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A million animal and plant species are perilously close to extinction. Their fate and ours are intimately connected

In an essay entitled The Sense of Wonder, the American conservationist Rachel Carson suggested two questions to make us think more deeply about our natural environment. “What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?”

Published in 1955, Carson’s call to mindfulness was influential in the burgeoning postwar environmental movement. But despite campaigners’ best efforts, the sense of jeopardy lurking within her second question is now acute. Wild animal populations are declining annually by about 2.5% as a result of habitat loss, invasive species, pollution, climate change, overfishing and overhunting. Since 1970, overall numbers are down by 69%. Livestock and the human beings who farm them now account for 96% of all the mammals on Earth. The Sumatran tiger, the Bornean orangutan and the hellbender salamander are among the million animal and plant species judged perilously close to extinction.

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Laws across Australia have shifted significantly to limit protest and are being used to restrain or intimidate those who speak up

You don’t have to believe that Deanna Coco’s climate protest blocking traffic on the Sydney Harbour Bridge was a good idea, or helped her cause. But being sent to prison until July and denied bail while she lodges an appeal against the sentence was a bad day for democratic expression in Australia.

Coco, 32 years old and known as Violet, was part of a group of four protesters from the activist group Fireproof Australia who blocked a southbound lane on the bridge just before 8.30am on 13 April this year. While others held a banner and glued themselves to the road, Coco climbed on to the roof of a hired van and set off a flare. When police arrived, she resisted arrest.

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‘The conference for nature this month in Montreal could be what Paris was for climate,’ Tanya Plibersek says

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Australia is being urged to take a leadership role at a global summit that aims to reach what has been described as the nature equivalent of the landmark Paris agreement on climate change.

Countries will meet in Montreal for the Cop15 biodiversity summit from 7 December to work on a new framework agreement to end biodiversity decline. Campaigners say if successful it should result in the global destruction of nature being halted and reversed to the extent that wild areas and habitat for threatened species start to increase in size between now and 2030.

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Ministers and experts say disputes between co-hosts unlikely to disrupt efforts to reach deal on protecting natural world

More than 10,000 scientists, government officials and activists will gather in Montreal this week for the world’s most important biodiversity conference, eager to hammer out a deal to stem habitat loss around the world and preserve sensitive ecosystems.

The UN Cop15 biodiversity summit opens on Tuesday, and will see countries negotiate this decade’s targets for protecting nature after more than two years of pandemic-related delays and just over two weeks since the end of the Cop27 climate meeting in Egypt.

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The variety is a cross between commercial and wild wheats – bred in a bid to develop crops that are more resilient to the climate crisis

A new drought-tolerant variety of durum wheat has been created as part of an international breeding programme to boost climate resilience in the food system by increasing crop diversity.

Durum wheat is used to make pasta, pizza crusts, and flatbreads such as pitta and chapatis, as well as for couscous, bulgur and pastry for desserts such as baklava.

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Businesses and conservation groups are increasingly talking about a voluntary biodiversity credit market as a potentially significant future source of nature protection funding, and while the market itself is barely even taking baby steps at the moment, a number of processes are ongoing whose outcome will help determine whether the approach will succeed or not.

Negotiators from nearly 200 nations descend on Montreal next week for the COP15 UN biodiversity summit eyeing a landmark agreement to protect and restore nature, but behind the headline targets lurk concerns over who pays and how to translate global ambition into national targets and action plans.

The astronauts installed new solar panels to give the International Space Station more power.

Protesters take to luxury beds and sofas in London store to call for action on ‘sky-rocketing’ energy bills

Just Stop Oil activists tucked themselves into a Harrods display bed as part of a national day of action on fuel poverty in the UK on Saturday.

Footage of the “warm up” demonstrations also showed security guards confronting protesters lying on sofas inside the shop in Knightsbridge, London.

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Canada outlined ambitious plans and their role in hosting the largest global biodiversity UN convention at a technical briefing on Friday, having released a slew of domestic initiatives in the run-up to the Montreal conference scheduled from Dec. 7–19.

Alok Sharma says the mine will damage the UK’s international reputation as well as the environment

A mooted new coalmine in Cumbria would be “a backward step”, the UK government’s climate champion has warned ahead of an imminent decision on the controversial plan’s future, expected this week.

Alok Sharma, whose presidency of the Cop26 international climate talks ended last month, took to Twitter on Saturday morning to slam plans for the mine, which would produce coking coal for steel production.

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Once common in England and Wales, the species was hunted to local extinction about 300 years ago

With their striking long beaks and elegant white plumage, the spoonbill looks like it belongs somewhere far more exotic than the windswept saltmarshes of the UK.

But the large wading bird is enjoying a boom in numbers as landowners across the country improve wetland habitats and tree cover.

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The group was awarded $1.8m and praised as an ‘inspiring women led program’ using First Nations knowledge to protect land and sea

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The Queensland Indigenous Women Rangers Network has been awarded a £1m ($1.8m) Earthshot prize for its work on protecting the Great Barrier Reef.

The network was awarded the Revive Our Oceans category of the prizes, which was launched by Prince William and David Attenborough in 2020.

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

Friends from Oman who turn CO2 into rock and a UK firm making packaging from seaweed are among the winners.

A London firm which developers nature-friendly packaging is among five climate prize winners.

Scientists who have replaced plastic packaging with seaweed among those to be given prize by Prince of Wales

Scientists who have replaced plastic packaging with seaweed are among those who have been given a £1m prize by the Prince of Wales’s Earthshot fund.

The prize is aimed at rewarding innovative solutions to tackle the climate and biodiversity emergencies, and is named after former US president John F Kennedy’s Moonshot challenge in the 1960s, which united millions of people around the goal of putting a person on the moon within a decade.

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EU member states clawed back nearly 5 million free carbon allowances in November that had been allocated to heavy industry and heat producers for 2022, data shows.

Compliance entities disposed of California Carbon Allowances (CCAs) in the aftermath of the Q4 WCI auction result publication, while financials lengthened their WCI holdings and dumped RGGI permits in a reversal from previous weeks, according to US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) data published Friday.

This year’s winners of the British Ecological Society competition "celebrate the diversity" of ecology.