The Guardian

The WA government has announced former asbestos mining town of Wittenoom officially closed. But will it get cleaned up? For one man, time is running out

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Deep in the heart of Western Australia’s outback, Maitland Parker is fighting the biggest battle of his life, and it is not because he is dying of cancer.

The Banjima elder’s mob have lived around the area now known as Wittenoom for tens of thousands of years, but he can no longer go there. The eerily striking Pilbara town – at the foot of a deep gorge, 15 hours’ drive north-east of Perth – is blanketed in the deadliest type of asbestos, crocidolite. This has earned it the unwanted accolade of being the “largest contaminated site in the southern hemisphere”.

Victims of intensive farming and the climate emergency, butterflies are beautiful – and vital

The British are remarkably lucky, lepidopterally speaking: some of the most common butterflies to frequent the country are staggeringly beautiful. The peacock, with its four spectacular “eyes” set on wings of velvet burgundy, is a glorious sight as it suns itself, wings held open. The modest common blue, sometimes seen in urban gardens, has a delicate upperwing the colour of an early summer sky, and an underwing speckled with dots and smudges, like characters in a yet-to-be-decoded language. Or there’s the painted lady – a large, handsome chequerboard of amber, chestnut and flecks of white. A migrant to British shores, it flies from southern Europe and north Africa each spring. These remarkable travellers are beginning to cross the English Channel now, the last leg of an epic, seemingly impossible journey. In the autumn, their progeny will fly back south.

But all is not well for British butterflies. Britain has – depending on how you count them – 58 species (compared with 2,500 or so of moths). Research conducted by the charity Butterfly Conservation has found that 24 of these are now threatened. The downward trend in numbers is long-term: a serious decline began to take hold after the second world war when intensive farming methods were adopted. Unpredictable, extreme weather patterns and the use of nitrate fertiliser (which encourages grass on farmland to grow thick and lush when butterflies often prefer it sparse and short) are also having an insidious effect.

Pioneering Bristol study blames the solid-fuel burners in people’s homes for breaches of World Health Organisation guidelines

Like many parts of the country, Bristol has experienced a huge rise in the number of houses installing wood burners over the past decade. But as they have proliferated, mainly in the wealthier parts of the city where many Victorian and Georgian houses have been renovated, so too have fears that they cause pollution.

And now a group of citizen scientists taking part in the first community-led project targeting toxic smoke from wood burners has discovered new evidence about their dangers.

Anti-logging protesters reject state governments’ claims new laws are necessary to protect workers’ safety

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Governments in two Australian states have been accused of undermining democracy by introducing legislation designed to criminalise environmental protests.

In Victoria, protesters attempting to prevent native forest logging would face 12 months’ jail or more than $21,000 in fines, and bans from protest areas under laws proposed last week by the Andrews Labor government.

On World Water Day on 22 March, Mina Guli started a challenge to run 200 marathons across 200 countries in a single year to draw attention to the global water crisis. She has run 27 over seven weeks throughout Australia, and aims to complete the remainder – in Central Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, India, Latin America, South East Asia, Mexico and the US – by March 2023, when the UN Water Conference is held in New York.

‘Australia has some of the driest places on the planet. However, while I completed these marathons, Australians confronted another harsh reality of the water crisis as they dealt with the deluge of heavy periods of rain and flooding throughout News South Wales and Queensland,’ she says

Laboratory chief blames Brexit for closure as money for corvid brain power research dries up

One of Britain’s most important, and unusual, centres for studying cognition is facing imminent closure as a result of Brexit. Set up 22 years ago to study the minds of crows, rooks and other birds noted for their intelligence, the Cambridge Comparative Cognition Laboratory is set to cease operations in July.

Its director, Professor Nicola Clayton, told the Observer she was devastated by the prospect of ending her research there. Nor was she in any doubt about the prime reason for the centre’s closure.

Such schemes should be celebrated only when local people and democratic institutions lead the way

Few environmental ventures have captured the popular imagination quite like rewilding. For decades, campaigners have been clamouring for the restoration of natural ecosystems as an urgent response to climate breakdown, and as a good in itself. And now it counts more than just environmentalists among its advocates – big business and the wealthy are getting involved too.

Across the UK, hundreds of thousands of acres are being snapped up for the purpose of rewilding by businesses, billionaires and asset managers. Asos billionaire Anders Povlsen and his wife, Anne, are now Scotland’s largest landowners. In a manifesto of sorts, addressed to the people of Scotland, the couple wrote that their intention was to “restore our parts of the Highlands to their former magnificent natural state and repair the harm that man has inflicted on them”. The investment companies Aviva and Standard Life have also bought land to plant forests and restore peatland. The brewery and pub chain Brewdog is planting “the biggest ever forest” in Scotland; while pop star Ed Sheeran is “trying to rewild as much of the UK as [he] can”.

Eleanor Salter writes about climate, culture and politics

The world’s longest serving environment correspondent explains the origins of a slow and continuing journey

It all began with Högertrafikomläggningen, Swedish for “the right-hand traffic reorganisation”.

On 3 September 1967, Sweden switched from driving on the left to driving on the right. The change mainly took place at night, but in Stockholm and Malmö all traffic stopped for most of the weekend while intersections were reconfigured.

With empathy and goodwill Anthony Albanese’s Labor government can end the inane climate wars

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This observation is more whimsy than science, but indulge me for a moment. Australians don’t change the stripe of their federal government that often and when they do, they make an emotional investment in the new regime.

The emotional investment often translates as hope. But this time, the prevailing atmosphere feels more like relief. Relief is adjacent to hope, but it’s not quite the same thing.

Labor won by offering modest environmental policies. It will have to go further in office to deal with the climate emergency

In his victory speech on election night last Saturday, Labor’s Anthony Albanese promised to turn Australia into a “renewable energy superpower” and end a decade of “climate wars”. This was good news. Under rightwing Coalition governments – an enduring alliance between the Liberal and National parties – Australia was seen as a climate pariah on the world stage. The new prime minister will have to do very little to raise his country’s standing.

From a global perspective, Mr Albanese’s most important policy is to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 43% by 2030 compared with 2005 levels. Mr Albanese’s goal is not as ambitious as the UK’s or the EU’s. But it is a marked improvement on the last government and will be well received in neighbouring Pacific nations tired of seeing existential threats from rising sea levels dismissed in Canberra. The Coalition government led by Scott Morrison promised that Australia would reach net zero by 2050, which at best would have seen a 28% cut in climate-altering emissions by the end of the decade. But significantly there were no new policies under that administration to meet this distant objective.

Exclusive: Environmental groups criticise NFU for helping companies to fight Defra rules on nitrates in waterways

Environmental groups have criticised the National Farmers Union for helping hundreds of agricultural businesses to push back against measures designed by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to protect vulnerable rivers in the UK.

Working with the specialist consultancy Hafren Water, the NFU has helped at least 200 land users in nearly 40 river basins and groundwater catchments to fight against “nitrate vulnerable zone” designations, according to documents made available to the union’s members.

Officers block access to vehicle to keep pair of herring gulls undisturbed

You may think they have plenty of conventional spots – cliffs, islands, seaside rooftops, chimney pots – to nest on.

But a pair of herring gulls have opted to construct their nest on the roof of a Dorset police car, taking it out of action because they are a protected species and cannot be disturbed.

Pink sea fan, at risk from bottom-trawling, predicted to spread northwards around coast up to Scotland as sea temperatures rise

It is one of Britain’s rarest and most threatened species, primarily due to bottom-trawling fishing, but researchers have found that the pink sea fan coral could expand its range in the climate crisis.

A slow-growing coral found in shallow waters from the western Mediterranean to north-west Ireland and south-west England and Wales, the pink sea fan (Eunicella verrucosa) is classified as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Legislation makes no mention of skins, feet, ears and tails so these can continue to be bought and sold

Elephant skins, feet, ears and tails will continue to be traded in the UK even after next month’s ivory ban comes into force, it has been revealed.

The government has been praised for its Ivory Act 2018, effective from next month, making the purchase and sale of elephant tusks punishable by fines of up to £250,000 or up to five years in prison.

Rising greenhouse gases have caused Lake Palcacocha to swell in size which makes the area at risk for a devastating outburst flood

In a global first for climate breakdown litigation, judges from Germany have visited Peru to determine the level of damage caused by Europe’s largest emitter in a case that could set a precedent for legal claims over human-caused global heating.

Judges and court-appointed experts visited a glacial lake in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca mountain range this week to determine whether Germany’s largest electricity provider, RWE, is partially liable for the rise in greenhouse gases that could trigger a devastating flood.

Exploitation common in the Gulf is emerging in the UK – and will only get worse without government intervention

Impoverished migrant workers forced to pay thousands of pounds in illegal recruitment fees, housed in squalid accommodation and unable to leave their jobs voluntarily. Is this Qatar? UAE? Saudi Arabia? No, it’s post-Brexit Britain.

Revelations that Nepali workers have allegedly been forced to pay extortionate fees to agents in Nepal for their jobs on a British farm supplying some of our leading supermarkets are just the latest in a series of shocking reports. Such cases expose how the UK is adopting practices commonly seen in the Gulf, a region with an appalling record of labour abuse.

The best of this week’s wildlife pictures, including hungry seagulls, a puffin census and a shy stingray

The tree, in Chile’s Alerce Costero national park, is known as the Great Grandfather and could be more than 5,000 years old

Scientists in Chile believe that a conifer with a four-metre-thick trunk known as the Great Grandfather could be the world’s oldest living tree, beating the current record-holder by more than 600 years.

A new study carried out by Dr Jonathan Barichivich, a Chilean scientist at the Climate and Environmental Sciences Laboratory in Paris, suggests that the tree, a Patagonian cypress, also known as the Alerce Milenario, could be up to 5,484 years old.

Exclusive: Fears over regulator’s ability to cope with planned expansion as inspections decline

The number of formal reports documenting security issues at the UK’s civil nuclear facilities has hit its highest level in at least 12 years amid a decline in inspections, the Guardian can reveal.

Experts said the news raised concerns about the regulator’s capacity to cope with a planned expansion in the sector.

Reports handed to EU claim vessels likely to have entered coastal states’ waters where stocks are dwindling

European fishing fleets have been illegally netting tuna from dwindling stocks in the Indian Ocean, according to data presented to EU authorities and analysed by expert groups.

EU purse seine (a type of large net) fishing vessels were present in the waters of Indian Ocean coastal states, where they were likely to have carried out unauthorised catches, and have reported catches in the Chagos archipelago marine protected area and in Mozambique’s exclusive economic zone.