The Guardian

Once-extinct, bitterns make booming ‘foghorn’ noise to attract mates with 228 calling males counted in last breeding period

The UK’s loudest bird has had a bumper breeding year after previously being driven to extinction in the country.

Bitterns became locally extinct in the 1870s due to persecution and draining of their wetland habitat for agriculture. Now the RSPB has revealed that thanks to conservation work, the bird, which has a distinctive “booming” call, has had one of its most successful breeding seasons.

Campaigners aiming to clean up waterways lodge complaint after government rejects FoI requests for details why applications failed

Local communities fighting to clean up their rivers by creating protected bathing areas have been refused access to the reasons their applications were rejected by the government.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) turned down a series of freedom of information (FoI) requests submitted by campaigners in Kent, Yorkshire, Oxfordshire, Cornwall, Suffolk and Lancashire to obtain more information on why the applications were unsuccessful. The campaigners have lodged a complaint against the refusals.

There is a signal beneath the noise, and it is bigger than just the safeguard mechanism

Climate scientists sometimes talk about moments when the “signal emerges from the noise” – when the human influence on heatwaves and downpours becomes greater than what could have been caused by natural changes alone.

The same might be said for Australia’s reborn attempts to formulate a climate policy. Sometimes the noise that surrounds the debate is so great that it can make the underlying signal about where we’re going hard to find. But the signal is there.

Shadow minister submits bill to curb spills as Environment Agency reveals sewage was dumped for almost 1m hours last year

Ministers have treated coastal communities as if they are “open sewers”, Labour has said, after a damaging analysis of Environment Agency (EA) data revealed sewage was dumped for almost a million hours last year.

In total, the data – which was analysed by the party – shows 141,777 sewage-dumping events occurred across 137 constituencies on the coasts of England and Wales in 2022.

Leaders of Drax, Siemens and others call for green growth to be a priority and ‘regional disparities’ to be closed

Business leaders in the north of England have written to the prime minister, chancellor and energy secretary asking for help to reach net zero.

Big names including Drax, Siemens, Peel, Manchester airport, the CBI and all 11 local enterprise partnerships (LEPs) in the north signed a letter urging the government to prioritise green growth in the north.

Research links pollution to increased risk of dementia, even at levels below UK, US and EU air quality standards

Exposure to air pollution is linked to an increased risk of dementia, even at levels below UK, US and EU air quality standards, according to research. Experts say the findings add to the need for urgent action to reduce exposure to pollution globally.

More than 57 million people worldwide are living with dementia and the global burden continues to increase. But interventions to delay or prevent the onset of dementia are scarce.

Judge finds protesters guilty of obstructing highway after incident in South Kensington last October

Seven climate activists who glued themselves to the road outside the Natural History Museum in south-west London have been convicted of obstructing a highway.

Ambulances, buses, delivery vans and a vehicle carrying a 90-year-old in need of medical assistance were caught up in the traffic in Cromwell Road, South Kensington, on 19 October last year.

Sediments from last ice age provide ‘warning from the past’ for Antarctica and sea level rise today, say scientists

Ice sheets can collapse into the ocean in spurts of up to 600 metres (2,000 feet) a day, a study has found, far faster than recorded before.

Scientists said the finding, based on sea floor sediment formations from the last ice age, was a “warning from the past” for today’s world in which the climate crisis is eroding ice sheets.

England and Scotland are experiencing a tick-borne virus outbreak. We don’t know the causes, but we know rising temperatures will mean more of them

Where I’m from, you can’t be considered a responsible outdoor person unless you’re willing to inspect your father’s naked body for ticks. Nova Scotia, on the east coast of Canada, has the dubious honour of being among the tick-iest places in the world. Surely these things are hard to measure, but reputable scientists claim it has the highest tick-to-person ratio in the country, and, at about one case of Lyme disease for every 1,000 residents per year, the highest incidence of Lyme disease as well. Walking outside on anything besides cut grass or concrete is likely to yield multiple tiny, near-indestructible arachnids that immediately make an upward dash for a warm crevice at the knee, armpit or often, groin, to burrow into. Finding and removing them can require a mirror and some contortions, or a helpful and unsqueamish friend or family member.

Things are – thankfully – not quite so bad in the UK. But the recent outbreak of potentially deadly tick-borne encephalitis virus (TBEV) in England and Scotland is a reminder that ticks are getting worse here, as well. The first suspected incidence of the disease in the UK was in 2019, and cases of Lyme disease also appear to be increasing over the past few years.

Stephen Buranyi is a writer specialising in science and the environment

Authority given permission to challenge high court ruling in favour of landowner

Wild camping may once again be allowed on Dartmoor, after the national park was granted permission to appeal against a decision to ban it.

Alexander Darwall, who bought 1,620 hectares (4,000 acres) of the national park in 2013, took the park authority to the high court last year, arguing that the right to wild camp without a landowner’s permission never existed. In January, a judge ruled in his favour, ending the decades-long assumption that wild camping was allowed.

These invasive ants are coming for your lifestyle – no more barbecues or sports grounds, no more tiny animals or native ants or nature!

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Marine Conservation Society calls for better regulation of how north-east Atlantic mackerel is caught as stocks decline

Mackerel populations are declining because of overfishing and the fish no longer a sustainable food choice, the Marine Conservation Society has said in its new UK guide to sustainable seafood.

North-east Atlantic mackerel has been considered an environmentally-friendly choice for consumers since before 2011, but the species has become increasingly scarce and now experts are calling for more regulation over how its caught.

Gerard Rennick met with scorn, derision and plenty of corrections over viral tweet and claim that scientists are ‘cancelling gravity’

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An Australian senator has attempted to undermine the entire theory of the greenhouse effect with a bizarre viral claim that scientists have been ignoring gravity’s role in heating the planet.

The tweet from the Queensland senator Gerard Rennick, a member of the conservative Liberal National party of Queensland which is part of the main opposition Coalition, has gone viral this week and has been met with scorn, derision and plenty of corrections from high-profile climate scientists.

Environment Agency says system trialled during strikes will continue for now despite false alarms and late warnings

The flood warning system relied on by hundreds of thousands of households in England will be put on permanent autopilot, officials have said, despite warnings it is inaccurate.

The Environment Agency has been trialling an automated flood warning system since December, when strike action by workers over years of below-inflation pay deals left gaps in incident rosters.

At launch of cleaner water plan, minister says those who say they can end problem are ‘detached from reality’ or dishonest

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Thérèse Coffey has admitted she cannot end the sewage scandal, in what critics are calling a “complete abdication of duty”.

Launching her department’s cleaner water plan at the London Wetland Centre in Barnes in the south of the capital, the environment secretary said upgrading the sewage network to stop spills could add hundreds of pounds each to people’s bills.

Exclusive: UAE’s fossil fuel boss will be the president of Cop28, making a mockery of the summit, say campaigners

The United Arab Emirates, which is hosting this year’s UN climate summit, has the third biggest net zero-busting plans for oil and gas expansion in the world, the Guardian can reveal. Its plans are surpassed only by Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

The CEO of the UAE’s national oil company, Adnoc, has been controversially appointed president of the UN’s Cop28 summit in December, which is seen as crucial with time running out to end the climate crisis. But Sultan Al Jaber is overseeing expansion to produce oil and gas equivalent to 7.5bn barrels of oil, according to new data, 90% of which would have to remain in the ground to meet the net zero scenario set out by the International Energy Agency.

From the Iberian lynx to the Chilean devil ray and mountain gorilla, these stunning images by some of the world’s best nature photographers appear in The New Big 5: A Global Photography Project for Endangered Wildlife, by photographer and Guardian contributor Graeme Green. The book was borne out of a project to create a big 5 of photography rather than hunting, shooting with a camera, not a gun

Researchers say there are interlinked benefits across mental and physical health from prescribed time in green spaces or near bodies of water

Prescriptions encouraging people to spend more time in nature are linked to reduced blood pressure and improvements in anxiety and depression symptoms, according to new analysis.

Doctors sometimes use nature-based social prescription programs – sometimes described as “green prescriptions” or “blue prescriptions” – to advise patients to spend time in green spaces or near bodies of water.

Many blue flag beaches were covered in waste, and Brighton was among the worst-hit, Lib Dem report shows

England’s most celebrated beaches faced 8,500 hours of sewage dumping last year, new figures show.

Many beaches with blue flag status– an international mark of recognition that a beach is deemed safe and has good water quality – were found to have been covered in waste over the last 12 months.