The Guardian

Exclusive: Defra issues new cull licences despite government adviser saying there is ‘no justification’

Badger cull licences have been issued by the government despite its own scientific adviser saying there is “no justification” for doing so.

Leaked documents seen by the Guardian show the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs this month issued 17 new licences to continue culling badgers, overruling Dr Peter Brotherton, the director of science at Natural England, the government’s adviser for the natural environment in England.

Analysis of policies of nearly 150 countries shows shortfall to hit target viewed as vital for transition from fossil fuels

The world is off track to meet the goal of tripling renewable electricity generation by 2030, a target viewed as vital to enable a swift global transition away from fossil fuels, but there are promising signs that the pace of progress may be picking up.

Countries agreed last December on a tripling of renewable power by the end of this decade. But few have yet taken concrete steps to meet this requirement and on current policies and trends global renewable generation capacity would only roughly double in developed countries, and slightly more than double globally by 2030, according to an analysis by the International Energy Agency.

Figures show breaches have rarely led to prosecution by Drinking Water Inspectorate since 2021

The drinking water regulator for England and Wales has brought only three prosecutions against water companies for providing poor quality water since 2021, despite 362 instances in which water was flagged as being unfit for human consumption.

Periodically, members of the public or companies have informed the Drinking Water Inspectorate about water that has not been not safe for human consumption. In those instances, the DWI can issue legal instruments that require companies to put in place a package of measures.

Insistence on investment purity misses the point and will only lead to a decline in arts sponsorship

In a ranking of climate villains in the fund management industry, Baillie Gifford would surely come a long way down most people’s list. The Edinburgh-based firm preaches long-termism and its specialism is backing technology companies, especially those with kit to accelerate the transition to cleaner energy and transport. It was early into Tesla on the thesis that polluting internal combustion engines are on the way out and Elon Musk had a winning electric design. Another high-profile bet was Northvolt, the Swedish pacesetter in batteries that is now the net zero envy of the rest of Europe.

Few portfolios in the mainstream asset management world are entirely free of fossil fuel assets but Baillie Gifford’s are definitely at the less oily end. As the firm has pointed out repeatedly in recent weeks, only 1% of the £225bn of the assets it manages is invested directly in fossil fuel companies, and the figure is still only 2% if one includes stocks such as supermarkets that sell petrol. That’s versus an industry average of 11%.

Kilauea, one of the most active volcanoes in the world, has begun erupting in a remote area that last saw an eruption half-century ago, the US Geological Survey’s Hawaiian Volcano Observatory said. The eruption is about 1.6 km (1 mile) south of the Kilauea caldera, in an area within Hawaii Volcanoes national park that last erupted in December 1974. The area surrounding the caldera has been closed to the public since 2008 because of other hazards, including ground cracking, instability in the crater wall and rockfalls.

• Hawaii’s Kilauea, one of the most active volcanoes in the world, erupts

Jim Everett-puralia meenamatta refused to attend court on charges of trespassing over an anti-forestry protest

• Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates
• • ‘I’m ready for everything and I don’t care’: the man refusing to turn up at an Australian ‘colonial’ court
• Get our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcast

A Hobart magistrate has issued an arrest warrant for an Aboriginal activist who refused to attend court on charges stemming from a protest because he does not consider himself an Australian citizen.

Jim Everett-puralia meenamatta says he wants to highlight the destruction of forests and issues of Indigenous sovereignty.

Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup

A bad forecast for the fruit harvest in Brazil could have knock-on effects on the price of Aussie breakfast beverages and beyond

• Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates
• Get our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcast

Oranges – and all the things we can make from them – are big business. But the industry is facing a severe crisis.

About 50m tonnes of oranges are grown each year, 34% of them in Brazil. Brazil is also the world’s biggest exporter of orange juice by far, producing about 70% of global supply.

Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup

The Museum of Australian Photography (MAPh), the proud custodian of more than 3,860 photographs, is holding a fundraising auction in Melbourne, with the proceeds of the sales shared equally with the contributing artists

The Coalition’s nuclear policy is leveraged on regional discontent over renewables. But many farmers don’t want nuclear in their back yard either

• Sign up for the Rural Network email newsletter
• Join the Rural Network group on Facebook to be part of the community

Here’s the thing about the Coalition’s latest nuclear policy. It tries to use one of the most contentious issues in rural areas, which is the rollout of renewables and the electricity transmission lines to carry energy around the country, to push an even more controversial energy transition.

Because nuclear power stations would also be built in the regions. And if you’re worried about renewables, hands up who wants a nuclear reactor next door?

Sign up to receive Guardian Australia’s fortnightly Rural Network email newsletter

My grandmother’s orchard stopped me in my tracks, and I only have to read the word to feel the shade of those trees

• Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email

My grandmother had a small orchard in her garden in Johannesburg. It was a few plum and peach trees, and very shady. The leaves of the plum trees were purpley-green, almost black, and the ground was covered with the pits of decayed peaches, so that when I ran barefoot across the sunny garden with its dry grass, and into the orchard, I was forced to stop; it was like running over hard pebbles. And when I stood still, it was dark and smelled like rotting fruit. There were gnats hovering near the ground. I lifted my foot and looked at the hard folds on the peach pit. My shadow stopped at the orchard’s border, it could not cross.

An orchard is a place where you tame trees, or try to. To plant one is an act of hope, the belief that home will mean abundance, that it is good to put down roots. “These trees came to stay,” is how Richard Wilbur opens his poem Young Orchard.

the shadows of long pines down trackless slopes,
the shadows of glass-faced towers down evening streets,
the shadow of a frail plant on a city sill—

Sign up for a weekly email featuring our best reads

battalions of starlings waging peaceful cries,
bearing the net higher, covering this world
like the vines of an orchard, or a mother drawing
the trembling gauze over the trembling eyes
of a child fluttering to sleep;

it was the light

Do you have an animal, insect or other subject you feel is worthy of appearing in this very serious column? Email helen.sullivan@theguardian.com

Discovery of three queen hornets in East Sussex means it is likely the bee-killing insect will be here for good

DNA testing has confirmed that Asian hornets overwintered in the UK for the first time this year, meaning it is very likely the bee-killing insect will be here for good.

Asian hornets (Vespa velutina) dismember and eat bees, and have thrived in France, where they have caused concern because of the number of insects killed. They sit outside honeybee hives and capture bees as they enter and exit, and chop up the smaller insects and feed their thoraxes to their young.

The SpongeBob SquarePants fungus and Shakira wasp might sound funny, but there is a rising acceptance that eponyms in the natural world are a legacy of empire and oppression

Unsurprisingly, numerous species of animal (including a flightless weevil and a parasitic flatworm) are named after David Attenborough – but were you aware of the existence of a Shakira wasp (aleoides Shakira) and the Taylor Swift millipede (nannaria swiftae)?

It’s not just fauna. Spring on middle-aged-lady Instagram is a riot of people posting pics of their Gertrude Jekyll (a formidable horticulturist) roses and there are hundreds of others named for everyone from Judi Dench to Jimmy Greaves. We name the natural world for people we admire and want to honour, and always have; even asteroids, which makes me wonder if anything out there has named us. (The dismissive alien equivalent of “flightless weevils” perhaps?)

Claude the koala was caught eating 4,050 food tree seedlings at Eastern Forest Nursery near Lismore in 2023. The bandit continues to return for a meal at the nursery, as workers look on. Conservationists say Claude's behaviour is part of a bigger problem as heavy land clearing has meant that there isn't enough food in the local area for koalas to eat

• Daylight robbery: Claude the ‘leaf thief’ koala caught munching seedlings

Koala became online hit after sampling wares at NSW nursery, but conservationists say increasingly brazen behaviour highlights serious issue

• Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates
• Get our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcast

Claude the koala became Australia’s cutest thief and a viral sensation when he was filmed munching on seedlings at a nursery near Lismore last September.

But fame has only made him more brazen, with the hungry marsupial now helping himself to a weekday feed in front of staff at Eastern Forest Nursery.

Sign up for a weekly email featuring our best reads

In a new Quarterly Essay, Joëlle Gergis says that while Rome wasn’t built in a day, the Albanese government’s lack of action on climate change does not reflect the urgency of the crisis

• Get our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcast

Although the 2022 federal election ushered in a new era of progressive politics in Australia, as Labor’s first term in power has progressed many people are now wondering if the political deadlock on our nation’s climate policy has really been broken.

Although some good ground has been made, the federal government’s actions still don’t reflect the urgency of the planetary-scale crisis we are in. Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions are rising and enormous fossil fuel projects continue to be approved to meet domestic and international demand.

Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup

With elections affecting half the world’s population this year, campaigners offer their views on the chances of real change

This year elections are taking place across the globe, covering almost half of the world’s population. It is also likely to be, yet again, the hottest year recorded as the climate crisis intensifies. The Guardian asked young climate activists around the world what they want from the elections and whether politics is working in the fight to halt global heating.

A decision from Unesco on giving the peat-rich Flow Country the same standing as the Great Barrier Reef is just weeks away

It is a land of mire, mist and midges that could soon be awarded a special status among the planet’s wild habitats. In a few weeks, Unesco is set to announce its decision on an application to allow the Flow Country in north Scotland to become a world heritage site.

Such a designation is only given to places of special cultural, historical or scientific significance and would put this remote region of perpetual dampness on the same standing as the Great Barrier Reef, the Grand Canyon and the Pyramids.

A climate activist was arrested at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris after sticking a blood-red poster over Monet's painting of poppy fields. The woman then revealed a T-shirt saying 'L'enfer' (hell). The action by a member of Riposte Alimentaire (Food Response) - a group of environmental activists and advocates of sustainable food production - was seen in a video posted to X. In the video she said of the poster covering Monet’s art that 'this nightmarish image awaits us if no alternative is put in place'

• Climate activist defaces Monet painting in Paris

On first day of predicted intense Atlantic hurricane season, Nature Conservancy urges action and warns against misinformation

Misinformation spread by climate deniers such as Florida’s extremist Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, increases the “vulnerability” of communities in the path of severe weather events, scientists are warning.

The message comes on Saturday, the first day of what experts fear could be one of the most intense and dangerous Atlantic hurricane seasons on record, threatening a summer of natural disasters across the US.

Approach replaces sugar with mashed pulp and husk of cocoa pod and uses less land and water

Healthier and more sustainable chocolate could hit store shelves after Swiss scientists and chocolatiers developed a recipe that swaps sugar for waste plant matter.

By mashing up the pulp and husk of a cocoa pod instead of just taking the beans, scientists have made a sweet and fibrous gel that could replace the sugar in chocolate, according to a report published in Nature Food.