The Guardian

Exclusive: Documents released after Freedom of Information Act requests show repeated requests for plans

Plans from the UK water industry to “urgently” tackle the sewage pollution crisis have been delayed by four months, with no publication date in sight, the Guardian can reveal.

Government ministers last year demanded water executives send them a “plan for urgent change” to tackle outflows which spill untreated human waste into rivers and seas.

MPs find agency has reduced number of properties it aims to protect in England despite more new homes being built on floodplains

Deteriorating flood defences mean more than 200,000 homes in England are at risk of flooding, with MPs blaming Environment Agency budget shortfalls.

A report by MPs on the public accounts committee said the EA had failed to meet a target of maintaining 98% of “high consequence” flood defences. The agency has had to downgrade the number of properties it aims to protect by 2027 from 336,000 to 200,000.

YouTube criticised for amplifying lies about the climate with disinformation videos watched by young people

A third of UK teenagers believe climate change is “exaggerated”, a report has found, as YouTube videos promoting a new kind of climate denial aimed at young people proliferate on the platform.

Previously, most climate deniers pushed the belief that climate breakdown was not happening or, if it was, that humans were not causing it. Now, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) has found that most climate denial videos on YouTube push the idea that climate solutions do not work, climate science and the climate movement are unreliable, or that the effects of global heating are beneficial or harmless.

Largest study of ocean DNA reveals abundance of fungi thriving in extreme environment of the deep sea

Large numbers of fungi have been found living in the twilight zone of the ocean, and could unlock the door to new drugs that may match the power of penicillin.

The largest ever study of ocean DNA, published by the journal Frontiers in Science, has revealed intriguing secrets about the abundance of fungi in the part of the ocean that is just beyond the reach of sunlight. At between 200 metres and 1,000 metres below the surface, the twilight zone is home to a variety of organisms and animals, including specially adapted fish such as lantern sharks and kitefin sharks, which have huge eyes and glowing, bioluminescent skin.

The UK's deer population is at its highest level for 1,000 years, and is growing exponentially. Now at roughly 2 million animals, the UK’s deer stalkers need to cull at least 750,000 animals a year just for the population to stand still. There are also more food banks in the UK than ever. As the need for food grows, donations, especially those containing protein, become harder to find. 
To combat these two problems, the Wild Venison Project has created a supply chain from deer stalkers all over the country to food banks that need protein-rich donations. The Guardian environment correspondent Damien Gayle follows the process from forest to food bank, to see if venison could provide an answer to Britain’s food shortage.

A farmer on the Gold Coast has captured video of fire ants forming floating rafts to survive flood waters in south-east Queensland. The footage was sent to Reece Pianta of the Invasive Species Council, who says the red imported fire ants (Rifa) only make rafts when they reach a certain density. The footage indicates there's been a surge in the population of the ants, which have infested about 700,000 hectares in Brisbane. "The concern we have is that if Rifa are floating on flood waters to lower-lying areas. They don't just inundate farmlands but wetlands and coastal habitats." Pianta says the rafting behaviour underlines the importance of properly funding the ant's eradication

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• Fire ants form rafts to survive Queensland flood waters as experts warn of surge

Invasive Species Council says rare rafting behaviour seen on cane farms south of Brisbane

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Fire ants are forming rafts to survive and travel on flood waters in south-east Queensland, with experts warning the wild weather may accelerate the spread of one of the world’s most invasive species.

After storms ravaged the region over Christmas and new year, Reece Pianta of the Invasive Species Council urged the community to be extra vigilant since red imported fire ants (Rifa) were filmed rafting on flood waters.

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EV market analyst says Australia’s charging network is now growing at a faster rate than the EV fleet

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Electric vehicle charging sites will double in Australia again over the coming year, according to a new report, on top of record-breaking growth over the past 12 months.

The analysis, released by consulting firm Next System, found the number of car-charging sites surged by 90% in Australia during 2023.

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Campaigners condemn decision as regressive, saying ‘climate change affects whole world, not half of it’

The organising committee for the Cop29 global climate change summit in Azerbaijan in December comprises 28 men and no women, the president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, has announced.

The decision was called “regressive” by the She Changes Climate campaign group, which said “climate change affects the whole world, not half of it”. In contrast, 63% of the members of the organising committee for the Cop28 climate summit, held in the United Arab Emirates last month, were women.

‘Voracious predators’ threaten honey production and pose risk to biodiversity, says Salvatore De Meo

Italian MEPs are calling on the European Commission to crack down on Asian hornets, which are spreading across some EU countries and killing off bees.

The yellow-legged hornets, native to south-east Asia, were first identified on the continent two decades ago, arriving in France before spreading to Spain, Belgium, Holland, Portugal and Italy, where after first appearing in 2012 they are causing havoc in the country’s northern regions.

German farmers blocked the road leading up to the Brandenburg gate in Berlin in the latest wave of anger against efforts to protect Europe's nature from farming pollution. Government plans have included increasing taxes for farming solutions and cutting subsidies for agricultural products. Farmers in western Europe have fought with increasing ferocity against greener policies, with protests in the Netherlands and Belgium. After previous protests in Berlin in December the government watered down plans to cut subsidies for diesel in farmyard vehicles, but lobby groups are calling for them to scrap them entirely

• Why Europe’s farmers are protesting – and the far right is taking note

Octopus Energy invests in scheme which recycles heat from computer data processing centres

Up to 150 public swimming pools in the UK could be offered an innovative way to cut their energy bills by recycling heat from computer data processing centres after a £200m investment by Octopus Energy into a green tech firm.

Tech startup Deep Green has already piloted using energy from processing centres to heat swimming pools, with the concept trialled last year in Exmouth, Devon.

Cyclone Belal is expected to remain a strong storm through the coming week

Active weather is expected to affect northern Australia and parts of the Mascarene Islands in the south Indian Ocean this week, with the monsoon trough a triggering factor in both cases.

The monsoon trough is an area of the Intertropical Convergence Zone that interacts with the larger scale monsoon circulation. This trough is marked by an area of relative minima in sea level pressure, as well as a local maximum of vorticity (a measure of the spin of the atmosphere).

Conservation groups target ‘impossible dream' of eradicating invasive predators after success of East Anglia trial

American mink – the mustelids escaped from fur farms who have decimated populations of water voles and other native birds, fish and amphibians – have been eradicated from a swath of East Anglia.

Until now, mink have never been successfully removed from any large area of Britain but the success of a trial using drops from the invasive predator’s pungent anal scent gland to lure animals into hundreds of traps raises hopes that the species can be eradicated from the whole country.

For some farmers already struggling, paying for more of their pollution is a step too far. Germany is the latest country to see anger boil over

The columns of tractors that have blocked roads in Germany, causing chaos in cities and headaches for commuters, are the latest wave in a growing tide of anger against efforts to protect Europe’s nature from the pollution pumped out by its farms.

In recent years, farmers in western Europe have fought with increasing ferocity against policies to protect the planet that they say cost too much. In the Netherlands, where the backlash has been strongest, a court ruling on nitrogen emissions in 2019 triggered furious and recurring protests over government efforts to close farms and cut the number of animals on them. In Belgium, similar fights led to convoys of tractors clogging the EU quarter of Brussels in March last year. In Ireland, which has seen smaller protests, dairy farmers angry at nitrogen restrictions marched with their cows to the offices of three government ministers last month.

No successor has been named for Lord Deben – and now the independent watchdog’s chief executive has resigned

Rishi Sunak has been accused of trying to avoid scrutiny of his green policies after details surfaced about his government’s failure, over more than 18 months, to appoint a new chair of the independent climate change committee.

Senior environmentalists said they believed Sunak may be deliberately trying to avoid appointing a successor to Lord Deben – who first announced that he was stepping down in July 2022 – until after a general election, so he does not face criticism for his U-turns on green issues.

Hotter and wetter weather has led to populations of the region’s most famous bird species to be halved in the last 30 years

Some of Scotland’s most famous bird species, including grouse and kestrels, are among those declining as a result of climate change, a new report has found.

The study, by public body NatureScot, charted the populations of Scotland’s terrestrial breeding birds between 1994 and 2022. It found significant changes to the numbers and species of birds living in the country’s urban, woodland, upland and farmland habitats, in large part due to ­hotter and wetter weather related to the climate crisis.

New paper claims unless demand for resources is reduced, many other innovations are just a sticking plaster

Record heat, record emissions, record fossil fuel consumption. One month out from Cop28, the world is further than ever from reaching its collective climate goals. At the root of all these problems, according to recent research, is the human “behavioural crisis”, a term coined by an interdisciplinary team of scientists.

“We’ve socially engineered ourselves the way we geoengineered the planet,” says Joseph Merz, lead author of a new paper which proposes that climate breakdown is a symptom of ecological overshoot, which in turn is caused by the deliberate exploitation of human behaviour.

Charity says new evidence shows how poultry farms are draining excrement into river system

The Environment Agency faces new allegations of neglect of the River Wye after a project by a conservation group found effluent and contaminated waters at free-range egg farms flowing directly into watercourses in the catchment.

Out of 47 sites visited in England and Wales in the Wye catchment, 19 had drains running from the poultry units to a nearby watercourse. Many of the farms had drains excavated within a few metres of the sheds.

Conservationists call for end to subsidies that make up 15% to 18% of industry’s income and threaten to ‘empty the ocean of fish’

The government needs to urgently end polluting tax breaks for the UK fishing fleet that threaten to “empty the ocean of fish”, say conservationists, after a first-of-its kind study reveals diesel subsidies to be worth up to £1.8bn a decade.

Without the tax subsidies, largely provided to the most fuel-intensive section of the fleet, many sectors would be unprofitable, according to the analysis by government environmental advisers.