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

Appeal tribunal orders firm to share details on hundreds of thousands of tonnes of outflows into North Sea

A water company that tried to keep secret details of hundreds of thousands of tonnes of raw sewage discharges into the sea has been ordered by an appeal tribunal to release the data in the public interest.

Northumbrian Water has repeatedly refused to release details about the scale of raw sewage discharges into the North Sea from an outflow at its pumping station in Whitburn, after a campaigner asked under freedom of information and environmental information regulations.

As the climate crisis forces people to abandon their land in Rajasthan, a new industry has sprung up in the desert state, with thousands of gaily decorated vans setting off to sell ice-cream across the country

The parched villages of Gangapur in the desert state of Rajasthan have a new season in their calendar. Between November and February, car workshops along the town’s dusty mile-long market open before sunrise, cylindrical stainless-steel food containers are put on display, and traders stock up on chocolate and strawberry syrups.

Come March, the villagers start preparing to migrate. In the workshops, thousands of vehicles are converted into vans for selling a variety of ice-cream, from plain condensed milk flavoured with cardamom to chocolate, vanilla and pistachio, while local farmers turned dessert makers have their old mini-trucks serviced in readiness for the drive to distant towns and cities, where they will sell the sweet treat for the next nine months.

Mutualités Libres among 140 health and environment experts calling for more clean air measures

One of Belgium’s mutual health insurers has been taking a closer look at the country’s three low emission zones.

Dr Luk Bruyneel, a health and economics expert at Mutualités Libres, explained: “As a health insurance fund, we have to protect the health of our members. As air pollution is a major health risk, we want to contribute evidence to the debate. Health insurance data for our 2.3 million members allows us to produce high-quality studies on health risks from air pollution.”

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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Hungerford, Berkshire: Behind all the top hats and ales, Hocktide is more than just a re-enactment of local folklore

The knobbly pollarded street trees along Hungerford’s broad rural high street are maypoled with ribbons. It’s quietish, as usual. But at intervals, a small crowd in top hats, carrying oranges, baskets and beribboned poles of yellow and blue flowers, emerges from each house and enters another in turn.

The pebbledashed frontage of two cottages conceals the two halves of a medieval cruck house, its pre-chimney beams smoke-blackened: a house that’s witnessed this ceremony each of its 575 years. Each neighbour retains grazing rights on the town’s common, due to the historical tenacity of the people here. This colourful spring pageant – coinciding with the first swift over the rooftops – is Tutti Day, the near-culmination of a fortnight’s Hocktide ceremonies, a celebration and a reaffirmation of the townspeople’s common rights.

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.

Tourists delighted as pinnipeds congregate at city’s Pier 39, apparently attracted by feast of anchovies

More than 1,000 sea lions have gathered at San Francisco’s Pier 39 this spring, the largest herd in at least 15 years.

Mounds of floppy, delightfully ungraceful marine mammals have plopped themselves on to rafts along the city’s pier, displaying themselves to the thousands of tourists who pass by the area each day.

Exclusive: decision to grant licences condemned by critics as a stunt that shows Tories are ‘playing politics with climate’

Fossil fuel companies will be allowed to explore for oil and gas under offshore wind-power sites for the first time, the government will announce on Friday, in a move that campaigners said is further proof that ministers are abandoning the climate agenda.

The North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA), which regulates North Sea oil and gas production, will confirm that it is granting licences to about 30 companies to look for hydrocarbons on sites earmarked for future offshore windfarms.

From excessive travel to food waste, weddings can have a huge carbon footprint. Here’s how to plan an eco-friendly celebration

A wedding is a couple’s big day. Unfortunately, it can also have a big carbon footprint.

The average American wedding creates around 60 metric tons of CO₂ – the carbon equivalent of 71 round-trip flights from New York to LA. You’d need to plant roughly 60 trees and let them grow for 100 years to sequester that amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. And with more than 2m marriages taking place in the US alone in 2022, the wedding industry’s environmental impact adds up.

Amsterdam is home to 45,000 sq metres of ‘blue-green’ roofs, which absorb rainwater and allow it to be used by building residents to water plants and flush toilets

You might visit Amsterdam for its canals, and who could blame you, really. But the truly interesting waterways aren’t under your feet – they’re above your head.

Beautiful green roofs have popped up all over the world: specially selected plants growing on structures designed to manage the extra weight of biomass. Amsterdam has taken that one step further with blue-green roofs, specially designed to capture rainwater. One project, the resilience network of smart, innovative, climate-adaptive rooftops (Resilio), has covered more than 9,000 sq metres (100,000 sq ft) of Amsterdam’s roofs, including 8,000 sq metres on social housing complexes. Citywide, the blue-green roof coverage is even bigger, estimated at more than 45,000 sq metres.

A new $47m vessel is preparing for its maiden voyage in coastal waters, but there are fears the Kangei Maru could one day mean a return to hunting in the Southern Ocean

The dish of the day has the appearance and consistency of steak. But the item on the menu at Nisshin Maru in Shimonoseki isn’t brisket or rib-eye – it is a prime cut of the restaurant’s speciality: whale meat.

Every few minutes, chefs in the open kitchen produce another plate of cetacean delicacies – raw sashimi marbled with fat, slices of “bacon”, roast minke whale cut into bite-size pieces and served with a selection of dipping sauces. On a warm weeknight, every table is full.

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

More than half of the country’s forestry is in community and Indigenous hands – and from CO₂ absorption to reducing poverty the results are impressive

Dexter Melchor Matías works in the Zapotec Indigenous town of Ixtlán de Juárez, about 1,600ft (490 metres) above the wide Oaxaca valley in Mexico, where community forestry has become a way of life. Like him, about 10 million people across the country live in and make a living from forests, with half of that population identifying as Indigenous.

As average temperatures soar around the world and wildfires rage across the Americas, in Mexico, where more than a quarter of the country suffers from drought, the number of wildfires has remained steady since 2012.

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.

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

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.

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

A dawn chorus of flutes, whistles and chirps once flowed through my Cambridge window, but there has been a shocking collapse in birdlife. What can be done?

Every year from February through to June, the early morning chorus of birdsong is one of the most evocative manifestations of spring. During late winter I open the bedroom window before going to sleep, to hear that incredible mix of flutes, whistles and chirps that begin before first light, when I wake. I listen for the layers of song that simultaneously come from close by and far away.

This year though, the dawn chorus that once was the soundtrack for spring in central Cambridge has collapsed. It was noticeably quieter in 2023, and this year strikingly so. Blackbirds are depleted and song thrushes no longer heard at all. The dunnocks – once one of the most common garden songsters – have disappeared, as have the chaffinches, whose early February song was among the first audible confirmations of lengthening days. The cheery chatter of house sparrows is absent and the once familiar sound of coal tits has fallen silent. Long-tailed tits are now rare, and so far this year I’ve heard no blackcaps. Great and blue tits, robins and goldfinches, are still present, but down in number.

From ancient olive groves to root vegetables, foreign pests introduced via the bloc’s open import system are causing damage worth billions – and outbreaks are on the rise

The plants slowly choke to death, wither and dry out. They die en masse, leaves dropping and bark turning grey, creating a sea of monochrome. Since scientists first discovered Xylella fastidiosa in 2013 in Puglia, Italy, it has killed a third of the region’s 60 million olive trees – which once produced almost half of Italy’s olive oil – many of which were centuries old. Farms stopped producing, olive mills went bankrupt and tourists avoided the area. With no known cure, the bacterium has already caused damage costing about €1bn.

“The greatest part of the territory was completely destroyed,” says Donato Boscia, a plant virologist and head researcher on Xylella at the Institute for Sustainable Plant Protection in Bari.

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).