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Birds are not just diverse, vivid and extraordinary. They can also save our souls – let’s protect them

For most of my life, I didn’t pay attention to birds. Only in my 40s did I become a person whose heart lifts whenever he hears a grosbeak singing or a towhee calling, and who hurries out to see a golden plover that’s been reported in the neighbourhood, just because it’s a beautiful bird, with truly golden plumage, and has flown all the way from Alaska. When someone asks me why birds are so important to me, all I can do is sigh and shake my head, as if I’ve been asked to explain why I love my brothers. And yet the question is a fair one: why do birds matter?

My answer might begin with the vast scale of the avian domain. If you could see every bird in the world, you’d see the whole world. Things with feathers can be found in every corner of every ocean and in land habitats so bleak that they’re habitats for nothing else. Grey gulls raise their chicks in Chile’s Atacama desert, one of the driest places on Earth.

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Unsustainable exploitation of the natural world threatens food and water security of billions of people, major UN-backed biodiversity study reveals

Human destruction of nature is rapidly eroding the world’s capacity to provide food, water and security to billions of people, according to the most comprehensive biodiversity study in more than a decade.

Such is the rate of decline that the risks posed by biodiversity loss should be considered on the same scale as those of climate change, noted the authors of the UN-backed report, which was released in Medellin, Colombia on Friday.

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EU’s subsidy system, that benefits big farming rather than sustainability, needs to change to prevent ongoing collapse in birds and insect numbers, warn green groups

Europe’s crisis of collapsing bird and insect numbers will worsen further over the next decade because the EU is in a “state of denial” over destructive farming practices, environmental groups are warning.

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If even oil companies accept human-caused global warming, why doesn’t everybody?

In a California court case this week, Judge William Alsup asked the two sides to provide him a climate science tutorial.

The plaintiffs are the coastal cities of San Francisco and Oakland. They’re suing five major oil companies (Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, ConocoPhillips and BP) to pay for the cities’ costs to cope with the sea level rise caused by global warming. Chevron’s lawyer presented the science for the defense, and most notably, began by explicitly accepting the expert consensus on human-caused global warming, saying:

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RN Drive's summary of the biggest stories of the week, plus some you may have missed.

There's a new theory to explain why whales beach themselves in large numbers

‘His blubber shook like Jell-o,’ says researcher of the attack on newborn orca by unrelated 32-year-old male

Scientists in the Canadian province of British Columbia have documented what is believed to be the first reported case of an orca whale killing an infant of the same species.

“We knew right away that this was a remarkable event,” said Jared Towers, a Cetacean researcher with Fisheries and Oceans Canada, of the encounter he and two colleagues witnessed in December 2016.

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Mining for lignite - or brown coal - in Greece is a huge industry. Together with Germany and Poland, the country accounts for more than one-third of the world’s coal production. But for residents of villages in the extraction areas of West Macedonia, it has many impacts, from displacement to health problems. Photographs and research by Anna Pantelia

Thick dust suspended in the atmosphere makes it hard to see the sun over Ptolemaida, a city 500 kilometres north-west of Athens in the West Macedonia region, known for its brown coal (lignite) mines and power stations.

Kostas works as a guard for the state-owned Public Power Corporation (PPC), like his father before him. “My father died of cancer when I was 12,” he says. “Four other men from his shift lost their lives from cancer.”

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About 150 animals wash up on a beach south of Perth, prompting a major rescue effort.

Rescue operation under way to save 15 beached whales in Hamelin Bay near Augusta on state’s south-west coast

More than 150 whales have washed ashore in Western Australia, of which about 75 have died.

A rescue operation is under way in Hamelin Bay, near the town of Augusta on the state’s south-western tip, with volunteers and vets trying to keep the surviving short-finned pilot whales alive before deciding when to herd them out to sea. About 50 of the whales are on the beach and 25 are in the shallows.

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'Social licence to operate' is a term describing how much community support a project or company has. As the Northern Rivers CSG experience shows, failing to get it can have costly impacts for firms. Hanabeth Luke, Lecturer, Southern Cross University Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.

How do the competing battery storage rollouts compare? Is the Marshall plan better than the Tesla proposal embraced by Weatherill?

Grid-scale battery storage is taking off in Australia but it is still a struggle for investors to get value from their services. The contracts for the new Victoria big batteries explain why.

It's not worth getting too excited about the many technical deficiencies in the proposed National Energy Guarantee and the poverty of the vision that underlies it.

Tony Burke says if the Greens back the plan, the ‘largest removal’ of a conservation area will be locked in for a decade

Labor has blasted the Greens for not lining up immediately behind their commitment to disallow controversial new marine park management plans proposed by the Turnbull government this week.

The shadow environment minister, Tony Burke, told Guardian Australia the government had been intent for four years “on the largest removal of area from conservation in history”.

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Whatever shape the shift to renewables takes, energy storage will be the Swiss Army knife for electricity grids – a tool for any task.

Ground broken at 80MW Victoria wind farm – fruition of Melbourne project involving 14 universities, cultural institutions, corporations and Councils.

Computing giant says it now contracts enough renewables to "send Marty McFly back in time in a DeLorean" after sealing 315MW Virginia solar farm PPA.

The dream of carbon capture and storage (CCS) continues to keep coal industry and its political backers hopeful for the future. But at what cost?

Agreements between the Commonwealth and state governments that protect native forests are based on hopelessly out-of-date information. It's a huge mistake to renew them without assessment. David Lindenmayer, Professor, The Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.