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The best of this week’s wildlife photographs from around the world

Leaders at COP29 must listen to demands for climate justice by putting human rights at the heart of all decision making and commit to massively scaling up needs-based climate financing and a full, fast, fair, and funded phase-out of fossil fuels across all sectors, said Amnesty International ahead of the UN climate summit in Azerbaijan.

“The high-income countries who share the greatest responsibility for the climate crisis must negotiate in good faith to achieve an ambitious and adequate target and deliver on their commitments. They must also substantially increase financing for adaptation to the significant climate harm that’s already here and will worsen very quickly, and to the Fund for responding to Loss and Damage to help the people worst impacted by the effects of global heating.”

Amnesty International will have delegates at COP29 from 9 to 24 November, who will be available for interviews about the need to centre climate-action decisions in human rights, and the Azerbaijani government’s ongoing assault on civil society.

“In light of the inadequate human rights protections in the Host Country Agreement, states must also take steps to protect freedom of expression and peaceful protest for all participants at COP29 and to limit the pernicious influence of fossil fuel lobbyists who will be ubiquitous at COP.

A network of accounts on X using stolen and possibly AI-generated images coordinated to engage with accounts supportive of Israel

This discovery follows previous research by the DFRLab and other investigators which exposed a similar network of inauthentic pro-Israel accounts which became active on Facebook, Instagram, and X after the beginning of the war in Gaza.

Talks take place in Azerbaijan amid an escalating crackdown on dissent.

Between 40,000 and 50,000 delegates are expected to attend COP29. This will include government representatives from all UN member states, as well as the State of Palestine, the Holy See, Niue, the Cook Islands, and the European Union. All of these are parties to the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and most have also joined the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. COP29 will also host diplomats, UN officials, journalists, climate scientists, trade union leaders, and policy experts. NGOs, activists, and Indigenous leaders are also planning to participate – although the involvement of independent media workers and human rights defenders from Azerbaijan itself has been curbed by an ongoing government crackdown.

Like previous climate summits, COP29 will host many participants whose agendas are seriously at odds with climate justice. Thousands of fossil fuel lobbyists, along with the heads of oil giants like Shell and BP, are expected to be in attendance. These participants have used previous summits to advance their own interests, opposing essential efforts to phase out fossil fuels and pushing for false solutions like carbon offsetting. Amnesty International is calling for a robust conflict of interest policy to prevent fossil fuel lobbyists undermining the aims of global climate treaties.

11. What is Amnesty calling for at COP29?

• Human rights must be at the heart of all climate action decision-making;
• States in a position to do so must massively scale up climate finance and funding for loss and damage; All states must commit to fully phasing out fossil fuels, in a way that is fast and fair;
• COP29 participants must not chase risky technologies, like carbon capture and storage and removals, or push gas as a “transition fuel”, as a means of distracting from the urgent need to phase out fossil fuels;
• The UNFCCC Secretariat, the government of Azerbaijan, and other governments must protect civic space, and guarantee the rights to freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly.

Troops revel in the destruction they have caused in southern towns and villages, joking about a blown-up mosque and torched hospital

Legal experts have previously warned that videos posted by Israeli soldiers could breach international law, and an Al Jazeera documentary revealed that their TikToks could amount to war crimes.

A French court has sentenced a nursing student to three years in prison for allegedly “glorifying terrorism” on social media.

Zaiter said “46 days after an arbitrary and unjust detention for having denounced the genocide and expressed my support for Palestine in Nice, I finally find my daughter.”

The trial highlights France’s stringent stance on public speech and pro-Israel laws.

The letter below was submitted by Transparency International EU and the undersigned organisations to European Climate Commission Wopke Hoekstra.

Subject: excluding fossil fuel lobbyists from EU delegations at UN climate talks (...)

“Everything,” says Angélica Choc, “depends on the vital liquid – water.” Choc is a Maya Q’eqchi’ land defender from El Estor in eastern Guatemala. For years, she and other Q’eqchi’ villagers have opposed the development of the nearby Fenix mine, a massive mountain-top nickel complex in El Estor’s Izabal Department. In early May 2024, I joined a delegation visiting several communities that are fighting against Canadian mining projects in Guatemala.

In our recent journal paper in Nature Geoscience, we show that a thin layer at the ocean surface called the “ocean skin”, a layer thinner than a human hair, increases this ocean CO₂ uptake by about 7%. That sounds like a small difference, but this additional uptake is equivalent to the CO₂ absorbed by the entire Amazon rainforest each year.

As the need to reduce emissions and meet reduction targets ramps up, insights about how the ocean skin works will help scientists understand how the ocean will respond to our emissions.

What’s new: The first ever camera trap study from Cambodia’s Central Cardamom Mountains has captured footage of 108 wildlife species, including 23 that are threatened with extinction. This survey confirms the area’s importance as a biodiversity hotspot, a recent report says.

A new report by the FACT Coalition found that many investigations into environmental crimes do not follow the money. Of the 230 cases analyzed, 76% involved the use of front and shell companies, likely due to flaws in the anti-money laundering systems of foreign countries, researchers said.

The environmental crimes analyzed occurred between 2014 and 2024 in Amazon countries, mainly in Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. The aim was to better understand how criminals operate and how the associated profits are laundered.

According to the report’s findings, 25% of all cases, and 44% of “follow the money” cases, involved at least one foreign jurisdiction. The U.S. was the foreign jurisdiction mentioned most across all cases analyzed, either as a transit or destination point for illegally sourced natural resources, such as gold or timber, or dirty money.

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