Environment news

• The Guardian view on green homes: solar panels and heat pumps should be a bare minimum | Editorial

  15-05-2025 19:30 via theguardian.com
  
  Ministers must resist pressure to relax environmental standards in the rush for new housingAlmost two decades after the last Labour government announced a zero carbon homes standard, and with the breaking of temperature records around the world now so normal as to seem routine, it ought to be uncontroversial that new buildings should be as environmentally friendly as possible. Given everything we know about global heating, and the law obliging the UK to reach net zero by 2050, it is disturbing t
  
  Read more

• ‘No one wants a building that kills birds’: why cities are turning off the lights

  15-05-2025 18:37 via theguardian.com
  As avian numbers plunge, activists demand action to save birds from crashing into high-rise blocksThe wren’s legs were tucked delicately underneath its diminutive body, slumped on its side as if asleep. If it wasn’t lying on the bare concrete of a Texas street, there would be few clues that it had endured a crunching, violent death.The bird had flown headfirst into the Bank of America building, a 72-storey modernist skyscraper in the heart of Dallas. Its corpse was catalogued by volu
  
  Read more

• Decades-long mystery of ginger cats revealed

  15-05-2025 17:01 via bbc.com
  Researchers in Japan and US have unlocked the 60-year mystery of what gives cats their orange colour.
  
  Read more

• How 'forever chemicals' have seeped into almost everything – video

  15-05-2025 15:21 via theguardian.com
  
  Pfas are a group of thousands of chemicals that are used for their non-stick and water-resistant properties. They are often refered to as 'forever chemicals' because they can take thousands of years to break down. Pfas are being found in so many everyday items that it's starting to feel like they are everywhere - non-stick frying pans, waterproof mascaras, stain-resistant clothing, packaging for takeaway food items. Pfas are even in our food, our drinking water and in the rain. Josh Toussaint-St
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• The US buried millions of gallons of wartime nuclear waste – Doge cuts could wreck the cleanup

  15-05-2025 15:00 via theguardian.com
  
  Hanford made the plutonium for US atomic bombs, and its radioactive waste must be dealt with. Enter Elon MuskIn the bustling rural city of Richland, in south-eastern Washington, the signs of a nuclear past are all around.A small museum explains its role in the Manhattan Project and its “singular mission – [to] develop the world’s first atomic bomb before the enemy might do the same”. The city’s high school sports team is still known as the Bombers, with a logo that
  
  Read more

• A seadragon and flushing worms: Environmental Photography award winners – in pictures

  15-05-2025 13:34 via theguardian.com
  
  Winning images from the 2025 Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation Environmental Photography award, selected from 10,000 images submitted globally. The contest aims to reward photographers who put their creativity to good use in raising awareness of the importance of environmental protectionShortlisted exhibited in Monaco from 3 June-31 July 2025 then touring in various locations around the world Continue reading...
  
  Read more

• Record number of river-blocking barriers removed in Europe, report says

  15-05-2025 11:41 via theguardian.com
  Hundreds of dams, weirs, culverts and sluices dismantled in 2024 to help waterways resume natural courseEurope dismantled 542 river-blocking dams, weirs, culverts and sluices in 2024, a report has found, helping a record number of waterways resume their natural course.The number of removals grew 11% from the year before, according to an annual report from Dam Removal Europe. Continue reading...
  
  Read more

• South Korea’s female freedivers: TV has made stars of the haenyeo but what is their real story?

  15-05-2025 10:00 via theguardian.com
  
  The craze for Korean culture has brought fame to the ‘women of the sea’, but not always to their benefit. Now they want to reclaim their stories to inspire a new generationThere is an episode in the Netflix drama When Life Gives You Tangerines where a woman dives into the sea and brings back a catch of abalone (sea snails), which she says will feed her family. The woman is a haenyeo. Haenyeo, or “women of the sea”, have been recorded as far back as the 17th century and ar
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• Weatherwatch: How ecologists are helping birds adapt to climate crisis

  15-05-2025 07:00 via theguardian.com
  Moving migratory pied flycatchers further north to breed where food remained resulted in twice as many chicksHow do you help a migratory bird adapt to the climate crisis? One radical solution, as a team of Dutch ecologists discovered, is to move them further north.Pied flycatchers are handsome black-and-white songbirds, which breed in deciduous woodlands across much of temperate Europe. Each autumn, they head south across the Sahara desert to overwinter in west Africa. Continue reading...
  
  Read more

• Labour has denounced me as ‘deeply misleading’ on its planning reform. I wish that were true | George Monbiot

  15-05-2025 07:00 via theguardian.com
  
  Even it now admits that brick by brick, these proposals will wreck habitats. This could be Starmer’s most damaging mistake yetThe precedent is uncanny, and the failure to learn from it downright mystifying. Keir Starmer is rushing gladly towards the catastrophe Boris Johnson inflicted on himself in 2020. Had he set out to stymie Labour’s chances of re-election, he couldn’t be doing it better.In 2020, Johnson promised “a whole new planning system” for England, which,
  
  Read more

• Country diary: A wildfire has killed off (nearly) everything wild | Eben Muse

  15-05-2025 06:30 via theguardian.com
  
  Cilgwyn, Gwynedd: It stripped the hill of its heather, bilberry and bog mosses – and with them the inhabitants of so many nests and burrowsA thick blue haze hangs over the valley – Cilgwyn has burned again. Dead fingers of blackened heather snap underfoot, and each step kicks up a cloud of ash. “Deliberate ignition” was the given cause of the last major fire here, in 2021. Before that, in 2018, another threatened to engulf the village, a kilometre west of Eryri (Snow
  
  Read more

• ‘We are witnessing ecocide’: Santander accused of funding vast deforestation

  15-05-2025 06:00 via theguardian.com
  In 2024, Spanish bank provided more than $600m in financing to firms linked to beef, palm oil, soya and supply chains driving deforestation, says Global WitnessSergio Rojas recalls how, as a child, he would see bulldozers rolling into Argentina’s Gran Chaco region, razing the forests to the ground and setting the felled trees alight. Animals would scatter and flee, with armadillos, deer, snakes and lizards darting across the ground in search of a new home.The forests of the Gran Chaco were
  
  Read more

• Mosquito-borne killer disease threatens blackbirds

  15-05-2025 01:40 via bbc.com
  The disease has spread great distances, with scientists racing to understand the risks.
  
  Read more

Follow @UK_Environment on Twitter!