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Exclusive: Report finds Natural England has created no new SSSIs, which protect areas from development, since 2023
The government’s wildlife watchdog for England is failing to save nature because it has stopped giving protection to rare wildlife and habitats, according to a new report.
No new sites of special scientific interest (SSSIs) have been designated by Natural England since 2023. SSSIs are nationally or internationally important places for rare wildlife and habitats. Without the designation, endangered species can be at risk of being lost to development.
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One way to pay for wildlife conservation is to allow the rich to bag a few animals for high prices. But critics see this approach as an exercise in neocolonialism
You can kill almost anything if you’re willing to pay. Big or small. Land, water or air. Ten a penny or one of the last of its kind. There’s nearly always a way, though it might not make you popular. The Niassa special reserve, a vast reservation larger than Switzerland, stretches for 190 miles along the northern rim of Mozambique, taking in 4.2m hectares of woodland and rivers. The reserve, one of the world’s largest protected areas, is home to elephants, leopards, hyenas, zebras and about 1,000 wild lions.
That word, however: protected. It applies to some, but not all, of its animal inhabitants. Each year, a specific number are set aside for sacrifice, for the greater good. Not long ago,I joined an expedition in Niassa, with one of Africa’s top game-hunting companies.
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‘Stone age’ system of booking cross-border rail tickets holding back climate action by consumers, says thinktank
Europe’s “stone age” system of booking train tickets makes it needlessly difficult for travellers to avoid polluting flights, a report has found.
Booking equivalent train tickets is “difficult or impossible” on almost half of the EU’s busiest international air routes, analysis from the Transport & Environment (T&E) thinktank shows.
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UK’s Rare Breeds Survival Trust says calf numbers of white park cattle last year were less than two-thirds of 2022 level
An ancient breed of cattle whose ancestors are thought to have accompanied the Celts as they were pushed to Britain’s fringes by the Romans has been designated as urgently at risk by a UK conservation charity.
Publishing its 2026 watchlist on Tuesday, the Rare Breeds Survival Trust moved white park cattle to its “priority” category as new calf numbers sank last year to less than two-thirds of their 2022 level.
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Knotbury, Staffordshire: A truly special dawn, when last night’s ice lingered on everything, and I was joined by no fewer than six ring ouzels
As I drove to this tiny moorland hamlet, the dawn sky looked so grey that I imagined it must have 100% cloud cover. Actually, there was none, and as the blue slowly crept in overhead, I could see that frost was everywhere.
I also realised that there was no breeze and every sound seemed distilled, so I stopped by the first farm to record my blackbird. He has mastered the sweetest imitations of displaying golden plovers, but this was my first chance to capture them. And there he was, doing his plover notes, but throwing in snippets of curlew as extras, and when he stood in profile at the roof apex, singing, bill wide, throat feathers spiked against the heavens, I knew the morning would be magical.
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Fish swam further and dispersed more widely after exposure to environmental levels of drug and main metabolite
Traces of cocaine that pollute rivers and lakes may accumulate in the brains of salmon and disrupt their behaviour, according to researchers who warn of unknown consequences for fish populations.
Juvenile Atlantic salmon that were artificially exposed to the drug and its main breakdown product swam further and dispersed more widely across a lake, suggesting the substances can affect where the fish go, what they eat and how vulnerable they are to predators.
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Sarah Finch is among six recipients of the Goldman Environmental prize, awarded to honour grassroots activists around the world
The woman whose campaigning set a legal precedent in the UK that stopped thousands of tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions has been awarded one of the world’s most prestigious environmental prizes alongside five other women from around the globe.
A supreme court ruling in a case brought by Sarah Finch has been cited in decisions against new oil concessions in the North Sea, the UK’s first new deep coalmine for 30 years and even plans for new large-scale factory farms.
Iroro Tanshi, a Nigerian conservation ecologist who launched a successful, community-led campaign to protect endangered bats from human induced wildfires;
Borim Kim, a South Korean activist who won the continent’s first successful youth-led climate litigation, finding her government’s climate policy to be in violation of the rights of future generations;
Alannah Acaq Hurley, a leader of the Yup’ik Indigenous people led a campaign that stopped what would have been the continent’s largest open-pit mine, in Alaska’s Bristol Bay region;
Yuvelis Morales Blanco, a youth activist who mobilised others in her Afro-descendant community in Puerto Wilches against two drilling projects, preventing the introduction of commercial fracking into Colombia;
Theonila Roka Matbob, of Papua New Guinea, whose campaign forced Rio Tinto, the world’s second-largest mining company, to sign an agreement to address devastation caused by its Panguna mine.
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Kerbside wheelie bins have been used in Australia since the 1980s but the recycling rate is stuck at 44%. Will another recycling bin make a difference?
There’s no garbage truck in Kamikatsu.
Instead, the Japanese town’s 1,400 residents take their waste to the local recycling centre, or “Gomi station”, and sort it themselves into more than 40 different categories.
Sign up to get climate and environment editor Adam Morton’s Clear Air column as a free newsletter
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As the rising number of vessels in the icy waters increases the risk of environmental disaster, scientists are scrambling to find potential solutions
Last winter, inside the subarctic Churchill Marine Observatory in Canada, scientists embarked on an experiment they hoped would result in a gamechanging remedy for polluted Arctic waters. They released130 litres of diesel into an ice-covered pool filled with raw seawater pumped in from Hudson Bayand added oil-eating microbes. The technique had been used successfully during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and the scientists wanted to see if they could break down oil in colder waters.
The microbes were sluggish in response and the population showed little change after the first three weeks, says Eric Collins, a microbiologist at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, who led the project. But that did not last. “When we went back eight weeks later, we saw that there was a big change,” Collins says. “One particular bacterium grew to a very high abundance in the tanks and it was clear that it was feeding on the oil.” But two months is too long to wait should an oil spill occur. Time is of the essence.
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Sarah Finch’s fight against drilling led to a landmark ruling on fossil fuel emissions – and a leading environmental prize
It started with a notice in the local newspaper and ended with winning one of the world’s most prestigious environmental prizes. In 2010, Sarah Finch was flicking through the local planning notices when one caught her eye: a proposal to drill for oil at Horse Hill in Surrey, just outside Crawley, over the border in West Sussex, 6 miles (10km) from her home.
Surrey is not the kind of place one expects to find the oil industry. It’s a county of little villages, farms, woods and commuter railway stations. Its semi-rural landscape stretches off towards the horizon in a typically English green patchwork. It is difficult to envision it littered with nodding donkey pumpjacks and gas flares.
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