The Guardian

I once had the good fortune to work with David Bellamy . I was directing a BBC children’s multifaith programme called Umbrella and we decided to do a programme on death – not the easiest topic for children.

David agreed to take part and suggested we film the piece in Hamsterley Forest, near his home in County Durham. When we played the edited tape into the studio recording, the children taking part were enraptured as he linked the life cycle of the trees with that of human beings.

Lib Dem MP for Bath hits out at PM after rivers burst their banks across southern England

Boris Johnson has been criticised for not visiting flood-stricken communities at Christmas after it emerged he had no immediate plans to travel to areas hit by heavy rain.

Families may be forced to spend the festive period away from their homes after rivers burst their banks in Kent, Cornwall, Sussex and Norfolk. The Met Office has 54 flood warnings and 141 flood alerts in place across the UK, including in the north of England and the Midlands, with some likely to remain active until Christmas Eve as more rain is forecast.

Mayor Sadiq Khan calls for government action to protect the capital’s waterways

The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has called on the government to provide more funding to clean up the pollution blighting London’s rivers, after a study highlighted the toxic effects on water from driving in the capital’s most congested areas.

The River Brent in west London and the River Lea in the east, at 18 miles and 42 miles respectively, are worst affected by pollution from roads. Concern over pollution has concentrated on toxic air, which is killing and shortening the lives of tens of thousands of people every year, but road pollution is also damaging the water supply.

Residents of Parc Hadau in Pontardawe will generate more clean energy than they can use

One of the world’s first net zero carbon neighbourhoods will be constructed in Wales after Neath Port Talbot council approved the development of 35 homes able to generate more clean energy than they use.

Development of the £8m project in Pontardawe in south Wales is expected to begin this spring. The residents of Parc Hadau will pay no energy bills because the development will use a mixture of renewable energy technologies to generate enough clean electricity to power its homes over the year.

Heavy rain and flooding cause chaos in parts of Norfolk, Sussex and Kent

Boris Johnson was urged to overhaul the system for deciding where flood-defence funding is spent and launch an emergency response unit as nearly 100 flood warnings were put in place across England on Sunday. ‘Catastrophic’ damage was caused during flooding in November in Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire

• Boris Johnson urged to overhaul flood defence funding or risk ‘catastrophe’

Regional leaders call on Boris Johnson to act as Kent and East Sussex are hit by flooding

Boris Johnson must overhaul the system for deciding where flood-defence funding is spent and launch an emergency response unit to prevent a repeat of the “catastrophic” damage caused by the November floods, leading politicians have said.

Nearly 100 flood warnings were in place across much of England on Sunday, hampering the Christmas getaway, with towns and villages deluged in Kent and East Sussex.

Energy giant Iberdrola predicts renewables will take ‘much more relevant position’ in Australia in coming years – and hopes to develop further projects

Spanish energy giant Iberdrola says it has decided to invest $500m in a wind and solar farm in South Australia as the first of a series of renewable power projects it hopes to develop in Australia.

Iberdrola’s head of renewables, Xabier Viteri, said that in the new year the company would also probably increase its target for renewable energy from the “ambitious” target of 10GW by 2022.

It’s an emotional time to be an entomologist, as ecological diversity that once existed slips away

How many Christmas beetles have you seen this year?

The insects – a genus containing some 35 separate species – traditionally appear in summer. Many settlers saw the scarabs, shimmering in festive red and green, as embodying the European holiday tradition.

Exclusive: Labor accuses Scott Morrison of using adjustments to Australia’s soil carbon data as an excuse not to act on climate change

Australia’s official greenhouse gas records have been adjusted such that emissions are now significantly higher than previously believed for the years when Labor was in power, and no longer rise each year since the Coalition repealed the carbon price.

The revisions, made clear in data published during the recent UN climate conference in Madrid, have allowed Scott Morrison to start claiming that emissions are now lower than when the Coalition was elected in 2013 and in any year when Labor was last in government.

Across northern NSW and southern Queensland, people have stepped up to truck water to those whose supplies have run dry

A few months ago, Russell Wantling pulled over to the side of the road near the southern Queensland town of Stanthorpe to speak to a family he saw carrying buckets of water from the town dam. Again and again, they lugged each bucketload up the dam wall and poured it into a tank strapped to the tray of an old ute.

“I just stopped and asked what they were doing,” Wantling says. “He said to me that they had no water, he couldn’t afford to buy water because he’d lost his job. So I went to my wife and said ‘we’ve got to do something, this is terrible’.

Global Greengrants UK, one of the four groups we are helping to fight the climate crisis, supports indigenous Brazilians

• Please donate to our appeal here

It is midnight at an almost deserted bus station and one of the Amazon’s most courageous warriors is sitting on a plastic chair and breastfeeding her child, apparently indifferent to the hefty price on her head.

Illegal miners have offered 100g of gold to anyone who kills Maria Leusa Munduruku, a forest defender, indigenous leader and women’s rights activist who has spearheaded campaigns to halt invasions of the Tapajós river basin by polluters, loggers and dam builders.

The plant has flowered for the first time in Britain, but the climate crisis is making such events rarer than ever

It is famous for smelling like “a thousand dead elephants rotting in the sun”, its petals resemble decaying flesh, and it is so rare that outside its natural habitat in Papua New Guinea, few botanists in the world have ever seen it in flower.

Now this highly pungent orchid – Bulbophyllum phalaenopsis – is in bloom for the first time in a glasshouse at Cambridge University Botanic Garden.

The big cats’ resourceful new behaviour was recorded by a WWF study on a remote island off the coast of Brazil

A thriving population of jaguars living on a small, unspoilt island off the coast of the Brazilian Amazon has learned to catch fish in the sea to survive, conservationists have found.

The Maracá-Jipioca Ecological Station island reserve, three miles off the northern state of Amapá, acts as a nursery for jaguars, according to WWF researchers who have collared three cats and set up 70 camera traps on the remote jungle island.

The family had brought the tree to their home and decorated it before they spotted the bird, who initially didn’t want to leave

A Georgia family got a real hoot from its Christmas tree: more than a week after they bought it, they discovered a live owl nestled among its branches.

Katie McBride Newman said on Friday that she and her daughter spotted the bird on 12 December. They had bought the 10ft-tall tree from a Home Depot, brought it back to their Atlanta area home and decorated it with lights and, coincidentally, owl ornaments.

The government has an opportunity to pivot in 2020 – to actually do something rather than pretending to

It’s hot as I write this final column for 2019, the day is creeping towards 40C. It’s dry. The ground is like concrete, and dust is obscuring yellowed grass on my parched suburban block. Bushfire smoke has rolled in and out of Canberra. Smoke is the last thing I smell before going to sleep and the first thing I smell as I wake up.

With the summer stretching out in front of us and no significant rain forecast before April, according to the Bureau of Meteorology, December and January promises extreme weather, burning bushland, eerie blood-red sunsets. Towns are on the brink of running out of water. Instead of resting and recharging with their loved ones, emergency services workers are spending their days toiling in a hellscape.

The pick of the best flora and fauna photos from around the world, from fighting sloths to rescued orangutans

Court rules Dutch government has duty to protect citizens’ rights in face of climate change

The Netherlands’ supreme court has upheld a ruling ordering the country’s government to do much more to cut carbon emissions, after a six-year fight for climate justice.

The court ruled that the government had explicit duties to protect its citizens’ human rights in the face of climate change and must reduce emissions by at least 25% compared with 1990 levels by the end of 2020.

Christmas is peak time for blockages and consumers are urged to be more careful about what they put down pipes

It looks like a 5ft-long grey sausage made of hundreds of scruffy pieces of fabric. On closer inspection, brightly coloured plastic, condoms and rubber bands can be identified in the bizarre-looking mass.

This is known in the water industry as “rag”, the technical term for items that do not degrade once they have been flushed down the toilet. The greyish material that dominates the mass is wet wipes, now the scourge of the UK’s sewers. Combined with fat and grease that has been tipped down sinks, it is already starting to build up into a fatberg.

Research shows underground storage can create new form of element which could affect groundwater

A new form of uranium has been discovered which is likely to have implications for current nuclear waste disposal plans, say scientists.

Many governments are planning to dispose of radioactive waste by burying it deep underground. However, new research has found that in such storage conditions a new chemical form of uranium can temporarily occur, while small amounts of uranium are released into solution. If uranium is in solution, it could make its way into groundwater.