Extinction Rebellion protests – live: Activists strip naked outside Barclays after police remove people glued to plants

In other Climate news, in early May, Gaza’s top water officials did a tour of new facilities and declared that the hard work had paid off: Gaza could no longer be considered “uninhabitable” because of its water and sewage crisis.

A week later, a devastating 11-day war between Palestinian militants and Israel’s army erupted, and that notion quite literally blew up.

Home to 2 million people, Gaza has suffered under a 14-year long Israeli and Egyptian blockade in place since the militant group Hamas violently seized control of the strip. Since then, four wars between militants and Israel have also battered vital infrastructure.

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The climate crisis is the defining issue of our time. Since the first major warnings about the impact of carbon emissions on the global climate in the 1970s, the stream of disquieting evidence has become a torrent.

This is no longer a crisis-in-waiting, it’s unfolding before our eyes. 2020 tied with 2016 as the hottest year, in the hottest decade since records began. Hellish wildfires spanned the globe, killing or displacing nearly 3 billion animals in Australia, and in California, a new word - gigafire - was needed to describe unprecedented blazes.

The UK experienced record downpours with severe flooding in Cumbria, Wales, and Yorkshire. Intense cyclones left swathes of the Indian subcontinent under water. Meteorologists ran out of names for Atlantic hurricanes as powerful systems dumped rain across the Americas and Caribbean and battered coastlines with ferocious winds, in the most active season on record.

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A number of Extinction Rebellion activists stripped naked infront of a branch of Barclays bank in London.

Four protestors, two male and two female, took of their clothes infront of a banner which read: “We are all vulnerable, stop funding fossil fuels”.

Underneath their clothes, writing across their bodies read “divest now”, “stop funding fossil fuels”, “stop funding death” and “morally bankrupt”.

North Atlantic right whales have become critically endangered as a result of oceans warming up, according to a new study.

Higher temperatures in the Gulf of Maine have driven the species from its traditional and protected habitat and into unsafe waters, researchers have said.

Warming in the Gulf of Maine has been rising faster than 99 per cent of the global oceans over the past decade, reducing the abundance of copepods – tiny fatty crustaceans that make up the whale’s main food source.

The whales now have to travel north-east to the Gulf of St Lawrence in Canada for food.

Leonie Chao-Fong reports​

Sales on eBay this year have saved almost 87 million items – 18,000 tonnes – from landfill as a result of an increase in second-hand sales.

There has been a 29 per cent increase in the online sales in 2021 compared to 2018.

Joanna Whitehead reports

China has told the US that it will form its own climate change plans.

US special envoy John Kerry is in China, where he has been urging the country’s leaders to do more to tackle climate change.

He has had a series of meetings with China’s chief climate affairs negotiator Xie Zhenhua, Vice-Premier Han Zheng, Foreign Minister Wang Yi and diplomat Yang Jiechi.

Mr Kerry’s list of proposals included a public commitment to the 1.5C global warming limit as stipulated in the 2015 Paris agreement, a time frame for carbon emissions to peak before 2030, and an end to financing overseas coal-fired projects.

But the two sides failed to reach agreement, according to the source, who requested anonymity, cited by South China Morning Post.

“China already has its own plans and road map for achieving its climate goals,” said the source, adding China would not bow under pressure from the US.

Since the 1980s, seabird breeding numbers in Scotland have declined by almost half, a report has found.

The main reasons behind the decline are fisheries, climate change, and invasive non-native species, a study by the government agency NatureScot said.

Drawing on data from the UK seabird monitoring programme, which looked at breeding numbers for 11 species, numbers fell by 49 per cent between 1986 and the most recent estimate in 2019.

Arctic skua showed the largest decline at 81 per cent, with a lack of sandeel fish understood to be a factor.

Common tern numbers have also dropped sharply by 48 per cent.

However guillemot numbers have increased by 17 per cent since 2016 and are at a similar level to the early 2000s.

Aerial footage shows the shocking scale of the Chaparral Fire in California.

The footage shared by Cal Fire on Instagram shows the wildfire burning in Riverside and San Diego that reached 1,427 acres, and was 80 percent contained as of Wednesday.

The UN weather agency says the world — and especially urban areas — had short, sharp drops in emissions of air pollutants over the coronavirus pandemic last year.

The World Meteorological Organisation, releasing its first ever Air Quality and Climate Bulletin today, warned that the reductions in pollution were “localised” and many parts of the world showed levels that outpaced air quality guidelines.

Some types of pollutants continued to emerge at regular or even higher levels, it said.

WMO secretary-general Petteri Taalas said: “COVID-19 proved to be an unplanned air-quality experiment, and it did lead to temporary localized improvements.

“But a pandemic is not a substitute for sustained and systematic action to tackle major drivers of both population and climate change and to safeguard the health of both people and planet.” 

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a series of initiatives today to deal with extreme weather.

Hurricane Ida – downgraded from a hurricane to a tropical depression – travelled north from the Gulf coast. The floods have killed dozens of people in Louisiana, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Connecticut.

Mr de Blasio announced a more aggressive use of travel bans to get residents off the street ahead of a storm, and evacuations to help people living in vulnerable spaces like basement apartments.

He estimated there were tens of thousands of basement apartments in the city in violation of building codes.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul said: “Some people have called this a 500-year event. I don’t buy it.

“This could literally happen next week ... I don’t ever want to again see Niagara Falls rushing down the stairs in one of the New York City subways.”