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Elephants can help humans live longer, healthier, happier lives. Help them, and we help ourselves

It sometimes feels as if we are living in the elephant’s darkest hour. China may be closing down its domestic ivory trade and the EU getting to grips with smuggling, yet the poachers continue their bloody business. Meanwhile, forests are being destroyed, herds’ migration routes are being blocked, and humans and elephants are competing ever more fiercely for land, food and water.

So this is a good time to point out that humans have plenty of selfish reasons to make space for elephants. It’s not a question of giving them a free lunch: they can pay their own way.

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Investigation finds failure to properly respond to spill near drilling platform posed ‘significant threat to the environment’

Failure to properly respond to an oil spill near an ExxonMobil rig in the Bass Strait increased the risk of contamination and posed a “significant threat to the environment”, an investigation has found.

The spill was reported to the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority (Nopsema) on 1 February after an oily sheen was spotted in the water near the West Tuna oil platform, about 45km off the coast of Lakes Entrance in Gippsland.

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Onshore wind has higher public approval than nuclear and fracking, so why are Tories expanding unpopular industries with higher carbon footprints?

Renewable power expanded exponentially under the Tory-Lib Dem coalition elected in 2010 and by 2015 the renewable industries had a turnover of £14.9bn and had reduced wholesale electricity prices. If this expansion had continued under the next government, an all-renewable UK electricity supply was achievable by 2025.

Though the 2015 Tory manifesto claimed onshore wind farms “often fail to win public support”, the government’s own surveys demonstrate widespread approval. Support remains high even for a large-scale local wind farm.

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Turnbull government's budget had nothing to say on climate, and little on energy. The policy he once derided as a "fig leaf" for climate action is coming to an end, leaving the PM with nothing to meet climate targets, and no strategy to manage the energy transition.

After photographing tigers and tapirs in one of Sumatra’s least known wildernesses, an unlikely pair of conservationists are hoping to discover a hidden population of orangutans in high altitude forests – and who knows what else.

Just a few years ago this place had no name. And in fact its new moniker – Hadabaun Hills – is the sole creation of Indonesian conservationist Haray Sam Munthe. Hadabaun means “fall” in the local language – Munthe suffered a terrible one in these hills while looking for tigers in 2013. But Hadabaun or Fall Hills remains unrecognised by the Indonesian governments and is a blank spot on the world’s maps – though it may be one of the last great refuges for big mammals on the island of Sumatra.

Last year a ragtag, independent group of local and international conservationists, led by Munthe and Greg McCann of Habitat ID, used camera traps to confirm Sumatran tigers and Malayan tapirs in these hills. Next month they hope to uncover a lost population of Sumatran orangutans.

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Two renewables penetration studies: One takes a centralised grid approach, the other takes a distributed approach. Here's what they found.

Ratch Australia Corporation announced today that it has awarded the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract for its $100 million Collinsville Solar PV Project.

Benthall Edge, Shropshire This plant has had a symbolic, medicinal and folkloric importance for centuries

The margins of woodland paths are full of woodruff, white on green, and sheltered under trees is the ghost of its scent. Galium odoratum is the sweet woodruff, an erect perennial of limestone woods, 15cm-30cm high with square stems through whorls of up to nine leaves – the ruffs – ending in tight umbels of cross-shaped, bright white flowers that have a vanilla scent.

Woodruff grows in dense rugs in the shady woods of Benthall Edge at the northern limit of Wenlock Edge before it plunges into the River Severn of the Ironbridge Gorge behind Buildwas power station, whose abandoned funnel looms above the tree tops.

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India solar prices fall again, now at a record low for the subcontinent and cheaper than the cost of domestic coal generation.

The fossil of a hatchling dinosaur dubbed Baby Louie is recognised as a new species of feathered dinosaur.

Tesla’s Elon Musk said the company will be offering no test drives or advertising for six to nine months for the Model 3.

Scientists release groundbreaking medical scans that reveal how the human brain develops.

The second budget of the Turnbull Government continues their dire management of Australia’s energy and climate change policy.

ANCIENT EARTH: Ancient red rocks in Western Australia's Pilbara contain traces of a hot spring that hosted the earliest-known life on land 3.5 billion years ago.

Data collected from air quality monitoring stations shows high levels of pollution at the site.

Environmental activists seek to use Trump’s cabinet of fossil fuel millionaires to pressure New York City pension funds to divest

Environmental activists held a rally inside Trump Tower in New York City on Tuesday, ahead of an expected decision from the president on whether to leave the Paris climate change agreement.

About 90 people gathered in a public garden on the fifth floor of Donald Trump’s building in midtown Manhattan to encourage the New York City government to divest its pension funds from fossil fuel companies. Organizers from environmental group 350.org said individual states and local councils can still take action on climate change, even in the face of a government that seems ambivalent on the subject.

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Pollution and climate change are election issues, write Professor Steve Tombs and Geoff Naylor

The government attributes 40-50,000 premature deaths each year to the effects of airborne pollution; there are some 1 million cases of foodborne illness, which result in 20,000 hospital admissions and 500 deaths a year; and up to 50,000 people die each year as a result of injuries or health problems originating in the workplace (Enemies of the state: the 40-year Tory project to shrink public services, G2, 9 May). Yet the rate of inspection and enforcement actions for environmental health, food safety and hygiene, and health and safety have all been falling. The statistically average workplace now expects to see a health and safety inspector once every 50 years.

In the name of cutting red tape, governments of all political persuasions have attacked independent regulation and enforcement. Budget cuts in the name of austerity have compounded the problem – especially at the level of local authorities. There is now a plethora of schemes to outsource and privatise wholesale some regulatory and enforcement activities. Private companies are increasingly involved in “regulating” either other private companies, or themselves, or both. Such changes mark the beginning of the end of the state’s commitment to forms of social protection put into place since the 1830s.
Steve Tombs
Professor of criminology, Open University

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Legislation is ‘cause for optimism’ as big body of laws is hard to reverse

Nations around the world have adopted more than 1,200 laws to curb climate change, up from about 60 two decades ago, a sign of widening efforts to limit rising temperatures, according to a new study.

“Most countries have a legal basis on which future action can be built,” said Patricia Espinosa, the UN’s climate change chief, at an international meeting on climate change in Bonn, Germany.

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Speaking at a global food convention in Milan on Tuesday, the former US president says he prioritised climate change while in office because it would be the issue that ‘defines the contours of this century more dramatically than any other’. His comments come as the Trump administration decides whether to keep the US in the Paris climate agreement

• Trump aides postpone meeting as clashes over Paris climate deal continue

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An exotic grass planted as a biomass crop could be a valuable habitat for the brown hare, scientists say.