The Guardian

Scientists express concern over health impacts, with another study finding particles in arteries

Microplastics have been found in every human placenta tested in a study, leaving the researchers worried about the potential health impacts on developing foetuses.

The scientists analysed 62 placental tissue samples and found the most common plastic detected was polyethylene, which is used to make plastic bags and bottles. A second study revealed microplastics in all 17 human arteries tested and suggested the particles may be linked to clogging of the blood vessels.

Relying on private companies to solve the climate crisis means that the planet’s fate rests in the hands of asset managers

We are living through perhaps the biggest and most important policy experiment in human history, without even being aware of it: we have been relying primarily on the private sector to put an end to the climate crisis. But this experiment increasingly looks like a mistake, and one that may cost us our planetary future.

To appreciate this, consider the global stock market. With stock prices now at all-time highs, it would be easy to assume that global business is uniformly buoyant. But look behind the headline figures and it becomes clear that while some industry sectors are flourishing, others are floundering. The cast of winners and losers throws up an irony that is significant and dreadful. One of the sectors where stock performance is worst happens to be one the world arguably needs to be best. That sector is clean, renewable energy, or what is more widely termed “green capitalism”.

Brett Christophers is a professor in the Institute for Housing and Urban Research at Sweden’s Uppsala University and author of The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet

Tory government has ‘ducked’ difficult decisions, leading to higher bills, says shadow energy secretary

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Labour has claimed a “culture of inertia and stasis” has blocked renewable energy projects under the Conservatives and says the party will overturn a de facto onshore wind ban “at the stroke of a pen” if it wins the general election.

The shadow energy secretary, Ed Miliband, told energy industry executives at a conference in London on Tuesday that Labour would immediately rip up a decade-long effective block on large onshore wind developments in England if elected.

Green businesses and jobs are booming – in stark contrast to the national economy – but political U-turns risk future growth

The UK’s net zero economy grew by 9% in 2023, a report has revealed, in stark contrast to the 0.1% growth seen in the economy overall. Nevertheless, the report pointed out that strong future growth from green businesses was being put at risk by government policy reversals, lack of investment and competition from the EU and US.

Thousands of new green companies were founded in 2023 and overall the sector was responsible for the production of £74bn in goods and services and 765,000 jobs, according to the report by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) and the Confederation of British Industry (CBI).

Belgian capital blocked by 900 tractors amid protests throughout bloc demanding policy changes

Farmers have clashed violently with police in the European quarter of Brussels, spraying officers with liquid manure and setting fire to mounds of tyres, while the EU’s agriculture ministers met to discuss the crisis in their sector.

As farmers also protested in Madrid and on the Polish-German border, at least 900 tractors jammed streets in the centre of the Belgian capital, police said, with protesters throwing bottles and eggs and setting off fireworks while riot police fired water cannon.

Fears for penguin colonies after the discovery of the highly contagious H5N1 virus in two dead skuas

Bird flu has reached mainland of Antarctica for the first time, officials have confirmed.

The H5N1 virus was found on Friday in two dead scavenging birds called skuas near Primavera Base, the Argentinian scientific research station on the Antarctic peninsula.

Bathing water status means government is obliged to test water quality throughout summer

Twenty seven new bathing sites are being considered for England, but campaigners have said that swimming remains dangerous in many areas because of the pathogens caused by sewage dumping.

If all of these sites are granted, it will be the largest ever number of bathing sites in rivers, lakes and coastal areas approved in one year. Activists campaign for bathing water status because it means the government is obliged to test the quality of the water throughout the summer months.

Church Cliff beach, Lyme Regis, Dorset

Coastguards beach, River Erme, Devon

Coniston boating centre, Coniston Water, Cumbria

Coniston Brown Howe, Coniston Water, Cumbria

Littlehaven beach, Tyne and Wear

Manningtree beach, Essex

Monk Coniston, Coniston Water, Cumbria

River Avon at Fordingbridge, Hampshire

River Cam at Sheep’s Green, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire

River Dart estuary at Dittisham, Devon

River Dart estuary at Steamer Quay, Totnes, Devon

River Dart estuary at Stoke Gabriel, Devon

River Dart estuary at Warfleet, Dartmouth, Devon

River Frome at Farleigh Hungerford, Somerset

River Nidd at the Lido leisure park in Knaresborough, North Yorkshire

River Ribble at Edisford Bridge, Lancashire

River Severn at Ironbridge, Shropshire

River Severn at Shrewsbury, Shropshire

River Stour at Sudbury, Suffolk

River Teme at Ludlow, Shropshire

River Tone in French Weir Park, Taunton, Somerset

Wallingford beach, River Thames, Berkshire

Derwent Water, Crow Park, Keswick, Cumbria

River Wharfe at Wetherby Riverside, West Yorkshire

Goring beach, Worthing, West Sussex

Worthing Beach House, Worthing, West Sussex

Rottingdean beach, Rottingdean, East Sussex

Population has spread from small area of East Anglia to become established in Cambridgeshire, Kent and Herefordshire

A rare dragonfly is no longer considered endangered after spreading its wings across England, but conservationists have said its wetland habitat is still at risk from climate breakdown.

The Norfolk Hawker, known for its bright green eyes and golden body, went extinct from the Cambridgeshire Fens in 1893 and became confined to east Norfolk and east Suffolk. It is thought this was caused by the draining of its preferred habitat of ponds and marshes for agriculture over the centuries. It has since been almost entirely restricted to the Norfolk Broads.

Hundreds of tractors arrived in Brussels Monday and more are on their way as European Union agriculture ministers meet to address farmers' concerns. It follows weeks of protests by farmers across the EU. Farmers are demanding the reversal of progressive measures to counter climate change and protect biodiversity, arguing that the rules are harming their livelihoods and strangling them with red tape

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Near flooding of Henley-on-Thames building prompts decision to tell the story of climate crisis

From the reconstructed riverside of The Wind in the Willows to an historic Georgian rowboat used in the inaugural Oxford-Cambridge race, the exhibits at the River and Rowing Museum celebrate the importance of British rivers.

But the award-winning building in Henley-on-Thames – designed by the modernist architect David Chipperfield – is facing a significant threat from the very river beside which it resides.

The country’s 13 million dogs create a lot of mess that’s hard to dispose of, dangerous and harmful to the environment

An unlikely folk hero has emerged in the Venice beach area of Los Angeles. Their identity is unknown, but their popularity is down to their homemade flags on cocktail sticks stuck into piles of dog faeces with messages like “Lazy. Pick. Up. Your. Dog. Poo”. The message is going down well. “I’m a big fan,” said one local. “No one wants to see a dog poop everywhere.”

These are the exact tactics that were used in Britain back in the 1980s, when dog faeces on the streets first began to be seen as unacceptable. Campaigners stuck little flags with similar messages aimed at getting dog poo off streets and public play areas. In many ways it was a successful campaign. There’s now widespread consciousness of the dangers to children of toxocara disease caused by accidentally ingesting excrement via their hands. And there are very few who would put up a public defence that a faeces-littered pavement is a sign of the healthy freedom of its citizens.

London minister Greg Hands embroiled in congestion and pollution debate with constituents over scheme in election battleground

When the Tory minister Greg Hands criticised a trial scheme in his constituency to block the use of residential roads as rat runs, he might have expected to win some votes and boost his party’s pro-car agenda.

Instead, he finds himself embroiled in a charged and divisive debate in his Chelsea and Fulham constituency, with a backlash from some Tories who back measures to curb traffic and introduce clean-air neighbourhoods.

Froglets from species classed as near-threatened arrive for the second time at Cotswolds wildlife park

A frog species that is in a “perilous state” due to an infectious disease has been successfully bred at a wildlife park in Oxfordshire.

Keepers at the Cotswold wildlife park in Burford have again bred the near-threatened cinnamon frog, four years after it became only the second zoological collection in Europe to breed the species.

‘Tricky’ Nicholls has pulled decades’ worth of Sydney’s rubbish out of the sea by hand – but he still has hope for our oceans

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Every morning a tractor rolls over Manly’s picture-perfect beaches, scraping away the signs of the day before. But below the water’s pristine surface, where council clean-up teams struggle to scour, a jumble of plastics tell a different tale.

It is a story Richard Nicholls knows well. Over three decades, the 63-year-old “Tricky” Nicholls has led thousands of divers and snorkelers on monthly clean-up dives while tracking trends in Sydney’s marine plastics.

Charity blames the decline of invertebrates on farming, sewage and run-off from roads and homes, months after the Environment Agency told them the water in Wiltshire river was clean

A citizen science programme has revealed the decline of one of the country’s most significant chalk streams after claims by Environment Agency officials that it had not deteriorated. The SmartRivers programme run by the charity WildFish, which surveys freshwater invertebrates, reported “strong declines in relation to chemical pressure” on the River Avon in Wiltshire. It said its data indicated a decline in the condition of the river over the last five years.

The charity compiled a report on its findings after the conservation groups say they were told at a meeting by the Environment Agency in August that “the Avon has not deteriorated in water quality in the last five years”. David Holroyd, head of water quality for Wiltshire Fishery Association, said the numbers of invertebrates collected in spring and autumn samples from 2019 and 2023 at 11 sites on the upper Avon had shown a decline.

Researchers say toxic chemicals pose a pollution risk as oil and gas companies are allowed to leave pipelines to rot

Decaying oil and gas pipelines left to fall apart in the North Sea could release large volumes of poisons such as mercury, radioactive lead and polonium-210, notorious for its part in the poisoning of Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko, scientists are warning.

Mercury, an extremely toxic element, occurs naturally in oil and gas. It sticks to the inside of pipelines and builds up over time, being released into the sea when the pipeline corrodes.

Hunted for years in NSW’s Pilliga, Rambo has now disappeared. In his place is an explosion of native species. But why will no one call Rambo ‘dead’?

There is a baby boom of critically endangered native species happening in north-west New South Wales. For the first time in more than a century, the Pilliga scrub – the largest native forest west of the Great Dividing Range – is crawling with multiple generations of greater bilbies, bridled nailtail wallabies, brush-tailed bettong, plains mice and Shark Bay bandicoots.

“All the animals are thriving and most of the females are breeding,” says the Australian Wildlife Conservancy ecologist Vicki Stokes, who monitors the colony’s progress via camera traps and transmitters attached to their tails. “And because the bandicoots have a gestation of just 18 days and the plains mice around 30, it’s happening fast. Some of them are on their third or fourth litters already.”

Flooding is now so frequent that the water course shifts endlessly. In northern NSW, flood-PTSD is rife

This summer, despite a shift to El Niño, my region – northern New South Wales – has been plagued by flood warnings. We are, of course, thankful it is not fire. Flooding here, especially in the warmer months, is normal, though nothing feels normal after the “one-in-one-hundred-year” flood in 2017 that swept away a cabin on my property, or the “one-in-one-thousand-year” flood in 2022 that submerged many of our low-lying townships and reduced much of our highlands, through landslips, to rubble.

Since then, the warning system app Hazards Near Me has been updated, and my phone now pings with flood warnings. It is hard to assess how seriously to take these pings when they are so frequent. If there is a flood warning, and it gets late, should I try to sleep or should I pace about in the pouring rain with a torch attempting to gauge the danger?

Researchers hope the findings will inform policymakers planning cities for a warming world

Few things are as soothing on a hot summer’s day as a walk through a beautiful botanical garden, but they are not just oases of calm. As climate breakdown fuels soaring temperatures, they could prove crucial in moderating the heat in the streets around them.

A comprehensive review of research into the heat-mitigating effects of green spaces during heatwaves has found that botanical gardens are the most effective. It is a finding the team at the Global Centre for Clean Air Research (GCCAR) hope will inform policymakers planning cities for a warming world.

The best of this week’s wildlife photographs from around the world