue reading...

Serving up ancient holy water from well underneath diplomatic mission in centre of London is unlikely but tests reportedly show it is safe to drinkLondon’s Australia House usually dishes out travel documents and advice but could also in theory provide entirely drinkable water from an ancient well underneath, according to laboratory tests.Related: Sealed chambers at ancient Aztec site in Mexico City could hold rulers' tombs Continue reading...

Improvements in the travel industry are helping us all to be greener globetrottersCamping aside, vacationing used to be viewed as eco hooliganism by the green movement. But as the standards of eco tourism grow and our own sustainable infrastructure stagnates, it will soon be easier to be green abroad than at home. A holiday could be a chance to claw back credit from Mother Earth. To paraphrase the International Union for Conservation of Nature, eco tourism promotes conservation, has a low visitor impact and benefits people in the host country.Parts of the travel industry are improving. If the eco-friendly extent of a resort is just a “save water by not washing your towel” notice, you can do better. Bookdifferent.com gives you the carbon footprint for a night’s stay. Also look out for an EarthCheck rating (formerly known as the Green Globe) which measures a hotel’s greenhouse gas emissions, energy efficiency and eco-system conservation. Continue reading...

Daniel Lubetzky, who was a social activist before starting Kind, says his government petition to use the word “healthy” is about righting a wrongNine months ago, the US Food and Drug administration accused Kind, the snack-bar maker, of breaking the law by describing its bars containing fatty nuts as “healthy”. Fighting back, Kind charged that the FDA’s rules are wrongheaded and outdated.At the center of this battle with government regulators is Daniel Lubetzky, founder and CEO of Kind, who tries to live up to his company’s name even when he’s talking about a foe. Continue reading...

Europe’s refugee crisis, the executions in Saudi Arabia, winter swimming in Russia – the best photography in news, culture and sport from around the world this week Continue reading...

Committee on Climate Change questions ministers’ claims of increased investment and urges more spending on defencesGovernment claims that it increased spending on flood defences ahead of the wettest December on record are “essentially meaningless”, an independent adviser on climate change has said.Daniel Johns, the head of adaptation at the Committee on Climate Change, urged the government to commit to spending more on defences after weeks of heavy rain caused flooding across the UK. Continue reading...

In 1871, ice trapped a fleet and sent 33 ships to the bottom of the Chukchi Sea but this week’s discoveries suggest climate change could uncover more as ice continues to meltArchaeologists have discovered the wrecks of two American whalers off the Arctic coast of Alaska, almost 145 years after ice trapped a whaling fleet and sent 33 ships to the bottom.

Decline of Monarch population wintering in Mexico now marks a statistical long-term trend, experts sayThis story was published in January, 2014

Leash Fen, Derbyshire I’ve often seen birders parked up on the road watching the short-eared owls that nest hereAfter days of rain, the fields either side of Spitewinter Lane were soaked, the heavy clay soil of those more recently ploughed liquid and greasy. Raindrops bounced off the asphalt. Thick cloud skimmed the top of Big Moor. I shrank inside my jacket, thrust hands deeper into pockets, and splashed along.This is a good place to contemplate the limits of development. The fields here, a thousand feet above sea level, are the last of what is known in the Pennines as intake land (taken in from the moor for cultivation). Just beyond their boundary of crumbling drystone walls and modern wire fences is Leash Fen, one of the biggest mires on the Peak District’s eastern edges, a bulging saddle of peat heaped on the gritstone beneath it. Continue reading...

Mavericks, along the San Mateo County coast, is known to form some of the biggest and most dangerous waves in the worldDozens of big-wave surfers rode 50ft swells at Mavericks, a famous surf spot in northern California, as El Niño-driven storms pounded the California coast.Mavericks, along the San Mateo County coast, is known to form some of the biggest and most dangerous waves in the world, and is home to the Titans of Mavericks big wave competition. Continue reading...

Environmental concerns will come a distant second to profit when governments can be sued for passing lawsSurprisingly, your article on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) fails to mention the environment (“A deal for freer trade or corporate greed? Here’s the truth about TTIP”, Business).The independent UK Committee on Climate Change supports fracking in the UK, but its chair, Lord Deben, has also stated that his committee would not hesitate to ban fracking if the UK was unable to meet its climate change commitments. Continue reading...

Rare species would be endangered if Ammon Bundy and his cattle-ranching militia are permitted unfettered access to federal land, experts warnAllowing cattle to graze across swathes of federal land in Oregon, as an armed band of militia is demanding, could have devastating consequences for the area’s delicate ecosystem, experts have warned.Rare species such as the greater sage grouse that does a mating dance on federal land adjacent to the Malheur national wildlife refuge, occupied by the militia, have already been harmed by widespread cattle grazing on high-desert plains across the west. Continue reading...

City links: An unusual Berlin property map, Rotterdam’s floating forest and the fate of Delhi’s metro all feature in this week’s roundup of the best urban storiesThis week’s stories range from a map tool that lets Berlin renters see if their landlord is illegally overcharging them to plans for Singapore’s new non-High Line and the role of sound in architecture. We’d love to read about your favourites too: share them in the comments below. Continue reading...

Deadly floods like the ones currently plaguing towns across the midwest, once labeled rare or freak weather events, are recurring with worrying regularityAbout 100 miles downstream of Hannibal, the boyhood home of Mark Twain, the small Missouri town of West Alton has spent the past week without almost its entire population as it has been completely swamped by water.

A hippo play fighting, galloping horses and two leopard cats are among this week’s pick of images from the natural world Continue reading...