The Guardian

A humpback whale was spotted by a tour group on Thursday with ropes and buoys entangled in its tail. The New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service and Maritime NSW vessels were on site monitoring the whale and enforcing an exclusion zone on Friday. The large whale disentanglement team was dispatched to assist the whale and managed to free it later on Friday.

• Humpback whale freed in Sydney Harbour after rescue mission

Oil firms, petrostates, airlines and carmakers ‘doubling down’ on sector that is popular with young people

Oil companies, petrostates, airlines and carmakers are among the big polluters bombarding the esports industry with adverts, a study has found.

Esports, short for electronic sports, are competitive video games watched by spectators, with multiplayer games such as League of Legends and Defense of the Ancients 2 attracting peak viewer figures in the millions.

Without regulatory reforms and proper funding, the country will lack a muscular enforcer to strike fear among polluters

The organisers of the March for Clean Water – that’s Feargal Sharkey and River Action, supported by organisations that range from Surfers Against Sewage to the RSPB to the Women’s Institute – make an excellent point: while it’s nice that the government will bring a water bill to parliament, the initiatives revealed so far “are not nearly extensive enough to address the scale of the UK’s water pollution crisis”.

You bet. None of the four “initial steps” announced by the environment secretary, Steve Reed, last month are likely to cause sleepless nights in any boardroom. The first, to ensure companies’ funding for infrastructure investment is ringfenced, read like a description of how the regulatory system in England and Wales was always supposed to work. One fears that the second, to add the protection of customers and the environment to companies’ articles of association, will be cosmetic; directors can always be fuzzy about how they interpret their fiduciary duties.

Environment minister says severe drought is ‘aggravating’ factor as smoke engulfs Porto Velho city

The Brazilian government has deployed almost 1,500 firefighters to the Amazon as the most severe drought in decades is turning the rainforest’s usually moist vegetation into kindling and flames.

Despite a sharp decrease in deforestation since the president, Lula da Silva, took power in January 2023, there have reportedly been 59,000 fires in the forest since the start of the year, the highest number since 2008, according to satellite data from the National Institute for Space Research.

Green MP tells home secretary sending Just Stop Oil activist to prison is unjust and waste of resources

A 20-month prison sentence handed to a 77-year-old woman for a climate protest on the M25 is disproportionate, unjust and a waste of resources, the Green MP Carla Denyer has said.

In a letter to Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, Denyer called the jailing of Gaie Delap three weeks ago “an example of an ongoing and serious problem with disproportionate sentencing for climate activists”.

Just cutting carbon emissions will not prevent climate breakdown, says Susana Muhamad before Cop16 in Colombia

Humanity risks catastrophic global heating if it focuses only on decarbonisation at the expense of restoring the natural world, Colombia’s environment minister has said in the lead-up to the world’s key nature summit later this year.

Susana Muhamad, who will be president of the UN biodiversity Cop16 summit in Cali in October, said that a singular focus on cutting carbon emissions while failing to restore and protect natural ecosystems would be “dangerous for humanity” and risk societal collapse.

Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow the biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on X for all the latest news and features

I’ve relearned the meaning of seasonality – and how fragile the natural systems that sustain us really are

A few months ago, when I received an email about an available allotment in my area, I struggled to remember when I had signed up for one. It turns out I had done so two years ago, fuelled by my envy for those with gardens during lockdown. Back then, all I wanted was a small bit of outdoor space that felt like my own, to plant flowers, herbs and, at a push, some chillies. A place where I could read and write in the sun, safe from distractions.

Now I was being presented a half plot of available land (125 square metres!) with an established apple tree in the middle – which I mistook for a cherry because of its pink blossom. “You’ll have to have a trial period, to see how you get on,” the woman showing me around said. She meant business. The plot, which was bigger than I could dream of, was beautiful but overgrown – getting it started would require proper graft. I wasn’t sure I had it in me.

Diyora Shadijanova is a journalist and writer

Permits for coal-fired power plants drop by 83% despite leading world in construction as focus turns to renewables

Coal-fired power is still enjoying a construction boom in China, but a marked slowdown in the permitting of future plants has given experts hope that the world’s biggest emitter may be turning a corner.

China led the world in the construction of new coal-fired power plants in the first half of 2024, with work beginning on more than 41GW of new generation capacity, data published on Thursday showed.

Woodland Trust’s competition comes as charity campaigns for more robust legal protection for precious trees

An oak tree shaped like an elephant and the oak with the widest girth in the UK have been shortlisted for the annual Tree of the Year competition.

The Woodland Trust runs the annual competition to raise awareness of the UK’s ancient and at-risk trees.

Marton oak, Cheshire
Sessile oak (quercus petraea) / Approximate age: 1,200 years / Girth: 14.02 metres.

Bowthorpe oak, Lincolnshire
English oak (quercus robur) / Estimated age: 1000 years / Girth: 13.38 metres.

Zoo staff brought Magic to Sphen’s side to process the loss, and the penguin colony joined in his mournful call

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Sydney gentoo penguin Sphen, whose same-sex love story made him and partner Magic an equality symbol worldwide, has died.

The couple shot to fame in 2018 when news of their same-sex male relationship in a Sydney aquarium made global headlines.

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Sharing increasingly crowded spaces could result in greater risk of pandemics, human and animal conflicts and loss of nature, say researchers

Over the next 50 years, people will push further into wildlife habitats across more than half the land on Earth, scientists have found, threatening biodiversity and increasing the chance of future pandemics.

Humans have already transformed or occupied between 70% and 75% of the world’s land. Research published in Science Advances on Wednesday found the overlap between human and wildlife populations is expected to increase across 57% of the Earth’s land by 2070, driven by human population growth.

Beef, lamb and dairy products are the most carbon-intensive foods by far. More boldness around dietary changes is needed

The publication of a major study linking habitual eating of processed and red meat to a greater risk of type 2 diabetes is the latest very good reason to think hard about what we consume. Rising obesity rates, food poverty and concerns about the seemingly unstoppable rise of ultra-processed and junk food mean British eating habits are a longstanding source of widespread concern. Many people also recognise that there are environmental reasons to change their diets. Meat and dairy are the most carbon-intensive foods by far. Most of us should eat less of them. But the messaging around this continues to be poor.

Ever since red and processed meat was linked to an increased risk of cancer a decade ago, people have been advised to limit their daily consumption of these to a maximum of 70g. But while the “five a day” fruit and vegetables campaign turns 21 this year, and warnings about excess sugar abound, other government guidelines on food remain vague. While they specify two weekly portions of fish, one of which should be oily, about meat they say only “eat some”. There are no recommendations as to how much white meat should be consumed.

Extreme heat affecting nearly 23m people across US south-west and pushing Texas’s electrical grid to the limit

A heat dome covering the US’s south-west region is affecting nearly 23 million Americans, bringing with it some of the highest temperatures of the summer and putting pressure on the electrical grid in Texas.

The heat dome phenomenon occurs when strong, high pressure traps hot air over a region, preventing cool air from traveling in and causing temperatures to rise on the ground and stay high.

Marsh restorations allowing populations of fen raft spider, which can be up to 7cm long, to recover

One of the rarest and largest species of spider in the UK is said to be making a comeback on nature reserves.

After facing near extinction over the last century, the UK’s population of fen raft spiders is steadily increasing, and numbers are at a record high this year, according to the conservation charity RSPB.

Twenty-four brain samples collected in early 2024 measured on average about 0.5% plastic by weight

A growing body of scientific evidence shows that microplastics are accumulating in critical human organs, including the brain, leading researchers to call for more urgent actions to rein in plastic pollution.

Studies have detected tiny shards and specks of plastics in human lungs, placentas, reproductive organs, livers, kidneys, knee and elbow joints, blood vessels and bone marrow.

It is time to say this privatisation zealotry has been a disaster. March with us and let ministers know – enough is enough

You’ve been lied to, you’ve been misled, you’ve being extorted, you’ve been cheated, and you’ve been abused. For the last 35 years, you have been subject to nothing more than possibly the greatest organised ripoff perpetrated on the British people, and you have had little in return apart from greed, profiteering, financial engineering, political failure and regulatory incompetency. You’ve been had.

Thirty-five years after we were promised a utopian, market-driven vision of greatness, a future in which we would glory in the delights of an unlimited supply of clean water; in which our sewage would be quietly, efficiently collected, treated and disposed of, while our rivers, lakes and seas would teem with an abundant, diverse array of flora and fauna; and to top it all off we would have the cheapest water bills on earth.

Feargal Sharkey is a campaigner and former lead singer of the Undertones

These new proteins could be our best hope of averting catastrophe. But governments are trying to have them banned

For many years, certain car manufacturers sought to obstruct the transition to electric vehicles. It’s not hard to see why: when you have invested heavily in an existing technology, you want to extract every last drop before disinvesting. But devious as in some cases these efforts were, they seem almost innocent in comparison with the concerted programme by a legacy industry and its tame politicians to suppress a far more important switch: the essential transition away from livestock farming.

Animal farming ranks alongside fossil fuel production as one of the two most destructive industries on Earth. It’s not just the vast greenhouse gas emissions and the water and air pollution it causes. Even more important is the amount of land it requires. Land use is a crucial environmental metric, because every hectare we occupy is a hectare that cannot support wild ecosystems.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

Conservationists say the number of hunting licences granted is too high and condemn it as ‘pure trophy hunting’

Sweden has issued licences to kill 20% of its brown bear population in the country’s annual bear hunt, which begins today, despite concerns from conservationists.

Officials have granted licences for just under 500 brown bears to be culled by hunters. That equates to about 20% of the total population, according to official figures, and would bring the number of bears in Sweden down to approximately 2,000 – a drop of almost 40% since 2008.

Go-ahead given for first stage of $30bn SunCable project, which minister says will be ‘transformational’ for Northern Territory

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The Australian government has given the green light to the first stages of what it describes as the country’s “biggest renewable energy project ever” – an ambitious proposal to send energy from a solar farm in the Northern Territory outback to Singapore via subsea cables.

The environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, said the approval under conservation law of SunCable’s $30bn-plus Australia-Asia Power Link was a “massive step towards making Australia a renewable energy superpower” and that the project would be “economically and socially transformational” for the NT.

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England’s controversial eradication scheme may have caused higher rates of disease in surrounding areas, research shows

England’s controversial badger cull may have increased the risk of bovine tuberculosis (bTB) among herds in neighbouring areas, according to new research.

Researchers at the University of Oxford found that although badger culling reduced incidences of tuberculosis in the areas where it took place, in neighbouring areas the risk of the disease in cattle increased by almost a third.