Cameras capture lone creature collecting materials for its lodge in riverside nature reserve

A wild beaver has been spotted in Norfolk for the first time since beavers were hunted to extinction in England at the beginning of the 16th century.

It was filmed dragging logs and establishing a lodge in a “perfect beaver habitat� on the River Wensum at Pensthorpe, a nature reserve near Fakenham in Norfolk.

Exclusive: ‘extremely unhelpful’ policy seen as deterrent to clearing thousands of dump sites across England

Millions of pounds in landfill tax owed to the government has to be paid by the Environment Agency (EA) if it clears any of the thousands of illegal waste dumps across the country.

Of the £15m that taxpayers are paying for the clearance of the only site the agency has committed to clearing up – a vast illegal dump at Hoad’s Wood in Kent – £4m is landfill tax.

Caistor St Edmund, Norfolk: I have memories of seeing them at night, on our pyjama-clad safaris round the farm, but they haven’t been here for a decade

There’s a shimmering in the sky and I can’t work it out. Driving, I can only snatch glimpses of flickering light. I pull into a lay-by near home. Now I can make out five or six broad-winged birds, flying in a loose flock. They are black and white and their motion reflects the low sun, flashing light and contrasting dark, like a disturbance in the force field.

Lapwings, or “peewits� as they are known for their call, are birds of my childhood. Every spring, they nested in the same field and, in winter, flocks gathered. I loved their crest and the way their petrol-sheened plumage changed with the light, from dark green to bronze or purple.

RSPB says growing trend for honouring species that are in decline is not matched by action on conservation

Britain’s street names are being inspired by skylarks, lapwings and starlings, even as bird populations decline.

According to a report by the RSPB, names such as Skylark Lane and Swift Avenue are increasingly common. Using OS Open Names data from 2004 to 2024, the conservation charity found that road names featuring bird species had risen by 350% for skylarks, 156% for starlings and 104% for lapwings, despite populations of these having fallen in the wild.

Conservationists say changes, coupled with underfunding, will curb take-up and leave less land protected for nature

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An ambitious scheme to restore England’s nature over coming decades has been undermined after the government inserted a clause allowing it to terminate contracts with only a year’s notice, conservationists have said.

The project was designed to fund landscape-scale restoration over thousands of hectares, whether on large estates or across farms and nature reserves. The idea was to create huge reserves for rare species to thrive – projects promoted as decades-long commitments to securing habitat for wildlife well into the future.

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‘Soilsmology’ aims to map world’s soils and help avert famine, says not-for-profit co-founded by George Monbiot

• George Monbiot: Over a pint in Oxford, we may well have stumbled upon the holy grail of agriculture

A groundbreaking soil-health measuring technique could help avert famine and drought, scientists have said.

At the moment, scientists have to dig lots of holes to study the soil, which is time-consuming and damages its structure, making the sampling less accurate.

Mark Carney is considering lifting a tanker ban that has protected coastal communities for 53 years

The distress call went out to the Canadian coast guard station after midnight on an October night. The Nathan E Stewart, an American-flagged tugboat, sailing through the light winds and rain of the central British Columbia coast, had grounded on a reef.

The captain tried to reverse, moving the rudder from hard over port to hard over starboard. The boat pivoted but did not move, and the tug repeatedly struck the sea bed.

Bureaucratic delays and funding shortages stall plans to carve out a forest reserve for the uncontacted Indigenous group on the southern fringe of the Brazilian Amazon

In 2024, agents of the National Foundation for Indigenous Peoples (Funai) walked more than 60 miles through rainforest on the southern fringe of the Brazilian Amazon on a mission to monitor and help protect a group of Indigenous people who had no contact with the modern world.

What they found was a small basket freshly woven from leaves, a child’s footprints on the bank of a creek, and tree trunks hacked open hours before to extract honey. There were huts abandoned a year before that were sinking into the forest floor, and brazil nut pods discarded around old campfires. They were all signs that the Pardo River Kawahiva people were there.

Former Perth curator Mark Harvey is one of the few people on Earth to have described 1,000 new species, many of them arachnids. Colleagues say his legacy is ‘unquantifiable’

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For most people around the world, 16 August 1977 was memorable because it was the day Elvis Presley died.

“We turned the radio on when we got back in the car and that was the headline. Elvis was dead,� remembers Dr Mark Harvey.

The impending collapse of UK carsharing is an embarrassment for a government attempting to curb the dominance of cars

Zipcar, the world’s largest carsharing club, is leaving the UK. The company, which operates about 3,000 shared vehicles in Britain, has announced plans to shutter its UK operations at the end of the month. The news comes as a bitter blow to the hundreds of thousands of Britons who regularly rely on carsharing, and is a major setback in efforts to reduce emissions and traffic congestion.

I’m particularly gutted. This year I finally learned to drive, specifically in order to become a Zipcar member for the rare occasions when I need a vehicle. As newly qualified drivers aren’t allowed to hire Zipcars until they’ve held a licence for a year, I bought a secondhand VW Beetle to tide me over, counting the days until I could flog it and sign up for Zipcar instead. Now, with the service shutting up shop, I fear I will be stuck maintaining a costly lump of steel that I need for less than 1% of the year.

Phineas Harper is a writer and curator

The case of a planned Cumbrian coalmine shows how governments around the world are being threatened by litigation in shadowy offshore courts

How do you reckon our political system works? Perhaps something like this. We elect MPs. They vote on bills. If a majority is achieved, the bills becomes law. The law is upheld by the courts. End of story. Well, that’s how it used to work. No longer.

Today, foreign corporations, or the oligarchs who own them, can sue governments for the laws they pass, at offshore tribunals composed of corporate lawyers. The cases are held in secret. Unlike our courts, these tribunals allow no right of appeal or judicial review. You or I cannot take a case to them, nor can our government, or even businesses based in this country. They are open only to corporations based overseas.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

In what are dangerous times for democracies around the world, parliament’s overhaul of nature laws in the EPBC Act shows ambitious reform remains possible

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The passage of long overdue reforms to the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act demonstrates powerfully that democratic governance is alive and well in Australia.

The Australian parliament has done its job and passed 21st-century reforms that support a modern economy, enable the creation of new and sustainable jobs while promising not to destroy, but in fact improve, the health of the natural world.

Ecologically sound farming and land stewardship can change individual, collective and planetary health

Within Indigenous communities across North America and beyond, we have long known that food is medicine. This isn’t just theory; it’s fact. We understand that seasonal, regionally specific and culturally relevant foods are vital for nurturing, nourishing and healing both our people and our planet. And it’s high time we all embrace the Native American concept of food as medicine.

Our ancestral wisdom has ensured our survival for millennia, even in the face of unthinkable circumstances like colonialism, genocide and ongoing oppression. This ever-relevant knowledge will ensure our collective survival amid today’s unthinkable circumstances here in the United States, such as political instability, climate change and rising health issues.

Nootka lupins, introduced in the 1940s to repair damaged soil, are rampaging across the island, threatening its native species

It was only when huge areas of Iceland started turning purple that authorities realised they had made a mistake. By then, it was too late. The Nootka lupin, native to Alaska, had coated the sides of fjords, sent tendrils across mountain tops and covered lava fields, grasslands and protected areas.

Since it arrived in the 1940s, it has become an accidental national symbol. Hordes of tourists and local people pose for photos in the ever-expanding fields in June and July, entranced by the delicate cones of flowers that cover the north Atlantic island.

In the tropical dry forests of northern Colombia, a small team is gradually restoring the degraded habitat of the rare cotton-top tamarin

Luis Enrique Centena spent decades silencing the forest. Now, he listens. Making a whistle, the former logger points up to a flash of white and reddish fur in the canopy. Inquisitive eyes peer back – a cotton-top tamarin, one of the world’s rarest primates.

“I used to cut trees and never took the titís into account,� says Centena, calling the cotton-tops by their local name. “I ignored them. I didn’t know that they were in danger of extinction, I only knew I had to feed my family. But now we have become friends.�

A boom in places offering petting sessions is linked to a rise in the illegal movement of exotic and endangered species, say experts

The second floor of an unassuming office building in central Bangkok is a strange place to encounter the world’s largest rodent. Yet here, inside a small enclosure with a shallow pool, three capybaras are at the disposal of dozens of paying customers – all clamouring for a selfie. As people eagerly thrust leafy snacks toward the nonchalant-looking animals, few seem to consider the underlying peculiarity: how, exactly, did this South American rodent end up more than 10,000 miles from home, in a bustling Asian metropolis?

Capybara cafes have been cropping up across the continent in recent years, driven by the animal’s growing internet fame. The semi-aquatic animals feature in more than 600,000 TikTok posts. In Bangkok, cafe customers pay 400 baht (£9.40) for a 30-minute petting session with them, along with a few meerkats and Chinese bamboo rats. Doors are open 12 hours a day, seven days a week.

The Mohana of Pakistan’s Sindh province once thrived on the lake but pollution and drought have caused the fragile ecosystem to collapse, along with their way of life

At the mouth of Lake Manchar, gentle lapping disturbs the silence. A small boat cuts through the water, propelled by a bamboo pole scraping the muddy bottom of the canal.

Bashir Ahmed manoeuvres his frail craft with agility. His slender boat is more than just a means of transport. It is the legacy of a people who live to the rhythm of water: the Mohana. They have lived for generations on the waters of Lake Manchar in Sindh province, a vast freshwater mirror covering nearly 250 sq km. The lake, once the largest in Pakistan, was long an oasis of life. Now, it is dying.

Bashir Ahmed in his boat on the lake, next to simple huts built on top of the right bank outfall drain

Labour knows it needs to win over the ‘sea wall’ cohort of coastal voters in the next election. But as anger over inequality grows, time is running out

It is a lovely sunny autumn day in Ramsgate on Britain’s Kent coast, and quintessential seaside chippy Peter’s Fish Factory is doing a roaring lunchtime trade. Across the road, at the entrance to the town’s pier, local MP and chair of the newly reformed coastal parliamentary Labour party (PLP), Polly Billington, is having her photo taken.

In between shots she shows us the community art project that adorns the fence along the entrance to the pier. It is made up of pictures, drawn primarily by local children and young people, of the 65 little ships that set sail earlier this year from Ramsgate to commemorate the 85th anniversary of the Dunkirk evacuation.

Evidence that the whales and other marine animals are particularly vulnerable to sound is driving calls for quieter vessels

The delicate clicks and whistles of narwhals carry through Tasiujaq, locally known as Eclipse Sound, at the eastern Arctic entrance of the Northwest Passage. A hydrophone in this shipping corridor off Baffin Island, Nunavut, captures their calls as the tusked whales navigate their autumn migration route to northern Baffin Bay.

But as the Nordic Odyssey, a 225-metre ice-class bulk carrier servicing the nearby iron ore mine, approaches, its low engine rumble gives way to a wall of sound created by millions of collapsing bubbles from its propeller. The narwhals’ acoustic signals, evolved for one of Earth’s quietest environments, fall silent.

The Neoliner Origin set off on its inaugural two-week voyage from France to the US with the aim of revolutionising the notoriously dirty shipping industry

It is 8pm on a Saturday evening and eight of us are sitting at a table onboard a ship, holding on to our plates of spaghetti carbonara as our chairs slide back and forth. Michel Péry, the dinner’s host, downplays the weather as a “tempête de journalistes� – something sailors would not categorise as a storm, but which drama-seeking journalists might refer to as such to entertain their readers.

But after a white-knuckle night in our cabins with winds reaching 74mph or force 12 – officially a hurricane – Péry has to admit it was not just a “journalists’ storm�, but the real deal.

The search for a ginkgo-toothed beaked whale had taken five years, when a thieving albatross nearly ruined it all

It was an early morning in June 2024 and along the coast of Baja California in Mexico, scientists on the Pacific Storm research vessel were finishing their coffee and preparing for a long day searching for some of the most elusive creatures on the planet. Suddenly a call came from the bridge: “Whales! Starboard side!�

For the next few hours, what looked like a couple of juvenile beaked whales kept surfacing and disappearing until finally Robert Pitman, a now-retired researcher at Oregon State University, fired a small arrow from a modified crossbow at the back of one of them.

Cristina Dorador is on an urgent mission in the world’s driest desert, the Atacama in Chile. As the rise of drug-resistant superbugs kills millions per year, Cristina has made it her mission to uncover new, life-saving antibiotics in the stunning salt flats she has studied since she was 14. Against the magnificent backdrop of endless plains, microscopic discoveries lead her team of scientists to question how critically lithium mining is damaging the delicate ecosystem and impacting Indigenous communities

Sri Lanka and Indonesia deployed military personnel as they raced to help victims of devastating flooding that has killed more than 1,100 people across four countries in Asia.

Millions of people have been affected by a combination of tropical cyclones and heavy monsoon rains in Sri Lanka, parts of Indonesia’s Sumatra, Thailand and Malaysia in recent days.

In Indonesia, at least 604 people have been killed and 464 remain missing, according to the national disaster agency. The death toll stands at 366 in Sri Lanka, with 366 missing, and 176 dead in Thailand. Three deaths have been reported in Malaysia

• Sri Lanka and Indonesia deploy militaries as Asia floods death toll passes 1,100

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