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British Heart Foundation says Ulez will help reduce 36,000 annual UK pollution deaths

The ultra-low emission zone (Ulez) across London will help reduce the 36,000 deaths caused in the UK every year by outdoor pollution, the British Heart Foundation said as it welcomed the new vehicle charging zone that will launch on Monday.

According to the leading heart charity, a significant proportion of air pollution-related deaths are in the capital, where pollution levels are often at their highest.

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Huon pines in Tasmania have locked up significant amounts of mercury pollution from the state's mining industrial history. And that can be released back to the atmosphere in bushfires. Larissa Schneider, DECRA fellow, Australian National University Kathryn Allen, Academic, Ecosystem and Forest Sciences, University of Melbourne Simon Haberle, Professor, Australian National University Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.

With demand set to rise across the world, Australia is set to become a global primary producer of hydrogen

In March, the Queensland University of Technology made history when it achieved the first export of a small quantity of clean, green hydrogen produced in Australia from renewable energy, to Japanese energy giant JXTG – proving that it was in fact possible.

Hydrogen is increasingly being seen as an alternative to LNG and other fossil fuels and Australia has a lot togain from a new export industry, with companies such as Woodside Energy and Siemens already investing.

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An exhibition in Hertfordshire displays items for the first time since the mid-19th Century.

New report ranks deadliest cities for feathered travelers, who often collide with glass-covered or illuminated buildings

Scientists estimate that at least 100 million and maybe as many as a billion birds die each year in the US when they collide with buildings, especially glass-covered or illuminated skyscrapers. And, in a new report, conservationists now have a better idea which American cities are the deadliest for those on the wing.

Chicago, with its many glass superstructures that spike into what is the busiest US avian airspace during migration, is the most dangerous city for those feathered travelers. More than 5 million birds from at least 250 different species fly through the Windy City’s downtown every fall and spring.

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Secmol is an Indian school pioneering practical green education in one of the harshest environments.

Blue sky thinking is a feature of much discussion around the future of our cities — but will it really help us create the sustainable cities of the next century?

British photographer Stephen Gill would often gaze out of a window of his home in Skåne, Sweden, to find a vast yet empty sky. A bird enthusiast from a young age – his first teenage photographic project focused on bird tables – he determined to capture Skåne’s native species and placed a pillar at the end of a field and a camera with a motion sensor opposite. The experiment worked: dozens of birds unwittingly posed for the camera. “Viewing what had taken place often left me stunned,” Gill says. Once, “a white-tailed eagle somehow managed to perch on the 6cm diameter stage”. His study, now a book called The Pillar (out 20 April, Nobody Books, with words by Karl Ove Knausgård), continued for four years: “I simply could not stop as infinite variations kept presenting.”

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A daily summary of our news plus bite-sized updates from around the world.

The energy used in producing food which is wasted in the US is enough to power countries such as Sweden or Switzerland.

California’s Independent Emissions Market Advisory Committee (IEMAC) should focus its attention on the WCI programme's allowance oversupply and provide concrete remedies if a problem if determined, along with examining the state's current forestry offset protocol, a legislator said Friday.

California regulator ARB is proposing to establish a “firm maximum” price for Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) credits and an advance crediting mechanism to bolster the programme’s existing cost containment provisions, officials said at a workshop on Friday.

With natural disasters like Cyclone Idai increasing in frequency and intensity across Africa, how can governments better mitigate against the risks of these events?

A US appeals court on Friday threw out parts of a 2016 EPA regulation limiting the use of HFCs, coming nearly two years after the same court overturned another Obama-era regulation governing the high global warming potential gases.

This week, how do we reduce plastic use without causing extra food waste; and how one dairy business has changed how it operates to stay strong in business.

This week's surge in EUA prices slowed on Friday, though strong gains in key energy contracts and more speculative buying still helped push carbon to a new 2.5-year high to leave it with a 14% weekly gain.

A bilby dreaming story guides a mother with a sick child to an outback town. Decades later, the child returns to repay the favour and look after the bilby.

Teaching union to debate call for schools to oppose fossil fuel giant’s backing of school fitness event

The UK’s biggest teaching union is to decide whether to object to fossil fuel giant Ineos sponsoring the school Daily Mile initiative over allegations the company is using the event to greenwash its image.

Campaigners accuse Ineos, owned by the UK’s richest man, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, of endangering the wellbeing of future generations through its fracking activities and plastics production.

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A three-toed skink’s unusual birth, a dead whale full of plastic and young elephants stuck in the mud

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Gavin Weightman responds to a column by Adrian Chiles about buddleia

So Adrian Chiles (G2, 4 April) has noticed buddleia bushes growing out of derelict buildings and judges them to signify industrial neglect. He suggests the plant does not grow so much in London because land is too expensive. In fact buddleia grows everywhere in London, sprouting from the tops of many buildings that are not abandoned and forming great thickets along railway lines. It is also a prized garden plant, attracting a great variety of insects, and is commonly called “the butterfly bush”. And though it is from China and was brought to Europe by a Frenchman, Linnaeus named it after the Rev Adam Buddle of Hadleigh rectory, Essex, in honour of observations he had made of local plants. Buddle never saw the butterfly bush, as he died more than a century before it was introduced in the last decade of Victoria’s reign.
Gavin Weightman
London

• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com

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