The Guardian

Exclusive: With Brazil’s politicians, agribusiness organisations and global traders piling on the pressure, the highly successful 2006 Soy Moratorium is under threat

One of the cornerstones of Amazon rainforest protection – the Soy Moratorium – is under unprecedented pressure from Brazilian agribusiness organisations, politicians, and global trading companies, the Guardian has learned.

Soy is one of the most widely grown crops in Brazil, and posed a huge deforestation threat to the Amazon rainforest until stakeholders voluntarily agreed to impose a moratorium and no longer source it from the region in 2006.

Downgrading species’ protection status for political gain puts decades of conservation efforts at risk, says WWF

Europe’s wolves will lose their “strict protection” status, alarming conservationists who fear for the survival of an animal brought back from the brink of local extinction.

A committee charged with saving wildlife took the wolf’s protection status down a notch on Tuesday after members voted through a proposal from the European Union that lowers the bar for shooting a wolf.

The Baku Cop29 talks were marked by division and self-interest, with rancorous meddling right until the end

• Fiona Harvey is an environment editor at the Guardian

When I first visited Azerbaijan this spring, one fixture of the Baku skyline was unmissable. The bright orange of flaring – the product of the oil and gas extraction that makes up 90% of Azerbaijan’s export revenues – lit up the night sky, not far from the Olympic stadium, where nearly 200 nations would gather in November for the Cop29 climate summit.

Flaring burns methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, and is a major source of carbon emissions. If all the world’s flared gas were captured instead, it could power sub-Saharan Africa. But that entails installing new equipment, so producers don’t bother.

Fiona Harvey is an environment editor at the Guardian

Survey finds 25 percentage point gender gap across all age brackets on whether nuclear power would be positive for the country, with majority of men saying it would

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New data points to a stark gender split in attitudes towards nuclear energy, with women much more likely to say they don’t support it or think the risks are too great.

Research company DemosAu surveyed 6,000 people on behalf of the Australian Conservation Foundation and found 26% of women thought nuclear energy would be good for Australia, compared with 51% of men.

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Exclusive: Campaigners say company’s apparent abandoning of 2030 pledge is a ‘masterclass in greenwashing’

Coca-Cola has been accused of quietly abandoning a pledge to achieve a 25% reusable packaging target by 2030 in what campaigners call a “masterclass in greenwashing”.

The company has been previously found by researchers to be among the world’s most polluting brands when it comes to plastic waste.

Numbers of red and grey squirrels rising, survey finds, but more greys are present in last remaining red strongholds

Campaigners are concerned about the rising presence of grey squirrels in England’s last remaining strongholds of reds.

An annual distribution survey of about 250 sites in woodlands and gardens across northern England shows that occupancy figures for red and grey squirrels are increasing – but they are rising more steeply for greys.

Vanuatu leads the charge of several nations arguing developed nations have a legal responsibility beyond non-binding promises

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Australia has been accused of undermining its Pacific neighbours in a landmark international legal case after it argued that high-emitting countries are not obliged to act on the climate crisis beyond their non-binding commitments to the 2015 Paris agreement.

In the case before the UN’s international court of justice (ICJ), Vanuatu is leading an argument brought by several Pacific nations and developing states – including Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu – that developed countries have a legal responsibility beyond existing UN frameworks. The case does not specify the names of countries that would fall under the definition of high emitters.

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New GCSE was announced under previous government in 2022 but now ‘sitting in limbo’, says Mary Colwell, one of its architects

The natural history GCSE has been shelved because it is “seen as a Conservative party initiative”, one of the architects of the proposed new qualification has said.

The conservationist and campaigner Mary Colwell told the Guardian she was “hugely frustrated” with the halt to the proposed new GCSE, which had been announced in 2022 and was supposed to be taught in schools by 2025.

Paul Watson, an early Greenpeace member, says his imprisonment in Greenland is a ‘political case’

The anti-whaling activist Paul Watson will learn within 14 days whether he will be extradited to Japan, a court has been told, as his four-month imprisonment in Greenland was extended.

At a hearing in Nuuk on Monday, the capital of the autonomous territory of Denmark, the judge Lars-Christian Sinkbæk said that Watson, who turned 74 today, would continue to be detained in a high security prison pending a decision from the Danish government. Watson’s legal team immediately submitted an appeal to Greenland’s high court.

The word ‘probably’ will haunt this fish for the rest of its days – a deflating description for a cute, toxic creature

Pufferfish are cute, and most pufferfish are toxic. Like people, they spend their weeks moving between states of puffed up and deflated. Or, really, three states: normal, puffed up and then the hangover after the puffing up. Ironically, the pufferfish toxin, called tetrodotoxin, is deadly because it stops a person’s diaphragm from moving – in other words, it stops you from being able to puff yourself up. And you could see that as a lesson for wanting to eat them in the first place.

You’re wondering what is inside a blown-up pufferfish, how they inflate. Firstly: it is not air, or else they would pop up and out of the water like a balloon in a swimming pool. Also, air is hard to come by down there. They turn themselves into absurd-looking spherical objects by sucking water – something called, grossly, “buccal pumping” – into their extremely elastic stomachs. They don’t have ribs, which helps. This gives predators a fright – but perhaps more to the point, large spheres are hard to swallow.

Readers are led to believe a short-on-facts advertorial exhorting government to let companies extract more gas is straight news coverage

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The big news on Monday morning was that the story splashed across the front of News Corp’s biggest-selling tabloid newspapers wasn’t news at all. It was an advertorial paid for by a fossil fuel industry. Not that readers glancing at page one of the Daily Telegraph, Herald Sun, Courier-Mail or Adelaide Advertiser were let in on this secret.

Instead, they were sold a lie – that the story was straight news coverage, in some cases described as an “exclusive” or a “special report”, on how (in the words of the Courier-Mail) Australia must “step on the gas” as it was the “only way to avoid higher bills, blackouts”.

Authorities accused of ‘wasting time in court’ rather than working to fix the problem in towns across the Northern Territory

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Lawyers for Aboriginal residents of a remote town in the Northern Territory say it is “shocking and disappointing” that the NT government is trying to overturn a landmark court ruling which found it was legally required to provide them safe drinking water.

The challenge is the latest development in a five-year legal stoush between the NT government and residents of Laramba, an Aboriginal community 205km north-west of Alice Springs, who took the government to court over elevated levels of uranium in their drinking water.

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Researchers at ANU found no real difference between the climate opinions of regional and urban Australians. Remember that as we head into the next federal election, with renewable energy on the front line

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I have many heritages: Chinese, Irish, Anglo and Japanese among them. I am a journalist. I grew up in the city but have lived in the country for 30 years. How should I define my identity?

Rural life has colonised my writing life. But I would hazard a guess I am not fully accepted as rural in many circles. I am certainly not the mythical bush person of legend.

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Ahead of rally and public hearings, community organiser says ‘risky scheme’ is being pushed for region with no details or consultation

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Community, environment and health groups will rally together against the Coalition’s nuclear proposal for the Latrobe Valley in Traralgon, as public hearings for a nuclear inquiry take place in town on Tuesday.

Adrian Cosgriff, a member of community advocacy group Voices of the Valley who worked in Gippsland’s oil and gas industry before retiring, said the region needed a decent plan for jobs as its coal-fired power stations shut down.

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With Biden soon to leave the White House, Republicans start an assault on the Environmental Protection Agency

Donald Trump’s allies have fired the opening salvoes of his coming administration’s attack on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the federal agency that enforces and regulates laws on air, soil, and water quality among other crucial environmental and health issues.

In a letter from Republican House leadership to EPA the administrator, Michael Regan, Republicans trained their sites on the agency’s scientific integrity policies that are designed to insulate scientists and research from political interference.

Vanuatu envoy makes claim as landmark hearing gets under way at international court of justice in The Hague

A handful of countries should be held legally responsible for the ongoing impacts of climate change, representatives of vulnerable nations have told judges at the international court of justice (ICJ).

During a landmark hearing at the Peace Palace in The Hague, which began on Monday, Ralph Regenvanu, Vanuatu’s special envoy for climate change and environment, said responsibility for the climate crisis lay squarely with “a handful of readily identifiable states” that had produced the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions but stood to lose the least from the impacts.

Group of 85 countries and blocs press for ambition in plastic waste treaty after no agreement was reached in Busan

Binding global targets to cut plastic production must be at the centre of any continuing negotiations to secure the world’s first treaty to tackle plastic waste, a group of 85 countries has said.

Talks in Busan, South Korea, attempting to secure agreement between more than 200 countries on the details of a plastic pollution treaty ended in failure over the weekend.

Direct flights from the US to Nuuk expected to double next year but there are concerns about the expected influx

The capital’s new airport has been opened, two more are in the making, and expectations are high: the Americans are coming to Greenland.

On Thursday, the first ever international flight into Nuuk, the most populous settlement on the autonomous Danish territory, landed to cheers on the ground and in the cabin of Air Greenland flight GL781 where passengers were served miniature bottles of Nicolas Feuillatte champagne.

Leading the charge towards clean energy would bring some much-needed positive momentum to international climate policy

When Australia announces its 2035 emissions target to the world, there will be a unique opportunity to promote Australia’s ambition to help other countries decarbonise through exports of renewable energy-based commodities, while coal and gas exports will fall.

Coal and gas exports from Australia are equivalent to well over a billion tonnes of CO2 when burned in other countries. That is around 3% of global fossil fuel CO2 emissions – far more than Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions at home that the national emissions target applies to.

Worcestershire town has been flooded seven times in past four years and shop owners can no longer afford insurance

In the aftermath of its latest flood, the town centre of Tenbury Wells was a scene of chaos. The main street was caked with a layer of mud, shop windows were smashed and piles of sodden furniture and wares, all ruined, were heaped in the street.

“On Monday when we came in we wanted to leave, lock the doors and just disappear,” said Richard Sharman, the owner of Garlands Flowers. “We’ve lost about £6,000 and we won’t get a penny back. Six weeks ago we lost about £4,000 in a flood.”