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Challenged by climate change, our most secretive butterfly could soon be getting a helping hand if a new campaign takes off

Recent very butterfly-unfriendly icy winds remind me of an insect that endures horrendous weather every summer. The mountain ringlet is our only montane butterfly, meaning that you have to climb a mountain – or at least 400 metres up a Lake District fell – to see it.

Some mountain ringlet caterpillars may live for two years so slowly do they grow, chewing grass in the most capricious British conditions, while the butterfly itself only survives for a few days in June and July.

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Watch the moment a young ape is freed after two years locked away in a wooden cage in Indonesia.

Survey shows 41% of people support bank’s decision to rule out funding Adani’s Queensland mine, with only 14% against, as the resources minister vows to switch banks

Almost three times as many people support Westpac’s decision to rule out funding Adani’s Queensland mine than disapprove of it, a survey has found.

But at least one Westpac customer is set to dump the bank over its new climate policy, which precludes helping open up a new coal region with Australia’s largest proposed coalmine.

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With so many choices for coffee, it's hard to know which is the environmentally healthy option. Shutterstock

Shopping can be confusing at the best of times, and trying to find environmentally friendly options makes it even more difficult. Welcome to the first instalment of our Sustainable Shopping series, in which we ask experts to provide easy, eco-friendly guides to purchases big and small.

The morning coffee ritual is serious business; Australians drink roughly 16.3 million coffees a day. Plenty of news coverage has been devoted to its health benefits and cultural significance, but how much do you know about the environmental cost of your daily latte?

Coffee is grown in some of the most biologically diverse regions of the world, sometimes causing significant damage. But there are choices you can make to reduce the ecological impact of your caffeine fix.

The issue

Coffee mostly affects tropical forests, as they are cleared to make way for coffee farms. But with certain cultivation practices, these coffee farms can support an impressive range of forest biodiversity.

The world’s most popular coffee type, Coffea arabica, grows under the rainforest canopies of Ethiopia. A natural requirement for shade means coffee is often cultivated under shading plants, from a single tree species to a diverse range of plant life.

However, to improve productivity, traditional coffee farms have been increasingly replaced with sun-tolerant coffee varieties that produce higher yields. Compared with shaded coffee, these simplified plantations support fewer native species, store less carbon, experience higher levels of erosion, and leach more nutrients. They also require more resources such as water and fertilisers.

Coffee grows in the shade on a farm in Jinotega, Nicaragua. REUTERS/Oswaldo Rivas How can we increase sustainability?

The most important choice when it comes to sustainable coffee is the actual coffee and its cultivation. Cultivation can contribute as little as 1% or as much as 70% of the total environmental footprint of a cup of coffee. How the coffee is consumed (instant, fresh grounds or pods, for instance) has less influence.

The lowest-impact coffee is grown using traditional cultivation methods with minimal mechanisation. At the other extreme are large farms that are highly mechanised and require more fertiliser and pesticides.

A combination of traditional cultivation methods, maintaining shading plants, protecting local forests and buffering waterways (filtering farmland runoff with vegetation before it enters waterways), has the lowest environmental impact.

What can you do?

While searching for your daily dose of caffeine, you have probably come across several different sustainability certification logos. They are the easiest way to find out about how your coffee is cultivated, and have proved effective in protecting coffee landscapes from degradation.

The two most prominent certification programs are The Rainforest Alliance and Australian Certified Organic.

Coffee bean bag with Rainforest Alliance logo. Karen Christine Hibbard/Flickr, CC BY-NC

The Rainforest Alliance requires a level of native vegetation to be maintained within each coffee farm. There is some criticism that the alliance has watered down its criteria in recent years, at least in terms of maintaining diverse shading vegetation. However, their certification leads to positive outcomes such as protection of waterways and native vegetation.

Australian Certified Organic certifies coffee roasters such as Coffex, Coffico and Rio Coffee. Australian Certified Organic

Australian Certified Organic is focused on protecting natural habitats and biodiversity, efficient water use, and minimising the use of chemicals in fertilisers and pest and disease management. These practices are strongly aligned with traditional coffee cultivation.

While certification programs are not perfect, logos can certainly act as a guide to sustainable products.

That said, products without logos aren’t necessarily unsustainable. Some small landholders with highly sustainable, shade-grown coffee can’t afford the expense of certification.

In this situation you can talk to your local roaster (or a distant one via the internet). Roasters may have direct relationships with their coffee growers and can tell you about their cultivation practices. Good questions to ask are whether the cooperative has any certification, whether the cultivation is organic or shade-grown, and whether the cooperative has any associated environmental programs.

Ultimately, a little knowledge of coffee cultivation and its impacts can go a long way in making wise and environmentally sound purchases. There is a huge range of coffee choices available, and good evidence that the choices you make can influence significant and positive environmental outcomes.

Aaron is employed by Astron Environmental Services, an environmental consulting company based in Western Australia.

Human noises are often 10 times that of background levels, impairing our enjoyment of natural parks and impacting animal behaviour, scientists have found

The sounds of the natural world are being overwhelmed by the blare of human activity, even in protected wildlife areas, new research has revealed.

The racket is not only harming people’s enjoyment of natural havens, which are known to have significant benefits for both physical and mental health, but it is also affecting wildlife, with animals less able to escape predators and birds less able to find mates.

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Researchers behind study, which may have helped cement case for banning microbeads, found guilty of scientific misconduct

A landmark paper claiming to show the devastating impact of microplastics on fish has been retracted after an investigation found the authors guilty of scientific misconduct.

The study, published in the prestigious journal Science, claimed that fish became “smaller, slower and more stupid” when exposed to tiny plastic fragments in the marine environment. It also suggested that perch larvae favour eating plastic over their natural prey “like teenagers eating junk food”.

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Arrival of a female wolf, that trekked 500km from Germany, means the pack could have cubs by spring

A wolf pack is roaming wild in Denmark for the first time in more than 200 years after a young female wolf journeyed 500km from Germany.

Male wolves have been seen in Denmark since 2012 and the new female could produce cubs this spring in farmland in west Jutland after two wolves were filmed together last autumn.

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Exclusive: Legal challenge on behalf of asthma sufferers could see ministers pay out compensation for failure to clean up illegal levels of pollution

Lawyers are preparing to mount an unprecedented class action against the government over its repeated failures to clean up illegal levels of air pollution from diesel traffic.

The legal challenge on behalf of asthma sufferers could see ministers paying out significant compensation for allowing the nation’s air to exceed legal limits for so long.

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Ecologist and conservationist who helped save the threatened grey partridge

Dick Potts, who has died aged 77, did more to bridge the gap between conservationists, farmers and the game shooting fraternity than any other figure. He combined his training as a scientist, his background as a farmer’s son and his passion for birds to help save the threatened grey partridge.

From small beginnings in a Portakabin on a farm in West Sussex in 1968, Dick developed a long-term study into the ecology of the partridge, one of Britain’s most distinctive farmland birds. Even then, numbers of this attractive gamebird were beginning to fall and Dick was charged with finding out why.

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A fossil found on Skye of the early mammal suggests it had a set of milk teeth, say palaeontologists.

Two coders will share a $55,000 prize for what a Nasa official calls the "ultimate 'geek' dream assignment.

After Trump’s revival of the Keystone XL pipeline project, some communities along its route are getting ready to fight back. Others see the US president keeping his promise to ‘make America great again’. The Guardian drove along the proposed route of the pipeline, through three red states – Montana, South Dakota and Nebraska – to hear what those who will be affected have to say about it

• Keystone defiance triggers assault on a constitutional right
• Life on the Keystone XL route: where opponents fear the ‘black snake’

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The Jali Ardhi, or ‘care for the land’ project, studies the impact of soil erosion on Maasai communities and their grazing lands. Photojournalist Carey Marks captures the changing landscape, its people – and the challenges they face

• The exhibition is at Plymouth University from 22 May to 2 June
  

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An electricity market "about as bad as you can get" has helped put household solar – and storage – back in the spotlight of Australia's renewables shift, prompting forecasts of "massive growth."

Scientists are counting albatrosses on remote islands from satellite images.

Greens challenge Labor to get new modelling to justify its support for an emissions intensity scheme, as attention turns to what's next for energy policy now that the renewable critics have egg on their face over predictions the RET could never be met.

Tesla shares fall after a bigger than expected Q1 loss. But revenue was up, and Elon Musk has his mind on other things...

Wolsingham, Weardale We were about to give up when we spotted the first morel, its convoluted, toffee-coloured, cap not much larger than a golf ball

Every winter this gently sloping bank on the outside of a bend in the Wear is swept clean by flood water. When spring arrives buried plant life reasserts itself through layers of sandy silt deposited when the river has swirled through the alders.

First the snowdrops spear through the surface. Last time we passed this way yellow star of Bethlehem flowers had appeared among emerging wild garlic leaves. On this day, less than a month later, the vegetation was a waist-high mosaic of butterbur, sweet cicely, ground elder and cranesbill leaves.

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Super-sharp images from a US satellite are keeping track of remote bird-breeding sites.

Energy Action today announced the launch of the Energy Action mobile app.