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The 5,614km fence runs from South Australia to southern Queensland and was built to keep dingoes out, but ecologists say it’s ‘making things worse’ for semi-arid ecosystems

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In the far-western reaches of New South Wales, the world’s longest fence tracks through the red dirt making a cartographically straight path along state borders.

The 5,614km fence starts in South Australia, where it’s called the Dog Fence, and joins the NSW border near Broken Hill, where it becomes that state’s responsibility and is called the Wild Dog Fence. At Cameron Corner it veers north into Queensland and becomes the Wild Dog Barrier Fence. It follows the route set out in the 1940s by the old dingo fence, used to keep dingoes out of remote grazing land to the west and prime agricultural country in Queensland’s Darling Downs.

About 6,000 have been installed this year, a quarter of them rapid chargers that can power up a car in under an hour

The UK has installed a record number of public electric car chargers this year, as companies race to keep up with the growing number of battery vehicles on British roads.

Nearly 6,000 new chargers were installed during the first three months of 2024, according to quarterly figures from data company Zapmap published by the Department for Transport. About 1,500 of those were rapid chargers, capable of charging a car in less than an hour.

The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical concepts

Which conspiracy theories have been proved true? Anne Gibson, Leicester

Send new questions to nq@theguardian.com.

Water detective Dr Leon Barron studies London’s wastewater, analysing it in all its chemical, narcotic, polluted glory, before and after treatment. Amazingly, he still drinks the stuff from the tap

If you live in London, Dr Leon Barron knows what you’re up to. He knows what prescribed drugs you’re on – painkillers, antidepressants, antipsychotics or beta blockers – and what illicit ones you’re taking for fun. He knows if you’ve been drinking and when (“Friday and Saturday are the main ones”); perhaps even if you’re worried about your dog getting fleas.

Of course, I only mean the collective “you”, the city. Barron, who leads the Emerging Chemical Contaminants team at Imperial College, has no idea what any individual is taking or doing; he explains that very clearly and carefully. He has a research scientist’s precision plus the slight wariness of someone whose research has grabbed headlines, with the inaccuracies and misinterpretations that brings (I wonder what he thought about “Prawn to be wild”, reporting his research on cocaine residue in wild river shrimps.) But he’s also infectiously enthusiastic and generous with his time, spending a whole morning taking me round his lab and through his groundbreaking work.

Athletics Kenya is worried about how the climate might shape the future of its country, let alone its sport. And it is not alone

The drive from the tiny Eldoret airport to the town of Iten in the south-west corner of Kenya takes about an hour. It’s a winding unlit road with few road signs: you need to know where you’re going to get there. The town’s population isn’t known – there hasn’t been a census in more than a decade – but the local ­municipal authority estimates it around 56,000, up from 40,024 in 2009.

Roughly 35% live below the poverty line. And yet, a sign on the only paved road into town calls this the Home of Champions, owing to its phenomenal athletic success. This corner of Kenya has produced 14 men’s and nine women’s Boston Marathon winners since 1991, who have brought home 22 and 14 wins, respectively. They have also won 13 of 18 gold medals in the 3,000m steeplechase at the World Athletics Championships since the event was introduced in 1983.

Organisers of this year’s environmental conference hope cooperation on green issues could help ease global tensions

This year’s Cop29 UN climate summit will be the first “Cop of peace”, focusing on the prevention of future climate-fuelled conflicts and using international cooperation on green issues to help heal existing tensions, according to plans being drawn up by organisers.

Nations may be asked to observe a “Cop truce”, suspending hostilities for the fortnight-long duration of the conference, modelled on the Olympic truce, which is observed by most governments during the summer and winter Olympic Games.

Governments issue health warnings as schools shut and crops fail, with fears that worse is to come as heatwave tightens grip

Extreme heat has gripped much of south and south-east Asia over recent weeks, killing dozens of people, forcing millions of students to miss school and destroying crops.

Both the Philippines and Bangladesh shut schools due to the unbearable heat last month, while governments across the region have issued health warnings. In Thailand, at least 30 people have died from heatstroke since the start of the year.

Effects of heat are expected to worsen after bill prohibiting municipalities from enacting shade and water protection is passed

For Javier Torres and other workers whose jobs are conducted outdoors in south Florida, the heat is unavoidable. A new law recently signed by Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, that prohibits any municipalities in the state from passing heat protections for workers ensures that it is likely to stay that way.

Torres has seen a co-worker die from heatstroke and another rushed to the emergency room in his years of working in construction in south Florida. He has also fallen and injured himself due to heat exhaustion.

More frequent heatwaves mean bees are unable to thermoregulate their hives – further endangering a species already in decline

Bumblebee nests may be overheating, killing off broods and placing one of the Earth’s critical pollinators in decline as temperatures rise, new research has found.

Around the world, many species of Bombus, or bumblebee, have suffered population declines due to global heating, the research said. Bumblebee colonies are known for their ability to thermoregulate: in hot conditions, worker bees gather to beat their wings and fan the hive, cooling it down. But as the climate crisis pushes average temperatures up and generates heatwaves, bumblebees will struggle to keep their homes habitable.

For 30 years, Brian McNeill hunted the world’s second-biggest fish from small boats off the wild west coast of Ireland. Now the species has made a recovery so rapid it has astounded scientists

The ambush was simple. A spotter on a hill would scan the sea and when he saw the big black fins approach, he would shout down to the boatmen. They would ready their nets and quickly row out to the kill zone.

When a shark got tangled in the mesh, Brian McNeill would wait a minute or two while it struggled, then steady himself and raise his harpoon. This was the crucial moment. The creature would be diving and thrashing, desperate to escape. If the blade hit the gills blood would spurt, clouding the water. The trick was to hit a small spot between the vertebrae.

Tebay, Cumbria: It’s been a tricky season, especially with the wet start to the year, but this remarkable device changes everything

In his book The Hill Shepherd, written in 1977, Edward Hart says that “the hill shepherd works effectively with the very minimum of equipment”. I was thinking about this quote as I laced my Gore-Tex boots and pulled on my hat for another day of lambing outdoors.

There are three bits of equipment that I need with me each day at lambing time – my lip balm, lambing rope (a very thin, silky rope that can be washed after each use) and a New Zealand super crook.

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

A pocket-sized city terrace extension and a multigenerational riverside property inspired by a country shed are among the innovative dwellings shortlisted in the sustainability category of the Houses awards, Australia’s premier residential design prize. This year’s five-panel jury noted a number of new sustainable design trends, including a move towards net-zero housing, abodes that accommodate adult children, innovative multi-use spaces for working from home, a growing appreciation for restoring dated dwellings and inspired designs for downsizers and elderly occupants.

• From Spanish mission extravaganzas to art deco curves: other people’s homes – in pictures
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Unesco joint research dating back 15 years found violence and intimidation against about 750 reporters and 44 murders

More than 70% of environmental journalists have been attacked for their work since 2009, according to a Unesco report, which warns of rising threats against those covering the climate crisis.

At least 749 environmental journalists have faced violence and intimidation in the last 15 years, the UN body found. It said that 44 reporters were murdered between 2009 and 2023 but that resulted in just five convictions.

Viruses that cause mild sniffles in humans are devastating populations of chimpanzees and gorillas. In some ape communities, it’s a bigger killer than habitat loss or poaching

There was something wrong with the chimpanzees. For weeks, a community of 205 animals in Uganda’s Kibale national park had been coughing, sneezing and looking generally miserable. But no one could say for sure what ailed them, even as the animals began to die.

Necropsies can help to identify a cause of death, but normally, the bodies of chimps are found long after decomposition has set in, if at all. So when Tony Goldberg, a US wildlife epidemiologist visiting Kibale, got word that an adult female named Stella had been found freshly dead, he knew this was a rare opportunity to look for an answer.

To protect our local river we had to prove it was being used for swimming. But that, bizarrely, is the reason we were rejected

The state of Britain’s rivers is incredibly depressing: the water companies dump too much sewage, the farmers dump too much muck, and the regulators are too cowed and underfunded to do their job and stop them.

It wasn’t always this way. As a child I used to swim in the River Wye and I remember the clouds of mayflies in the summer, as well as huge leaping salmon. It was thanks to this wealth of wildlife that the Wye was classified as a special area of conservation along its whole length. Sadly, however, thanks to the failure of the Welsh and British governments to protect the river, much of this abundance is gone, and the Wye’s official status is now “unfavourable – declining”, thanks to pollution from manure and sewage.

Oliver Bullough is the author of Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals

Last year was the most dangerous to be a reporter since 2015. Without the courage of correspondents risking everything to report from conflict areas, we could be at risk of ‘zones of silence’ spreading around the world

Conflict in Gaza, war in Ukraine, a battle over the global environment – the world is becoming an increasingly hostile place, particularly for frontline journalists.

Last year saw 99 killings of reporters, up 44% on 2022 and the highest toll since 2015.

Jonathan Watts is the Guardian’s global environment writer

The far right are on the march in Germany and the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany has become the most popular party in several states. Immigration and a sense of being economically left behind have been driving factors in the rise in popularity but the Green party and the federal government’s climate policies have also borne the brunt of public anger. The Guardian travelled to Görlitz, on the German border with Poland, to find out to what extent Germany’s green policies are fuelling the far right

• How climate policies are becoming focus for far-right attacks in Germany

Guardian Seascapes reporter Karen McVeigh tells Madeleine Finlay about a recent trip to the Galápagos Islands, where mounds of plastic waste are washing up and causing problems for endemic species. Tackling this kind of waste and the overproduction of plastic were the topics on the table in Ottawa this week, as countries met to negotiate a global plastics treaty. But is progress too slow to address this pervasive problem?

Read more about Karen McVeigh’s trip to the Galápagos Islands

Follow all the reporting from the Guardian’s Seascapes team

Year in, year out, there's a good chance someone in politics has suggested nuclear power as an answer to Australia's energy problems. Guardian Australia's Matilda Boseley explains why. Modern-day nuclear energy is climate friendly compared with coal and gas. But going nuclear isn't practical for Australia – and it's an idea that's more than likely coming directly from the Coalition's 'delaying action on climate change' handbook

• Dutton’s blast of radioactive rhetoric on nuclear power leaves facts in the dust

The UN global plastic treaty could be as important as the 2015 Paris accords, if negotiators can stand up to industry lobbyists

Last week, in an enormous convention centre in downtown Ottawa, I joined delegates who have been negotiating over the most important environmental deal since the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change.

The global plastic treaty has a mandate to agree on a legally binding, international agreement to tackle plastic pollution across the entire plastics life cycle, from the initial extraction of fossil fuels for plastics production to the end-of-life disposal of plastic waste. The current meeting is the fourth of five scheduled negotiations and is critically important – without agreement on the objectives, structure and key measures, the prospect of agreeing on the final treaty text by the end of 2024 seems ambitious.

All the trees are dying. Yet we go about our lives

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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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

• The stream of plastic pollution: could a global treaty help us turn off the tap? – podcast

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.

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

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).