Breaking Waves: Ocean News

Mexico is a leading international pork producer, but Yucatán residents say the waste oozing from hundreds of enormous hog farms is destroying the environment The stink of excrement was the first thing the residents of Sitilpech noticed when the farm opened in 2017. It hung over the colourful one-storey homes and kitchen gardens in the Maya town in Yucatán, and has never left. Next, the trees stopped bearing fruit, their leaves instead covered with black spots. Then, the water from the vast, porous aquifer emerged from the well with a horrible, overwhelming stench. “Before, we used that water for everything: for cooking, for drinking, for bathing. Now we can’t even give it to animals. Today, we have to give the chickens purified water because otherwise they get diarrhoea,” says one resident. “The radishes grow thin and the coriander often turns yellow. This has always been a quiet town, where life was very good until that farm started,” they say. Continue reading...

Growing infestations along the Logan river pose ‘very high risk’ of spreading downstream, Invasive Species Council says Follow our Australia politics live blog for latest updates Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast An increase in fire ant infestations along Queensland’s Logan River is raising concerns Australia’s worst invasive species could form floating rafts and spread downstream. The Invasive Species Council advocacy manager, Reece Pianta, said governments should urgently ramp up eradication efforts along the Logan River, in south-east Queensland. Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email Continue reading...

In today’s newsletter: The view from Azerbaijan is of disappointingly low direct finance guarantees to the developing world, although it is ‘less bad than nothing’ • Sign up here for our daily newsletter, First Edition Good morning. Cop29 in Baku finally finished at 5.31am local time yesterday, more than 35 hours after it was due to conclude – and the extra time did not lead to a triumphant outcome. On the biggest issue under discussion, the transfer of climate finance from the developed to the developing world, the headline figure in the agreement was $1.3tn (£1tn) by 2035. But that masked much smaller commitments in direct finance, mostly in the form of grants and low-interest loans, which amounted to only $300bn. Nor is the outcome an injustice whose impact is limited to the global South, of course: if the money isn’t there to support a green energy transition in developing economies, temperatures will rise all over the world. UK weather | Storm Bert is expected to cause further disruption on Monday after torrential downpours caused “devastating” flooding over the weekend and a major incident in Wales. At least five people have died in England and Wales since the storm hit. Economy | A defiant Rachel Reeves will rebuke critics of her tax-raising budget on Monday, telling disgruntled business leaders at the Confederation of British Industry that they have offered “no alternatives”. CBI director-general Rain Newton-Smith will meanwhile accuse Reeves of jeopardising economic growth, saying: “Tax rises like this must never again be simply done to business.” Britons detained abroad | Families of prominent British prisoners detained abroad have urged the foreign secretary to deliver on pledges to help secure their release with signs of growing resistance from diplomats. There are fears that they are resisting a plan to appoint a special envoy on those detained abroad without a fair trial lest it affect trade deals. Middle East | A Guardian investigation has found that Israel used a US munition to target and kill three journalists and wound three more in a 25 October attack in south Lebanon which legal experts have called a potential war crime. Europe | A little-known, far-right populist took the lead in Romania’s presidential election on Sunday, and will probably face leftist prime minister Marcel Ciolacu in a runoff in two weeks, an outcome that has rocked the country’s political landscape. Calin Georgescu led the polls with about 22% of the vote after nearly 93% of votes were counted. The money could come not just in the form of the grants and very low-interest loans that developing countries need, but … from a “wide variety of sources, public and private, bilateral and multilateral and alternative sources”. Money will be “mobilised” rather than provided – a nice distinction that allows for the inclusion of private sector co-investing to be counted alongside public money from government budgets and development banks. Continue reading...

Nearly all observers believe Chris Bowen is strongly committed to action. Most agree that can’t be said for his party Cop29 in Baku has concluded but its outcome is disappointing – in many dimensions. Its decisions on finance – agreeing that the developed world would provide US$300bn a year by 2035 – come nowhere close to what’s needed. Ultimately, it may even be poisonous because of its lack of ambition and muddled scope – it does not even cover loss and damage. Baku saw little sense of urgency or increased climate action, despite the universal message from scientific studies, including the Climate Action Tracker. Our global update this year found that in the last three years there’s been virtually no improvement in either action on the ground, nor ambition to take action in the future. And this is despite a series of seemingly never-ending, global warming-linked deadly catastrophes unfolding around the world. Continue reading...