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This immense worm moves slowly and gracefully underground and can grow to the length of an outstretched arm

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The giant Gippsland earthworm already has an upbeat campaign song.

“I am a real worm, I am an actual worm,” bangs the chorus of Doctor Worm, a late-90s novelty hit by the American indie rock band They Might Be Giants.

Environmentalists call bid to skirt UN treaty ‘reckless’ amid fears that mining will cause irreversible loss of biodiversity

A Canadian deep-sea mining firm has revealed it has been negotiating with the Trump administration to bypass a UN treaty and potentially gain authorisation from the US to mine in international waters.

The revelation has stunned environmentalists, who condemned the move as “reckless” and a “slap in the face for multilateralism”.

British eel trader says move will destroy traditional elvering but campaigners welcome decision

Endangered eels caught in British estuaries will no longer be exported to Russia after the government banned the trade.

In a decision that Britain’s last remaining eel trader said would end centuries of traditional elvering, a request to dispatch millions of glass eels – young eels that develop into elvers – to a restocking project in Kaliningrad was refused by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).

Greenpeace lost – not because it did something wrong but because it was denied a fair trial

The stunning $667m verdict against Greenpeace last week is a direct attack on the climate movement, Indigenous peoples and the first amendment.

The North Dakota case is so deeply flawed – at its core, the trial was really about crushing dissent – that I believe there is a good chance it will be reversed on appeal and ultimately backfire against the Energy Transfer pipeline company.

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

Wettest March day for 15 years in some parts of northern Australian state, while storms and hail hit Mediterranean

More heavy rain has hit Queensland, Australia, just weeks after the devastation of Cyclone Alfred. Much of north and central Queensland was put under severe weather alert for heavy rainfall earlier this week, as six-hourly rainfall totals of 30-60mm were anticipated, with the risk of seeing up to 120mm locally in this period.

In the north-west of the state, this rain caused the Haughton River to rise rapidly, with water levels reaching 2.68 metres on Wednesday night, exceeding the 2.5-metre major flood level.

Heavy rainfall expected to stretch from Queensland’s Sunshine Coast to the Victorian border, with the potential for isolated falls of up to 100mm

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A wet and wild weekend is on the way for much of Australia, as heavy rain in Queensland moves east and a tropical low off the coast of Western Australia threatens to develop into a cyclone.

Sydney, Brisbane and Canberra can all expect a washout on Saturday, with heavy rainfall expected to stretch from Queensland’s Sunshine Coast down to the Victorian border, including the potential for isolated falls of up to 100mm.

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Bloc set to accept compromise that would allow companies to trade carbon credits, in blow to climate finance

The long-awaited carbon levy on international shipping that was to supply vital climate finance looks set to be significantly diluted, after the EU appeared to be backing down in global talks, in a blow to vulnerable countries.

The EU is set to accept a compromise that would allow companies to enter into a system of trading carbon credits instead of paying directly for their emissions, the Guardian has learned.

Ministers urged to do more after United Utilities discharged raw sewage into Unesco site for 6,327 hours last year

Celebrated by William Wordsworth, Windermere has long epitomised the natural timeless beauty of the Lake District, with millions of tourists drawn to the shores that inspired the poet. But today England’s biggest lake is a shadow of its 19th century self: its waters no longer clear but blighted by algae and its wildlife decimated by pollution, in a symbol, critics say, of all that is wrong with the privatised water industry.

This month the environment secretary, Steve Reed, vowed to break with the recent past, standing on its shores and promising that Labour would “clean up Windermere”. The lake is showing the impact of sewage pollution from United Utilities treatment plants and increased pressure from climate change-induced temperature rises.

Less use of gas and coal in electricity supply and industry sectors drove reduction, Department for Energy Security and Net Zero says

The UK’s carbon emissions fell by 4% last year, according to official figures.

Provisional statistics published on Thursday by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) show UK territorial greenhouse gas emissions were 371m tonnes carbon equivalent (MtCO2e) in 2024, down from 385 MtCO2e in 2023.

Exclusive: Cost blow-out has experts worried people will use ‘huge’ volumes of pesticides to protect themselves from ‘tiny killers’

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Australian households will spend $1.03bn every year to suppress fire ants and cover related medical and veterinary costs, with about 570,800 people needing medical attention and 30 likely deaths from the invasive pest’s stings, new modelling shows.

The Australia Institute research breaks down the impact of red imported fire ants (Rifa) by electorate, with the seats of Durack and O’Connor in Western Australia, Mayo in South Australia and Blair in Queensland the hardest hit if the ants become endemic.

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Blair: $1.7m in medical costs, $1.5m in vet costs and $5.1m in household pesticide costs.

Dickson: $1.4m in medical costs, $1.2m in vet costs and $4m in household pesticide costs.

Ryan: $1.5m in medical costs, $1.3m in vet costs and $3.4m in household pesticide costs.

Many winemakers halt shipments on chance White House makes good on threat of 200% markup on European goods

As the threat of exorbitant US tariffs on European alcohol imports looms, a warehouse in the French port city of Le Havre awaits a delivery of more than 1,000 cases of wine from a dozen boutique wineries across the country.

Under normal circumstances, Randall Bush, the founder of Loci Wine in Chicago, would have already arranged with his European partners to gather these wines in Le Havre, the last stop before they are loaded into containers and shipped across the Atlantic. But these wines won’t be arriving stateside anytime soon.

As life starts to return to the capital’s parks and woodlands, photographer Sarah Lee has been capturing daffodils and budding plants, walkers, buskers and joggers out in the sunshine. She says: ‘Everything feels so dark right now, it’s good to know the light is coming back’

Net zero is a target that countries should be striving for to stop the climate crisis. But beyond the buzzword, it is a complex scientific concept – and if we get it wrong, the planet will keep heating.

Biodiversity and environment reporter Patrick Greenfield explains how a loophole in the 2015 Paris climate agreement allows countries to cheat their net zero targets through creative accounting, and how scientists want us to fix it

Gene Likens, who first identified acidic rainwater in 1960s, said the Trump administration’s ‘rollbacks are alarming’

The US could be plunged back into an era of toxic acid rain, an environmental problem thought to have been solved decades ago, due to the Donald Trump administration’s rollback of pollution protections, the scientist who discovered the existence of acid rain in North America has warned.

A blitzkrieg launched by Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on clean air and water regulations could revert the US to a time when cities were routinely shrouded in smog and even help usher back acid rain, according to Gene Likens, whose experiments helped identify acidic rainwater in the 1960s.

Final gathering in April will mark end of street protests although campaign to continue ‘in courts and prisons’

Supporters of the climate group Just Stop Oil have announced that, after three years of disruptive protests, they are ending their campaign of civil resistance.

Hannah Hunt, whose speech on Valentine’s Day 2022 marked the beginning of the campaign, made the announcement outside Downing Street in London on Thursday.

Duration of spills by water companies up on previous year, in data described by environment secretary as ‘disgraceful’

Raw sewage was discharged into rivers and coastal waters in England for almost 4m hours last year, with waterways that have the highest environmental protections subjected to days of pollution.

Data released by the Environment Agency on Thursday revealed water companies discharged untreated effluent for 3.62m hours, a slight increase on last year.

It doesn’t pass the sniff test

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Sweeping synthesis of 2,000 global studies leaves no doubt about scale of problem and role of humans, say experts

Humans are driving biodiversity loss among all species across the planet, according to a synthesis of more than 2,000 studies.

The exhaustive global analysis leaves no doubt about the devastating impact humans are having on Earth, according to researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag) and the University of Zurich. The study – which accounted for nearly 100,000 sites across all continents – found that human activities had resulted in “unprecedented effects on biodiversity”, according to the paper, published in Nature.

Critics say industry threatens the endangered Maugean skate and laws were rushed through with ’no proper process’

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Controversial legislation to protect the Tasmanian salmon industry has passed parliament after the government guillotined debate to bring on a vote in the Senate on Wednesday night.

Government and Coalition senators voted in favour of the bill, which was designed to bring an end to a formal reconsideration by the environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, into whether an expansion of fish farming in Macquarie harbour in 2012 was properly approved.

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