The Guardian

The week’s top environment news stories and green events. If you are not already receiving this roundup, sign up here to get the briefing delivered to your inbox

Lion cubs at play, the world’s oldest known giant tortoise and a mountain hare are among this week’s pick of images from the natural world

Protected cycle lanes are one of the best ways to reduce congestion in London, carrying up to five times as many people per hour as a main road, a new report shows

Congestion isn’t exactly the most fashionable political topic of our times, but it is a problem that threatens London’s status as a well-functioning, competitive global city. Businesses need to be able to make and receive reliable deliveries, Londoners need to be able to get to work on time, and tourists – almost 20 million of them a year in London – need to get around quickly and easily too.

As politicians wake up to the need to do more to increase Britain’s productivity, being smarter in how we set up our transport infrastructure is essential. Our streets will get more congested if we do nothing as London continues to grow – currently at the rate of an additional London borough every three years. If no further action is taken, GLA figures show that by 2041, three days would be lost per person every year due to congestion.

The British Ecological Society has announced the winners of its annual photography competition, Capturing Ecology. Taken by international ecologists and students, the winning images will be exhibited at the society’s joint annual meeting in Ghent in December

Walton on the Naze, Essex The iron-rich, sandy layer of the Red Crag, laid down by a cool sea, is rich in marine fossils.

I walk past the arcades and beach cafes. The smell of vinegar on chips is sharp in my nose and makes my mouth water but I haven’t come to Walton on the Naze for seaside snacks. Higher ground is visible beyond the beach, partly shrouded in mist, and I strike out towards it.

Australia is home to one in 10 of the world’s unique bird species – and most of the world’s birds can trace their lineage to the continent

• Vote in the Australian bird of the Year

If you live in Australia, you may not realise how unique and special the birds around you are. Our continent was perhaps the most important for the evolution of modern birds, with a majority of the world’s species tracing their ancestry here.

Long ecologically adrift as an island continent, Australia benefited through the evolution of a remarkable diversity of fascinating, colourful, noisy, clever, innovative species of bird.

The system works fine when there two candidates in an election but is a poor option when there are multiple ones – and it can lead to some bad results

• Ben Raue is Guardian Australia’s resident psephologist

The results so far of the Guardian’s bird of the year poll have not been without controversy. The Australian white ibis, a bird that is disliked by many who encounter it, took an early lead and has maintained that lead for more than a week. While this seems like a strange result, it makes sense when you think about the options provided to the voters. With so many birds to choose from, the voting system used has a tendency to produce a winner who has a committed support base, even if that option also has a lot of opponents.

The vote was conducted using the first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting method – everyone gets one vote, and the candidate with the highest vote wins. This system works fine when there are just two candidates running in an election, but when you get more than two, it inevitably results in candidates winning with less than a majority of the vote. The ibis is sitting on 13.6% of the total vote, with the magpie coming second on 11.1%. The top two birds combined have received less than a quarter of the total vote.

Decision to hear Saul Luciano Lliuya’s case against the energy giant is a ‘historic breakthrough with global relevance’, campaigners say

A German court has ruled that it will hear a Peruvian farmer’s case against energy giant RWE over climate change damage in the Andes, a decision labelled by campaigners as a “historic breakthrough”.

Farmer Saul Luciano Lliuya’s case against RWE was “well-founded,” the court in the north-western city of Hamm said on Thursday.

The Africa Food Prize winner talks about her work with Kenya’s smallholder farmers, and how indigenous crops can be a tool in the battle against food insecurity and climate change

When Ruth Oniang’o was working as a nutrition researcher in 1980s Kenya, she noticed an ominous change in the country’s agricultural landscape: regions that had once provided a diversity of nutritious food crops were being turned over to cash crops like sugarcane. Grown mostly for export, these crops were usurping land and soil that was intended for feeding people.

Spurred on by what she witnessed all those years ago, today Oniang’o--a professor of nutrition and a native Kenyan--leads the Rural Outreach Program, a nonprofit that champions the role of indigenous African crops and smallholder farmers in safeguarding food security. With the ROP, Oniang’o visits hundreds of farming communities in Kenya and helps them access, grow, and share seeds for indigenous crop varieties like sorghum, cassava, arrowroot, and jute mallow--foods that are not only nutritious, but also disease-resistant and climate-resilient. This year, these efforts got her recognised as the joint winner of the 2017 Africa Food Prize.

MPs say ministers are showing no confidence in tackling the illegal levels of air pollution that prematurely kill an estimated 40,000 people a year

Ministers have been accused of having to be “dragged screaming” to tackle illegal levels of air pollution across the UK, which kills an estimated 40,000 people a year prematurely.

Neil Parish, co-chair of a parliamentary inquiry into air quality, told ministers from the Treasury, environment, transport and local government departments they were showing no confidence that they would tackle toxic air pollution as soon as possible.

Annual survey by the Marine Conservation Society records 10% rise in litter in 2017 - with much of it plastic

The rubbish washing up on the UK’s beaches is continuing to increase, rising by 10% in 2017, the Marine Conservation Society’s (MCS) annual beach clean has revealed.

Much of the waste is plastic, leading the MCS to call on the government to urgently introduce a charge on single-use plastic items, such as straws, cups and cutlery. The chancellor, Philip Hammond, recently announced the government is considering such action.

Retailers in favour of setting up mandatory system in England and Wales after government sought views on idea

Iceland and the Co-op have become the first supermarkets to support a bottle deposit scheme after the government sought views on the idea to reduce plastic pollution in the oceans.

The retailers came out in favour of setting up a mandatory deposit return scheme (DRS) in England and Wales as the environment secretary, Michael Gove, began to review the results of a seven-week consultation on whether to introduce a system to increase recycling rates of plastic bottles and reduce leakage into the oceans.

Ken Matthews, who is in charge of fixing NSW’s water administration, says he is ‘disappointed’ at lack of progress on prosecutions

Modern water meters need to be rolled out as a matter of urgency in the Barwon-Darling river system and prosecutions launched against breaches, the man charged with fixing New South Wales’s water administration has warned.

Immediately after the ABC Four Corners program that alleged large-scale water theft and meter tampering by some irrigators, the state government asked water expert Ken Matthews to review the system.

Know your miner from your myna. Both are aggressive in different ways – discover why we’re killing one but never the other

• Vote for Australia’s bird of the year

A kookaburra nestles on my balcony and belts its deliciously rambunctious laugh, like an ape in a zoo. But, mid-cackle, it is interrupted by a series of urgent, high-pitched screams like sirens.

Three miner birds flutter in its face, screaming hysterically at it. At first, the kookaburra just gives the unrelenting interlopers an unblinking, nonchalant death stare before eventually giving in and moving on. The miners follow it and chase it out of the neighbourhood.

New research shows by the end of the century an increase in sea level will threaten the White House, early colonial settlements and other historic places

Large tracts of America’s east coast heritage are at risk from being wiped out by sea level rise, with the rising oceans set to threaten more than 13,000 archaeological and historic sites, according to new research.

Even a modest increase in sea level will imperil much of the south-eastern US’s heritage by the end of the century, researchers found, with 13,000 sites threatened by a 1m increase.

How climate denial blogs misinform so many people with such poor scientific arguments.

The body of evidence supporting human-caused global warming is vast – too vast for climate denial blogs to attack it all. Instead they focus on what a new study published in the journal Bioscience calls “keystone dominoes.” These are individual pieces of evidence that capture peoples’ attention, like polar bears. The authors write:

These topics are used as “proxies” for AGW [human-caused global warming] in general; in other words, they represent keystone dominoes that are strategically placed in front of many hundreds of others, each representing a separate line of evidence for AGW. By appearing to knock over the keystone domino, audiences targeted by the communication may assume all other dominoes are toppled in a form of “dismissal by association.”

New labelling guidelines suggest we should keep more of our fruit in the fridge. But not everything is suitable for cold storage – here’s a fruit-by-fruit guide

Is there anything more disappointing than biting into an apple, only to find it has gone all fluffy and soft? It happens all the time – and now we know why. According to a government initiative on food labelling, it is because we are not storing our Pink Lady apples in the fridge.

As part of a drive to reduce annual household food waste in the UK by 350,000 tonnes, labelling is changing. In future, it will include, among other things, a “little blue fridge” icon for foods that keep for longer in the fridge, including apples and oranges. Can this be right? Well, yes – but it’s a matter of timing. Here’s a guide to when to let fruit chill.

The experimental study is the first to directly show harm to songbirds, extending the known impacts of neonicotinoids beyond insects

The world’s most widely used insecticide may cause migrating songbirds to lose their sense of direction and suffer drastic weight loss, according to new research.

The work is significant because it is the first direct evidence that neonicotinoids can harm songbirds and their migration, and it adds to small but growing research suggesting the pesticides may damage wildlife far beyond bees and other insects.

Supermarket packaging will carry new logos advising which items can be kept in the fridge, ensuring they last longer and reduce food waste

Bags of supermarket apples will carry a new logo advising consumers to keep them in the fridge to make them last longer as part of a shake-up of food labelling aimed aimed at cutting about 350,000 tonnes of domestic food waste – worth £1bn – by 2025.

The confusing and sometimes misleading “display by”, “best by” and “use by” dates on packaging is being simplified to encourage shoppers to get the most out of their larder, fridge and freezer.

To mark International Women Human Rights Defenders’ Day, we pay tribute to some of the women killed this year because of their activism

In 2017, 44 female activists died, more than half of them murdered for defending their rights. Among the women killed are those who fought to protect their land from the state and multinational companies, or called out injustices or corruption, or stood up for the rights of lesbian, gay and transexual people.

While thousands of men defend human rights, women face particular challenges for their activism. They are targeted for who they are, as women, not just because they are protesting. In countries that view a woman’s role as being in the home, female human rights defenders are more prone to attack than men because they are seen as breaking social norms.