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Coastal rubbish dumps dotted around Britain are at risk of erosion and nobody knows what exactly is inside them

Britain’s coasts were battered in this winter’s storms. The Royal North Devon Golf Club, England’s oldest golf course, had a sizeable chunk of its eighth hole washed away during Storm Eleanor in January. Less well publicised were fears of flooding at a nearby landfill site, which was last used in 1995 and contains hospital waste and other toxic material.

Related: Pollution risk from over 1,000 old UK landfill sites due to coastal erosion

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The base of the ice around the south pole shrank by 1,463 square kilometres between 2010 and 2016

Hidden underwater melt-off in the Antarctic is doubling every 20 years and could soon overtake Greenland to become the biggest source of sea-level rise, according to the first complete underwater map of the world’s largest body of ice.

Warming waters have caused the base of ice near the ocean floor around the south pole to shrink by 1,463 square kilometres – an area the size of Greater London – between 2010 and 2016, according to the new study published in Nature Geoscience.

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Government funding delay for £1.3bn scheme may force firm to lay off staff within weeks

The £1.3bn Swansea tidal lagoon faces a major blow as the company behind the scheme braces for significant job cuts if UK and Welsh government talks on the project fail to yield a breakthrough.

Tidal Lagoon Power has waited for 15 months since an independent review backed the scheme as a “no regrets” source of clean and reliable energy.

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There are win-win solutions to this problem.

Democracy is not a zero-sum game. Behaving as if it is degrades democratic process and our personal political sovereignty.

A zero-sum game is a contest for control of finite resources. Whatever one gains, another must lose. When two or more candidates compete for a single public office, only one can win, so many people view politics as bloodsport, applying “winner takes all” thinking to everything political. But elected officials are not conquerors; they are sworn servants to all their constituents.

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2 April 1918 Close at hand rise a group of single upright stalks, each topped by a small green knob, the inconspicuous flowers of the moschatel or adoxa

The golden kingcups light up the stagnant ditch which through the winter has been filmed with a yellowish scum. Their roots are deep in the ancient leaf-mould and decomposing twigs and branches, a rich, black ooze; this forcing-bed has sent up a thick cushion of leaves stretching from bank to bank, and now that the handsome flowers are out the ditch is transformed. On the steep bank below the now green
hedge the silver stitchwort is out; beside it is a bed of the trefoil leaves of the wood-sorrel, so acceptable in a salad, pleasantly acid; and amongst them the delicate lilac-veined flowers.

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Valley of Desolation, Wharfedale, Yorkshire Dales: The snow revives innocence, but it’s from this winter’s dramatic destabilisation of the polar vortex and a reminder of climate change

Spring is held in a sort of suspense. The sun’s growing confidence brings hope, but the blizzards are back again, shutting out the light, clogging the floor of Strid Wood with snow, smothering the first leaves of dog’s mercury and ramsons. Around this date in previous years I have heard drumming snipe on the moors or found breeding frogs in the ponds around here, but there will be few such mood-lifting discoveries today.

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China's defunct Tiangong-1 space lab mostly burnt up on re-entering the Earth's atmosphere.

A dog helps save an endangered turtle; farmers get the keep fit message; a calf and a camel make friends on the Nullabor; and bullocky Craig Lockwood yokes up his team.

A European, UK-led project aims to showcase how space debris could be removed from orbit.

Bernard Poujol believes ducks are the future for rice farms, but he hasn't quite perfected his technique.

When the First Fleet sailed into Sydney Cove in 1788, they entered an ancient and unforgiving landscape. A new book charts Australians' relationship with one of the world's most volatile climates. Joelle Gergis, ARC DECRA Climate Research Fellow, School of Earth Sciences, University of Melbourne Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.

The developments and set backs in foreign affairs for the month of March.

Doug Jones, Bernie Sanders and Chris Christie add to pressure over $50-a-night deal linked to chief executive of energy lobbying firm

Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt is under increasing pressure over a rental arrangement he had with a leading energy sector lobbyist.

Related: Veterans affairs chief David Shulkin says he was fired: 'I did not resign'

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The Río Nuevo, which now stretches across 16 miles of San Luis province, is believed to be the product of deforestation, changes in farming practices and climate change. Now as its changing course threatens farmland, roads and even a city, the government is struggling to contain it

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The Royal Air Force pushing boundaries, 100 years since it began. Three women serving with the RAF explain.

Green innovation comes in many forms. And promising project don't have to be big, they only have to make a start.

Do you have any input into the design of the products you buy and consume day-to-day? Your phone, laptop, clothes, even your food?

A census suggests that one-horn rhino numbers have increased by 12 to 2,413 in the national park.

The company says a Model X vehicle involved in a fatal crash in the US was in Autopilot mode.

As the price of pods has soared so has violence – and forest defenders are increasingly risking their lives to protect precious wildlife habitat from being felled for profit

The vanilla thieves of Anjahana were so confident of their power to intimidate farmers they provided advance warning of raids. “We are coming tonight,” they would write in a note pushed under doors in this remote coastal village in Madagascar. “Prepare what we want.”

But they either undervalued their target commodity or overestimated the meekness of their victims. After one assault too many at the turn of the year, a crowd rounded up five alleged gangsters, dragged them into the village square and then set about the bloody task of mob justice.

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