The Guardian

EU laws that have protected hundreds of conservation sites and the species that live in them for decades could be watered down or lost with the EU withdrawal bill

• Interactive: How will Brexit affect British wildlife?

Hundreds of treasured wildlife habitats across the UK that have been protected for decades by the European Union must be urgently maintained and preserved with a new environment act, MPs and campaigners say.

EU opts for public awareness campaign on the impacts of plastics on the environment saying a tax would not be sustainable

The EU has ruled out penalties on single-use plastic products, in favour of raising public awareness of the damage consumer plastics are doing to the world’s oceans.

Frans Timmermans, vice president of the European commission, said a tax would “not be sustainable”, but that changing the way plastic was produced and used could work. “The only sustainable method is to create recyclable plastic and take out microplastics. You can’t take out microplastics with a tax. You need to make sure things are reused, and not put in the ocean.”

A lost leopard, a wounded rhino and a sunbathing iguana are among this week’s pick of images from the natural world

Increasingly unfamiliar and unpredictable weather events mean that business as usual is not an option for these islands to survive

As a Caribbean climate scientist, I am often asked to speak about how climate change affects small islands. In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, one of two category five storms to batter the eastern Caribbean in just a week, three words resonate in my mind.

The first word is “unfamiliar”. Scientific analysis shows that the climate of the Caribbean region is already changing in ways that seem to signal the emergence of a new climate regime. Irma and Maria fit this pattern all too well. At no point in the historical records dating back to the late 1800s have two category five storms made landfall in the small Caribbean island chain of the eastern Antilles in a single year.

Beatrice Fihn, the executive director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (Ican), says she initially thought the announcement of the award was a prank. Speaking on Friday at Ican’s head office in Geneva, Switzerland, Fihn describes the prize as a surprise and an honour

Indigenous leaders say operations in the remote Amazon violate rights and risk fatal epidemics

There are more indigenous peoples living in “isolation” in Peru than any country in the world except Brazil. All live in the Amazon - the majority in poorly-protected reserves, or areas where reserves have been proposed but never established, or “protected natural areas” such as national parks.

For years indigenous federations and other civil society organisations in Peru and abroad have worked for the territories of indigenous peoples in “isolation” to be made off-limits, citing Peruvian and international laws, emphasising their rights to self-determination, and stressing their vulnerability to contact because of their lack of immunological defences and the risk of epidemics and fatalities. The biggest dangers - in terms of outsiders entering their territories, exploiting resources and/or actively seeking contact - are oil and gas companies, loggers and logging roads, narco-traffickers, evangelical missionaries, Catholic priests, artisanal miners and highways.

Mayor has written to BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen urging them to contribute funding to help combat UK pollution as they have done in Germany

The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has written to three leading car manufacturers asking them to contribute to the fund set up to tackle the capital’s air pollution crisis.

Khan has accused BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen of “double standards” after it emerged they had paid £223m to the German government’s Sustainable Mobility Fund for Cities earlier this year, but have given nothing to the UK.

World leaders must do more to defend custodians of natural world whose lives are at risk from big business, says UN rapporteur Victoria Tauli-Corpuz

Global leaders must do more to protect indigenous people fighting to protect their land and way of life if the world is to limit climate change, according to the UN special rapporteur Victoria Tauli-Corpuz.

Speaking ahead of key climate talks in Bonn next month she urged politicians to recognise that indigenous communities around the world were the most effective custodians of millions of hectares of forest “which act as the world’s lungs”.

Current UK law allows trade in ‘antiques’ carved before 1947 but government bows to campaigners and will ban sale of ivory regardless of age

The UK government has bowed to campaigners and will ban the sale of ivory regardless of age, according to a new consultation.

The UK is the biggest exporter of legal ivory in the world and shutting down the trade will help prevent illegal ivory being laundered by criminals. More than 50 elephants are killed by poachers every day on average and the population of African elephants plunged by a third between 2007-14 alone, leading to warnings that the entire species could go extinct.

Accelerating rates of land clearing in Queensland are undermining Australia’s Direct Action greenhouse gas cuts

Accelerating rates of tree clearing in Queensland are wiping out any cuts to greenhouse gas emissions the federal government has made through its $2.55bn Direct Action fund, according to the latest data released by the Queensland government.

The results also point again to apparent holes in the federal government’s greenhouse gas accounting, as its official figures maintain that land clearing in Queensland is reducing, and that changes in land use across the whole country are cutting emissions rather than adding to them.

Dungeness, Kent This is an exposed environment, buffeted by maritime winds, the closest the UK gets to a desert. But lichen heath is taking hold

The vast shark’s tooth of shingle that is Dungeness protrudes into the strait of Dover. Though the sky is overcast, as I drive on to the promontory the light intensifies, reflecting from the sea on to the flint pebbles. It’s like walking into a room with glass walls.

This is an ancient, undulating, beach dotted with old abandoned boats and sheds. Millennia ago the sea deposited 40 square kilometres of shingle here, sifting it into ridges of smaller pebbles and troughs of bulkier ones. Above the shoreline, Dungeness is a static shingle platform, a huge, flat cairn.

A wet July and August in Britain put a dampener on our midsummer butterflies

I am still seeing butterflies almost daily, sunning themselves when they can and feasting on late-flowering ivy. Most are red admirals, a large, dark and powerful presence sailing through autumnal skies or feeding on rotten fruit in orchards.

It has been a vintage red admiral year, with numbers up by 75% on 2016 in Butterfly Conservation’s Big Butterfly Count. But sadly it has not been a vintage butterfly summer.

Neonicotinoid insecticides are found in 75% of global honey samples and half contain a cocktail of chemicals

Honey from across the world is contaminated with potent pesticides known to harm bees, new research shows, clearly revealing the global exposure of vital pollinators for the first time.

Almost 200 samples of honey were analysed for neonicotinoid insecticides and 75% contained the chemicals, with most contaminated with multiple types. Bees range over many kilometres to collect nectar and pollen, making the honey they produce an excellent indicator of the pesticide pollution across their local landscape.

26-year study reveals natural biological factors kick in once warming reaches certain point, leading to potentially unstoppable increase in temperatures

Warming soils are releasing more carbon into the atmosphere than previously thought, suggesting a potentially disastrous feedback mechanism whereby increases in global temperatures will trigger massive new carbon releases in a cycle that may be impossible to break.

The increased production of carbon comes from the microbes within soils, according to a report in the peer-review journal Science, published on Friday.

Scientists confirm creatures discovered on Ball’s Pyramid in 2001 are the same species rats were believed to have killed off a century earlier

Scientists have confirmed that giant insects found on a rocky outcrop off Lord Howe Island are a genetic match for the island’s stick insects that were believed to have gone extinct almost 100 years earlier.

The species were assumed to be one and the same. However significant morphological differences between the Lord Howe Island stick insects collected in the early 1900s and stored in museum collections, and the phasmids discovered in 2001 on Ball’s Pyramid (a remnant volcano about 23km off the main island), created a suspicion the latter could be a related species – rather than the original back from the dead.

WWF says alternatives to industrially farmed animal feed must be developed to stop biodiversity loss

Farm animals could be fed on insects and algae, potentially preventing significant amounts of deforestation and water and energy waste, according to environmental campaigners.

“We’re a bit squeamish about eating insects in the UK,” said WWF’s food policy manager Duncan Williamson at the Extinction and Livestock conference in London. “But we can feed them to our animals. We are going to need animal feed for the foreseeable future, but algae and insects are an alternative to the current system.”

Prince says catastrophic hurricanes are consequence of climate change and welcomes growing awareness of plastic pollution

The world’s oceans are at last receiving the attention they deserve, as the scale of plastic pollution is finally becoming clear, the Prince of Wales has said, hailing this growing awareness as the first step to saving the marine environment.

Prince Charles said it had taken years for the enormity of the problem to emerge, but promised to make it a key priority of his campaigning, alongside rainforests.

Response: an opinion piece by Laura Laker accused me of hypocrisy, but our review examining the law and cycling aims to make the roads safer for everyone

Laura Laker accuses me of “headline-grabbing hypocrisy” in relation to the safety of cyclists. That’s quite an extreme reaction to my announcement of a review whose specific purpose is to improve the safety of all road users, especially in relation to cyclists.

As I made clear, the review will address two key issues. The first is legal: whether the law is defective in the case of bodily harm or death from a cyclist, and specifically whether, as the rule of law demands, there is an adequate remedy here. Our aim is to complete this work early in the new year.

Deputy premier brands Australia ‘deforestation hotspot’ after a 45% jump in her state’s reef catchment clearing

Queensland underwent a dramatic surge in tree clearing – with the heaviest losses in Great Barrier Reef catchments – in the year leading up to the Palaszczuk government’s thwarted bid to restore protections.

Figures released on Thursday showed a 33% rise in clearing to almost 400,000 hectares in 2015-16, meaning Queensland now has two-thirds the annual rate of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon.

WWF report finds 60% of global biodiversity loss is down to meat-based diets which put huge strain on Earth’s resources

The ongoing global appetite for meat is having a devastating impact on the environment driven by the production of crop-based feed for animals, a new report has warned.

The vast scale of growing crops such as soy to rear chickens, pigs and other animals puts an enormous strain on natural resources leading to the wide-scale loss of land and species, according to the study from the conservation charity WWF.