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Abrupt extinction of short-faced kangaroo a reminder to protect the environment, palaeontologists say

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When a caver and Gippsland local, Joshua Van Dyk, stumbled across the fossilised remains of a kangaroo species that had been extinct for about 46,000 years, it seemed as though the macropod was making eye contact with him.

“It had fallen behind some rocks … and was looking straight at me,” Joshua recalls of the 2011 discovery he made in a cave near Buchan in east Gippsland.

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It’s almost a century since the 1924 expedition ended in tragedy, yet the question of whether the climbers conquered the summit remains unanswered

On the morning of 6 June, 1924, George Mallory – one of the world’s greatest mountaineers – set off with his companion, Sandy Irvine, from a camp on the slopes of Mount Everest and headed for its summit.

A veteran of three British Everest expeditions, Mallory knew the world’s highest mountain better than any other climber at the time. He had come close to death there on three occasions.

A new approach aims to restore fish levels in the Yukon River but some feel it unfairly targets traditional practices while failing to tackle huge losses to industrial fishing in the ocean

Earlier this month Alaska officials announced a new plan they say could revive the Yukon River’s struggling salmon population. The 2,000-mile waterway that runs from Canada’s Yukon Territory to the Bering Sea has seen sharp declines in its Chinook, or king salmon, in recent years.

The new strategy aims to restore the number of fish that reach their northern spawning areas near the Canadian border to 71,000, up from about 15,000 that reached the Canadian border in 2023, by suspending commercial, sport, domestic and personal use fisheries in the Yukon River until 2030. Previously, fishing closures were revisited each year.

People want more seafood than the oceans can sustainably supply, so a German firm aims to plug that gap with cultivated fish – but are consumers ready to buy it?

The redbrick offices, just north of Hamburg’s River Elbe and a few floors below Carlsberg’s German headquarters, are an unexpectedly low-key setting for a food team gearing up to produce Europe’s first tonne of lab-grown fish.

But inside Bluu Seafood, past the slick open-plan coffee and cake bar, the rooms are dominated by gleaming white tiles, people bustling about in lab coats, rows of broad-bottomed beakers and pieces of equipment more at home in a science-fiction thriller. A 50-litre tank (a bioreactor) is filled with what looks like a cherry-coloured energy drink. The liquid, known as “growth medium”, is rich with sugars, minerals, amino acids and proteins designed to give the fish cells that are added to it the boost they need to multiply by the million.

Belfast: At first I thought it was the planes flying overhead, then I looked down and saw the most spectacular thing I’ve seen in nature

I love going back to the same riverside path at the edge of the city. It’s so familiar, but thanks to nature no visit is ever the same. I took my first outdoor steps here beside pink flowers with seeds you can pop, visited the ducks on a snowy Christmas morning and walked my friend’s dog through a meadow with cows.

But one spring afternoon this year was the most amazing yet. I have never seen or heard anything so spectacular in nature. I was walking with my dad when I saw a frog hop across the muddy path. We then crossed a bridge to the other side of the river. There was a droning noise. At first I thought this was coming from planes overhead.

Lindsay McKenna’s wildlife centre takes in exotic animals when owners can’t cope. She and other experts fear the law is failing the very animals it is designed to protect

When Lindsay McKenna went out to buy a piece of furniture from a seller, the last thing she expected was to return with a wild animal.

“Something moved in the garage when I was in there helping the guy lift [the furniture],” she said. “It was a racoon in an incredibly small cage, it could hardly turn around. It was wet. It was filthy. It was skinny, aggressive.”

Two-year-old calf one step closer to reuniting with family group after tragic accident that left her stranded in remote lagoon

An orca calf, trapped for weeks in a remote lagoon in western Canada, has freed herself and is travelling towards open waters, hailed as “incredible news” by a growing body of human supporters.

The move puts her one step closer to reuniting with her family one month after a tragic accident left her stranded.

Panel of nearly 100 countries to draw up guidelines for industries that mine raw materials used in low-carbon technology

A UN-led panel of nearly 100 countries is to draw up new guidelines to prevent some of the environmental damage and human rights abuses associated with mining for “critical minerals”.

Mining for some of the key raw materials used in low-carbon technology, such as solar panels and electric vehicles, has been associated with human rights abuses, child labour and violence, as well as grave environmental damage.

These cafes are determined to steer customer habits back away from single-use cups

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Almost everyone has a reusable cup (or three) in their kitchen cupboard, but the convenience of disposable cups often triumphs on the morning coffee run.

In Australia, an estimated 1.8bn single use coffee cups go to waste each year, and the number exceeds 500bn globally.

EV sales have plateaued across the world but the newfound glut of vehicles may just be temporary

Elon Musk became the world’s richest man by evangelising about electric cars – and delivering them by the million. Yet in recent months his company, Tesla, has struggled to maintain its momentum: sales have dropped this year, and so has its share price.

Those struggles have become emblematic of a broader reckoning facing the electric vehicle (EV) industry. After the soaring demand and valuations of the coronavirus pandemic years, the pace of sales growth has slowed. The industry has entered a new phase, with questions over whether the switch from petrol and diesel to cleaner electric is facing a troublesome stall or a temporary speed bump.

Group banned plants ‘removed from habitat’ from its shows – causing uproar from enthusiasts

A furious row has blown up in the UK’s leading succulent society over the practice of taking desirable specimens from the wild, with the chair resigning in protest over the behaviour of his fellow enthusiasts.

Succulents have risen in popularity in recent years: they are attractive and hardy.

Soiled seas and huge shareholder dividends: where has the £64bn borrowed by firms since privatisation gone?

So that’s how they do it. I’d been wondering how, when more sewage has been entering our rivers than ever before, some of the water companies have managed to improve the ratio of the sewage they treat v the sewage that pours untreated from their storm overflows into our rivers and the sea. Now we know.

It’s called “flow trimming”. Sounds innocuous, doesn’t it? What it means is that sewage is diverted into rivers and ditches upstream of the water treatment works. By reducing the amount of sewage entering the works, the companies can claim to be dealing responsibly with a higher proportion of it.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist. Join him for a Guardian Live online event on Wednesday 8 May at 8pm BST. He will be talking about his new book, The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism. Book tickets here

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Open letter calls for green policies that empower farmers, after months of protests jeopardise future of flagship biodiversity deal

The EU’s nature restoration law will only work if it is enacted in partnership with farmers, a group of leading scientists has said, after months of protests have pushed the proposals to the brink of collapse.

In an open letter, leading biodiversity researchers from across the world said that efforts to restore nature are vital for guaranteeing food supplies – but farmers must be empowered to help make agriculture more environmentally friendly if the measures are to succeed.

Ali died of cancer last year. He was 21, and had to live in the choking smoke of the Rumaila oilfield

A year has passed since my beautiful boy Ali Julood died. Not a day goes by when I do not think of him smiling and playing football with his friends outside. Those days are gone. As a father, that gives me great pain.

Ali was diagnosed with leukaemia at the age of 15. The cancer caused him to drop out of school, leave his football team and spend years undergoing painful medical treatment. He died at the age of 21 on 21 April 2023.

Authorities are rushing to save more than 150 whales from a mass stranding at a beach in Western Australia’s south-west. Four pods have spread across roughly 500 metres at Toby Inlet near Dunsborough and 26 of these have died, Parks and Wildlife Service Western Australia confirmed. Wildlife officers, marine scientists and veterinarians are on site assessing the conditions of the whales that have become stranded

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• Mass pilot whale stranding on WA beach sparks rescue

Finance chiefs say higher taxes for the super-rich are key to battling global inequality and climate crisis

• Billionaires should pay minimum 2% wealth tax, say G20 ministers

When the governors of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund convened for the spring meetings last week, it was all about the really big questions. What can the international community do to accelerate decarbonisation and fight climate change? How can highly indebted countries retain fiscal space to invest in poverty eradication, social services and global public goods? What does the international community need to do to get back on track towards reaching the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)? How can multilateral development banks be strengthened to support these ambitions?

There is one issue that makes addressing these global challenges much harder: inequality. While the disparity between the richest and poorest countries has slightly narrowed, the gap remains alarmingly high. Moreover, in the past two decades, we have witnessed a significant increase in inequalities within most countries, with the income gap between the top 10% and the bottom 50% nearly doubling. Looking ahead, current global economic trends pose serious threats to progress towards higher equality.

Svenja Schulze is Germany’s minister for economic cooperation and development; Fernando Haddad is the minister of finance in Brazil; Enoch Godongwana is the minister of finance in South Africa; María Jesús Montero is first vice president and minister of finance and Carlos Cuerpo is the minister of economy, trade and business in Spain

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.

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.

As diplomats search for a deal to curb the world’s growing problem of plastic, piles of bottles, buoys, nets and packaging keep building up in what should be a pristine environment

As our small fishing boat slows to a halt in a shallow bay south-east of Puerto Ayora, Santa Cruz, in the Galápagos Islands, a green turtle surfaces next to us, followed by a second, then a third a few metres away. A spotted eagle ray glides underneath the vessel.

The skipper, Don Nelson, steps on to the black volcanic reef, slippery with algae. We follow, past exposed mangrove roots and up on to higher ground. Pelicans swooping into the trees and small birds, perching on branches, ignore our approach.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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).