The Guardian

Agricultural waste outstrips sewage as the main danger – and activists blame the ex-environment secretary’s cuts to farm inspections

Liz Truss is responsible for farmers being allowed to dump a catastrophic “chemical cocktail” of pollutants into Britain’s rivers, according to environmental campaigners.

This has meant agricultural waste now outstrips sewage as the leading danger to England’s waterways.

Sale of peat-based compost for use on private gardens and allotments to be outlawed within 18 months

Sales of peat for use on private gardens and allotments will be banned in England from 2024, the government has announced.

Environmental campaigners have long called for stricter laws to restore peatlands.

Unless an emergency meeting for a further round of negotiations is convened an agreement looks unlikely in 2022, Greenpeace warns

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A fifth round of negotiations for a UN ocean treaty to protect and manage the high seas failed to reach an agreement on Friday in New York.

The treaty has been described as “the most significant ocean protection agreement for four decades”.

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Biodiversity certificates scheme for private landowners gets mixed reception as issues with likened carbon credits system linger

Conservation groups have called on the Albanese government to get on with strengthening the country’s environmental protections after it announced a plan to create a market for nature restoration.

The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, said the new scheme would recognise private landholders who restored and managed habitat by granting them biodiversity certificates that could then be sold to other parties.

The Environmental Protection Agency wants to include two common ‘forever chemicals’ in Superfund law

The Biden administration on Friday announced a new proposal that could force polluters of two common PFAS compounds to pay billions of dollars for the toxic substances’ cleanup.

The Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to designate PFOA and PFOS as hazardous substances under the Superfund law, the statute that guides cleanup at the nation’s most contaminated sites.

The best of this week’s wildlife pictures, including bathing elephants, a slow loris and newborn panda twins

Lib Dems say investment will end up on customers’ bills and public will be paying for executives’ bonuses

The UK government’s strategy to tackle sewage discharges is a “cruel joke”, critics have said, after ministers laid out plans to stop the pollution.

George Eustice, the environment secretary, announced that water companies would have to invest £56bn over 25 years into a long-term programme to tackle storm sewage discharges by 2050.

Peter Purves says innovation to cut waste is a disaster for amateur arts and crafts

Peter Purves has decried the invention of tubeless toilet rolls as a “complete catastrophe” as it deprives the public of a key component of amateur arts and crafts.

Loo paper brand Cushelle has become the first company to remove the cardboard inner tube from its packaging in an attempt to reduce waste.

A journey down the waterway in an area of outstanding natural beauty highlights troubles facing UK rivers

The thick mist hangs low over the high moor where the river rises from a boggy wilderness. It rushes over granite slabs and waterfalls down rocks, pooling alongside small oaks amid the coconut tang of yellow gorse, before picking up pace once more, fed, at last, by a few days of rain.

Twenty-three miles downstream its brackish flow swooshes at pace into a steep-sided estuary where paddleboarders ride the tidal motion and surfers run into the swell of Bigbury Bay.

‘Really lousy’ garden wins contest on island of Gotland that aims to promote water conservation

Residents of Sweden’s largest island have been competing to determine which of them has the ugliest lawn.

The competition is an effort by the municipality of Gotland to promote water conservation. After the island, located in the middle of the Baltic Sea, received a record-breaking number of visitors and residents last summer, its politicians realised that it needed to make drastic changes to save its water supplies. Gotland’s population doubles during the summer months and this places a heavy demand on water reserves and limited groundwater supplies.

Exclusive: Experts warn drought could be start of three-year cycle with dire impacts on wildlife and environment

River-flow rates in England have been lower this summer than at any time in the past 21 years, data has shown, and could be much worse next year, with dire impacts on wildlife and the natural environment, conservation experts have warned.

Analysis since 2002 of England’s groundwater, reservoir levels and river flows – three key indicators for the severity of drought, and for river health – shows that July this year was the worst in that period.

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Environmental activists stage sit-down protests, blocking entrances and gluing themselves to pumps

Environmental protesters have taken action at petrol stations in central London, vandalising pumps, blockading entrances and spraypainting “no new oil” across signs.

The Just Stop Oil campaign said 51 of its supporters took part in the protests at seven petrol stations on Friday morning. Some groups staged sit-down protests at entrances or glued themselves to pumps, while others moved from station to station damaging pumps.

Government to build centre on mainland instead following community campaign against the development

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The Western Australian government has abandoned plans for a $3.3m “discovery centre” on Penguin Island following a community campaign against the development.

Reece Whitby, the minister for environment and climate action, made the announcement on Friday, saying in a statement that following a scientific review and community consultation, the proposed centre would be shifted to the mainland.

Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has said the world narrowly avoided a 'radiation disaster' when the last regular line supplying electricity to Ukraine’s Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant was temporarily cut by shelling.

'The world must understand what a threat this is: if the diesel generators had not turned on, if the automation and our station staff had not reacted after the blackout, then we would have already been forced to overcome the consequences of the radiation accident,' Zelenskiy said. 'Russia has put Ukraine and all Europeans in a situation one step away from a radiation disaster.'

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Conservationists welcome successful breeding season but say birds remain at risk of being illegally killed

Nearly 120 rare hen harrier chicks have fledged in England this year, the highest number for more than a century, England’s conservation agency has said.

Natural England and its partners recorded 119 hen harrier chicks successfully fledging from nests across uplands in County Durham, Cumbria, Lancashire, Northumberland and Yorkshire. A fledgling is a young bird that has grown enough to acquire its initial flight feathers and is preparing to leave the nest and care for itself.

The winning image in the South Australian Museum-Australian Geographic Nature Photographer of the Year competition shows a humpback whale carcass and circling sharks, artistically depicting the circle of life with every living animal being food for another

New research also says southern parts of the country may experience deadly heatwaves annually by that time

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Tropical regions including northern Australia could experience dangerously high heat levels most days of the year by 2100, while southern regions of Australia may experience deadly heatwaves annually, new research suggests.

The study, published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, suggests that even if the world meets the Paris agreement of limiting global warming to 2C, exposure to dangerous heat will “likely increase by 50-100% across much of the tropics”.

Extreme heatwaves will be more common by end of decade unless more is done to cut emissions, say experts

The record-breaking heatwaves seen across much of the world in recent months will become increasingly common by the end of the decade, according to research.

Experts say how hot they will be is “hugely” dependent on our ability to curb carbon emissions in the next few years.

Post-Brexit UK accused of abandoning international obligations to protect marine life and human health

Britain is threatening human health, marine life and fishing by releasing raw sewage into the Channel and the North Sea, say three French Euro MPs.

They have asked the European Commission to seek “political and legal” measures to stop the pollution, accusing the UK of abandoning international environmental regulations.

Exclusive: Projects which would have cut annual electricity bills by £100m turned down

Solar farms are being refused planning permission in Great Britain at the highest rate in five years, analysis has found, with projects which would have cut £100m off annual electricity bills turned down in the past 18 months.

Planning permission for 23 solar farms was refused across England, Wales and Scotland between January 2021 and July 2022, which could have produced enough renewable energy to power an estimated 147,000 homes annually, according to analysis of government figures by the planning and development consultancy Turley.