The Guardian

Exclusive: new analysis indicates south will get significantly more funding per capita than elsewhere, in part because of higher property prices

The government’s planned spending on flood defences heavily favours London and the south-east of England, according to a new analysis, with spending per person up to 13 times higher than in other regions.

The recently published plans set out spending to 2021 and, for major projects, beyond that date. By far the largest projects are those for the Thames estuary, leading to 60% of the planned spending going to London and south-east, home to 32% of England’s population.

Activists warn of serious environmental consequences for UN-backed hydro projects in Nepal, Tajikistan and the Solomon Islands

Plans to earmark more than $136m (£109m) of UN money for large dam projects in Nepal, Tajikistan and the Solomon Islands have been angrily condemned by activists, who have warned the projects could have serious environmental consequences.

The UN’s green climate fund was set up during the Paris climate agreement to mobilise $100bn a year by 2020 for poor countries looking for innovative and transformational projects.

Buxton, Derbyshire What compels our imagination is the sheer drive of frogs and toads to get to the spawning ponds

What is it about frogs and toads that has made them such classic icons of sexual reproduction? It cannot be timing, because their breeding is often over before the other elements of high spring – flowers, bees, birdsong, sunshine – are in full flood. Frogs will gather at the spawning pond when the starlit nights are frosted and the vegetation rimed in white.

Nor can it be that frogs or toads flesh out the dawn chorus. I have often found that frogs are most vocal on late-winter nights, and the little burp of toads, which is more creak than croak, is so quiet one has to strain to pick it out. The soft, even, purring of frogs is sweeter but, as one herpetologist noted, a pondful of thousands in full throat was completely inaudible just 50m away.

This terrible mine is much more than the sum of its poisonous venal parts. It represents the searing contempt in which voters are held

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Helle Thorning-Schmidt, appearing on the ABC’s Q&A, says every country needs to determine the right mix of energy sources for its requirements, but the important thing is investment, planning and political will. She says Denmark started investing in its renewables strategy 30 years ago and now makes more from the export of related technology than from its traditional agricultural sector

Energy minister says Australia’s remoteness means it cannot match European countries yet in producing electricity from renewables

Josh Frydenberg has pointed to South Australia’s intermittent power issues as evidence that the rest of the country is not ready to transition out of fossil fuels, calling the state Australia’s “great experiment”.

The minister for the environment and energy appeared alongside Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the chief executive of Save the Children International and the former prime minister of Denmark, on the Q&A panel on Monday night.

At Kimba in the heart of the country, a community is divided – in one case literally so – over a plan to deposit the national stockpile of radioactive waste

At a point almost halfway between the east and west coasts of Australia, a mob of emus scamper along the Napandee property fenceline. The mallee scrub out this way appears otherwise deserted, the kind of remote location where one could hide a dead body and get away with it – but what about an entire country’s radioactive waste?

Landowner Jeff Baldock is determined to find out.

We are dairy farmers in Scotland who rear our calves to eight weeks of age in hutches clearly visible to the public next to a road. Walkers, cyclists and motorists stop to view and photograph the calves in their happy and comfortable environment. We have never had a negative comment as to their welfare and since starting to calve in September – the last one arrived on Sunday night – no antibiotics have been required to treat any ailment with the calves.

Though I would agree that the calves pictured in your article (Dairy is scary. The public are waking up to the darkest part of farming, theguardian.com, 30 March) looked too big for the hutch accommodation provided, I find this to be the healthiest method to rear calves for the first period of what is in our interest to be a happy, contented and productive life.
Robin Young
Dunblane, Stirling

Study reveals fall in birth weight in areas of the Tennessee Valley which had greatest boom in coal-fired power plant activity following nuclear closures

Children in a region of the US were born smaller after the area switched from nuclear plants to coal-fired power stations, new research has found.

The study looked at of the impact of nuclear power plant closures in the aftermath of the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania in 1979 – the most serious such accident in US history – in which one of the power station’s reactors underwent a partial meltdown.

Rise in number of environmentally conscious consumers lead to boom in sales of organic wines, beers and spirits

It is made from grapes grown without pesticides and chemicals, is kind to the environment and rarely triggers hangovers. Sales of organic wine are booming in the UK as part of the growing trend for “conscious consumerism”.

According to the organic food and farming group the Soil Association, sales of organic beers, wines and spirits rose by 14.3% last year to reach nearly £6m, driven by strong demand for wines where consumers are increasingly seeking “natural” ingredients and reassurances about provenance. Still a relatively small share (2.2%) of the overall UK organic market, sales are now growing at double the rate of the market as a whole.

European Environment Agency report solar and and wind is reducing fossil fuel dependency but clean energy capacity still not growing fast enough

A surge in the use of wind and solar energy helped Europe to cut its fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions by about 10% in 2015, an authoritative new report has found.

Energy use from renewables rose to 16.7% of Europe’s total, up from 15% in 2013, and accounted for 77% of the continent’s new power capacity.

April brings the joys of spring for the northern hemisphere while winter is a step closer for the southern hemisphere. We’d like to see your wildlife photos

Everything is starting to finally bloom for the northern hemisphere, with the start of April promising milder spring weather. Meanwhile the southern hemisphere is preparing itself for more of those cooler autumn days. So what sort of wildlife will we all discover on our doorsteps? We’d love to see your photos of the April wildlife near you.

You can share your April wildlife photos, videos and stories with us by clicking on the blue ‘Contribute’ buttons. Or if you’re out and about you can look for our assignments in the new Guardian app.

The influx includes a newly discovered breeding colony of the nomadic and somewhat mysterious banded stilt

Tens of thousands of coastal birds have flocked to the outback after record-breaking rains filled inland lakes to their highest levels in three decades.

The influx includes a newly discovered breeding colony of the nomadic and somewhat mysterious banded stilts, on one of the lakes’ islands in the remote eastern Pilbara region of Western Australia.

Parks and Wildlife and Indigenous land and ranger groups have observed huge numbers of birds, including the mysterious banded stilt, flocking to inland lakes to breed after record-breaking rain events in Australia’s desert regions

Chemicals firm is using Brexit as a chance to seek further exemptions from climate policy costs

Anglo-Swiss chemicals firm Ineos is privately leading an industry lobbying attempt to avoid paying for the cost of decarbonising Britain’s economy.

Documents released under freedom of information rules reveal that Ineos is pushing the government to use Brexit as a chance to exempt the chemicals sector entirely from climate policy costs.

These powerful, and at times graphic, images bear witness to the plight of critically endangered Sumatran elephants and the challenges they face. These include the conversion of forest habitat to oil palm plantations, degradation of forest habitat by illegal logging, conflicts with farmers through crop-raiding, and being illegally hunted for their ivory tusks. While the situation is dire, the camera’s lens also finds hope in the efforts of those working to safeguard the animal’s future

Manchester airport A grounded traveller is distracted by the pied wagtails swarming over the terminal roof

The storm has mostly moved over, but its trailing coat still ruffles the air outside Terminal 1 of Manchester airport, and the backlog of cancelled and delayed flights testifies to its handiwork. With an unexpected three hours to kill, I leave the terminal by way of a first-floor access road, as the dregs of the day drain from the oppressively blank sky.

I am braced for boredom, but an incongruous flicker of movement stops me in my tracks. The sheer brazenness of the small, energetic bird as it hops around on the asphalt is startling but, before I can contemplate it further, another bird bouncing along a railing distracts my eye. Another, then another, and, before I know it, my eyes are attempting to join 200 or more restless black and white dots, each one a point of elusive energy that seems to flee my gaze just before I can settle on it.

Fancy looking a polar bear right in the eye, then swinging across the canopy of the Brazilian rainforest? VR is for you

I worry that humanity isn’t getting enough direct contact with the wild and we’ll all end up with Nature Deficit Disorder. Plus, how can you protect what you don’t love and haven’t experienced?

Greenpeace has been encouraging us to bear witness for more than 40 years. In the past this meant telexes sent from the ship Rainbow Warrior; now it means virtual reality (VR).

Rare only 40 years ago, farmed salmon is now taken for granted in our kitchens. But the growth of the industry has come at great cost

Every day, salmon farmers across the world walk into steel cages – in the seas off Scotland or Norway or Iceland – and throw in food. Lots of food; they must feed tens of thousands of fish before the day is over. They must also check if there are problems, and there is one particular problem they are coming across more and more often. Six months ago, I met one of these salmon farmers, on the Isle of Skye. He looked at me and held out a palm – in it was a small, ugly-looking creature, all articulated shell and tentacles: a sea louse. He could crush it between his fingers, but said he was impressed that this parasite, which lives by attaching itself to a fish and eating its blood and skin, was threatening not just his own job, but could potentially wipe out a global multibillion-dollar industry that feeds millions of people.

“For a wee creature, it is impressive. But what can we do?” he asks. “Sometimes it seems nature is against us and we are fighting a losing battle. They are everywhere now, and just a few can kill a fish. When I started in fish farming 30 years ago, there were barely any. Now they are causing great problems.”

Llanfairfechan, Gwynedd In their usual river habitat, these magnificent, large, hole-nesting ducks are shy and rightly so

Traeth Lafan’s wide expanse of sand is a landscape that draws you in, like the Elenydd moors or the high Arctic, through its abstraction. Nothing’s solid here; all’s sketched and coloured in shifting tones of water and light. Even history has become ambiguous, uncertain. These are drowned lands, their legends tide-steeped, wind-honed.

I come here for the birds, to which the fluid landscape accords a peculiar gift. Its bas-relief undulations, its distances, absorb and hide. What on first glance appears empty, on closer scrutiny teems with life. Though on this grey and turbulent day, with a flooding tide, little stirs. A couple of oystercatchers, heavy-billed, speed past. A little egret lifts out of a filling channel and braves the buffets as it heads back towards the old heronry at Penrhyn Point. In the stand of Scots Pine at the furthermost end of the promenade ravens discourse, shear down to the water’s edge, soar aloft with shellfish in their bills, to drop them from a height on the concrete sea-wall before folding their wings and swooping down to pick out the morsel of flesh.