The Guardian

Warming seas are luring sharks to stay in populated swimming spots longer. But are shark attacks really on the rise?

Already in 2020, five Australians have been tragically killed after being bitten by sharks in what looks set to be a year of higher than usual deaths from the ocean predators.

Two surfers, a scuba diver, a spearfisher and a swimmer have all died from injuries caused by shark bites.

As dry season starts campaigners sound alarm over ‘shocking’ scale of fires, as Bolsonaro doubles down on denials

Dramatic new images have shown fires raging over wide areas of the Brazilian Amazon nearly a year after blazes across the region sparked an international crisis for the far-right government of President Jair Bolsonaro.

The video images and photographs were filmed during a flight by Greenpeace over a wide area of forest in Mato Grosso state in the south of the Amazon on 9 July. Filmed just as the Amazon dry season was beginning, they raise fears that this year’s fires could be as devastating and perhaps worse than 2019’s.

UN and IEA call for stricter standards to improve energy efficiency and cut use of HFCs

Up to eight years’ worth of global greenhouse gas emissions could be prevented over the next four decades by setting tougher standards for air conditioning, according to a study.

It found that improving the energy efficiency of cooling systems by using climate-friendly refrigerants could remove emissions equivalent to between 210bn and 460bn tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2060.

Species is one of Europe’s largest and rarest raptors, last seen in England in 2016

Birdwatchers have been flocking to the boggy and desolate moors of the Peak District to try to spot a bearded vulture, one of the rarest birds ever seen in the UK, which has set up home on a remote cliff in the national park.

This is only the second sighting of a bearded vulture in the UK, one of the largest and rarest raptors in Europe, and which was last seen in England in 2016.

A mapping project led by the conservationist Klaus Thymann has revealed a rich, varied habitat off the coast of Jutland

Ten-year-old was fishing with his father and two other men about 5km from shore when he was ‘grabbed from the boat’

A boy who was grabbed by a shark from a boat off Tasmania’s north-west coast has suffered arm, head and chest injuries.

The 10-year-old was taken to hospital on Friday afternoon following the attack near Stanley.

As a large low-pressure system deepened over the Tasman Sea this week, large swells hit the east coast of Australia

• Huge swells leave houses at risk

Several houses on Ocean View Drive now dangerously close to cliff edge as huge waves wash away beaches

Beachfront homes along the New South Wales Central Coast have been left dangling over the ocean and in danger of collapse after powerful surf caused massive erosion.

A powerful low across Australia’s east coast earlier in the week created large swells and high waves battering some coastal areas.

‘Questions naturally arise’ about review’s independence, environmental group says

Environment groups are increasingly anxious and frustrated as they wait for the release of an interim report from a review of Australia’s national environmental laws.

The review’s chair, the former competition watchdog head Graeme Samuel, handed his report to the environment minister, Sussan Ley, almost three weeks ago.

Greta Thunberg has urged European leaders to take immediate action on the climate and ecological emergency in a letter she wrote together with some of the world’s leading scientists.

Thunberg said that the coronavirus crisis and the climate crisis could not be addressed as one and the same. She said coronavirus was a ‘tragedy’ and had ‘no positive effects on the climate’

• Pandemic shows climate has never been treated as crisis, say scientists

Biden’s $2tn green agriculture plan is ambitious but realistic. That’s important, because everything is riding on it

The world’s food supply is imperiled by a climate crisis already upon us, and Joe Biden this week put forward an agenda to address it that’s as bold as you could hope from a man who actually intends to get elected.

Related: Biden unveils $700bn 'buy American' proposal to revive US industry

Letter also signed by Greta Thunberg urges EU leaders to act immediately on global heating

Greta Thunberg and some of the world’s leading climate scientists have written to EU leaders demanding they act immediately to avoid the worst impacts of the unfolding climate and ecological emergency.

The letter, which is being sent before a European council meeting starting on Friday, says the Covid-19 pandemic has shown that most leaders are able to act swiftly and decisively, but the same urgency had been missing in politicians’ response to the climate crisis.

International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List changes ocean giants’ status to ‘critically endangered’

With their population still struggling to recover from over three centuries of whaling, the North Atlantic right whale is now just “one step from extinction”, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The IUCN last week moved the whale’s status on their Red List from “endangered” to “critically endangered” – the last stop before the species is considered extinct in the wild.

The status change reflects the fact that fewer than 250 mature individuals probably remain in a population of roughly 400. While grim, scientists and conservationists expressed hope that this move may help speed up protections for these dwindling giants.

Across the world, failure of official advice to provide sustainable, healthy diets is shocking, say scientists

Official dietary advice across the world is harming both the environment and people’s health, according to scientists who have carried out the most comprehensive assessment of national dietary guidelines to date.

Food is responsible for a quarter of the emissions driving the climate crisis and millions of early deaths. The analysis assessed all available dietary guidelines, covering 85 countries and every region of the world. The researchers said governments’ failure to help people eat good diets was “shocking”.

Human fingerprint on record temperatures ‘has rarely, if ever, been clearer’, says report

The record-breaking heatwave in the Siberian Arctic was made at least 600 times more likely by human-caused climate change, according to a study.

Between January and June, temperatures in the far north of Russia were more than 5C above average, causing permafrost to melt, buildings to collapse, and sparking an unusually early and intense start to the forest fires season. On 20 June, a monitoring station in Verkhoyansk registered a record high of 38C.

Conditions at plants contributed to transmission of virus, experts say, as country remains second only to US for deaths

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Brazilian meat plants helped spread Covid-19 in at least three different places across the country as the virus continues to migrate from big cities to the country’s vast interior, labour law prosecutors have said.

At the beginning of this week the country was second only to the US with 1.88 million confirmed Covid-19 cases and 72,833 deaths .

Its powerful agribusiness sector is allied with the country’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, who has dismissed the pandemic as a “little flu”. The beef sector is worth $26bn (£20.7bn), according to the Brazilian Confederation of Agriculture and Livestock (CNA), while its chicken industry is worth another $8bn.

Meat plants have stayed open during the pandemic, and staff work closely together, often in refrigerated areas. Other countries, including the US, Canada, Ireland and Germany, have also seen clusters around slaughterhouses.

Oklahoma no longer has legal authority to prosecute cases involving Native Americans across about 3m acres

The news alert about a ruling from US supreme court took Kimberly Tiger by surprise.

On Thursday, the court ruled that the federal government never formally disestablished the expansive reservation that is home to Tiger’s tribe, the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, in Oklahoma.

Plan to stamp out ‘lethal’ plastic, which gets stuck in airways of wildlife and pollutes waterways, follows South Australia’s proposal

The Queensland government will move to ban plastic straws, cutlery, stirrers and plates in a bid to stem the destructive effects of plastic on marine life and waterways.

The government introduced legislation on Wednesday that would ban the single-use items, making Queensland the second state after South Australia to put such a proposal before parliament.

G20 countries aim their pandemic bailout spending at fossil fuel industries, leaving Paris climate change targets in doubt

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Governments are spending vastly more in support of fossil fuels than on low-carbon energy in rescue packages triggered by the coronavirus crisis, new data has shown, despite rhetoric from many countries in support of a “green recovery”.

Data from the Energy Policy Tracker, a new research effort by several civil society groups, shows that at least $151bn (£120bn) of bailout cash has been spent or earmarked so far to support fossil fuels by the G20 group of large economies. Only about a fifth of this spending is conditional on environmental requirements such as reducing greenhouse gas emissions or cleaning up pollution.

Conservationists say timber millers may be ‘subject to legal exposure’ if they accept logs from VicForests ‘salvage logging’

A proposal by Victoria’s state-owned forestry agency to log forest burnt in the summer bushfires would affect habitat for more than 30 threatened species, according to analysis by The Wilderness Society.

VicForests has proposed opening 59 new coupes in the state’s north-east and East Gippsland regions for so-called salvage logging of burnt native forests.