The Guardian

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.

Parliamentary committee also recommends cut-off date for sale of diesel and petrol cars

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A Victorian parliamentary committee has recommended the Andrews government consider a ban on gas connections in new homes to help accelerate the state’s transition to renewables.

It also urged Victoria to commit to a cut-off date for the sale of new petrol, diesel and gas-fuelled vehicles.

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Greenwashing ploys cannot mask the pollution wreaked both by cigarettes and new nicotine products

The most common source of plastic pollution in our environment is not bottles, plastic bags or food wrappers, but cigarette butts. Smokers stub out nearly 800,000 metric tonnes of cigarettes every year, enough butts to cover New York’s Central Park. They are in every country on the planet, from city streets to rubbish tips, rivers and beaches.

Cigarettes contain single-use plastics because they are engineered and manufactured that way. Butts take a decade to degrade, releasing more than 7,000 toxic chemicals into the environment. Wildlife is also at risk: researchers found partly-digested cigarette butts in 70% of seabirds and 30% of sea turtles sampled for one study.

Policy failure and lack of enforcement have left Britain’s waterways and farmland vulnerable to ‘forever chemicals’

We have recently woken up to a disgusting issue. Rather than investing properly in new sewage treatment works, water companies in the UK – since they were privatised in 1989 – have handed £72 bn in dividends to their shareholders. Our sewerage system is antiquated and undersized, and routinely bypassed altogether, as companies allow raw human excrement to pour directly into our rivers. They have reduced some of them to stinking, almost lifeless drains.

This is what you get from years of policy failure and the near-collapse of monitoring and enforcement by successive governments. Untreated sewage not only loads our rivers with excessive nutrients, but it’s also the major source of the microplastics that now pollute them. It contains a wide range of other toxins, including PFASs: the “forever chemicals” that were the subject of the movie Dark Waters. This may explain the recent apparent decline in otter populations: after recovering from the organochlorine pesticides used in the 20th century, they are now being hit by new pollutants.

Campaigners report incidents of the cruel practice on several certified boats, amid allegations of a flawed auditing system

The Marine Stewardship Council, which certifies fisheries under its blue tick sustainability label, has ordered an independent investigation into allegations of shark finning on tuna vessels in certified Pacific fisheries.

Shark finning is the cruel practice of removing fins from live sharks. A report by the UK charity Shark Guardian with CNS Global Consulting, a sustainable development consultancy, has alleged it took place on board three vessels operating in the western central Pacific that were certified by the MSC, which runs the world’s largest fishery certification programme.

Five projects to receive funding from Defra and Natural England to tackle wildlife loss and improve access to nature

Up to 99,000 hectares of land in England, from city fringes to wetlands, will be focused on supporting wildlife in five major “nature recovery” projects, the government has said.

The five landscape-scale projects in the West Midlands, Cambridgeshire, the Peak District, Norfolk and Somerset aim to help tackle wildlife loss and the climate crisis, and improve public access to nature.

Barnaby Joyce ponders ditching net zero, while Matt Canavan’s claim the climate goal is ‘a failed agenda’ globally dismissed as ‘laughably untrue’

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The Coalition is picking through the entrails, scouring the wreckage and sifting through whatever other analogies we might have missed as it works out how it lost the election.

In postmortem interviews, the Liberals and Nationals are debating what they should do differently on the core issue of the climate crisis after a wave of seats to pro-climate Greens, independents and a Labor party with bolder climate targets.

Wandering salamanders live in the world’s tallest trees and wind tunnel tests show how the amphibians take their ‘leaps of faith’

A new study is shedding fresh light into the incredible world of California’s temperate forests, and the daring survival techniques of one of its inhabitants: parachuting salamanders.

The study, published on Monday in the journal Current Biology, shows how salamanders living in the canopy are able to parachute consistently, slowing their speed and controlling their movements.

Other seven locations popular with locals have high concentrations of harmful bacteria due to sewage and livestock

Only one popular river spot for bathing and water sports in and around Oxford has bacteria within safe levels, a survey by a campaign group has found.

The other seven locations in rivers which are regularly used by swimmers, punters, rowers and kayakers, were found to have concentrations of harmful bacteria one and a half to three times above recommended safe levels, a study by the Oxford Rivers Project funded by Thames Water has found.

Commitment to building four-storey bioreactors is gamechanger for cultivated meat industry, says expert

The building of the world’s largest bioreactors to produce cultivated meat has been announced, with the potential to supply tens of thousands of shops and restaurants. Experts said the move could be a “gamechanger” for the nascent industry.

The US company Good Meat said the bioreactors would grow more than 13,000 tonnes of chicken and beef a year. It will use cells taken from cell banks or eggs, so the meat will not require the slaughter of any livestock.

Residents of Jacobabad say loss of trees and water facilities makes record-breaking temperatures unbearable

Muhammad Akbar, 40, sells dried chickpeas on a wheelbarrow in Jacobabad, and has suffered heatstroke three times in his life.

But now, he says, the heat is getting worse. “In those days there were many trees in the whole city and there was no shortage of water and we had other facilities so we could easily beat the heat. But now there are no trees or other facilities including water, due to which the heat is becoming unbearable. I’m scared that this heat will take our lives in the coming years.”