The Guardian

Experts say Theresa May, if she accepts view of report, would have to outline how government intends to protect the nation

In a landmark report, the government is to outline the specific risks it believes Britain faces due to the impact of climate change. The report, to be delivered early in the new year, will be the first response made by Theresa May’s administration to a major environmental concern and will have considerable implications for future green policy outcomes.

The UK climate change risk assessment, the first since 2012, will spell out what the government believes are the major risks facing Britain as global warming continues to affect the planet. Earlier this year, the Committee on Climate Change, a body of experts set up under the Climate Change Act to advise government, said Britain was poorly prepared for global warming. Likely impacts include deadly heatwaves, flooding, and food and water shortages, it said.

Chalton, Hampshire In the morning we find a carpet of shining black pellets brimming with skulls and rubbery tails

At the highest and darkest point of the South Downs escarpment, an Anglo-Saxon hall stands beefy and lumbering under a black sky dusted with stars. Built with hand-hewn oak timbers and hazel spars, it is the latest addition to the educational farm on Butser Hill where I work as a creative developer, feeding goats and designing guide books.

The farm is an outdoor archaeological laboratory, and recreates ancient buildings from the neolithic period onwards. Inside the hall a log fire releases sparks like doves at a wedding, burning through the daylight hours to amuse wandering visitors searching for a taste of history.

Wildlife advocates said the animals, which were being readied for shipment on Friday night, were unsuitable for live export

More than 30 wild elephants were being readied on Friday evening for an airlift from Zimbabwe to captivity in China, according to wildlife advocates.

The founder of Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force, Johnny Rodrigues, said on Friday that their plane was still at Victoria Falls airport because officials could not find scales big enough to weigh the animals, which were confined inside heavy crates.

In 27 years as environment editor at the Guardian, I have seen both devastation and progress. Now I’m retiring – but I still have hope for the future of the planet

In September 1989, Guardian editor Peter Preston took me to one side. “Environment? Your idea. You do it,” he said. I was on the arts desk and had quite forgotten that, two years earlier, I had proposed that we cover this fast-emerging issue in more depth and with new pages.

We had a great correspondent in Paul Brown, but no single journalist could keep up with events. This was the height of Thatcherism, the old Soviet Union was collapsing in ecological ruin, and there had been serious nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. That year, more than two million people in Britain had voted Green in the European parliament elections.

Fruit bats, a nosy kangaroo and the last male northern white rhino are among this week’s pick of images from the natural world

The week’s top environment news stories and green events. If you are not already receiving this roundup, sign up here to get the briefing delivered to your inbox

“Only vicar’s daughters become naturalists.” This was the response of Stan Micklethwaite when his young daughter Mari (my future wife) declared her life’s ambition. Stan spent most of his working life weighing wagons of coal at the pithead of Barrow colliery near Barnsley, yet his many active leisure pursuits included beekeeping and gardening, with Mari always at his side, eager to learn. Neither Stan nor Mari’s mother, Nellie, lived to hear of the fame that Mari, who has died aged 80, went on to achieve in her adult career as a wildlife writer, illustrator, broadcaster, conservationist and storyteller. No doubt they would have been surprised as well as very proud.

Mari and I met in 1954, as chief bridesmaid and best man at a cousin’s wedding, and we married two years later. It was only after our four children were all at school in Warwickshire that Mari was able to enrol in classes at local colleges to learn more of botany, horticulture and ecology, writing copious notes with cross-reference to multiple sources as well as her own careful observations of the natural world around her.

The aftermath of southern Africa’s drought is having a devastating impact in rural Zimbabwe. More than four million people will be in need of food aid between January and March 2017, nearly half the rural population

All photographs by Justin Jin

An oil terminal to be built in northern Russia where the river Yenisei meets the Arctic Ocean lacks the technology to deal with oil spills, say environmentalists

The livelihood of the Nenets people who live along the northern stretches of the Yenisei, Russia’s longest river, depends on two pursuits: fishing and reindeer herding.

But locals have said both of those activities are under threat from an oil terminal due to be built on the Tanalau cape, near where the river empties into the Arctic Ocean. Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) have protested against the high risk of an oil spill in difficult Arctic conditions. More than 40 people have signed a letter of protest to the company building the terminal, the Independent Petroleum Company (IPC).

Record temperatures threaten traditional ways of life in Greenland but as the sea ice retreats, new mining, fishing and tourism opportunities are helping communities to adapt

Asked if he is fearful about the impact of climate change, Tønnes “Kaka” Berthelsen’s response is typical of many Greenlanders. “We are more concerned about the Maldives,” he said bluntly.

Greenland has lived with extreme environmental changes for a decade or more. Sea ice is forming two months later and melting one month earlier. Rivers fed by retreating glaciers are at record levels. And temperature records were smashed twice this year, with stunned meteorologists rechecking their measurements after 24C was recorded in the capital, Nuuk, in June.

National Grid expect Len Goodman’s show to create a ‘TV pickup’ as people across the country boil kettles, flush toilets and switch on lights after the show

Len Goodman will follow in the footsteps of David Jason, Pauline Collins and an extraterrestrial as one of Christmas TV’s top challenges for the people tasked with keeping the lights on.

When the judge finishes reminiscing over 12 years of Strictly Come Dancing on Friday night, kettles will be boiled, lights switched on and water company pumps powered up as toilets are flushed across the UK.

Fermyn Woods, Northamptonshire I watch them through thickets of interwoven hazel and birch as they make their getaway

Crack! A stick snaps a little distance to my right. Too big a snap for a small animal. Probably deer-sized, I estimate. I wonder how close I can get to the originator before being detected in the wood’s growing afternoon gloom. I creep away from the muddy path, through snagging brambles and naked hazel. I have advanced 15 meters towards the target when I feel a stick give under my foot and an inevitable, and similar, “crack” resonates through the still hush. Instantly, three young roe deer start from cover 20 meters away; I watch them through, and between, thickets of interwoven hazel and birch as they make their unswerving getaway with a stiff, springing gallop.

My tracking skills are good enough to know how rudimentary they are. As a young lad I would, entranced, read Jim Corbett’s accounts of years spent pursuing man-eating leopards and tigers in the forests of India. Marvelling at how his corporeal self was absorbed into the forest. The meaning of every rustle, crack, bird call and grunt so familiar and significant that they keyed directly into his nervous system, and into that of the cat that was sometimes his quarry, sometimes his hunter, often both.

Brazilian photographer Ricardo Stuckert captured amazing close-up photographs of an uncontacted Amazonian tribe after his helicopter flight took a detour to avoid a rainstorm and happened to fly over their longhouse

New wind and solar farms, alongside wood burning and nuclear reactors, helped to push low carbon power to a new high in the third quarter of 2016

Half of the UK’s electricity came from wind turbines, solar panels, wood burning and nuclear reactors between July and September, in a milestone first.

Official figures published on Thursday show low carbon power, which has been supported by the government to meet climate change targets, accounted for 50% of electricity generation in the UK in the third quarter, up from 45.3% the year before.

Route in Tourouvre-au-Perche cost €5m to construct and will be used by about 2,000 motorists a day during two-year test period

France has opened what it claims to be the world’s first solar panel road, in a Normandy village.

A 1km (0.6-mile) route in the small village of Tourouvre-au-Perche covered with 2,800 sq m of electricity-generating panels, was inaugurated on Thursday by the ecology minister, Ségolène Royal.

The strongest El Niño on record reached its peak in the final months of 2015, but its devastating impact on global food and water supplies continues to be felt

In Europe’s ‘bleak midwinter’ of 1430-1440, medieval society made dramatic changes in response to food shortages and famine caused by exceptional cold. What lessons can we learn from history?

Sat in the centrally heated school Christmas concert, I sang, like countless others, In the Bleak Midwinter, not knowing the half of it. Christina Rossetti’s mournful, yearning poem, later set to music by Gustav Holst, was written in 1872, but speaks of a “bleak midwinter, long ago”, relocating the nativity to a chill northern landscape where, “Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone.”

The 2016 US presidential election wasn’t the first case of a successful email hacking faux scandal

A batch of stolen emails was released to the public, with evidence pointing towards Russian hackers. The media ran through the formerly private correspondence with a fine-toothed comb, looking for dirt. Although little if any damning information was found, public trust in the hacking victims was severely eroded. The volume of media coverage created the perception that where there’s smoke, there must be fire, and a general presumption of guilt resulted.

The year was 2009, and the victims were climate scientists working for and communicating with the University of East Anglia. The story was repeated in 2016 with the Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee.

After years of record temperatures, the Arctic is melting. The Northwest passage had an ice-free summer in 2016, allowing cruise ships into one of the world’s most remote places. Join our environmentally friendly Arctic tour, and witness the consequences of human behaviour

The largest city in the Russian Arctic expects global warming to change its trading fortunes with the revival of the northern sea route

It’s noon in Murmansk, but the sky is dark. Chunky silhouettes can just be made out scurrying along Lenin Street, swaddled in furs. This is a polar night, and it will be more than a month before anyone here sees the sun again.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, this city – by far the world’s largest settlement within the Arctic Circle – went into steep decline, its population tumbling from nearly half a million to barely 300,000.