The Guardian

Thousands of Filipino and international crew members are stuck as they await results of Covid-19 tests

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From the balcony of her cabin, Sofia Ivanov* welcomes the light rain that cools the scorching Manila summer. As coronavirus empties the world’s cruise lines of guests, crew workers like her get to use the luxurious guest rooms before they lose their jobs.

Over two dozen other massive cruise ships dot her view of Manila Bay. It’s a spectacular view, but Ivanov is tired of it after seeing nothing else for weeks. 

Report also warns Australia will experience more extreme fire seasons due to climate crisis

The amount of pristine tropical rainforest lost across the globe increased last year, as the equivalent of a football pitch disappeared every six seconds, a satellite-based analysis has found.

Nearly 12m hectares of tree cover was lost across the tropics, including nearly 4m hectares of dense, old rainforest that held significant stores of carbon and had been home to a vast array of wildlife, according to data from the University of Maryland.

The powerful forces behind the death of the Honduran indigenous leader are still targeting human rights defenders and environmental campaigners like her

• Join a conversation with the author on Tuesday 9 June: Nina Lakhani joins Guardian US international editor Martin Hodgson to discuss the story behind Cáceres’s murder. Live on the Guardian at 1pm EST/10am PST/5pm BST. Email events.us@theguardian.com to sign up and get a reminder

Fifty-one months ago today Berta Cáceres was gunned down by hired assassins at her home in western Honduras. Cáceres was an indigenous leader, a political radical and a grassroots human rights defender who dedicated her life to resisting the patriarchal neoliberal world order and fighting for environmental justice. She was smart, kind, provocative and a rare leader who could listen, negotiate and bring people together. She was killed less than a year after winning the prestigious Goldman environmental prize for leading a campaign to stop construction of an internationally funded hydroelectric dam on a river considered sacred by the indigenous Lenca people. She died way too young, at only 44, at a time when our world’s indigenous peoples and natural resources are under sustained attack from unsustainable greed and consumption. The race to save the planet is on, but radical changes are needed and time is running out. Her death was a crime against her family, the Lenca people, Honduran society and humanity. Fifty-one months ago today, the world lost a rare leader.

Related: Who killed Berta Cáceres? Behind the brutal murder of an environment crusader

Analysis shows 500 species on brink of extinction – as many as were lost over previous century

The sixth mass extinction of wildlife on Earth is accelerating, according to an analysis by scientists who warn it may be a tipping point for the collapse of civilisation.

More than 500 species of land animals were found to be on the brink of extinction and likely to be lost within 20 years. In comparison, the same number were lost over the whole of the last century. Without the human destruction of nature, even this rate of loss would have taken thousands of years, the scientists said.

Lockdown won’t save the world from warming, but the pandemic offers an opportunity to green the global economy

The air is clean and fresh, fish have reappeared in urban waterways, birds are frequenting uncut gardens, wild mammals are meandering through cities and greenhouse gas emissions will likely drop by an unprecedented 8% this year. Nature has clearly benefited from several months of dramatically reduced economic activity. From a climate crisis perspective, this drop in emissions is astonishingly close to the 7.6% yearly reduction in emissions that scientists have advised will be necessary during the next decade. And yet none of this is cause for celebration.

Most surprising are the carbon-intensive industries that confirm they are continuing to decarbonise despite the pandemic

The flowering bedstraw was thought to have died out on the sub-Antarctic island in the 1980s

A critically-endangered herb once thought extinct on sub-Antarctic Macquarie Island has been found growing at a new location as the world-heritage site continues its rabbit-free recovery. 

The remote island was declared free of pests in 2014, following a seven-year feral animal eradication project.

The photographs that make up William Arnold’s Suburban Herbarium appear more as clues than specimens. They are not the plants we would notice as we pass verges and hedges, but an idea of them, transmuted and transmitted through photographic methods which are magical and antiquarian

Suburban Herbarium is published by Uniformbooks with a foreword by Mark Cocker and an essay by Val Williams

Conservationists warn the species, which was almost extinct 10 years ago, could be under threat if Japanese fishery is MSC certified

A decade ago, the highly prized “king of fish”, the bluefin tuna, was taken off menus in high-end restaurants and shunned by top chefs, amid warnings by environmentalists that it was being driven to extinction. Recent assessments of Atlantic bluefin tuna, which can grow to the size of a small car and live for up to 40 years, have shown much healthier populations.

But now conservationists and scientists are warning that the largest and most valuable tuna species could once again be under threat if a Japanese bluefin fishery in the Atlantic Ocean is awarded an internationally recognised “ecolabel” they claim is based on flawed science.

If speed weren’t a factor, we could rely on the market to incentivise green technology at its own pace – but the clock is ticking

“It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white so long as it catches mice.”

The maxim attributed to Deng Xiaoping comes to mind in relation to the federal government’s technology investment roadmap discussion paper and its response to the King review.

Animal rights groups have been pushing a synthetic alternative to horseshoe crab blood in drug safety testing

Horseshoe crabs’ icy-blue blood will remain the drug industry’s standard for safety tests after a powerful US group ditched a plan to give equal status to a synthetic substitute pushed by Swiss biotech Lonza and animal welfare groups.

The crabs’ copper-rich blood clots in the presence of bacterial endotoxins and has long been used in tests to detect contamination in shots and infusions.

Carnaby’s black-cockatoo, the grey range thick-billed grasswren and the swift parrot just three species in deep trouble after laws fail them

Scientists and conservationists are calling for changes to Australia’s national environment law to urgently address failures in how it is protecting native wildlife, including bird species that have declined significantly over the past decade.

Samantha Vine, the head of conservation at BirdLife Australia, says: “Our laws are actually allowing extinction to happen.” 

Scientists and artists take advantage of low noise levels to record birdsong around world

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Scientists and artists have used the drop in noise pollution during the coronavirus lockdown to create the first global public sound map of the spring dawn chorus.

Throughout May, people around the world have uploaded about 3,000 early morning bird recordings made on their phones to the Dawn Chorus website, where they are being shared to help conservation and to create public art. 

It will not do to wait until the next power plant announces its closure. Building alternative infrastructure should start now

The Covid-19 recession will bring fiscal stimulus on a massive scale. There are high hopes that the recovery will be green but it could be an uphill struggle. A big opportunity for Australia’s governments is to keep the renewable energy revolution going.

There will be pressure to invest in anything that quickly brings back jobs and prosperity, never mind long term, social or environmental goals. A return to the world as it was in 2019 will seem a marvellous goal for the many people whose jobs have gone or whose businesses have faltered. In order to improve the economy relative to pre-Covid, to build back better, will need governments to lead.

Cross-party group highlights new evidence on how dirty air may worsen infections

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Air pollution must be kept at low levels to help avoid a second peak of coronavirus infections, according to a cross-party report from MPs.

There is growing evidence from around the world linking exposure to dirty air and increased infections and deaths from Covid-19. Lockdowns cut air pollution levels in many places, but the MPs said measures were needed to ensure it remains low.

The pick of the world’s best flora and fauna photos, including tiny turtles and blossoming poppies.

Intensified by climate change, the current 20-year arid period is one of the worst on record, with wide-ranging effects

When Ken Pimlott began fighting US wildfires at the age of 17, they seemed to him to be a brutal but manageable natural phenomenon.

Related: Dust bowl conditions of 1930s US now more than twice as likely to reoccur

Lancaster Wildlife Trust has brought the species back to peatlands following a local extinction in the 19th century

Large heath butterflies are returning to peatlands in greater Manchester 150 years after they went locally extinct.

The acidic peat bogs and mosslands around Manchester and Liverpool were home to the country’s biggest colonies of large heath butterflies – known as the “Manchester argus” – but numbers plummeted as land was drained for agricultural land and peat extraction. 

Date moved for Covid-19 travel reasons, but fears raised over delay to green recovery plans

Global talks aimed at staving off the threat of climate breakdown will be delayed by a year to November 2021 because of the coronavirus crisis, the UN has confirmed.

The summit, known as Cop26, which 196 nations are expected to attend, will now take place in Glasgow from November 1 to 12 next year, as reports had anticipated, with the UK government acting as host and president. They were originally set to take place from November 9 this year.

Rising temperatures, natural disasters and deforestation taking heavy toll, say scientists

Climate breakdown and the mass felling of trees has made the world’s forests significantly shorter and younger overall, an analysis shows. 

The trend is expected to continue, scientists say, with worrying consequences for the ability of forests to store carbon and mitigate the climate emergency and for the endangered wildlife that depends on rich, ancient forests. 

Ambitious goal requires us to ‘get over the political roadblock’ says Malcolm Turnbull, who backed climate change thinktank’s report

A rapid expansion of renewable energy over the next five years could establish Australia as a home for new zero-emissions industries, cut electricity costs and create more than 100,000 jobs in the electricity industry alone, a new analysis suggests.

The briefing paper by Beyond Zero Emissions, a climate change thinktank, presents an alternative vision to the Morrison government’s gas-fired recovery plan, arguing the shift to a clean electricity grid is inevitable and there are opportunities in accelerating it, rather than slowing it down. Renewable energy investment in Australia fell 50% last year.