The Guardian

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.

Crook, County Durham Within a day of uploading a picture of what I thought was one species of harvestman, I was told it was a more interesting alien

We may be living in a golden age for natural historians. The old naturalists’ field clubs, rooted in the Victorian passion for collecting and sharing knowledge of flora and fauna, may be in decline, but, thanks to social media, it has never been easier to correspond with a helpful expert when you need one.

Post a picture of, say, an unfamiliar spider on the internet and it’s likely that someone out there will identify it for you.

Men in late 20s and early 30s with alcohol or drugs in their system the most frequent victims of fatal river drowning

Risk-taking young men who drown trying to swim Melbourne’s Yarra river are making it the deadliest inland river per metre in Australia.

New data shows alcohol, drugs, tourists and young men who dare each other to swim the river are contributing to regular drownings.

When two Dutch journalists travelled to the DRC to report on illegal gold mining in the vast Okapi wildlife reserve, they ended up running for their lives

Conflict is never far away in the Democratic Republic of Congo – a country rich in natural resources such as gold, diamonds, coltan and tin – and the country is on the brink of a new civil war. Tensions have been rising since December, when President Joseph Kabila postponed the elections.

It’s time the world woke up to the real impact of modern, industrial farming, says Philip Lymbery, author of Farmageddon and the Deadzone

The world desperately needs joined-up action on industrial farming if it is to avoid catastrophic impacts on life on earth, according to the head of one of the world’s most highly regarded animal campaign groups.

Philip Lymbery, chief executive of Compassion in World Farming (CIWF) and the author of Farmageddon and more recently Deadzone, said: “Every day there is a new confirmation of how destructive, inefficient, wasteful, cruel and unhealthy the industrial agriculture machine is. We need a total rethink of our food and farming systems before it’s too late.”

Tepco, still struggling to decommission Fukushima Daiichi, gets initial approval to start two reactors at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa

The operator of Japan’s stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has been given initial approval to restart reactors at another atomic facility, marking the first step towards the firm’s return to nuclear power generation more than six years after the March 2011 triple meltdown.

Japan’s nuclear regulator on Wednesday approved an application from Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) to restart two reactors at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa – the world’s biggest nuclear power plant – even as the utility struggles to decommission Fukushima Daiichi.

South Africa’s rising poaching problem has seen a shocking 6,115 rhinos killed in the last nine years. Saving the Survivors’ ground-breaking initiative sees a small team of vets race to the scene to try and treat the animals before it’s too late

Exclusive: Every area of the capital breaches global standards for PM2.5 pollution particles, with most areas exceeding levels by at least 50%

The scale of London’s air pollution crisis was laid bare on Wednesday, with new figures showing that every person in the capital is breathing air that exceeds global guidelines for one of the most dangerous toxic particles.

The research, based on the latest updated London Atmospheric Emissions Inventory, shows that every area in the capital exceeds World Health Organisation (WHO) limits for a damaging type of particle known as PM2.5.

Renewables accounted for two-thirds of new power added to world’s grids last year, says International Energy Agency

Solar power was the fastest-growing source of new energy worldwide last year, outstripping the growth in all other forms of power generation for the first time and leading experts to hail a “new era”.

Renewable energy accounted for two-thirds of new power added to the world’s grids in 2016, the International Energy Agency said, but the group found solar was the technology that shone brightest.

Morfa Harlech, Gwynedd They have drifted on ocean currents for 500m years, pulsing gently towards landfall

The wave smudges out something written in the sand with a stick. I imagine it as a spell cast to charm ashore those lost at sea. And so it does, as tides ebb and flow, stranding the barrel jellyfish. These extraordinary creatures, also known as dustbin-lid jellyfish because of their size and shape, have been shipwrecked after an epic voyage.

Rhizostoma pulmo or R octopus is the largest jellyfish in British waters (they can grow to nearly 90cm in diameter) and is harvested around Wales for high-value medical-grade collagen. It feeds on plankton and its sting does not injure humans any more than do nettles; it is fed upon by leatherback turtles and sunfish.

Plant’s operator seeks approval for a phased development in the face of residents’ opposition and concerns over air quality

Plans for the world’s biggest waste-to-energy plant in Sydney’s west have been cut in half, in an effort to address concerns from health and environmental authorities, and residents.

The Next Generation, a company owned by one of the largest waste operators in Australia – Ian Malouf, founder of Dial A Dump – has lodged new documents seeking a phased development of the plant.