The Guardian

Campaigners say activities leading to severe environmental harm usually also violate human rights

The international criminal court (ICC) has been urged to start investigating and prosecuting individuals who harm the environment.

Academics, lawyers and campaigners from around the world have sent expert opinions to the court outlining what they call its current regime of “impunity” for serious environmental crimes.

Although forced to water down its original settings, the revised model will help Australia reach its decarbonisation targets

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In bringing together a fiercely divided auto industry, the Albanese government appears to have struck a consensus model for a vehicle efficiency standard that will meaningfully bring down emissions – and Australian motorists will reap the rewards.

While the government ultimately had to buckle to industry pressure and water down the preferred settings it had unveiled in February – the most significant concessions being the easing of rules for certain large SUVs and a six-month delay to the credit and penalty system – the fact targets were ambitious to begin with meant that even environmental and electric vehicle bodies back the compromise deal.

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Asymptomatic cases may seem reassuring for the penguins, but scientists fear they could act as ‘Trojan horses’ for other species

Adélie penguins in Antarctica are testing positive for bird flu without showing outward signs of disease, according to researchers who travelled around 13 remote breeding sites on an ice-breaking cruise ship.

Since bird flu arrived in the region this year, there have been concerns about the virus reaching the Antarctic’s fragile penguin populations. In November last year, researchers warned in a pre-print research paper that if the virus caused mass mortality in these colonies, “it could signal one of the largest ecological disasters of modern times”.

Plan follows slashing of £28bn green pledge, which Ed Miliband denies having considered resigning over

Labour’s plan for state-backed offshore windfarms will be a “gamechanger”, Keir Starmer has said, as the party seeks to regain the initiative on green policy after the slow-motion ditching of its £28bn investment pledge.

Speaking to broadcasters after a visit to Holyhead port in north Wales alongside Vaughan Gething, the country’s new first minister, Starmer insisted that a transition to sustainable power was still “one of my central missions”.

Riding a bike is not a political act, yet cyclists have become the bete noire for the anti-woke, anti-green, anti-liberal crowd

Getting my bike nicked was like losing a pet. I didn’t want a new one; I wanted to go back in time and not lose my old one. But, in the end, an inanimate object is not infinitely grievable and I need wheels. This is how I fetched up with a Liv bike, my precious first born putting the seat up for me. I said how proud and heart-filled I was, watching him do a little job that I didn’t want to do myself for the first time, and he said: “I’ve been showing you how to use a remote control since I was six years old,” and I thought: OK, fair, but, more to the point, look at my lovely bike.

Freshly re-enamoured of the world of two wheels, I have plunged straight back into the cycling discourse, the perfect microcosm of the wokeness split in all its forms. Take the ex-footballer Joey Barton, who is being sued by Jeremy Vine for calling the broadcaster a “bike nonce”. Meanwhile, the socials are full of people furiously agreeing that aggressive cyclists pose more danger to them than articulated lorries. The fervent attacks on low-traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs) and low-emission zones such as Ulez in London are really just a full-throttle loathing of people on bikes, aggrandised by acronyms and libertarian bat signals.

Government has repeatedly used figure to justify more fossil fuel developments despite climate crisis

Are 200,000 jobs really supported by the oil and gas industry in the North Sea? Campaigners and MPs are questioning the longstanding government claim.

Ministers have repeatedly used the 200,000 jobs figure as justification for pushing ahead with more fossil fuel developments despite the escalating climate crisis and widespread opposition from scientists and energy experts.

Predatory species, which poses huge danger to bee populations, spotted on 11 March, indicating winter stay

Asian hornets may have become established in the UK after the earliest-ever sighting of the predatory insect was recorded by the government this month.

This is a dangerous development for Britain’s bee population and could have a knock-on effect on agriculture that needs the pollinators, because once hornets are established it is almost impossible to eliminate them.

An overheated property market, education taxes and more expensive healthcare – successive governments have left a bitter legacy for millennials

When asking “Who screwed the millennials?” should we just apply Occam’s razor and answer “John Howard”? His government certainly shoulders a lot of blame but so do those who have done nothing to help since he was voted out.

The earliest millennials will be 70 in 2050, meaning almost all will be working when the world is forecast to reach temperatures more than 2C above pre-industry averages unless we do something.

Turkey’s 8th National Antarctic Science Expedition is seeking answers to questions about the future of the world with 22 different projects on the continent. Anadolu Agency’s photojournalist Sebnem Coskun is documenting the expedition’s scientific research, climate change impacts and life in the region to share the findings with the world.
The expedition involves uncovering concealed data within the ice, gathered from years of research on crucial topics like sea ice and glacier dynamics.

Internal lobbying has added safeguards to a power for the resources minister to water down consultation requirements

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The Albanese government has kept a lid on dissent over changes to the approval process for offshore gas projects, but a late internal push has seen the environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, regain a power to prevent consultation rules being watered down.

While the resources minister, Madeleine King, had labelled claims she was taking over environmental approvals a “conspiracy theory”, widespread opposition from the Greens, the crossbench, First Nations activists and environmental groups spurred an informal Labor pro-climate group into action.

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African Verreaux’s eagle owl to make final flyover during Easter holidays before move to Yorkshire Dales

Any night owl who has spent 30 years of working all day would be dreaming of retirement.

Such is the case for Ernie, an owl with a “big personality”, who will be quitting after delighting guests at Warwick Castle for three decades.

Keir Starmer will need to make it affordable to be an artist, because the value of art is beyond financial metrics

Nineteen years ago now, I was asked to perform my standup high in the Colorado Rockies at the Aspen comedy festival, a trade fair for the American comedy industry patronised by wealthy locals. In super-affluent Aspen, I discovered, to my horror, economically uncompetitive service industry workers were homed in special “employee housing projects”, like castrated catering cyborgs from a Russian science fiction novel, sleeping in pods, dreaming of electric sheep. But today that system seems benign compared with the housing poverty of Sunak island.

In Aspen, the famous comedians were domiciled in luxury hotels. I was in a cheap motel on the edge of town, where I breakfasted daily with a quartet of equally undervalued underground comic book writers, regarded as witless savants nonetheless capable of providing content by the predatory industry vampires. Daniel Clowes told me the contents of his Oscar ceremony goody bag – the film of his Ghost World comic was nominated – were worth more than everything he had earned as a writer to that point.

Stewart Lee’s Basic Lee is at Cambridge Arts theatre 15-16 April

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Tour boat divers have long borne witness to mass bleaching events. Once reluctant to wade into discussions about global heating, they are now opening up

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“You can see it on their faces,” says scuba diving instructor Elliot Peters. “There’s definitely some remorse and sadness.”

Peters works at a resort on Heron Island in the southern part of the Great Barrier Reef and, in recent weeks, he’s had to tell curious guests why so many of the corals around the island are turning bone white.

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It’s not as easy as it seems

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The lack of diversity could mean the fruit’s extinction. It offers a stark warning of what could happen to other key foods

The meeting of the World Banana Forum last week in Rome didn’t make many headlines. But what was under discussion there has serious implications for everyone. The ubiquitous yellow fruit is the proverbial canary in the mine of our modern food system, showing just how fragile it is. And the current plight of the banana should serve as an invitation to us all to become champions of food diversity.

When you peel a banana, you’re on the receiving end of a near-miraculous $10bn supply chain. One that sends seemingly endless quantities of a tropical fruit halfway across the world to be among the cheapest, most readily available products in supermarket aisles (on average, around 12p a banana). But, incredibly, there’s no inbuilt backup plan or safety net if the one variety that most of the global trade depends on starts to fail.

Dan Saladino is a food journalist, broadcaster and author of Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them

Campaigners say government is failing to match major step forward as bloc prepares to introduce ‘polluter pays’ principle

New EU rules which introduce “polluter pays” principles to get pharmaceutical and cosmetic companies to pay for the pollution they cause in rivers will not be adopted by the government in England, as campaigners say the country is falling behind.

Lawmakers in Europe have signed off on an update to the urban waste water treatment (UWWT) directive, which is to further tighten restrictions on pollution. More nutrients from agricultural waste and sewage will have to be removed from waterways under the new rules. It also for the first time applies standards to micropollutants such as chemicals from pharmaceutical waste.

Elsewhere, record-breaking snowfall in Japan and unseasonally high temperatures in South Sudan

Last week, central parts of the US experienced a severe outbreak of tornadoes with more than two dozen forming across the states of Ohio and Indiana, resulting in at least three deaths and multiple injuries.

A number of intense supercell thunderstorms travelled eastwards across central Indiana late in the afternoon and evening of 14 March, from which tornadoes formed. Many of these were weak with estimated maximum wind speeds of 65-85mph – the requirement to be categorised as an EF-0 tornado.

A Bolivian conservation programme has identified at least 60 'Paddington' bears in areas where they had not been spotted before. The animal is the inspiration behind the beloved fictional character Paddington, who travels to London, is adopted by a family and eats lashings of marmalade. In 2017, Chester zoo’s Andean carnivore conservation programme installed trap cameras in Tarija forest areas, and in 2023 it spotted members of the thriving bear community playing and walking among the trees. According to Ximena Velez-Liendo, the programme's coordinator, the Andean bear is vulnerable to extinction. The expert said if threats to the species, such as the loss of habitat, retaliatory hunting and the effects of the climate crisis were not addressed by 2030, the region could lose almost 30% of the population

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

The Long Table says it took thousands of hours of work to turn derelict site into a community space, but landlord has now sold it

A Gloucestershire restaurant with a radical business model, in that it feeds all comers regardless of their ability to pay, is losing its premises after the owner sold the property.

The community around The Long Table, featured in the Guardian earlier this month, has been left reeling after it was ordered to move out of the mill it occupies in Stroud – even as it sought to engage with the landlord to buy the building.