The Guardian

Nature-based solutions such as parks and ponds are recommended – as is giving heatwaves names

The UK urgently needs a plan to prevent thousands of heatwave deaths a year as the climate continues to warm, a cross-party committee of MPs has warned.

More than 4,500 people died in heatwaves in 2022, the MPs’ report said, and this number could rise to 10,000 a year by 2050 without action. Heatwaves are “silent killers”, the MPs said, pushing up heart rate and blood pressure, with those over 65 and with existing health problems most at risk.

Government plans for fishery closures are ‘window dressing’ in face of ‘appalling record’ on meeting targets, experts warn

Ministers are “window dressing” with nature policies announced to “cover up” the government’s failings on environmental targets, wildlife groups have said.

The Office for Environmental Protection (OEP) found earlier this month that nature in England is at risk of falling into an “irreversible spiral of decline” because of the government’s failures to meet its legally binding targets on species abundance and water quality.

California scientist and film-maker spot apparent pup – never before seen in the wild – in drone pictures

Researchers in California may have gotten the first ever look at a newborn great white shark, which they captured in drone images taken last summer.

The newborn animal has never before been spotted in the wild. But in July, the wildlife film-maker Carlos Gauna and Phillip Sternes, a biology doctoral student at the University of California, Riverside, glimpsed something unexpected in the waters near Santa Barbara on California’s central coast.

Exclusive: one of Britain’s rarest butterflies, found only in Norfolk Broads, critically threatened by climate crisis

The swallowtail, one of Britain’s rarest butterflies and also the largest, has suffered its worst summer since records began.

The butterfly is confined to the Broads in East Anglia, where its caterpillar’s food plant is found, and is now breeding on just 16 sites.

Inquiry into invasive pest hears of risks species poses to health, agriculture and environment if it becomes endemic

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Fire ants could sting 8.6 million Australians a year if they were to become endemic – but a pathogenic fungus and pesticide-loaded drones might help avert that scenario, according to submissions posed to the federal government’s fire ants inquiry.

Submissions to the Senate inquiry into red imported fire ants (Rifa) in Australia closed on Monday, just days after the latest in a string of fire ant detections beyond south-east Queensland, where an infestation of the invasive pest is ongoing.

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Committee urges UK to set ‘powerful example’ of tackling climate change after ‘mixed messages’ of Cop28

The UK must act urgently to meet its international climate commitments, the independent climate watchdog has warned, after sending “mixed messages” to other countries at the Cop28 UN climate summit in December.

While carbon reduction from electricity generation has shown progress, the rate at which all other sources of emissions are being cut must quadruple to meet the UK’s target under the Paris agreement of 68% reductions in emissions by 2030, according to the Climate Change Committee.

Open letter calls for Soil Association certification to be removed from industry, amid concerns of negative environmental impact

The British body that certifies food in the UK as organic has been accused of misleading consumers over its labelling of Scottish farmed salmon.

Thirty charities, conservation and community organisations, including WildFish, the Pesticide Action Network and Blue Marine Foundation, say the negative environmental impacts of the industry in Scotland “run completely counter” to the principles of the Soil Association’s promotion of healthy, humane and sustainable food.

Regional mayor Dan Norris launches project to explore potential for former mines to produce low-carbon heat

When Bryn Hawkins worked in coalmines through the 1960s and early 1970s he says few understood the impact the burning of fossil fuels would have on the planet.

Now, public officials are hoping disused mines that provided millions of tonnes of fossil fuels could be used as a potential source of renewable energy across the country.

Parts of south-east Queensland have been hit by flash flooding and torrential rain with homes and businesses underwater. More than a dozen people have been rescued from areas north and west of Brisbane. The Bureau of Meteorology said forecast rainfall in those areas could lead to flash or riverine flooding in the next 48 hours. Ex-Tropical Cyclone Kirrily is also ensuring more wet weather in Queensland's north-west, days after crossing the coast

• Heavy rain prompts further flood rescues in Queensland, with SEQ warned of more severe storms

Exclusive: Hundreds of anglers take part in UK’s largest citizen science water-testing project

Eighty-three per cent of English rivers contain evidence of high pollution caused by sewage and agricultural waste, according to the largest citizen science water testing project ever to take place in the UK.

Hundreds of anglers took part in the study, organised by the Angling Trust, after being angered by the brown blooms of sewage in the waters they painstakingly tend for the benefit of fish.

French farmers have been getting closer to Paris as they continue to block highways in protest against price pressures, taxes and green regulation. Dozens of tractors occupied a motorway near the city of Beauvais leading to the French capital. In Belgium, farmers blocked highways in the south of the country and parked tractors near the European parliament in Brussels

• French farmers paralyse routes into Paris in tractor protest

Draft rules follow the ‘polluter pays principle’ and will mean companies cover 80% of extra clean-up costs

Beauty companies will have to pay more to clean up microplastic pollution after EU negotiators struck a new deal to treat sewage.

Under draft rules that follow the “polluter pays principle”, companies that sell medicines and cosmetics will have to cover at least 80% of the extra costs needed to get rid of tiny pollutants that are dirtying urban wastewater. Governments will pay the rest, members of the bloc said, in an effort to prevent vital products from becoming too expensive or scarce.

With confirmed or suspected cases in two Antarctic penguin species, researchers fear highly contagious virus could rip through colonies

At least one king penguin is suspected to have died from bird flu in the Antarctic. If confirmed, it will be the first of the species killed by the highly contagious H5N1 virus in the wild.

Researchers have previously raised alarm about “one of the largest ecological disasters of modern times” if bird flu reached remote Antarctic penguin populations. The birds are currently clustering together for breeding season, meaning the disease could rip through entire colonies if it continues to spread through the region.

Existing production destroys more value than it creates due to medical and environmental costs, researchers say

A shift towards a more sustainable global food system could create up to $10tn (£7.9tn) of benefits a year, improve human health and ease the climate crisis, according to the most comprehensive economic study of its type.

It found that existing food systems destroyed more value than they created due to hidden environmental and medical costs, in effect, borrowing from the future to take profits today.

Strong waves and sediment-laden freshwater pushed out from river catchments may have damaged parts of reef system, experts say

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Back-to-back cyclones crossing the Great Barrier Reef have experts concerned vast flood plumes and heavy waves may have damaged parts of the world’s biggest coral reef system.

Reef scientists and conservationists went into the summer worried that an El Niño weather pattern would elevate the risk of mass coral bleaching.

A year after Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, declared a humanitarian crisis among the Yanomami and vowed zero tolerance for illegal mining, environmental enforcers have said the progress since the ousting from the reservation of 80% of the wildcat miners is in jeopardy. As the military has rolled back its support for the crackdown, the miners have made fresh incursions into Yanomami land, they say

National Trust says it hopes to establish 50 hectares across three sites close to surviving pockets of rainforest

More than 100,000 trees are being planted in north Devon as part of efforts to boost temperate or Celtic rainforests, some of the UK’s most magical but endangered environments.

The trees are being planted close to surviving pockets of rainforest at two spots close to the coast and one inland.

Two environmental protesters hurled soup on to the Mona Lisa at the Louvre in Paris, calling for 'healthy and sustainable food'. The painting, which was behind bulletproof glass, appeared to be undamaged. Gallery visitors looked on in shock as two women threw the yellow-coloured soup before climbing under the barrier in front of the work and flanking the splattered painting. One of the two activists removed her jacket to reveal a white T-shirt bearing the name of the activist group Riposte Alimentaire (Food Response)

• Protesters throw soup at Mona Lisa painting in Paris

Restore Trust’s insidious campaign to get its preferred candidates on to the body’s board could set a dangerous precedent

Ah! The turning of the seasons! Once it was always early summer, as swifts swooped from gables, when the private limited company Restore Trust would announce the “anti-woke” candidates it hoped to parachute on to the National Trust board. As the elephant hawk-moths emerged in the simmer dim, Restore Trust would unveil would-be guardians of our heritage such as the evangelical Christian Stephen Green, who has supported the death penalty for some homosexuals in Uganda, and the pliable biographer Andrew Gimpson, who is even worse, having described Boris Johnson as “a statesman of astonishing political gifts… impelled by a deep love of his country and a determination to serve it to the uttermost of his powers”. I wouldn’t trust Gimpson with a single Jammie Dodger, let alone our national scones. Either way, Restore Trust’s declaration of war on the woke National Trust has become an annual event as comforting, in its own way, as the once reliable blooming of the daffodils. But suddenly, like that yellow splash of colour, it seems to happen earlier every year.

Nostalgia is an illness. But it always seemed important to my mother that the daffodils were out by my birthday in the first week of April. Perhaps, because my earliest birthdays were skewed by the uncertainties of orphanages and foster homes, it mattered to her that something as permanent as the daffodils, and by association the apparently endless cycle of seasons, should mark the anniversary of my arrival on your Earth. I still think of all daffodils as mine, and resent Wales’s cultural appropriation of my flower. Especially when it already has the leek, Dafydd ap Gwilym, Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci and Pot Noodle’s “too gorgeous” Peter Baynham.

Stewart Lee appears with Celya AB, Fern Brady, Rob Brydon, Rob Delaney, Kevin Eldon, Rosie Holt, Athena Kugblenu and Nish Kumar in Belter for the Shelter, in aid of Hackney Night Shelter, at the Hackney Empire, London, on 1 February

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The cost of decarbonising is vast. Something like the privatisations of the 80s may be needed to raise enough funds

If Labour forms the next government, as polls suggest, it must provide the private sector with the kind of incentives that will lift investment in Britain’s economy, making it more productive and environmentally friendly. Joe Biden has done it for the US. Why not Keir Starmer in the UK?

Transforming the economy will come at an outsize cost. Worse, it’s an escalating cost that is way beyond the public finances of Britain and possibly even the EU.