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Pollution aside, the problem with expanding Heathrow lies in the disruption and delay inevitable in such a complex project

Get ready for another season of that interminable saga, Heathrow’s third runway. There was a lull during the Covid pandemic when the airport’s owners, despite winning permission from the supreme court in 2020 to submit a planning application, cooled their jets while they waited for passenger numbers to recover. Now the whole thing is back, courtesy of Rachel Reeves. The chancellor is reported to be preparing to use a speech next week to declare support for a third runway at Heathrow alongside wider airport expansion in the south-east.

The best form of airport expansion is none at all, environmentalists (some of them in the cabinet) will argue, but it looks as if Reeves has dismissed those objections in the name of economic growth. A £1.1bn investment in Stansted, to enable it to grow its annual capacity from 29 million passengers to 43 million, was welcomed by the government last year.

More than 40% of individual corals monitored around One Tree Island reef bleached by heat stress and damaged by flesh-eating disease

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More than 40% of individual corals monitored around a Great Barrier Reef island were killed last year in the most widespread coral bleaching outbreak to hit the reef system, a study has found.

Scientists tracked 462 colonies of corals at One Tree Island in the southern part of the Great Barrier Reef after heat stress began to turn the corals white in early 2024. Researchers said they encountered “catastrophic” scenes at the reef.

First Quantum Minerals’ copper operation was shut down more than a year ago, but Indigenous people report restrictions on movement and unexplained illness and death

For the people of the nine Indigenous communities within the perimeter of the sprawling Cobre Panamá copper mine, travelling into and out of the concession is far from straightforward. An imposing metal gateway staffed by the mining company’s security guards blocks the road. People say the company severely restricts their movement in and out of the zone, letting them through only on certain days.

The mining concession, located 120km (75 miles) west of Panama City, is owned by Canada-based First Quantum Minerals, which operates through its local subsidiary, Minera Panamá. The company’s private security guards, not the national police, patrol the concession. Local residents, mostly subsistence farmers of modest means, say that First Quantum operates as a state within a state.

Critical CO₂ stores held in permafrost are being released as the landscape changes with global heating, report shows

A third of the Arctic’s tundra, forests and wetlands have become a source of carbon emissions, a new study has found, as global heating ends thousands of years of carbon storage in parts of the frozen north.

For millennia, Arctic land ecosystems have acted as a deep-freeze for the planet’s carbon, holding vast amounts of potential emissions in the permafrost. But ecosystems in the region are increasingly becoming a contributor to global heating as they release more CO₂ into the atmosphere with rising temperatures, a new study published in Nature Climate Change concluded.

Artisanal shellfish farmers face ruinous losses but money meant to help is going to the powerful fishing industry, say critics

Early on a warm September morning in southern Italy, Giovanni Nicandro sets out from the port of Taranto in his small boat. Summoning his courage, the mussel farmer inspects his year’s work – only to find them all dead, a sight that almost brings him to tears.

“We have many problems,” he says. “The problems start as soon as we open our eyes in the morning.” The loss is total – not only for Nicandro but also for Taranto’s 400 other mussel farmers, after a combination of pollution and rising sea temperatures devastated their harvest.

Move is part of £300m investment that includes deepwater quay and building of hundreds of homes near city centre

Belfast harbour is to invest £90m to upgrade its port to serve a wave of wind energy projects and cruise ships as part of a £300m investment plan.

A new deepwater quay capable of supporting wind projects will be the largest part of an investment plan that also includes the construction of hundreds of homes at a site near the city centre.

Lightwood, Derbyshire: The spray had created such a stunning showcase of ice that it lured me down a steep bank – twice

For 10 days Buxton was buried by snow and further bound, night after night, in sub-zero conditions. At Lightwood there’s a steep-sided dell enfolded beneath old beech trees and held in almost permanent shadow, so that as I threaded a precarious route to the bottom, I could feel a further instant fall in temperature.

The goal was a water pipe. Its outflow cascades for barely a metre, but relentless spray has scoured as its catchment basin a gritstone arc 3 metres across. Those rocks are plastered by platyhypnidium moss, while the drier south side is adorned with frost-wilted remnants of broad buckler and hart’s-tongue ferns.

President declares energy emergency, reiterates Paris withdrawal plan and overturns emissions standards

Donald Trump declared a national energy emergency on the first day of his new presidency, as part of a barrage of pro-fossil fuel actions and efforts to “unleash” already booming US energy production that included also rolling back restrictions in drilling in Alaska and undoing a pause on gas exports.

The emergency declaration, which made good on a campaign-trail promise but could be open to legal challenge, would allow his administration to fast-track permits for new fossil fuel infrastructure.

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Altadena’s Village Playgarden education center served diverse families with outdoor classrooms, small farm and animals – till it was destroyed by flames

In Altadena, it had become the hot ticket among the preschool set.

But when Geoff and Kikanza Ramsey-Ray first bought the two-acre property at the edge of town in 2008, it was a shambles. The home was a rental for over 30 years and the grounds were woefully neglected. Yet the couple saw promise. Nestled against Angeles Crest national forest, with a mountain view and on a road with few other homes, the place felt protected and perfect for their vision: an early education center called Village Playgarden.

Bubbles of air trapped in ancient Antarctic ice, dating up to 2m years old, contain unknown information about Earth’s past climate

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Traversing the world’s most unforgiving continent requires a generous measure of stoicism. “We took risks, we knew we took them,” wrote the Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott in 1912, trapped by a fierce blizzard in the days before he died, on an ill-fated expedition to reach the south pole. “Things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint.”

More than a century later, elemental extremes are still an unfortunate fact of life for scientists in Antarctica. Despite three seasons of bad luck which have delayed his team’s quest to find the world’s oldest ice, the paleoclimate scientist Dr Joel Pedro remains sanguine. He has good reason to be: this summer, after multiple setbacks and a relocation, a plan years in the making is finally coming to fruition.

Volunteers who leave water in the desert describe rising fears of vigilantes and climate peril

It was a blustery day in the Sonoran desert as a group of humanitarian aid volunteers hiked through a vast dusty canyon to leave gallons of bottled water and canned beans in locations where exhausted migrants could find them.

Empty plastic bottles, rusty cans and footprints heading north were among the signs of human activity strewn between the towering saguaro and senita cacti, in an isolated section of the Organ Pipe Cactus national monument – about 20 miles (32km) north of the US-Mexico border.

Francesca Osowska, the outgoing chief executive of NatureScot, says more needs to be done for Scotland to hit target of restoring 30% of natural environment by 2030

Scotland faces a significant challenge to meet its pledges on protecting nature without more funding and a shift in attitudes, a senior conservation figure has warned.

Francesca Osowska, the outgoing chief executive of the agency NatureScot, said greater urgency and action was needed to meet a promise to restore 30% of Scotland’s natural environment by 2030.

Sifting for bottles together never gets old – it’s the idea that something so fragile could have survived for so long in one piece and in one place

My family and I have a weird hobby. We like to dig for old bottles. It’s something we stumbled upon, quite literally, one soggy weekend.

On a visit to the family farm, we were exploring a shady gully below the house, where an occasional creek meandered down the hill. One of the kids tripped on a jutting ridge in the mud. Dug up and sluiced out, the object revealed itself to be a round, honey-hued medicine bottle.

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

Report criticises ‘slow progress’ on industry regulation, amid record fish mortality and concerns over welfare and environmental pollution

The Scottish government has been criticised for its “slow progress” on regulating the salmon farming industry by a parliamentary inquiry that took evidence for five months before reaching its conclusion.

The report reveals that MSPs “seriously considered” calling for a moratorium on new farms and expansion of existing sites due to concerns over persistently high salmon mortality rates but did not do so due to uncertainties over the impact on jobs and communities.

Our society emphasises the value of conquering and overcoming your fears – but I can live with the idea of not climbing every mountain

Earlier this year, I finally climbed Mount Anne. This has taken an unlikely amount of time – I’ve been climbing Tasmanian mountains for years, but had never been up one of the island’s signature summits.

A “peak bagging” hobby is great fun, and takes you out to all sorts of interesting places. Some Tasmanians set themselves to climb the Abels, a list of 158 mountains that are at least 1100m high, but the list compiled by the Hobart Walking Club, the one I follow, is far more ridiculous – a total of 481 summits to find your way up. A list that huge seems bigger than most of them.

The fires have been devastating for humans and taken a toll on nature, but many of California’s ecosystems will be able to regenerate

Beth Pratt has spent her career protecting Los Angeles’ mountain lions, which roam an area currently engulfed by wildfires. These apex predators, also known as cougars or pumas, share a scrubby landscape with lavish private homes and a dense network of roads. When major fires take out huge areas of open space, their options are limited.

“This is the LA area – these mountain lions can’t move into the Kardashians’ back yard,” says Pratt, California executive director for the National Wildlife Federation. “My heart is very heavy right now,” she says.

Experts believe H5N1 bird flu belongs in a growing category of infectious diseases that can cause pandemics across many species. But there are ways to reduce the risks

Bird flu poses a threat that is “unique and new in our lifetime” because it has become a “‘panzootic” that can kill huge numbers across multiple species, experts warn. For months, highly pathogenic bird flu, or H5N1, has been circulating in dairy farms, with dozens of human infections reported among farm workers. It has now jumped into more than 48 species of mammals, from bears to dairy cows, causing mass die-offs in sea lions and elephant seal pups. Last week, the first person in the US died of the infection.

This ability to infect, spread between, and kill such a wide range of creatures has prompted some scientists to call H5N1 a “panzootic”: an epidemic that leaps species barriers and can devastate diverse animal populations, posing a threat to humans too. As shrinking habitats, biodiversity loss and intensified farming create perfect incubators for infectious diseases to jump from one species to another, some scientists say panzootics could become one of the era’s defining threats to human health and security.

Ontario’s Marineland lost five belugas last year, which the park’s management puts down to the ‘circle of life’. But activists claim animal welfare is at stake

On the southern shores of the Niagara River, a few hundred feet from the thundering falls, sits Marineland of Canada – an amusement park, zoo, aquarium and forest occupying nearly 1,000 acres of land (400 hectares). Over the years, millions of people have clamoured to view the park’s 4,000 animals, including its prized walruses, orcas, dolphins and belugas.

But over the past few years, the park has taken a decidedly dark turn as there has been a string of deaths among the world’s largest captive beluga population. Last year, five belugas died at the facility bringing the total number of whales and dolphins to die there since 2019 to more than 20.

A fire tornado was spotted as the Palisades fire continued to blaze through the San Fernando valley in California

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Environmentalists condemn unauthorised releases as ‘reckless’ and ‘highly irresponsible’

For a brief moment this week, lynx have been roaming the Scottish Highlands once again. But this was not the way conservationists had hoped to end their 1,000-year absence.

On Wednesday, Police Scotland received reports of two lynx in a forest in the Cairngorms national park, sparking a frantic search. That episode ended in less than a day. Both animals were quickly captured by experts from the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS) and taken to quarantine facilities at Highland wildlife park.

Firefighters battle on as people across Los Angeles struggle to find a way forward on Friday

At least 45 whales were entangled by fishing ropes and line on the east coast in 2024. 'There’s a lot of times when we’ll get out to an entanglement where we just think, this animal should just probably be put to sleep,' says Sea World’s head of marine sciences, Wayne Phillips.

The constant drag of rope and floats slowly causes a whale to succumb to exhaustion. 'It’s probably the worst way of dying for any marine … animal,' marine scientist Olaf Meynecke, says. 'It takes weeks to several months until they actually die'

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

Wildfires continued to burn across LA, with at least five people killed and more than 1,500 buildings destroyed. A new blaze broke out in the Hollywood Hills and evacuation orders were extended to Santa Monica. Winds had eased, but the danger was far from over

• California fires live: follow the latest news
• At least five dead as firefighters struggle to contain LA blazes

Wildfires continued to grow in Los Angeles as overtaxed fire crews battled three major out-of-control blazes that have killed at least five people. The largest and most devastating so far have been the Palisades fire and the Eaton fire, but other blazes, particularly the growing Hurst fire and the Hollywood Hills-based Sunset fire, are continuing to worry Los Angeles residents

The tiny nation of Niue has raised £3m selling sponsorship of its marine protected area at just over £100 for a square kilometre

Niue, also known as the Rock of Polynesia, is one of the tiniest island states in the world. It takes a mere two hours to drive around it, giving views of its rugged limestone cliffs and occasional sandy coves. These coves give way to caves and chasms, once used for storage, burial sites and even as living spaces. But perhaps what visitors seek most are its crystal clear waters, home to spinner dolphins, eels, grey reef sharks, sea snakes and humpback whales.

Now the island is engaged in an innovative plan to try to conserve these vast and pristine territorial waters. The scheme, which has been running for a year, involves selling off sponsorship of the ocean surrounding the island to individuals or companies for NZ$250 (£116) a square kilometre. So far, it has raised NZ$7m, nearly halfway to its target.

British chef Mike Keen paddled up the coast of Greenland eating only what local people did, and the health benefits led him to question the global food system

For a period of two months last year, a typical day for chef Mike Keen would see him skipping breakfast and lunch in favour of snacks such as dried capelin (a small bait fish), dried halibut, jerky-like dried whale and a local Greenlandic whale skin and blubber treat called mattak.

Mike Keen eats fermented seal blood in Sermilik fjord, east Greenland. Photograph: Mike Keen

Experts say sighting of orca in Puget Sound with second deceased calf is ‘devastating’ for ailing population

An apparently grieving killer whale who swam more than 1,000 miles (1,600km) pushing the body of her dead newborn has lost another calf and is again carrying the body, a development researchers say is a “devastating” loss for the ailing population.

The Washington state-based Center for Whale Research said the orca, known as Tahlequah, or J35, was spotted in the Puget Sound area with her deceased calf.