The Guardian

The Guardian has partnered with Friends of the Earth and theprintspace to host a month-long fundraiser and art exhibition – The Art of Activism – featuring pre-eminent activists like Katharine Hamnett, Greta Thunberg and Turner prize-winning artists such as Jeremy Deller.

Fifteen artworks from the exhibition have been curated exclusively for the Guardian Print Shop. You can buy a print or a limited edition Katharine Hamnett tote bag to support the campaign, with more than half of the profits going to Friends of the Earth

· Buy your exclusive print and limited edition tote bag here

Queensland’s government will limit the agricultural pollution harming the Great Barrier Reef

The Queensland government has passed new regulations to limit agricultural pollution damaging the Great Barrier Reef in the face of a hostile campaign that has sought to discredit consensus science.

On Tuesday the state made relatively minor commitments to agricultural groups, including an undertaking not to vary new limits for farm sediment and chemical runoff into reef catchments for at least five years.

They may be adapted to one of the harshest environments on the planet, but Greenland’s animals and plants are increasingly vulnerable

All photographs by Carsten Egevang

From our environment to our economies, our security to our societies, biodiversity is vital. But preserving it will require transformative change

The evidence is unequivocal: biodiversity, important in its own right and essential for current and future generations, is being destroyed by human activities at a rate unprecedented in human history.

Governments around the world recognised this at the Earth summit in Brazil in 1992 and established the Convention on Biological Diversity to protect and conserve biodiversity. But the situation has become more and more dire. I have chaired or co-chaired three international assessments on the state of knowledge of biodiversity, and all have repeated the same message – we are destroying it at an alarming rate. Each time we have called for action, only to be largely ignored.

Islanders, whose homes already face inundation, have complained to the UN over Australia’s lack of action on climate change

Torres Strait islanders “embarrassed” by Scott Morrison’s appearance at last month’s Pacific Islands Forum will request he visit their region to view the impacts of climate change.

Warraber man Kabay Tamu, representing a group of islanders who have complained to the United Nations about climate-based human rights breaches, will deliver the invitation to Australia’s delegation at the UN climate summit in New York next week.

Three executives at Tepco acquitted, marking the end of the only criminal action over the disaster

Three former executives at the company that runs the ruined Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant have been acquitted of failing to prevent the March 2011 nuclear meltdown, in the only criminal action resulting from the disaster.

Tsunehisa Katsumata, a former chairman of Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) and former vice presidents Sakae Muto and Ichiro Takekuro, had apologised for the triple meltdown at the plant, but said they could not have foreseen the massive tsunami that triggered the disaster.

19 September 1979: A Royal Commission report warns of the ‘unnecessarily extravagant use of pesticides’

Farmers and Whitehall officials are too complacent over the effects of pesticides, according to a report published yesterday by the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution.

The unnecessarily extravagant use of pesticides, is deliberately encouraged, says the report. Many farmers considered themselves to occupy a privileged position, assuming that what was good for agriculture was automatically good for the environment.

New report shows roadmap for Australia to be global green energy export leader

Australia could run entirely on renewable electricity and produce double what it needs to create a massive green export industry by 2050, leading experts say.

A report from scientists working under the Australian-German Energy Transition Hub has examined the economic opportunities of decarbonisation over the coming decades.

Most of the risk is from naturally occurring arsenic, the byproducts of chemicals used to disinfect water and contaminants

Contaminated tap water causes 100,000 cancer cases in the US over a lifetime, according to a new study from scientists with the Environmental Working Group.

Most of the cancer risk is from naturally occurring arsenic, the byproducts of chemicals used to disinfect water and radioactive contaminants, according to the analysis, which was published in the peer-reviewed journal Heylion.

Fiordland penguin found 170km west of Melbourne recuperates for eight weeks after 2,500km swim

A New Zealand penguin that washed up on a beach in Victoria has been released back to the wild to complete a 2,500km swim home.

The emaciated Fiordland penguin was found struggling against rocks in the shallows at Kennett River, 170km west of Melbourne, on 10 July.

Tasmanian senator says Hitler would be ‘so proud’ after academic website announces it will not tolerate climate change denial

The Liberal senator Eric Abetz has compared the Conversation website to Hitler, Stalin and Mao, after it announced a zero-tolerance approach to climate change deniers.

The academic news and analysis website has said it will remove comments and lock accounts that put forward those views, outraging the Tasmanian senator.

Strong civil society movements are needed to ramp up pace of change, says study

Greenhouse gas emissions could be halved in the next decade if a small number of current technologies and behavioural trends are ramped up and adopted more widely, researchers have found, saying strong civil society movements are needed to drive such change.

Solar and wind power, now cheaper than fossil fuels in many regions, must be scaled up rapidly to replace coal-fired generation, and this alone could halve emissions from electricity generation by 2030, according to the Exponential Roadmap report from an international group of experts.

Eight-country poll shows people view climate crisis as priority over migration and terrorism

A majority of the public recognise the climate crisis as an “emergency” and say politicians are failing to tackle the problem, backing the interests of big oil over the wellbeing of ordinary people, according to an eight-country poll.

The survey, which comes before what is expected to be the world’s biggest climate demonstrations on Friday, found that climate breakdown is viewed as the most important issue facing the world, ahead of migration, terrorism and the global economy, in seven out of the eight countries surveyed. In the US it comes third behind terrorism and affordable healthcare.

Offshore leasing auction starts for 7GW capacity project that could supply 6m UK homes

The crown estate has opened the first leasing round for offshore windfarms in a decade to usher in a new generation of wind projects expected to eventually generate an investment of £20bn.

The business intends to auction off new seabed rights in the waters around England and Wales to wind power developers. The leasing scheme allows up to 7GW of electricity generation capacity – enough to meet the needs of more than 6m homes.

New Democrat Coalition worried that Green New Deal plays into Republican messaging, seek ‘secure durable climate legislation’

Moderate congressional Democrats worried about the infeasibility of passing the kind of sweeping climate legislation their progressive counterparts are proposing, such as the Green New Deal, are laying out their own policies.

The New Democrat Coalition released an 11-page outline of principles on Wednesday, along with a list of bills to back them up, advocating for incremental and “pro-market” steps to cut pollution.

Greta Thunberg tells Congress to ‘listen to the scientists’ and take real action on climate change.

The teenage climate change campaigner submitted the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change special report on rising temperatures as her testimony, pointing out it was not ‘political opinion’ but simply ‘science’

• Greta Thunberg tells Congress to ‘listen to the scientists’ during testimony – live

New rules will allow production lines at pork plants to run faster, despite concerns over safety and quality

The US government has given the go-ahead to new rules to eliminate production line speed limits at pig slaughterhouses, deeming restrictions “unnecessary” despite fears that lifting them will worsen the already high number of serious injuries suffered by US meat plant workers.

Amputations, fractured fingers, second-degree burns and head trauma are just some of the serious injuries suffered by US meat plant workers every week, according to an investigation last year by the Guardian and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

António Guterres cites ‘fantastic leadership’ of young activists and is counting on public pressure to compel governments to honor the 2015 Paris Agreement

The UN secretary general says that he is counting on public pressure to compel governments to take much stronger action against what he calls the climate change “emergency”.

“Governments always follow public opinion, everywhere in the world, sooner or later,” António Guterres, said Tuesday in an interview with Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets, led by Columbia Journalism Review and the Nation, in partnership with the Guardian. Guterres, a former prime minister of Portugal, added: “And so … we need to keep telling the truth to people and be confident that the political system, especially democratic political systems, will in the end deliver.”

After crossing the Atlantic on a solar-powered boat, the climate activist Greta Thunberg visited Barack Obama in Washington. The former US president later shared a photo of the pair and praised Thunberg as 'one of our planet's greatest advocates'. The Swedish teenager is in the US to speak at the UN climate summit on 23 September

• Greta Thunberg to Congress: ‘You’re not trying hard enough. Sorry’
  

Canterbury Museum says find overturns presumption pelagornithids evolved in northern hemisphere

The discovery of a toothed seabird fossil north of Christchurch is forcing scientists to rethink theories of the bird’s evolution.

A fossil of a protodontopteryx, believed to have lived 62 million years ago, was found at the Waipara Greensand site on New Zealand’s South Island last year.