Environment

The best of this week’s wildlife photographs, including a green forest lizard, gentoo penguins and a wild beaver

Sandstorms whipped up from the Gobi desert have spread from northern China to Thailand and South Korea and as far east as Japan, causing a reduction in visibility and an increase in respiratory illness. There have been four sandstorms in the space of a month in China this year

Labour analysis shows that raw sewage was discharged into cabinet ministers’ constituencies for 180,759 hours last year

More than 7,500 days’ worth of raw sewage was dumped in the constituencies of cabinet ministers last year, an analysis has found.

The Yorkshire seat of the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, was third on the leaderboard, with 3,455 dumping events, lasting 20,615 hours, Labour party analysis has found.

The parched state’s landscape is peppered with magnificent red, orange and yellow blooms that can be seen from space

California’s superblooms this year are so lush and so exuberant that they can be seen from space.

Satellite images from Maxar Technologies, a Colorado-based company, show striking images of bright orange, red, yellow and purple blooms across southern California.

Corallivorous fish were regarded as harmful to coral but research suggests their poo could be keeping reefs healthy

The faeces of coral-eating fish may act as “probiotics” for reefs, according to a study.

Previously it was thought that corallivore – fish such as pufferfish, parrotfish and butterfly fish that eat coral – weakened marine surfaces. But new research suggests that by eating some parts of the coral and then pooing in different areas of the reef, they are part of a cycle that redistributes beneficial microbes that can help coral thrive.

Data shows 48% of species declined between 2015 and 2020 with woodland birds faring worst

Bird populations in the UK continue to crash, new data shows, as campaigners predict the government will fail to meet its own nature targets unless radical changes are made.

Statistics released by the government show that bird populations continue to decline in the long and short term. In 2021, on average the abundance of 130 breeding species was 12% below its 1970 value. Though much of this loss was between the late 1970s and the late 1980s, caused mostly by relatively steep declines in woodland and farmland birds, there was still a significant 5% decrease between 2015 and 2020.

Madeleine King says gas can help decarbonise the economy but not even big users of the fossil fuel are convinced

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The words from the resources minister, Madeleine King, must have felt like a comforting salve to Australia’s gas industry.

In a speech last week in Western Australia, King told resource industry figures in Perth that gas would be indispensable as Australia and the region decarbonised.

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Dead creature was one of 150 descendants of four hippos imported by drug baron Pablo Escobar in 1980s

Colombia has logged its first hippopotamus-caused road traffic accident after a car crashed into one of the animals at high speed, leaving the vehicle mangled and the two-tonne mammal lying lifeless and bloodied across a highway.

The hippo was declared dead soon after the crash on Tuesday night in the municipality of Doradal on a highway connecting the cities of Bogotá and Medellín, local environmental authorities said.

The 14-acre site was being used to store plastics for recycling when the out of control blaze broke out on Tuesday

An evacuation order affecting more than 1,000 people was expected to remain in place through Wednesday around a large industrial fire in an Indiana city near the Ohio border, where crews worked through the night to douse piles of burning plastics, authorities said.

Multiple fires, which began burning on Tuesday afternoon, were still ablaze on Wednesday in a 14-acre (5.5-hectare) property containing various types of plastics.

Rules will also include ban on campfires and barbecues as part of a crackdown on antisocial behaviour

Visitors to the New Forest face being fined up to £1,000 for petting ponies and for lighting campfires and barbecues, as part of measures to tackle antisocial behaviour.

The new rules, approved by New Forest district council, ban the petting and feeding of animals out of concern for their wellbeing and to prevent them from becoming aggressive.

Sadiq Khan to press on with plans for ultra-low emission zone despite challenge being allowed to proceed

A legal challenge to the expansion of London’s ultra-low emission zone will be heard in the high court later this year, after a judgment permitted councils to proceed.

The city’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, vowed to press on regardless with plans to extend the Ulez, which he has argued is needed to tackle toxic air that is responsible for thousands of premature deaths a year.

Proposal would require two of every three new vehicles sold in US to be electric by 2032

The Biden administration on Wednesday proposed strict new automobile pollution limits that would require that all-electric vehicles account for as many as two of every three new vehicles sold in the US by 2032 in a plan that would transform the US auto industry.

Under the proposed regulation, released by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), greenhouse gas emissions for the 2027 through 2032 model years for passenger vehicles would be limited to even stricter levels than the auto industry agreed to in 2021.

New Mexico’s ancient water systems nurtured its rural farmlands through climate change. But after last year’s wildfires, there’s little time left to save them

Jimmy Sanchez knows that making things grow during a megadrought isn’t impossible – it just requires a bit of creativity.

In 1882, his ancestors constructed a 24-mile-long ditch to bring water from headwaters in the nearby mountains to the bone-dry foothills where they lived in Holman, New Mexico, allowing their village to sustain fruit, vegetables, and livestock.

The number of cows has nearly doubled in a generation, and the resulting fertiliser and irrigation needs are having a devastating impact

In tourism adverts and on movie screens, Aotearoa has sold its pristine landscapes, churning alpine waterfalls and bright jade-braided rivers to the world, under the tagline “100% pure New Zealand”.

A new report, however, reveals the dire state of many of the country’s fresh waterways: contaminated by thousands of sewage overflows, flooded with nutrient pollution, blooming with toxic algae, risking public health and rendered unswimmable to the communities that have lived by them for years.

Scientists attribute the ‘unprecedented’ visibility of the water body to a boom in the population of zooplankton

Lake Tahoe has attained a clarity that scientists haven’t seen in 40 years – and it’s all because of a microscopic animal acting as a “natural cleanup crew” to restore the clear blue waters.

On Monday, researchers from the UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center (TERC) released their annual report showing that the lake’s average visibility in 2022 was at 71.7ft – compared with 61ft in 2021 – which was largely due to a spike in clarity in the last five months of the year.

Radical rise in spending on trains, trams and buses needed to cut car use, reports body representing unions in England and Wales

Ministers have been urged to ramp up spending on public transport in England and Wales to tackle the climate emergency, and to unlock a £50bn a year boost to the economy, in a report by the Trades Union Congress (TUC).

The report released by the TUC, a federation representing 48 unions, argues for a radical increase in investment – calling for £18bn more a year to be spent on operating trains, trams and buses to help cut car use by 20%, improve quality of life and boost the UK economy.

Climate researchers say magnitude of predicted weather event uncertain but if an extreme El Niño occurs ‘we’ll need to buckle up’

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Climate models around the globe continue to warn of a potential El Niño developing later this year – a pattern of ocean warming in the Pacific that can increase the risk of catastrophic weather events around the globe.

Some models are raising the possibility later this year of an extreme, or “super El Niño”, that is marked by very high temperatures in a central region of the Pacific around the equator.

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Agency sued after ProPublica and the Guardian revealed the EPA gave a Chevron refinery approval for a fuel that could leave people nearby with a one-in-four lifetime risk of cancer

• This article is co-published with ProPublica, a non-profit newsroom that investigates abuses of power

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is facing a lawsuit filed by a community group and questions from a US senator over the agency’s approval of fuels made from discarded plastic under a program it touted as “climate-friendly”.

The new scrutiny is in response to an earlier investigation by ProPublica and the Guardian that revealed the EPA approved the new chemicals even though its own scientists calculated that pollution from production of one of the plastic-based fuels was so toxic that one in four people exposed to it over their lifetime would be expected to develop cancer. That risk is 250,000 times greater than the level usually considered acceptable by the EPA division that approves new chemicals, and it’s higher than the lifetime risk of cancer for current smokers.

Exclusive: Satellite analysis shows toxic blackwater flowed into the Darling-Baaka River via the Wetherell outlet two days before the deaths

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The worst mass fish kill in living memory, which saw millions of animals floating dead on the Darling-Baaka river near Menindee, may have been contributed to by an alleged failed strategy to release a combination of “blackwater” and clean water by authorities, researchers have claimed.

The researchers, who host a water program on Broken Hill’s local community radio, also allege that a smaller fish kill in the same river in February was the result of a similar water release strategy by WaterNSW and should have set alarm bells ringing.

Exclusive: funding requests, uncertain responsibilities and a failure to secure long-term contracts has critics asking if the fossil fuel-based venture is still a good deal

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A multibillion-dollar Japanese plan to extract hydrogen from Victoria’s brown coal is at risk of failing due to demands for extra subsidies and a lack of willingness from Japanese customers to sign up for long-term deals.

People familiar with the Hydrogen Energy Supply Chain (HESC) project said only a portion of the ¥220bn (A$2.48bn) funding would actually be spent on developing a liquefaction plant in the Latrobe valley and export facilities at the nearby Hastings port.