The Guardian

Industry says New South Wales is ‘up there with best global practice’ as environment minister aims for 52% of new car sales by 2030-31

The New South Wales government will waive stamp duty on electric vehicle purchases and provide subsidies for 25,000 new purchases as part of a $490m strategy to drive uptake of EVs.

Under the plan announced on Sunday, people buying battery and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles priced under $78,000 from 1 September will pay no stamp duty, and $3,000 rebates will be available on the same day for the first 25,000 private purchases of electric vehicles priced under $68,750.

Controversial plan to build 3,000 houses in Sussex will have ‘catastrophic impact’ on environment, say wildlife campaigners

Two of the UK’s oldest institutions – Eton College and trout fishing – are heading for an unexpected, watery confrontation. The battle has been sparked by an announcement by the £42,000-a-year boarding school that it plans to sell off 500 acres of East Sussex for a massive housing development. The move has triggered widespread anger, with infuriated members of the fishing community arguing that the proposal is a threat to one of the most important spawning grounds of the sea trout in England.

The proposed 3,000-house new town would be built at North Barnes Farm, near East Chiltington, at the edge of the South Downs National Park. The Bevern stream, part of the River Ouse catchment area, runs through the land and is a nationally important spawning ground for sea trout.

After more than 20 years watching from the cliffs of Botany Bay, Wayne Reynolds’ passion is having tangible results

He may have seen it tens of thousands of times before but when Wayne Reynolds spots a whale emerging from the water, he reacts with the excitement of a child pointing out a rollercoaster at an amusement park.

“Oh wow, there’s a minke and her calf,” he yells out with boyish enthusiasm from the rocky cliff at Potter Point in Kurnell, in Sydney’s south. “I just go into auto-mode, I can’t help it.”

The ‘new energy economy’ unfolding all around us is once again hostage to Australia’s gruesome, internecine climate change politics

On Thursday morning, shortly after the resources minister, Keith Pitt, finished his “net zero by 2050: not on your nelly” sortie on the ABC, the governor of the reserve bank, Philip Lowe, touched down in Queensland Nationals country.

Lowe went to Toowoomba to deliver a keynote address at the Australian Farm Institute conference. The speech was principally about household debt, house prices and whether Australians could ever expect a pay rise. But during the questions that followed the presentation, the RBA governor was asked about decarbonisation in the agriculture sector.

Companies should be subject to globally agreed carbon floor price to reach Paris climate goals

Companies with high greenhouse gas emissions should be subject to a carbon price of $75 a tonne of carbon dioxide, the International Monetary Fund has said, as a way of reaching the goals of the Paris climate agreement.

A carbon floor price would mean that companies, including energy generators and heavy industries, would have to pay for the carbon they produce. At present, many countries and regions have their own carbon pricing systems, but there is no globally agreed carbon price.

The best of this week’s wildlife pictures, including courting gannets and sleeping elephants

Welcome to the worst drought in an estimated 1,200 years

If water is the lifeblood of planet Earth, the American south-west is in big trouble.

John Wesley Powell, the one-armed US army civil war veteran who led the first white expedition down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon – a daring boat run in 1869 – later became an ethnographer who wrote a prescient 1878 government paper titled: Report on the Lands of the Arid Regions of the United States. In it, he unflinchingly described the scarcity of water, and summarized that much of the American south-west, if it must be settled, should be settled lightly and modestly. Overpopulate it, and it will be unforgiving.

Research sheds more light on the giant ‘living fossils’ once thought extinct but which have survived since the age of the dinosaurs

The coelacanth – a giant, mysterious fish that has survived since the time of the dinosaurs – can live for 100 years, a study has found.

The slow-moving fish, which grow to be the size of a human, are nicknamed a “living fossil”, and also grow at a very slow pace.

Countries urged to take urgent action on managing water and land and tackling the climate emergency

Drought is a hidden global crisis that risks becoming “the next pandemic” if countries do not take urgent action on water and land management and tackling the climate emergency, the UN has said.

At least 1.5 billion people have been directly affected by drought this century, and the economic cost over roughly that time has been estimated at $124bn (£89bn). The true cost is likely to be many times higher because such estimates do not include much of the impact in developing countries, according to a report published on Thursday.

Government accused of disregarding coroner’s words about death of Ella Kissi-Debrah, aged 9

The government has refused to commit to an immediate lowering of legal levels of air pollution as a result of the death of a nine-year-old child from toxic air.

Ella Kissi-Debrah was the first person in the UK to have air pollution listed as a cause of their death in a historic ruling by a coroner earlier this year.

Colony of small-flowered tongue orchid plants discovered in rooftop garden of investment bank Nomura

A rare species of orchid believed to have been extinct in the UK has been discovered on the roof of an office building in the City of London.

Serapis parviflora, also known as small-flowered tongue orchid, was found growing in the 11th-floor rooftop garden of the Japanese investment bank Nomura. It is usually found in the Mediterranean basin and the Atlantic coast of France, Spain and Portugal.

Alauda Airspeeder Mk3, a four-metre-long multicopter, makes unmanned test flights but team hopes to shift to pilots

An electric flying race car has taken flight for the first time in Australia, ahead of a proposed series of remotely piloted races later in the year.

The Alauda Airspeeder Mk3, a four-metre-long multicopter, has taken its first unmanned test flights in the South Australian desert, with approval from Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority.

Estimated 3.4m children learn in unhealthy environment, says charity behind research

Millions of British children attend schools where air pollution is worse than the World Health Organization limit, campaigners have said.

An analysis found that more than a quarter of schools, from nurseries to sixth-form colleges, were in locations with high levels of small particle pollution. This means an estimated 3.4 million children are learning in an unhealthy environment, said Global Action Plan (Gap), the charity behind the research that was released on Clean Air Day on Thursday.

Overall use of drugs has fallen but treatments of a ‘critically important’ class rose from 2015 to 2019

UK pig farms’ increasing use of critically important antibiotics for human health has prompted concerns about farming practices and efforts to reduce reliance on the drugs.

Previously unpublished industry data seen by the Guardian, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and Vet Record shows the use of a class of antibiotics prescribed for various infections in humans more than doubled on UK pig farms between 2015 and 2019.

eBioAtlas programme aims to identify fish, birds, amphibians and land animals in freshwater systems from the Ganges to the Mekong

Concealed by the turbid, swirling waters of the Amazon, the Mekong and the Congo, the biodiversity of the world’s great rivers has largely remained a mystery to scientists. But now a multimillion-pound project aims to describe and identify the web of life in major freshwater ecosystems around the world with “gamechanging” DNA technology.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and UK-based environmental DNA (eDNA) specialists NatureMetrics have launched a partnership to take thousands of water samples from freshwater river systems like the Ganges and the Niger delta to identify the fish, birds, amphibians and land animals that live in and around them.

Data shows only 127 of 323 cities had acceptable PM 2.5 levels despite drop in emissions during lockdowns

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More than half of European cities are still plagued by dirty air, new data shows, despite a reduction in traffic emissions and other pollutants during last year’s lockdowns.

Cities in eastern Europe, where coal is still a major source of energy, fared worst of all, with Nowy Sącz in Poland having the most polluted air, followed by Cremona in Italy where industry and geography tend to concentrate air pollution, and Slavonski Brod in Croatia.

Former fields were naturally regenerated with oak trees growing from acorns buried by the birds

More than half the trees in two new woodlands in lowland England have been planted not by landowners, charities or machines but by jays.

Former fields rapidly turned into native forest with no plastic tree-guards, watering or expensive management, according to a new study which boosts the case for using natural regeneration to meet ambitious woodland creation targets.

Trial of diverting cotton textiles from landfill to farm has potential to recycle ‘huge amount’ of cotton material

There are lots of places where unwanted cotton clothes could go to escape landfill – the op-shop, a garage sale or turned into rags for tradies.

But what about shredding them and putting them back into the soil? And what if, in a world of perfect circularity, that soil was on a cotton farm?

Two people injured as protester parachutes into stadium before Germany v France match in Munich

Police in Munich are investigating a Greenpeace activist for “several offences” after the 38-year-old parachuted into the stadium before Germany’s Euro 2020 match against France, injuring two people.

The stunt, which Greenpeace said did not go as planned, was captured on camera shortly before the game kicked off on Tuesday evening. The activist was seen flying over the stadium in Munich strapped to a yellow parachute microlight aircraft before apparently getting tangled in overhead camera wires.

Help is needed to replace gas boilers with low-carbon alternatives, warn builders, energy firms and charities

Households on low incomes should be supplied with free heat pumps in order to kickstart the market for low-carbon heating equipment and meet the UK’s climate targets, experts have told the government.

Heat pumps can currently cost thousands of pounds to install, but the more that are installed, the faster that cost is likely to come down. They are widely regarded as the best way to replace the UK’s gas boilers and reduce carbon dioxide emissions from homes.