Latest news with #local authorities
News24
18 hours ago
- Climate
- News24
8 more people die in flooding as heavy rain lashes China
Eight people died in extreme Chinese weather. 18 are still unaccounted for. Extreme rains delivered a year's worth of rain in less than a week in some areas. Extreme weather killed at least eight people in the city of Chengde just outside the Chinese capital Beijing, with 18 still unaccounted for, as heavy rainfall pounded the hilly region over the past week. The deaths occurred in villages within the Xinglong area of Chengde in Hebei province, state-run Xinhua reported late on Wednesday citing local authorities, without specifying when or how the people died. Work is still under way to locate those missing, Xinhua said. Set against mountainous terrain, Chengde was known as a resort town for Qing dynasty emperors to escape Beijing's heat in the summer centuries ago. Extreme rains that began last Wednesday have lashed Beijing and surrounding regions, pouring a year's worth of rain in less than a week in some areas and killing at least 30 in the outskirts of the capital. READ | 30 dead, 80 000 residents relocated as 'intense volume of rainfall' hits China Twenty-eight of those deaths occurred in hilly Miyun district. The deaths in Chengde occurred in villages which border Miyun situated about 25km away from the Miyun reservoir, the largest in China's north. The reservoir saw record-breaking inflow and outflow of water, and overall water level and capacity during this round of rainfall which devastated nearby towns. At its peak on Sunday, up to 6 550 cubic metres of water - about 2.5 Olympic-sized pools - flooded into the reservoir every second, pushing its capacity to a record high of 3.63 billion cubic metres since it was built in 1960. The villages where eight have died sit on higher elevations in a valley, upstream of the Miyun reservoir. In another village to the north of the reservoir, a landslide on Monday killed eight people while four remained missing. Extreme rainfall and severe flooding, which meteorologists link to climate change, increasingly pose major challenges for Chinese policymakers, with officials partially attributing a slowdown in factory activities to heavy rains and flooding.
BBC News
3 days ago
- Politics
- BBC News
Plans approved to prevent unauthorised camps in Teignbridge
A council is to spend more than £70,000 on a range of measures to try to stop unauthorised Gypsy and traveller District Council said it had to clean up sites and repair damage following the unauthorised use of council-owned land, with eight cases requiring legal action in 2024.A report discussed on Tuesday proposed installing boulders, barriers and a new fence at six parks across the district. The council approved all the plans to make access more difficult for unauthorised council said there was no transit provision for Gypsy and traveller groups at the moment in Devon and it would work with other local authorities to identify possible sites. The report which was considered by the council's executive committee said unauthorised encampments created "significant demands" on resources through "the requirement to clean the site and surrounding areas, repair any damage caused and deal with complaints from residents and businesses that have been impacted".The plans include a new rail with steel posts at Osborne Park, boulders at access points to Sandringham Park and Bakers Park, lockable bollards at Courtenay Park and Forde Park and a barrier at Dawlish Countryside council said there were "no real alternatives" other than "to continue to reactively manage the unauthorised occupation of the parks and accept the associated costs, complaints and impacts on local residents and businesses".However, the council also acknowledged the risk that "the measures proposed will not guarantee a stop to further unauthorised encampments at these sites" and that encampments may move to other, more accessible, council-owned land.|About 20 members of the public attended the executive meeting which heard there had been an unprecedented number of encampments this year.
The Independent
7 days ago
- Business
- The Independent
‘Unfair' council tax may need to be replaced, MPs warn
Labour has been warned that it must massively overhaul England's council tax system or even replace it entirely to secure future funding for struggling local authorities. Councils do not have adequate funding to meet spending pressures, the Housing, Communities and Local Government (HCLG) Committee has said. In a new report, the cross-party group finds that there is a 'broken link' between the levels of tax households are now being asked to pay and the quality of local services they are receiving in return. It points to mandatory high-cost services, like adult social care and educating children with special educational needs and disabilities, as driving the spiralling costs 'almost entirely'. Florence Eshalomi, HCLG Committee chair, said: 'When residents are paying more and more in taxes but seeing less and less in regular, everyday services, such as libraries and fixing potholes, then trust in local democracy is at risk of being undermined. ' Councils are trapped in a straitjacket by central government, with local authorities lacking the flexibility or control to devise creative, long-term, preventative solutions which could offer better value-for-money.' The committee's report recommends that the government begins the process of 'overhauling or replacing council tax ' and in the meantime, gives local authorities more control over the levy in their authority. It also calls for councils to be given the power to revalue properties within their area, and define and set property band rates. Campaigners have long called for a nationwide revaluation of properties, with council tax bands in England still based on property values in 1991. The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) recently found that the most expensive properties are attracting three times as much tax as the least valuable despite being worth more than eight times more now, as prices have risen in more affluent areas. In April, nine in ten councils enforced the maximum possible council tax rise of 4.99 per cent, with six given permission to raise local rates even higher. These were Windsor and Maidenhead, Newham, Bradford, Birmingham, Somerset, and Trafford. A HCLG spokesperson said: 'The government is taking decisive action to fix the broken council funding system, so local leaders can deliver the vital public services their communities rely on. 'We have announced over £5 billion of new grant funding for local services on top of the £69 billion already made available this year to boost council finances, and we will go further to reform the funding system to make it fit for the future. 'This will ensure councils get the support they need and protect residents from further costs by keeping a 5% limit on the amount council tax can be raised without a referendum.' The department, led by deputy prime minister Angela Rayner, announced in June proposals for a new approach to local government funding to ensure it is 'going where it's most needed'. One proposal would see central funds made more available to areas where demand is greatest, meaning these areas will be more able to afford lower council tax increases. However, this will likely mean that less funding will be available to areas where local services are not stretched, and residents have not been asked to pay such steep bill rises in recent years.
News24
22-07-2025
- General
- News24
Six killed in Afghanistan coal mine collapse
A coal mine collapse in northern Afghanistan on Tuesday killed six miners and injured 18 others, local authorities said. The incident took place in the Baghlan region of northern Afghanistan, where at least 10 miners died in February 2022 in another coal mine collapse. Syed Mustafa Hashimi, head of the provincial information and culture office, told AFP that part of the mine had 'suddenly collapsed,' killing the six. Eighteen people have been hospitalised, he added, without describing the severity of their injuries. Afghanistan mines marble, minerals, gold, lithium and precious stones in addition to coal. There is little oversight over the industry, and fatal accidents are frequent. Miners often work without adequate equipment or safety gear. In December 2024, 22 men were trapped in a collapsed coal mine in Samangan, another northern province, but were rescued hours later.
The Guardian
21-07-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Caught between a fossil fuel past and a green future, China's coal miners chart an uncertain path
Gazing over the remains of his home, Wang Bingbing surveys a decades-old jujube tree flowering through the rubble, and the yard where he and his wife once raised pigs, now a pile of crumbled brick. In the valley below, a sprawling coalmine is the source of their dislocation: years of digging heightened the risk of landslides, forcing Wang and his family out. To prevent the family from returning, local authorities later demolished their home. 'We really didn't want to leave,' Wang's wife, Wang Weizhen, says ruefully. Wang's life is the story of coal's past, when the industry was notoriously dangerous but booming. His children and grandchildren are facing coal's future, an economic and environmental predicament that China's policymakers have yet to solve. As the world's largest greenhouse gas emitter transitions to cleaner energy, families like Wang's are on the precipice of being left behind by China's green revolution, fearing for their economic prospects as the country charts a delicate path between its fossil fuel foundations and clean energy ambitions. Looking older than his 55 years, Wang's body is marked by years in the industry. Above his right eyebrow rests a faint scar from a mining accident in his 20s that killed two of his colleagues. Ten years ago, he stopped working completely due to a liver illness, and he and his wife now survive on a monthly government welfare payment of 500 yuan (£52). Born in 1971 in Lüliang, a small city in western Shanxi, China's coal heartland, Wang joined his local mine at the age of 18. 'My family was poor and there was no work to do,' he says. 'I didn't have much education either, so I had no choice but to work in the coalmine.' As the country grapples with its shift away from coal, it is also dealing with the increasing fallout from natural disasters, with 25 million people affected in the first half of this year, according to China's emergency ministry. Coal is at the heart of Shanxi's economy. Between 2018 and 2023, more than 10% of all the coal produced globally was dug up from Shanxi's dry, silt-covered valleys, according to analysis from Global Energy Monitor, a US-based NGO. But the natural resource occupies an uneasy place in China's national plans. On the one hand, the country is pursuing renewable energy at a jaw-dropping scale. In May, China installed enough wind and solar to generate the same amount of electricity as Poland. On the other, the majority of China's power generation still comes from coal, with officials seeing it as essential for ensuring energy security and jobs. Although China is now the dominant producer of the technology such as solar panels and electric vehicles that will underpin the world's green transition, it is also the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, which contribute to natural disasters such as the extreme floods that hit Shanxi in 2021, displacing nearly 2 million people. But climate change means little to Wang. 'I don't know about national policies on reducing emissions,' he says, although he hopes his grandson can avoid a life in the mines. 'It's too dangerous,' he says. But he admits there are few alternatives. About one in 10 people in Shanxi are employed in coal and related industries. Even in Shanxi's urban areas, researchers and activists have largely focused for years on air pollution rather than climate change, says Du Jie, the director of Jinqing, an environmental NGO based in Shanxi. It wasn't until the catastrophic flooding of 2021 that many people's eyes were opened to the existential risks posed by a warming planet. 'The floods were truly a once-in-a-century event for Shanxi,' Du says over coffee in the lobby of a shiny office building in Taiyuan, Shanxi's capital, about 175km (110 miles) and decades of modernisation away from the Wangs in Lüliang. 'After the disaster relief ended, when we looked back, what struck me most was climate change. In the past, we all knew that climate change was a serious issue, right? But for us in Shanxi, life had been relatively comfortable – we had never really experienced major droughts or floods like this before.' The floods prompted Du to start thinking about how to raise awareness about climate change and low-carbon lifestyles in a more systematic way. One project involved surveying more than 1,000 people across Shanxi about how to reduce emissions in daily life. But making the connection between the coal industry and environmental damage is tricky. A recent survey of Shanxi citizens conducted by People of Asia for Climate Solutions, an NGO, found that more than 40% opposed the closure of mines, and less than half agreed the coal industry was a major cause of climate change. However, economic prosperity has encouraged a shift in attitudes. 'Now, as basic needs are more or less met, people do recognise that protecting the environment is important,' Du says. In Zhuangshang, a state-backed 'zero carbon village' in southern Shanxi, residents are paid to install solar panels to generate electricity for their own needs, with excess supplied to the local grid. One resident, surnamed Li, receives a subsidy of 2,000 yuan a year to rent out his rooftop in the village. That, plus reduced energy prices for solar-generated power, means electricity is basically free for him and his neighbours. 'How can you not be happy?' he says. But Zhuangshang is just one village. 'At the national level, there's strong support and hope for Shanxi to undergo industrial transformation,' Du says. 'But the question is: how do we get the public ready for this change?' Additional research by Lillian Yang
