The Guardian

Minister says $2m app will reduce plastic going to landfill but experts warn the recycling industry remains under-resourced

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The national rollout of an app to help Australians better sort their recycling has received a lukewarm reception as critics warn it won’t help solve fundamental problems with the industry.

Recycle Mate is a free to access app by developer DreamWalk that has been available in an earlier form in New South Wales since 2019.

British landscapes will be devastated by the collapse of the ash. In the long term, resistant strains may pull through

The ash is one of Britain’s most recognisable and common trees. Tall and elegantly canopied, it is also one of its most beautiful, with its pale, feathered leaves and its fruits – its “ash keys” – hanging from its branches like real bunches of keys dangling from a caretaker’s belt. The late emergence of the leaves of ash trees allows species such as dog violet and mercury to thrive beneath them. Woodpeckers, owls and nuthatches nest in them. Lichens, moss and liverworts grow happily on them. Friendly fungi – such as the marvellously named King Alfred’s cakes – flourish upon them.

The National Trust reports that 30,000 ash trees on its land will have been felled this year owing to ash dieback. “Dieback” sounds like a gentle, seasonal withdrawal. In fact, ash dieback is a devastating disease caused by a fungus, Hymenoscyphus fraxineus, likely to have been carried into the UK on imported ash saplings in the early part of this century. A ban came on such imports in 2012 – too late to do much but slow the fungus’s spread. When affected by the gradually developing ailment, the leaves of the ash wither and blacken, and lesions develop on the branches; eventually the tree dies.

Macron government backs down after UK and Channel Islands governments agree to more licences

France has quietly dropped its threat of a trade war over post-Brexit access to fishing waters after the UK and Channel Islands governments agreed to issue 83 more operating licences before an EU deadline.

The offer did not fully meet the demands of Emmanuel Macron’s government but Brussels and Paris signalled their satisfaction after a period of increasingly bellicose rhetoric.

Group of six argued obstruction in London’s financial district was lawful protest against government inaction

Six climate crisis activists whose protest halted transport links serving London’s financial district have been acquitted by a jury.

The group of Extinction Rebellion protesters targeted the Docklands Light Railway (DLR), which runs commuters around the City, Canary Wharf and other parts of east and south-east London, saying they wanted to draw attention to the financial industry’s contribution to the climate emergency.

Experts were amazed to find population of the most endangered feline in the Americas living on the edge of Santiago, Chile, a city with a population of 8 million

• Andean cat, one of most elusive of animals, found near Chile's capital

A sycamore saved by activists who slept beneath it and a cypress on a beach are among the contenders

A sycamore tree saved from felling by Nottinghamshire rebels who slept beneath it and a Monterey Cypress growing on a Welsh beach that was also protected by people’s passion for trees are among 10 contenders for Britain’s Tree of the Year 2021.

Public voting is open for the Woodland Trust’s annual contest which the charity hopes will highlight the lack of legal protection for ancient and much-loved trees in Britain.

Open letter calls on IEA to help researchers by removing paywalls from global energy datasets

The International Energy Agency is facing calls to make the national energy data it collects from governments publicly available.

This would aid independent research, which in turn could help to accelerate the global transition to low-carbon energy.

As poorer nations pay the price for wealthy countries’ pollution, fighting climate injustice is a moral obligation

• Guardian and Observer charity Christmas appeal 2021: the fight for climate justice

“I remember thinking: if we make it out alive, how and where are we going to start all over again?” said Vanessa Nieuwenhuizen, who dragged her children to safety through rapidly rising flood waters in Samoa. Others in the Guardian’s interviews with people with personal experience of the climate emergency also talked vividly of the bewilderment and grief caused by wildfires, flooding and drought, of livelihoods lost and lives turned upside down.

“Every tree, every bush, every flower was burned and the whole ecosystem was wiped out,” recalled Antonis Vakos, a beekeeper from the island of Evia in Greece. For some the impact of extreme weather was sudden and catastrophic. For others it meant slow environmental degradation: entire ways of life gradually disappearing amid climate volatility, rising seas, and melting snow and ice. As Daharu Isah, a Nigerian farmer, expressed it: “The weather keeps playing tricks on me.”

Record numbers of endangered manatees are dying as polluted waters kill off their food sources

Florida wildlife officials will undertake a manatee feeding and rescue operation involving hand-feeding the mammals romaine lettuce, amid unprecedented mortality among the gentle aquatic creatures affectionately known as “sea cows”.

Typically, manatees return to warm water winter feeding grounds, where they feast on plentiful seagrass.

The best of this week’s wildlife pictures, including a two-day-old baby elephant, an invasive toad species and a bamboo shark

Study finds natural regrowth yields better results than human plantings and offers hope for climate recovery

Tropical forests can bounce back with surprising rapidity, a new study published today suggests.

An international group of researchers has found that tropical forests have the potential to almost fully regrow if they are left untouched by humans for about 20 years. This is due to a multidimensional mechanism whereby old forest flora and fauna help a new generation of forest grow – a natural process known as “secondary succession”.

The hubbub of an Indonesian reef should comes as no surprise: the world below is alive with sound

A coral reef in Indonesia thought to be dead has been discovered to be erupting with glorious uproar – the sound of fishes whooping and grunting as they communicate and search for food. It’s like Finding Nemo come to life. We shouldn’t be surprised. The ocean, like Prospero’s island in The Tempest, is full of strange noises. It crackles and it roars. Jacques Cousteau may have been a great ocean explorer, but when he made his film The Silent World in 1956, I wonder whether he was actually listening down there, through the bubbles of his aqualung.

Sound travels five times faster in the water. The ocean is a giant conductor of sound, an aquatic internet for every organism in it. They feel it in their bodies, and as they create sound, they are physically reaching out: from pistol shrimps that snap their claws so loudly that the sound makes them seem a hundred times bigger, to the great whales who, as Roger Payne, the first person to record and release whale song, has observed, make a sound as big as the ocean itself, and which can be heard for thousands of miles. A humpback in the Caribbean can be heard by a fellow whale off the coast of Europe. At 230 decibels (an aeroplane 100 feet away reaches 140dB), sperm whales are the loudest animals on Earth. Diving with these cetaceans in three-mile-deep waters off the Azores, I had to sign a consent form from the islands’ government, waiving liability should my hearing be damaged. Indeed, when I was first echo-located by a large female sperm whale, I felt her sonar clicks judder through my body like an MRI scanner.

Philip Hoare is an author whose books include Leviathan, Or the Whale

New research sees two-thirds of mollusc types only found living by hydrothermal vents added to IUCN’s red list of endangered species

Almost two-thirds of the hundreds of mollusc species that live in the deep sea are at risk of extinction, according to a new study that rings another alarm bell over the impact on biodiversity of mining the seabed.

The research, led from Queen’s University in Belfast, has led to 184 mollusc species living around hydrothermal vents being added to the global red list of threatened species, compiled by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). While researchers only studied molluscs that were endemic to the vents (hot springs on the ocean floor), they said they would expect similar extinction risks for crustaceans or any other species reliant on the vents.

Project backed by Boris Johnson likely to get go-ahead but is on site that rare birds travel though, campaigners say

A major new windfarm project that will power millions of homes is likely to be approved on Friday, but conservationists fear for the safety of endangered birds in the area.

The Norfolk Boreas offshore windfarm is due to get the green light from the government, the Guardian can reveal.

In Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel The Ministry for the Future, climate disasters kill tens of millions of people – and that’s a scenario he portrays as relatively optimistic

To really grasp the present, we need to imagine the future – then look back from it to better see the now. The angry climate kids do this naturally. The rest of us need to read good science fiction. A great place to start is Kim Stanley Robinson.

Robinson is one of the most brilliant writers of the genre. During Covid quarantine, I read 11 of his books, culminating in his instant classic The Ministry for the Future, which imagines several decades of climate politics starting this decade.

Scientists working on the Search For The Lost Fishes project have spotted the freshwater Batman River loach, which has not been seen since 1974

A freshwater fish that scientists thought was extinct has been found in south-east Turkey, after an absence of nearly 50 years.

“I’ve been researching this area for 12 years and this fish was always on my wishlist,” said Dr Cüneyt Kaya, associate professor at Recep Tayyip Erdoğan University. “It’s taken a long time. When I saw the distinctive bands on the fish, I felt so happy. It was a perfect moment.”

In the face of the impending climate catastrophe, there has been a growing clamour to repopulate the trillions of trees our planet has lost over the centuries. But large-scale tree planting is not helping, and in some cases it's creating more problems for the environment. Josh Toussaint-Strauss discusses how we've been getting tree planting wrong, and what we should be doing instead to safeguard precious ecosystems and reduce greenhouse gases

Trump’s energy department blocked a rule intended to phase out less efficient bulbs. Now Biden plans to move forward, slowly

The Biden administration has moved to reverse the depredations endured by one of the more unusual targets of Donald Trump’s culture wars during his time as US president: the humble lightbulb.

The US department of energy has put forward a new standard for the energy efficiency of lightbulbs that would essentially banish the era of older, incandescent technology in favor of LED lighting.

Climate change is happening, and businesses know it. So why don’t company reports show it?

Last week, Shell walked away from 170 million barrels of oil off the coast of Shetland, declaring the “economic case for investment” too weak. As might be expected with such a politically sensitive venture, there has been much speculation about what other factors might have been at play, whether pressure from Nicola Sturgeon or from Whitehall. But let’s try another question: how did Shell ever decide that there was an economic case? After all, the energy giant does not deny that its entire business will have to change. It advertises its “target to become a net zero emissions” company by 2050, publishes a “sustainability report” and partners with environmental organisations around the world. Yet little of this environmental awareness shows up in the hard numbers.

The company’s latest accounts features this disclaimer: “Shell’s operating plans, outlooks, budgets and pricing assumptions do not reflect our net zero emissions target.” In other words: whatever the oil giant says is not what it thinks.

Farmers and rural business owners call for stricter rules and enforcement

Fly-tipping incidents in England increased last year, with household waste accounting for by far the biggest proportion of the problem, which has been worsened by the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic.

From March 2020 to March 2021 in England, 1.13m fly-tipping incidents were dealt with by local authorities, an increase of 16% on the 980,000 reported in the previous year, according to data released by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs on Wednesday. Higher numbers of incidents were reached in 2007-09, but the way the data is collated has changed, so direct comparisons with years before 2018 are not possible.