Leading national tree and horticultural organisations – the Woodland Trust, the Horticultural Trades Association (HTA) and the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) are making a renewed call to Ministers, and all levels of government, to act now to cool UK cities through green infrastructure, warning that repeated extreme heat is already reshaping daily life and risks becoming the new summer norm.

The warning comes after the UK saw record-breaking heat twice this year, with London recording an all-time May high of 35.1°C and the UK then experiencing provisional record-breaking June heat on three consecutive days during last week’s heatwave. The organisations say the solution is already in front of us: more trees, more green infrastructure, and a stronger domestic tree-production sector able to supply the planting the country urgently needs.

The latest Met Office figures show why action cannot wait: the UK provisionally set a new UK daily maximum temperature record for June on 24 June, before it was exceeded on the following two days as the heatwave intensified. Temperatures reached 37.7°C at Lingwood, Norfolk, on 26 June, while the Mayor of London’s Heat Ready London plan warned that rising temperatures are already putting homes, schools, hospitals, care services and infrastructure under pressure.

One morning in Sandbach, a neighbour appeared at Graham Warner’s door with a large folder: a delivery, she said, from an unidentified source.

“I think you’ll find this very interesting. Happy reading,” she said.

Warner was checking into a planned housing development behind his home. But the folder contained astonishing material not about the development but about the golf course next door to it, roughly 100 metres (330ft) away. The 18‑hole course stretches across a narrow strip of land, about two kilometres by 400 metres, bordered by Cheshire dairy pastures, with the old Trent and Mersey canal running alongside it. The British golfing legend Ian Woosnam used to train young golfers here.

Communities across the UK are being invited to reconnect with their local landscapes this National Meadows Day (Saturday 4 July), celebrating the cultural, ecological and historical importance of meadows – and calling for renewed action to protect them.

Plantlife’s National Meadows Day shines a light on how generations of communities have cared for these spaces, embedding meadows into local identity, culture and pride.

At Lugg Meadow in Herefordshire, one of the UK’s last surviving Lammas meadows, the relationship between people and land stretches back over a thousand years, with the site recorded in the Domesday Book. Here, the landscape is still managed through a traditional communal system: land is divided into strips marked by ancient ‘dole stones’, hay is cut in July, and from Lammas Day (1 August), the meadow is opened for shared grazing. For hundreds of years, local families have continued this rhythm, sustaining both livelihoods and biodiversity.

Climate change is reshaping bird populations across the UK, with some of our most familiar and vulnerable species under increasing pressure. That’s the latest assessment from the RSPB and British Trust for Ornithology’s (BTO) Climate Change and UK Birds report, which confirms that it’s driving major shifts for our birds.

This includes where species live, how common they are, and the timing of key life events like breeding and migration. Rising temperatures, changing rainfall patterns and more frequent extreme weather events are accelerating these changes. As a result, some of the UK’s most vulnerable birds are already declining.

The Farne Islands off the Northumberland coast have long drawn fans of the natural world keen to catch sight of the resident guillemots and puffins.

But as recently as last week, another much bigger black-and-white animal has been delighting wildlife spotters. Orcas have been appearing more regularly than ever before.

In the past, fishers working on these waters may have caught a glimpse of orcas far out to sea, but this year and last, sightings have been more regular, and much closer to the shore, with dolphins also becoming much more common.

An 18-month-long project to "re-wiggle" a river after more than a century has been successfully completed prompting "tears and celebrations".

A section of the River Kemp, in south Shropshire, had been straightened by landowners in the 1800s, disconnecting it from its natural floodplain and reducing biodiversity.

Now water is flowing in the meander again, after it was restored in a project led by Severn Rivers Trust (SRT) and involved local landowners.

A colony of beavers reintroduced to an area of west London has helped prevent a railway station from flooding, according to the project behind their return.

The Ealing Beaver Project says, since the mammals moved in, Greenford station, downstream from the animals' wetland home at Paradise Fields, no longer floods after heavy rain.

The beavers slow the flow of water during downpours and create wetlands that hold it back, easing pressure on the drainage system further downstream.

"We get very excited by flattened poo," is a sentence I was not expecting.

Neither was I expecting to be standing thigh-high in a chalk stream surrounded by people armed with poles wearing waders and lifejackets.

"Found another," cries a volunteer with their head in a river bank.

Reserves officer for Central Rivers and Downs with Hampshire and Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust, Andy Reeves, grins and updates his chart.

They sneaked the news out in a paragraph near the bottom of an article about a nature podcast - "As part of the BBC’s evolving commissioning strategy, Winterwatch will not be continuing."

I thought this was coming when they reduced it from two weeks to one. You can send in comments to the BBC here - https://www.bbc.co.uk/contact/comments

The first swifts have nested in boxes installed at a University of Cambridge college which is hoping to help stem the decline of the birds and a lack of natural nesting sites.

Swifts are endangered, external and were added to the Red list of Birds of Conservation Concern in the UK in 2021, with numbers plummeting by 70% between 1995 and 2024, the RSPB said.

While there are swift boxes at a number of university sites in the city, boxes were only added to Darwin College three years ago.

A small band of volunteers has helped to grow nearly 8m native trees in Scotland, crucial to efforts to restore lost parts of the Atlantic rainforest, after collecting 11m seeds by hand.

About 100 volunteers, including retired teachers and doctors, office workers and young families, have spent tens of thousands of hours venturing into often remote woods in the western Highlands and islands to search out seed-bearing trees.

They have used detailed maps compiled by NatureScot and Scottish Forestry that identify pockets of ancient woodland, often in exposed, challenging locations, scrambling up hillsides to find the right specimens.

Thousands of observations of marine wildlife have been recorded during the 2026 National BioBlitz, providing valuable data that will help scientists to monitor changes in biodiversity around the UK coastline.

The annual citizen science event, led by The Rock Pool Project, took place between 23 and 31 May 2026 and saw participants from Cornwall to Shetland explore rocky shores and record marine species using the iNaturalist app. In total, 3,781 observations of 544 species were submitted, creating a fascinating national snapshot of life in the intertidal zone.

Different species are appearing off the coast of Jersey as seawater temperatures heat up, a marine expert has said.

The head of Jersey's Marine Resources, Francis Binney, said: "The water around Jersey is controlled or influenced very strongly by land temperature, when the land is hot in Jersey the sea gets hot."

"The sea has boosted up to nearly its normal maximum temperature already, normally you don't get to see that until high summer", he said, adding the normal maximum was 18C (64.4F).

A new, smarter way of using Government-owned land will support nature recovery, climate adaptation and the resilience of public services under new plans set out today (Friday 26 June).

Bringing together action across more than 577,000 hectares – roughly 4% of England’s land – the Government Estate Nature Plan moves from fragmented, site‑by‑site efforts to a more coordinated, whole estate approach, strengthening resilience and helping protect critical public services from climate impacts.

By minimising disruption caused by water shortages and wildfires, healthy ecosystems can play a vital role in mitigating and adapting to the impacts of climate change. The focus will be to both support nature and build infrastructure resilience.

The clear up of 30,000 tonnes of waste which was illegally dumped in ancient Kent woodland is almost complete.

A year on from the start of the Environment Agency-led (EA) operation at Hoads Wood, near Ashford, only around 10% of the waste remains.

The EA said criminal gangs dumped the waste over a period of six months in 2023.

An animal welfare charity has welcomed government proposals to ban snares but says action should have been taken sooner.

The Fox Project, in Pembury, Kent, has campaigned against snares for decades, describing the use of the traps as "unnecessary cruelty".

The proposed ban was included in Labour's Animal Welfare Strategy published in December 2025, but was absent from last month's King's Speech, prompting questions over when it will be introduced.

A group of storks born and raised by a Sussex rewilding project have been spotted nesting in a Surrey industrial estate in what has been called a "major milestone" for the scheme.

The Knepp Estate in West Sussex has been attempting to rewild storks in south-east England since 2016, reintroducing the migrating birds into the wild in the hope they will return to the UK for the first time in 600 years.

Now, a group of the birds have nested at an industrial estate near Guildford, with the hope they will rear chicks in the coming years.

A zoo is hoping to repopulate a species previously described as extinct in the UK for nearly 100 years.

Dartmoor Zoo said it was working to reintroduce black-veined white butterflies which were believed to have become extinct after World War One, partly due to increased use of pesticides and removal of native hedgerows.

The zoo said nine female butterflies had arrived on Tuesday from Normandy, France, and within 10 minutes of arrival one had already laid a batch of eggs.

Farmers and forestry experts say their crops, newly-planted saplings and fences are being "decimated" following an increase in the number of deer across south-west England.

The deer are being blamed for damaging woodlands and destroying crops, as well as wrecking expensive fencing and allowing other livestock to escape.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has set out plans to increase the culling of deer and to introduce more deer officers to advise farmers on management and potential firearms licences.

A nature project in Dorset has secured nearly £150k in early stage funding and could receive close to £1 million to support conservation efforts.

Dorset Wildlife Trust has received £142,176 in development funding from The National Lottery Heritage Fund for its Nature Connection North Dorset scheme.

If successful in its bid for a full grant, the trust could receive up to £970,822.

In the last week, a group of bowlers had a lucky escape when a tree crashed down onto a green. A few days later, an MP in the House of Commons revealed a mature tree had fallen on her house. So could this be linked to the recent soaring temperatures?

Trees can really suffer during a heatwave and the heat stress can show in lots of different ways.

It can affect processes on a molecular level, right up to the biology of the whole tree itself.

Could recognising Lough Neagh as a legal "person" help restore the largest freshwater lake in these islands?

The former lawyer who secured a Rights of Nature recognition for a Spanish saltwater lagoon believes it could.

Prof Eduardo Salazar-Ortuño led the battle to grant the recognition to Mar Menor in Murcia, Spain, after the ecology of the lagoon collapsed in 2016.

He said it could "transform" the future of Lough Neagh.

A species of ant has been reintroduced to an area of Shropshire as part of a restoration project to support the health of woodlands.

Southern red wood ants are considered a keystone species, meaning they play an important role in supporting healthy ecosystems.

The conservation project is led by the National Trust in partnership with Swansea University and ant conservation specialists Ant Antics, has seen the species moved to woodland near Bridgnorth in an attempt to boost biodiversity across the Dudmaston Estate.

Red tape is making it "far easier" to cut woodlands down in Wales than to create new ones, a charity has warned.

Chris Matts, from the Woodland Trust, said "nature-based systems" are some of the most important tools for tackling climate change, but said bureaucracy was an issue.

Government statistics show the number of trees being planted is increasing, but conservationists have said it is not keeping up with targets.

New Official Statistics on insect pollinators have been published from the UK Pollinator Monitoring Scheme (PoMS) during Insect Week 2026. The data collected every year across Great Britain (GB) between 2017 and 2024 show a mixed picture for pollinators across the survey methods and a wide range of insect groups, with hoverflies declining by around a third in both their abundance and number of species recorded during this time, signalling possible risks to the health of our ecosystems.

More than 3,000 dedicated volunteers have contributed data to PoMS, with the new statistics representing surveys from nearly 3,500 sites across the countryside and gardens.

The UK Pollinator Monitoring Scheme (PoMS) monitors the abundance of up to 18 insect groups across three surveys. The hoverflies, a key target group for the scheme, showed the most consistent declines of between 26% to 37% over eight years (2017-2024). Often overlooked, hoverflies are vital pollinators, known to visit at least 52% of global food crops and 70% of animal-pollinated wildflowers. Whilst this represents a significant decline for hoverflies, the PoMS results show a mixed picture for other insect groups, with some showing no change and other groups increasing since 2017.