The Guardian

Concerns raised over weakened regulations on imports in potential post-Brexit trade deals

Livestock raised for food in the US are dosed with five times as much antibiotic medicine as farm animals in the UK, new data has shown, raising questions about rules on meat imports under post-Brexit trade deals.

The difference in rates of dosage rises to at least nine times as much in the case of cattle raised for beef, and may be as high as 16 times the rate of dosage per cow in the UK. There is currently a ban on imports of American beef throughout Europe, owing mainly to the free use of growth hormones in the US.

Tasmanian scientists are trialling  a new tactic to help the shy albatross fight extinction: constructing artificial nests. Over one hundred specially built mudbrick and aerated concrete artificial nests were airlifted on to Bass Strait’s Albatross Island in July 2017 as a trial program. So far the results are looking promising with the breeding success of pairs on artificial nests 20% higher than those on natural nests. Conservationists hope the nests will boost the population of the threatened seabird, which is vulnerable to climate change.

EPA administrator says ‘There are assumptions made that because the climate is warming that necessarily is a bad thing’

Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, has suggested that global warming may be beneficial to humans, in his latest departure from mainstream climate science.

Pruitt, who has previously erred by denying that carbon dioxide is a key driver of climate change, has again caused consternation among scientists by suggesting that warming temperatures could benefit civilization.

Beaches, wildlife, the Great Barrier Reef, unspoilt natural wilderness and national parks all considered threatened by climate change

Tourism is Australia’s most vulnerable and least prepared industry to deal with climate change despite the fact it is already feeling its effects, according to an advocacy group report.

The report by the Climate Council, based on 200 source documents and articles, says while tourism is growing at an extraordinary pace – an 8% jump in visitors last financial year – not enough is being done to prepare for damage to the country’s greatest drawcards.

Exclusive: documents show Katrina Hodgkinson changed plan to allow irrigators to extract 32% more after industry ramped up its lobbying

A water-sharing plan for the Barwon-Darling was altered by the former New South Wales minister for primary industries, Katrina Hodgkinson, even though public consultations on the draft plan had ended and her bureaucrats had already submitted a draft for her to sign.

The changes made it more favourable to irrigators and delivered valuable additional water during low flows. According to some modelling it may have increased legal extractions by irrigators by 32%.

Marbled crayfish have developed the ability to self-clone – and now a million-strong crustacean army exists in waters stretching from Europe to Japan

Name: Marbled crayfish. Marmorkrebs in German.

Age: Potentially infinite.

Genome study finds the invasive clonal freshwater crayfish is descended from a single female and reproduces without males

A voracious pest that mutated in a German aquarium and is marching around the world without the need for sexual reproduction may sound like science fiction, but a genetic study has revealed that a rapidly spreading all-female army of crayfish is descended from a single female and reproduces without any males.

The clonal freshwater crayfish is regarded as an invasive species which threatens endemic wild species, but its success may help scientists better understand how cancer spreads.

Indonesian authorities say male orangutan was found with 130 airgun pellets and machete wounds in the second known killing this year

The body of a Borneo orangutan has been found riddled with some 130 airgun pellets, Indonesian authorities have said, the second known killing this year.

The male orangutan, which also showed signs of machete wounds, was found by villagers in Borneo’s East Kutai district this week, police said, adding that an autopsy had been carried out.

In a sixth year of consecutive growth, organic sales rose by 6% to a record £2.2bn, driven largely by independent outlets and home deliveries

Sales of organic food and drink in the UK rose by 6% last year to a record £2.2bn, fuelled by strong growth through independent outlets and home delivery which outpaced sales in rival supermarkets.

Almost 30% of all organic sales now take place online or on the high street, according to a new report from Soil Association, the trade body which licenses organic products and promotes organic farming.

Longterm decline is blamed on loss of hedgerows and insect prey but urban hedgehogs may offer a glimmer of hope, says a new report

The number of hedgehogs living in the British countryside has plummeted by more than half since 2000, according to a new report.

The popular but prickly character topped a vote in 2013 to nominate a national species for Britain, but it has suffered as hedgerows are lost and the invertebrates it feasts on diminish. However, the survey offers a glimmer of hope as losses in towns and cities appear to have slowed and the numbers patrolling nighttime gardens may be increasing.

Photographer Sean Gallagher has set up a new Instagram feed called Everyday Extinction. Featuring work from 25 wildlife photographers, photojournalists and scientists, the project aims to highlight species extinction and celebrate biodiversity

• Warning: this gallery contains some graphic images

Case brought by group from Hunter Valley town, which it says has been devastated by Peabody Energy’s Wilpinjong mine

In what is described as a landmark case, a New South Wales court will be asked to overturn a decision to extend the life of a coalmine on the grounds the state government failed to properly consider the impact on the climate.

The case is brought by a community group from the tiny Hunter Valley village of Wollar, which it says has been devastated by the development and gradual expansion of the Wilpinjong coalmine over the past decade.

As Day Zero looms and the South African city gets set to run out of water, experts say lessons learned during Melbourne’s brush with a similar fate may help avert a global crisis

In December 2017, Seona Candy drove through the vineyards of the Franschhoek Valley near Cape Town towards the banks of the Sonderend river. In the late 1970s, the waterway was dammed to create the biggest reservoir in South Africa’s Western Cape. Behind the thick walls of the Theewaterskloof dam lay the capacity to hold 480 million cubic metres of water, nearly half of Cape Town’s water supply.

“When I got there, it was mostly dust,” Candy says.

Hoang Duc Binh had posted footage on Facebook of fishermen protesting following a huge chemical spill from a steel plant

A court in central Vietnam has sentenced an activist to 14 years in jail for livestreaming fishermen marching to file a lawsuit against a Taiwan-owned steel plant’s spill of toxins into the ocean.

Hoang Duc Binh, 34, was convicted of abusing democratic freedoms to infringe on the interests of the state, organisation and people, and opposing officers on duty, following a trial on Tuesday by the people’s court in Nghe An province, lawyer Ha Huy Son said.

Move makes it the largest university fund in the UK to ditch all coal, oil and gas holdings, following a long student campaign

The University of Edinburgh is dumping all its fossil fuel investments, making it the largest UK university endowment fund to be completely free of all coal, oil and gas holdings.

The decision was announced on Monday and followed a long student campaign. More than 60 UK universities have now divested from fossil fuels, with the University of Sussex the latest to make the move.

A new paper shows that climate myths consistently fail critical thinking tests

Climate myths are often contradictory – it’s not warming, though it’s warming because of the sun, and really it’s all just an ocean cycle – but they all seem to share one thing in common: logical fallacies and reasoning errors.

John Cook, Peter Ellerton, and David Kinkead have just published a paper in Environmental Research Letters in which they examined 42 common climate myths and found that every single one demonstrates fallacious reasoning. For example, the authors made a video breaking down the logical flaws in the myth ‘climate changed naturally in the past so current climate change is natural.’

SkyPixel has announced the winners of its annual aerial photography competition and the results are breathtaking. The contest, which ran from October to December, received more than 44,000 submissions from people in 141 countries, across the categories of landscape, portrait and story. The grand prize was awarded to Florian Ledoux, a photographer from France, who captured a polar bear jumping across ice floes in Nunavut, Canada

Helen Pidd was cycling through stationary traffic when a passenger opened his door into her path

As soon as the car door hit me I thought: finally. After cycling regularly for 15 years it always seemed something of a miracle that I had never been knocked off.

My second instinct was to feel sheepish. Was it my fault?

While the hole over Antarctica has been closing, the protective ozone is thinning at the lower latitudes, where the sunlight is stronger and billions of people live

The ozone layer that protects people from the sun’s ultraviolet radiation is not recovering over most highly populated regions, scientists warned on Tuesday.

The greatest losses in ozone occurred over Antarctica but the hole there has been closing since the chemicals causing the problem were banned by the Montreal protocol. But the ozone layer wraps the entire Earth and new research has revealed it is thinning in the lower stratosphere over the non-polar areas.

Capacity is growing fast and turbines getting bigger – some almost as large as the Shard

Britain accounted for more than half of the new offshore wind power capacity built in Europe last year, as the sector broke installation records across the continent.