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Government’s UKEF criticised for ‘locking us all into more carbon emissions for decades to come’ with assistance for the sector

A UK government agency has financially supported the high-carbon aviation industry with billions of pounds since the Paris climate agreement was adopted, it can be revealed.

The effective subsidy for new airports, aircraft and maintenance comes despite the agency believing the oil-dependent sector is unlikely to begin cutting emissions “materially” before the next decade.

Troy, New York, has yet to remove a single lead pipe five years after getting the money. What went wrong?

In 2018, almost 30 cities across New York state received federal money to carry out a specific, urgent task: removing lead service lines that poison drinking water.

The city of Troy – which sits across the Hudson River and just north of Albany – was among them, receiving $500,000. But five years later, city leaders have failed to spend a single dollar of that money, and have yet to remove a single lead pipe.

Tulare Lake was drained a century ago. Now locals fear flooding as agencies rush in sandbags and rebuild levees

Kayode Kadara is worried about the rising waters near his home. Just a few months ago, this landscape in California’s Central Valley was a dry basin filled with pistachio and almond groves.

Then a winter of historic rain and snow brought Tulare Lake – a huge freshwater body drained a century ago by agricultural canals – rushing back from the dead. Workers from state agencies have brought sandbags in by helicopter, rebuilt levees and constructed walls to hold the deluge back.

Environmental law professor Jody Freeman urged to cut ties with ConocoPhillips, which pays her more than $350,000 a year

The Harvard environmental law professor at the centre of a conflict-of-interest row lobbied the regulator on behalf of the oil and gas company that pays her more than $350,000 a year, a new investigation can reveal.

Emails seen by the Guardian and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) show that Jody Freeman facilitated a meeting between a director at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and ConocoPhillips, one of the world’s worst polluters that is pushing to weaken forthcoming climate regulations. The company’s Willow drilling project in Alaska was recently approved by the Biden administration, despite scientists warning it will be catastrophic for global heating.

Cornishman Ned Bailey has caught and returned ‘notched’ lobsters for years as part of a broader effort to preserve stocks. But many fishers do not

Ned Bailey has spent the best part of four decades fishing off the south coast of Cornwall. Today, in his yellow oilskins and accompanied by his wind-tousled collie spaniel, the 58-year-old is doing the rounds in the Falmouth estuary, hauling up a string of rust-darkened lobster pots.

He tosses out stray crabs, several starfish and a squirming conger eel. Every so often he pulls out a lobster: if the carapace is over 90mm (3.5in) long, he keeps it; if not, it’s thrown back into the sea, in line with regulations.

Coalition of 13 regional Indigenous leaders points out Australian parliament’s votes are only 227 among nearly 18 million. Follow the day’s news live

• Liberal party accused of ‘turning its back’ on Indigenous people by opposing voice
• ‘Dutton’s voice stance doesn’t protect Indigenous people. The no campaign is already scaring them’ | Lorena Allam
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Former Tasmanian Liberal premier condemns party’s opposition to voice

Tasmania is the last Liberal state government left in the country and its former premier has taken to social media this morning to speak out against the federal party’s decision to oppose the voice to parliament.

Should the Liberal party maintain its opposition to the voice it will simply accelerate its increasing irrelevance.

I have asked for Cyber Security NSW to issue advice to NSW government employees, to implement this change as soon as possible.

I will no longer be using TikTok.

Shadow minister submits bill to curb spills as Environment Agency reveals sewage was dumped for almost 1m hours last year

Ministers have treated coastal communities as if they are “open sewers”, Labour has said, after a damaging analysis of Environment Agency (EA) data revealed sewage was dumped for almost a million hours last year.

In total, the data – which was analysed by the party – shows 141,777 sewage-dumping events occurred across 137 constituencies on the coasts of England and Wales in 2022.

Two people were seen boarding the train with the animal wrapped in a towel

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A platypus believed to have been taken from the wild and transported on a Brisbane train urgently needs to be returned to its natural environment, officials say.

Two people were spotted boarding the train at Morayfield on Tuesday with a platypus wrapped in a towel, Queensland police said.

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Gerard Rennick met with scorn, derision and plenty of corrections over viral tweet and claim that scientists are ‘cancelling gravity’

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An Australian senator has attempted to undermine the entire theory of the greenhouse effect with a bizarre viral claim that scientists have been ignoring gravity’s role in heating the planet.

The tweet from the Queensland senator Gerard Rennick, a member of the conservative Liberal National party of Queensland which is part of the main opposition Coalition, has gone viral this week and has been met with scorn, derision and plenty of corrections from high-profile climate scientists.

Chris Barrie says global heating poses larger security threat than China, and Australians should be armed with this information

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A former Australian defence force chief has called on the government to release its assessment of the security threats posed by the climate crisis, which he says they received late last year.

Guardian Australia understands the Office of National Intelligence’s “urgent climate risk assessment” looked at how global heating affected Australia’s national security, but relied in part on classified information.

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The Natural Resources Access Regulator is also prosecuting the alleged theft of water by another irrigator near Wentworth on the Murray

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A Riverina irrigator has been convicted and fined more than $150,000 for taking $1.1m worth of water from an at-risk groundwater source in south-western New South Wales during a period of drought between July 2017 and June 2020.

Dean Troy Salvestro pleaded guilty to five charges against sections 91G(2) and 60C(2) of the Water Management Act 2000 in a judgment handed down in the NSW land and environment court. Four of the charges concerned breaches of bore extraction limits and one charge was for taking water not in accordance with an access licence allocation.

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Global heating has been seen as the cause for these damaging storms, which are expected to increase significantly this century

A spate of devastating tornadoes that have recently ripped through parts of the eastern and southern US states could portend the sort of damage that will become more commonplace due to changes wrought by global heating, scientists have warned.

More than 50 people have died from the tornadoes and thunderstorms in the past two weeks, with the latest powerful storm system wreaking havoc in states including Alabama, Illinois, Mississippi, Tennessee and Arkansas on Friday. One man survived by hiding in his bathtub, while a separate storm caused a tiger to escape a zoo.

From the Iberian lynx to the Chilean devil ray and mountain gorilla, these stunning images by some of the world’s best nature photographers appear in The New Big 5: A Global Photography Project for Endangered Wildlife, by photographer and Guardian contributor Graeme Green. The book was borne out of a project to create a big 5 of photography rather than hunting, shooting with a camera, not a gun

Cross-currents of denialism, boosterism, broken governance systems and deep-seated racism will meet with rapidly accelerating sea level rise

Predictions about how much water is coming vary greatly. Some scientists say we should be planning on three feet of rise by 2050, six feet by 2070 and 10 feet by 2100. Someday, not too long from now, the stories of many current coastal and riverside cities across the US will include sudden plot twists as well as new beginnings, as edges that had seemed solid liquify and become indistinguishable from the seas around them.

That brings us to Charleston, South Carolina. Its geography is that of a small New York City. The city also has a history of racial immorality, often ignored by its contemporary boosters.

Oslo wants to raise taxes on its aquaculture industry, which could provide a model for how to better manage the marine environment

Norway supplies more than half of the world’s farmed salmon – a whopping 1.5m tonnes last year. After fossil fuels, it is the country’s largest source of national income, and a hugely lucrative one: in 2022, operating profit margins for Norway’s salmon farmers were estimated at 45%.

Last September, the Norwegian government set out a proposal to raise taxes on the industry. Aimed at sharing the profits of one the country’s key resources, the idea was widely described as a “salmon tax”, and set at 40% (on top of 22% corporation tax).

Researchers say there are interlinked benefits across mental and physical health from prescribed time in green spaces or near bodies of water

Prescriptions encouraging people to spend more time in nature are linked to reduced blood pressure and improvements in anxiety and depression symptoms, according to new analysis.

Doctors sometimes use nature-based social prescription programs – sometimes described as “green prescriptions” or “blue prescriptions” – to advise patients to spend time in green spaces or near bodies of water.

Many blue flag beaches were covered in waste, and Brighton was among the worst-hit, Lib Dem report shows

England’s most celebrated beaches faced 8,500 hours of sewage dumping last year, new figures show.

Many beaches with blue flag status– an international mark of recognition that a beach is deemed safe and has good water quality – were found to have been covered in waste over the last 12 months.

CPTPP membership will result in more deforestation and endanger animal welfare, say campaigners

The UK’s membership of a Pacific trade agreement will result in more deforestation overseas, endanger animal welfare and “make a mockery” of the government’s environmental commitments, campaigners have said.

Ministers signed an agreement late last week for the UK to become a member of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), a trading bloc of 11 nations including Japan, Canada, Australia and Mexico.

Blood rushes through its veins and the whale’s enormous body shakes slightly

Blue whales are the largest animal ever to have lived – including the dinosaurs – which also makes them the largest animal ever to have slept. All that sleep! A whole whale’s worth, in vast, cold water, the ocean a closed eye, salty and dark. To watch a whale sleeping is to feel as though they have turned the world around them into sleep, that they are suspended in sleep itself, in the liquid that fills your bones when you turn off the light.

Sperm whales sleep vertically, in groups, suspended impossibly, the way an object might be suspended only in a dream. They look like planets, their orbit suddenly stopped. They look as if they could stop time. And maybe they would, if they ever slept for longer than 20 minutes, or closed both eyes.

Scientists have captured footage of a fish swimming more than 8km underwater, setting a new record for the deepest fish ever recorded. The animal, an unknown snailfish species belonging to the genus Pseudoliparis, was filmed at a depth of 8,336 metres in the Izu-Ogasawara trench, south-east of Japan. The footage was captured from an autonomous deep ocean vessel as part of a two-month expedition that began last year

• Scientists find deepest fish ever recorded at 8,300 metres underwater near Japan