The Guardian

Gove’s vision for the environment is undoubtedly ambitious but it is at odds with much government action – making it real will be a gargantuan task

Who knew? Environment secretary Michael Gove, arch Brexiter and seen just months ago grinning and thumbs up in eco-villain Donald Trump’s lair, turns out to be – in words, at least – a deep green.

His first major speech railed against “corporate greed and devil-take-the-hindmost individualism”, “extractive and exploitative political systems” and the “selfish agenda” of vested interests.

Palm oil plantations on illegally deforested land in Sumatra – home to elephants, orangutans and tigers – have allegedly been used to supply scores of household brands, says new report

Pepsico, Unilever and Nestlé have been accused of complicity in the destruction of Sumatra’s last tract of rainforest shared by elephants, orangutans, rhinos, and tigers together in one ecosystem.

Plantations built on deforested land have allegedly been used to supply palm oil to scores of household brands that also include McDonald’s, Mars, Kellogg’s and Procter & Gamble, according to a new report.

A pod of pilot whales, nesting storks and a clan of hyenas are among this week’s pick of images from the natural world

Sixty-five MPs have written to the environment secretary urging him to include the measures in his new strategy to tackle the air pollution crisis

A cross party group of MPs is calling on Michael Gove to adopt a clean air bill in his new strategy to tackle the crisis of air pollution in the UK.

Sixty five MPs have written to the environment secretary as he prepares to address the most pressing issue in his intray – a demand by judges for a new air quality strategy by 31 July to cut illegal levels of pollution from diesel vehicles.

Drivers who fail to give cyclists enough space when overtaking will be pulled over, and officers will explain how to overtake cyclists safely

London’s police force has launched a new initiative to tackle drivers who pass cyclists too closely, using plain clothes officers.

From Friday, the Space for Cyclists initiative will be carried out by UK’s only cycle-mounted police command, the Met’s cycle safety team, after months spent adapting the tactic for London’s roads from a West Midlands Police initiative, introduced last year.

North Lees, Derbyshire The site of the old smelting works felt wholly reclaimed, and as the rain ended the air filled with insects and soon after wrens

The rain started as I crossed the pasture above North Lees Hall, the model, it is widely accepted, for Thornfield Hall in Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre. It’s a house the author visited more than once, staying with her friend Ellen Nussey in nearby Hathersage, and the intertwining of the names – thorn being an anagram of north and lee derived from the Anglo-Saxon for field – coupled with the detailed description Brontë gives, are persuasive.

Big reductions in no-take marine protected areas are being considered, going beyond those recommended by an earlier federal government review

Australia’s marine protected areas look set to be slashed by the federal government, with plans announced for cuts that go beyond those recommended by a review commissioned by the previous Abbott government.

Draft management plans released by the Director of National Parks on Friday propose that large areas of Queensland’s Coral Sea, as well as off the coast of Western Australia, the Northern Territory and New South Wales, will lose or have their protection downgraded, to make way for expanded long-line fishing and seafloor trawling – which have been shown to damage the conservation value of the oceans.

A recent heatwave in Siberia’s frozen wastes has resulted in outbreaks of deadly anthrax and a series of violent explosions

Strange things have been happening in the frozen tundra of northern Siberia. Last August a boy died of anthrax in the remote Yamal Peninsula, and 20 other infected people were treated and survived. Anthrax hadn’t been seen in the region for 75 years, and it’s thought the recent outbreak followed an intense heatwave in Siberia, temperatures reaching over 30C that melted the frozen permafrost.

Long dormant spores of the highly infectious anthrax bacteria frozen in the carcass of an infected reindeer rejuvenated themselves and infected herds of reindeer and eventually local people.

Hotels and local government in Cancún will pay premiums, and insurance industry will pay out if the reef is damaged by storms

A stretch of coral reef off Mexico is the testing ground for a new idea that could protect fragile environments around the world: insurance.

The reef, off the coast of Cancún, is the first to be protected under an insurance scheme by which the premiums will be paid by local hotels and government, and money to pay for the repair of the reef will be released if a storm strikes.

Scuffles and accusations of aggression increase at Cuadrilla’s Preston New Road shale gas exploration site

Tensions at Britain’s most high-profile fracking site have risen following an increase in violent clashes between protesters, security guards and police. One demonstrator said she had been left unconscious following a “pretty brutal” scuffle with security officers on Wednesday, and another activist fell from his wheelchair, the same day, when police officers pulled him out of the way of a 40-tonne lorry.

Both protesters said they planned to report the incidents that had occurred – at Cuadrilla’s Preston New Road site, near Blackpool – to the Lancashire police.

Six-year-old Xanda was shot and killed by hunters when he roamed outside the protected area of the Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe

A son of Cecil the lion has been killed by trophy hunters in Zimbabwe, meeting the same fate as his father whose death in 2015 caused a global outcry.

Xanda, who was six years old and believed to have fathered a number of cubs himself, was shot just outside the Hwange National Park, not far from where Cecil died.

Environmental groups accuse agency of turning blind eye as Texas ‘renders useless’ pollution controls by issuing lax permits for oil and gas facilities

Campaign groups are suing the Environmental Protection Agency in a bid to force it to clamp down on industrial air pollution in Texas.

Related: Texas companies penalized in less than 3% of illegal air pollution cases – report

Pangolins are the world’s most trafficked wild mammal and decimated Asian populations have sharply shifted the focus of exploitation to Africa

The true scale of the slaughter of pangolins in Africa has been revealed by new research showing that millions of the scaly mammals are being hunted and killed.

Pangolins were already known to be the world’s most trafficked wild mammal, with at least a million being traded in the last decade to supply the demand for its meat and scales in Asian markets. Populations of Asian pangolins have been decimated, leaving the creatures highly endangered and sharply shifting the focus of exploitation to Africa’s four species.

PM says there is a role for government but ‘the goal should always be for investment decisions to be made by the market’

Malcolm Turnbull says it is better the market decides whether or not to build a new coal-fired power station in Australia rather than delivering that outcome through government intervention.

The prime minister was asked at an economic forum in Melbourne on Thursday whether the government would intervene to see new coal plants constructed, or whether it would leave that decision to the market.

A torrential rainstorm has battered Yongji county in China’s Jilin province for the second time in a matter of days. The local meteorological department issued a red alert before dawn as the downpour threatened to bring more flooding to an area where eight people died earlier in ther week

In a film released by Surfers Against Sewage, narrated by the actor Imelda Staunton, the scale of the plastic waste that circulates on the currents of the world’s oceans is compared to a global nuclear security threat. The group is calling for people to adopt a five-point plan to reduce plastic pollution

• Plastics campaign calls for grassroots action to cut pollution across the UK
  

Individuals, schools and businesses are urged to adopt a five point plan to help make their towns and cities free of single-use plastic

• Plastic pollution threatens ‘near permanent contamination of the natural environment’

Communities across the UK are being urged to spread grass roots resistance to single-use plastic to reduce the millions of tonnes of it seeping into the oceans.

Local councils, schools and businesses will be targeted in the Plastic Free Coastlines campaign that aims to ape the movement to end the use of plastic bags.

Summer’s here, and so are bees. These new macro images by Alejandro Santillana are being showcased in the Insects Unlocked project at the University of Texas at Austin

The vast majority of newly built stations in Indonesia relied on export credits agencies or development banks, says study by Market Forces

The much-discussed boom in coal-fired power in south-east Asia is being bankrolled by foreign governments and banks, with the vast majority of projects apparently too risky for the private sector.

Environmental analysts at activist group Market Forces examined 22 deals involving 13.1 gigawatts of coal-fired power in Indonesia and found that 91% of the projects had the backing of foreign governments through export credit agencies or development banks.

The endangered wild dogs are well adapted to high temperatures but a warming world means pup survival is plummeting, study shows

Rising temperatures are making it too hot for African wild dogs to hunt and the number of their pups that survive is plummeting, according to a new study. The research is among the first to show a direct impact of increased heat on wildlife that appears well adapted to high temperatures.

There are only 7,000 African wild dogs left in the wild and they have lost 93% of their historic ranges to humans. Research earlier in July suggested that a “biological annihilation” of wildlife in recent decades means a sixth mass extinction in Earth’s history is already under way.