The Guardian

The best of this week’s wildlife photographs from around the world

The project in Uganda has captured the disastrous effects of the climate crisis on a vital source of water that is central to the lives and sacred beliefs of the local Bakonzo community

• Photographs by Project Pressure

Campaign network calls on government to prioritise smaller cars and introduce higher charges for SUV owners

More than 1m cars too big to fit in parking spaces are being sold in the UK each year, and numbers are growing, research has found.

A trend for cars bigger than the average urban parking space means new vehicles are outgrowing towns and cities.

Animal rights charity argues surcharge of 40-60p discriminates against dairy-free customers

A leading animal rights charity has launched a campaign calling for Gail’s Bakery to drop its surcharge on plant-based milks, claiming it “unfairly discriminates” against customers with dairy intolerances or those trying to make more ethical choices.

Gail’s, a chain that is expanding rapidly in Britain, charges 40p to 60p extra if customers want oat or soya milk in their coffee or tea.

I bought it to be part of a greener future, but that was before Musk proved so awful. I’d sell it now, but prices have dropped

After our children left home, my wife and I decided to treat ourselves and buy a new car for a driving holiday in Europe. We’d been driving a family estate car for years, loading it up with kids and making trips to and from universities, but we wanted something for ourselves.

As a surprise, she booked a test drive for the Tesla Model S for my birthday. It was unlike any car I’d been in before. I thought “Wow, this is amazing.” It felt like the future: a computer on wheels that was constantly updating with new features. I can’t say I feel that way now – and many people seem to share that view. Tesla sales figures declined by 13% in the first few months of this year. Others feel even more uneasy: more than 200 demonstrations happened last weekend outside company facilities around the world to protest against Elon Musk and the wrecking ball he has taken to the federal government.

Application, submitted by Cranswick, would have created one of the largest industrial poultry and pig units in Europe

A megafarm that would have reared almost 1 million chickens and pigs at any one time has been blocked by councillors in Norfolk over climate change and environmental concerns.

Councillors on King’s Lynn and West Norfolk borough council unanimously rejected an application to build what would have been one of the largest industrial poultry and pig units in Europe.

Maintaining seed diversity and abundance is essential – and requires constant work. It’s time for Congress to return to the seed business

From 1862 until 1923, US senators and members of Congress provided vast numbers of seeds to constituents. At its peak, the congressional seed distribution program delivered over 60m seed packets directly to farmers and market gardeners every year, helping introduce new varieties of everything from wheat and corn to oats, soybeans, flowers and vegetables. A century later, far fewer Americans till the soil for a living, but seeds remain central to our lives.

To understand the importance of seeds, try to imagine a morning without them. It would begin naked on a bare mattress, with no cozy sheets or pajamas, and there would be no fluffy towel to wrap up in after your shower. All of those things come from the seeds of the cotton plant. Stumbling wet into the kitchen, you would find no coffee, and no toast or bagel to go with it. There would be no eggs, no bacon, no cereal, no milk. All of those staples come from seeds or from livestock raised on seed crops. And if you thought you might console yourself with a chocolate bar, you can forget it. Cocoa powder, and the cocoa butter that makes it melt in your mouth, are both derived from seeds.

Sanger Institute’s Tree of Life team say genomes offer invaluable insight into how species will fare under climate crisis

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“We are following the ‘invertebrate of the year’ series with bated breath,” began the email that arrived in the Guardian’s inbox last week.

Mark Blaxter leads the Sanger Institute’s Tree of Life programme, a project that sequences species’ DNA to understand the diversity and origins of life on Earth. But far more importantly, Blaxter and his team are superfans of our invertebrate of the year competition and have offered to map the genome sequence of whoever wins this year.

Action urgently needed to save the conditions under which markets – and civilisation itself – can operate, says senior Allianz figure

The climate crisis is on track to destroy capitalism, a top insurer has warned, with the vast cost of extreme weather impacts leaving the financial sector unable to operate.

The world is fast approaching temperature levels where insurers will no longer be able to offer cover for many climate risks, said Günther Thallinger, on the board of Allianz SE, one of the world’s biggest insurance companies. He said that without insurance, which is already being pulled in some places, many other financial services become unviable, from mortgages to investments.

Entire population of Thargomindah forced to flee homes as levee breaks and record water levels of 1974 flood eclipsed

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At first, the levee bank held firm as the flood waters came.

Locals had tirelessly constructed the dirt wall, building on areas where the last major flood had approached the south-west Queensland town.

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Reports predict global heating will bring catastrophes and that air conditioning market could grow by 41%

The world is on track for disastrous global heating – but this will create profits for some air conditioning companies, according to forecasts by leading Wall Street financial institutions.

Recent reports by Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and the Institute of International Finance all make clear the finance sector considers the Paris climate agreement limiting global temperatures, signed a decade ago by nearly 200 nations, is effectively dead and investors should plan accordingly.

Hurricane Helene proved a hard truth: a freezer of seeds is the literal version of putting all your eggs in one basket

About a month after Hurricane Helene devastated western North Carolina last fall, Roger Wynn and I met in an Asheville, North Carolina, supermarket parking lot. He’d driven two hours from Little Mountain, South Carolina, where the passing storm had also left its destructive mark.

“When the power finally came back on,” Wynn said, “two of my freezers didn’t work.” Wynn was worried not about spoiled food inside, but his seed collection. On that autumn day, in an act of forced downsizing and seed philanthropy, Wynn handed over two boxes filled with seeds. He wanted me, as founder of the non-profit Utopian Seed Project, to share the seeds with farmers across the region. The boxes contained a trove of Appalachian varieties: speckled field peas, white mountain half-runner beans, purple-podded bush beans and lots of butterbeans.

Appeal court finds in favour of anglers who said plans to clean up river were so vague ​a​s to be totally ineffectual

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A group of anglers trying to restore the ecosystem of a river have seen off a challenge by the environment secretary, Steve Reed, who claimed that cleaning up the waterway was administratively unworkable.

Reed pursued an appeal against a group of anglers from North Yorkshire, who had won a legal case arguing that the government and the Environment Agency’s plans to clean up the Upper Costa Beck, a former trout stream devastated by sewage pollution and runoff, were so vague they were ineffectual.

More than half of Britain’s 59 native species are in long-term decline, UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme finds

Last summer was the fifth worst in nearly half a century for butterflies in Britain, according to the biggest scientific survey of insect populations in the world.

For the first time since scientific recording began in 1976, more than half of Britain’s 59 native species are in long-term decline.

A 19th-century zoologist found the ‘little salt dweller’, which could be a portal to the past – if only we could locate it again

Last February, with colleagues Gert and Philipp and my daughter Francesca, I made the long journey to an unremarkable city called Río Cuarto, east of the Argentinian Andes. We went in search of a worm of unusual distinction.

Why a worm? As humans, we naturally love the animals that are most familiar. But from a zoologist’s point of view, the vertebrates, from mammals and birds to frogs and fish, can be seen as variations on a single theme. We all have a head at one end (with skull, eyes and jaws); in the middle, a couple of pairs of limbs (a goldfish’s fins, or your arms and legs); and, holding all this together, a backbone ending in a tail.

Government wants to spur economic growth and drive housebuilding but charities say nature should be priority

Wildlife groups have expressed alarm after ministers promised a radically “streamlined” approach to UK environmental regulation intended to drive economic growth and speed up new housing, as well as major projects such as airports.

While officials said the plans should boost nature conservation overall, the removal of what one called “bat by bat” decisions, a reference to the £100m bat shelter constructed for part of HS2, could water down individual protections.

Invertebrates may be the unsung heroes of the planet but they have received a lot of love and recognition from Guardian readers. A dazzling array of nominations have flown in for insects, arachnids, snails, crustaceans, corals and many more obscure creatures for our invertebrate of the year competition. Natural history reporter Patrick Barkham reviews this year’s shortlist of 10

• Vote for the beast that may be as ruthlessly predatory as us – the fen raft spider

Experts say previous economic models underestimated impact of global heating – as well as likely ‘cascading supply chain disruptions’

Economic models have systematically underestimated how global heating will affect people’s wealth, according to a new study that finds 4C warming will make the average person 40% poorer – an almost four-fold increase on some estimates.

The study, by Australian scientists, says average global GDP per person will be reduced by 16% even if warming is kept to 2C higher, . This is much higher than previous estimates of a drop of about 1.4%.

The flood-affected area in outback Queensland has grown to double the size of Victoria after experiencing its worst deluge in 50 years. Water broke the banks of a makeshift levee in Thargomindah in the state's south-west, forcing the evacuation of 100 residents. Stock losses are expected to be catastrophic and more rain is forecast for the coming week

• Outback deluge pushes Queensland towns to the brink: ‘Out here it’s drought or floods’

• Rain records to fall in Queensland with Townsville to set new annual high – in April

You can forget the advice on disguises, secret codes and spreading propaganda by dropping leaflets in train carriages. But there is something for us all here about the need for action

The SOE Syllabus was a series of lectures given to prospective secret agents in Britain during the second world war. These “lessons in ungentlemanly warfare” were released from the top secret bit of the Public Record Office (now known as the National Archive) and published as a historical curio in 2001, when my esteemed colleague John Crace picked out the sillier bits in one of his Digested Read reviews. There was a whole lecture about how to craft a disguise, in which people with sticky-out ears were advised to use glue to pin them back.

But now, 24 years later, I have picked up the book with a graver purpose – just on the off-chance that if we end up having to resist a fascist state, the past might have something to offer. They won’t know everything, these ungentlemanly gentlemen, being as they didn’t have the internet. But they can’t have known nothing.

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

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