The Guardian

If you work in the UK fishing industry we’d like to hear what you think about the latest changes to affect fisheries

After pledging to repatriate control of UK fisheries and set quotas as part of core Brexit strategy, the government appears to have backed down in face of EU opposition. Instant return of control after Britain leaves the EU no longer seems possible, with vessels from Europe allowed to have continued access during the transition period after 29 March 2019.

Opposition condemns Coalition plan to open more recreational and commercial fishing areas

Labor says it will move to disallow new marine park management plans proposed by the Turnbull government, branding the change the “largest removal of marine area from conservation, ever, from any government in the world”.

The new management plans were uploaded by officials on the federal register of legislation on Tuesday, cutting across a public announcement the Turnbull government had planned to make on Wednesday.

A shoestring expedition to one of the remotest places in Sumatra has returned with stunning photos of tigers, tapirs, clouded leopards among other rare species, large and small. Will they find orangutans next?

Last year a motley crew of conservationists, adventurers and locals trekked into one of the last unexplored regions of Sumatra. They did so with a mission: check camera traps and see what they could find. The team – organized by the small NGO, Habitat ID – came back with biological gold: photos of Sumatran tigers, Malayan tapirs, and sun bears. They also got the first record of the Sunda clouded leopard in the area and found a specimen of a little-known legless reptile called Wegner’s glass lizard. But most tantalizingly of all is what they didn’t find, but still suspect is there: a hidden population of orangutans that would belong to the newly described species, Tapanuli orangutan (Pongo tapanuliensis).

“The trek into the interior was fraught with hordes of leaches, wasps, cliffs, river-crossings, and trackless jungle, and it pushed everyone on the team to their limits,” Greg McCann, the head of Habitat ID and a team member, said, clearly relishing the adventure to an undisclosed area they call Hadabaun Hills.

Hopes for species rest on IVF with two females after death of Sudan, the ‘gentle giant’

The last male northern white rhinoceros has died, leaving only two females with which conservationists hope to save the species from extinction.

Sudan, the “gentle giant” who lived in the Ol Pejeta conservancy in Kenya, was put down on Monday after the pain from a degenerative illness became too great. He is survived by his daughter and granddaughter.

Plastic and cardboard packaging makes up more than a quarter of product weight in some of the UK’s best-selling chocolate eggs

Packaging alone accounts for up to a quarter, on average, of the total weight of the most popular Easter eggs on sale on the High Street, new research by a consumer group has revealed.

Earth Hour campaign aims to raise awareness of the impact global warming could have on food supplies, from cod stocks to the rice and tomatoes used to make chicken tikka masala

Some of the UK’s best-loved dishes – including fish and chips and chicken tikka masala – could be under threat as a result of climate change, environmentalists warn in a new report on Tuesday.

Courts are a new front line of climate action with cases against governments and oil firms spiralling, and while victories have so far been rare the pressure for change is growing

Global moves to tackle climate change through lawsuits are poised to break new ground this week, as groups and individuals seek to hold governments and companies accountable for the damage they are causing.

Claxton, Norfolk: A lone blackbird offers hope of spring in the snowstorm’s Arctic silence

Even now there are several roadside heaps of it where the snowdrifts had been so high that we were entirely cut off for three days. These vestiges hardly conjure the power of that extraordinary storm, but it has been fascinating to track the whole system as a single organism.

22% of seagrass in Western Australia’s Shark Bay was lost after 2010-11 heatwave, causing release of up to 9m tonnes of carbon

A marine heatwave in Western Australia in 2010 set off a massive “carbon bomb”, damaging the world’s largest seagrass meadow, releasing millions of tonnes of carbon that had been collected for thousands of years below the surface.

Although Australia doesn’t currently count carbon released from damaged seagrass meadows in its official greenhouse gas emissions, if it did, the results mean those figures might need to be revised upwards by more than 20%.

Twenty years ago the regional forest agreements were introduced to protect native forests and deliver 'ecologically sustainable forest management'. Now, with the RFAs set to be renewed, conservationists say ancient forests are being destroyed, while the timber industry says its operating under strict codes. It's the return of the forest wars

Group of campaigners arrested after spray painting mayor’s offices as part of a series of direct action protests over of the capital’s illegal air pollution

Air pollution protesters say they are prepared to go to prison as they step up their campaign against the poisonous air that kills tens of thousands of people in the UK each year.

A group of campaigners including pensioners and young parents, were arrested on Monday after targeting the offices of London mayor Sadiq Khan, spraying slogans on the walls calling for tougher action on air pollution.

RFAs were meant to protect forests and create a sustainable timber industry, but as renewals approach both sides are readying for battle

For more than 30 years Jill Redwood has fought to save the ancient old growth forests of East Gippsland in Victoria.

Living alone, isolated and self-sufficient on a small rural property in the Brodribb river valley alongside the Snowy river national park, Redwood, the coordinator of the East Gippsland Environment Centre, says there have been endless attempts to silence and frighten her. She’s undaunted.

140m people in three regions expected to migrate before 2050 unless environment is improved

Climate change will result in a massive movement of people inside countries and across borders, creating “hotspots” where tens of millions pour into already crowded slums, according to the World Bank.

More than 140m people in just three regions of the developing world are likely to migrate within their native countries between now and 2050, the first report on the subject has found.

Let fossil fuel-funded think tanks make their case, then ignore it

In 2007, the US Supreme Court ruled that carbon dioxide is an air pollutant, which means that if it poses a threat to public health or welfare, the EPA must regulate it under the Clean Air Act. In 2009, the EPA completed its review of the climate science literature and correctly concluded in its Endangerment Finding that carbon pollution poses such a threat via climate change. That document is the foundation for all government climate policies, including the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan. Climate deniers have thus long had their sights set on revoking the Endangerment Finding.

That’s a tall order, since the scientific literature is crystal clear on this question. House Republicans first tried to simply rewrite the Clean Air Act to state the greenhouse gases aren’t pollutants, but they failed to get nearly enough support to pass that legislation. Next they proposed setting up a ‘Red Team’ of climate deniers to debate the mainstream climate science ‘Blue Team.’ But Trump’s chief of staff John Kelly worried that having this prominent debate on the record would be a distraction and potentially expose the administration to litigation, so he killed the idea.

Conflict and civilisational threats likely unless action is taken to reduce the stress on rivers, lakes, aquifers, wetlands and reservoirs

More than 5 billion people could suffer water shortages by 2050 due to climate change, increased demand and polluted supplies, according to a UN report on the state of the world’s water.

The comprehensive annual study warns of conflict and civilisational threats unless actions are taken to reduce the stress on rivers, lakes, aquifers, wetlands and reservoirs.

Aigas, Beauly, Inverness-shire They had to hurry to cache enough food before the ice took over, an underwater stash of nutritious bark kept fresh for winter snacking

I think we’d almost forgotten about ice. A decade of mild winters had pressed delete in our recent memory banks, banished ice to the Winter Olympics or perhaps to nostalgia – something that happened back then. Well, this Highland winter was having none of it. It rampaged in with sharp teeth in November, bit hard and hasn’t let go. It shows no sign of doing so yet.

The beavers in the Aigas loch had to hurry to cache enough food before the ice took over, an underwater stash of birch and willow logs, the nutritious bark kept fresh for winter snacking. They don’t hibernate. They still emerge in the long dark to forage where they can, labouring away at their evenly spaced breathing holes in the ice, gnawing at the rims every night to keep them open.

Wildlife managers hope taste aversion technique can help safeguard the endangered northern quoll

Scientists are a step closer to stopping the devastating march of toxic cane toads across northern Australia, as the introduced species continues to decimate what is left of the native quoll populations.

Field trials of a technique used to turn quolls off the taste of toads has yielded positive results, which were published in this month’s Austral Ecology journal.

Clothing banks are disappearing from car parks at night, costing charities in lost revenue and bins

Clothing recycling bins are disappearing from supermarket and council car parks across the UK, costing the charities that should benefit from them hundreds of thousands of pounds, it is claimed.

According to the Textile Recycling Association, the UK’s trade association, 750 clothing banks have recently gone missing from all parts of the UK except Scotland. Some have been found, repainted with the logo of an organisation that is being investigated by the Charity Commission.

Alice Mabin is the photographer and author of the upcoming book The Grower. It tells the story of agriculture in Australia, a difficult industry with isolated landscapes as a backdrop. She spent more than a year visiting 400 properties, shooting enterprises including sheep, beef, dairy and truffles to show what conditions were like for families who live in rural environments and the challenges they face

Green Alliance says ending UK sales earlier would close climate target gap and halve oil imports

Ministers have been urged to bring forward their 2040 ban on new diesel and petrol car sales by a decade, a move which an environmental thinktank said would almost halve oil imports and largely close the gap in the UK’s climate targets.

The Green Alliance said a more ambitious deadline of 2030 is also needed to avoid the UK squandering its leadership on electric cars.