AFP UK

As conductor Guillaume Berney marks the opening downbeat, the first chords ring out in a Lausanne concert hall of what could conceivably be an extract of Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony — if the great German composer had ever managed to complete the piece.

The classical music world has often speculated what Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) would have gone on to write after his monumental Ninth Symphony.

And a number of musicologists and composers have already ventured to orchestrate and complete some of the scraps of notation they believe were his first sketches for his next symphonic masterpiece. 

But to mark their 10th anniversary season this year, Berney and the Nexus orchestra have decided to use artificial intelligence to create a four-minute extract which they have dubbed BeethovANN Symphony 10.1. 

“That is not a typo,” Berney told the audience at the first night, with a second performance scheduled in Geneva on Friday.

Berney explains that the ANN refers to the artificial neural network that created it, basically without human intervention. 

“We don’t know what it will sound like,” Berney acknowledged to AFP ahead of the Lausanne concert. 

The final score was only generated and printed out hours before the performance, after computer programme designer Florian Colombo oversaw the final step in what for him has been a years-long process.

– ‘Like watching a birth’ –

Seated in his small apartment with a view over the old city of Lausanne and the Alps in the distance, Colombo made a couple small changes before clicking a button to generate the score. 

“It’s like watching a birth,” Berney said as he picked up the first pages emerging from the printer. 

The excitement was palpable as the freshly created sheet music was presented to the orchestra.

The musicians eagerly began rehearsing for the evening concert, many smiling with surprise as the harmonies unfolded.

“This is an emotional experience for me,” said Colombo, himself a cellist, as the sound filled the hall.

“There is a touch of Beethoven there, but really, it is BeethovANN. Something new to discover.”

Berney agreed. 

“It works,” he said. “There are some very good parts, and a few that are a bit out of character, but it’s nice,” the conductor said, acknowledging though that “maybe it lacks that spark of genius.”

Colombo, a computer scientist at the EPFL technical university, developed his algorithm using so-called deep-learning, a subset of artificial intelligence aimed at teaching computers to “think” via structures modelled on the human brain or ANNs.

To generate something that might possibly pass as an extract from Beethoven’s Tenth, Colombo first fed the computer all of the master’s 16 string quartets, explaining that the chamber works provided a very clear sense of his harmonic and melodic structures. 

He then asked it to create a piece around one of the theme fragments found in Beethoven’s sparse notes that musicologists believe could have been for a new symphony.

“The idea is to just push a button to produce a complete musical score for an entire symphonic orchestra completely without intervention,” Colombo said.

“That is, except for all the work I put in ahead of time,” added the computer programmer who has been working for nearly a decade towards deep-learning-generated music.

– ‘Not blasphemous’ –

Colombo said that using a computer to try to recreate something begun by one of the world’s greatest musical geniuses was not encroaching on the human creative process.

Instead, he said, he saw his algorithm as a new tool for making musical composition more accessible and for broadening human creation.

While the programme “can digest what has already been done and propose something similar,” he said the aim was for “humans to use the tools to create something new.” 

“It is not blasphemous at all,” Berney agreed, stressing that “no one is trying to replace Beethoven.”

In fact, he said, the German composer would likely have been a fan of the algorithm.

“Composers at that time were all avantgarde,” he said, pointing out that the best were “always eager to adopt new methods.” 

In eastern Belgium, an abandoned highway is almost completely buried under kilometres of piled-up rubbish: crushed refrigerators, splintered furniture, torn curtains, twisted metal, stuffed toys, defunct electronics and shards of glass.

The makeshift dump — comprising 90,000 tonnes of domestic debris stretching for eight kilometres (five miles) down the closed A601 motorway north of the city of Liege — is testament to the devastation wreaked by unprecedented floods in mid-July. 

When residents in this part of the affected Wallonia region had their homes, schools and businesses broken apart by the rushing water, authorities were suddenly confronted with a mountain of refuse.

“All their household appliances, their cupboards, their furniture were destroyed, and so they put them in the street outside their places and the municipalities were obviously forced to clear the streets for safety reasons,” the head of Liege’s rubbish-clearing service INTRADEL, Luc Joine, told AFP.

– Pest control –

With local garbage and recycling depots quickly saturated, INTRADEL designated three temporary sites to store the 160,000 tonnes that were trucked away — more than half of it going to the disused motorway, in a mostly rural area.

After an initial screening by police to ensure no human remains were hidden in the stacks of garbage, the regional government stepped in. 

Joine explained that the road surface prevented pollution seeping into the topsoil, and tarpaulins shielded visible parts of the trash highway from nearby houses while guards were posted around the clock to stop trespassers.

Pest control workers also regularly pass by to get rid of rats, and trucks spraying water suppress rising dust and odours.

Authorities, though, are aware that the road-dump solution is a short-term fix.

The plan is to clear the site by recycling up to 60 percent of the debris and incinerating the rest, but the scale of the task means the operation will take at least nine months.

The environment minister for the regional Walloon government, Celine Tellier, said the administration has set aside 30 million euros ($36 million) to tackle the trash at the three temporary dumps.

She added that the underlying approach was to show respect to the people whose accumulated and broken detritus was now steaming under the Belgian sun.

“These are also pieces of the lives of citizens who lost a lot of memories in the floods,” she said.

“It is touching, on a personal level, to see children’s toys, child car-seats and so on next to a family photos. And so of course this debris is important and I think we need to treat all this, all these personal histories, with dignity.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel returned Friday to the scene of deadly flooding in the west of the country in a bid to shore up support for her embattled party before this month’s national election.

Since the July disaster put crisis management and climate change back at the top of the agenda, Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) and their unpopular candidate, Armin Laschet, have been haemorrhaging support.

With the September 26 vote fast approaching, the outgoing Merkel checked in on the flood-stricken village of Altenahr in Rhineland-Palatinate state, and will view two inundated towns in Laschet’s own neighbouring North Rhine-Westphalia on Sunday.

After touring the rubble-strewn roads of Altenahr where the vast majority of homes are still uninhabitable, Merkel acknowledged residents’ trauma.

“When you are here you get a small sense of the mortal fear many people had in the night of the flooding, who had to wait it out on top of or under their roofs,” she said.

“We will not forget you, and the next government will pick up where we left off” to ensure public aid reaches the victims, she pledged. 

Merkel, who will retire from politics when a new government is in place, had made a well-received visit in the immediate aftermath of the deluge, offering billions of euros in federal aid to rebuild ravaged infrastructure.

The appearance stood in marked contrast with a politically calamitous stop by Laschet in what is now widely seen as a fateful moment in the erstwhile frontrunner’s campaign.

As President Frank-Walter Steinmeier gave a sombre speech mourning the floods’ 181 victims, the CDU leader was caught on camera behind him joking with local officials.

– ‘Put foot in it’ –

“Merkel went there and listened and had the right expression and the right gestures and Laschet managed to put his foot in it,” political scientist Ursula Muench told AFP.

She noted that after Merkel’s 16 years in office, her shadow looms large over the race — particularly as Laschet’s chief rival, Social Democratic Finance Minister Olaf Scholz, also tries to present himself as her rightful heir.

His party is now polling 25 percent, five points up on Laschet’s conservatives, according to a new survey for public broadcaster ARD.

The Christian Democrats are now encouraging as many joint appearances as possible between Merkel and Laschet, who will accompany her on Sunday.

However, the visit carries some political risk as emotions are still running high in the stricken region.

In the village of Dernau, clean-up volunteer Christine Jahn complained this week about red tape holding up tranches of a pledged 30 billion euros ($36 billion) in federal and state aid.

“I want less babbling and more getting on with it, so that the money arrives without bureaucracy,” the 66-year-old told AFP.

Public anger has also focused on a failure to sufficiently warn vulnerable residents or rush them to safety before the waters surged through their community. 

– Flippant response? –

The catastrophe at the same time renewed the focus on climate change, which 80 percent of Germans say they want more political action to mitigate, according to a poll for broadcaster RTL.

A major international study last month found that man-made global warming made the deadly floods in Germany as well as Belgium up to nine times more likely.

In the Ahr and Erft regions of Germany, 93 millimetres (3.6 inches) of rain fell in a single day at the height of the crisis.

In the immediate aftermath, Laschet drew criticism for seemingly contradictory statements in a television interview on the urgency of addressing the climate crisis.

Asked whether he thought the government had made mistakes on the issue, Laschet said it would be wrong to “change policies just because of one day” in what sounded to many critics like a flippant response to the disaster.

All eyes are now on Laschet, whose CDU has shed around 14 points in support since he became party leader in January and is still on a downward slide, to see whether he can find his footing again before election day. 

President Joe Biden, who has made threats from climate change a priority, flies to New Orleans on Friday to tour damage from Hurricane Ida, which pounded the Gulf Coast before bringing havoc to New York.

This will be Biden’s first trip out of the Washington area since his administration became consumed by the crisis in Afghanistan, where a sudden Taliban victory prompted the hectic evacuation of the last US troops and more than 120,000 Afghans and foreign citizens.

Biden is scheduled to meet with local and state officials, tour damage on the ground and inspect Ida’s impact from a helicopter.

Keen to return to domestic issues, Biden will likely use his trip to highlight the links between increasing episodes of extreme weather and the broader global climate crisis.

On Thursday, he said Hurricane Ida and uncontrollable wild fires in the US west are “yet another reminder” of the crisis.

“It’s a matter of life and death and we need to meet it together,” he said in a speech at the White House.

Hurricane Ida, a category four storm, delivered huge floods and wind damage in the south, hitting one of the epicenters of the US oil industry, as well as pounding historic New Orleans.

Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi took hits before remnants of the storm rolled north to New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, inundating the New York City subway and flooding streets across the US financial capital.

In the New Orleans area alone, about a million people were left without power and swaths of the city remain without electricity or running water.

On Thursday, Biden told Ida’s victims “we’re all in this together. The nation is ready to help.”

He said he’d ordered the use of drones and military satellites to help survey damage and speed up “complicated and really dangerous” repair work.

He also ordered use of the critical US petroleum reserve to smooth the supply disruption caused by the hurricane at oil refineries.

“My message to the people of the Gulf Coast… (is) we are here for you,” he said.

The perilous state of the planet’s wildlife will be laid bare when the largest organisation for the protection of nature meets on Friday, hoping to galvanise action on the world’s intertwined biodiversity and climate crises. 

Relentless habitat destruction, unsustainable agriculture, mining and a warming planet will dominate discussion at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) conference in the French city of Marseille. 

“We are facing huge challenges. We are seeing the climate changing and impacting hugely our societies. We are seeing biodiversity disappearing and the pandemic hitting our economies, our families, our health,” said IUCN chief Bruno Oberle in a speech before the Marseille meeting opened.

“And we know that all these challenges are linked to each other and these challenges are linked to our human behaviour.”

The meeting, delayed from 2020 by the pandemic, comes ahead of crucial UN summits on climate, food systems and biodiversity that could shape the planet’s foreseeable future.  

French President Emmanuel Macron said the goal was to “put nature at the top of international priorities” in a statement ahead of the IUCN meeting. 

“Because our destinies are intrinsically linked, planet, climate, nature and human communities.”  

Macron said the conference should lay the “initial foundations” for a global biodiversity strategy that will be the focus of UN deliberations in China in April next year.

The international community is trying to frame interim goals for this decade as well as longer-term aims for 2050.

Previous IUCN congresses have paved the way for global treaties on biodiversity and the international trade in endangered species. 

But efforts to halt extensive declines in numbers and diversity of animals and plants have so far failed to slow the destruction.

In 2019 the UN’s biodiversity experts warned that a million species are on the brink of extinction — raising the spectre that the planet is on the verge of its sixth mass extinction event in 500 million years.

– Interwoven threats –

The nine-day IUCN meeting, which opens at 1500 GMT on Friday, will include an update of its Red List of Threatened Species, measuring how close animal and plant species are to vanishing forever.

Experts have assessed nearly 135,000 species over the last half-century and nearly 28 percent are currently at risk of extinction, with habitat loss, overexploitation and illegal trade driving the loss.

Big cats, for example, have lost more than 90 percent of their historic range and population, with only 20,000 lions, 7,000 cheetahs, 4,000 tigers and a few dozen Amur leopards left in the wild. 

The meeting is likely to hammer home the message that protecting wildlife is imperative for the healthy function of ecosystems and for humanity.

Loss of biodiversity, climate change, pollution, diseases spreading from the wild have become existential threats that cannot be “understood or addressed in isolation,” the IUCN said ahead of the meeting in a vision statement endorsed by its 1,400 members.

Motions on the table include protecting 80 percent of Amazonia by 2025, tackling plastic in the oceans, combating wildlife crime and preventing pandemics.

The IUCN will also, for the first time in its seven-decade history, welcome indigenous peoples to share their knowledge on how best to heal the natural world as voting members.

Oberle thanked indigenous groups for joining the IUCN’s membership and bringing a “wealth of experience” on how to have a different relationship with the planet.

German environmental groups on Friday announced a legal offensive against car giants Volkswagen, Daimler and BMW to force them to reduce emissions faster, emboldened by recent court victories in favour of climate protection.

Greenpeace Germany and Deutsche Umwelthilfe (DUH) said they have sent a claim letter to the three carmakers asking them to commit to more ambitious targets for reducing carbon emissions, including ending production of fossil-fuel cars by 2030.

If they do not respond to the letter in the coming weeks and halt their “illegal behaviour”, the NGOs said they are ready to file lawsuits in court.

“We are holding those companies to account that have been destroying our climate for years,” DUH executive director Sascha Mueller-Kraenner told a press conference.

While all three car companies have announced plans to transition from diesel and petrol cars to more environmentally-friendly electric vehicles, the plaintiffs say their goals are vague and non-binding.

“The companies’ electrification plans are not ambitious enough and too slow. They won’t be enough to avert the climate crisis,” said Greenpeace’s Martin Kaiser.

A fourth company, German oil and gas firm Wintershall Dea, is also being targeted in the legal proceedings for its role in the climate emergency.

The complaints, if they go ahead, would be a first in Germany. 

The plaintiffs are basing their case on a landmark verdict by Germany’s constitutional court in April which found that Germany’s plans to curb CO2 emissions were insufficient to meet the targets of the Paris climate agreement and placed an unfair burden on future generations.

In a major win for activists, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government then brought forward its date for carbon neutrality by five years to 2045, and raised its 2030 target for greenhouse gas reductions.

Greenpeace’s Kaiser said the plaintiffs also received “a tailwind” from a court ruling in the Netherlands in May, which ordered oil giant Shell to slash its carbon emissions by 2030.

– ‘No basis’ –

Fridays for Future activist Clara Mayer, who is acting as a plaintiff in the case against VW, said recent deadly floods in western Germany had shown that the climate emergency “is now right outside our front door”.

She said VW, as one of the world’s largest carmakers and a major CO2 emitter, had “an immense responsibility”.

The 12-brand group, which also includes Audi, Porsche and Skoda, said in a statement that it did not believe the campaigner’s legal route was “an appropriate way to solve important societal challenges”.

It added that VW was investing 35 billion euros ($41 billion) in its bid to become a global leader in electric vehicles by 2025.

Mercedes-Benz maker Daimler meanwhile said it “sees no basis” for the injunction demand and vowed to defend itself “through all legal means” should it come to a lawsuit.

Luxury carmaker BMW reiterated that the company was committed to the Paris climate agreement, which aims to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius compared with pre-industrial levels.

The spectre of legal action against the car manufacturers comes just days before the IAA auto show, one of the world’s biggest, opens its doors in Munich.

Climate campaigners have vowed to stage protests to disrupt the event.

German environmental groups on Friday announced a legal offensive against car giants Volkswagen, Daimler and BMW to force them to reduce emissions faster, emboldened by recent court victories in favour of climate protection.

Greenpeace Germany and Deutsche Umwelthilfe (DUH) said they have sent a claim letter to the three carmakers asking them to commit to more ambitious targets for reducing carbon emissions, including ending production of fossil-fuel cars by 2030.

If they do not respond to the letter in the coming weeks and halt their “illegal behaviour”, the NGOs said they are ready to file lawsuits in court.

“We are holding those companies to account that have been destroying our climate for years,” DUH executive director Sascha Mueller-Kraenner told a press conference.

While all three car companies have announced plans to transition from diesel and petrol cars to more environmentally-friendly electric vehicles, the plaintiffs say their goals are vague and non-binding.

“The companies’ electrification plans are not ambitious enough and too slow. They won’t be enough to avert the climate crisis,” said Greenpeace’s Martin Kaiser.

A fourth company, German oil and gas firm Wintershall Dea, is also being targeted in the legal proceedings for its role in the climate emergency.

The complaints, if they go ahead, would be a first in Germany. 

The plaintiffs are basing their case on a landmark verdict by Germany’s constitutional court in April which found that Germany’s plans to curb CO2 emissions were insufficient to meet the targets of the Paris climate agreement and placed an unfair burden on future generations.

In a major win for activists, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government then brought forward its date for carbon neutrality by five years to 2045, and raised its 2030 target for greenhouse gas reductions.

Greenpeace’s Kaiser said the plaintiffs also received “a tailwind” from a court ruling in the Netherlands in May, which ordered oil giant Shell to slash its carbon emissions by 2030.

– ‘No basis’ –

Fridays for Future activist Clara Mayer, who is acting as a plaintiff in the case against VW, said recent deadly floods in western Germany had shown that the climate emergency “is now right outside our front door”.

She said VW, as one of the world’s largest carmakers and a major CO2 emitter, had “an immense responsibility”.

The 12-brand group, which also includes Audi, Porsche and Skoda, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mercedes-Benz maker Daimler said it “sees no basis” for the injunction demand and vowed to defend itself “through all legal means” should it come to a lawsuit.

Luxury carmaker BMW reiterated that the company was committed to the Paris climate agreement, which aims to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius compared with pre-industrial levels.

The spectre of legal action against the car manufacturers comes just days before the IAA auto show, one of the world’s largest, opens its doors in Munich.

Climate campaigners have vowed to stage protests to disrupt the event.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel will return on Friday to the scene of deadly flooding in July in a bid to restore support for her embattled party before this month’s national election.

Since the disaster put crisis management and climate change back at the top of the agenda, Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) and their unpopular candidate, Armin Laschet, have been haemorrhaging support.

With the September 26 vote fast approaching, the outgoing Merkel will check in on the flood-stricken community of Altenahr in Rhineland-Palatinate state on Friday, followed by two inundated towns in Laschet’s own neighbouring North Rhine-Westphalia on Sunday.

Merkel, who will retire from politics when a new government is in place, made a well-received visit in the immediate aftermath of the deluge, offering empathy and billions in federal aid to rebuild ravaged infrastructure.

The appearance stood in marked contrast with a politically calamitous stop by Laschet in what is now widely seen as a fateful moment in the erstwhile frontrunner’s campaign. 

As President Frank-Walter Steinmeier gave a sombre speech mourning the floods’ 181 victims, the CDU leader was caught on camera behind him joking and laughing with local officials.

– ‘Put foot in it’ –

The two appearances gave voters a chance to directly compare the luckless Laschet with Merkel, political scientist Ursula Muench told AFP.

“Merkel went there and listened and had the right expression and the right gestures and Laschet managed to put his foot in it,” said Muench, director of the Academy for Political Education near Munich.

She noted that after Merkel’s 16 years in office, her shadow looms large over the race — particularly as Laschet’s chief rival, Social Democratic Finance Minister Olaf Scholz, also tries to present himself as her rightful heir.

His party is now polling 25 percent, five points up on Laschet’s conservatives, according to a new “Deutschlandtrend” survey for public broadcaster ARD Thursday.

The Christian Democrats are now encouraging as many joint appearances as possible between Merkel and Laschet, who will accompany her on Sunday.

However the visit carries some political risk as emotions are still running high in the stricken region.

In the village of Dernau, where entire streets are still uninhabitable, clean-up volunteer Christine Jahn complained this week about red tape holding up tranches of a pledged 30 billion euros ($36 billion) in federal and state aid.

“I want less babbling and more getting on with it, so that the money arrives without bureaucracy,” the 66-year-old told AFP.

Public anger has also focused on a failure to sufficiently warn vulnerable residents or rush them to safety before the waters surged through their community. 

Prosecutors in August launched a criminal investigation against the district chief of hard-hit Ahrweiler for negligence as warnings were made belatedly, resulting in the deaths of dozens of residents.

– Flippant response? –

The catastrophe also renewed the focus on climate change, which 80 percent of Germans say they want more political action to mitigate, according to a poll for broadcaster RTL published on Wednesday.

A major international study last month found that manmade global warming made the deadly floods in Germany as well as Belgium up to nine times more likely.

In the Ahr and Erft regions of Germany, 93 millimetres (3.6 inches) of rain fell in a single day at the height of the crisis.

In the immediate aftermath, Laschet drew criticism for seemingly contradictory statements in a TV interview on the urgency of addressing the climate crisis.

Asked whether he thought the government had made mistakes on the issue, Laschet said it would be wrong to “change policies just because of one day” in what sounded to many critics like a flippant response to the disaster.

All eyes will now be on Laschet, whose CDU has shed around 14 points in support since he became party leader in January and is still on a downward slide, to see whether he can find his footing again before election day. 

At sunset, a buffalo calf’s distressed grunts reverberate through the bush.

But it’s a trick. 

The grunts are blaring from a loudspeaker, designed to lure lions to a tree and let a South African wildlife reserve carry out a census of its apex predator.

As an added enticement, the carcasses of two impalas are affixed to a tree. The scent promises a fresh meal.

In the headlights of a 4×4, armed rangers with night binoculars and torches watch over the scene.

“We know our lions, but with this process, we verify them,” says Ian Nowak, head warden at the Balule Nature Reserve.

A wildlife researcher next to him listens intently, her ears tuned to clues from the nocturnal sounds.

That’s how she knows a rumbling is from elephants grazing in the tall grass. And that’s how she knows when to raise her camera to photograph lions, looking for distinctive scars or peculiar ears — anything that identifies them for the count.

This job requires patience. The team once spotted 23 lions ripping into the bait.

“They growl and they fight. Then they lie down and eat,” Nowak whispers. “It can be quite a frenzy on the bait. They smack each other and then settle down.”

– Don’t fence them in –

At 55,000 hectares (136,000 acres), Balule is huge — yet it connects with an even bigger ecosystem that, all told, is almost the size of Belgium.

Balule and other nearby game farms have transitioned into nature reserves, joining up with the Kruger National Park to create a vast territory without internal fences, covering 2.5 million hectares, that extends to Mozambique.

To create such enormous space for wildlife is a rare success story these days. 

Conservationists meeting in Marseille, southern France, are deeply worried for Africa’s “big cats”, facing loss of habitat and human encroachment as well as poaching.

Balule is so big that its census-takers have to criss-cross the terrain to make the count as thorough as possible.

“Sometimes they’ve eaten. If they’re full, they don’t come,” Nowak said. “Especially the males, they’re lazy as hell.”

Twenty years ago, Balule was mostly farmland and lions were few. 

Last year, the census found 156 of the lordly beasts. 

“Lions are doing incredibly well, mainly because there’s a large enough space to operate,” Nowak says.

Overall, the news is good for lions in South Africa, thanks to government conservation efforts — helped by the inducement of tourists who are willing pay to see the animals. Private investors have also stepped in.

A years-long drought has also been a boost. Antelopes and buffalo did not have enough to eat, making them easier prey for large carnivores.

– ‘Lions don’t share’ –

The loudspeaker rumbles again with the recording of the injured buffalo calf. This time, a small jackal appears, hoping for a nibble. At the slightest sound, it dashes away.

The wildlife researcher detects another movement in her thermal binoculars. The headlights flash back on, illuminating the majestic mane of a lion approaching stealthily, careful but calm. 

“He’s initially cautious,” says Nick Leuenberger, one of the regional wardens. “He doesn’t know if he’ll be walking in on another pride.” 

“Lions defend their food, they don’t share,” he adds. 

“Here the lion tolerates the jackal. He knows he’s not a major threat to his food source.”

Suddenly, the lion leaps up to one of the suspended impalas, biting into its belly. After his meal, he lies at the foot of the tree. 

Now the team can move on. No other animals will dare approach.

The next night, seven hyenas take turns snipping at the fresh impala, without a lion in sight.

But on the way back, the 4×4 slams the brakes. To the left, a hippo roars furiously, its mouth wide open.

To the right, seven lionesses raise their heads above the grassline. A magical sight, but no danger to the hippo. Nowak says it would take at least twice as many lions to threaten the hippo.

The tension eases. A lion emerges from the brush and walks along the trail. A lioness joins him, and the 4×4 follows them slowly until they disappear into the night.

New Zealand saw its warmest winter on record this year as climate change fuelled rising temperatures, a government scientific agency said Friday.

Temperatures in the June-August period were 1.32 degrees Celsius (2.38 degrees Fahrenheit) above average, exceeding the previous record set last year, the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) said.

The agency said the data meant seven of the top 10 hottest winters in New Zealand had occurred since 2000.

It said the last time the country recorded back-to-back record winters was in 1970 and 1971, but those years now stood at 18th and 13th respectively on the all-time list — which dates back to 1909.

“What was considered to be unusually warm at the time is no longer considered unusual,” NIWA meteorologist Nava Fedaeff said.

Fedaeff said natural weather patterns played a role in both record-setting periods but a key difference was the amount of carbon dioxide now polluting the atmosphere.

She said one measuring station near Wellington recorded a carbon dioxide concentration of 320 parts per million in the early 1970s but the level was now 412 parts per million, up almost 30 percent.

“These similar winters, decades apart, show us that there are key natural ingredients to getting a warm winter, but adding climate change to the mix is like taking the same recipe and swapping plain flour for self-raising,” she said.

The country’s centre-left Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern declared a ‘climate emergency’ last year, saying urgent action was needed for the sake of future generations.

New Zealand has committed to becoming carbon neutral by 2050 and generating all of its energy from renewable sources by 2035.