The Guardian

Den trees used by the endangered species are off-limits to loggers so campaigners – among them former Treasury head Ken Henry and MP Sophie Scamps – register them to save them

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Greater glider spotting is a meditative thing, says Bulga local Steve Fredericks.

“A bad night of glider spotting is better than a good night of television.

Chris Packham calls for meeting with attorney general as prominent figures condemn long jail terms for M25 activists

Chris Packham has called for a meeting with the attorney general for England and Wales as he joined a chorus of prominent voices condemning long jail terms for Just Stop Oil protesters.

Speaking after five activists were sentenced to up to five years for planning protests on the M25, the broadcaster and naturalist said: “Be clear, be very, very clear, this is not just about climate activism.

The best of this week’s wildlife photographs from around the world

From a Grand Designs-style property nestled underground to a remote timber-framed home on a hillside

Friends of the Earth says older people and young children are most at risk in heat-vulnerable neighbourhoods

Inadequate climate protections mean at least 6 million lives are at risk from extreme heat in England, an analysis has found.

A report by the campaign group Friends of the Earth found older people and young children were the most high-risk groups for heatwaves, with 1.7 million under-5s and 4.3 million people over 65 living in the most heat-vulnerable neighbourhoods in England.

The pernicious, oppressive era of arresting people for holding signs or merely walking down the street must come to an end

How do you know when protest tactics are working? When governments ban them. The oppressive laws introduced by the previous government – the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and the Public Order Act 2023 – are a tick list of effective political engagement. Everything from locking on and digging tunnels to actions on roads, at airports, oil refineries or newspapers, even marching down a street, has been criminalised. Why? Because these methods work. If they didn’t, the government wouldn’t have bothered.

The Conservatives justified their draconian measures with the claim that they prevented “disruption to the public”. But had they cared about disruption, they would have done all they could to prevent climate breakdown. Nothing is more disruptive than the flickering and eventual collapse of Earth systems. If you believe a few people sitting in the street is a major impediment to traffic, take a look at what a sea surge, a flash flood, a windstorm or a rail-buckling, road-melting, bridge-jamming heat event can do to transport infrastructure.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

Driven out by hunting and habitat loss, the snow-white birds are now nesting and breeding in a few pockets in England

With their long, spoon-shaped beaks, it is perhaps little surprise that the RSPB has nicknamed the offspring of a spoonbill a “teaspoon”.

It has been a bumper year for the snow-white wading birds, which have been found nesting and breeding in Cambridgeshire for the first time since the 17th century.

Union says members being ‘kept up at night’ over failure to commit to continue payments at current rate

Farmers are facing a “cliff edge” as the Labour government refuses to commit to maintaining the agriculture budget for England, the president of the National Farmers’ Union has said.

The issue is one of the first pressures Labour is facing over its tight fiscal rules, along with a rebellion on the party’s refusal to remove the two-child benefit cap.

Organisers working to ensure safe environment for attenders in October after guerrillas’ warning of disruption

Colombian authorities have insisted it will be safe to attend a UN biodiversity summit in Cali later this year, after a dissident rebel group threatened to disrupt the event.

This week Central General Staff (EMC), a guerrilla faction that rejected the country’s 2016 peace agreement, said the UN nature summit Cop16 would “fail”, in a post on X addressed to the Colombian president, Gustavo Petro.

Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow the biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on X for all the latest news and features.

Campaigners receive longest ever sentences for non-violent protest after being convicted of conspiracy to cause public nuisance

Five supporters of the Just Stop Oil climate campaign who conspired to cause gridlock on London’s orbital motorway have been sentenced to lengthy jail terms.

Roger Hallam, Daniel Shaw, Louise Lancaster, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu and Cressida Gethin were found guilty last week of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance for coordinating direct action protests on the M25 over four days in November 2022.

It’s July! It should be all about picnics and ice-creams, not plastic rain ponchos. I have officially lost my joie de vivre

That’s it, I’m calling it: this is the worst summer ever. Despite the fact we are currently seeing a fleeting glimpse of sun, the weather has been notably dismal. The Met Office says it could be the coldest summer of the past 24 years. Last week, it started raining inside our bedroom as well as outside, and, after days and days of cold and wet weather, that felt like the final straw. This is my Sad girl summer. Having never before suffered from seasonal affective disorder, I have officially lost my joie de vivre. And I know I’m not alone. Moaning about the weather may be an Olympic sport for the British, but this feels different. During social interactions people seem too listless and despondent to even have a proper whinge. They just shake their heads, sadly, while staring at their shoes. This can’t go on. Can it?

Well, apparently it can, with some predictions saying we will be enduring this autumnal chill until, well, actual autumn. The thought of entering winter without having fully charged up on sunshine fills me with a looming sense of horror. Having grown up in the mountains of north Wales, I have an abnormally high tolerance for rain. I’m basically a bog witch comprised of 60% water and 40% lichen. I can spend days indoors and not get cabin fever. Saying that, wet Welsh weather is partly why I moved south. My dad, who is visiting at the moment, treats London as if it’s the Costa del Sol. Look at everyone eating outdoors, like Spaniards! But though the sun may be shining as I write this, we know the drill by now: it peeks out for just long enough to remind us that it exists, before retreating behind another heavy, grey cloud fecund with rain. Emergency-poncho-clad tourists haunt the streets like plasticky ghosts.

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist and author

A sustainable project aims to repurpose encroacher bush to create building blocks to solve Namibia’s housing crisis

“People think the house would smell because the blocks are made of all-natural products, but it doesn’t smell,” says Kristine Haukongo. “Sometimes, there is a small touch of wood, but otherwise it’s completely odourless.”

Haukongo is the senior cultivator at the research group MycoHab and her job is pretty unusual. She grows oyster mushrooms on chopped-down invasive weeds before the waste is turned into large, solid brown slabs – mycoblocks – that will be used, it’s hoped, to build Namibian homes.

CCC says delays and reverses under Rishi Sunak have left UK drastically off track from Paris commitments

The new Labour government must oversee a massive ramping up of renewable energy generation in this parliament or the UK will breach its international obligations under the Paris agreement, the government’s climate watchdog has said.

The Conservative government left the country drastically off track to meet its international commitments, despite setting the carbon-cutting target before hosting the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow in 2021, the Committee on Climate Change found in its most recent annual report.

Those pushing the nuclear option are making some questionable claims about the capacity of renewable energy

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Advocacy for the Coalition’s hopes to build nuclear power plants is increasingly coming with large side-orders of misinformation, not just on the speed or costs of nuclear but on renewables.

Dr Adi Paterson, the chair of the Nuclear for Australia advocacy group, has taken to attacking the credentials of CSIRO experts while going hyperbolic with his rhetoric.

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Snakebites, the ‘deadliest of neglected tropical diseases’ often impact rural communities the most, but a new study offers hope

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A commonly used blood thinner can be used as an antidote to cobra venom, an international study has found, research that a Queensland expert has called “really exciting”.

In the study, published in the Journal of Science Translational Medicine on Thursday, Prof Nicholas Casewell described snakebites as the “deadliest of neglected tropical diseases, with its burden landing overwhelmingly on rural communities in low and middle income countries”.

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Fourteen attorneys general petition federal emergency officials as millions in US under excessive heat advisories

Fourteen state attorneys general are urging the federal government to declare extreme heat and wildfire smoke major disasters. The petition comes as millions of people in the south and north-east face excessive heat advisories, and large swaths of the western US and Canada battle ongoing wildfires.

“The likelihood of high-severity extreme heat and wildfire smoke events is increasing due in part to climate change,” wrote the Arizona attorney general, Kris Mayes, in a letter submitted to the Federal Emergency Management Agency on Tuesday. “We urge Fema to update its regulations to prepare for this hotter, smokier future.”

The NHS, child poverty, defence: Labour is selling itself on its ability to get some big things done

Britain’s new government has just reached the point where things get serious. The king’s speech marks the ceremonial divide between Labour’s pinch-yourself fortnight following the 4 July election landslide and the start of the hard slog of delivery, by which Keir Starmer’s government will actually be judged next time. It’s the end of the overture and the start of the drama itself, the part that really matters.

Before the election there was a debate among those around Starmer about how to approach the opening days in government. Some wanted the new government to immediately trigger a blizzard of activity to show that Labour was active and a contrast to the Conservatives. In this view, promoted in particular by Starmer’s chief of staff, Sue Gray, the first 100 days were crucial, an agenda-driven opportunity to reignite confidence in government.

There are fewer than 400 of critically endangered species left and sighting gives ‘glimmer of hope’

A critically endangered North Atlantic right whale has been spotted off the coast of Ireland for the first time in more than a century.

Holidaymaker Adrian Maguire, from County Tyrone in Northern Ireland, glimpsed the large, dark body of the whale on the surface of the water while out fishing for mackerel.

Regulators approve Meatly pet product, cultivated chicken made from growing cells

Lab-grown pet food is to hit UK shelves as Britain becomes the first country in Europe to approve cultivated meat.

The Animal and Plant Health Agency and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs have approved the product from the company Meatly.

Footage shows severe flooding across Toronto after the Canadian city was hit by three big storms in recent days. The Canadian rapper Drake shared a video on Instagram appearing to show parts of his home submerged in flood water. Authorities say the storm left 167,000 people without power and several flights were delayed or cancelled. At least 14 people were rescued