The Guardian

Exclusive: As global demand for chocolate booms, ‘dirty’ beans from deforested national parks have entered big business supply chains

• ‘Once this was all trees, but they burned them to plant cocoa’: the ruin of West Africa’s rainforest
  

The world’s chocolate industry is driving deforestation on a devastating scale in West Africa, the Guardian can reveal.

Cocoa traders who sell to Mars, Nestlé, Mondelez and other big brands buy beans grown illegally inside protected areas in the Ivory Coast, where rainforest cover has been reduced by more than 80% since 1960.

Ministers are thought to be planning to offer £3m for initiatives such as solar panels on social housing

Green energy projects run by cities and local authorities around the UK stand to receive millions of pounds of government support, providing another fillip for renewable power just a day after the subsidised price of windfarms hit a record low.

The Guardian understands that ministers this autumn will offer more than £3m to help local leaders build low carbon initiatives, such as installing solar panels on social housing.

Industry body warns over need for seasonal workers after Brexit as growers face 20% shortfall in supply of labour

UK apple growers are in the grip of a 20% shortfall in the supply of seasonal labour, pushing them towards “a cliff edge” as Brexit nears, the industry has warned.

At the start of the annual British apple harvesting season with more than 20 indigenous varieties going on sale in supermarkets, the main trade body for both apples and pears says worries about future labour availability are at the top of its lobbying agenda.

Lawyers for two anti-fracking campaigners argue in high court that injunction obtained by Ineos curtail’s protester rights

The legality of a wide-ranging injunction obtained against anti-fracking protesters by a multinational firm is to be examined in a three-day court hearing.

Two campaigners have launched a legal challenge against the injunction obtained by Ineos, the petrochemicals giant. Joe Corré, the son of the fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, and Joe Boyd, say it is draconian, oppressive and dramatically curtails protesters’ rights.

Fertile soil is being lost at rate of 24bn tonnes a year through intensive farming as demand for food increases, says UN-backed study

A third of the planet’s land is severely degraded and fertile soil is being lost at the rate of 24bn tonnes a year, according to a new United Nations-backed study that calls for a shift away from destructively intensive agriculture.

The alarming decline, which is forecast to continue as demand for food and productive land increases, will add to the risks of conflicts such as those seen in Sudan and Chad unless remedial actions are implemented, warns the institution behind the report.

CCTV footage from under Whitechapel in east London shows a fatberg that weighs as much as 11 double decker buses and is the length of two football pitches blocking the sewer. It is mostly made up of fat, wet wipes and nappies, and is expected to take three weeks to clear

• ‘Total monster’: fatberg blocks London sewage system
  

Thames Water must break up congealed mass of fat, wet wipes and nappies to prevent raw sewage flooding streets

A fatberg weighing the same as 11 double decker buses and stretching the length of two football pitches is blocking a section of London’s ageing sewage network.

The congealed mass of fat, wet wipes and nappies is one of the biggest ever found and would have risked raw sewage flooding on to the streets in Whitechapel, east London, had it not been discovered during a routine inspection earlier this month.

Trump’s NASA nominee Jim Bridenstine is a climate denier who wants to end the agency’s climate research

According to 2016 election exit polls, only 38% of voters considered Donald Trump qualified to be president. 17% of those who thought him unqualified voted for Trump anyway, perhaps because he promised that as a wealthy businessman, he would be able to hire the best people to advise him. That was a claim his daughter Ivanka explicitly made in her speech at the Republican National Convention:

Eight to 10 members of a remote indigenous group were allegedly killed by men working for illegal prospectors in Javari Valley

Brazilian authorities are investigating reports of a massacre of up to 10 people from an isolated tribe in the Amazon by illegal gold miners.

The killings, alleged to have taken place in Javari Valley, are claimed to have been carried out by men working for gold prospectors who dredge illegally in the region’s rivers.

A hungry arctic fox, mating sea angels and playful brown bears are among the creatures captured by photographers for this year’s competition. The exhibition opens on 20 October at the Natural History Museum

Pulborough Brooks, West Sussex One by one, the birds tip dramatically to one side, lowering one wing while raising the other, to lose height

The sharp honking sounds of geese echo across the Brooks. The air is clearing, but the rain still hangs over the low-lying hills in the distance, spreading down the sky like dark ink on wetted paper. As I walk out onto the marshes and towards the river Arun, the sun is rising behind me, spearing through the grey cloud.

Energy capacity auction shows offshore wind dramatically outstrips nuclear - and ministers must take note

Hinkley Point C nuclear power station was conceived in the days when offshore wind cost £150 per megawatt hour and a few misguided souls, some of them government ministers, thought a barrel of oil was heading towards $200.

Successive governments swallowed the line that Hinkley represented a plausible answer to the UK’s threefold energy conundrum – keeping the lights on, reducing carbon emissions and producing the juice at affordable prices for consumers and business.

Joe Boyd is appealing to public for donations to challenge petrochemicals giant over ‘anti-democratic’ injunction

A second campaigner is challenging a sweeping injunction obtained by a petrochemicals giant against anti-fracking activists that has been criticised for profoundly limiting protests.

Joe Boyd, an anti-fracking campaigner, is going to the high court in London on Tuesday in an attempt to stop the injunction which has been secured by the multinational firm, Ineos. He is appealing to the public for donations as he could face a large bill if he loses.

Ministers say culls are vital for cutting TB infections in cattle but scientists say there is little evidence to support the policy

Up to 33,500 badgers will be shot this autumn in an attempt to control tuberculosis in cattle, a huge rise from the 10,000 killed in 2016.

The government has announced that 11 new badger cull areas have been licensed, adding to the 10 already in place. Devon now has six badger culls under way, with Somerset and Wiltshire having three each, with others in Cheshire, Cornwall, Dorset, Gloucestershire and Herefordshire.

A small great white shark was rescued after it was found floundering on a beach in Sydney, Australia, on Monday. The shark was found by beachgoers in shallow waters at Manly beach and was moved to a beach rockpool to be monitored by authorities

• Pool shark: beached great white given temporary refuge in Sydney rock pool
  

Public pool closed to swimmers after injured marine predator transferred for observation by wildlife experts

A juvenile great white shark was rescued after washing up on a Sydney beach – and given a new temporary home in a nearby public swimming pool.

The shark, which washed ashore on Manly beach in Sydney’s north about midday, appeared to be injured and onlookers alerted marine rescue and lifeguards.

Green groups say record low price should sound death knell for Hinkley Point C after subsidy auction sets price for windpower below even lowest forecast

Offshore windfarms are to be built for a record low price in the UK early next decade, after developers bid far more aggressively than expected for a multimillion-pound pot of government subsidies.

Industry watchers had expected the guaranteed price for power from windfarms around Britain’s coast to come in somewhere between £70 and £80 per megawatt hour, below the £92.50 for the nuclear power station at Hinkley Point.

Locals blame coca interests for the state’s broken promise on protecting Tipnis national park, biodiversity hotspot and home to thousands of indigenous people

When Ovidio Teco’s Amazon homeland was declared “untouchable” by the Bolivian government in 2011, his war had been won.

The concerns of people like him had been listened to: their beautiful and ancient land would not be carved in two by a 190-mile highway.

Little Bradley Ponds, South Devon Taxonomy tussles aside, spotting any grass snake can be far from easy, and I circled the ponds several times

This small nature reserve was my final stop: a tranquil oasis surrounded by woodland and set back from the road near Bovey Tracey in south Devon. I had spent the morning visiting gardens in search of grass snakes, nosing around compost heaps and scanning the edges of ponds without luck. Reptiles known to inhabit one glorious wildlife-friendly property on the edge of Buckfastleigh had kept out of sight, while nearby locations offered up handsome slow worms, but not the secretive species I was after.

Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 14 September 1917

Already a peacock butterfly has selected our curtains for winter quarters, but it is early for this fly to be going into hibernation, and many are still on the wing, settling on the scabious and ragworts in the lanes or the flowers in our gardens. Perhaps the yellowing foliage of the sycamore and showers of curled, crisp beech leaves already down had given it a warning; it had a duty to fulfil: a long death-like slumber and a short flight next spring to find the young nettles and lay its eggs, thus linking up the years. It is many years since peacocks and red admirals were so abundant as they are now; everywhere people are struck by the numbers, not only locally nor even in other parts of England. A friend in France writes:– “The crops here are barbed wire, thistles, and nettles; I don’t know what the first produces, but the two last have brought out great lots of painted ladies, red admirals, peacocks, and a positive swarm of small tortoiseshells.” The weeds of the war-scarred, untilled land have produced one beautiful crop.

Related: Red Admiral spotting: desperately seeking a British butterfly revival