The Guardian

London, and the other areas in the south of England, were hit by torrential downpours that resulted in significant flooding on Monday night.

London fire brigade said its 999 control officers received more than 150 calls to flooding incidents in the capital. Forecasters said the torrential showers were expected to continue through most of the evening

Letter to world heritage committee comes as minister embarks on week of lobbying against change

Australia’s major environment groups have written to the UN’s world heritage committee, urging it to put the Great Barrier Reef on its “in danger” list as the Morrison government ramps up its lobbying against the change.

The environment minister, Sussan Ley, was due to land in Europe on Monday evening for a week-long campaign against the in-danger recommendation for the ocean jewel.

Ingrid Horrocks learned to swim in the wild – but no river or lake in the region she grew up in is ‘swimmable’ any more

For most of those of us who swim, swimming is not something we think about: it is something we do.

I learned to swim in the sea, as some of us did in Aotearoa New Zealand in the early 1980s, walking down to the beach with my Auckland primary school. One of my earliest memories is of graduating to the “heads under” group and of sucking salt from my hair.

Minnesota pet owners warned not to release fish into wild, where they wreak havoc on native species

Authorities in Minnesota have appealed to aquarium owners to stop releasing pet fish into waterways, after several huge goldfish were pulled from a local lake.

Officials in Burnsville, about 15 miles south of Minneapolis, said released goldfish can grow to several times their normal size and wreak havoc on indigenous species.

After 46 years, I’m lowering my expectations. Who needs more than ice-cream and a few salty snacks?

Summer is here: I can smell it (lighter-fuel-doused charcoal and the ammonia punch of After Bite dabbed on giant angry weals) and hear it (strimmers and mowers and the ice-cream van). I can feel it too: a slither of itchy unease at the core of my being, a tight-chested sense that everything is slipping out of my control when I see a few sun icons on my phone.

“Which summer tribe are you?” the magazine quizzes ask, but I’m not mermaidcore, Riviera chic or Amish prairie cowgirl: I’m “looking longingly at cardigans” – and not just because this season has got off to such a damp and chilly start.

Ambitious draft goals to halt biodiversity loss revealed, with proposed changes to food production expected to ‘raise eyebrows’

Eliminating plastic pollution, reducing pesticide use by two-thirds, halving the rate of invasive species introduction and eliminating $500bn (£360bn) of harmful environmental government subsidies a year are among the targets in a new draft of a Paris-style UN agreement for biodiversity loss.

The goals set out by the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) to help halt and reverse the ecological destruction of Earth by the end of the decade also include protecting at least 30% of the world’s oceans and land and providing a third of climate crisis mitigation through nature by 2030.

People are dying. Aquatic animals are baking in their shells. Fruit is being cooked on the tree. It’s time to act

Human beings crave clarity, immediacy, landmark events. We seek turning points, because our minds are good at recognizing the specific – this time, this place, this sudden event, this tangible change. This is why we were never very good, most of us, at comprehending climate change in the first place. The climate was an overarching, underlying condition of our lives and planet, and the change was incremental and intricate and hard to recognize if you weren’t keeping track of this species or that temperature record. Climate catastrophe is a slow shattering of the stable patterns that governed the weather, the seasons, the species and migrations, all the beautifully orchestrated systems of the holocene era we exited when we manufactured the anthropocene through a couple of centuries of increasingly wanton greenhouse gas emissions and forest destruction.

This spring, when I saw the shockingly low water of Lake Powell, I thought that maybe this summer would be a turning point. At least for the engineering that turned the southwest’s Colorado River into a sort of plumbing system for human use, with two huge dams that turned stretches of a mighty river into vast pools of stagnant water dubbed Lake Powell, on the eastern Utah/Arizona border, and Lake Mead, in southernmost Nevada. It’s been clear for years that the overconfident planners of the 1950s failed to anticipate that, while they tinkered with the river, industrial civilization was also tinkering with the systems that fed it.

State officials report ‘unprecedented’ deaths due to starvation as pollution and algal blooms take toll

More manatees have died already this year than in any other year in Florida’s recorded history, primarily from starvation due to the loss of seagrass beds, state officials have said.

The Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission reported that 841 manatee deaths were recorded between 1 January and 2 July, breaking the previous record of 830 that died during the whole of 2013 because of an outbreak of toxic red tide.

When Unesco recommended the reef be placed on the ‘in danger’ list, the Coalition’s response was to shift the blame. We must do better

• Unesco recommends reef world heritage site be listed as ‘in danger’
• Timeline: decades of damage and Australia’s fight to stop ‘in danger’ listing

Escaping responsibility has become the recurrent theme of the Morrison government. Whether it is the glacial progress of the vaccination rollout, dealing with the megafires two summers ago, or the parlous state of the Great Barrier Reef, someone else is always to blame.

When Unesco released its recommendation to the World Heritage Committee in June to place the Great Barrier Reef on the “in danger” list, the first reaction of the federal government was to blame China.

Exclusive: Environment officials raised concerns that damage to habitat on Robbins Island could be difficult to offset

A proposed new windfarm on Robbins Island off north-west Tasmania could threaten a disease-free Tasmanian devil population, according to federal environment officials, who say the damage to habitat could be difficult to offset.

Correspondence obtained by Guardian Australia under freedom of information laws shows officials raised concerns that no comparable habitat existed anywhere else to compensate for the effects the project could have on the island’s unique devil colony, which is considered a stronghold for the survival of the species.

The Delta variant is rattling markets. But the temptation to soothe them with quantitative easing must be resisted

Falling share prices. Investors piling into the safe haven of bonds. Rising infection rates of the Delta variant of coronavirus. The events of the past week have demonstrated one thing clearly: this isn’t over yet.

A couple of months ago the way out of the crisis looked clear. Immunisation programmes were allowing developed countries to remove restrictions on activity. A pick-up in growth was expected to continue without interruption. Rising government bond yields were seen as a sign of life returning to normal.

Wildlife officials in Montana stake out chicken coop visited by same grizzly that fatally mauled camper

A grizzly bear that pulled a California woman from her tent and killed her has been fatally shot by wildlife officials, who used night-vision goggles to stake out a chicken coop it had also raided near the small Montana town of Ovando.

They shot the bear shortly after midnight on Friday when it approached a trap set near the coop about two miles from Ovando where 65-year-old Leah Davis Lokan of Chico, California, was killed on Tuesday, said Greg Lemon with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks.

The world was watching as a judge formalised into law a government’s duty of care to protect under-18s from the climate crisis

At about 9.30am on Thursday morning, 17-year-old Melbourne school student Anjali Sharma was walking her two-year-old kelpie-cross dog Maya down to the creek when the notifications started buzzing on her phone.

“I was getting updates from the lawyers in the court,” says Sharma, who as we speak is about to take another call from a journalist at the Times of India.

Capturing stunning rock climbing images requires a specialised set of logistic, physical and artistic skills. In this episode of Art of Photography,  internationally renowned climbing photographer Simon Carter outlines some of the techniques he has used to capture some of the world’s most spectacular rock climbing photographs of the past 25 years

• From Devil’s Tower to the Grampians: Simon Carter’s rock climbing photography – in pictures
• More from Guardian Australia's Art of Photography series

Company has been issued with a huge fine but those affected by its actions are finding it hard to celebrate

• Southern Water fined £90m over sewage
• Timeline: privatisation to pollution fines

The town of Whitstable sits on the north Kent coast, home to the oysters that have brought it worldwide fame from waters that are some of the most protected in Europe.

Celebrities, royals, tourists and locals flock to its annual festival to taste the native Whitstable oyster. But in 2013 the pollution in the sea where the famous oysters feed was so extreme that the Prince of Wales, the Duchess of Cornwall and other high-profile guests had to be served Irish shellfish hastily imported for the occasion.

Privatised firm dumped billions of litres of raw sewage off north Kent and Hampshire coasts to avoid costs and penalties

• Timeline: from privatisation to pollution fines
• ‘The sea was milky white’: how the scandal unfolded

Southern Water has been fined a record £90m for deliberately dumping billions of litres of raw sewage into protected seas over several years for its own financial gain.

Mr Justice Jeremy Johnson, sentencing the privatised water company, said it had discharged between 16bn and 21bn litres of raw sewage into some of the most precious, delicate environments in the country.

The best of this week’s wildlife pictures, including a hungry hippo, coot chick and mother and basking turtle

Harmful PFAS chemicals are being used to hold food, drink and cosmetics, with unknown consequences for human health

Many of the world’s plastic containers and bottles are contaminated with toxic PFAS, and new data suggests that it’s probably leaching into food, drinks, personal care products, pharmaceuticals, cleaning products and other items at potentially high levels.

It’s difficult to say with precision how many plastic containers are contaminated and what it means for consumers’ health because regulators and industry have done very little testing or tracking until this year, when the Environmental Protection Agency discovered that the chemicals were leaching into a mosquito pesticide. One US plastic company reported “fluorinating” – or effectively adding PFAS to – 300m containers in 2011.

Researcher accidentally spots tiny insect walking on the underside of the water surface as if it were a pane of glass

An Australian beetle has been observed walking upside down along the surface of water – the first instance that such behaviour has been visually documented.

The tiny aquatic beetle, about 6mm to 8mm in length, has been recorded scuttling along the undersurface of a pool of water in New South Wales.

The Australian beetle, about 6mm to 8mm in length, was discovered by a PhD student while researching frogs in the Watagan Mountains of New South Wales. The unidentified species is believed to belong to the Hydrophilidae family of beetles, commonly known as water scavengers