The Guardian

Cost of environmental damage will be six times higher than price of limiting global heating to 2C, study finds

Average incomes will fall by almost a fifth within the next 26 years as a result of the climate crisis, according to a study that predicts the costs of damage will be six times higher than the price of limiting global heating to 2C.

Rising temperatures, heavier rainfall and more frequent and intense extreme weather are projected to cause $38tn (£30tn) of destruction each year by mid-century, according to the research, which is the most comprehensive analysis of its type ever undertaken, and whose findings are published in the journal Nature.

Government support for green manufacturing is actually the easy part. To truly reduce emissions, we must stop digging up and burning fossil fuels

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Last week Anthony Albanese finally announced the government’s major plan for the transition to a renewable energy economy. The Future Made in Australia plan was quickly derided by critics as “picking winners”, in the misguided view that the market is better at deciding how to tackle climate change and that the market is in any way free or lacking distortions.

It’s an article of faith among many economists and commentators that governments should not try to “pick winners”, despite the fact that Australia has a long and glorious tradition of doing so.

Westerners see elephants as pets, said Mokgweetsi Masisi, whose government threatened to send 30,000 elephants to Germany and the UK to demonstrate their dangers

Many Europeans value the lives of elephants more than those of the people who live around them, the president of Botswana has said, amid tensions over potential trophy hunting import bans.

Botswana recently threatened to send 30,000 elephants to the UK and Germany after both countries proposed stricter controls on hunting trophies. The country’s president, Mokgweetsi Masisi, said it would help people to understand human-wildlife conflict – which is among the primary threats to the species – including the experiences of subsistence farmers affected by crop-raiding by the animals.

Notorious for drawing large crowds, Emerson was removed by officials who were surprised to find him back in Victoria in a week

Last week, gun-wielding conservation officers stuffed a 500-lb elephant seal in the back of a van, drove him along a winding highway in western Canada and left him on a remote beach “far from human habitation”.

The plan was to move the young seal far from British Columbia’s capital city, where over the last year, he has developed a reputation for ending up in “unusual locations”, including flower beds, city parks and busy roads.

Cars submerged in raging flood waters, planes taxiing on flooded runways and ankle-deep water at a metro station – this is what the United Arab Emirates and its desert city of Dubai look after a deluge. Dubai received about as much rain in 24 hours as it usually does in a year

• Desert city of Dubai floods as UAE hit by heaviest rainfall in 75 years

Graeme Samuel, who led 2020 review of environmental laws, says ‘I doubt that I’ll be red-faced when we do actually see the laws’

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The head of a review into Australia’s national environmental laws has accused Western Australia’s mining industry and media of spreading “misinformation” about the Albanese government’s nature reforms.

Graeme Samuel told a federal Senate hearing into the extinction crisis that “naysayers” in WA’s mining sector had run a campaign of “negative publicity” against improved environmental protections.

Tell all the maugean skates to hang on until after the next election

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Annual watchlist raises concern for native chicken, duck, geese and turkey populations as well as rare pig breeds

All of the UK’s native breeds of chicken, duck, geese and turkey are under threat because of bird flu, a report from the Rare Breeds Survival Trust (RBST) has found.

The disease, which has swept the globe after it originated in poultry farms in Asia, has caused devastating declines in bird populations. It has also now jumped to mammals and some cases have been found in humans, though it has not been found to be spreading from human to human.

Co-authors say ‘no-regrets policy’ would save consumers €2.8bn a year while cutting emissions by 48m tonnes

Healthier ready-to-eat meals could cut EU emissions by 48m tonnes annually and save customers €2.8bn (£2.4bn) each year, as well as reducing disease, a report has found.

Fast food and ready meals provide more than a sixth of the EU’s calories but contain far more salt and meat than doctors recommend, according to an analysis from the consultancy Systemiq commissioned by environmental nonprofit organisations Fern and Madre Brava.

Common eastern bumblebee queens’ ability while hibernating could help it endure flooding, scientists say

Bumblebees might be at home in town and country but now researchers have found at least one species that is even more adaptable: it can survive underwater.

Scientists have revealed queens of the common eastern bumblebee, a species widespread in eastern North America, can withstand submersion for up to a week when hibernating.

Floods, cyclones, heat stress and predatory starfish contributing to impacts as fourth planet-wide bleaching event confirmed

The Great Barrier Reef is in the midst of what could be its worst summer on record with a widespread and extreme coral bleaching event coming on top of floods, two cyclones and outbreaks of coral-eating starfish, according to an official Australian government report.

The “summer snapshot” report released by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority and the Australian Institute of Marine Science said: “Compared [with] previous summers, cumulative impacts have been much higher this summer and a widespread bleaching event is still unfolding.”

The law will come into force in national parks within two years and in all of the country’s marine protected areas by 2030

Greece has become the first country in Europe to announce a ban on bottom trawling in all of its national marine parks and protected areas.

The country said will spend €780m (£666m) to protect its “diverse and unique marine ecosystems”.

The challenge for a resource-rich, medium-sized economy such as Australia is to identify the right green industries to focus on, while minimising the risks to taxpayers

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It’s taken a while to get here, but Anthony Albanese is on the verge of promising what some economists and most clean energy advocates have been urging Australian governments to do for years. Or at least a version of it.

The prime minister’s promised “future made in Australia” act is clumsily named, and the announcement last week had few details, but the idea – that the government will need to use its weight to help develop green industries if the country is to make a rapid transition from fossil fuels to a clean economy – has been a long time coming.

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Hybrids outsold pure electrics in the past three quarters, according to new figures, while petrol and diesel sales fell 8%

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Australians are choosing hybrid over electric vehicles, but sales of both continue to climb while internal combustion engines record a decline.

Hybrids outsold EVs in three consecutive quarters with 95,129 sales – overtaking 69,593 EVs sold, according to the Australian Automobile Association’s quarterly EV Index released on Tuesday night.

Loss of intensity and diversity of noises in ecosystems reflects an alarming decline in healthy biodiversity, say sound ecologists

Read more: No birdsong, no water in the creek, no beating wings: how a haven for nature fell silent

Sounds of the natural world are rapidly falling silent and will become “acoustic fossils” without urgent action to halt environmental destruction, international experts have warned.

As technology develops, sound has become an increasingly important way of measuring the health and biodiversity of ecosystems: our forests, soils and oceans all produce their own acoustic signatures. Scientists who use ecoacoustics to measure habitats and species say that quiet is falling across thousands of habitats, as the planet witnesses extraordinary losses in the density and variety of species. Disappearing or losing volume along with them are many familiar sounds: the morning calls of birds, rustle of mammals through undergrowth and summer hum of insects.

Heavy rain likely to cause low yields in Britain and other parts of Europe, with drought in Morocco hitting imports

• Which UK foods are at risk?

The UK faces food shortages and price rises as extreme weather linked to climate breakdown causes low yields on farms locally and abroad.

Record rainfall has meant farmers in many parts of the UK have been unable to plant crops such as potatoes, wheat and vegetables during the key spring season. Crops that have been planted are of poor quality, with some rotting in the ground.

Tanya Plibersek says two new agencies will be established but a commitment to rewrite national environment laws has been pushed back

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The Albanese government has further delayed a commitment to rewrite Australia’s failing national environment laws.

The environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, said the government would introduce legislation in coming weeks to create two previously announced bodies – an environment protection agency and a second organisation called Environment Information Australia, which will provide public data on ecosystems, plants and animals.

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Scientists have recorded widespread bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef as global heating creates a fourth planet-wide bleaching event. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Coral Reef Watch, 54% of ocean waters containing coral reefs have been experiencing heat stress high enough to cause bleaching

• Global heating pushes coral reefs towards worst planet-wide mass bleaching on record

Paris claims ban breaches UK-EU trade deal but environmentalists say dispute is ‘hypocrisy’, given Macron’s rhetoric on saving oceans

France has been accused of hypocrisy by conservationists over a fresh post-Brexit dispute with the UK over fishing rights.

France launched an official protest after the UK banned bottom trawling from parts of its territorial waters last month, with the aim of protecting vulnerable habitats.

Intense swells of cold water from the depths are killing sharks, rays and other creatures, researchers say

A climate-disrupted ocean is pushing sharks, rays and other species to flee ever-hotter water in the tropics, only for them to be killed by increasingly intense upswells of cold water from the depths, a study has found.

One of the authors of the paper described the “eerie” aftermath of a mass die-off of more than 260 marine organisms from 81 species in a singular event of extreme cold upswelling off the coast of South Africa in 2021.