The Guardian

US technology allows fruits to stay ripe for twice as long and reduces plastic packaging

Avocados that stay ripe for twice as long as usual thanks to an edible coating on their skin made from plant materials will go on sale in Europe for the first time this week.

Large supermarket chains in Germany and Denmark will stock the fruit, which is treated with a tasteless coating that has the potential to reduce fresh fruit and vegetable waste throughout the supply chain and cut the use of plastic packaging.

Water minister Melinda Pavey says imminent ‘day zero’ dates would apply only if there was no rain and no water restrictions

Coastal towns in New South Wales face serious water supply constraints if summer rains fail to materialise, with some potentially running out by January.

But the water minister, Melinda Pavey, urged people not to abandon their holiday plans, saying the new list of “day zero” dates for NSW towns was a worst-case scenario based on how long water supplies would last with no inflows and without water restrictions.

COP25 delegates from developing countries try to ban the emissions accounting measure in a clause described as an ‘anti-Australia option’

Australia’s plan to use an accounting loophole to meet its international emissions targets has been formally challenged at UN climate talks, with about 100 countries wanting the practice banned under the Paris agreement.

Delegates from developing countries led by Belize and Costa Rica have introduced a ban on using carryover credits from the Kyoto protocol into the text of the rulebook for the Paris climate agreement, which is being debated at a meeting in Madrid.

The Australian musician Megan Washington worked with composer Robert Davidson on a performance based around Greta Thunberg's excoriating address to the UN’s climate action summit in New York in September. The piece was performed at the City Recital Hall's  20th anniversary event We Are Twenty, to celebrate the music of the future and what music can look like in the next 20 years. "Greta’s speech is the definition of punk, and more important than any song that has been written in my lifetime, so I couldn’t ‘look to the future’ without including it," Washington said. "Rob is an actual genius because his compositions are proof that there is music in all of us, when we speak passionately, and from the heart." 

Choose your favourite image from entrants in BirdLife Australia’s annual photography awards. From a lone rainbow bee-eater in Western Australia to fabulous fantail in New South Wales, the best images by photographers across Australia have been entered into this year’s poll. Voting will run until Friday 13 December

• Black-throated finch wins 2019 bird of the year with tawny frogmouth second

Industry groups call for ban on HFC-134a refrigerant in car air-conditioning, already banned in the EU and US

Australia is at risk of becoming a dumping ground for cars pre-charged with a greenhouse gas 1,400 times more potent than carbon dioxide, industry groups warn.

The culprit is refrigerant used in car air-conditioning systems known as HFC-134a, a gas first introduced to replace ozone-depleting gases that were phased out in the 90s.

COP25 in Madrid criticised for focusing on details instead of agreeing deep cuts to emissions

Urgent UN talks on tackling the climate emergency are still not addressing the true scale of the crisis, one of the world’s leading climate scientists has warned, as high-ranking ministers from governments around the world began to arrive in Madrid for the final days of negotiations.

Talks are focusing on some of the rules for implementing the 2015 Paris agreement, but the overriding issue of how fast the world needs to cut greenhouse gas emissions has received little official attention.

Ahead of the election, we challenge the parties on the climate emergency, flying, rewilding, red meat and more

• Parties on how they would tackle climate crisis

Putting a tax on meat, ending the sale of petrol and diesel cars within a decade and upgrading the energy efficiency of every home in the UK are among the eye-catching green promises from the political parties fighting for voters’ backing in the general election.

Others include zero-emission railways and a £640m Nature for Climate fund to restore the natural world and help fight the climate emergency. These pledges are in the answers given to a series of questions put to the main parties by the Guardian to draw them out on specific key issues.

Conservatives, Greens, Labour, Lib Dems and SNP tackle the biggest climate and environmental issues

• Which party has answer to big green questions?

The Guardian put the following questions to the main politicial parties to draw them out on specific key climate and environmental issues ahead of the election.

Dozens of species are now at risk but a conference this week will showcase new technology that could help stop the illegal trade

The two young women who arrived at Heathrow in February 2014 en route to Düsseldorf were carrying nondescript luggage. Customs officers were suspicious nevertheless and looked inside – to find 13 iguanas stuffed into socks inside the cases. Astonishingly, 12 of the highly endangered San Salvador rock iguanas had survived their transatlantic journey.

“There only about 600 of these animals left in the wild, in the Bahamas, and these animals were being taken to a private collector somewhere in Germany. Incredibly, we were able to return 12 of them, alive, to their homeland – on San Salvador island,” said Grant Miller, who was then working for the Border Force’s endangered species team.

With the climate emergency putting our mental health at risk, Emma Beddington presents an everyday guide to eco wellbeing

Much like the planet, people have a tipping point. Mine came last summer, when a respected scientist told me matter-of-factly that he thought it was “at least highly unlikely” that his teenage children would survive beyond late middle age. At that point, three decades of climate unease crystallised into debilitating dread, and I’m far from alone.

If you accept that food matters, we need to talk about what we want from our farmers, and what we want our regional landscapes to be

I’m starting to think that after living on a farm for 25 years, I might now learn the art of agriculture at the age of 54. I’m starting to think, in the hierarchy of needs, it might matter more to me than journalism. Because of, well, food. As a journalist for 30-plus years, that is a hard truth. But food matters. Where food comes from matters. The landscape that provides our food matters.

And if you accept those propositions, we need a conversation about what we want from our food producers – our farmers. We need to think about what we want our regional landscapes to be. Talking to farmers, as I do in my home town and in my work, I think we could look back in a decade and find we have lost a fair chunk of middle growers: the in-betweeners. What we will have left is small, specialised food producers who cater to niche eaters with decent incomes, and vast entities churning out cheap food demanded by markets controlling our rural landscapes and our water. In that scenario, Australia would revert to the squatters’ blocks of days past – vast estates with sporadic populations dotted through the countryside. Which is fine, I guess, if that is what Australia wants. As long as it is an informed decision.

Angus Taylor heads to COP25 next week, where Australia has already twice been given the ‘fossil of the day’ award

For two weeks at the end of every year, the world’s governments meet to work on a global response to climate change. This year is the 25th meeting of what is known as the conference of the parties under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Those who attend know it as COP, or COP25.

Here’s what you need to know about this year’s talks, which started on Monday in Madrid, and what they could mean for Australia.

Photographer Judah Passow has documented those were affected by the Bhopal disaster 35 years ago, which killed an estimated 25,000 people ad has left more than 150,000 suffering from chronic medical conditions

Judah Passow has waived his fee for this work. Contributions to the Bhopal Medical Appeal can be made at www.bhopal.org

Sharks, tuna, marlin and other large fish at risk from spread of ‘dead zones’, say scientists

Oxygen in the oceans is being lost at an unprecedented rate, with “dead zones” proliferating and hundreds more areas showing oxygen dangerously depleted, as a result of the climate emergency and intensive farming, experts have warned.

Sharks, tuna, marlin and other large fish species were at particular risk, scientists said, with many vital ecosystems in danger of collapse. Dead zones – where oxygen is effectively absent – have quadrupled in extent in the last half-century, and there are also at least 700 areas where oxygen is at dangerously low levels, up from 45 when research was undertaken in the 1960s.

Emissions expected to be 13% lower than 2005 by 2030 but government plans to use ‘carryover credits’ from Kyoto protocol

The federal government has released new data that suggests the Morrison government is on track to meet the emissions reduction target it set at the Paris climate conference, but only by including an accounting loophole.

The emissions projections report suggests Australia will better its 2030 emissions target, a 26%-28% cut below 2005 levels, by 16 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.

Activist says 4% greenhouse gas emissions rise since 2015 shows action is insufficient

The global wave of school strikes for the climate over the past year has “achieved nothing” because greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise, Greta Thunberg has told activists at UN climate talks in Madrid.

Thousands of young people were expected to gather at the UN climate conference and in the streets of the Spanish capital on Friday to protest against the lack of progress in tackling the climate emergency, as officials from more than 190 countries wrangled over the niceties of wording in documents related to the Paris accord.

Officials call for global targets on protection of land, oceans and wildlife to be subject to Paris-style legal framework

If humanity wants to reverse the widespread destruction of the natural world, biodiversity needs legal protection like the Paris agreement on climate change, members of the European parliament have said.

Action to halt biodiversity decline is based on voluntary commitments but, less than a year before a crucial UN biodiversity conference in China, MEPs pointed to the destruction of precious ecosystems and the more than 1m species facing extinction as evidence that the approach is failing.

The pick of the best flora and fauna photos from around the world, including a howling coyote and a baby alligator

Sharp rise in wholesale pork prices prompts warnings over cost of bratwurst, chorizo and other seasonal fare

The “schnitzel alert” sounded by German meat producers earlier this week has been echoed in other European countries, as wholesale pork prices rise by as much as 40%.

BVDF, the federal association of the German meat industry, warned consumers that price rises meant some of their favourite national specialities, such as schnitzel and bratwurst, were going to be more expensive over Christmas.