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 toiletsYou 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...

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

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 OceanThe 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...

Rishi Sunak claimed to have farmers’ backs but their union’s president is far from convinced, as he spars with the government over floods, falling markets and fraught retailer relations‘This is the first time I’ve had my lawn cut by somebody else,” says Tom Bradshaw, the new president of the National Farmers’ Union. Just over a month after being voted...

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

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