The Guardian

Aquatic mammals can recognise friends and family members without seeing or hearing them

Dolphins are able to recognise one another by the taste of their urine, a study has found.

Researchers at the University of St Andrews have discovered that the mammals can recognise friends and family members without seeing or hearing them.

Cities in the UK and around the world are installing new bike lanes to help reduce emissions, but some claim they are making traffic worse. The argument goes that bike lanes means less space for cars and therefore more congestion. While this might sound plausible, it appears to hark back to outdated traffic management theory. Josh Toussaint-Strauss finds out how traffic really works, and the actual impact of installing new bike lanes

About 50 schemes are thought to be in pipeline between now and 2025 despite climate pledges

Several major UK fossil fuel projects have been approved since Cop26 concluded, an analysis has found, while about 50 schemes are thought to be in the pipeline between now and 2025.

Three separate schemes have received some form of approval from government bodies during the six-month period since Boris Johnson’s administration hosted the UN climate summit in Glasgow. Campaigners say his government is reaching a crunch point, with three major onshore schemes currently being appealed and the levelling up minister, Michael Gove, set to rule on a number of such applications over the next six weeks.

Massive food producers hold too much power – and the regulators scarcely understand what is happening. Sound familiar?

For the past few years, scientists have been frantically sounding an alarm that governments refuse to hear: the global food system is beginning to look like the global financial system in the run-up to 2008.

While financial collapse would have been devastating to human welfare, food system collapse doesn’t bear thinking about. Yet the evidence that something is going badly wrong has been escalating rapidly. The current surge in food prices looks like the latest sign of systemic instability.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

The Evidence Project is a photography-led campaign created by Britta Jaschinski, Keith Wilson and Arturo de Frías focusing on the impact of the climate crisis, biodiversity loss, and the causes of viral pandemics. These images by many of the world’s leading photographers are their evidential proof to provoke governments, businesses, opinion leaders and consumers to initiate the changes required for a safe and sustainable future for all life on Earth. Central to this campaign is the production of a new crowdfunded book, which the creators expect to publish later this year

Environmental organisations partner to create 15,000-acre protected wetland from Glastonbury to Bridgwater Bay

At this time of year the booming call of the bitterns resonates across the Avalon Marshes in Somerset while hawks skim over the reed beds and great white egrets nest in the shallows. The pools and ditches are alive with rare reptiles, mammals, insects and spiders.

Plans to improve the habitat for flora and fauna that live in one of the UK’s most extraordinary landscapes by creating a “super nature reserve” stretching from these marshes around Glastonbury to the edge of Bridgwater Bay were announced on Thursday.

Carbon capture and storage isn’t working close to a scale that would significantly lower emissions – despite billions in taxpayers’ cash thrown at it

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Scott Morrison’s loving embrace and financial backing of the gas industry has been a defining feature of his prime ministership.

Hit with a historical pandemic, Morrison chose gas – not renewables – to fire an economic recovery.

If national emissions data is incorrect then Australia less likely to be on track to meet Coalition’s target of a 26-28% cut by 2030

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Queensland forests are being cleared at almost twice the rate reflected in national greenhouse gas emissions, new analysis suggests, prompting questions about the climate data that Australia reports to the United Nations.

The study of data from Queensland’s statewide landcover and tree study (Slats) shows 455,756 hectares of forests were cleared across the state in 2018-19.

Scientists compare findings of tree study to mass coral bleaching in Great Barrier Reef

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Australia’s tropical rainforest trees have being dying at double the previous rate since the 1980s, seemingly because of global heating, according to new research that raises concerns tropical forests could start to release more carbon dioxide than they absorb.

The study, published in the journal Nature, found the average life of tropical trees in north Queensland had been reduced by about half over the past 35 years . The finding was consistent across different species and rainforests.

The #everydayclimatecrisis visual petition is a collection of more than 1,000 photographs taken by women and non-binary people across Australia showing the impact of the climate crisis on their lives. The images of fires, floods and environmental destruction will be tabled to parliament in Canberra in June in a call for leaders to do more. The women hope that if a picture is worth 1,000 words, then 1,000 pictures can be a catalyst for change

All that the energy giants are interested in is profit. Public ownership – as in France – is the only answer

Our energy system is crucial to two of the biggest issues facing the British public: the cost of living crisis and the climate and environment emergency. Yet we are leaving this sector to be inefficiently and exploitatively run by private companies.

Electricity is generated by burning fossil fuels or by renewable technology such as wind turbines; then it is distributed along the national and regional grids, and finally sold to us by energy suppliers. In the UK, there is no public sector role in this: every part of the process is privatised.

David Hall is a visiting professor and former director of the Public Services International Research Unit at the University of Greenwich

Fields in Trust charity finds about one in 24 people in Britain live 10 minutes walk from nearest park

Nearly 2.8 million people in the UK live more than 10 minutes walk from a public park, garden or playing field, according to research.

Fields in Trust, which protects and campaigns for public green spaces, found just four out of the 11 regions in Great Britain met its “six-acre standard” for green space provision.

Latest analysis adds to evidence that the impacts of human-caused global heating are already damaging many lives around the world

Record-breaking heatwaves in north-west India and Pakistan have been made 100 times more likely by the climate crisis, according to scientists. The analysis means scorching weather once expected every three centuries is now likely to happen every three years.

The region is currently suffering intense heat, with the Indian capital New Delhi setting a new record on Sunday above 49C and the peak temperature in Pakistan reaching 51C. Millions of people are suffering from crop losses, and water and power outages.

Gump was the last lizard of her kind when she died in 2014, and her demise should be ‘a scar on our conscience’

The last Christmas Island forest skink was named Gump. She lived in a spacious cage filled with rocks, soil, logs and a ready supply of fresh invertebrate food in the island’s national park. She wasn’t particularly active, but then again it’s impossible to know what goes on in the mind of a skink. Her namesake was Forrest Gump – they were both solitary individuals who, despite being mild and unassuming, experienced momentous events while remaining quite unaware of the exceptional courses their lives had taken.

The Christmas island forest skink (or whiptail skink) used to thrive on its island home, an Australian territory off the coast of Indonesia. In 1979, researchers documented that they were its most abundant skink. These lizards were, visually, fairly nondescript. Not too small, but by no means large, they averaged about 20cm (8in) in length, with a slim body covered in brown-yellow scales. They were practically the default image that comes to mind when you think “lizard”.

Stockholm institute calls for ‘bold science-based decision-making’ to tackle climate, social and economic crises

The world is at “boiling point” and humanity needs to redefine its relationship with nature if it is to address a web of crises, from rising prices to extreme heat and floods, according to a report released ahead of a landmark UN conference.

The research from the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) and the Council on Energy Environment and Water says the solutions to the interlinked planetary and inequality crisis exist, but calls for “bold science-based decision-making” to “completely rethink our way of living,”.

Replacing GDP as the single metric to measure progress and instead focus on indicators that take “inclusive wealth” and the caring economy into account.

Establishing a regular UN forum on sustainable lifestyles.

A global campaign on nature-based education for children.

Transforming people’s everyday relationship with nature by integrating it in cities; protecting animal welfare and shifting to more plant-based diets. It also says policymakers should draw on indigenous local knowledge.

World Meteorological Organization says extreme weather wreaked heavy toll on human lives

Critical global indicators of the climate crisis broke records in 2021, according to a UN report, from rising oceans to the levels of heat-trapping emissions in the atmosphere.

The UN World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said these were clear signs of humanity’s impact on the planet, which was bringing long-lasting effects. Extreme weather, which the WMO called the day-to-day face of the climate emergency, wreaked a heavy toll on human lives and led to hundreds of billions of dollars in damages, the agency said.

Scientists hail breakthrough that could maximise catches while reducing damage caused by fishing

An unusual technique for catching scallops that was stumbled upon accidentally by scientists could potentially reduce some of the damage caused to our seabeds by fishing.

The marine scientist Dr Rob Enever and his team at Fishtek Marine, a fisheries consultancy based in Devon, designed small underwater “potlights” to help protect fish stocks by replacing the need to use fish to bait crab and lobster pots.

Toxic air, water and soil are ‘existential threat to human and planetary health’, says global review

Pollution is killing 9 million people a year, a review has found, making it responsible for one in six of all deaths.

Toxic air and contaminated water and soil “is an existential threat to human health and planetary health, and jeopardises the sustainability of modern societies”, the review concluded.

Report tells of 20-hour shifts for £3.50 an hour, racism and sexual abuse under cover of transit visa loophole

A third of migrant workers on UK fishing vessels work 20-hour shifts, and 35% report regular physical violence, according to new research that concludes there is rampant exploitation and abuse on British ships.

“Leaving is not possible because I’m not allowed off the vessel to ask for help,” one migrant worker told researchers at the University of Nottingham Rights Lab, which focuses on modern slavery. They found fishers reported working excessive hours, with few breaks, on an average salary of £3.51 an hour.

The climate crisis is giving trees a bigger window to spread their pollen, but cleaner air and better early warning forecasts can help protect us

If you have sneezed your way through the last few days, you are not alone. About a quarter of the UK population are thought to suffer from hay fever, with numbers continuing to grow. And the latest research suggests that the climate crisis is going to make the hay fever season a whole lot longer and more intense, with up to three times as much pollen wafting around by the end of the century. Hold on to your antihistamines.

For people with lung conditions such as asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, pollen bursts are a serious risk that can be deadly in the most extreme cases. In November 2016, a pollen outbreak caused by a thunderstorm fragmenting pollen into smaller pieces in Melbourne, Australia, overwhelmed the emergency services and resulted in at least nine deaths.

Kate Ravilious is a freelance science journalist based in York, UK; she writes on Earth, climate and weather-related issues