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Need something brilliant to read this weekend? Here are six of our favourite pieces from the last seven days

Footage supplied by the office of the Greens legislative council member Cate Faehrmann shows scientists digging to reach broad-shelled turtles stuck under boggy mud in the Gingham watercourse. Researchers from the University of New England have been desperately trying to help more than 300 turtles they say have been left to die in the Gwydir wetlands after the NSW state water agency stopped environmental flows after a landowner complained about overflow on their property. UNE conservation biologist Prof Debbie Bower called the scene a 'disaster'. 'These deaths are incomprehensible, given there is environmental water sitting in the dam. This could save the turtles, but WaterNSW is just not allowing its release,' she says

Local governments have until 1 July next year to introduce a four-bin recycling system, but some councils – and waste experts – say it’s unnecessary

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When Victoria embarked on its four-bin system for household waste back in 2020, the goal was to position the state as a leader in recycling.

The rollout of a purple-lidded bin for glass – a fourth bin alongside organics, recycling and rubbish – would be a “gamechanging” way to keep glass and other valuable resources out of landfill, then environment minister Lily D’Ambrosio said.

At 1.5C of global warming, up to 90% of coral reefs could be lost. The next few months could be a defining moment

Where I come from – Hawai’i – the reef isn’t just something you look at. It’s part of us. It feeds our families, protects our shores, and lives at the center of our culture. In our stories, coral is one of our oldest ancestors. It’s a reminder that everything in the ocean, and all of us, are connected.

Right now, that integral connection is under threat.

Jason Momoa is an actor, film-maker, and UNEP Advocate for Life Below Water, dedicated to protecting our oceans and advancing global awareness around coral reef conservation

From rainwater harvesting to tree nurseries, communities in Medellín are taking steps to increase their landslide and flooding resilience

In his home on a steep hillside in the neighbourhood of Golondrinas in Medellín, Róbinson Velásquez Cartagena stands proudly next to two large tanks of water – a rainwater harvesting system he designed and built to help reduce the risk of flooding and landslides.

It is one of the nature-based solutions that Velásquez and others in the community have proposed as part of a disaster risk and climate crisis adaptation plan for Comuna 8, a growing informal settlement of 150,000 people in Colombia’s second-largest city.

Santa Marta conference born out of frustration at Cop summits, where renewable progress has been stalled by major polluters

Everybody knows fossil fuels cause climate breakdown, but until recently, mention of them was all but erased from the annual UN climate summits. Last year, two weeks of discussions ended without fossil fuels being mentioned in the final outcome.

Frustration with those talks led a small developing country with a large fossil fuel sector – Colombia, the largest coal and fourth biggest oil exporter in the Americas – to rewrite the rules. With co-convener the Netherlands, and support from more than 50 countries, Colombia will host a groundbreaking new global conference this month to begin the long-awaited “transition away from fossil fuels”.

Legally questionable confidentiality clause adopted almost word for word from demands of Microsoft and trade groups

Microsoft and other US tech companies successfully lobbied the EU to hide the environmental toll of their datacentres, an investigation has found, with demands to block a database of green metrics from public view written almost word for word into EU rules.

The secrecy provision, which the European Commission added to its proposal almost verbatim after industry lobbying in 2024, hinders scrutiny of the pollution that individual datacentres emit. It leaves researchers with just national-level summaries of their energy footprints.

Exclusive: Experts say scheme will help repair damaged marine ecosystems while sequestering large amounts of carbon

More than 15m juvenile oysters are to be released into the North Sea in one of the biggest rewilding projects in UK waters.

The scheme, which will use a unique rearing process, hopes to re-establish a huge oyster bed around Orkney that experts say will create a “trophic cascade” of climate and ecological benefits.

Pollution is ‘silent accelerator that robs individuals of their healthiest years’, say researchers

Research reveals air pollution is advancing the average age that people in the UK acquire long-term illnesses. For some conditions people could be getting ill more than two years earlier because of the air pollution they breathe.

The first author of the research from Prof Hualiang Lin’s group at Sun Yat-sen University said: “Our study demonstrates that air pollution is not just a risk factor for falling ill; it acts as a silent accelerator that robs individuals of their healthiest years.”

Lower Botanic Gardens, Belfast: A precious field here provides flood protection and carbon research, and has a productive community garden. Still, it is in jeopardy

Among many languages on the poster at the field’s entrance gate is a declaration in Ulster-Scots: This be oor fiel. Close to my home in the heart of an urban landscape, “our field” in Lower Botanic Gardens invites my idle wandering.

Going by the desire paths that crisscross its floodplain meadow, I follow in many footsteps. Recently rewilded and recultivated for a new age, this council-owned field has always responded to the needs of the times. The field grew vegetables during the second world war, and grew families in prefabricated housing after that war ended. Today, in subtle and transformative ways, this cherished place still provides for and protects local people.

After two devastating hurricanes, El Yunque national forest has built a new visitors center that hosts a vibrant arts festival

Sustainability certification by Marine Stewardship Council may be obscuring labour abuses in seafood supply chains, say researchers

The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), which operates a “blue tick” scheme to indicate the sustainability of fish, has been accused of creating an “illusion” of ethical sourcing, after a study reported that widespread labour abuses have taken place on the fishing vessels it approves.

One in five vessels where the crew reported abuses to the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) over the last five years took place on ships catching seafood certified as sustainable by the MSC, researchers found.

For his project ‘De Oförtrutna’ (The Relentless), photographer Christer Björkman pictured Swedish scientists working in the spirit of Carl Linnaeus, the botanist who created the modern taxonomic system that classifies organisms based on appearance. Each scientist brought to the shoot a book and an item of importance to their work

Scientists say finding is ‘very concerning’ as collapse would be catastrophic for Europe, Africa and the Americas

The critical Atlantic current system appears significantly more likely to collapse than previously thought after new research found that climate models predicting the biggest slowdown are the most realistic. Scientists called the new finding “very concerning” as a collapse would have catastrophic consequences for Europe, Africa and the Americas.

The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) is a major part of the global climate system and was already known to be at its weakest for 1,600 years as a result of the climate crisis. Scientists spotted warning signs of a tipping point in 2021 and know that the Amoc has collapsed in the Earth’s past.

The world’s top 100 oil and gas companies made more than $30m every hour in unearned profit in the first month of the US-Israeli war in Iran, according to exclusive analysis for the Guardian.

The conflict pushed the price of oil to an average of $100 a barrel in March, leading to estimated windfall war profits for the month of $23bn for the companies.

Lucy Hough speaks to Damian Carrington, the Guardian’s environment editor

Australia is well behind other countries in embracing clean cars – it’s past time we kicked into gear on going electric

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It is tempting to think about what could have been. In 2020, a time many people would prefer to forget, there was a significant push to set an end date for the sale of new petrol and diesel cars.

The UK had announced a ban from 2030. India – the world’s most populous country and which, like Australia and the UK, uses right-hand-side drive cars – had a target to do the same. In Norway, about 60% of new cars were already electric.

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The government hails the ‘green revolution’ as a solution to economic decline, but some young jobseekers say the rhetoric does not match their experience

On paper, Jake Snell, 19, sounds like the perfect candidate for a role in the UK’s burgeoning green energy sector. He has high grades in maths and physics A-level, a distinction in BTec engineering and another distinction in an extended engineering diploma. He has also done work experience at an engineering company.

He is from Lowestoft, a coastal town in Suffolk, outside Great Yarmouth. Both towns contain areas that fall within the most deprived 20% in England and are part of a wider pattern of coastal places with low employment opportunities.

Amid growing evidence of fungi’s key role in ecosystems and storing carbon, African scientists are championing the need to preserve ‘funga’ as much as flora and fauna

Madagascar has long been celebrated for its remarkable wildlife, with the vast majority of its species – from ring-tailed lemurs to certain species of baobab trees – found nowhere else on the planet. But when discussing the island nation’s endemic treasures, fungi are often left out of the conversation.

Yet “fungi are some of the most important things in the world”, says Anna Ralaiveloarisoa, a Malagasy scientist. “They feed 90% of terrestrial plants. Without them, there is no life on the Earth.”

I’ve just watched another of my neighbours rip up everything green and growing around their home. It’s enough to make David Attenborough weep

It’s noisy outside. I forget over winter how loud the garden gets when the imperatives of shagging, fighting for territory, then raising babies become urgent – the sparrows are kicking off, the tits are fighting a turf war and competing wood pigeons are cooing to seduce Susan, the escaped wedding dove who lives on our roof. When I sat in the sun yesterday, the industrious buzz of bees tackling the dregs of cherry blossom was lawnmower-loud, accompanied by “back off” peeps from blackbirds nesting in the ivy.

There was another noise too, though: the rumble of a mini-digger ripping up a nearby garden. They started with the hedge – I thought, actually, that was all they were going to do, because it happens around here a lot. It would have been the third case I’ve spotted in a matter of weeks. The first was proudly pointed out to me by the owner; the second I only saw in the aftermath – a bare row of jagged stumps where there used to be dense leaves. But this time, I realised they had bigger plans: when the hedge was out, they kept digging, clearing away bushes, plants, trees, every inch of anything that ever lived there. By evening, all that remained was a scraped-back trench of bare earth and a skip full of uprooted branches, skeins of ivy, clumps of grass. In the space of one beautiful warm April day, what used to be a garden is not any more.

The Ukraine war on our doorstep is a constant threat. Contaminated drinking water is a dangerous new twist

In the second week of March, the nature vlogger Ilie Cojocari went out to film the arrival of spring on the Nistru (Dniester) river, 70 metres away from his home in Naslavcea, a village bordering Ukraine on the northernmost point of Moldova. But as he approached the river he could smell the stench of oil rising up from the water and see dark spots floating on its surface. Something was wrong.

Two days earlier, Russia had attacked Ukraine’s Novodnistrovsk hydropower complex 15 miles upriver. Cojocari had been kept awake all night by the sound of shelling. “No one slept in the [Moldovan] district of Ocniţa that night,” he told me.

Paula Erizanu is a Moldovan journalist and writer based in Chișinău

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New study describes what may be the first case of a unified community of chimps, in Uganda, turning on itself

On a June day in 2015, primatologist Aaron Sandel was quietly observing a small cluster of the Ngogo chimpanzee group in Uganda’s Kibale national park when he noticed something strange. As other members of the chimpanzees’ wider group moved closer through the forest, the chimpanzees in front of him began to display nervous behaviour. They grimaced and touched each other for reassurance, acting more like they were about to meet strangers than close companions.

In hindsight, Sandel said, that moment was the first sign of what would become a years-long bloody conflict between a once close-knit group of chimps.

An ambitious ‘refaunation’ project is bringing the much-loved birds and other lost species back to the city’s national park

Images of the iconic blue-and-yellow macaw can be spotted all over Rio de Janeiro. Yet the real thing has been seen so rarely in the Brazilian city that some wondered if it ever really existed there at all.

The French explorer Jean de Léry first described an abundance of the giant, colourful parrots around Indigenous tribes in the 16th century, and the Austrian naturalist Johann Natterer sighted the Ara ararauna in the city in 1818.

Taking sand from the Nigerian city’s lagoon to supply a building boom harms more than fish – it affects the entire food chain, erodes coastlines and is depriving fishing communities of their livelihoods

Before dawn, when the noise of Lagos’s danfo buses fills the air and generators rumble to life, the city’s lagoon is already stirring. Not from fish splashing or canoes gliding, but from the long suction pipes of the dredging machines, pulling up the lagoon bed and spitting out wet sand that will be used in the construction of high-rise blocks, housing estates and flyovers.

Sand dredging is regulated by the Lagos state government and the waterways authority but in a city of more than 20 million people, where sharp sand has never been in higher demand, not all dredging is being done by the book.

Dredging leaves its mark on the landscape along the shores of the Lagos Lagoon in Epe

In the holiday hotspots of the Costa del Sol, the risks are rarely mentioned. But in neighbouring Cádiz, the country’s first tsunami-ready town is leading by example

Even on a wet, wintry day in Málaga, the Mediterranean looks benign. But only 25 miles (40km) south-west of its port, where half a million tourists disembark from cruise ships into the Costa del Sol each year, lies a system of tectonic plates and faults that fracture the seabed between Spain and north Africa.

Earthquakes are routine here. They are mostly too small to notice but sometimes strong enough to rattle glasses in cafes on the seafront. In December, a tremor with a magnitude of 4.9 off the coast of Fuengirola triggered more than 40 calls to Andalucía’s 112 emergency line.