The Guardian

Australian PM last week insisted he would address forum to ‘correct mistruths’ about Coalition’s action on emissions

Scott Morrison does not yet have a speaker’s spot at a global climate ambition summit this weekend despite telling parliament last week he intended to use an appearance at the event to “correct mistruths” about his government’s heavily criticised record on emissions reduction.

A government spokesman on Monday night said Australia had been invited to take part in the 12 December summit “both personally by [British] prime minister Boris Johnson during a phone call with prime minister Morrison, and again in writing by the leaders of hosting nations: the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Chile and also the United Nations”.

Letters sent to the forestry agency advised logging in bushfire-affected areas should apply the ‘precautionary principle’ to consider threatened species

Victoria’s publicly-owned forestry agency has been allowed to restart logging in bushfire-ravaged east Gippsland despite a warning from a regulator there was a risk of “serious and irreversible damage” to the state’s biodiversity.

Documents released under freedom of information laws show the state’s conservation regulator twice wrote to VicForests during and after last summer’s catastrophic bushfires advising it should apply the “precautionary principle” when logging in the area.

Local wildlife trust says work has devastated Herefordshire river but landowner says EA asked him to do it

Environment agency officials were under pressure on Monday to explain exactly what consent they gave to carry out extensive work on the banks of a protected river in England.

Officials from the EA, Natural England and the Forestry Commission moved in last week to stop the work along the River Lugg outside Kingsland, near Leominster in Herefordshire.

Rosamund Kissi-Debrah ‘would have moved house’ if aware of level of pollution threat to her daughter

The mother of a nine-year-old girl who died after an acute asthma attack said she would have moved house immediately had she been told of the link between air pollution and her daughter’s condition.

Rosamund Kissi-Debrah told the inner south London coroner that she knew nothing about nitrogen dioxide or air pollution during her daughter’s life.

Companies accused of “zero progress” on reducing plastic waste, with Coca-Cola ranked No 1 for most littered products

Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Nestlé have been accused of “zero progress” on reducing plastic waste, after being named the world’s top plastic polluters for the third year in a row.

Coca-Cola was ranked the world’s No 1 plastic polluter by Break Free From Plastic in its annual audit, after its beverage bottles were the most frequently found discarded on beaches, rivers, parks and other litter sites in 51 of 55 nations surveyed. Last year it was the most frequently littered bottle in 37 countries, out of 51 surveyed.

Climate crisis likely to cause warmer, wetter winters and hotter, drier summers, says Met Office

Snowball fights and sledging could be at risk because by the end of the century snow will not settle on the ground in much of the UK due to the climate crisis, Met Office analysis has suggested.

Detailed projections suggest traditional winter activities such as building snowmen could disappear if global greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced.

Man, 29, says shark bite at Kangaroo Island’s D’Estrees Bay was ‘like being hit by a truck’

Paramedics have hailed the “remarkable” survival story of a South Australian surfer who swam back to shore alone and walked 300 metres for help after suffering “extraordinary” injuries from a shark bite at a remote beach.

Paramedic Michael Rushby said the man had “serious” lacerations on his back, backside and leg “consistent with quite a large shark bite”, but managed to haul himself to safety.

Naima Brown’s encounter with a lab-grown chicken nugget reminded her of a Happy Meal – but she’s less certain about what it means for the future of food

“Clean”, “cultured”, “no-kill” – these are just a few of the monikers that have been applied to San Francisco-based food start up Just Inc’s lab-grown chicken nuggets.

The product has just been approved for sale to consumers in Singapore – a world first. But the company’s CEO Josh Tetrick would prefer it if everyone dropped the additional descriptors and just called his company’s product “meat”.

Clean energy firm Gridserve has plans for more than 100 such sites over next five years

Britain’s first all-electric car charging forecourt is set to open for business in Braintree, Essex, to charge electric vehicles with 100% renewable energy.

From Monday, the super-fast electric forecourt will deliver 350KW of charging power, or enough to add 200 miles of driving range, within 20 minutes, to up to 36 cars at a time.

Britain’s credibility as climate champion rests on bold and urgent action, say campaigners

Britain must end all oil and gas extraction in the North Sea as a matter of urgency if it is to maintain its position as a credible climate champion. That was the stark warning issued by green campaigners yesterday in the wake of last week’s decision by Denmark to halt its exploration for new North Sea reserves as part of its commitment to cut carbon emissions and tackle climate change.

The Danish decision is an embarrassment for Boris Johnson who announced last week that Britain would take a lead in the battle against global heating by cutting national carbon emissions by 68% by 2030, a rate faster than any other major economy.

With the developments in laboratory-cultured meat, vegetarians and vegans need to ask themselves: is it still about animal welfare or is it about stopping people eating meat?

Cultured meat, produced in bioreactors from muscle cells taken from live animals, has been approved for the first time by a regulatory authority. “Chicken bites” by San Francisco startup Eat Just have been approved for sale by the Singapore Food Agency. It’s a landmark moment that could lead to a revolution in “kind/clean” meat, significantly cutting down industrial livestock production, potentially doing away with it altogether.

Copenhagen-based Søren Solkær , best known for taking photographic portraits of big names in music and film such as Björk and David Lynch, has spent the past four years capturing starling murmurations. Inspired by traditional Japanese landscape painting and calligraphy, these stunning photographs are collected in a new book, Black Sun.

“The starlings move as one unified organism that vigorously opposes any outside threat. A strong visual expression is created, like that of an ink drawing or a calligraphic brush stroke, asserting itself against the sky,” says Solkær.

From non-polluting transport to sustainable industries, urban areas are perfect for testing radical solutions to global problems

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The pandemic will leave behind a very different world from that of a year ago. Thousands of people have died; entire industries have been brought to the brink; welfare states have been shaken. In the coming years, the major challenge facing all public leaders will be charting a path of recovery through the devastating human, social and economic marks that Covid-19 has left on our societies.

But rather than redoubling on the fragile world of the pre-pandemic age, we should be taking advantage of this moment to build one that is more just, balanced and sustainable.

The ABC’s Graham Creed says new climate change research could ‘fill a big gap’ in public understanding

Graham Creed has spent 30 years with his head in synoptic charts, and for the past 20 he’s been on television letting Australians know if it’s going to be hot, cold, wet or dry.

But for the past two years, usually at the end of months with heatwaves and extreme temperatures, Creed has been adding extra information to his weather segments.

Astonishing rock paintings discovered in Colombia hold a lesson for today’s rainforest

In the past week, remarkable images of ancient cave art have hit the headlines: rock paintings made in South America around 12,000 years ago. The art, created on rock faces in the Serranía de la Lindosa, on the northern edge of the Colombian Amazon, is a riot of ochre-coloured geometrical pattern, handprints, and images of animals and humans. Until recent excavations, the works of art had been unknown to the international community. Their exuberant creativity will soon be revealed to a broad audience in the UK thanks to the Channel 4 series Jungle Mystery: Lost Kingdoms of the Amazon.

The people who made these works of art were, it is believed, among the earliest humans to occupy the region, after migrations across what is now the Bering Strait some 25,000 years ago. Preliminary study of the iconography of the art has led scholars to speculate that among the deer, tapirs, alligators, bats, serpents, turtles and porcupines, long-extinct megafauna are also represented: mastodons, American ice-age horses, giant sloths, camelids.

The pick of this week’s best flora and fauna images, including a festive robin and a moth trap

Witness describes damage to mile-long stretch of Lugg as egregious act of ‘ecological vandalism’

Police and environment agency staff have moved in to stop further damage being done to a protected river, after what one witness described as one of the most egregious acts of ecological vandalism in 25 years.

A mile-long stretch of the River Lugg outside Kingsland, near Leominster in Herefordshire, has been flattened by a bulldozer. Trees have been felled, the river straightened and the river bed damaged.

It takes thousands of years for soils to form, meaning protection is needed urgently, say scientists

Global soils are the source of all life on land but their future looks “bleak” without action to halt degradation, according to the authors of a UN report.

A quarter of all the animal species on Earth live beneath our feet and provide the nutrients for all food. Soils also store as much carbon as all plants above ground and are therefore critical in tackling the climate emergency. But there also are major gaps in knowledge, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) report, which is the first on the global state of biodiversity in soils.

The corporate race for cultured protein rests on a view of human beings as greedy and incapable of change

The stuff of science fiction has landed on our plates. Meat grown in a lab, instead of inside the body of an animal, has been approved for sale for the first time. The Singapore Food Agency has given regulatory approval to Eat Just’s “chicken bites”, grown from the cells of a chicken that’s still flapping its wings. The US startup took a biopsy of cells from a live chicken, bathed them in a nutrient medium and grew them in a bioreactor, where they grew exponentially until the meat was harvested, encased in batter and turned into nuggets. The ruling means that, for the first time, cultured meat can be sold to the public.

Eat Just, Inc – and the dozens of other cultured meat startups racing each other to get lab-grown meat on to the menu across the globe – are selling the promise that carnivores will be able to eat meat with a clean conscience. Flesh without the blood, meat without murder and the beginning of the end of the environmental damage caused by intensive animal agriculture. The news was met with a sigh of relief from meat eaters across the world, and with good reason: it will allow us to carry on as before, eating what we like while clever technology sidesteps the problems caused by our appetites.

Proposals cite climate change as most severe threat to US reefs, which may be in danger of disappearing in some places

In a long-awaited move from the Trump administration, the US has proposed critical habitat protections for twelve coral species in the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean. The rules would protect over 6,000 sq miles (nearly 16,000 sq km) of critical coral habitat.

The rules cite climate change as the most severe threat to all 12 coral species across their range. Impacts of the climate crisis include ocean acidification, which hinders the ability of corals to grow, and ocean warming, which causes corals to expel the algae living in their tissues in a phenomenon known as coral bleaching. Fishing and land-based pollution have also contributed to the species’ decline.