The Guardian

Missisauga officials have twice forcibly cut Wolf Ruck’s grass and billed him, after he decided to rewild his garden

Most mornings, Wolf Ruck walks the mown paths in his yard in Mississauga, Ontario, watching for insects landing on the goldenrod, birds feeding on native seed heads, and chipmunk kits playing in the tall grass.

The septuagenarian artist, film-maker and former Olympic canoeist began rewilding his garden with native plants three years ago, as part of a growing movement across Canada towards replacing water-thirsty lawns with “naturalised gardens”.

Scientists call for regulation to stop regional use of marine cloud brightening having negative impact elsewhere

A geoengineering technique designed to reduce high temperatures in California could inadvertently intensify heatwaves in Europe, according to a study that models the unintended consequences of regional tinkering with a changing climate.

The paper shows that targeted interventions to lower temperature in one area for one season might bring temporary benefits to some populations, but this has to be set against potentially negative side-effects in other parts of the world and shifting degrees of effectiveness over time.

UN says finding funds to tackle climate crisis is ‘a steep mountain to climb’, as talks end with little agreement

Finding the finance needed to stave off the worst impacts of the climate crisis will be “a very steep mountain to climb”, the UN has conceded, as two vital international conferences failed to produce the progress needed to generate funds for poor countries.

With less than five months to go before the Cop29 UN climate summit in Azerbaijan in November, there is still no agreement on how to bridge the near-trillion dollar gap between what developing countries say is needed and the roughly $100bn a year of climate finance that flows today from public sources in the rich world to stricken developing nations.

Conservationists hope insects carrying ‘birth control’ bacteria can save honeycreeper being wiped out by malaria

Millions of mosquitoes are being released from helicopters in Hawaii in a last-ditch attempt to save rare birds slipping into extinction.

The archipelago’s endemic, brightly coloured honeycreeper birds are dying of malaria carried by mosquitoes first introduced by European and American ships in the 1800s. Having evolved with no immunity to the disease, the birds can die after just a single bite.

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

Mainstream groups including National Trust and RSPB will join hunt saboteurs and direct action activists for first time

Crabs, badgers and scores of dragonfly wings will be among the fancy dress worn by thousands of people joining more than 350 environmental groups marching through London on Saturday to demand the next government does not “recklessly” ignore the nature crisis.

For the first time, mainstream organisations including the National Trust and the RSPB will stand beside hunt saboteurs and direct action activists in the Restore Nature Now march, as campaigners call on the next government to take “bold” steps to tackle the biodiversity crisis.

Nuclear power? Really!?

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Community conservation groups are fighting to protect woodlands from illegal logging, farming and fires, but limited resources are a constant challenge and the task is getting ever more difficult

• Safidy Andrianantenaina is a Madagascan photographer and recipient of the revolutionary storyteller grant, a Photographers Without Borders and On the Edge joint project

Rishi Sunak’s decision to side with climate deniers isn’t just wrongheaded: it’s costing our environment and our economy

In 2019, the UK became the first G7 country to legislate for net zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050. At the time, I was the cabinet minister who signed this into law. We did so knowing that taking action to tackle the climate crisis was supported by all the major political parties. We had no time to waste. It had been the Conservative party in opposition under David Cameron that had backed the Climate Change Act more than a decade earlier because we argued that climate action was more important than political divisions. As a result, the UK’s internationally renowned framework of carbon budgets has seen our emissions more than halve since 1990.

Britain has long been viewed as a clean energy leader across the world. We pioneered the first successful emissions trading scheme, followed by the contracts for difference model for funding renewable energy projects that made the North Sea into one of the largest windfarms in the world. A few weeks after delivering the net zero bill, I helped to secure the UK’s bid to host Cop26 in Glasgow. There, more than 80% of countries followed our lead and committed to a net zero target.

Climate and clean energy leadership has created jobs, growth and regeneration. The impact has been transformative. For the first time, wind power now makes up the largest source of our electricity. Coal, which used to make up more than 40% of our power when I was first elected as an MP in 2010, will from next year be consigned to the history books. Our economy has grown by 80% since 1990, and at the same time our emissions have halved. When I signed net zero into law, I always viewed our plan as a mainstream, even conservative, vision. One of the legacies of Cop26 is the growth in clean energy markets across the world. Elsewhere, the Inflation Reduction Act in the US and the green deal in Europe have committed to at least a decade of support for green industries.

Yet the UK now risks falling ever further behind in the net zero race. We have seen Rishi Sunak decide to prioritise new oil and gas expansion at a time when our fossil fuel industries are in rapid decline and will become stranded assets within decades. His decision to renege on net zero means the UK has scaled back on measures that would have saved households £8bn a year in lower energy costs. It has cost us the ability to lead in new technological markets and risks losing Britain the greatest economic opportunity in a generation.

Chris Skidmore is a former Conservative energy minister

UK nuclear site pleads guilty to IT security breaches from 2019 to 2023

The UK’s most hazardous nuclear site, Sellafield, has pleaded guilty to criminal charges related to cybersecurity failings brought by the industry regulator.

Lawyers acting for Sellafield told Westminster magistrates’ court on Thursday that cybersecurity requirements were “not sufficiently adhered to for a period” at the vast nuclear waste dump in Cumbria.

The charges relate to information technology security offences spanning a four-year period from 2019 to 2023. It emerged in March that the Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) intended to prosecute Sellafield for technology security offences.

DNA analysis of old samples finds only five historical cases raising hopes for polar bears as a distinct species

A family of “grolars” in Canada’s Arctic remains the only confirmed example of hybrid offspring between polar and grizzly bears, according to a new study which may provide some optimism for conservationists worried about the future of polar bears as a distinct species.

A team of North American researchers examined old bear samples collected between 1975 and 2015 using a newly developed tool to look for previously unknown examples of hybrid bears.

Britain’s landscape is under threat from developers and rapacious corporations. But I have a solution – if the next PM will listen

What do Britons most love about Britain? At the last count it was still the NHS. After that it was not the royal family, the army or democracy. Believe it or not, it is the countryside, according to polling commissioned last year by Future Countryside, an initiative of the Countryside Alliance. Today, the NHS may cram election manifestos, but of the countryside we hear not a word.

This will not last. An almighty clash is looming between the lucrative renewables industry and defenders of the rural landscape. Labour and the Tories are both eager to weaken local planning. Keir Starmer wants to curb the rights of citizens to object to new development in the countryside. The Tories recently announced a return to onshore wind, hence the proposal for a turbine cluster on the Yorkshire Moors above Charlotte Brontë’s Calderdale. Sixty-five turbines funded by the Saudis are to rise a staggering 200m each, higher than Blackpool Tower. It is hard to believe such an outrage is to be allowed for so trivial a contribution to the climate.

Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

Landmark judgment says planning bodies must account for burning of extracted fuel when considering site proposals

The climate impact of burning coal, oil and gas must be taken into account when deciding whether to approve projects, the supreme court in London has ruled.

The landmark judgment, handed down on Thursday, sets an important precedent on whether the “inevitable” future greenhouse gas emissions of a fossil fuel project should be considered.

The animal, which is still categorised as ‘vulnerable’, has been the subject of a 20-year conservation programme

Less than a quarter of a century after the Iberian lynx was feared to be only a whisker away from extinction, populations of the animal have recovered enough across Spain and Portugal for it to be moved from “endangered” to “vulnerable” on the global red list of threatened species.

The change in status, announced on Thursday by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (ICUN), is the result of a two-decade-long effort from a coalition of partners including the EU and regional and national governments in Spain and Portugal, as well as wildlife NGOs and local people.

This government had many climate failures, but its 2014 boost to green energy made the UK an offshore wind superpower

As day-trippers to the British seaside enjoy fish and chips and a bracing paddle, they may notice, as they gaze out to sea, one of the great hidden legacies of this Conservative government: offshore wind power. Turning steadily in the breeze, the vast array of offshore and onshore turbinesaround Great Britain provide about a quarter of our electricity needs, with no carbon emissions and at a cost below imported gas or nuclear generation. They are a national success story. We have the second biggest offshore turbine fleet in the world, behind only China.

The Tory government effectively banned onshore wind turbines in 2015. But at the same time, the growth in offshore wind can be traced back to a 2014 decision to establish a new support mechanism for low-carbon generation. Called “contracts for difference”, it guarantees a set price for units of electricity. If the market price falls below the set price, the generator receives a top-up payment. If the market price rises above the set price, the generator pays back the difference.

Rebecca Willis is professor of energy and climate governance at Lancaster University

Labor MPs tweet Simpsons jokes about nuclear policy after Dutton earlier conceded research found people ‘didn’t want a Springfield’ in their back yard

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Three-eyed koalas, Peter Dutton masquerading as Snow White in a “seven nukes” fairytale, and an arsenal of Simpsons gags to boot.

The Coalition is objecting about what they say are “juvenile” online memes from government MPs attacking its nuclear policy, as Labor MPs mount a social media attack on the opposition’s controversial and uncosted nuclear proposal.

Just Stop Oil activists have sprayed two jets with orange paint at a private airfield in Stansted where they say Taylor Swift's plane landed before her shows at Wembley stadium. The group said on X: 'Private jet users are responsible for up to 40x as much carbon emissions compared with a commercial flight'. The previous day, Just Stop Oil protesters sprayed Stonehenge with orange powder paint before the summer solstice

• Stonehenge sprayed with orange powder paint by Just Stop Oil activists

Researchers find extreme heat four times more likely than at turn of millennium and urge reduction in fossil fuels

The deadly heatwave that scorched large swaths of Mexico, Central America and the southern US in recent weeks was made 35 times more likely due to human-induced global heating, according to research by leading climate scientists from World Weather Attribution (WWA).

Tens of millions of people have endured dangerous day – and nighttime temperatures as a heat dome engulfed Mexico – a large and lingering zone of high pressure that stretched north to Texas, Arizona and Nevada, and south over Belize, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.

Only two countries provide fair amount to compensate lower-income nations for biodiversity loss, with most paying less than half what they should, says ODI

The UK, Canada, New Zealand, Italy and Spain are among the rich countries contributing less than half their fair share of nature finance to poor countries, a new report has found.

Developed nations have agreed to collectively contribute a minimum of $20bn annually for nature restoration in low and middle-income countries by 2025. This money is in addition to the $100bn agreed for climate finance.

Largest ever climate survey also finds majority want countries to set aside differences to fight global heating

Most people in the world’s biggest fossil fuel producing countries want their countries to transition quickly to clean energy to fight the climate crisis, according to the largest ever climate opinion poll, conducted by the UN.

Many of these states have profited heavily from fossil fuel exploitation, but the 77-nation poll shows their citizens are deeply concerned about the impacts of global heating on their lives. In China and India, the biggest coal producers, 80% and 76% respectively want a quick green transition.