The Guardian

The best of this week’s wildlife photographs from around the world

Corpse flower mania is sweeping the nation (inner-city Sydney)

• Sign up here to get an email whenever First Dog cartoons are published
• Get all your needs met at the First Dog shop if what you need is First Dog merchandise and prints

Fridays for Future organiser warns conspiracy theories are increasingly taking hold despite effects of global heating

The rise in extreme weather is not generating political support for climate action, Germany’s best-known climate activist has warned, as conspiracy theories increasingly circle after disasters made worse by global heating.

“Like many, I did buy into the idea that big catastrophes would do something to politics,” said Luisa Neubauer from Fridays for Future Germany. “I bought into that – and I’m glad about it – because I was naively believing there was a democratic responsibility that would live through coalition changes and climate changes.”

Birdwatch survey comes as concerns grow over infection risks posed by garden bird feeders

People are being urged to spend an hour this weekend counting the birds in their garden, park or local green space for the world’s largest survey of garden wildlife.

More than 9m birds were counted last year by 600,000 participants in the RSPB’s Big Garden Birdwatch, providing a vital snapshot of how wild birds are faring.

First there was Moo Deng, then there was Pesto the Penguin – but have you met Sydney's Putricia, the corpse flower? To the scientific community, the Botanic Gardens of Sydney’s corpse flower is known as Amorphophallus titanum, which translates to 'large, deformed penis'. But online, the rare endangered plant has taken a life of its own.

It’s the first time a corpse flower has bloomed in the Royal Botanic Garden in 15 years – and when they do blossom, they last just 24 to 48 hours

• ‘Putricia for president’: Sydney’s blooming corpse flower becomes a cult hero – to those who can’t smell her

• She looks like a ‘deformed penis’ and smells like a dead possum: Sydney goes wild for its blooming corpse flower

Schemes backed by previous government to improve energy efficiency have left homeowners unable to sell

Almost 40 building companies have been blocked by the government from installing insulation amid a growing outcry over the profusion of botched jobs across the UK.

Ministers also announced that any homes found to have received botched insulation would have the issues put right by the installer responsible at no extra cost to the homeowner.

Emergency use of Cruiser SB, a neonicotinoid pesticide highly toxic to bees, to be outlawed in UK in line with EU

Bee-killing pesticides have been banned for emergency use in the UK for the first time in five years after the government rejected an application from the National Farmers’ Union and British Sugar.

The neonicotinoid pesticide Cruiser SB, which is used on sugar beet, is highly toxic to bees and has the potential to kill off populations of the insect. It is banned in the EU but the UK has provisionally agreed to its emergency use every year since leaving the bloc. It combats a plant disease known as virus yellows by killing the aphid that spreads it.

Exclusive: Supporters of bill say Labour has already insisted on removal of clauses requiring UK to meet targets agreed at Cop and other summits

A landmark bill that would make the UK’s climate and environment targets legally binding seems doomed after government whips ordered Labour MPs to oppose it following a breakdown in negotiations.

Supporters of the climate and nature bill, introduced by the Liberal Democrat MP Roz Savage, say Labour insisted on the removal of clauses that would require the UK to meet the targets it agreed to at Cop and other international summits.

Mark Avery to stand down from role with Wild Justice but won’t completely give up campaigning, he insists

If government ministers and civil servants are grey squirrels, they may think they can rest easy – the predatory pine marten in the Westminster jungle is leaving them in peace.

A campaigner who has “created a landscape of fear” over the authorities’ failure to protect nature is stepping back from Wild Justice to spend more time with the wildlife – and grandchildren – in his garden.

But climate change and energy minister says government will not announce its 2035 emissions target before election

• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

Australia’s climate change and energy minister, Chris Bowen, is “not giving up” on the Paris climate agreement despite the US president, Donald Trump, moving to pull the world’s second-largest polluter out of the global accord.

Bowen made the comments as the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, all but ruled out withdrawing from Paris if he won the federal election in 2025, suggesting such a move would damage trading relationships and cost jobs.

Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email

Gusts of up to 80mph may bring disruption but also a surge in cheap wind power after days of near-zero output

A looming “weather bomb” is expected to snuff out a surge in wholesale energy prices after windfarms produced the lowest levels of electricity since September 2023.

Cloudy and still weather has caused Great Britain’s renewable energy output to fall to near zero this week but is expected to give way to gusts of up to 80mph, alongside heavy rain and snow, on Thursday and Friday.

Representatives of Heartland Institute linking up with MEPs to campaign against environmental policies

Climate science deniers from a US-based thinktank have been working with rightwing politicians in Europe to campaign against environmental policies, the Guardian can reveal.

MEPs have been accused of “rolling out the red carpet for climate deniers” to give them a platform in the European parliament, amid warnings of a “revival of grotesque climate denialism”.

Some areas of the Amazon experienced their worst drought in 120 years in 2024. Brazilian rivers such as the Negro fell to their lowest levels on record, affecting more than 140,000 families for months.
Photographer Musuk Nolte documented the crisis

Climate crisis is making it harder for insurance companies to operate, with many pausing or withdrawing policies

Homeowners in the United States are facing an enormous financial crunch due to the climate crisis, with many struggling to find insurance or even dropping premiums that are soaring due to a mounting toll of wildfires, hurricanes and other disasters, new federal government data shows.

The figures, the most comprehensive numbers ever released by the US treasury department on the issue, show insurance premiums are increasing quickly across the country, with people living amid the greatest climate-driven risks experiencing the steepest rises of all. In the four years to 2022, people living in the top 20% riskiest places for such perils paid, on average, 82% more than those in the 20% lowest climate risk zip codes.

António Guterres issues warning at Davos, days after Donald Trump pulled US out of Paris climate agreement

• Davos day two live – latest updates

The world’s addiction to fossil fuels is a “Frankenstein’s monster sparing nothing and no one”, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, told leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday.

“Our fossil fuel addiction is a Frankenstein’s monster, sparing nothing and no one. All around us, we see clear signs that the monster has become master,” Guterres said in a speech days after 2024 was revealed to have been the hottest year on record and Donald Trump began his second term as US president by pulling the country out of the Paris climate agreement and pledging to “drill, baby, drill” for more oil and gas. The fossil fuel industry gave $75m (£60m) to Trump’s campaign.

Experts say UK should stop biomass burning as electricity sector decarbonisation by 2030 can be achieved without it

The UK should stop burning wood to generate power because it is not needed to meet the government’s target of decarbonising the electricity sector by 2030, according to analysis.

Ed Miliband, the energy security and net zero secretary, is expected to make a decision soon on whether to allow billions of pounds in new public subsidies for biomass burning, despite fierce opposition from green groups.

Acronyms, in-jokes and online fan clubs spring up as viewers across the globe prepare for Sydney’s first corpse bloom in 15 years – from a safe distance

• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

In a Sydney greenhouse, a tall pointed flower is about to bloom for the first time in years.

To the scientific community, the Botanic Gardens of Sydney’s corpse flower is known as amorphophallus titanum, which translates to large, deformed penis. But online, the rare endangered plant has taken on a new name: Putricia.

Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email

Pollution aside, the problem with expanding Heathrow lies in the disruption and delay inevitable in such a complex project

Get ready for another season of that interminable saga, Heathrow’s third runway. There was a lull during the Covid pandemic when the airport’s owners, despite winning permission from the supreme court in 2020 to submit a planning application, cooled their jets while they waited for passenger numbers to recover. Now the whole thing is back, courtesy of Rachel Reeves. The chancellor is reported to be preparing to use a speech next week to declare support for a third runway at Heathrow alongside wider airport expansion in the south-east.

The best form of airport expansion is none at all, environmentalists (some of them in the cabinet) will argue, but it looks as if Reeves has dismissed those objections in the name of economic growth. A £1.1bn investment in Stansted, to enable it to grow its annual capacity from 29 million passengers to 43 million, was welcomed by the government last year.

More than 40% of individual corals monitored around One Tree Island reef bleached by heat stress and damaged by flesh-eating disease

• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

More than 40% of individual corals monitored around a Great Barrier Reef island were killed last year in the most widespread coral bleaching outbreak to hit the reef system, a study has found.

Scientists tracked 462 colonies of corals at One Tree Island in the southern part of the Great Barrier Reef after heat stress began to turn the corals white in early 2024. Researchers said they encountered “catastrophic” scenes at the reef.

Critical CO2 stores held in permafrost are being released as the landscape changes with global heating, report shows

A third of the Arctic’s tundra, forests and wetlands have become a source of carbon emissions, a new study has found, as global heating ends thousands of years of carbon storage in parts of the frozen north.

For millennia, Arctic land ecosystems have acted as a deep-freeze for the planet’s carbon, holding vast amounts of potential emissions in the permafrost. But ecosystems in the region are increasingly becoming a contributor to global heating as they release more CO2 into the atmosphere with rising temperatures, a new study published in Nature Climate Change concluded.