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Plants, insects and organisms crucial to food production in steep decline, says UN

The world’s capacity to produce food is being undermined by humanity’s failure to protect biodiversity, according to the first UN study of the plants, animals and micro-organisms that help to put meals on our plates.

The stark warning was issued by the Food and Agriculture Organisation after scientists found evidence the natural support systems that underpin the human diet are deteriorating around the world as farms, cities and factories gobble up land and pump out chemicals.

Park safety director alleges buckets of uranium sat near exhibit for almost 20 years, but interior department says there’s no risk

For almost 20 years, workers and visiting schoolchildren at a Grand Canyon museum may have been unknowingly exposed to radiation from three buckets of uranium sitting next to a taxidermy exhibit, according to allegations from a National Park Service safety director.

The whistleblower says officials learned about the buckets last year and tried to hide the revelation, according to the Arizona Republic newspaper. This month, Elston “Swede” Stephenson emailed all park staff and brought the matter to the attention of the head of the interior department, which oversees the park service, and the agency’s internal watchdog.

Biologists discover single female Wallace’s giant bee inside a termites’ nest in a tree

As long as an adult thumb, with jaws like a stag beetle and four times larger than a honeybee, Wallace’s giant bee is not exactly inconspicuous.

But after going missing, feared extinct, for 38 years, the world’s largest bee has been rediscovered on the Indonesian islands of the North Moluccas.

Centrica says it will take £300m hit on cap on energy bills and lowers 2019 cashflow outlook

The owner of British Gas, Centrica, lost about three-quarters of a million customers last year and warned it will take a £300m hit from the government’s price cap on energy bills.

Shares in Britain’s biggest energy company dropped more than 10% after the company lowered its cashflow outlook for 2019, leading investors to fear Centrica’s dividend could be cut.

Voters in Toledo, Ohio, will decide if Lake Erie has legal rights. It's an attempt to amend the city's charter after efforts failed to address toxic algal blooms that affect water supplies.

The wall along the U.S.-Mexico border cuts across sensitive desert and mountainous terrain. But environmental regulations are waived for wall construction, raising concerns about longterm damage.

(Image credit: Mallory Falk/KRWG)

Report says few headlines sparked by food crises that ravaged Madagascar, Ethiopia and Haiti

Climate change was responsible for the majority of under-reported humanitarian disasters last year, according to analysis of more than a million online news stories.

Whole populations were affected by food crises in countries ravaged by by drought and hurricanes such as Ethiopia and Haiti, yet neither crisis generated more than 1,000 global news stories each.

Residents of cities like Chester, outside Philadelphia, fear a rise in pollution from incinerators after China’s recycling ban

The conscientious citizens of Philadelphia continue to put their pizza boxes, plastic bottles, yoghurt containers and other items into recycling bins.

Related: Fighting pollution: Toledo residents want personhood status for Lake Erie

Australia’s largest coal producer says decision to cap production doesn’t mean it intends to drop greenfield coal projects

Green groups say Australia’s biggest coal producer Glencore should commit to withdrawing from new coalmining projects if it is serious about aligning its business with the goals of the Paris agreement.

The company has moved to cap its output of thermal and coking coal at current production levels of 145m tonnes a year after pressure from investors who want companies to take stronger action and factor in the financial risks of climate change.

The baby boomers gave us Trump and Brexit. Can my generation age more gracefully?

Generational politics is bullshit, but a Gen X guy would say that. I sometimes wonder, though, whether whatever is distinctive in my generation’s experience (and haunting our minds) might have something to offer the future.

After a brief flurry of interest in the 1990s, thinkpieces on my demographic quickly waned. There were never that many of us; the meat in the sandwich was and is meagre.

Government advisers suggest homes are heated using low-carbon energy instead

Gas hobs or boilers should be banned from being installed in new homes within the next six years, government advisers have recommended.

A report by the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) says that from 2025 at the latest, no new homes should be connected to the gas grid – with super-efficient houses and flats heated using low-carbon energy instead.

Environmental campaigners say Samir Flores Soberanes’s murder is a ‘political crime’

A Mexican environmental activist has been murdered before a referendum on a controversial thermal-electric plant and pipeline that he opposed.

Samir Flores Soberanes, an indigenous Náhuatl, was killed in his home during the early hours of Wednesday in the town of Amilcingo in Morelos state, 80 miles south of Mexico City. He was a human rights activist, producer for a community radio station and long-time opponent of the Proyecto Integral Morelos (the integral project for Morelos) – which includes the plant and pipeline.

Hipster tastes have fueled a spike in succulent poaching. Now conservationists are finding creative ways to rescue them

When most people drive through the Cactus Forest in Saguaro national park, their gazes are fixed skyward. Towering saguaros fill the view on either side of the road, rising 40, even 60ft high, their human-like arms outstretched.

But on a recent December afternoon, Ray O’Neil was focused on the ground. He was looking for holes. As the park’s chief ranger, O’Neil is on constant alert for an unusual menace: cactus poachers. Saguaros aren’t just beautiful to look at; they also fetch a hefty price, up to $100 a foot, on the black market, where they are enormously popular with landscapers.

Plastic is everywhere, and it’s not going anywhere – potentially posing serious risks to our health. A crew of scientists and activists is conducting a hands-on investigation

When I arrive at the marina in Victoria on a late-July morning, the sky and water are complementary shades of azure. On the deck of the 72ft shiny-bright Sea Dragon, moored here in the island capital of British Columbia for just one day, are four young women, part of the crew of the research voyage “eXXpedition”. They’re hauling buckets of black sludge up to the deck from the ocean floor.

The team will meticulously pack the wet sand from the harbor floor into little glass jars. These jars will be added to a library of sand, water and air samples that they’ve collected over the past six weeks from across the north Pacific. They’ll ship some of those samples off to Plymouth, England, to be analyzed by eXXpedition’s marine scientist Imogen Napper. The idea is that by cataloging this library, she and the team will begin to get a better sense of what kind of plastic is out there in the ocean.

William Happer, a physicist who has suggested higher levels of carbon dioxide are beneficial, would be on committee

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The White House is planning to assess how climate change impacts national security and will involve a prominent doubter of the scientific consensus that manmade warming is putting the US at risk.

Related: US coastal businesses hit by everyday impact of climate change, study shows

Pattern seems to confuse flies, researchers who dressed horses up as zebras find

The mystery of how the zebra got its stripes might have been solved: researchers say the pattern appears to confuse flies, discouraging them from touching down for a quick bite.

The study, published in the journal Plos One, involved horses, zebras, and horses dressed as zebras. The team said the research not only supported previous work suggesting stripes might act as an insect deterrent, but helped unpick why, revealing the patterns only produced an effect when the flies got close.

Republicans have claimed Ocasio-Cortez’s congressional resolutions will mean the end of ice cream, hamburgers and the US military. Where are they getting it from?

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the American political right’s objet socialiste du jour, recently introduced a Green New Deal – a joint Congressional resolution with Democratic senator Ed Markey calling for a “10-year national mobilization” overhauling nearly every aspect of American society to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Those who have read through it will find a hopeful and ambitious but dry legislative document.

However, Ocasio-Cortez says that all Democratic presidential candidates support the Green New Deal, which has sent conservatives into a nonsensical tailspin, claiming it would mean the end of ice cream, hamburgers and the US military.

Insects are dying. And that’s terrible news for humans.

(Image credit: Avery Kleinman/WAMU)

Clare Farrell ‘barred’ from Bethany Williams show despite role in producing fashion line

Clare Farrell, co-founder of the environmental action group Extinction Rebellion, claimed she was barred from entering a show at London fashion week two days after helping to organise a protest against the British Fashion Council to highlight the industry’s role in fuelling climate change.

About 150 people from Extinction Rebellion formed human roadblocks and brought traffic to a standstill outside event venues on Sunday to cause disruption and urge the industry body to declare a climate emergency.