The Guardian

Air quality in big cities is likely to improve even more in coming weeks, say scientists

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The nationwide shutdown caused by the coronavirus outbreak has led to big drops in air pollution across the UK’s major cities, new data analysis shows.

Levels of toxic pollutants were likely to fall even further, scientists said, as traffic remained off the roads but prevailing westerly winds from the Atlantic returned. Current easterly winds are bringing additional pollution from continental Europe to Britain.

Articles from conservative groups argue plastic bags are safer for coronavirus than reusable bags, misrepresenting recent studies

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The fight to ban plastic bags, many of which end up polluting oceans and rivers, has taken a step backward as conservative US think-tanks exploit the fear of Covid-19, campaigners have said.

Articles warning that reusable cloth bags are worse than plastic ones for spreading coronavirus have been linked to major rightwing nonprofits such as the Manhattan Institute, and contain misinformation aimed at defeating or repealing plastic bag bans, said Greenpeace USA.

Independent MP calls for approvals pause as Natural Resources Commission report shows more than 37,000ha approved last year

Land-clearing approvals in New South Wales have increased nearly 13-fold since the Coalition government relaxed laws in 2016, according to a secret report to the state cabinet by its Natural Resources Commission.

The report, marked “Cabinet in Confidence”, was commissioned by the government in January 2019 under an agreement between the Liberals and Nationals to review land clearing if applications exceeded 20,000ha a year. The commission handed it to the government in July, but released it only after the Independent MP Justin Field threatened legal action.

Bacterium is able to break down polyurethane, which is widely used but rarely recycled

A bacterium that feeds on toxic plastic has been discovered by scientists. The bug not only breaks the plastic down but uses it as food to power the process.

The bacterium, which was found at a waste site where plastic had been dumped, is the first that is known to attack polyurethane. Millions of tonnes of the plastic is produced every year to use in items such as sports shoes, nappies, kitchen sponges and as foam insulation, but it is mostly sent to landfill because it it too tough to recycle.

Severity of damage has increased, with areas spared in previous years experiencing moderate or severe bleaching

The government agency responsible for the Great Barrier Reef has confirmed the natural landmark has suffered a third mass coral bleaching episode in five years, describing the damage as “very widespread”.

The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority said the assessment was based on information from in-water and aerial observations, and built on the best available science and technology to understand current conditions.

A hulking grizzly bear has found online stardom after he was caught groggily emerging from hibernation on camera. Canadian ranger Nicole Gagnon filmed the end of Boo's hibernation on her phone, a moment she said she had been waiting to document for eight years. It has since been viewed over 100,000 times on Twitter. Boo, 18, draws thousands of tourists every year to his 20-acre enclosure near the town of Golden, Canada

If there is an economic alternative now, there was one before – and we are all suffering from the failure to take it

Covid-19 isn’t just infecting humans. It’s also weakening ideology.

Think about Tina: the acronym popularised after Margaret Thatcher declared that “There is no alternative” to the market economy.

Jet stream appears to have stopped moving south and may be moving back towards normal

International cooperation on ozone-depleting chemicals is helping to return the southern jet stream to a normal state after decades of human-caused disruption, a study shows.

Scientists say the findings prove there is the capacity to heal damaged climate systems if governments act promptly and in coordination to deal with the causes.

Viruses such as Covid-19 wouldn’t emerge in food markets if it wasn’t for factory farming, globalised industry and rapid urbanisation

• Laura Spinney is the author of The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World

When I get stressed, a patch of annoying red eczema appears on the inside of my upper right arm. The doctor gives me some cream to rub on it, but I also know that to stop it coming back I have to deal with the underlying problem.

Too much information, you’re thinking, but let me make the analogy. The reason we shouldn’t call the Sars-CoV-2 virus causing global misery the “Chinese virus” is the same reason I shouldn’t blame my eczema on my upper arm: there is clearly a superficial weakness there, but the real cause lies elsewhere.

Offshore windfarms and onshore projects in US and China fuel one of strongest years on record

The world’s wind power capacity grew by almost a fifth in 2019 after a year of record growth for offshore windfarms and a boom in onshore projects in the US and China.

The Global Wind Energy Council found that wind power capacity grew by 60.4 gigawatts, or 19%, compared with 2018, in one of the strongest years on record for the global wind power industry.

Auditor general predicts drought in 20 years as demand rises and climate crisis reduces supply

England is in danger of experiencing droughts within 20 years unless action is taken to combat the impact of the climate crisis on water availability, the public spending watchdog says.

The National Audit Office (NAO), in a report published on Wednesday, says some parts of England, especially the south-east, are at risk of running out of water owing to decreased rainfall and a need to cut the amount taken from natural waterways.

A bubble has finally been burst – but will we now attend to the other threats facing humanity?

We have been living in a bubble, a bubble of false comfort and denial. In the rich nations, we have begun to believe we have transcended the material world. The wealth we’ve accumulated – often at the expense of others – has shielded us from reality. Living behind screens, passing between capsules – our houses, cars, offices and shopping malls – we persuaded ourselves that contingency had retreated, that we had reached the point all civilisations seek: insulation from natural hazards.

Now the membrane has ruptured, and we find ourselves naked and outraged, as the biology we appeared to have banished storms through our lives. The temptation, when this pandemic has passed, will be to find another bubble. We cannot afford to succumb to it. From now on, we should expose our minds to the painful realities we have denied for too long.

Renowned scientist Terry Hughes says huge swathes of reef have been affected in a ‘severe’ situation

The Great Barrier Reef has experienced a third mass coral bleaching event in five years, according to the scientist carrying out aerial surveys over hundreds of individual reefs.

With three days of a nine-day survey to go, Prof Terry Hughes told Guardian Australia: “We know this is a mass bleaching event and it’s a severe one.”

Creatures are intelligent and patient but have been declared an endangered species along south coast

Most of us are familiar with the remains of cuttlefish, Sepia officinalis, large chalky internal shells that are washed up on beaches and sold in pet shops as a source of calcium for birds.

This relative of the squid and octopus thrives in the seas around Britain and is caught in large numbers for our continental neighbours who regard them as a culinary delicacy. Europeans also use their ink as a colouring agent in food, ink and paint.

Activist says she self isolated and warns young people to take the outbreak seriously

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Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager who inspired the global school climate strikes, says it is “extremely likely” she has had the Covid-19 virus.

The teenager, whose solo protest outside the Swedish parliament kickstarted the global youth campaign, said in a post on Instagram that she had self isolated after she and her father returned from a trip around central Europe about two weeks ago.

Numbers of endangered primate thought to have shrunk by half in the last 36 years

Twin ring-tailed lemurs have been born at a UK zoo.

The endangered primates were born to mother Fiona and father Dog at Chester zoo on 2 March and have just begun to venture outside.

A female peregrine has been spotted on a balcony nest, but Sally, star of Springwatch, hasn’t been seen

The rollercoaster saga of the Salisbury Cathedral peregrine falcons is continuing this spring, with one bird protecting an egg on a balcony of the great building but another missing in action.

A female that has been visiting the balcony regularly in recent weeks has laid one egg and can be viewed hunkering down on the nest via a cathedral webcam.

Rightwing governments have denied the problem and been slow to act. With coronavirus and the climate, this costs lives

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The coronavirus pandemic has brought urgency to the defining political question of our age: how to distribute risk. As with the climate crisis, neoliberal capitalism is proving particularly ill-suited to this.

Like global warming, but in close-up and fast-forward, the Covid-19 outbreak shows how lives are lost or saved depending on a government’s propensity to acknowledge risk, act rapidly to contain it, and share the consequences.

Campaigners urge governments to tie any bailouts to aviation and cruise industries to requirements for climate action

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The economic rescue packages to deal with the impact of the coronavirus must also be green, a growing chorus of environmental campaigners have urged, concerned that hasty measures will lock the world into a high-carbon future.

“Governments need to put huge amounts of money into trying to sustain jobs and livelihoods,” said Mary Robinson, a former Irish president and UN high commissioner for human rights, who served twice as UN climate envoy. “But they must do it with a very strong green emphasis. The threat from climate change is as real as the threat from Covid-19, though it seems far away.”

Descendants of the drug lord’s pets bear similarities to extinct megafauna

When the drug lord Pablo Escobar was shot dead in 1993, he left behind a zoo stocked with wild animals alongside his multibillion dollar cocaine empire. The lions, giraffes and other exotic species were moved from the luxurious Hacienda Nápoles estate east of Medellín to new homes, but nearly three decades later, dozens of hippos, descendants of animals left behind, are thriving in small lakes in northern Colombia, making them the world’s largest invasive animal.

Now scientists say that contrary to the conventional wisdom that large invasive herbivore mammals have strictly negative effects on their new environments, Escobar’s “cocaine” hippos show how introduced species can restore a lost world.