The Guardian

The continuing violence in Syria, the Rosetta spacecraft’s final descent, Sam Allardyce leaves the England manager’s job, the ongoing migration crisis – the best photography in news, culture and sport from around the world this week

New analysis shows impact of storms across the north of England last winter, with some councils still helping homes to recover

More than 15,000 homes and businesses were flooded in areas across northern England in last year’s devastating storms, new analysis shows.

Councils are still helping flood-hit homes recover from the disruption caused last winter as storms Desmond, Eva and Frank swept across the country, the Local Government Association (LGA) said.

Cilgerran, Pembrokeshire Lime-green bunches clustered heavy on each branch, spinning down with the equinoctial gales or hanging as grim, dry, umber swags

Even before the first frost, ash trees along the Teifi gorge are taking on the pale autumn tints that are prelude to their fall. The river here roils darkly down to salt-marshes round Cardigan, its depths brown and turbid with slurry run-off, tide-lines blanched by agrochemical pollutant along each bank, dippers and wagtails gone, birds silent in the woods, the life departed. Salmon, sewin (sea trout) and brown trout, which once drew anglers and coracle-fishers to this place, raise scarcely a ripple now on the smooth and dying flow.

I’ve come to look for ash-keys, which vary so much from year to year. I think back to my childhood, when bright lime-green bunches clustered heavy on each branch, spinning down with the equinoctial gales or hanging as grim, dry, umber swags throughout the winter until late black buds of spring opened into leaf to hide them from view.

Seven types of the yellow-faced or masked bees once found in great numbers in Hawaii are under threat, federal officials say

Seven types of bees once found in abundance in Hawaii have become the first bees to be added to the US federal list of endangered and threatened species.

The listing decision, published on Friday in the Federal Register, classifies seven varieties of yellow-faced or masked bees as endangered, due to such factors as habitat loss, wildfires and the invasion of non-native plants and insects.

The PM ridiculed state renewable targets after the South Australian blackout, the very targets he has to achieve to meet his own emissions promises

One big storm and our climate and energy debate is surging back to peak stupid.

Now Malcolm Turnbull has encouraged the campaign to use the South Australian blackout to slow the shift to clean energy, saying state renewable energy targets are “extremely unrealistic”.

2,000 government officials gathered in Montreal to adopt the first ever international mechanism to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from aviation

A UN negotiation is inching towards a landmark deal to curb emissions from airplanes, although environmental groups have warned that the plan will not go far enough to help slow climate change.

The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a UN agency, has gathered more than 2,000 government officials from around the world at its Montreal headquarters to adopt the first ever international mechanism to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from aviation.

23 panda cubs are collected in China ahead of the country’s national day on 1 October. The cubs were shown off at the Chengdu Giant Panda Breeding Research Base on Thursday. Aged between one and four months old, the cubs lay on their bellies, occasionally exerting just a little effort to crawl a few inches forward. This year, the team at the giant panda base reported double the number of newborn cubs, when compared with last year

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

EU ministers are expected to ratify the agreement, along with India and Cananda, next week meaning enough countries will have signed up for the deal to come into legal force

EU ministers have agreed to ratify the landmark Paris climate agreement at an extraordinary summit in Brussels on Friday, all but guaranteeing that it will pass a legal threshold to take effect next week and sparing the bloc’s blushes in the process.

The European Parliament is expected to rubber stamp the decision in Strasbourg next Tuesday, allowing the EU to sign off on it as soon as the following day.

A pair of parakeets, a baby tamarin and a lost species of frog are among this week’s pick of images from the natural world

Father of the two chicks was stolen from Port Elizabeth’s Bayworld marine park as a protest against animals being kept in captivity

The two chicks of an endangered African penguin that was stolen from a marine park in South Africa have died.

Buddy the penguin was taken from Bayworld in Port Elizabeth by two men in a protest against animals being kept in captivity, but staff warned he was ill-equipped to survive in the wild.

Fracking is great, the green movement is a religion, his dire predictions about climate change were nonsense – and robots don’t mind the heat, so what does it matter? At 97, the creator of Gaia theory is as mischievous and subversive as ever

James Lovelock’s parting words last time we met were: “Enjoy life while you can. Because if you’re lucky, it’s going to be 20 years before it hits the fan.” It was early 2008, and the distinguished scientist was predicting imminent and irreversible global warming, which would soon make large parts of the planet uninhabitably hot or put them underwater. The fashionable hope that windfarms or recycling could prevent global famine and mass migration was, he assured me, a fantasy; it was too late for ethical consumption to save us. Before the end of this century, 80% of the world’s population would be wiped out.

His predictions were not easy to forget or dismiss. Sometimes described as a futurist, Lovelock has been Britain’s leading independent scientist for more than 50 years. His Gaia hypothesis, which contends that the earth is a single, self-regulating organism, is now accepted as the founding principle of most climate science, and his invention of a device to detect CFCs helped identify the hole in the ozone layer. A defiant generalist in an era of increasingly specialised study, and a mischievous provocateur, Lovelock is regarded by many as a scientific genius.

French and Chinese developers will be the first nuclear operators in the UK that will have to pay to decommission the site

The French and Chinese companies that are to build the £18bn Hinkley Point C nuclear power station will have to pay up to £7.2bn to dismantle and clean it up.

Documents published yesterday reveal for the first time how much the developers, EDF and China General Nuclear Power Group (CGN), will have to pay to decommission the plant, beginning in 2083.

In recent years numbers of South America’s freshwater dolpins have fallen. But they’re not being caught to eat, but as bait for a common catfish being fraudulently sold under a different name

This month, marine conservation NGO Oceana released a major report on seafood fraud, which reviewed more than 200 scientific studies that had collectively examined over 25,000 fish samples from around the world. Through its analysis, Oceana was able to show that an astonishing one in five seafood samples globally is mislabelled to represent other species and mislead consumers. Nestled within that report was the case of the Amazon river dolphins – a peculiar testimony to the often bizarre, trickle-down effects of seafood fraud.

These freshwater dolphins occupy the Amazon and Orinoco river basins that stretch across the northern half of South America. They have historically been abundant across this vast watery network, and are protected by law, making it illegal to kill them. But for years, poachers have been targeting the dolphins and using them as bait to catch a much smaller type of catfish.

The fate of the Peel watershed in northern Yukon is at the centre of an extended legal battle between the territorial government and First Nations. The case is one of many conflicts over natural resource development to test Canada’s commitment to reconciliation and indigenous rights

From isolated mountain ranges to a pitch under a road bridge, our readers shared their most enjoyable wild camping experiences

Conservationists say 48 new protected areas are needed to fill the gaps in the ‘blue belt’ coastal network to ensure wildlife can flourish

Conservationists have called for the creation of a further 48 protected areas in English waters that would “fill in the gaps” of a national network designed to ensure healthy and productive seas.

If designated, they would add to the 50 existing marine conservation zones (MCZs) and create an “ecologically coherent network” where habitats and wildlife could flourish, according to a report from the Wildlife Trusts.

Symonds Yat Rock, Forest of Dean This is an old world forest; organic, unwieldly, fecund, oaky – forest as nature wanted

Summer’s end, and the forest is thick. Beneath the leaves, the sun creates puddles of bright and black, through a canopy still swollen enough to block most of its light. Roads are green tunnels. Paths are dark and have a warm smell, the dense flotilla-dust of bug, web and sap lit brilliantly in the air. Soon the forest leaves will burn, through every shade of russet, to glorious autumnal death.

The Forest of Dean is an old world forest; organic, unwieldy, fecund, oaky. Forest as nature wanted, not the sterile, shadowed ranks of spruce that too often masquerade as such. In high summer a walk under the canopy seduces, in autumn one through its fresh decay beguiles. But now the more subtle charms of September’s change-month call for a higher lookout.

Female snakes, hungry after waiting for their eggs to hatch, are heading indoors in search of food such as rats

A shortage of volunteer snake-handlers is starting to bite in north Queensland, where an end-of-breeding-season influx of hungry reptiles into homes is driving an increase in the number of calls for help.

The need for sustenance by female snakes that have shed weight while waiting for their eggs to hatch has driven them indoors in search of food, including rats.

How much time do you spend thinking about cyber security? Probably not as much as you should. We are all vulnerable to attack, and as the internet becomes more pervasive, the threat is growing

When a 20-year-old hacker broke into US vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account during the 2008 presidential campaign, it didn’t take a great deal of computer expertise.

“The hacker simply used the password reset prompt and answered the secret questions,” says Dr Nalin Gamagedara Arachchilage, a lecturer in cyber security at the Australian Centre for Cyber Security, part of the University of New South Wales, based at the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra.