The Guardian

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.

Public should be given a greater say on development plans, experts say

Environmental lawyers and academics have called for a comprehensive rethink on how Australia’s natural landscapes are protected, warning that short-term politics is infecting decision-making and suggesting that the public be given a greater say on development plans.

The Australian Panel of Experts on Environmental Law has launched a blueprint for a new generation of environment laws and the creation of independent agencies with the power and authority to ensure they are enforced. The panel of 14 senior legal figures says this is motivated by the need to systematically address ecological challenges including falling biodiversity, the degradation of productive rural land, the intensification of coastal and city development and the threat of climate change.

Series of measures includes reducing plastic in its own-brand packaging by 10% – but does not go as far as cutting it out altogether

Asda has become the latest supermarket to join the war against plastic by pledging to reduce it “wherever” it can, including slashing the amount in its own-brand packaging by 10% in the next 12 months.

In a series of measures, Asda promised to scrap 5p carrier bags in all stores by the end of the year, switch 2.4m plastic straws used in its cafes to paper and introduce reusable drinks cups in its shops and cafes by the end of 2019.

Decades ago, the late writer and critic Naomi Lewis spent hours on the streets rescuing birds tangled in nylon thread. She should have been a warning sign of the horrors to come

Not knowing what to do with myself and my bad temper in my 30s, I went to a creative writing class at City Lit, a London-based adult-education college. The teacher looked odd – about 70, she was always dressed in black, her hair was grey and a little wild and she seemed to have dusted her face in flour, some of which speckled her black clothes.

But there was something magical about Naomi Lewis. She was full of enthusiasm, thrilled by the efforts of her class. She would sit at the end of our square of tables, always cheery, and call out excitedly: “So good! So much of interest!”

Esmond Martin, whose groundbreaking investigations contributed to the fight against elephant poaching, died after being stabbed at his home in Nairobi

A world-renowned ivory investigator whose detailed reports contributed to the fight against elephant poaching and the illegal wildlife trade has been killed at his home in Kenya, police said on Monday.

Esmond Martin, 75, died after being stabbed at his house in the Nairobi suburb of Langata on Sunday afternoon.

Plastic is destroying our oceans, yet big corporations are still being given money to produce cheap plastic. It’s time for polluters to pay for the damage they cause

A six-year-old boy, Harrison Forsyth, provided us with a much needed wake-up call last week. He called on the boss of Aldi to protect our oceans:

“Dear boss of Aldi, I have watched this programme called Blue Planet 2 and I have seen that the plastic in the sea is making the animals sick and die.

Coalition pressures Queensland government to back Aurizon proposal to build rail link

Labor has inched closer to resolving its stance on the controversial Adani coalmine as the federal resources minister, Matt Canavan, declared he was looking at alternatives to open up the Queensland coal basin and “get these jobs going”.

With federal parliament resuming for the new political year on Monday, the shadow cabinet was expected to discuss policy options on Adani after the Labor leader, Bill Shorten, toughened his rhetoric substantially against the north Queensland mine.

Peers use evidence-free anecdotes and cabbie hearsay to claim cycle lanes cause congestion – shouldn’t we demand a higher standard?

• House of Lords peers criticised for ‘propagating bike lane myths’

A number of peers have attempted to defend unsubstantiated claims that cycle lanes cause congestion and air pollution, apparently echoing anecdotal evidence from their own observations, taxi drivers and the rightwing press. These claims tend to go unchallenged and are allowed to shape the political debate – but this has to stop.

In a House of Lords debate on air pollution on 15 January, the prominent scientist and Labour peer Lord Robert Winston questioned the government over journey times for motor traffic before and after cycle lane construction, saying idling or slow-moving engines pollute more at slow speeds.

Large filter feeders, such as baleen whales and basking sharks, could be particularly at risk from ingesting the tiny plastic particles, say scientists

Whales, some sharks and other marine species such as rays are increasingly at risk from microplastics in the oceans, a new study suggests.

5 February 1918 The sap is running, forcing on new life. In the withy bed the hares in couples, weeks before their proverbial date for madness, dodge round the clumps, while a ‘joyous clamour’ rises from the mere

The gay cock chaffinch, in smart, nuptial garments, rattles out repeated challenges to a distant rival, who strives to answer in as sprightly terms; it began to sing here three days ago at least. The blackbird this morning pipes airs and variations with such skill and finish that we can hardly realise that he has only just begun to sing.

The spring-like weather, which has brought out the semi-wild snowdrops in a Cheshire wood, has dotted the yellow crocuses about our gardens, awakened the sleepy bees and sent them to the winter aconites, has stirred their blood.