The Guardian

It’s not as easy as it seems

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The lack of diversity could mean the fruit’s extinction. It offers a stark warning of what could happen to other key foods

The meeting of the World Banana Forum last week in Rome didn’t make many headlines. But what was under discussion there has serious implications for everyone. The ubiquitous yellow fruit is the proverbial canary in the mine of our modern food system, showing just how fragile it is. And the current plight of the banana should serve as an invitation to us all to become champions of food diversity.

When you peel a banana, you’re on the receiving end of a near-miraculous $10bn supply chain. One that sends seemingly endless quantities of a tropical fruit halfway across the world to be among the cheapest, most readily available products in supermarket aisles (on average, around 12p a banana). But, incredibly, there’s no inbuilt backup plan or safety net if the one variety that most of the global trade depends on starts to fail.

Dan Saladino is a food journalist, broadcaster and author of Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them

Campaigners say government is failing to match major step forward as bloc prepares to introduce ‘polluter pays’ principle

New EU rules which introduce “polluter pays” principles to get pharmaceutical and cosmetic companies to pay for the pollution they cause in rivers will not be adopted by the government in England, as campaigners say the country is falling behind.

Lawmakers in Europe have signed off on an update to the urban waste water treatment (UWWT) directive, which is to further tighten restrictions on pollution. More nutrients from agricultural waste and sewage will have to be removed from waterways under the new rules. It also for the first time applies standards to micropollutants such as chemicals from pharmaceutical waste.

Elsewhere, record-breaking snowfall in Japan and unseasonally high temperatures in South Sudan

Last week, central parts of the US experienced a severe outbreak of tornadoes with more than two dozen forming across the states of Ohio and Indiana, resulting in at least three deaths and multiple injuries.

A number of intense supercell thunderstorms travelled eastwards across central Indiana late in the afternoon and evening of 14 March, from which tornadoes formed. Many of these were weak with estimated maximum wind speeds of 65-85mph – the requirement to be categorised as an EF-0 tornado.

A Bolivian conservation programme has identified at least 60 'Paddington' bears in areas where they had not been spotted before. The animal is the inspiration behind the beloved fictional character Paddington, who travels to London, is adopted by a family and eats lashings of marmalade. In 2017, Chester zoo’s Andean carnivore conservation programme installed trap cameras in Tarija forest areas, and in 2023 it spotted members of the thriving bear community playing and walking among the trees. According to Ximena Velez-Liendo, the programme's coordinator, the Andean bear is vulnerable to extinction. The expert said if threats to the species, such as the loss of habitat, retaliatory hunting and the effects of the climate crisis were not addressed by 2030, the region could lose almost 30% of the population

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

The Long Table says it took thousands of hours of work to turn derelict site into a community space, but landlord has now sold it

A Gloucestershire restaurant with a radical business model, in that it feeds all comers regardless of their ability to pay, is losing its premises after the owner sold the property.

The community around The Long Table, featured in the Guardian earlier this month, has been left reeling after it was ordered to move out of the mill it occupies in Stroud – even as it sought to engage with the landlord to buy the building.

The fish do not actually ring the doorbell – you do!

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World water development report warns that access is major source of conflict between countries

Women and girls are the first to suffer when drought strikes poor and rural areas, and water strategies around the world must reflect this, the UN has said in a plea to countries to mend conflicts over water resources.

Stress on water resources, which is being exacerbated by the climate crisis, as well as overuse and pollution of the world’s freshwater systems, is a large source of conflict, according to the latest UN world water development report.

MSPs vote for controls as it emerges another hen harrier has vanished in area ‘notorious’ for persecution

Grouse moors across Scotland will be required to hold licences and could face shooting bans as part of radical measures to combat bird of prey persecution passed by MSPs on Thursday.

The Scottish parliament voted for the controls amid intense pressure from conservation scientists and campaigners after decades of illegal attacks on birds of prey by gamekeepers instructed to protect grouse on shooting estates from being eaten.

Any call to go directly from coal to nuclear is effectively a call to delay decarbonisation of our electricity system by 20 years

The battle lines have been drawn over Australia’s energy future.

With the nation signed up to net zero emissions by 2050, the Albanese Labor government is committed to renewables. The Coalition wants nuclear.

Welney landlord fears business may not survive impact of increasingly lengthy spells of flooding on customer numbers

Dennis Birch estimates his pub loses about £3,000 a week when the road into the village of Welney is closed because of flooding – and this winter, it was closed for a record-breaking 89 days.

Now labelled “the most flooded road in Britain”, Birch said he questions whether the 18th-century Lamb and Flag can survive the impact the flooding has on the number of customers coming through his door.

The mass deaths were puzzling scientists around the world – there were no signs of viruses or parasites. Then we looked closely at their skin

It was while we were sitting and talking in a hotel bar at the first global congress of herpetology that the world’s amphibian experts realised there was a problem: frogs, toads, salamanders and newts were disappearing in their thousands around the world and nobody understood why.

Not a single talk at the 1989 congress at the University of Kent had discussed the strange disappearance of the world’s amphibians. But scientist after scientist had the same story: from Central America to Australia, they were vanishing.

Stars of Avatar: The Way of Water photographed in baroque style by Christy Lee Rogers

Photographs of the actors Kate Winslet, Zoe Saldana and Sigourney Weaver seemingly floating underwater in elaborate blue dresses, with eyes shut and arms outstretched, are to be sold to raise money for ocean conservation.

The images are the work of one of the world’s most celebrated underwater photographers, Christy Lee Rogers, who teamed up with the stars of the 2022 film Avatar: The Way of Water and its director, James Cameron, a longtime proponent of ocean conservation, who commissioned the photoshoot.

High temperatures in February affected millions of people and put further pressure on chocolate prices

A searing heatwave that struck west Africa in February was made 4C hotter and 10 times more likely by human-caused global heating, a study has found.

The heat affected millions of people but the number of early deaths or cases of illness are unknown, due to a lack of reporting.

Established 24 years ago, the Carrifran Wildwood has been credited with inspiring the current surge of rewilding projects across the UK and beyond

About 6,000 years ago, most of southern Scotland was covered by broadleaf woodland, interspersed with patches of rich scrub, heath and bog. In stark contrast, the landscape today is dominated by close-cropped, severely nature-depleted hills, punctuated by sharp-edged blocks of non-native spruce plantation.

Now, thanks to the Carrifran Wildwood, one of the UK’s first community-led rewilding projects, patches of habitat resembling Scotland’s primeval forest are staging a comeback.

Fossil of giant river dolphin found in Peru, whose closest living relation is in South Asia, gives clues to future extinction threats

Scientists have discovered the fossilised skull of a giant river dolphin, from a species thought to have fled the ocean and sought refuge in Peru’s Amazonian rivers 16m years ago. The extinct species would have measured up to 3.5 metres long, making it the largest river dolphin ever found.

The discovery of this new species, Pebanista yacuruna, highlights the looming risks to the world’s remaining river dolphins, all of which face similar extinction threats in the next 20 to 40 years, according to the lead author of new research published in Science Advances today. Aldo Benites-Palomino said it belonged to the Platanistoidea family of dolphins commonly found in oceans between 24m and 16m years ago.

For the first time in 10 years, a baby pygmy hippo has been born at Attica Zoological Park. Zoo staff said they were thrilled to welcome the birth as a lack of male pygmy hippos in captivity made breeding efforts complicated. The rare male calf was born on 19 February and joins his parents, Lizzie and Jamal, as the only pygmy hippos at the zoo. Native to western Africa, pygmy hippos are listed as an endangered species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature

The state rescinded its decision over Carmichael mine fly-in, fly-out jobs but it’s unlikely to be the end of the dispute

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When Adani’s north Queensland coalmine obtained its final approvals in 2019, the residents of Clermont held an impromptu celebration at the Leo hotel.

“Our town needs it, everyone’s passionate about it, it will be great for the community. A welcome, welcome thing,” one local at the pub told the ABC.

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Executives at Texas summit claim clean-energy transition is failing and say world should ‘abandon the fantasy’ of fossil-fuel phaseout

The bosses of the world’s leading oil and gas companies have poured scorn on efforts to move away from fossil fuels, complaining that a “visibly failing” transition to clean energy was being pushed forward at an “unrealistic pace”.

The oil executives, gathered at the industry’s annual Cera Week conference in Houston, Texas, have taken turns this week to denounce calls for a rapid phase-out of fossil fuels, despite widespread acknowledgment within the industry, as well as scientists and governments, of the need to radically reduce planet-heating emissions to avoid the worst effects of the climate crisis.