The Guardian

Labor says it will phase out the practice by 2028 – 10 years after it first announced the policy. But farm advocates say the timeline is ‘radical’

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One of the great contrasts that has struck me on city visits is the rise of dog culture.

Massive pet warehouses with owners and their dogs waiting outside to buy dog clothes, fancy food, treats, leads, collars, beds, blankets and booties. That is before they are taken to the doggy dentist on the way to doggy daycare or down to the doggy park for a doggy dalliance or perhaps a posh puppuccino.

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Scientists say discovery may be linked to decades-long decline in sperm counts in men around the world

Microplastics have been found in human testicles, with researchers saying the discovery might be linked to declining sperm counts in men.

The scientists tested 23 human testes, as well as 47 testes from pet dogs. They found microplastic pollution in every sample.

More than 216,000 fish died in 2022-2023, when England recorded a 54% increase in sewage spills

Mass deaths of fish in England’s rivers have increased almost tenfold since 2020, with fears sewage pollution is exterminating life in the country’s waterways.

Environment Agency (EA) data from the past four years shows an alarming rise in the number of fish deaths linked to sewage pollution, with figures escalating from 26,690 in 2020-2021 to 216,135 in 2023-2024.

These spaces are crucial for our wellbeing, but cash-strapped councils are being forced to treat them as revenue earners

My local green space, Brockwell Park in Brixton and Herne Hill, south London, is an oasis of calm in the busy city. Friends catch up in the walled garden, where wisteria trails over pillars and roses and bluebells explode from the earth. In the community garden, local people work together to grow vegetables and run sessions to connect nature-deprived children to the land.

In the centre of the sometimes crushing metropolis, this park means everything to me – it keeps me sane, and it gives me hope. But this green lifeline is, every summer, taken away, as I await the arrival of the park’s music festival season with dread. As huge metal walls go up, dividing us from the green, and HGVs begin flattening the grass and soil, I feel a genuine sense of horror. A large part of the park is cut off for weeks, and our community’s heart is pulled out as people stream into events whose expensive tickets most people living round here could never afford. And the same is happening in shared green spaces all over the UK.

Rebecca Tamás is a writer of environmental nonfiction and a poet. Her most recent book is Strangers: Essays on the Human and Nonhuman

Five years after her last companion died and the aquarium’s owner pledged to free her, Bella still languishes in a tiny tank amid shops

In the heart of Seoul, amid the luxury shops at the foot of the world’s sixth-tallest skyscraper, a lone beluga whale named Bella swims aimlessly in a tiny, lifeless tank, where she has been trapped for a decade.

Her plight is urgent, with campaigners racing to rescue her from the bare tank in a glitzy shopping centre in South Korea’s capital before it is too late.

A state industrial strategy is needed to reduce carbon output, produce cleaner growth and redistribute jobs around the UK

Theresa May and Boris Johnson both argued for levelling up and for a state-supported green transition undergirded by an industrial strategy. Neither delivered and their successor, Rishi Sunak, has repudiated their legacy as prime minister. He looks to the City to deliver growth, with banks determining the rate of investment to meet the challenge of the climate emergency. This is a recipe for failure. The Climate Change Committee (CCC), the government’s independent advisers on cutting carbon emissions, warned last year of “worryingly slow” progress to meet net zero targets. The government is not engaging on what it will take to decarbonise.

Weaning the country off fossil fuels and on to green energy is a complex transition that should be a job for the state, not the free market. Yet Britain is bottom of the league for state spending on renewables in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. In the offshore industry alone 30,000 workers could end up with nowhere to go by 2030 without new roles in green industries. Relying on big finance to meet that gap will entrench today’s failing model, which emphasises the need to attract significant capital flows through deregulation and privatisation, strengthening the hand of boom-and-bust financial services and weakening labour rights. The flipside is a bigger trade deficit and a destructive politics of redistribution to asset holders and to London.

Milford Haven, Southampton and Immingham top the list for emissions of gases and particulates

Ships calling at the UK’s most-polluted ports produce more nitrogen oxides than all the cars registered in the same cities or regions, analysis has shown.

A report from Transport & Environment (T&E) said that ships were continuing to discharge huge quantities of air pollutants at ports, with Milford Haven, Southampton and Immingham topping the list for emissions of harmful sulphur oxides and fine particulate matter (PM2.5) as well as nitrogen oxides (NOx).

A new exhibition at the Natural History Museum in London includes ‘tragic’ tales of species wiped out from their natural habitats

Douglas Russell, a senior curator at London’s Natural History Museum, was examining a collection of nests gathered on the island of Guam when he made an unsettling discovery.

“The nests had been picked up more than 100 years ago, and I was curating them with the aim of adding them to the museum’s main collection. They turned out to be one of the most tragic, saddest accumulations of objects I’ve ever had to deal with,” Russell told the Observer last week.

Popular among teenagers, the large electric bikes have triggered numerous complaints to councils as fears grow for the safety of riders and pedestrians

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If you frequent coastal towns or suburbs around Australia, you might be familiar with the sight of large, speedy ebikes zooming along the footpath. Fat bikes, as they’re commonly known, have been described as the monster trucks of the cycling world. With wide, thick tyres and seats big enough for two, the electric bicycles are designed to handle sand and off-road terrain.

But they have also garnered a cult status among young people, who are using them to get around with friends, take their surfboard to the beach and commute to school.

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PFAS chemicals present in air, rain, atmosphere and water in basin, which holds nearly 95% of US freshwater

Toxic PFAS “forever chemicals” are ubiquitous in the Great Lakes basin’s air, rain, atmosphere and water, new peer-reviewed research shows.

The first-of-its-kind, comprehensive picture of PFAS levels for the basin, which holds nearly 95% of the nation’s freshwater, also reveals that precipitation is probably a major contributor to the lakes’ contamination.

Edible oil droplets trap bugs without the harm to people and wildlife that synthetic pesticides can cause

Tiny sticky droplets sprayed on crops to trap pests could be a green alternative to chemical pesticides, research has shown.

The insect glue, produced from edible oils, was inspired by plants such as sundews that use the strategy to capture their prey. A key advantage of physical pesticides over toxic pesticides is that pests are highly unlikely to evolve resistance, as this would require them to develop much larger and stronger bodies, while bigger beneficial insects, like bees, are not trapped by the drops.

A 1C increase in global temperature leads to a 12% decline in world gross domestic product, researchers have found

The economic damage wrought by climate change is six times worse than previously thought, with global heating set to shrink wealth at a rate consistent with the level of financial losses of a continuing permanent war, research has found.

A 1C increase in global temperature leads to a 12% decline in world gross domestic product (GDP), the researchers found, a far higher estimate than that of previous analyses. The world has already warmed by more than 1C (1.8F) since pre-industrial times and many climate scientists predict a 3C (5.4F) rise will occur by the end of this century due to the ongoing burning of fossil fuels, a scenario that the new working paper, yet to be peer-reviewed, states will come with an enormous economic cost.

Fossil-fuel dependent country hopes to provide bridge between wealthy global north and poor south at November gathering

Oil is inescapable in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. The smell of it greets the visitor on arrival and from the shores of the Caspian Sea on which the city is built the tankers are eternally visible. Flares from refineries near the centre light up the night sky, and you do not have to travel far to see fields of “nodding donkeys”, small piston pump oil wells about 6 metres (20ft) tall, that look almost festive in their bright red and green livery.

It will be an interesting setting for the gathering of the 29th UN climate conference of the parties, which will take place at the Olympic Stadium in November.

Church asks people to record species found in local graveyards, which can provide good habitat for complex life form

The still calm of graveyards invites visitors to think about the dead, but now the Church of England is asking people across the country to look for surprising signs of life within them.

Graves are a haven for lichen, with more than 700 of the 2,000 British species having been recorded in English churchyards and cemeteries so far. According to surveys by the church, many sites have well more than 100 species on the stonework, trees and in the grassland.

Glyphosate found in samples from French infertility clinic raising questions about controversial chemical’s impact on fertility

More than 55% of sperm samples from a French infertility clinic contained high levels of glyphosate, the world’s most common weedkiller, raising further questions about the chemical’s impact on reproductive health and overall safety, a new study found.

The new research also found evidence of impacts on DNA and a correlation between glyphosate levels and oxidative stress on seminal plasma, suggesting significant impacts on fertility and reproductive health.

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

Scientists point to loopholes in new legislation that have been closed under European Union regulations

New rules intended to reduce the use of antibiotics in farming in the UK have been criticised as too lax and weaker than their equivalent under EU laws.

The updated regulations come into force on Friday. They ban the routine use of antibiotics on farm animals, and specifically their use to “compensate for poor hygiene, inadequate animal husbandry, or poor farm management practices”.

Tanya Plibersek ordered investigation after judge accused law firm of ‘subtle coaching’ of Tiwi Island traditional owners during legal challenge

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The Environmental Defenders Office did not breach the conditions of its $8.2m in federal funding, according to a government review of the legal firm’s conduct.

The environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, requested the review after a federal court judgment in January made sharp criticisms of the EDO’s conduct in a legal matter against Santos.

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Exclusive: Study shows Penguin Island population in freefall, sources say, amid pressure from tourism, boat traffic and warming seas

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A once-thriving population of little penguins on a tourist island off Perth’s coast has plummeted to no more than 120 birds, with plans to build a container port in nearby foraging grounds further threatening the survival of the colony.

The latest population study on Penguin Island – 600 metres offshore and 50km south of Perth city – has revealed that penguin numbers have crashed by two-thirds in the past five years, sources say.

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