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The PM is to pledge an extra £2bn a year for scientific research and development projects in the UK.

As Iraq’s oilfields burn as retreating Isis forces set them on fire, Sebastião Salgado has published a book of his photographs taken in 1991 documenting a similar conflagration as Saddam Hussein’s forces set alight oil wells in Kuwait

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The fate of my small, south London road is a microcosm of the ways towns and cities are still planned around cars, not humans

This blog is sometimes criticised for focusing too much on events in London. At risk of seeming more parochial still, I’m about to write about my own London street. But stay with me: the failings in my part of SE5 contain lessons for the wider lack of safe cycling across the whole country.

Champion Hill, close to Camberwell in south-east London, is a classic rat run – a narrow and not-very-long residential street which has the misfortune to be on a shortcut between major routes, and is thus awash with traffic several times a day.

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Despite government support for measures such as planting trees to stop floods, no funds have yet been been allocated

Natural ways of preventing flooding such as planting trees have no government funding despite ministers repeatedly backing the idea, according to a freedom of information request by Friends of the Earth.

Almost a year since devastating floods hits swathes of northern Britain, environment secretary, Andrea Leadsom, and floods minister, Thérèse Coffey, have both recently supported the approach, which aims to slow the flow of water off hills and reduce peak levels.

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Hardown Hill, Dorset I skirt the old quarry workings, swamped in spring with bluebells and now swathed with rusty bracken

Old Bottom, as the Marshwood Vale was once called, has filled with autumn rain. Walking means slogging, ankle deep or more, through cold, claggy clay, navigating puddles of yellow water overhung with dripping trees. Time to escape the woods for higher, drier ground.

Hardown Hill is one of a circle of hills and forts ringing the vale. Steep sides of deciduous woodland and gaps of rough pasture run up to a flat top of heath where nightjars call in summer. The summit is open, unfenced common land, home to sand lizards and occasionally Dartford warblers. Villagers used to cut the heath for fuel. Gorse was particularly prized in bread ovens because it burned quick and hot before disintegrating into an insignificant pile of fine ash. In Dorset dialect, gorse was furze, pronounced “vurze”, just as fox was “varx”.

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In China, the drone industry has expressed particular interest in how Unmanned Aerial Vehicles can be used to grow food and maintain crops.  

The Department administers a diverse range of legislation to protect the environment, support sustainable development, give effect to obligations under international conventions and treaties, and implement specific national priorities.

Rats’ agility and keen sense of smell will one day be used to reach parts of shipping containers that sniffer dogs cannot reach

The pangolin – the world’s most heavily trafficked mammal – might have a new champion: rats that will be trained to sniff out trafficked pangolin parts in shipments heading from Africa to Asia.

Ten to 15 African giant pouched rats are being reared in Tanzania to detect pungent pangolin remains as well as smuggled hardwood timber. They are just a few weeks old and most are still with their mothers.

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Eco Energy World secures 2nd solar farm approval in Queensland; both projects likely to use "merchant" funding model.

Gas price jump pushing up electricity prices in Queensland, while post-Trump spike in bond rates will push up financing costs for renewable energy projects.

The 2016 Marrakech Climate Summit finished strongly, despite the election of President Trump, with a multitude of commitments and actions.

Ten Canberra Institute of Technology (CIT) students will travel to Paris in 2017 to study advances in renewable energy.

Trump's position on clean energy and climate change is little different to that of Tony Abbott's, whose policies have been unchanged by Malcolm Turnbull. But Trump's success has unleashed a new push from the lunar right that will make any progress incredibly hard to achieve.

The Ukrainian government now aims to give a new renewable life to the Chernobyl exclusion zone.

Despite signing in 2013, Australia has still not ratified the UN’s Minamata Convention on Mercury.

Now that the election is in the past, it’s worth returning to Tesla’s announcement to see what strategic values or challenges this would bring.

Elon Musk says Tesla's solar tiles could cost less than – and last twice as long as – a regular "dumb roof."

Adani Australia says design and tendering underway for $200m, 100-200MW solar project in Qld Bowen Basin; construction set to begin 2017.

Two short-beaked echidna puggles hit the scales for the first time at Taronga zoo in Sydney – the first born at the zoo for 29 years. The pair were two of three puggles all hatched within a short period from 16-30 August. The youngest was born to mother Pitpa, the last echidna born at Taronga

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Our cultural practices help define us, but when the mood of the world is against us, what do we do?