Rammed earth sourced from, or near, the grounds of a proposed building site is attracting attention as an eco-friendly construction material

From afar, the low-rise homestead perched in the Wiltshire countryside may look like any other rural outpost, but step closer and the texture of the walls reveal something distinct from the usual facade of cement, brick and steel.

The Rammed Earth House in Cranborne Chase is one of the few projects in the UK that has been made by unstabilised rammed earth – a building material that consists entirely of compacted earth and which has been used as far back as the Neolithic period.

Charity praises effort to stop Ramsgate’s Pie Factory Music closing but calls for more youth services in coastal towns

The last remaining youth centre in one of England’s most deprived coastal places has been saved from being sold after a long campaign by the charity that has for 13 years called it home.

In November the Guardian revealed how the centre in Ramsgate on the Kent coast was facing being auctioned off by Kent county council, despite an independent report that estimated the centre was saving the council more than £500,000 a year in costs, including for services in mental health, youth justice and social care.

Shas Sheehan challenges refusal to remove 25,000 tonnes of waste causing ‘grave environmental hazard’ near school

A 25,000-tonne illegal waste dump next to a primary school in Wigan presents “a grave environmental hazard� and should be cleared, the chair of the Lords environment committee has told the government.

Shas Sheehan challenged the refusal of the Environment Agency to clean up an illegal waste dump in Bolton House Road in the Greater Manchester town, given the agency was spending millions clearing up illegal waste deposited in Kidlington, Oxfordshire.

CAA’s guidance also including booking sites to enable passengers to make ‘more informed travel decisions’

Airlines and booking firms should give UK customers information about the environmental impact of their flights, the regulator has said.

The Civil Aviation Authority urged booking sites to enable passengers to make “more informed travel decisions� by setting out estimates for carbon emissions for flights landing or taking off from British airports.

States and financial bodies using modelling that ignores shocks from extreme weather and climate tipping points

Flawed economic models mean the accelerating impact of the climate crisis could lead to a global financial crash, experts warn.

Recovery would be far harder than after the 2008 financial crash, they said, as “we can’t bail out the Earth like we did the banks�.

At a party event in a school hall in Lewisham, people told me how disillusionment with Labour has led to this moment

“How many?�

On the end of the phone is a nice press officer for the Greens, head full from a long day in Gorton, Manchester, showing off their would-be MP. And now, as Friday’s sky turns indigo, I’m calling about reports from Lewisham, south London, that tomorrow they’re expecting a flood of 500 Green activists. This comes as a surprise to the party’s own news machine.

Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist

Animal Equality says two surprise inspections in three years suggests ‘embarrassingly poor’ level of scrutiny

Scottish salmon farmers recorded more than 35m unexpected salmon deaths in just under three years but there were only two unannounced inspections of facilities over the same period.

In December, the Scottish government’s secretary for rural affairs, Mairi Gougeon, said that there was “a really robust regulatory regime when it comes to fin-fish aquaculture� but animal welfare campaigners say the figures call that claim into question.

A mangrove conservation project in Guanabara Bay has shown how a dying ecosystem can be transformed into a thriving sanctuary

With deep blue waters flanked by dramatic peaks, Guanabara Bay is the postcard view of Rio de Janeiro – but it is also one of Brazil’s most polluted coastal environments. Raw sewage and solid waste flow into the bay from surrounding cities, home to more than 8 million people. Cargo ships and oil platforms chug in and out of commercial ports, while dozens of abandoned vessels lie rotting in the water.

But at the head of the bay, between the cities of Itaboraí and Magé, the environment feels different. The air is purer, the waters are empty but for small fishing canoes, and flocks of birds soar overhead.

Paying attention to the calls of our avian neighbours can reduce stress, find scientists in Germany

Feeling stressed? Try a dose of birdsong to lift the spirits. A new study shows that paying attention to the treetop melodies of our feathered friends can boost wellbeing and bring down stress levels.

Previous research has shown that people feel better in bird-rich environments, but Christoph Randler, from the University of Tübingen, and colleagues wanted to see if that warm fuzzy feeling translated into measurable physiological changes. They rigged up a park with loudspeakers playing the songs of rare birds and measured the blood pressure, heart rate and cortisol levels (a marker of stress) of volunteers before and after taking a 30-minute walk through the park. Some volunteers experienced the birdsong-enriched environment, some heard just natural birdsong, and some wore noise-cancelling headphones and heard no birdsong. Half of the recruits were asked to pay attention to the birdsong.

With government action stalled and living in ‘inhumane’ conditions, families in San José are making plans to relocate

In Emilio Peña Delgado’s home, several photos hang on the wall. One shows him standing in front of a statue with his wife and oldest son in the centre of San José and smiling. In another, his two sons sit in front of caricatures from the film Cars. For him, the photos capture moments of joy that feel distant when he returns home to La Carpio, a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Costa Rica’s capital.

Delgado migrated with his family from Nicaragua to Costa Rica when he was 10, as his parents sought greater stability. When he started a family of his own, his greatest hope was to give his children the security he had lacked. But now, that hope is often interrupted by the threat of extreme weather events.

Trump has prioritized fossil fuel companies over consumers, hitting the lowest-income families hardest

Donald Trump promised to cut energy prices by 50%. Instead, average electricity prices over the past year have risen by about 6.7%, while natural gas prices have increased by 10.8%. Energy prices are influenced by many factors beyond any president’s direct control, including market conditions, weather-driven demand, regional infrastructure constraints and the rapid growth of energy-intensive datacenters that are driving new system costs. Policy choices do not determine prices on their own, but they do shape market outcomes, and the direction of this administration’s energy policy has been clear.

From his first days in office, President Trump made clear that his energy agenda would prioritize fossil fuel producers over consumers. His administration moved to expand US liquefied natural gas exports, increasing exposure to volatile global markets. At the same time, it froze wind power projects that provide some of the cheapest new electricity, intervened to keep costly coal plants running, and backed the elimination of energy-efficiency tax credits that lower household energy bills.

Mark Wolfe is executive director of National Energy Assistance Directors Association, co-director of the Center on Energy Poverty and Climate and adjunct faculty at the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy at George Washington University

Inadequate food supplies and collapsing rainforests must be recognised as national security threats – not pigeonholed as green issues

Ecosystems and national security used not to be mentioned in the same breath all that often – unless environmental campaigners were doing the talking. For years, climate and nature experts have struggled to get across the message that species extinctions, dead rivers and deforestation are an existential threat to people as well as animals and plants. As George Monbiot wrote last week, the publication of a government report thought to have been authored by intelligence chiefs, about the threats to the UK’s national security from biodiversity collapse, should be viewed as a step forward. The risks have become too extreme to be ignored.

The document is a national security assessment, not a scientific report. The data that it relies on comes from other sources. But the warnings that it contains about the UK’s heavy dependence on food and fertiliser imports, and the probable consequences of nature depletion, must be heeded. Originally due to be published in the autumn, the review appears to have had some sections removed. An earlier version is reported to have included warnings about the risks of “eco-terrorism� and the growing likelihood of war between China, India and Pakistan due to competition over a shrinking water supply from the Himalayas.

It took an FOI request to bring this national security assessment to light. For ‘doomsayers’ like us, it is the ultimate vindication

I know it’s almost impossible to turn your eyes away from the Trump show, but that’s the point. His antics, ever-grosser and more preposterous, are designed to keep him in our minds, to crowd out other issues. His insatiable craving for attention is a global-threat multiplier. You can’t help wondering whether there’s anything he wouldn’t do to dominate the headlines.

But we must tear ourselves away from the spectacle, for there are other threats just as critical that also require our attention. Just because you’re not hearing about them doesn’t mean they’ve gone away.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

The heatwave in Melbourne and Adelaide this week is likely to become the norm. We should prepare now

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On Tuesday, Australia’s second-largest city baked through one of its hottest days since modern instrumental records began in 1910. Several Melbourne suburbs topped 45C. The country’s fifth-largest city, Adelaide, reached that temperature on Monday. Its residents then suffered through their hottest night ever, with a minimum of about 34C.

Remote communities were even harder hit. It was 48.9C in Hopetoun and Walpeup in Victoria’s north-west, and 49.6C in Renmark, over the South Australian border. An out-of-control bushfire burned in the Otways region, south-west of Melbourne, near areas that just two weeks ago faced flash flooding.

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On a recent trip to Lake Geneva in Switzerland, biodiversity reporter Phoebe Weston witnessed the impact of one of the planet’s most potent invasive species, the quagga mussel. In just a decade the mollusc, originally from the Ponto-Caspian region of the Black Sea, has caused irreversible change beneath the surface of the picturesque lake. While ecologists believe invasive species play a major role in more than 60% of plant and animal extinctions, stopping them in their tracks is almost impossible. Phoebe tells Madeleine Finlay how invasive species spread, how conservationists are trying combat them and why some think a radical new approach is needed.

‘It’s an open invasion’: how millions of quagga mussels changed Lake Geneva for ever

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Fifteen years after a tsunami caused the Fukushima nuclear accident, only bears, raccoons and boar are seen on the streets. But the authorities and some locals want people to move back

Norio Kimura pauses to gaze through the dirt-flecked window of Kumamachi primary school in Fukushima. Inside, there are still textbooks lying on the desks, pencil cases are strewn across the floor; empty bento boxes that were never taken home.

Along the corridor, shoes line the route the children took when they fled, some still in their indoor plimsolls, as their town was rocked by a magnitude-9 earthquake on the afternoon of 11 March 2011 which went on to cause the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chornobyl.

Wolves killed more than 2,100 reindeer in Finland last year, and herders are blaming the Ukraine war

Juha Kujala no longer knows how many reindeer will return to his farm from the forest each December. The 54-year-old herder releases his animals into the wilderness on the 830-mile Finnish-Russian border each spring to grow fat on lichens, grass and mushrooms, just as his ancestors have done for generations.

But since 2022, grisly discoveries of reindeer skeletons on the forest floor have disrupted this ancient way of life. The culprits, according to Kujala: wolves from Russia.

Conservationists hail the ‘desperately needed’ measures and urge greater protection after up to 11% of endangered Tapanuli orangutans wiped out

The floods and landslides that tore through Indonesia’s fragile Batang Toru ecosystem in November 2024 – killing up to 11% of the world’s Tapanuli orangutan population – prompted widespread scrutiny of the extractive companies operating in the area at the time of the ecological catastrophe.

For weeks, investigators searched for evidence that the companies may have damaged the Batang Toru and Garoga watersheds before the disaster, which washed torrents of mud and logs into villages, claiming the lives of more than 1,100 people.

When Essex University’s Southend campus opened, it was a message of hope for a ‘left behind’ UK seaside town. Its closure will be felt far beyond its 800 students, some of whom will not get their degrees

The seaside city of Southend-on-Sea, on England’s east coast, looks grey on a winter afternoon in term-time. Its high street, bordering the university campus, is sparsely populated with market stalls, vape shops and discount retailers, and feels unusually quiet.

“There used to be lots of shops, restaurants and youth clubs around here,� says 23-year-old Nathan Doucette-Chiddicks. Now, the city is about to lose something else that it can scarcely do without.

A US judge will decide if, as research suggests, a chemical tyre additive is harming endangered fish species

Last week, a district judge in San Francisco, California, presided over a three-day trial brought by west coast fishers and conservationists against US tyre companies. The fishers allege that a chemical additive used in tyres is polluting rivers and waterways, killing coho salmon and other fish. If successful, the case could have implications far beyond the United States.

Canada has reached a tentative deal for 30 belugas in an amusement park to be shipped to four aquariums in US

• ‘It’s heartbreaking’: how 30 captive beluga whales have become pawns in row over animal cruelty

Before boarding the plane, the travellers will be given a dose of Valium to calm their nerves. For some, it will be the first time they’ve flown. Others have logged thousands of miles over the Pacific Ocean. Like most weary and anxious passengers, they will be offered minimal personal space on board and food isn’t included in their fare.

But for these jet-setters, the tight quarters and minimal refreshments aren’t meant to maximize airline profits: they’re meant to keep them safe.

Despite no criminal charges being brought against them, four officers have been detained since the MV Dali struck the Francis Scott Key Bridge, killing six workers

Several crew members of a ship that collided with a bridge in Baltimore almost two years ago are still being held in the US by federal authorities despite the fact that no criminal charges have been brought against them.

In the early hours of 26 March 2024, the MV Dali departed the port of Baltimore bound for Sri Lanka. While navigating the Fort McHenry channel, the 1,000ft-long Singapore-flagged cargo vessel lost power before striking the bridge. The impact resulted in the deaths of six people who were working on the bridge at the time.

A shortlist of 24 images has been selected for the wildlife photographer of the year people’s choice award. You can vote for your favourite image online. The winner will be announced on 25 March and shown from that date as part of the overall wildlife photographer of the year exhibition, which runs until 12 July at the Natural History Museum in London

Bushfires, marches and a summer of sport – Guardian Australia’s best photos from around the country

• Prayers, vigils and mitzvahs on the national day of mourning for Bondi beach terror attack victims – in pictures

• Drag racing at Sydney’s weekly street meet offers a change of pace for all walks of life

This week’s best wildlife photographs from around the world