The Guardian

Display at Chelsea flower show highlights work in UK and US to bring orchid habitats back to health

Scientists are racing against the clock to save the world’s orchids by discovering the soil fungi they need to thrive, breeding them and then, in a first for conservation, transplanting them into orchid habitats.

Among the showy blooms at Chelsea flower show this week was a moss-covered exhibit, sprouting from which were the types of rare, native flowers one does not normally see at horticultural exhibits.

PFAS contamination recorded in groundwater on Angus Fire site in Bentham, and includes chemicals with known health impacts

A small North Yorkshire town has been found to have the highest concentration of “forever chemicals” in the UK, it can be revealed.

The market town of Bentham, which is home to 3,000 people and set on the banks of the River Wenning, is also home to the Angus International Safety Group – locally known as Angus Fire – which, since the 1970s, has been producing firefighting foams containing PFAS at a factory near the town centre.

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

Shishir Dholakia of the University of Southern Queensland's Centre for Astrophsics has identified Gliese 12b, a possibly temperate Earth-sized planet just 40 light years away. The student has been co-leading an international team that published the discovery in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

• Earth-sized planet spotted orbiting small star with 100 times sun’s lifespan

Speaking at the UK River Summit, Philip Duffy said officials do not want to reveal the true ‘embarrassing’ environmental picture

The head of the Environment Agency has admitted that freedom of information requests have been buried by the regulator because the truth about the environment in England is “embarrassing”.

Philip Duffy, the body’s chief executive, told an audience at the UK River Summit in Morden, south London, this week that his officials were “worried about revealing the true state of what is going on” with regards to the state of the environment.

Action against Letzte Generation could have ‘immense chilling effect’ on climate protest, campaigners say

Five members of Letzte Generation, Germany’s equivalent to Just Stop Oil, have been charged with “forming a criminal organisation”, a move civil rights campaigners say could in effect criminalise future support for the climate campaign.

Mirjam Herrmann, 27, Henning Jeschke, 22, Edmund Schulz, 60, Lukas Popp, 25, and Jakob Beyer, 30, were charged under section 129 of the German criminal code. It is believed to be the first time the law has been applied to a non-violent protest group.

After old rivalries between Dogon farmers and Fulani herders erupted into violence, exacerbated by Islamist rebels, thousands of the semi-nomadic pastoralists have fled to camps in towns, leaving their cherished animals and way of life. Many must beg to survive at sites lacking food and clean water, with no end in sight to the conflict

Propping up Australia’s largest coal-fired power station could deter investments in renewable energy or batteries. And might other operators now coming begging?

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The New South Wales government has bought itself an insurance policy worth as much as $450m to keep open a power station it couldn’t afford to have exit the grid.

But operating the 2880-megawatt Eraring plant up to four years beyond its scheduled August 2025 closure date will cost more than just the price of corporate welfare – there’s also the environmental and economic impacts to quantify.

The loss of the ecosystems, which are vast stores of carbon, would ‘be disastrous for nature and people across the globe’, says IUCN

Half of all the world’s mangrove forests are at risk of collapse, according to the first-ever expert assessment of these crucial ecosystems and carbon stores.

Human behaviour is the primary cause of their decline, according to the analysis by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), with mangroves in southern India, Sri Lanka and the Maldives most at risk.

Peter Dutton unveils an unusual housing policy

• See more of Fiona Katauskas’s cartoons here

Projections of the size and scale of a future CCS industry should come with heavy doses of scepticism

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As far as bonanzas go, a claim this week that Australia could pull in almost $600bn by storing carbon dioxide from other countries is one that puts even the Aukus nuclear submarine deal in the shade.

The oil and gas industry lobby group Australian Energy Producers made the claim, reported in the Australian, pointing to a study carried out by global energy analysts Wood Mackenzie.

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Five nature reserves will be created each year for next five years to celebrate coronation of King Charles

A temperate rainforest in the Lake District has been declared a national nature reserve in a move that will protect the rare ancient habitat for future generations.

The Borrowdale rainforest is one of the few surviving examples of a “mysterious and untouched” landscape that covers less than 1% of the UK.

The No Mow May campaign has persuaded local authorities to protect biodiversity. But bigger changes are needed

This time last year, residents of the council estate where I live in Greenwich were left in tears after local authority contractors mowed down scores of newly planted purple alliums on our shared lawn just days after they’d bloomed. In minutes, one man with a strimmer had reduced the flowers that my neighbours, many of whom do not have private gardens, had grown over months to mere mulch.

Shamefaced, this year the council sought to make amends by sowing a biodiversity meadow near where the alliums had met their fate. The new wildflowers were doing well – on track to compensate for the previous year’s blunder – until, to the consternation of residents, they were yet again mown down by council contractors. Even the local authorities’ own efforts to improve the biodiversity of the borough proved no match for its trigger-happy lawnmower men.

Phineas Harper is a writer and curator

Winter downpours also made 20% wetter and will occur every three years without urgent carbon cuts, experts warn

The seemingly “never-ending” rain last autumn and winter in the UK and Ireland was made 10 times more likely and 20% wetter by human-caused global heating, a study has found.

More than a dozen storms battered the region in quick succession between October and March, which was the second-wettest such period in nearly two centuries of records. The downpour led to severe floods, at least 20 deaths, severe damage to homes and infrastructure, power blackouts, travel cancellations, and heavy losses of crops and livestock.

Photographer Gideon Mendel has filmed and photographed floods around the world extensively. He travelled by boat through the historic town centre of Port Alegre, documenting the reflections across a city that had become a liquid landscape

The New Zealand Department of Conservation has released vision of a man appearing to attempt to 'body slam' an Orca, describing the behaviour as 'shocking and stupid'. The 50-year-old Auckland man has been fined $600. Hayden Loper, a principal investigator at the department, says the man showed reckless disregard for his own safety and that of the orca. “The video speaks for itself, it is shocking and absolutely idiotic behaviour."

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• New Zealand man filmed trying to ‘body slam’ an orca in actions described as ‘idiotic’

Ministers are discussing who will build the plant, which will join Hinkley Point C and Sizewell C as major future suppliers to the grid

Ministers have earmarked north Wales as the site of a large-scale nuclear power plant, which is part of plans to resuscitate Britain’s nuclear power ambitions.

Wylfa on Anglesey (Ynys Môn) has been named as the preferred site for the UK’s third major nuclear power plant in a generation, coming after EDF’s Hinkley Point C nuclear plant, which is under construction in Somerset, and its Sizewell C nuclear project planned for Suffolk.

High temperatures in Mexico have been linked to dozens and perhaps hundreds of deaths of howler monkeys

It’s so hot in Mexico that howler monkeys are falling dead from the trees.

At least 83 of the midsize primates, who are known for their roaring vocal calls, were found dead in the Gulf coast state of Tabasco. Others were rescued by residents, including five that were rushed to a local veterinarian who battled to save them.

Wealthy states must cut emissions faster than their developing peers, court says, in major step for climate justice

Greenhouse gases are pollutants that are wrecking the marine environment, and states have a legal responsibility to control them, an international court has stated in a landmark moment for climate justice.

Wealthy nations must cut their emissions faster than their developing peers, the court also decided.

Prospective partners on Farmer Wants a Wife are asked to give up their lives to support the farm – watching from home, I wonder why they would say yes

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A few episodes into the current season of Farmer Wants a Wife, one of the contestants, Farmer Dean, abandons his uteload of prospective love interests at the gate to walk across the red loam soil to check his watermelon crop. Watching from my couch in Cowra, I had two realisations.

The first was that Dean – who left the season halfway through – was probably a “real” farmer, unlike some the show has put up before. The second was that good farmers make less-than-ideal husbands.

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