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Wealthy nations accused of depriving poorer ones of nutrient-rich food and wasting mackerel, sardine and anchovy stocks

Shoppers’ appetite for salmon is causing millions of tonnes of nutritious mackerel, sardines and anchovies to be wasted as fish feed, according to new research.

Its authors say farming salmon is an inefficient way to produce nutritious seafood, calculating that half to 99% of minerals, vitamins and fatty acids in the wild-caught fish are not retained when fed to farmed Atlantic salmon.

Slump effectively lowers cost of emitting carbon for the most polluting companies

• Russia-Ukraine crisis: live news

The price of carbon permits in Europe has crashed dramatically following Russian’s invasion of Ukraine, lowering the cost of emitting carbon for the EU’s most polluting companies.

Permit prices, which are part of the European Union’s (EU) emissions trading scheme, were launched in 2005, and reached a high of €97 (£80) in early February, but have now slumped below €70. Prices were on course to drop to almost €60 on Wednesday afternoon, representing the biggest fall since 2014.

Review of G20 fiscal stimulus spending counters many countries’ pledges to ‘build back better’

Only about 6% of pandemic recovery spending has been “green”, an analysis of the $14tn that G20 countries have poured into economic stimulus.

Additionally, about 3% of the record amounts governments around the world have spent to rescue the global economy from the Covid-19 pandemic has been spent on activities that will increase carbon emissions, such as subsidies to coal, and will do little to reduce greenhouse gases or shift the world to a low-carbon footing.

UN environment assembly resolution is being hailed as biggest climate deal since 2015 Paris accord

World leaders, environment ministers and other representatives from 173 countries have agreed to develop a legally binding treaty on plastics, in what many described a truly historic moment.

The resolution, agreed at the UN environment assembly in Nairobi, Kenya, calls for a treaty covering the “full lifecycle” of plastics from production to disposal, to be negotiated over the next two years. It has been described by the head of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) as the most important multilateral environmental deal since the Paris climate accord in 2015.

Authorities fear that thousands of tons of fuel carried onboard could leak and pollute the ocean

An abandoned ship carrying an estimated $401m (£295m) worth of cars, including Porsche, Audi, Bentley and Lamborghini models, has sunk nearly two weeks after a fire broke out onboard.

The Felicity Ace sank on Tuesday about 400 kilometers (250 miles) off Portugal’s Azores Islands as it was being towed, MOL Ship Management in Singapore said in a statement. A salvage team had put out the fire which had burned for days, fueled by lithium-ion batteries in electric vehicles onboard.

Despite nearly a third of shark species nearing extinction, Spain supplied 51,000 tonnes of shark fins from 2003-20, says IFAW

European countries are selling so many shark fins to Asia that they dominate nearly half the trade, a study has found.

Shark populations continue to decline, driven by the global shark fin trade. Last year, scientists found a third of sharks and ray species have been overfished to near-extinction, jeopardising the health of entire ocean ecosystems and food security for many countries.

Waitrose, Morrisons and M&S among firms to install refill stations in attempt to reduce plastic waste

“Every shopper in the UK” will have access to refillable groceries in a large supermarket or with a delivery service under plans by some of the country’s biggest grocers.

Waitrose, Ocado, Morrisons, Marks & Spencer and the supply-chain company CHEP have joined a refillable grocery partnership and plan to both roll out unpackaged options in-store as well as letting people fill containers with essentials during home deliveries.

Howard Cox denies any conflict of interest in his links to fair fuel group of MPs and company Ultimum

A lobbyist who has worked with Conservative MPs to argue that the development of as yet unproven fuel additives means it is unnecessary to phase out petrol and diesel engines is the director of a firm developing such products, it has emerged.

Howard Cox, who runs the FairFuelUK campaign, is heavily involved with the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on fair fuel, which recommended last year that ministers urgently look at fuel additives, saying these reduced emissions by more than 50%.

As rescuers continue to search for those missing in Lismore, Ballina is preparing for a one-in-500-year flooding event. The Richmond River peaked at 7.15 metres at Woodburn, four hours upstream from Ballina – almost 2 metres higher than its February 1954 peak of 5.42 metres. All that water is now rushing to Ballina.

The government services minister, Linda Reynolds, says the federal government has received 145,000 claims for the one-off $1,000 disaster recovery payment. That’s 14 times the number of applications in the 2021 floods, when 10,245 claims were made.

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• Ballina flood: wall of water racing to town as NSW conditions remain ‘very dangerous’
  
• Lismore counts the devastation as Ballina braces for its worst flood in history
  
• ‘A jetski turned up with Mick Fanning on it’: world champion surfer ferries locals through NSW floods
  
• Australia news updates live: fourth NSW flood death confirmed; Warragamba Dam spills; Ballina mayor calls for help
  

How is anyone supposed to plan for that much rainfall in such a short time? This is simply what living in a climate emergency looks like

• What caused the ‘rain bomb’? How the unprecedented Queensland and NSW 2022 floods unfolded

The things that will stay with me about the weather event and subsequent flooding that engulfed Brisbane and south-east Queensland over the weekend was how rapidly it unfolded, its capricious unpredictability and extreme violence.

This was not a repeat of the 2011 disaster, which I also lived through, and the captains of hindsight suggesting this – in a simplistic and premature attempt to assign blame – are making a false equivalence.

Campaigners aghast as emergency exemption on use of thiamethoxam granted due to risk to sugar beet crop

An insecticide banned due to its harm to bees will be used on sugar beet in Britain this year after ministers authorised an emergency exemption. The government overruled its own scientific advisers and the decision was called “scandalous” by campaigners.

The neonicotinoid, called thiamethoxam, was banned in 2018 across Europe after a series of studies found it damaged bees. But British Sugar applied for an emergency exemption and on Tuesday the conditions for the exemption were met.

A vast, fast-moving cloud of ash hundreds of metres tall and several kilometres wide has swept over southern Paraguay, blown in from wildfires raging in neighbouring Argentina after two years of severe drought. 

A weather front of cold air from the south acted 'like a broom', explained Eduardo Dose, a Paraguayan hydrologist, scooping up soot from burnt pastures and forests as well as dust from drought-stricken wetlands. Strong winds then channelled the choking cloud 

Wildfires send giant cloud of ash across southern Paraguay

Irish scientists publish images of spider feeding on pipistrelle bats in Shropshire

Protected pipistrelle bats have been captured and fed on by a noble false widow spider, the first time the behaviour has been seen.

The arachnids are thought to have been accidentally introduced to the UK from the Canary Islands about 100 years ago and have been spreading ever since.

Report warns government agency unable to fulfil duty of protecting environment as pay has plunged in real terms

People working for the government’s conservation watchdog are so underpaid that it is threatening the UK’s ability to reach net-zero pledges, a trade union report warns.

Salaries of those working for the government agency Natural England have fallen by 20% in real terms over the last decade, with starting pay thousands of pounds lower than private and charity-sector equivalents, according to the Prospect union’s Natural England 2022 report.

Experts and advocates are also exploring new ranking systems to add urgency to the growing disaster of rapidly warming landscapes

Climate scientists from around the world issued dire warnings on Monday, in the latest IPCC report on the dangers posed in the unfolding climate crisis. Among them is extreme heat, a crisis that on average already claims more American lives than hurricanes and tornadoes combined.

Though the impact is already being felt, heatwaves are largely silent killers. Often, the toll is tallied far into the aftermath of an event and is vastly undercounted. Unlike fires and floods that produce immediate and visible destruction, heat’s harmful effects can seem more subtle – even if they are in fact more deadly.

'In one word, it's devastating,' says the Mitchelton Football Club technical director Joe Fenech, after heavy rain and flood waters washed away the club's equipment, and destroyed its $1.5m synthetic playing field. 'We spent all the budgeted money on equipment, footballs, poles, gear and kits – you name it. We stocked it really well in a [shipping] container, and that container just floated away under the bridge,' says Fenech. The season was supposed to start last weekend for the 102-year-old football club, but now Fenech predicts boots won't be back on the field for another five or six weeks

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• Brisbane flood: residents assess damage to homes as clean-up efforts begin
• NSW and Qld floods live updates – latest eastern Australia flood news

Cockatoo populations reduced after 2019-20 bushfires with decline expected to continue as climate crisis causes increased heatwaves

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The gang-gang cockatoo, the animal emblem of the Australian Capital Territory, will be officially listed as a threatened species after a large decline in its numbers due to the climate crisis and the bushfire disaster.

The environment minister, Sussan Ley, has accepted the recommendation of the threatened species scientific committee that the small cockatoo requires protection under Australia’s environmental laws.

Australia needs to decide how much worse we want these disasters to get and take the climate action needed to keep people safe

• NSW and Qld floods live news – latest eastern Australia flood updates
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In Lismore we have experienced floods forever. But this is not a flood, this is a catastrophe. This is extreme. This is a giant, angry river in the sky. This is climate change. I’ve seen people sitting on their roofs, panicking, screaming in fear – hoping their lives will be spared.

My friends are in tinnies, the same friends that always jump in their tinnies during floods. Usually, they go from veranda to veranda to visit and check up on the families, sitting there with their chooks, dogs, cats, rabbits, sometimes a goat or a sheep. There is always a place on the veranda for the wildlife too. They have a beer together and talk about how long until the river unswells, the clean-up, and ask if everyone has got what they need. They talk about how this flood is different from the last one. They talk about the big one in 1974. Even if they weren’t there.

More intense bushfires due to climate change will slow recovery of ozone layer, scientist says

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Smoke injected high into the atmosphere by the 2019-2020 Australian bushfires resulted in a depletion of the ozone layer, new research has found.

Scientists have found that the smoke from the devastating bushfires caused a 1% loss in ozone – an amount that typically takes one decade to recover.

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