The Guardian

Over 10,000 blazes seen so far in August, with response of President Bolsonaro condemned as ineffective

The Amazon has seen the worst start to the fire season in a decade, with 10,136 fires spotted in the first 10 days of August, a 17% rise on last year.

Analysis of Brazilian government figures by Greenpeace showed fires increasing by 81% in federal reserves compared with the same period last year. Coming a year after soaring Amazon fires caused an international crisis, the new figures raised fears this year’s fire season could be even worse than last year’s.

Painstaking conservation effort to accommodate insect’s complex lifecycle pays off

The biggest reintroduction to date of the large blue has led to the rare butterfly flying on a Cotswold hillside where it has not been seen for 150 years.

About 750 butterflies emerged on to Rodborough Common in Gloucestershire this summer after 1,100 larvae were released last autumn following five years of innovative grassland management to create optimum habitat.

Centrists draw up report aimed at bringing the UK in line with official climate advice

A group of moderate Conservative MPs has joined green groups in calling for the government’s ban on new fossil fuel vehicles to be brought forward by five years to 2030 as part of a plan to ignite a green economic recovery.

The recently reformed caucus of centrist Conservatives has called on ministers to accelerate the shift to electric vehicles as part of a comprehensive green policy report aimed at bringing the UK in line with the official advice of the government’s climate tsars.

Rebuilding bushfire-ravaged areas during a pandemic has been a huge challenge. One group of survivors is embracing the opportunity to roll out sustainable, fire-proof homes

As a bushfire raged through north-east Victoria late last year, leaving destroyed houses and blackened bushland in its wake, Cudgewa man Joshua Collings, his partner Kate and their young son Tully joined a convoy of cars snaking their way down the mountain.

Their home was gone. They wanted to get out of there. But back at the evacuation centre in nearby Corryong, police had given bleak warnings about what they would see out the window. The couple landed on an idea to distract Tully, who was then three years old, from the devastation.

Government under fire after major companies again given green light to lift carbon emissions without penalty

Industry and environment groups have questioned the point of the Coalition government’s “safeguard mechanism” – which promised to keep a lid on industrial greenhouse gas emissions – after major companies were allowed to again increase pollution without penalty.

BHP, Anglo American and Tomago Aluminium were among companies given the green light to increase emissions by a combined 1.6m tonnes of carbon dioxide a year in an announcement by the Clean Energy Regulator in late July.

Native people have long suffered poor infrastructure and high costs – so some communities are turning to renewables

Within hours of posting a video to Facebook and Twitter in which she offered to donate iPads to K-12 Native students, Amanda Cheromiah was inundated with increasingly desperate requests.

Related: Bid to save Alaskan wild salmon receives surprise boost from Trump Jr

Bank argues JBS has ‘no action plan’ to tackle link between indirect suppliers and Amazon destruction following Guardian investigation

Analysts at global banking giant HSBC have sounded the alarm over the potential risks of investing in JBS, the world’s biggest meat company, after a string of investigations raising concerns about Amazon deforestation issues in its beef supply chain.

The meat giant “has no vision, action plan, timeline, technology or solution” for monitoring whether the cattle it buys originate from farms involved in rainforest destruction, according to analysis by the bank, which has substantial investments in the troubled meat packing firm.

Indigenous people in headwaters region say financing harms communities and ecosystems

Indigenous people living at the headwaters of the Amazon have called on European banks to stop financing oil development in the region, as it poses a threat to them and damages a fragile ecosystem, after a new report found $10bn in previously undisclosed funding for oil in the region.

The headwaters of the Amazon in Ecuador and Peru are home to more than 500,000 indigenous people, including some who choose to live in voluntary isolation. The area, covering about 30m hectares (74m acres), hosts a diverse rainforest ecosystem, but it is threatened by the expansion of oil drilling.

Across the UK, once thriving waterways are being wiped out by farming and water companies

You can judge the state of a nation by the state of its rivers. Pollution is the physical expression of corruption. So what should we conclude about a country whose rivers are systematically exploited, dumped on and bled dry?

I’m writing from the Welsh borders, where I’m supposed to be on holiday. It’s among the most beautiful regions of Britain, but the rivers here are dying before my eyes. When I last saw it, four years ago, the Monnow, a lovely tributary of the River Wye, had a mostly clean, stony bed. Now the bottom is smothered in slime and filamentous algae. In the back eddies, the rotting weed floats to the surface, carrying the stench of cow slurry.

The overarching project of my life has been making myself safe. But what is the point if everyone else is drowning and burning and starving?

• This is part of a series of essays by Australian writers responding to the challenges of 2020

I am descended from people who factor a flat tyre into a drive to the airport. I own a personal, portable water filter, just in case. I am someone who patrols her boundaries. I am a list writer, a timetable checker.

The overarching project of my life has been making myself safe. No alarms; no surprises. It has become legend in my family that, at age 11, I ruined a holiday by demanding we move out of our accommodation at the foot of what everyone told me was a dormant volcano, because I thought it was too dangerous. (The volcano did erupt, on my 35th birthday.)

Exclusive: Walker Corporation says de-listing area of wetlands, which are a critical migratory bird habitat, was of ‘urgent national interest’

Walker Corporation lobbied former federal environment minister Josh Frydenberg to remove an area from internationally listed wetlands for its Toondah Harbour apartment and retail development, government documents show.

Documents obtained from the environment department by Guardian Australia under freedom of information laws show the company used a meeting with Frydenberg in August 2016 to stress the government had the power the remove part of the Moreton Bay Ramsar wetland as a matter of “urgent national interest”.

Research could pave way for cheap supercapacitor storage of renewable energy

The humble house brick has been turned into a battery that can store electricity, raising the possibility that buildings could one day become literal powerhouses.

The new technology exploits the porous nature of fired red bricks by filling the pores with tiny nanofibres of a conducting plastic that can store charge. The first bricks store enough electricity to power small lights. But if their capacity can be increased, they may become a low-cost alternative to the lithium-ion batteries currently used.

I study the Arctic. The decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accord is reprehensible – but we can’t give up hope

When you stand facing an exposed edge of permafrost, you can feel it from a distance.

It emanates a cold that tugs on every one of your senses. Permanently bound by ice year after year, the frozen soil is packed with carcasses of woolly mammoths and ancient ferns. They’re unable to decompose at such low temperatures, so they stay preserved in perpetuity – until warmer air thaws their remains and releases the cold that they’ve kept cradled for centuries.

Animal stuck in shallow water at creek in Helford estuary is released back into the sea

A stranded dolphin has been saved after a five-hour rescue operation in Cornwall.

The mammal was stuck in shallow water at Mawgan Creek in the Helford estuary, near Helston, an area well known for being a stranding trap for dolphins with many tidal muddy creeks.

Enhanced photosynthesis holds promise of higher yields in a drought-afflicted future

Tobacco plants have been modified with a protein found in algae to improve their photosynthesis and increase growth, while using less water, in a new advance that could point the way to higher-yielding crops in a drought-afflicted future.

The technique focuses on photosynthesis, the complex process by which plants are able to use sunlight and carbon dioxide to produce nutrients that fuel their growth. Enhancing photosynthesis would produce huge benefits to agricultural productivity, but the complexities of the process have stymied many past attempts to harness it.

A tanker leaking tonnes of oil off the coast of the Indian Ocean island is breaking up, threatening ecological disaster

• Seed-coating chemicals harm birds’ development, study finds
• US and Canada have lost 29% of birds since 1970

Popular pesticides are causing bird species to decline at an alarming rate in the US, adding fuel to a 50-year downward trend in bird biodiversity, a new report has found.

Related: Chirp to arms: musicians record album to help conserve endangered birds

Stranded oil tanker is breaking up, threatening even greater ecological devastation

People living in Mauritius have described the devastation caused by an oil spill from a stranded tanker and called for urgent international help to stop the ecological and economic damage overwhelming the island nation.

More than 1,000 tonnes of fuel has already seeped from the bulk carrier MV Wakashio into the sea off south-east Mauritius, polluting the coral reefs, white-sand beaches and pristine lagoons that attract tourists from around the world.

In this week's episode of A New Normal, Iman Amrani asks viewers what their thoughts are around travel and the environment post-Covid. With international travel increasingly more difficult to do during a pandemic, and persisting questions around the impact is has on the environment, she goes to speak to people who are taking a summer break closer to home

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The number of fires burning in Brazil’s Amazon in July was up 28% on the same month last year, according to data from Brazil’s space research agency INPE, and early numbers for August show a 7% increase this month. There is international concern over growing deforestation in the Amazon under Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro