The Guardian

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

Feeding Bryde’s whales, fighting seals and a Harry Potter spider are among this week’s pick of images from the natural world

Patrick Muhayirwa was trapped in an ambush while patrolling to protect gorillas in Africa’s oldest national park

• Another day, another dead wildlife ranger. We must do more to help them
  

A 26-year-old wildlife ranger has been gunned down by militia operating in the Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

According to park authorities, Patrick Prince Muhayirwa was part of a group of rangers and DRC army personnel patrolling the huge park to prevent poaching.

Improved light, ventilation and heat control can boost workers’ productivity by thousands of dollars a year and reduce instances of sick building syndrome

People working in green buildings think better in the office and sleep better when they get home, a new study has revealed.

The research indicates that better ventilation, lighting and heat control improves workers’ performance and could boost their productivity by thousands of dollars a year. It also suggests that more subjective aspects, such as beautiful design, may make workers happier and more productive.

Scientists stepped outside their comfort zones to protest the attacks they face from the incoming administration

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and for scientists, these are desperate measures.

Tuesday in San Francisco’s Jessie Square, approximately 500 people gathered for a ‘rally to stand up for science.’ Many of the attendees were scientists who had migrated to the rally from the nearby Moscone Center, where some 26,000 Earth scientists are attending the annual American Geophysical Union (AGU) conference this week.

Company owned by Centrica gave $20,000 to TPPF, praised by new US energy secretary for opposing ‘hysteria of global warming’

British Gas’s parent company, Centrica, has given tens of thousands of dollars to a US thinktank that denies climate change and is backed by Donald Trump’s energy secretary.

Direct Energy, a US energy company wholly owned by Centrica, donated $20,000 to the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) in 2010, according to tax filings.

Stanage, Derbyshire On a bleak night, with a folk memory of wolves and belief in evil spirits, who wouldn’t need protection?

The long flowing line of Stanage Edge is, for rock climbers, one of the world’s great crags, segmented, like a gritstone worm, into various buttresses and features, each of them named, each providing many different routes to the top, each of those – and there are hundreds – also named.

I am at a buttress at the crag’s southern end known, paradoxically, as Apparent North, near a short tough climb called Hamper’s Hang. I am shrinking inside my jacket against a dismal wet day. I thought I knew this place, having been here as a climber scores of times, but my understanding of it has just been turned on its head.

For more than a decade, Australia has been held back by climate science denial and an antipathy towards environmentalism

If you can hear what sounds like a faint drumroll coming from across the Pacific then it’s the sound of millions of jaws dropping on hard surfaces.

President-elect Donald Trump is a phrase journalists are regularly typing into their keyboards. That was jaw dropping enough, even for some Republicans.

The emerging biofuel industry is casting the net wide to find solutions to two environmental problems: reducing waste and increasing fuel production

In a world of dwindling resources, waste is one thing in no danger of running out. Each Australian generates more than 2,000kg of waste per year, and around half of that ends up in landfill. But at least some of that waste could be turned into a resource that is both in demand and in decline: fuel.

The global waste-to-fuel industry is considering options as varied as agave, plastics and disused tyres to solve two environmental problems – reducing waste and increasing fuel production.

Exclusive: Warning against sale of seafood from environmentally destructive fishing fleets operating with slave-like conditions

Greenpeace has warned that Australia’s weak labelling laws may be allowing the sale of seafood from environmentally destructive and unethical fishing fleets in south-east Asia.

The group has released the results of a 12-month investigation of Thailand’s ghost fishing fleet, a collection of refrigerated vessels, or reefers, notorious for causing damage to fragile ecosystems and subjecting vulnerable migrant labour to slave-like conditions.

Rampant road building has split the Earth’s land into 600,000 fragments, most of which are too tiny to support significant wildlife, study shows

Rampant road building has shattered the Earth’s land into 600,000 fragments, most of which are too tiny to support significant wildlife, a new study has revealed.

The researchers warn roadless areas are disappearing and that urgent action is needed to protect these last wildernesses, which help provide vital natural services to humanity such as clean water and air.

Critics argue the president-elect’s picks represent ‘an unprecedented amount of influence from the fossil fuel industry’. Their statements don’t do much to dispel the notion

As Donald Trump assembles his cabinet, one consistent theme has emerged: many of his nominees have expressed doubt about the science of human-caused climate change.

“We’re seeing an unprecedented amount of influence from the fossil fuel industry in Trump’s cabinet,” Jeremy Symons, who works on climate politics for the Environmental Defense Fund. “What’s missing from this cabinet is the balance one would expect to bring the other side to the equation and it really leaves us wondering: who is looking out for us? Clearly the oil companies are well attended, but who’s looking out for us?”

Waste companies call for tax on packaging to drive up rates as UK likely to miss EU recycling targets

Recycling rates in England have fallen for the first time ever, prompting calls for a tax on packaging and meaning EU targets are now almost certain to be missed.

The amount of rubbish sent to recycling plants by householders had been steadily increasing for more than a decade, but more recently flatlined for three years. Now new government figures published on Thursday show that the recycling rate in England has dropped from 44.8% in 2014 to 43.9% in 2015.

Environmentalists should be alert but not pessimistic over the impact of Trump’s presidency, says the leading climate economist

The impact of Donald Trump’s presidency on the environment may not be as catastrophic as some fear, says leading climate economist Lord Nicholas Stern.

The cross-bench peer said that while it was difficult to predict what Trump would do in office, those worried that Trump’s leadership spelled disaster for the planet should focus on the good things he has said on climate change rather than dwelling on the bad.

Malcolm Roberts attends meeting with Trump EPA transition team head Myron Ebell and other longtime deniers

A key figure picked to prepare the US federal environment agency for life under a Donald Trump administration has met in Washington DC with some of the world’s most notorious and longest-serving climate science deniers, including One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts.

Myron Ebell, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), was picked by the now president-elect to lead the Environmental Protection Agency “transition team” back in September.

With Trump set to have a ‘chilling effect’ on environmental policy, 20,000 Earth and space scientists met in California to face up to a new responsibility

They argued about moon-plasma interactions, joked about polar bears, and waxed nostalgic for sturdy sea ice.

But few of the 20,000 Earth and climate scientists meeting in San Francisco this week had much to say about the president-elect, Donald Trump – though his incoming administration loomed over much of the conference.

Wolsingham, Weardale With brighter light, mosses can reproduce – with structures of exquisite functional beauty

Today was the worst kind of winter day; short, sunless and cold. It took a real effort of will to leave home and walk muddy footpaths under drizzly skies, but I was glad that I did.

Everywhere there were signs of vigorous, bright green, new growth in the woodlands beside the river bank.

Deploying drifters and using computer models, oceanographers identified the most likely crash area for flight MH370

No doubt nearly everyone is familiar with the story. In early 2014, Malaysian flight MH370 left Kuala Lumpur Malaysia, on a flight to China. The flight disappeared from communication and was never found; despite great search efforts.

It isn’t that there is no evidence of the crash. In July of last year, a portion of a wing was found near Madagascar and Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean. Since then, other debris has been found in the Western Indian Ocean.

Ministers accused of ignoring scientists’ recommendations as UK fleets allowed to catch more cod, haddock and sole

British fishing fleets will be allowed to catch greater quantities of cod, haddock and sole next year, after Europe’s ministers approved a new fishing quota that will cheer fish and chip shops but has alarmed scientists concerned over dwindling stocks.

The European Union’s fisheries council reached an agreement in the early hours of Wednesday morning, in what may be one of the last such quota divisions in which the UK takes part if supporters of a hard Brexit have their way.

Diesel filters cost £1,000 to replace so many garages exploit legal loophole by removing filter letting cars pump out toxic particles

The rogue practice of removing vital pollution filters from the exhausts of diesel vehicles has suffered a blow with the Advertising Standards Agency for the first time banning an advert for the service.

However the number of filterless cars on UK roads, pumping out high levels of toxic particles, remains unknown and air pollution campaigners say the government must investigate and then crack down on the shady practice.