The Guardian

The winning images in this year’s Bird Photographer of the Year competition have been selected from 23,000 entries from around the world. The overall winner Patricia Homonylo’s image showed birds killed by colliding with windows

• Wildlife photographer of the year 2024 – preview

Flooding in central and southern England caused widespread travel disruptions and closed schools after some areas experienced a month's worth of rainfall in 24 hours. In parts of Bedfordshire, roads turned into rivers, with cars making their way through submerged streets. The London fire brigade said it received hundreds of calls about flooding-related incidents, including people needing to be rescued from cars and homes

• Flooding causes chaos after month’s rain falls in a day in parts of England

Ocean acidification close to critical threshold, say scientists, posing threat to marine ecosystems and global liveability

Industrial civilisation is close to breaching a seventh planetary boundary, and may already have crossed it, according to scientists who have compiled the latest report on the state of the world’s life-support systems.

“Ocean acidification is approaching a critical threshold”, particularly in higher-latitude regions, says the latest report on planetary boundaries. “The growing acidification poses an increasing threat to marine ecosystems.”

Drone footage shows flooded streets in the village of Érsekcsanád in southern Hungary after heavy rainfall caused the Danube River to overflow. Parts of the region have experienced five times the average rainfall for the month of September, leaving large swathes of land submerged in floodwater. Central Europe was recently hit by extensive flooding, which left several people dead and caused billions of euros in damage.

• Floods in Poland and wildfires in Portugal show reality of climate breakdown, says EU

There’s a war brewing between those who want to plan for future challenges and those who want to turn back the tide

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The leadership of Australian farming is a club that has strict rules. Like the classic movie Fight Club, the first rule about farm club is you don’t talk about farm club.

But that doesn’t always work out well for farmers. There are clever people in the leadership club who are loath to speak out.

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Firms underreported true scale of sewage pollution for 10 years, which allowed them to set higher bills, tribunal told

Six water companies overcharged customers between £800m and £1.5bn by “significantly or systematically” underreporting the true scale of their sewage pollution of rivers and waterways, a tribunal has heard.

In the first environmental competition class action against water companies in England, lawyers argued that the privatised firms had abused their monopoly position to mislead regulators over the amount of sewage they were discharging from their assets over the past 10 years.

Requiring key sectors to switch to clean energy sources could trigger benevolent cascades, report claims

In the terminology of the climate and ecological crises the phrase “tipping point” is loaded with dreadful implications.

It evokes a climate breakdown supercharged by the mass escape of methane locked in Siberian permafrost, or the great currents of the oceans smothered by freshwater melting from the Greenland ice sheet, or the Amazon turning from great rainforest to parched savannah after the felling of one too many trees.

The opposition leader, Peter Dutton, detailed the Coalition’s nuclear power plan in a speech in Sydney but did not announce its cost, saying it is coming 'in due course'. 'Our nuclear plan requires a significant upfront cost, and you can look at the international examples to see as much. But a whole new and vast transmission network and infrastructure won’t be needed under the plan that we’re putting forward,' Dutton said

• Dutton praises Canada to sell nuclear plan. But does Ontario really have cheaper power?

Price of electric cars falls again with the MG4 hatchback cheapest at $30,990 but experts warn high-end EV sales may stall

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Electric vehicles have broken through another price barrier in Australia, with the cost of one new model reduced to less than $31,000 for the first time.

But industry experts say the fierce price battle is only playing out among cheaper and smaller electric cars, with Australian taxes reducing competition at the other end of the market.

From flooding to drought, extreme weather is devastating our communities. It is time for the world’s heaviest emitters to help mitigate the impacts of climatic breakdown on the countries most affected

Millions of people in my country, Malawi, face unprecedented existential crises driven by climate breakdown. The frequency of extreme weather events and the massive impact they have on communities have left government officials like me with a huge dilemma of how to act fast enough to save lives. In the past three years, we have gone from facing the worst flooding in recent times to the most severe drought in a decade. The impact has been devastating to communities across the country.

When Cyclone Freddy hit us in March 2023, it killed more than 600 people. The cyclone injured many more, tore families apart, destroyed livelihoods, and the long-term effects from diseases were even worse. A little over a year later, we were in the middle of a raging drought, which the president, Lazarus McCarthy Chakwera, declared a national disaster in March. Millions of people are facing acute food insecurity, leading to malnutrition and health issues that are putting lives at risk, not least for people on long-term treatment for conditions such as tuberculosis and HIV.

Floods inundated emergency housing built for those who lost their homes in an earthquake that hit Ishikawa on the Sea of Japan coast in January

At least six people have died and 10 others are missing after heavy rain triggered flooding and landslides along a peninsula in Japan that is still recovering from a deadly earthquake at the start of the year.

Public broadcaster NHK and other outlets said on Monday that six people had been confirmed dead, while the Kyodo news agency said more than 100 communities had been cut off by blocked roads after almost two dozen rivers burst their banks.

Exclusive: Independent MPs and Lidia Thorpe tell PM that environment law reforms under negotiation must remove exemptions for native forest logging

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Independent MPs and a crossbench senator are trying to increase the pressure on the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, to remove Howard-era exemptions that allow native forest logging to operate outside national environment laws.

The government has been negotiating over reforms to the laws in the Senate, where Greens and crossbenchers David Pocock and Lidia Thorpe have been pushing for an end to the exemptions for logging covered by regional forest agreements.

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Showing climate delivery can be done effectively and fairly would be an extraordinary climate legacy for Keir Starmer

A well-intentioned but badly designed and poorly communicated energy policy from the German government, and more recent protests by farmers in France and the Netherlands, have knocked the confidence of European political leaders that environmental progress can be delivered in a way that works for people and enjoys democratic support. Unashamedly popular climate policies from Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves and Ed Miliband offer the chance to reshape European climate politics and confound these sceptics.

Showing climate delivery can be done fairly, effectively, affordably and with strong public support would be an extraordinary climate legacy for Starmer. It would build on Britain’s relatively strong record of having halved its climate footprint already, and it would offer hope amid all the gloom.

Joss Garman is executive director of the European Climate Foundation

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Ecover, backed by activist model Lily Cole, calls for fewer washes to reduce microplastics and other sources of water pollution

A company that sells cleaning products is giving customers some surprising advice: wash your clothes less.

Ecover is calling for a change in our laundry habits after research found people felt under societal pressure to wash their clothes more frequently, and were unaware that this could damage the environment.

The Rev Sue Parfitt has lost right to conduct religious ceremonies after her arrest at a Just Stop Oil demonstration

An 82-year-old retired priest has spoken of her pain at losing her right to conduct religious ceremonies because of her participation in Just Stop Oil protests.

The Rev Sue Parfitt was arrested in May after causing damage to the glass around Magna Carta at the British Library in London as part of a protest with the climate action group. She is still awaiting trial.

Guardian Australia’s photographer-at-large Mike Bowers captures a burst of yellow on NSW’s south-west slopes

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Pennsylvania plant was site of most serious nuclear meltdown and radiation leak in US history in 1979

A nuclear reactor at the notorious Three Mile Island site in Pennsylvania is to be activated for the first time in five years after its owners, Constellation Energy, struck a deal to provide power to Microsoft’s proliferating artificial intelligence operations.

The plant was the location of the most serious nuclear meltdown and radiation leak in US history, in March 1979 when the loss of water coolant through a faulty valve caused the Unit 2 reactor to overheat. More than four decades later, the reactor is still in a decommissioning phase.

Four protesters against North Sea oil and gas licences have charges of criminal damage thrown out

Four Greenpeace activists who staged a “no new oil” protest on the roof of Rishi Sunak’s North Yorkshire manor house have had charges of criminal damage thrown out.

The activists said “justice and common sense” had prevailed after a judge on Friday ruled the evidence against them was “tenuous” and they had no case to answer.

A ban on exporting offshore gas was lifted in WA this week, and the Greens say two of the ‘biggest winners’ were the massive resources companies

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Western Australian gas companies Mineral Resources and Woodside gave more than $20,000 to WA Labor while it was considering changes to its domestic gas policy that allowed more gas to be exported from the state.

On Thursday the state government lifted a ban on onshore gas being exported, allowing 20% to go overseas until 2031, in a change the premier, Roger Cook, said would boost the state’s gas industry.

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British growers are taking a increasing share of sales long dominated by imports by focussing on green credentials

From the tip of Cornwall to the far reaches of Scotland, the shoots of resurgence in the British cut-flower market are raising hopes of a fledgling return to home-produced fragrant flowers becoming a bigger part of the £1bn industry in the UK.

UK flower production bloomed to £179m last year, according to figures from Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, up from £126m in 2019. The market has been dominated by imports, usually from Holland, for more than 50 years, but last year imports fell slightly to £761.8m from £869.1m in 2022.