Prime Minister Keir Starmer departs 10 Downing Street, London, to attend Prime Minister’s Questions at the Houses of Parliament, November 12, 2025
IF KEIR STARMER intended to stave off a leadership challenge by advertising his readiness to fight one, he has miscalculated.
All his intervention has done is placed the question of his leadership at the top of MPs’ minds.
Perhaps identifying Wes Streeting as a possible challenger was intended to frighten the left away from triggering a contest — since Streeting is even further right than Starmer.
In practice it simply showcases the Prime Minister’s insecurity and the toxic culture Streeting accurately describes in Downing Street — where the government briefs against its own, and a leadership that has always relied on bans and expulsions to maintain authority descends into a “circular firing squad,” to use the ever eloquent Barry Gardiner’s phrase. Unlike Starmer, MPs might reflect, Streeting has never pretended to be on the left and as a Blairite true believer might at least try to govern through persuasion rather than fear.
Nobody should fear challenging Starmer: his government is as inept as it is cruel and is paving the way for a far-right Reform UK regime.
But Streeting is no solution. The Health Secretary would be a cosmetic change, no more: he’s wedded to the same policies of privatisation and cuts that have wrecked our public services and national infrastructure. Starmer loyalists point to the long death agony of the last Tory government as evidence that switching leader doesn’t help — and it won’t, without dramatic changes in Labour policy.
And that’s a problem. Starmer’s leadership exists to prevent change, not deliver it: its whole mission has been the destruction of Corbynism and the threat of a socialist-led Labour Party. That project was endorsed by the overwhelming majority of Labour MPs even before last year’s election brought in cohorts of carefully vetted conformists.
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The Rio Guajará (Guajará River), part of the vast Amazon River delta
As COP30 kicks off in Belém, Brazil, we look at the significance of hosting this year’s UN climate conference in the heart of the Amazon rainforest.
The world’s largest rainforest – home to more species of plants and animals than anywhere else on Earth – is opening its doors, giving humanity a chance to do right by the planet that hosts it. As we walk through the rainforest, we are humbled, as it reminds us that it is the heartbeat and the lungs of our planet.
Here in Belém, “the gateway to the Amazon”, life moves in time with nature. The air is thick with humidity, sudden tropical showers fall, followed by the hum of insects and the call of birds. Vultures circle above, herons perch on the riverbanks, and capybaras wander through the green patches that break the city’s skyline. Coconut water stalls line the streets, purple açaí leaves a natural liner around the lips of the men, women and children who eat it – with their fish or in their milkshakes. Even amongst the hustle and bustle, as the streets fill up, Belém is very clearly inseparable from the forest that cradles it.
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Representing the Holy See just prior to the opening of COP30, at the leaders’ summit on 7 November, Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, reminded delegates of Pope Leo XIV’s message: “If you want to cultivate peace, care for creation.” Cardinal Parolin reminded world leaders that the climate crisis is not only a question of technology or finance, but of justice and solidarity – pointing out that ‘those in the most vulnerable situations are the first to suffer,’ and he called for COP30 to become ‘a sign of hope’ in a world already ‘in flames’ from both environmental and human conflict.
His words echoed those of Pope Francis in Laudato si’, who wrote that “we have no such right” to destroy creation, reminding us that humanity’s vocation is not to dominate the earth but to till and keep it – to care for the world and for every creature that shares it with us.
The message is clear: caring for the planet is inseparable from caring for one another.
As delegates gather in Belém over the next two weeks, the world will watch for commitments that can bring together words and action, pray for funding that reaches the communities protecting the world’s organs, and hope for agreements that honour both people and planet.
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A pumpjack operates in the foreground while a wind turbine at the Buckeye Wind Energy wind farm rises in the distance, September 30, 2024, near Hays, Kansas, US
THE United Nations climate negotiations got under way today in the Brazilian city of Belem, known as the gateway to the Amazon River.
The negotiations follow the leaders’ summit which was held last Friday where leaders pushed for greater urgency and co-operation in the fight to curb global warming by drastically reducing the carbon pollution that causes it.
Andre Correa do Lago, president of this year’s Cop30, emphasised that negotiators engage in “mutirao,” a Brazilian word derived from an indigenous word that refers to a group uniting to work on a shared task.
“Either we decide to change by choice, together, or we will be imposed change by tragedy,” do Lago wrote in his letter to negotiators Sunday. “We can change. But we must do it together.”
Complicating the calls for togetherness is the United States. The Trump administration did not send high-level negotiators to the talks and is withdrawing for the second time from the 10-year-old Paris Agreement.
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A humpback whale jumps out of the waters of the Pacific Ocean near Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Credit: Alfredo Martinez/Getty Images
Rising ocean temperatures, heatwaves and dwindling prey are forcing marine mammals into new and more dangerous waters, scientists warn.
For millennia, some of the world’s largest filter-feeding whales, including humpbacks, fin whales and blue whales, have undertaken some of the longest migrations on earth to travel between their warm breeding grounds in the tropics to nutrient-rich feeding destinations in the poles each year.
“Nature has finely tuned these journeys, guided by memory and environmental cues that tell whales when to move and where to go,” said Trisha Atwood, an ecologist and associate professor at Utah State University’s Quinney College of Agriculture and Natural Resources. But, she said, climate change is “scrambling these signals,” forcing the marine mammals to veer off course. And they’re not alone.
Earlier this year, Atwood joined more than 70 other scientists to discuss the global impacts of climate change on migratory species in a workshop convened by the United Nations Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals. The organization monitors and protects more than 1,000 species that cross borders in search of food, mates and favorable conditions to nurture their offspring.
More than 20 percent of these species are on the brink of extinction. It was the first time the convention had gathered for such a purpose, and their findings, published this month in a report, were alarming.
“Almost no migratory species is untouched by climate change,” Atwood said in an email to Inside Climate News.
From whales and dolphins, to arctic shorebirds and elephants, all are affected by rising temperatures, extreme weather and shifting ecosystems, which are disrupting migratory routes and reshaping critical habitats across the planet.
Asian elephants, for instance, are being driven to higher ground and closer to human settlements as they search for food and water amidst intensifying droughts, fueling more frequent human-elephant conflicts, the report found. Shorebirds are reaching their Arctic breeding grounds out of sync with the insect blooms their chicks depend on to survive.
The seagrass meadows that migrating sea turtles and dugongs feed on are disappearing due to warmer waters, cyclones and sea level rise, according to the report. To date, around 30 percent of the world’s known seagrass beds have been lost, threatening not only the animals that depend on them, but also humans. These vital ecosystems store around 20 percent of the world’s oceanic carbon, in addition to supporting fisheries and protecting coastlines.
A view of seagrass meadows found in the depths of Izmit Bay off the coast of Karamursel, Turkey. Credit: Tahsin Ceylan/Anadolu via Getty Images
Together, these examples reveal how climate change is tipping the delicate balance migratory species have long relied on to survive.
“Climate change is disrupting this balance by altering when and where resources appear, how abundant they are, the environmental conditions species must endure, and the other organisms they interact with, reshaping entire networks of predators and competitors,” Atwood said.
Especially amongst marine life.
On the United States’ West Coast, for instance, Atwood said, warming waters are pushing juvenile great white sharks out of their traditional southern habitats. This shift has led to a sharp rise in sea otter deaths in Monterey Bay, California, where they are increasingly getting bitten by the sharks.
Whales and dolphins are particularly vulnerable species as rising temperatures threaten both their prey and their habitat, according to the report.
Heatwaves in the Mediterranean are projected to reduce suitable habitat for endangered fin whales by up to 70 percent by mid-century as their prey dwindles or moves due to rising temperatures. In some places, such as the Northern Adriatic Sea, hotter temperatures may eventually prove intolerable for bottlenose dolphins. “Rising water temperatures could exceed the species’ physiological tolerance,” the report says, which also acknowledges that this is already happening in other parts of the world, such as the Amazon River.
Two bottlenose dolphins play in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Tarifa, Spain on Sept. 21. Credit: Matthias Balk/picture alliance via Getty Images
In 2023, more than 200 river dolphins, which migrate seasonally between tributaries and lagoons in the Amazon, died due to record-high temperatures, along with much of their prey. In some areas, their shallow aquatic habitats exceeded 100 degrees Fahrenheit. “The river systems were unusually empty and dry and the animals got isolated,” said Mark Simmonds, scientific councilor for marine pollution for the U.N. convention, who led some of the discussions around climate change impacts on cetaceans at the workshop in February. “They lost the water that they would have been living in.”
Loss of prey in traditional habitats is of particular concern for migrating marine mammals that are forced to follow their prey into new, and sometimes more perilous, waters.
This is particularly evident in the case of critically endangered North Atlantic Right whales, which the report says are especially prone to ship strikes and entanglement in fishing gear as they pursue their prey—tiny crustaceans called copepods—which are moving towards cooler waters. There are fewer than 400 of the whales left.
The North Pacific humpback whales that feed off the coast of California are also at risk.
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Low water levels at Baitings Reservoir in Ripponden in June after dry weather exposed a 14th-century packhorse bridge. Photograph: Adam Vaughan/EPA
Government and water companies are devising emergency plans for worst water shortage in decades
Water companies and the government are drawing up emergency plans for a drought next year more extreme than we have seen in decades.
Executives at one major water company told the Guardian they were extremely concerned about the prospect of a winter with lower than average rainfall, which the Met Office’s long-term forecast says is likely. They said if this happened, the water shortfall would mean taking drastic water use curtailment measures “going beyond hosepipe bans”.
Droughts are usually multi-year events. While much of England went into drought this summer, with hosepipe bans across large swathes of the country, things were not as bad as they could have been because it had been a rainy autumn and winter the year before. This meant reservoirs were full and that groundwater – storage of water under the soil – was charged up.
But months of record dry weather meant a lot of that water was used, and it has not been replaced, despite roughly average September and October rainfall. Average reservoir storage is at 63.3% compared with the average of 76% for this time of year. Ardingly, in West Sussex, and Clatworthy and Wimbleball in Somerset, are below 30%.
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Prime Minister Keir Starmer departs 10 Downing Street, London, to attend Prime Minister’s Questions at the Houses of Parliament, November 12, 2025
