Scientists race to untangle complex links between exposure and mortality as fire weather grows more prevalent

A thousand kilometres from the infernos gorging on northern Ontario’s boreal forests, Erin O’Connor watched the sky above Canada’s biggest city turn an “almost post-apocalyptic” orange as it filled with light-scattering particles of soot and ash. Stepping outside the halls of Toronto General hospital, where air filters were keeping patients safe from the worst of the fumes, she was struck by a smell so strong it felt like standing by a campfire.

“It really hit you in the face as soon as you walked outside,” said O’Connor, who runs University Health Network’s emergency department and saw a rise in patients presenting with allergies and shortness of breath. “As the days progressed, it was like that everywhere. It seemed even inside you could smell that burning.”

UCLA professor Daniel Blumstein and his team started an OnlyFans account – @OnlyMarms – featuring cute, G-rated photos and videos of marmots to raise money for their research amid government funding cuts

It’s certainly increasing its output

• See more of Fiona Katauskas’s cartoons here

Footage captured by a civil servant shows capybaras calmly roaming the entrance hall of the legislative assembly building in Mato Grosso, Brazil. The large rodents are regular visitors, often wandering over from a nearby park. 'They show up here quite often, so we've gotten used to seeing them,' Nayara Bueno says

UN index says weather is affecting wheat yields while conflicts in Ukraine and Iran hit exports and drive up prices

• Business live – latest updates

Global food prices have hit their highest level in three and a half years, as summer heatwaves and conflict in Ukraine and the Middle East push up crop costs.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) index of food commodity prices rose last month to its highest level since January 2023, after a jump in prices for cereals, sugar and vegetable oil.

Also known as the tree lobster, this ultra-rare creature was inadvertently driven to the brink by European settlers

• Revealed: the top 10 invertebrates of the year

When small species are left alone to evolve for centuries on small islands, they often become larger. Quietly, over thousands of years, Dryococelus australis grew to a great size on Lord Howe Island, in the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand.

But the peaceful life of the Lord Howe Island stick insect, an invertebrate of such gargantuan proportions that it is also fondly known as the tree lobster, was destroyed by European settlers. In 1918, a shipwreck brought black rats to the island. The flightless insects were once so common they were used by settlers as bait for fishing, but the rats wiped out the entire population on the island in just two years.

Last month in England was the driest July since records began almost two centuries ago. How concerned should we be?

Half of England and all of Wales are officially in drought. But what does this mean and could taps eventually run dry?

• The headline of this article was amended on 7 August 2026 to refer to England and Wales, rather than the UK. Also, the average usage of 139 litres of water a day is for people in England and Wales, not in the UK as stated in an earlier version; and the 47bn kilolitres of water extracted from the environment in 2023 was in England only. Groundwater was added to the list of main sources of water.

Much of the continent is battling wildfires and drought during a summer of extreme heat

In this week’s newsletter: a Guardian investigation reveals that the UK exported 139,000 tonnes of rubbish to poor districts in Adana, where farmers are left to cope with microplastics, toxic smoke, and debris

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A year ago this month, when global talks to end our spiralling plastic crisis collapsed, Emma Hardy, Britain’s then marine minister and the UK’s head of delegation, said she was “hugely disappointed”. The UK is committed to working, at home and abroad, to “protect the environment and pave the way to a circular economy”, she pledged.

But Britain, one of the world’s largest exporters of plastic waste, remains part of a global trade that enables us to send mountains of plastic rubbish to other, mostly poorer countries, fuelling pollution, health impacts and waste crime.

‘Danger no longer only comes from the hitmen, but from the state’: the Honduran farmers labelled terrorists for protecting their land

El Niño could push 50 million people into acute hunger before end of next year

‘We stared into an abyss’: the men and women battling France’s megafire

This week’s best wildlife photographs from around the world

Scientists say global blazes account for 10% of UK’s particle pollution – and climate crisis could make the problem worse

Smoke rising above wildlife habitats, thousands of people evacuated and homes and livelihoods reduced to ashes – this is fast becoming the defining image of Britain and European summers.

Dr Mark Parrington, a senior scientist at the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, said: “Recent wildfires in south-western Europe produced large quantities of smoke, which caused significant degradation air quality across southern France and central regions of Spain.

Slovakia reaches new high of 42C as authorities in Poland forced to shut down Kozienice and Połaniec power plants

• Europe’s dry riverbeds and scorched earth – in pictures

Temperature records have been broken in several countries across central and eastern Europe as the extreme weather that has caused wildfires and droughts across the continent continues.

Countries including Slovakia, Austria and Hungary registered record temperatures. On Thursday, the Slovakian hydrometeorological agency said a new high of 42C (108F) had been reached in Dolné Plachtince.

When temperatures get to 40C inside, and French building regulations won’t even allow shutters, these tenants’ listed homes are simply unlivable

The population of Firminy, south-east France, has been dwindling for decades. Its recent history is one of factory closures in a region built by steel, and locals tell me that many people leave for better opportunities in neighbouring Saint-Étienne, or to live in the Haute-Loire’s countryside.

On the top of a hill, however, stands Firminy’s pride: l’Unité d’Habitation, an imposing tower of concrete designed by Le Corbusier. The architect’s final project is an oddity – a building for people, where two-thirds of the apartments are dedicated to habitations à loyer modéré (or HLM – social housing); but also a piece of history, whose facade and roof were listed as monuments historiques in 1993.

On my TikTok I find trash that’s blowing in the wind, and mimic its movements using what I have to hand

I’ve always been interested in the concept of value and what is thought of as rubbish. When people throw things away, a perfectly good table, say, I think, “That’s still usable.” I’m a dancer and choreographer and hoard clothing – costumes from shows or pieces my mum has lent me. Sometimes, I’ll collect random things offered on Facebook.

During the pandemic I was unable to perform but became hyper-aware of everyday movements around me. On daily walks in Los Angeles, where I live, I’d notice pieces of litter being blown about. I felt as if it was trying to get someone’s attention, but nobody was looking. I thought: “What if I start mimicking it? What if I used the trash as my choreographer?”

This year’s finalists for the National Architecture awards’ sustainability category include a compact Canberra housing development and the largest commercial use of hempcrete in the country.

Architecture ‘holds a mirror up to who we are as a society – what we value, what we’re willing to invest in, what we want to leave behind,’ says Adam Haddow, the chair of the jury for the awards. ‘The architects on this list … [have] designed buildings built to last, not just physically, but in the way they’ll continue to serve people long after the ribbon is cut’

• Australia’s best apartment designs for 2026 – in pictures

While many leaders compare the wildfire crisis to the second world war, governments fail to adopt the real lessons of pre-emptive wartime action

As France and Spain battle historic wildfires, comparisons to the second world war abound. “One of the continent’s biggest evacuation efforts since World War II,” reports the Associated Press. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has called the wildfires his country’s “most difficult situation since the second world war”.

The images crossing all our screens certainly feel war-like – emergency aircraft and black smoke fill the skies, frantic civilians seeking shelter, historic towns lying in ruins, charred forests and burned-out vehicles, exhausted and sweat-soaked emergency responders.

Cristian Lucañas has discovered multiple species of cockroach in the Philippines, and believes there’s far more to the much-maligned insect than meets the eye

When Cristian Lucañas tells people about his job, their response is normally a mix of shock and confusion. “The majority would actually be questioning why,” says Lucañas, 32, who is the only entomologist specialising in cockroaches in the Philippines, where he is known as the “Cockroach Lord”.

He recalls one person, apparently perplexed at the insects’ existence, asking simply: “Did God create cockroaches?” Others seek advice on how best to kill them.

As climate disaster stares us in the face, the radical right says ‘Embrace the Mediterranean life’. Embrace death, more like it

Can’t you leftists understand? Mass death is good for you. Reject the woke love of life! Welcome civilisational collapse! Watch it all burn, then dance in the ashes! This, roughly speaking, is how the dismissal of climate action is now being justified: the argument has shifted from science denial to outright nihilism.

The new incendiary spirit is exemplified by that serial arsonist Allister Heath, editor of the Sunday Telegraph. In a column in the Daily Telegraph last week, originally titled “Britain can’t stop climate change. Scrap net zero and embrace Mediterranean life”, he argued that “climate change is real” but “the war against global warming has been lost”.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

Britain exported 139,000 tonnes of rubbish to Turkey last year, leaving smallholders and poor districts of Adana to cope with the debris, microplastics and toxic smoke

• UK plastic ‘waste colonialism’ found to be polluting Turkey’s farming heartland

Plastic debris clings to the reeds in a waterway metres from where Ayhan*, a farmer in Adana, southern Turkey, is harvesting aubergines. “We get pollution from all sides here,” he says, referring to the plastic recycling zone upstream, as well as a nearby textile plant that he suspects is making the water acidic. “The plastics are all there, by the bank, and the fumes come this way.”

Between May 2021 and July 2024, 13 British companies sent 545 shipments of household and supermarket plastic waste, totalling 52,000 tonnes, to the Kemal Deniz recycling zone, under a mile from Ayhan’s aubergine fields, according to data analysed for the Guardian by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), an international NGO.

A Guardian investigation finds irrigation canals polluted with microplastics in Turkey, a major destination for UK waste

• ‘Nobody cares’: Turkish farmers bear the burden of UK’s plastic waste problem

High levels of microplastics and other plastic contamination have been discovered in a waterway close to a major recycling hub in Turkey supplied with plastic waste by British companies.

The polluted waterway, which floods into agricultural fields after heavy rain, feeds into a larger canal used for irrigating crops on the Çukurova plain, in the city of Adana, in the south of the country. It is one of the largest and most fertile agricultural basins in Turkey.

Alfred Drummond-Herdman’s extraordinary timelapses have been viewed by millions – and led him to identify new species

Alfred Drummond-Herdman is possibly the only person in the UK who is sent animal faeces in the post out of goodwill. His bedroom in Edinburgh is full of the stuff: clothes have been removed from his wardrobe and cupboards, replaced with terrariums and plastic containers housing sections of cowpats, grouse droppings and rabbit pellets.

“I have a very understanding housemate,” he says.

Biologists say cargo ships stranded in Gulf may carry highly potent invasive species around the world as trade resumes

• Middle East crisis – live updates

The closure of the strait of Hormuz has created conditions for an extreme global biodiversity threat, with scientists warning that thousands of stranded ships could spread invasive marine species across the world’s oceans once they begin sailing again.

More than 1,500 commercial vessels have been stuck in the Gulf since the strategic waterway closed on 28 February after the outbreak of the US-Israel war on Iran. An international team of marine biologists said that with the stranded ships remaining motionless, their hulls were becoming encrusted with marine life – from microbes and algae to barnacles and other invertebrates – that could hitchhike to ports around the world when trade resumed.

Matthew Myerscough’s remarkable find is one of many detailed in his new book. But his journey into fossil hunting began years earlier, when he was caught in an avalanche

When Matthew Myerscough walks along a beach, he cannot help hunting for fossils. “I think my fossil radar is always on – even if I’m not looking, it’s hard sometimes to not see things,” says the 40-year-old civil engineer, who has discovered thousands of fossils on British beaches.

It was while he was “not looking” on Lavernock beach near Penarth, south Wales, that he recently stumbled across the fossilised bone of an early type of plesiosaur, a marine reptile that roamed the oceans while dinosaurs stalked the land during the early Jurassic period.

Reporting from some of the poorest seaside towns revealed how young people have been left isolated – but remain resilient and full of hope

If you were asked to summon up images of the coastline of England and Wales, you might think of sunny days, buckets, spades and carefree holidays. But for many young people growing up by the sea, decades of evidence tell a very different story. For them, rather than a picture-perfect horizon full of hope, the sea has become a boundary that swallows up opportunity.

With a 73% decline in funding for youth services in England over the past 12 years, and a lack of opportunities that has led to nearly 1 million 16- to 24-year-olds not in work, education or training (Neet), the situation for young people, especially in places of deprivation, has never seemed more desperate.

In Guatemala’s Maya biosphere reserve local people are making a living from trees at the same time as increasing forest cover, showing nature is best protected by those who depend on it

The low rumbling grows louder until a huge harvester crashes into the open, dragging a 15-metre trunk of mahogany in its wake. The tractor manoeuvres before releasing its load and shovelling it like a matchstick on to a growing pile of lumber at the edge of the clearing. Then, with a crunch of gears and a belch of diesel, it turns and lurches back into the forest.

This is sustainable forestry at its most brutal, yet in a few weeks’ time silence will return to this pocket of tropical forest in Guatemala’s Maya biosphere reserve (MBR). Nature will be left to reclaim the land and chainsaws won’t return for at least four years, as part of a strict management plan that is helping to buck the trend of rampant deforestation.