The Guardian

Open letter says lawmakers must ‘reject fearmongering’ and allow scientists to develop crops that can withstand ‘climate emergency’

The EU must “reject the darkness of anti-science fearmongering” before a key vote on gene editing, 34 Nobel prize winners have said.

In an open letter shared with the Guardian and other European newspapers, the laureates demanded that lawmakers relax strict rules on genetic modification to embrace new techniques that target specific genes and edit their code. The technology could make crops more resistant to disease and more likely to survive extreme weather events that are growing more violent as the planet heats up.

Scientists call for urgent intervention, as bearded pig populations are devastated by the deadly virus on islands such as Borneo

Populations of wild pigs are crashing due to the spread of African swine fever (ASF), threatening the livelihoods of millions who depend on them for food, researchers warn.

With a fatality rate of almost 100%, ASF has swept across Asia, Europe and Africa, devastating domestic and wild pig populations over the past 10 to 20 years. The impacts are especially significant in Borneo, in south-east Asia, where bearded pig numbers have declined by between 90% and 100% since it arrived on the island in 2021, researchers said.

Regulator accused of ‘massaging figures’ by telling staff to pause inspections at poorly performing waste sites until January

The Environment Agency told staff in September to stop inspecting the most poorly performing waste sites until January in order to meet corporate compliance targets, it can be revealed.

The regulator has been accused of “massaging the figures”, with an insider telling the Ends Report and the Guardian that a lack of resources means the body is “failing to do its statutory duty in a timely manner”.

Fishing nets churn up carbon from the sea floor, more than half of which will eventually be released into the atmosphere

Scientists have long known that bottom trawling – the practice of dragging massive nets along the seabed to catch fish – churns up carbon from the sea floor. Now, for the first time, researchers have calculated just how much trawling releases into the atmosphere: 370m tonnes of planet-heating carbon dioxide a year – an amount, they say, that is “too big to ignore”.

Over the study period, 1996-2020, they estimated the total carbon dioxide released from trawling to the atmosphere to be 8.5 to 9.2bn tonnes. The scientists described trawling as “marine deforestation” that causes “irreparable harm” to the climate, society and wildlife.

The ocean-poisoning superyachts of global plutocrats are a symbol of the class that’s really behind Britain’s misfortunes

Rishi Sunak is in thrall to just two syllables: small boats. Plunging wages, extortionate heating bills, collapsing public services – such trivia does not detain the UK’s first Goldman Sachs prime minister from his Peloton. But small boats crossing the Channel? These he will vow to stop, fulminating in speeches, plastering the words across his lectern as if in a deadly pandemic.

To pull it off, he is yet again this week burning through his dwindling political capital, just like those tech venture capitalists he adores. So he’s declaring Rwanda safe for refugees – which, according to our supreme court, is like claiming black is white – while handing Rwanda hundreds of millions of pounds (its president was yesterday promising a refund). Our chief lawmaker promised this week to break international law and to strip asylum seekers of court protection – or, as he termed it, “the legal merry-go-round”.

Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist

When males die from sex-fuelled exhaustion, still-living members of the species are known to feast on fallen comrades

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If you are exploring our beautiful Australian wilderness this year, keep an eye out for animals behaving in interesting ways. You never know what you might see, as our research team discovered.

In 2023, our colleague from Sunshine Coast council, Elliot Bowerman, took a two-night trip to New England national park – its 1,500-metre-high mountain peaks are some of the loftiest on Australia’s mid-east coast.

Study finds female chrysalises that develop at higher temperatures have fewer eyespots, making them harder to see in dry grass

Female meadow brown butterflies who develop in warmer weather sport fewer spots on their wings, in an unexpected adaptation to global heating.

The discovery was made by University of Exeter scientists who found that females whose chrysalises developed at 11C had six spots on average, while those developing at 15C had just three.

Fancy a mango?

Office for Environmental Protection report shows only four of 40 targets for England likely to be achieved

The government is failing on almost all of its environmental targets, risking an “irreversible spiral of decline” in nature, a damning report by the environment watchdog has found.

Dame Glenys Stacey, chair of the Office for Environmental Protection (OEP), has said in the report, published today, that if action is not taken England will fail to meet its goal of halting nature’s decline by 2030, as well as a host of other vital nature targets.

There is method in the oil conglomerate’s decision that the best candidate for CEO is the one already doing the job

After a “robust and competitive” hunt for a new chief executive, the board of BP has decided that the best appointment is the bloke who has been sitting in the boardroom for three and a half years already and doing the job on a stand-in basis since the defenestration of Bernard Looney last September.

No surprise there. BP has never appointed a boss from outside, and Murray Auchincloss, the former chief financial officer, fits the bill as a continuity candidate. He has been in the company for 25 years and is wedded to Looney’s – and chair Helge Lund’s – strategy of “orderly” transition to net zero by 2050 or sooner. He did the numbers on the approach, after all.

Products and services billed as climate neutral, biodegradable or eco must provide proof, with carbon schemes banned as evidence

Terms such as “climate neutral” or “climate positive” that rely on offsetting will be banned from the EU by 2026 as part of a crackdown on misleading environmental claims.

On Wednesday, members of the European parliament [MEPs] voted to outlaw the use of terms such as “environmentally friendly”, “natural”, “biodegradable”, “climate neutral” or “eco” without evidence, while introducing a total ban on using carbon offsetting schemes to substantiate the claims.

Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on X for all the latest news and features

Total is 20% higher than thought and may have implications for collapse of globally important north Atlantic ocean currents

The Greenland ice cap is losing an average of 30m tonnes of ice an hour due to the climate crisis, a study has revealed, which is 20% more than was previously thought.

Some scientists are concerned that this additional source of freshwater pouring into the north Atlantic might mean a collapse of the ocean currents called the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) is closer to being triggered, with severe consequences for humanity.

A Derbyshire man who was caught on camera stealing peregrine falcon eggs has been jailed for 18 weeks. The footage was taken in April 2023 from a hidden camera put in place at a quarry near Bolsover by an investigations team at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Eggs from wild peregrine falcons can sell for tens of thousands of pounds overseas. Christopher Wheeldon, from Darley Dale, was seen abseiling down a cliff and stealing three eggs. He admitted to disturbing the nest and was sentenced in January

My dad was completely flooded in on his boat, with just a ukulele and three potatoes to tide him over. A bad situation, certainly – but still a better bet, perhaps, than those of us living in bricks and mortar

My dad lives on a boat. Despite the earrings, tattoos, missing teeth and bare feet, he is not a pirate – just a man with an expensive divorce and a public sector job, living in one of the most unaffordable cities in the UK.

This month, his mooring in Oxford was hit by the kind of flood described as “once in 100 years”. Except the same thing happened 10 years ago. And three years before that. All along the same stretch of water.

Drought in Hwange national park was the cause of most of the deaths, and wildlife experts fear the climate crisis could make such events look normal

At least 160 elephants have died as drought conditions hit Zimbabwe, and with hot, dry weather likely to continue, conservationists fear there could be more deaths to come.

The elephants died between August and December last year in the 14,651 sq km Hwange national park, which is home to endangered elephants, buffalo, lions, cheetahs, giraffes and other species. At least six other elephants have recently been discovered dead outside the park in suspected poaching incidents.

New system should help preserve art collection at Dorset country mansion by providing a steady, gentle heat

Over the years Kingston Lacy, which was built to resemble a Venetian palace that has materialised in the English countryside, has been kept warm and dry with open fires and coal and oil boilers.

Now a “pioneering” ground source heat pump has been installed to protect the spectacular Dorset country mansion and its collection of paintings by masters such as Velázquez, Titian and Rubens.

Exclusive: Documents released after Freedom of Information Act requests show repeated requests for plans

Plans from the UK water industry to “urgently” tackle the sewage pollution crisis have been delayed by four months, with no publication date in sight, the Guardian can reveal.

Government ministers last year demanded water executives send them a “plan for urgent change” to tackle outflows which spill untreated human waste into rivers and seas.

MPs find agency has reduced number of properties it aims to protect in England despite more new homes being built on floodplains

Deteriorating flood defences mean more than 200,000 homes in England are at risk of flooding, with MPs blaming Environment Agency budget shortfalls.

A report by MPs on the public accounts committee said the EA had failed to meet a target of maintaining 98% of “high consequence” flood defences. The agency has had to downgrade the number of properties it aims to protect by 2027 from 336,000 to 200,000.

YouTube criticised for amplifying lies about the climate with disinformation videos watched by young people

A third of UK teenagers believe climate change is “exaggerated”, a report has found, as YouTube videos promoting a new kind of climate denial aimed at young people proliferate on the platform.

Previously, most climate deniers pushed the belief that climate breakdown was not happening or, if it was, that humans were not causing it. Now, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) has found that most climate denial videos on YouTube push the idea that climate solutions do not work, climate science and the climate movement are unreliable, or that the effects of global heating are beneficial or harmless.

Largest study of ocean DNA reveals abundance of fungi thriving in extreme environment of the deep sea

Large numbers of fungi have been found living in the twilight zone of the ocean, and could unlock the door to new drugs that may match the power of penicillin.

The largest ever study of ocean DNA, published by the journal Frontiers in Science, has revealed intriguing secrets about the abundance of fungi in the part of the ocean that is just beyond the reach of sunlight. At between 200 metres and 1,000 metres below the surface, the twilight zone is home to a variety of organisms and animals, including specially adapted fish such as lantern sharks and kitefin sharks, which have huge eyes and glowing, bioluminescent skin.