The Guardian

The president blamed ‘poor forest management’ for the state’s crisis. But much of the area burning isn’t forest

You cannot possibly understand what it means to live with the risk of wildfire until you have to do so.

I’m a fire scientist and have spent most of my adult life in the flammable south-west. At the start of the fire season, you pack up the things in your house you cannot replace and stage them so they are ready to be thrown into the car. You make a plan for your family and your pets. You identify escape routes and put together a bag with clothing and you spend the summer alert to smoke, radio reports and evacuation notices.

Ambitious scheme also aims to fully decarbonise country’s economy shortly after

Spain has launched an ambitious plan to switch its electricity system entirely to renewable sources by 2050 and completely decarbonise its economy soon after.

By mid-century greenhouse gas emissions would be slashed by 90% from 1990 levels under Spain’s draft climate change and energy transition law.

Study of beetles could explain global decline – and also be a warning to humankind

Heatwaves severely damage the fertility of male beetles and consecutive hot spells leave them virtually sterilised, according to research.

Global warming is making heatwaves more common and wildlife is being annihilated, and the study may reveal a way in which these two trends are linked. The scientists behind the findings said there could also be some relevance for humans: the sperm counts of western men have halved in the last 40 years.

Decades after it became part of the fabric of our lives, a worldwide revolt against plastic is underway. By Stephen Buranyi

Plastic is everywhere, and suddenly we have decided that is a very bad thing. Until recently, plastic enjoyed a sort of anonymity in ubiquity: we were so thoroughly surrounded that we hardly noticed it. You might be surprised to learn, for instance, that today’s cars and planes are, by volume, about 50% plastic. More clothing is made out of polyester and nylon, both plastics, than cotton or wool. Plastic is also used in minute quantities as an adhesive to seal the vast majority of the 60bn teabags used in Britain each year.

Add this to the more obvious expanse of toys, household bric-a-brac and consumer packaging, and the extent of plastic’s empire becomes clear. It is the colourful yet banal background material of modern life. Each year, the world produces around 340m tonnes of the stuff, enough to fill every skyscraper in New York City. Humankind has produced unfathomable quantities of plastic for decades, first passing the 100m tonne mark in the early 1990s. But for some reason it is only very recently that people have really begun to care.

Ancient, flightless, nocturnal birds have been absent from Wellington for more than a century

Wellington could soon have kiwis nesting beside Parliament House thanks to an ambitious conservation project that aims to reintroduce the country’s iconic national bird to the capital city within the next decade.

There are 68,000 kiwi left in New Zealand but the number of birds are declining at a rate of 2% per year. A century ago, there were millions but attacks by by dogs, cats, possums, stoats and rats have led to huge population decline.

The grass is already fuelling regular and intense fires in the Northern Territory

African gamba grass could invade up to 38m hectares of tropical savanna in northern Australia, causing “grave concerns” for fire management, a report has found.

In the Northern Territory, gamba grass has already taken hold and is fuelling regular and intense grass fires between the town of Batchelor and the Darwin rural area. The report, released on Tuesday by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Environment Centre NT, said firefighting costs in that area had increased 30-fold in a decade.

Environmental protesters have daubed the windows of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy in London in an attempt to provoke their arrests. One protester climbed above the revolving doors of the department on Victoria Street, Westminster, and wrote ‘frack off’ in black spray paint. The vandalism came as police started to remove protesters who had superglued themselves to card entry gates inside the staff entrance to the building as part of an anti-fracking protest. The protest is intended to be the first in a series continuing throughout the week and culminating with a mass civil disobedience action on Saturday, which activists are calling ‘rebellion day’.

Project will trace tortoiseshell products in shops back to where they were poached

Researchers will use DNA technology to try to stop the illegal poaching of hawsksbill turtles for use in tortoiseshell products.

The population of the critically endangered species has declined by more than 75% in the Pacific Ocean in the past century and a key threat to the species’ survival is illegal trade.

LNG is often touted as a good alternative to coal but the increase in production means increased emissions that will cancel out any recent savings

Australia’s carbon footprint has expanded for the last three years straight – and the coal industry is not to blame. The biggest driver has been liquefied natural gas, known as LNG.

Science and policy institute Climate Analytics found that between 2015 and 2020 the emissions growth from LNG will effectively wipe out the carbon pollution avoided through the 23% renewable energy target.

Desperate efforts to save the whales – and the Chinook salmon on which they depend – risk fishing communities losing a way of life

Days before the start of the summer fishing season, when guides and outfitters on Canada’s west coast gamble their financial prospects for the year, fishing lodge owner Ryan Chamberland received devastating news.

The coastal waters of Vancouver Island, which he and four generations of his family had fished for salmon, would be out of bounds. The unexpected closure was part of a desperate effort by the Canadian government to save an endangered population of killer whales.

Protest blocks doors of Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy

Protesters have blocked the doors of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) in the first act of a planned week of mass civil disobedience over environmental breakdown.

Dozens of members of the group Extinction Rebellion locked themselves to the revolving doors of the building on Victoria Street, close to parliament in central London, while others glued themselves to the glass.

Show leadership to halt forest loss from agribusiness, Amsterdam Declaration group tells EU

The UK, France and Germany have called on the European commission to launch tough new action to halt deforestation by the end of the year.

A long-delayed EU action plan should be brought forward “as soon as possible”, says a letter to the commission sent by the Amsterdam Declaration group of countries, which also includes Italy, the Netherlands and Norway.

Environmental lawyers say reliance on local authorities to take action is not working

The government’s plan to tackle air pollution in some of the worst affected cities in the UK is unravelling into a “shambolic and piecemeal mess”, according to environmental lawyers.

ClientEarth, which has successfully defeated the government three times in court, said the emphasis on local authorities taking action was backfiring with no joined-up strategy, delays and poorly researched proposals.

At first I kept an open mind about Trump’s interior secretary. But it soon became clear he put the oil, gas and mining industry above our agency’s mission

Back in 2017, the staff at the interior department was not hoping for the best, we were hoping for the competent. A presidential transition can bring dramatic change to the leadership of a federal agency – particularly the agency that manages the conservation and use of one fifth of America’s land area and the seabed of our continental shelf.

Civil servants pledge to continue to serve the American people and the agency mission regardless of whether or not they agree with the political positioning of the president and his cabinet. So we watched the Ryan Zinke confirmation hearings carefully, listening for hints at his management style, his communications style, and his general understanding and respect for public lands and the mission of the agency. These were the qualities that mattered, not his ideology. We were hoping for competence.

Councils say residents also erroneously putting recyclable waste into plastic bags before disposing of them

Throwing soft plastics into the recycling bin is still the most common recycling mistake made by Australians, according to new research by Planet Ark.

A survey of 180 councils commissioned by the environment organisation for Recycling Week asked councils to identify what were the most common recycling mistakes made by their residents.

Exclusive: sticking point in negotiations likely to be increasing the capacity of the existing Goonyella to Abbot Point line to carry coal from Galilee Basin

The Queensland freight rail operator Aurizon is understood to be in discussions with Adani that will hinge on who pays for upgrades to the existing rail network, as the Indian mining company tries to resolve significant elements of its scaled-down plans.

Aurizon had planned to build a rail line linking the Galilee Basin to the Abbot Point port near Bowen, but confirmed last week it had “no plans” to pursue that proposal.

Drilling at Preston New Road site in Lancashire has triggered 37 minor quakes in three weeks

A senior executive at the fracking company Cuadrilla privately said this summer it did not expect to cause earthquakes that would be serious enough to force it to halt operations.

But despite that confidence, the company has triggered 37 minor quakessince it started fracking for gas at its Preston New Road site in Lancashire three weeks ago.

Exclusive: ministers seeking to make firms pay more towards recycling their own waste

Supermarkets, retailers and major drinks brands are set to pay tens of millions of pounds more towards recycling their used packaging under the government’s new waste strategy expected to be published this month, the Guardian understands.

Supermarkets and other major producers of packaging waste currently pay a small fraction of the cost of collecting and recycling the 11m tonnes of packaging waste produced in the UK.

Undersea forests, bleached and killed by rising ocean temperature, might disappear in a few decades, experts warn

Children born today may be the last generation to see coral reefs in all their glory, according to a marine biologist who is coordinating efforts to monitor the decline of the world’s most colourful ecosystem.

Global heating and ocean acidification have already severely bleached 16 to 33% of all warm-water reefs, but the remainder are vulnerable to even a fraction of a degree more warming, said David Obura, chair of the Coral Specialist Group in the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

Man in his 20s was at Pyramids beach when he suffered injuries to his leg and ankle

A bodyboarder has been flown to Royal Perth hospital after he was bitten by a shark at a beach south of the city.

St John Ambulance says the injured man is believed to have “suffered traumatic injuries to a foot and ankle.”