The Guardian

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.

Photographer Matthew Staver and writer Oliver Milman visited the US National Wildlife Property Repository, where illegal wildlife products, from stuffed tigers to worked ivory, are stored and counted

If the US had a national house of horrors, it would probably be the federal government compound that lies on the fringes of Denver, Colorado, incongruously set within a wildlife reserve where bison languorously dawdle against a backdrop of the snow-crowned Rockies.

The National Wildlife Property Repository, operated by the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), is a warehouse of the macabre. It’s a Noah’s ark of protected deceased biodiversity that smugglers attempted to get into the US before being caught by FWS staff at airports and ports.

Wolsingham, Weardale The grasshoppers are singing, dragging the little pegs on their hind femurs across the edges of their long membranous wings

In the 40 years that I have followed this steep, stony, path leading down to Tunstall reservoir, one moorland edge bank of fescues, betony and bell heather has always been a reliable spot for grasshoppers. Facing south-west, sheltered from wind by a larch plantation it’s a perfect place to sit on a sunny afternoon and listen to their soundtrack of summer.

You would need more finely tuned ears than mine to distinguish all 13 of our grasshopper species by their songs, but here I have only ever found two; the meadow, Chorthippus parallelus, and the common green, Omocestus viridulus.

First global analysis of all mass–produced plastics has found humans have produced 8.3bn tonnes since the 1950s with the majority ending up in landfill or oceans

Humans have produced 8.3bn tonnes of plastic since the 1950s with the majority ending up in landfill or polluting the world’s continents and oceans, according to a new report.

The first global analysis of all mass–produced plastics has found that it has outstripped most other man-made materials, threatening a “near permanent contamination of the natural environment”.

Australian Conservation Foundation asks environment and energy minister to revoke Carmichael mine approval

A fresh legal challenge could be brewing for Adani’s planned Carmichael coalmine. New advice has found the federal environment minister’s approval of the mine may have been unlawful in light of new scientific evidence of its impacts on the endangered black-throated finch.

As a result, the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) has asked the federal minister for the environment and energy, Josh Frydenberg, revoke the approval and ask Adani to resubmit its plans for consideration.

Brexit department warns EU counterparts it will ‘return waste to its country of origin’ if an agreement on nuclear cooperation cannot be reached

Britain has warned the EU that it could return boatloads of radioactive waste back to the continent if the Brexit talks fail to deliver an agreement on nuclear regulation.

In what is being taken in Brussels as a thinly veiled threat, a paper setting out the UK position for the negotiations stresses the right “to return radioactive waste … to its country of origin” should negotiations collapse.

Neart na Gaoithe project on east coast likely to go ahead after long-running court battle despite claim it threatens seabirds

A £2bn offshore windfarm in Scotland looks set to go ahead after the RSPB lost a long-running legal challenge against the plans, which the conservationists said threatened puffins, gannets and kittiwakes.

The Scottish government gave its consent to four major windfarms in the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Tay in 2014, but the RSPB launched a judicial review, saying it was extremely concerned at the impact on seabirds.

Catholic order builds chapel in middle of cornfield in attempt to use religious freedom protections to block Atlantic Sunrise pipeline

Catholic nuns in Pennsylvania are resisting plans to build a $3bn pipeline for gas obtained by fracking through its land by creating a rudimentary chapel along the proposed route and launching a legal challenge, citing religious freedom.

The Adorers of the Blood of Christ order has filed a complaint against the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in a bid to keep the pipeline off their land. The nuns’ lawyers argue in court papers that a decision by FERC to force them to accommodate the pipeline is “antithetical to the deeply held religious beliefs and convictions of the Adorers”.

The wall of Republican climate denial is starting to crack; who will be the Neo that accelerates the process?

Trump’s EPA administrator Scott Pruitt wants to hold televised ‘Red Team/Blue Team’ climate science ‘debates.’ The idea is that a ‘Red Team’ of scientists will challenge the mainstream findings of ‘Blue Team’ scientists. That may sound familiar, because it’s exactly how the peer-review process works. But climate deniers have lost the debate in the peer-reviewed literature, with over 97% of peer-reviewed studies endorsing the consensus on human-caused global warming, and the few contrarian papers being flawed and failing to withstand scientific scrutiny.

So Scott Pruitt is trying to put his thumb on the scale, giving the less than 3% of contrarian scientists equal footing on a ‘Red Team.’ John Oliver showed how to do a statistically representative televised climate debate (so brilliantly that it’s been viewed 7.4m times), but it’s probably not what Pruitt had in mind: