The Guardian

Harvesting in Bulga state forest, inland from Port Macquarie, is just 400km from global nature-positive summit the government is hosting

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Forest campaigners have accused the federal government of hypocrisy for hosting a global nature-positive summit in Sydney while logging resumed in public forest 400km away in mid-north New South Wales.

The NSW Forestry Corporation has started its harvesting operations in Bulga state forest, inland from Port Macquarie. The area is a stronghold for threatened species including endangered koalas and the endangered greater glider – Australia’s largest gliding possum.

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Exclusive: Environment groups urge government to stick to its promises and refuse pesticide application

UK ministers are considering allowing the use of a bee-killing pesticide next year despite promising during the election to ban it.

Neonicotinoids are banned in the EU because they are toxic to bees, but have been authorised for use every year in the UK since 2021.

Items such as cables and old tech could contain £266m worth of metal vital for decarbonisation drive, study finds

Scientists have called for people to go “urban mining” after a study revealed that old cables, phone chargers and other unused electrical goods thrown away or stored in cupboards or drawers could stave off a looming shortage of copper.

The research found that in the UK there are approximately 823m unused or broken tech items hiding in “drawers of doom” containing as much as 38,449 tonnes of copper – including 627m cables – enough to provide 30% of the copper needed for the UK’s planned transition to a decarbonised electricity grid by 2030.

Wasps released on Nightingale Island have protected Wilkins’ bunting by halting spread of mould-causing insects

A tiny parasitic wasp has given a lifeline to one of the world’s rarest bird species by killing off an invasive insect that was threatening its survival.

The Wilkins’ bunting lives on Nightingale Island, part of the Tristan da Cunha group; the world’s most remote inhabited archipelago. It eats the fruit of the Phylica arborea, the island’s only native tree.

Demand for beef, soy, palm oil and nickel hindering efforts to halt demolition by 2030, global report finds

The destruction of global forests increased in 2023, and is higher than when 140 countries promised three years ago to halt deforestation by the end of the decade, an analysis shows.

The rising demolition of the forests puts ambitions to halt the climate crisis and stem the huge worldwide losses of wildlife even further from reach, the researchers warn.

Food Standards Agency says applications for cultivated steak, chicken and foie gras have already been submitted

Cell-cultivated meat could be on sale in the UK within a few years, the food regulator has said, with applications for lab-grown steak, beef, chicken and foie gras already submitted, while another 15 applications are expected in the next two years.

The Food Standards Agency (FSA) was awarded £1.6m of government funding on Tuesday to develop an efficient safety assessment process for the novel foods. It said the UK was an attractive market as it had a high number of vegans, vegetarians and flexitarians, a higher openness to new foods than many other European countries and a large financial sector to back startup companies.

Research reveals ‘sea walnuts’ fuse together if they become injured, and nervous systems merge

It might not be what the Spice Girls envisaged when they sang 2 Become 1, but scientists have found comb jellies do actually fuse together if they are injured.

Researchers studying a species of the gelatinous marine invertebrates known as “sea walnuts” said they made the discovery after spotting an unusually shaped individual in the laboratory tank.

Sub-Antarctic marine park expansion welcomed but scientists say some areas important to penguins and seals missed out on sanctuary-level protection

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The environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, has declared Australia will soon protect more ocean than any other country after the government finalises a more than 300,000 square kilometre expansion of a sub-Antarctic marine park.

Speaking ahead of what was billed as a global nature positive summit starting in Sydney on Tuesday, Plibersek confirmed the Heard and McDonald Island Marine Park about 4,000 km south-west of Perth would quadruple in size.

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Total declared salmon catch estimated at 5,399 fish, down from 6,952 in 2022 – and 20,000 in years up to 2017

Salmon numbers in England and Wales last year were the lowest on record, figures show, as pollution and climate breakdown are killing off the endangered fish.

A report from the Environment Agency and Cefas shows Atlantic salmon stocks in England and Wales have dropped to their lowest level since records began in 1997.

World Meteorological Organization says water is ‘canary in the coalmine of climate change’ and calls for urgent action

Rivers dried up at the highest rate in three decades in 2023, putting global water supply at risk, data has shown.

Over the past five years, there have been lower-than-average river levels across the globe and reservoirs have also been low, according to the World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO) State of Global Water Resources report.

As prime minister Justin Trudeau trails in polls, opposition seek to persuade voters environmental policy is a burden

Mass hunger and malnutrition. A looming nuclear winter. An existential threat to the Canadian way of life. For months, the country’s Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has issued dire and increasingly apocalyptic warnings about the future. The culprit? A federal carbon levy meant to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

In the House of Commons this month, the Tory leader said there was only one way to avoid the devastating crisis: embattled prime minister Justin Trudeau must “call a ‘carbon tax’ election”.

Exclusive: Farmers still awaiting promised payments for uninsurable damage caused by Storm Henk

Labour may cut financial support for flooded farmers, the Guardian has learned, while money to compensate them for deluges in January has still not hit their pockets.

The previous Conservative government earlier this year promised up to £25,000 in payments for uninsurable damage from flooding caused by Storm Henk. However, the eligibility criteria for these grants has still not been set out, leaving farmers out of pocket. The scheme has been plagued with delays, with some affected farmers not being paid because they live too far from a river.

At least 14 people died in floods in Bosnia and Herzegovina on Friday and others were missing as torrential rain and landslides destroyed homes, roads and bridges across the centre of the country, officials said. Bosnia's presidency said it had requested military help for the wider Jablanica area, and engineers, rescue units and a helicopter were deployed, including to rescue 17 people from a mental health hospital. Neighbouring Croatia was hit by floods on Friday, though there were no reports of casualties. Authorities issued a severe weather warning for the Adriatic coast and central regions of the country

Prime minister suggests there will be more public money made available for new technologies

• What is carbon capture, usage and storage?

Keir Starmer has signalled his government will drastically increase its green investment plans in an attempt to avoid a rerun of 1980s-style industrial decline by safeguarding jobs in heartland manufacturing communities.

On a visit to a Merseyside glass factory on Friday to unveil billions of pounds in funding for carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects, the prime minister suggested there would be more public money made available for new technologies.

Recycling is, by its nature, complicated. The imperfections in the process don’t mean the whole system is a con

The process of recycling is, by its nature, complicated. We put our mix of rubbish in the right bins, and from that point onwards hope that those we entrust it to – be it local councils picking up rubbish or supermarket recycling schemes – will do the rest. If this is you, then you may be dismayed to learn that a recent Everyday Plastics report found that most soft plastics collected by two of Britain’s biggest supermarkets are not being recycled and are, instead, incinerated.

Soft plastics are anything flimsy that you can scrunch in your hand: think bread bags, pouches, clingfilm, chocolate wrappers and crisp packets. But as this latest report shows, they aren’t as easily recyclable as you might think. Here’s why.

James Piper is the co-host of the Talking Rubbish podcast and author of The Rubbish Book

Behind the violence of extreme weather is that of the fossil fuel industry, and Americans are suffering for it

The weather we used to have shaped the behavior of the water we used to have – how much and when it rained, how dry it got, when and how slowly the snow in the heights melted, what fell as rain and fell as snow. Climate chaos is changing all that, breaking the patterns, delivering water in torrents unprecedented in recorded history or withholding it to create epic droughts, while heat-and-drought-parched soil, grasslands and forests create ideal conditions for mega-wildfires.

Water in the right time and quantity is a blessing; in the wrong ones it’s a scourge and a destroying force, as we’ve seen recently with floods around the world. In the vice-presidential debate, Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor, noted that his state’s farmers “know climate change is real. They’ve seen 500-year droughts, 500-year floods, back to back.” Farmers around the world are dealing with flood, drought and unseasonable weather that impacts their ability to produce food and protect soil.

Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility

Exclusive: Study suggests people more willing to reduce own carbon footprint if they see leaders doing the same

Political leaders “walking the talk” on climate action by flying less or eating less meat could be a “crucial missing link” in fighting global heating, according to a study.

Researchers found that people are significantly more willing to reduce their own carbon footprint if they see leaders doing the same. The finding, by psychologists in the UK, was not a given, as green action by high-profile people can sometimes be dismissed as virtue-signalling.

Researchers tethered 50 long-spined and 50 short-spined urchins outside lobster den and sharks were observed ‘smashing the whole thing’

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An experiment designed to investigate lobster predation on sea urchins unexpectedly found that Port Jackson and crested horn sharks ate the spiky animals instead.

The research, led by University of Newcastle marine ecologist Jeremy Day, involved tethering sea urchins at the entrance to a lobster den – home to at least 20 large eastern rock lobsters – near Wollongong on the south coast of New South Wales.

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An experiment designed to investigate the role lobsters play in regulating sea urchin numbers unexpectedly found sharks were eating them instead. The research, led by the University of Newcastle marine ecologist Jeremy Day, involved 50 long-spined and 50 short-spined sea urchins tethered to the entrance of a lobster den on the south coast of NSW. Over the course of 25 nights, sharks ate 45 of the urchins, while lobsters ate only four. Sea urchins are native to NSW but have become are a pest in Tasmania, where they are threatening local ecosystems

The best of this week’s wildlife photographs from around the world