The Guardian

Study suggests the thousands of dams clogged with sediment pose a threat to water supplies

Thousands of the world’s large dams are so clogged with sediment that they risk losing more than a quarter of their storage capacity by 2050, UN researchers have concluded, warning of the threat to water security.

A new study from the UN University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health found that, by mid-century, dams and reservoirs will lose about 1.65tr cubic metres of water storage capacity to sediment.

Molly Sampson found an Otodus megalodon shark species tooth at a beach near her home in Maryland while hunting for fossils

For Christmas, nine-year-old Molly Sampson and her sister Natalie, 17, asked their parents for one thing: insulated waders, to “go shark’s-tooth hunting like professionals”, said Molly’s mother, Alicia Sampson.

When the waders arrived from Santa, Molly told the Guardian, she declared that she would be looking “for a Meg”, or megalodon tooth, and ventured to Maryland’s Calvert Beach to hunt fossils on Christmas Day with Natalie and their father, Bruce Sampson.

Head of carbon credit system review says absolute emissions cuts must be priority, as Albanese government weighs up limits on use of credits

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The head of a review of Australia’s carbon credit system says polluters must make deep cuts in their own greenhouse gas emissions and not rely heavily on offsets – paying for emission cuts elsewhere – if the climate crisis is to be addressed.

Prof Ian Chubb, a former chief scientist who headed the Albanese government’s review of the carbon credit scheme, said he backed a UN expert group recommendation that companies should prioritise absolute emissions cuts consistent with the goal of limiting global heating to 1.5C, and offsets should be used only “above and beyond” that.

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European carp – an invasive species – are breeding in huge numbers, putting smaller native fish under pressure as they stir up the water and damage aquatic vegetation. John Koehn, an adjunct professor at Charles Sturt University’s Gulbali Institute, says the massive carp spawning event is not unusual for wet times and it will be months before it is known how many of the carp survive to adulthood

• After a year of rain, towns at the end of Australia’s giant river system await the slow, inevitable deluge 
• Mosquito population explosion plagues flood-ravaged NSW – video

A pilot study by the agriculture department in 2013 detected chemicals not found by the self-regulatory system

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The pesticide testing Australia relies on to pick up chemicals in fresh fruit and vegetables sold domestically routinely picked up far fewer breaches than a government study in 2013.

Unpublished results of a 2013 pilot study for a national produce monitoring system (NPMS) by the federal agriculture department have been revealed under freedom of information laws.

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Fast action in global gigafactory race is happening outside UK, as Swedish pacesetter shows

In a fantasy world, the would-be rescuer of Britishvolt would be a consortium that included a car manufacturer or two. The ailing startup would instantly get what it needs most after six months of crisis: endorsement for a battery product that is still in development, plus some , future customers.

At that point, the big political claims made about Britishvolt, its planned gigafactory in Northumberland and “the UK’s place at the helm of the global green industrial revolution”, as the former prime minister Boris Johnson put it a year ago, would start to sound more credible.

Millions of residents faced flood warnings, almost 50,000 people were under evacuation orders, and more than 110,000 homes and businesses were without power after more than a foot and a half (45cm) of rain fell in southern California. Swollen rivers swamped homes in small communities, inundating them with water and mud and stranding residents. Footage shows entire neighbourhoods covered in water, with cars submerged and houses flooded

• Death toll in California storms hits 17 and ‘likely to grow’, says state’s governor

Animal has been evading capture from Rochford fishing lake since mid-December

A seal trapped in a fishing lake has “found himself in a branch of Waitrose” and has no incentive to escape, according to an expert.

The animal has evaded multiple attempts at capture since first being spotted at Rochford Reservoir, in Essex, almost a month ago, the BBC reported.

Campaigners say most sites cannot cope with amount of wastewater, raising risk of raw discharges into rivers

Investment into expanding sewage treatment works by Thames Water falls far short of what is needed to stop raw sewage discharges into rivers, according to campaign group.

Campaigners analysed 106 treatment works in the upper Thames area, which stretches from the Chilterns into the Cotswolds. A treatment works is where wastewater is stored and treated, before being released to the environment. The research suggested three-quarters of the works examined did not have enough capacity to cope with the amount of wastewater from the population. If a treatment works is over capacity, it increases the likelihood of raw sewage being released to the environment.

Seas dominate global weather patterns and the climate crisis is causing profound and damaging changes

The world’s oceans were the hottest ever recorded in 2022, demonstrating the profound and pervasive changes that human-caused emissions have made to the planet’s climate.

More than 90% of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gas emissions is absorbed in the oceans. The records, starting in 1958, show an inexorable rise in ocean temperature, with an acceleration in warming after 1990.

Australian billionaires had backed $30bn Sun Cable venture designed to help power Darwin, Indonesia and Singapore but the company has gone into voluntary administration

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Australian billionaires Mike Cannon-Brookes and Andrew Forrest have fallen out over plans to build a giant solar farm in the Northern Territory to supply Darwin, Indonesia and Singapore with power, with the venture entering voluntary administration.

Grok, the family investment arm of Cannon-Brookes, and the appointed administrators said in separate statements the company driving the project, Sun Cable, would continue to operate and seek new financial support.

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George Eustice says adapted kerosene boilers can run on ‘hydro-treated vegetable oil’ and cut emissions by 88%

A proposal to incentivise households in rural areas to run their heating systems on vegetable oil is to be put to parliament.

The former environment secretary George Eustice will introduce a bill proposing the removal of duties on renewable liquid heating fuels and incentives to replace kerosene in existing boilers.

The pilot program that ran in 2013 was cancelled by then agriculture minister Barnaby Joyce and the results never released

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A pilot program to monitor pesticides in Australian fruit and vegetables was halted by the Abbott government despite it revealing residues up to 90 times the permitted maximum levels in strawberries.

The research also found levels of pesticides in some peach and apricot samples were “unacceptable from an acute or short-term dietary risk perspective”, meaning eating affected fruit could pose a health risk.

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Corporate responsibility lawsuit begun by NGOs accusing Evian brand owner of ‘failing’ to address environmental footprint

Danone, the French yoghurt and bottled water company, is being taken to court by three environmental groups who accuse it of failing to sufficiently reduce its plastic footprint.

The company behind Evian and Volvic mineral water was failing in its duties to act under a groundbreaking French law, the groups said.

Disasters costing at least $1bn killed 474 people last year, government figures show

The US endured a particularly painful year as communities wrestled with the growing impacts of the climate crisis, with 18 major disasters wreaking havoc across the country as planet-heating emissions continued to climb.

Storms, floods, wildfires and droughts caused a total of $165bn in damages in the US last year, $10bn more than the 2021 total and the third most costly year since records of major losses began in 1980, according to new US government data.

Study suggests 23m years of evolutionary history could be wiped out if the island’s endangered mammals go extinct

From the ring-tailed lemur to the aye-aye, a nocturnal primate, more than 20m years of unique evolutionary history could be wiped from the planet if nothing is done to stop Madagascar’s threatened mammals going extinct, according to a new study.

It would already take 3m years to recover the diversity of mammal species driven to extinction since humans settled on the island 2,500 years ago. But much more is at risk in the coming decades: if threatened mammal species on Madagascar go extinct, life forms created by 23m years of evolutionary history will be destroyed.

And why did I have to be a hippo? Why not a hawk, a hare, a magnificent horse?

When you are young, your name will associate you with one animal or another. Mine was, inevitably and to my great disappointment, a hippo: an animal of thick, grey skin, whiskers sprouting from its cheeks, feet that were far too small for its body. Hippos weren’t even cute, I knew this: their strange mouths, cheeks at the end of a long nose, hid (where? how?) vast discoloured teeth which they used to chomp anything from antelope to zebra. I wanted my name to start with an elegant lowercase h: a letter that also happened to be the shape of a miniature giraffe. Instead I was H for Hippo, stocky and sturdy, like a Kalabari mask from Nigeria.

Hippos eat grass instead of fish, according to Kikuyu legend, because of a deal with God: the hippo wanted to swim in waters cooled by the snow from Mount Kenya but God worried he would eat his little fishes, which were very dear to him. (And why wouldn’t they be? Little silver fish, quick and made of light.) So the hippo promised that, at night, he would emerge from the water “every time that food passes through my body, and I will scatter my dung on the earth with my tail”.

Experts say extreme weather is a growing danger to displaced people and could force more to flee homes

Governments must get to grips with the links between the climate crisis and the plight of migrants around the world, experts have said, as increasingly extreme weather is a mounting danger to already vulnerable displaced people, and is potentially pushing more people to flee their homes.

Migrants and displaced people number more than 100 million around the world, mainly in developing countries, and are among the populations most at risk from extreme weather.

Plan to restrict car journeys in Oxford becomes lightning rod for fears of global assault on freedoms

Jordan Peterson is rarely lacking in strong opinions, but even by the standards of the Canadian psychologist turned hard-right culture warrior, this was vehement stuff: a city is planning to lock people in their local districts as part of a “well-documented” global plot to, ultimately, deprive them of all personal possessions.

Where was this? Not Beijing, or even Pyongyang. It was Oxford. In the days since Peterson’s tweet – viewed 7.5m times – officials in the city have fielded endless queries from around the world asking why they are imposing a “climate lockdown”. Inevitably, there have also been some threats.

Welsh government considers whether to block plan after experts say manure from intensive units is turning Wye into ‘pea soup’

The Welsh government is under pressure to block a new mega chicken farm in the Wye catchment, in what campaigners call a “crucial moment in the life or death of the Wye”.

The River Wye has become synonymous with the intensive poultry industry, with more than 20 million chickens in its catchment area, producing more manure than the land can absorb and turning the river the colour of “pea soup”.