The Guardian

Run by the Society of German Nature Photographers (Gesellschaft Deutscher Tierfotografen), the prestigious annual contest celebrates the best wildlife photography from members in Germany. Here are this year’s winners

The winner of the $50,000 Moran contemporary photographic prize has been announced as Tamara Dean for her image titled Endangered, part of a series which explores climate change and the Great Barrier Reef. We take a deep dive into Dean’s work over the past three years and see how it has evolved to explore her profound concern for the planet

Leader also criticises ‘insensitive, neocolonial’ suggestion by Kevin Rudd

Fiji’s prime minister, Frank Bainimarama, has slapped down the Liberal MP John Alexander for suggesting Australia should prioritise helping people in the Pacific move to higher ground to avoid sea-level rise over reducing its use of coal.

In a speech at the Australasian Emissions Reduction Summit at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, Bainimarama said Fiji was already feeling effects of climate change and had moved three communities to safer territory, while a further 40 were in a queue awaiting relocation.

Report calls for change of priorities and culture to avert catastrophic biodiversity loss

Governments need to ramp up investment in nature restoration and raise the tax burden on companies that degrade wildlife, according to recommendations made to the G7 group of rich nations.

The proposals are part of a growing debate on how to radically change humanity’s relationship with nature in the wake of a new UN mega-report that showed an alarming decline in the Earth’s life-support systems.

Undercover footage by activists has exposed brutal treatment for one batch of young calves being trucked to the Netherlands to be sold as veal

Irish calves as young as two weeks old are being beaten, kicked and punched, according to secretly filmed footage.

Campaigners followed more than 5,000 calves on 23 livestock trucks from Ireland to the French control post at Tollevast, where animals are supposed to find rest and feed under EU laws.

Ex-archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams welcomes plans for fully costed proposals

The former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has welcomed an “urgent change” by Cambridge University, after it agreed to provide fully costed plans setting out how it could divest multibillion-pound endowments from fossil fuel corporations.

The university’s management accepted a motion, known as a grace, which urged Cambridge to “set out fully the advantages and disadvantages, including the social and political ones”, of divestment from global coal, oil and gas companies.

From native species to Indigenous land management and water efficiency: Australia’s role in the extinction crisis

A devastating new UN report shows the planet is in serious danger from the accelerating decline of the Earth’s natural life-support systems. Here we look at 10 of the key points from the report – and their relevance for Australia.

Exclusive: Company pursues approvals based on original plans for 60m-tonne megamine

Adani has refused to commit to the size of its “scaled-down” Carmichael coal project and is still pursuing final approvals based on plans for a 60m-tonne megamine in central Queensland.

The Queensland government has confirmed that while Adani announced last year it intended to build a much smaller mine, the Indian company has filed no formal plans on that basis.

Exploitation and predatory pricing drove the transformation of the US beef industry – and created the model for modern agribusiness. By Joshua Specht

The meatpacking mogul Jonathan Ogden Armour could not abide socialist agitators. It was 1906, and Upton Sinclair had just published The Jungle, an explosive novel revealing the grim underside of the American meatpacking industry. Sinclair’s book told the tale of an immigrant family’s toil in Chicago’s slaughterhouses, tracing the family’s physical, financial and emotional collapse. The Jungle was not Armour’s only concern. The year before, the journalist Charles Edward Russell’s book The Greatest Trust in the World had detailed the greed and exploitation of a packing industry that came to the American dining table “three times a day … and extorts its tribute”.

In response to these attacks, Armour, head of the enormous Chicago-based meatpacking firm Armour & Co, took to the Saturday Evening Post to defend himself and his industry. Where critics saw filth, corruption and exploitation, Armour saw cleanliness, fairness and efficiency. If it were not for “the professional agitators of the country”, he claimed, the nation would be free to enjoy an abundance of delicious and affordable meat.

Insects are ‘the glue in nature’, says Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson, underpinning the food and water we rely on

Humanity must save insects, if not for their sake, then for ourselves, a leading entomologist has warned.

“Insects are the glue in nature and there is no doubt that both the [numbers] and diversity of insects are declining,” said Prof Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson, at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. “At some stage the whole fabric unravels and then we will really see the consequences.”

Almost 600 conservation experts have signed a letter by the wildlife charity WWF, published to coincide with UN report into loss of biodiversity

Almost 600 conservation experts have signed the Call4Nature open letter written by wildlife charity WWF, which is being published to coincide with the IPBES report (see letter below).

Just six of the 76 giant vessels worldwide are banned from operating in country’s waters

Australia’s ban on super-sized industrial fishing boats is far too narrow and places local fisheries under threat, environmentalists have said.

A report released on Tuesday by the Australian Marine Conservation Society and Save Our Marine Life says just six of the 76 super trawlers worldwide are banned from operating in Australian waters.

The global assessment report paints a dire picture of our effect on the natural world

That humans are meddling with the natural world, in ways that we often fail to understand, is no longer in doubt. From the near-extinction of many land animals – the elephant, the tiger, the rhinoceros – in their natural habitats to the destruction of forests in the developing world, the decline of insect life in areas of intensive agriculture in developed countries, and more recently the increasingly evident scourge of plastics in the oceans, our imprint on the natural world has become impossible to ignore.

Biggest cost of tree disease will be loss of benefits such as clean air and water, study finds

An invasive fungal disease killing ash trees will cost the British economy nearly £15bn, a study has found.

Ash dieback, which is lethal to European ash trees, originated in Asia and is thought to have been brought to the UK on imported ash trees some years before it was first identified in Britain in 2012.

Ministers announce report on economic case for biodiversity, but activists insist actions, not studies, are needed

The British government has commissioned Sir Partha Dasgupta, a professor at Cambridge University, to write a report on the economic case for biodiversity as policymakers across the planet are urged to step up efforts to reverse the alarming decline of the natural world.

Senior United Nations officials praised the announcement, which was made at the G7 environment ministers’ meeting at the weekend, and expressed hope it will lead to a biodiversity study that is as influential as the Stern review on the economics of climate change.

Scientists reveal one million species at risk of extinction in damning UN report

Human society is in jeopardy from the accelerating decline of the Earth’s natural life-support systems, the world’s leading scientists have warned, as they announced the results of the most thorough planetary health check ever undertaken.

From coral reefs flickering out beneath the oceans to rainforests desiccating into savannahs, nature is being destroyed at a rate tens to hundreds of times higher than the average over the past 10m years, according to the UN global assessment report.

Environmentalists say Australia should be at the forefront of a global deal to save nature

Australia’s major political parties are facing calls to explain what role they will play in securing a global deal to save nature and the human populations reliant on it after a major scientific report warned a million species across the world face extinction.

The first-of-its-kind assessment by an international scientific panel convened by the United Nations, known as the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, warns species are declining at a rate unprecedented in human history, with three-quarters of land-based environments and two-thirds of the marine environment significantly altered.

Residents of the town on the banks of the Mississippi River have watched a family members and neighbors have been lost to cancer. Official figures show the risk of cancer from toxic air is 50 times higher in Reserve than the national average. Feeling neglected by politicians, they are fighting back against the chemical plant has been emitting chloroprene into the air for half a century

Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane have seen water levels hit near-decade lows after a hot summer and dry autumn

Sydney, Darwin, Brisbane and Melbourne are all facing the prospect of dams below 50% capacity after low rainfall and high temperatures across the country.

In Sydney, inflows are at their lowest since 1940. Greater Sydney’s 11 dams were at a combined 55% capacity on Sunday – compared to 73% at the same time last year.

Photographer Matthew Newton travelled alongside the 5,000-strong protest against Adani’s proposed Carmichael coalmine, which left Hobart on 17 April before making its way to Clermont in central Queensland and on to Canberra, where it ended on 5 May. The former Greens leader Bob Brown lead the charge