The divestment movement has a long history among US student activists, including in the overlapping movements of today

Cameron Jones first learned about fossil fuel divestment as a 15-year-old climate organizer. When he enrolled at Columbia University in 2022, he joined the campus’s chapter of the youth-led climate justice group the Sunrise Movement and began pushing the school in New York to sever financial ties with coal, oil and gas companies.

“The time for institutions like Columbia to be in the pocket of fossil fuel corporations has passed,” Jones wrote in an October 2023 op-ed in the student newspaper directed toward the Columbia president, Minouche Shafik.

British Medical Association says decision to take Dr Sarah Benn off medical register for five months ‘sends worrying message’

Doctors groups are calling for urgent consideration of the rules for medical professionals who take peaceful direct action on the climate crisis, which they say is the “greatest threat to global health”, after a GP was suspended from the register for non-violent protest.

Dr Sarah Benn, a GP from Birmingham, was taken off the medical register for five months on Tuesday by the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS), the disciplinary arm of the General Medical Council (GMC), over her climate protests. The tribunal said Benn’s fitness to practise as a doctor had been impaired by reason of misconduct.

£2.2bn-worth of oil processed in China, India and Turkey – to whom Russia supplies crude – was imported in 2023, data shows

The UK has been accused of “helping Russia pay for its war on Ukraine” by continuing to import record amounts of refined oil from countries processing Kremlin fossil fuels.

Government data analysed by the environmental news site Desmog shows that imports of refined oil from India, China and Turkey amounted to £2.2bn in 2023, the same record value as the previous year, up from £434.2m in 2021.

A dawn chorus of flutes, whistles and chirps once flowed through my Cambridge window, but there has been a shocking collapse in birdlife. What can be done?

Every year from February through to June, the early morning chorus of birdsong is one of the most evocative manifestations of spring. During late winter I open the bedroom window before going to sleep, to hear that incredible mix of flutes, whistles and chirps that begin before first light, when I wake. I listen for the layers of song that simultaneously come from close by and far away.

This year though, the dawn chorus that once was the soundtrack for spring in central Cambridge has collapsed. It was noticeably quieter in 2023, and this year strikingly so. Blackbirds are depleted and song thrushes no longer heard at all. The dunnocks – once one of the most common garden songsters – have disappeared, as have the chaffinches, whose early February song was among the first audible confirmations of lengthening days. The cheery chatter of house sparrows is absent and the once familiar sound of coal tits has fallen silent. Long-tailed tits are now rare, and so far this year I’ve heard no blackcaps. Great and blue tits, robins and goldfinches, are still present, but down in number.

Study reveals repurposing of ecologically vital land for homes or agriculture is happening particularly rapidly in Asia

Estuaries – the place where a river meets the ocean – are often called the “nurseries of the sea”. They are home to many of the fish we eat and support vast numbers of birds, while the surrounding salt marsh helps to stabilise shorelines and absorb floods.

However, a new study shows that nearly half of the world’s estuaries have been altered by humans, and 20% of this estuary loss has occurred in the past 35 years.

Dumfries, Scotland: It’s strange to think sequoias are more numerous here than in their homeland California. This one, down the road from me, is captivating company

As a young boy, my copy of Strange But True contained fascinating photographs of a coach and horses and a Model T Ford driving through a hole in an enormous sequoia. Recently, these monsters have been in the news due to the number of sequoias, or giant redwoods, in the UK – about 500,000 here, compared with only about 80,000 in California, where the species is endangered after being used in construction for two centuries.

I was reminded of a very large tree on my patch in Galloway, at the Crichton Campus in Dumfries. I have photographed the monster previously, thinking it a large cedar, but it is indeed one of our stock of Sequoiadendron giganteum (note the clue in the name), introduced to Britain’s country gardens and large estates in the 18th and 19th centuries. This specimen was planted in the early 1850s with seeds from the Lobb brothers, plant collectors who also introduced the monkey puzzle tree here.

From ancient olive groves to root vegetables, foreign pests introduced via the bloc’s open import system are causing damage worth billions – and outbreaks are on the rise

The plants slowly choke to death, wither and dry out. They die en masse, leaves dropping and bark turning grey, creating a sea of monochrome. Since scientists first discovered Xylella fastidiosa in 2013 in Puglia, Italy, it has killed a third of the region’s 60 million olive trees – which once produced almost half of Italy’s olive oil – many of which were centuries old. Farms stopped producing, olive mills went bankrupt and tourists avoided the area. With no known cure, the bacterium has already caused damage costing about €1bn.

“The greatest part of the territory was completely destroyed,” says Donato Boscia, a plant virologist and head researcher on Xylella at the Institute for Sustainable Plant Protection in Bari.

The region is turning towards Russia and other global players when it comes to security. Tackling the climate crisis would contribute to a solution

Two apparently separate developments in the Sahel are linked by more than geography. Last week, the US confirmed that it will withdraw more than 1,000 troops from Niger after the military junta revoked a security pact – just six years after a new $110m military base opened. Meanwhile, a record heatwave is the latest deadly extreme weather event.

The US had hoped to maintain the military agreement despite last summer’s coup, part of a wave of military power grabs across the central Sahel and the wider region. French troops had already been expelled, with France earlier withdrawing from Mali and Burkina Faso. Mali’s regime also ordered an end to the UN stabilisation mission. Western departures come alongside the growing presence of Russian mercenaries, including the Wagner group.

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The biggest cities in the US are mourning animals who fostered a rare sense of connection. Art is preserving their legacies

Working near Central Park, one New Yorker regularly witnessed one of its most beloved residents: Flaco the owl, who became a celebrity after escaping the nearby zoo. The woman took the bird’s message to heart, re-evaluated her life and decided to quit her job. Now, she’s one of dozens with a Flaco tattoo.

“They’ll be walking around the rest of their lives, that name and owl on their arm,” says Duke Riley, an environmental artist who spearheaded a special sale at his tattoo parlor this month. Customers flocked to East River Tattoo in Brooklyn, where, for $150, they could walk away with ink memorializing Flaco. The line stretched around the block, Riley says.

The dystopian picture of renewables painted by the opposition leader is full of inconsistencies, partial truths and misinformation

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The Coalition leader, Peter Dutton, has been trying to paint a picture of what life in Australia will be like if it tries to power itself mostly with renewable energy and without his technology of choice: nuclear.

Towering turbines offshore will hurt whales, dolphins and the fishing industry, factories will be forced to stop working because there’s not enough electricity and the landscape will be scoured by enough new transmission cables to stretch around the entire Australian coastline.

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Replacing red meat with fish could prevent diabetes, reduce our carbon footprint and save lives. So who’s for spaghetti and fishballs?

“What’s for supper?” my wife asks. We are watching the six o’clock news and the pause I leave before answering is longer than I mean it to be. I’m trying to find the words.

“Fish wellington,” I say, finally. The silence that follows is longer still.

In the past 10 years the idea that trees communicate with and look after each other has gained widespread currency. But have these claims outstripped the evidence?

There are a lot of humans. Teeming is perhaps an unkind word, but when 8 billion people cram themselves on to a planet that, three centuries before, held less than a tenth of that number, it seems apt. Eight billion hot-breathed individuals, downloading apps and piling into buses and shoving their plasticky waste into bins – it is a stupefying and occasionally sickening thought.

And yet, humans are not Earth’s chief occupants. Trees are. There are three trillion of them, with a collective biomass thousands of times that of humanity. But although they are the preponderant beings on Earth – outnumbering us by nearly 400 to one – they’re easy to miss. Show someone a photograph of a forest with a doe peeking out from behind a maple and ask what they see. “A deer,” they’ll triumphantly exclaim, as if the green matter occupying most of the frame were mere scenery. “Plant blindness” is the name for this. It describes the many who can confidently distinguish hybrid dog breeds – chiweenies, cavapoos, pomskies – yet cannot identify an apple tree.

Stories of dismay but also resilience as crisis in food production builds after 18 months of exceptionally wet weather

Farmers have been dealing with record-breaking rainfall over at least the past year, meaning food produced in Britain has fallen drastically.

Livestock and crops have been affected as fields have been submerged since last autumn on account of it being an exceptionally wet 18 months.

Swallows, cuckoos, curlews – so many species have dwindled or disappeared completely, and people are mourning their loss

Read more: World faces ‘deathly silence’ of nature as wildlife disappears, warn experts

The sounds of our natural world are changing dramatically. Earth’s wildlife populations have plunged by 69% in fewer than 50 years. Fading along with them are many of the distinctive soundscapes of nature: the night-time calls of mammals, morning chorus of birds and buzz of insects.

This global story is stitched together by many local stories of loss. We spoke to readers about how natural sounds are changing where they live.

Proposed ‘fast-track’ law could see conservation concerns ignored and projects once rejected for environmental reasons given the green light

New Zealand’s parliament is considering a law that would allow major development projects to bypass environmental approvals – and that should be a cause for extreme alarm.

The proposed Fast-track Approvals Bill emerged from the coalition agreements that enabled a centre-right government to form after last year’s election.

Nicola Wheen and Andrew Geddis are professors of law at the University of Otago.

From right to roam to anger over polluted rivers, a new breed of activists is pushing back against environmental destruction

Something very interesting is happening in the UK, to do with nature, the expanses of land we think of as the countryside, and where all those things sit in our collective consciousness. The change has probably been quietly afoot for 20 or 30 years. Now, it suddenly seems to be blurring over from the cultural sphere into our politics, with one obvious consequence – the belated entry into the national conversation of issues that have long been pushed to the margins, from land access and ownership to the shocking condition of our rivers.

The prevailing British attitude to nature has long been in an equally messed-up state. From the 1600s onwards, endless enclosure acts pushed people off the land and seeded the idea of the countryside as somewhere largely out of bounds. Britain’s rapid industrialisation only accelerated the process. And despite occasional cultural and political tilts in the opposite direction – the bucolic visions of the 18th- and 19th-century Romantics, the mass trespass movement of the 1930s – most of us now show the signs of that long story of loss and estrangement.

Recordings of healthy fish are being transmitted to attract heat-tolerant larvae back to degraded reefs in the Maldives

An underwater experiment to restore coral reefs using a combination of “coral IVF” and recordings of fish noises could offer a “beacon of hope” to scientists who fear the fragile ecosystem is on the brink of collapse.

The experiment – a global collaboration between two teams of scientists who developed their innovative coral-saving techniques independently – has the potential to significantly increase the likelihood that coral will repopulate degraded reefs, they claim.

Video shows trees and shrubs along Western Australia's south-west coastline turning brown after Perth recorded it hottest and driest six months since records began. There were similar scenes in the state's south-west eucalypt forests in 2010 and 2011 – a major die-back event that prompted more than a dozen studies. Drought-hit forests were hit by fire years later

The best of this week’s wildlife photographs from around the world

More than 50% of the planet’s species live in the earth below our feet, but only a fraction have been identified – so far

Read more: No birdsong, no water in the creek, no beating wings: how a haven for nature fell silent

The sound of an earthworm is a distinctive rasping and scrunching. Ants sound like the soothing patter of rain. A passing, tunnelling vole makes a noise like a squeaky dog’s toy repeatedly being chewed.

On a spring day at Rothamsted Research, an agricultural research institution in Hertfordshire, singing skylarks and the M1 motorway are competing for the airways. But the attention here is on the soundscapes underfoot: a rich ecosystem with its own alien sounds. More than half of the planet’s species live in the soil, and we are just starting to tune into what they are up to. Beetle larvae, millipedes, centipedes and woodlice have other sound signatures, and scientists are trying to decipher which sounds come from which creatures.

As nature falls silent in most cities around the world, New Zealand’s capital has been transformed by the sound of native birds returning to the dawn chorus

Read more: No birdsong, no water in the creek, no beating wings: how a haven for nature fell silent

Some time in the pre-dawn darkness, the commotion starts. From her bed, Danae Mossman hears the noise building: loud romantic liaisons, vomiting, squeals, the sound of bodies hitting the pool at full tilt.

Things get particularly loud between midnight and 4am, Mossman says, “when they are getting busy”.

A kororā, or little penguin, colony live under Danae Mossman’s house – and show no signs of wanting to leave

In the first of a new series, we look at why people reject so much of the bountiful catches from our seas in favour of the same few species, mostly imported – and how to change that

Perched on a quay in the Cornish port of Falmouth is Pysk fishmongers, where Giles and Sarah Gilbert started out with a dream to supply locally caught seafood to the town. Their catch comes mainly from small boats that deliver a glittering array of local fish: gleaming red mullets, iridescent mackerels, spotted dabs and bright white scallops, still snapping in their shells.

Occasionally, they will get a treasured haul of local common prawns – stripy, smaller and sweeter than the frozen, imported varieties in UK supermarkets. So, when customers come into the shop asking for prawns, Giles Gilbert presents “these bouncing jack-in-a-boxes” with a flourish, hoping to tempt buyers with the fresh, live shellfish.

Notorious for drawing large crowds, Emerson was removed by officials who were surprised to find him back in Victoria in a week

Last week, gun-wielding conservation officers stuffed a 500lb elephant seal in the back of a van, drove him along a winding highway in western Canada and left him on a remote beach “far from human habitation”.

The plan was to move the young seal far from British Columbia’s capital city, where over the last year, he has developed a reputation for ending up in “unusual locations”, including flower beds, city parks and busy roads.

The law will come into force in national parks within two years and in all of the country’s marine protected areas by 2030

Greece has become the first country in Europe to announce a ban on bottom trawling in all of its national marine parks and protected areas.

The country said will spend €780m (£666m) to protect its “diverse and unique marine ecosystems”.

Scientists have recorded widespread bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef as global heating creates a fourth planet-wide bleaching event. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Coral Reef Watch, 54% of ocean waters containing coral reefs have been experiencing heat stress high enough to cause bleaching

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• Global heating pushes coral reefs towards worst planet-wide mass bleaching on record

Paris claims ban breaches UK-EU trade deal but environmentalists say dispute is ‘hypocrisy’, given Macron’s rhetoric on saving oceans

France has been accused of hypocrisy by conservationists over a fresh post-Brexit dispute with the UK over fishing rights.

France launched an official protest after the UK banned bottom trawling from parts of its territorial waters last month, with the aim of protecting vulnerable habitats.

A new collection of wildlife photography aims to help understand why people have photographed animals at different points in history and what it means in the present. Huw Lewis-Jones explores the animal in photography through the work of more than 100 photographers in Why We Photograph Animals, supporting the images with thematic essays to provide historical context

• Photography on display at the Cheltenham science festival 4-9 June 2024

Weak government climate policies violate fundamental human rights, the European court of human rights has ruled.

In a landmark decision on one of three major climate cases, the first such ruling by an international court, the ECHR raised judicial pressure on governments to stop filling the atmosphere with gases that make extreme weather more violent.

The court’s top bench ruled that Switzerland had violated the rights of a group of older Swiss women to family life

• Human rights violated by inaction on climate, ECHR rules in landmark case

Footage captures flooding near the rural township of Charleville following a weekend of heavy rain in parts of southern Queensland and northern New South Wales. Communities across the region have been impacted by flooding, with some isolated by road closures.

According to the Bureau of Meteorology, the Warrego River gauge near Bakers Bend, in south-west Queensland, recorded a peak of 10.16m on Monday morning

• Australia news live: major flooding in south-west Queensland

• It’s not just the total rainfall – why is eastern Australia experiencing such sudden, devastating downpours?

• Weather tracker: flood warnings after heavy rain in south-eastern Australia

The best of this week’s wildlife photographs from around the world

Exclusive: ex-officials at the Food and Agriculture Organization say its leadership censored and undermined them when they highlighted how livestock methane is a major greenhouse gas

• Ex-officials at UN farming body say work on methane emissions was censored
• Analysis: Impact of farming on climate crisis will be a key Cop topic – finally

The night before publication, Henning Steinfeld was halfway across the world dealing with panicked politicians and an outbreak of avian flu. His report, and how it would be received, was frankly the last thing on his mind.

With a small group of officials, Steinfield, head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)’s livestock policy branch, had been working for months on a report analysing the link between the six major species of livestock and climate change, which they all knew could be explosive. “I was very frustrated by the fact that the livestock-environment issue hadn’t resonated even though people accepted in private that it was a big issue – for climate change, and also water and biodiversity,” he said. “But no one was interested in getting into it because I think they were afraid of what it could mean.”

Exclusive: Pressure from agriculture lobbies led to role of cattle in rising global temperatures being underplayed by FAO, claim sources

• ‘The anti-livestock people are a pest’: how UN food body played down role of farming in climate change
• Analysis: Impact of farming on climate crisis will be a key Cop topic – finally

Former officials in the UN’s farming wing have said they were censored, sabotaged, undermined and victimised for more than a decade after they wrote about the hugely damaging contribution of methane emissions from livestock to global heating.

Team members at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) tasked with estimating cattle’s contribution to soaring temperatures said that pressure from farm-friendly funding states was felt throughout the FAO’s Rome headquarters and coincided with attempts by FAO leadership to muzzle their work.

Cargill and ADM led push to weaken new protections for threatened ecosystems in South America, report says

Cargill and ADM, two of the world’s leading livestock feed companies, helped to scupper an attempt to end the trade in soya beans grown on deforested and threatened ecosystem lands in South America, a new report alleges.

Soya is one of the cheapest available types of edible protein, and is in huge demand for feed for animals around the world; as our consumption of meat and dairy has risen globally, the need for soya has soared too.

Outbreaks in the Lombardy ‘pork belt’ were extinguished, say experts, but wild boar could act as a reservoir

Huge pig culls took place last week in Italy in an attempt to contain the country’s largest outbreak of African swine fever (ASF) virus since the 1960s, which threatened the entire pig-farming sector.

ASF is deadly to pigs and poses a serious threat to the global pig industry but is not a danger to humans, according to the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH).