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Exclusive: Labour ministers choosing to weaken green protections inherited from the bloc, analysis reveals
The UK is using Brexit to weaken crucial environmental protections and is falling behind the EU despite Labour’s manifesto pledge not to dilute standards, analysis has found.
Experts have said ministers are choosing to use Brexit to “actively go backwards” in some cases, though there are also areas where the UK has improved nature laws such as by banning sand eel fishing.
The planning and infrastructure bill, which overrides the EU’s habitats directive and allows developers to pay into a general nature fund rather than keeping or creating new habitat nearby to make up for what is destroyed.
The UK falling behind on water policy, with the EU implementing stronger legislation to clean rivers of chemicals and microplastics and making polluters pay to clean up.
Air pollution, as the EU is legislating to clean up the air while the UK has removed EU air pollution laws from the statute book.
Recycling and the circular economy, as the EU enforces strict new standards for designer goods that could leave the UK as a “dumping ground” for substandard, hard-to-recycle products.
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Churning quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at the rate we are going could lead the planet to another Great Dying
Daniel Rothman works on the top floor of the building that houses the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, a big concrete domino that overlooks the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Rothman is a mathematician interested in the behaviour of complex systems, and in the Earth he has found a worthy subject. Specifically, Rothman studies the behaviour of the planet’s carbon cycle deep in the Earth’s past, especially in those rare times it was pushed over a threshold and spun out of control, regaining its equilibrium only after hundreds of thousands of years. Seeing as it’s all carbon-based life here on Earth, these extreme disruptions to the carbon cycle express themselves as, and are better known as, “mass extinctions”.
Worryingly, in the past few decades geologists have discovered that many, if not most, of the mass extinctions of Earth history – including the very worst ever by far – were caused not by asteroids as they had expected, but by continent-spanning volcanic eruptions that injected catastrophic amounts of CO2 into the air and oceans.
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Hot summer also causing trees to shed their leaves as concerns raised over ‘food gap’ for wildlife in autumn
Autumn is the “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”, according to the poet John Keats – but anyone hoping for a glut of blackberries this September may be sorely disappointed.
In many parts of the UK brambles have been bursting with fruit since mid-summer, with some now bearing only shrivelled berries. And it is not the only hallmark of autumn that appears to have come early: trees are dropping their leaves, apples are ripe and acorns are hitting the ground.
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Exclusive: Concentrations of faecal bacteria in the lake were found to peak in summer but there were high levels throughout year
Bathing water quality across most of Windermere is poor throughout the summer, indicating high levels of sewage pollution, according to a comprehensive analysis of water quality in England’s largest lake.
High levels of bacteria found in human faeces – Escherichia coli (E coli) and intestinal enterococci (IE) – indicating sewage pollution, were found to be highest in the summer months, when Windermere is used heavily by holidaymakers for swimming and watersports.
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Pilsbury, Derbyshire: This one – my first of the year – is a whirlwind. But the most extraordinary moment was when, just for a few seconds, it stopped
Our friend Helen (the person who encouraged me to write a first speculative Guardian diary 39 years ago) suddenly announced: “I see a stoat.” It would be the year’s first. I was anxious not to miss a glimpse, which is as much as you usually enjoy, because stoats move like eels and evaporate like smoke.
Not this one. A limestone wall through ancient sheep pasture seemed to have a magnetic hold over its movements. He rippled across the capstones like water, until he transferred attention to a feeding flock of tits that gathered, chattering with alarm at a possible predator.
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Fishing club chaired by singer threatens court action over abstraction it says is putting rare trout population at risk
The singer and environmentalist Feargal Sharkey is threatening to take the Environment Agency to court for draining a river that hosts the oldest fishing club in England and putting a rare population of brown trout at risk.
The former Undertones frontman chairs the Amwell Magna Fishery, which has used the secluded stretch of the River Lea in Hertfordshire since 1841.
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While famously rainswept, climate crisis, population growth and profligacymean the once unthinkable could be possible
During the drought of 2022, London came perilously close to running out of water. Water companies and the government prayed desperately for rain as reservoirs ran low and the groundwater was slowly drained off.
Contingency plans were drafted to ban businesses from using water; hotel swimming pools would have been drained, ponds allowed to dry up, offices to go uncleaned. If the lack of rainfall had continued for another year, it was possible that taps could have run dry.
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Triggerplants in particular live up to their name with a rapid response when touch-sensitive stamen are nudged
Flowers are surprisingly touchy, especially their male parts, the stamens, with hundreds of plant species performing touch-sensitive stamen movements that can be endlessly repeated. Insects visiting Berberis and Mahonia flowers to feed on nectar get slapped by stamens that bend over and smother pollen on to the insect’s face or tongue. This unwelcome intrusion scares the insect into making only a short visit, so the flower avoids wasting its nectar and pollen. The insect then finds another flower where it brushes the pollen off on receptive female organs and cross-pollinates the flower.
An insect landing on the flowers of the orchid Catasetum gets a violent reception – whacked by a pair of sticky pollen bags shooting out at such great speed the insect gets knocked out of the flower with the pollen bags glued to its body.
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With the number of very hot days rising as well as average temperatures, more and more animals are vulnerable. But while some species can adapt, others are seeing huge population declines
The residents of Tecolutilla, Mexico, knew the heatwave was bad when they heard the thuds. One by one, the town’s howler monkeys, overcome with dehydration and exhaustion, were falling from the trees like apples, their limp bodies smacking the ground as temperatures sizzled past 43C (110F) in spring last year.
Those that survived were given ice and intravenous drips by rescuers. At least 83 of the primates were found dead in the state of Tabasco, though local veterinarians estimated hundreds throughout the region probably perished.
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After three years of negotiating, talks over a global plastics treaty came to an end in Geneva last week with no agreement in place. So why has it been so difficult to get countries to agree to cut plastic production? Madeleine Finlay hears from Karen McVeigh, a senior reporter for Guardian Seascapes, about a particularly damaging form of plastic pollution causing devastation off the coast of Kerala, and where we go now that countries have failed to reach a deal
Clips: Fox News, BBC, 7News Australia, France 24, DW News, CNA
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Photo: Vivian Grisogono
