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EU carbon prices plunged heavily on Friday to their lowest levels since May 16 as traders sold in anticipation of a pause in the year’s stellar gains ahead of a key option expiry date and as auction volumes approach a record.

Germany is to extend beyond this year a three-year project to support poorer nations on carbon markets, while also opening a tender seeking experts to study EU ETS market liquidity, documents showed.

Government faces criticism from its own advisors over failure to mention emissions targets as campaigners enter second week of hunger strike

The government is coming under growing pressure from environmentalists and its own advisers over its support for a new runway at Heathrow.

The Committee on Climate Change [CCC] has expressed its “surprise” that there was no mention of the government’s legal obligations to reduce greenhouse gases when it announced it was backing Heathrow expansion plans earlier this month.

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The week’s top environment news stories and green events. If you are not already receiving this roundup, sign up here to get the briefing delivered to your inbox

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The secretive mammals are fast disappearing from the Highlands but last-ditch efforts to save them are fraught with challenges

Set deep in mixed woodland of Scots pine and birch, near the banks of the river Beauly in Inverness-shire, several huge, concealed pens contain two breeding pairs of Scottish wildcat.

Wildcats mate from January to March, and their high, anguished breeding calls through the dark winter nights are thought to have inspired tales of the Cat Sith, a spectral feline of Celtic legend that was believed to haunt the Highlands.

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Ontario will not participate in the next quarterly WCI auction in August, sources told Carbon Pulse, as its new premier announced that his government's first act will be to scrap the provincial cap-and-trade scheme.

Below is a table of the closing prices, ranges and volumes for China's regional pilot carbon markets this week. All prices are in RMB, and volumes in tonnes of CO2e. Data sourced from local exchanges.

This week’s quarterly RGGI auction settled slightly above the secondary market at $4.02/short ton, the market’s operator announced Friday, while compliance buying dropped significantly from the previous sale in March.

Wade Kelly's drone captured dozens of the reptiles on camera this week, sunbathing by the Daly River in Australia.

A colourful sand lizard, a giant baobab tree and a racoon with a head for heights are among this week’s pick of images from the natural world

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Improvements to the world's biggest particle smasher are designed to uncover new physics.

British actor Benedict Cumberbatch is among those giving readings at the ceremony.

The Australian federal government and the Energy Security Board (ESB) on Friday provided fresh details on the country’s proposed National Energy Guarantee (NEG) but refused to discuss the scheme’s overall emissions ambition, which may lead to its ultimate demise.

A court in The Hague on Tuesday sentenced a 46-year-old Pakistani man to eight years in jail over his role in masterminding a €6.5 million tax fraud scheme via the EU ETS.

Author and activist Will McCallum gives us his top tips for eliminating plastics from our everyday lives.

The Kilauea volcano has been pouring lava into the ocean off Hawaii, causing a hydrochloric acid mist.

New Zealand’s opposition leader on Friday backed the establishment of a climate change commission, brightening the outlook for a non-partisan body to set up national carbon budgets and oversee the emissions trading scheme.

China’s five major state-owned power companies last year racked up combined losses of 13.2 billion yuan ($2.1 bln) from generating coal-fired electricity, a sign of the challenges facing the industry in the world’s biggest-polluting nation.

Wollemi pines have survived for hundreds of millions of years. Once covering Australia, they now survive in a few isolated spots – but they're coming back in a big way. Cris Brack, Assoc Professor Forest measurement & management, Australian National University Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.

You can’t make money from letting cows run wild, right? When Patrick Barkham got access to the sums at a pioneering Sussex farm, he was in for a surprise.

Orange tip butterflies jink over grassland and a buzzard mews high on a thermal. Blackthorns burst with bridal white blossom and sallow leaves of peppermint green unfurl. The exhilaration in this corner of West Sussex is not, however, simply the thrilling explosion of spring. The land is bursting with an unusual abundance of life; rampant weeds and wild flowers, insects, birdsong, ancient trees and enormous hedgerows, billowing into fields of hawthorn. And some of the conventional words from three millennia of farming – ‘hedgerow’, ‘field’ and ‘weed’ – no longer seem to apply in a landscape which is utterly alien to anyone raised in an intensively farmed environment.

This is Knepp, a 3,500-acre farm in densely-populated lowland Britain, barely 45 miles from London. Once a conventional dairy and arable operation, at the turn of this century, Knepp’s owners, Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree, auctioned off their farm machinery, rewilded their land and, as much by accident as design, inched towards a new model of farming. Some view the result as an immoral eyesore, an abnegation of our responsibility to keep land productive and tidy. Others find it inspiring proof that people and other nature can coexist.

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