The Guardian

Activist group Shoot’em with a Camera seeks to infiltrate a bear hunt by acquiring licenses they don’t intend to use

Jane Goodall, the renowned conservationist, and a group of wildlife activists are some of the unexpected entrants in a lottery to hunt up to 22 grizzly bears near Yellowstone national park.

Related: Alarmed conservationists call for urgent action to fix 'America's wildlife crisis'

Doctors urge ministers to act as 1,320 killed by asthma in England and Wales last year

A record number of people are dying of asthma, and experts have warned growing air pollution and a lack of basic care could be to blame.

In England and Wales 1,320 people died of asthma last year, a sharp rise of more than 25% over a decade, according to data from the Office for National Statistics.

Government-owned company has back-pedalled on its pledge to cycle-proof the line, say campaigners, locking out cyclists for generations to come

The company building the HS2 high speed rail line is accused of watering down commitments on cycle crossings along the route, in a move campaigners say will endanger lives and lock out cycling for generations to come.

The government-owned company, HS2 Ltd, was accused of back-pedalling on its legally-binding assurance that it would “cycle-proof” phase 1 of HS2, from London to the West Midlands, earlier this year by Cycling UK, the national cycling charity. The assurances, which became legally binding when they were incorporated into the High Speed Rail Act, stated HS2 Ltd would have a dialogue with the Cycle Proofing Working Group (CPWG), a government advisory body, with the assumption that they would include high quality design standards.

New research has identified the species of shark currently found in hotter parts of the world that could migrate to UK waters by 2050 as the oceans warm

The floor of the Central Valley is slumping, and there is arsenic in the tap water. Now it seems the two problems are connected

Isabel Solorio can see the water treatment plant from her garden across the street. Built to filter out the arsenic in drinking water, it hasn’t been active since 2007 – it shut down six months after opening when the California town of Lanare went into debt trying to keep up with maintenance costs.

Related: ‘Nothing to worry about. The water is fine’: how Flint poisoned its people

The Cornwall community achieved this status last December, by uniting against straws, bottles, takeaway boxes and disposable forks. Now 330 other towns aim to follow them

Emily Kavanaugh is standing in her skincare-product shop, Pure Nuff Stuff, on Chapel Street. The narrow lane leads down towards the Jubilee pool, the triangular lido that juts like a ship’s prow into the sea from Penzance. “Here, try one,” Kavanaugh says, handing me a piece of packing material. The little white cloud looks and feels like a polystyrene packing “peanut”, but, Kavanaugh assures me, “it tastes exactly like a communion wafer”. After a wary nibble, I pop the whole thing in and notch it up as a snack.

Kavanaugh’s packaging is made not of plastic but corn starch. If eating it feels like an act of faith, it is because there is a growing fervour in this Cornish seaside town. Last year, Penzance became the first town in Britain to receive “plastic-free” status from Surfers Against Sewage (SAS). The former single-issue movement, founded in Cornwall in 1990, has become a national marine conservation charity with plastics in its sights. But, rather than target shopping bags or plastic-lined coffee cups, SAS is attempting to unite whole communities against single-use plastic of all types, including straws, bottles, packaging, takeaway boxes, cotton buds, clingfilm and forks.

By resurrecting a proposal to allow trophy hunters to shoot 250 hippos annually, Zambia stirs controversy.

The hippo — really? That’s the common response when tour guides in Africa tantalize travelers with this question: “What’s the most dangerous animal on the continent?” Lion? Rhino? Elephant? No, no, no. Eventually, the tour guide delivers the answer with a twinkle in their eye: the hippo, yes, that water-loving, one-tonne mammalian oddity. Despite their hefty and somnolent appearance, hippos are fast and aggressive — a dangerous mix — and may kill several hundred people a year (of course the most dangerous animal in Africa is not really the hippo at all, it’s the mosquito — but no one likes a know-it-all).

Despite being one of the most unusual animals on the planet — their closest relatives are whales and dolphins — hippos don’t get a lot of love. They tend to be overshadowed by the continent’s other remarkable mega-mammals. Who can compete with elephants and giraffe and lion? Perhaps, that’s why it’s not exactly surprising that the announcement of a hippo cull in Zambia didn’t exactly make global news.

Rombalds Moor, West Yorkshire: We can’t blame the heatwave for this desiccated landscape – we’ve spent decades deliberately drying out our peatland habitats

The moors are a tinderbox. Parched and crisped by weeks of dry summer heat, the heather is a burnt brown-to-burgundy, the moorland grass yellowed. The bracken looks all right – still a deep pea-green (it takes a lot to bother bracken) – but finger-wide cracks have opened in the colourless peat of the footpath. It’s early morning; the day hasn’t yet been fully cranked up, and the broken sky is a messy palette of blues and greys. A loose flock of a dozen meadow pipits forages for caterpillars.

Major hurdles to Carmichael mine remain despite comments by Karan Adani that the company has ‘completed financing’

Adani says its Carmichael coalmine remains contingent on a loan to build a rail line to the Galilee Basin – comments that analysts believe will ramp up pressure on the Australian government to further subsidise the project.

Karan Adani, the son of company boss Gautam Adani, and the head of the conglomerate’s ports business, told India’s Economic Times the company had “completed financing on the mine” and that it had received all necessary approvals.

Phosphate fertilisers are causing dangerous levels of pollution in waterways that harm aquatic plants and animals

Much of the environment is awash with fertilisers, boosting thuggish weeds such as stinging nettles that swamp other wild plants. Nitrate is a big villain in this onslaught, but far less notice is taken of phosphate.

Phosphate is crucial for plant growth and development, and it is estimated that half the world’s food supplies rely on phosphate fertilisers, but this is a dwindling resource that is used very inefficiently, which is leading to widespread pollution. Unlike nitrate, phosphate binds very strongly to the soil, which makes it difficult for plant roots to get hold of. And so farmers apply even more phosphates in fertilisers and manure, although much of that phosphate then sticks to the soil again, driving the levels of phosphate in the soil even higher.

Related: Conservationists claim 'legal victory' in dispute over government protection of rivers

Democratic lawmakers and scientists denounced proposal to allow administrators to reject study results if research isn’t public

Democratic lawmakers joined scientists, health and environmental officials and activists on Tuesday in denouncing a proposal by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), backed by industry, that could limit dramatically what kind of science the agency considers when making regulations.

Related: Andrew Wheeler: 'point man for Trump' focused on undoing Obama's EPA agenda

United Utilities, imposing ban on 7m households, is second worst for leaking pipes

The water company ordering a hosepipe ban on 7m households in the north-west of England has the second-worst record for leaking pipes of any supplier, industry data shows.

The temporary use ban being imposed by United Utilities from 5 August has led to calls for water firms to do more to tackle leakage on their networks.

As hunters hold immense clout in the Trump administration and most of the council’s members are advocates of the sport, critics worry the board will protect their hobby, not the animals

Donald Trump has called big-game trophy hunting a “horror show”, despite his own sons’ participation in elephant and leopard hunts, and in 2017 he formed an advisory board to steer US policy on the issue.

Oxford University Museum: For 70 years, researchers have been watching ‘particularly hideous’ young swifts turn into long-winged angels

This glorious structure is a place rich in history. As we walked through the galleries our guide paused to show us the great oak door behind which Bishop Wilberforce confronted “Darwin’s bulldog”, Thomas Huxley, in their famous debate on evolution. We, however, were intent on a more modest fraction of the building’s past. For it was here in 1947 that the ecologists Elizabeth and David Lack noticed how breeding swifts were vanishing into air vents in the roof’s slate-covered tower.

CSIRO says lack of consumer awareness is ‘number one issue’ affecting recycling

Australians have to boost their recycling of lithium-ion batteries, a new CSIRO report has found.

Consumers only recycle 2% of our lithium-ion batteries, and an estimated $813m to $3bn worth of valuable components is in landfill. The commonly-used rechargeable batteries are used in mobile phones, laptops, household appliances and, increasingly, electric vehicles.

This week marks the annual stocktake of the crown’s swans on the River Thames, known as swan upping. The process of counting the swans on the river and identifying them as belonging to the Queen or one of the two City livery companies that also have rights to them – has been carried out since the 12th century, when the birds were so prized for their meat that all wild swans in England were appropriated as property of the crown. The pomp, finery and techniques of swan upping would be familiar to the villagers who looked on centuries ago

Model predicts population of UK’s tallest bird could double within 50 years after its return to the east of England following a 400-year absence

Common cranes which recolonised eastern England less than 40 years ago after a 400-year absence are now here to stay, research has found.

There could be as many as 275 breeding pairs of the UK’s tallest bird within 50 years, scientists at the University of Exeter, the RSPB and the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (WWT) predict.

Researchers say the western barred bandicoot was actually five species and those ‘reintroduced’ would never have lived in SA

An endangered Australian bandicoot that was reintroduced to the Australian mainland is now believed to be one of five distinct species, and researchers say it may have been a mistake to introduce it to South Australia.

Scientists working for the Western Australian Museum have published research that concludes that what has been known as the western barred bandicoot is in fact five distinct species – four of which had become extinct by the 1940s as a result of agriculture and introduced predators. The species were closely related but occurred in different parts of Australia.

United Utilities says 7 million customers will be affected by first ban since 2012

Millions of households in the north-west of England will face the first hosepipe ban in the country since 2012 after the UK’s longest heatwave in more than 40 years.

The water company United Utilities said 7 million customers would be affected by the ban, which is due to come into force on 5 August.

Special Rapporteur on indigenous peoples calls for a new, rights-based approach to conservation

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on indigenous peoples, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, has released a report highly critical of the global conservation movement and calling for indigenous peoples and other local communities to have a greater say in protecting the world’s forests. Titled Cornered by Protected Areas and co-authored with the US-based NGO Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), the report is an explicit condemnation of “fortress conservation.”

What exactly is meant by that? It is “the idea that to protect forests and biodiversity, ecosystems need to function in isolation, devoid of people,” the Rapporteur told the Guardian. “This model - favoured by governments for over a century - ignores the growing body of evidence that forests thrive when Indigenous Peoples remain on their customary lands and have legally recognised rights to manage and protect them.”